You are browsing the archive for February2009
Google PowerMeter will help users figure out how much energy they consume.
Google PowerMeter, now in prototype, will receive information from utility smart meters and energy management devices and provide anyone who signs up access to her home electricity consumption right on her iGoogle homepage. The graph below shows how someone could use this information to figure out how much energy is used by different household activites.
Duncan Jepson’s new documentary focuses on China’s established and emerging hip-hop artists and their impact on youth culture and culture at large.
The filmmakers go to locations and ask 50 people the same question with diverse, sometimes heartbreaking, results.
Fifty People, One Question: London from Fifty People, One Question on Vimeo.
before Michelle was immortalized Warhol-style. Mickelene Thomas has already created a pop art rendition.
MICKALENE THOMAS, Michelle O, Screenprint on Rives BFK, 2008
The fates handed us tickets to last night’s Portland International Film Festival screening of Sugar, a film by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck about the economic and emotional weight felt by aspiring Dominican baseball players. Recommended viewing. (Thanks Ricky!)
Glenn Adamson is the head of research at the Victoria and Albert Museum and the author of Thinking Through Craft, a critical appraisal of the value, position and possibilities for modern craft production. He’ll be speaking this weekend at the University of Oregon. (Saturday 2/21, White Stag Block, 70 NW Couch St. 2:30pm)
The March issue of The Atlantic features an interesting article by Richard Florida on the effects that the economic/housing collapse may have on the use of space in America. Among Florida’s proposals are a shift from home ownership to long-term renting and the development of suburbs into higher-density nodes within urban metro-zones. Here’s a quote:
If there is one constant in the history of capitalist development, it is the ever-more-intensive use of space. Today, we need to begin making smarter use of both our urban spaces and the suburban rings that surround them—packing in more people, more affordably, while at the same time improving their quality of life. That means liberal zoning and building codes within cities to allow more residential development, more mixed-use development in suburbs and cities alike, the in-filling of suburban cores near rail links, new investment in rail, and congestion pricing for travel on our roads. Not everyone wants to live in city centers, and the suburbs are not about to disappear. But we can do a much better job of connecting suburbs to cities and to each other, and allowing regions to grow bigger and denser without losing their velocity.
