Revive?
That I am sitting outside and dictating bespeaks an intention to blog differently. I guess we'll see how it all works out...
That I am sitting outside and dictating bespeaks an intention to blog differently. I guess we'll see how it all works out...
Net Zero Energy Buildings: Moving from Demonstration Projects to the Mainstream
Tuesday, January 25, 2011 | 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM
The New York Academy of SciencesPresented by the Green Buildings Discussion Group
Since the completion of the Lewis Center at Oberlin College in 1999, which at 13,000 sf was at that time the largest net zero energy building (nZEB) in the country, the green building community has been conceptualizing and developing strategies to scale up nZEBs and make them more commonplace within the industry. Yet, for years energy neutral buildings have remained rarities and typically have been low-intensity use buildings under 15,000sf.
The recent completion of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) Research Support Facility (RSF)—a 220,000 sf office and lab building with a data center in Golden, CO—has led to new optimism. The NREL-RSF is a testament to a new level of performance, and to an approach to design and construction that rewards cooperation and respects the expertise of all team members. Dr. Paul Torcellini of NREL will describe the design process, which included an analysis and rethinking of occupant behavior and office interiors and led to an innovative building design with unique features that allow the building to operate as an nZEB. Building on this insight into the inspiring work of the NREL-RSF team, Bert Gregory of Mithun will discuss his firms' involvement in net zero energy buildings and neighborhoods such as the Lloyd Crossing and Project Green planning efforts. He will present inspiring projects that are achieving new levels of sustainability in a challenging marketplace and will provide expert insights into metrics, best practices, trends, and prospects in the realm of low/net zero energy buildings.
Panel Agenda
Organizers
Chris Garvin, Terrapin Bright Green
Catherine Pfeiffenberger, SkanskaModerator
Chris Garvin, Terrapin Bright Green
Speakers
Bert Gregory, Mithun
Paul Torcellini, National Renewable Energy LaboratoryNetworking reception to follow.
As per Manhattan Times (http://www.manhattantimesnews.com/2010/required-viewing-the-maccabeats-make-c...:
Just in time for Chanukah, Yeshiva University’s a cappella group the Maccabeats have scored an international YouTube hit with their video “Candlelight,” sung to the tune of Taio Cruz's "Dynamite." Part of the video was filmed in Ft. Tryon Park. Check it out now and you could be the viewer who tips it over 1,000,000 hits.
Okay, folks, a little puzzle for you. Why did this comment lead to an "inappropriate language" warning from NPR's filters when I tried to submit it?
If it is the authors (and not just you) who claim that they have established that current configurations of human sexual behavior are, in any sense, in opposition to "human nature" because they are cultural accretions then they are talking out of their...um...hats. Culture is part of human nature. Culture is the means by which Homo Sapiens has been able to adapt to and reshape such a multitude of environments. It is equally possible to describe the human brain as accretions of earlier and later developments...and some of those later accretions developed (in part) to process human culture. Should we accept only those parts that most nearly resemble our earliest evolutionary antecedents' as being "truer", somehow? I have no doubt that the book you review is a valuable one and I am considering adding it to my reading list. I will, however, be careful about the conclusions I draw from their evidence.
The answer after the jump:
edited by Gaëlle Krikorian and Amy Kapczynski
From Zone Books. It may either be purchased in hard-copy or downloaded for free, and redistributed on a non-commercial basis. Derivative works are not permitted.
The end of the twentieth century saw an explosive intrusion of intellectual property law into everyday life. Expansive copyright laws have been used to attack new forms of sharing and remixing facilitated by the Internet. International laws extending the patent rights of pharmaceutical companies have threatened the lives of millions of people around the world living with HIV/AIDS. For decades, governments have tightened the grip of intellectual property law at the bidding of information industries. Recently, a multitude of groups around the world have emerged to challenge this wave of enclosure with a new counterpolitics of “access to knowledge” or “A2K.” They include software programmers who take to the streets to attack software patents, AIDS activists who fight for generic medicines in poor countries, subsistence farmers who defend their right to food security and seeds, and college students who have created a new “free culture” movement to defend the digital commons. In this volume, Gaëlle Krikorian and Amy Kapczynski have created the first anthology of the A2K movement, mapping this emerging field of activism as a series of historical moments, strategies, and concepts. Intellectual property law has become not only a site of new forms of transnational activism, but also a locus for profound new debates and struggles over politics, economics, and freedom. This collection vividly brings these debates into view and makes the terms of intellectual property law legible in their political implications around the world.
Has French culture become provincial and inward looking? France aspires to be a global cultural power. But a new book - 'The Death of French Culture' - argues that its government creates a walled garden producing cinema and literature for its own market but not for the world. Gone are the days of geniuses like Emile Zola and Francois Truffaut who spoke to millions. Laurie Taylor is joined by the book's author Donald Morrison and by Noelle Lenoir, a former French minister for European affairs. They consider whether protectionism has caused a decline in French creativity and if state subsidies produce mediocre art.
Yoga is practiced by about 15 million people in the United States, for reasons almost as numerous — from the physical benefits mapped in brain scans to the less tangible rewards that New Age journals call spiritual centering. Religion, for the most part, has nothing to do with it.
But a group of Indian-Americans has ignited a surprisingly fierce debate in the gentle world of yoga by mounting a campaign to acquaint Westerners with the faith that it says underlies every single yoga style followed in gyms, ashrams and spas: Hinduism.
The campaign, labeled “Take Back Yoga,” does not ask yoga devotees to become Hindu, or instructors to teach more about Hinduism. The small but increasingly influential group behind it, the Hindu American Foundation, suggests only that people become more aware of yoga’s debt to the faith’s ancient traditions.
That suggestion, modest though it may seem, has drawn a flurry of strong reactions from figures far apart on the religious spectrum. Dr. Deepak Chopra, the New Age writer, has dismissed the campaign as a jumble of faulty history and Hindu nationalism. R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has said he agrees that yoga is Hindu — and cited that as evidence that the practice imperiled the souls of Christians who engage in it.
The question at the core of the debate — who owns yoga? — has become an enduring topic of chatter in yoga Web forums, Hindu American newspapers and journals catering to the many consumers of what is now a multibillion-dollar yoga industry.
Intellectual Property Watch
5 November 2010Lessig Calls For WIPO To Lead Overhaul Of Copyright System
By Kaitlin MaraInfluential copyright scholar Larry Lessig yesterday issued a call for the World Intellectual Property Organization to lead an overhaul of the copyright system which he says does not and never will make sense in the digital environment.
A functioning copyright system must provide the incentives needed for creative professionals, but must also protect the freedoms necessary for scientific research and amateur creativity to flourish.In the digital environment, copyright has failed at both, said Lessig.
“And its failure is not an accident,” he said. “It’s implicit in the architecture of copyright as we inherited it. It does not make sense in a digital environment.”
The copyright system will “never work on the internet. It’ll either cause people to stop creating or it’ll cause a revolution,” said Lessig, citing a growing system of copyright “abolitionism” online in response to a worrying tendency to criminalise the younger generation.
“If and only if WIPO [the World Intellectual Property Organization] leads in this debate will we have a chance” at fixing the copyright system, he said.
Lessig spoke at the 4-5 November WIPO Global Meeting on Emerging Copyright Licensing Modalities – Facilitating Access to Culture in the Digital Age. This event is a part of the ongoing implementation of the WIPO Development Agenda. Lessig is a professor at Harvard Law School.
He also spoke on video with Intellectual Property Watch after his speech, which can be seen below.
Larry Lessig: WIPO Must Lead Overhaul of Copyright System from Intellectual Property Watch on Vimeo.
Copyright Online: What has Changed?
Reading a book in physical space is unregulated, said Lessig: reading, lending, or reselling a book is not “fair use” – it is free use. They are unregulated acts.
But online, every use is a copy. This is “not about a generation that can’t respect the rules, it’s a problem in the design of the system.”
Intellectual Property Watch
26 November 2010Study Of Public Domain, Copyright At WIPO Offers Recommendations
By Catherine Saez @ 8:48 amA better definition of the public domain is needed, but copyright and public domain are not antagonistic, said a study commissioned by the World Intellectual Property Organization presented this week. Also this week, a book on the role of copyright in access to knowledge in Africa was launched.
The study was presented in a side event to the WIPO Committee on Development and Intellectual Property (CDIP), which monitors the implementation of the 45 recommendations of the WIPO Development Agenda and is meeting from 22 to 26 November. Among those recommendations, some are specifically targeted towards the preservation of the public domain.
The public domain is an important part of copyright and IP in general, said study author Severine Dusollier, professor at the University of Namur (Belgium). The study was completed in May, and commissioned by WIPO as part of a series of studies and surveys to address concerns raised under recommendations 16 and 20 of the WIPO Development
Dusollier presented the study during the side event and at the plenary on Tuesday.
Recommendation 16 asks to “consider the preservation of the public domain within WIPO’s normative processes and deepens the analysis of the implication and benefits of a rich and accessible public domain.” And Recommendation 20 asks to “promote norm-setting activities related to intellectual property that support a robust public domain in WIPO’s member states (…).”
When Rich Juzwiak saw a series of video clips that Jay Leno played for the country star Taylor Swift on Monday night’s broadcast of “The Tonight Show,” depicting her reacting with repeated expressions of surprise to a series of awards-show victories, he knew it looked more than familiar. He argued on his blog that the segment had been taken directly from a similar Web video he made with a colleague. The result: NBC acknowledged the work of Mr. Juzwiak and his co-worker on Tuesday’s “Tonight Show.”
Baslow was studying sociolinguistics at the University of Texas at Austin when, seeing too many fellow students getting jobs as cab drivers, he decided that a change of path was needed. After long, careful (and increasingly desperate) consideration he joined the U.S. Customs Service in NY to become an Import Specialist Assistant. In that capacity he helped defend our shores against the international flatware conspiracy and, almost single-handedly, protected us from the ravages of under-priced rawhide dog yummies. The romance was short-lived, however, as he soon heard the siren song of Electronic Computing. Over the course of the next twenty-two years he learned COBOL and became an Assistant Programmer, fell under the spell of Unix and shell programming, and ended up writing Perl programs and administering litigation databases in a bad part of town. Along the way he has written children's puppet shows, published bad prose poetry in an obscure literary journal, married and begotten two children. He is unemployed and overweight. He is known to talk too damn much.
