March 2009
Car-Free Suburb Planned for Melbourne, Australia →
Image: Future Melbourne (Zone 9 is where the eco suburb might be.)
Given its recent devastation by bushfires (which continue as we write) the Australian state of Victoria could do with a good news story. And this might be it. A design has been unveiled for a suburb only two kiliometres from the central business district of Melbourne that will be free of cars. The think tank behind the vision,...
Solar Hot Water →
The evacuated tube solar hot water heaters like the one shown in the top picture are getting really cheap now that the Chinese manufacturers are cranking them out- the salesman told me that he could put one on my house for $ 3,000 and that it could serve a family of four.
That would replace a conventional electric hot water heater that uses roughly 15kWh of energy per day. A natural gas heater...
New Skins on Old Icons →
Blair Kamin calls the Sears Tower ” a symbol of Chicago’s urban might, not only because of its dark, masculine color but also because its exterior boldly expresses the structural system of “bundled tubes” that support it.”
It’s not for nothing that Skidmore, Owings and Merrill were nicknamed the “three blind mies”- it has a bit of that Miesian...
Golf Course, Filtration Plant, Park and Prison...? →
The Bronx NIMBYs went nuts when it was proposed that a water filtration plant be built in a park. So the architects, Grimshaw, followed what is becoming a common strategy:put a green roof on it and show it from the air. Building? What building?
And in this case, it’s BIG, nine acres big, and they are putting in putting.
“The distinction here is it’s not just a green roof, but a...
Bill Clinton Denied Tesla Roadster Ride by Secret... →
President Clinton spoke eloquently of how responsible businesses must use technology to save both the economy and the environment. He even singled out Tesla – several times, in fact — as a shining example of the green tech movement. Tesla, he said, enables people to upgrade their lifestyle but reduce their carbon footprint. I was very proud to say the least! During lunch, President Clinton...
Steven Holl Raises Eyebrows →
Steven Holl Architects
4+1=2? When Steven Holl Architects announced this week that it had won a competition to design a corporate master plan in China’s southern financial capital Shenzhen, near a new tower by OMA, it immediately raised some eyebrows. It wasn’t its “4-in-1” tower design that was so striking. It wasn’t the sustainable touches. It was the jargon.
...
Infrastructure Overhaul →
For the past few years it has been hard to ignore America’s crumbling infrastructure, from the devastating breach of New Orleans’s levees after Hurricane Katrina to the collapse of a big bridge in Minneapolis last summer. In 2005 the American Society of Civil Engineers estimated that $1.6 trillion was needed over five years to bring just the existing infrastructure into good repair. This does not...
Interview: Andy Kunz, New Urbanist →
Andy Kunz is an urban designer and town planner, and the director of the websites www.NewUrbanism.org and www.NewTrains.org . A veteran member of the Congress for the New Urbanism, Kunz’s work focuses on the importance of green transportation and trains as a solution to climate change and peak oil.
15 Healthful Reasons Why You Should be Having... →
1.Natural Stress Relief
Stress is a leading cause of sickness, yet most people are practically bathing in it daily. Sickness leads to doctors, prescription medicines, countless miles spent driving/flying to specialists, none of which are particularly the most pleasant or good for the environment. This is especially important to take heed during the difficulteconomic situation we are facing at the...
Theft, Vandalism Plaguing Parisian Bike Sharing... →
Broken Vélibs in Paris (Sybil Star on Flickr) Eighteen months into a wildly successful launch, the Parisian bike-sharing program Vélib - a portmanteau of vélo (bicycle) and liberté (freedom) – has run into serious problems with theft and vandalism of the bikes. Launched in 2007 as part of an effort to “green” Paris, now over half of the original 15,000 customized bikes have been stolen, in a mania...
February 2009
0 posts
Why Do CEOs (Still) Love Ayn Rand? →
How did a Russian-born novelist become such an influential “thought leader” for American CEOs, entrepreneurs, and MBAs — and even Alan Greenspan? Consider the message behind Ayn Rand best sellers The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, which speaks to anyone with ambition and a big ego: The gifted should do what’s in their self-interest. If you have a sharp mind, it is your moral responsibility to...
“The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.”
– Ralph Nader (via quote-book) (via kari-shma)
The Loyal Customer Paradox →
For years, Tropicana’s products have pictured a beautiful orange punctured by a straw. What could be fresher? Still, it was rather long-in-the-tooth, so Trop’s parent, PepsiCo, decided to modernize the marketing message and update the design to feature a glass of chilled OJ and some modern typography.
Well, in almost any product group, your most loyal users are also the ones who like things just...
Reducing Options to Improve Decisions →
Here’s the problem. Most of us prefer the process we know rather than the productivity-enhancing one we don’t. We might like it if we tried it; we just don’t want to try it, thank you very much. And no amount of cajoling, short of firing, is going to change our minds.
One thing you might try to help your staff make the right choice is restrict the options for them, writes Peter Bregman on Harvard...
No one is sure who will get what, but the wish... →
Other than the Medicaid money, Pennsylvania and New Jersey have not yet figured out how much money they will receive under the stimulus bill, said spokesmen for Rendell and Gov. Jon S. Corzine.
The reason is that the legislation doesn’t just shovel money to states or cities based on their size or some other criteria and let them decide how to dole it out.
Instead, it has what Hughes called...
Manager.. Myth? →
The desire to win is so widespread among human beings that it is often called the “competitive instinct”. Whether the desire to win is instinctive or learned is a matter of debate, but the amount of human resources that are devoted to sport all over the world (from children’s school sports to the Olympics) is testimony to the desire to win. We all have some of this desire in us, to some degree....
7 Great Ideas that Haven't Worked -- Yet →
TechRadar calls out seven brilliant tech ideas that completely flopped:
wireless USB connections
speaking to your PC
Fold-away keyboards
Internet voting
micropayments
WiMax
the standalone PDA
How Globalization Really Affects Business →
In a cunning essay on globalization, Marc Levinson, an economist who was also an editor at The Economist, appraises three books arguing, in one way or another, that Asia (and in particular China), is on its way to “dominating the world economy.” The books are:
The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East, by Kishore Mahbubani Operation China: From Strategy to...
Redefining Global Strategy →
The key to understanding why the world isn’t actually flat, Ghemawat says, is this:
National differences, he says, exist along four dimensions: cultural, administrative, geographic, and economic. Further, the importance of these dimensions can differ by industry. For example, geography and culture may matter little in the semiconductor industry, but for the food industry the implications of...
Sony vs. Samsung →
In “Sony vs. Samsung,” by Sea-Jin Chang, Rosenzweig sees the problem of the competency trap playing out, as Sony’s excellence in the analog world cannot be sustained in the digital era. Chang, the author, sees other factors at work, like Sony’s management infighting. Rosenzweig acknowledges this, but says
Overall, he praises the unusual access that Chang had to leaders at both Sony and...
The Red Queen Among Organizations: How... →
“The Red Queen Among Organizations: How Competitiveness Evolves,” by William J. Barnett. The “Red Queen” plays off the idea that competition raises every company in a sector — “performance is relative to competition, not absolute. A company can run faster and fall farther behind at the same time,” Rosenzweig writes. That’s especially true if companies fall into a ‘competency trap,’ where its...
Why Is My Boss Playing Favorites? →
The boss has a favorite? Of course he does. All bosses have favorites. You’ve been reading too many business books about the Excellence of Management. The higher the boss, the more in touch with his “inner child” he or she is likely to be. That means giving free rein to their full complement of emotions - greed, envy, love, hate, jealousy, competitive verve, you name it. Successful people are the...
“Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to...”
– Aldous Huxley (via reluctantbuddha) (via quote-book)
“what you dream about today may happen tomorrow..”
– anon.
Read this book. I cried while reading the majority... →
(via lococommotion)
In 1991, fourteen-year-old Brent Runyon came home from school, doused his bathrobe in gasoline, put it on, and lit a match.
He suffered third-degree burns over 85% of his body and spent the next year recovering in hospitals and rehab facilities. During that year of physical recovery, Runyon began to question what hed done, undertaking the complicated journey from near-death...
'Watchmen': Inside Zack Snyder's Outrageous New... →
..for all its self-awareness and cynicism, Watchmen isn’t some cheap-and-silly Scary Movie parody. Adapted faithfully, if not completely, from the celebrated 1986 comic-book series, Snyder’s film is visually and intellectually ambitious, filled with heady ruminations about savior figures, pop culture, and the politics of fear. At a time when superhero stories are commonplace and our...
