School Life Monday: What Your Home Says About You...

One of our most basic psychological needs is to create a home, that is a space that is decorated in such a way as to reflect our values back to us. That's why we can legitimately get so excited (or distressed) by matters of home decoration - and why, after too long on the road, we long to get back to our own place.

FURTHER READING

“One of the most meaningful activities we are ever engaged in is the creation of a home. Over a number of years, typically with a lot of thought and considerable dedication, we assemble furniture, crockery, pictures, rugs, cushions, vases, sideboards, taps, door handles and so on into a distinctive constellation we anoint with the word home. As we create our rooms, we engage passionately with culture in a way we seldom do in the supposedly higher realms of museums or galleries. We reflect profoundly on the atmosphere of a picture, we ponder the relationship between colours on a wall, we notice how consequential the shape of the back of a sofa can be and ask with care what books really deserve our ongoing attention…”

Tiny Homes for the Homeless an Occupy Madison Project

from Revolution News:

Madison Wisconsin: In a city with a homeless population that has risen by 7 percent over the last four years to about 3,370, Occupy Madison organizers decided to tell their local leaders to “put up or shut up” and developed a non profit organization Occupy Madison Inc. In June 2013 OM Build was born and Tiny Homes was decided on as a solution.

To achieve their goals of a Tiny Village complete with 9 tiny homes, permanent comprehensive day resource center, safer places to sleep at night, as well as access to restrooms, showers, laundry, community gardening space, and other basic needs for people experiencing homelessness, OM Build realized that they would need to work from within the system. The hard and relentless work paid off. Scheduled for November 15th 2014 is a Ribbon Cutting Event for The first Tiny Village for the Homeless in Madison.

Local organizers also state “Our approach to working within the system came only after we realized that without dotting every “i”, and crossing every “t”, the city and the county would never let us operate– they used every opportunity to enforce ordinances, regulations, and seemingly arbitrary whims against us. This paralleled precisely the persecution of everyday, unaffiliated, homeless individuals. When you are homeless, “the system” is rife with obstacles designed to prevent creative innovation or adaptation– we at Occupy Madison experienced the same headaches.” organizers also stated “In many ways, we have had much more success since we changed our approach. This was due not only to how we communicated with city and county offices (we never shirked from being open or transparent), but how we are perceived by Madison’s genteel liberal population. It’s stunning how a flowerbed on a windowsill can be so much better for PR than the window itself, or the house it’s attached to.”

At least six other cities nationwide are adopting Tiny Homes… others are installing Homeless Spikes. One OM Build organizer in Madison stated that Homeless pikes are “disgusting” and a “weak attempt to make even society’s most uninviting spaces– doorways, parks, etc– uninhabitable as well” He also states “People don’t choose to sleep in the gutter. Physically preventing people from getting whatever rest they can will not help them in any way, and nor do they help society. It’s tempting to say that for every spike a municipality erects, they should provide a warm, safe, clean, bed. But the truth is that we should be providing those beds anyway.”

Local organizers and volunteers state that “next is occupancy and fundraising. We’ve done a lot of work and spent a lot of money getting our site ready for people to move in. Now is a critical time for us financially– if we can’t raise enough funds to pay for making the site as wonderful as it is, there’s a real risk our whole project could go under.” Donations can be sent to paypay account http://bit.ly/1uSYGew Fundraiser in the past have been matched on a dollar per dollar basis and none of current progress would be possible without a 100% volunteer effort.

Local grass root groups that deserve a special shout out include: Friends of the State Street Family, The Bubbles program, (which provides free laundry services to the homeless), Occupy Madison, OM Build, Homeless Ministry at Bethel Lutheran Church, Madison Street Pulse (a cooperative homeless newspaper based In Madison WI).

The Internet of Things (video from NYTimes)

very interesting thoughts on simple uses of complicated technology.

The Ups and Downs of Making Elevators Go

from The WallStreet Journal:

By KATE LINEBAUGH

You press a button and wait for your elevator. How long before you get impatient and agitated? Theresa Christy says 20 seconds.

As a mathematician steeped in the theories of vertical transportation at Otis Elevator Co., Ms. Christy, 55, has spent a quarter-century developing systems that make elevators run as perfectly as possible—which means getting most riders into a car in less than 20 seconds. "Traditionally, the wait time is the most important factor," she says. "The thing people hate the most is waiting."

Developed in the 19th century, elevators transformed urban living, real estate markets and skylines around the world. As an Otis research fellow, Ms. Christy gets to work on the toughest problems and on signature projects like the 1,483-foot-high Petronas Towers in Malaysia, for a time the world's tallest building.

During the recent $550 million upgrade of the Empire State Building, Ms. Christy was asked whether she could help get more people up to the observation deck. She said she couldn't get more people into a car but could move them up more quickly. So she increased the elevators' speed by 20%, to 20 feet per second. Now the cars can rise 80 floors in about 48 seconds, 10 seconds faster than before.

Ms. Christy strikes down one common myth—that "door close" buttons don't work. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't, she says. It depends on the building's owner.

The challenges she deals with depend on the place. At a hotel in the holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia, she has to make sure that the elevators can clear a building quickly enough to get most people out five times a day for prayer.

In Japan, riders immediately want to know which car will serve them—indicated by a light and the sound of a gong—even if the elevator won't arrive for 30 seconds. That way, people can line up in front of the correct elevator.

Japan also boasts, in Ms. Christy's opinion, the smoothest, best-riding elevators. "When you get into an elevator there, you sometimes think you are 'stuck' in the elevator because the motion is so smooth and quiet," she says. But that service comes with extra costs and slower speeds.

Another problem: How many people fit in an elevator? In Asia, more people will board a car than in Europe or New York, Ms. Christy says; Westerners prefer more personal space. When she programs an elevator system she uses different weights for the average person by region. The average American is 22 pounds heavier than the average Chinese.

At their core, elevators are a mode of transportation. Serving passengers well is constrained by the number of elevators, their speed, how fast their doors open and close, and how many people can fit in a car. In the U.S., these factors come together 18 billion times a year, each time a passenger rides an elevator.

That experience is at the heart of what Ms. Christy does. From her sparse second-floor office in a leafy office park in Farmington, Conn., she writes strings of code that allow elevators to do essentially the greatest good for the most people—including the building's owner, who has to allocate considerable space for the concrete shafts that house the cars. Her work often involves watching computer simulation programs that replay elevator decision-making.

"I feel like I get paid to play videogames. I watch the simulation, and I see what happens, and I try to improve the score I am getting," she says.

Here is a typical problem: A passenger on the sixth floor wants to descend. The closest car is on the seventh floor, but it already has three riders and has made two stops. Is it the right choice to make that car stop again? That would be the best result for the sixth-floor passenger, but it would make the other people's rides longer.

For Ms. Christy, these are mathematical problems with no one optimum solution. In the real world, there are so many parameters and combinations that everything changes as soon as the next rider presses a button. In a building with six elevators and 10 people trying to move between floors, there are over 60 million possible combinations—too many, she says, for the elevator's computer to process in split seconds.

"We are constantly seeking the magic balance," says the Wellesley math major. "Sometimes what is good for the individual person isn't good for the rest."

A named inventor on 14 patents, Ms. Christy has a few more pending. She refers to the latest of them as the "surfboard feature." The idea came from a joke with colleagues when they were leaving one night after a dinner out. They sheepishly worried whether someday elevators might display a rider's weight. (Elevators already calculate the total weight in the car.)

The joke got Ms. Christy thinking of a feature that would allow people with a bulky or heavy item to have a car to themselves. So she and her colleagues created a system that can be programmed to allocate an empty car to a user. The feature would give users like hotel bellhops a numeric code that is punched in before entering the elevator. (A hotel in Hawaii considered using it to prevent surfers from disturbing other guests with their surfboards—hence its name.) The feature is generally used now by staff in hotels and office buildings.

One part of Ms. Christy's career didn't go as planned. With aspirations of getting into management, Ms. Christy got her M.B.A. from Babson College, but the role didn't suit her. "I thought I wanted to be a manager," she said. "But I really like solving the puzzles myself. I didn't like assigning them to other people. I was a little jealous."

Write to Kate Linebaugh at kate.linebaugh@wsj.com

I Didn't Get This For Christmas

But i really wanted it!


Glass globe doorknob is a whole-room fisheye for the other side of the door.

Hideyuki Nakayama's glass globe doorknob refracts the scene on the other side of the door in its depths, giving you a preview of what's going on in the next room before you turn the knob.

here's the original story (via BoingBoing)

15 House Plants You Can Use As Air Purifiers

A NASA research document came to the conclusion that 'house plants can purify and rejuvenate air within our houses and workplaces, safeguarding us all from any side effects connected with prevalent toxins such as formaldehyde, ammonia and also benzene.'

Here are 15 plants that could clean your air for just the price of a few drops of water each day.

source

Thanks, presurfer