CUD 2008.02.21 Closing Sessions
February 23, 2008 by Chris | permalink
ALL the presentations will be found at the portal with the following web address: www.connectedurrbandevelopment.org
Pete Worden. Director, NASA Ames Research Centre kicked off the closing keynotes. His talk was really great. He started by showing quite an impressive array of NASA satellites that are observing the earth. There are a number which are there to specifically look at the status of our planet. He then followed with a series of movies that illustrated planetary change. WOW were they cool! have to GO TO NASA WEBSITE TO FIND MOVIES of cloud cover and total precipitable water. The latter looks like a big smoky globe. He also showed the subsurface water currents and flows in our oceans. These looked like electric eels snaking their way around. you could see HUGE subsurface eddies off of the coasts.
Current activities are really around working on how to interact with the data – the hyperwall. Collaborative displays in order for groups of people to synthesize data is the way of the future.
With Ikhana, a predator airplane, is used to overfly an urban area, or the napa valley, to look at the data. One area that they are now focusing on is night light from cities. This is to look at energy useage and urban environment. Cyanobacteria is the first key to life. They are looking at how this ‘pond scum’ was able to thrive and survive. This year is the 50th anniversary of the founding of NASA.
Bill Mitchell. MIT. Now leading the Media Lab. He started out with three circles in an overlapping Venn diagram: ICT systems, Mobility systems, Energy Systems. They converge in the centre to make Smart Cities. He presented the City Car that they have developed over the past three/four years. They asked themselves the question; what can we get rid of and start all over? The thing is essentially a chassis which is a container to hold the batteries with four snap on wheels that drive the vehicle. It it anticipated to recharge based on induction. It has come really far since I saw it last. He drew up a series of ‘efficiencies’ that would be created by the car. One was the ability to pack in more vehicles, another is that the car becomes the energy storage system for the city [battery and induction] car based e-bay like auctioning of parking spaces.
One-way bicycle to the shopping market and then one-way car back from it.
They should be thought of like Mobility vending machines.
Excellent presentation. It is wonderful to see that this has really made such good progress.
NEED TO LOOK UP Wireless electricity research at MIT.
Gary Bridges. Sr VP IBSG. People and Processes. This weeks SCIENCE magazine is about Cities. This is really a parallel processing issue. We need to have lots of programs going on simultaneously all focused on the future of the city. He went on to talk about Innovation phases: Invention, Adoption, and Implementation. He believes that the most important part of his team at IBSG is the adoption.
The history of the world population is the history of energy. He showed a series of graphs which indicated the parity between population growth and energy consumption. Was not sure of the point. I think it is really more about the efficiency of a society in the conversion of an energy source rather than access to energy. Although, the latter is the real basis of economies.
