Architektura/ budownictwo STREETS FOR PEOPLE - NOT TRAFFIC
In countries all over the world there is still a dangerous view that a `good' street is one that helps make driving easier and vehicle journey times shorter. Dangerous, yet pervasive.
The ugly by-products of this thinking are all around us. Ring roads that cut across the historic street patterns of towns and rancid underpasses. Not to mention “safety” rails which force people into convoluted detours and which result in some of us taking much greater risks to avoid.
How curious that streets are the one public service we all have to use, all the time, yet so little thought has been given to their design. Imagine negotiating your way through a public building which had just “happened” over the years. It would feel confusing and unwelcoming, littered with instructions, signs and obstructions, the product of false starts and dead ends.
Now, however, change is around the corner. More and more policymakers recognize that this traffic-centered conception of streets has led to the creation of dysfunctional places. The social
and economic value of the pre-20th century role of streets, as places of community interaction, shared by all members of society - as well as conduits for traffic - is being rediscovered. New ways of designing streets are being tried out; new terms such as `shared space' between pedestrians, cyclists and vehicles are becoming popular.
Shared surfaces, increasingly found in residential areas remove the physical distinctions, like kerbs or different materials, which keep traffic in one place and the rest of us in another. They include seating and planting - they could go further, with seesaws and swings. All these are visual prompts, showing that the street belongs to people who use it for more than just driving and parking. Streets become play spaces once again instead of rat-runs.
There is still work to do to get shared space right for everyone, of course. Guide dogs are trained to stop at kerbs, so removing them can be confusing. Eye-contact between pedestrians and motorists is key, but this is obviously of little use to the visually impaired. So the design solutions of shared space need more attention.
What we most want is civilised streets. Places where the needs of people are prioritised over cars. Places rooted in an assumption that everyone will use common sense and courtesy.
When streets are slower and safer, they start to become more social and civilised. People are happier walking and cycling in them - helping the waistline and the environment. They are safer for children, who should be able to play in the space outside their homes. There is a more serious risk of injury from straying from the pavement in a 30mph zone than in a street deliberately designed to create uncertainty.
The street also becomes a destination in its own right. Most people find it hard to meet their neighbours: streets should be a comfortable setting for the first tentative hellos. A recent survey of new housing developments found that a third of residents believed the streets were unsafe for children to walk, cycle or play in and almost half felt that their neighbours went their own way, rather than doing things together or trying to help each other.
Brighton's New Road, once a stretch of uninviting tarmac, represents a new start. Having been redesigned and reinvented, it is now a beautiful and inviting street, one of the most popular places in town with a 175% increase in pedestrian activity and a 600% per cent increase in people deciding to shop or simply stop, sit and enjoy the new space. It has become a street instead of a road, where the fastest vehicle recorded has been a bicycle (at 13 mph as it happens). Flipping the hierarchy is at the heart of its success, putting pedestrians at the top of the pyramid, vehicles at the bottom, with cyclists and public transport users in between. The re-opening was celebrated by tango and theatre. In the end, the best thing about more civilised streets is that they generate a sense of community. It encourages us to live our lives in a different way. And what better benchmark for our country's streets than a place where you can ask your neighbour to dance.
QUESTIONS
1. How is thinking about street design changing?
2. What is ”shared space”?
3. What are ”civilised streets”? What are their benefits?
4. How should we design and manage streets to ensure that they are safe for all?
5. Give examples of badly designed streets in your town/city.
6. What makes a high - quality street? (think of kerbs, paving, colours, materials, maintenance, crossing points, traffic level, lighting, sense of security, signage, public spaces etc)
7. Have you got a favourite street in your town/city?
KEY WORDS
residential areas traffic- centered conception
people - centered conception policymakers
dysfunctional places shared space
shared surface community interaction
conduit pedestrians
cyclists public transport users
residential areas ( physical) distinctions
kerbs seating
planting seesaws
swings visual prompts,
play spaces rat- run
guide dogs design solutions
civilised streets be prioritised over
pavement housing developments
residents redesigned and reinvented
flipping the hierarchy
Chemia/biotechnologia
GENETICALLY MODIFIED FOODS
Genetically modified (GM) foods are food items that have their DNA altered through genetic engineering. Unlike conventional genetic modification that has been carried out through conventional breeding for thousands of years, GM foods first appeared in the market in the early 1990s. The most common modified foods are derived from plants: soybean, corn, canola, cotton seed oil and fruit. For example, a typical GM food could be a strawberry that has to survive under hostile weather conditions, i.e. in cold climate. A farmer would get its DNA changed, so that it could survive in the frost. They would take DNA from frost resistant cell, and transfer it into the strawberry genes. Popular GM crops include insect-resistant corn and herbicide-tolerant cotton, corn and rapeseed varieties. Lots of controversies surround genetically engineered crops and foods. One of them focuses on the long-term health effects for anyone eating them. In the late 1990s dr. Arpad Pusztai, a leading UK scientist, was hired by the Rowett Institute to develop a new safety protocol for genetically modified foods in Europe. E.g. he found that the rats used in his study had developed potentially precancerous cell growth in the digestive tract, which inhibited the rats' brain, liver and testicle development and generally weakened the immunity system. As he concluded, it was just because insecticide gene was inserted in a rat's gene system.
Activists and many scientists opposed to genetic engineering say that with current technology there is no way to ensure that genetically modified organisms will remain under control, and the use of this technology outside secure laboratory environments represents multiple unacceptable risks to both farm and wild ecosystems. Potential impact on biodiversity may occur if herbicide-tolerant crops are sprayed with herbicide to the extent that no wild plants (weeds) are able to survive. Plants toxic to insects may mean insect-free crops. However, this could result in decline of other wildlife (e.g.) birds which rely on weed seeds and/or insects as food resources.
Although some scientists have claimed that selective breeding is a form of genetic engineering (e.g. corn is derived form teosinte, dogs have evolved with human intervention over the course of tens of thousands of years from wolves), others assert that modern transgenesis-based genetic engineering is capable of delivering changes faster than, and sometimes of different types from, traditional breeding methods.
Proponents of current genetic techniques as applied to food plants point to hypothetical benefits that the technology may have, for example, in the harsh agricultural conditions in Africa. They argue that with modifications, existing crops could possibly be able to thrive under the relatively hostile conditions providing much needed ford to malnourished people. Proponents also cite golden rice and golden rice 2, genetically engineered rice varietes that contain genetically modified vitamin A levels. Some hope this rice variety may boost vitamin A deficiency that currently claims thousands of lives every year.
KEY WORDS
genetic engineering: inżynieria genetyczna
frost-resistant: odporny na mróz
herbicide-tolerant: tolerancyjny na środki chwastobójcze
insecticide: środek owadobójczy
digestive tract: przewód pokarmowy
precancerous cell growth: przedrakowa narośl na komórce
immunity system: system odpornościowy
biodiversity: różnorodność biologiczna
malnourished: niedożywiony
brain: mózg
liver: wątroba
Elektronika/ elektryczny
HOW IS ELECTRICITY GENERATED ?
A generator is a device that converts mechanical energy into electrical energy. The process is based on the relationship between magnetism and electricity. In 1831, Faraday discovered that when a magnet is moved inside a coil of wire, electrical current flows in the wire.
A typical generator at a power plant uses an electromagnet—a magnet produced by electricity—not a traditional magnet. The generator has a series of insulated coils of wire that form a stationary cylinder. This cylinder surrounds a rotary electromagnetic shaft. When the electromagnetic shaft rotates, it induces a small electric current in each section of the wire coil. Each section of the wire becomes a small, separate electric conductor. The small currents of individual sections are added together to form one large current. This current is the electric power that is transmitted from the power company to the consumer.
An electric utility power station uses either a turbine, engine, water wheel, or other similar machine to drive an electric generator or a device that converts mechanical or chemical energy to generate electricity. Steam turbines, internal-combustion engines, gas combustion turbines, water turbines, and wind turbines are the most common methods to generate electricity. Most power plants are about 35 percent efficient. That means that for every 100 units of energy that go into a plant, only 35 units are converted to usable electrical energy.
Most of the electricity in the United States is produced in steam turbines. A turbine converts the kinetic energy of a moving fluid (liquid or gas) to mechanical energy. Steam turbines have a series of blades mounted on a shaft against which steam is forced, thus rotating the shaft connected to the generator. In a fossil-fueled steam turbine, the fuel is burned in a furnace to heat water in a boiler to produce steam. Coal, petroleum (oil), and natural gas are burned in large furnaces to heat water to make steam that in turn pushes on the blades of a turbine.
Did you know that most electricity generated in the United State comes from burning coal? In 2006, nearly half (49%) of the country's 4.1 trillion kilowatthours of electricity used coal as its source of energy.
Natural gas, in addition to being burned to heat water for steam, can also be burned to produce hot combustion gases that pass directly through a turbine, spinning the blades of the turbine to generate electricity. Gas turbines are commonly used when electricity utility usage is in high demand. In 2006, 20% of the nation's electricity was fueled by natural gas.
Petroleum can also be used to make steam to turn a turbine. Residual fuel oil, a product refined from crude oil, is often the petroleum product used in electric plants that use petroleum to make steam. Petroleum was used to generate about two percent (2%) of all electricity generated in U.S. electricity plants in 2006.
Nuclear power is a method in which steam is produced by heating water through a process called nuclear fission. In a nuclear power plant, a reactor contains a core of nuclear fuel, primarily enriched uranium. When atoms of uranium fuel are hit by neutrons they fission (split), releasing heat and more neutrons. Under controlled conditions, these other neutrons can strike more uranium atoms, splitting more atoms, and so on. Thereby, continuous fission can take place, forming a chain reaction releasing heat. The heat is used to turn water into steam, that, in turn, spins a turbine that generates electricity. Nuclear power was used to generate 19% of all the country's electricity in 2006.
Hydropower, the source for almost 7% of U.S. electricity generation in 2006, is a process in which flowing water is used to spin a turbine connected to a generator. There are two basic types of hydroelectric systems that produce electricity. In the first system, flowing water accumulates in reservoirs created by the use of dams. The water falls through a pipe called a penstock and applies pressure against the turbine blades to drive the generator to produce electricity. In the second system, called run-of-river, the force of the river current (rather than falling water) applies pressure to the turbine blades to produce electricity.
Geothermal power comes from heat energy buried beneath the surface of the earth. In some areas of the country, enough heat rises close to the surface of the earth to heat underground water into steam, which can be tapped for use at steam-turbine plants. This energy source generated less than 1% of the electricity in the country in 2006.
Solar power is derived from the energy of the sun. However, the sun's energy is not available full-time and it is widely scattered. The processes used to produce electricity using the sun's energy have historically been more expensive than using conventional fossil fuels. Photovoltaic conversion generates electric power directly from the light of the sun in a photovoltaic (solar) cell. Solar-thermal electric generators use the radiant energy from the sun to produce steam to drive turbines. In 2006, less than 1% of the nation's electricity was based on solar power.
Wind power is derived from the conversion of the energy contained in wind into electricity. Wind power, less than 1% of the nation's electricity in 2006, is a rapidly growing source of electricity. A wind turbine is similar to a typical wind mill.
Biomass includes wood, municipal solid waste (garbage), and agricultural waste, such as corn cobs and wheat straw. These are some other energy sources for producing electricity. These sources replace fossil fuels in the boiler. The combustion of wood and waste creates steam that is typically used in conventional steam-electric plants. Biomass accounts for about 1% of the electricity generated in the United States.
KEY WORDS:
(to) convert, (to) transmit, (to) generate, generator, coil, wires, magnet, electromagnet, current, rotary, shaft, blades, turbines, furnace, power plant, fossil fuels, hydropower, nuclear power, solar energy (power), wind power, biomass, fission, combustion
Marketing i zarządzanie
PROMOTIONAL TOOLS
Marketing is often defined as a matter of identifying consumer needs and developing the goods and services that satisfy them. This involves developing the right product, pricing it attractively, and making it available to the target customers, by persuading distributors and retailers to stock it. But it is also necessary to inform potential consumers of the product's existence, its features, and its advantages, and to persuade them to try it. There are generally several stages involved in a consumer's decision to buy a new product. A well-known acronym for this process is AIDA, standing for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. According to the familiar "4 P's" formulation of the marketing mix - product, price, place and promotion - attracting attention, arousing interest, and persuading the consumer to act are all part of promotion. Marketing textbooks conventionally distinguish four basic promotional tools: advertising, sales promotion, public relations, and personal selling, which together make up the marketing communications mix.
For consumer goods, the most important tool is generally advertising. As well as advertising particular brands, companies also carry out prestige or institutional advertising, designed to build up the company's name or image. Advertising is often combined with sales promotions, such as free samples, coupons and competitions.
For industrial goods, particularly specialised ones, the most important tool is often personal selling. Sales reps can build up relationships with company buyers, and can be very useful in persuading them to choose a particular product.
The fourth promotional tool is public relations (frequently abbreviated as PR): activities designed to improve or maintain or protect a company's or a product's image. Public relations includes things like company publications, most notably the annual report, sponsorship, community relations programmes, the lobbying of politicians, and the creation of news stories, all designed to get publicity for the company or a particular product. Unlike paid advertising, publicity is any (favourable) mention of a company's products that is not paid for, in any medium received by a company's customers or potential customers. Companies often attempt to place information in news media to draw attention to a product or service. Quite apart from financial considerations, the advantage of publicity is that it is generally more likely to be read and believed than advertising. It can have a great impact on public awareness that could not even be achieved by a massive amount of advertising.
Within the limits of their budget, marketers have to find the optimal communications mix of advertising, sales promotion, personal selling, and publicity, without neglecting the other elements of the marketing mix, i.e. the possibility of improving the product, lowering its price, or distributing it differently.
KEY WORDS:
target customers "4 P's"
promotional tools advertising
public relations media
public awareness marketing mix
sales promotion personal selling
publicity
Mechaniczny
A BALL NUT
A new idea for a ball nut was created by John Drake of Drake Manufacturing in Warren, Ohio. In an automobile, the ball nut uses a recirculating stream of ball bearings to transmit the rotation of the steering wheel to the steering mechanism. Conventional designs recirculate the balls through an external mechanism. Drake's idea was to recirculate the balls internally. It would simplify the structure, making it cheaper to build and more compact.
The only complication was that the very newness of the design presented a challenge in manufacturing it. Drake's internal recirculating ball nut has a unique design. For about two-thirds of a revolution, the thread is nearly identical to a conventional ball nut with ball bearings traveling along the grooves in the forward direction. When they reach the end of this section, the balls enter a reversing groove that transports them up and over the land of the screw. When the balls reach the opposite end of the reverse groove, they are directed down into the screw at the beginning of the forward groove to begin the cycle again.
Because of the novel design, however, engineers ran into a challenge in machining the area of the thread where its direction changes. Measures taken to overcome helical path interference produced such a complicated geometry that it was very difficult to define it mathematically.
So the company hired a laser-scanning service bureau, GKS Inspection Services in Plymouth, Mich., to execute a CAD model. GKS solved the problem by applying a combination of a CMM and a laser scanner. "Laser scanning helped us get the new ball nut defined by accurately measuring the geometry of our prototype so we could establish dimensional limits," said James Vosmik, president of Drake Manufacturing.
According to Drake Manufacturing, the new design offers considerable advantages over conventional ball nut designs. It eliminates the need for additional components, such as a crossover insert or external recirculation tubes.
The simplicity leaves fewer possible points of failure. The company says that elimination of the external recirculation system makes a more compact package and reduces friction losses. The simplicity of the new system also makes it less expensive to manufacture than conventional ball screw assemblies. The nut in the new design can be machined in a single setup on an internal grinder.
Drake Manufacturing's engineers defined the simple geometry of the internal threads on the ball screw nut on a solid modeling system. The thread form is executed by a milling cutter or grinding wheel that has a special form designed to produce the nut thread.
According to Vosmik, Drake Manufacturing is refining the manufacture of the ball nut. The machinery is in limited use and the company is "still trying to define manufacturing tolerances," he said. Questions remain over how close tolerances need to be, and how much quieter the ball nut should be when it is used in a vehicle.
KEY WORDS:
assemble, automobile, ball bearing, bearing, ball nut, compact, design, dimensional, external, friction, geometry, grinder, groove, helical, interference, internal, milling cutter, nut, prototype, reverse, revolution, screw, steering wheel, thread, vehicle
Ochrona Środowiska
GLOBAL WARMING
Global warming, the gradual increase of the temperature of the earth's lower atmosphere as a result of the increase in greenhouse gases since the Industrial Revolution.
The temperature of the atmosphere near the earth's surface is warmed through a natural process called the greenhouse effect. Visible, shortwave light comes from the sun to the earth, passing unimpeded through a blanket of thermal, or greenhouse, gases composed largely of water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and ozone. Infrared radiation reflects off the planet's surface toward space but does not easily pass through the thermal blanket. Some of it is trapped and reflected downward, keeping the planet at an average temperature suitable to life, about 60°F (16°C).
Growth in industry, agriculture, and transportation since the Industrial Revolution has produced additional quantities of the natural greenhouse gases plus chlorofluorocarbons and other gases, augmenting the thermal blanket. It is generally accepted that this increase in the quantity of greenhouse gases is trapping more heat and increasing global temperatures, making a process that has been beneficial to life potentially disruptive and harmful. During the 20th cent., the atmospheric temperature rose 1.1°F (0.6°C), and sea level rose several inches. Some projected, longer-term results of global warming include melting of polar ice, with a resulting rise in sea level and coastal flooding; disruption of drinking water supplies dependent on snow melts; profound changes in agriculture due to climate change; extinction of species as ecological niches disappear; more frequent tropical storms; and an increased incidence of tropical diseases.
Among factors that may be contributing to global warming are the burning of coal and petroleum products (sources of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, ozone); deforestation, which increases the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; methane gas released in animal waste; and increased cattle production, which contributes to deforestation, methane production, and use of fossil fuels.
In 1992, at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, over 150 nations signed a binding declaration on the need to reduce global warming.
A UN Conference on Climate Change, held in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997 resulted in an international agreement to fight global warming, which called for reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases by industrialized nations. Not all industrial countries, however, immediately signed or ratified the accord. In 2001 the G. W. Bush administration announced it would abandon the Kyoto Protocol; because the United States produces about one quarter of the world's greenhouse gases, this was regarded as a severe blow to the effort to slow global warming.
Improved automobile mileage, reforestation projects, energy efficiency in construction, and national support for mass transit are among relatively simpler adjustments that could significantly lower U.S. production of greenhouse gases. More aggressive adjustments include a gradual worldwide shift away from the use of fossil fuels, the elimination of chlorofluorocarbons, and the slowing of deforestation by restructuring the economies of developing nations. The United States, Australia, China, India, Japan, and South Korea established (2005) an agreement outside the Kyoto Protocal that proposed to reduce emissions through the development and implementation of new technologies.
KEY WORDS:
global warming, greenhouse gases, greenhouse effect, deforestation, fossil fuels, fighting global warming
Telekomunikacja
IN-FLIGHT MOBILE CALLS
Mobile phone calls in the air have become real and it was Middle Eastern airline “Emirates” which allowed this. The first authorised mobile phone call on commercial flight was made at 30,000 ft en route to Casablanca, onboard an Airbus aircraft.
It is said that the airline has invested up to 27 million USD to fit its fleet with the “Aeromobile” system, which ensures that passenger mobile phones operate at their absolute minimum power. The service will only be activated when the aircraft is at cruising altitude and the cabin crew will have full control over the system, including the ability to prevent voice calls at certain times such as during night flights.
The number of calls that may be made at any one time is also limited to a maximum of five or six calls, the same number as usually allowed on in-seat phones. The service will also allow passengers to send and receive text messages, with charges in line with premium international roaming rates. Users will be billed on their regular phone bills by their own service providers. In the future, further features will be added including BlackBerry push e-mail technology and other data transmission-based applications.
In Europe, the UK comms regulator Ofcom has also confirmed plans to enable airlines to offer mobile services. Under the European proposal, the system works by passengers' own mobile phone handsets connecting to an on-board base station, acting as a kind of nano-cell.
Both the passenger terminals and the nano-cell must be switched off during take-off and landing to ensure they do not interfere with mobile networks on the ground. Once the aircraft reaches a minimum height of 3,000 meters, the system may be switched on by the cabin crew. Mobile handsets will then be able to use the aircraft's network service to make and receive calls which will be routed via a satellite link to the network on the ground. Again, calls will be billed through passengers' normal service providers. Ofcom said that if the service proves successful it could be extended to 3G and other services in future.
KEY WORDS:
voice calls, in-seat phones, premium roaming rates, push e-mail, comms regulator,
nano-cell, passenger terminals, be routed, service providers, 3G