All posts by Paul Raven

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Bright-greening Dubai

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Whatever you may think of Dubai (and however much of it is actually true), you can’t deny that those people know how to dream big. The Dubai Chamber of Commerce has apparently green-lit a plan for a self-sufficient off-grid ecotopian zone, dubbed (with what one presumes is as much hope as anything else) “Food City”. And here’s the proposal from architectural outfit GCLA:

Dubai "Food City" concept

GCLA has described their proposal for Food City as the “the marriage of landscapes and urbanism”. Their project integrates a variety of proposals to decrease overall energy use — concentrated solar collectors, towers covered in thin-film photovoltaic cells, piezoelectric pads in pedestrian areas, and methane harvesting through sewage percolation tanks.

GCLA also proposes water conservation measures critical to off-the-grid survival in water-starved Dubai, like atmospheric water harvesting, solar desalination through concentrated solar collectors, grey water recycling, and application of hydroponic sand to minimize water loss. Essentially, GCLA’s vision is an amalgamation of nearly every urban sustainability initiative in the past few years. It’s certainly utopian, but it may ultimately prove necessary.

Necessary, perhaps; but plausible, practical or realistic? Even assuming the best about Dubai, I’ll be surprised if the application of money and architectural talent alone can build a self-sufficient garden city in one of the dryest places on the planet… but it sure does look pretty. [image copyright GCLA; reproduced under Fair Use terms, contact if takedown required]

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Garage ribofunk – the rise of homebrew genetic engineering

digital rendering of DNAHere’s another story that keeps bouncing back… and receiving progressively more paranoid coverage the closer it gets to mainstream news sources, too. That said, a certain amount of concern about biohacking or DIY genetic engineering is probably sensible – as much as most of the hobbyists brewing up weird bugs in their broom-closets are the sort of cheery can-do geeks who want to help, the ever-lowering barriers to entry of these technologies mean that it wouldn’t take much for someone with more nefarious purposes in mind to get themselves started:

… some researchers and law-enforcement officials have raised red flags. In a paper published in Nature Biotechnology in 2007, a group of scientists and FBI officials called for better oversight of so-called synthetic DNA, an ingredient widely used by professional biologists and hobbyists, saying it could theoretically lead to the creation of harmful viruses like Ebola or smallpox, since their genomes are available online. “Current government oversight of the DNA-synthesis industry falls short of addressing this unfortunate reality,” the paper said.

Ms. Aull, who lives with a cat and three roommates who are “a little bit weirded out” by her experiments, says the worries are overblown. DIY biologists are trying to “build a slingshot,” she says, “and there are people out there talking about, oh, no, what happens if they move on to nuclear weapons?”

Other biohackers argue that Mother Nature is more likely than any home hobbyist to create dangerous new pathogens. They cite the current A/H1N1 “swine flu” virus, which is a made-in-the-wild brew of human, bird and pig influenzas. Mackenzie Cowell, a founder of DIY Bio, says members aim to do good and are committed to working safely.

Frankly, I’m quite surprised that this movement hasn’t been stamped on more thoroughly and quickly; the post-9/11 world hasn’t exactly been kind to anything that can raise a pulse (and sell newspapers) simply by having the word ‘terrorism’ bolted on to it. Perhaps the DHS see themselves in a future alliance with the Shapers against those pesky Mechanist kids from cyberspace… [via PosthumanBlues; image by ynse]

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Behold – the magic cloak of illusion! Er… it was here a minute ago…

vanishing actA big part of the fun of this blogging gig (for me at least) is watching stories resurface and reiterate themselves over time. Point in case: metamaterials and ‘invisibility cloaks’, which cropped up a few times last year, and which raise their head again with news from Hong Kong University that researchers have discovered a theoretical method for not only making things appear invisible, but also for making one thing appear to be another thing entirely. Confused? Well, this might help:

The trick is to create a material in which the permittivity and permeability are complementary to the values in a nearby region of space containing the mouse we want to hide. “Complementary” means that the material cancels out the effect that the mouse has on a plane lightwave passing through. So a plane wave would be bent by the mouse but then bent back into a plane as it passes through the complementary material, making the mouse disappear.

The second step is to then distort this plane wave in the way that an elephant would. This means creating transformational material that distorts a plane lightwave in the same way as an elephant. So anybody looking at this mouse would instead see an elephant.

An invisibility cloak is just a special case of this, when the mouse is simply replaced by the illusion of free space, say Chan and co.

Simply? Well, they sound pretty sure of themselves, but I’ll maintain my skepticism until I see it actually working… or don’t see it, rather. [via SlashDot; image by crystalchu]

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Amateur hour is over – Amazon becomes a publisher

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This year is just burgeoning with disruptive change for the publishing industry, and here’s the latest cat among the pigeons: Amazon have decided that they can do more than just distribute books. They’re going to start republishing them as well.

Even great books can be overlooked. And authors with great potential often struggle to connect with the larger audience they deserve to reach. We’re fortunate at Amazon.com to have customers who know a good book when they read one, so we’ve introduced AmazonEncore to help connect authors and their books with more readers.

AmazonEncore is a new program whereby Amazon will use information such as customer reviews on Amazon.com to identify exceptional, overlooked books and authors with more potential than their sales may indicate. Amazon will then partner with the authors to re-introduce their books to readers through marketing support and distribution into multiple channels and formats, such as the Amazon.com Books Store, Amazon Kindle Store, Audible.com, and national and independent bookstores via third-party wholesalers.

How successful this will turn out to be, I have no idea. Knowing how prevalent spurious reviews can be on Amazon – particularly on self-published works of dubious merit – I’m curious to discover what sort of vetting process they’ll go through before actually deciding to push a title out of obscurity and into the spotlight. Perhaps they’ll give Harriet Klausner the editorial hotseat…

[Via George Walkley, marketing and digital strategist for Little, Brown Books here in the UK.]

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PR advice for writers from Jeff VanderMeer

Booklife by Jeff VanderMeerHyperprolific author and anthologist Jeff VanderMeer recently completed and submitted Booklife, a non-fiction book about the writing life that promises to be full of insight, harsh truths, good ideas and (knowing VanderMeer) dark humour.

He’s been posting a few excerpts from it in various places, including a chunk of tips on PR and self-publicity for writers which are well worth reading even if you’re not a writer – they say a lot about the art of publicity in a world where everyone is already their own PR firm (whether they realise it or not).

That advice includes a warning on the dangers of listening to advice from those who aren’t as qualified to give it as they might like to think:

How did some of these people arrive at bad places? Horrible advice. Always keep in mind that advice, especially advice on promoting yourself, is often anecdotal or a Received Idea–received from a time machine from the Distant Past. Sincerely-given but idiotic career advice can be a shiv in the side, an icepick through the eye. Worse, it can result in a slow malarial fever from which you never recover, performing actions you later have no good rationale for doing. The worst career advice attempts to separate you from your work, you a shucked oyster wondering what happened, and why.