Month: September 2016

Portugal Joins Other Countries by Running Only on Renewable Energy

- Adam Clare

Portuguese architecture
Portugal reached a very significant milestone on its path to being fully powered by renewables by consuming energy only from sustainable resources for four days. Other countries are on similar paths. In 2012 Germany got 50% of it’s power from renewable sources, Scotland powered itself exclusively on renewables for a week earlier this year, but the most impressive is Costa Rica. In 2015 Costa Rica went at least of a quarter of the using only renewables and improving this year.

Portugal joins those countries (and others) that are looking forward to a future that isn’t dependent on finite energy sources. More countries should be joining this renewable revolution.

Electricity consumption in the country was fully covered by solar, wind and hydro power in an extraordinary 107-hour run that lasted from 6.45am on Saturday 7 May until 5.45pm the following Wednesday, the analysis says.

News of the zero emissions landmark comes just days after Germany announced that clean energy had powered almost all its electricity needs on Sunday 15 May, with power prices turning negative at several times in the day – effectively paying consumers to use it.

Read more.
Thanks to Delaney!

Simulations Help Predict How People Panic

- Adam Clare

Sadly there are still incidents of death that are a result of people panicking while evacuating spaces. For decades engineers have looked into ways to make buildings easy to evacuate and have made a lot of headway, unfortunately there are still times when their efforts are for not. Today the work into dealing with evacuating panicky people is being done by more than engineers; psychologist are using computer simulations to investigate new approaches to better building designs.

“One crucial aspect of crowd dynamics lies in the social interactions that take place between individuals,” say the authors. “These interactions create feedback loops and amplification effects and give rise to self-organized macroscopic patterns.”

The simulation was also run without the stressors and this led to some interesting differences. For instance, “In the absence of stress, participants tended to keep reasonably safe distances from their neighbors in order to avoid the collision penalty,” says the report. This means that there were almost zero body contacts. In the regular escape, the participants were prepared to sacrifice points in order to jostle their way to a faster exit.

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Cities Improve Parking by Removing Parking Spaces

- Adam Clare

Car culture greatly damaged urban centres the world over and now cities are trying to undo the damage. Smart cities are banning cars from certain areas, installing bike lanes, more sidewalks, and now are removing parking. Cities built too many parking spaces for cars and now they are reclaiming that space. It’s important to remember that most of the time parking spaces are empty – and you can improve parking by managing the supply.

Sometimes, the supply of parking goes down because nobody needs it. Since 1990, the city of Philadelphia has conducted an inventory of parking every five years in the downtown Center City neighbourhood, counting publicly accessible parking spaces and analysing occupancy rates in facilities with 30 or more spaces. Because of plentiful transit options, a walkable environment and a high downtown residential population, Philadelphia is finding that it needs less parking. Between 2010 and 2015, the amount of off-street parking around downtown shrank by about 3,000 spaces, a 7% reduction. Most of that is tied to the replacement of surface lots with new development, according to Mason Austin, a planner at the Philadelphia City Planning Commission and co-author of the most recent parking inventory.

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Toronto’s Green Roofs Keep Growing

- Adam Clare


Back in 2006 we first looked at how green roofs were becoming a development issue in Toronto, in 2009 Toronto implemented that green roof bylaw. Then in 2014 we took a look at how North America’s green roof industry is growing.

This year, Toronto has become the hub for green roofs! Torontist took a look into what made this happen and why green roofs are perfect for cities.

There are approximately 500 green roofs, big and small, in Toronto. This is thanks to a 2010 bylaw [PDF] requiring all new developers to cover between 20 and 60 per cent of their buildings with vegetation. It’s the first (and, for now, only) regulation of its kind in North America, making Toronto uniquely positioned for environmental design.

The bylaw is why the 41-story RBC WaterPark Place [PDF] at Bay Street and Queens Quay has three green roofs that together could fill a NFL football field.

Developers can opt out of installing anything remotely grassy for a fee. But Jane Welsh, City Hall’s project manager for environmental planning, told Torontoist only five per cent of buildings choose to go sans-green roof.

Welsh also says municipally-owned buildings install a green roof anytime there’s a repair or replacement to the top of the building, when feasible.

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Thanks Delaney!

Why Watching Game of Thrones is Good for Your Relationship

- Adam Clare

Binge watching TV shows is common for a lot of couples, and that’s good. There are debates around the merit of binge watching and whether or not consuming media that ferociously is fine or not. For a good relationship binging doesn’t make a big difference – it’s following the drama of the characters that makes it worthwhile. Game of Thrones is a show that has a lot of drama which makes it an ideal show to share with your partner.

It turns out that watching the same show together gives couples a shared experience that is akin to having a social circle! Obviously, you should still go out and be social with real people.

They based their work on previous findings that suggested shared experience deepens intimacy because it allows people gradually to incorporate aspects of their partners into their sense of self. The process is called ‘‘self-expansion,’’ and can foster feelings of closeness and love.
Using the characters in a TV show as subjects for gossip or for discussion of traits and behavior, or even for shared projection of fantasy, can do the same for a couple as talking about shared acquaintances—and give them the same necessary sense of belonging.

Read more.
Thanks to the Flea!

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