By BOB DRIEHAUS
NY TimesPublished: August 13, 2008

CINCINNATI — From his months-old French bistro, Jean-Robert de Cavel sees restored Italianate row houses against a backdrop of rundown tenements in this city’s long-struggling Over-the-Rhine neighborhood.

He also sees a turnaround for the district, thanks to plans to revive a transit system that was dismantled in the 1950s: the humble streetcar line.

“Human beings can be silly because we move away from things too quickly in this country,” Mr. de Cavel said. “Streetcar is definitely going to create a reason for young people to come downtown.”

Cincinnati officials are assembling financing for a $132 million system that would connect the city’s riverfront stadiums, downtown business district and Uptown neighborhoods, which include six hospitals and the University of Cincinnati, in a six- to eight-mile loop. Depending on the final financing package, fares may be free, 50 cents or $1.

The city plans to pay for the system with existing tax revenue and $30 million in private investment. The plan requires the approval of Mayor Mark Mallory, a proponent, and the City Council.

At least 40 other cities are exploring streetcar plans to spur economic development, ease traffic congestion and draw young professionals and empty-nest baby boomers back from the suburbs, according to the Community Streetcar Coalition, which includes city officials, transit authorities and engineers who advocate streetcar construction.

More than a dozen have existing lines, including New Orleans, which is restoring a system devastated by Hurricane Katrina. And Denver, Houston, Salt Lake City and Charlotte, N.C., have introduced or are planning to introduce streetcars.

“They serve to coalesce a neighborhood,” said Jim Graebner, chairman of the American Public Transportation Association’s streetcar and vintage trolley committee. “That’s very evident in places like San Francisco, which never got rid of its streetcar system.”

Modern streetcars, like those Cincinnati plans to use, cost about $3 million each, run on an overhead electrical wire and carry up to 130 passengers per car on rails that are flush with the pavement. And since streetcars can pick up passengers on either side, they can make shorter stops than buses.

Streetcar advocates point to Portland, Ore., which built the first major modern streetcar system in the United States, in 2001, and has since added new lines interlaced with a growing light rail system. Since Portland announced plans for the system, more than 10,000 residential units have been built and $3.5 billion has been invested in property within two blocks of the line, according to Portland Streetcar Inc., which operates the system.

Critics, including Randal O’Toole, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian research organization in Washington, and an expert on urban growth and transportation issues, counter that growth along streetcar lines is dependent on public subsidy and of little use.

“It looks like it’s going to take you somewhere, but it’s only designed to support downtown residents,” he said. “If officials fall for the hype and don’t ask the hard questions, voters should vote them out.”

Cincinnati’s streetcar enthusiasts counter that they serve to shrink residents’ everyday world of work, shopping and entertainment by bringing services and businesses to one area.

“One happy consequence will be that streetcar customers who live in the area will be less mobile by choice,” said John Schneider, a Cincinnati real estate developer and downtown resident who championed an unsuccessful 2002 county sales tax proposal that would have financed a regional light rail system.

Since then, gas prices have risen sharply and advocates have started emphasizing streetcars’ ability to revitalize urban neighborhoods.

“In years gone by, people would move to cities to get a job,” Cincinnati’s city manager, Milton Dohoney, said. “Today, young, educated workers move to cities with a sense of place. And if businesses see us laying rail down on a street, they’ll know that’s a permanent route that will have people passing by seven days a week.”

After looking into streetcar systems in Seattle, Tacoma, Wash., and Charlotte, Mr. Dohoney became convinced that they spur growth. “Cincinnati has to compete with other cities for investment,” he said. “We have to compete for talent and for place of national prominence.”

A hundred miles north, Mayor Michael Coleman of Columbus, Ohio, has come to the same conclusion and is pushing to build a $103 million streetcar network along the city’s High Street connecting Ohio State University with the downtown business district. The loop would be paid for through a 4 percent surcharge on concert tickets, sporting events and downtown parking and a $12.5 million contribution from Ohio State.

“It is directly tied to economic development, and when times are tough in Ohio, we need an additional tool to create jobs,” Mr. Coleman said.

While critics question whether scarce city money would be better spent elsewhere, Mr. Coleman argues that streetcars are important to the city’s growth.

“We have to plan for the future,” he said. “I believe in 10 years, we would ask, ‘Why didn’t we do this?’ It will be 10 times more expensive, and the cost of gas will be un

By LIZ GALST
NY Times Published: August 13, 2008

The business for ground-source heat pumps is so hot that when some people driving in and around Seattle see Gerard Maloney’s EarthHeat van, with the company’s phone number on the side, they call from their cellphones. “Really, we have people doing this,” Mr. Maloney said.

Like other energy alternatives, ground-source heat pumps have won new admirers as energy costs have skyrocketed.

The pumps, also called geothermal heat pumps, use the relatively constant temperature just below the earth’s surface — six feet below, in many cases — to draw warm air into a building in winter and remove warm air in summer. Advocates say the systems can save building owners 25 percent to 65 percent on energy costs while reducing carbon dioxide emissions.

Around the nation, owners of the small businesses that constitute most of the $2.5 billion ground-source heat pump industry report that demand for their systems and services has surged.

“We started as many jobs by April of 2008 as we had done in all of 2007,” said Bruce Wollaber, president of Comfort Engineered Systems in Nolensville, Tenn., a designer and installer of heat pump systems. Bill Beattie, co-owner of Rockford Geothermal in Rockford, Ill., said, “If we stay on track, we’re probably going to grow by about 40 percent this year.”

All this comes with some growing pains for the industry, which has its sights set on capturing 30 percent of the heating and air-conditioning market by 2030. System manufacturers have a backlog of orders, installers say. Trained workers are increasingly difficult to come by. Still, said Jim Bose, executive director of the International Ground Source Heat Pump Association, an industry and advocacy group, “it’s not a pipe dream. It can be done.”

The systems use a network of water-filled pipes laid either horizontally (6 feet under) or vertically (often 200 to 300 feet down), that attach to a heat exchanger.

The technology can be used almost anywhere, on any type of building. “We’ve got them all the way from Texas to the Arctic Circle,” said Mr. Bose, a professor of engineering technology at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater.

And even without financial incentives from the government or energy utilities, says John Shonder of the Energy Department’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, “ground-source heat pumps have the lowest life-cycle costs in several cost studies that I’ve done” of heating and air-conditioning systems. (For details on incentives, see www.dsireusa.org.)

The systems pay for themselves in three to eight years, depending on “location and energy prices,” Mr. Shonder said.

In fact, heat pump systems may offer the greatest savings to the owners of commercial buildings, says John W. Lund, director of the Geo-Heat Center at the Oregon Institute of Technology. “For commercial buildings, where you have a fairly large heating and cooling load, the payback period could be two to three years.”

Though no comprehensive survey of the heat pump sector exists, Energy Department statistics on units shipped tell a striking story. In 2003, system manufacturers shipped 36,439 units. In 2006, the last year for which data is available, manufacturers shipped 63,683 units.

Bridgette Oliver, marketing and communications manager for ClimateMaster in Oklahoma City, the nation’s largest manufacturer of ground-source heat pump equipment, confirmed a rapid rise in sales. “Between 2005 and 2007, our revenue increased by 200 percent,” she said. “Our employees increased by 176 percent.”

Similarly, ClimateMaster’s major rival, WaterFurnace of Indiana, reported double-digit growth recently, and company executives said they were running two shifts at their manufacturing plant in Fort Wayne.

“Finding reliable and compliant employees to train” has been one challenge of such rapid growth, Ms. Oliver said. Moreover, system installation is bottlenecked, she says, because “drillers are overwhelmed. Drillers are where we’re really hurting.”

Though equipment manufacturers say they are able to keep pace with demand, many designers and installers have had slowdowns in parts delivery. “All the equipment is customized,” Mr. Maloney of EarthHeat said. “The suppliers are backlogged and a few of the companies are six to eight weeks out from being able to send us everything. Last year, the high-density polyethylene pipe we use was really hard to come by.”

The industry’s expansion is hampered as well by a lack of trained contractors. “Right now, we don’t have enough installers, and we don’t have enough drillers,” said Jack DiEnna, executive director of the Geothermal National and International Initiative, an industry group in Washington. “I’ve got drillers who are booked out for six months.”

Contractors say there is a similar shortage of employees. “We’re bringing in folks who aren’t necessarily career HVAC guys,” Mr. Maloney said, referring to heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning work. “We’re having to train them ourselves.” He says his 10-person company recruits employees using Craigslist in Seattle. “Even folks who have no skills are interested in learning, because it’s such a growth industry,” he said.

Rockford Geothermal is keeping pace by subcontracting “a lot of sheet metal work and plumbing,” Mr. Beattie said. He anticipates hiring three or four employees in the next six to 12 months.

The industry may find sales and workloads booming even further should Congress pass and the president sign the Renewable Energy and Job Creation Act of 2008. The legislation, sponsored by Charles B. Rangel, the New York Democrat who is chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, would extend tax credits of up to $4,000 through the end of 2014 to homeowners who have ground source heat pumps installed. (The bill offers no aid to businesses.) The House approved the bill in May, and it is awaiting action in the Senate.

To help the industry grow, Mr. DiEnna and others look to models like the work force and contractor training programs now in development at Hudson Valley Community College in New York. The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, the state’s energy authority, finances the programs.

“What we need to get this industry to its potential of at least 30 percent of the HVAC industry is exactly what’s happening now,” Mr. DiEnna said. “Companies like ClimateMaster are ramping up production. States such as New York are getting involved in work force development and contractor training. And there are increasing incentives from government. With this kind of growth, mom and pop shops can benefit as much as any of the big guys.”

By Eileen P. Duggan
Washington University in St. Louis News & Information
Dec. 19, 2003

Casual gamblers may be no more impulsive than non-gamblers when it comes to discounting the value of a delayed reward in favor of a smaller amount of cash on hand. But gamblers are more likely than non-gamblers to take a chance on a possible higher payoff instead of taking a smaller guaranteed reward.

That’s the conclusion of a recent study by three psychology researchers at Washington University in St. Louis. Their study, “Is Discounting Impulsive? Evidence From Temporal and Probability Discounting in Gambling and Non-gambling College Students,” was published in a recent issue of the journalBehavioural Processes (Volume 64, Issue3).

Are gamblers impulsive? When it comes to choosing between a smaller guaranteed reward now or waiting for the possibility of a larger reward, a new study shows gamblers are more likely to delay for a possible higher payoff.

“The main area of research of the study is discounting, where the value of the reward diminishes as it’s delayed, when you can’t have it right away,” said Leonard Green, Ph.D., Washington University professor of psychology in Arts & Sciences and one of the co-authors of the study. “You might rather have $80 now than $100 in a year, because the $100 later is worth less than $100 to you now.”

The study also looked at probabilistic rewards, “which is how we get into gambling,” said study co-author Joel Myerson, Ph.D., research professor of psychology. “You might rather have $100 for sure than a 50 percent chance of getting $200. You discount the value of the probabilistic option.”

Daniel D. Holt, a doctoral candidate in psychology, studied 18- to 24-year-old college undergraduates at a Midwestern state university where gambling is legal at age 18. Holt chose 19 students who were identified as gamblers based on a score of 4 or higher on the 1987 South Oaks Gambling Screen (SOGS), developed by H.R. Lesieur and S. B. Bloom. For a control group of non-gamblers, 19 volunteers were selected based on similarities to the gambler group in both gender and age, but whose SOGS scores were either 0 or 1.

Holt chose a college-age sample in order to avoid individuals who might already have developed other psychological and social problems associated with pathological gambling.

“Dan was more interested in learning about basic aspects of impulsivity as represented by risk-taking or an inability to delay,” Green said. “So he wanted to use a rather normal population: they’re people who gamble but they’re not pathological; they’re not in need of therapy.”

To assess temporal discounting, the individuals were given a series of choices between a smaller amount of money (e.g., $100) available immediately and a larger amount (e.g., $1,000) that could be received after a specified delay (e.g., 3 years). The amount of the immediate reward was adjusted after each choice to determine the subjective value of the delayed, larger amount.

“There were no differences between the gamblers and the non-gamblers in the degree to which they discounted the delayed rewards,” Green said. “The gamblers weren’t differentially affected by delay. Although the more delayed the reward, the less they wanted it, their choices were no different from the non-gamblers.”

But when probability discounting was assessed, “we found that the gamblers were much more likely to go for the risky, higher payoff,” Green said.

In the probability discounting tasks, the participants chose between a smaller, certain amount of money and a larger amount that could be received with a stated probability. A similar adjusting-amount procedure was used to estimate the subjective value of the probabilistic rewards.

Although both groups discounted large probabilistic amounts more steeply than small probabilistic amounts, the gamblers did not discount as much as the non-gamblers. In other words, “college students who gambled were willing to take more risks than non-gamblers,” said Holt.

“Given a choice between a risky, larger reward or a safe, smaller reward, the gamblers were more likely to take the risky payoff,” Green said.

Insight into behavioral problems

The study results might explain why some people make certain bad choices. “For example, why is it people engage in behaviors the long-term consequence of which is worse for them?” Green said. “Why do you have that incredible chocolate cake right now when you’re trying to lose weight, or you’re trying to stay healthy, or trying to stay fit? One of the reasons is that being healthy, being fit, is a delayed reward; it occurs later. And the later it is, the less it controls your present behavior. It’s discounted.”

Similarly, gamblers “might be making bad choices because they’re not taking the risk into account adequately,” said Holt.

The researchers were not interested in gambling, per se. “The area of discounting may have important implications for a lot of different human behaviors ― self-control issues, impulsivity, risk-taking, as well as gambling,” Green said.

The study also argues against the longstanding view that impulsivity is a general trait that includes both an inability to delay gratification and a tendency to take risks.

The term “impulsive” is often used to describe people who “can’t wait. They can’t delay; they’ve got to have it now,” Green said. “So they’re willing to forgo something better that comes later in order to get something right away.” But the term can also be applied to someone who doesn’t take risks adequately into account. “They just act ‘impulsively;’ they don’t think and consider all the risks,” he said.

So if gamblers are thought to be impulsive because they don’t adequately consider risks, then some researchers might argue that gamblers would also be impulsive in being less likely to delay.

“But what Dan found was that they weren’t more impulsive with delay,” Green said, “suggesting that this term ‘impulsive’ lumps together traits that might be different.”

So the term “impulsivity” might not help distinguish between different disorders that are all currently classified as impulse-control disorders.

“What we would argue is that our study might give insight into different behavioral problems,” Green said. “Some problems might be a combination of risk-taking and an inability to delay. Other problems might reflect difficulties with risk-taking; and other problems might reflect difficulties with the ability to delay. And the term ‘impulsive’ can’t be used to describe all three of those.”

Green, Myerson and Holt suggest that their research may lead to ways of assessing the likelihood that people will engage in self-harmful behaviors. Psychologists might be able to target those individuals and develop cost-effective interventions for those who are at risk, or assess their improvement as a result of therapy.

“If the individual understands the determinants of his or her behavior,” Green said, “then the individual may be better able to control his or her own behavior

thanks to Mike Abelson of Postalco

group show at cherry and martin through aug 16

By BENEDICT CAREY
NY Times Published: August 11, 2008

A decent backyard magic show is often an exercise in deliberate chaos. Cards whipped through the air. Glasses crashing to the ground. Gasps, hand-waving, loud abracadabras. Something’s bound to catch fire, too, if the performer is ambitious enough — or needs cover.

“Back in the early days, I always had a little smoke and fire, not only for misdirection but to emphasize that something magic had just happened,” said The Great Raguzi, a magician based in Southern California who has performed professionally for more than 35 years, in venues around the world. “But as the magic and magician mature, you see that you don’t need the bigger props.”

Eye-grabbing distractions — to mask a palmed card or coin, say — are only the crudest ways to exploit brain processes that allow for more subtle manipulations, good magicians learn.

In a paper published last week in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, a team of brain scientists and prominent magicians described how magic tricks, both simple and spectacular, take advantage of glitches in how the brain constructs a model of the outside world from moment to moment, or what we think of as objective reality.

For the magicians, including The Great Tomsoni (John Thompson), Mac King, James Randi, and Teller of Penn and Teller, the collaboration provided scientific validation, as well as a few new ideas.

For the scientists, Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen Macknik of the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, it raised hope that magic could accelerate research into perception. “Here’s this art form going back perhaps to ancient Egypt, and basically the neuroscience community had been unaware” of its direct application to the study of perception, Dr. Martinez-Conde said.

“It’s a marvelous paper,” Michael Bach, a vision scientist at Freiburg University in Germany who was not involved in the work, said in an e-mail message. Magicians alter what the brain perceives by manipulating how it interprets scenes, Dr. Bach said, “and a distant goal of cognitive psychology would be to numerically predict this.”

One theory of perception, for instance, holds that the brain builds representations of the world, moment to moment, using the senses to provide clues that are fleshed out into a mental picture based on experience and context. The brain uses neural tricks to do this: approximating, cutting corners, instantaneously and subconsciously choosing what to “see” and what to let pass, neuroscientists say. Magic exposes the inseams, the neural stitching in the perceptual curtain.

Some simple magical illusions are due to relatively straightforward biological limitations. Consider spoon bending. Any 7-year-old can fool her younger brother by holding the neck of a spoon and rapidly tilting it back and forth, like a mini teeter-totter gone haywire. The spoon appears curved, because of cells in the visual cortex called end-stopped neurons, which perceive both motion and the boundaries of objects, the authors write. The end-stopped neurons respond differently from other motion-sensing cells, and this slight differential warps the estimation of where the edges of the spoon are.

The visual cortex is attentive to sudden changes in the environment, both when something new appears and when something disappears, Dr. Martinez-Conde said. A sudden disappearance causes what neuroscientists call an after-discharge: a ghostly image of the object lingers for a moment.

This illusion is behind a spectacular trick by the Great Tomsoni. The magician has an assistant appear on stage in a white dress and tells the audience he will magically change the color of her dress to red. He first does this by shining a red light on her, an obvious ploy that he turns into a joke. Then the red light flicks off, the house lights go on and the now the woman is unmistakably dressed in red. The secret: In the split-second after the red light goes off, the red image lingers in the audience’s brains for about 100 milliseconds, covering the image of the woman. It’s just enough time for the woman’s white dress to be stripped away, revealing a red one underneath.

In a conference last summer, hosted by Dr. Martinez and Dr. Macknik, a Las Vegas pickpocket performer and co-author named Apollo Robbins took advantage of a similar effect on the sensory nerves on the wrist. He had a man in the audience come up on stage and, while bantering with him, swiped the man’s wallet, watch and several other things. Just before slipping off the timepiece, Mr. Robbins clutched the man’s wrist while doing a coin trick — thereby lowering the sensory threshold on the wrist. The paper, with links to video of Mr. Robbins’ performance, is at http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nrn2473.html.

“That was really neat, and new to me,” said Dr. Bach, who was in the audience. The grasp, he said, left “a sort of somatosensory afterimage, so that the loss of the watch stays subthreshold” in the victim. The visual cortex resolves clearly only what is at the center of vision; the periphery is blurred, and this is likely one reason that the eyes are always in motion, to gather snapshots to construct a wider, coherent picture.

A similar process holds for cognition. The brain focuses conscious attention on one thing at a time, at the expense of others, regardless of where the eyes are pointing. In imaging studies, neuroscientists have found evidence that the brain suppresses activity in surrounding visual areas when concentrating on a specific task. Thus preoccupied, the brain may not consciously register actions witnessed by the eyes.

Magicians exploit this property in a variety of ways. Jokes, stagecraft and drama can hold and direct thoughts and attention away from sleights of hand and other moves, performers say.

But small, apparently trivial movements can also mask maneuvers that produce breathtaking effects. In a telephone interview, Teller explained how a magician might get rid of a card palmed in his right hand, by quickly searching his pockets for a pencil. “I pat both pockets, find a pencil, reach out and hand it to someone, and the whole act becomes incidental; if the audience is made to read intention — getting the pencil, in this case — then that action disappears, and no one remembers you put your hand in your pocket,” the magician said. “You don’t really see it, because it’s not a figure anymore, it has become part of the background.”

The magician’s skill is in framing relevant maneuvers as trivial. When it’s done poorly, Teller said, “the actions immediately become suspicious, and you instantly click that something’s wrong.”

David Blaine, a New York magician and performance artist, said he started doing magic at age 4 and quickly learned that he did not need any drama or special effects. “A strong and effective way to distract somebody is to directly engage the person,” with eye contact or other interaction, Mr. Blaine said. “That can act on the subconscious like a subtle form of hypnosis.”

Not that there’s anything wrong with a dove, a plume of smoke or a burst of fire. As long as it doesn’t break magic’s unwritten code: First, do no harm. Frightening neighborhood parents, however, is allowed.

By CORNELIA DEAN
NY TimesPublished: August 11, 2008

Last year, a private company proposed “fertilizing” parts of the ocean with iron, in hopes of encouraging carbon-absorbing blooms of plankton. Meanwhile, researchers elsewhere are talking about injecting chemicals into the atmosphere, launching sun-reflecting mirrors into stationary orbit above the earth or taking other steps to reset the thermostat of a warming planet.

This technology might be useful, even life-saving. But it would inevitably produce environmental effects impossible to predict and impossible to undo. So a growing number of experts say it is time for broad discussion of how and by whom it should be used, or if it should be tried at all.

Similar questions are being raised about nanotechnology, robotics and other powerful emerging technologies. There are even those who suggest humanity should collectively decide to turn away from some new technologies as inherently dangerous.

“The complexity of newly engineered systems coupled with their potential impact on lives, the environment, etc., raise a set of ethical issues that engineers had not been thinking about,” said William A. Wulf, a computer scientist who until last year headed the National Academy of Engineering. As one of his official last acts, he established the Center for Engineering, Ethics, and Society there.

Rachelle Hollander, a philosopher who directs the center, said the new technologies were so powerful that “our saving grace, our inability to affect things at a planetary level, is being lost to us,” as human-induced climate change is demonstrating.

Engineers, scientists, philosophers, ethicists and lawyers are taking up the issue in scholarly journals, online discussions and conferences in the United States and abroad. “It’s a hot topic,” said Ronald C. Arkin, a computer scientist at Georgia Tech who advises the Army on robot weapons. “We need at least to think about what we are doing while we are doing it, to be aware of the consequences of our research.”

So far, though, most scholarly conversation about these issues has been “piecemeal,” said Andrew Maynard, chief science adviser for the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. “It leaves the door open for people to do something that is going to cause long-term problems.”

That’s what some environmentalists said they feared when Planktos, a California-based concern, announced it would embark on a private effort to fertilize part of the South Atlantic with iron, in hopes of producing carbon-absorbing plankton blooms that the company could market as carbon offsets. Countries bound by the London Convention, an international treaty governing dumping at sea, issued a “statement of concern” about the work and a United Nations group called for a moratorium, but it is not clear what would have happened had Planktos not abandoned the effort for lack of money.

“There is no one to say ‘thou shalt not,’ ” said Jane Lubchenco, an environmental scientist at Oregon State University and a former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

When scientists and engineers discuss geoengineering, it is obvious they are talking about technologies with the potential to change the planet. But the issue of engineering ethics applies as well to technologies whose planet-altering potential may not emerge until it is too late.

Dr. Arkin said robotics researchers should consider not just how to make robots more capable, but also who must bear responsibility for their actions and how much human operators should remain “in the loop,” particularly with machines to aid soldiers on the battlefield or the disabled in their homes.

But he added that progress in robotics was so “insidious” that people might not realize they had ventured into ethically challenging territory until too late.

Ethical and philosophical issues have long occupied biotechnology, where institutional review boards commonly rule on proposed experiments and advisory committees must approve the use of gene-splicing and related techniques. When the federal government initiated its effort to decipher the human genome, a percentage of the budget went to consideration of ethics issues like genetic discrimination.

But such questions are relatively new for scientists and engineers in other fields. Some are calling for the same kind of discussion that microbiologists organized in 1975 when the immense power of their emerging knowledge of gene-splicing or recombinant DNA began to dawn on them. The meeting, at the Asilomar conference center in California, gave rise to an ethical framework that still prevails in biotechnology.

“Something like Asilomar might be very important,” said Andrew Light, director of the Center for Global Ethics at George Mason University, one of the organizers of a conference in Charlotte, N.C., in April on the ethics of emerging technologies. “The question now is how best to begin that discussion among the scientists, to encourage them to do something like this, then figure out what would be the right mechanism, who would fund it, what form would recommendations take, all those details.”

But an engineering Asilomar might be hard to bring off. “So many people have their nose to the bench,” Dr. Arkin said, “historically a pitfall of many scientists.” Anyway, said Paul Thompson, a philosopher at Michigan State and former secretary of the International Society for Environmental Ethics, many scientists were trained to limit themselves to questions answerable in the real world, in the belief that “scientists and engineers should not be involved in these kinds of ethical questions.”

And researchers working in geoengineering say they worry that if people realize there are possible technical fixes for global warming, they will feel less urgency about reducing greenhouse gas emissions. “Even beginning the discussion, putting geoengineering on the table and beginning the scientific work could in itself make us less concerned about all the things that we need to start doing now,” Dr. Light said. On the other hand, some climate scientists argue that if people realized such drastic measures were on the horizon, they would be frightened enough to reduce their collective carbon footprint. Still others say that, given the threat global warming poses to the planet, it would be unethical not to embark on the work needed to engineer possible remedies — and to let policy makers know of its potential.

But when to begin this kind of discussion? “It’s a really hard question,” Dr. Thompson said. “I don’t think anyone has an answer to it.”

Many scientists don’t like talking about their research before it has taken shape, for fear of losing control over it, according to David Goldston, former chief of staff at the House Science Committee and a columnist for the journal Nature. This mind-set is “generally healthy,” he wrote in a recent column, but it is “maladapted for situations that call for focused research to resolve societal issues that need to be faced with some urgency.”

And then there is the longstanding scientific fear that if they engage with the public for any reason, their work will be misunderstood or portrayed in inaccurate or sensationalized terms.

Francis S. Collins, who is stepping down as head of the government human genome project, said he had often heard researchers say “it’s better if people don’t know about it.” But he said he was proud that the National Human Genome Research Institute had from the beginning devoted substantial financing to research on privacy, discrimination and other ethical issues raised by progress in genetics. If scientific research has serious potential implications in the real world, “the sooner there is an opportunity for public discussion the better,” he said in a recent interview.

In part, that is because some emerging technologies will require political adjustments. For example, if the planet came to depend on chemicals in space or orbiting mirrors or regular oceanic infusions of iron, system failure could mean catastrophic — and immediate — climate change. But maintaining the systems requires a political establishment with guaranteed indefinite stability.

As Dr. Collins put it, the political process these days is “not well designed to handle issues that are not already in a crisis.” Or as Mr. Goldston put it, “with no grand debate over first principles and no accusations of acting in bad faith, nanotechnology has received only fitful attention.”

Meanwhile, there is growing recognition that climate engineering, nanotechnology and other emerging technologies are full of “unknown unknowns,” factors that will not become obvious until they are put into widespread use at a scale impossible to turn back, as happened, in a sense, with the atomic bomb. At its first test, some of its developers worried — needlessly — that the blast might set the atmosphere on fire. They did not anticipate the bombs would generate electromagnetic pulses intense enough to paralyze electrical systems across a continent.

Bill Joy, a founder of Sun Microsystems, cited the bomb in a famous 2000 article in the magazine Wired on the dangers of robots in which he argued that some technologies were so dangerous they should be “relinquished.” He said it was common for scientists and engineers to fail “to understand the consequences of our inventions while we are in the rapture of discovery” and, as a result, he said, “we have yet to come to terms with the fact that the most compelling 21st-century technologies — robotics, genetic engineering and nanotechnology — pose a different threat than the technologies that have come before. They are so powerful they can spawn whole new classes of accidents and abuses.”

He called it “knowledge-enabled mass destruction.”

But in an essay in the journal Nature last year, Mary Warnock, a philosopher who led a committee formed to advise the British government after the world’s first test-tube baby was born there in 1978, said when people fear “dedicated scientists and doctors may pursue research that some members of society find repugnant” the answer is not to allow ignorance and fear to dictate which technologies are allowed to go forward, but rather to educate people “to have a broad understanding of science and an appreciation of its potential for good.”

In another Nature essay, Sheila Jasanoff, a professor of science and technology studies at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, said a first step was for scientists and engineers to realize that in complex issues, “uncertainty, ignorance and indeterminacy are always present.”

In what she described as “a call for humility,” she urged researchers to cultivate and teach “modes of knowing that are often pushed aside in expanding scientific understanding and technological capacity” including history, moral philosophy, political theory and social studies of science — what people value and why they value it.

Dr. Hollander said the new ethics center would take up issues like these. “Do we recognize when we might be putting ourselves on a negative technological treadmill by moving in one direction rather than another?” she said. “There are social questions we should be paying attention to, that we should see as important.

“I mean we as citizens, and that includes people in the academy and engineers. It includes everybody.”

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
NY Times Published: August 9, 2008
Copenhagen

The Arctic Hotel in Ilulissat, Greenland, is a charming little place on the West Coast, but no one would ever confuse it for a Four Seasons — maybe a One Seasons. But when my wife and I walked back to our room after dinner the other night and turned down our dim hallway, the hall light went on. It was triggered by an energy-saving motion detector. Our toilet even had two different flushing powers depending on — how do I say this delicately — what exactly you’re flushing. A two-gear toilet! I’ve never found any of this at an American hotel. Oh, if only we could be as energy efficient as Greenland!

A day later, I flew back to Denmark. After appointments here in Copenhagen, I was riding in a car back to my hotel at the 6 p.m. rush hour. And boy, you knew it was rush hour because 50 percent of the traffic in every intersection was bicycles. That is roughly the percentage of Danes who use two-wheelers to go to and from work or school every day here. If I lived in a city that had dedicated bike lanes everywhere, including one to the airport, I’d go to work that way, too. It means less traffic, less pollution and less obesity.

What was most impressive about this day, though, was that it was raining. No matter. The Danes simply donned rain jackets and pants for biking. If only we could be as energy smart as Denmark!

Unlike America, Denmark, which was so badly hammered by the 1973 Arab oil embargo that it banned all Sunday driving for a while, responded to that crisis in such a sustained, focused and systematic way that today it is energy independent. (And it didn’t happen by Danish politicians making their people stupid by telling them the solution was simply more offshore drilling.)

What was the trick? To be sure, Denmark is much smaller than us and was lucky to discover some oil in the North Sea. But despite that, Danes imposed on themselves a set of gasoline taxes, CO2 taxes and building-and-appliance efficiency standards that allowed them to grow their economy — while barely growing their energy consumption — and gave birth to a Danish clean-power industry that is one of the most competitive in the world today. Denmark today gets nearly 20 percent of its electricity from wind. America? About 1 percent.

And did Danes suffer from their government shaping the market with energy taxes to stimulate innovations in clean power? In one word, said Connie Hedegaard, Denmark’s minister of climate and energy: “No.” It just forced them to innovate more — like the way Danes recycle waste heat from their coal-fired power plants and use it for home heating and hot water, or the way they incinerate their trash in central stations to provide home heating. (There are virtually no landfills here.)

There is little whining here about Denmark having $10-a-gallon gasoline because of high energy taxes. The shaping of the market with high energy standards and taxes on fossil fuels by the Danish government has actually had “a positive impact on job creation,” added Hedegaard. “For example, the wind industry — it was nothing in the 1970s. Today, one-third of all terrestrial wind turbines in the world come from Denmark.” In the last 10 years, Denmark’s exports of energy efficiency products have tripled. Energy technology exports rose 8 percent in 2007 to more than $10.5 billion in 2006, compared with a 2 percent rise in 2007 for Danish exports as a whole.

“It is one of our fastest-growing export areas,” said Hedegaard. It is one reason that unemployment in Denmark today is 1.6 percent. In 1973, said Hedegaard, “we got 99 percent of our energy from the Middle East. Today it is zero.”

Frankly, when you compare how America has responded to the 1973 oil shock and how Denmark has responded, we look pathetic.

“I have observed that in all other countries, including in America, people are complaining about how prices of [gasoline] are going up,” Denmark’s prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, told me. “The cure is not to reduce the price, but, on the contrary, to raise it even higher to break our addiction to oil. We are going to introduce a new tax reform in the direction of even higher taxation on energy and the revenue generated on that will be used to cut taxes on personal income — so we will improve incentives to work and improve incentives to save energy and develop renewable energy.”

Because it was smart taxes and incentives that spurred Danish energy companies to innovate, Ditlev Engel, the president of Vestas — Denmark’s and the world’s biggest wind turbine company — told me that he simply can’t understand how the U.S. Congress could have just failed to extend the production tax credits for wind development in America.

Why should you care?

“We’ve had 35 new competitors coming out of China in the last 18 months,” said Engel, “and not one out of the U.S.”

Robin Stummer for The New Statesman
Published 31 July 2008

Vienna’s flak towers have long been abandoned - they are too painful a reminder of the city’s Nazi past. Now a group of students is campaigning to get them reopened, writes Robin Stummer

Vienna’s secrets can be big. One of the largest measures half a million cubic metres, weighs several hundred thousand tonnes, and thrusts more than 55 metres into the sky. Not surprisingly, it’s a pretty open secret. Everyone in the city knows about the Flaktürme - flak towers - the huge gun emplacements built during the Second World War to fend off Allied bombers.

All six of these reinforced concrete colossi survive, brooding grey thugs of buildings that sprouted at the heart of a city of baroque cherubs, delicate colonnades and sensuous art nouveau maidens. Being thugs, they have refused to budge, and still dominate their surroundings without a hint of remorse.
Yet the flak towers do not exist as part of “official” Vienna, the tourist temple to Mozart, Strauss and chocolate cake. Other than a brief mention in guidebooks and the occasional academic study, they are invisible. Yet Vienna is, of course, also the city of Sigmund Freud, and these relics of a dark past are poised to burst out of the city’s subconscious.

Furious at Vienna’s state of denial over the towers and the Nazi era that gave rise to them, a band of students and architectural historians is determined that the full truth about the monsters - one of the largest groups of concrete structures in Europe - should be told.

Built between December 1942 and January 1945 as Allied air raids increased, the towers were ordered by personal decree of Hitler. They were designed by the German architect Fried rich Tamms, who designed much of the Reich’s autobahn system and its bridges. Hitler had planned for the towers to be clad in marble after the war and, of course, inevitable victory for the Reich; they would be engraved with the names of the millions who had died for the Führer. Each pair of Vienna’s towers comprised a combined searchlight/radar tower and a gun tower. The walls and roofs were up to three metres thick, and inside each tower was a warren of corridors and rooms. Generators and water tanks made the Führer’s fortresses self-sufficient.

The flak-tower system was ingenious, but useless. Hitler’s strategic masterminds were dismayed to find that American and British pilots overcame the Wehrmacht’s ultimate deterrent with ease: they simply flew higher, beyond the reach of the guns, or skirted around them. Similar towers were built in Berlin and Hamburg, with equally dismal results. But they did have some use. Sections of each tower were used as air-raid shelters for civilians, and thousands sought refuge in them as the Red Army closed in on Vienna.

Since 1945, most of the towers have remained locked, with the city and national government holding the keys. The occupying Red Army tried to blow some up, but made barely a scratch. In theory, the buildings are protected by law as historic structures, but they are otherwise ignored by the state. In the 1980s, one was converted into an aquarium and another used for storage, but the others remained frozen in time.

In 2006, a group of students persuaded the city government to open one, the Arenbergpark radar tower, briefly, for an art show. The students overstayed their welcome. Fuelled by a latter-day brand of 1960s-style agitprop activism, they soon began to demand that all the towers be used for art and cultural events and for fostering “historical awareness” of the Nazi era. “Some of us started to have the idea of going further than just an art exhibition,” says Marcus Hafner, a philosophy student and leading “open flak towers” campaigner.

The students ran the Arenbergpark tower for several months as a free zone open to all visitors. Inside, they had been astonished to find an extraordinary range of artefacts, undisturbed since the last grim weeks of the battle for Vienna in spring 1945. Clothes, children’s toys, news papers, discarded uniforms, medical equipment and helmets lay strewn about, in perfect con dition. Underfoot were scattered what the students took to be toy aircraft, but were in fact models used for plotting the movement of Allied aircraft. On the walls, graffiti in French, Russian and Italian had been left by those who built the towers.

The memory of these workers is at the heart of the controversy over what to do with the towers.
They were forced labour, an army of several thousand slaves culled from defeated or embattled nations. The Austrian government has paid compensation to some of the workers, but many received nothing. Intriguingly, among the items reportedly found inside the Arenbergpark tower were detailed documents linked to the day-to-day management of the forced labour army, including their food ration.

But then, last year, the police moved in. Citing safety fears, the city government forcibly cleared the Arenbergpark tower last summer, fencing off its entrances and changing the locks. “It is simply that some people don’t want to be reminded about the war,” says Hafner. “I would like to see the flak towers become lighthouses for a better future.” The campaign to “free” the towers continues, but from the outside.

“In Vienna’s historic centre, these towers can be seen as surrealistic concrete architecture,” says the architectural historian and flak-tower freedom campaigner Ute Bauer, “but I’m not happy about detaching the war from the architecture. At least one of them has to be turned into a memorial. They have to remind us of the inhuman ‘efficiency’ the Nazis established.”

Bauer, whose book The Vienna Flak Towers In Austrian Remembrance is a groundbreaking cultural study of the buildings, is now working on an oral history research project and methodically picking through some of the documents found inside the Arenbergpark tower. Encouragingly, she is supported by the city government and the Austrian Fund for Indemnification - yet, bizarrely, she herself is barred from actually entering the towers. Big secrets unravel very slowly in Vienna.

originally found on bldgblog

4:06 PM, August 9, 2008
LA Times Blog

Who stole the bronze bust of George Freeth, the father of California surfing, from its perch on the Redondo Beach pier? A $5,000 reward awaits the person with the answer, courtesy of Body Glove founder Bob Meistrell, the Daily Breeze reports. The bust went missing sometime late Wednesday night or early Thursday morning, hacked loose from the concrete pedestal where it sat for 31 years.

Freeth, half Hawaiian and half Irish, came to the U.S. in 1907 after Jack London, awed by the 23-year-old surfer’s athleticism, wrote about him in “A Royal Sport: Surfing in Waikiki,” an article published in the lady’s Home Companion, according to Surfing for Life. London’s raves led real estate tycoon Henry Huntington to hire Freeth to put on surfing exhibitions in front of the Hotel Redondo, billing him as “The Man Who Could Walk on Water. Thousands came to watch him and soon, he was traveling up and down the SoCal coast, spreading the gospel of surfing.

In 1909, when a fishing boat capsized in heavy surf in Santa Monica, Freeth swam out and saved all seven men on board. For that, he earned the Congressional Medal of Honor. (That’s it on the right side of the photo. His National Lifesaving Award is on the left.) Freeth went on to be the first lifeguard in Southern California and organized the state’s first professional lifeguard corps.

Remember “Baywatch”? Freeth is credited with inventing that red, torpedo-shaped rescue can that was as much a prop on the show as Pam Anderson’s jiggle. By the time he died in the 1919 influenza pandemic that swept the globe, the sport of Hawaiian kings was well on its way to defining California culture to the rest of the world.

And now his statue is gone. Know who took it? Here’s the contact info:

Bob Meistrell: (310) 374-3441 (ext. 292 or 277)

By JAN HOFFMAN
NY Times Published: August 8, 2008

IT seemed like a good idea at the time.

Save gas money, be environmentally correct, lose weight — just by biking to work. And so after two decades, Dan Cooley, 41, saddled up a silver 21-speed Raleigh in April to make the daily two-mile commute to his nursing job at a senior citizen center in Louisville, Ky. In four months, he lost 15 pounds. Way to go, Dan!

Friday morning, July 25, around 6:50 a.m., he was pedaling on a residential street, wearing his green hospital scrubs, when a Volkswagen roared out of a driveway in front of him. Swerving to avoid the car, Mr. Cooley cursed loudly and rode on.

The driver and his passenger cursed back. As Mr. Cooley pulled over to the sidewalk, the car turned onto a driveway, knocking him off his bike. In Mr. Cooley’s narrative, the passenger, swearing, jumped out and pummeled him. Then he got back into the car, which zoomed away. Mr. Cooley lay prostrate on the sidewalk, bloodied, with a concussion and a torn ligament.

“We’ve had a car culture for so long and suddenly the roads become saturated with bicyclists trying to save gas,” Mr. Cooley said 10 days after the attack, still feeling scrambled, in pain and traumatized. “No one knows how to share the road.” He doesn’t plan to bike to work again this season.

Every year, the war of the wheels breaks out in the sweet summer months, as four-wheelers react with aggravation and anger to the two-wheelers competing for the same limited real estate.

This summer, the number of new cyclists has increased strongly across the country. In June, nearly 11,000 first-time riders participated in Denver’s Bike to Work Day. Dahon, makers of folding bikes popular with commuters, reports a 30-percent sales increase from a year ago, with many models having been sold out since the spring. Transportation Alternatives, a bicycling advocacy group, estimates that 131,000 people cycle daily in New York, up 77 percent since 2000.

Like Mr. Cooley, the newbies are lured by improved bike lanes as well as the benefits of exercise, a smaller carbon footprint and gas savings. But talk about a vicious cycle! With more bikes on the road, the driver-cyclist, Hatfield-McCoy hostility seems to be ratcheting up. Cycling: good for the environment, bad for mental health?

Having noted the uptick in aggression, Michelle Holcomb, a cycling instructor in Dallas, now carries a secret weapon. Recently, as she cycled into an intersection at a four-way stop and began turning left, a driver at the cross street revved and shot through, laughing as he missed her front wheel by inches. “Smile for the camera,” muttered Ms. Holcomb, who videotaped the incident with her new helmet camera.

In this dogfight, bigger’s impact is always much, much badder. But smaller is hardly better-behaved. It’s especially true in city traffic, where pedestrians add a third volatile element to a compound already wildly unstable.

Last Thursday evening, at the peak of Manhattan rush hour, Howard Savery was crossing Broadway at 40th Street with fellow bipeds. Abruptly he reared back, just avoiding a crash with an impatient cyclist, racing through the red light.

“Well, that’s a first!” remarked Mr. Savery, a banker, who was heading home to Staten Island.

First time he’d nearly been knocked over by a cyclist in Manhattan?

No, corrected Mr. Savery: “That’s the first time one of them actually beeped at me. Usually they run you down silently.”

In spot clashes around the country, the hostility this summer has erupted in baroque violence:

¶A Brentwood, Calif., doctor was charged with assault. Police say he intentionally braked in front of two cyclists, with one smashing into his rear window and the other crashing to the pavement.

¶In bike-utopia, Portland, Ore., where 6 percent of the people cycle daily — the national average is under 1 percent — a cyclist knocked off his bike clung desperately to the hood of a moving car. And a car passenger fought with a cyclist after yelling at him to wear his helmet.

¶Last weekend, Utah state police arrested the driver of a pickup truck, suspected of plowing intentionally into cyclists on a morning ride.

Isolated, freakish events, certainly. Indeed, some cycling advocates say that as riders in their communities have become a customary sight, civility by motorists has improved. But overwhelmingly, on blogs and Web sites nationwide, drivers and cyclists routinely describe shouted epithets, flung water bottles, sprays of spit and harrowing near-misses of the intentional kind.

Psychologists and traffic experts say the tension rises from many factors, including summer road rage and the “my hurry matters more than your hurry” syndrome, exacerbated when drivers feel captive to slower-moving cyclists.

And then there’s old-fashioned turf warfare.

One recent morning, BikeSnobNYC, the cycling blogger, was riding to work in a downtown Manhattan bike lane. Suddenly, an S.U.V. pulled in front of him, reversed and slipped into a parking spot. Mr. BSNYC veered and took out a camera.

“I’m working on a project,” he told the driver. “I’m taking photos of people who almost kill me.”

Recounting the exchange during a phone interview, his dudgeon only grew. “He says I’m lucky he was looking out for me because I don’t belong in the ‘most busiest city in the world’ on my bicycle,” said Mr. BSNYC, whose closely guarded identity is part of his mystique.

Red-flag words, and from a driver “with Jersey plates” yet? A provocation to any cyclist, especially one who later posted the photos on his blog.

Driver-rider hostility has become worse this summer because legions of cyclists are simply inexperienced. At least according to the drivers. “They say the cyclists are all over the road and don’t know the rules,” said Michele Mount, a spokeswoman for AAA of New Jersey.

“They pull out without looking at traffic,” she said. “They don’t signal. I get that there is safety in numbers and they’re trying to protect themselves, but there’s barely room for cars on the road, let alone a bike lane.”

Even Mr. BSNYC piled on. “You can’t ride a bike in the city as an adult the way you did as a 10-year-old in a suburban cul-de-sac,” he said. “I see people riding like children on a sidewalk, or going the wrong way down a street.” (Cyclists should ride with traffic, not against it.)

A pandemic of obliviousness — earbuds, texting — further ramps up the tension. Recently, Scott Diamond, ride coordinator for the Morris Area Freewheelers, a New Jersey cycling club, saw what he called a trifecta of irresponsible cycling: “A guy riding his bike without a helmet, talking on his cellphone, with his kid in the bike attachment behind him.”

There’s a whiff of class warfare in the simmering hostility, too. During morning rush, the teeth-gritting of drivers is almost audible, as superbly fit cyclists, wearing Sharpie-toned spandex and riding $3,000 bikes, cockily dart through the swampy, stolid traffic to offices with bike racks and showers.

On a Seattle blog, an observer howled: “Drown yourself in espresso and tears!”

AT the opposite end of the class spectrum are cyclists who can’t afford other transportation: often immigrants on clunkers, without helmets or lights, heading to work at dawn or dusk.

“We need to find some way to let them know what the rules are,” said Earl Jones, chairman of a bicycle task force in Louisville.

The ability of drivers and cyclists to trash talk and then disappear into the anonymity of traffic further poisons the atmosphere. Dave Schlabowske, the bicycle and pedestrian coordinator for Milwaukee, recalled a car pulling alongside as he pedaled to a meeting: passenger, a child of about 6, rolls down window. No seat belt.

Driver, male, fixes Mr. Schlabowske with a glare, and then gives instruction to small child. Obediently, child complies: he flips Mr. Schlabowske an obscene gesture, shouts complementary epithet. Looking triumphant, driver peels off.

To some extent, the hostility is a byproduct not only of the abdication of common sense, but of widespread ignorance of state and local laws. In every state, cyclists have the same rights and responsibilities as drivers of motor vehicles. But in the particulars, state vehicle codes and municipal ordinances vary. Consider the frustrated driver who shouts to a cyclist, “Get on the sidewalk!”

In Los Angeles, cyclists may ride on sidewalks unless they exhibit “willful” or “wanton” behavior. But in San Francisco, cycling on sidewalks is forbidden, except for bike riders under 13.

The anticyclist hostility even follows riders into court. Just ask a bike lawyer. For as surely as night follows day, with more riders on the road, there is a small but growing peloton of lawyers specializing in bike law, usually representing injured cyclists.

Gary Brustin, a cyclist and California bike lawyer, said anticyclist fervor makes jury selection daunting. “They are white-hot about us,” Mr. Brustin said. “They are seething.” In California, bicycle plaintiffs lose two out of three cases that go to trial.

The anger has not gone unnoticed by officials around the country. A dozen states now mandate at least a three-foot passing gap. In June, South Carolina passed an antiharassment law to protect cyclists. This summer, Washington, D.C., posted speed limits for cyclists on a popular trail. New York City has been painting a green-striped bike lane down Broadway, from Times Square to Herald Square. Complete Streets bills seek to require that roads be designed for all users.

But the bottom line, say driving behavior experts, is that the learning curve has just begun. Tom Vanderbilt, author of “Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do” (Knopf, 2008), said that because drivers do not expect to see cyclists, they don’t.

Therefore, said Andy Clarke, president of the League of American Bicyclists, an advocacy group, the turmoil will abate when enough cyclists are on the road, so that everyone learns to share the space. As in Amsterdam. Or Davis, Calif., where nearly 15 percent of the population cycles daily.

Will the Hatfields and the McCoys ever be able to coexist? Ground zero for such tensions may be Woodside, Calif. (population 5,600, 14 square miles), on the San Francisco peninsula, tucked in forested mountains. Its famous switchbacks are so narrow they are often unmarked by white stripes.

Woodside is host to hundreds of recreational cyclists on weekends. And on many weekdays, a peloton known as “the noon riders” — as many as 100 cyclists from Silicon Valley businesses riding during lunch break — blasts through.

“Mention the noon riders to anyone in town and you’ll see the blood pressure go up,” said Susan George, Woodside’s town manager. One day, she said, she rounded a bend and came upon them: “I slammed on the brakes and they swarmed around me, screaming and yelling obscenities. My heart was pounding. It was very scary.”

In September, Woodside will test a campaign known as Honor the Stop. It’s the brainchild of Marc Evans, a San Francisco endurance coach whose client was one of two cyclists killed this spring by a driver.

Honor the Stop features a pledge card and a two-tone wristband: black, for those killed or injured on the road, and red, to represent the wearer’s commitment to obey stop signs.

Woodside will distribute 5,000 bands. “It’s not a campaign just for cyclists,” Mr. Evans said. “It’s for all road users.”

Does Ms. George, the town manager, have a fantasy that the noon riders will wear the bands and politely stop at intersections?

“I have fantasy visions of the noon riders,” replied Ms. George, “but it’s not necessarily about wearing these bracele

By ARIEL KAMINER
NY Times Published: August 8, 2008

David Byrne is an installation artist, author, blogger, recording executive, photographer, film director and PowerPoint enthusiast. He’s even been known to dabble in music. But in certain New York neighborhoods he may be most visible as a bicycle rider, a lanky figure pedaling around the Lower East Side, or from Bay Ridge out to Coney Island in Brooklyn or up to the Bronx Museum of the Arts.

In recent years his interest in bicycles has expanded from riding them to thinking seriously about the role they play in urban life, as he has started making connections with politicians and international design consultants keen to keep cars from taking over the city. So when the Department of Transportation asked him to help judge a design competition for the city’s new bike racks, he eagerly agreed — so eagerly, in fact, that he sent in his own designs as well.

They were simple shapes to define different neighborhoods around the city: a dollar sign for Wall Street; an electric guitar for Williamsburg, Brooklyn; a car — “The Jersey” — for the area near the Lincoln Tunnel. “I said, ‘Well, this disqualifies me as a judge,’ ” he recalled, “but I just doodled them out and sent them in.” He figured maybe they’d be used to decorate the contest Web site, nycityracks.wordpress.com.

Instead, much as when George W. Bush asked Dick Cheney to find him a vice president, Mr. Byrne ended up landing the job for which he was leading the search team. Well, almost: the competition for new standard racks is still on, but on Friday nine racks made from his own whimsical designs were installed around the city. “They immediately responded, saying, ‘If you can get these made, we’ll put them through,’ “ he recalled. “I was kind of shocked.”

He’s not just being modest: for his previous installation, “Playing the Building,” still on display at the Battery Maritime Building in Lower Manhattan, he said he had to battle red tape for two years before even getting permission to look inside. This time around the agency agreed pretty much on the spot to his designs and all the proposed locations. That’s when it dawned on him: “I said: ‘Oh, that’s right, the city owns the sidewalks. They don’t have to get permission to move a stop sign.’ “

His Manhattan gallery, Pace/MacGill, along with PaceWildenstein, agreed to have the racks fabricated in exchange for the chance to sell them, down the line, as works of art. But for the 364 days that the racks will be out on the streets, Mr. Byrne doesn’t want them to be admired as artwork, he said; he wants them to be lashed with heavy chains, banged with Kryptonites and scratched by gears. He wants them to be used.

To avoid confusion, he kept the same square metal tubing used in the familiar U- or M-shaped racks — which Janette Sadik-Khan, the city transportation commissioner, unlovingly compares to “handcuffs chained to the street.”

The results? In addition to “The Jersey,” “The Wall Street” (the dollar sign) and “The Hipster” (the guitar): “The Chelsea”, a man; “The MoMA,” a modern abstraction; “The Coffee Cup,” by the Hungarian Pastry Shop in Morningside Heights; “The Villager,” a dog, for Greenwich Village; and “The Ladies’ Mile,” a single high-heeled shoe, cooling its heel outside Bergdorf Goodman.

In Times Square Mr. Byrne wanted to invoke the young lady whose vivid profile is enshrined on the mud flaps of every other truck on the Interstate. “Somebody hinted to the Department of Transportation that the city might get negative publicity,” he said. “She’s definitely low culture, but there’s nothing obscene about it — and in a way it acknowledges Times Square’s seedy past. I heard that Janette had to go to Bloomberg just to make sure it was O.K.”

Did the most powerful mayor in the nation really have to issue a stay of execution? Did some big-rig interest group push the design through in the middle of the night? Ms. Sadik-Khan insisted there was no such drama. “Mudflap Tammy” made her debut along with the other racks.

This all comes at a strange moment for New York cyclists, when they are being depicted as both the scourge and the promise of the city. On the one hand, when a police officer was caught on video picking a cyclist out of a crowd and shoving him to the ground, the president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association said the officer had been acting “under direct orders.”

On the other hand, since his congestion pricing plan was killed, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg seems to have transferred his bets to cycling as the next best way to reduce automobile traffic. Green bike lanes are appearing all around the city. Serious people are discussing a bike-sharing program. And the Department of Transportation is making way for thousands of new bike racks around the city.

Mr. Byrne’s will be the most visible, a fact that may position him as the symbol of the civic virtues of cycling. He’s even writing a nonfiction book called “Cycling Diaries,” scheduled to appear in 2009. But soft-spoken, curious and culturally omnivorous, he’s never quite been the celebrity spokes-model type. Besides, he said, “I don’t think people are going to switch over to bikes because it’s good for them or because it’s politically correct. They’re going to do it because it gets them from A to B faster.”

He has a similarly plain-spoken explanation for his own riding. “It’s a little faster than walking,” he said. “It feels good if the weather’s O.K., and if you see something that interests you, you just stop.”

Every day he rides his folding Montague hybrid bike (with bell and basket) from his home in Midtown, down the Hudson River bike path to SoHo, where despite working in a very bike-friendly office — his own — he locks up on the street below.

He calls riding “a pleasure and a convenience,” but it seems to be more than that: an essential part of the way he lives in and interacts with the city. His blog, at journal.davidbyrne.com, is full of observations he has made while tooling around on two wheels. In May he chronicled the spill he took when — after a few drinks, he admits — he skidded on the cobblestones of West 14th Street and broke two ribs. (Sprawled in the street, he wrote, he got “no help from the N.Y.P.D., though one of them asked if I was David Byrne.”)

He briefly considered a martini-glass bike rack for the Meatpacking District but decided against it.

Ms. Sadik-Khan said she believed that the involvement of an artist like Mr. Byrne would raise the profile of cycling citywide. “The idea that it’s cool to bike really helps,” she said, and “the New York City Department of Transportation is not necessarily known for its cool reputation.”

Mr. Byrne isn’t anticipating a revolution, but he does sense a shift in the wind. Riding a bicycle, “used to be completely uncool,” he said. “Now it’s cool in different ways: for some people it’s cool if you have an old junker. For other people it’s cool if you have a racing bike.

“Anyway, it doesn’t immediately relegate you to nerd status anymore.”

Some pricey sales at a fancy gallery might help too. “Danielle, my studio manager, kept asking the question — ‘Well, David, these are practical, how can they be sold as art?’ “ he said. “I didn’t have a good answer for that.”

Marc Glimcher, president of PaceWildenstein, said, “I think that it is permissible for art to be accidentally very useful.” But he guessed that the racks might sell for $10,000 to $20,000. At that price, will anyone dare use them?

“That would be a good question if it weren’t bicycle people,” he said. “They’re a strange breed, and of course we have to include David in that. They will not be the least bit intimidated to lock their bicycle to this. If you stand in one place long enough, someone may lock a bicycle to you.”

By DAVID BROOKS
NY Times Published: August 7, 2008

Dear Dr. Kierkegaard,

All my life I’ve been a successful pseudo-intellectual, sprinkling quotations from Kafka, Epictetus and Derrida into my conversations, impressing dates and making my friends feel mentally inferior. But over the last few years, it’s stopped working. People just look at me blankly. My artificially inflated self-esteem is on the wane. What happened?

Existential in Exeter

Dear Existential,

It pains me to see so many people being pseudo-intellectual in the wrong way. It desecrates the memory of the great poseurs of the past. And it is all the more frustrating because your error is so simple and yet so fundamental.

You have failed to keep pace with the current code of intellectual one-upsmanship. You have failed to appreciate that over the past few years, there has been a tectonic shift in the basis of good taste.

You must remember that there have been three epochs of intellectual affectation. The first, lasting from approximately 1400 to 1965, was the great age of snobbery. Cultural artifacts existed in a hierarchy, with opera and fine art at the top, and stripping at the bottom. The social climbing pseud merely had to familiarize himself with the forms at the top of the hierarchy and febrile acolytes would perch at his feet.

In 1960, for example, he merely had to follow the code of high modernism. He would master some impenetrably difficult work of art from T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound and then brood contemplatively at parties about Lionel Trilling’s misinterpretation of it. A successful date might consist of going to a reading of “The Waste Land,” contemplating the hollowness of the human condition and then going home to drink Russian vodka and suck on the gas pipe.

This code died sometime in the late 1960s and was replaced by the code of the Higher Eclectica. The old hierarchy of the arts was dismissed as hopelessly reactionary. Instead, any cultural artifact produced by a member of a colonially oppressed out-group was deemed artistically and intellectually superior.

During this period, status rewards went to the ostentatious cultural omnivores — those who could publicly savor an infinite range of historically hegemonized cultural products. It was necessary to have a record collection that contained “a little bit of everything” (except heavy metal): bluegrass, rap, world music, salsa and Gregorian chant. It was useful to decorate one’s living room with African or Thai religious totems — any religion so long as it was one you could not conceivably believe in.

But on or about June 29, 2007, human character changed. That, of course, was the release date of the first iPhone.

On that date, media displaced culture. As commenters on The American Scene blog have pointed out, the means of transmission replaced the content of culture as the center of historical excitement and as the marker of social status.

Now the global thought-leader is defined less by what culture he enjoys than by the smartphone, social bookmarking site, social network and e-mail provider he uses to store and transmit it. (In this era, MySpace is the new leisure suit and an AOL e-mail address is a scarlet letter of techno-shame.)

Today, Kindle can change the world, but nobody expects much from a mere novel. The brain overshadows the mind. Design overshadows art.

This transition has produced some new status rules. In the first place, prestige has shifted from the producer of art to the aggregator and the appraiser. Inventors, artists and writers come and go, but buzz is forever. Maximum status goes to the Gladwellian heroes who occupy the convergence points of the Internet infosystem — Web sites like Pitchfork for music, Gizmodo for gadgets, Bookforum for ideas, etc.

These tastemakers surf the obscure niches of the culture market bringing back fashion-forward nuggets of coolness for their throngs of grateful disciples.

Second, in order to cement your status in the cultural elite, you want to be already sick of everything no one else has even heard of.

When you first come across some obscure cultural artifact — an unknown indie band, organic skate sneakers or wireless headphones from Finland — you will want to erupt with ecstatic enthusiasm. This will highlight the importance of your cultural discovery, the fineness of your discerning taste, and your early adopter insiderness for having found it before anyone else.

Then, a few weeks later, after the object is slightly better known, you will dismiss all the hype with a gesture of putrid disgust. This will demonstrate your lofty superiority to the sluggish masses. It will show how far ahead of the crowd you are and how distantly you have already ventured into the future.

If you can do this, becoming not only an early adopter, but an early discarder, you will realize greater status rewards than you ever imagined. Remember, cultural epochs come and go, but one-upsmanship is forever.