Steven Howland wins leadership award May 28, 2009
Posted by Angelo in Education, People.Tags: Mary R. Kihl, School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, Steven Howland
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Very proud to hear today that Steve Howland, a student worker here at Decision Theater, was awarded the first ever Mary R. Kihl Leadership Endowment award.
Steve is working towards a Masters in Urban and Environmental Planning with a concentration in Environmental Planning.
See full announcement here at the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning.
In a recent paper by Howland, he discusses mitigation strategies for the Southwest desert region and the specific impacts of climate change that can be solved locally.
Obama’s ‘Body of work’ speech settles brouhaha May 15, 2009
Posted by Angelo in Arizona State University, People.add a comment
This video is worth watching, if only to see how the president of the United States put an overblown media controversy to rest –giving that phrase a new context, now.
ASU president gets ’smart grid’ February 12, 2009
Posted by Angelo in Arizona State University, Energy & Climate, People, Watchlist.Tags: Michael Crow
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Despite the downturn, Arizona State University president Michael Crow realizes that bigger economic agenda items cannot wait. ASU, and certainly Arizona cannot stop pushing the sustainability envelope.
The plan that Crow is advancing -a network of research centers focused on Clean Technology — is the ‘recipe’ for the US economic revival that Thomas Friedman recommends. It involves creating the intellectual muscle for the so-called Energy Internet.
Janet Napolitano’s ‘journal’ February 6, 2009
Posted by Angelo in Emergency Preparedness, People, Watchlist.Tags: Arizona, DHS, Janet Napolitano, response and recovery
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For those readers of this blog in Arizona, you may want to check out the blog that our former Governor Janet Napolitano, now the Secretary of Homeland Security started a few weeks back.
It’s the start of what I might imagine is a larger communication strategy by the DHS, as it gets into lockstep with the rest of the Obama administration –including the State Department — that has been using a wide range of social media and outreach from the get-go.
Napolitano’s sprung into action dealing with everything from ice storms and ICE (immigration and customs enforcement) plans as the journal records. Even a passing comment on her Arizona connection with refeence to security around the Super Bowl!
Should buildings “talk?” January 24, 2009
Posted by Angelo in Design, Energy & Climate, People, Urban Growth, Visualization.add a comment
Would buildings one day communicate with you?
When I ask my colleague Dr. Robert Pahle about the ability to connect a database to a visualization of a city, his answer is “they don’t now, but they should!” If he has his way, they soon will.
He is currently using the City of Tempe model (a very popular 3D model we use here) and embedding it with rich data. Soon anyone would be able to pull up real-time information about a building and look at its footprint, he says –the carbon it generates, the energy it consumes, the number of occupants, the parking spots available in the underground garage etc.
We could take it further, and make that data available online, so you could have that data sent to your Blackberry via a text message –if it is that critical that you have it in near real-time.
We are at an early stage of interacting with our environments. Notice how energy ‘calculators’ are catching on.
- The Global Institute of Sustainability has a great one as part of the Campus Metabolism project.
- The University of British Columbia web site shows the real-time consumption and savings at the Vancouver campus –in terms of copy paper used, greenhouse gases saved etc.
- There are simple ones like this, and carbon footprint calculators, and green building calculators.
Armed with this granular knowledge of our local environments, you could use it to make better decisions, whether it is what school to enroll your child in, which organization to do business with, or which city to set up your factory in.
