smart geometry 2010 – in progress
It is all in full swing, but here are some amazing pictures from SG this year!
thou shall not passport
The first day of Smart Geometry is more or less over now, last night’s tutors’ dinner is now just a memory and a crumpled receipt in someone’s pocket.
I’m sat in Oxford, in my house, Winnie-the-Pooh-ing about and putting things in the dishwasher.
This doesn’t seem like very responsible behaviour for a tutor, especially for one of such an exciting cluster as the “Rapid R&D to Rapid Assembly – snap fit, push on….” group. Surely I should be solving wicked problems and grinding out slick moves to make snap fit shuttering carpentry late into the night.
No. If you don’t have a passport – but you do want to travel – then, in a slightly twisted version the words of the great John Nash, “Fuck you buddy“. Read the rest of this entry »
Carbon Buzz interview
On Monday I’m going to go and interview Judit Kimpian about her involvement in the Carbon Buzz project.
Carbon Buzz is a platform where people who design buildings can put their design stage building performance data from their simulations, and then compare it with real, in-use data. Check out the website, and there is the Carbon Buzz handbook too.
I’m interested in it for a number of reasons, mainly because it is one of the only chances in architecture where you get to see a comparison between design intent, and the delivered product. The apparent fact that the simulations are getting it so wildly wrong intrigues me too. If the designers of the simulations know that their calculations are so wrong, then why are they still used, hopefully Judit can shed some light on this!
Since the interview was organised the project has been funded for another three years by the Technology Strategy Board, so we’ll get to see a continuation of this work.
If you have any questions that you’d like me to ask Judit then put them into the comments on this post. I’ll publish the interview in a few days once it is edited.
BP Quiz gets going
The bpQuiz site is up and rolling along nicely.
I thought I’d start building the results graphs so that you can see how they are starting to form.
For starters, here’s a map of who has taken the quiz so far (as of today Thursday). As usual wordpress won’t allow me to do anything fun, so if you click on the picture below it’ll take you to the bpquiz proto-blog.
This one shows the aggregate confidences assigned to the questions (the red bars) next to the marked responses (the blue bars)
It is interesting to see how they differ on a few questions, but also how well correlated they are too in general. I was expecting to see a more pronounced difference.
There are plenty more graphs coming up when my sanity and enthusiasm for graphs allows!
Finally, if you’ve done the quiz, and you feel bad for not getting too many right, don’t! The average score is currently about 44%, so you probably did better than you think.
If you haven’t done the quiz yet, then get over to http://bpquiz.co.uk/ and have a go!