20
Mar
2011
Chasing a made up number’s source…
A while ago I wrote about the magical 45% number that is cited whenever anyone tries to justify their involvement in a built-environment project that seeks to reduce CO2 emissions.
In the last few months I’ve made a few steps in finding the source of this number, and it seems that it might pay to be a bit more careful while using it in future. (Seems – I’d like to know if anyone knows better.)
The most likely source of the number comes from CIBSE guide F. (Thanks Sophie for finding it, I know I’ve been a terrible bore about this subject.)
| domestic | Commercial & Public | Industrial |
| 29% | 13% | 4% |
all adds up to 46% - eureka! It has been found! Lets just cross our Ts and dot our Is to be sure.
This table comes from the ‘Digest of UK energy statistics (London: The Stationery Office)’, and was published in 2000. There are a couple of tricky things here, one glaring, and one that takes a bit of digging. Firstly, 2000 was 11 years ago, and the odds are that the data are even older. 12 years ago I looked like this! These data are published annually and a lot happens in 12 years – is it still a valid number to be quoting? I had a look, and the stationary office doesn’t publish that data any more, it is the the Department of Energy and Climate Change‘s thing.
The places that I’ve been most successful in finding useful information are:
- Eurostat:Using official statistics to calculate greenhouse gas emissions: A statistical guide html version, pdf.
- Department of Energy in the US
If there is an up to date figure then I’d love to see it, it’d make me feel like much less of a fraud when I try to convince people about this kind of thing.
20
Mar
2011
ideas speed dating
This is a bit of a UTS architecture classic, I think I first heard about it from Adrian Lahoud and Tarsha Finney a few years ago, and Friday’s class was the first chance I’ve had to really try it out.
The format is simple, split the class in half, and sit the two halves facing each other. Then get them to talk about their ideas for 4 minutes. I had everyone sitting pretty close together – it gets pretty noisy but it seems to pump up the endergy a bit. Once the 4 minutes is up you get one side of the group to rotate. Then start again.
It got good feedback from the class. It's almost too easy, it feels a bit like cheating! Because of the short time and high energy the ideas seem to flow so quickly. There is a bit of a problem with how to rearange the group so that the static ones get to talk to each other too, but I'd imagine that once I get around to reading group theory in the bedroom I'll have a way to fix that.
I had an odd number so I popped the odd one off the end and gave them a 4 minute write up session so that they could capture their ideas.
2
Mar
2011
…and so the studio starts…
I’ve started teaching a design studio (believe it or not)!
As is usually the way with things that I do, it’s going to be pretty experimental. Here are some of the links to what they are up to:
http://beginnersguidetotheapocalypse.wikispaces.com/ is a simple ‘messy space’ wiki for them to share things.
http://utsapocalypse.net/ is a place for them to blog daily in a slightly more formal way.
and this http://bit.ly/dZIeNC is the brief that I’ve given them at the moment.
I’ll keep updating things as they happen, so keep going back, especially to the blogs, if there are 15 people posting once a day then we ought to have over a thousand blog posts by the end of the semester!
19
Feb
2011
Nav project winding up
The navigation project that Dan & Bin have been working on over the summer is about to finish. We’ve got one week left, so it’s mostly commenting and tidying up.
It’s a long way from being a commercial product, but it is certainly useful as an in-house tool. There will be more on the blog about where we are now, and where we could go from here, in the next week, but just as a reminder – here’s the link blog.bvn-usyd.com.
It’s pretty impressive in action, it finds the shortest path (or top n shortest paths) in a cellular building, and can display the measurement along the path. It can do lots of other stuff too, but I’ll leave that up to the boys to describe!
19
Feb
2011
Both sides of the story
I’m setting a reading list for a debate amongst my students about Australian energy policy. It’s likely to be relatively abstract discussion as none of us has access to, or expertise in, the specific data.
I’ve already got
and
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WHY vs WHY Nuclear Power Barry Brook (YES) vs Ian Lowe (NO) |
| and | |
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Sustainable Energy – without the hot air, David JC MacKay |
as the main texts for the debate. The first book is specifically Australian, but the second is UK focused (but only really from a data point of view). I’d like to include some contrarian texts too, the two that come to mind are
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The False Promise of Green Energy , by Andrew Morriss, William T. Bogart and Roger E. Meiners |
| and | |
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The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves , by Matt Ridley |
but I haven’t read either of them, and I’d be interested to hear what other people recommend, and what they think of the books mentioned.
The current motion for the debate is: “this house believes that Australia’s energy supply mix is doing just fine the way it is” and I’m a bit worried that nobody will come to support the motion with any enthusiasm.
I’ll be posting more studio related bits as it gets going, but I’d love some suggestions.