TED Talk Thursday – Daan Roosegaarde: A smog vacuum cleaner and other magical city designs

According to TED.com: ” Daan Roosegaarde uses technology and creative thinking to produce imaginative, earth-friendly designs. He presents his latest projects — from a bike path in Eindhoven, where he reinterpreted “The Starry Night” to get people thinking about green energy, to Beijing, where he developed a smog vacuum cleaner to purify the air in local parks, to a dance floor that generates electricity to power a DJ booth. Check out Roosegaarde’s vision for a future where creativity is our true capital.”

” Daan Roosegaarde builds jaw-dropping artworks that redefine humanity’s relationship to city spaces. Along with his team at Studio Roosegaarde, Roosegaarde is devoted to “landscapes of the future,” city prototypes and urban adornments that fuse aesthetics with sustainability.”

“From Smog Free Project in Beijing — a tower that purifies its surrounding atmosphere and harvests pollutants to preserve as jewelry — to an interactive dance floor that generates electricity from dancers, Roosegaarde’s designs revolutionize the role of technology in the built environment.”

Daan Roosegaarde: A smog vacuum cleaner and other magical city designs

 

For those of you not familiar with TED Talks here is a brief summery from www.ted.com: “TED is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader. Along with two annual conferences — the TED Conference in Long Beach and Palm Springs each spring, and the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford UK each summer — TED includes the award-winning TEDTalks video site, the Open Translation Project and Open TV Project, the inspiring TED Fellows and TEDx programs, and the annual TED Prize”

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I look forward to your thoughts and comments!

TED Talk Thursday – A Vision for Sustainable Restaurants by Arthur Potts Dawson

According to TED.com: “If you’ve been in a restaurant kitchen, you’ve seen how much food, water and energy can be wasted there. Chef Arthur Potts-Dawson shares his very personal vision for drastically reducing restaurant, and supermarket, waste — creating recycling, composting, sustainable engines for good (and good food).”

“Arthur Potts Dawson wants us to take responsibility not just for the food we eat, but how we shop for and even dispose of it. And he’s showing the way — with impeccable taste.”

“Which came first, epicure or eco-warrior? For 23 years, Arthur Potts Dawson has worked alongside Britain’s most respected chefs, including Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Jamie Oliver. But his interest in food began during childhood, on a Dorset farm. “There was never much money around when I was growing up,” he says. “We learned to turn lights off, put a jumper on instead of the heating.”

“This thrifty sensibility found expression in his acclaimed London restaurants Acorn House and Water House, opened in 2006. From rooftop gardens to low-energy refrigerators and wormeries that turn food waste into compost, these restaurants prove the profitability of an eco-friendly approach — and serve as training grounds for the next generation of green chefs. Potts Dawson is now taking his crusade to kitchen tables, launching The People’s Supermarket, a member-run cooperative supporting British farms, and cooking for Mrs Paisley’s Lashings, a supper club whose profits fund urban gardens in London schools.”

A Vision for Sustainable Restaurants by Arthur Potts Dawson

 

For those of you not familiar with TED Talks here is a brief summery from www.ted.com: “TED is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader. Along with two annual conferences — the TED Conference in Long Beach and Palm Springs each spring, and the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford UK each summer — TED includes the award-winning TEDTalks video site, the Open Translation Project and Open TV Project, the inspiring TED Fellows and TEDx programs, and the annual TED Prize”

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I look forward to your thoughts and comments!

TED Talk Thursday – Why wildfires have gotten worse and what we can do about it by Paul Hessburg

According to TED.com : “Megafires, individual fires that burn more than 100,000 acres, are on the rise in the western United States — the direct result of unintentional yet massive changes we’ve brought to the forests through a century of misguided management. What steps can we take to avoid further destruction? Forest ecologist Paul Hessburg confronts some tough truths about wildfires and details how we can help restore the natural balance of the landscape.”

“Paul Hessburg is a research ecologist who builds models of historical and modern era conditions in large forests and studies what factors make them behave as they do. In fact, much of his research is trying to decipher what is normal. In his research, Hessburg wants to know how the forests we inherited worked before we changed them. What did “natural” look like, and what specifically did we change about naturalness? What’s still working well, and what could use a hand down?”

“Hessburg has spent most of his adult life (35 years) in his dream job. He works for the USDA, Forest Service, at the Pacific Northwest Research Station, where he is stationed at a field laboratory in Wenatchee, WA, US. That’s located about five blocks just east of heaven, he says. He has a doctorate in Forest Pathology from Oregon State University, and he has been working in forestry for 40 years. He’s also an Affiliate Professor at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA.”

Why wildfires have gotten worse and what we can do about it by Paul Hessburg

 

For those of you not familiar with TED Talks here is a brief summery from www.ted.com: “TED is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader. Along with two annual conferences — the TED Conference in Long Beach and Palm Springs each spring, and the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford UK each summer — TED includes the award-winning TEDTalks video site, the Open Translation Project and Open TV Project, the inspiring TED Fellows and TEDx programs, and the annual TED Prize”

And here a brief summery of TEDx programs: “TEDx is an international community that organizes TED-style events anywhere and everywhere — celebrating locally-driven ideas and elevating them to a global stage. TEDx events are produced independently of TED conferences, each event curates speakers on their own, but based on TED’s format and rules.”

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I look forward to your thoughts and comments!