Hasta La Ideas

Promotion: entries are now being accepted for the Wood Awards 2012.

The annual awards showcase outstanding design, craftsmanship and installations using wood, including furniture, small projects, staircases, large-scale public buildings and more.

The main categories of the Wood Awards 2012 are:

» commercial and public access
» private
» small project
» structural
» repair and adaptive reuse
» bespoke furniture
» production-made furniture

Enter for free via the Wood Awards website. Deadline: 1 June 2012.

Here’s some more information from the organisers:

The Wood Awards 2012 – Calling for entries

The Wood Awards is once again open for entries for the UK’s premier award scheme for the world’s only naturally sustainable material. The Wood Awards is free to enter, with no administration charge, and entries are now open via the website www.woodawards.com. The closing deadline is 1st June.

As Britain’s premier architecture and furniture competition celebrating excellence in design and craftsmanship using timber, the aim of the Wood Awards is to recognise, encourage and promote outstanding design, craftsmanship and installation in wood. Over the last nine years since its re-launch, the projects entered in the Wood Awards have ranged from exquisitely designed and executed staircases, furniture and timber frame buildings, to iconic public buildings from the UK’s leading architectural practices.

Previous Gold Award winners include the Weald and Downland Museum by Edward Cullinan Architects, Norwich Cathedral Visitors Centre by Hopkins Architects, Pinions Barn by Simon Conder Associates, The Savill Building by Glenn Howells Architects and last year, the Rothschild Foundation, using European oak, by Stephen Marshall Architects.

The categories for the Wood Awards have been updated for the 2012 competition with the introduction of ‘Small Project’ as a main category, the renaming of the ‘Conservation / Restoration’ category as ‘Repair & Adaptive Reuse’, and the extension of one ‘Furniture’ category into two: ‘Bespoke Furniture’ and ‘Production Made Furniture’. In separating the small projects from the ‘Private’ category this year with their own ‘Small Project’ category, the Wood Awards has the opportunity to give much smaller projects, from bespoke staircases to garden buildings, the specific recognition they deserve. The category ‘Repair & Adaptive Reuse’ still incorporates both the careful conservation and ingenious restoration seen every year, but intend to encourage entries where the decision to repurpose an existing building has been made over simply moving or rebuilding completely. There will also be a more specific focus on the wood species and timber products used in each project. Commenting on this evolution, chairman of the judges, Michael Morrison of Purcell Miller Tritton, said: “Both judges and sponsors wanted to respond to the interesting challenges the awards often present, and these changes will help give us another fascinating year.”

Canada Wood, the joint initiative between the Canadian government and timber industry association partners representing producers in Canada, and the timber industry’s sustainability and promotion campaign Wood for Good, have both this year become lead sponsors of the Wood Awards, alongside long standing supporters the American Hardwood Export Council and the Carpenters’ Company. Other sponsors include TRADA and American Softwoods. The Wood Awards is a showcase, a flagship for wood in the best of British architecture, furniture and design, and with the enthusiastic commitment of its sponsors, the Wood Awards, and excellence in design and craftsmanship using wood, is thriving.

With permission from the owner, anyone associated with an eligible building or furniture project can enter. Visit www.woodawards.com for more information on how to enter, criteria, details on each of the categories, and inspiration.

Wood Awards on Twitter | Wood Awards on Facebook | Wood Awards on Linkedin

Graph of the Internet.

Law enforcement is an extremely complex line of work, as police officers have to keep up-to-date with events and people in the community, but usually from the sidelines or through second-hand information. Tools that can augment police officers’ mental models of the communities they serve, especially in an ever increasing information-rich world, are critical to the future of policing.

And that’s where graph theory comes in. Graph theory looks at objects (nodes) and the relationships (edges) between them. These objects could be people, computers, or buildings, while the corresponding relationships could be family ties, Internet connections, and roads. As Facebook and other social networking tools continue to bring our world closer together each day, social network applications of graph theory are becoming a hot topic. Ever hear of “six degrees of separation?” Thanks to Facebook, it’s now closer to four or five.

Criminal networks are really just a specific example of social networks. Currently, law enforcement agencies use link analysis, a basic application of graph theory, to attempt to understand these networks. Link analysis produces a visual output of relationships between nodes, but “people tend to believe that actors in the center or at the top of a graph are crucially and most important.” Instead, Renee van der Hulst describes a framework for using social network analysis (SNA) for crime analysis. Beyond just outputing a visual graph, SNA provides a mathematical approach to quantify the “characteristics of network activity, social roles, positions and associated social mechanisms.”

A simple graph of a social network, including nodes and edges.

In 2011, researchers from Virginia Commonwealth University implemented a pilot program of SNA in the Richmond, VA Police Department to test its effectiveness. The Richmond City Police Department asked the researchers to identify the reason behind why “two groups of previously friendly males” were now engaging in a “rash of violence” against each other. The researchers mined a police informational database for details concerning twenty-four persons of interest, as well as any connections four people out.

(more…)

La candela romantica a forma di tappo in sughero dura 2 ore, giusto il tempo di una cenetta per giocartela.
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An impromptu conference aimed at reforming a war-torn nation

For many Somali‬ refugees, the film Black Hawk Down serves as one of their only memories of the civil war that has ravaged their country for the last two decades. This Thursday, 17 May 2012, thousands of expats—along with the rest of the world—will see their nation again in a live broadcast of TEDxMogadishu, an impromptu conference bravely taking place in Somalia’s capital city.

Documenting the event are filmmakers Sebastian Lindstrom and Alicia Sully, a progressive duo who recently shot a feature film highlighting the various ways people use camel milk. After filming the TEDx summit in Doha, Lindstrom and Sully joined fellow organizers in Somalia to finalize plans for TEDxMogadishu and make the underground announcement about the nation-shaping symposium.

With a war on the periphery and pirates on the beaches why risk venturing to Mogadishu when the whole conference will be streamed online via satellite? Well, for the first time in years, Mogadishu is being spared active fighting, and people are coming back and opening businesses. There are success stories to share, like that of participant and supporter Liban Egal, who is the founder of the brand new First Somali Bank.

The goal for TEDxMogadishu is to create a space in which to spread ideas for positive change in Somalia. Lindstrom points out that the group empowering the independently organized event isn’t the first to see a change taking place in Somalia (he helpfully sent over links to The New York Times, Newsweek, Voice of America and Foreign Policy). In some ways, Mogadishu is a model forum for the TEDx conference as it stands on the forefront of something hugely important–the rebirth of a nation.

If you tune in to the satellite stream of the conference on Thursday, you will witness a powerful movement happening in Mogadishu. Along with the short lead time on the announcement of the event, safety precautions are being put into place to protect the attendees and speakers, which Lindstrom says includes “a chef and restauranteur, a real estate developer, the founder of a university, the founder of the first Somali bank, a camel farmer, healthcare specialist, a Somali journalist and more.”

To find out how to attend the three-hour conference you can call or email the organizers. Those tuning in digitally can catch the live feed at 2pm in Mogadishu (12pm London, 7am New York).

A parte lo stile retrò della tastiera ma forse, quello della mela, era troppo sottile.
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