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Lost In Space: A Traveller's Tale
John Thackara2022-08-23T13:53:25+00:00January 22nd, 2000|most read, moving|
As well as being thresholds between land and air, modern airports are gateways to complexity. Through them, we enter the operating environment of global aviation, surely mankind's most complicated creation. But in airports, although we are isolated from the rythms of the natural world, we remain ignorant of how this artificial one works. The result is to reinforce what philosophers call our ontological alienation: a sense of rootlessness and anxiety; of not quite being real; of being… lost in space.
Aviation is typical in many respects of the way the whole world is going: saturated with information and systems; complex but incomprehensible; an exhilarating human achievement, and a terrifying prospect, at the same time. It's time design got to grips with these ambiguous features of our technological society. But I'll return to these broader issues at the end.
Right now, I want to focus on three design questions: why does air travel makes you feel strange ? what can design do to improve the experience? and why go in person, when you can call?
I believe answers to these three questions can be found by looking at the ways that different kinds of space affect the way we think and feel. The first is architectural space, a familar enough concept which is sufficiently mAinstream nowadays to coommand generous coverage in newspapers and on television. Then there is aviation space, the 'operating environment' within which airports, airplanes, electronic signals, and people, interact with each other continuously on a global scale. Typical airport plans, of the kind you would find in an architect's office, say almost nothing about the quality of our interaction with these intangible systems and processes. I will then compare these first two kinds of space to a third, telematic space – the space of electronic communications, where all that's whizzing around is information.
In order to explain the strange way we feel when traveling by air, and the impact on us of airport and aviation space, I need to explain a bit about the aviation system as a whole, which determines what architects would call the programme of an individual airport building.
Since 1993, the world's airlines carried more than one billion passengers on scheduled flights every year. That's equivalent to one sixth of the world's population. Airlines also carried 22 million tons of freight last year – almost a quarter of the total value of the world's manufactured exports. It took something like 12 million aircraft departures to carry such stupendous quantities of people and goods around the world. These were to and from about 16,000 airports in the Unites States alone – perhaps 30,000 in the world? Nobody actually knows: no single organisation represents them all.
But the aviation system's earthbound infrastructure is as nothing compared to the complexity of its operating environment, or aviation space. The aviation system, of which airports are one component, is distributed not just in space, but also in time. Airports exist at the intersection of airways – the space through which aircraft pass – which are densely criss-crossed, in three spatial dimensions,and at different times – by the routes planes are flying, did fly, and will fly.
Aviation space is also saturated with electronic information from humans and machines, chattering out directions to thousands of aircrew – and onboard computers – at any one moment. The fact that people – passengers, aircrew, ground staff, air traffic controllers and the like – are part of the system, too, means that when it comes to complex environments, forget the banks and dealing rooms that feature so prominently on television as symbols of modern space: airports are by far the most advanced smart buildings on earth.
Expansion of the system, and in particular the rate of building of new airports, is staggering. Compound growth in air travel and transport of six per cent or more has a profound impact on the phenomenology of air travel – the vague sensation that these huge flows of people and matter and information are increasing in volume and power all the time.
Once a year, Airports International magazine lists hundreds of new aiport projects around the world. Many are in places I, for one, have never heard of – exotic towns spending tens and hundreds, billions of dollars on new facilities.
No single world body is responsible for the aviation system as a whole. There are airlines – thousands of them: the breakup of Aeroflot produced 800 new ones in the URSS . Then there are all sorts operators and managers of airport – some local, some national. There do exist supranational air traffic control bodies, but they have an uphill struggle integrating national systems.Nobody is coordinating this phenomenal expansion of world aviation. It's just happening.
Speed is money
This stupendous investment of money and materials is not the consequence of an integrated plan to manage increasing traffic: it is a potent interaction between politics and markets. Economically, aviation growth is a visceral response by the market to apparantly limitless demand. Politically, airports have become economic and political touchstones against which cities and regions measure their status in the world. In post-Cold War Europe more than 300 emerging cities or regional entities are competing with each other to attract increasingly mobile capital and jobs. For them – and for hundreds of other cities and regions around the world – an airport has become a strategic priority.
The biggest international airports and major hubs – the United States alone has 30 – are like giant pumps that greatly increase flow through the whole system. Phenomenal costs land on those places that wish to keep up. A single 747-capacity runway can cost $200m; an international passenger terminal ranges from $100 million upwards. Once road and rail links, baggage handling systems, air traffic control systems and so on, are factored in, the capital cost of an international airport quickly exceed a billion dollars.Japan's new Kansai airport cost $15 billion -insofar as anyone actually knows the full amount,or is prepared to say.
The ground traffic generated by all those workers, passengers, well-wishers, cab drivers and so on, is enormous too. Los Angeles International generates more than 150,000 vehicle trips daily in and out of the central terminal area alone – excluding long-stay car parks, warehouses, nearby hotels and their suppliers. For planners, it's like designing a traffic system for a city with more than half a million inhabitants.
Airports also have huge workforces. Frankfurt, whose workforce is well over 40,000, is the biggest single-site employer in the whole of Germany. London Heathrow,in order to handle more than 1,000 airliner movements a day, employs 55,000 people directly – meterologists, air traffic controllers, pilots, cabin crew, cleaners, caterers, check-in staff, baggage handlers, engineers, firemen, police, security guards. Heathrow's staff numbers exclude more than 300,000 or more people employed by a myriad suppliers. All those van drivers and sandwich makers.
Airports are also the world's largest employers of dogs.
It is only because airports are multinational businesses in their own right that costs on this scale can be sustained. Indeed, commercial activity on the ground, not aircraft taking off and landing, is now one of the main drivers of airport design. Less than 50 per cent of Heathrow's earnings now come from landing fees or servicing aircraft. International transit passengers not flying spend an average of $35 a head at Heathrow's hundreds of shops, restaurants, hairdressers – and four caviar bars. Heathrow is also the largest market for Havana cigars in the world – including Havana.
Dwell time
In the olden days, when airports were planned and operated as transport utitlities – if only for an elite – engineers and operations people would have regarded an idle passenger as evidence of system inefficiency. Not today. Mobility is just one of the products on sale at a modern airport. So much so that to commercial managers, 'passenger discretionary time', or 'dwell time'- the time spent by passengers killing time between flights – is a sales opportunity. Why else ask people check in up to 3 hours before takeoff?
The management of dwell-time to optimise commercial yield is one reason – traffic jams are another – that between 1950 and 1990, the proportion of time spent in the air by passengers on a journey has steadily decreased. As the transport economist John Whitelegg has observed, the amount of time each person devotes to travel is roughly the same regardless of how far or how fast they travel. Facilities are sited further apart, and people have to travel furether top reach them than they did 70 years ago. "Time is money, we are told, and increasing mobility is a way of saving time", says Whitelegg; "but how successful are modern transport systems at savnig time?". If air travel is any guide, the answer appears to be: not very much.
Social speed
In fact, the faster we go the less time we feel we have. Following on from the work of Ivan Illich in the 1970s, the German sociologist D Seifried has coined the term social speed to signify the average speed of a vehicle (and its passengers) after all sorts of hidden time costs are added in. So in addition to 'getting to the airport' time – and dwell-time once you get there – Seifried reminds us about the time spent earning the money to go on the journey in the first place. Some urban designers have introduced the concept of time planning to take account of these hidden costs of travel.
Air travel purists, wedded to the fantasy that air travel denotes fast and efficient mobility, face worse disillusion ahead. London's Gatwick, for example, has developed a $40 million airport theme park whose target is one million people a year – 'travellers' whose only destination is the airport itself.
Apart from shopping and leisure, airports are also being used ever more intensively by businesses. Virtual corporations – companies that have forsaken headquarters buildings for a life on the road – are big users of airports. The growing amount of business carried out across national boundaries in the new economy has fuelled demand for meeting rooms, exhibition and showroom facilities, business centres, and other non-travel-specific facilities – inside, next to, under, and on top of, most new airports. Airports have replaced science and business parks as the epicentre of business real estate.
These multiple programmes and agendas – operational, commercial, political – are one reason why writers have started talking about airports as cities – cities of the air.Both cities and airports cover large areas; both are a complex of intersecting transport systems, economies, buildings, and people.
But there is one crucial difference: cities have inhabitants. At airports, everyone is transient. Herein lies one element of the airport's existential ambiguity.
The American writer Richard Sennett is particularly outraged that cities have become more like a pump for traffic, than a place to live, and that planners can describe a local airport as a 'traffic-flow support nexus'. "When public space becomes a derivative of movement", says Sennett, "it loses any independent experiential meaning of its own. On the most physical level, these environments of pure movement prompt people to think of the public domain as meaningless… It is catatonic space".
Catatonic space
The word catatonic is horribly apt as a description of the way these great modern spaces make us feel. What is going on when they have this effect?
Any space, including artificial space, affects our minds and our bodies. But artificial environments shield us from phenomena like climate, and particularly daylight, whose cycles in the natural world expose us physically to the reality of constant change. In an optically static environment, like most airports, the body is physically desensitised from its sense of time.
In a brilliant essay called The Poetics of Light the American architect Henry Plummer observed that "our very sense of being is based on an experience of process, activity, and movement. We seem to find an image of our own existence in the changing lights of the natural world". Moment-to-moment mutations of light also provide what the philosopher Henry Bergson called "lived time", and Ernst Cassirer "a consciousness of sequence". I was reminded of this recently when, wandering slack-jawed around Anchorage airport en route to Japan, I accidentally stepped outside to an Alaskan night: it was literally like waking up from a dream. Startled by the cold, dank spooky Alaskan air, I lost my bearings for a moment. Where was I? Luckily, a blast of noise, and the warm embrace of kerosene fumes, reminded me where I was. For a moment there, I could have been lost to nature.
Lived time, natural time, cold, dank spooky Alaskan air time, stands in stark contrast to the so-called objective time of clocks and departure times at airports. According to the psychologist David Winnicott, loss of temporality is a feature of the psychotic and deprived individual, in which a person "loses the ability to connect the past with the present". The bridging of the present into the past, and into the future is, says Winnicott, "a crucial dimension of psychic integration and health".
So there you have it. Air travel, by scrambling your mind-and-body clock, creates the preconditions for psychosis. So that's another reason it makes you feel strange!
This will not come as dramatic news to architects. As far back as the 1930s, the celebrated Hawthorn Study analysed a connection between light and mental comfort. Hawthorn's work represents the pre-history of environmental psychology and has been an established branch of science for about 15 years now. It is to environmental psychologists that we owe the term 'sick building syndrome', and the development of so-called 'environmentally porous' new buildings. The smartest new structures now let fresh air and daylight in.
I have suggested thus far that the challenge posed by airports to architecture and design is threefold: the designer confronts contradictory operational and commercial agendas; she has to tackle the impact of artificial environments on our physical/mental state; and there is the problem of cognitive disorientation, of not understanding the system, on our mental/physical state.
The contradictory agendas of airport operators are by themselves an intractable problem facing architects and designers. Remarkably, the architect is one of the few people on earth – along with the planner and the economist – who grapples materially with the big picture – the totality of the aviation system. Almost everyone else tends to be a specialist in one bit of the system. But it is obvious, given these conflicting agendas, that the chances of an architect imposing a coherent design solution are small. I will return to the consequences of that in a moment.
The second problem – of artificial space which isolates us from natural rythms – can be and is being tackled by letting in fresh air and daylight – just as almost any nineteenth century parent, opening a child's window at night, would have known intuitvely! Window manufacturers are making a huge song-and-dance out of the fact that their latest high-tech products, some of which are being used in airports, can actually be opened. Even where windows remain sealed, letting in daylight is now a fully-blown fad in airport design.
The logic of movement
A spectacular example of this trend is Kansai International Airport in Japan which opened in 1994. It's a $15 billion pheneomenon, described – even by the can-do Japanese – as "an exceptional endeavour for the country". To secure the 500 hectares needed for airport with a projected capacity for 160,000 aircraft movements a year – in a country where 70 per cent of the land is occupied by mountains – the airport is built on an artificial island. It's about 5km offshore from Osaka, where the average water depth at the site is 18.5m, with unstable clay underneath. Preparation of the the site began in 1987, and involved driving one million sand piles into the seabed. They then built an 11km long seawall, which outlined the island, And filled the resulting hole with 164 million cubic metres of soil.It must have taken a lot of buckets and spades.
Meanwhile, Renzo Piano, working with engineers Ove Arup and partners, won an international competition for the 300,000 m2 terminal. The central concept, the geometry of the main roof, was inspired by the design of an airflow, and developed by reference to fractal geometry. Renzo Piano believes that an "air terminal should be structured as a diagramme of the people moving through it. The entire building – structure, light and air movement – should complement the logic of passenger movement". To its credit,the airport has also segregated commercial activities on another level, allowing passengers more or less uninterrupted access from landside to airside. With a main span of 82.5m-long main beams over the 300m long main halls will afford travellers the pleasure of being part of a moving throng in a great space. The roof is airy and uncluttered and full of light. The design allows people to experience a drama of changing space, light and sights -familiarity intermixed, as the jury report put it, with "bold revelations of the future". Passengers arriving from the mainland enter a great canyon- the interface between nature and the machine – that is some 25m wide and 300m long.
At their first briefing meeting, Piano's team was presented with a 2,000 page summary of the technical briefing. As legend has it, the great man ceremoniously threw this $50 million document in the trashbin – if only to make the point that he needed to start with, and hold onto, a clear design concept. The details could be worked out later. Amazingly, the design concept survived a vast, fast, multi billion dollar programme more or less intact – although even the Japanese ran out of money towards the end and had to trim the 'wings' of Piano's masterpiece by about half, pending expansion later.
Kansai successfully emerged as an architeturally coherent building. But the opportunity to build a new island, built on millions of sand-piles, and to spend $10 billion, is not an option for most airport developers in the world. So the third design problem I want to discuss – the cognitive dissonance that comes from being a rootless monad in an architecturally opaque space – is likely to remain pervasive in airports around the world unless new design stratgies are developed.
Countless modern writers, from Karl Marx, to Baudelaire,to Richard Sennett, have written about the alienation you feel in modern cities. Urban anxiety is part of our culture: Bladerunner; MTV videos of wild creatures singing songs amidst burned out cars; the lurid urban advertising used by law-and-order politicians during elections. All these media use urban angst as their backdrop. But psychologists have only recently addressed the phenomenon. They have now discovered the importance of what they call "situated understanding" – a phrase of Hubert Dreyfus – the fact that having a clear mental picture of an artificial environment contributes to mental health.
When it comes to giving us a clear mental picture of our environment, architecture has not exactly excelled itself in recent years: in most airports, one is situated in a box – and it feels like it. After a pre-history involving utilitarian brick buildings on the edge of fields, airports once seemed destined to become the architectural equivalent of modern cathedrals. Eero Saarinen's TWA terminal in New York had a particularly strong impact on the public imagination and became for many critics a symbol of modernity. But, as Reyner Banham so memorably observed, the TWA terminal was obsolete before it even opened. Designed for fleets of propeller-driven Lockheed Constellations, by the time it opened the first jets, the Comets and Boeing 707s were in use, and the terminal's airside had to be encrusted with jet-blast deflectors. Today, Saarinen's masterpiece at JFK has almost disappeared: you glimpse it every now and again, cowering between lumpish great buildings like a lost child in Times Square.
Planners, besieged by data, can't really help but think in terms of boxes. Boxes contain lots of space, can be packed together, and stack up nicely. And frankly, a well-made box is preferable to artworks like Roissy Charles de Gaulle in Paris. This monument to system complexity looked stunning on paper – but turned out a nightmare to use. I must have been to Roissy 40 times; it's nice, as you glide down those capillary-like tunnels into the featureless aorta of the main building, to imagine oneself in a Jacques Tati movie. But I still have to think twice, and sometimes ask at Information, where to catch the railway shuttle.
Sim city without batteries
When complex systems are not hidden or disguised – for example in the vast, cathedral-like dealing rooms built by Japanese banks in the 1980s – the geometry and atmosphere of the space is determined by the technology, not by a designer. Architecture really doesn't have a language for unstable contexts of this kind – still less for ones like airports where large numbers of people, as well as data, are passing through. As the architect Bernard Tschumi points out in Architecture and Disjunction, "three thousand years of architectural ideology have tried to assert that architecture is about stability, solidity, foundation, when it is the very opposite: like modern scientific knowledge, buildings are constantly on the verge of change." And as Donald Schon put it in The Refelective Practitioner back in 1971, "design is now increasingly taking place beyond the stable state".
Beyond the stable state
Some architects have at least acknowledged the problem that confronts buildings and urban spacesin an era of speed and change. The Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas talks about the "incoherence, or more precisely randomness, that is the underlying structure of all architects' careers. They are confronted by an arbitarary sequence of demands – parameters they did not establish, in countries they hardly know, about issues they are only dimly aware of". We have dismantled urbanism, says Koolhaas, leaving only architecture – "more and more substance is grafted on starving roots".
The trouble is that although Koolhaas the critic understands the problem, Koolhaas the architect can't do much about it. An extremely macho 'hundred crane man' during construction of Euro-Lille in France (quantities of cranes are a measure of how big a building project is), his project celebrates space, change and movement but does virtually nothing to to give passers-through a cognitive sense of place. You feel like one of those tiny humanoid figures architects use to decorate their models – sleek, but blind.
Some airpoort managers do try out new tools and techniques to make complex space more inhabitable. Schiphol in Amsterdam, for example, installed a large Jenny Holzer artwork in one particularly vapid void. Cryptic words and phrases flow up and down the 20 metre-high stack of digital displays all day long. Jenny Holzer's use of typography and digital displays has a particular resonance for anyone contemplating the notion of semiotic pollution in the sheer volume of information swirling around us. I guess these are the first artists to have spent a lot of their lives staring at departure boards. But this large, strong, clearly-conceived, and subversive object, is pitiful in the context of Schiphol as a whole. Phenomenologically, it is inert. It is powerless to communicate amidst the silent roar of people, movement and information that pervades the airport.
Cartography also fails in such contexts. Maps represent one of the fundamental tools by which we make sense of the world; as cartographic historian Stephen Hall has explained, "they mediate between an inner mental world, and an outer physical world, of which the map reader may have no direct experience". By that definition, maps should be an excellent antidote to the cognitive fog that surrounds us in vast artificial environments such as an airport. And it is true that the best maps and charts do inform you where you stand in relation to the whole. But what they do not do is convey a sense of movement, of flow, of process -which is the experiential reality that you are aware of, but cannot see, in places like airports.
It is not the role of signs, either, to reveal the fundamental structure of a system.Their role is to control and optimise flow, to induce your movement in a particular direction at a particular time. They are the graphic design equivalent, for humans, of the metal strips on the floor that robots follow blindly around automated factories.
Don't get me wrong. I love good signs.When I arrive back at Schiphol from any other airport in the world (except possibly from the new bits of Frankfurt, whose Grundig digital signs are also fab) I get real pleasure from the sheer design quality of the banks of video information screens, and those large yellow signs. If one is going to be processed by a system, better to be processed by an elegant, even beautiful system, than by a bad one.
But I return to my point that neither maps, which are representation, nor signs, which issue instructions, can help us understand the system as a whole. Visual displays to explain complex processes do exist – the French make particuilarly beautiful ones for their nuclear power stations; and the Japanese make wonderful, high-resolution digital displays for banks and dealing rooms that are a sheer pleasure to watch; but neither airport operators nor architects seem have thought about presenting information to the public using new media in a creative way.
Slow space
The same cannot be said of artists. Throughout the twentieth century artists have intervened in a variety of ways into manmade space: futurism, cubist collage,Duchamp's readymades, Dada, constructivism, surrealism, Fontana's spatialism, Fluxus, land art, arte povera, process art, conceptualism. These groups and ideas all confronted the movement, energy, dynamism, and sheer process–ness that modern man encounters, in the modern places we have made. They treated the deadness and catatonia of modern public space both as a rebuke, and a challenge. Their aim has been twofold: to create reflective, liminal or 'slow' space on the one hand; and to animate space, to give it a narrative content, on the other.
In recent years a new generation of media artsists has emerged with new tools and new ideas.. Jeffrey Shaw's piece Legible City, for example, is a quite remarkable idea: the participant bicycles down virtual street where instead of buildings, you pass words. Shaw worked with a writer on the project, and together they created a template for the words based on the grid and actual buildings of Manhatten. If you turn a corner, you move from one narrative – or sentence – into another one.
Keiici Irie, one of the most brilliant of the new young architects in Japan, used sound to animate and delineate spacein a project called Movable Realities; you pass ed through 'cones' of sound, each of which plays a different sound sequence. In a show called T-Zone which we did together in London and Glasgow, Irie created 10m high slabs slabs of glass behind which were video cameras which captured your picture as you walked past, and replayed them with a delay on small monitors. In Glasgow we had to turn the thing off because the frequencies were interefering with air traffic control at Glasgow Airport. [Just in case you were wondering what possible conection this had with airports!].
Another Japanese artist, Toshio Iwai, who designs games for Nintendo and installations for the Group Of Seven Summit, intervenes in space with crisp, evocative, and visceral combinations of computers, projectors, and various interfaces. I do not mean to be over-literal about this, but one could at least imagine an enriched design scenario for airports which combined the latest mapping and computerised cartography with the spatial sensibility of the best artists – and simply bring the places to life.
Let me remind you of the three questions I posed at the beginning: why does air travel makes you feel so strange? how might design improve the experience? and why go in person, when you can call?
My reason for telling you about media artists followed my reluctant conclusion, concerning question two, that architecture and design by themselves lack the motivation and the tools to improve our experience of airport space. My thought was that perhaps different specialisms, like cartography or media art, might be able to add a new dimension to the articulation of these spaces.
The trouble is, I'm not completely naive: it's highly unlikely that airports and their design can be influenced in such interesting ways – let alone by artists. Some enlightened airport operators do try to make their facilities cleaner, easier to use, more humane. Schiphol exemplifies this. Sometimes they even hang art on walls, or put sculptures in the concourses. But apart from the fact that most concourses are semiotically stronger than most art, this is not really the point. The fundamental logic of airports – their basic operating software – is to process passengers, not to enlighten them. Even Schiphol suffers gravely from the fact that no person, and no team, is responsible for the perceptual integrity of the airport as a whole.
But there's another, quite different reason why my contemplation of radical design scenarios for airports ran out of steam. Aviation as a whole is already far too greedy a consumer of energy – and space. If we are serious about striving towards a sustainable world economy, and given population and other trends, we have to increase the energy- and matter-efficiency with which live on this planet by a factor of 20. Getting a bit better each year will not be enough. In this rather daunting context, there's no way our world can afford the continued mad growth of aviation. If we are serious about a sustainable economy then aviation will have to contract.
It sounds implausible, but consider this: matter is more expensive than energy; energy is more expensive than information. It is almost infinitely cheaper to move information than people or things. So why not fly less, and communicate more?
Hence my third and final point: the telematic alternative. Rather than try to "cure" the alienating effects of airports – for example, by radical artistic intervention into airport space – should we not be looking for alternative ways to achieve the same ends as air travel, without the obscene consumption of energy that we now know aviation entails? Why go in person when you can call?
From aviators to avatars
Despite all the hoopla about highways of the mind, the capacity of information and communication technology to recreate what it's like to be in a meeting with people somewhere else is a long way off. A lot of the whizzier demonstrations you see or hear about are either faked, or cost $10,000 an hour. But whether or not the technology will actually deliver distant verisimilitude now, or later, is not the main point. Existing forms of comunication deliver perfectly satisfactory results to billions of people everyday; POTS they call it in the trade – or "Plain Old Telephone Service".
If the aim of air travel were simply to exchange information, then we wouldn't bother doing it. The trouble is – to state the obvious – that's not why we do it. It's that mind-body business again: experientially, there never will be an alternative to actually 'being there'. Now I know that – and you know that – but the terrifying thing is that the world's telecommunications companies don't appear to know that. On the contrary: they're spending vast amounts of money and gobbling ludicrous quantities of bandwidth in the search for systems and networks that will reproduce as closely as possible the sensation of 'being there'.
At Germany's huge GMD national computer laboratories, for example, one team has harnessed together a whole row of super-fast Thinking Machine computers in order to increase the perceptual depth of its 'virtual conference room'. GMD's idea is to recreate, as closely as possible, the experience of sitting round a conference table – only with the people opposite you being located in differenm parts of the world. Most major TelCos are engaged in similar experiments – mindless to the fact that most of us find real meertings, let alone virtual ones, futile enough.
Skip Ishii, a researcher formerly at Japan's NTT, and now at the MediaLab in Boston, is a leading critic of Being There-ness as the strategic aim of TelCos. Ishii points out that the human eye has something like 40 million receptors in it. Many millions more receptors are to be found in our ears, up out noses, in our skin and on our tongues. There are dense clusters of receptors elsewhere on the body, too – but this is a family readership, so I will not dwell on those! Even if you could capture the smells, sounds, tastes, and feel of a place, digitise them, and send them down a wire – you'd still never get near the sensation of Being There. Why? Because we humans are not so dumb. Our minds and out bodies are one intelligence. We'd just know, that's why.
So why bother trying? Well, there's big business in all this. Assuming, as the industry does, that 2 billion people will be flying annually by 2005, and that 20% of that number will be travelling on business, as forecasters predict. That's 400 million business travellers who might be persuaded – or told by their boss – to take the superhighway of the mind instead of flying.
As a matter of fact, this is already happening. Sales of videoconferencing equipment and services in the United States climbed from $350 million in 1992 to $7 billion in 1997- and the graph continues to rise. But the real growth is in the internet, and there, the graphs are not shooting upwards for the reasons the TelCos imagine. The geometric explosion in usage of the Internet is despite the fact that it is actually rather difficult to use, is low in information content quantitatively, and is many many years away from 'Being There' verisimilitude. Most of what you send or receive is boring old text. Visual trickery will come: as we have seen, industry is busy developing high-bandwidth networked computer graphics and real-time simulators. But funnily enough, the prospect of virtual reality 'coming true' is not what is turning on one million new Internet subscribers a month,now. Simulation, per se, has already lost its allure.
No. What drives the explosion in Internet usage is something else, a new quality to existing communication,the quality of connectivity.
Connectivity is the capacity of the communication networks to connect everything and everyone, to everything and everyone else. Unlike the telephone, whose great advantage is its intimacy as a medium – you use the phone, but you don't think about it – the Internet very positively conveys the idea of shared communication space. So although the engineers and bandwidth junkies will continue their quest for 'Being There' verisimilitude, the more interesting task for design is to enhance the communication quality of cyberspace by more artful and indirect means.
The promise of proxemity
To give you a flavour of what this might involve,let me tell you about a project called The Poetics of Telepresence which the Netherlands Design Institute commissioned from two English designers, Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby.
Their idea, which was to look at the effect of fusing physical and telematic space, was inspired by the obscure (outside Umberto Eco books) social science of proxemics. Proxemics looks at how different spatial relationships – standing close, standing apart, eavesdropping – change the whole tenor of the way we communicate. Dunne and Raby extrapolated from these findings to ask: why should videoconferencing always be face to face? They developed scenarios in which each person sits inside a box in which the weather in the other person's ncountry is represented, and listens to the person's voice. They also asked, why limit contact to speech, or sight? We could use radio to trigger heat devices remotely, or to emit smoke or smells. [I particularly liked the idea of a "hot air" button on my telephphone, so I could politely let the person at the other end know she or he was talking nonsense]. Temperature is highly evocative of the body: to recreate an intimate atmosphere of co-presence for a call, why not make the area warm?
The big telecom companies emphasize 'purposive' communication – all those ghastly television advertisements with dynamic business persons doing deals on mobile telephones. But a lot of the most important communication is informal, accidental, and happens by chance. In the brain, intense activity takes place in liminal parts of the cortex that nobody understands, but know are important. In offices, the water cooler or coffee machine tends to be more important than the boardroom as a communication nexus; so why not create similar reflexive spaces and street-corner moments in cyberspace? Dunne & Raby came up with ideas whereby telecommunications might allow you 'bump into' people in distant spaces.
New ways by which people might be represented in telematic space include the use of 'avatars'; these are images or symbols (the word has origins in Hinduism) either literally or metaphorically represent a particular person. Microsoft have an avatar team whgose experiments include Miro-like squiggles that co-habit so-called chat-spaces with others of their (ie our) kind. An English team is developing 3d whole-body scanners thatr will be installed, rather like passport photo booths, in public spaces. Having digitised your whole body, you will be able to send it out into the internet on your behalf where it will meet and hand out with other avatars.
Speed is God; time is the devil
The thing about air travel is that it affords you the illusion of compressing space and time. But, as John Urry has observed, "speed turns nature into landscape" – and we have no real idea what this unprecedented explosion in mobility and telecommuniccations portends. It took centuries for information about the smelting of iron ore to cross a single continent and bring about the iron age. During the time of sailing ships, it took years for knowledge and technologies to spread around the world. Just 100 years ago, 99 per cent of all people lived their lives within a 50 kilometre radius of where they were born.
All that has changed – and in a couple of generations. The telegraph and radio made it possible to deliver information point to point, simultaneously. Radio, television and satellite increased the communicational footprint. Now we have the internet and world wide web – and nobody really knows what the interaction of this new medium with the old ones will mean in the medium term for the nature and dynamics of knowledge.
We tend to scoff nowadays at nineteenth century medical experts who warned that the acceleration of life, and use of the telephone, would cause "serious mental degeneration"; we think it quaint to discover that the word 'phoney' should derive from early descriptions of the communicative quality of telephones.
But how sophisticated are we, really, today? We seldom step back and think critically about the aviation system as a whole, for example, preferring to pass our days either mindlessly passing through it – or working intensively on small bits of it: flying aircraft, managing passenger manifests, delivering canapes, designing avionics, staring at air traffic control screens. There are thousands more functions in the system, and millions of people work on them day and night. But aviation is so complex that we find it hard to grasp as a totality. Even social scientists hold back. They will wax indignant about the impact of television, or of the computer, but I have yet to hear a behavioural critique of aviation – even though aviation has transformed the way we experience 'here' and 'now' and 'there' and 'then'.
I set out to explore a common activity, flying, and to provoke you look and think about it differently next time you do it. My proposition is that in the modern world – of which airports and air travel are a paradigm – ignorance is not bliss. We need new design languages, a grammar of complexity, to describe the contemporary world – not as it used to be, and not as the engineers would like us to see it, but as it actually is: a world of global computer and communication networks; of distributed intelligence; of interactivity; of connectivity.
In the seventeenth century we were exposed by science to the fact that – to cut a long story short – the world is not flat. Today, to cut an even longer story even shorter, the world is more complicated than it used to be. But we made it, and we can still understand it. We have to, if we are to control it.
This is the text of the Lumiance Lecture that I gave in Amsterdam, in 1994, at the invitation of Harry Swaak, the founder and (then) CEO of Lumiance. Harry was also also chairman of the board of the Netherlands Design Institute where I had started work as its first Director 12 months earlier.
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Remember last year, when all eyes were on a proposed Islamic community center near Ground Zero? Protesters and politicians railed against the project, arguing that it disgraced hallowed ground.
Park51's developer told the Associated Press that it will still be years before the community center's vision is fully realized, with a mosque, health club and theater.
Park51 did not immediately return TPM's request for further comment. The exhibit opens September 21.


It is very important to save Energy at home, but the majority of natural resources are used by the Industry. And practically everything that we use and consume on a daily basis is produced, processed, generated or transported under varying use of energy and raw materials.
If we can make the use of this energy just a little bit smarter, and more efficient it could have a great impact on how we use our earths' resources. Today I would like to mention and celebrate great examples on how smart engineering solutions in the Industry could help save those resources.
Look! An improvement of 1MW in a continuous process equals to 1.000kW or 1360 horsepower and would represent the energy consumed by approximately 20 compact cars running day and night at full throttle.
One great example is a project for the Markley Group Data Center. The scope was to improve the overall cooling design and the installation of more efficient equipment, to cool the largest Data storage center in the Boston area. The project cost 400,000$ but was paid of with the energy savings within 8 months. With the 1,832MWh Energy savings our 20 compact cars could run for 1,800 hours. Imagine the CO2 that was saved.
We love energy saving! What is your favorite tip? How do you save energy or increase comfort at home? If you are an Engineer, what was your best project that helped you save most Energy?
Check out our Energy Efficiency challenges!
Reclaimed ThermoVoltaic: A disruptive Technology for Energy efficiencyWhat if at least half of water emissions are recovered?


Discussion in 'Buying Tips, Advice and Discussion (archive)' started by furryrabidbunny, Aug 5, 2005.
I just got back helping a friend upgrade their memory and hard drive on a dell dimension 4600c. All in all, it ended up being about four hours of work. I walked away with a free 60 gig hard drive (she is very nice). So can anyone recommend a good enclosure. I need a firewire one, I dont have usb 2 on my emac. Also, what size would the hard drive be in a slim case dell computer?
any caddy should work , but what type of HDD is it ? IDE Serial ?
i am pretty sure this is the drive.
That enclosure is for a 2.5" notebook drive. Is that what you have, or is it a desktop 3.5" one?
it is a desktop. I was dumb, didn't even look at the size. So i do need a 3.5"? my second question is... once i have an hooked up, I can clear the drive right? Windows and all her files are still on there.
OK. I use this enclosure a lot for that flavor.
EDIT: Those photos are old, the current revision does have a power switch.
sweet. my other question is how are these external drives used? I've never owned one, and the purpose is to do backups. Would i just connect it when i need it and disconnect it and store it when i dont need it?
i love macally stuff. I have a mouse from them... works great... does the thing run super hot?
It words a lot like you might use a CD. You plug in the FW cable, turn it on, and there it is. Drag it to the trash when you're done, then it's safe to turn off and unplug.
the mspr on that macally is 89... good deal through new egg.
I have a stack of those sitting on the desk and they do get warm piled up like that. Just one won't be bad at all, and they give you a little plastic stand so it can sit vertically if you prefer.
i guess i'll pick up the macally one.. only brand i've heard of. I am not too worried about the heat... i have to do one major backup, then i am going to use smart folders to keep track of what needs to be backed up. I know that hard drives are fragile, how does the macally protect it?
The enclosure i like is this one http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16817173003 but it is more expensive.
i guess i'll pick up the macally one.. only brand i've heard of. I am not too worried about the heat... i have to do one major backup, then i am going to use smart folders to keep track of what needs to be backed up.
Yeah, the heat really isn't a major issue. The power supply is separate, so they do fine without fans.
I know that hard drives are fragile, how does the macally protect it?
You screw little silicone grommets into the mounting holes on the side of the drive, and those slide into slots in the enclosure. Lots of enclosures don't bother with cushioning at all, so I'm not really sure how important it is to have it in real life, but it's there.
i want to get the macally one, but i am debating if i should just get the firewire one or spend the extra cash to get the usb & firewire case.


text:
Search Query: 'surviving' : 30 Clips
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THE HINDENBURG DISASTER AFTERMATH
A blackened skeleton is all that remains of the Hindenburg after its fiery crash at New Jersey's Lakehurst Naval Air Station. Injured passengers are loaded into ambulances while surviving crew pose together before the Navy and U.S. State Department of Commerce launch an inquiry into the disaster.
Date: 1937 - BLACK/WHITE
Source: Video: BetaSP
Length: 00:01:53:00, No Audio
SD: $99 - Web (320): $79
Similar: 1937, 1930s, Thirties, 1937, 1930s, Thirties, 05/06/1937, may 6th, LZ 129 Hindenburg
U-BOAT KILLS FORTY OFF N.J. COAST
Mistaken by the watch on the tanker R.P. Resor for a fishing boat as it approached with lights ablaze, a submarine torpedoes and sets fire to the ship, and all are lost but two crew members.
Similar: boat, boats, ship, ships, subs, submarine, submarines, tanker, tankers, fishing, vessel
HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS RETURN TO AUSCHWITZ
Pairs of Holocaust surviving twins return to Auschwitz to discuss Dr Josef Mengele and pray at the ruins of the gas chambers.
Date: 1985 - COLOR
Source: Video: DV
Length: 00:01:01:00, With Audio
Similar: holocaust, survivor, survivors, jew, jews, jewish, history, historic, twin, twins, return, returning, doctor
MEXICO FLOODED
Citizens flee the gulf coast in the state of Tobasco, Mexico after floods deluge the region.
Date: November 3, 2007 - COLOR
Similar: 11/03/2007, 2007, 2000s, 2000's, Mexican, Mexicans, flood, floods, flooded, flooding, swim, swimmer
PAKISTAN EARTHQUAKE RESCUE - 1
A search dog helps a rescue team find survivors amongst the rubble.
Date: October 13, 2005 - COLOR
Similar: 10/13/2005, 2005, 2000s, 2000's, October 13, earthquake, earthquakes, rescue, rescues, rescuer
PAKISTAN EARTHQUAKE RESCUE
In Muzzafarabad, Pakistan, an international team of rescue workers pulls a woman out from under a collapsed building.
GAY RIGHTS ACTIVIST GEORGE HISLOP
Gay rights activist George Hislop speaking to a crowd. Hislop uses his walk to climb stairs. He speaks to reporters about his fight for Canada Pension Plan benefits as a same-sex surviving partner.
Date: October 9, 2005 - COLOR
Similar: Canada, Canadian, Canadians, Toronto, Ontario, civil, rights, gay, activist, activists, George, benefits, pioneer, pioneers
HURRICANE KATRINA SURVIVORS
Hurricane Katrina survivors tow their belongings in containters and aid an injured person.
Date: September 3, 2005 - COLOR
Similar: Hurricane Katrina, hurricanes, 2005, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, disaster, disasters, nature, natural, flood, floods
MAN SURVIVES CAR ACCIDENT IN TORONTO, CANADA
A man trapped under his Ford Explorer survives after help from police and pedestrians.
Similar: 10/04/2004, 2004, 2000s, 2000's, October 4, Canada, Canadian, Canadians, Toronto, Ontario, Ford, Explorer, car, cars
HURRICANE KATRINA REFUGEES
Montage of flooded neighborhood, hurricane Katrina survivors, and a hand-painted sign that reads, "Keep Out Or Die."
Similar: disaster, disasters, destruction, damage, damages, natural, horrible, horrific, tragic, tragedy, debris, victim, victims, survivor, survivors
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
El Parque natural de Sierra Mágina es un espacio natural protegido español situado en el sur de la provincia de Jaén, Andalucía. Fue declarado parque natural en 1989 y protege una superficie de 19 962 ha.

Caracterizado por su gran belleza paisajística, refugio de una valiosa flora mediterránea y de interés etnológico. Se trata de un parque natural relativamente tranquilo y apacible, conformado por 9 municipios  dispuestos de forma circular en torno al abrupto macizo montañoso de Sierra Mágina.

Régimen de protección
El parque natural de Sierra Mágina fue aprobado por la ley 2/1989, de 18 de julio, por la que se aprueba el Inventario de Espacios Naturales Protegidos. Además, se establecen las medidas adicionales en la Ley 42/2007, del Patrimonio Natural y de la Biodiversidad. Según la clasificación establecida por la UICN, esta figura corresponde a la categoría V de Paisaje Terrestre Protegido.  Destacar el Decreto 202/2018, de 30 de octubre, por el que se aprueba el II Plan de Desarrollo Sostenible del parque natural de Sierra Mágina y su área de influencia socioeconómica y el Programa Operativo Horizonte 2020.

Desde 2003, está incluido en el Inventario de Espacios Naturales Protegidos de Andalucía como Zona de Especial Protección para las Aves (ZEPA). En 2012, fue declarado Zona Especial de Conservación (ZEC). Se gestiona por el Plan Rector de Uso y Gestión (PRUG) de 2012 y el Plan de Ordenación de Recursos Naturales (PORN) aprobado en Decreto 57/2004, de 17 de febrero.

Ámbito territorial
Ocupa una extensión de 19 961 hectáreas y ocupa los términos municipales de Albanchez de Mágina, Bedmar y Garcíez, Bélmez de la Moraleda, Cambil, Huelma, Jimena, Jódar, Pegalajar y Torres, todos ellos pertenecientes a la Comarca de Sierra Mágina. Otros municipios que se incluyen en el área de influencia del parque natural pero sin superficie protegida son: Cabra de Santo Cristo, Campillo de Arenas, Cárcheles, La Guardia de Jaén, Larva, Mancha Real y Noalejo.

De las 19 961 hectáreas que abarca, el 20% de la superficie se destina a usos agrícolas. El bosque ocupa el 36%, el matorral un 34% y pastos un 10%.

Características físicas del medio

Topografía
Es una orografía abrupta que presenta desniveles de más de mil metros
en algunas de sus laderas como el barranco del Gargantón en Bélmez, la ladera Sur del pico Almadén o el Aznaitín.

Las alturas del parque se sitúan entre los 600 m s. n. m. del río Cuadros y los 2167 del Pico Mágina. Otras cumbres importantes de la sierra son la Peña de Jaén (2147 m s. n. m.), Miramundos 2077 m s. n. m., Cerro Cárceles (2061 m s. n. m.), Pico Almadén (2036 m s. n. m.), Peña Grajera (2014 m s. n. m.), Cerro Ponce (2006 m s. n. m.), Aznaitín (1745 m s. n. m.), Monteagudo (1614 m s. n. m.), Cerro de Enmedio (1550 m s. n. m.) y Carluca (1445 m s. n. m.).

Geología

La Sierra de Mágina, sobre cuyo núcleo se articula el parque natural, pertenece a la Cordillera Subbética.

La sierra es caliza con materiales de sedimentación marina. Se dan formaciones geomorfológicas de interés paisajístico como pliegues, fallas, lapiaces, torcales y dolinas.

Clima
Hay oscilaciones en cuanto a temperatura y humedad en función de la altura y la orientación dentro de la sierra. En general se da un clima mediterráneo continentalizado con inviernos fríos (6º a 8 °C). Las lluvias se dan en primavera y otoño y los veranos son calurosos. La pluviosidad oscila entre los 350-700 mm con una acusada variación anual dando lugar a frecuentes los ciclos de sequía. Ahora bien, la zona sur del parque natural es diferente por tener un clima mediterráneo de media montaña, con una precipitación media anual de 900mm y temperaturas medias entre 12 y 14 grados centígrados.

La pluviometría desciende cuanto más hacia el este del parque natural, al producirse el efecto föhn, de manera que cuando los frentes borrascosos que provienen del Atlántico van avanzando por la sierra, el aire va perdiendo humedad y sube su temperatura.

Hidrografía
En el parque encontramos abundantes nacimientos, arroyos encajados en los barrancos y ríos favorecidos por la naturaleza caliza del macizo de Sierra Mágina. La lluvia se filtra hacia los acuíferos del subsuelo y mana al llegar a una capa de arcilla impermeable. Destaca paisaje fluvial sobresaliente del río Bedmar con el adelfal de Cuadros.

Flora

Dependiendo del piso bioclimático encontramos vegetación de ribera con chopos y galerías de cañizo, adelfales como el de río Cuadros y lentisco. A medida que se sube en altura se encuentran bosques de pino, encinares, quejigos, acerales y arbustos como el enebro y la coscoja. En otoño es interesante el cambio de tonalidad de la colonia de cornicabra. En las zonas de alta montaña se dan enebros y sabinas. El monumento natural del Pinar de Cánava lo constituye un pequeño bosque de pinos carrascos centenarios y de tamaño excepcional.

Las especies endémicas del parque natural son Jurinea fontqueri, Helianthemun frigidarium y Lithodora nitida,

Fauna
En el parque natural se da la posibilidad de observar la fauna representativa del monte mediterráneo como jabalíes, garduñas, ardillas, zorros, y especialmente cabras monteses. También existe una buena concentración de rapaces, como por ejemplo águila real y el águila de Bonelli (antes águila perdicera), siendo además muy frecuente la presencia de buitre leonado, buitre negro e incluso quebrantahuesos que acuden en busca de comida.

Actividades deportivas
Se trata de un espacio natural que ofrece la posibilidad de la práctica de deportes de naturaleza como el senderismo, la alta montaña, el trail running (carreras por montaña), escalada, ciclismo (cicloturismo, bicicleta montaña), tiro con arco, orientación y espeleología.

Turismo

Se pueden realizar un gran número de senderos de uso público, de los que podremos obtener más información en el portal de la Ventana del Visitante de la Junta de Andalucía.
Las rutas propuestas para la visita al parque natural de Sierra Mágina son las siguientesː

De los Manantiales
En vehículo y a pie, desde Pegalajar al área recreativa de Fuenmayor (Torres).

El área recreativa Fuenmayor está situada a 7 kilómetros al sur de la localidad de Torres. Este manantial dispone de una fuente con saltos de agua y un gran estanque, en mitad de un paraje rodeado de chopos, encinas, nogales y majuelos de gran tamaño. En el área hay dispuestas antiguas piedras de molino a modo de mesas y taburetes, bajo la sombra de un espeso follaje formado por los árboles ya citados. En cuanto a la flora, por los alrededores del sendero de la Fuenmayor pueden verse encinares, orlas de matorral espinoso, repoblaciones de pino carrasco y laricio, así como cultivos leñosos: olivo, cerezo, almendro, caqui, peral, etcétera, y arroyos en los que aparece la vegetación de ribera. Asimismo, pueden contemplarse vistas de varios de los picos de Sierra Mágina y observar de manera variada un gran número de aves. El sendero de la Fuenmayor pasa junto a la cascada del Zurreón, un salto de agua de gran atractivo cuando las bajas temperaturas lo congelan. Es uno de los pocos saltos de aguas existentes en el parque natural. Además se pueden ver las rastras del cerro Almadén, una de las expresiones geológicas más características de la sierra.

De Castillos y Torreones

En vehículo y a pie, desde el Castillo de Jódar al Castillo de Jimena pasando por el área recreativa del río Cuadros y el Castillo de Albanchez de Mágina.

En los aledaños del río Cuadros se encuentra uno de los adelfales naturales probablemente mayores y más importantes de la península ibérica. Las adelfas, al no resistir bien las heladas, se desarrollan en las partes bajas de Sierra Mágina y en zonas en las que hay cursos de agua próximos. Tienen una gran capacidad de rebrote y, si bien son venenosas, constituyen una formación vegetal muy bella, llegando a alcanzar aquí portes arbóreos extraordinarios. A lo largo del sendero del Adelfal de Cuadros se pueden observar también sauces llorones, higueras y otras especies propias de la ribera.

Por la Alta Montaña de Mágina

De senderismo, desde el centro de visitantes de Mata Bejid a Pico Mágina.

Puerto de La Mata
De senderismo, desde Mata Bejid al Puerto de La Mata.

De Olivos Eternos
vehículo y a pie, desde el mirador de La Golondrina (Jódar) a Cambil.

Patrimonio histórico-artístico

Arquitectura rural

Para el aprovechamiento del agua se construyeron estructuras hidráulicas destinadas a su almacenamiento y conducción para aprovechamiento en las distintas actividades humanas. Se pueden observar acequias como las del entorno del río Gargantón en Bélmez, albercas en el entorno de Hondacabras en Torres, lavaderos, molinos de rodezno en el río Guadalijar en Huelma y balsas de riego. Diseminados por el entorno del parque natural encontramos cortijos aislados o en hilera y casas cueva en Pegalajar. Relacionados con la ganadería se dan apriscos como el de Cañada de las Cruces y refugios de pastores de la trastermitancia y para la obtención de nieve pozos de nieve en el entorno del Pico Mágina. Del aprovechamiento tradicional del carbón vegetal se observan antiguas carboneras en el Llano de los Vaqueros en Cambil. Las labores del cereal de secano para la obtención de harina y alimento del ganado de la siega y el aventado se realizaban en las eras, que se observan todavía con su empedrado, mediante trillos y horcas.

Cerca de Jimena se pueden observar las construcciones típicas en piedra seca de canteros y labradores de Los Caracoles. Son de interés etnológico de gran belleza, simplicidad e integración en el paisaje. Se pueden observar en el lugar restos de piedras redondeadas y gruesas llamadas lanchas. Tras ser moldeadas, se empleaban como muelas en los molinos de agua para cereal, así como prensa de aceituna para la molturación y producción de aceite de oliva. Se conservan especialmente bien dos, conocidas como piedra de repasar o remolederos. También se pueden ver bloques de piedra que eran usados para el suelo de los molinos, como solera.

Patrimonio monumental

Destaca el centro histórico de Albanchez de Mágina y Torres, las empinadas calles de Bélmez de la Moraleda y Bedmar, la sencillez del pueblo de Solera, el trazado urbano de Jimena, Huelma, Cambil y los pueblos más grandes del parque de Jódar y Mancha Real.

Cultura popular

Gastronomía

Se trata de la gastronomía tradicional de Jaén basada en la cercanía de los productos que se obtienen. La variedad de aceituna picual es la más producida en el parque y la D.O. Aceite Sierra Mágina es la más extensa de Europa. En los locales de restauración se encuentra muy arraigada la cultura de la tapa. El cultivo tradicional del almendro da lugar la repostería muy conocida la de Albanchez, que emplea la almendra. Se puede encontrar guisos cuya base es la cabra blanca andaluza y la oveja montesina de la zona. A finales de primavera se recogen y ponen en los mercados los cerezas de Torres. Se pueden aprovechar los productos de las huertas de temporada y los higos, granadas, uvas, nueces, melocotones y albaricoques que se producen en las tierras fértiles del parque natural.

Artesanía
El principal producto es la artesanía el esparto contando con el Museo de Jódar para su divulgación. Antaño empleada para cuerdas, cestos, capachos etc y en la actualidad para las sombrillas de playa que se observan en el litoral mediterráneo y objetos decorativos.

Leyendas populares

El fenómeno paranormal de las caras de Bélmez es la referencia más clara y actual del componente mágico de la comarca. El curanderismo en Noalejo, las cabañuelas para la predicción del tiempo, las fiestas de las hogueras como San Antón, San Blas y San Juan, la costumbre de tapar las cerraduras con las gachas de la Noche de Difuntos para que no entren los espíritus o las referencias al ser mitológico juancaballo son reminiscencias de antiguos rituales de origen incierto y expresiones de la memoria colectiva popular.

Infraestructuras y servicios

Carreteras
Para comunicar las diferentes poblaciones del parque se encuentran las carreteras A-324, A-401, A-320, JA-3206 y JA-3203. Los ejes principales norte sur que transcurren en las inmediaciones del parque son la A-44 y la A-401.

Equipamiento del parque natural

Para información sobre el parque natural e interpretación de la biodiversidad cuenta con el Centro de Visitantes Mata Bejid en Cambil, punto de información Castillo de Jimena.

Véase también
 Espacios naturales protegidos de Andalucía

Referencias

Bibliografía
Guía Oficial del parque natural Sierra Mágina. Agencia de Medio Ambiente y Agua de Andalucía. Junta de Andalucía Editorial Almuzara (2011).  ISBN 978-84-15338-32-1

Sierra Mágina, Guía del Excursionista. Isidoro Caballero Lorente. Editorial La Serranía (2009). ISBN 978-84-96607-78-1

Enlaces externos

 Parque natural Sierra Mágina
 Junta de Andalucía - Consejería de Turismo - Parque natural Sierra Mágina
Asociación para el Desarrollo Rural de Sierra Mágina  (ADR Sierra Mágina)

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
The Astronaut Monument is a monument commemorating the training of Apollo astronauts in northern Iceland in 1965 and 1967. It is located outside the Exploration Museum in Húsavík, and contains the names of 32 Apollo astronauts who were sent to Iceland for training in geology for crewed lunar missions. Fourteen of the trainee astronauts later flew to the Moon, and seven of those conducted geology work on the lunar surface.

The monument includes the names of the astronauts, the American and Icelandic flags, the insignia of the Apollo program, and features two steel globes on top of two basalt columns to represent the Earth and the Moon.

The monument was unveiled on July 15, 2015, by the grandchildren of Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong.

Apollo geology trainees
The 32 Apollo astronauts listed on the monument are:

 William Anders
 Neil Armstrong
 Charles Bassett
 Alan Bean
 Vance D. Brand
 Gerald P. Carr
 Eugene Cernan
 Roger B. Chaffee
 Walter Cunningham
 Charles Duke
 Donn F. Eisele
 Joseph Engle
 Ronald Evans
 Owen Garriott
 Edward Gibson
 Fred Haise
 Joseph P. Kerwin
 Don L. Lind
 Jack R. Lousma
 Ken Mattingly
 Bruce McCandless
 Curt Michel
 Edgar Mitchell
 William Pogue
 Stuart Roosa
 Harrison Schmitt
 Russell Schweickart
 David Scott
 John L. Swigert
 Paul J. Weitz
 Clifton Williams
 Alfred Worden

Seven of the trainees did geological research and sample collection while on the Moon: Armstrong, Bean, Cernan, Duke, Mitchell, Schmitt, and Scott.

Seven others flew to the Moon but did not land: Anders, Evans, Haise, Mattingly, Roosa, Swigert, and Worden.

See also
 Astronaut training
 Geology of the Moon
Moon rocks
Lunar soil
 Lunar Receiving Laboratory
 Lunar Sample Laboratory Facility

References

Monuments and memorials in Iceland
Museums in Iceland
Science and technology in Iceland
Iceland–United States relations
Húsavík
Apollo program
Monuments and memorials to explorers
History of spaceflight
William Anders
Neil Armstrong
Alan Bean
Gene Cernan
Charles Duke
Ronald Evans (astronaut)
Fred Haise
Ken Mattingly
Edgar Mitchell
Stuart Roosa
Harrison Schmitt
Rusty Schweickart
David Scott
Jack Swigert
Alfred Worden


October seems to be the wedding expositions month, as we have been busy showing a little bit of our party decorations to the future brides and grooms, first in Luxembourg at the Salon du Mariage in Luxexpo, and now it Arlon at the Hall Polyvalent! We couldn't be happier meeting a lot of new people and exchanging ideas with other wedding providers!
We take very seriously our stands this is why we have spent more than 8 hours decorating it and making sure that the people can really get the feeling of being in a mini wedding, while showing them some samples of a dinner table, a dessert buffet, welcome signs and wedding favours.
On this occasion we decided to focus on the 3 main themes, on the middle of the stand we had the theme of an "Enchanted Forest" as we love the outdoor weddings full of nature, flowers and greenery. We added a crafty party with the wall full of white paper flowers, which can be perfect for a backdrop for a wedding and made a create wall for our stand.
Then on the right side we had a flowery vintage/golden decoration where we exposed some of our vintage plates and cutlery, while still keeping an elegant mood.
And finally we had a boho-chic colourful side, on the left which was full of flowers and a big Emmanuelle Vinage Chair.We are so happy that every day we have more and more vintage and boho-chic unique decorations to rent some that The Party Ville owns and some that Oddhaus Vintage a new vintage online boutique sells and through a partnership we are able to rent them to our clients. If you don't know this online shop, you can check out their Instagram here.
We had for the second time the opportunity to expose the beautiful wedding cakes and desserts from our partner Dream Cakes and we were very happy about the reaction of the persons who absolutely loved her cakes.


The collapse of the Rana Plaza factory complex in Bangladesh in April 2013 shocked the world. More than 1,100 people died and 2,500 were injured by the sudden failure of a building with appalling safety standards that had developed major cracks the day before.
Revelations that many global clothing brands had been using the factory led to the Bangladesh Accord: a legally binding agreement between fashion companies, the Bangladeshi government and workers' trade unions to make factories safe, publicly disclose inspection reports and educate workers about their rights. It meant that, for the first time, global brands agreed to monitor how the factories supplying their goods are run.
The move was also meant to push for transparency across the fashion supply chain. But, three years down the line, how much has changed? Very little, according to Bryony Moore, researcher at watchdog Ethical Consumer. And this means that another disaster like Rana Plaza is no less likely today than it was three years ago.
Moore is the joint author of a new transparency index that ranks fashion companies on how open they are about publishing details of their supply chains.
The research team — a collaboration between Ethical Consumer and campaigning organisation Fashion Revolution — selected 40 companies, a mix of luxury and high street brands. They sent them questionnaires asking about their supply chain monitoring policies and what information they make public. If they failed to reply, the team gathered publicly available information from company websites. Then they scored them: the more transparent they are across different indicators, the higher their score.
There has been some backlash to this methodology from luxury brands such as Chanel and Fendi, which fared particularly badly on the index. Chanel replied that the "reality of our actions seems more important to us than any related media coverage".
But, as Moore tells me, this goes against the idea of transparency. Companies should be making clear how — and how far — they monitor supply chains, she explains. Transparency is essential, Moore says, to tackle the 'don't ask, don't tell' culture in the fashion industry.
So what did the index find? Even auditing the first supply tier — where clothes are sewn together and finished — is problematic, Moore says, because there is often so much subcontracting and sub-subcontracting, sometimes to homeworkers.
And beyond it, things get considerably worse. "When we started asking to drill down below sewing factories, companies didn't seem to know," Moore says. Only two of the surveyed companies published details of second-tier suppliers, which include fabric and yarn mills. And more than half published no details of monitoring processes for raw materials such as cotton.
This lack of transparency at yarn and raw material level could cover all manner of sins, from workers' rights to pollution caused by dyeing. Cotton production can involve large-scale pesticide and water use, and human rights abuses such as the use of child labour. Production of the textile fibre rayon can cause deforestation.
"The global nature of the fashion industry means products move about," Moore says. The labour and fabric behind just one T-shirt span continents. Companies could easily get this information, but they don't seem to be doing so, she says.


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Bone/Mineral Metabolism
Cardiometabolic Disorders
Reproduction/Androgen Disorders
All Subspecialties Adrenal Bone/Mineral Metabolism Cardiometabolic Disorders Diabetes Diabetes Education Hormone Therapy Neuroendocrinology Obesity Pediatric Endocrinology Practice Management Reproduction/Androgen Disorders Thyroid
By Michael Monostra
Campbell DJT, et al. Diabet Med. 2021;doi:10.1111/dme.14622.
Nearly half of adults with new-onset diabetes do not stick to drug regimen in first year
Most adults with new-onset diabetes in Alberta, Canada, are prescribed metformin monotherapy, but nearly half do not use medication as directed 1 year after initiation, according to findings published in Diabetic Medicine.
David J.T. Campbell
"While the expansion of medical options provides prescribers with more options, local guidelines still recommend that metformin monotherapy be chosen for cases of uncomplicated diabetes with an HbA1c less than 8.5%, due largely to the cost-effectiveness of this therapy relative to other more expensive medications," David J.T. Campbell, MD, PhD, MSc, FRCPC, assistant professor and consultant endocrinologist in the departments of medicine, community health sciences and cardiac sciences at the Cumming School of Medicine, University of Calgary, in Canada, told Healio. "Therefore, the point of our study was to see if prescribers were still using metformin when appropriate, in the face of so many new medications."
Adults with diabetes treated with metformin combination therapy or non-metformin medication were more likely to adhere to treatment compared with those treated with metformin monotherapy. Data were derived from Campbell DJT, et al. Diabet Med. 2021;doi:10.1111/dme.14622.
Campbell and colleagues conducted a retrospective cohort study of adults older than 18 years from Alberta with incident diabetes diagnosed from April 2012 to March 2017. Incident cases were identified using an algorithm of two or more physical claims for diabetes in a 2-year period or at least one hospitalization for diabetes. Adults with an HbA1c between 6.5% and 8.5% and those who filled a prescription for diabetes medication within 1 year of diagnosis were included. Pharmacotherapy was categorized as either metformin monotherapy, non-metformin diabetes medication or metformin-containing combination therapy. Participants were defined as having adhered to medication if they had a supply to cover at least 80% of observed treatment days. Data on age, sex, HbA1c, neighborhood income quintile, geographic location, prescriber specialty and medication costs were also collected.
There were 17,932 adults included in the study cohort, of whom 89% received metformin monotherapy as their initial therapy, 7.6% were prescribed a metformin combination agent and 3.3% received a non-metformin medication. Sulfonylureas and DPP-IV inhibitors were the most commonly co-prescribed medications for those receiving metformin combination therapy and the most common agents for those not prescribed metformin.
Nearly half of do not maintain prescribed regimen
Of the study cohort, 48% did not adhere to diabetes therapy in their first year of treatment. Those who were older (RR = 1.01; 95% CI, 1.01-1.01; P < .001) or had comorbidities were more likely to adhere to treatment. Adults living in the highest neighborhood income quintile were more likely to adhere to treatment compared with those living in the lowest income quintile (RR = 1.12; 95% CI, 1.07-1.17; P < .001). Those treated with medications other than metformin (RR = 1.1; 95% CI, 1.02-1.18; P = .016) or metformin combination therapy (RR = 1.27; 95% CI, 1.22-1.33; P < .001) were more likely to adhere to treatment compared with adults taking metformin.
Within the first year of treatment, 54% of those who started on metformin remained on it. The proportion of adults taking metformin who adhered to medication dropped by 10% after 30, 90 and 100 days. Most of those who discontinued metformin did not switch to another medication. Adults with a higher HbA1c were more likely to discontinue metformin monotherapy and more likely to switch to a combination therapy compared with those with a lower HbA1c.
"There are important implications for patients who discontinue therapy that is initially prescribed," Campbell said. "We know that metformin helps to lower blood glucose, and there is even evidence that it helps to reduce diabetes complications in the long run, yet many patients are forgoing these benefits by discontinuing their treatment shortly after starting."
Higher costs with non-metformin monotherapy
Adults prescribed metformin combination therapy or a non-metformin agent had about double the total health care costs compared with those prescribed metformin. After 1 year of medication initiation, adults on metformin monotherapy accrued 139 Canadian dollars in medication costs, whereas those on metformin combination therapy accrued CA$932 in medication costs, and those prescribed non-metformin agents CA$817 in costs.
"We would like to better explore the reasons for nonadherence to metformin and other diabetes treatments in order to plan and design programs and supports to help patients remain on effective medical therapies," Campbell said. "Furthermore, we hope to use our database of patients with diabetes to answer other real-world medication-related questions, including better understanding if other therapies are used in the appropriate clinical settings, as per guidelines."
David J.T. Campbell, MD, PhD, MSc, FRCPC, can be reached at dcampbel@ucalgary.ca.


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Q: Adding headers for specific filetypes on k8s ingress I'm running nginx ingress and ingress controller on k8s. Need to add extra headers for specific filetypes (ie. http://blah/blah.pdf). The usual way (when not on k8s) to do things would be to leverage the location directive. However, running something as below on k8s adds extra location with no params, which is kinda expected, but results in ingress controller trying to serve the upstream from its local filesystem instead of a remote pod's:
The code:
nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/server-snippet: |
  location ~* \.(pdf)$ {
             add_header a "b";
  }

The result:
            location ~* \.(pdf)$ {
                    add_header a "b";
            }

            location / {
            # some stuff
            }

Had a thought to add an extra rewrite below add_header directive, but that would cause an infinite redirection loop.
So let's take a step back. According to the docs, headers can be added in the following contexts: http, server, location, if in location:

*

*The first two are out of the question since I need to add headers only for specific filetypes, not globally.

*Location - as described above.

*Nested location - won't work on k8s.

*If? An approach that would be very far from perfect, nevertheless tried it and so far didn't work for me - after deployment, no proper code appears in ingress controller's nginx.conf (not sure why).

As of now I'm out of additional ideas. Hints would be greatly appreciated.
edit:
Seems that, when configured using nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/configuration-snippet, if is properly added to location context. What I was trying previously was to use nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/location-snippet, which yielded no results. Anyway, I've achieved a working config. The question whether this is an optimal one still remains open.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
Staff & Advisors
Company Plan & Accomplishments
IND Stages
Overview Presentation
Video – Effects of Toxins On Living Cells
Toxic Metal Impact
Global Incidence of Lead Toxicity
Facts of Lead Poisoning
Lead Toxicity
Epidemiology of Lead Exposure
Blood Lead Levels of Children
Alliance Opportunities
Rita Ellithorpe, MD
Rita Ellithorpe, M.D., the Company's Medical Advisor, has given talks and published research on chelation therapy suppositories and is an expert on fatigue and cellular medicine. In May 2003, she founded TLC in Tustin, California, where more than 3,000 patients have been using chelation suppositories, and is also TLC's Medical Director. She received her medical degree from Chicago Medical School at the University of Health Science in North Chicago, Illinois. She holds a second doctorate in Integrative Medicine focusing on health at the cellular level. Dr. Ellithorpe is Board Certified by the American Academy of Anti-aging Medicine, and also Board-certified in Integrative Medicine. She has participated in several clinical studies and has served as a principal investigator. Dr. Ellithorpe is the principle author of the book Detox Outside the Box.
View Rita's CV PDF
© 2018 Applied-BioResearch, Inc.


WP3 – Joining of ATF clads & testing of joints/welds: WP3 targets the development of reliable joining approaches for the different ATF cladding material concepts and the validation of the joint reliability by dedicated testing activities comparing the joint properties with the cladding material property requirements defined at the project outset (WP10). Developing a reliable joining approach is mainly a challenge for the SiC/SiC composite clads; hence, the selection of appropriate joining materials and methods for the SiC/SiC clads are two important objectives of WP3. Another goal is the establishment of a reliable testing approach to determine the shear strength of SiC/SiC joints. The reliable joining of coated and surface-alloyed commercial clads is less challenging, since coating and surface modification of clads will follow the welding of the substrate clads according to clad-specific welding technologies. Conventional welding technologies ensure hermetic sealing of the fuel-loaded cladding tubes by welding end caps on both ends of the tubes. Even though welding technologies are established for commercial clads, the performance of the produced welds must still be assessed. WP3 will assess the performance of as-produced joints/welds, joints/welds exposed to water/steam (WP5) and ion/proton irradiation (WP6), so as to understand the in-service degradation mechanisms of ATF joints/welds. The optimised joints/welds must pass the set of critical screening tests prior to neutron irradiation in BR2.


text:
Football / December 18, 2017
New Venue, New Opponent
Hawkeye Fan Shop — A Black & Gold Store | Kinnick Edge | Hawk Talk Monthly — Dec. 2017 | Pinstripe Bowl Web Site | Official Bowl Tour site | Pinstripe Bowl Tickets | Pinstripe Bowl Coverage
By DARREN MILLER
hawkeyesports.com
IOWA CITY, Iowa — 'Tis the college football bowl season, which typically means a new opponent in a new venue.
The University of Iowa will take it a step further with a new offensive coordinator who is coming off a game where the Hawkeyes gained 505 yards and scored 56 points.
This is the fifth consecutive bowl game for Iowa; its last four were in January. The Hawkeyes (7-5) play Boston College (7-5) in the New Era Pinstripe Bowl on Dec. 27.
"A bowl game is a bowl game," Iowa offensive coordinator Brian Ferentz said Monday at a news conference in the Stew and LeNore Hansen Football Performance Center. "We have played games on as short of notice as five days. There isn't any time challenge. We're going to a new venue, it's an unfamiliar venue, but that is exciting. This is another part of playing football. The unique challenge is getting ready for a team you don't have a lot of history with and that's true of any bowl game. In that way, it's what we do every year. Just in a new venue that we're excited about."
Boston College finished the season with five wins in the last six games, scoring 45, 41, 35, 14, 39, and 42 points. The defensive coordinator for the Eagles is Jim Reid, who spent three seasons with the Hawkeyes.
"Coach Reid knows a little about us; he is familiar with our program and he is familiar with us offensively, at least philosophically," Ferentz said. "He is going to have some answers for us. When you look at them the last four or five games, some of the teams and players they have been able to contain is impressive."
Ferentz will spend the remaining eight days before kickoff looking for matchups to exploit. Boston College allowed an average of 398.1 yards per game.
"Where the matchups are? I haven't found them yet," Ferentz said. "We're still looking and I hope we can find some before we play them."
Ferentz calls Eagle senior defensive end Harold Landry a "difference-maker up front" and he has been impressed with junior defensive back Will Harris, who leads a talented and experienced secondary.
"They have big (linebackers) who do a nice job in the run game," Ferentz said.
Of the nine Eagles named All-Atlantic Coast Conference, four played defense: Lukas Denis (safety, second team), Landy (third team), Ty Schwab (linebacker, third team), Zach Allen (defensive end, honorable mention).
"We're excited about the challenge of playing Boston College, a really good football team," Ferentz said. "(They) remind me a lot of our program on how they are built and structured, so that will be an interesting challenge for us. They see an offense like ours every day in practice, so they won't be caught off guard by that."
The Hawkeyes have completed 10 pre-bowl workouts and since Saturday, the focus has been all football.
"We're out of school, out of finals, out of class, so it is about football," Ferentz said. "It's about taking young guys and pushing them forward and with the older guys, we want to sharpen those skills as we move ahead."
Tickets are available to the 2017 New Era Pinstripe Bowl by visiting Iowa's Athletic Ticket Office at www.hawkeyesports.com/tickets. The game will be televised on ESPN at 4:15 p.m. (CT) on Dec. 27 with Kevin Negandhi, Mack Brown, Booker McFarland, and Jen Lada on the call.


ETC Institute conducted a public opinion survey of Champaign-Urbana-Savoy area residents in April 2018. The purpose of the survey was to better understand public perception of Champaign-Urbana MTD services and to identify areas in which service improvement are needed and where better communication may be needed. Both users and non-users of public transit were encouraged to complete the survey.


"Both men and women want to play. Picasso played until he died. By play I mean being so closely related to the imagination that you're constantly creating. Every minute is new, spontaneous. That's the feminine principle. Life is never boring because there's always something new happening. Without that we just die."
"The creative matrix is a terrifying abyss because it contains both demons and angels. Some people are overwhelmed by the demons of the past; I guess we all are at some point. But that matrix is where the new seeds are. When life becomes boring and your job is no longer exciting or your marriage is no longer satisfactory, you have to find new life, and that means dropping into that matrix. It often looks like depression. It's black at first because you are in a psychic womb. It's terrifying. Some people can't take it. But every artist knows that's where you've got to go to find the new light."
A friend gave me this amazing deck of tarot cards a couple years ago and I've been using them consistently as a source of inspiration and creativity.
What I love about it - where do I start? One thing I love is how beautifully the archetypal characters are illustrated with layers of collaged images. Another is how comprehensively the deck represents universal themes and challenges that we all face at one point or another in the journey.
So I pull the Harvest card, 9 of Worlds. This is about reaping the physical rewards of hard work, the number 9 representing completion of a cycle. Though blurry to you, the image glows with oranges and yellows, colors that show up in many of my paintings. Fall leaves, baskets with autumn produce, full moons, and animals storing up for winter all suggest a harvest coming from my efforts at growing a new online business. Good thing I've invested in the Guide to Art and Money and today, Building An Empire In One Year. The Empire Building Kit is only being offered today for 24 hours. Check it out!
All systems are go for me to be building my art-focused business online. I envision original art, prints, clothing-collaborations with a seamstress friend, an illustrated cookbook, and more that can be purchased online.
Before Night Falls, The Red Violin, Amadeus, Me and You and Everyone We Know, Whale Rider, Like Water for Chocolate, The Sea Inside, and anything by Jim Jarmusch. These movies have inspired me because of their portrayal of the creative life or simply for their breathtaking beauty.
Malcolm Gladwell is one of my fave authors. He writes about things that make you think about the way you think - I just love how that stimulates creativity.


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Empowered employees: Automotive dealership…
Empowered employees: Automotive dealership praised by staff for supportive environment
By Bill Quinnan | Orange County Register
Lexus of Westminster continues to earn recognition both as an automotive dealership and as an employer.
In December, the Orange County Register named Lexus of Westminster a Top Workplace for a sixth time. In surveys conducted during the Top Workplaces selection process, employees have praised the dealership for its supportive environment and for the appreciation shown to staff.
Lexus of Westminster has also achieved the prestigious Elite of Lexus award on 19 occasions, recognizing the dealership for excellence in customer service in all aspects of the dealership from sales, service and administration. Lexus awards the designation based on customer feedback from surveys rating owner satisfaction, sales and service as extremely exceptional and on the dealership exceeding Lexus operational and certification standards.
"We are proud (of our growth) from last year, and we are excited for several all new models that will create excitement on our showroom," said Lexus of Westminster General Manager John Oh.
The family-owned-and-operated dealership has done business in the same location in Westminster California for more than 40 years. Lexus of Westminster was one of the first-phase charter dealerships for Lexus in the late 1980s, prior to the launch of the Lexus brand, according to Oh.
'Cornerstones' of success
Asked what qualities might make working at Lexus of Westminster different from working at another automotive dealership, Oh noted that the ownership in involved in the day-to-day operations and listens to the needs of the associates. This has enabled the dealership to retain long-term associates, who are the cornerstone for the success of the business.
Even through the Great Recession, Lexus of Westminster was able to maintain the same benefits and employee count, according to Oh.
"The associates at Lexus of Westminster are empowered to treat each customer as guests in their homes, which attributes to world-class ownership experiences," Oh said. "The associates are given world-class training each year to make sure that they are able to provide that special ownership experience that sets the dealership apart."
Opportunities for growth exist in every department at the dealership based on the strengths of the individuals, Oh explained.
"Many of our department managers started with entry-level positions, including the general manager, service and parts director, service manager, business manager and others."
Oh noted that Lexus of Westminster offers competitive associate benefits, including medical and 401-K plans. The achievements of associates are recognized through various events throughout the year, such as annual company picnics and holiday-recognition events.
Lexus of Westminster also offers special deals on cars for its employees and provides a car allowance for associates who achieve Master certification through Lexus, which requires training as well as excellence in a particular field.
Part of the family
Being a family-owned and -operated dealership enables Lexus of Westminster to instill a sense of fun into the workplace environment, Oh said. The dealership strives to make employees the feel that they are also part of the "family" by including them in birthday and holiday celebrations. Associates also enjoy spending time together outside the workplace.
"We enjoy being with each other and will often get together on off hours," Oh said. "It is these friendships that contribute in making a fun and enjoyable place to work."
The dealership has also received Top Volume awards from both Lexus and Lexus Financial Services. Lexus of Westminster also takes an active role as a member of the community, supporting such organizations as the Boys and Girls Club of Westminster, Abrazar Community Centers and The Assistance League of Huntington Beach.
Lexus of Westminster
Industry: Retail automotive
Employees in region: 122
Headquarters: Westminster
Website: lexuswestminster.com
Top Workplaces – Orange County Register, 2008, 2009, 2012-2015
Elite of Lexus Award – Lexus, 2013 (19-time recipient)
Top Volume awards – Lexus and Lexus Financial Services, multiple years
What employees enjoy
"I know I make a difference."
"The atmosphere and attitude here is warm and friendly."
"The values and ethics at Lexus of Westminster are above board and there is a zero tolerance for shady activity."
Bill Quinnan


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Why three phase synchronous motor is not self starting
Published September 3, 2018 · Updated September 16, 2018
Why Three Phase Synchronous Motor not Self Starting?
When a three-phase supply is given to the stator of a three-phase wound synchronous motor, a rotating field is set up in the air gap which rotates at a synchronous speed (Ns = 120f/p). This is represented by the imaginary stator poles.
Let us consider a two-pole synchronous motor as shown in Figure. and the stator rotating field is in the anticlockwise direction. The field current of the motor produces a steady state magnetic field. Therefore, there are two magnetic fields present in the machine.
The synchronous motor works on the principle of magnetic locking. The operating principle can be explained with the help of 2-Pole synchronous machine with the following steps.
Step 1. When a three phase supply is given to the stator winding, a Rotating magnetic field is produced in the stator.
Step 2. Due to Rotating Magnetic field, let the stator poles Ns and Ss rotate with synchronous speed. At a particular time stator pole, Ns coincides with the rotor poles Nr and SS coincides with Sr i.e like poles of the stator and rotor coincide with each other. As we know, like poles experience a repulsive force. So rotor poles experience a repulsive force Fr. Assume that the rote tends to rotate in the anti-clockwise direction as shown in the Fig.(i).
Step-3. After half cycle, the polarity of the stator pole is reversed, whereas the rotor poles cannot change their position due to inertia as shown in Fig. (ii). Now unlike poles coinciding each other and rotor experiences the attractive force fa and tends to rotate in clockwise direction. In brief, we can say, with the rotation of stator poles the rotor tends to drive in the clockwise and anti-clockwise direction in every half cycle. Hence, to and fro motion is excited on the rotor and as a result, the rotor does not rotate. As a result, the average torque on the rotor is zero. Hence 3-phase synchronous motor is not a self-starting Motor.
In order to develop a continuous torque, the two fields must be stationary with respect to each other. This is possible when the rotor also rotates at synchronous speed. The basic principle of synchronous motor operation is that the rotor chases the stator magnetic field. In other words, the stator rotating magnetic field tends to drag the rotor along as if the north pole on the stator locks into the south pole of the rotor.
Step 4. If the rotor of the synchronous motor is rotated by some external means at the start so that it also reverses its polarity as the polarity of the stator poles, there exists a continuous force of attraction between stator and rotor poles. This is called magnetic locking. Once the magnetic locking is obtained, the rotor poles are dragged by the stator revolving field (or imaginary poles) and a continuous torque is obtained. As the rotor poles are dragged by the stator revolving field, hence the rotor rotates at the same speed as that of stator revolving field, i.e., at synchronous speed.
Step 5. Due to this, the rotor continuously experiences a unidirectional torque in the direction of the rotating magnetic field. Hence 3-phase synchronous motor must run at synchronous speed.
What will happen if by chance the rotor position is in such a way that the, unlike the rotor and stator poles, are facing each other?
But owing to the large inertia of the rotor, the rotor fails to rotate along with the stator poles. Hence again the difference of position of magnetic axes gets created and the rotor gets subjected to quickly reversing torque. This is because the speed with which routing magnetic field is rotating is so high that it is unable to rotate the rotor from its initial position, due to the inertia of the rotor. So under any case, whatever may be the starting position of the rotor, the synchronous motor is not self-starting.
PROCEDURE TO START SYNCHRONOUS MOTOR
Now suppose the rotor is rotated by some external means at a speed almost equal to synchronous speed. And then the rotor is excited to produce its poles. At a certain instant now, the stator and rotor unlike poles will face each other such that their magnetic axes are near each other. Then the force of attraction between the twos pulls both of them into the magnetic locking condition.
Once magnetic locking is established, the rotor and stator poles continue to occupy the same relative position. Due to this, the rotor continuously experiences a unidirectional torque in the direction of the rotating magnetic field. Thence rotor rotates at synchronous speed and said to be in synchronism with rotating magnetic field. The external device used to rotate rotor near synchronous speed can be removed once synchronism is established. The rotor then continues its rotation at ^Ns due to magnetic locking. This is the reason why synchronous motor runs only at synchronous speed and does not rotate at any speed other than the synchronous. This operation is shown in the Figures. (a) and (b).
It is necessary to keep field winding i.e., rotor excited from dc supply to maintain the magnetic locking as long as the motor is operating.
Procedure: A general procedure to start a synchronous motor can be stated as:
Give a three phase ac supply to the three-phase winding. This will produce rotating magnetic
field rotating at synchronous speed NS RPM.
Then drive the rotor by some external means like the diesel engine in the direction of rotating the magnetic field, at a speed very near or equal to synchronous speed.
Switch on the dc supply given to the rotor which will produce rotor poles. Now there are two fields one is the rotating magnetic field produced by stator while the other is produced by the rotor which is physically rotated almost at the same speed as that of the rotating magnetic field.
At a particular instant, both the fields get magnetically locked. The stator field pulls the rotor field into synchronism. Then the external device used to rotate rotor can be removed. But rotor will continue to rotate at the same speed as that of rotating magnetic field i.e., NS due to magnetic locking.
Note:- To start the synchronous motor, it needs some device to rotate the rotor at a speed very near or equal to the synchronous speed. In the next article, we will discuss the method of starting the synchronous motor.


A 2 ft Stingray model has PAR exceeding a conventional 250 watt MH lighting, but uses less than 60% of its power. This represents a significant saving to your energy cost.
LED also reduces heat reflected to the aquarium, reducing the need of a high powered chiller.
Dimmable lighting makes it easier to acclimate corals / plants or to adjust intensity due to algae. For reef model, separate dimming channels allow fine control of color temperature.
Our lighting fixtures are rated for 30,000 hours (around 6.5 years with 12 hrs lighting period). This reduces environmental waste due to replacement light bulb. It is also better for aquatic life as they won't suffer intensity shock due to bulb changes.
Our external power supply converts power to low voltage to reduce the risk of electric shock. Our LED fixtures produce no harmful UV radiation.
Each of our LED panel is equipped with a temperature sensor and overheat protection.
Enjoy the shimmer effect from the beach? LED produces the shimmer effect that is found in MH and uniform lighting that is found in T5.
T5 or compact fluorescent (CF) tubes contain mercury that is very harmful to our environment. Our LED emitter contains no mercury and is RoHS compliant.
Although the initial investment for LED fixture is higher than MH or T5 fluorescent tube, the fixture quickly pays for itself with savings from bulb replacement and lower electricity cost. We estimated that payback can be achieved in as little as three years, making this a smart investment!