Chris Boyd Selected Photography and Video Stills Exhibition.
This fast rising young Warrington-born artist worked with Tate Online as part of the London 2012 countdown, directing the music promo, ‘And Again’ for Tigs, and has won the Channel Five TV’s Big Art Challenge UK Art Prize. Labelled by controversial art critic, Brian Sewell, as a ‘genius’, his is a name to watch.
Showing posts with label creativity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label creativity. Show all posts
25.2.08
14 Grand Engineering Challenges of the 21st Century
Some of the world's brightest minds have been laying out this century's greatest engineering challenges.
The panel of 18 engineers, technologists and futurists included Google co-founder Larry Page and genomics pioneer J. Craig Venter. They spent more than a year pondering how best to improve life on Earth and came up with 14 Grand Engineering Challenges, a list the National Academy of Engineering deemed so momentous it should be capitalized.
The list addresses four themes the committee considered "essential for humanity to flourish" - environmental sustainability, health, reducing our vulnerability and adding to the joy of living.
"We chose engineering challenges that we feel can, through creativity and committment, be realistically met, most of them early in this century," said committee chair William J. Perry, the former Secretary of Defense who teaches engineering at Stanford University. "Some can be, and should be, achieved as soon as possible."
Heres the list:
Make solar energy affordable.
Provide energy from fusion.
Develop carbon sequestration methods.
Manage the nitrogen cycle.
Provide access to clean water.
Restore and improve urban infrastructure.
Advance health informatics.
Engineer better medicines.
Reverse-engineer the brain.
Prevent nuclear terror.
Secure cyberspace.
Enhance virtual reality.
Advance personalized learning.
Engineer the tools for scientific discovery.
The committee, which also included such luminaries as futurist Ray Kurzweil and robotics guru Dean Kamen, decided not to make any predictions or focus on gee-whiz gadgets. They felt it more important to outline broad objectives that might influence research funding and governmental policy.
The 14 challenges they laid out were culled from hundreds of suggestions from engineers, scientists, policymakers and ordinary people around the world.
"Meeting these challenges would be game changing," said Charles M. Vest, president of the NAE. "Success with any of them could dramatically improve life for everyone."
You too can have input by clicking on the engineering challenge you think is the most important:
Engineering's Grand Challenges
http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/
The panel of 18 engineers, technologists and futurists included Google co-founder Larry Page and genomics pioneer J. Craig Venter. They spent more than a year pondering how best to improve life on Earth and came up with 14 Grand Engineering Challenges, a list the National Academy of Engineering deemed so momentous it should be capitalized.
The list addresses four themes the committee considered "essential for humanity to flourish" - environmental sustainability, health, reducing our vulnerability and adding to the joy of living.
"We chose engineering challenges that we feel can, through creativity and committment, be realistically met, most of them early in this century," said committee chair William J. Perry, the former Secretary of Defense who teaches engineering at Stanford University. "Some can be, and should be, achieved as soon as possible."
Heres the list:
Make solar energy affordable.
Provide energy from fusion.
Develop carbon sequestration methods.
Manage the nitrogen cycle.
Provide access to clean water.
Restore and improve urban infrastructure.
Advance health informatics.
Engineer better medicines.
Reverse-engineer the brain.
Prevent nuclear terror.
Secure cyberspace.
Enhance virtual reality.
Advance personalized learning.
Engineer the tools for scientific discovery.
The committee, which also included such luminaries as futurist Ray Kurzweil and robotics guru Dean Kamen, decided not to make any predictions or focus on gee-whiz gadgets. They felt it more important to outline broad objectives that might influence research funding and governmental policy.
The 14 challenges they laid out were culled from hundreds of suggestions from engineers, scientists, policymakers and ordinary people around the world.
"Meeting these challenges would be game changing," said Charles M. Vest, president of the NAE. "Success with any of them could dramatically improve life for everyone."
You too can have input by clicking on the engineering challenge you think is the most important:
Engineering's Grand Challenges
http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/
The Genius of Christopher Wren
Today is the day when the extraordinary Christopher Wren died. Feb. 25, 1723.
Wren was a leading mathematician, astronomer and architect of his time.
Born in 1632, Wren had a breadth of interests worthy of a Leonardo. His ideas and inventions include instruments for surveying, measuring angles and writing in the dark, as well as different machines to lift water and create perspective drawings, ways of finding longitude and distance at sea, military devices for defending cities, and designs for submarines and telescopes. He also discussed the grinding of conical lenses and mirrors and devised a blood-transfusion method, demonstrating it with two dogs.
Wren became a professor of astronomy at age 25. He solved Kepler's Problem on cutting a semicircle, independently proved Kepler's third law, and formulated the inverse-square law of gravitational attraction.
Wren was a founding member of the Royal Society in 1660 and later served as its president. But his interest in physics and engineering soon led him to architecture, and he designed buildings at Cambridge and Oxford, where he was teaching.
He submitted plans for a classical addition to the decrepit, decaying, dilapidated Gothic St. Paul's Cathedral in London in May 1666. His plan was accepted just six days before the Great Fire of London in September of that year. The conflagration burned nearly all of the ancient city center, including 87 churches, 44 livery halls and 13,200 houses -- but took only nine lives. The fire left most of the cathedral in charred ruins, but plans proceeded to restore it. Then a further collapse in 1668 made it clear that a completely new St. Paul's would have to be built.
Wren submitted three new designs before King Charles II and his commissioners finally agreed to one. The foundation stone was laid in 1675, and after 33 years a-building, Wren's architect son (also named Christopher) placed the last stone on the topmost spire above the lantern above the dome in 1708.
Within days of the fire, Wren had also submitted to the king a complete urban design to replace the twisting, meandering and often narrow lanes of the City of London with a plan of baroque splendor, including wide, radial avenues and broad vistas. It was not to be, as merchants and property owners did not want to have their lots realigned. They set about rebuilding as soon as the ashes had cooled and -- with just a little widening and straightening here and there -- rebuilt the city along its medieval streets.
As surveyor general of the Royal Works, Wren designed many buildings in the post-fire years, including the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, hospitals in Chelsea and Greenwich and 51 churches -- 23 of which survive (some with significant post-Blitz rebuilding). He was knighted in 1673, but for all this work, he was paid only 200 pounds a year ($56,000 in today’s money) and was summarily dismissed in 1718 amid a dispute over the speed of rebuilding.
Wren died at age 91 at his home in Hampton Court after returning from a visit to St. Paul's. He is buried in the crypt of St. Paul's, beneath a plaque that in Latin acknowledges him as "builder of this church and this city…. Reader, if you seek his monument, look around you.”
Wren was a leading mathematician, astronomer and architect of his time.
Born in 1632, Wren had a breadth of interests worthy of a Leonardo. His ideas and inventions include instruments for surveying, measuring angles and writing in the dark, as well as different machines to lift water and create perspective drawings, ways of finding longitude and distance at sea, military devices for defending cities, and designs for submarines and telescopes. He also discussed the grinding of conical lenses and mirrors and devised a blood-transfusion method, demonstrating it with two dogs.
Wren became a professor of astronomy at age 25. He solved Kepler's Problem on cutting a semicircle, independently proved Kepler's third law, and formulated the inverse-square law of gravitational attraction.
Wren was a founding member of the Royal Society in 1660 and later served as its president. But his interest in physics and engineering soon led him to architecture, and he designed buildings at Cambridge and Oxford, where he was teaching.
He submitted plans for a classical addition to the decrepit, decaying, dilapidated Gothic St. Paul's Cathedral in London in May 1666. His plan was accepted just six days before the Great Fire of London in September of that year. The conflagration burned nearly all of the ancient city center, including 87 churches, 44 livery halls and 13,200 houses -- but took only nine lives. The fire left most of the cathedral in charred ruins, but plans proceeded to restore it. Then a further collapse in 1668 made it clear that a completely new St. Paul's would have to be built.
Wren submitted three new designs before King Charles II and his commissioners finally agreed to one. The foundation stone was laid in 1675, and after 33 years a-building, Wren's architect son (also named Christopher) placed the last stone on the topmost spire above the lantern above the dome in 1708.
Within days of the fire, Wren had also submitted to the king a complete urban design to replace the twisting, meandering and often narrow lanes of the City of London with a plan of baroque splendor, including wide, radial avenues and broad vistas. It was not to be, as merchants and property owners did not want to have their lots realigned. They set about rebuilding as soon as the ashes had cooled and -- with just a little widening and straightening here and there -- rebuilt the city along its medieval streets.
As surveyor general of the Royal Works, Wren designed many buildings in the post-fire years, including the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, hospitals in Chelsea and Greenwich and 51 churches -- 23 of which survive (some with significant post-Blitz rebuilding). He was knighted in 1673, but for all this work, he was paid only 200 pounds a year ($56,000 in today’s money) and was summarily dismissed in 1718 amid a dispute over the speed of rebuilding.
Wren died at age 91 at his home in Hampton Court after returning from a visit to St. Paul's. He is buried in the crypt of St. Paul's, beneath a plaque that in Latin acknowledges him as "builder of this church and this city…. Reader, if you seek his monument, look around you.”
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