The NY Times had a great piece today on the innovations in concrete that are being employed in the rebuilding of the I-35 bridge in Minneapolis (the one that collapsed in 2007):

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/31/science/earth/31conc.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&hpw=&adxnnlx=1238508229-PsswDycY1Wu7kxo1wITtmQ

Among other things, cement producers are adding titanium dioxide to make the concrete self-cleaning and others are working on making concrete carbon sequestering, and thereby potentially cardon neutral (or even negative).

This is a great example of how investement in infrastructure, even relatively old-world stuff like bridges, is affording the ability to innovate and implement.

B.I.G. recently openend their first Danish solo exhibit at the DAC in Copenhagen:

http://english.dac.dk/visArtikel.uk.asp?artikelID=4737

The video at the bottom of the page is worth watching, even if it is presented in Danish (with subtitles).

This video was made by some people at MIT.  They’re playing with the idea of wearable data projectors and cameras to create an immersive augmented reality.  It’s an interesting inversion of virtual worlds – bringing the data in the real world.

(I know, more stuff about the economy).  I thought this was interesting – existing homeless encampents are starting to grow in cities like Sacremento which have high forclosure rates.  In the case of Sacremento, the city is considering establishing ‘permanent’ tent cities with utilities such as plumbing out of concern for cholera and other diseases.  There have been suggestions that the city buy foreclosed properties and put the people there, but since they’re ‘private property’, and the city is cash-strapped in the first place, this seems to be a non-starter.  This reminds me of Rem’s studies of 3rd-world trash cities a little…

Full article here.

Not sure where this video clip comes from, but it doesn’t paint a very rosy picture of Dubai’s future.  I’ve never really understood how these desert extravaganzas could be sustained long-term.

Some commentary from the blog that posted it:

Short of opening a Radio Shack in an Amish town, Dubai is the world’s worst business idea, and there isn’t even any oil. Imagine proposing to build Vegas in a place where sex and drugs and rock and roll are an anathema. This is effectively the proposition that created Dubai – it was a stupid idea before the crash, and now it is dangerous.

People are literally fleeing this place, to date leaving 3000 cars stranded at the airport with keys still in the ignition. And the reason for this is that if you default on your Dubai mortgage, you can end up in a debtors prison. Perhaps Dubai will at least create a new Dickens?

On the same theme, Time just published an incredible set of photos of Detriot.

Here’s an interesting article in The Atlantic essentially predicting what various regions of the country will look like in a decade.  A lot of this has been said before, but it’s still interesting.

Along with the rise of mega-regions, a second phenomenon is also reshaping the economic geography of the United States and the world. The ability of different cities and regions to attract highly educated people—or human capital—has diverged, according to research by the Harvard economists Edward Glaeser and Christopher Berry, among others. Thirty years ago, educational attainment was spread relatively uniformly throughout the country, but that’s no longer the case. Cities like Seattle, San Francisco, Austin, Raleigh, and Boston now have two or three times the concentration of college graduates of Akron or Buffalo. Among people with postgraduate degrees, the disparities are wider still. The geographic sorting of people by ability and educational attainment, on this scale, is unprecedented.

The University of Chicago economist and Nobel laureate Robert Lucas declared that the spillovers in knowledge that result from talent-clustering are the main cause of economic growth. Well-educated professionals and creative workers who live together in dense ecosystems, interacting directly, generate ideas and turn them into products and services faster than talented people in other places can. There is no evidence that globalization or the Internet has changed that. Indeed, as globalization has increased the financial return on innovation by widening the consumer market, the pull of innovative places, already dense with highly talented workers, has only grown stronger, creating a snowball effect. Talent-rich ecosystems are not easy to replicate, and to realize their full economic value, talented and ambitious people increasingly need to live within them.

The Financial Times has a great post about Detroit.  A quick preview:

Detroit may be the archetypal down-and-out rust-belt city, but to call it “dying” masks a more complex reality. Greater Detroit still has three to four million residents, a world-class university next door in Ann Arbor and the bone structure of a great city, as a car-industry consultant with the ear of a poet put it over lunch one day. Why, then, the relentless focus on its failings? Nearly everyone you meet is either weary or angry at seeing their home town made the butt of jokes on late-night television and the subject of anguished political commentary. But no one denies that the region’s property market is abysmal, its finances a mess and its industrial base shrinking at an alarming rate.

Instead, Michiganders, despite being self-deprecating to a fault, make a point their countrymen won’t want to hear: Detroit is no longer the nation’s worst-case scenario, but on its leading edge, the proverbial canary in the coal mine. “It’s like the rest of the country is getting to where Detroit has been,” said Peter De Lorenzo, who writes the acerbic and very funny Autoextremist.com blog. That means that smug mock-horror is no longer the appropriate reaction to the frozen corpse. Instead, get ready for a shock of recognition.

There are also some hauntingly beautiful pictures of detroit over at seedetroit.com.  A few highlights:

I almost want to take a vacation there to do some research…

Popular Science has a story about the recent announcement that PV prices have dropped below $1/W, along with an anaylsis of material availability suggesting that these prices couldn’t keep pace with large-scale production:

First Solar’s eventual goal is “grid parity,” a phrase that refers to making solar power cost the same as competing conventional power sources without subsidies. Right now the cost of making panels accounts for a little less than half the total cost of installation. The company estimates that it needs to get manufacturing costs down to $0.65 to $0.70 per watt, and other installation costs down to $1 a watt in order to reach grid parity—goals First Solar plans to reach by 2012.

The question, though, is whether First Solar or any other solar manufacturer would be able to handle the flood of orders that would ensue if they reached competitive cost. At that point, it comes down to a matter of having enough of raw materials. That is where the real limitations come to bear, according to a paper that will appear in the March issue of the journal Environmental Science & Technology. In the paper, Wadia and colleagues Paul Alivisatos and Daniel Kammen evaluated the global supplies and extraction costs for 23 promising photovoltaic semiconductor materials and found that the three materials that currently dominate the market—silicon, CdTe and another thin-film technology based on copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS)—all have limitations when ordered in mass. While silicon is the second-most abundant element in the Earth’s crust, it requires enormous amounts of energy to convert into a usable crystalline form. This is a fundamental thermodynamic barrier that will keep silicon costs comparatively high. Both CIGS and First Solar’s CdTe rank poorly in abundance and extraction cost, with CdTe ranking dead last in long-term potential based on current annual extraction rates.

…

To that end, Wadia and his colleagues found that iron pyrite—better known as fool’s gold—was several orders of magnitude better than any of the alternatives, based on both cost and abundance. Copper sulfide and copper oxide were also attractive candidates. The problem with these materials is that they’re less efficient in converting the sun’s rays to electricity, and as a result have been the focus of considerably less research. But the Berkeley study accounts for this fact, and concludes that lower-efficiency materials that are cheaper and more abundant will ultimately serve the alternative energy market better.