The Hague in a certain sense is an imprisoned city, confined by the sea, the highway connecting Amsterdam and Rotterdam, and neighbouring cites. It therefore relies for its growth on the redefinition of sites within its boundaries. To grow, for this city, means to become more dense.

The Hague, the Dutch capital of conservatism and bureaucracy, has planned the completion of more than 30 projects in the centre – most of them much larger than any of the existing buildings – which will radically transform the character and scale of the existing fabric. Surprisingly, the increase in density (more than 500,000 m2 of program) goes hand in hand with plans to minimize car traffic on street level. To achieve this, a so-called parking-road is strung around the heart of the city, defining a 1,000,000m2 ‘island’ forbidden to all but local traffic. This loop-road will connect to a number of – largely underground – parking garages and to a subterranean service road that brings trucks to the heart of the shopping district.

Most – existing and new – car parks connect to the loop individually, each one of them isolated from the others. One of the new projects, which is as much an element of infrastructure as it is a building, is the digging of a multistorey tunnel – a 1,200m subway ’scoop’, with two stations and a 500-car parking garage. This tunnel-building is the necessary addition that makes all the other buildings work. The tunnel acts like a spine connecting the separate ‘organs’, creating a body of underground connections that serves the city from underneath.

The city is turning into a kind of La Defense in reverse, the slumbering existing buildings reanimated by an underworld of interconnecting parking garages, rails, tramstops and roads even, bringing underground everything necessary but no longer acceptable on grade.

The main challenge of this project was to prove that architecture can have a positive effect when applied to the rigour of transportation pragmatism. The building is a sandwich of a subway-line with two layers of parking on top and a station at either end. It stretches out below the main shopping street, repeating its outlines, leaving a ‘workspace’ of 600×15m approximately, to overcome the boredom of a 600m long continuous section. To provide an answer to the question of underground orientation/isolation, every opportunity has been taken to modify the height and the width of the space, to connect physically or visually to other parts of the tunnel’s program, to provide views of the outide – city or sky, to link the tunnel with surrounding shops and parkings.

Usually, parking garages are victims of technical and economic constraints, the full weight of all structural and mechanical difficulties imposed upon them. In this case, the linearity of the site turned out to be an escape from this prison of practice. Ventilation: the tunnel is the duct; structure: the tunnel is the walls, the beams and the slabs. The parking becomes a fluid space, making use of the slopes in the rail and exploiting one of the gives, its enormous length, as an unprecedent quality. Where parking and stations meet, partitioning walls have been kept transparent. Architectural finishes are almost non-existent due to the surprising beauty ofthe  rock-like concrete walls, pored in the irregular coast soil of The Hague; only light – daylight and electric – gives texture and clear readings of the fluid spaces underground.

World’s Largest Photovoltaic Project

Where I used to commute in the high school everyday. The platform roofing infrastructure is made of narrower S shape rails abandoned in the earlier time. There’s an express lane in between platforms.

One of the most important programs of the station besides tickets machines is the 7-11 adjacent to the gate, with almost 5,000 stores among the island. Besides purchasing anything you can possible imagine and need, you can also buy high-speed train tickets, pay taxes, and deliver/send anything from them.

Qufu (Chinese: 曲阜; pinyin: Qūfù; Wade-Giles: Ch’ü¹-fu⁴) is a city in Shandong Province, China. It is located at 35° 36′ northern latitude and 117°, 02′ east, about 130 km south of the provincial capital Jinan and 45 km northeast of the sub-provincial city Jining. Qufu has an urban population of about 60,000, the entire administrative region has about 650,000 inhabitants.

Qufu is the birthplace of Confucius; it served as the capital of the State of Lu during the Spring and Autumn Period. Qufu contains numerous historic palaces, temples and cemeteries. Many of the major cultural sites in the city are all associated with Confucius, such as the three sites of the Temple of Confucius, the Cemetery of Confucius, and the Kong Family Mansion. The Qufu complex of monuments have been listed asUNESCO World Heritage Sites since 1994.

Qufu also played a minor role in the Yanzhou Campaign of the Chinese Communists in 1948.

A siheyuan (Chinese: 四合院; pinyin: sìhéyuàn) is a historical type of residence that was commonly found throughout China, most famously in Beijing. The name literally means a courtyard surrounded by four buildings. In English, siheyuan are sometimes referred to as Chinese quadrangles. Throughout Chinese history, the siheyuan composition was the basic pattern used for residences, palaces, temples, monasteries, family, businesses and government offices. In ancient times, a spacious siheyuan would be occupied by a single, usually large and extended family, signifying wealth and prosperity. Today, however, most remaining siheyuan are used as mass housing complexes, and suffer from a lack of modern amenities.

The image of the tree, of branching phylogenies, has come to underly all our thinking about organisms and evolution. It is a “canonical icon” whose influence can be described as an “unconscious hegemony.”The hierarchical structure expresses the pattern of branching speciation, of successive, unending, natural wedging through natural selection which forms the “tree of life.” The tree combines the “ladder” of evolution, from lower to higher lifeform — and with man at the top — with the “cone” of increasing diversity. (Steven Jay Gould in Hidden Histories of Science) As Gould points out, the latter is factually incorrect. The Cambrian explosion was the moment of greatest diversity. The former is, of course, an anthropocentric bias.

Historical narratives unfold like trees.

Christopher Alexander’s Notes on the Synthesis of Form is an attempt to reach fitness of object and context through the hierarchy of the tree. For Alexander, the tree” gives an explicit description of the structure implicitly responsible for the success and stability of the unselfconscious form-making process.” and “gives the strongest possible decomposition of the problem that does not interfere with the task of synthesizing it parts in a unified way.” According to Alexander, The tree diagram shows “natural clusters” which he calls the “program.” The analytic stage of design thus yields the tree of sets of requirements. In the synthetic stage, a diagram is made for each of these subsets which are then realized in the form. (see arch theories )

The fundamental purpose of Alexander’s undertaking is to correlate the hierarchical analysis of the functional problem with a synthetic hierarchy of diagrams that combine into the form. “The hierarchical compostion of these diagrams will then lead to a physical object whose structural hierarchy is the exact counterpart of the functional hierarchy established during the analysis of the problem.” (p.131)

Subsequently, Alexander proposed the semilattice as alternative to tree structure. (see rhizome.)

“The trial is a process whose global balance sheet can easily be recorded. It consists of an ordered structure with given axioms, a structure that branches out in several models: the social tree, the tree of the production of energy, of entropy, and of pollution, the tree of causes, the hydrographic tree, the tree of the “better”, the tree of good, evil, and knowledge–and a tree in general. All these trees together make a forest, into which ‘The Wolf carries the lamb off and then eats him.’ This is not demonstrated by an order (proces ) between that which precedes and that which follows, but shown as a forest of models, a forest of symbols. The proof is only one process among others: there exist philosophers from whom a whole forest is hidden by a single tree.” (Michel Serres, Hermes, p. 19)

One of the world’s rarest and oldest maps went on display at the Library of Congress in Washington. It was made in 1602 by Italian priest Matteo Ricci, who visited China in the 1500s and taught the Chinese about the existence of “the Americas.” The emperor asked him to make a map.

The result is an enormous map, on five-foot-tall panels of rice paper, with China at the center. It’s the first map in Chinese to show the land we now call North and South America.

The 12ft by 5ft document, printed on six rolls of rice paper, is on show at the Library of Congress. It is one of only two copies in existence in good condition, and was coined ‘the impossible black tulip of cartography’ by experts strugging to track it down.

The map includes drawings and annotations detailing different regions of the world. Africa was noted to have the world’s highest mountain and longest river, while a brief description of North America describes ‘humped oxen’, wild horses and a region named ‘Ka-na-ta’.

Designer-daily.com

For the past six years, the CDMS, the world’s most sensitive dark matter detector, sat deep beneath the Minnesotan countryside, watching super-cooled Germanium crystals for evidence of material abundant in the Universe, but almost non-existent on Earth. Today, rumors are flying on the Web that the team has finally found the weakly interacting particles (WIMPs) that physicists have long searched for, which could be the key to understanding the fundamental makeup of the universe.

Dark matter, a substance that can’t be seen in space but contributes a gravitational pull strong enough to shape galaxies, has never been observed directly. Physicist believe that WIMPs, a theoretical class of particles 100 times heavier than protons, make up the majority of dark matter. The discovery and observation of WIMPs could lead to a rewriting of the most basic laws in both particle physics and astronomy.

(continue reading)

John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer, philosopher, poet, music theorist, artist, printmaker,and amateur mycologist and mushroom collector. A pioneer of chance music, electronic music and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde. Critics have lauded him as one of the most influential American composers of the 20th century. He was also instrumental in the development of modern dance, mostly through his association with choreographer Merce Cunningham, who was also Cage’s romantic partner for most of their lives.

Cage is perhaps best known for his 1952 composition 4′33″, the three movements of which are performed without a single note being played. The content of the composition is meant to be perceived as the sounds of the environment that the listeners hear while it is performed, rather than merely as four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence, and the piece became one of the most controversial compositions of the twentieth century. Another famous creation of Cage’s is the prepared piano (a piano with its sound altered by placing various objects in the strings), for which he wrote numerous dance-related works and a few concert pieces, the best known of which is Sonatas and Interludes (1946–48).

His teachers included Henry Cowell (1933) and Arnold Schoenberg (1933–35), both known for their radical innovations in music, but Cage’s major influences lay in various Eastern cultures. Through his studies of Indian philosophy and Zen Buddhism in the late 1940s, Cage came to the idea of chance-controlled music, which he started composing in 1951. The I Ching, an ancient Chinese classic text on changing events, became Cage’s standard composition tool for the rest of his life. In a 1957 lecture, Experimental Music, he described music as “a purposeless play” which is “an affirmation of life – not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living”.

Flickr : The Info Graphics Pool

50 great examples of infographics

VisualComplexity.com intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project’s main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web. I truly hope this space can inspire, motivate and enlighten any person doing research on this field.

Not all projects shown here are genuine complex networks, in the sense that they aren’t necessarily at the edge of chaos, or show an irregular and systematic degree of connectivity. However, the projects that apparently skip this class were chosen for two important reasons. They either provide advancement in terms of visual depiction techniques/methods or show conceptual uniqueness and originality in the choice of a subject. Nevertheless, all projects have one trait in common: the whole is always more than the sum of its parts. -VC

It’s until recently that the city decided to expend a passenger entrance to the back (south) side. As a result, developers had quickly turned the ruined warehouses into residential/office towers.

Beijing Bicycle
Beijing Bicycle (simplified Chinese: 十七岁的单车; traditional Chinese: 十七歲的單車; pinyin: Shí qī suì de dān chē; literally “’seventeen-year-old’s bicycle’ or ’seventeen-year-old bachelor’) is a 2001 Chinese drama film by Sixth Generation Chinese director Wang Xiaoshuai, with joint investment from the Taiwanese Arc Light Films and the French Pyramid Productions. The film stars first-time actors Cui Lin and Li Bin, supported by the already established actresses Zhou Xun and Gao Yuanyuan. It premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival on 17 February 2001 and won the Jury Grand Prix, but was subsequently banned in Mainland China. The ban was eventually lifted in 2004.
Beijing Bicycle revolves around a seventeen-year-old boy Guei (Cui) from the countryside who came to Beijing to seek work. He finds a job with a courier company, which assigns him a brand-new bicycle. After it is stolen one day, the stubborn Guei goes on a search for his missing bicycle. At the other end of the city, Jian (Li) is a schoolboy who buys Guei’s stolen bicycle from a second-hand market. When Guei’s search brings the two boys together, more than the ownership of the bicycle is brought into question. The film explores the theme of youth as well as several social issues, including class, youth delinquency, theft, and rural-urban socio-economic divisions and change.

Original Shanghai West Station,  an exotic mixture of the west and the east.

1907, railed street car.

Shanghai at the end of Ching dynasty

Nanjing Rd. 1938

The Bund, The Bund (simplified Chinese: 外滩; traditional Chinese: 外灘; pinyin: Wàitān) is an area of Huangpu District in central Shanghai, People’s Republic of China. The area centres on a section of Zhongshan Road (East-1 Zhongshan Road) within the former Shanghai International Settlement, which runs along the western bank of the Huangpu River, facing Pudong, in the eastern part of Huangpu District. The Bund usually refers to the buildings and wharves on this section of the road, as well as some adjacent areas. The Bund is one of the most famous tourist destinations in Shanghai. Building heights are restricted in this area.

Nanjing Rd, 1941

Shanghai Old Station (till 1990)

The current Beijing South Railway Station (Chinese: 北京南站; pinyin: Běijīng Nán Zhàn) is a large railway station on the south side of Beijingthat opened on August 1, 2008. The new station replaced the old Beijing South Station, also known as the Yongdingmen Railway Station before 1988, which stood 500 m away and operated from 1897 to 2006. The new Beijing South Station, reportedly the largest in Asia, joins the Beijing Railway Station and the Beijing West Railway Station as the third major passenger rail hub in the Chinese capital.It will serve as the terminus for high-speed trains to the city, including the Beijing–Tianjin Intercity Rail, which can reach speeds above 350 km/h.

the old station

the old site/new site

new station structural diagram

new station plan

new station section

Photo: Michael Schmelling

Thanks to the ever-shortening product upgrade cycle, the US generates about 2 million tons of electronic waste each year. Many discarded cell phones are shipped abroad, where valuable parts are stripped out and toxic metals are burned or dumped. But most domestic recyclers are more responsible. Here’s how one New York outfit, WeRecycle, does it.

1/ Collect A consumer drops a phone into a receptacle, and it’s trucked to one of WeRecycle’s facilities in New York or Connecticut.

2/ Sort Staffers pick through the phones, removing working units and wiping data from them. These are sold to domestic resellers, who offer them as refurbished models.

3/ Reclaim Batteries are sent to a domestic smelter, which extracts valuable metals like zinc, manganese, nickel, and iron. The nickel, manganese, and iron are used in stainless steel; other metals are remelted and sold in bars. Cadmium, which is highly toxic, is sold back to battery manufacturers.

4/ Shred The phones are then dumped onto a conveyer system and fed en masse into a room-sized shredder, which grinds and chops the remaining parts into small, uniformly sized chips. Tasty!

5/ Filter Chopped phone bits ride on conveyor belts through a series of sorting machines. Magnets and other mechanisms separate out the steel, gold, aluminum, copper, and other materials. The remaining plastic—the least valuable component—is diverted into collection bins.

6/ Melt Sorted and chipped pieces are sold to domestic mills, where remaining metals are smelted and cast into bars. Plastics go to manufacturers, where they are separated by polymer type, melted, and recast into new products. Ideally, nothing is left over.

via wired

http://rail.kychung.com/

The China Railways CRH5 is an electric multiple unit high-speed train in use by China Railway High-speed. China Railways has contracted Alstom and Changchun Railway Vehicles to produce 60 sets, which are based on Pendolino trains used in Finland and the ETR-600 New Pendolino used in Italy. 30 additional sets have been ordered in 2009 to complete the current fleet operating on China northern and eastern lines.
The CRH5 are non-tilting trains, developed for the Chinese Railways and which technology has been transferred to local manufacturers. The CRH5 have a design speed of 200 km/h and now operate steadily at 250 km/h.
The CRH5 trains met a number of failures in early stages, attributed to new technologies introduced on CRH5 and relatively short trial run before first delivery

Taipei Station system diagram: Similar to the subway system in New York, Taipei Station is a multiplicity of High Speed Rail System, local railway system, subway systems, bus terminal systems, and underground shopping corridors. It’s rhizomatically connects to surrounding areas.

Taipei Station

Despite many fears, planes are, in fact, the safest way to travel.  Accidents involving trains have increased over the years, one contributing factor being the increasing speed.

http://www.aviationearth.com/what-is-the-safest-way-to-travel-planes-trains-or-automibiles/

Railway workers transport crosstie to the site where a passenger train derailed in Dongxiang County, east China’s Jiangxi Province, on May 23, 2010. The death toll from the train derailment in Jiangxi Sunday has risen to 19, say rescue authorities. Another 71 people were injured, 11 of them seriously. The train derailed after hitting a section of track that had been damaged by a landslide. The Shanghai-Kunming railway line was closed after the accident. More than 2,000 rescuers and four excavators were working at the site, trying to restore the line before dark. (Xinhua/Zhou Ke) >>> LINK

A landslide has caused the derailment of a passenger train in south-east China, with at least 19 people killed and 71 injured.

The train crashed into dirt and debris blocking the tracks in a mountainous area of Jiangxi province at 0210 (1810 GMT), the railway ministry said.

>>> BBC



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nw_1BLekcmg

Clarence Brown’s “Possessed”, as told by Slavoj Zizek, Slovenian theorist and philosopher

Cheaper, flexible in program.

vA bogie (pronounced /ˈboʊɡi/, us dict: bō′·gē) is a wheeled wagon or trolley. In mechanics terms, a bogie is a chassis or framework carrying wheels, attached to a vehicle. It can be fixed in place, as on a cargo truck, mounted on a swivel, as on a railway carriage or locomotive, or sprung as in the suspension of a caterpillar tracked vehicle.

Bogie

Hong Kong & Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture 2009

www.crisisfronts.org/hksz

The primary site of inquiry for the project is the Closed Area interstitial border zone immediately opposite the boundary between Hong Kong and Shenzhen, a zone that is at once largely empty and traversed by thousands of people every day through a vast and intricate managerial flow. It is a zone that is fluxual and intensely managed by infrastructure. In the context of the increasing inter-connectivity of the two cities and the transition from Special Administrative status in 2046. It is also a political and territorial gray area, a region that is at once part of a geographic center of a combined or linked regional metropolis, and at the same time a zone of shared and overlapping peripheries.

Perhaps even more so than the iconic and exploding skylines of Hong Kong and Shenzhen, the border is the true emblem of the broader metropolitan region. But its architecture is diffuse, its protocols rigid, and its contrasts of scale, speed, and time extreme. It is an amalgam of contrasts: a territory of agreement, coupled with an infrastructure of quarantine and separation, aquaculture and wetlands with duty free shopping. Already the site of dense development catering to transients and frequent commuters, the border has also proven to be a zone subject to great expansion as well as one with a tremendous gravity and attraction – a space more than a line.

These are conditions that provide the basis for a series of protocols and logics sampled from the border area. Our proposal suggests that the border might be thought to be increasingly populated and densified while at the same time devising mechanisms to preserve and redistribute existing land uses and practices within the border zones which are themselves fragile and ecologically necessary.

The project itself is a loose parametric infrastructural and organizational framework. Our aim to find opportunities to seed the landscape and the infrastructure with new urban protocols for the border region having to do with leisure, agriculture, water purification and remediation, energy harvesting, and civic exchange. The proposed infrastructure is generated based on initial organizational and relational protocols and will evolve over the duration of the Biennale as visitors respond and add information to inflect it.

Visitors are encouraged to sample from the printed souvenir postcards, which are printed with portions of an online questionnaire querying practices with respect to travel and communication between Hong Kong and Shenzhen. The intent here is to forecast possible urban infrastructural arrangements based on the sampling of a population’s latent attitude towards the uncertainty of a future collective identity. This intersection is fertile ground to accommodate the imminent demands of various boundary transformations of the near future.

One possible scenario of this begins with the expansion and proliferation of the zones of delay that occur along existing transit corridors and border crossing points. These are already zones programmed with commerce and could become the core around which new pockets of time and territory will percolate and coalesce. The proposed infrastructural framework is implemented to ease the displacement of vital wetland and agricultural territories as the zones of delay are extended into the surrounding landscape. This displacement constitutes a dynamic front – a turbulent region that is interspersed with a collection of agricultural patches that fluctuate between wet and dry on a seasonal basis and are connected by a series of circulatory linkages that promote a more extended duration of occupation.

As visitor data is added the infrastructure will grow and further differentiate as it acquires and remixes protocols and practices sampled from the Crisis Fronts studio.

Project Team: Michael Chen, Jason Lee, Cole Reynolds, Tai Li Lee, Roy Zhuang

Fabrication: Edwin Shum, Model-Tech (HK) Ltd.

Web Interface: Bob Holling, Studio Holling

Support is provided by Pratt Institute School of Architecture and the Pratt Institute Faculty Development Fund.

Events:

Biennale Opening Forum “Cultural Education / Bi-City Exchange”, December 4th, 2:00 – 3:00pm, at the Main Pavilion.

BYOB x DETOUR Pecha Kucha Night, a crossover event between the Biennale and DETOUR 2009 (organized by Hong Kong Ambassadors of Design), December 5, 5:00-7:00pm, at the Police Married Quarters, Hollywood Road

Additional images by:

Jose Blanco, Joanna Cheung, Andres Correa, Ivan Delgado, Nick Garrate, Allison Hoffman, Heidi Jandris, Kamilla Litvinov, Sebastian Misiurek, Jeos Oreamuno Jun Pak, Anna Perelman, Cole Reynolds, Bradley Rothenberg, John Seward, Jintana Tantinirundr

Wendy W Fok, Steven Ma + Dominik Szerlec have just won 2nd place for the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge․Hong Kong Boundary Crossing Facilities International Design Ideas Competition Open Group.

Description

Transient and ephemeral by nature and aesthetics, the transitional energy “ephemeral roof exchange” represents the trilateral relationship between the borders of Hong Kong, Macao and Zhuhai, where the iconic design becomes a symbol of the intermediary relation between land and sky.

Design Concept

Bringing together a fusion of technological, economical and cultural entities, and combining a public free space into a unified secure zone between Hong Kong, Macao, and Zhuhai, the “ephemeral roof exchange” becomes an interactive connection point and node which extends its use as a pivotal point of interaction fro the three points of entry, while establishing itself for future new developments in and around the area of the site.

Through readapting the original site, the three-point, access system creates an entry diversion that is iconic from the aerial perspective – for the viewing pleasure of visitors arriving into and departing from the Fosters designed airport – while, in parallel, delivers an architectural phenomena and dramatic dispatch of the design is inspired by the iconic and indigenous Bauhinia Blakeana of Hong Kong, which subsequently sets a stage for future thematic conception for the HKBCF in further design development of the facilities for Hong Kong, Macao and Zhuhai developmental area.

While the three different points of entry specifically pertain to advanced sustainable technology, specifically, Solar, Hydro and Piezoelectrical energy concepts, the aesthetics tribulation spawns from the physical qualities of elegance, lightness, and patterning, where the edges of the dynamic roof system aesthetically feathers out into the clouds, and floats into the spectrum of the horizon. The roof system dually offers itself like a mirage of a watering-hole in the vast desert that is equality as ephemeral, while physically acting as a transient pivotal terminal of spectacles exchange for the People of Hong Kong, Macao and Zhuhai.

Energy Concept

Three point energy collection points are each representational to the location and orientation of the site. The Solar Photovoltaic Louvres with a South Orientation is designed for the Hong Kong/ Kowloon exchange entrance that dually uses the natural heat and sun light from the Hong Kong and supporting area as the secondary energy source that is collected into the system of the energy roof system. A Hydro Collective System designed with humidity and rain water collectors recycles hydro-energy to provide a cooling system for the waiting guests locates itself within HK/Macao/Zhuhai Terminal. While the Piezoelectrical system is a self sustainable energy system embedded into the asphalt and landscaping throughout the site that recycles and reuses the evanescent nature of sound and vibrational energy collected from the numerous passing vehicles during the border crossing as a cast-off form of energy.

Each energy system interrelates to a larger sphere which contributes and infiltrates throughout the site. Just like the iconic flower which grows from the soil of the motherland, the energy from the site harvests itself as a form innate energy that provides to the foundation of the site and future development of the exchange point. Essentially, energy would be collected from both roof and ground designed technologies.

The iconic nature of the design is developed hand-in-hand with a strong hold on sustainable concerns to strive into making this the most sustainable transportation exchange hub in the world.

Wendy W Fok is an occasional contributor to core.form-ula and you can see more of her work over @ WE-DESIGNS.ORG

RailRunner

RailRunner has positioned itself in the market place as a technology which may be utilized to enhance or feed the existing double stack networks as well as to provide or allow for an intermodal option in markets that have been traditionally truck served. These are enormous markets which present significant opportunities. In the US short haul sector alone, which we define as trips in the 300 to 800 mile range, over 200 million trips are made annually, worth an estimated USD 300 billion. On a revenue basis, trucks currently handle in excess of 90% of this business. RailRunner provides an economically viable and environmentally sound opportunity to convert this current truck traffic to rail.

Camshaft:

The relationship between the rotation of the camshaft and the rotation of the crankshaft is of critical importance. Since the valves control the flow of air/fuel mixture intake and exhaust gases, they must be opened and closed at the appropriate time during the stroke of the piston. For this reason, the camshaft is connected to the crankshaft either directly, via a gear mechanism, or indirectly via a belt or chain called a timing belt or timing chain. In some designs the camshaft also drives the distributor and the oil and fuel pumps. Also on early fuel injection systems, cams on the camshaft would operate the fuel injectors.

In a two-stroke engine that uses a camshaft, each valve is opened once for each rotation of the crankshaft; in these engines, the camshaft rotates at the same rate as the crankshaft. In a four-stroke engine, the valves are opened only half as often; thus, two full rotations of the crankshaft occur for each rotation of the camshaft.

The timing of the camshaft can be advanced to produce better low end torque or it can be retarded to produce better high end torque.

VVT(wiki)

Comparison of MIVEC, VTEC and VVT

Jiayuguan City (The end and last gate of the Great Wall, an important node in the Silk Road)

“When a man is riding through this desert by night and for some reason -falling asleep or anything else -he gets separated from his companions and wants to rejoin them, he hears spirit voices talking to him as if they were his companions, sometimes even calling him by name. Often these voices lure him away from the path and he never finds it again, and many travelers have got lost and died because of this. Sometimes in the night travelers hear a noise like the clatter of a great company of riders away from the road; if they believe that these are some of their own company and head for the noise, they find themselves in deep trouble when daylight comes and they realize their mistake. There were some who, in crossing the desert, have been a host of men coming towards them and, suspecting that they were robbers, returning, they have gone hopelessly astray….Even by daylight men hear these spirit voices, and often you fancy you are listening to the strains of many instruments, especially drums, and the clash of arms. For this reason bands of travelers make a point of keeping very close together. Before they go to sleep they set up a sign pointing in the direction in which they have to travel, and round the necks of all their beasts they fasten little bells, so that by listening to the sound they may prevent them from straying off the path.”—- Marco Polo, Travels

The Silk Road (German: Seidenstraße) (or Silk Routes) is an extensive interconnected network of trade routes across the Asian continent connecting East, South, and Western Asia with the Mediterranean world, as well as North and Northeast Africa andEurope. The term “Seidenstraße” (literally “Silk Road”) was coined retrospectively by the German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen in 1877 and has since found its way into general usage. It gets its name from the lucrative Chinese silk trade, which began during the Han Dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), and was the major reason for the connection of trade routes into an extensive trans-continental network. In recent years, both the maritime and overland Silk Routes are again being used, often closely following the ancient routes.

Ghost in the Shell

Ghost in the Shell: Innocence

In 2029, the world is connected by a global electronic network. Tokyo has a network security force called Section 9, which is on a mission to arrest the elite hacker known as the Puppet Master. Major Motoko Kusanagi, a cyborg officer, leads the investigation and finds that the Puppet Master hacks human minds and leaves victims with implanted fake memories. Kusanagi questions her own existence as an artificial construct, wondering if there is something more. As the investigation goes on, she learns that the Puppet Master may have answers for her and is looking for her

The opening lines of voice-over in the 1995 anime Ghost in the Shell establish the setting as New Port City. In this film, the city’s visual style is modeled upon Hong Kong. Characters seen on signs are in Chinese, rather than Japanese. The writing depicted on the scenery is Chinese Hànzì characters, which are also used in written Japanese (kanji), but omits hiragana and katakana which are both exclusively used in written Japanese.

—–

Ghost in the Shell is a masterpiece. I would go so far as to say that it’s the second best science fiction film I’ve ever seen (behind 2001, of course), but no one knows about it. I find it terribly unfortunate that the only American viewers familiar with Ghost in the Shell are anime fans, many of whom overlook the film’s complexity and see only its nudity and violence. The movie kind of gets in its own way– within the first five minutes we see the heroine’s nude body as well as a very messy head-exploding scene, and many of the viewers who would otherwise end up enthralled by the film’s abundant style and intelligence immediately dismiss it as exploitative anime trash. Every time I show this movie to non-anime fans I have to explain beforehand that Ghost in the Shell is a serious work of science fiction and that everything in it, including the adult content, is part of the point the movie makes about where our society is headed.

The film is stylish, artistic, and beautiful. Masamune Shirow’s stunningly believable vision of the future makes the jump from manga to anime remarkably well. As brilliant as the comics are, I really prefer the film version, which eliminates the nearly pornographic T&A (the film has nudity but it’s clearly not meant to be titillating) and all of the exaggerated comic relief which only detracted from the manga in my opinion. The film’s action sequences are strikingly different from the overly stylized symphonies of destruction seen in most action films. Gunfire, martial arts combat, and car chases are depicted exactly as they would occur in the real world– without fast music or Armageddon-style hyper-editing or any of the needless cinematic baggage we’ve come to expect. But it’s the movie’s ideas that make it great, particularly in the last half hour, when thoughtful viewers learn what this story is all about– the emergence of a new kind of life form, an intelligent and self-aware intelligence that can live indefinitely without ever inhabiting a physical body. The film argues that this will occur within the next thirty years, and the superbly ambiguous ending inspires us to come up with our own ideas of what will happen to humanity once this new life form begins to reproduce. This is filmmaking that should be seen and discussed.

And now the disclaimer. All of the above comments refer to the subtitled Japanese version of the film, NOT the English dub. Simply put, the dub ruins everything. A good example is Kusanagi’s wry comment at the very beginning of the film. An officer who is communicating with Kusanagi through a kind of electronic telepathy tells her there’s a lot of static in her brain. In the original Japanese version (as well as in the manga) she replies that “It’s that time of the month,” but in the dub her comment is inexplicably changed to “Must be a loose wire.” It’s completely insane– do they think that, in a film with considerable nudity and graphic violence, people are going to be offended by a PMS innuendo? The whole movie is filled with such intelligence-insulting changes; please do yourself a favor and watch the subtitled version.

Review from IMDb (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113568/)

He was a writer. He thought he wrote about the future but it really was the past. In his novel, a mysterious train left for 2046 every once in a while. Everyone who went there had the same intention…..to recapture their lost memories. It was said that in 2046, nothing ever changed. Nobody knew for sure if it was true, because nobody who went there had ever come back- except for one. He was there. He chose to leave. He wanted to change.

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2046 was directed by Kar Wai Wong, who also directed In the Mood for Love. This film is also lyrical, deliberately paced, and very romantic.

Without giving too much away, the film takes place in Hong Kong and Singapore in the 60’s. The main character, Chow, is a writer and womanizer. Part of the story takes place in his work, a science fiction tale called 2046.

The story is told out of sequence, with past and present jumbled. In a clever use of irony, we gradually understand that the future is being used to tell the past. Some scenes are presented early, in a way that is confusing until the context is presented later.

There are 3 female characters who are in his life, and the story is segmented accordingly.

The cinematography is beautiful. Interestingly, Wong uses 3 colors nearly exclusively: Blood red, sea green, and yellow. Sometimes he will use light to make those colors stand out, other times it is the objects themselves which are in that color.

I would characterize the story as one of love and loss. There is one poignant scene where, after he realizes what has been happening, he states that timing is crucial in love.

The film is well acted, the characters are understandable if not necessarily ones we can identify with, and the story gradually allows itself to be revealed, a peek here and a peek there, until all the pieces fall into place.

Turn off the lights, cuddle up with a glass of wine, and see this one. Well worth it.

Plot Summery and Review from IMDb (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0212712/)

Narrow rails are more flexible and malleable in both directionality and adaptability, but besides the relatively instable lateral support to

the train, they also lose accuracy and specificity and therefore are hard to achieve higher speed.

Up to Dec 2009, the accumulated deaths of the U.S troops in Iraq had reached 4,287. However, in the year of 2006, almost 5,000works in China died in coal mining accidents.

http://www.yikers.com/video_2_billion_mice_invade_china.html

For the past two weeks residents living around China’s second largest lake have been able to smell a rat—make that two billion rats.

When the Yangtze River flooded on June 23, the water level rose in Dongting Lake, which sits along the river south of Wuhan in central China’s Hunan Province.

The flooding began flushing out rat holes around the lake, triggering a literal rat race for higher ground.

Since then farming communities in more than 20 counties near Dongting have been overrun, observers say.

“For the past week, the situation has been very serious,” Tan Lulu, who works for the international conservation group WWF, told National Geographic News from WWF’s Hunan office in Changsha.

Farmers are using everything from poison to hammers—and even their bare hands—to kill the rodents, Lulu noted.

“There are so many rats that you can kill three of them with one [strike],” she said, adding that the banks of the lake are carpeted with dead rats.

Rat Poison

About two billion rodents have been coursing through the region, according to Chinese media reports, although it’s not clear how this number was determined.

The rats have ravaged at least 4 million acres (1.6 million hectares) of farmland by eating the roots and stems of crops, the state-run China Daily newspaper reported.

In response, several news reports note, residents in the district of Dahu have killed more than 2.3 million rats—or 90 tons of the rodents—since the invasion began.

To combat the problem, local authorities have distributed rat poison in the affected areas.

Sanitation staff has also been dispatched to prevent disease outbreaks.

In some places around Dongting Lake, 2-foot-tall (0.6-meter-tall) concrete walls have been hastily built to keep the rodents away from farms.

“The current focus is on educating the villagers in protecting themselves while killing the rats, and supervising the local health situation,” Peng Zaizhi, director of the emergency control division of the Hunan provincial disease prevention and control center, told the China Daily.

Environmental Degradation

Dongting Lake is officially considered to be 1,058 square miles (2,740 square kilometers). But the lake is a flood basin of the Yangtze River, and its actual size fluctuates with seasonal rains.

Lulu, of the WWF, said a drought preceding the recent flooding exacerbated the rat problem.

“The drought exposed land that used to be the lake, and the rodents took up residence there,” she said.

“When that land became submerged, the rats fled to higher ground.”

The region has also been affected by the cutting and replanting of trees for two paper mills near the lake.

“Dongting Lake used to be a beautiful place,” Lulu said, “but it has become very polluted.”

——

Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, China’s top grazing ground, is suffering from a rat plague on about 10 percent of its pastoral areas.

Zhang Zhuoran, chief of vegetation conservation section of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Regional Prairie Affairs Station, said there were 62.87 million hectares of exploitable pasture in the region, and six million hectares were overrun with rats.

There were outbreaks of rat plague in the Hulun Buir and Xilin Gol prefectural leagues, the two main prairies in northeastern Inner Mongolia, with 1.4 million ha of pastoral areas affected.

The worst hit is Xin Barag Right Banner, a county-level area that falls under the jurisdiction of Hulun Buir Prefectural League.

Local prairie affairs station monitors indicate that 40 percent of Xin Barag Right Banner’s pastureland is infested. There were 977 rodent holes on an average for each hectare, but at most, there were 1,600 holes.

Zhang blamed a severe drought caused by minimal rainfall in Hulun Buir for the rat plague outbreak in larger pastoral areas.

He said the autonomous regional government had set aside a special fund equivalent to 285,714 U.S. dollars for rat control efforts that still largely relied on scattering poison via planes.

The rat control efforts were expected to end by early next month.

(Xinhua News Agency April 19, 2008)

Besides flood and drought, grasshopper infestation is considered one of the most severe natural disasters in China for thousands of years. The threshold of increment responses to certain temperature and humidity requirements.

Fujian Tulou (simplified Chinese: 福建土楼; pinyin: Fújiàn Tǔlóu) is “the most extraordinary type of Chinese rural dwellings”[1] of the Hakka and others in the mountainous areas in southwestern Fujian, China. They were mostly built between the 12th and the 20th centuries.
A tulou is usually a large, enclosed and fortified earth building, rectangular or circular in configuration, with very thick load-bearing rammed earth walls between three and five stories high and housing up to 80 families. Smaller interior buildings are often enclosed by these huge peripheral walls which can contain halls, storehouses, wells and living areas, the whole structure resembling a small fortified city.
The fortified outer structures are formed by compacting earth, mixed with stone, bamboo, wood and other readily-available materials, to form walls up to six feet (≈2m) thick. Branches, strips of wood and bamboo chips are often laid in the wall as additional reinforcement. The end result is a well lit, well-ventilated, windproof and earthquake-proof building that is warm in winter and cool in summer. Tulous usually have only one main gate, guarded by 4-5 inch thick wooden doors reinforced with an outer shell of iron plate. The top level of these earth buildings has gun holes for defensive purposes.
A total of 46 Fujian Tulou sites, including Chuxi tulou cluster, Tianluokeng tulou cluster, Hekeng tulou cluster, Gaobei tulou cluster, Dadi tulou cluster, Hongkeng tulou cluster, Yangxian lou, Huiyuan lou, Zhengfu lou and Hegui lou, have been inscribed in 2008 by UNESCO as World Heritage Site, as “exceptional examples of a building tradition and function exemplifying a particular type of communal living and defensive organization [in a] harmonious relationship with their environment”.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujian_Tulou)

The Three Gorges Dam (simplified Chinese: 长江三峡大坝; traditional Chinese: 長江三峽大壩; pinyin: Chángjiāng Sānxiá Dàbà) is a hydroelectric riverdam that spans the Yangtze River in the town of Sandouping, located in the Yiling District of Yichang, in the Hubei province, China. It is the world’s largest electricity-generating plant of any kind.

The dam body was completed in 2006. Except for a ship lift, all of the originally planned components of the project were completed on October 30, 2008 when the 26th generator was brought into commercial operation. Currently, it contains 26 completed generators in the shore power plant, each with a capacity of 700 MW.Six additional generators in the underground power plant are being installed and are not expected to become fully operational until around 2011. Coupling the dam’s 32 main generators with 2 smaller generators (50 MW each) to power the plant itself, the total electric generating capacity of the dam will eventually reach 22,500 MW. The project produces hydroelectricity, increases the river’s navigation capacity, and reduces the potential for floods downstream by providing flood storage space. From completion until September 2009 the dam has generated 348.4 TWh of electricity, covering more than one third of its project cost.

The project management and the Chinese state regard the project as an historic engineering, social and economic success, with the design of state of the art large turbines, and a move toward the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.However, the dam has also flooded archaeological and cultural sites and displaced some 1.3 million people, and is causing significant ecological changes, including an increased risk of landslides. The building of the dam has been a controversial topic both in China and abroad.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Gorges_Dam)

Qingming Shanghe Tu (Along the River of Qingming Festival)

Along the River During the Qingming Festival (simplified Chinese: 清明上河图; traditional Chinese: 清明上河圖; pinyin: Qīngmíng Shànghé Tú) is the title of several panoramic paintings; the original version is generally attributed to the Song Dynasty artist Zhang Zeduan (1085-1145). It captures the daily life of people from the Song period at the capital, Bianjing, today’s Kaifeng. The theme celebrates the festive spirit and worldly commotion at the Qingming Festival, rather than the holiday’s ceremonial aspects, such as tomb sweeping and prayers. The entire piece was painted in hand scroll format and the content reveals the lifestyle of all levels of the society from rich to poor as well as different economic activities in rural areas and the city. It offers glimpses of period clothing and architecture. As an artistic creation, the piece has been revered and court artists of subsequent dynasties have made several re-interpretive replicas.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Along_the_River_During_the_Qingming_Festival

Here is the Indesign Template for the studio representation and publication.

There are 3 spreads with different formatting examples operating within the 3×3 grid.

Please adhere to the grid, the fonts, and font sizes to keep the work consistent for publication.

China2010_Template Folder

Get a glimpse of the alternately frustrating and thrilling efforts of NOVA’s team as it builds an ancient style of wood-and-bamboo bridge over a river near Suzhou, China.

Jennifer Baichwal’s cameras follow Edward Burtynsky (1955- ) as he visits what he calls manufactured landscapes: slag heaps, e-waste dumps, huge factories in the Fujian and Zhejiang provinces of China, and a place in Bangladesh where ships are taken apart for recycling. In China, workers gather outside the factory, exhorted by their team leader to produce more and make fewer errors. A woman assembles a circuit breaker, and women and children are seen picking through debris or playing in it. Burtynsky concludes with a visit to Shanghai, the world’s fastest growing city, where wealth and poverty, high-rises and old neighborhoods are side by side. Written by <jhailey@hotmail.com>

Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky posits that man made landscapes define who we are as people. He sees a certain physical beauty in the order and/or symmetry in some of these landscapes, despite the negative reasons for them or the subsequent degradation they pose to the environment and people around them. The most extreme examples of these landscapes he finds in China. In manufacturing, two examples he photographs are at the opposite ends of the size scale: ship building, where a certain balance is required in the product itself, and electronics assembly. With the latter, it is not only the rows upon rows of laborers doing the exact same task, but the minuteness of and efficiency in what they are producing. Other examples he photographs are villages where electronic waste recycling is the primary industry. Again, there are the extremes of massive waste heaps against the minute components the laborers of all ages are salvaging. Cities are the most aggregate man made landscapes, and he looks specifically at the recent development of Shanghai, perhaps the fastest growing city in terms of absolute growth. But the vastest example he photographs is the construction and subsequent effects of the Three Gorges Dam, where entire villages, looking like bomb sites, are dismantled since they will eventually be under water. Written by Huggo text via>> IMDB

Images via Manufactured Landscapes (2006), Jennifer Baichwal (Director)

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (abbreviated WWZ) is a 2006 post-apocalyptic horror novel by Max Brooks. It is a follow-up to his 2003 book The Zombie Survival Guide. Rather than a grand overview or single narrative, World War Z is a collection of individual accounts in the form of interviews with characters conducted by the author. Brooks plays the role of an agent of the United Nations Postwar Commission who published the novel a decade after the Zombie War. The United Nations left out much of his work from the official report, choosing to focus on facts and figures from the war rather than individual stories; these form the bulk of the novel. The interviews chart a decade-long war against zombies from the view point of many different people of various nationalities. The personal accounts also describe the changing religious, geo-political, and environmental aftermath of the Zombie War.

World War Z was inspired by The Good War, an oral history of World War II by Studs Terkel; and by the zombie films of director George Romero. Brooks used World War Z to comment on social issues like government ineptitude and American isolationism, while also examining themes of survivalism and uncertainty.

text via >>> wikipedia

A disillusioned killer embarks on his last hit but first he has to overcome his affections for his cool, detached partner. Thinking it’s dangerous and improper to become involved with a colleague he sets out to find a surrogate for his affections. Against the sordid and surreal urban nightscape (set in contemporary Hong Kong), he crosses path with a strange drifter looking for her mysterious ex-boyfriend and an amusing mute trying to get the world’s attention in his own unconventional ways. Written by Perry Yu <perry@pobox.com>

Fallen Angels is the story of a professional killer in Hong Kong. It follows the in’s and out’s of his job and his partner in crime who he rarely sees. After 3 years of working together he wants out. Another sub-plot is about a mute (caused by eating expired cans of pineapples for a month, after he was heart broken) who breaks into restaurants, cafés and ice-cream trucks at night and forces people to buy his goods! Written by Luke Anderson <lando1@hotmail.com>
text taken from IMDB >> link

A worker checking a train in Wuhan, central China.

BEIJING — Nearly 150 years after American railroads brought in thousands of Chinese laborers to build rail lines across the West, China is poised once again to play a role in American rail construction. But this time, it would be an entirely different role: supplying the technology, equipment and engineers to build high-speed rail lines.

The Chinese government has signed cooperation agreements with the State of California and General Electric to help build such lines. The agreements, both of which are preliminary, show China’s desire to become a big exporter and licensor of bullet trains traveling 215 miles an hour, an environmentally friendly technology in which China has raced past the United States in the last few years.

“We are the most advanced in many fields, and we are willing to share with the United States,” Zheng Jian, the chief planner and director of high-speed rail at China’s railway ministry, said.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California has closely followed progress in the discussions with China and hopes to come here later this year for talks with rail ministry officials, said David Crane, the governor’s special adviser for jobs and economic growth, and a board member of the California High Speed Rail Authority.

China is offering not just to build a railroad in California but also to help finance its construction, and Chinese officials have already been shuttling between Beijing and Sacramento to make presentations, Mr. Crane said in a telephone interview.

China is not the only country interested in selling high-speed rail equipment to the United States. Japan, Germany, South Korea, Spain, France and Italy have also approached California’s High Speed Rail Authority.

Read the rest of the article @ the New York Times >>> link

The World Factbook provides information on the history, people, government, economy, geography, communications, transportation, military, and transnational issues for 266 world entities. Our Reference tab includes: maps of the major world regions, as well as Flags of the World, a Physical Map of the World, a Political Map of the World, and a Standard Time Zones of the World map.

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/

Bamboo scaffold for a carving of Buddha in a hillside. Cambodia. via legmountain.com

Bamboo scaffolding on skyscrapers. Hong Kong. via legmountain.com

Bamboo scaffold for a carving of Buddha in a hillside. Cambodia. via legmountain.com