Иноязычная профессиональная коммуникация. Практикум

Rachel Armstrong: Architecture that repairs itself?

0:15 All buildings today have something in common. They're made using Victorian technologies. This involves blueprints, industrial manufacturing and construction using teams of workers. All of this effort results in an inert object. And that means that there is a one-way transfer of energy from our environment into our homes and cities. This is not sustainable. I believe that the only way that it is possible for us to construct genuinely sustainable homes and cities is by connecting them to nature, not insulating them from it.

0:53 Now, in order to do this, we need the right kind of language. Living systems are in constant conversation with the natural world, through sets of chemical reactions called metabolism. And this is the conversion of one group of substances into another, either through the production or the absorption of energy. And this is the way in which living materials make the most of their local resources in a sustainable way. So, I'm interested in the use of metabolic materials for the practice of architecture. But they don't exist. So I'm having to make them.

1:30 I'm working with architect Neil Spiller at the Bartlett School of Architecture, and we're collaborating with international scientists in order to generate these new materials from a bottom up approach. That means we're generating them from scratch. One of our collaborators is chemist Martin Hanczyc, and he's really interested in the transition from inert to living matter. Now, that's exactly the kind of process that I'm interested in, when we're thinking about sustainable materials.

1:56 So, Martin, he works with a system called the protocell. Now all this is -- and it's magic -- is a little fatty bag. And it's got a chemical battery in it. And it has no DNA. This little bag is able to conduct itself in a way that can only be described as living. It is able to move around its environment. It can follow chemical gradients. It can undergo complex reactions, some of which are happily architectural. So here we are. These are protocells, patterning their environment. We don't know how they do that yet. Here, this is a protocell, and it's vigorously shedding this skin. Now, this looks like a chemical kind of birth. This is a violent process.

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2:43 Here, we've got a protocell to extract carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and turn it into carbonate. And that's the shell around that globular fat. They are quite brittle. So you've only got a part of one there. So what we're trying to do is, we're trying to push these technologies towards creating bottom-up construction approaches for architecture, which contrast the current, Victorian, top-down methods which impose structure upon matter. That can't be energetically sensible.

3:11 So, bottom-up materials actually exist today. They've been in use, in architecture, since ancient times. If you walk around the city of Oxford, where we are today, and have a look at the brickwork, which I've enjoyed doing in the last couple of days, you'll actually see that a lot of it is made of limestone. And if you look even closer, you'll see, in that limestone, there are little shells and little skeletons that are piled upon each other. And then they are fossilized over millions of years.

3:37 Now a block of limestone, in itself, isn't particularly that interesting. It looks beautiful. But imagine what the properties of this limestone block might be if the surfaces were actually in conversation with the atmosphere. Maybe they could extract carbon dioxide. Would it give this block of limestone new properties? Well, most likely it would. It might be able to grow. It might be able to self-repair, and even respond to dramatic changes in the immediate environment.

4:08 So, architects are never happy with just one block of an interesting material. They think big. Okay? So when we think about scaling up metabolic materials, we can start thinking about ecological interventions like repair of atolls, or reclamation of parts of a city that are damaged by water. So, one of these examples would of course be the historic city of Venice. Now, Venice, as you know, has a tempestuous relationship with the sea, and is built upon wooden piles. So we've devised a way by which it may be possible for the protocell technology that we're working with to sustainably reclaim Venice. And architect Christian Kerrigan has come up with a series of designs that show us how it may be possible to actually grow a limestone reef underneath the city.

4:56 So, here is the technology we have today. This is our protocell technology, effectively making a shell, like its limestone forefathers, and depositing it in a very complex environment, against natural materials. We're looking at crystal lattices to see the

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bonding process in this. Now, this is the very interesting part. We don't just want limestone dumped everywhere in all the pretty canals. What we need it to do is to be creatively crafted around the wooden piles.

5:24 So, you can see from these diagrams that the protocell is actually moving away from the light, toward the dark foundations. We've observed this in the laboratory. The protocells can actually move away from the light. They can actually also move towards the light. You have to just choose your species. So that these don't just exist as one entity, we kind of chemically engineer them. And so here the protocells are depositing their limestone very specifically, around the foundations of Venice, effectively petrifying it.

5:51 Now, this isn't going to happen tomorrow. It's going to take a while. It's going to take years of tuning and monitoring this technology in order for us to become ready to test it out in a case-by-case basis on the most damaged and stressed buildings within the city of Venice. But gradually, as the buildings are repaired, we will see the accretion of a limestone reef beneath the city. An accretion itself is a huge sink of carbon dioxide. Also it will attract the local marine ecology, who will find their own ecological niches within this architecture.

6:23 So, this is really interesting. Now we have an architecture that connects a city to the natural world in a very direct and immediate way. But perhaps the most exciting thing about it is that the driver of this technology is available everywhere. This is terrestrial chemistry. We've all got it, which means that this technology is just as appropriate for developing countries as it is for First World countries. So, in summary, I'm generating metabolic materials as a counterpoise to Victorian technologies, and building architectures from a bottom-up approach.

6:56 Secondly, these metabolic materials have some of the properties of living systems, which means they can perform in similar ways. They can expect to have a lot of forms and functions within the practice of architecture. And finally, an observer in the future marveling at a beautiful structure in the environment may find it almost impossible to tell whether this structure has been created by a natural process or an artificial one. Thank you. (Applause)

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Catherine Mohr: The tradeoffs of building green

0:12 First of all, I'm a geek. I'm an organic food-eating, carbon footprint-minimizing, robotic surgery geek. And I really want to build green, but I'm very suspicious of all of these well-meaning articles, people long on moral authority and short on data, telling me how to do these kinds of things. And so I have to figure this out for myself. For example: Is this evil? I have dropped a blob of organic yogurt from happy self-actualized local cows on my counter top, and I grab a paper towel and I want to wipe it up. But can I use a paper towel? (Laughter)

0:51 The answer to this can be found in embodied energy. This is the amount of energy that goes into any paper towel or embodied water, and every time I use a paper towel, I am using this much virtual energy and water. Wipe it up, throw it away. Now, if I compare that to a cotton towel that I can use a thousand times, I don't have a whole lot of embodied energy until I wash that yogurty towel. This is now operating energy. So if I throw my towel in the washing machine, I've now put energy and water back into that towel ...

unless I use a front-loading, high-efficiency washing machine, (Laughter) and then it looks a little bit better. But what about a recycled paper towel that comes in those little half sheets? Well, now a paper towel looks better. Screw the paper towels. Let's go to a sponge. I wipe it up with a sponge, and I put it under the running water, and I have a lot less energy and a lot more water. Unless you're like me and you leave the handle in the position of hot even when you turn it on, and then you start to use more energy. Or worse, you let it run until it's warm to rinse out your towel. And now all bets are off.

1:55 (Laughter)

1:57 So what this says is that sometimes the things that you least expect – the position in which you put the handle – have a bigger effect than any of those other things that you were trying to optimize. Now imagine someone as twisted as me trying to build a house. (Laughter) That's what my husband and I are doing right now. And so, we wanted to know, how green could we be? And there's a thousand and one articles out there telling us how to make all these green trade-offs. And they are just as suspect in telling us to optimize these little things around the edges and missing the elephant in the living room.

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Now, the average house has about 300 megawatt hours of embodied energy in it; this is the energy it takes to make it – millions and millions of paper towels.

2:42 We wanted to know how much better we could do. And so, like many people, we start with a house on a lot, and I'm going to show you a typical construction on the top and what we're doing on the bottom. So first, we demolish it. It takes some energy, but if you deconstruct it – you take it all apart, you use the bits – you can get some of that energy back. We then dug a big hole to put in a rainwater catchment tank to take our yard water independent. And then we poured a big foundation for passive solar. Now, you can reduce the embodied energy by about 25 percent by using high fly ash concrete. We then put in framing. And so this is framing – lumber, composite materials – and it’s kind of hard to get the embodied energy out of that, but it can be a sustainable resource if you use FSCcertified lumber.

3:33 We then go on to the first thing that was very surprising. If we put aluminum windows in this house, we would double the energy use right there. Now, PVC is a little bit better, but still not as good as the wood that we chose. We then put in plumbing, electrical and HVAC, and insulate. Now, spray foam is an excellent insulator -- it fills in all the cracks -- but it is pretty high embodied energy, and, sprayed-in cellulose or blue jeans is a much lower energy alternative to that. We also used straw bale infill for our library, which has zero embodied energy. When it comes time to sheetrock, if you use EcoRock it's about a quarter of the embodied energy of standard sheetrock.

4:18 And then you get to the finishes, the subject of all of those "go green" articles, and on the scale of a house they almost make no difference at all. And yet, all the press is focused on that. Except for flooring. If you put carpeting in your house, it's about a tenth of the embodied energy of the entire house, unless you use concrete or wood for a much lower embodied energy. So now we add in the final construction energy, we add it all up, and we've built a house for less than half of the typical embodied energy for building a house like this.

4:48 But before we pat ourselves too much on the back, we have poured 151 megawatt hours of energy into constructing this house when there was a house there before. And so the question is: How could we make that back? And so if I run my new energy-efficient

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house forward, compared with the old, non-energy-efficient house, we make it back in about six years. Now, I probably would have upgraded the old house to be more energyefficient, and in that case, it would take me more about 20 years to break even. Now, if I hadn't paid attention to embodied energy, it would have taken us over 50 years to break even compared to the upgraded house. So what does this mean? On the scale of my portion of the house, this is equivalent to about as much as I drive in a year, it's about five times as much as if I went entirely vegetarian. But my elephant in the living room flies. Clearly, I need to walk home from TED. But all the calculations for embodied energy are on the blog.

5:54 And, remember, it's sometimes the things that you are not expecting to be the biggest changes that are.

6:00 Thank you. (Applause)

Sebastian Thrun: Google’s driverless car

0:11 As a boy, I loved cars. When I turned 18, I lost my best friend to a car accident. Like this. And then I decided I'd dedicate my life to saving one million people every year. Now I haven't succeeded, so this is just a progress report, but I'm here to tell you a little bit about self-driving cars.

0:36 I saw the concept first in the DARPA Grand Challenges where the U.S. government issued a prize to build a self-driving car that could navigate a desert. And even though a hundred teams were there, these cars went nowhere. So we decided at Stanford to build a different self-driving car. We built the hardware and the software. We made it learn from us, and we set it free in the desert. And the unimaginable happened: it became the first car to ever return from a DARPA Grand Challenge, winning Stanford 2 million dollars. Yet I still hadn't saved a single life.

1:16 Since, our work has focused on building driving cars that can drive anywhere by themselves -- any street in California. We've driven 140,000 miles. Our cars have sensors by which they magically can see everything around them and make decisions about every aspect of driving. It's the perfect driving mechanism. We've driven in cities, like in San

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Francisco here. We've driven from San Francisco to Los Angeles on

Highway 1.

1:53 We've encountered joggers, busy highways, toll booths, and this is without a person in the loop; the car just drives itself. In fact, while we drove 140,000 miles, people didn't even notice. Mountain roads, day and night, and even crooked Lombard Street in San Francisco. (Laughter) Sometimes our cars get so crazy, they even do little stunts.

2:28 (Video) Man: Oh, my God. What? Second Man: It's driving itself.

2:38 Sebastian Thrun: Now I can't get my friend Harold back to life, but I can do something for all the people who died. Do you know that driving accidents are the number one cause of death for young people? And do you realize that almost all of those are due to human error and not machine error, and can therefore be prevented by machines?

3:01 Do you realize that we could change the capacity of highways by a factor of two or three if we didn't rely on human precision on staying in the lane – improve body position and therefore drive a little bit closer together on a little bit narrower lanes, and do away with all traffic jams on highways? Do you realize that you, TED users, spend an average of 52 minutes per day in traffic, wasting your time on your daily commute? You could regain this time. This is four billion hours wasted in this country alone. And it's 2.4 billion gallons of gasoline wasted.

3:49 Now I think there's a vision here, a new technology, and I'm really looking forward to a time when generations after us look back at us and say how ridiculous it was that humans were driving cars.

3:59 Thank you. 4:01 (Applause)

How can Formula 1 racing help ... babies?

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0:11 Motor racing is a funny old business. We make a new car every year, and then we spend the rest of the season trying to understand what it is we've built to make it better, to make it faster. And then the next year, we start again.

0:27 Now, the car you see in front of you is quite complicated. The chassis is made up of about 11,000 components, the engine another 6,000, the electronics about eight and a half thousand. So there's about 25,000 things there that can go wrong. So motor racing is very much about attention to detail.

0:50 The other thing about Formula 1 in particular is we're always changing the car. We're always trying to make it faster. So every two weeks, we will be making about 5,000 new components to fit to the car. Five to 10 percent of the race car will be different every two weeks of the year.

1:10 So how do we do that? Well, we start our life with the racing car. We have a lot of sensors on the car to measure things. On the race car in front of you here there are about 120 sensors when it goes into a race. It's measuring all sorts of things around the car. That data is logged. We're logging about 500 different parameters within the data systems, about 13,000 health parameters and events to say when things are not working the way they should do, and we're sending that data back to the garage using telemetry at a rate of two to four megabits per second. So during a two-hour race, each car will be sending 750 million numbers. That's twice as many numbers as words that each of us speaks in a lifetime. It's a huge amount of data.

2:04 But it's not enough just to have data and measure it. You need to be able to do something with it. So we've spent a lot of time and effort in turning the data into stories to be able to tell, what's the state of the engine, how are the tires degrading, what's the situation with fuel consumption? So all of this is taking data and turning it into knowledge that we can act upon.

2:28 Okay, so let's have a look at a little bit of data. Let's pick a bit of data from another three-month-old patient. This is a child, and what you're seeing here is real data, and on the far right-hand side, where everything starts getting a little bit catastrophic, that is the patient going into cardiac arrest. It was deemed to be an unpredictable event. This was a heart attack that no one could see coming. But when we look at the information there, we

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can see that things are starting to become a little fuzzy about five minutes or so before the cardiac arrest. We can see small changes in things like the heart rate moving. These were all undetected by normal thresholds which would be applied to data. So the question is, why couldn't we see it? Was this a predictable event? Can we look more at the patterns in the data to be able to do things better?

3:26 So this is a child, about the same age as the racing car on stage, three months old. It's a patient with a heart problem. Now, when you look at some of the data on the screen above, things like heart rate, pulse, oxygen, respiration rates, they're all unusual for a normal child, but they're quite normal for the child there, and so one of the challenges you have in health care is, how can I look at the patient in front of me, have something which is specific for her, and be able to detect when things start to change, when things start to deteriorate? Because like a racing car, any patient, when things start to go bad, you have a short time to make a difference.

4:13 So what we did is we took a data system which we run every two weeks of the year in Formula 1 and we installed it on the hospital computers at Birmingham Children's Hospital. We streamed data from the bedside instruments in their pediatric intensive care so that we could both look at the data in real time and, more importantly, to store the data so that we could start to learn from it. And then, we applied an application on top which would allow us to tease out the patterns in the data in real time so we could see what was happening, so we could determine when things started to change.

4:53 Now, in motor racing, we're all a little bit ambitious, audacious, a little bit arrogant sometimes, so we decided we would also look at the children as they were being transported to intensive care. Why should we wait until they arrived in the hospital before we started to look? And so we installed a real-time link between the ambulance and the hospital, just using normal 3G telephony to send that data so that the ambulance became an extra bed in intensive care.

5:25 And then we started looking at the data. So the wiggly lines at the top, all the colors, this is the normal sort of data you would see on a monitor – heart rate, pulse, oxygen within the blood, and respiration. The lines on the bottom, the blue and the red, these are the interesting ones. The red line is showing an automated version of the early warning

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score that Birmingham Children’s Hospital were already running. They’d been running that since 2008, and already have stopped cardiac arrests and distress within the hospital. The blue line is an indication of when patterns start to change, and immediately, before we even started putting in clinical interpretation, we can see that the data is speaking to us. It’s telling us that something is going wrong.

6:15 The plot with the red and the green blobs, this is plotting different components of the data against each other. The green is us learning what is normal for that child. We call it the cloud of normality. And when things start to change, when conditions start to deteriorate, we move into the red line. There's no rocket science here. It is displaying data that exists already in a different way, to amplify it, to provide cues to the doctors, to the nurses, so they can see what's happening. In the same way that a good racing driver relies on cues to decide when to apply the brakes, when to turn into a corner, we need to help our physicians and our nurses to see when things are starting to go wrong.

7:05 So we have a very ambitious program. We think that the race is on to do something differently. We are thinking big. It's the right thing to do. We have an approach which, if it's successful, there's no reason why it should stay within a hospital. It can go beyond the walls. With wireless connectivity these days, there is no reason why patients, doctors and nurses always have to be in the same place at the same time. And meanwhile, we'll take our little three-month-old baby, keep taking it to the track, keeping it safe, and making it faster and better.

7:43 Thank you very much. 7:44 (Applause)

Erik Schlangen: A “self-healing” car

0:52 (Hammer) 0:58 (Laughter)

1:19 (Microwave beeps) (Laughter)

1:30 You probably all agree with me that this is a very nice road. It's made of asphalt, and asphalt is a very nice material to drive on, but not always, especially not on these days as

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