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Bracing For Fire
By Rodman Linn

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A photo from space of the Las Conchas fire in the Jemez mountains near Los Alamos, N.M. just after its start at 1:30 p.m. on June 26, 2011. On the first day, driven by strong and unpredictable winds, the fire burned 43,000 acres--a rate of about an acre per second. By the time the fire was controlled, it had burned more than 150,000 acres. (Photo courtesy of NASA.)

How Computer Modeling Might Help Us Better Understand--and Better Manage--Wildfires

This summer, throughout the West, higher temperatures and decreased precipitation brought on by climate change have ramped up the frequency of wildfires -- big, catastrophic fires -- while a century of fire suppression feeds the flames with a thick tangle of fuel in our overgrown forests.

We can't stop all fires -- and we shouldn't. Healthy ecosystems depend on them. But understanding what drives big fires and predicting their behavior helps the fire community prepare for the next blaze through appropriate land management, emergency plans and firefighting strategies. Beyond those benefits, a deeper understanding of wildfires prompts important insights into tactics for using prescribed fire as well as insight into larger regional environmental issues, including how fires change river flows and the availability of water for drinking, agriculture and energy production.

For scientists studying wildfire, the challenge is predicting the seemingly unpredictable. A wide range of conditions -- temperature, humidity, wind speed, wind direction, larger weather patterns, available fuel, fuel conditions and terrain --influence the behavior of fire. Figuring out details such as the movement of hot gasses coming off a raging forest fire or the combination of convective and radiative heat transfer that ignite unburned fuels, for example, seems impossible at first. There's so much to consider, from how the fire front interacts with the atmosphere that drives it forward to the feedbacks of the fuel's structure on the fire and winds to the impacts of the topography and regional meteorology.

Fortunately, Los Alamos National Laboratory is well suited to address this kind of multidisciplinary, ultimately physics-based problem -- and the lab has a stake in wildfire prediction and management. As the Cerro Grande and Las Conchas fires demonstrated, the laboratory and neighboring communities are equally vulnerable to runaway conflagrations on our doorstep. Furthermore, Los Alamos' mission includes addressing energy security and national security, both of which can be affected by wildfires.

Modeling wildfires exploits the lab's unique capabilities in physics, computational modeling and high-performance computing. For decades the lab has built computer models of complex systems that move and change through time. That work includes hot gasses -- fire -- and the atmosphere. The laboratory's supercomputers make it possible.

When a team of atmospheric scientists, computational physicists and mathematicians in the laboratory's Earth and Environmental Sciences division, collaborating with the U.S. Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station and Southern Research Station, set out to simulate the interacting processes that make up a wildfire as a basis for predicting its behavior, they leveraged a wealth of expertise and experience that had been developed partially through the laboratory's weapons program.

A research effort initiated by Laboratory Fellow Francis Harlow, a pioneer in computational fluid dynamics, and Andrew White, a visionary figure in the national high-performance computing community, led to the development of FIRETEC. It was the first wildfire model to simulate the interaction among many of the physical processes that determine the continuously shifting dance between fire and its surroundings. FIRETEC, which is now developed in collaboration with U.S. Forest Service, simulates three-dimensional interactions among fire, fuel and the environment at landscape scales. By coupling FIRETEC with an atmospheric-dynamics model called HIGRAD and using real-world data, the team can represent the interaction between fire and atmosphere and the way fire adjusts to terrain, vegetation, fuel and the dynamics of fire itself.

FIRETEC presents a new way of studying fire and learning how to better manage and cope with it. The model provides additional scientific input for decisions by policymakers working in land management, water resources and energy. The team hopes it will eventually assist fire and fuel management operations. Currently the team is partnering with the Rocky Mountain Research Station to study the combined influence of wind and slope on heat exposure in firefighter safety zones, with the Air Force Wildland Fire Center to study the efficiency of various prescribed fire tactics and with INRA of France and the Canadian Forest Service to study the effects of fuel breaks for fire management.

But there's more research to be done to further improve wildfire modeling for practical use in the field during a fire. FIRETEC's complexity and the massive amounts of data involved require enormous high-performance computers such as those available at Los Alamos to perform simulations. The laboratory-led team is now working with the Forest Service to apply what it learns from FIRETEC to assist in developing and refining less detailed but faster-running tools that incident fire commanders could run on their laptops to predict fire behavior over the next few hours. This is a short enough time frame to deploy firefighters in anticipation of the fire's next move or help keep firefighters out of harm's way. This faster-running tool could also benefit decision-support tools such as Simtable, which is currently used in the laboratory's Emergency Operations Center.

On another front, as part of a larger Los Alamos study on the impact of climate-driven changes on watersheds, laboratory researchers are working toward using FIRETEC to potentially spin off simplified models. One model can explore, for example, how the aftermath of a catastrophic fire in the Colorado River system might alter flows in the San Juan River. That's important locally because the San Juan supplies drinking water to Santa Fe and cools the Four Corners Generating Station, a major regional energy source. How will climate-driven changes to vegetation alter the pattern of fires and the severity of the effects in that watershed? What can be done to minimize those impacts? Research underway now should answer these questions.

Providing those answers is an appropriate endeavor for Los Alamos for several reasons. While the Los Alamos community has had more than its fair share of encounters with wildfire, the research is more than personal: it fits the laboratory's mission to enhance energy security and national security. Additionally, the required expertise in the combination of multi-phase fluid dynamics, heat transfer, combustion, computational modeling and computer science are optimally aligned with many of the laboratory's other mission areas. "Science serving society" is a catchy phrase, but in the case of wildfire modeling at Los Alamos, it couldn't be more apt.

Rod Linn is a senior scientist in the Computational Earth Science group at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he studies and models a wide range of atmospheric phenomenon using computational physics. Linn has led much of the development and application of the FIRETEC computer program for predicting wildfire behavior, but the breadth of work using this tool is accomplished through a broad set of Los Alamos investigators as well as domestic and international collaborators.

More about how Los Alamos National Laboratory prepares for wildfires:

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President Obama's New Energy Initiative Another Win for Solar
Today, the White House announced a truly groundbreaking initiative called Clean Energy Savings for All Americans. This program aims to increase access to solar energy across communities of all income levels and geographies, so that no matter where you live, if you have a sunny roof, you have the chance to go solar. And the Administration did so by providing a bevy of options that move renewables and solar forward significantly.

The array of initiative components culminates in a goal of providing one gigawatt of solar for low to middle-income households by 2020. And chief among the announcements is the issuance of new guidance for property-assessed clean energy (PACE) financing that will allow mortgage insurance to now be issued by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and the Veterans Administration (VA), rather than through the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Association (Freddie Mac), which ran into roadblocks with PACE loans six years ago.

Cutting through the alphabet soup of federal agencies, the bottom line is that more Americans will now be able to choose solar, and private industry can seize the opportunity to build more solar systems.

"Solar panels are no longer for wealthy folks who live where the sun shines every day, they're already a reality for Americans in communities all across the country. Today we're offering even more families and communities the chance to choose cleaner sources of energy," said Obama about the initiative.

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One of the greatest parts about the PACE plan is that it leverages the flexibilities of the executive branch in ways that are seldom seen in Washington stovepipes. The initiative cuts red tape with the result that roughly 200,000 homes could choose to lower their electricity bills through solar over the next four years.

SEIA applauds the President for taking these measures, which mirror the solar industry's commitment to expand solar access to everyone, regardless of their income or where they live. These policies empower veterans and lower income households to cut power bills, while putting more Americans back to work with good-paying jobs installing solar panels from Los Angeles to Boston.

This is how it should be. This year, solar reached one million installations in the U.S., crossed over the threshold of providing 1 percent of American electricity, and provided more new power capacity than all other energy sources combined in the first quarter, and we're just getting warmed up. It's time for all Americans to have a ticket to the solar revolution, celebrating American innovation and smart federal policy.

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Bracing For Fire
By Rodman Linn

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Donald Trump Poop Bags, My Cartoonist Dad And Me: Rethinking How We Pick Up After Dogs
In the 1970s in New York City, dog poo was a whole to-do. A campaign to clean up the streets of excrement began when Fran Lee, an Upper West Side activist, started drawing attention to a purported link between feces on sidewalks and child blindness. What followed was something of a waste-management creativity renaissance: enthusiasts wrote up plans for everything from sidewalk dog toilets to poop-freezing sprays to city-funded "enviromaids" employed to pick up after dogs.

Ultimately, the solution was a simple mandate: Pick up after your dog. Many scoffed at the thought. My dad was among the dissenters. But, one day in the early 1980s when we were out together in SoHo with our dog Mabel, she went, we walked away, and then a stranger shouted at us for not picking it up. That moment changed everything.

Back then, our excrement removal routine depended on something once commonly found in most households: newspaper. Indeed, Fran Lee, the anti-poop crusader, specifically suggested people use The New York Times for this purpose. It was an exciting time for print media.

In our home, newspaper served several purposes, not a few of which had to do with animal care and control; it lined the ground for Mabel when she was a puppy; it was bedding for the guinea pig. Once, when he was coming home with the Sunday Times, my dad spotted a rat on the stairs and slammed the paper down, killing it. He wrote to the Times to tell them of this alternate use of their publication. They published it as a letter to the editor.

This was not the first time my dad's work was seen in a major paper. He is a prolific political caricaturist, and his send-ups were frequently in the publications I'd bring on walks. Often, while walking the dog, I would find myself interested enough in something that I'd stand over Mabel's deposit for a minute, finishing a paragraph. It was a habit I probably picked up from my dad. "I remember reading a Times article on a piece of paper I was using to scoop," he once told me. "It was about some new discovery regarding the stars and planets. My deep thought was about living out, at that moment, the perfect conjunction of the glorious and the disgusting. Needless to say, I never finished the article."

Years later I would go on to write for some of the newspapers we used to for this purpose. Was my choice of career determined by these stolen moments of paper-reading? Hard to say, but I know the secondary use for newspaper never left my mind. In the pre-blog era, if I found myself obsessing about an article I was writing, I'd remember the ephemeral nature of the medium. It'd soon be covered in shit.

When I got my own dog in the mid 2000s, I realized that my family had been living in the dog-waste dark ages. Even the most functional use of print media was on the wane. Every pet store carried small plastic bag rolls especially made for the purpose of poop. The bags were cheap, but it seemed weird to me to spend any money on a plastic bag that would be used to place poop into another plastic bag.

I wasn't a Times subscriber at that point, but, thanks to an abundance of takeout menus and old New Yorkers, I managed to resist the poop-bag craze for years. But seamless.com changed the volume of menus shoved under the door, and I eventually started to read magazines on my iPad. More recently I used supermarket plastic bags, but those are also in their golden years, thanks to online grocery delivery and increasing legislation across the country that imposes fees on their use.

So, I started to buy those darn rolls. Using them is part of a semi-daily ritual that is now about nothing but poop. To be sure, there are a few lines of decorative poop bags -- pink argyle, green stripes, etc. But... yawn. I dreamt of something that would tickle my intellect, not match my handbag.

This line of thinking led me to try to imagine a way in which we could embrace the ephemeral nature of printed content, while also injecting a bit of culture into a routine chore. Is there a way that turd-tidying could be, again, a time to take in a tidbit of art, or even literature? Could we use our dogs' waste to perhaps make a political statement? Is it possible that these small moments of civic duty (doodie!) could get us to look up from our phones and actually, in some way, alter the way we look at the world?

I brought the idea to my father. He has caricatured presidential hopefuls for many decades and has dabbled in unusual media before -- in the 1980s, he sculpted Ronald Reagan out of chopped liver.

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Could I mine his talent to put something meaningful on a bag meant for excrement? Who would be the appropriate person for him to caricature for this purpose? It'd have to be someone in the news -- maybe someone generally disliked by the kind of people who would appreciate a bit of wit in an unusual place. The answer seemed obvious: Donald Trump. His name even contains the word "dump!" It was meant to be.

Dad initially refused -- he did not want to be associated with poop. I argued the point: Is poop not one of the great equalizing factors of mankind? He complied.

I didn't have such luck in the other direction: Poop bag makers wanted nothing to do with Trump. There are only a handful of US-based factories that have the machinery to make the kind of small rolls I wanted, and all said they did not want to be involved in politics. After much searching, I finally found a factory in a place that was thrilled to print Donald Trump's face on a minimum of 5,000 poop bags. That place was China.

Call it a physical manifestation of editorial commentary: Experience the joy of smashing the presumptive GOP candidates face into excrement. But the fun doesn't end there! Tie it up and put it on display on the curb -- his head filled with your dog's shit.

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My years as a print journalist may be in the rear view, but as a curator of plastic bag art, I've only just found my preferred medium. The Donald Trump bags have inspired me to go big: Why not a subscription service! PoopBag OfTheMonth.com was born. What do YOU want to see on your poop bag?! The only limits are your imagination! And the size of the crap.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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'Indian Point' -- Documentary On Problem-Plagued Nuclear Plants Is Out
"Indian Point" is a film about the long problem-plagued Indian Point nuclear power plants that are "so, so risky -- so close to New York City," notes its director and producer Ivy Meeropol. "Times Square is 35 miles away."

The plants constitute a disaster waiting to happen, threatening especially the lives of the 22 million people who live within 50 miles from them. "There is no way to evacuate--what I've learned about an evacuation plan is that there is none," says Meeropol. The plants are "on two earthquake fault lines," she notes. "And there is a natural gas pipeline right there that an earthquake could rupture."

Meanwhile, both plants, located in Buchanan, New York along the Hudson River, are now essentially running without licenses. The federal government's 40-year operating license for Indian Point 2 expired in 2013 and Indian Point 3's license expired last year. Their owner, Entergy, is seeking to have them run for another 20 years--although nuclear plants were never seen as running for more than 40 years because of radioactivity embrittling metal parts and otherwise causing safety problems. (Indian Point 1 was opened in 1962 and closed in 1974, its emergency core cooling system deemed impossible to fix.)

At Indian Point 2 and 3 there have been frequent accidents and issues involving releases of radioactivity through the years. The discharges of tritium or irradiated water, H30, which cannot be filtered out of good water, into the aquifer below the Westinghouse nuclear plants and also the Hudson River have been a major concern.

But it's not just Indian Point that "Indian Point" is about. The film emphasizes: "With so much attention focused on Indian Point, the future of nuclear plants in the United States might depend on what happens here."

"I would give the film an 'A.' I wholeheartedly recommend it for wide release throughout the United States," says Priscilla Star, founder of the Coalition Against Nukes: "It is a stellar learning tool. It depicts the David-versus-Goliath struggle involving those trying to close these decrepit nuclear plants and the profit-hungry nuclear industry. It shows grassroots activists fighting the time bombs in their community."

The film premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last year. For the past two weeks it has been showing five-times-a-day at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, also in Manhattan. That run will go until Thursday, July 21. On Friday, July 22, it is to open in Los Angeles. After its theatrical release, it will air on the Epix cable TV channel.

Among those in the film are anti-Indian Point activist Marilyn Elie and long-time environmental journalist Roger Witherspoon who has written extensively about Indian Point. And also Entergy employees appear. Meeropol and her crew were given full access to the nuclear plants.

The documentary provides a special focus on Dr. Gregory Jaczko. He was chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) when the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster in Japan began in March 2011. As notes Meeropol, Jaczko sought to have "lessons learned" from the Fukushima catastrophe--which involved General Electric nuclear plants--applied to nuclear power plants in the U.S. And he was given "a really tough time." Pressure by the nuclear industry caused Jaczko, with a doctorate in physics from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, to be "pushed out" as NRC chairman and member. Meeropol tells of how "this guy, a decent person trying to do his job, was completely abused."

Meeropol, in an interview, said the NRC "is too closely linked to the nuclear industry. It's not going to do anything that the nuclear industry regards as too costly or onerous. I want that to be one of the biggest takeaways from the film--how a regulatory body cares more about the industry it is supposed to regulate than the public. And of all industries that should be regulated, it's the nuclear power industry." She said she found the nuclear industry and nuclear energy officials in the U.S. government "one and the same."

Meeropol began the "Indian Point" film project in January 2011. She had moved from Brooklyn up to the Hudson Valley "a decade ago when our son was born. Commuting in and out of the city on the Metro-North train, I went right past the plants. They looked so foreboding and odd there in that beautiful landscape."

Also, until she, her husband and son moved upstate, "having lived in New York City, I had no idea how close they were to the city."

Further, in the community where they went to live, Cold Spring, 15 miles from the plants. "we could hear the [emergency] sirens" from the plants and she was unsettled receiving in the mail an "emergency preparedness booklet titled: 'Are You Ready?'"

So the experienced filmmaker started doing research on the "dangerous endeavor of making nuclear energy." With the Fukushima disaster beginning just a few months after she started on the film, that "broadened" its perspective.

She said the films she has made have always been "character-driven" and she was attracted to feature in "Indian Point" Marilyn Elie--"she knows her stuff"--and Roger Witherspoon. "I liked his dynamic. He is a journalist. She is an activist." She stressed to Entergy officials that she would be even-handed "and quite amazingly was given access" to the plants. Her connecting with Jaczko was crucial. It "became my crusade to redeem Greg Jaczko before the world."

She started making the film on a shoe string. "I ran out of money numerous times." But she was able to get financial support from the Sundance Institute, the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Catapult Fund, and individual contributions. And "partnering" with Julie Goldman, founder of Motto Films, was extremely important. Goldman is also producer of "Indian Point." A "very generous grant" was received from the MacArthur Foundation which also "opened up other doors."
Indian Point sits there on the Hudson, continuing with accidents and in emitting what the NRC says are "permissible" levels of radioactivity. They are highly likely candidates for a Chernobyl or Fukushima-level catastrophe in the most highly populated area of the United States. And the NRC, steadfastly ignoring Jaczko's warnings, in league with Entergy, seeks to let the decrepit time bombs run for another 20 years--just asking for disaster.

The good news is that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has been endeavoring to have the Indian Point nuclear plants closed and safe-energy activists and an array of environmental and safe-energy organizations are working hard to shut them down--and the film "Indian Point" is out.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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How to influence your clients and not just sell to them

Design has the potential to be an industry of influence. And for that to happen, every design business and those working within it need to recognise, get comfortable with and develop their potential for influence. By becoming experts in influence, they become better communicators which encourages their clients to be braver with their decisions delivering more for all parties.

What does this mean for you and what needs to happen for it to take place within your business?

A consultancy that is seeing the impact of this change within their business is Open Water. I spoke with Creative Director and Head of the business, Philip Hansen about his experience of a shift in influence.

For Hansen, it's about the bigger picture: “New approaches to influence rather than just selling are just one indication of a more general move towards design thinking within businesses,” he says. He has noticed changes in his clients and the way they are treating their customers. They are setting their businesses up in a far more customer focused way, focussing ‘on' them rather than ‘at' their clients.

Taking the client's perspective

Open Water is acting on this observation. Hansen says the consultancy is “using this insight to improve relationships with clients. We are asking: ‘How can we look at things from their perspective?'”

This has lead Open Water to think more about what it is it brings, with a focus, not just on the deliverables but on the interactions that shape the deliverables. “We bring more than an end product. We bring our thinking,” says Philip.

What can get in the way of this shift? Pressures at both ends play a part, around both time and money.These can force consultancies and clients to be speedy at the expense of opportunity with a rush to the end product. And what you focus on will develop. If you focus on your end product, you're saying ‘this is all we do'.

Focus on the customer not the end product

Hansen believes that “design businesses offer such a broad range of things, services etc they've always got something to offer. But an approach that is more focused on the process, that uncovers problems and keeps focus on the customer is surely more positive and has greater intrinsic value.”

What impact has growing their own idea of influence had on Open Water? Hansen explains that “As we have become more comfortable about influence, our clients have become better. The kind of work we get improves, but interestingly, the quality of what we do hasn't changed. But what has improved are our ability and skills to guide clients.”

Influence can become a key skill

How has this shift happened? When a consultancy starts to think of influence as a natural and ever present part of the conversation, and part of its expertise it then becomes something that can be managed.

Take for example, a typical situation for a design business, receiving feedback on work. If feedback is always seen as negative, you end up with a jarring communication with your client. What Hansen did was turn that into more of a conversation.

He says: “We ask a client questions about the view they have put forward. We are curious and during this process it may emerge in fact it often does that we can answer these questions in a different way.

“What happens next is that we enter a new position with our clients. When they come to us with a new piece of work, the client starts to ask us these questions before the process has started. For us this is an example of practical influence, it's desirable to all sides.”

When designers are faced with a situation where they could use influence, they don't always think about it in a design way. They may think, ‘the barrier is insurmountable or out of their control.' But actually it's about something that both parties are trying to work towards. Do they have the skills to change that position? Surely they do. These are the skills that got them here in the first place, to the point where they have an idea to present.

Where you can influence your client

So what happens when a client says ‘I don't like this…' or ‘I prefer it this way.' These are opportunities for design businesses to use skills of influence.

How might you go about developing your approach to influence? Here are some questions to ask. If your sales process is about developing a way to create income that is authentic to the business, how does your sales ethos compare with the ethos of the business? Do you have a clear idea of what these are and are they aligned? Sometimes the sales team is separated from the business and protected. They are allowed their own culture because it's ‘the way they work' or ‘how sales have to happen'. But if your business ethos and sales ethos are misaligned? What might you be missing out on? What extra opportunities can you create from these being in-tune with each other?

Hansen also has a rallying call to the industry as a whole: “Being a designer is like living a thousand lives. You get to work with your clients on their business in ways that others don't. If the industry doesn't see itself as an industry of influence, it's too reliant on clients coming to their own conclusions. And that limits our potential for change in the long-run.”

John Scarrott works with design business leaders and their teams on their sales, presenting and networking skills. Follow him @JohnDScarrott or find him at johnscarrott.com

The post How to influence your clients and not just sell to them appeared first on Design Week.

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Starbucks launches new concept café for “busy London commuters”

Starbucks has launched a new concept café in Canary Wharf which looks to make buying coffee faster and easier for London's busy commuters.

The new express café has been designed by Starbucks' in-house design team, and follows on from similar stores in New York, Toronto and Chicago. The London store marks the first of this style in Europe.

It features a walk-around interior, with a touchscreen at its centre allowing customers to place their orders. Seating and tables are limited and arranged around the peripheries of the store and outside the main entrance, allowing more space for people to walk in and out.

The menu included at this early order point has been “streamlined”, says Starbucks, providing a shorter, more succinct list of coffees to choose from to give customers a speedy ordering experience.

The express store is aimed at customers “on-the-go” who are already well-acquainted with the Starbucks menu, so “know what they want” before they get to the till, says the company.

Included in the short menu is a selection of coffees, espresso shots and some of the more popular food items such as breakfast sandwiches. These items are displayed on digital menu boards which rotate daily.

Customers are also able to order ahead, via Starbucks' own mobile order and pay system through the store's app, customers can locate the store they want to collect from, order their drink then pay via their phone, ready to pick up in store.

The express store follows on from another Starbucks café concept which opened in London earlier this year, which looked to slow down rather than speed up customers.

The Reserve coffee bar, based opposite the Noel Coward Theatre near Leicester Square, encourages pre-theatre-going customers to relax over coffee cocktails, wine and an antipasti platter, while providing break-out spaces and charging points for people wishing to work and study. This café also uses the mobile order and pay system.

But the express store is aimed specifically at commuters in a rush on their way to work, and hopes to “improve convenience for customers”, says Starbucks EMEA vice president of operations Rhys Iley.

He adds that the concept is the “latest in Starbucks' evolving store portfolio”, though there are currently no hints as to future formats. The express store is open seven days a week and based at the centre of the City of London's financial district, in Canary Wharf.

The post Starbucks launches new concept café for “busy London commuters” appeared first on Design Week.

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