Anywhere Grid-Less Hosteling For One With Ecocapsule

Ecocapsule is smart house powered purely by the solar and wind energy. It allows people to reach the frontiers with the luxury of the hotel room. It can serve as micro-house, cottage, pop-up hotel or even as charging station for electromobiles. Image Credit: Nice Architects

Anywhere Grid-Less Hosteling For One With Ecocapsule

Ever wonder how hard it would be to live in a space without access to electricity wires from a pole, or water from a pipe, supplied by a societal utility - and further, once achieved, hard hard it would be to replicate the solution?

A group of folks located in the Slovak Republic known as Nice Architects have created an egg shaped living space that hopes to make a living off-the-grid "audience-of-one" a reality and it goes by the name of Ecocapsule.

A 2D top-down view schematic of the Ecocapsule's living space floorplan. Image Credit: Nice Architects

This egg-shaped living space is set to be debuted in Vienna, Austria this month (May 28 & 29, 2015) at a start up show that began in 2012 and has become what Forbes magazine calls "a smarter SXSW (Austin, TX)", the Pioneers Festival.

First functional prototype of the independent micro-house Ecocapsule will be exhibited in the foyer of the Hofburg palace as a part of Pioneers festival 2015 event in Vienna. Image Credit: Nice Architects

Each unit is equipped with solar panels, a retractable wind-turbine, and a design that captures rain water.

Solor and wind power conversion included. The egg shape enhances water capture from dew or rain which is stored in a tank located underneath the floor and pumped for use in the sink, toilet, or shower. Image Credit: Nice Architects

Inside, the design includes a kitchenette with running water, a flushing toilet, and hot shower.

Interior view from the storage end of the Ecocapsule. One has a hands on environment where one can sleep, cook, shower, deal with personal waste & cleanliness, and have little worry about power assisting in maintaining basic living needs. Image Credit: Nice Architects

The Ecocapsule is suitable for a wide range of human-living applications. Suggestions by Nice Architects include independent research station, a tourist lodge, emergency housing, a humanitarian-action unit ... or as we might suggest at Oblate Spheroid, a personal/office space to be placed in the backyard which eliminates the cost and time consumed complying for the need of permits required by the local government offices.

Urban elbow room without the hassles associated with dealing with permitting. Image Credit: Nice Architects

Place the Ecocapsule on a flatbed trailer, and now one has an actual trailer for grid-less, energy assisted, hosteled comfort for almost any application including ... just camping.

Exterior view shows external and interior storage plus bed. Image Credit: Nice Architects

Those interested in buying one will be able to pre-order at the end of 2015, with delivery in the first half of 2016.

FAQ Section

What is the price of the Ecocapsule?

Price of the Ecocapsule will be announced in the last quarter of the 2015. 

When will  be Ecocapsule available for purchase?

We will start taking pre-orders in the last quarter of the 2015. We expect to start delivering first produced units in the first half of the 2016.

Shipping price - Ecocapsule can fit info standard shipping container, keeping shipping cost low. Here are examples of approximate shipping fees:

Slovakia -New York               2393 USD   2200 Euro

Slovakia-Buenos Aires           1958 USD   1800 Euro

Slovakia-Johannesburg           2937 USD   2700 Euro

Slovakia - Melbourne             1631 USD   1500 Euro

Camper version - We are still developing chassis for the capsule and hopefully we will be ready in late 2016.

Custom versions:

We will be initially offering one version of the Ecocapsule. Later we will extend customization options.

Where can we see it?

First public display of the Ecocapsule will be during Pioneers festival in Vienna (28-29th May 2015).

Later it will be displayed in Slovak national pavilion at Expo 2015.

Basic Specifications:
(ht: Nice Architects)

Dimensions: 

W - 8.366 Feet - 2.55m 
L - 14.599 Feet - 4.45m 
H - 7.381 Feet - 2.25m or 14.763 Feet - 4.5m with extended pole
 
Weight: 3307 lbs. - 1500kg
 
Installed power output: wind 750W / solar 600W
 
Battery capacity: 9744Wh 


TAGS: Ecocapsule, Pioneers Festival, SXSW, Forbes, Slovak Republic, Nice Architects, Vienna, Austria,

Barack Obama Doodler-In-Chief

"Americans coming together" is a theme of this week's Democratic National Convention. People stop to look at a mural by artist Shepard Fairey on Monday, September 3. Image Credit: CNN/Zoran Milich

Barack Obama Doodler-In-Chief

This article published in the New York Times is just priceless. If anyone reads this article titled "The Competitor in Chief — Obama Plays To Win, In Politics and Everything Else" and questions the President as to the factual nature of this article, one may find out that this is a man many people just could not warm up to.

The article opens up with this following paragraph; As Election Day approaches, President Obama is sharing a few important things about himself. He has mentioned more than once in recent weeks that he cooks “a really mean chili.” He has impressive musical pitch, he told an Iowa audience. He is “a surprisingly good pool player,” he informed an interviewer — not to mention (though he does) a doodler of unusual skill.

Where was this article in 2008 during the run up to the last presidential election? Oh yes ... this article was where the actual colleagues, friends, teachers, and grades achieved by Barack Obama during his college years were stored!

This article from Forbes, which analyses the New York Times front page article, serves as great reading while filling time between speakers who stand up and talk at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina over the next three days. If the speakers do not make you realize we have operated under the wrong leadership over these last three and a half years ... this article will.

This excerpted and edited from Forbes -

New York Times Proves Clint Eastwood Correct -- Obama Is Lousy CEO
BY  Rich Karlgaard, Forbes Staff - 9/03/2012 @ 12:34PM

A New York Times front page story today — New York Times! — might have killed President Obama’s re-election hopes.

The story is called “The Competitor in Chief — Obama Plays To Win, In Politics and Everything Else.” It is devastating.

With such a title, and from such a friendly organ, at first I thought Jodi Kantor’s piece would be a collection of Obama’s greatest political wins: His rapid rise in Illinois, his win over Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primaries, the passage of health care, and so on.

But the NYT piece is not about any of that. Rather, it is a deep look into the two outstanding flaws in Obama’s executive leadership:

1. How he vastly overrates his capabilities:

     But even those loyal to Mr. Obama say that his quest for excellence can bleed into cockiness and that he tends to overestimate his capabilities. The cloistered nature of the White House amplifies those tendencies, said Matthew Dowd, a former adviser to President George W. Bush, adding that the same thing happened to his former boss. “There’s a reinforcing quality,” he said, a tendency for presidents to think, I’m the best at this.

2. How he spends extraordinary amounts of time and energy to compete in — trivialities.

    For someone dealing with the world’s weightiest matters, Mr. Obama spends surprising energy perfecting even less consequential pursuits. He has played golf 104 times since becoming president, according to Mark Knoller of CBS News, who monitors his outings, and he asks superior players for tips that have helped lower his scores. He decompresses with card games on Air Force One, but players who do not concentrate risk a reprimand (“You’re not playing, you’re just gambling,” he once told Arun Chaudhary, his former videographer).

    His idea of birthday relaxation is competing in an Olympic-style athletic tournament with friends, keeping close score. The 2009 version ended with a bowling event. Guess who won, despite his history of embarrassingly low scores? The president, it turned out, had been practicing in the White House alley.

Kantor’s piece is full of examples of Obama’s odd need to (a) dominate his peers in everything from bowling, cards, golf, basketball, and golf (104 times in his presidency). Bear in mind, Obama doesn’t just robustly compete. The leader of the free world spends many hours practicing these trivial pursuits behind the scenes. Combine this weirdly wasted time with a consistent overestimation of his capabilities, and the result is, according to NYT’s Kantor:

    He may not always be as good at everything as he thinks, including politics. While Mr. Obama has given himself high grades for his tenure in the White House — including a “solid B-plus” for his first year — many voters don’t agree, citing everything from his handling of the economy to his unfulfilled pledge that he would be able to unite Washington to his claim that he would achieve Israeli-Palestinian peace.

    Those were not the only times Mr. Obama may have overestimated himself: he has also had a habit of warning new hires that he would be able to do their jobs better than they could.

    “I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters,” Mr. Obama told Patrick Gaspard, his political director, at the start of the 2008 campaign, according to The New Yorker. “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m going to think I’m a better political director than my political director.”

Though he never ran a large organization before becoming president, he initially dismissed internal concerns about management and ended up with a fictionalized White House and a fuzzier decision-making process than many top aides wanted.

Kantor’s portrait of Obama is stunning. It paints a picture of a CEO who is unfocused and lost.

Imagine, for a minute, that you are on the board of directors of a company. You have a CEO who is not meeting his numbers and who is suffering a declining popularity with his customers. You want to help this CEO recover, but then you learn he doesn’t want your help. He is smarter than you and eager to tell you this. Confidence or misplaced arrogance? You’re not sure at first. If the company was performing well, you’d ignore it. But the company is performing poorly, so you can’t.

With some digging, you learn, to your horror, that the troubled CEO spends a lot of time on — what the hell? — bowling? Golf? Three point shots? While the company is going south?

What do you do? You fire that CEO. Clint Eastwood was right. You let the guy go.
[Reference Here]

With the "Debt Clock" streaming past $16 Billion dollars during the Democratic National Convention, with over 1/3 of this amount added by this Doodler-In-Chief in only four years, some decisions just seem simpler to make, during this Carter's Second Term, than others when the light of truth shines upon them.

Let 'im go.


** Article first published as Barack Obama Doodler-In-Chief on Technorati **

NBC Plays The PC Card On IQ Test Report

Science Cover: A female Aedes aegypti mosquito attempts to take flight after a blood meal. Image Credit: James Gathany/CDC

NBC Plays The PC Card On IQ Test Report
(does not mention that the study also recognizes gender along with social rank in family dynamics)

The NBC Weekend Today Show for Saturday decided to report on an article published in the journal Science and when doing so decided to color the conclusions to meet their own politically correct, or should we say gender correct, template.

In the study titled - Explaining the Relation Between Birth Order and Intelligence
Petter Kristensen and Tor Bjerkedal, Science 22 June 2007 - NBC claimed that intelligence is more about environment than biology without EVER mentioning either the word Male or Female ... but if one reads the article, the phrase that really sticks out is the order on which the study finds the IQ ranking – “It's a matter of what they call social rank in the family - the highest scores were racked up by the senior boy - the first born - or, if the firstborn had died in infancy, the next oldest.”

By reading this, gender plays a greater role (ie. first born Male - as in senior boy) than does actual rank as first born.

CNN took a clearer and more direct description to the findings in the article in their title of the reporting of the findings.

This from AP via CNN –

Boys treated as eldest do better on IQ tests
POSTED: 5:51 p.m. EDT, June 21, 2007

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Boys at the top of the pecking order -- either by birth or because their older siblings died -- score higher on IQ tests than their younger brothers.

The question of whether firstborn and only children are really smarter than those who come along later has been hotly debated for more than a century.

Norwegian researchers now report that it isn't a matter of being born first, but growing up the senior child, that seems to result in the higher IQ scores.

Petter Kristensen and Tor Bjerkedal report their findings in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

It's a matter of what they call social rank in the family -- the highest scores were racked up by the senior boy -- the first born or, if the firstborn had died in infancy, the next oldest.
----
Frank J. Sulloway of the Institute for Personality and Social Research at the University of California, Berkeley, welcomed what he called the Norwegians' "elegantly designed" analysis.

"These two researchers demonstrate that how study participants were raised, not how they were born, is what actually influences their IQs," said Sulloway, who was not part of the research team.
Reference Here>>

And this from AP via Forbes -

Families' Eldest Boys Do Best on Tests
By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID - Associated Press - 06.21.07, 4:15 PM ET

Boys at the top of the pecking order - either by birth or because their older siblings died - score higher on IQ tests than their younger brothers. The question of whether firstborn and only children are really smarter than those who come along later has been hotly debated for more than a century.
----
It's a matter of what they call social rank in the family - the highest scores were racked up by the senior boy - the first born or, if the firstborn had died in infancy, the next oldest.
----
The average IQ of first-born men was 103.2, they found.

Second-born men averaged 101.2, but second-born men whose older sibling died in infancy scored 102.9.

And for third-borns, the average was 100.0. But if both older siblings died young, the third-born score rose to 102.6.

The findings provide "evidence that the relation between birth order and IQ score is dependent on the social rank in the family and not birth order as such," they concluded.

It's an issue that has perplexed people since at least 1874, when Sir Francis Galton reported that men in prominent positions tend to be firstborns more often than would have been statistically expected.

Since then, several studies have reported higher intelligence scores for firstborns, while other analyses have questioned those findings and the methodology of the reports.

While the Norwegian analysis focused on men, other studies have included women, some indicating a birth-order effect and some not.
Reference Here>>