Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

Unlike The Ship Itself, the Story of the Titanic Goes On Forever

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March 24th, 2012

The Titanic’s heartbeats keep going. Now it will cost you $20 to see the exhibition

As the 100^th anniversary date of the Titanic nears, a museum in Belfast launches a landmark attraction. “That’s where she was built. That’s where she was designed. That’s where the workers lived.” Noel Molloy is a man with a mission to explain and entertain. He is project manager for Titanic Belfast, monumental like the ship it commemorates.

Titanic proportions

The term “Titanic proportions” applies. The top of the five-storey building is exactly as high as the tip of Titanic when the transatlantic liner was completed at the Harland and Wolff yard a century ago. During construction, she was known as SS No 401; her twin, Olympic, occupied the adjacent slipway as SS No 400. Any Belfast resident will tell you, “Titanic was fine when she left us” on April 2, 1912. Twelve days later, on her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York, Titanic struck an iceberg. As she sank, with the loss of 1 517 lives, at 2.20 the next morning, the seeds of a thousand legends took root.

Compelling story

“We know thousands of people whose relatives worked on Titanic,” says Molloy, “but we can’t find anyone who worked on Olympic.” The reason is the most compelling tragedy in maritime history. “Whatever the latest story is, that’s the truth,” says Molloy. His team of 600 faced a formidable task: to create a visitor attraction that puts the story in its social context; to explain events with veracity and panache; and to pay due respect to the victims. If they succeed, this anodized angel may prove the salvation of a city.

Tragedy plus time equals tourism

The killing fields of the Somme, the skeletal fragments of Hiroshima that survived the atomic bomb, and the tunnels of Cu Chi where the Viet Cong fought: all are now tourist attractions that intrigue as much as they appall. The brutality and heroism of the 20th century conflicts lure visitors in their millions. Now Belfast has signed up for the same franchise. The city has seen more than its fair share of tragedy. One hundred years ago, Northern Ireland’s capital was a proud and wealthy powerhouse of the British Empire, its foundations resting on the linen trade and heavy engineering – with the finest shipbuilders on earth.

Belfast yard

While Harland and Wolff did not have a monopoly on large ships, the Belfast yard was biggest and best. The White Star Line wanted to achieve supremacy on the world’s leading intercontinental link, between southern England and New York. All the energy and artistry invested in the Titanic were nullified in the 160 minutes beginning at 11.40pm on April 14, 1912, when the ship was fatally wounded by an iceberg. Voices of some survivors, recorded in the 1960s, recount that horrifying night. The needless loss of life was soon exposed by official inquiries by the Board of Trade and the US Senate. The Titanic carried lifeboats for fewer than half the passengers and crew, and many of the vessels were only half-full when they were launched.

Tags: Belfast, Exhibitions, Harland and Wolff, Titanic
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Apple Fans Can’t Get Enough

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March 16th, 2012

Apple’s 4G iPad debuts in Australia

Apple’s latest iPad was another hot-seller on Friday, with hundreds queuing at stores across Asia to be the first to get their hands on the 4G-ready tablet computer as the company’s share price hit $600 for the first time.

Progressive development

The new iPad is a progressive development of Apple’s tablet, with a more powerful CPU and screen and better camera. “The iPad is already a pretty mature product and it’s hard to revolutionize it any further,” said Dickie Chang, an analyst with research firm IDC based in Hong Kong. “It’s slightly heavier than its predecessors and I think Asian consumers will be more concerned about that,” he said. Crowds were down on previous Apple launches, but there was still excitement as stores opened. “I’ve come from Russia to buy an iPad for my three-year-old son David,” Oleg Konovalov, a newspaper salesman, told Reuters in Tokyo. “Everyone in Russia wants an iPad, but to buy it there I will have to wait several months.”

Apple shares at record highs

The buzz and hype propelled Apple shares to record highs in US trade on Thursday, with Apple stock touching a high of $600.01 before easing back. It peaked half an hour after the first iPad went on sale in Australia, extending the market worth of the world’s most valuable company to almost $560 billion. Only a month earlier, the stock price had crossed $500 for the first time. The stock has jumped 45 percent this year.

10 more countries

The new iPad goes on sale on Friday in 10 countries, including the United States, Canada, Singapore, France and Britain, with diehards lining up overnight in front of Apple stores in Munich, Paris, London, Singapore and Hong Kong. Across the border from Hong Kong in the Chinese city of Shenzhen, people keen to get their hands on the new iPad had to wait for the tablet to be smuggled into mainland China. “We don’t have iPad 3s yet, but some will arrive later in the day when the students deliver them to us. We’ll have more supplies over this weekend,” said a store operator in Shenzhen.

Wall Street

Wall Street expects a strong start for the latest iPad and some analysts even expect sales of the current model to overtake the iPad 2. Apple will continue to sell the iPad 2 but dropped its price by $100 to start at $399. Apple may sell 65.6 million iPads, according to an estimate by Canaccord Genuity analysts who also raised their target price on Apple stock to $710 from $665. So far, the company has sold 55 million iPads since it was launched in 2010. The third-generation iPad is seen more as a collection of incremental improvements, such as a high-definition “retina” display and a better camera, rather than a major innovation.

Money maker

The iPad is a continuous money-maker because of the development of the App market. New software, games newspapers and books are available as Apps. An iPad user makes a small purchase for a few dollars and downloads his purchase on to his iPad. The Apps will go on forever and iPad will keep laughing all the way to the bank!

Tags: 4G iPad, Apps, iPad, Latest iPad, Money-maker
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What’s The Connection between Skyscrapers and Economic Turmoil?

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February 10th, 2012

“Once I built a tower up to the sun, brick and rivet and lime. Once I built a tower, now it’s done. Brother, can you spare a dime?”

The Empire State Building was completed in 1931, the same year “Yip” Harburg wrote this lyric. The song grew to become an anthem to unemployed American builders during the Great Depression. But these words could easily apply to those put out of work after building Burj Khalifa or one of hundreds of other skyscrapers that now cast long shadows across the Middle East.

The skyscraper index

If you’re beginning to wonder whether skyscrapers are an economic jinx, you are not alone. What began as Andrew Lawrence’s tongue-in-cheek “Skyscraper Index” to correlate skyscraper construction with business cycles has grown into serious research. As recently reported by BBC news, Barclays capital wrote: “Often the world’s tallest buildings are simply the edifice of a broader skyscraper building boom, reflecting a widespread misallocation of capital and an impending economic correction…” Misallocation of resources is one of the unfortunate side effects of economic bubbles. Mega skyscrapers may be an indication of a distorted relationship between land values and construction costs.

Why build these skyscrapers?

The construction cost of a one story commercial building is typically $100-$200 per square foot, varying widely because up to 70% of this is the cost of the land. The construction cost per square foot of a skyscraper is approximately $500 per square foot and the cost of WTC 1 in New York City is $1,150/square foot.

Construction costs

Working through the details is one exercise, but economic reasons for building a skyscraper seem to vanish by the tenth floor. So if a pencil building seems to be the best fit for the economics of a site, you might want to consider funding horizontal public transportation to another location. The chances are good that the land values are floating on an economic bubble. And when the bubble pops, the skyscraper will have to support itself long after it makes economic sense.

The skyscraper symbol

The Great Pyramid of Giza stood as the highest man-made structure on earth for almost 4000 years before the Lincoln Cathedral exceeded its height in the 14th century. This record held for another six centuries before the Washington monument topped it at 555 feet.

Symbolic structures

These were all symbolic structures. They didn’t pretend to be green or economically practical. They were works of art which symbolized something. Skyscrapers rarely make economic sense, but they can be powerful symbols. So many people think of modern skyscrapers as symbols of economic prosperity it has become a cliché since they often indicate quite the opposite.

Are they Green?

While there can be an advantage in avoiding horizontal sprawl, vertical sprawl can be just as bad for the environment, possibly worse. Even so-called “green” skyscrapers consume a massive amount of resources and energy. They cast long shadows, kill millions of birds and expose far more surface area for collecting solar heat than the land beneath them.

Tags: Construction costs, Economic downturn, Skyscraper index, Skyscrapers
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