Architektura/ budownictwo
STREETS FOR PEOPLE - NOT TRAFFIC
In countries all over the world there is still a dangerous view that a ‘good’ street is one that helps make driving easier and vehicle journey times shorter. Dangerous, yet pervasive.
The ugly by-products of this thinking are all around us. Ring roads that cut across the historic street patterns of towns and rancid underpasses. Not to mention “safety” rails which force people into convoluted detours and which result in some of us taking much greater risks to avoid.
How curious that streets are the one public service we all have to use, all the time, yet so little thought has been given to their design. Imagine negotiating your way through a public building which had just “happened” over the years. It would feel confusing and unwelcoming, littered with instructions, signs and obstructions, the product of false starts and dead ends.
Now, however, change is around the corner.. More and more policymakers recognize that this traffic-centered conception of streets has led to the creation of dysfunctional places. The social
and economic value of the pre-20th century role of streets, as places of community interaction, shared by all members of society – as well as conduits for traffic – is being rediscovered. New ways of designing streets are being tried out; new terms such as ‘shared space’ between pedestrians, cyclists and vehicles are becoming popular.
Shared surfaces, increasingly found in residential areas remove the physical distinctions, like kerbs or different materials, which keep traffic in one place and the rest of us in another. They include seating and planting – they could go further, with seesaws and swings. All these are visual prompts, showing that the street belongs to people who use it for more than just driving and parking. Streets become play spaces once again instead of rat-runs.
There is still work to do to get shared space right for everyone, of course. Guide dogs are trained to stop at kerbs, so removing them can be confusing. Eye-contact between pedestrians and motorists is key, but this is obviously of little use to the visually impaired. So the design solutions of shared space need more attention.
What we most want is civilised streets. Places where the needs of people are prioritised over cars. Places rooted in an assumption that everyone will use common sense and courtesy.
When streets are slower and safer, they start to become more social and civilised. People are happier walking and cycling in them – helping the waistline and the environment. They are safer for children, who should be able to play in the space outside their homes. There is a more serious risk of injury from straying from the pavement in a 30mph zone than in a street deliberately designed to create uncertainty.
The street also becomes a destination in its own right. Most people find it hard to meet their neighbours: streets should be a comfortable setting for the first tentative hellos. A recent survey of new housing developments found that a third of residents believed the streets were unsafe for children to walk, cycle or play in and almost half felt that their neighbours went their own way, rather than doing things together or trying to help each other.
Brighton’s New Road, once a stretch of uninviting tarmac, represents a new start. Having been redesigned and reinvented, it is now a beautiful and inviting street, one of the most popular places in town with a 175% increase in pedestrian activity and a 600% per cent increase in people deciding to shop or simply stop, sit and enjoy the new space. It has become a street instead of a road, where the fastest vehicle recorded has been a bicycle (at 13 mph as it happens). Flipping the hierarchy is at the heart of its success, putting pedestrians at the top of the pyramid, vehicles at the bottom, with cyclists and public transport users in between. The re-opening was celebrated by tango and theatre. In the end, the best thing about more civilised streets is that they generate a sense of community. It encourages us to live our lives in a different way. And what better benchmark for our country’s streets than a place where you can ask your neighbour to dance.
Proposed QUESTIONS
1. How is thinking about street design changing?
2. What is ”shared space”?
3. What are ”civilised streets”? What are their benefits?
4. How should we design and manage streets to ensure that they are safe for all?
5. Give examples of badly designed streets in your town/city.
6. Are there any shared spaces or civilised streets in the area you live?
7. What makes a high - quality street? (think of kerbs, paving, colours, materials, maintenance, crossing points, traffic level, lighting, sense of security, signage, public spaces etc)
8. Have you got a favourite street in your town/city?
KEY WORDS
vehicle traffic- centered conception
people – centered conception policymakers
dysfunctional places shared space
shared surface community interaction
conduit pedestrians
cyclists public transport users
residential areas ( physical) distinctions
kerbs seating
planting seesaws
swings visual prompts,
play spaces rat- run
guide dogs design solutions
civilised streets be prioritised over
pavement housing developments
residents redesigned and reinvented
flipping the hierarchy
Chemia/biotechnologia
GENETICALLY MODIFIED FOODS
Genetically modified (GM) foods are food items that have their DNA altered through genetic engineering. Unlike conventional genetic modification that has been carried out through conventional breeding for thousands of years, GM foods first appeared in the market in the early 1990s. The most common modified foods are derived from plants: soybean, corn, canola, cotton seed oil and fruit. For example, a typical GM food could be a strawberry that has to survive under hostile weather conditions, i.e. in cold climate. A farmer would get its DNA changed, so that it could survive in the frost. They would take DNA from frost resistant cell, and transfer it into the strawberry genes. Popular GM crops include insect-resistant corn and herbicide-tolerant cotton, corn and rapeseed varieties. Lots of controversies surround genetically engineered crops and foods. One of them focuses on the long-term health effects for anyone eating them. In the late 1990s dr. Arpad Pusztai, a leading UK scientist, was hired by the Rowett Institute to develop a new safety protocol for genetically modified foods in Europe. E.g. he found that the rats used in his study had developed potentially precancerous cell growth in the digestive tract, which inhibited the rats’ brain, liver and testicle development and generally weakened the immunity system. As he concluded, it was just because insecticide gene was inserted in a rat’s gene system.
Activists and many scientists opposed to genetic engineering say that with current technology there is no way to ensure that genetically modified organisms will remain under control, and the use of this technology outside secure laboratory environments represents multiple unacceptable risks to both farm and wild ecosystems. Potential impact on biodiversity may occur if herbicide-tolerant crops are sprayed with herbicide to the extent that no wild plants (weeds) are able to survive. Plants toxic to insects may mean insect-free crops. However, this could result in decline of other wildlife (e.g.) birds which rely on weed seeds and/or insects as food resources.
Although some scientists have claimed that selective breeding is a form of genetic engineering (e.g. corn is derived form teosinte, dogs have evolved with human intervention over the course of tens of thousands of years from wolves), others assert that modern transgenesis-based genetic engineering is capable of delivering changes faster than, and sometimes of different types from, traditional breeding methods.
Proponents of current genetic techniques as applied to food plants point to hypothetical benefits that the technology may have, for example, in the harsh agricultural conditions in Africa. They argue that with modifications, existing crops could possibly be able to thrive under the relatively hostile conditions providing much needed ford to malnourished people. Proponents also cite golden rice and golden rice 2, genetically engineered rice varietes that contain genetically modified vitamin A levels. Some hope this rice variety may boost vitamin A deficiency that currently claims thousands of lives every year.
genetic engineering: inżynieria genetyczna
frost-resistant: odporny na mróz
herbicide-tolerant: tolerancyjny na środki chwastobójcze
insecticide: środek owadobójczy
digestive tract: przewód pokarmowy
precancerous cell growth: przedrakowa narośl na komórce
immunity system: system odpornościowy
biodiversity: różnorodność biologiczna
malnourished: niedożywiony
brain: mózg
liver: wątroba
PROMOTIONAL TOOLS
Marketing is often defined as a matter of identifying consumer needs and developing the goods and services that satisfy them. This involves developing the right product, pricing it attractively, and making it available to the target customers, by persuading distributors and retailers to stock it. But it is also necessary to inform potential consumers of the product's existence, its features, and its advantages, and to persuade them to try it. There are generally several stages involved in a consumer's decision to buy a new product. A well-known acronym for this process is AIDA, standing for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. According to the familiar "4 P's" formulation of the marketing mix - product, price, place and promotion - attracting attention, arousing interest, and persuading the consumer to act are all part of promotion. Marketing textbooks conventionally distinguish four basic promotional tools: advertising, sales promotion, public relations, and personal selling, which together make up the marketing communications mix.
For consumer goods, the most important tool is generally advertising. As well as advertising particular brands, companies also carry out prestige or institutional advertising, designed to build up the company's name or image. Advertising is often combined with sales promotions, such as free samples, coupons and competitions.
For industrial goods, particularly specialised ones, the most important tool is often personal selling. Sales reps can build up relationships with company buyers, and can be very useful in persuading them to choose a particular product.
The fourth promotional tool is public relations (frequently abbreviated as PR): activities designed to improve or maintain or protect a company's or a product's image. Public relations includes things like company publications, most notably the annual report, sponsorship, community relations programmes, the lobbying of politicians, and the creation of news stories, all designed to get publicity for the company or a particular product. Unlike paid advertising, publicity is any (favourable) mention of a company's products that is not paid for, in any medium received by a company's customers or potential customers. Companies often attempt to place information in news media to draw attention to a product or service. Quite apart from financial considerations, the advantage of publicity is that it is generally more likely to be read and believed than advertising. It can have a great impact on public awareness that could not even be achieved by a massive amount of advertising.
Within the limits of their budget, marketers have to find the optimal communications mix of advertising, sales promotion, personal selling, and publicity, without neglecting the other elements of the marketing mix, i.e. the possibility of improving the product, lowering its price, or distributing it differently.
KEY WORDS:
target customers "4 P's"
promotional tools advertising
public relations media
public awareness marketing mix
sales promotion personal selling
publicity
Ochrona Środowiska
Global warming, the gradual increase of the temperature of the earth's lower atmosphere as a result of the increase in greenhouse gases since the Industrial Revolution.
The temperature of the atmosphere near the earth's surface is warmed through a natural process called the greenhouse effect. Visible, shortwave light comes from the sun to the earth, passing unimpeded through a blanket of thermal, or greenhouse, gases composed largely of water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and ozone. Infrared radiation reflects off the planet's surface toward space but does not easily pass through the thermal blanket. Some of it is trapped and reflected downward, keeping the planet at an average temperature suitable to life, about 60°F (16°C).
Growth in industry, agriculture, and transportation since the Industrial Revolution has produced additional quantities of the natural greenhouse gases plus chlorofluorocarbons and other gases, augmenting the thermal blanket. It is generally accepted that this increase in the quantity of greenhouse gases is trapping more heat and increasing global temperatures, making a process that has been beneficial to life potentially disruptive and harmful. During the 20th cent., the atmospheric temperature rose 1.1°F (0.6°C), and sea level rose several inches. Some projected, longer-term results of global warming include melting of polar ice, with a resulting rise in sea level and coastal flooding; disruption of drinking water supplies dependent on snow melts; profound changes in agriculture due to climate change; extinction of species as ecological niches disappear; more frequent tropical storms; and an increased incidence of tropical diseases.
Among factors that may be contributing to global warming are the burning of coal and petroleum products (sources of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, ozone); deforestation, which increases the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; methane gas released in animal waste; and increased cattle production, which contributes to deforestation, methane production, and use of fossil fuels.
In 1992, at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, over 150 nations signed a binding declaration on the need to reduce global warming.
A UN Conference on Climate Change, held in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997 resulted in an international agreement to fight global warming, which called for reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases by industrialized nations. Not all industrial countries, however, immediately signed or ratified the accord. In 2001 the G. W. Bush administration announced it would abandon the Kyoto Protocol; because the United States produces about one quarter of the world's greenhouse gases, this was regarded as a severe blow to the effort to slow global warming.
Improved automobile mileage, reforestation projects, energy efficiency in construction, and national support for mass transit are among relatively simpler adjustments that could significantly lower U.S. production of greenhouse gases. More aggressive adjustments include a gradual worldwide shift away from the use of fossil fuels, the elimination of chlorofluorocarbons, and the slowing of deforestation by restructuring the economies of developing nations. The United States, Australia, China, India, Japan, and South Korea established (2005) an agreement outside the Kyoto Protocal that proposed to reduce emissions through the development and implementation of new technologies.
global warming, greenhouse gases, greenhouse effect, deforestation, fossil fuels, fighting global warming
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