By Brent Stephens on November 27, 2012
Many thanks to Parham Azimi, a graduate student in environmental engineering here at IIT that is working with me on a small project, for telling me about a piece of software today that will probably save us hours of labor and frustration in the future: GetData Graph Digitizer.
This software allows you to import screenshots of graphs and plots from papers and reports and export accurate estimates of data contained in the figures. We’ve had to do this several times lately, particularly with older papers that only present graphical summary data and not the raw data (we’re talking pre-online-SI here). I’ve wasted more time than I’d like to mention visually “translating” from figure to table so that we could actually use the presented values. This program allows you to import the figure screenshot, define the x and y axes, set the physical length of x and y scales, and then click on individual data points… when you do that, out comes a table of values based on the size and scales of the graph alone. It’s a Thanksgiving Miracle!
By Brent Stephens on November 17, 2012
After nearly 4 months living here in Chicago, I finally made it down to visit The Plant this afternoon. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s an old meat packing facility on the south side of town that is being converted into a sort of eco-industrial park where each business that sets up shop inside the building will be able to align their energy and resources inputs and waste outputs with other businesses around them. Read on for a summary of what I learned about their plans and their individual processes during a 2+ hour long tour today given by board member and IIT adjunct faculty member Blake Davis!
Main lobby for now; brewery taproom in the future!
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By Brent Stephens on November 15, 2012
Yesterday Google announced on their official blog that they were awarding a $3 million grant to the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) in support of healthy buildings and indoor environmental health. Google’s interest in healthy indoor environments stems from their own internal commitment to using low-emitting products in their own workspaces. Now they will be helping to change the way we all think about building materials. Google imagines a nutrition-like-label about every product we use indoors, with a list of building “ingredients” for each product (with a particular focus on potentially harmful or toxic chemicals). Their grant will support industry research and the development of better standards around healthy materials.
This is exciting news for our field. I appreciate that they are funding both research and standards development, as they should go hand-in-hand, the latter informed by the former. Standards are a bit of a mess as they stand now.
One issue I see is Google’s vision of an “ingredients” label for building products. It’s a smart idea, but I hope it’s done right (or I hope we can get some of this funding to ensure it’s done right). Currently products are identified in LEED as merely containing low levels of total volatile organic compounds (TVOCs) in their mix (think: paint must have a low TVOC content). But that misses two points: (1) how well does mere TVOC content in bulk correlate to actual emissions after application? (there is some evidence that this correlation may not be very strong) and (2) are there individual VOCs that are more important for health concerns than the sum of TVOCs? There are also some issues with how VOCs are actually defined, but we’ll save that for another day. On (1), I do believe that the new 2012 proposed LEED guidelines push for actual emissions testing, but the way they specify the testing is extremely important.
Overall, I’m excited to see some movement in this direction. I’ve linked to a few other bits of media coverage if you’re interested:
