deblogatory: 2009

23 December 2009

Site Lets Investors See and Copy Experts’ Trades

From a NY Times article.

The trouble with mutual funds is that investors can feel as though they have put their money in a black box. The 90 million Americans with money in funds know little about fees, what securities their money is invested in and who is in charge.

Daniel Carroll, who started investing when he was 15, thinks he has a way to let average investors learn about investing while experts manage the money. In 2008, he started KaChing, a Web site where 400,000 amateur and professional investors manage virtual portfolios. Others have logged on to see what the investors on the site are doing and make the same trades in their own real portfolios.

On Monday, KaChing is to add a new twist. Customers can set up brokerage accounts that automatically mirror the trades of a money manager, some of them professionals.

“The idea of an asset manager showing all his research, his holdings — it’s unheard-of,” said Mr. Carroll, now 27 and the vice president for business development at KaChing. “In the financial industry, the idea is that information is currency; they protect it with their lives.”

Individuals are desperate for advice and transparency from people who help them manage their money, and mutual funds do not provide enough, said Andy Rachleff, KaChing’s chief executive and a longtime venture capitalist who co-founded Benchmark Capital.

“The mutual fund industry is a $10 trillion industry that has seen no innovation for 25 years. The Internet has had no impact,” Mr. Rachleff said.

KaChing has attracted a roster of prominent early investors from Silicon Valley who have financed the company with $3 million. They include Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape; Kevin Compton of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers; and Jeffrey Jordan, chief executive of OpenTable, the online reservation service.

The angel investors have also been investing their own money through KaChing during the pilot period. “The concept is great — the ability to tap into not just the wisdom of the crowd, but to be able to identify and invest with the particular geniuses in the crowd that stand out,” said Mr. Andreessen, who has invested $100,000 using the site.

Customers will be able to open a brokerage account with Interactive Brokers and link their account with their choice of investors on KaChing. KaChing charges customers a single management fee of 0.25 percent to 3 percent, set by each investor. KaChing keeps a quarter of the fee, and the investors get the rest.

Each time the investors make a trade, KaChing will automatically make the same trades for the customer. Customers can log on whenever they want to check their portfolio’s performance. They can send the investor private messages and receive alerts if the investor does something unusual. With the click of a mouse, customers can stop mirroring an investor.

KaChing rates investors on the site by giving them a score the company calls Investing IQ. The formula is modeled after one used by managers of Ivy League endowments, Mr. Rachleff said, and considers risk-adjusted returns, whether investors stick to their strategies and the quality of the research they provide to explain their ideas.

So-called genius investors are those with high scores that have at least a yearlong record on KaChing. The genius investors sign regulatory documents that they will not break the law, including “front-running” stocks, which is the illegal practice of buying or selling a security for their own account with the advance knowledge of pending orders.

KaChing monitors trades in the personal brokerage accounts of each of its model investors and their families. The site is also a registered investment adviser with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Only a dozen people have qualified as genius investors so far. They include a retired lawyer in Omaha, a student at Chapman University and the founder of a Bay Area investment firm.

For investors, KaChing is a way to make some money on the side or expand their existing business. Andrew F. Mathieson, founder of the investment firm Fairview Capital in Greenbrae, Calif., said he hoped to use KaChing to cater to people who did not meet the firm’s million-dollar minimum.

“Most investment products are sold rather than bought,” he said. “Our vision of this is it’s a product that will be bought by investors on the basis of the information we’re putting on the site.”
Recommend More Articles in Technology » A version of this article appeared in print on October 19, 2009, on page B4 of the New York edition.

22 December 2009

Toyota Midnight Rider Tundra Tailgater

Sweet party truck!

Normally when we feature a cool car we like to tell you about the engine power, but in the case of the Toyota Midnight Rider Tundra Tailgater by Brooks & Dunn we're stuck on the accessories. This flatbed packs a 42 inch HDTV and Kicker sound system, a BBQ grill, beer tap and ice chest. Designed with Brooks & Dunn's truck/country music fans in mind we suddenly feel the urge to follow the band on their 2010 farewell tour in one of these bad boys.

Check It Out

21 December 2009

Now imagine you're prey

18 December 2009

Experiencing the Void

A proposal for the Guggenheim Museum's Rotunda which is part of the 50th Anniversary celebration from Julien de Smedt. Unfortunately, this is only a 2D project, and there are no plans that I know of for making this real.

17 December 2009

Hermes' Tokyo Window Display

An eye catching and artistic yet wonderfully simple store window display.

06 December 2009

View from the Top

The Burj Dubai's spire lets one person see the world. Luckily that person has a video cam so we can all share. Burj Dubai is currently the world's tallest building, in a country sitting on the some of the world most serious debt right now...

Movie Trailers

Mashup trailers for modern movies in the style of movies from the 40s and 50s:

I can't imagine how much work and time went into these! Pretty cool...

03 December 2009

Camouflage artist Liu Bolin

These are photos not photoshops... More of his work here: http://www.ekfineart.com/html/artistresults.asp?artist=82&testing=true

25 November 2009

Learning His Body, Learning to Dance

A dancer with Cerebral Palsy teams up with a choreographer that significantly changes his adaptations to his disabilities that doctors and other professionals have been unable to help him with. This article was particularly interesting to me in the way it represents how we limit ourselves based on the preconceptions that others have, and how there is so much information out in the world that has not been crossbred and allowed to germinate.

An interesting read: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/25/arts/dance/25palsy.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=all

21 November 2009

Police Take Notice

I saw a sign today that said "Bank of America business only. No Soliciting or Trespassing. Police Take Notice."

Does that mean that police notice you trespassing (highly unlikely since this was inside an office building) or does that mean police please take notice of people who may trespass here? It is a choice between a sign that is unlikely to be effective and poor grammar...

18 November 2009

A 1936 Stainless Steel Ford Coupe

A handsome polished, stainless steel 1936 Ford Coupe, one of only 6 made, that was made as a collaboration between Ford and The Allegheny Ludlum Steel. Excerpted from The New York Times.

Photo by Richard S. Chang for the NY TImes.

One of the standouts was a 1936 Ford coupe that was made out of stainless steel and looked like an apparition on the lush green field. Its owner, Leo Gephart of Scottsdale, Ariz., stood proudly at its front bumper fielding questions from the crowd.

“They only made six of them,” he said. “Ford did it as a publicity deal for Allegheny Ludlum Steel. They were going to use the cars for promotion. They were going to make 10. Henry Ford ran six, and the seventh ruined the dies.”

Mr. Gephart said only one of the stainless steel Fords was delivered to a private owner, a dentist who had introduced stainless steel in dentistry.

Mr. Gephart first came across the car 40 years ago. “I told the owner to give me a call if he ever wanted to sell it,” he said. “He gave it to his son. Twenty years later, it was at a restoration shop. The guy at the shop was dressed up. He was going to a cruise. He told me he was going to give it to his grandson. I bought it from the grandson 20 years later.”

A Case in Antiquities for ‘Finders Keepers’

An examination of repatriating antiquities to their place of origin, a growing trend that is affecting great museums around the world. While I can understand a culture wanting its treasures back (I think immediately of how much richer a visit to The Forbidden City might be, for example), I also would feel much poorer if The Metropolitain Museum became a place to hold only American items, for example. From the New York Times.

Herbert Knosowski/Associated Press
A bust of Nefertiti that Egypt wants from a Berlin museum.

Zahi Hawass regards the Rosetta Stone, like so much else, as stolen property languishing in exile. “We own that stone,” he told Al Jazeera, speaking as the secretary general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities.

The British Museum does not agree — at least not yet. But never underestimate Dr. Hawass when it comes to this sort of custody dispute. He has prevailed so often in getting pieces returned to what he calls their “motherland” that museum curators are scrambling to appease him.

Last month, after Dr. Hawass suspended the Louvre’s excavation in Egypt, the museum promptly returned the ancient fresco fragments he sought. Then the Metropolitan Museum of Art made a pre-emptive display of its “appreciation” and “deep respect” by buying a piece of a shrine from a private collector so that it could be donated to Egypt.

Now an official from the Neues Museum in Berlin is headed to Egypt to discuss Dr. Hawass’s demand for its star attraction, a bust of Nefertiti.

These gestures may make immediate pragmatic sense for museum curators worried about getting excavation permits and avoiding legal problems. But is this trend ultimately good for archaeology?

Scientists and curators have generally supported the laws passed in recent decades giving countries ownership of ancient “cultural property” discovered within their borders. But these laws rest on a couple of highly debatable assumptions: that artifacts should remain in whatever country they were found, and that the best way to protect archaeological sites is to restrict the international trade in antiquities.

In some cases, it makes aesthetic or archaeological sense to keep artifacts grouped together where they were found, but it can also be risky to leave everything in one place, particularly if the country is in turmoil or can’t afford to excavate or guard all its treasures. After the Metropolitan Museum was pressured to hand over a collection called the Lydian Hoard, one of the most valuable pieces was stolen several years ago from its new home in Turkey.

Restricting the export of artifacts hasn’t ended their theft and looting any more than the war on drugs has ended narcotics smuggling. Instead, the restrictions promote the black market and discourage the kind of open research that would benefit everyone except criminals.

Legitimate dealers, museums and private collectors have a financial incentive to pay for expert excavation and analysis of artifacts, because that kind of documentation makes the objects more valuable. A nation could maintain a public registry of discoveries and require collectors to give scholars access to the artifacts, but that can be accomplished without making everything the property of the national government.

The timing of Dr. Hawass’s current offensive, as my colleague Michael Kimmelman reported, makes it look like retribution against the Westerners who helped prevent an Egyptian from becoming the leader of Unesco, the United Nation’s cultural agency. But whatever the particular motivation, there is no doubt that the cultural-property laws have turned archeological discoveries into political weapons.

In his book “Who Owns Antiquity?”, James Cuno argues that scholars have betrayed their principles by acquiescing to politicians who have exploited antiquities to legitimize themselves and their governments. Saddam Hussein was the most blatant, turning Iraqi archeology museums into propaganda for himself as the modern Nebuchadnezzar, but other leaders have been just as cynical in using antiquities to bolster their claims of sovereignty.

Dr. Cuno advocates the revival of partage, the traditional system in which archeologists digging in foreign countries would give some of their discoveries to the host country and take others home. That way both sides benefit, and both sides have incentives to recover antiquities before looters beat them to it. (To debate this idea, go to nytimes.com/tierneylab.)

As the director of the Art Institute of Chicago, Dr. Cuno has his own obvious motives for acquiring foreign antiquities, and he makes no apology for wanting to display Middle Eastern statues to Midwesterners.

“It is in the nature of our species to connect and exchange,” Dr. Cuno writes. “And the result is a common culture in which we all have a stake. It is not, and can never be, the property of one modern nation or another.”

Some of the most culturally protectionist nations today, like Egypt, Italy and Turkey, are trying to hoard treasures that couldn’t have been created without the inspiration provided by imported works of art. (Imagine the Renaissance without the influence of “looted” Greek antiquities.) And the current political rulers of those countries often have little in common culturally with the creators of the artifacts they claim to own.

Dr. Hawass may consider the Rosetta Stone to be the property of his government agency, but the modern state of Egypt didn’t even exist when it was discovered in 1799 (much less when it was inscribed in 196 B.C., during the Hellenistic era). The land was under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, and the local historians were most interested in studying their Islamic heritage.

The inscribed stone fragment, which had been used as construction material at a fort, didn’t acquire any significance until it was noticed by Napoleon’s soldiers and examined by the scholars on the expedition.

When the French lost the war, they made a copy of the inscriptions before surrendering the stone to the English victors, who returned it to the British Museum. Eventually, two scholars, working separately in Britain and in France, deciphered the hieroglyphics.

This all happened, of course, long before today’s nationalistic retention laws and the United Nations’ Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. But what if the Rosetta Stone were unearthed in modern times?

Were the Rosetta Stone to appear on the artmarket without the proper export permits and documented provenance, Dr. Cuno says, a museum curator who acquired it would risk international censure and possible criminal charges. Scholars would shun it because policies at the leading archeological journals would forbid the publication of its text.

“Not being acquired or published, the Rosetta Stone would be a mere curiosity,” Dr. Cuno writes. “Egyptology as we know it would not exist, and modern Egyptians would not know to claim it as theirs.”

The Supreme Council of Antiquities wouldn’t even know what it was missing.

25 October 2009

Books: The Architecture of Additions: Design and Regulation by Paul Spencer Byard

03 October 2009

interesting elevators « deputydog

30 September 2009

fake window from blind

http://pipeline.gnr8.biz/index.php?task=home&id=92

28 September 2009

Portfolio of Jesse van Dijk

27 September 2009

How to add a USB port to your Alarm clock as a Power outlet

From Engadget.com is an article on How to Add USB power to your alarm clock, so that you can attach USB powered devices such as lights, etc. McGyver, eat yer heart out!

Movie Trailers

Mashup trailers for modern movies in the style of movies from the 40s and 50s:

I can't imagine how much work and time went into these! Pretty cool...

Fascinating Ice and Snow Sculptures

Some cool snow and ice Sculptures over at Odee.com

25 September 2009

Helmet Cam of Being Buried in an Avalanche

A skier with a helmet cam gets caught in an avalanche.

Avalanche Skier POV Helmet Cam Burial & Rescue in Haines, Alaska from Chappy on Vimeo.

Read the story here.

How to Cross the Ocean on a Freighter Ship

The romantic idea of crossing the ocean in a freighter ship, explained, from The Art of Manliness blog post.

At the Port of Long Beach, California, I boarded a freighter named the Punjab Senator. Twenty-two days later I got off the ship in Singapore after a winter crossing of the Pacific. This trip wasn’t for everyone, but it was definitely an adventure I’ll remember for the rest of my life.

If you’re tired of ho-hum traveling by plane and want to experience a trip aboard a freighter ship, here’s what you need to know to get started.

First Things First: Common Misconceptions About Freighter Travel

1. Freighter travel is a cheap alternative to flying on a plane. The popular old-school romantic notion of showing up penniless at a dock with a rucksack and then “earning” your passage by swabbing the decks will have to remain in Robert Louis Stevenson novels. Traveling on a freighter requires advanced booking and it is generally more expensive than flying. A fifteen day cruise from Oakland to Shanghai will cost about $2000 (US). When traveling on a freighter ship you are essentially paying for many days and nights of food and accommodation in addition to the transportation.

2. Freighter travel is similar to being on a cruise. The purpose of a cruise ship is to provide a relaxing and enjoyable time for everyone on board. The purpose of a freighter is to get cargo from point A to point B as quickly as possible. Cruise ships troll around tranquil seas, with stabilizers so that you barely know you are moving. Freighters haul at a breakneck pace across the open ocean, often through storms. A cruise will be populated with thousands of people, whereas a freighter is often a larger vessel with only 20 or so people on it. While a cruise ship has restaurants, spas, gymnasiums, and tons of activities, a freighter will have a TV with a DVD player, a radio, and if you’re lucky, an old Nautilus machine for working out.

3. You can ride a freighter from anywhere to anywhere. Most freighter ships follow well defined shipping routes and make stops at the large port cities (Long Beach, Oakland, Singapore, Hong Kong, Kaohsiung, etc.) But if your dream is to catch a freighter from the Jersey shore to Isla Mujeres, Mexico….it’s not going to happen.

Now that we’ve gone over the negatives, here’s how you can get started. There are several companies that book freighter cruises – just google freighter travel. I used www.freighterworld.com and I was extremely happy with them. If you browse the site you can get a good idea of the duration, cost, and ports that you can travel to and from. Their FAQ section contains a wealth of information. As a further affront to your Kerouac dreams of spontaneous adventure, you will have to book your passage at least a month in advance and proof of insurance is also necessary.

If you decide to go for it, here are some tips:

1. Bring Seabands. I had spent a significant amount of time on fishing boats, cruise ships, and sailboats without ever getting seasick. However, when the Punjab Senator cruised out of the Port of Oakland into the open Pacific, I felt my stomach turn. I used sea bands which are little wrist bands that exert pressure on your wrist to alleviate the effects of nausea. I am unsure if the seasickness was psychosomatic or real – the idea of trudging straight into the Pacific during winter was slightly unsettling – but the seabands definitely made me feel better when I was wearing them. During a storm, our ship hit a roll of 20 degrees, which is a tremendous amount of motion. The good news is that by the end of the trip I was able to sleep through motion that left my belongings scattered about my room.

2. Bring books. I am not a fast reader, but during this trip I completed some monster works by Dostoyevsky, Ayn Rand, Solzhenitsyn, and John Steinbeck. The ship had a good library, but many of the works were in German since the crew was mostly German. On a typical day I worked out twice, watched a DVD or two, wrote extensively, took two naps, ate three meals, and still had enough down time to finish four novels.

3. Understand that you must entertain yourself. On my ship the officers consisted of 7 Germans and 4 Russians, and the remainder of the crew consisted of 10 Kiribati. English is the language of the sea, but no one else on the boat was a native English speaker. Additionally, in spite of the friends I made on the ship, the seamen are there to work, and there were many times when everyone was too busy to hang out. At the majority of the ports we stopped at, I went to the shore alone because the entire crew was busy supervising the loading and unloading of cargo.

4. Special diets are not accommodated. The hardest part about freighter traveling (for me) was the food. As a passenger you eat with the officers-on my boat they were German and Russian. They ate a meat intensive, diet and I am a vegetarian. On land, it is never a problem for me to find acceptable cuisine anywhere, but in the galley you can’t simply choose somewhere else to eat. For me, that meant many weeks of eating cheese sandwiches. Thank goodness I brought a tub of peanut butter.

5. Know where your ship is. Some of the ports are HUGE, as in miles across…a seemingly endless maze of containers stacked four stories high. If you go onshore alone, it is much easier to get out of the port than it is to come back to the port to re-board. There are often several exits for a port and not knowing where to go can be extremely frustrating. I was lost in the port of Singapore for a significant amount of time trying to find my way back to my ship.

6. Freighter room etiquette. In general, the setting is informal and the rules are similar to college dorm room etiquette. If someone’s door is open, you are welcome to go in. If someone’s door is shut, they are either not there or they would like privacy.

In this article, I tended to focus on some of the negative aspects of freighter travel. To be best prepared, you should know about the difficulties. You don’t need instructions on how to drink gin and tonics while celebrating an International Date Line crossing. Overall, I really enjoyed the unique experience of freighter travel. I have an understanding and appreciation of the ocean I would not have otherwise. The informal atmosphere that allowed you to sit in the bridge while the first mate navigated was matchless. Finally, freighter travel gives some adventure street-cred that is tough to get. When you’re drinking a beer in Phnom Pehn, Cambodia and some backpacker asks you where you flew into, it feels pretty manly to look up and say, “I didn’t.”

The World of Yet Also

Never land.

(First published on Click Opera March 13th, 2005.)

One of the reasons the Michael Jackson trial is so unfortunate is that the world of Either-Or will pass judgment on a creature of Yet-Also. The world of clear, unambiguous categories will pass judgment on someone who flies Peter-Pan-like over the binaries that confine and define the rest of us.

When we look at Michael Jackson, I believe we're looking at the future of our species. Michael is a creature from a future in which we've all become more feminine, more consumerist, more postmodern, more artificial, more self-constructed and self-mediating, more playful, caring and talented than we are today. But it's hard to use those adjectives, because they're Either-Or adjectives and he's from the world of Yet-Also, a world I believe we will all come to live in if we're lucky, a world where there is no more authenticity-by-default-through-brute-necessity and no more "human nature". A world of pure synthesis, pure self-creation.

Jackson is what all humans will become if we develop further in the direction of postmodernism and self-mediation. He is what we'll become if we get both more Wildean and more Nietzschean. He's what we'll become only if we're lucky and avoid a new brutality based on overpopulation and competition for dwindling resources. By attacking Jackson and what he stands for -- the effete, the artificial, the ambiguous -- we make a certain kind of relatively benign future mapped out for ourselves into a Neverland, something forbidden, discredited, derided. When we should be deriding what passes for our normalcy -- war, waste, and the things we do en masse are the things that threaten us -- we end up deriding dandyism and deviance. And Jackson is the ultimate dandy and the ultimate deviant. He can fly across our Either-Or binaries, and never land. It's debateable whether he's the king of pop, but he's undoubtedly the king of Yet-Also.

Consider all the extraordinary ways in which Michael Jackson is Yet-Also. He's black yet also white. He's adult yet also a child. He's male yet also female. He's gay yet also straight. He has children, yet he's also never fucked their mothers. He's wearing a mask, yet he's also showing his real self. He's walking yet also sliding. He's guilty yet also innocent. He's American yet also global. He's sexual yet also sexless. He's immensely rich yet also bankrupt. He's Judy Garland yet also Andy Warhol. He's real yet also synthetic. He's crazy yet also sane, human yet also robot, from the present yet also from the future. He declares his songs heavensent, and yet he also constructs them himself. He's the luckiest man in the world yet the unluckiest. His work is play. He's bad, yet also good. He's blessed yet also cursed. He's alive, but only in theory.

There's one way in which Michael Jackson is not Yet-Also though. He's not famous yet also ordinary. Almost all the other stars in the world, the stars of Either-Or world, anyway, make an exception to Either-Or's categorical thinking in this one instance: given the choice between being either famous or ordinary, they all insist they're both. It's the one instance in which hardline Either-Ors will accept a Yet-Also answer. It's an answer they like because it fills the positions of talent with the representatives of the untalented. It affirms them as they currently are rather than challenging them to become something else. They want affirmation, not aspiration. They don't want their artists and celebrities to embody the values of worlds they don't understand. Ambiguous worlds, future worlds. They want to walk, not moonwalk, and they want their stars to walk too.

And so our creature of Never-Land will be judged by the creatures of Never-Fly. They will almost certainly throw him into jail. Their desire to see him as grounded, categorised and unfree as they themselves are is overwhelming. The grounded, situated, unfree creatures of Either-Or are baying for the clipping of fairy wings. Knives, hatchets and scissors glint in Neverland. There's an assembly of torch-bearing witchfinders. Peter Pan must be ushered back from fiction to reality, from the air to the ground. Back into a race, back into a gender, back into a confined clarity. Assuming he doesn't commit suicide, as he threatens in Martin Bashir's documentary, by jumping from a balcony, Jackson will be ushered away from the fuzzy subtle flicker states of our future, back to the solid states of our past and present. Either-Or will have its triumph over Yet-Also. Yet it will also, unknowingly, "triumph" over its own better future.

24 September 2009

Show Caves of the Nouveau Riche

I came across the words of the title of this post in a post at i09.com but it really didn't satisfy my want to see show caves. I have long been interested in grottoes and hidden gardens of the rich.

The Wieliczka Salt Mines http://www.cyf-kr.edu.pl/krakow_i_okolice/?a=wieliczka
http://www.forestiere-historicalcenter.com/
http://www.bacchuscaves.com/Portfolio_mod-1.asp
http://io9.com/367910/show-caves-of-the-nouveau-riche

13 September 2009

The Paper Architect

A pretty amazing set of structures made out of cutting paper by the artist Ingrid Siliakus.

via the Daily Icon blog.

05 September 2009

Chalk Stomp

Imagine the performers from Stomp were murdered and turned into chalk outlines, then animated with music from one of their performances. What you you get? This: http://uploads.ungrounded.net/221000/221483_Play.swf

04 September 2009

Really Small Guns

02 September 2009

Faster Evacuation? Put an obstacle at the exit.

It seems that wide open exits cause slower evacuations than an exit that is partially blocked according to an article in Scientific American:

If you find yourself in a crowded building during an emergency, perhaps the last thing you want to see is an obstructed exit. But a new study by a group of Japanese researchers shows that wide-open exits are not always the most efficient at speeding pedestrians through. A judiciously placed obstacle, such as a column, can actually reduce bottlenecking and evacuation times.

Daichi Yanagisawa, a graduate student in the School of Engineering at the University of Tokyo, and his colleagues examined various ways of reducing conflicts—friction, essentially—between individuals as they try to squeeze through an exit.

In research set to appear in the journal Physical Review E, Yanagisawa and his co-authors tested various theories using a model incorporating both the friction of conflicting pedestrians and the slowing effects of obstacles that they must circumnavigate. The researchers also ran evacuation drills with 50 human subjects working toward a narrow exit.

The research team found that the problem with wide-open spaces in front of exits is that evacuees can approach from all sides, allowing the maximum number of pedestrians to enter into conflict at the exit. Reducing exit access with an obstacle can pare down the severity of those conflicts. "When a proper obstacle is set up at an appropriate position in front of the exit," Yanagisawa says, "it blocks a pedestrian moving to the exit and decreases the number of pedestrians moving to the exit at the same time."

Not just any old obstacle will do, of course. Yanagisawa notes that its size, shape and orientation has to be tailored to the space and to the width of the exit itself. In general, however, off-center obstacles are more effective than those placed directly in front of an exit. "When an obstacle is set up at the center of the exit," Yanagisawa says, "it makes pedestrians detour and slows down the evacuation." An obstacle placed to one side, on the other hand, "decreases the probability and the impact of conflicts without making pedestrians detour a lot," he explains.

Andreas Schadschneider, a professor at the University of Cologne's Institute of Theoretical Physics in Germany who has studied pedestrian and traffic flows, says that the obstacle effect has popped up occasionally in the literature for several years. But the new work is, to his knowledge, the first time it has been empirically tested. "So, it no longer remains a vague theoretical prediction, but should be considered a serious effect that might be used for substantial increase in the safety of sports arenas and other large public buildings," Schadschneider says.

He adds that even empirical tests with human subjects cannot fully replicate the conditions of an evacuation, however. For one thing, real-world evacuees might be discouraged by the appearance of an obstacle and retreat toward a different exit, which could negate the obstacle's benefits. Real evacuation simulations are extremely difficult to carry out and can be extremely dangerous, Schadschneider says, pointing to a 2006 test of Airbus's A-380 aircraft in which one subject suffered a broken leg and dozens of others sustained lesser injuries.

The researchers also note that their model does not yet compensate for the intelligence of real-life pedestrians, and Yanagisawa cautions that the new results do not imply that building managers should start blockading fire exits. The findings, he says, merely suggest that researchers should start to "consider installing obstacles as one option which holds potential to shorten a total evacuation time."