City Of Floating Houses Planned By Dutch

Climate change is redefining the rules by which we live and at a pace we never expected. Because of rising sea level, several areas of the globe are in danger of vanishing from the map, disappearing under water. Society must adapt and maybe, one day, live in floating houses.

Credit: EUREKA

Depending on their geographical situation, some countries are more advanced than others in their adjustment to the effects of global warming, and particularly the rising level of the seas. In 1953, the Netherlands and large parts of Belgium and England were struck by what is known as the Watersnoodramp, literally “flood disaster”, destroying 10.000 buildings and killing over 2.500 people. Since then, the “low countries” have developed a culture of flood engineering that has sealed the reputation of its builders and might help to fight the consequences of rising sea levels due to climate change.  

A Dutch speciality
The results of FLOATEC, a European R&D project underwritten by EUREKA, can be found all over Europe, but the Netherlands is the primary market for the solution developed within the project. ‘It had the full backing of the Dutch government’ says Edwin Blom, project leader at Dura Vermeer. ‘The authorities designated some areas of the country as preferred grounds for experimentation on amphibian houses’. The project also benefited of a unique legal obligation existing in Netherlands: 7% to 12% of every construction site is to be dedicated to water storage, which makes floating houses also very convenient.

Credit: EUREKA

The leading partner in the EUREKA FLOATEC project, Dura Vermeer, is a Dutch company specialising in building homes in a country where many would consider buying a houseboat. It is currently employing some 3000 people in The Netherlands. Over the last 12 years, this company has become an outright leader in a market that barely existed before - that of floating buildings. With some revolutionary achievements under its belt, such as the Rotterdam floating exhibition pavilion, a greenhouse built on water, or the amphibious village in Maasbommel, all located in Netherlands, it has a strong record of daring architectural projects.

Best of both worlds
So, how do you build a floating house? Edwin Blom describes it as a relatively easy construction process: The secret lies in the foundations of the building, made of multiple layers of light plastic foam supporting the concrete, allowing it to float the same way a boat would do. But the technology used until now has its limitations. There is a maximum size and weight beyond which a structure loses its buoyancy and simply sinks. The engineers from Dura Vermeer had to look for a technological partner able to solve this problem, the key being in the use and development of the right type of material.

However, it proved to be impossible to find in the Netherlands a collaborator with the level of skill and innovation required. They finally found the perfect match thanks to the network of European R&D experts offered by EUREKA: Acciona Infrastructures, a Spanish company and a forerunner in the sector of nanotechnology-based composite materials. Whereas most of the research done in the sector has been oriented towards lucrative high-tech sectors such as aerospace or military, Acciona Infrastructures has been from the very start looking to adapt their knowledge to the needs of the construction business. ‘We would not have even thought of this market opportunity if we did not take part in this EUREKA project’ says Bladimir Osorio, project leader at Acciona Infrastructures.

Easy as building blocks
Together with a Spanish engineering consultancy, Solintel, the partners worked on a new way to build floating structures: simpler, more solid and using lighter materials. This new building method uses EPS, or expanded polystyrene, ‘the same kind as is used for packaging and which people are familiar with: little white balls glued together’, says Blom. The modified polystyrene is inserted in multiple layers in between stratums of composite and concrete and divided into beam-like modules that can easily be assembled into a bigger supporting structure ‘a bit like building blocks’. The modules are arranged in a floating grid into which the concrete is cast.
Even so, the technology is much more advanced than the one traditionally used, Edwin Blom points at the fact that it is still much cheaper than other method used until now: ‘We simply do not need to use as much material as we used to, he says. Smaller blocks can now support bigger structures and, in the end, the cost of the whole building is reduced’. For his Spanish counterpart Osorio, the project was ‘a real technological breakthrough that would never have been possible without EUREKA’.

If climate change means more floods in densely populated areas, the technology to answer this problem now exists thanks to the FLOATEC project, and the cards to be played are now in the hands of the governments and local authorities in charge of urban planning. For some countries, small island-states in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, the stakes are even higher, as it is estimated that they could disappear within the next 100 years. According to Jenny Grote Stoutenburg, a researcher in law from the German Max Planck Institute, ‘if a threatened island managed to keep an artificial, floating structure, occupied by caretakers, it could probably maintain its claim to statehood’.

Contacts and sources:
Piotr Pogorzelski
EUREKA

When It Comes To Pursuing Your Goals, Let You Unconscious Be Your Guide Say Researchers

A new University of Alberta study says when it comes to goal setting, your unconscious mind can be a great motivator.

Alberta School of Business researcher Sarah Moore and colleagues from Duke and Cornell universities say that unconscious feelings about objects in the environment influence the pursuit of long-term goals. Their study explores how the unconscious mind responds to objects in relation to an individual's goals—and how the unconscious continues to influence feelings about these objects once the goals are reached—whether or not the outcome has been successful.

In Freud we should trust?

"In the past few years, we recognized that some of [Sigmund] Freud's ideas on the unconscious mind were, in fact, correct and that a lot of our decision-making and a lot of our feelings are based on things that we're not really aware of," said Moore, who is an assistant professor in the Alberta School of Business. "In our study, we looked at how our unconscious feelings about objects in the environment influence how we pursue goals."

Moore notes that previous studies have shown that when it comes to short-term, finite goals, such as responding to basic needs (for example, thirst or hunger), the unconscious will evaluate objects and form preferences based on whether the object will help an individual achieve the goal. She says that in the case of thirst, items such as a water fountain or a bottle of Coke will be seen favourably, while a chocolate bar or KFC sign would not. However, she explains that, once the goal is reached, those same objects will be evaluated differently.

"Once your thirst is quenched, you don't evaluate the water fountain positively anymore because you've accomplished the goal," she said, " but there are differences when we look at long-term goals".

Win some, lose some—but goal still important

Moore's research focused on longer-term goals, such as getting in shape or undertaking educational pursuits. For both types of goals, she says, the process is similar in that the unconscious identifies and responds to positively to objects and triggers in the environment that support the goal. However, the unconscious deals differently with these objects during progress towards long-term goals. Moore says that, unlike with short-term finite goals, the unconscious will continue to positively value objects related to the long-term goals even after a level of success has been achieved. She says this phenomenon points to the indeterminate nature of the goal.

"In some sense, we're never 'finished' long-term goals," said Moore. "If we successfully finish the small steps toward our long-term goals, it becomes a cycle: we take a small step, we succeed, we feel good about it; therefore, we continue to feel good about the long-term goal. This process makes us more likely to take the next small step toward achieving that goal."

What was surprising for the researchers was how participants in their study reacted to objects after a failure. While the researchers expected the participants who failed to react negatively or express dislike for objects related to their test goal, Moore and her colleagues found that failure resulted in a neutral view of the objects.

"You don't hate the objects related to the goal because that goal is very important to you in the long run," said Moore. "Your unconscious is telling you 'now is not the time to pursue the goal. You just failed, let's leave it alone for awhile. We're not going to pursue these objects in the environment; we're going to switch to some other goal.'"
Contacts and sources:
Jamie Hanlon
University of Alberta

65 Million More Obese Adults In The US And 11 Million More In The UK Expected By 2030, Added Health Cost $66 Billion

The rising prevalence of obesity around the globe places an increasing burden on the health of populations, on healthcare systems and on overall economies. 

A major challenge for researchers is to quantify the effect of these burdens to inform public policies. Using a simulation model to project the probable health and economic consequences from rising obesity rates in the United States and the United Kingdom, researchers at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health and Oxford University forecast 65 million more obese adults in the U. S. and 11 million more in the U.K. by 2030, leading to millions of additional cases of diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and cancer. The findings suggest that medical costs associated with treatment of these preventable diseases in the U.S. alone will increase by $48-66 billion per year.

Credit: Wikipedia

The paper, "Health and Economic Burden of the Projected Obesity Trends in the USA and the UK," is part of a series of articles on obesity published in the August 27 issue of Lancet. The research was led by Y. Claire Wang, MD, ScD, Mailman School assistant professor of Health Policy and Management, with colleagues from Oxford University.

To construct historic trends in BMI the researchers analyzed data from two nationally representative surveys: the U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) from 1988 to 2008, and the Healthy Survey for England (HSE) from 1993 to 2008. The U.S. and U.K. have the highest obesity rates among the countries belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Projecting from these data sets: the researchers predicted the following impacts for the U.S. by 2030:
Obesity prevalence among men would rise from 32% in 2008 to approximately 50% and from 35% to between 45% and 52% among women.
7.8 million extra cases of diabetes
6.8 million more cases of coronary heart disease and stroke
539,000 additional cases of cancer
Annual spending on obesity-related diseases would rise by 13-16%, leading to 2.6% increase in national health spending.
Total medical costs associated with treatment of these preventable diseases are estimated to increase by $48-66 billion/year.

For the U.K., researchers predicted the following developments by 2030:

• Prevalence of obesity among men would increase from 26% to between 41—48%, and among women from 26% to 35-43%.


• 668 000 more cases of diabetes


• 461,000 more cases of heart disease and stroke


• 139,000 additional cases of cancer.


• In the U.K., annual spending on obesity-related health would increase even more rapidly than in the U.S. due to its older population, rising 25%.

"Many chronic and acute health disorders associated with excess bodyweight burden society—not only by negatively affecting the health-related quality of life but also by incurring significant costs," says Dr. Wang. These stem not only from increased healthcare expenditures but also from worker absenteeism, disability pensions, less productivity at work due to poor health, and earlier retirement."

The new study shows that even a small drop in average body mass index (BMI) would have a major health and economic impacts. They therefore recommend action to promote healthier body weights.

"Taking no action would have the catastrophic consequences described in our study, but a population level decrease in BMI by 1% would avoid as many as 2.4 million cases of diabetes, 1.7 million cases of heart disease and stroke, and up to 127 000 cases of cancer in the U.S. alone ."

There are currently 99 million obese individuals in the U.S and 15 million in the U.K. The distribution of obesity is somewhat different in the two nations. In the U.S. about one-quarter of all men are obese regardless of ethnicity. Almost half of black American women (46%) are obese, compared with a third of Hispanic women and 30% of white women. In the U.K., the proportion of obese white men (19%) is slightly higher than black men (17%) and much higher than Asian men (11%). One-third of black women in the U.K. are obese, compared with 1 in 5 white women and 1 in 6 Asian women.

While there is some evidence that the rise in obesity is levelling off in some nations and possibly in the U.S., the jury is still out, says Dr. Wang. "Population weight changes are slow to manifest. Whether or not the U.S. and UK have turned a corner or plateaued will not be clear until survey results over the next few years provide additional data points."

The suggestion that obese people die earlier, thus saving the likely expected social and healthcare costs if that person survives to old age, is also discussed in the paper. However the authors conclude, "Without a doubt, healthcare expenditure is high for elderly people, but these costs should not be used to justify the cost-savings of dying younger, or to suggest that obesity prevention has no benefit."

The study was funded by the National Collaborative on Childhood Obesity Reseach, a joint effort of the National Institutes of Health, Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Department of Agriculture, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Dr. Wang is also a contributing author on two other related papers in the Lancet series on obesity.
Contacts and sources:
Stephanie Berger
Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health