Building design and evacuation plans

How fast can you get down the stairs?

A news item on TV this evening reminded me that building designs may fail to prioritize evacuation, and that laws enacted after designs get implemented may be equally likely to fail to make evacuation feasible in existing buildings, whether there are natural or human impacts, for example: earthquakes or missiles; that threaten building occupants.

The following mind map represents consequential impacts on stairwells, rather than superstructures, without taking into account variation in individual or planned evacuation speeds; which depend in turn upon immediate floor-level casualties, and willingness of non-casualties to engage in near-peer evacuations.

Notes on Feevy

Feevy is a free online service for collecting and recasting RSS feeds in sleek, pre-formatted widgets (three+ styles) that I learned about in the Blogging for Educators workshop (TESOL EVO, 2008). I've tried it out in the sidebar, and in a post on this blog, with both a feed from a separate blog, and a comment feed from this blog. [I've removed the experimental post, and replaced the experimental sidebar widget already.]

One upside of Feevy is, like in PageFlakes, you don't need to know where to find or how to construct an RSS feed for a blog or website. You can simply copy the URL of the site you want to add to your widget, and paste the URL into the Feevy site, which creates the widget code for you, either from URLs (one at a time) or from OPML input (in batches). The more sites you add to your Feevy collection, the more content is likely to bubble up through the widget itself. Another upside is you can put Feevy widget code almost anywhere on your blog or site, or in multiple locations.

Though I had already written, "...you can only have one Feevy widget...," [that was wrong;] there are ways you can trick up different displays by tagging the blogs you add or have added to your Feevy collection, and tweaking the appearance of the widget. For details, please check the FAQ (item 2.5, Can I tag the blogs in my feevy for... different feevies? 2008.03.04) [or compare the two widgets currently in the sidebar {upper and lower right, 2008.03.05}].

A word about smile-e

Smile-e (2007)
Originally uploaded by pabeaufait.

This post introduces a new logo for pab's potpourri, smile-e (2007), created with Omni Graffle Pro.

The concept is actually about three years old, but has come a long way since 2004. It has survived two trans-oceanic relocations: one on paper, another on disk.

The yin-yang design represents blending of face-to-face and online communication. The smiley on top of the "e" indicates preference for face-to-face communication.

Smile-e (2004)
Originally uploaded by pabeaufait.