EYE kiaroLED(TM) Luminaire Named Top Product by Building Operating Management

EYE Lighting International, a leading manufacturer of lamps, luminaires and related lighting products, announced today that its kiaroLED outdoor architectural luminaire has been recognized as a "Top Product" by the readers of Building Operating Management magazine.

Introduced in 2011, kiaroLED has quickly gained market acceptance due to precision optics that focus light on task, reduce glare, and eliminate light spillage behind the pole. "KiaroLED is perfect for parking areas, business parks, campuses, hotels, and general area lighting," said Rob Freitag, VP Marketing for EYE Lighting. "Building owners and facility managers now understand that installing outdoor LED lighting is a quick way to reduce operating costs and save energy. KiaroLED also provides better lighting for improved safety and security."

Teresa Bair, Technical Marketing Manager for kiaroLED, added, "We designed kiaroLED with features important to the building management market: dimming capability, motion sensing, easy installation and maintenance. And its stylish appearance goes well with all business environments. Needless to say, we think the readers of BOM chose well."

EYE Lighting International, with over 100,000 square feet of manufacturing space located near Cleveland, Ohio, is a leading provider of lamps and related lighting products. For more than 20 years, the company has introduced the latest technologies in High-Intensity-Discharge and Halogen lamps, luminaires and related lighting products to designers and specifiers.

EYE Lighting high performance products are known for excellent color rendering, long-life, reliability, and superior quality... testimony to its ISO Certifications. EYE Lighting is the only lighting company in the world with an ISO 17025 accredited lab under the same roof as manufacturing. Every day satisfied customers specify EYE Lighting products to reduce energy use, save money, and meet sustainability goals.

The company provides lighting application products ranging from a decorative lamp of 20W light output to that of a city streetlight with 300W high intensity discharge (HID).

Bridgelux's advanced LED arrays provide mechanical and optical affinity with earlier products, facilitating the customers with all inclusive developments, reducing design efforts. The entire array is designed to line up with the established drive currents to make the process of electronic driver selection easy for the upcoming luminaire and lamp product development, extending its market period.

According to Jeff Spencer, the director of product management commercial for Schneider Electric's Juno Lighting Group, the development risks are considerably minimized by Bridgelux's LED arrays' product design and its dedication to novelty, ensuring simplified designing. This recent development can be adopted by stabilizing the platform with the LED array products providing customers with this progressive technology without product overhaul.

Bridgelux arrays exits in a wide series of color temperatures ranging from 2700K to 5600K provided with 3 SDCM color control options for clear and constant lighting installations, providing numerous color rendering index (CRI) options with improved design flexibility for luminaire and lamp producers.

Lit up with art, music, behold the Yamuna

In the dark, a small stretch of the bank along the otherwise polluted Yamuna resembled an oasis of light. Dotted with installations of objects connected to the river and its fragile ecology, a string of over 1,000 bottles lit with fluorescent LED sticks drew light patterns across the water.

Welcome to the 'Yamuna-Elbe Public Art and Outreach Program', an initiative to connect the river Elbe in Hamburg, Germany, to the Yamuna in Delhi.

At the heart of the project is a series of public art projects, installations by artists like Atul Bhalla, Sheba Chachi and Gigi Scaria and related activities to raise awareness about the river, its sustainability and ecology and draw more people to the riverfront to experience it as a tangible urban heritage.

Co-curated by Ravi Agarwal, a Delhi-based environmentalist-artist, and Till Krause, a land artist from Hamburg, the project is trying to create "ecologically sustainable rivers in cities". The highly polluted Yamuna is almost reduced to a drain in the capital.

"We wanted to draw more people to the river. People in the capital rarely visit the river. But ever since the project has started, it has drawn a steady stream of visitors," Agarwal told IANS.

"People have to see the river and decide. No amount of description in newspapers or in the media can compensate for physically experiencing the river," Agarwal said at the project site near Loha Pul -- an old iron road and rail bridge -- on the northeastern fringe of the metropolis.

It made for a striking image when an illuminated wooden jetty abutted into the shallow pool and an installation of a woman's private part swathed in bandages burned with fires - simulated by projections of coloured lights in the middle of the inky river.

Then, the replica of an eco-diversity park and a giant river water purifier shaped like a high-rise shimmered like a modern-day monument.

Over the weekend, an orchestra of wind instruments and percussion from around the world recreated the story of Yamuna in a concert, "Stories Through Sound".

Created by multi-percussionist Suchet Malhotra and western folk musician Glenn Louvet, the concert was divided into four segments -- cosmos, rivers of the forest, industry and river meets the ocean.

The musicians presented the story of the Yamuna with music from a combination of indigenous instruments like the horn, didgeridoo, bongos, frame drums, darbuka, djembe, pipes and flutes.

"We used at least 60 instruments. This symphony was created specially for the Yamuna project. This is the first time I have told the story of a river through my music," world musician Malhotra told IANS.

He said "composing the symphony was a revelation".

"We discovered in the course of our research that at least three billion litres of sewage is being pumped into the water. Such facts disappoint people, hence the music to raise awareness about the river," he said.

On Friday, musician Vidya Shah will render Indian classical vocals dedicated to the river.

Over the weekend, the river and its ecology unveiled itself to children who participated in a Yamuna walk with environmentalist Vimlendu Jha.

They followed the river downstream from five kilometres north of the Wazirabad barrage where it is relatively cleaner to the Najafgarh drain, the blackest sewage channel draining into the river, and converged with feedback at Loha Pul.

A Central Park ghost seen in a room-sized camera

This ghostly apparition has been created with a camera obscura, the ancient ancestor of the modern camera. Here, a scene outside the room is projected through a pinhole in one wall and appears on the opposite wall, upside down, but with colour and perspective preserved.

The Greek philosopher Aristotle described the phenomenon in the 4th century BC and the camera became an essential tool for artists of the Renaissance - or so painter David Hockney argues. He claims artists projected images onto a flat surface, using the detail to guide their art, an idea hotly contested by art historians and physicists alike.

The camera obscura has also become an enduring object of fascination for Cuban-born photographer Abelardo Morell, whose 1991 image of the process itself, Light Bulb, appears below. Since then, Morell has worked out the best way to photograph the faint images, including this view of Central Park, Manhattan.

Working at the Advanced magicshine bike light Source at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, California, and FLASH, the free-electron laser in Hamburg, Germany, a team led by Stefano Marchesini has used the pinhole effect to create X-ray holograms of microscopic objects. When more holes were required to brighten the dim images, the challenge became how to assemble the information from overlapping images, says Marchesini.

Enter the impressive-sounding, massively parallel Fourier-transform holography. With an electron beam Marchesini's team etched a 2-micrometre-square reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, and created holograms of the drawing and of the bacterium Spiroplasma milliferum. He hopes the technique will be a useful tool since the X-ray holograms it creates are among the brightest, sharpest images of microscopic objects ever.

Riding into the future

PETER Kirkham has had his share of bumps and scrapes on his regular cycling commute from Berwick to South Melbourne.

His latest crash was the most serious: he and a car merging on to the Princes Highway at Springvale at dusk collided, and he landed on the bonnet and then the windscreen. Mr Kirkham had scans in hospital for a broken back, a sore hip and leg.

Mr Kirkham blames driver behaviour rather than the roads for any lack of safety on the bike. He notes the impatient drivers, the unobservant ones who pull in front of him to park, or the plain idiotic travellers who throw partially-full beer cans at him, or swerve his way.

The drivers get worse as you travel further into the outer suburbs where riders are more of an oddity, he said.

He admits there are a few "dodgy spots" on the Princes Highway where bike lanes appear then disappear ― such as between Fountain Gate and Hallam-Belgrave Road ― or where there are narrow road-shoulders between Berwick and Pakenham.

"Between Pakenham and Berwick, you're close to the dirt shoulder of the road while cars are going at 90-100km/h. It gets better as you go between Berwick and Narre Warren ― the traffic slows down for traffic lights.

"Dandenong is actually better to travel through than Narre Warren. You'd think it would be the other way around."

Safe Cycling Australia launched a petition in June calling for a one-metre minimum safe passing distance around cyclists, and it has received more than 1000 signatures. It has also prepared pro forma or template letters that concerned cyclists can send to federal and state ministers.

Mr Kirkham questioned how a one-metre rule could be properly enforced.

"If you make it a definitive rule, how can you prove the vehicle is within a metre of the bike?" Mr Kirkham said. "But I'd like to see it come in. There needs to be an attitudinal change from drivers. The roads are plenty wide enough for cars and bikes to fit.