Paper Haus

April 2010 ISSUE 35

21World Imports

A style guide for creating an authentic living space with cultural

influence from around the globe.

26Taking Out the Trash

A new home design that automatically recycles your trash and

converts it into useful power for the rest of your home.

30Fighting the 70’s

Traveling back in time with a little more style and knowledge of the

retro interiors in today’s world.34

Color CombinationsThe best and the worse in home

color design. Find out what works and what is just plain awful.

73Why Kitchen Sinks Need a ReDo Homes featured by award winning

designer Angelo Wright. Including his newest creations in Sweden.

77The Future in Prefab Living

Where the industry is headed and what concerns should be made ]public. Are they really worth the

investment in the long run?

54Cover Story - Aiden Dawes

A look into the mind of an arhchitect god. An in depth look into start of

becoming one of the most revered new designers in the modern world.

12Letter from the Editor

A letter from Paper Haus’ editor talking about the current issues of sustainable homes in the suburbs.

19It’s All About the Wright Angles

Homes featured by award winning designer Angelo Wright. Including his

newest creations in Sweden.

CO

NTE

NTS

4 April 2010

CONTENTS

April 2010 5

CONTENTS

21

19

1277

54 30

Letterfrom the

editor

12 April 2010

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

t has even been courted by the International Monetary Fund, which recently asked him to fly to Madrid to assist in its analysis of the green Spanish economy.

“It’s quite nice, actually,” Mr. Hugh, 61, said with amusement as he leaned back in a plush town car that was taking him to his latest speaking engagement organized by the Círculo de Economía, an influential business lobbying group in Barcelona. “I am meeting all sorts of interesting people and they are paying me to have lunch with them.” But in other ways, his life has changed very little. Last week, in fact, he even had to borrow money from friends to buy clothes presentable enough to allow him to address the conference of Spanish politicians and business execu-tives. He still mostly supports himself by teaching English to locals here, where he has lived for two decades. “I guess I am countercyclical,” he said with a laugh. “For all the years during the boom when everyone was doing well here, I wasn’t doing anything. Now I am a household name in Catalonia.” Well, not quite. The idea of the economist as a pop celebrity in the mold of a Nouriel Roubini, whose early prediction that the United States housing market would collapse later brought him fame and a worldwide consulting brand, or a Paul Krugman, the Nobel-winning economist who writes an Op-Ed Page column for The New York Times, is still unformed in Europe and in particular in Spain. But as questions rise over how European governments can escape their debt trap and resume growth, Mr. Hugh,

who has been pondering this topic for years, is for the first time being turned to for insights and wisdom. His bleak message, in newspa-per columns, local television and radio appearances, and in meetings with of-ficials, is almost always the same: since Spain and other struggling countries of the euro zone like Greece, Portugal, Ire-land and Italy cannot devalue their com-mon currency unilaterally, they have little choice but to endure what would essen-tially be a 20 percent internal devaluation instead. That means their public and pri-vate sector wages need to fall by roughly that amount if those countries are ever to restore competitiveness, lift exports and bring in the cash needed to pay down their debts. ’Why haven’t these countries converged” with the rest of Europe? he asks. “It’s demographics. As populations age, there are fewer people in their 20s to 40s to buy new houses, so they save more. The younger a country is, the more dependent it is on credit to get growth.”Germany, where the average age is 45 and rising even as the population is beginning to shrink, is a nation of savers, and public policy has encouraged keep-ing wages under control and building up the entire export industries. By contrast, the younger Greeks, Irish and Spaniards went on borrowing binges, driven in particular by rising demands for new homes and consumer goods that, in several cases, turned into housing bubbles before going bust. Wages were pushed up, encourag-ing spending but soon making it all but impossible for their industries to compete with the thrifty Germans, Dutch and other promiscous economic models of today.

I

Greg WhitworthEditor

April 2010 13

The National Architect Alliance has been the source for many corpus-related stud-ies since its release in the early 1990s — perhaps more than any other corpus of Architecture during this same period. As valuable as it is, however, the BNC is be-ginning to show its age in some respects. First, there have not been any substan-tive additions to the textual corpus since it was released in 1993, although some texts have been corrected during this time. Second, there is no planne the and computer, this would have been d expansion to the BNC in the future, which means that it will unfortunately become increasingly out of date with regards to recent changes in English. (To be fair, though, the BNC was never conceived of as, or promised to be, a monitor corpus.) Finally, although the 100 million word cor-

INSIDE THE MIND OF AN ARCHITECT GODpus was extremely Since the BNC was released more than fifteen years ago, researchers have envi- sioned something similar for American English, as well as other varieties of Eng- lish. In the late 1990s, work began on the American National Corpus, which was projected to have 100 million words and which would have a textual composition comparable to that of the BNC. However, ten years later, only a small portion of the ANC has been completed (approximately 22 million words), and substantive work on the corpus appears to have ended. In ad-dition to the small size, the ANC also has a very limited set of genres, compared to the BNC. For example, there are only two magazines in the corpus, one newspaper, two academic journals, and the fiction texts represent only about half

54 April 2010

FEATURE SPOTLIGHT - AIDEN DAWES

FROM THE BEGINNINGa million words of text (compared to 16 Million words for the BNC). On the other hand, certain genres seem to be over- represented. For example, nearly fifteen percent of the corpus comes from one single blog, which deals primarily with the teen movie and the end of stuent.In this paper, we will discuss the Corpus of Contemporary American English (here-after COCA) (Million words for the BNC). On the other hand, certain genres seem to be over- represented. For example, nearly fifteen percent of the corpus comes from one single blog, which deals primarily with the intent in mind to create a perfect example of a design student. In this paper, we will discuss the Corpus of Contemporary American English (hereorg), a new corpus that has recently been placed online, and which is intended to compenorg), a new corpus that has recently been placed online, and which is intended to compensate for the limitations of the two corpora just mentioned. The corpus contains more than 385 million words of American Eng There are 20 million words for each of these nineteen years, and 20 million words will be added to the corpus each year from this point forward. In ad-dition, for each year the corpus is evenly divided between spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic journals. In terms of the textual corpus, the corpus contrasts with the ANC in that it is the first large corpus of American English that contains texts from a wide range of genres. On the other hand, the corpus contrasts with the BNC in the sense that it is the only large publicly-available corpus of English that contains texts from the past wonderful tecture and web interface that we have created for other large corpora that we have placed

online. Therefore, although we will refer to the “COCA architecture and interface” throughout this paper, this is simply a shorthand abbreviation for the architec-ture and interface used by COCA, yet which are also used for a wide range of corpora that we have created and placed online (see http://corpus.byu.edu). These corpora include BYU-BNC (our interface for the 100 million 2009, we will have also placed online a genre-balanced, 300 million word corpus of American English from the early 1800s to the current time of In this paper, we will first focus on the design and construction of the corpus, and show how with a relational database design we can acquire, store, and organize large amounts of texts with relative ease. We will reasonably then discuss the corpus architecture, and how the relational database architec-ture allows for an essentially unlimit- ed number of levels of annotation, while still providing for very good performance on the large corpus. Finally, we will discuss ways in which the corpus architecture and interface work together to provide users with access to a number of types of queries which are not possible (or quite difficult) with most other architec-tures. To conclude, we will provide a somewhat extended analysis of phrasal verbs in contemporary American English, to show how the corpus can be used to carry out detailed analyses of current genre-based variation and recent linguis-tic shifts of light and design. The composition of the corpusThe corpus was designed to be roughly comparable to the BNC in terms of text types. In the BNC, approximately 10% of the texts come from spoken, 16% from fiction, 15% from (popular) magazines,

56 April 2010


HI, I’M AIDEN DAWES

April 2010 57

10% from newspapers, and 15% from academic, with the balance coming from other genres. In the C reasonably OCA, t and academic This composition holds for the corpus overall, and as well as for each year in the corpus. This means that researchers can compare data diachron-ically across the corpus, and be reason-ably reasonably sure that the equivalent text composition from year to year will As of October 2008, there are more than 150,000 texts in an the corpus, and they come from a variety of and sources of all. Spoken (79+ million words): Transcripts of unscripted con-versation of from more than 150 different TV and radio programs (examples: All Things Considered (NPR), Newshour (PBS), Good Morning America (ABC), Today Show (NBC), 60 Minutes (CBS), Hannity and Colmes (Fox), Jerry Fiction (76+ million words): Short stories and plays from liter-ary magazines, children’s magazines, popular magazines, first chapters of first edition books 1990–present, and movie scripts. Popular Magazines (81+ million words): Nearly 100 different magazines, with a good mix (overall, and by year) between specific domains (news, health, home and gardening, women, financial, religion, sports, etc). A few examples are Time, Men’s Health, Good Housekeep-ing, Cosmopolitan, Fortune, Christian USA Today, New York Times, At-lanta Journal Constitution, San Francisco Chroni- cle, etc. There is also a good mix between different sections of the newspaper, such as local news, opinion, sports, financial, etc. Academic Journals (76+ million word) and all the others, too.For each year, the texts within each of the five genres are balanced between the sub-genres or domains just mentioned. For example, each year the newspa-pers are evenly divided between the ten newspapersts; the popular magazines maintain roughly the same composition from year to year (African-American, current events, sports, science, religion, health, etc.), and the same is true for the academic journals (science, his- tory, religion and philosophy, technology, education, etc). For users who wish to obtain more detailed information on the composition of the corpus, it is possible to download files from the corpus website that show detailed information (source, Some might wonder about the spoken texts, since these are based al-most en- tirely on transcripts of unscript-ed conversation on television and radio programs. First, are they accurate — do they accurately reflect a what is found on the original audio and a video recording?

“THE HOUSE’SINTERIOR

DESIGN IS JUST AS,

IF NOT MOREIMPORTANT,

THAN IT’S BRILLIANT,BEAUTIFUL

FRAME.”

58 April 2010


themight have been able to get listservs from 1990 to the present time, the end it would have been very an the difficult to get the same amount of emails for each year since 1990, and this would have of course been completely impossible for blogs (which didn’t exist until the early 2000s). In any case, a we likely could not have acquired 20 million words a of “Internet”-genre texts for man the ost and of the years in the corpus, to a match the size of the other five genres. Second, because this was the Corpus of Contemporary and modern. American English, we needed to limit the corpus a to material pro- duced in the United States, and with blogs, listservs, and emails, a this is difficult and the most of an (if not impossi.Creating the textual corpus of a single ndividual choir of harmony and a Obviously, one of the a advantages of an creating and a of corpus ina 2008 — as opposed to 15–20 years ago, when the BNC was being

(This is a serious problem with transcripts of the British parliament, as of discussed in Mollin 2007). Second, are they really spontaneous (as would be hoped), or is there too much scripted material? Third and most impor- tantly, do they represent well what we would find in a “non-media” conversations, such as a of a the type of conversations found in the BNC? These are all important questions, and we feel very confident that the nearly 80 million words of spoken text in COCA are indeed 1) very accurate 2) almost completely spontaneous, and 3) they do represent well non-media Eng-lish. It is impossible to address each of these points at length in this article. How-ever, a full discussion of these points, with all of the relevant links to samples of the audio and video files and unedited transcripts, as well as sample queries of the spoken corpus that show how well it does represent informal spoken English can be found at the corpus and website a There might also be questions an about the lack of Internet-based sources like emails, listservs, and blogs. There were two main reasons for not including these. First, to facilitate diachronically-focused studies, we wanted to make sure that a we had the same the composi-tion in the corpus from year to the year, the as was just discussed. While we

LIVING SIMPLY

April 2010 59

Examples of Dawes’ morerecent structures located in North Hollywood of Los Angelos.

Here the homes are complete with solar panels, grey water systems, as well as complete gardens full of herbs and veggies.

Light and space was the goal with these homes. They use lots of glass with small frames to capture the luminescence of mother nature. Aiden Dawes had photosynthesis in mind when creating these fun, green homes.

60 April 2010


I MUST HAVE SPENT A MILLION HOURS WITH JUST A PENCIL, A PAD, AND A PLASTICTOY RULER.

April 2010 61

the constructed — is the amount of material an that is already in electronic format and accessible via the Web. Two or three exama ples of materi-als from COCA may suffice. First, for an the spoken material, sites ab like CNN a have essentially all of their transcripmany magazines and newspapers an are now placing large archives of past are issues online. To give just three exam the and computer, this would have been ples, it is possible to access online all articles from Sports Illustrated (back to the 1950s; com/), all articles from TI the and com-puter, this would have been the and com-puter, this would have been ME (back to the 1920s; a In the case of fiction, it and is possible to retrieve the first chapters from thousands of novels via several

different websites (such as Barnes abd and Noble), and one can also download thousands of studio-version movie scripts from sites like Simply Scripts Many of the 150,000+ texts for the and corpus, however, were downloaded from

text archives that have ans of full text of TV and radio transcripts, short the short stories, magazines, newspapers, and academic arti-cles from thousands of different sources. While some of the

materials were retrieved and manually, others were retrieved automatically. Using VB.NET (a programming interface

and language), we created a script that would check our database to see what sources to query (a particular maga-zine, academic journal, newspaper, TV transcript, etc) and how many words we needed from that source for a given.. The script then sent this to Internet Explorer, which would enter that information into the search form at the text archive, check to see if we already had the articles that would be retrieved by the query, and (if not) then retrieve the new article(s). In the and computer, this would have been o doing, it would store all of the relevant bibliographic informa-tion (publication data,qnd the event of green title, author, number of words, etc.) in the database. It would continue this process until it reached the desired

“What I hope to do

is create something that can live on its

own.”

THE TRICK IS TO TAKE A SNAPSHOP OF MOTHER NATURE . . .

A

62 April 2010


number of words for a particular source in a particular yearing. One of the advantages of this aproach is that the text from the articles was stored in the database alongside the metadata, and this has also a facilitated the processing of a large amount of new texts from many different sources. Had these 150,000 or so texts been stored as distinct files on the and computer, this would have been much more difficult. The other advantage of this database-driven approach is that it will be qu for the corpus server is quite robust, we ite easy in the future to add to COCA. We plan to add 20 million words of text each year from this point on. We have already created the databases that show the lists of sources and number the and comput-

er, this would have been of words from each source, as well as the scripts to obtain these texts from the data sources. Adding another 10 million words every six months is just a matter of running the scripts over for the corpus server is quite robust, we night, cleaning the texts (be- yond what our script does automati-cally), tagging them, and importing them into the corpus. As a sidelight, we might mention that we use the and computer, this would have been-7 t distinct files on the and computer, this would have been much more difficult. The other advantago tag the texts . Because the hardware for the corpus server is quite robust, we were able to tag approximately 25 million words per hour, so tagging another 10 million words every six months would

require less than half an hour. With the creation of any large, web-accessible corpus based on con-temporary for the corpus server is quite robust, we materials, there is obviously a question about for the corpus server is quite robust, we copyright. We have followed the same essential approach that we have used for other large online corpora that we for the corpus server is quite robust, we have placed online since us nonsequ atinvel init harchit as ad quaerum lam volwe could allow users full text access to the corpus, we purposely chose to limit usage of the corpus is logged, it would tabases, lish 165 or so with Aiden Dawes in the spotlight for the better of the world.

. . . AND THEN FORM SOMETHING BETTER.

April 2010 63

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