Since then, the self-consciously styled home has become almost commonplace, particularly in cities like New York and Los Angeles where creative types congregate. “It’s not just rich people now,” he said. “It’s all of us.”

As Andersen noted in a recent issue of Vanity Fair, in an essay on the larger topic of cultural stasis, millions of Americans are now “amateur stylists — scrupulously attending, as never before, to the details and meanings of the design and decor of their homes, their clothes, their appliances, their meals, their hobbies, and more.”

For proof of this phenomenon, one need only consult one of the shelter magazines or a design blog like Apartment Therapy that features photos of homes designed down to the last detail. Studying these spaces, one can’t help noticing that the decor seems to bear little relationship to the way people actually live: deer antlers adorn the walls of people who almost certainly don’t hunt; vintage typewriters sit on school desks too small to be functional; books have been arranged on shelves by color to reflect some perceived notion of good design.

Elaine Miller, who writes Decorno, an occasionally sharp-tongued design blog, believes this sort of stagecraft is largely a result of living through social media.

“People are insanely self-conscious,” Miller said. “People act like they’re always being watched. Even their house is a performance.”

Ah, the bar cart. If there’s one thing that typifies the self-consciously styled home, it may be that. Evoking a mythical Hollywood Regency glamour, the bar cart telegraphs that the resident leads a life as rich as a socialite in a Slim Aarons photo and is constantly entertaining at home, though in reality it’s a prop that mostly collects dust. (This reporter should know: Of the three pieces of furniture in his living room, one is a bar cart that’s still waiting for its first party.)

But with so many of us aspiring to be amateur Dorothy Drapers (and posting the evidence on design blogs), it’s inevitable that once-fresh decorating ideas like the bar cart will become cliches.

Design classics like Barcelona chairs and Arco floor lamps are now so overplayed that it’s impossible to own them without feeling like a design victim.

At least one popular Tumblr has built its entire identity around ridiculing their presence in the homes featured on blogs. The site, which goes by a name that can’t be printed in this newspaper, calls out a range of familiar design cliches (from the Saarinen Womb Chair to a “terrarium that contains a tiny succulent array perched upon a stack of books”). But even seemingly uncommon decorative accessories like a library card catalog are pilloried, illustrating the been-there-seen-that feedback loop that will be familiar to any Pinterest user.

One wonders if earlier generations were so self-conscious about decorating their homes. Didn’t they simply buy things they liked or could put to good use, and keep them for decades?

Miller agreed with that theory — up to a point. “Even my grandparents went out and bought the same lamps as their neighbors,” she said. “The difference was, they weren’t trying to be awesome. They were just trying to get lights in their house.”

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A mid-March inspection of the lighting conditions in the Christopher St. area led to the identification of more than 100  illumination problems. Today, two months later, the famed West Village street remains poorly lit.

The lighting inspection was sponsored by state Senator Tom Duane, in collaboration with City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, Congressmember Jerrold Nadler, state Assemblymember Deborah Glick, Community Board 2 and the West Village Coalition. The survey was conducted on March 15 and covered the area between W. 10th and Morton Sts. from Sixth Ave. to West St.

The study of the 28-block area followed a series of meetings between Duane and neighborhood stakeholders to discuss ways to increase safety on Christopher St. and in the surrounding blocks.

“Ensuring that our streets are as well-lighted as possible will help make our community safer and our neighborhood more welcoming for everyone who lives, works and visits here,” Duane said.

Joined by representatives of the Sixth Police Precinct, the Bedford-Barrow-Commerce Block Association, the Christopher St. Patrol and private volunteers, Duane and his staff identified 18 instances where streetlights were missing from their bases, nonfunctioning or obstructed by tree limbs. In addition, more than 100 multifamily residences in the survey area reportedly failed to meet exterior lighting requirements.

New York City law, Duane noted, requires owners of multifamily dwellings to “install and maintain one or more lights at or near the outside of the front entranceway of the building” to be kept lit from sunset to sunrise.

The findings of the survey, Duane said, have been transferred to the city’s Department of Transportation — the agency in charge of proper placement and functioning of streetlights — and to the Parks Department, which is responsible for pruning any trees that are blocking streetlights. Duane also said he sent letters to property owners of residential buildings lacking legally required exterior illumination to remind them of the existing regulations.

Numerous owners of multifamily residences responded to his outreach, Duane said, adding that he also heard back from some owners of single-family residences who — although not subject to the law — were interested in improving their buildings’ exterior lighting in the interest of the neighborhood.

Duane said the agencies have begun to take action to resolve the illumination issues found in the survey.

However, some residents and visitors of the Christopher St. area said they are not satisfied with what has been done on lighting in the past two months.

Dave Poster, head of the volunteer anticrime Christopher St. Patrol, was a member of one of the teams that surveyed the Christopher St. lighting conditions last March. Poster said he was enthusiastic about Duane’s initiative to assess outdoor illumination in the neighborhood, adding that well-lit streets are necessary to reduce criminal activity in the area.

“It’s safer for residents and visitors, and that’s what I’ve been doing for 21 years,” the activist said.

Yet, sadly, Poster noted, no changes have been implemented to address the insufficient illumination in some of the blocks bordering the Hudson River Park.

“There’s been no difference made, and I’d like to see a difference down here as much as anybody else would,” he said.

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Tipmont REMC’s EnviroWatts program gave grants to three area nonprofits involved in green initiatives.

Tipmont’s program gave out $22,000 to Civic Theatre of Greater Lafayette, Wabash River Enhancement Corp. and The West Lafayette (WL) Tree Fund.

The Civic Theatre is using their $7,000 toward LED stage lighting. This lighting will cut its current power use in half. LED lighting consumes less electricity than the current system and will produce less heating, saving on air conditioning costs.

Wabash River Enhancement Corp. will purchase 100 rain barrels, stands, and downspout diverters for their watershed program with their $10,000. This program encourages landowners to capture and use rainwater rather than allowing polluted runoff to enter waterways. The barrels will be distributed in a cost-sharing program.

The WL Tree Fund will be purchasing and planting 50 trees in the Northwestern Heights neighborhood with $5,000. These will replace 40 ash trees along Summit Drive. Replacing ash trees is necessary due to the recent emerald ash borer infestation.

“This grant distribution brings the program’s total to 375,004 awarded in 93 grants since funding began in 2001,” said Tipmont REMC chief executive officer Tim McCarthy.

About 1,000 Tipmont members participate in the green program by volunteering to contribute one cent per kilowatt hour of electricity they use, which is up to $5 a month.

Astronics Corporation, a leading provider of advanced technologies for the global aerospace and defense industries, announced today that its wholly-owned subsidiary, Astronics Luminescent Systems, Inc., has been selected by Learjet Inc., a subsidiary of Bombardier, to supply the illuminated instrument panels for its newly introduced Learjet 70* and Learjet 75* light business jets.

Peter J. Gundermann, President and Chief Executive Officer of Astronics, commented, "Being selected as a supplier for the new Learjet 70 and Learjet 75 aircraft speaks to our best-in-class technology and the strong relationship we have built with Learjet over the years. We believe the quality and performance of our cockpit lighting products complements the innovative flight decks Learjet designs into their aircraft."

Astronics will provide a complete suite of instruments panels that are illuminated with light emitting diodes (LEDs) which provide increased reliability while reducing power consumption.

Astronics Corporation is a leader in advanced, high-performance lighting, electrical power and automated test systems for the global aerospace and defense industries. Astronics' strategy is to develop and maintain positions of technical leadership in its chosen aerospace and defense markets, to leverage those positions to grow the amount of content and volume of product it sells to those markets and to selectively acquire businesses with similar technical capabilities that could benefit from its leadership position and strategic direction.

Astronics Corporation, and its wholly-owned subsidiaries, Astronics Advanced Electronic Systems Corp., Ballard Technology, Inc., DME Corporation and Luminescent Systems Inc., have a reputation for high-quality designs, exceptional responsiveness, strong brand recognition and best-in-class manufacturing practices.

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According to a report, Amazon is set to refresh its Kindle line of e-reader and tablets later this year with new products. The company will launch its first Kindle e-ink e-reader with a front-lit display and also a new larger screen Kindle Fire tablet, which will be based on Google’s Android OS but will be heavily skinned with Amazon’s UI much like the current Kindle Fire slate.

A source to Reuters revealed plans for the front-lit e-ink Kindle e-reader display after having seen a prototype of the device. The feature will allow readers of the e-ink display to read in dimly lit or dark environments without the need to purchase an external book light. Though the feature will make its debut on the Kindle, it had appeared in the past on Sony Reader, an e-ink rival, and more recently on competitor Barnes & Noble’s Nook Simple Touch with Glow Light.

The upside of the front-lit display would be the convenience factor, but the downside is that it will have some marginal impact on the Kindle’s battery life. As the Kindle has battery stamina, this should not be a huge hit. As the LED light would cost very little–approximately $10–it is said that Amazon may keep prices on par or increase prices slightly to offset costs.

There were previous rumors of a color e-ink panel, but that may not happen at least this year.

Instead, for color, Amazon is said to be releasing a larger version of its LCD-based Kindle Fire tablet with an 8.9-inch display. An 8.9-inch and even a 10-inch Kindle Fire tablet were both rumored since before Amazon debuted the 7-inch tablet, which captured a big market share due to its more economical price point in the Android slate market.

The Huntsville Botanical Garden held a special ribbon cutting on Tuesday to unveil its new parking area.

Huntsville Mayor Tommy Battle and Madison Mayor Paul Finley helped cut a garden-themed ribbon.  The facility’s new parking garden has a sub-surface, and is also made of materials recycled from previous projects around Huntsville.

Workers installed special features for water management, heat reduction, and heat island mitigation.

“We also worked with the city in changing the code for the LED lighting requirements in parking lots, said Paula Steigerwald, the Garden’s CEO.

LED fixtures are said to offer a better quality of light using 50 percent less energy, with three times the bulb life.

The parking area is also designed to allow rain from storms to be filtered and strategically used in so-called “rain gardens”, rather than becoming runoff.

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Thank you. Welcome everyone. I’m Sid Rosenblatt from Universal Display. Universal Display is a technology development company. We formed a company that fund the research at Princeton University and the University of Southern California in the field of emissive materials and we continue to fund the research. Please read all of our 10-K’s and 10-Q’s. You see these every time. We all pay our lawyers a lot of money to write these things and I’d appreciate it if somebody would read it, so.

We have developed a technology in organic light emitting diode technology and you hear a lot about it today. In 1996 when we started funding the research and started getting patents in this, no one really knew what light emission materials are.

The key to Universal Display’s technology is our power efficiency, convention OLED technology. It was developed by Kodak Corporation in the early 80’s and what our scientists at Princeton and USC were able to do, is come with a much more efficient light emitting material. In that we use 75% less power to get the same amount of light out of the devise that a conventional OLED would.

We have very broad patents on the architecture of using what we call phosphorescent OLEDs, phosphorescence and I’ll sort of go through what that is, but it is a process of converting energy into usable light. In addition to that, we provide and make the materials that go into the devices. Today it is in Smartphones, it’s in all of the Galaxy phones, it’s in all of Samsung Galaxy phones, it is also in the Razor phone, it is in a number of other devices.

Recently you have heard that Samsung and LG, each are talking about introducing OLED TVs, 55-inch TVs, an estimated price about $9000. I don’t think they are going to be selling them in Best Buy’s at $9000, but it is product introduction. The TV, some of you may have seen it at TES, either one of them. They are very bright. They inherently switch on and off three times faster than video rates.

One of the keys to OLED technology that’s different in any other technology is that it has a true black background than when you light it. You put light up the pixels and you get a million to one contrast ratio and the 55-inch TV was a quarter of an inch thick and is very power efficient. So we expect these to be in the market in real mass production, probably the end of 2013, early 2014.

One of the other areas that is currently really in the very early stages, but those folks are at Lightfair and can also use these materials for lighting applications. These are very efficient light emitters. You have a different form factor. They are thin. It’s as thin as wherever two pieces of glass, you put it between or if you put it on plastic or foil, it’s as thin as whatever substrate you put it on.

We have more than 1,400 patents issued and pending worldwide, in the basic architecture of using a phosphorus emitter, down to specific materials that we make and sell. We have our materials made for us by PPG industries and then we sell these. It’s our partners that we have today. We have a long-term license agreement with Samsung. Samsung is about 95% or 96% of the OLED market today.

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Stateside, the war effort was beginning to ramp up. On May 5, 1942, the sixth minesweeper to be built in Whitestone in the past seven weeks slid into the East River. The boat was christened at the Wheeler Shipbuilding Corp.’s yard at the foot of 154th Street.

Officials at the Wheeler yard indicated that minesweeper production was gradually being stepped up and would soon maintain a pace of one a week. The company held the coveted Navy “E” pennant for efficiency in turning out the highly important minesweepers.

On May 18, 1942, Queens underwent its first blackout. Only the Flushing and Astoria trains, as well as factories engaged in war production, were exempt. More than 35,000 air raid wardens in the borough took part in the blackout. All street lights and traffic lights were turned off and automobiles were stopped and required to turn off their lights.

Traffic was at a standstill for 20 minutes. A photograph from a roof at Steinway Street and 30th Avenue only showed lights at the distant Brewster Building, busy turning out Brewster aircraft for the war effort.

Even though the U.S. Army had been ordered to take charge of the nation’s commercial airlines, LaGuardia Field “will not be taken over tomorrow afternoon, or next week,” Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia said as he arrived May 15, 1942.

He was returning from Washington, D.C., where he met President Franklin D. Roosevelt in a conference on “routine business.” LaGuardia Field, the busiest airport in the world, had been busier than ever in recent months as the travel of military personnel on official business increased steadily.

Although the Army was not expected to curtail civilian travel entirely, such travel was severely restricted. Civilians, unless it was “absolutely necessary,” were to take trains.

A Star Journal reporter went around to 50 gas stations trying to get gas without a ration card. At each station, he got the same response: no card, no gas. And even if he had the card, in most of the stations there was no gas to be sold.

At one station, a half-dozen cars were parked around the tanks. The dealer said, “I expect a delivery of gas in 15 minutes. These drivers are regular customers and I told them to come at this time.”

In another station, a dealer refused to sell more than 3 gallons: “We haven’t enough gas to sell more.”

The ranking naval hero of Queens, Lt. John Bulkeley, who “slapped” a Japanese cruiser down to Davey Jones’ locker with a torpedo from his PT boat, was introduced by LaGuardia to a crowd estimated to top a million for a May 17, 1942, event in Central Park.

Billed as the “I Am an American Day Rally,” the event was planned as a “reaffirmation of allegiance of the Constitution and all-out support for the nation’s war programs.”

Bulkeley also notched another spot in the hall of fame when he piloted the speeding PT boat, which spirited Gen. Douglas MacArthur from Bataan to Australia under the guns of the Japanese fleet.

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"The new 9-Inch Radar Driver Feedback Sign is the first in a number of exciting new product launches we have planned for 2012 that is built on our new controller board design." said Jan DeSantis, Business Development Manager for TraffiCalm Systems. "The new sign will be available for shipment beginning June 1st, and we're anticipating that its light-weight footprint at just ten pounds along with the numeric, text and emoticon display capabilities will quickly make it an extremely popular part of our product line."

The fully-featured and affordably priced new DFB sign features a fully enclosed electronic control system (ECS) that can be easily removed from the mounting frame as a complete unit for simplified installation and repair making it a labor efficient and cost effective solution.

The display shows the speeds of approaching vehicles using amber LEDs and is designed for use in areas where speeds are expected to be 35 mph or less; however, the sign is capable of showing and recording a wide range of speeds from 5 mph to 99 mph.

In addition, the new 9-Inch Radar Driver Feed Back Sign with Slow Down Message sign face measures a compact 8" by 24" inches, and has two 9" high LED highway gothic numerals to clearly display the speed.

"As an added benefit, the new 9-Inch Radar Driver FeedBack (DFB) can also display a "SLOW DOWN" message in two lines of 3" high characters, or a 9" high 'happy' or 'sad' face emoticon." added DeSantis. "This really is a great product for urban and residential traffic applications and comes with a five-year warranty.

All of TraffiCalm Systems' DriveBrite radar driver feedback sign products feature a selection of available intelligent power options that make the signs ideal for use in a wide variety of settings along with solar options for areas of installation where direct power is not available or is cost prohibitive.

With TraffiCalm's SafetyCalm custom data collection software, information such as traffic volume, peak traffic hours, vehicle speeds, and more can be quickly downloaded directly via a wireless Bluetooth link that allows local officials, law enforcement agencies, and transit authorities to make informed planning and enforcement decisions based on timely access to valuable traffic data.

TraffiCalm's first generation DFBs and Variable Speed Limit Signs have been installed world-wide and include their successful DriveBrite22" Highway Radar Driver Feedback and 15" Urban Radar Driver Feedback sign. Both products feature: real time speed feedback, Bluetooth Class 1 connectivity, programmable speed thresholds, high-impact polycarbonate electronics unit, solar power options, and are offered in white, yellow, fluorescent yellow-green, or fluorescent orange faceplates using the super-high efficiency retro-reflective 3M Diamond Grade Reflective Sheeting Series.

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It isn't every day that a stock analyst gets both sides of a call right. But it surely helps when you have built a model for analyzing an industry.

In Jed Dorsheimer's view, the model he built for the light-emitting-diode industry is what turned him from a bridesmaid in the Best on the Street survey (he finished second in 2010 in the alternative-energy category based on his solar picks) to the top of the ranks in the electronic and electrical equipment industry this year. That model led him to downgrade Aixtron SE, a maker of equipment for producing LEDs, to a sell early last May, and the German company's American depositary shares skidded 66% through year's end.

Mr. Dorsheimer, an analyst at Canaccord Financial's Canaccord Genuity unit who has been covering the LED industry for about a decade, in 2007 saw a knowledge gap: No market-research firm had a supply-demand model to understand pricing in the industry. So he began building such a model, to see "who had what out there in the field." He unveiled it in 2009 in a white paper titled "The Second Cycle."

The paper led him to conclude that LED-building tools like Aixtron's would be in demand and that the company's shares were undervalued. Mr. Dorsheimer initiated coverage on Aixtron in July 2009 with a buy rating, and its shares nearly tripled through the time of his sell call in May 2011, when he saw a cyclical downturn amid a peak in equipment sales.

Mr. Dorsheimer takes particular pride in his ability to see the landscape and correctly call the peak and trough. "It's difficult to get people into a name and pull them out of a name, lending bias to one-sided calls," he says.

Not all picks can be winners on both sides. Mr. Dorsheimer's optimism on SemiLEDS Corp., a maker of LED chips and components sold primarily to customers in China and Taiwan, didn't pan out. Launching coverage on SemiLEDS about a month after its IPO with a buy rating in mid-January, Mr. Dorsheimer saw shares decline 36% through mid-April, when he downgraded his rating to a hold.

He pointed to a legal battle with rival Cree Inc. as among the factors weighing on shares. Ultimately, though, "the inability to sell beyond the Chinese and Taiwanese market…led to the poor performance," he says.

When rating stocks, the 38-year-old Mr. Dorsheimer first tries to determine the macroeconomic environment that would have an impact on a particular industry (his model for the LED industry is an example). Then, he'll look to see which companies might outperform or underperform based on various performance estimates. He then slots them roughly into categories of expected performance over the course of a year and rates them buy, hold or sell.

One name he likes this year is Acuity Brands Inc., which he rates as a buy. He sees it as an early rebound opportunity in a recovering economy, saying that "Wall Street is underestimating the earnings power and growth potential."

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