Elemental

Ten years later, and still not everyone gets all of this. However, things are changing. Facebook has a lot to answer for. When my brother (a chef, so not often “connected” to the internet except by SMS) gets a twitter account, then I’ll know I can stop banging on about this stuff.

In the meantime, revisit the message of Cluetrain, brainchild of Chris Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger and Rick Levine via Michael Specht:

mel starrs Diversions Cluetrain Manifesto, Facebook, Marketing, Micro-blogging, social media, social network, twitter, Web 2.0

What I’ve been reading about:

• Analyst concerns over Persimmon’s £900m debt – 24/10/2008 – Contract Journal – really good explanation of debt…

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What I’ve been reading about:

• Construction now officially in recession – 24/10/2008 – Contract Journal – It's official. Deep joy.

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What I’ve been reading about:

• Building a Sustainable Design Community | Fast Company – "The Designers Accord is neither a governing body like the American Institute of Graphic Arts (the largest industry organization) nor a third-party certification standard like LEED. It is an agreement to reroute design, manufacturing, and even the economy toward a livable ecological future. "Our goal isn't to create a thing. It's to re-create our mind-set," Casey says"
• Carbon emissions from electricity generation, by country « lightbucket – Geek-tastic stats on electricity: "Table 1 below lists the 35 countries with the highest electrical energy generation in 2007, sorted in descending order of emissions per unit electrical energy generated. The table is based on data from CARMA (with units converted to metric)."

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What I’ve been reading about:

• AIArchitect This Week | The 10:20:30 Rule – "Fire your 10 percent worst clients each year. Replace the bottom 20 percent and reward the top 20 percent of your employees and consultants. Focus on the 30 percent most and least successful projects."

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Well, I never thought I’d write that as a blog title! I’m not a fan of electric heating and haven’t been since before I did some investigation into Part L back in 2002.

However, as I was browsing through my copy of h&v news this week I came across an article by Kelly Butler of TEHVA, some of which I agreed with. As I said when I started blogging, changing my mind is my prerogative:

it is clear that as the generation of electricity de-carbonises, any form of heating that uses electricity increases in carbon defined popularity. But de-carbonisation is some way off yet and it takes a big leap of faith in political terms to guide us towards a more strategic set of policy instruments that appreciate that the services of the future need to built into the houses of today.

His crystal ball is showing him a future where the grid is decarbonised and it’s business as usual. Butler goes on to point out the applications where electric heating is suited:

domestic electric heating and hot water services are ideally suited to dwellings that have:

• Low heat requirements and the need for highly responsive well controlled heating, which is why they are so popular in new apartments.

• Restrictions on other services, such as gas pipe for high rise or economically unviable CHP; again relevant in apartments.

• Small hot water draw-off, with smaller cylinders and in some cases instantaneous delivery.

• Some form of renewable such as solar or heat pumps which needs to work with a supplementary heat source.

However, one thing Butler tries to gloss over is the fact that heating water using electricity (which is a scarce resource) could be at the detriment of using it for other uses which cannot be fuelled any other way. The grid capacity is just not there. Also the vision of business as usual with a decarbonised grid seems rosy and contrary to say, a Transitions Towns type vision. As Butler says himself, it is a big leap of faith, but I suppose it is one possible scenario of the future.

I wasn’t completely won over by the electric heating special feature though – the page opposite had a marketing pitch from an electric heating manufacturer which was wholly lacking in substance. Electric heating has it’s place, and will probably continue to replace some gas applications in the future, but an article on how to ‘trick’ Part L compliance does still not sit well with me.

mel starrs Opinion Electric heating, electricity, Kelly Butler, renewable energy

What I’ve been reading about:

• Diocese of London – Regeneration map – "Over the past 12 months, the Diocese of London and Groundwork have been working to map the major areas of regeneration across the capital. This has involved bringing together data created by national, regional and local bodies to create a map covering the whole capital. This is now being used to inform the strategic development priorities and investments for the Diocese of London.
  The following maps are made available to encourage those living and working in London to understand the scale of the change in their areas."

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What I’ve been reading about:

• Degree Days for energy management – via Melanie Thomson's Get Sust: Russell Layberry of the Environmental Change Institute, Oxford University Centre for the Environment, has been reviewing UK degree day data and has developed a dataset that is more accurate than traditional sources (which are calculated from hourly Met Office data rather than daily maximum and minimum temperatures).
• Sustainable buildings with AEC+Planning+Facility management – "This research explores associations between LEED criteria, project life cycle, stakeholder interests, and the delivery systems used in building construction.
  The paper presents a matrix of weighted indexes to explain and provide increased collaboration among project participants, and improved efficiency throughout the project life cycle."

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Image via Wikipedia

Clearing out some MBA stuff and keep coming across snippets regarding models, heuristics and concepts which I want to keep for future reference. Here are some:

• theories are stable explanations for recurring phenomena
• theorising is “sense making”
• “there is nothing so practical as good theory”
• 3 stages to theorising:
  • concepts (define)
  • conceptual framework (description of connections)
  • theory

And some stuff on cognitive styles:

• Intuition – “knowing, without knowing why”
• “Truly outstanding managers are those who can couple hunch, judgement and synthesis with logic and analysis” (Henry Mintzberg)

Don’t have the money or rigid blocks of time to do an MBA? Check out this reading list “The Personal MBA Recommended Reading List” which has been knocking around for a couple of years. You’ll still need ‘time’ but with disciplined self learning you could theoretically get through the list in 1 year (77 books in total). More probable that it will take 2-5 years though…

And books I would recommend which aren’t necessarily on the list above but which touch on theories, statistics, decision making and all that stuff:

Reckoning with Risk: Learning to Live with Uncertainty Gerd Gigerenzer

Judgment in Managerial Decision Making Max Bazerman

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything Levitt and Dubner

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference Malcolm Gladwell

Supercrunchers: How Anything Can Be Predicted Ian Ayres

and a couple I have on my reading list for my holidays next week:

Wikinomics Dan Tapscott

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable Nassim Nicholas Taleb

mel starrs Geekery books, Malcolm Gladwell, Management, Marketing, MBA

What I’ve been reading about:

• CCK08: Two Conversations with Gen Millennium, and Some Questions on Learning and Knowledge Failures – Generational differences in the workplace and KM – another great article from Dave Pollard: "But in other respects this is terrible news. Aside from the wasted content effort, this means that most young people will learn from peers, not from mentors. How much of what senior people know will never be learned by younger workers, simply because the networks of trust necessary for valuable conversations will not have been forged (and given that Gen Millennium workers are expected to change jobs on average every four years, might never be forged)?" – go read the whole thing.

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