Elemental

These are my links for September 25th through October 1st:

• "Passive" Heating and Cooling Is a Misnomer. It’s Active. : TreeHugger – "there are 36 Billion square feet of non-residential buildings from the 50s through the 80s that need to be retrofitted and greened. It ain't going to be easy."
• AIArchitect This Week | Buildings Brought to Life: The First Project to Meet the Living Building Challenge Is Only Months Away – "For a building to meet the Living Building Challenge it must consume net-zero energy and water. It must produce net-zero waste. It must choose an ecologically responsible site and maintain it. Inherently unsustainable materials (like lead, mercury, and formaldehyde) are not allowed, and there’s a limited radius from which materials can be transported to the building site during construction. Indoor air quality must be maintained, and, among many other requirements, all of these sustainability features must be featured in educational materials and programs at the building. Since the challenge was formulated in 2006, no building has met it."
• Don’t Underestimate the Power of Information in Pursuing Sustainability | GreenerBuildings.com – "The Energy Passport is a related idea that could be implemented much more easily. Conceived in the early '90s by Dr. Yuri Matrosov of the Moscow Center for Energy Efficiency (CENEf), Energy Passport programs were first adopted in Moscow, then in Germany, which is now pushing for it to be implemented in the EU as a whole.
  The initial Energy Passport is based on modeled energy use and then actual energy use is compared each year with predicted use, which then could be accessed by tenants and others. Clearly, comparing actual energy use with predicted energy use, as well as consumption trends over time, would give designers and developers an incentive to get the prediction right in the first place (parenthetical note, without clear modeling rules it is shockingly easy to game the results of energy models), as well as provide a clear benchmark for operators to manage their buildings more closely."
• Glass Industry Raises Concerns Over ASHRAE 90.1 Revisions That Could Reduce the Use of Glass in Nonresidential Buildings – Impact of potential changes to prescriptive route for ASHRAE 90.1 (similar to old elemental method for Part L) for glazing: "The proposal does not recognize or accommodate the need for different glazing solutions across climate zones. It is a "one size fits all" approach and will limit the glazing choice to a small range of high transmission, clear low-E glazings. They are not the appropriate products in all climate zones, especially the Southern cooling-dominated climates because of the sunlight intensity. Use of such high transmission glass in those climate zones will likely result in greater use of blinds resulting in increasing lighting energy usage.
  …There is only limited possibility for saving energy in buildings unless the space also includes automatic daylighting controls. Even with recent proposals, daylighting controls are only required in rooms where the "primary side-lighted area" is less than 1,000 square feet. …"
• How to keep your mouth shut « Scott Berkun – Oh, I have been here many times. Like Scott, I'm recovering ;o). Read the whole post: "But then later on, in a new job at Microsoft in a group known as MSTE, I discovered a world of dysfunction, despair and passive/aggression. No one spoke their mind in public. Few people worked hard or asked tough questions. Quality of work, and morale, was low. So I soon felt obligated to mention these facts as often and as loudly as possible to leadership. I even expected to be rewarded for telling people how bad things were. Why wouldn’t they want to hear this? I thought.
  Before I knew it, I was that guy. The guy who always complains."
• 500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error
• Constructing Excellence in the Built Environment » Blog Archive » Ethics and the Built Environment (by Jon de Souza) – If consultants only get involved at the Jus in Bello stage, is it ethical to build immoral buildings? Waiting avidly for part 2: "At present, the discussions about ethical behaviours in construction largely consider what happens after a decision has been taken to construct – the Jus In Buildo stage if you will. (Told you). What is missing is consideration of that former stage – the question asked is “can we build it”, but not “should we”. This seems to chime with our view of the world – that there are some things that simply shouldn’t be built. I mean, can any of us really morally defend snow domes in Dubai?"
• UK notches strong gains in renewable capacity in 2008 – Politics – Renewable energy news – Recharge – wind, solar, biofuels, wave/tidal/hydro and geothermal – "The UK’s installed renewable generation capacity surged 19% in 2008, thanks largely to a 727 megawatt (MW) increase in onshore wind capacity and a 192MW boost in offshore wind, according to new government statistics.
  At the same time, the amount of electricity produced from renewables in the UK rose a more modest 10%, to 21.6 gigawatt hours (GWh)."

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These are my links for April 21st through April 27th:

• NGS GreenSpec – Materials – Embodied energy – Data on embodied energy is notoriously difficult to find. This is a useful source: "The figures included in the following table are a much-shortened and abbreviated adaptation of a survey published by the Sustainable Energy Research Team (SERT) of the University of Bath. The survey, ‘Inventory of Carbon & Energy (ICE)’ V1.6a, was compiled and written by Prof. Geoff Hammond & Craig Jones, 2008. The full detailed survey, complete with original data, methodology and notes, is availablefrom www.bath.ac.uk/mech-eng/sert/embodied/
  The figures are based on a ‘Cradle-to-Gate’ analysis of publicly available information."
• BSD launches wiki site – Building Sustainable Design – "The BSD Project wiki allows you to upload details of projects, images and design team information to our project database.
  You don’t have to know every last detail about a particular project, just log in and fill in the bits you do know then encourage other members of the project team to upload information on the aspects of a scheme for which they were responsible.
  Like Wikipedia, the BSD site is a database open to everyone, to contribute or scrutinize and over time we hope the wiki will grow into a valuable resource of contemporary project design."
• ACE – CFLs won’t save much energy if they stay in the kitchen drawer – Andrew Warren on all those unsolicited lightbulbs. Not only unsolicited, but often packaged in boxes too big to go throught the letterbox, requiring an extra car trip to the post depot. *sigh*
  "Since 2002, the energy companies have distributed 262m light bulbs. That amounts to an average of over eleven CFLs for every single household in Britain. Nonetheless I keep meeting people who have never received any such largess. Bearing in mind the large number of studio and single-bedroom flats around, with far fewer than eleven light sources, that ought to mean that some households must have got at least a couple of dozen.
  Are they all installed? Amazingly, nobody seems to know. There is no requirement for anybody to keep tally on which addresses these 262m bulbs have gone to, let alone to establish whether they are being put to use. If ever there was a need for a sample survey of existing homes, this must surely be it."
• Recovery soon for construction? (Brickonomics) – "Clearly the wider economy as measured by GDP has a major impact on construction output, but the link is neither linear nor direct. … construction is a series of mini-industries with growth cycles that are out of phase.
  When you aggregate the various cycles of construction together the effect is to elongate the overall response rate to outside signals….. So while housing is moving up, commercial may well still be moving down before rising later.
  The pattern is further muddled by the heavy influence of public spending, which accounts for about a third of all work. This can operate counter-cyclical to the private sector, dulling the up and down movement and reshaping the V towards a U.
  And it is this spending that currently poses the most concerns regarding the shape of the construction recovery.
  There is a real risk that public spending on construction will take an L-shaped path in the near future as the Treasury seeks to balance its books."
• James Randerson: To stop a climate catastrophe we must first believe we can make a difference | Environment | guardian.co.uk – "Far from over-playing their hand to swell their research coffers, scientists have been toning down their message in an attempt to avoid public despair and inaction."
• scottberkun.com » Where do your ideas die? (With a bad illustration) – This sounds familiar (from my days back in large engineering consultancies): "Executives often do this flinchy sort of thing and it’s big news at many corporations to start “idea programs” to encourage people to submit ideas. These programs are launched, ideas are submitted, and there is much rejoicing. But little change.
  The reason there is little change is that idea inputs were never the problem. The bottleneck was further upstream. Crowdsourcing, brainstorming, mindmapping, and the dozens of other techniques people obsess about help create early idea volume, but do little to help the curators, the people who winnow down the hundreds of ideas down to dozens, and dozens down to a handful.
  It’s much more useful to study where the bottlenecks are, when and why new ideas are killed, and who the people are that are killing them."

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These are my links for March 11th through March 15th:

• The Building Futures Game – Building Futures – The Building Futures Game is the outcome of 3 years research and development work carried out by the Building Futures team, CABE and architectural practice AOC. The toolkit emerged through a shared desire as to how one might enable communities to think about the future of their neighbourhood, while providing stakeholders with an interactive and alternative way of consulting with a wide variety of groups on their concerns and aspirations.
• Disney Aims for Zero Carbon Emissions, Zero Waste in New Environmental Goals | GreenerBuildings – "The corporate responsibility report lays out seven long-term environmental goals for the company:
  • Zero waste.
  • Zero net direct greenhouse gas emissions from fuels.
  • Reduce indirect greenhouse gas emissions from electricity consumption.
  • Net positive impact on ecosystems.
  • Minimize water use.
  • Minimize product footprint.
  • Inform, empower and activate positive action for the environment"
• T-Zero – "T-ZERO is a free internet tool that provides independent sustainable refurbishment advice to users, with the option of linking directly to the suppliers, manufacturers, and installers of any measures you choose. It is designed for those refurbishing their own homes, homes they manage, or the homes of clients, taking you through a series of simple steps."
• How to Grow Your Own Fresh Air – TED 2009 « GreenSpaces Blog – More 'healthy' plants (I'm slightly obsessed with the original NASA study – spider plants are *good*). Mother in Law's tongue for bedroom, and Areca Palm for living room.
• Welcome to YouCanPlan – via Be2Camp and then EcoBuild: "Our idea is based on the concept of ‘enabled self procurement’ or ESP to help build new sustainable communities. ESP is a process where future residents of communities are supported as the developers of their own homes, combining the choice of self build with the efficiency of speculative development."
• Green for go: sustainability in the JCT contract – Building – "Following an industry-wide consultation, it published Building a Sustainable Future Together, a guidance note which is principally concerned with how sustainability in design and construction is provided for in contract documents. It also includes new contract clauses that extend those currently in JCT contracts, such as the Framework Agreement. The two principal new clauses are:
  1) The contractor is encouraged to suggest economically viable amendments to the employer's requirements which, if instructed as
  a variation, may result in improvement in environmental performance in the carrying out of the works or of the completed works
  2) The contractor shall provide to the employer all the information that he reasonably requests regarding the environmental impact of the supply and use of materials and goods which the contractor selects."
• A second look at solar power on roofspace « lightbucket – Lightbucket doesn't blog often, but when he (she?) does, they're worth reading.
  "Averaged over the year, rooftop PV can exactly match England’s electricity sales, but there is a huge seasonal variation. During the summer, PV output is higher than the full-year average, but electricity demand is lower, so PV can supply more than twice the total demand. The situation reverses in midwinter. In December, the month of lowest insolation, rooftop solar PV can meet only 20% of electricity demand. Additional capacity will be needed to meet winter demand. Energy storage technologies can smooth out variations in output over a 24-hour timecale, and maybe longer, but certainly not over 6 months.
  If we had solar photovoltaics on all roofspace in England, we could comfortably meet England’s summertime electricity use, but only a fifth of wintertime electricity use."
• Ten things to manage in a recession: 4 – executive costs « pwcom 2.0 – Paul illustrates Charles Handy's 'Hollywood' model perfectly: "… some AEC professionals have already opted to work as freelances or as independent consultants, undertaking a succession of contracts of their own choice instead of working for an employer. Particularly in the consultancy sector, just as small firms might combine with others with complementary skills and/or resources, so experienced individual professionals could combine with other independent practitioners to compete for work and then form part of the multi-disciplinary team appointed to undertake the project. …. Being formed of a group of independent ‘e-lances’ or ‘tech-nomads’, the operational overheads of such a multi-disciplinary consortium are also likely to be lower, making their services more cost-effective – an advantage likely to be underlined if the team also uses low-cost collaboration technology to manage and share its data."
• You are the weakest link, goodbye – Joan has a list of funny/tragic redundancy stories.
• cityofsound: Work and The City, Frank Duffy (2008) – Good review of Duffy's book: "In particular, Work and the City convincingly details how this has led to a grossly inefficient under-utilisation of resources with damaging effects on individuals, corporations, and almost all aspects of urban ecosystem."
• Sustainability Consulting: What is it, and am I qualified? Part I « Bright Green Talent Musings (www.brightgreentalent.com) – And I count myself amongst those who say sustainability is NOT a discipline: "As individuals from all kinds of backgrounds and industries push into the field of sustainability consulting, it can become murky as to what that work even entails. This is especially true when considering the different perspectives and methodologies that are employed and adding even more complexity is the variability among clients and their needs. Thus, this quote sums up for me what sustainability consultants are trying to do – they help businesses address and redress the way in which they operate so that they will be better positioned for the market of the future a la decreasing their negative impact on the natural environment. Some argue that like the trends of international business and e-commerce, sustainability will at some point cease to be its own discipline and assume its rightful place within all of business practices."
• » Perpetual beta SuDoBE — Sustainable Design of the Built Environment – Chris makes a great point: "What would happen if we treated buildings as being in perpetual beta state? How would this change things in the construction industry? Perhaps developers and the design team would make a long term commitment to upgrading the building in line with occupants’ (and others’) experiences after the building’s initial release.
  Of course buildings, like most artefacts are in perpetual beta. There are always ‘bugs’ to iron out and features that don’t work. Many of our new low and zero carbon buildings will fail either from the outset or a few months or years down the line. It would be a real step forward if we could admit that now and put in place the mechanisms that will allow us to decide whether they are working as intended, to fix them when they aren’t and to pass on what we have learned to Carbon 2.0. Would the industry allow us to do that? Do we need to ask?"
• Robinson Low Francis to slash staff pay 12.5% – Building – I'm sure this is just the same as cutting salaries by 20-40% – surely they'll just end up doing a similar amount of work, in fewer (probably longer) days (was my experience of working part-time, anyway): "At engineer Scott Wilson, some senior staff have agreed to work three- or four-day weeks, according to Jerome Monro-Lafon, its UK managing director."
• Survey confirms building control officers enforce regs – Building – "The LABC’s survey looked at 2000 projects to see how many potential contraventions would have occurred if a building control officer hadn’t stepped in and enforced the regulations. It found Part A attracted the most enforcement action with building control officers asking for remedial action in 18% of projects followed by Part L at just over 16% and Part B at just under 16%. Part G which deals with hygiene attracted enforcement action in just 1.5% of the surveyed projects."
• Natural lighting and sustainability | Sustainable Building Blog – Building Sustainable Design – "The tightening regulatory allowances placed on artificial lighting are already beginning to push the limits of what lighting technology can deliver. Our regulatory framework must not become unworkable or breed dull, unhealthy and uninteresting visual environments. The lighting community must steer regulation through better government lobbying, but we should not forget the place natural light has in avoiding the need for regulation in the first place."
• Pursuing the Elusive Goal Of a Carbon-Neutral Building by Richard Conniff: Yale Environment 360 – "But Kroon is also a reminder of what even some of the best hearts and minds in the sustainable design movement cannot yet achieve. For a “green premium” unofficially estimated at about 5.7 percent of construction cost, the Kroon design team managed to reduce projected energy use and emissions by 61 percent below the levels for a comparable building of conventional design. The biggest savings came not from sexy new technologies but from figuring out how to make the design function like an old-fashioned cathedral, with a slender profile for maximum daylighting, an east-west orientation for greater solar gain on the long southern exposure, careful use of shading, and plenty of stone and concrete to store thermal energy. A solar photovoltaic array and geothermal wells will supply much of the remaining energy load. “We got damned close to carbon neutral,” boasted a construction manager…"
• Sustainable Cities – The most useful output I've seen from CABE – sustainable cities website. A feast of information and examples: "This website gives expert advice on planning, designing and managing a sustainable place. It cuts through the complexity with clear priorities for action. And it shows which places are getting it right."
• Constructing Excellence in the Built Environment » Blog Archive » Reverting to type (by Don Ward) – Don Ward has a great post: "The industry loves lowest price tendering – it invented it, and back in 1963 codified it in the NJCC’s code of practice for single stage tendering. Large parts of the industry have since conspired with clients over the years to continue with lowest price tendering – it is easy, and it means you don’t have to work too hard to deliver on value. But let’s face it, it usually knowingly sets the project up to fail. It’s a bizarre process – as a questioner said at a conference the other day put on by the Universities of Reading, Loughbrough and Salford, construction must be the only industry that competes to deliver the same thing for the client rather than something different? And is it the only industry that thinks it’s clever to make its money by screwing the client and/or the supply chain?"

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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

These are my links for June 20th through June 24th:

• Nuclear Power Crawling Forward | Worldwatch Institute – Fairly level headed (considering it's author is from Greenpeace) and well researched appraisal of global nuclear power reactors construction in 2007. Some interesting facts and figures.
• No Impact Man: LV GRN: Slimy pets to eat your garbage and entertain your kids – DIY wormery advice from Colin Beaven.
• How to Save the World – Getting Rid of E-mail – Dave Pollard on why we don't need email for 90% of the time. Excellent advice, especially #10.
• My Business Magazines Lied to Me : Coconut Headsets – Rob's past experiences in the business blogosphere have scarred him, and made him uber-cynical, but his sparce postings have an insight which make him compelling reading…
• STROMA RELEASES FREE CODE SOFTWARE – Free CSH software from Stroma in Castleford.
• THE TOP 100 Green Design Firms – ENR | McGraw-Hill Construction – Construction Industry, News Articles, Business Conditions & Analysis, Markets, Finance, Costs, Legislation, Government, Management, Labor, Construction Methods, Equipment & Materials – ranking of ENR's Top 100 Green Designers is based on firms’ 2007 design revenue from projects registered with, and actively seeking certification from, third-party ratings groups under objective environmental or sustainable design standards.

mel starrs News 100, business, composting, CSH, Designers, email, ENR, free, green, Internet, LEED, Management, nuclear, Productivity, Social, Software, statistics, stroma, Top, tutorials, waste

These are my links for May 27th through May 29th:

• 10 Reasons Gen Xers Are Unhappy at Work – Harvard Business Online’s Tammy Erickson – Why Gen X are ditching corporate companies for start-ups. As always with lists, there are some generalisations, but some insight here.
• Show Us Your Food: A Q&A With the Authors of What The World Eats – Freakonomics – Opinion – New York Times Blog – Another book from the guys who brought us Hungry Planet. Great article on What the World Eats.
• e-Oculus » Archive » Firms Vary Approaches to Going Green – "Buildings should work more so their systems work less". Paul Stoller from Atelier 10
• Design Build Network – Morgan Lovell’s Green Office Demonstrates Blueprint for the Future – "The project is one of just two of its kind in the country to achieve an 'Excellent' rating from assessors." – anyone in a position to dispute this? Does sound likely to me…
• Monbiot.com » Majesty, We Have Gone Mad – Goerge, IMO, back on form.

mel starrs News Activism, books, BREEAM, career, competitors, conferences, consumption, corporate, culture, food, globalization, leadership, Management, nutrition, oil, Saudi, UK, work

(another article I found sitting forlornly in my draft bucket since March for no apparent reason – late but not out of date)

Dave Pollard has posted another excellent post on KM. The scary thing is how many of the things he says not to do, I have seen done at various (or many) employers. Including:

• Directories of everyone and everything, rather than key people (not sure I agree with him here -it’s always good to look up colleagues in other offices on screen, especially when phoning having never met them)
• Self-appointed experts – this I have seen and it renders the entire system useless. He advocates other’s voting for who is expert on things. A kind of Digg for expertise.
• Using email for all electronic communication. Another favourite of mine. A particular gem is the email sent to tell everyone something has been published on the intranet. Gah! My rule of thumb – only send emails when there is an action. Use other tools such as Intranets or RSS for FYI’s. Give everyone an RSS reader and show them how to use it. Publish all the intranet information with RSS feeds. Then they can manage their own inbox, deciding when and where to process the FYI’s.

The tools exist to make this stuff easy. The theory is proven. Implementation – not so good. It’s worth remembering that the ubiquitous email hasn’t been with us all that long. How did it manage to get such a pervasive hold on everyone?

mel starrs Uncategorized Dave Pollard, Knowledge, knowledge management, Management, Productivity

I don’t know where* I found this definition but it came to mind when I found Scott Berkun (who wrote the excellent The Art of Project Management) had a new book out on innovation, The Myths of Innovation.

Innovation is the collection, assessment and implementation of ideas to transform an organization’s:

• Products: product attributes (what it consists of), product performance (how it works), or product platform (how it’s offered);
• Processes: internal or customer-facing processes, alliances, or technologies;
• Customer Experience: service, delivery channels, brand, or ‘wraparounds’ (the extras it offers customers, such as a connected and helpful community of passionate users); and
• Business Model: how it makes money (or at least covers its costs)

*If you recognise this, let me know and I’ll credit it properly…

mel starrs Uncategorized Management, Scott Berkun

When calculating how big your market is and estimating how what proportion you need to win, have you ever made the mistake of announcing you only need to atract 1% of the market? BusinessPundit explains the mistake in using Chinese math:

If you need 100 clients to break even for the year, does it matter how large the potential market is? Probably not. If your potential market is 10,000,000, does that make it easier to get 100 clients than if your potential market was 200 clients? It depends. Probably not. First of all, you have to have something of value (which many startups don’t) and you have to be able to convince even one person why they need it (which many startups can’t) or your market size is irrelevant. You won’t even get 1 client. Secondly, it may be easier to market in the case where you need 100 out of 200 because it may be easier to identify your target audience if it is only 200 people. In that case you are probably in a niche that is easy to market to and don’t just have to blanket your ads on the general public.

mel starrs Uncategorized Management

I follow a few managerial slanted blogs, including 100 Bloggers where they posted back in August 2006 regarding a Gallup Panel poll (subs required) on what people look for in their jobs.  This phrase stuck with me from the article:

People don’t quit jobs: they quit managers

In an industry such as ours where people hop from one company to another for seemingly very similar conditions, prospects, pay, benefits etc – there may be some truth to this…

mel starrs Uncategorized Management