Elemental

These are my links for August 18th through August 24th:

• 500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error
• Stanford engineers’ new solar energy conversion process could revamp solar power production – "A new process that simultaneously combines the light and heat of solar radiation to generate electricity could offer more than double the efficiency of existing solar cell technology, say the Stanford engineers who discovered it and proved that it works. The process, called "photon enhanced thermionic emission," or PETE, could reduce the costs of solar energy production enough for it to compete with oil as an energy source."
• Dilbert Creator Scott Adams Tries to Build an Eco-Friendly House – WSJ.com – Slightly concerned that Sott Adams couldn't leverage his fame to get some decent advice for his self build, but then this article wouldn't have been so entertaining: "The greenest home is the one you don't build. If you really want to save the Earth, move in with another family and share a house that's already built. Better yet, live in the forest and eat whatever the squirrels don't want. Don't brag to me about riding your bicycle to work; a lot of energy went into building that bicycle. Stop being a hypocrite like me."
• NewEnergyFocus.com – FiTs data shows “surprise uptake” by commercial sector – "The most up-to-date figures from Ofgem show that between the scheme going live and today (August 9), there have been 5040 installations, with 4969 of them residential, 57 commercial and 13 community installations. Of these, 13 were hydro, 142 wind and 4885 solar PV and the total installed capacity totals 21.9MW."
• INSIGHT: Save What’s Left: Architects as Stewards of Our Planet – "I am not arguing for mindless, indigenous architecture and the elimination of the architectural profession; I am arguing for a new adaptive architecture that clearly understands its regional setting. Our simple goals could be to reduce the consumption of energy in the building sector by 50% in the next 15 years, and then achieve energy neutrality in the built environment 10 years later. These achievements might be analogous to the Manhattan Project or to landing on the moon before the Soviets. The new focus on regionalism and energy conservation would be accompanied by a new attitude toward nature and the landscape, an attitude that seeks to conserve and reintroduce native species and native landscapes."
• Home | VELUX – via Rory Bergin's blog, a tool for modelling energy for domestic properties
• Op-Ed Contributor – Math Lessons for Locavores – NYTimes.com – excellent, though US-centric article on the absurdities of locavorism. Single issue arguments do annoy me.
• bere:architects » Blog Archive » First Welsh Passivhaus prototype – Fenestration Calculations & Cost Data – Hats off to bere:architects for publishing such a wealth of cost data. Lots of useful graphs and data.
• London Housing Design Guide – London Development Agency – "The Mayor’s London Housing Design Guide sets a new benchmark for housing in the capital and will soon be a requirement for publicly-funded homes. By consolidating and simplifying a comprehensive set of standards, the guide aims to provide consistency and clarity about what is expected in London from the outset of a development. The standards are anticipated to be taken forward across all tenures through the Mayor’s forthcoming draft Housing Supplementary Planning Guide (SPG)."
• Boris the builder: The Mayor’s vision for London housing | Life & Style – "Since 1980 there have been no mandatory minimum space standards for housing in the UK, ever since the famous Parker Morris standards for Space in the Home, which were drawn up in 1961, were abolished by Margaret Thatcher's government in 1980. This has led, in recent years, to London having the smallest new houses and apartments of any major city in the Western world — and this at the end of an era of huge economic growth and rises in living standards. A new apartment in London now is estimated to have up to 30 per cent less space than its equivalent of 40 to 50 years ago. The new guide contains 90 standards that will apply from next year on all new housing built on London Development Agency-owned land, or any developments funded by public money. More excitingly, it is hoped that the guide will be part of the updated London Plan after 2012, and as such will be planning policy — meaning it will cover all new housing in the private sector, too."
• grid carbon will stay high for some time yet « carbon limited – "the official line is that the carbon intensity of the grid will remain roughly steady until 2015, when it will plummet towards near-zero carbon in 2040. (As an aside, is it a coincidence that the dropoff comes in 2015, given that it’s the latest possible date for the next general election?) It will be interesting to see how that drop off moves in coming years. The announcement strongly reinforces the message from DECC that decarbonisation of heat will not be achieved through electrification. In other words, heat pumps are not the answer to decarbonising heat at the national scale."

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These are my links for July 2nd through July 8th:

• Woobius Scribbles — Bottom-up collaboration in the construction industry – Excellent post on collaborative working by Woobius and the curse of email:"You know that feeling. You’ve just set up the best collaboration system ever. You have all the processes documented and approved. Everyone’s agreed to use the system. Things couldn’t be better. Then, the project kicks off and there comes that sinking feeling when you realise that everyone is bypassing your carefully tuned system.
  Everyone is sending emails instead."
• If zero carbon is the answer then just what was the question? « isite – Martin has an excellent rant and takes on Passivhaus amongst other issues pertaining to zero carbon: "Passivhaus is emerging as the aspirational darling or solution. But what is the true embodied energy of passivhaus, in particular the massive amounts of insulation, sheeting and duct tape? Passivhaus will reduce energy requirements and costs. Excellent. But I would love to see the payback time on the total and higher than normal embodied energies and waste."
• Tellytubby land: BedZed revisited – Building – Fantastic review of BedZed 7 years on. I was fully aware of the situation with the CHP, but less so with the allotments and car use issues. A long article, but very worthwhile reading.
• Climate change odds much worse than thought – MIT News Office – More doom, but presented in pretty roulette wheels. I ought to stop reading all this doom, but am strangely compelled to keep checking for confirming evidence. Behavioural economists, make of this what you will.: "The new research involved 400 runs of the model with each run using slight variations in input parameters, selected so that each run has about an equal probability of being correct based on present observations and knowledge. Other research groups have estimated the probabilities of various outcomes, based on variations in the physical response of the climate system itself. But the MIT model is the only one that interactively includes detailed treatment of possible changes in human activities as well – such as the degree of economic growth, with its associated energy use, in different countries."
• The orders figures and public spending fears point to industry chaos ahead – need it be so? (Brickonomics) – I'm in broad agreement with Brian on this:"What firms should be doing now is assessing what they are good at and what they are not good at, what makes them profit, what costs them time and resources unprofitably.
  They should focus on quality of earnings not volume of earnings.
  They should focus effort on what they are good at and judiciously shed the operations that are weak….
  That however does not alter the reality that this recession will be cruel and that the industry has no choice but to retreat. Turnover overall must fall. Competition does need to be taken out of the market.
  It is better that firms recognise their weaknesses and retreat from them than seek to bid unrealistically against those better placed.
  The worst of all outcomes would be to lose good firms because of the woeful bidding by weak operations desperate to win work at any price."
• We don’t know what is coming next – so get ready – The Regeneration Blog – Jackie's advice on getting ready for a potential change in administration: "But in the meantime, my current advice is this: you know not what is coming next, so get as ready as you can. Have a total clear out (in every sense), trim down, strip back everything and establish your priorities.
  Swot up on localism and reconnect with your bottom-up roots. If you are able to deliver decent outputs (notably jobs or homes) you will be safe even if – or perhaps especially if – as we suspect, the RDA's get wiped away and their responsibilities are given to County Councils and the like. "
• Sustainable Design Tools Exhibited at AIA 2009: AECbytes Feature Article – Excellent review of the latest 'sustainable design' software tools available on the market, including Ecotect (aligned with Autodesk and therefore AutoCAD – very popular with architects), IES (my favourite) and TAS and Hevacomp (which are now both owned by Bentley (the home of AutoCAD rival Microstation). Whatever happened to Cymap? Seem to have been left behind…
• PlanningBlog: When did everyone get so cynical? « – "Regeneration is quite often seen as big business riding roughshod over local people’s wishes. It’s eyed with suspicion and written off as ‘ a waste of taxpayers money’ before it’s even come out of the ground.
  This all ties in with the wider anti-politician backlash currently sweeping the country. Politicians and anyone in authority are seen as ‘out to line their own pockets’ and anything they propose or champion is therefore, by association, a bad thing.
  Of course we should question authority and challenge things we don’t agree with but whatever happened to taking something at face value? A much needed regeneration of an area might actually be just that, not a conspiracy or an attempt to get one over on the general public.
  I’m not sure what the answer is to this. … Perhaps the problem is with the politicians themselves and only political reform can ‘reconnect’ and re-build trust between the people and those in authority."
• Government ends energy bulbs scheme – The IET – Some sensible news: "Power companies will no longer be able to mail out millions of energy-saving light bulbs to meet their targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions from homes.
  The Department for Energy and Climate Change (Decc) has announced changes to the Government scheme requiring energy suppliers to cut emissions from homes, including an end to the direct mail out of low-energy light bulbs by January 1, 2010."

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What I’ve been reading about:

• Building cities from scratch in Abu Dhabi and Dubai. – By Witold Rybczynski – Slate Magazine – Slide show showing two approaches to new cities in the Middle East
• The Sustainable City–Ecological Dream or Technocratic Nightmare? – Something I've been giving thought to recently. I'm veering towards the Jane Jacobs view…
• Energy Companies Fear Renewables Bubble – Fifty-two percent of those surveyed believe that high valuations are a factor restricting growth in the sector
• Instapaper – via LifeHacker – a way of keeping track of longer articles you want to read later
• …as sustainability chief moves west – Building Design – Trevor Butler leaves BDP, moves to Canada and starts a company called Archineers.
• Waterfootprint.org: Water footprint and virtual water – Not surprised to see this pop up on my radar. The next logical step…

mel starrs News aggregator, calculator, competitors, development, Dubai, international, planning, Productivity, renewable, sustainability_water, tools, toread, water

What I’ve been reading about:

• Design Builder – (Relatively) new kids on the DSM software block, 30 day free trial, uses the DOE Energy Plus engine. Anyone got any experience – good or bad?
• Task force gives housing the green light – "This is not about dumbing down or abandoning the concept of zero carbon. This is about ensuring the same high level of carbon savings, but allowing developers more flexibility" Paul King
• Definition of Zero Carbon Report – UKGBC pdf report (41 pp.) on more flexible definition of zero carbon. More on this when I get a chance to read it and others reactions…
• Feedity – Looks like Feedity has a revamp – turn any page into an RSS feed. Now have to go through the ones I did on on the old version and update. So not backwards compatible – bah!
• Smart opportunity missed – Smart metering threshold raised from 73,200 kWh per annum to 732,000 kWh reducing the number of potential businesses covered from 400,000 to 40,000.

mel starrs News Blogging, carbon, competitors, definition, domestic, dsm, EPC, Feeds, free, Housing, Metering, property, rss, service, Software, Sustainability, target, tools, UKGBC, web2.0, zero_carbon

I have been asked recently on a number of occasions ‘Why do you blog?’. I have a couple of answers depending on who asks the question, the most common (mostly to people I have worked with in the past) being ‘Remember how I used to send emails around to everyone when I found something interesting? And no-one read it? Now I send that message out to the internet’.
This medium allows me to use a ‘pull’ rather than ‘push’ mechanism for sharing knowledge. I find an interesting titbit, usually in my Bloglines inbox, email or a magazine, let the idea percolate a while and then post it. Rather than pushing it upon my colleagues and then being disappointed that they haven’t read it, I wait for others to find me and the information. Of course, I try to make it easy for people to find me (tagging, using sensible post titles etc). When people do find it, they are more likely to be interested and engaged, as it is on their terms, rather than mine. I suppose exceptions would be folks who have subscribed via FeedBlitz, but the majority of readers of this site either find it as a result of a direct search for information, or are returning readers who I suspect work in a similar industry. This makes blogging a much more appealing proposition to me as an author than emails ever did.
This ‘need’ to share knowledge can be explained by Malcolm Gladwell in ‘The Tipping Point‘. The very fact that I am blogging about my industry defines me as a potential ‘maven’ – a socially motivated collector of information who freely shares the information with others. By doing so, I am meeting a social need of mine, which is stronger than say, a power need whereby people might protect their knowledge from others in an effort to gain leverage in some way.
Blogging is more than that to me though. I like to think of it as a way of ‘lifehacking‘ my thought processes. By actively collecting information, let it ferment and then sorting it out into some coherent sense, I am better equipped to make informed conversations and decisions on the topics. I’m not saying this necessarily happens, but I’d like to think it ought to be a consequence.
And new tools are finding me every day making the process itself easier and easier. I thought it would be useful to post my current blogging method and tools – I am constantly tweaking this as I find new tools.
My information gathering process

• Bloglines – an online RSS aggregator with the ability to generate email addresses for subscriptions (point all the following to this account). Apart from the aggregation of feeds to one place, Bloglines presents content in a fairly standard format, usually stripping out ads, getting rid of any pop-ups and keeping your screen ‘clean’ and free of distractions (such as massively long blogrolls, while occasionally useful, usually massive time killers).
• Watch That Page – for sites which have neither RSS or email. WTP will send an email (to a bloglines address you set up above – use a different email address for every subscription and name it after the page, company, whatever you are watching) everytime a page changes. This is how I keep an eye on who is becoming a BREEAM assessor.
• Bloglines Search – within the Bloglines interface there is the ability to set up searches across all the blogs that bloglines follows for keywords, such as competitors or your own company name or keywords such as BREEAM.
• Technorati Search (via RSS) – again you can search for either your own company name or those of your competitors. WARNING: this is an excellent way of catching employees blogging at and about work. Not that I condone either catching people out OR blogging at work. If you are sharing your latest exploits on MySpace with your mates, you might want to leave out who you are currently working for. Not only could your current employer be less than impressed, but keep in mind future employers are increasingly more likely to google you when you apply for a job.
• Google Alerts (via email) – similar to the two above, this searches for terms you set within Google News. Best for company news.
• Google Blog Search (via RSS) – similar Bloglines and Technorati.
• del.icio.us tags (via RSS) – not quite so useful for competitor analysis, but useful for searching for posts on topics of interest. Tags need to be of a medium specificity eg: ‘sustainability’ throws back dozens of posts per hour (too many), ‘sustainable+construction’ throws a few a week (too few). Experiment until you get it right for what you are looking for.
• Numerous email subscriptions and RSS feeds directly from useful sites, such as info4local

My drafting process

• Within Bloglines (where most of the above is collected) there is the ability to email the article
• Within Writely there is the ability to send yourself emails (to an encoded address)
• Send articles to Writely
• Group together related ideas within Writely to eventually draft posts
• Post either directly from Writely into WordPress or cut and paste into WordPress for better formatting options

Other useful tools

• del.icio.us is where I save most of my reference articles – things I don’t intend to write about but might need to refer to later
• EditGrid is where I currently store online spreadsheets (I used to use Google spreadsheets but EditGrid has charts), including for instance my BREEAM assessors spreadsheet
• gliffy is a great resource for drawing diagrams
• bookmooch is where I currently keep my wishlist of books – there’s a handy widget which lets me add books recommended by others direct from their post to bookmooch if the isbn is available on the page
• Google Calendar is where I put upcoming events of interest in the UK for sustainable buildings (I will be publishing this soon on this site once I work out some time zone issues)

After all of this processing, I can’t say I have achieved a state of great zen, but I am approaching ‘mind like water’, like any good disciple of Dave Allen’s ‘Getting Things Done‘.

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