... a beginner at something

Everyday Sustainability - It's About Time ... and Energy

UPDATE 2012-09-15: sharing the presentation for dreamups.org. Download Everyday Sustainability – ESD Forum 2012 pdf (12.4MB).

 

This week, Michel shared a post on the Commons and Chris  commented on it in a closed forum,

"...to provide a complementary model which, when using an energy unit of account as the basis of value judgements ..."

 

The energy unit of account resonates with me. I use it to calculate break even to decide whether and when it is worth to buy new devices. Surprise, surprise, when technology improvements and foreseeable years of use combine, it makes a lot of eco-nomic sense to pay for specific eco-logic upgrades. Here is how it works for me.

Crowd-asking: Japanese culture

Preparing for her Japan visit to speak at the Sibos financial conference, Jennifer asked in public:

Preparing for #Osaka @cocreatr please share two novels + two movies that will help me better appreciate your culture

 

Within a few hours she got two replies in public and two faves. One book series I recommend to many a gaijin who asks is Japan in Your Pocket.

There is more.

Meltdown in higher education

 

Milford School Bell at Dept of Education by dbking

Back in 2010, Seth Godin predicted The coming melt-down in higher education (as seen by a marketer):

 

For 400 years, higher education in the US has been on a roll. From Harvard asking Galileo to be a guest professor in the 1600s to millions tuning in to watch a team of unpaid athletes play another team of unpaid athletes in some college sporting event, the amount of time and money and prestige in the college world has been climbing.

I'm afraid that's about to crash and burn. ...

Yes, here it is:

Gielis Shapes

Gielis shape, toroid mapped

"In 1997 the superformula was discovered, which solved the problem of the limited symmetry of superellipses and supercircles. Supershapes like pentagons and starfish, triangles and rose sepals, flowers and leaves, can now be described by a single equation, based on the generalization of Lamé's supercircles and superellipses.

The key step from Lamé’s supercircles was to convert the equations to polar coordinates and to add a single parameter for symmetry. It was extended into three dimensions as well.

This discovery was published in the book “Inventing the Circle” (2001, 2003) and as Invited Special Paper in the American Journal of Botany in April 2003. Worldwide awareness was created by websites such as Nature Science update, Science News Online, and Wolfram’s Mathematica website.

Supershapes were introduced later in the field of geometry under the general name of Gielis' curves, surfaces & -transformations, also in higher dimensions."

Quoted from GIELIS' CURVES & SURFACES

 

Highlighting the course of corporate transparency

As Nigel Cameron says, the impact of social media will be felt.

New tools connect more people, markets, and customers faster and cheaper, to shape reputation and build business selection pressure towards corporate transparency.  As the race is only going to get faster, how prepared is your organization?

Image: Canadian Museum for Human Rights by oggiedog on flickr

Someone you'd want to work with?

People find each other, connect, and some deepen the relation, co-create and collaborate. As on town square so on the web, giving us all useful free tools like Firefox, Linux, Apache and more. On the way to intense co-creative productivity, how do we determine who we want to work with?

In a closed forum, Venessa asked, "what information do you want to see when looking at a person's profile to get a fast snapshot if they are someone you'd want to work with?"  This reminded me of her kind selection to cross-post on her blog, much visited, an earlier post of mine, and of next-gen profiles we prototyped for a digital collaboratory. 

Let me summarize 3 years of intense digital contacts that followed more than 20 years of local forum BBS, loose web connection and strong digital group collaboration at work. Much was accomplished by e-mail, too.

Image credit: Social Media monitoring and the spectrum of online relationships by David J Carr

Traditional sabotage of sense

Sharing two pieces aimed at native speakers and those fluent in legalese as a second language. Sharing with us common people - because, if we have trouble understanding, could it be from sabotage of sense at the sender's end?

1.

Have you ever become frustrated when you tried to understand a court record or other legal document? Were you so confused and uncertain of its meaning that you had to pay a lawyer to figure it out? You and I may not like jargon-ridden, convoluted language, but the legal profession thrives on it.

 

The 4 T to take Open Space Technology virtual

Whoa, totally missed the APF #futrchat about Open Space co-hosted by @jenjarratt and  @urbanverse, even though it was announced with planetary timezones. Feels good to be missed, too, so thank you.

On the other hand, I brush off missed opportunities with a laconic "who knows what this may be good for" since in my teens I read about the power of positive thinking. So there.

Building on this example of an opportunity,  here the

Hyperlink, or it did not happen!

Still forwarding important non-confidential information by e-mail attachment? You might be committing a disservice to the receivers and undermine their trust in you. Save our inboxes. Adopt the e-mail charter.

Go back a few years. How were engineering and scientific works of note created back then? Yes, with lots of references and a bibliography. Acknowledging all the sources we built upon to enable the readers to verify for themselves. Supporting progress by allowing society to weed out the implausible and the plagiarized and accept the rest as best current truth. Wikipedia does the same with its notability guideline.