The Coming Clash Between Water and Energy

Our thirst for water competes with our hunger for energy. Only radical new ideas will get us out of this mess

Photo: Dan Saelinger

In almost every type of power plant, water is a major hidden cost. Water cools the blistering steam of thermal plants and allows hydroelectric turbines to churn. It brings biofuel crops from the ground and geothermal energy from the depths of the Earth. Our power sources would be impotent without water.

Don’t believe us? Plug your iPhone into the wall, and about half a liter of water must flow through kilometers of pipes, pumps, and the heat exchangers of a power plant. That’s a lot of money and machinery just so you can get a 6–watt-hour charge for your flashy little phone. Now, add up all the half-liters of water used to generate the roughly 17 billion megawatt-hours that the world will burn through this year. Trust us, it’s a lot of water. In the United States alone, on just one average day, more than 500 billion liters of freshwater travel through the country’s power plants—more than twice what flows through the Nile. Read more at spectrum.ieee.org

Tips for Writing Well

Guide for Writing

Without further ado, then, here are my Tips for Writing Well:

Keep it simple

don’t exaggerate

stand apart from your subject as much as possible

Watch your grammar

Vary sentence structures

Be clear on the meaning of the words

avoid cliches

The road to hell is paved with adverbs

That’s my simple guide for writing well. Of course, you still need to pick good subjects and you must know more about them than the average reader. Master these skills and let the rest of the world wake up to your contributions. Read more at hubpages.com

Working Smarter in Terra Nova Circa 2015

By Jay Cross, Jane Hart, Charles Jennings, Harold Jarche, Clark Quinn, and Jon Husband

We will call our destination Terra Nova, Latin for “new world.” Within five years, the world will have changed so radically, you will not recognize it. It is a new era and it is right around the corner.

In Terra Nova, push and pull combine to create a dynamic flow of power, authority, know-how, and trust. Change is so fast and furious that work and learning blur into one activity. Workers respond to novel situations as best they see fit, governed by the organization’s values and their own gut feelings.

Terra Nova is holistic, with significant decision-making power delegated to the workers themselves. “Power to the people” could be its rallying cry.

“I love to learn [pull] but I hate being trained [push].” —Winston Churchill.

Companies don’t want learning—they want things done. Traditional learning (stuffing information into people’s heads) is often expensive and unreliable compared to building know-how into the job.

Motivation

As Dan Pink writes in Drive, the Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (2010), “It’s about satisfying workers’ desire for autonomy, which stimulates their ‘innate capacity for self direction.”

In Terra Nova, successful organizations embrace respect for the individual, flexibility and adaptation, openness and transparency, sharing and collaboration, honesty and authenticity, and real-time responsiveness and immediacy. Workers are motivated by achievement and autonomy. Everybody wins.

Learning in a community is unlike learning in a classroom. You take snippets of conversation, mix in something you saw on the web, and Google the concepts you’re fuzzy on. The lessons that emerge from this stew of soundbites and fragments are richer and more textured than what you’d find in most books.

Terra Nova is a New Ball Game

Developing talent and extracting results in Terra Nova starts with unlearning obsolete but embedded beliefs. Smart companies prosper. Clueless companies die. Brains make the difference. Organizations that continuously exercise and improve their collective brainpower come out on top. Until recently, most of the collaboration and development that fuels the growth of individual and group braininess was haphazard. We hope to bring this activity into the sunlight and suggest tips on benefitting from social learning, informal learning, instructional design 2.0, mobility, judgment skills, and more in the near future.

How do you think the world of learning will look in 2015? Comments are welcomed and encouraged below. Read more at www.elearnmag.org

Scobleizer Searching for world-changing technology

The Seven Needs of Real-Time Curators

March 27, 2010 By Robert Scoble

I keep hearing people throw around the word “curation” at various conferences, most recently at SXSW. The thing is most of the time when I dig into what they are saying they usually have no clue about what curation really is or how it could be applied to the real-time world.

A curator is an information chemist. He or she mixes atoms together in a way to build an info-molecule. Then adds value to that molecule.

So, what are the seven needs of real time curators?

Real-time curators need to bundle

Real-time curators need to reorder things

Real-time curators need to distribute bundles

Real-time curators need to editorialize

Real-time curators need to update their bundles

Real-time curators need to add participation widgets

Real-time curators need to track their audienceRead more at scobleizer.com

The Value of Nothing

by Mitch Ditkoff

When children are born prematurely, they are placed in incubators until ready for the world.

It’s the same with innovators — or should be. They, too, need to incubate. They, too, need to lay fallow. They, too, need an occasional day off — especially if the results they’re looking for aren’t showing up.

THE TECHNIQUE

The next time you are working hard, but getting no results — notice it. Take a break. Breathe. If you feel the urge to produce, let the urge pass. During this time, notice the ideas that come to you — and write them down. Read more at www.business-strategy-innovation.com

Ten commandments for changing the world

Angela Bischoff and Tooker Gomberg

1 You Gotta Believe

2 Challenge Authority

3 Know the System

4 Take Action

5 Use the media

6 Build Alliances

7 Apply Constant Pressure

8 Teach Alternatives

9 Learn From your Mistrakes

10 Take Care of Yourself and Each OtherRead more at vcn.bc.ca

If Language is Consciousness, What of the Semantic Web?

Research reported in the New Scientist this week suggests that the internal monologue we establish is integral to understanding the world.  It may even have formed part of a feedback loop with cognition – using language to categorise things with words forced us to make connections between them, and begin to perceive our world.  If that’s so, then what does that mean for the Web?

While making the Internet more user-friendly is laudable, what are the consequences of a web which understands meaning?

Image credit: http://blsciblogs.baruch.cuny.edu/com3068/ Read more at wellbredinsolence.wordpress.com