Solvation

Highlights of 2011

In 2011, my work focused on organizational and societal development, and its measurement. Here are some professional highlights from 2011, in chronological order. I'm deeply grateful for my teammates and partners, and for those who made these opportunities possible.

(1) I taught Organizational Behavior to 1st Year MBA students, most of whom were military veterans, and all of whom had limited business experience. I'd characterize the students as under-educated (only one could write well), highly motivated, and what I think of as "lawful": prefering discipline, order, and a strongly-normed environment. I learned that the first item of the curriculum is to learn how to learn from someone like me. I also came away from the process feeling like the entire approach to traditionally conceived Organizational Behavior needs to change drastically.

(2) I helped develop the Deliberative Society, a brand new service offering, based on over a decade of work at the Center for Deliberative Democracy with Reframe It software. This was instantiated at a major consulting firm as a trial offering. As a "support" member of the team, I collaborated in thinking through the productization of the offering, built some knowledge in the domain, and became familiar again with the culture of Top 4 consulting firms.

(3) I launched (heh!) Winged Pigs with Eric Grant, focusing on offerings to help startups deal with non-product related issues that can make or break its success. Our strengths are in organizational design, facilitating interpersonal dynamics and agile process design, and its measurement. There was a lot of encouragement but we ended the year without having successfully landed a VC portfolio company client. My business development skills evolved over the year; I believe we would have been more successful had I known then what I know now.

(4) I presented "Measuring Life," which is really an introduction to new economic thinking at TEDxHayward, a joint venture of CSUEB and Stanford University. I was happy to hear feedback that my talk was conceptually understandable and well-delivered. This is a growth area for me.

(5) I organized the Technology Track for the SoCap11, the Social Capital Markets conference with 1500 attendees over three days. The Technology Track was one of seven tracks. Highlights included Jay Nath, the Director of Innovation for the City and County of San Francisco talking about opening data sets and Jamais Cascio from Institute for the Future previewing his thoughts on an upcoming book showcasing the future in 50 years as well as some fascinating panels curated by the UN Foundation and Innosight. I enjoyed this tremendously - the right combination of management, interpersonal interactions, and creativity. I wish I had had more time - there is such great work going on (those are five separate links); a lot to curate.

Finally, and overarchingly, I became involved in several Communities of Innovation, particularly the Innovating Finance group, which has been guided by the success of the WWF UK and ICAEW Finance Innovation Lab. I'm noticing patterns here that I suspect will continue to reinforce each other in the new year.

I look forward to 2012!

Why Economics Needs Data Mining

Cosma Shalizi explains eloquently the major issues surrounding the accuracy of economic modeling. He talks about how we don't know whether what happened in the past can be relevant for he future.

Also, listening between the lines (at approximately 4:30), please hear the plea for the idea that if you're going to do models, you need data to validate them.

 

Cosma Shalizi urges economists to stop doing what they are doing: Fitting large complex models to a small set of highly correlated time series data. Once you add enough variables, parameters, bells and whistles, your model can fit past data very well, and yet fail miserably in the future. Shalizi tells us how to separate the wheat from the chaff, how to compensate for overfitting and prevent models from memorizing noise. He introduces techniques from data mining and machine learning to economics -- this is new economic thinking. via ineteconomics.org

 

 

The Future of Economic Wellbeing

This is simply a quick overview of topics I intend to work up further.

(1) The difference between microfinance and economic development is that microfinance assumes the intangible assets are already there (or easily built), specifically the intangible assets related to health, relationships, and skills. Economic development focuses on building those intangible assets first, without concern about whether a lack of access to capital will mean they stagnate or decay once they've been built.

(2) The way to enable future economic growth is to build intangible assets. "Supply side" economic thought glossed over the fact that when you invest in a business, relationships and knowledge are formed along with an actual product that may or may not make it to market and then be competitively successful. However, stimulus money does the same thing; in particular it builds relationships and guards physical and mental well-being. Just as community development + microfinance need to work together in emergent markets, encouraging the flow of capital and ensuring the maintenance and growth of intangible assets is crucial in the revitalization of mature markets, whether they're distressed or booming.

Most intangible assets are built in families and communities (and intangible liabilities are unfortunately built there too, in the forms of behaviors that limit the development of trust, health, emotional wellbeing, etc.) Specific metrics can be built into community monitoring processes in order to support community and build a framework for future economic value.

(3) Specifically, the way that the innovative environment in Silicon Valley can be "replicated" is by mapping the intangible assets which are used to create the tangible ones, and then thinking about how to build those intangible assets within a new environment. It's a "localization process," requiring replicating and refining that process in other contexts. Based on past research at Ricoh Innovation Labs, I have a system for visually depicting such a map and its change over time.

(4) So, once we've gotten to a point where we can develop intangible assets in the emergent and distressed markets, and we understand how to innovate and to replicate the development of innovative environments, then we can map how to replicate specific, successful programs within that environment, using the same methodology.

(5) Finally even in existing firms who are relatively successful in navigating the fast-changing waters, it's likely they have a Corporate Social Responsibility program. There are many reasons to have such a program, including building internal morale. However, by measuring impact and tying this into community metrics, a significant amount of knowledge can be built, turning CSR programs into strategic assets for firms.

Real Marketing vs Mad Men

I have had several conversations recently with people about Marketing's role, and I realized I have internalized a "different kind" of marketing so thoroughly that I've forgotten that only a certain breed of Marketing pros really think this way.

Real Marketing is Facilitative

The role of the marketer is to facilitate the emergence of the market and the connection of the market to the product or service.

You can think of marketing as "becoming the exchange platform."

The questions a real marketer needs to know:

• what are the attributes of people who might need this good or service?
• where are those people?
• how do those people communicate?
• what are their triggers: what makes them act?

And then the work of marketing is to live where the market already is, and create messages that they understand that put the product or service in a place where it's easy for them to buy/adopt.

Then finally, the marketing person needs to learn:

• What just happened?
• How can I improve?
• Are there new people who need the goods or service (or can I conjecture that there might be in the future)? Where are those people and how do they communicate?

So you can see "marketing" methodology can be used for any situation where there's communcation between an institution and a population: non-profit, social enterprise, community group, or business. Also, it can be used to "sell," which is to say facilitate the exchange of money for goods/services, or it can be used to exchange knowledge or messages or ideas. You can use this to explain a product, or you can use this to find a pool of recruits.

Marketing is a community building activity.

BP, Executive Compensation, and Corporate Responsibility

Evidently, the next step is for BP to lower a box a mile underwater and then a big tube will contain the oil into a boat. OK, seems like a straightforward concept; it might work and keep working for several months, if they can get the box over the well in deep water using robots. Then the idea is that another well is drilled elsewhere in the meantime to relieve the pressure.

In the same article, Reuters reports: "Obama administration officials were reviewing the practice of granting exemptions from environmental impact studies for oil exploration projects deemed to involve little risk. The Minerals Management Service had exempted BP from a detailed environmental review of the project."

Now, I'm just not seeing how that would've caught the problem. The problem was failing to design redundant safety systems. I'm not sure how environmental impact would encourage them to be careful. Making more rules does not encourage following them. Making rules is about codifying the punishment, and we clearly do not punish people in financial leadership commensurate with their negligence.

BP is a British company, and you can check out the executive compensation, which, at about $5 million for 2009, is not extreme as these things go (Chesapeake Energy CEO made $100million in total compensation for 2009, compared to its average salary of $32k, a multiple of 3000x), and reasonably justified precisely because the head of BP does take on exhorbitant responsibility. But do we HOLD them to that responsibility? What seems to happen is that we decide, "Well, hey. Tony Hayward, CEO, you got to the position where we pay you a lot of money, you MUST be a leader, and so we respect you, and if you err in a way that causes calamity, you'll land on your feet because we NEED our leaders to land on our feet."

But we don't. We need our business leaders, the ones we aggrandize with the justification that they're taking on enormous responsibility, to behave responsibly or face the consequences. It's the leadership of the firm that sets the tone for making tradeoff decisions between community safety and shareholder profit-taking.

There's something seriously wrong with the system when making the same decisions at a far lower pay rate is more likely to get you the appropriately severe punishment. Isn't that what corruption is: Money buys a special set of rules?

On that note, Wells Fargo, paid its CEO $21 million worth of compensation. Relatedly, I just investigated buying stamps from the ATM. They do charge to sell you stamps, but they don't tell you. And they sell quantities like 18 or 36 that make it very difficult to multiply by $0.44 and realize that you're paying a premium (90 stamps for $47; that's how I realized there was a premium. For those of you who are math challenged, 100 stamps at $0.44 would cost $44, so 90 stamps would be less than that, and $47 is more than some amount that's under $44. So I knew I was going to pay a fee). Despite the fact that I needed the stamps, I couldn't bring myself to buy them; it was too disgustingly exploitative.

I must move my money, despite the amount of work it will take to set up elsewhere. 

Merit Based Teacher Pay

I interrupt my (ir)regularly scheduled postings to put up a conversation that fell out of a facebook thread begun by a friend who is a current teacher after a haitus. The first 8 years of her career were teaching third graders in East Oakland, during which time they went through a principal each year, and she was the senior-most teacher in the school. She is opposed to merit pay, because she perceives a huge problem in the proposals she's been aware of that would increase the current bias that teachers have in favor of bright, intellectually talented students. She's concerned that the neediest kids would be even less desireable as classroom assignments if teachers are financially compensated based on students' test scores.

I normally don't do things like this, but her response to my comment was an outrageously encouraging, "Jessica - can you please start setting educational policy? :) I love the ideas, and I don't know why merit pay has only ever been (at least in the proposals I've heard) tied to test scores." So I thought I'd share!

My response:

There's a perfectly good way to do it. "Merit" doesn't mean absolute test scores, it means improvement from before given a specific human being.

You look at how the kids are coming in; you look at what happens to the kids OUTSIDE OF SCHOOL during the year; you look at how the kids are going out. You do this for several years in order to get a baseline set of data from which to build expectations from.

And when I say "look at how the kids are doing," I mean on not only academic milestones, but on developmental ones too. We all know kids sometimes pause a bit in intellectual development while they "figure out" important things about their social worlds (at any level), or are consumed with awkwardness and self-absorbtion they grow a foot and change their biochemistry.

Also, we can assess on any number of positive/supportive-of-strength personality profiling.

If we did this along with the teachers, we may even have a better way to do classroom assignments. (Every parent knows which parent is "better" or "worse" for their kid, even given a group of great teachers. I know my son performs like crazy for very demanding but extremely logical teachers. I didn't - I performed best for insightful and enlightening teachers; they didn't even have to cover the course material.)

Before we talk about merit, we should know what improvement looks like. It's a return-on-investment kind of metric (how much you get out compared to what you've put in), not an absolute amount.  In fact that would INCREASE the desireability of teaching the needy kids, since improvements in any area count, and there's such a high opportunity for improvement.  You can even incent the pay higher for getting kids below-grade-level to grade-level, assuming that's a harder role because you are likely to have complicating issues, at least self-esteem.

What it will also point out are the kids who are needy in a way a teacher can't possibly meet: they need healthcare or counseling or are chronically underfed. We would have to dovetail this into healthcare or other components, but it would also legitimize (financially) having those resources affiliated with the schools.

Well, do you agree with Bronwyn? Should I be setting educational policy? Before you answer, let me point you to another one of my hare-brained ideas: Education Reconceived where I just completely upend the curriculum taxonomy to make way for more relevant k12 coursework, and to build in a mechanism for change.

Goodguide Political Contributions Widget

I found this widget via FastCompany. It's fascinating.

I encourage you to click through and play with the filter - on Goodguide, you can scroll and mouseover for more information.  Also, you can select by industry or sort the output in different ways. The top one is the financial industry, sorted by how much the total contributions were. (The half-check box is Deutschebank.)

Democratic

Republican

GoodGuide.com political contribution data for the finance sector

And if you're wondering where to shop, here's this:

Democratic

Republican

GoodGuide.com political contribution data for the retail sales sector

GoodGuide.com political contribution data for over 100 companies
View data for other companies at GoodGuide.com

Are You a Social Entrepreneur?

"Social Capital" and "Social Entrepreneurialism" are evolving terms that have fuzzy meanings. So, instead of adding another definition, I'm going to give you a check list to help you decide whether you might be a Social Entrepreneur.

You're a Social Entrepreneur when:

(1) Whether for-profit or non-profit, your entity was founded and continues to exist in large part because of an identified social need, rather than a market need. There might be both; however without the social need, the entity just wouldn't be the same. The employees feel that their work is purposefully contributing to a greater good.

(2) That social need might be related to providing for the growth or development of any kind of intangible asset(s): intellectual assets, relationship building and conflict management, the environment (water, land, air), health -- mental, physical, and spiritual.

(3) Your entity is market-driven when it comes to finding resources: people feel it's within the entity's mission to find donors or capital because they have a transaction of value to offer. (This is in contrast to having people donate because they should support the entity due to moral or ethical reasons. That type of entity has a role also, but it's a charitable role.)

(4) There is a growth strategy, and it can encompass merging with another entity. With traditional non-profits, one persistent issue is that some non-profits have a concept of "territory," as though non-profits were monopolies in their particular specialty. In that case, merging with another entity -- even if services can be delivered more efficiently that way -- can be perceived as a loss of status (which is then related to difficulty in fundraising).  In a socially entrepreneurial venture, there are other mechanisms to increase revenues, so more flexibility is available for merging separate operating entities.

Differentiating Spiritual from Social

Begin reading at the bottom.

When you finished (or read it the first time), did you feel pain?

Many do. That pain is evidence that we're connected. We imagine these two young men; we imagine or remember our own losses. That's Spiritual. Even those of us who do not know these people nevertheless feel their pain.

I need to pause here. I do also want to say how heartbreaking it was to hear, and express my condolences to those who knew Vijay personally, his family and Mike in particular.

I'm drawing connections into the financial world after the jump.

Can't Take it With You? How to Downsize

I have recently downsized from a house that was far too large for my needs. My new apartment fits much better—but is just small enough to need some storage. As you can imagine, I've had a lot of decisions to make, and of course this isn't the first time I've had to make them.

I realized I was using the framework of evaluating items based on not only their tangible value, but their intangible value as well. I also realized that this was helping me go much more quickly.

This is a big job, that we all face at some point, whether we do this in our own home or after a family death, so I thought I'd share some insights.

How do you establish value?

Wynton Marsalis on Colbert Report

Wynton Marsalis was a guest on the Colbert Report, a show on Comedy Central hosted by Stephen Colbert, whose schtick is satirically mocking pompous and superficial hosts.  Marsalis took one of Stephen's snide taunts and gave such a beautiful quote, I had put up this mini-post:

Stephen Colbert: How do you win at jazz?  Is there a point system?

Wynton Marsalis:  Let me tell you what.  When you start to play and you see people jumping up and down in the audience, and hollering and screaming, and wanting to get up on the tables... and then some other people next to them have tears coming out of their eyes and another person is sleeping, and the whole room erupts in a volcano of feeling?

Stephen Colbert: Yep.

Wynton Marsalis: You won.

Technorati's Ironic Lack of Community Focus

I occasionally point out that there's a lack of representation in technology-based communities of a non-upper-middle-class-male life experience. I mention that this leads to many problems, including structures that instantiate a specific type of young-male worldview and style of interpersonal interaction.

Another example for the heap: the blog categories for Technorati.  I'm not exactly sure where a blog about volunteerism would go, since there actually is no category -- ironically -- for community activities.

Gas Mileage vs. Fuel Efficiency

Around the same time that I blogged a little calculator for a friend thinking about what to do with his cars, the AAAS put out a news release, Replacing Least Efficient Car Has Benefits for Climate, Wallet".

In particular, check out the embedded video which explains why thinking about efficiency (per 10,000 miles, for example) enables better consumer decision-making. 

When Variance is High

I was talking to a friend this weekend. He mentioned how broadly distributed intellectual potential is among the population, and it got me thinking....

When I was a kid, I played games at recess and ran around. I swam butterfly for a year in high school.  I played some tennis. A few coaches commented that I have decent hand/eye coordination and was reasonably quick. I was nothing special, either way... unless what I needed to do required both my feet to leave and then to return to the ground! In that case, failure was (and is) a reasonable expectation, and an injury, quite possible. Unless I'm going to be landing in water at the end, this whole "leaving the earth's surface" thing is clearly something my brain doesn't process well at all.

I was lucky, since I was a girl - the fact I was eager to play sports successfully offset my comparative lack of height as well as my leaping challenges. But for many boys, Physical Education class was a nightmare of humiliation, where coaches had achievement expectations that the boys just didn't have the inclination to train for and in many cases lacked the physical talent to meet.

Those same boys grew up in many cases to be academically successful men; fathers, who could determine funding priorities and administer school districts. I'm not sure this is related, but my son's academically excellent public school has a Physical Education department whose grading requirements for an A- in 9th and 10th grades are apparently "successfully changes into PE clothes."  There is no required physical education at all for 11th and 12th grades. The coaches do care a lot about the teams, but not at all about educating anyone of even average physical talent.

In other words, I suspect that since PE was difficult for people who weren't talented athletically, it was curtailed and then turned into an utterly useless program.  Imagine what would happen if we taught math that way? If you're not "math team" caliber, you show up for class, play math-based games if you want to -- hang out and talk to your friends if not -- and then you get an "A-" so long as you don't cause any problems.

I believe we need to create "learning environments" for physical learning in the schools. Teachers ridiculing kids who can't make the quota of pushups isn't okay; but neither is saying "voila! no need for push-ups!" I think understanding how to deal with the wide distribution of physical talent will help academics find innovative new approaches for managing the wide distribution of intellectual talent.

So back to the conversation with my friend, because there's another part to this, centered around the wide disparity in IQ that schools have to deal with, and how that affects the way people approach their lives, particularly how they approach conflict.

I don't actually have any answers to the questions he raised. But I have been thinking a lot about, specifically, the role of public education beyond the education of specific intellectual skills.

I have seen bright children become so competitive that they lose all sense of empathy. I have seen average children become so insecure and anxious they get sick. I have seen children (and adults) become violently angry and destructively frustrated when they just can't "get it," particularly when the pressure's on and the stakes are high.

I believe the future of education has to be team-based, because we can't afford, as a society, to exacerbate impulsive anger in children who aren't succeeding at the moment, whether they're just not smart enough or they're just generally prone to anger or impulsivity, or they are having short term personal crises.  Having social support helps people feel calmer, and gives them confidence they'll weather whatever they need to face.

We need to know a lot more about how to integrate people who are experiencing failure, anger, and obsession. We have an idea of how to create an intellectual learning environment: it's okay to try, mistakes are tolerated, unpacked, and knowledge is gained. Now we need to learn how to create learning environments that accommodate emotional learning.

And we have to expand those domains to encompass a way to differentiate the curriculum for a very wide disparity in natural talent.

7/29-8/4: Skoll Foundation SocialEdge.org forum

Next week, I'll be hosting a forum on the Skoll Foundation's community website,  SocialEdge, which describes itself as "the global online community where social entrepreneurs and other practitioners of the social benefit sector connect to network, learn, inspire and share resources."

I'll be addressing the following issue:  When entrepreneurs start a social venture, they are immediately in conflict: they have a short-term focus on achieving financial return for their investors, with a long-term focus of building a community's intangible assets as their mission.

A social venture itself is usually specifically about developing intangible assets within a community: social connectedness, intellectual resources and skills, creative expression, personal health, a safer and cleaner environment. But the entrepreneur/investor relationship (typically through an equity deal) is at odds with this because the equity partner is mostly interested in return on financial capital: in an equity deal, this is the only measure of success.

Microfinance has emerged as a solution by providing debt, which changes the expectation for the scale of financial returns.  However, microfinance typically manages risk of course by lending small amounts and also by focusing on how building a community's intangible assets manages the risks associated with default. 

Social Enterprises often require a scale that microfinance can't address, and while the service area may be in desperate need of intangible asset development, the social enterprise is rarely a "distressed property" in terms of its social, physical, and intellectual assets.

But a hybrid is possible:

• apply concepts from microfinance to Entrepreneurship in developed countries (heretofore the VC playground)
• use debt to provide seed capital for ambitious ideas -- de facto very high risk
• mitigate the risk through the same focus on intangible asset development: providing resources to develop the social and intellectual assets associated with the building the enterprise.

An example of such hybridizing is what Marc Dangeard is building with the Entrepreneur Commons, which I've mentioned here previously.  He explains:

Sustainable Economy

A few people have asked how in the world the variety of things I work on are related to each other. Well, some aren't (tennis, piano, quilting...). But professionally, they're all tied together. 

I've decided to make a map of what that looks like to me. For my astute and precise friends, you'll notice that there are many more examples that could be added. Please feel free to comment if your map is faceted differently, and of course mention anything you feels needs mentioning.

Happy Boobies: It's National Bra Fit Week!

While a raucous China/Tibet protest ensues in the area, I'm going to finish up this post I started a while ago, as evidently, it's National Bra Fit Week.

For those who are unaware, it's not just about bras.  Clothing is manufactured on a B and sometimes a C cup... but of course women tend to want the bustline to fit without much extra room, or even to be snug.  Each cup size translates to an inch, so a DD requires 3" more fabric circumference than a B.  Tailored clothing? Forget it. And of course, I only mention DD, because that's the largest size polite people are supposed to discuss (based on what can be seen in stores, catalogs, etc), but obviously breasts get bigger than that, and the larger the size, the more variance possible in the shape, which makes clothing all the more difficult to design. 

I should point out that underneath one's breasts are one's lungs.

I had for quite a while been hoping someone, somewhere would adopt a sizing mechanism for tops based on bust size and sleeve length (like mens' neck and sleeve length), allowing for different types of fit (equivalent to men's "fitted", "average", and "athletic").

Well, after years of their existence(!), I've found the store!! It's so exciting I can barely type!  OK, it only really addresses those issues specific to my body type, but let's face it all supermodels and many post-pubescent teens have the "my shoulders and rib cage are too large!" fitting problem for which Victoria Secret has kindly devoted an store full of push-ups and other ways to enhance cleavage.  My fully-fed and grown up C-and-under friends can walk into VS or any other store, or even read Vogue (or Cosmo) for leads on which designers cut their clothes in order to help the athletic or "apple-shaped" among us feel voluptuous (without the backache). 

But larger-breasted women are forced to either look like they're flaunting it -- sometimes we do, sometimes we really, really don't! -- or wear baggy clothing.

Introducing: bravissimo.com.  About the founder:

Sarah had been appalled by the lack of choice in her size and was fed up of being offered enormous matronly contraptions more suitable for landing parachutes and being told she could not possibly expect to find gorgeous bras in her size. 

Gosh, I just love that! The exchange rate aside, I've contacted Sarah who says she's putting out new dresses in mid-April, so go take a look!

Bubble in Social Capital Affects Product Design

When I was a young GenX just out of graduate school, the problem with corporate environments was they were stultifyingly bureaucratic.  Processes were in place, but if you followed them you'd run off the road.  Suggest an improvement and be branded heretical (after all, sometimes you'd suggest Technology).

But the pay was commensurate with the power of the company.  If you were doing BizDev and you called from DuPont, you got a meeting. And employees were paid a above-average in their industry, because, after all, DuPont wanted the best and the brightest.

Now, it's about gossip (viral marketing) and when a young (inexperienced) person joins a hot company full of other young (inexperienced) people, they get paid very little.  In exchange, they're associated with the virally-hyped brand of the company. They're allowed in the club.

It's seductive, because those people are so darned *cheap* and they're well-educated and smart, so it seems like it's a good idea, doesn't it?

But what happens less and less is selection for people who are, what Michael Porter would call, "sophisticated and anticipatory." We now increasingly give strategic jobs to the financial elite, not people who are of the market the product will serve, nor those who are from the community who will be major consumers, nor those who have had to take on the responsibility of growing up and becoming independent adults in their 20's.  Instead, those jobs go to young people, who on paper seem inexpensive....But they're not. There are obviously hidden costs in the form of poor ability to manage uncertainty.

One in a robust group could learn; an entire team of hyper-protected helicopter-parented youth have a high likelihood of being blindsided by reality and failing miserably.

MIT/Stanford VLAB Summary

VLAB had a very interesting line-up on Tuesday in a packed house at Stanford's Business School.

Ron Gonen, the CEO of RecycleBank, might have the most interesting doppelgoogle ever.  He also has an interesting business model for recycling, one that allows consumers to acquire frequency points for recycling.  The concept hinges on RFID chips that allow operators to match recycling with recycler.

An engaging, dynamic speaker -- who knows how to flatter Californians -- Ron reports 90% penetration in the communities he's launched within. He gets quite a bit of interesting information based on the places the recycler-consumers choose to spend their frequency points. He notes that low-income neighborhoods use their points at the supermarket.

One of his points that I think bears repeating here: he strives to leave some money on the table with respect to charging municipalities so that the municipality can point to the success of the program and build positive community cohesion.

The second presenter was the CEO of Lucid Design. This company creates real-time energy use dashboards for commercial building owners.  He made mention of a reality TV show that is a competition for lowering the carbon footprint.  The winner?  50% Saved.

The last commercial presenter was the founder of GreenPlug, a company that makes chips and gives firmware to companies: Pip Coburn, are you here?  (Pip had a very memorable picture in his book "The Change Function" that rails upon the excessive amount of computer hardware that must be lugged.) The hardware automatically recognizes what the specific device needs, and turns off after it's fully charged.  Further, it's created for easy disassembly, minimizing e-waste.

Advanced Materials and Consumerism

There is an interesting article out of MIT, about a new tiny, quick sensor.

Note to VC Funds interested in alternative energy because it's such an obvious thing: the field is competitive, there are many paths that are going to dead-end, and it's highly interactive with regulatory forces.

Wanna diversify?  You should be investing in filtering and sensing technology.  Control of microstructure as well as the creation of new types of advanced materials will make these the must-have consumer products of the (20)10's.

42

I'm trying to find a way to explain what I'm thinking regarding social networks' fractal nature, and how the topology of these fractal social networks is complex.  Of course I thought I'd go see what other people have said on this topic, and ran across "Connecting the Fractal City," by Nikos A. Salingaros. 

You know how sometimes you run across something and you see that it's so relevant to so many things on so many levels you just can't isolate one yet?  Like that.

He does give public policy suggestions, but in the meantime, because I think there's importance here in all kinds of areas beyond policy, A TEENY excerpt: