Friday, November 28, 2008
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
WINDSPIRE INSPIRES GOING GREEN! (GREAT LAKES IT REPORT PRESS RELEASE)
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| An example of a Windspire installation |
Posted: Monday, 17 November 2008 9:35PM
Warren Schools To Consider Renewable Energy Curriculum
A unique vertical-axis wind turbine would be installed at the Macomb Math, Science and Technology Center under an agreement to be considered Wednesday night by the board of the Warren Consolidated Schools.
The Windspire wind turbine would be installed by Southern Exposure Renewable Energy Co. of Ortonville. It's manufactured by Nevada-based Mariah Power.
The turbine is part of a larger proposal to create a "renewable energy institute" at the math and science magnet school, with the company and the school district working together to develop a new renewable energy curriculum.
More at www.mariahpower.com or www.seenergyco.com.
Recently Mariah Power partnered with Mastech of Sterling Heights to manufacture its Windspire product at Mastech's plant in Manistee. The first Michigan made wind turbines are scheduled to become available in February.
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Friday, November 7, 2008
Meeting: Luke Clyburn 11-6-08
Next Meeting? Date & Time?AGENDA ITEMS?
With Obama, hopes for Great Lakes rise
BY JOHN FLESHER • ASSOCIATED PRESS • November 7, 2008
TRAVERSE CITY -- Barack Obama's election as president and his appointment of Rahm Emanuel as chief of staff are hopeful signs for the struggle to heal the ailing Great Lakes ecosystem, advocates said Thursday.
Obama and Emanuel, both from the Lake Michigan city of Chicago, have championed initiatives in Congress to protect the lakes. In September, the president-elect released a plan pledging a $5-billion down payment toward a wide-ranging restoration that would include sewage system upgrades, toxic cleanups and wetlands repair.
Emanuel introduced a comprehensive cleanup bill in 2003, shortly after his election to the House. Although it didn't pass, he has continued working with lawmakers from both parties to build support, said Cameron Davis, president of the Alliance for the Great Lakes.
Davis, an Obama campaign adviser, said he had known of the Illinois senator's commitment to the lakes since he met him during a Lake Michigan beach cleanup a decade ago.
"It's hard to imagine how the Great Lakes could not be a priority" for the new administration, Davis said in a conference call with reporters.
He said he considers Emanuel "the godfather of Great Lakes restoration."
"He swims in Lake Michigan for exercise and for fun," Davis said. "I know he's got a very intimate connection to the lake that we care so much about, and I can't imagine that will be lost or ignored."
The Healing Our Waters-Great Lakes Coalition, an organization that represents more than 100 groups, also expressed high hopes for an ecosystem that scientists warn is on the verge of ruin from big-city sewage, toxins and invasive species.
The lakes contain nearly one-fifth of the world's fresh surface water and 95% of the U.S. supply.
"The millions of people who rely on the Great Lakes now count on President-elect Obama's leadership to restore these waters, before the problems worsen and become more costly to correct," said Jeff Skelding, the coalition's national campaign director.
Advocates say they hope the change of administrations will bring more money to the Great Lakes Legacy Act, which cleans up highly-polluted harbors and river sediments.
This year, the House voted to provide $150 million a year for five years for cleanup work, but the Senate authorized just $54 million a year for two years.
Supporters acknowledged they will have to scrap for more money even with a friendly administration in power, given the federal budget deficit and the economic slowdown.
"It will be very hard for a president to propose major new programs unless you can find the money somewhere to fund them," said Michael Kraft, professor of public and environmental affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. "Spending will be severely constrained."
Still, he predicted the Obama administration will be more supportive simply by virtue of having more policymakers with scientific and environmental advocacy backgrounds than the Bush team, which drew heavily from business and industry.
"I see what is likely to be a real effort to get beyond the idea that environmental protection competes with economic development," Kraft said.
Obama's plan also calls for a crackdown on invasive species and for appointing an official to coordinate the dozens of federal programs that deal with the lakes.
Davis said it is too early to speculate about who might get that job.
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Disruption Seeks/Creates Cracks in the SILO!
Published Online: October 28, 2008
Published in Print: November 5, 2008
Scholars Discuss 'Disruptive Innovation' in K-12 Education
A latecomer to a panel discussion this week on “disruptive innovation” in K-12 education and health care may have suspected that he or she had entered the wrong room.
The main speaker, Clayton M. Christensen, was talking about the steel industry, not education or health. Then he discussed the automobile, radio, microchip, and software industries.
To Mr. Christensen, a professor at the Harvard Business School, those industries offer profound lessons for K-12 schooling. In every case, the introduction of a new technology led to the upending of the established leaders by upstart entrants, he explained at an Oct. 27 panel discussion at the American Enterprise Institute.
See Also
What technological innovations have changed the way you teach and the way your students learn? Share your experiences in our forum.
Mr. Christensen, the lead author of Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns, said similar changes will soon happen to public school districts, as providers of virtual schooling gradually claim more and more students, starting with those who are poorly served by their current schools.
'No Stupidity'
The book, published last spring and co-authored by Michael B. Horn and Curtis W. Johnson, predicts that those changes will accelerate until, by 2019, roughly half of all high school courses will be taken online. ("Online Education Cast as 'Disruptive Innovation'," May 7, 2008.)
To the roomful of policy experts and educators at the think tank’s luncheon meeting, Mr. Christensen explained that the leading companies did not lose their primacy through their managers’ incompetence. Instead, it was because they obeyed two hallowed principles of business: First, listen to your best customers and give them what they want; and second, invest where the profit margin is most attractive.
Rather, businesses need to be willing to act in ways that may be opposed to their short-term interests, and that lower their costs and simplify their products or services, making them more attractive to a larger pool of potential customers.
“It’s a story with no villains and no stupidity,” noted Frederick M. Hess, the director of education policy studies at the AEI and the moderator of the discussion.
Mr. Horn, who runs Innosight Institute, a think tank in Watertown, Mass., devoted to Mr. Christensen’s theories, was on a panel at the event. Outlining the application to education, he cited Harvard education professor Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences and said “children’s need for customization collides with schools’ imperative for standardization.”
The billions of dollars that have been invested to put computers into schools have failed to make a difference because “we have crammed them into conventional classrooms,” said Mr. Horn.
Schools and students have not been able to reap the benefits of technology, he said, because of the web of constraints—called “interdependencies”—that schools have not been able to escape, including the organization of the school day, the division of learning in academic disciplines, the architecture of school buildings, and the federal, state, and local mandates that educators must obey.
'Customization'
On hand at the Oct. 27 event as the official “responder and raconteur” was education expert Chester E. Finn Jr., the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute in Washington.
Perhaps to the surprise of some in the audience, Mr. Finn generally agreed with Mr. Christensen’s and Mr. Horn’s arguments.
Mr. Finn, who served in the U.S. Department of Education during the Reagan administration, had two main points of contention. First, he disliked the authors’ reliance on Mr. Gardner’s theories, which, he asserted, are dismissed by “respectable cognitive psychologists.”
On that point, the authors are “wrong, but it doesn’t matter,” he concluded. “Gardner or no, I’m still in favor of greater individualization and customization of education.”
Second, Mr. Finn said, he thinks the authors have underestimated the power of politics to stymie the change in education, because in most cases it is the schools, not the students, that are the purchasers of the new technology-driven forms of education.
That means virtual schools will face “resistance and pushback and hubris, and a sort of smugness” from public education, Mr. Finn said.
As a result, he said, he did not expect regular public schools to become the “main route” for new technologies to be applied to K-12 education.
Mr. Finn added that a more likely route was for charter schools and families to purchase the technology directly, possibly in the form of supplemental private education, perhaps subsidized by philanthropies.
Sunday, November 2, 2008
INNOVATION CONSTANT: IRRESPECTIVE of Space and Time!
It’s No Time to Forget About Innovation
James Yang
BY its very nature, innovation is inefficient. While blockbusters do emerge, few of the new products or processes that evolve from innovative thinking ultimately survive the test of time. During periods of economic growth, such inefficiencies are chalked up as part of the price of forging into the future.
But these aren’t such times. Wild market gyrations, frozen credit markets and an overall sour economy herald a new round of corporate belt-tightening. Foremost on the target list is anything inefficient. That’s bad news for corporate innovation, and it could spell trouble for years to come, even after the economy turns around.
“To be honest, we had a problem with innovation even before the economic crisis. That’s the reason I wrote my book,” says Judy Estrin, former chief technology officer at Cisco Systems and author of “Closing the Innovation Gap.” “We’re focusing on the short term and we’re not planting the seeds for the future.”
In tough times, of course, many companies have to scale back. But, she says: “To quote Obama, you don’t use a hatchet. You use a scalpel. Leaders need to pick and choose with great care.”
There are important things managers can do to ensure that creative forward-thinking doesn’t go out the door with each round of layoffs. Fostering a companywide atmosphere of innovation — encouraging everyone to take risks and to think about novel solutions, from receptionists to corner-suite executives — helps ensure that the loss of any particular set of minds needn’t spell trouble for the entire company.
She suggests instilling five core values to entrench innovation in the corporate mind-set: questioning, risk-taking, openness, patience and trust. All five must be used together — risk-taking without questioning leads to recklessness, she says, while patience without trust sets up an every-man-for-himself mentality.
In an era of Six Sigma black belts and brown belts, Ms. Estrin urges setting aside certain efficiency measures in favor of what she calls “green-thumb leadership” — a future-oriented management style that understands, and even encourages, taking risks. Let efficiency measures govern the existing “factory farm,” she says, but create greenhouses and experimental gardens along the sides of the farm to nurture the risky investments that likely will take a number of years to bear fruit.
“I’m not suggesting you only cut from today’s stuff and keep the future part untouched,” she says. “You have to balance it.”
Yet even that approach has its drawbacks. Companies that create silos of innovation by designating one group as the “big thinkers” while making others handle day-to-day concerns risk losing their innovative edge if any of the big thinkers leave the company or ultimately must be laid off.
“Innovation has to be embedded in the daily operation, in the entire work force,” says Jon Fisher, a business professor, serial entrepreneur, and author of “Strategic Entrepreneurism,” which advocates building a start-up’s business from the beginning with an eye toward selling the company. “A large acquirer’s interest in a start-up or smaller company is binary in nature: They either want you or they don’t, based on the innovation you have to offer. The best way to foster innovation is to create something, put it to the test, build a good company and then get it under the umbrella of a world-renowned company to move it forward.”
David Thompson, chief executive and co-founder of Genius.com Inc., based in San Mateo, Calif., says that innovation “has a bad name in down times” but that “bad times focus the mind and the best-focused minds in the down times are looking for the opportunities.”
“You do have to batten down the hatches and reduce expenses, but you can’t do it at the expense of the big picture,” Mr. Thompson adds. “You always have to keep in mind the bigger picture that’s coming down the road in two or three years.
“The last thing you want to do with innovation is just throw money at it. It’s a very tricky balance.”
In fact, hard times can be the source of innovative inspiration, says Chris Shipley, a technology analyst and executive producer of the DEMO conferences, where new ideas make their debuts. “Some of the best products and services come out of some of the worst times,” she says. In the early 1990s, tens of millions of dollars had gone down the drain in a futile effort to develop “pen computing” — an early phase of mobile computing — and a recession was shriveling the economic outlook.
Yet the tiny Palm Computing managed to revitalize the entire industry in a matter of months by transforming itself overnight from a software maker into a hardware company.
“Our biggest challenge right now is fear,” she says. “The worst thing that a company can do right now is go into hibernation, into duck-and-cover. If you just sit on your backside and wait for things to get better, they’re not going to. They’re going to get better for somebody, but not necessarily for you.”
HOWARD LIEBERMAN, also a serial entrepreneur and founder of the Silicon Valley Innovation Institute, says innovation breeds effectiveness. It’s not about efficiency, he argues. “Efficiency is for bean counters,” he says. “It’s not for C.E.O.’s or inventors or founders.”
The current economic downturn comes as no surprise to him, he says, because it mirrors the downturn at the time of the dot-com bust. Then and now, the companies that survive are those that keep creativity and innovation foremost.
“Creativity doesn’t care about economic downturns,” Mr. Lieberman says. “In the middle of the 1970s, when we were having a big economic downturn, both Apple and Microsoft were founded. Creative people don’t care about the time or the season or the state of the economy; they just go out and do their thing.”
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