all things sustainably considered

Organizational psychology has long concerned itself with how to design work so that people will enjoy it and want to keep doing it. Traditionally the thinking has been that employers should appeal to workers’ more obvious forms of self-interest: financial incentives, yes, but also work that is inherently interesting or offers the possibility for career advancement. Grant’s research, which has generated broad interest in the study of relationships at work and will be published for the first time for a popular audience in his new book, “Give and Take,” starts with a premise that turns the thinking behind those theories on its head. The greatest untapped source of motivation, he argues, is a sense of service to others; focusing on the contribution of our work to other people’s lives has the potential to make us more productive than thinking about helping ourselves.

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Susan Dominus, Is Giving the Secret to Getting Ahead?

A deep piece on the research and personality traits of Adam Grant, Warton Business School professor and the author of the soon-to-be-released Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success, in which he argues that a sense of service to others — an almost obsessive focus on the contribution of our work to other people’s lives — may be the single greatest key to productivity, much greater than trying only to help ourselves.

Read the case study that started his career: as a sales lead at an academic fundraising call center, bringing in a student who benefitted from that fundraising, and letting him tell the callers, directly, of how it had changed his life, led to enormous gains in their productivity, gains that could not be explained by other factors, even when the callers themselves were unaware of that motivation, or actively pooh-poohed it.

(via stoweboyd)

z-x-y:

Hemeroscopium House, by Ensamble Studio

For the Greek, Hemeroscopium is the place where the sun sets. An allusion to a place that exists only in our mind, in our senses, that is ever-changing and mutable, but is nonetheless real. It is delimited by the references of the horizon, by the physical limits, defined by light, and it happens in time.

springwise:

‘Invisible biometrics’ detect user identity by how they use the device

Online fraud and identity theft is fast becoming a headache for large companies and individual computer users alike. We’ve already seen alternatives to standard passwords in the form of LaunchKey, the platform that verifies logins via smartphones. Based on the premise that everyone has a unique way of using their devices, Israel-based BioCatch is behavioral profiling software that now hopes to trip up cybercriminals by recognizing when their online interactions don’t match up with the person they’re claiming to be. READ MORE…

laughingsquid:

Famous People Pay Tribute to Cancer Patient by Lip-Synching His Song

science-junkie:

A storage power plant on the seabed

Norwegian research scientists will contribute to realising the concept of storing electricity at the bottom of the sea. The energy will be stored with the help of high water pressure.

The idea of an underwater pumped hydroelectric power plant may sound like Jules Verne fiction, but then it was hatched by a German engineer who has spent much of his professional life working in aerospace technology.

“Imagine opening a hatch in a submarine under water. The water will flow into the submarine with enormous force. It is precisely this energy potential we want to utilize,” explains Rainer Schramm, inventor and founder of the company Subhydro AS to Gemini.no. “Many people have launched the idea of storing energy by exploiting the pressure at the seabed, but we are the first in the world to apply a specific patent-pending technology to make this possible,” he adds.

Read more

fastcompany:

It’s no secret that the world’s ocean trash problem is getting bad; looking at a handful of images from the Texas-sized Pacific garbage patch should be enough to convince anyone. As for all of our litter that doesn’t end up in the middle of the ocean? It often stays close to shore, where volunteers for Ocean Conservancy’s International Coastal Cleanup pick some of it up, cataloging all the items they find.

The 10 types of trash that are littering our beaches

emergentfutures:

Rodrigo Nino, CEO of Prodigy Network, spoke at PSFK CONFERENCE 2013 about building a crowd funded skyscraper in the city of Bogota, Colombia.

Full Story: PSFK

laughingsquid:

George Takei Responds to Teenage ‘Traditional’ Marriage Fans With Humorous Signs

emergentfutures:

With Personal Data, Predictive Apps Stay a Step Ahead

Apps that proactively help people with their lives represent a significant departure from earlier approaches to software.

Full Story: Technology Review

Bill Gates, speaking to the Royal Academy of Engineers in London last March, managed to capture the problem that Love’s idea would be leveled against: “Our priorities are tilted by marketplace imperatives,” Gates said. “The malaria vaccine, in humanist terms, is the biggest need, but it gets virtually no funding. If you are working on male baldness or the other things you get an order of magnitude more researching funding because of the voice in the marketplace.

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—	How Drug Companies Keep Medicine Out of Reach - Brian Till - The Atlantic (via futuristgerd)