all things sustainably considered

May 25

Printable A3-sized solar cells hit a new milestone in green energy

Printing 10 meters of solar cells in a minute means good things for solar.

Full Story: ArsTechnica

futurescope:

McKinsey: The $33 Trillion Technology Payoff

From Bits Blog NYT:

A new report from the McKinsey Global Institute, the research arm of the consulting firm, delivers a twist on the art form, and the difference is more than the timing. The 154-page report not only selects a dozen “disruptive” technologies from a candidate list of 100, but also measures their economic impact. By 2025, the 12 technologies — led by the mobile Internet, the automation of knowledge work, and the Internet of Things — have the potential to deliver economic value of up to $33 trillion a year worldwide, according to the McKinsey researchers. […]

[read more] [McKinsey Global Institute]

(via emergentfutures)

May 24

“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.” —

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)

(Source: The New York Times, via emergentfutures)

May 20

[video]

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…

[video]

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

(via emergentfutures)

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

(via npr)

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

(via futuramb)

[video]