5 milyar dolarlık dev ihale yarın

İstanbul Boğazı'na 3. köprü yapımını da içeren Kuzey Marmara Otoyolu ihalesi yarın yapılacak. İhale için yarısı yabancı 18 firma şartname aldı.

Stoltenberg, CHP Genel Başkanı Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu'nu ziyaret etti

Kar yağışı ve yoğun sis nedeniyle ulaşımda aksamalar meydana geliyor

Antalya'da sahilde tartıştıktan sonra denize girerek kaybolan çiftin aranmasına yeniden başlandı.

G.Saray'ın transfer stratejisi sadece lig üzerine kurulu değil. Terim, Şampiyonlar Ligi deneyimi yaşamış oyuncularla Avrupa'da da başarılı olacak bir ekip hedefliyor

İzmir'deki büyülü organizasyonda kadınlar arasındaki çekişme tribünleri mest etti. All-Starlar mücadele bir yana şovlarıyla da hünerlerini sergiledi; maçın yıldızları Işıl, Taurasi ve Nevriye'ydi

Samsun maçından sonra Tanrı ile konuştuğunu açıklayan Brezilyalı futbolcu, Taffarel'in kurduğu Atleta de Cristo tarikatının müritlerindenG.Saray'ın Samsun'u 2-0'dan 4-2 yenmesi kadar maçtan sonra Melo'nun Tanrı ile konuştuğunu açıklaması da gündemin ilk sıralarına çıktı.

Diyarbakır-İstanbul seferini yapan ve Sabiha Gökçen Havalimanı'na inişe geçen Pegasus Havayolları'na ait uçakta bomba paniği yaşandı.

Beşiktaş 117, Samsun da 115 km ile nadiren gözüken bir performansa ulaştı. İki takım dün neredeyse 243 kilometrelik İstanbul-Bursa arasındaki mesafeyi koştu

Bordo-Mavili kulübün Genel Sekreteri Hasan Yener, 'Federasyonu protesto için bundan sonra içerde ve dışarda hiçbir maça gitmeyeceğiz. Futbolu bu noktaya getirenler yarın bunun hesabını verir' dedi

Dışişleri Bakanı Ahmet Davutoğlu, sözde Ermeni soykırımını inkar edenlere hapis cezası getirilmesine ilişkin düzenlemeye hazırlanan Fransa'ya çok sert tepki gösterdi.

Efsanevi şarkıcı Michael Jackson'ın son günlerini geçirdiği malikanedeki kişisel eşyaları, açık artırmada 1 milyon dolara satıldı.

Could the hard-line Palestinian group abandon Damascus for Qatar -- and in so doing lay a foundation for a détente with Israel?

Why is the West so willing to look the other way when it comes to the Democratic Republic of the Congo's clearly flawed election results?

Katie Smith Milway, partner at The Bridgespan Group, explains how to make the most of an internal move. For more, read the article.

Quiet but unsubtle innovation insurgencies are emerging in global enterprise. Instead of investing more in innovation process or cultural transformation, I'm observing more large organizations giving greater resources and responsibilities to ever-smaller teams. Innovation initiatives that were once handled by dozens a decade ago are now run by only handfuls. The median size of the core innovation group has dropped from a football/soccer eleven to a basketball five. Less apparently enables more.

This trend seems transcendent. GlaxoSmithKline CEO Andrew Witty publicly observes that the institutionalization and industrialization of the drug discovery process has hurt his industry. The pharma giant (the world's third largest) has de-scaled its research teams. "What we now have are labs with individuals in them, typically very small teams — the smallest is eight people and the biggest is 60, all in a lab, all mixed in together." GSK is betting that smaller size assures faster velocity and greater agility for innovation decision.

Facebook's Zuckerberg is a big champion of small teams. Likewise, the early Google super-charged its innovation engine by encouraging individuals and smaller groups alike to innovate hard and fast for top management review. Apple's Steve Jobs was notorious for insisting that focused innovation required focused teams. Linear Technology is also a high-impact, small niche player in a capital-intensive industry that leverages the small exceptionally well.

There's nothing novel about this "smaller is beautiful" innovation mindset. Kelly Johnson's pioneering Skunk Works at Lockheed during the 1950s offers a world-class example. "The Mythical Man-Month" — Fred Brooks' classic 1975 treatise on the pragmatics of software development — identified many of the pathologies associated with making teams larger as innovation deadlines loom. But it's also true that many organizations bidding to become more innovative have invested extraordinary time and effort in creating processes and (Read more...) that have made teams enablers, rather than the top-management focus of their innovation investments. Because so many large organizations must coordinate so many silos — and simultaneously scale and customize their innovation offerings — team sizes relentlessly drift upward. A nucleus of seven can easily leap an order of magnitude to 70+ within six months if certain milestones are hit. That's bad.

I increasingly see resistance from team leaders and top-management alike to allow innovation teams to grow anything but incrementally. They work very hard to stay very small. Even top-tier talent is turned aside or denied. The emphasis has shifted from "how do we successfully scale the team?" to "how do we successfully scale the team's influence and deliverables?" Instead of seeing an explosion of virtual teams, what's emerged are teams cleverly using digital and social media to extend their reach both inside the enterprise and out. Key suppliers and channels are contacted on an "as needed" basis. More innovative technology minimizes the need to add more people to the main team.

These intermediated colleagues aren't seen or treated as "teammates," but as a support resource for the hard core. If this sounds a bit exploitive, perhaps it is. The organizational priority is making innovation processes and culture subservient to the small teams rather than making small teams serve the innovation process. I'm even watching innovation cultures deconstruct into innovation "cults" where the team needs to powerfully influence top management perception. Is that healthy? That depends on how well the team leaders align with C-suite innovation vision and values.

The key performance indicator here is, ironically, slow growth. A fast-growing innovation team means either the wrong people were hired or that the wrong challenge was picked. The team delivers measurably impressive results with only marginally more members. That is the success metric. Empire-building is out; remarkably "lean and mean" is in. One clearly sees principles of both the "agile" and "XP" software development sensibilities in this. Those are methodologies where principles clearly trump process as the innovation driver.

I don't know if "going small to get big" defines large enterprise innovation going forward. But tight teams are growing in innovation power and influence, if not size. Take a very, very good look at your organization's innovation teams. Would they do better with a few more folks? Or could they do much, much more with less?

"That was a small lesson I learned on the journey. What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power. Nothing much of lasting value ever happens at the head table, held together by a familiar rhetoric. Those who already have power continue to glide along the familiar rut they have made for themselves." — Michael Ondaatje, The Cat's Table

As this season of protest heads into the holiday season, the powers-that-be might be tempted to breathe a sigh of relief. Not so fast. The Occupy Wall Street camps may have been cleared from the streets, but the movement continues to gather steam. Arab Spring continues to spread across the region and into the winter. Meanwhile, the parliamentary victories of upstart, off-center (and off-the-wall) political organizations — Exhibit A: the Pirate Party — has brought the sideshow to center stage. The agendas may be inchoate and the uprisings chaotic, but the message is clear: the established way of leading, ruling, governing, and managing is not working anymore. That's not exactly a newsflash, but what the most tuned-in leaders get is that it's not just not working for the 99% — it's not working for the 1% either (or it won't be much longer). Just a little over a year into his presidency and already emerging as a bit of a populist maverick, President Benigno "Noynoy" Aquino III of the Philippines recently roused a crowd of top executives from around the world with his exhortation to "institutionalize people power — embed it within institutions so people may easily make their voices heard." It's not optional, he says. "People will always find a way to be heard." Why listen? Not just to calm the unrest or even just because it's the right thing (Read more...) do — but because that multitude of voices promises to open up the cloistered halls of power, flush out the stale air, and signal the future. That's what author Michael Ondaatje learned (and chronicled in his riveting new novel, The Cat's Table) during his 1954 ocean voyage from Colombo to England as an 11-year-old unsupervised schoolboy, relegated to dine with an assortment of oddballs and outcasts, invisible to the elite denizens of first class. "Nothing much of lasting value ever happens at the head table," he writes. "Those who already have power continue to glide along the familiar rut they have made for themselves." Escaping that rut and rethinking who gets a seat at the table just might be the most urgent leadership imperative of our day. Jim Whitehurst got a short course in doing just that when he arrived as CEO of the rough-and tumble Red Hat from his post as COO of the rather more buttoned-up Delta Airlines four years ago. From his first days at the helm of the billion-dollar open source software company, which lives, breathes, and bleeds the values of open source development (not least: the best ideas win, no matter where they come from), Whitehurst realized "if I'm not called an idiot at least once a day, then something's wrong." The power of redistributing power came home to Whitehurst (and his fellow Delta alum Jackie Yeaney, head of strategy and marketing at Red Hat) in the course of introducing a formal strategic planning process to the fast-growing company. They quickly learned that the conventional approach of a few executives (and maybe a handful of outside consultants) drafting a strategy behind closed doors to present to the wider organization would never fly in a company that valued openness and participation as fervently as Red Hat. Instead, Yeaney, Whitehurst, and a wide array of Red Hat colleagues spent three and a half years inventing and testing a powerfully original and radically open approach to setting direction. Yeaney unpacks that journey in-depth in her excellent entry in the HBR/McKinsey Beyond Bureaucracy Challenge over on the MIX, but let me just share a few of the compelling lessons on what every leader has to gain by re-setting the table: Invite dissent — and build belief. "At Red Hat," says Yeaney, "there is a firm belief that the best way to get great ideas is to get a lot of ideas, from a diverse set of viewpoints." Even if those ideas actively contradict what you think. As President Aquino puts it, "Dissent is what speaks truth to power." Calling for ideas from the ranks is not the same as genuinely inviting dissent into the conversation. "You truly have to have no consequences for doing that," says Whitehurst. All ideas are welcome, but no idea is sacred. Creating an environment capable of metabolizing a diversity of viewpoints (and even brutal criticism) only works if people are held together by shared belief. Whitehurst and his colleagues focus as much time on strengthening the Red Hat community's values of openness, transparency, and collaboration as they do on seeking out new ideas. Don't just invite people to the table — involve them in the most important work. If you want to derive all of the insight and benefits of inviting broad participation in charting your organization's future, it's not enough to just ask for ideas. "Red Hat employees generated LOTS of ideas," says Yeaney. But the real power in the process was recruiting people from all over the company to form a series of "exploration teams" to define key areas of focus. The leaders of those teams then "tapped the people with the most knowledge and the most interesting ideas to take charge of actually developing strategy and plans in each area." Just as important, those plans were never handed back up the chain of command for "final answers." The effect? Yeaney cites three key benefits: First, the process generated "more creativity, accountability, and commitment." Second, "by not bubbling every decision up to the senior executive level, we avoided the typical 50,000-foot oversimplification" of issues. And third, "we improved the flexibility and adaptability of the strategy." With the responsibility for planning and execution in the hands of the same people — the people actually doing the work — responsiveness to new opportunities or shifts in the market went up dramatically. There's a corollary here: make the work visible — even if it's messy. While not every individual at Red Hat was deeply involved in the process, everybody was kept in the loop. A dedicated cross-functional "engagement team" was charged with inventing ever-new ways to maintain transparency and expand the conversation, and exploration and strategy team leaders narrated their work and called for ideas and feedback on an internal wiki. The conversation continues to this day with discussions about the strategic framework, specific initiatives, and progress reports woven into company meetings, team events, and new hire orientation. Even if you think you still have the power — act as if you don't. There's a lot of passion in circulation and you have so much to gain by figuring out a way to enlist it to your cause (and so much to lose if you don't). Whitehurst took that lesson to heart — and reaped the rewards. "My first response was, 'Strategy's secret! You can't collaboratively do strategy.' But it turns out that 95% of strategy really can be open — what categories are we going into, what are our sources of competitive advantage, what are the value points for our customers. The process works better, the results are better, and the execution is better when people not only know what the strategy is, but when they know why the strategy got put in place — and they've had a part in making it happen." Is it time to re-set your own table?

People can be extremely indirect in how they resist change. Not long ago I observed the executive team of a global media company reviewing strategic projects that had been initiated by a new CEO. The projects were intended to better leverage the corporate "center" through common processes, sharing of best practices, talent swapping, and the like. Although these made perfect strategic sense, the business unit leaders perceived the shifts as a potential loss of autonomy, power, and control. But rather than expressing this discomfort explicitly, they verbally supported the CEO and found more subtle ways to resist.

Here are a few of the quietly derailing comments that I heard in this meeting:

"Before we move into broad implementation, let's collect some more data to make sure that we're not going to regret these changes."

"We have so many other initiatives going on right now that I don't see how we can free people up to concentrate on this."

"This is absolutely the right thing to do, but first we have to create a toolkit to help our people work differently."

These comments exemplify passive resistance, and there are two reasons why such resistance is hard to navigate. First is that the pushback sounds logical and reasonable. It's hard to argue with a manager who can cite ten more critical projects — especially when that manager is closer to the day-to-day realities than you are, and can back up the argument with business justification. Second, because passive resistance is couched in support and logic, it's not always clear where the resistance is coming from: Does the person actually believe that the proposed change is not in the best interests of the business, or is there some personal or subconscious reason such as feeling threatened or anxious about (Read more...) change?

Since people tend to avoid confrontation, especially with authority figures, passive resistance is more common in organizations than most of us realize. And sometimes it's actually a good thing — it causes managers to avoid impulsive actions, think through implications of change, get people on board, and deal with emotional issues. Most of the time, however, passive resistance undermines a leader's ability to get things done quickly and effectively. In fact it often puts leaders in the untenable position of confidently charging ahead — only to later discover that the team was not fully on-board.

If you find yourself struggling with passive resistance, here are three steps that could break the logjam:

First, ask yourself whether you are fully committed to the change. Pushing through resistance takes a certain amount of capital; make sure that the payoff will greatly exceed your effort.

Smoke out the real reasons for resistance. What lies beneath the logical arguments and delaying tactics. Trying to counter the rational justifications for delay is a losing proposition. Instead find out what's really going on: Do your subordinates distrust your judgment? Are they afraid of their own peoples' reactions? Are they uncomfortable about how things will work after the change is implemented? Are they uncertain about their own ability to pull it off? To get at these issues, encourage your people to honestly share their thoughts, without fear of repercussions. Ask them to envision what success would look like and what it would take to get there. With enough of these conversations, you might enlist them in making the change happen, rather than preventing it.

Instead of dwelling on resistance, focus on your peoples' readiness to move forward. Everyone has some amount of readiness to change, so tap into it. Is there an aspect of the change that your subordinates agree with? Is there one area where the change can be piloted right away? Are there some elements that you can accomplish in the short term? In the global media company mentioned above, the team eventually decided to start strengthening the corporate center by creating two functional communities that could act as virtual centers for sharing best practices and leveraging talent. This step was less threatening to the business leaders — and it also proved the case that centralization could be beneficial.

Although we often don't admit it, passive resistance is pervasive in most organizations. To what extent have you experienced it, and what suggestions can you offer to overcome it?

In yet another effort to solve the euro crisis, France and Germany last week agreed on a stability pact that essentially offers increased bailout funds in return for even stronger fiscal austerity on the part of the major debtor countries of Europe.

But the deal arguably necessitated changes to the Treaties governing the European Union and as such required assent from all 27 EU member countries, ten of which are not members of the euro zone but whose economies are nonetheless closely integrated with it. To get around this problem and to provide the markets with a united front of governments, Germany and France wanted to make the deal an EU-wide agreement and sought to obtain a unanimous agreement to seek appropriate Treaty changes.

Britain's David Cameron, however, believed that some aspects of the deal would harm the City of London's position as a financial center contributing something like 10% of Britain's GDP. He was also under pressure from a resurgent euro-skeptical right wing in his Conservative party to recover powers over policy-making rather than to agree to cede any more sovereignty to Brussels.

He therefore decided to threaten to veto changes to the Treaty unless it included some protection for the City's interests. Germany and France, whose governing elites at heart suspect that Anglo-Saxon speculators are aggravating the euro crisis, would have none of it and called Cameron's bluff, probably feeling that in the end, like his predecessors, Cameron would not be prepared to deliver on his threat. Cameron, however, felt that his political credibility would be irretrievably damaged if he were not to follow-through on his threat and consequently vetoed any EU deal. He was alone in his dissent.

The upshot of that veto is that the euro zone and nine of the ten other EU members will (Read more...) ahead with a separate deal, effectively creating a two-speed Europe, with only Britain going at the other speed. Mr. Cameron claims that Britain's position is uncompromised by this veto, as it remains a full EU member with all rights and privileges, including access to the Single Market.

That may be true. But what is certain is that by its veto Britain has effectively decided to stay out of any deals to fix the euro. That is a significant loss of influence for Britain and it is doubtful that Britain has gained any benefit from Cameron's veto because the City remains vulnerable to the imposition of European regulations and now lacks an advocate as well. For their part, France and Germany can claim that Britain is putting local interests above the common good and that getting 26 out of 27 is European unanimity in all but name.

Basically, Cameron's decision to try and blackmail France and Germany into letting the City off the hook was never going to work. Germany and France don't actually need Britain's participation to strike a rescue deal so the threat of veto was relatively empty and they knew it. The only question was whether the fig-leaf of British participation was worth the price of concessions to the City. Clearly it wasn't, and that fact should have been relatively obvious to the British team.

Cameron himself will probably also lose out from this failed blackmail. His coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats, are strongly pro-European and their commitment to the coalition must now be in question. And the conservative euro skeptics are likely to use this perceived victory as an opportunity to increase pressure for a referendum on EU membership, further polarizing British politics on this divisive issue. In the end, the decision may cost Cameron his job and trigger an early UK election. Frankly, Cameron would have been much better advised to go in prepared to accept the deal and spend capital on selling it domestically rather than pin his colors to an illusory national interest.

Of course, none of this discussion changes the fact that the deal that France and Germany have struck is not good, because it seems to doom Europe to a decade or more of no growth, unless the ECB starts acting like a real central bank, which it doesn't feel able to as yet. Nor does it change the fundamental problems underlying the euro, which are that it isn't really a viable currency union to begin with, given the very different economies it yokes together, and the fact that a United States of Europe really isn't a politically feasible goal.

Post by David Bollier on his blog:

The infrastructure for starting and maintaining new commons just got a big boost in Spain with the founding of Goteo.org, a new crowdfunding website. The explicit mission of Goteo.org is to help finance and support “the independent development of creative and innovative initiatives that contribute to the common good, free knowledge, and open code.”

The site is obviousy inspired by the crowdfunding website Kickstarter and other distributed-funding innovations, but Goteo.org differs in being dedicated exclusively to funding open-source and commons-related projects. It is also dedicared to fostering distributed collaboration on proposed and ongoing projects.

Most of the Goteo.org website is in Spanish, but here is an English FAQ describing the project. Geoteo sees itself as “a platform for investing in ‘feeder capital’ that supports projects with social, cultural, scientific, educational, technological, or ecological objectives that generate new opportunities for the improvement of society and the enrichment of community goods and resources.” The site explains:

Goteo differs from other models of crowdfunding by positioning itself as a social network composed of promoters, co-financers, and collaborators.

As a member of the network, you can take on one or more roles, depending on the project. Goteo offers:

• To promoters: Choose a new model of collective financing and distributed collaboration, by giving your project visibility if you share all of these principles, and by getting your potential community involved right from the beginning.

• To co-financiers: Access a wide range of projects, designed, produced and/or distributed from a free and open source perspective, in which to contribute monetarily in exchange for collective returns and individual rewards.

• To collaborators: Participate in Goteo with resources, time, energy and skills, by helping concrete projects and the platform itself further the common (Read more...) and achieve positive change in society.

Although only a few weeks old, Goteo.org has already funded several projects. One isTuderechoasaber.es, a website that lets people submit requests for information to any public institution in Spain. The goal is to facilitate the public’s right of access to public information — which is currently quite difficult in Spain – and so to promote greater accountability of public institutions. The project will adapt open-source software developed by the British website WhatDoTheyKnow.com. The ultimate goal is to enable citizens or organizations in any country to launch similar sites within a few weeks.

Another successful Goteo.org project is an open and collaborative library called #Bookcamping, which was born during the 15M protests in Spain last year. The project wants to leverage social networks to make the knowledge-production and -exchange more “horizontal and rhizomatic.” To date, this free library has raised 6,184 euros, or 120% of its goal.

Another interesting project, Nodo Móvil (Mobile Node) proposed building a free mobile wireless telecommunications infrastructure of digital mesh networks that can be used in cities. It would interconnect multiple computers and peripherals (LAN: Local Area Network) in different spaces, and opeate independently of telecommunications companies. Nodo Móvil raised 1,295 euros, or 104% of its goal.

The nonprofit behind Goteo.org is the Open Source Foundation (Fundación Fuentes Abiertas) and its principal promoter is the Barcelona-based Platoniq, which describes itself as “an international organization of cultural producers and software developers who are pioneers in the production and distribution of copyleft culture.”

A hearty bravo to this welcome innovation for commons culture! May it soon be replicated in other countries and other languages.  And in the meantime:  Participate.  Donate.  Support.

Two people of equal skill work in the same office. For the sake of comparison, let's say both arrive at work at 9 am each day, and leave at 7 pm.

Bill works essentially without stopping, juggling tasks at his desk and running between meetings all day long. He even eats lunch at his desk. Sound familiar?

Nick, by contrast, works intensely for approximately 90 minutes at a stretch, and then takes a 15 minute break before resuming work. At 12:15, he goes out for lunch for 45 minutes, or works out in a nearby gym. At 3 pm, he closes his eyes at his desk and takes a rest. Sometimes it turns into a 15 or 20 minute nap. Finally, between 4:30 and 5, Nick takes a 15 minute walk outside.

Bill spends 10 hours on the job. He begins work at about 80 percent of his capacity, instinctively pacing himself rather than pushing all out, because he knows he's got a long day ahead.

By 1 pm, Bill is feeling some fatigue. He's dropped to 60 percent of his capacity and he's inexorably losing steam. Between 4 and 7 pm, he's averaging about 40 percent of his capacity.

It's called the law of diminishing returns. Bill's average over 10 hours is 60 percent of his capacity, which means he effectively delivers 6 hours of work.

Nick puts in the same 10 hours. He feels comfortable working at 90 percent of his capacity, because he knows he's going to have a break before too long. He slows a little as the day wears on, but after a midday lunch or workout, and a midafternoon rest, he's still at 70 percent during the last three hours of the day.

Nick takes off a total of two hours during his 10 (Read more...) work, so he only puts in 8 hours. During that time, he's working at an average of 80 percent of his capacity, so he's delivering just under 6 ½ hours of work — a half hour more than Bill.

Because Nick is more focused and alert than Bill, he also makes fewer mistakes, and when he returns home at night, he has more energy left for his family.

It's not just the number of hours we sit at a desk in that determines the value we generate. It's the energy we bring to the hours we work. Human beings are designed to pulse rhythmically between spending and renewing energy. That's how we operate at our best. Maintaining a steady reservoir of energy — physically, mentally, emotionally and even spiritually — requires refueling it intermittently.

Work the way Nick does, and you'll get more done, in less time, at a higher level of quality, more sustainably.

Create a workplace that truly values a balanced relationship between intense work and real renewal, and you'll not only get greater productivity from employees, but also higher engagement and job satisfaction.

There's plenty of evidence that increased rest and renewal serve performance.

Consider a study conducted by NASA, in collaboration with the Federal Aviation Administration, of pilots on long haul flights. One group of pilots was given an opportunity to take 40 minute naps mid-flight, and ended up getting an average of 26 minutes of actual sleep. Their median reaction time improved by 16 percent following their naps.

Non-napping pilots, tested at a similar halfway point in the flight, experienced a 34 percent deterioration in reaction time. They also experienced 22 micro sleeps of 2-10 seconds during the last 30 minutes of the flight. The pilots who took naps experienced none.

Or consider the study that performance expert Anders Ericcson did of violinists at the Berlin Academy of Music. The best of the violinists practiced in sessions no longer than 90 minutes, and took a break in between each one. They almost never practiced more than 4 ½ hours over a day. What they instinctively understood was the law of diminishing returns.

The top violinists also got an average of more than 8 hours of sleep a night, and took a 20-30 minute nap every afternoon. Over a week, they slept 16 hours more than the average American does.

During my 30s and 40s, I wrote three books. I sat at my desk each day from 7 am to 7 pm, struggling to stay focused. Each book took me at least a year to write. For my most recent books, I wrote in a schedule that matched the great violinists — three 90 minute sessions with a renewal break in between each one.

I wrote both those books in six months — investing less than half the number of hours I had for each of my first three books. When I was working, I was truly working. When I was recharging — whether by getting something to eat, or meditating, or taking a run — I was truly refueling.

Stress isn't the enemy in the workplace. Indeed, stress is the only means by which we can expand capacity. Just think about weightlifting. By stressing your muscles, and then recovering, you gradually build strength. Our real enemy is the absence of intermittent renewal.

A group of Scandinavian entrepreneurs caught my eye this year, so when I was in London the other week, I decided to look them up.  They had a local office above a shop in the fashionable shopping district around the Bond Street tube station and were a fascinating group, who seem to have built a [...]

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• Saving E-Textiles from an E-waste Fate « A Sanguine Neurastheniac
  "An article in the Journal of Industrial Ecology from August discusses how the very thing that makes e-textiles interesting–the unobtrusive integration of electronics and fabric–could make them an e-waste nightmare."
• Quick guide to dynamics of peoples assemblies
  This text has been prepared by the Commission for Group Dynamics in Assemblies of the Puerta del Sol Protest Camp (Madrid). It is based on different texts and summaries which reached consensus in the internal Assemblies of this (Read more...) (and which will be made available on the official webs of the 15th May Movement) and from the experiences gained in the General Assemblies held in this Protest Camp up until 31st May 2011.
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  "Three weeks ago, on the 16th of November, Cristian Ferreyra was shot dead by two masked men in front of his house and his family. Cristian lived in San Antonio, a village north of Santiago del Estero in Argentina. He was part of an indigenous community, and member of the indigenous peasant organisation MOCASE Via Campesina. His 'crime'? To refuse to leave his homeland in order to make way for a massive soybean plantation, "

The problem of a Chevrolet Volt (a pluggable hybrid electric vehicle) which caught fire a few weeks after being totaled in a US government side crash test was due to a leaking coolant line from coolant that cools the battery. The critical response to the Volt fires in the press seemed a bit over the top to me. Okay, so you trash the car in a crash test and, in a condition such that humans won't try to use it, the thing catches fire. So what? We should be so lucky that battery safety is our biggest problem with PHEV and EV cars. As things stand, we aren't driving them because they cost so much. On the bright side, the...

This project at Washington State University is incredibly nifty. Researchers use a 3-D printer to make a bone-like material that can temporarily do the job of bone, while serving as a scaffold for new bone to grow on. Over time, it dissolves safely.

Read more about it on the WSU website

Video Link

Source: boingboing.net/2011/12/02/3-d-printer-makes-scaffolding.html?utm_source=feedburner

But what's next for Russia's newly emboldened protest movement?

10 years later, life isn't just better -- it's much better.