134 Matching Annotations
  1. Nov 2024
    1. The potential for cuts in 2030 is 31 gigatons of CO2 equivalent – which isaround 52 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions in 2023 – and 41gigatons in 2035.· Increased deployment of solar photovoltaic technologies and wind energy coulddeliver 27 per cent of this total emission reduction potential in 2030 and 38 percent in 2035.· Action on forests could deliver around 20 per cent of the potential in both years.• Other strong options include efficiency measures, electrification and fuelswitching in the buildings, transport and industry sectors.

      for - stats - 27% of the gap can be reduced by wind and solar deployment and 20% by action on forests, while efficiency, electrification, fuel switching in buildings, transport and industry sectors can also contribute - UN Emissions Gap Report 2024 - Key Messages

  2. Oct 2024
    1. Successful Secretary Presented by Royal Office Typewriters. A Thomas Craven Film Corporation Production, 1966. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=If5b2FiDaLk.

      Script: Lee Thuna<br /> Educational Consultant: Catharine Stevens<br /> Assistant Director: Willis F. Briley<br /> Design: Francisco Reynders<br /> Director & Producer: Carl A. Carbone<br /> A Thomas Craven Film Corporation Production

      "Mother the mail"

      gendered subservience

      "coding boobytraps"


      "I think you'll like the half sheet better. It is faster." —Mr. Typewriter, timestamp

      A little bit of the tone of "HAL" from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). This is particularly suggestive as H.A.L. was a one letter increment from I.B.M. and the 1966 Royal 660 was designed to compete with IBM's Selectric

      This calm voice makes suggestions to a secretary while H.A.L. does it for a male astronaut (a heroic figure of the time period). Suddenly the populace feels the computer might be a bad actor.

      "We're living in an electric world, more speed and less effort."—Mr. Typewriter<br /> (techno-utopianism)

    1. Soderbeck tells us about a recent job that took 40 hours to complete. He ended up charging the customer just $50.

      "Well, I already gave him an estimate," he says with a chuckle. "I'm not gonna change that quote, I've been here too long to do that."

      It seems like an unwritten rule for typewriter repair shops to go way over on time versus pay to repair a typewriter based on an initial quote.

      I've seen at least one other quote like this, but don't think I collected it.

    1. It is important to learn as much and at the sametime as little as possible.J

      By abstracting and concatenating portions of material, one can more efficiently learn material that would otherwise take more time.

  3. May 2024
    1. reating anchor samples and pre-recorded feedback messages as part of the course design can help speed up the feedback process and relieve the pressure of time.

      I wonder if you can share libraries of comments. or if that is counter productive b/c it's someone else's voice.

    2. Leveraging the power of peers in the feedback process is one humanizing strategy

      value of peer reviewing

  4. Apr 2024
    1. One study of women in rural areas without electricity in the 1940s found that hand-washing and ironing a 38-pound laundry load required taking about 6,300 steps around the house, the well, the stove, and back to the house. After nine such loads, a woman would have walked the equivalent of a marathon. The electrification of housework reduced the ambulatory burden of that same laundry load by 90 percent.

      Which study?

      Was it mentioned by Robert Caro in his Johnson biography which has a chapter laying out some of this work before electrification?

    2. the average married couple in America still works about 67 hours a week.
    1. [Narrator]: The power of the MC 68000 permitted another breakthrough:the common user interface.[Bill Atkinson]: On Lisa we make each of the programs have a similar user interface,so that what you've learned from using one programcarries over and you feel naturally how to use the next.

      While the idea of a common user interface on computers may have felt like a selling point when facing a new scary machine with a variety of functionalities, did it really save that much time, effort, and learning curve? Particularly with respect to the common office tools it was replacing?

      The common user interface was really more a benefit to the company and all the companies which programmed for it at scale. The benefits are like Melvil Dewey's standardization of the Dewey Decimal Classification which allowed libraries everywhere to work on the same system rather than needing to reinvent their own individually.

      This sort of innovation with scalability is helpful as humans are far better at imitation than innovation.

  5. Mar 2024
    1. It must not be forgotten that the directaim of the card system is : maximum of work with minimumof labour (60).
    2. It is there-fore to be expected that the initial cost of the card system is nota fair criterion of its cost when in working order.

      Setting up and learning a note taking or card index system has a reasonably large up-front cost, but learning it well and being able to rely on it over long periods of time will eventually reap larger and cheaper long-term outcomes and benefits.

      Unless changing systems creates dramatically larger improvements, the cost of change will surely swamp the benefits making the switch useless. This advice given by Kaiser is still as true today as it was in 1908, we tend not to think about the efficiency as much now as he may have then however and fall trap to shiny object syndrome.

    3. Accuracy This is one of the chief claims of the card system. 63To increase accuracy in fUing, the materials arealways arranged numerically. We thereby approach as nearlyas possible to mathematical exactness. The advantages of thecard system become more and more apparejit as the files increasein bulk, and accuracy must remain a constant factor in aU workconnected with it. It will also bring its reward in the smoothworking of the files and the immediate accessibility of anythingrequired. In accuracy might be included consistency, which isindispensable for effective work (356).

      In modern, digital settings, the work of approapriately indexing content is lost in exchange for other forms of organization (tagging, for example), this means one is less reliant on an index for looking up material and more reliant on concordance search of particular words within an ever-growing corpus of collected knowledge.

      Over time and with scale, simple tagging may become overwhelming as a search method for finding the requisite material, even when one knows it exists.

      As a result a repository may do better in the long run with a small handful of carefully applied rules from the start.

    4. Labour saving therefore means systematic application of expertlabour.

      This quote is broadly recognized in economic settings as true, but few in the knowledge management space place emphasis or focus on designing both simple systems which are easy to master and use on a regular, ongoing basis. This allows the knowledge worker the ability to more quickly (almost blindly) handle their indexing and filing operations so that things are precisely where they need them when required for use.

      Poor design will not only decrease the ease of use, but also discourage the user from both efficiently using and benefiting from their systems.

      Even simple and efficient filing systems require familiarity and expertise for them to effect useful gains to their users, and prove their effectiveness over time. If a user can't get to a basic level of functionality in short time, they're likely to give up on it and never see the ultimate benefits.

    5. The development of the card system and itsmore universal adoption within recent years isundoubtedly due in the mail to the development in modernbusiness and factory organisation ; it may be regarded as anoffspring of manufacture in quantities. (Massenfabrikation, Gross-industrie.) The recognised principle in manufacture in quantities ismaximum of output with minimum of labour. The means to attainthis end is specialisation, which in its turn yields greater precisionand accuracy as it^ result. All this is equally applicable to thecard system, and the last factor, greater precision and accuracy,is one of its most conspicuous claims.

      Julius Kaiser contemporaneously posits that mass manufacture and maximizing efficiency (greater output for minimum input) are the primary drivers of card index system use in the early 20th century. These also improve both precision and accuracy in handling information which allow for better company or factory operation, which would have been rising concerns for businesses and manufacturing operations at the rise of scientific management during the time period.

    6. When the card guidesare also used for classification purposes (144) a specially strongguide should be selected, as their replacing entails a great dealof re-writing.
  6. Feb 2024
    1. Arber also suggests to Murray in this letter that he should use atypewriter. ‘I am quite certain’, he wrote, ‘that the only way to keep down thecost of corrections is to type-write the copy’, suggesting a model called theIdeal Caligraph, no. 2 price £18. Murray did read The Snake Dance of theMoquis of Arizona but he did not buy a typewriter.
  7. Dec 2023
  8. Oct 2023
    1. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”

      This quote is a feature of toxic capitalism, which should be efficient enough to allow a person to quickly obtain another job to thereby make the issue moot.

      Part of it is tied into identity as well.

  9. Sep 2023
    1. We should only write on one side of these papers so that in searching through them, we do not have to take out a paper in order to read it. This doubles the space, but not entirely (since we would not write on both sides of all the slips). This consideration is not unimportant as the arrangement of boxes can, after some decades, become so large that it cannot be easily be used from one’s chair. In order to counteract this tendency, I recommend taking normal paper and not card stock.
  10. Jul 2023
  11. Jun 2023
    1. The author, Rediscovering Analog, reads a book at least twice, usually. He first reads it mainly for pleasure, just to enjoy it and to see what's in it. During the second time, if applicable, he goes through the book using intellectual (or learning) systems and methodologies to extract value from the book.

      The first pass, which the author terms Scouting, is thus namely for enjoyment, but keeping in mind what might be valuable or interesting that will be valuable in the future, basically an unguided open ear. He has a list of scouted books in each section of the Zettelkasten that might be relevant to the section. What he does is have a stack of physical cards there with just the name of the book and the author, without anything else. Then when author proceeds to extract value from the book, he takes the card out and puts it in the respective book. Afterwards throwing this particular card into the trash. It's a form of the Anti-Library.

      ( Personally, I would include an appropriate reading cost and a level on Adler's hierarchy of books. In addition, I would make sure that my process of orientation, in the Inquiry-Based Learning framework, has been completed before I put it as a book within the Anti-Library. )


      This may not be the most efficient for the purpose of acquiring value, but efficiency is not all there is. Enjoyment is a big part of intellectual work as well, as Antonin Sertillanges argues in his book The Intellectual Life: Its spirit, methods, conditions, as well as Mihaly Csikszentmihaliy in his book Flow.

    1. the productivity and quality improvements are likely due to a switch in the business professionals’ time allocation: less time spent on cranking out initial draft text and more time spent polishing the final result.

      This points to AI providing the best time savings in draft generation, which fits with the idea of having the AI generate the drafts based on the professional's queries.

      For UX designers, this points to AI in a design tool being most useful when it generates drafts (sketches) that the designer then revises. Where UX deliverables don't compare easily to written deliverables is the contextual factors that influence the design, like style guides or design systems. Design too AI assistants don't yet factor those in, though it seems likely it will, if provided style guides and design systems in a format it can read.

      Given a draft of sufficient quality that it doesn't require longer to revise than a draft the designer would create on their own, getting additional time to refine sounds great.

      I'm not sure what to make of the reduced time to brainstorm when using AI. Without additional information, it's hard not to assume that the AI tool may be influencing the direction of brainstorming as professionals think through the queries they'll use to get the AI to generate the most useful draft possible.

  12. May 2023
    1. They are efficiency and effectiveness. For memory systems, an effective system is one that gets the right answer every time no matter how long it takes you. And the efficient system is one that uses the least amount of resources like time, associations, dependent systems, etc. but it may not be that good at providing the correct answers.

      Efficiency and effectiveness measures for specific mnemonic systems may vary from person to person, so one should consider them with respect to their own practices. There may not be a single "right" or "correct" practice universally, but there could be one for everyone individually based on their own choices or preferences.

  13. Apr 2023
    1. Identifiers are an area wherethe needs of libraries and publish-ing are not well supported by thecommercial developmen
  14. Mar 2023
  15. Jan 2023
    1. Session - Pomodoro Timer Alternatives Session - Pomodoro Timer is described as 'Session helps you be more productive by guiding you to work in sessions, track your time, and remind you to rest' and is a Pomodoro Timer in the office & productivity category. There are more than 25 alternatives to Session - Pomodoro Timer for a variety of platforms, including Mac, Windows, Linux, Online / Web-based and Android. The best alternative is Super Productivity, which is both free and Open Source. Other great apps like Session - Pomodoro Timer are Gnome Pomodoro, YAPA-2, Pomofocus and Pomotodo. Session - Pomodoro Timer alternatives are mainly Pomodoro Timers but may also be Task Management Tools or Todo List Managers. Filter by these if you want a narrower list of alternatives or looking for a specific functionality of Session - Pomodoro Timer.

      session平替

    1. 个人学习可能取决于他人行为的主张突出了将学习环境视为一个涉及多个互动参与者的系统的重要性
  16. Dec 2022
    1. I think one of the the things that 00:00:27 really separates us from the high primates is that we're tool builders and I read a a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet the Condor used 00:00:41 the least energy to move a kilometer and humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list it was not not too proud of a showing for the crown of 00:00:53 creation so that didn't look so good but then somebody at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle and a man on a bicycle or human on a bicycle 00:01:07 blew the Condor away completely off the top of the charts and that's what a computer is to me what a computer is to me is it's the most remarkable tool that we've ever come up with and it's the 00:01:19 equivalent of a bicycle for our minds

      Cleaned up quote:

      I think one of the [the] things that really separates us from the high primates is that [uh] we're tool builders. And I read a [uh] study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The Condor used the least energy to move a kilometer and [uh] humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list. It was not [not] too proud of a showing for the crown of creation. So [uh] that didn't look so good, but then somebody at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle. And a man on a bicycle or human on a bicycle blew the Condor away—completely off the top of the charts and that's what a computer is to me. [uh] What a computer is to me is: it's the most remarkable tool that we've ever come up with and it's the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.<br /> —Steve Jobs in Memory & Imagination: New Pathways to the Library of Congress. Documentary. Krainin Productions, 1990.

      Snippet from full documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob_GX50Za6c

    1. There is, however, an argument often made with respect to not fully addressingpoverty and inequality. It is based on the assumption that there is a necessarytrade- off between having a strong economy and having a robust social welfarestate. The recent origins of this argument can be traced back to an influen-tial book entitled, Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff by the economistArthur Okun.
  17. Nov 2022
  18. Oct 2022
    1. On the whole, his efficiency probablyreduced the time required for taking and filing notes to the amountother historians spent in note-taking alone. What he wrote in hisnotes was brief, and yet specific enough so that he saved himself thejob of searching at length for what he had read. His mind was freeto reflect and appraise.

      Earl Pomeroy suggests that Paxson's note taking method freed his mind to better reflect and appraise his work. This allows a greater efficiency of work, particularly when it comes to easier search and recall as well as the overall process which becomes easier through practice.

    1. Dwyer, Edward J. “File Card Efficiency.” Journal of Reading 26, no. 2 (1982): 171–171.

      Ease of use in writing and grading with short assignments by using 4 x 6" index cards in classrooms.

      This sounds like some of the articles from 1912 and 1917 about efficiency of card indexes for teaching.

      I'm reminded of some programmed learning texts that were card-based (or really strip-based since they were published in book form) in the 1960s and 1970s. Thse books had small strips with lessons or questions on the front with the answers on the reverse. One would read in strips through the book from front to back and then start the book all over again on page one on the second row of strips and so on.

    1. As is common in the tradition of the zettelkasten, Goutor advises "that each note-card should contain only one item of information, whether a quotation, a summary, or anything else". (p28) He ascribes this requirement to his earlier need for clarity. (cross reference: https://hypothes.is/a/SfWFwENIEe2KfGMbR5n7Qg)

      He indicates that while it may seem wasteful to have only one item on each card that the savings in time, efficiency in handling, classification, and retrieval will more than compensate for the small waste.

      This sort of small local waste being compensated for by a larger global savings and efficiency can be seen in the design of the shipping container industry as discussed in Mark Levinson's The Box (Princeton University Press, 2008). Was this the exact sort of efficiency mentioned by Ahrens'? (Compare at https://hypothes.is/a/t4i32IXoEeyF2n9jQxu6BA)

    1. nd the way in which these cate-gories changed, some being dropped out and others beingadded, was an index of my own intellectual progress andbreadth. Eventually, the file came to be arranged accord-ing to several larger projects, having many subprojects,which changed from year to year.

      In his section on "Arrangement of File", C. Wright Mills describes some of the evolution of his "file". Knowing that the form and function of one's notes may change over time (Luhmann's certainly changed over time too, a fact which is underlined by his having created a separate ZK II) one should take some comfort and solace that theirs certainly will as well.

      The system designer might also consider the variety of shapes and forms to potentially create a better long term design of their (or others') system(s) for their ultimate needs and use cases. How can one avoid constant change, constant rearrangement, which takes work? How can one minimize the amount of work that goes into creating their system?

      The individual knowledge worker or researcher should have some idea about the various user interfaces and potential arrangements that are available to them before choosing a tool or system for maintaining their work. What are the affordances they might be looking for? What will minimize their overall work, particularly on a lifetime project?

  19. Sep 2022
    1. https://web.archive.org/web/20120122115952/http://pileofindexcards.org/blog/2006/10/13/one-pocket-rule/

      Noguchi Yukio had a "one pocket rule" which they first described in “「超」整理法 (cho seiri ho)”. The broad idea was to store everything in one place as a means of saving time by not needing to search in multiple repositories for the thing you were hunting for. Despite this advice the Noguchi Filing System didn't take complete advantage of this as one would likely have both a "home" and an "office" system, thus creating two pockets, a problem that exists in an analog world, but which can be mitigated in a digital one.

      The one pocket rule can be seen in the IndieWeb principles of owning all your own data on your own website and syndicating out from there. Your single website has the entire store of all your material which makes search much easier. You don't need to recall which platform (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, et al.) you posted something on, you can save time and find the thing much more quickly by searching one place.


      This principle also applies to zettelkasten and commonplace books (well indexed), which allow you to find the data or information you put into them quickly and easily.

  20. Aug 2022
  21. Jul 2022
    1. Realisable service level efficiency improvements could38reduce upstream energy demand by 45% in 2050.

      increasing service level efficiency can play a major role in reducing upstream energy demands.

  22. Jun 2022
    1. The Essential Habits ofDigital Organizers

      This chapter is too entailed with productivity advice, which can be useful to some, but isn't as note taking focused for those who probably need more of that.

      What is the differentiator between knowledge workers, knowledge creators, students, researchers, academics. How do we even clearly delineate knowledge worker as a concept. It feels far too nebulous which makes it more difficult to differentiate systems for them to use for improving productivity and efficiency.

    2. If we overlay the four steps of CODE onto the model ofdivergence and convergence, we arrive at a powerful template forthe creative process in our time.

      The way that Tiago Forte overlaps the idea of C.O.D.E. (capture/collect, organize, distill, express) with the divergence/convergence model points out some primary differences of his system and that of some of the more refined methods of maintaining a zettelkasten.

      A flattened diamond shape which grows from a point on the left so as to indicate divergence from a point to the diamond's wide middle which then decreases to the right to indicate convergence  to the opposite point. Overlapping this on the right of the diamond are the words "capture" and "organize" while the converging right side is overlaid with "distill" and "express". <small>Overlapping ideas of C.O.D.E. and divergence/convergence from Tiago Forte's book Building a Second Brain (Atria Books, 2022) </small>

      Forte's focus on organizing is dedicated solely on to putting things into folders, which is a light touch way of indexing them. However it only indexes them on one axis—that of the folder into which they're being placed. This precludes them from being indexed on a variety of other axes from the start to other places where they might also be used in the future. His method requires more additional work and effort to revisit and re-arrange (move them into other folders) or index them later.

      Most historical commonplacing and zettelkasten techniques place a heavier emphasis on indexing pieces as they're collected.

      Commonplacing creates more work on the user between organizing and distilling because they're more dependent on their memory of the user or depending on the regular re-reading and revisiting of pieces one may have a memory of existence. Most commonplacing methods (particularly the older historic forms of collecting and excerpting sententiae) also doesn't focus or rely on one writing out their own ideas in larger form as one goes along, so generally here there is a larger amount of work at the expression stage.

      Zettelkasten techniques as imagined by Luhmann and Ahrens smooth the process between organization and distillation by creating tacit links between ideas. This additional piece of the process makes distillation far easier because the linking work has been done along the way, so one only need edit out ideas that don't add to the overall argument or piece. All that remains is light editing.

      Ahrens' instantiation of the method also focuses on writing out and summarizing other's ideas in one's own words for later convenient reuse. This idea is also seen in Bruce Ballenger's The Curious Researcher as a means of both sensemaking and reuse, though none of the organizational indexing or idea linking seem to be found there.


      This also fits into the diamond shape that Forte provides as the height along the vertical can stand in as a proxy for the equivalent amount of work that is required during the overall process.

      This shape could be reframed for a refined zettelkasten method as an indication of work


      Forte's diamond shape provided gives a visual representation of the overall process of the divergence and convergence.

      But what if we change that shape to indicate the amount of work that is required along the steps of the process?!

      Here, we might expect the diamond to relatively accurately reflect the amounts of work along the path.

      If this is the case, then what might the relative workload look like for a refined zettelkasten? First we'll need to move the express portion between capture and organize where it more naturally sits, at least in Ahren's instantiation of the method. While this does take a discrete small amount of work and time for the note taker, it pays off in the long run as one intends from the start to reuse this work. It also pays further dividends as it dramatically increases one's understanding of the material that is being collected, particularly when conjoined to the organization portion which actively links this knowledge into one's broader world view based on their notes. For the moment, we'll neglect the benefits of comparison of conjoined ideas which may reveal flaws in our thinking and reasoning or the benefits of new questions and ideas which may arise from this juxtaposition.

      Graphs of commonplace book method (collect, organize, distill, express) versus zettelkasten method (collect, express, organize (index/link), and distill (edit)) with work on the vertical axis and time/methods on the horizontal axis. While there is similar work in collection the graph for the zettelkasten is overall lower and flatter and eventually tails off, the commonplace slowly increases over time.

      This sketch could be refined a bit, but overall it shows that frontloading the work has the effect of dramatically increasing the efficiency and productivity for a particular piece of work.

      Note that when compounded over a lifetime's work, this diagram also neglects the productivity increase over being able to revisit old work and re-using it for multiple different types of work or projects where there is potential overlap, not to mention the combinatorial possibilities.

      --

      It could be useful to better and more carefully plot out the amounts of time, work/effort for these methods (based on practical experience) and then regraph the resulting power inputs against each other to come up with a better picture of the efficiency gains.

      Is some of the reason that people are against zettelkasten methods that they don't see the immediate gains in return for the upfront work, and thus abandon the process? Is this a form of misinterpreted-effort hypothesis at work? It can also be compounded at not being able to see the compounding effects of the upfront work.

      What does research indicate about how people are able to predict compounding effects over time in areas like money/finance? What might this indicate here? Humans definitely have issues seeing and reacting to probabilities in this same manner, so one might expect the same intellectual blindness based on system 1 vs. system 2.


      Given that indexing things, especially digitally, requires so little work and effort upfront, it should be done at the time of collection.


      I'll admit that it only took a moment to read this highlighted sentence and look at the related diagram, but the amount of material I was able to draw out of it by reframing it, thinking about it, having my own thoughts and ideas against it, and then innovating based upon it was incredibly fruitful in terms of better differentiating amongst a variety of note taking and sense making frameworks.

      For me, this is a great example of what reading with a pen in hand, rephrasing, extending, and linking to other ideas can accomplish.

    1. Curiosity is a productivity app that gives you one place to search all your files and apps. That lets you save time and get more done.Curiosity connects with the tools you already use, including your local folders and cloud apps like Google Drive or Slack. You can use the shortcut-powered command bar to access things quickly and the file browser for deeper searches with advanced filters.
    1. Energy efficiency has never been more crucial! The time to unleashing its massive potential has come

      Will this conference debate rebound effects of efficiency? If not, it will not have the desirable net effect.

      My linked In comments were:

      Alessandro Blasi, will this conference address the rebound effect? In particular, Brockway et al. have done a 2021 meta-analysis of 33 research papers on rebound effects of energy efficiency efforts and conclude:

      "...economy-wide rebound effects may erode more than half of the expected energy savings from improved energy efficiency. We also find that many of the mechanisms driving rebound effects are overlooked by integrated assessment and global energy models. We therefore conclude that global energy scenarios may underestimate the future rate of growth of global energy demand."

      https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032121000769?via%3Dihub

      Unless psychological and sociological interventions are applied along with energy efficiency to mitigate rebound effects, you will likely and ironically lose huge efficiencies in the entire efficiency intervention itself.

      Also, as brought up by other commentators, there is a difference between efficiency and degrowth. Intelligent degrowth may work, especially applied to carbon intensive areas of the economy and can be offset by high growth in low carbon areas of the economy.

      Vaclav Smil is pessimistic about a green energy revolution replacing fossil fuels https://www.ft.com/content/71072c77-53b3-4efd-92ae-c92dc02f09ad, which opens up the door to serious consideration of degrowth, not just efficiency improvements. Perhaps the answer is in a combination of all of the above, including targeted degrowth.

      Technology moves quickly and unexpectedly. At the time of Smil's book release, there was no low carbon cement. Now there is a promising breakthrough: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/28/carbon-free-cement-breakthrough-dcvc-put-55-million-into-brimstone.html

      As researchers around the globe work feverishly to make low carbon breakthroughs, there is obviously no guarantee of when they will occur. In that case then, with only a few years to peak, it would seem the lowest risk pathway would be to prioritize the precautionary principle over a gambling pathway (such as relying on Negative Emissions Technology breakthroughs) and perhaps consider along with rebound effect conditioned efficiency improvements also include a strategy of at least trialing a temporary, intentional degrowth of high carbon industries / growth of low carbon industries.

  23. Apr 2022
    1. Research has shown that,across disciplines, experts look in ways different from novices: they take in thebig picture more rapidly and completely, while focusing on the most importantaspects of the scene; they’re less distracted by visual “noise,” and they shiftmore easily among visual fields, avoiding getting stuck.

      Experts have more practiced levels of visual perception of surroundings that provide them with information more quickly than novices who don't yet know what or where to focus their attention. Teaching with eye tracking technology might help to bridge the gap between novice and expert more quickly.

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  24. Mar 2022
    1. That’s all fine and well and good as long as you don’t have a crisis

      Systems that are too efficient will become brittle. Brittle systems collapse catastrophically when conditions vary too far from expectations. The only way to accommodate unforeseeable circumstances is to give up some efficiency for greater flexibility. This produces robust systems that endure where brittle systems collapse.

  25. Feb 2022
    1. A coach is not there to do the work,but to show us how to use our time and effort in the most effectiveway.

      Much as coaches help their athletes become better, teachers are there to help students use their time and work efforts in the most effective ways.

    2. Only after aligning every single part of the delivery chain, frompackaging to delivery, from the design of the ships to the design ofthe harbours, was the full potential of the container unleashed.

      Streamlining one's entire workflow from start to finish can unleash tremendous amounts of additional system-wide productivity. Starting out by tinkering with small things here and there is more likely to doom these smaller individual changes to failure with out associated global changes.

      Once the overall system has been redesigned and reconfigured, then one can make and perfect smaller scale local changes.


      Link this to the idea of kelp and sailing/rowing from The West Wing.

    3. We need a reliable and simple external structure tothink in that compensates for the limitations of our brains

      Let's be honest that there are certainly methods for doing all of this within our brains and not needing to rely on external structures. This being said, using writing, literacy, and external structures does allow us to process things faster than before.


      Can we calculate what the level of greater efficiency allows for doing this? What is the overall throughput difference in being able to forget and write? Not rely on communication with others? What does a back of the envelope calculation for this look like?

  26. Jan 2022
    1. Yes, precisely because I've been involved in maintaining codebases built without real full stack frameworks is why I say what I said.The problem we have in this industry, is that somebody reads these blog posts, and the next day at work they ditch the "legacy rails" and starts rewriting the monolith in sveltekit/nextjs/whatever because that's what he/she has been told is the modern way to do full stack.No need to say those engineers will quit 1 year later after they realize the mess they've created with their lightweight and simple modern framework.I've seen this too many times already.It is not about gatekeeping. It is about engineers being humble and assume it is very likely that their code is very unlikely to be better tested, documented, cohesive and maintained than what you're given in the real full stack frameworks.Of course you can build anything even in assembler if you want. The question is if that's the most useful thing to do with your company's money.
  27. Sep 2021
    1. All four of these extraneural resources — technology, the body, physical space, social interaction — can be understood as mental extensions that allow the brain to accomplish far more than it could on its own.

      Technology, the body, physical space, and social interaction can be extensions of the mind.

      What others might exist? Examples?

  28. Aug 2021
    1. To me, the greatest benefit of IndexCards is that they force you to not write too much. This is a big help to those of us who are still squishing the bitter juice of BigDesignUpFront from our brains. The expense and rarity of vellum played a similar role in MedievalArchitecture.
    2. This is one of the points made in TheMythOfThePaperlessOffice -- that workplaces often shift from more efficient paper-based technologies to less efficient electronic technologies (electronic technologies can be either more or less efficient, of course) because computers symbolize The Future, Progress, and a New Way Of Doing Things. An office on the move, that's what an office that uses cutting-edge technology is. Not an office that is stuck in the past. And the employees are left to cope with the less productive, but shinier, New Way. -- ApoorvaMuralidhara

      New technologies don't always have the user interface to make them better than old methods.

  29. Jul 2021
    1. Joe learned the most efficient way to use his body by acquiring a set of routines that were quick and preserved energy. Otherwise he would never have survived on the line.

      Sometime in the past six months I ran across a description of how migrant workers do this sort of activity in farming contexts. That article also pointed out the fact that the average person couldn't do this sort of work and that there was extreme value in it.

    1. Sure, the slow way is always "good enough" — until you learn a better way of doing things. By your logic, then, we shouldn't have the option of including "Move to" in our context menus either — because any move operation could be performed using the cut and paste operations instead? The method you proposed is 6-7 steps long, with step 4 being the most onerous when you're in a hurry: Select files "Cut" "Create New Folder" Think of a name for the new folder. Manually type in that name, without any help from the tool. (We can't even use copy and paste to copy some part of one of the file names, for example, because the clipboard buffer is already being used for the file selection.) Press Enter Press Enter again to enter the new folder (or use "Paste Into Folder") "Paste" The method that Nautilus (and apparently Mac's Finder) provides (which I and others love) is much more efficient, especially because it makes step 4 above optional by providing a default name based on the selection, coming in at 4-5 steps (would be 3 steps if we could assign a keyboard shortcut to this command like Mac apparently has ): Select files Bring up context menu (a direct shortcut key would make this even sweeter) Choose "New Folder With Selection" Either accept the default name or choose a different name (optional) Press Enter Assuming "Sort folders before files" option is unchecked, you can continue working/sorting in this outer folder, right where you left off: Can you see how this method might be preferable when you have a folder with 100s or 1000s of files you want to organize it into subfolders? Especially when there is already a common filename prefix (such as a date) that you can use to group related files together. And since Nemo kindly allows us to choose which commands to include in our context menu, those who don't use/like this workflow are free to exclude it from their menus... Having more than one way to accomplish something isn't necessarily a bad thing.
  30. Jun 2021
    1. “In the past the man has been first,” he declared; “in the future the system must be first.”

      This is the problem however. We can't program humans out of the equation entirely, for what is the general enterprise meant for in the first place?

    2. The goal, as Taylor defined it in his celebrated 1911 treatise, The Principles of Scientific Management, was to identify and adopt, for every job, the “one best method” of work and thereby to effect “the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts.”

      Reminder to go back and read this.

      [[Frederick Winslow Taylor]]

  31. May 2021
    1. Tech support works with scripts. Just get to know these scripts by heart and answer all questions from the script you can in one long sentence, before they ask it. Like in "Hi I have a problem with this and that...I have restarted the router, I have checked the cables, the red light is on, the green light is off, not other lights are blinking......etc.etc.etc. That way the person at the other end of the line can just go click-click-click and you'll be 10 steps further in their script in 5 seconds.
    1. I want to avoid nginx overhead (especially if they have tons of alias and rewrites) for in-server communication. Basically, you can have sveltekit server, backend server and nginx server, in that case, communicate inside your internal network will be very expensive like: browser->nginx server(10.0.0.1)->sveltekit server(10.0.0.3)->nginx server(10.0.0.1)->backend server(10.0.0.2) instead just: browser->nginx server(10.0.0.1)->sveltekit server(10.0.0.3)->backend server(10.0.0.2)
    1. two distinct paths to success have emerged, and students should decide early in their graduate school careers which path to travel. Is their primary objective to obtain a degree as expediently as possible, or is it to learn? These two goals are not always mutually exclusive, and with genuine curiosity and perseverance, independent learning is possible. However, the path for obtaining a degree ­efficiently is not obvious, and the guidelines in this regard can be elusive, unspoken and often unrealised.
    1. Park, J. J. H., Grais, R. F., Taljaard, M., Nakimuli-Mpungu, E., Jehan, F., Nachega, J. B., Ford, N., Xavier, D., Kengne, A. P., Ashorn, P., Socias, M. E., Bhutta, Z. A., & Mills, E. J. (2021). Urgently seeking efficiency and sustainability of clinical trials in global health. The Lancet Global Health, 9(5), e681–e690. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2214-109X(20)30539-8

  32. Apr 2021
  33. Mar 2021
  34. Feb 2021
    1. We're small, but we're efficient. We can do with the number of people we have what would take twice the workforce of other companies. Everyone here wears many hats, and that allows us to cover a lot of ground without needing as many people.
  35. Jan 2021
    1. If you're using webpack with svelte-loader, make sure that you add "svelte" to resolve.mainFields in your webpack config. This ensures that webpack imports the uncompiled component (src/index.html) rather than the compiled version (index.mjs) — this is more efficient.
    1. Frankly, if the Ubuntu Desktop team “switch” from making a deb of Chromium to making a snap, I doubt they’d switch back. It’s a tremendous amount of work for developer(s) to maintain numerous debs across all supported releases. Maintaining a single snap is just practically and financially more sensible.
    2. This example of the chromium really shows that unless snaps or other similar format was used, applications would have to be sometime very heavily patched to work on older versions of systems to the point that it generates so much work that it would not be worth do to it otherwise, or at least not worth when the snap option exists and doesn’t require that much more work.
  36. Dec 2020
    1. Better contribution workflow: We will be using GitHub’s contribution tools and features, essentially moving MDN from a Wiki model to a pull request (PR) model. This is so much better for contribution, allowing for intelligent linting, mass edits, and inclusion of MDN docs in whatever workflows you want to add it to (you can edit MDN source files directly in your favorite code editor).
  37. Nov 2020
  38. Oct 2020
    1. Please don't copy answers to multiple questions; this is the same as your answer to a similar question

      Why on earth not? There's nothing wrong with reusing the same answer if it can work for multiple questions. That's called being efficient. It would be stupid to write a new answer from scratch when you already have one that can work very well and fits the question very well.

    1. Node doesn't have a DOM available. So in order to render HTML we use string concatenation instead. This has the fun benefit of being quite efficient, which in turn means it's great for server rendering!
    1. But is overhead always bad? I believe no — otherwise Svelte maintainers would have to write their compiler in Rust or C, because garbage collector is a single biggest overhead of JavaScript.
  39. Sep 2020
    1. If you're using webpack with svelte-loader, make sure that you add "svelte" to resolve.mainFields in your webpack config. This ensures that webpack imports the uncompiled component (src/index.html) rather than the compiled version (index.mjs) — this is more efficient.
    1. you may specify only the form state that you care about for rendering your gorgeous UI. You can think of it a little like GraphQL's feature of only fetching the data your component needs to render, and nothing else.
  40. Aug 2020
  41. Jul 2020
  42. Jun 2020
    1. If those comments are loaded outside of the blog_post association, then attempting to reference the blog_post association from within each comment will result in N blog_posts table queries even if they all belong to the same BlogPost!
  43. May 2020
    1. In a previous post, we discussed “combining and conquering” the GDPR. That is, how the work done to meet various GDPR requirements can be leveraged when addressing others. This same concept applies here — synchronize your consent records with other areas such as your records of processing or data subject requests to assist with compliance. Doing so, for example, will enable you to quickly trace a withdrawal back to a particular processing activity or data subject request that needs to be reviewed.

      "data reuse"

  44. Apr 2020
    1. A left navigation is faster and more efficient for users to scan. In just three visual fixations, users scan six items in the left navigation compared to the three items scanned in the top navigation. The left navigation also facilitates a vertical scanning direction that is natural for people
    1. allows for lighter travel: rent everything you need at the destination
  45. Feb 2020
    1. Not every problem should lead to a new process to prevent them. Additional processes make all actions more inefficient, a mistake only affects one.
    2. Use the simplest and most boring solution for a problem, and remember that “boring” should not be conflated with “bad” or “technical debt.” The speed of innovation for our organization and product is constrained by the total complexity we have added so far, so every little reduction in complexity helps. Don’t pick an interesting technology just to make your work more fun; using established, popular tech will ensure a more stable and more familiar experience for you and other contributors.
    1. Automation helps us keep these steps out of our way while maintaining control through fast feedback loops (context-switching is our enemy).
    1. Never compile the same project twice Nix allows to easily share build results across machines. If the CI has built the project, developers or servers can download the build results instead of re-building the same thing.
  46. Dec 2019
    1. Because moving tasks around is as easy as dragging a row to a new location, you can easily re-prioritize without jumping between views or clicking twelve times to get where you need to go.

      I do love the drag-and-drop ability of rows/columns in Sheets!

    2. And it requires way fewer clicks than most other options. And let's face it: Nobody has time for extra clicks—you just want to get work done, not manage the work you need to get done.
  47. Sep 2019
    1. Cost reduction suggestion

      there may be ways to reduce costs associated with the development of Census-equivalent statistics, including relying less on the general public to answer questions every five years

  48. Jul 2019
    1. Eliminating the fraction of demand that occurs in these spikes eliminates the cost of adding reserve generators, cuts wear and tear and extends the life of equipment, and allows users to cut their energy bills by telling low priority devices to use energy only when it is cheapest.
  49. Mar 2019
    1. You were beginning to gather that there were other symbols mixed with the words that might be part of a sentence, and that the different parts of what made a full-thought statement (your feeling about what a sentence is) were not just laid out end to end as you expected.

      This suggests that Joe is doing something almost completely unrecognizable--with language at least. I guess my assumption is that I would know what Joe was doing he'd just be doing it so quickly I wouldn't be able to follow. And he'd complete the task--a task I recognize--far more quickly than I possibly could using comparable analog technologies. Perhaps this is me saying, I buy Englebart's augmentation idea on the level of efficiency but remain skeptical or at least have yet to realize it's transformative effect on intellect itself.

  50. Feb 2019
    1. prolonged interaction between the instructor and the students

      I'm always a little proud when I say that Hypothesis will not make things easier/more efficient for teachers. If anything, it helps widen and deepen this "prolonged interaction between the instructor and students," which takes even more time!

    1. “Faced with declining tax revenues, counties and municipalities are turning over the operation of parts of the criminal justice system to private corporations that promise to provide legally mandated services at “no cost to taxpayers”. These companies then charge fees for these same services to individuals accused of crimes or on probation – fees higher than what states would charge for equivalent services, if they charge at all. Often already impoverished, those many who can’t pay the fees are now being imprisoned for debt.” “Contracting-out is a vast and growing part of the federal government. Contract spending mushroomed from $200 billion in 2000 to $530 billion in 2011. The total cost of federal contract employees is twice that of federal civil servants… The POGO study – Bad Business 55 … found that “billions of dollars [are] wasted on hiring contractors” based on “a misguided assumption that market economies enable contractors to be more cost efficient than the government. On average, contractors charged the federal government more than twice the amount it pays federal workers.”

    Tags

    Annotators

  51. Jan 2019
    1. fifteen-hour work week

      Wouldn't that ease of gathering only be viable for a certain amount of time, in certain areas? With larger populations and in scarcer areas, that time increases. I wonder what other statistics or sources provide similar or disparate numbers, and how those numbers change over time. When did gathering become less efficient?

  52. Nov 2018
    1. “My feeling at the time was this was a good idea,” Dr. Wachter says. “The trend toward our system being pushed to deliver better, more efficient care was going to be enduring, and the old model of the primary-care doc being your hospital doc … couldn’t possibly achieve the goal of producing the highest value.”

      How can care be made further efficient? E.g., integration, cost-sharing, payment-sharing, parent partners, nurse partners

  53. Aug 2018
    1. efficiency has come to mean accomplishing a task with the least possible human intervention—a goal that often turns out to be self-defeating, particularly when efficiency becomes almost an end in itself. Recall Thomas Edison’s famous line that genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration and contrast it with our contemporary enthusiasm for machine-like efficiency

      Interesting connection here between the efficiency mandate and the "talent means no effort required" attitude we see in many school settings.

  54. Apr 2017
  55. enst31501sp2017.courses.bucknell.edu enst31501sp2017.courses.bucknell.edu
    1. William Cunningham,

      William Cunningham is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Minnesota where he taught for 36 years in the Departments of Botany and Genetics and Cell Biology as well as the Conservation Biology Program, the Institute for Social, Economic, and Ecological Sustainability, the Center for Environmental Learning and Leadership, and the McArthur Program in Global Change. He received his Ph.D. in Botany from the University of Texas in 1963 and spent two years at Purdue University as a postdoctoral fellow. At various times, he has been a visiting scholar in Sweden, Norway, Indonesia, and China, as well as several universities and research institutions in the United States. Dr. Cunningham has devoted himself to education and teaching development at the undergraduate level in biology. He began his educational career in structural biology but for the last 10-15 years has concentrated on environmental science, teaching courses such as Social Uses of Biology; Garbage, Government, and the Globe; Environmental Ethics; and Conservation History. Within the past four years, he has received both of the two highest teaching honors that the University of Minnesota bestows: The Distinguished Teaching Award and a $15,000 Amoco Alumni Award. He has served as a Faculty Mentor for younger faculty at the university, sharing the knowledge and teaching skills that he has gained during his distinguished career.

      Cunningham, William. "Arctic National Wildlife Refuge." Environmental Encyclopedia 1 (2011). Accessed March 26, 2017.

  56. Jan 2017
  57. Feb 2016
    1. We are on the threshold of sweeping change that will make it easier for teachers to teach and students to learn faster and more effectively

      I see this as evidence of technology determinism, which this article is shot through with. This kind of sentiment comes off as if technologies make things better, faster, more efficient for all involved parties, without consequence. It also assumes a consensus around what improved teaching and learning looks like and means. IMO, "efficiency" recalls turn of 20th century industrialist philosophy and rhetoric. In the work of education, I think that we need to ask if efficiency really is always better, and better for who. I am suggesting that in many cases efficiency is better for administrators from a business perspective, but not so for learners.

  58. Jan 2016
    1. I only skimmed this, but I think I got the point. You move more people faster on escalators when none of them are reserved for walking -- simply because not enough people are willing or able to walk. If you have walking lanes, they are under-used, and the standing lanes are over-crowded.

  59. May 2014
    1. SSPP # 7.2 Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) (Electronic Maximum annual weighted average PUE of 1.4 by FY15 )

      SLAC target PUE of 1.4 by FY15

    1. When the project is complete later this year (all done while the existing data center remained in operation!), the data center's annual PUE will drop from 1.5 to 1.2, saving 20 percent of its annual electrical cost.

      Warren Hall target efficiency: 1.2 as of 2011

    1. The MGHPCC is targeting a PUE of less than 1.3. A recent report cites typical data center PUEs at 1.9. This means that our facility can expect to

      Target of 1.3 (vs typical data centers around 1.9) PUE