Wednesday, March 2, 2016

Engineering Students - Think Africa


Engineering Better Presentations With SPA

SPA - sounds, pictures, and associations.  Audiences like stories and images. According to business strategists Chip and Dan Heath - "Stories are like mental flight simulators: they allow us to rehearse problems and become better at dealing with them."

Hello Lamb Post


Tuesday, March 1, 2016

The Power of a Post-it Note

Remember the words of Ted Sorensen, President Kennedy's speechwriter - - If you cannot get your basic point on a Post-it Note, you don't know what it is.

McKinsey on Infrastructure - Thinking About the Funding Gap


Engineering Standardization Into a System

From Vox - Why America abandoned nuclear power (and what we can learn from South Korea):

"How did France pull this off? It helped that the country had only one utility (EDF) and one builder (Areva) working closely together. They settled on a few standard reactor designs and built them over and over again, often putting multiple reactors on a single site. That allowed them to standardize their processes and get better at finding efficiencies. Canada and Japan kept costs relatively stable with similar tactics.

Contrast this with the US, where our electricity sector is split up among dozens of different utilities and state regulators. As a result, US nuclear vendors had to develop dozens of variations on the light-water reactor to satisfy a variety of customers. That pushed up costs.

France's regulatory process was also less adversarial than America's — and, for better or worse, doesn't allow legal intervention by outside groups once construction gets underway. After the Soviet Union's Chernobyl disaster in 1986, the government tweaked safety rules, leading to some delays. But costs didn't skyrocket like they did in the US after Three Mile Island."

The Value of Water

Value of Water Releases National Poll on Public Attitudes about Water, Infrastructure | thevalueofwater