randform

“verticalized overhead power line with book lover using excessive light”, fotography of the Sony Center court yard on Potsdamer Platz by Loretta (see also the randform post chains)

I was recently looking a bit into the issue of smart grids and ran over an interesting european strategy analysis.

In 2005 the european smartgrid platform www.smartgrids.eu was set up. On their document page the currently newest document linked to is from 2010, it is a Strategic Deployment Document for Europe’s electricity networks of the future (2010) on page 53 one finds:

Engineering in the energy sector, electricity grids in particular, is seen by many as old- fashioned and “difficult” as it requires a high level of competence in mathematics, physics and other sciences. This discourages the potential new students from studying and pursuing a career in power engineering.

… and

All stakeholders in the electricity sector have a responsibility to improve the image of the sector, e.g. by engaging with educational institutions and explaining in an understandable way the real benefits of being involved with and able to deliver solutions to the energy, climate and environmental challenges of today.

This sounds very much as if the major problem of getting new working force for the electricity high-tech sector is mainly a question of hipness. In part it may be true that science and math is regarded as highly “unhip” in certain circles (and the reasons for this are manifold), however the comment in the document seems to miss somewhat a crucial point. Or maybe lets say it sounds a bit strange in the view that even fields medallists in e.g. Great Britain or France try to politely point out that there is structurally something at odds with the whole european science and math research and education.

Happy holidays to all randform readers!

supplement 1.1.2012: a happy new year to all randform readers!

Tonträgerindustrie auf dem Ladentisch

I left a long comment at the Berlin city blog Spreeblick which discusses the role of commercial social media, their democracy and the Gema (the german perfomance rights organization). The comment is in german and you can read it also after the click.

Addition on 20.08.2012: A part of this comment which deals with social media and democracy can be found translated in the randform post “translation.”

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I had posted a question to the thinkspace at openeconomics.net, which is an initiative of the open knowledge foundation. The site had been managed amongst others by Guo Xu who is the coordinator of the Open Economics Working Group. The question hasn’t been moderated yet, but regardless of that I thought I may post the question also here.
The question I ask is which other forms of money flow regulation -aside from national currencies- are seriously discussed among economists. In particular this concerns the question on how to tackle the Euro problem.

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“Verwerflicht auf Nachschattengewächs”, artwork by Pestikid.

Unfortunately it is still unclear what will happen to my laptop, so I have still restricted access to my little personal archive. Hence I thought I may post quickly some eye candy, which is not from the archive. The above artwork is playing a bit with scientific paradigms as it calls the above plant a Nachschattengewächs (a plant which grows after its shadow in a “reprobated light”, which is a wordplay with the word Nachtschattengewächs, which is an interesting word itself, as it can be interpreted as describing plants in “night shadows”).*

*It should be pointed out that the above plant is no Nachtschattengewächs but a dried Hagrose.

In Berlin there had been recently municipal elections, so a different Berlin local government is currently set up. As it currently looks like (see for example the article “Eine Mauer durch die Forschung”) there will be a department for “economy, technology and research” and a department for “education and science.”

->related randform post “on high teach speed”

Just a short note: It seems the logic board of the computer is again in pieces.

bye, bye THISYouKNOWmustNOTbemaned***

Unfortunately on Oct. 1st some countries signed the socalled Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). The European Union may eventually join in. The agreement is rather problematic.

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Recently I was –here on randform– recalling some of my pictures of a trip to Oxford. Here some more pictures from a previous trip.

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Some recycled pictures from Oxford, England where I was on a conference last year. Since I had not much time and only my little camera with me, they are a bit random and fuzzy. However they still give some impressions so I decided to post them here.

The image of the women’s room in the youth hostel (see below) may look more uncomfortable than it actually was. That is luckily all the six women in the room were attending the conference and all of them were very considerate people that is the partying teenager stayed out of the room and thus we all had more or less rather quiet nights.

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The Theseus program is a german research project (sofar funded for five years). It is kind of a bit on the side of the already mentioned Quaero project. Theseus is amongst others concerned with the development of aspects of the semantic web. Moreover it is especially concerned with technology in connection to business applications and services. So for example companies like antibodies-online may look out for unified descriptions of their products* etc. The Theseus project hosts the socalled TEXO lab, which offers now a prize for an app written in USDL (which seems to be some variant of WSDL, i.e. a metalanguage, which describes entities of web services). The website of the prize is in german, but thanks to google-translate (which still works for this site) one can get an easy translate of the site. This may enhance the global competition for a posh enterprise app.

*as a side remark: eventually this could also be useful for flutracking