Month: June 2009

Printable Guide to Help You Have a Good Work/Life Balance

- Adam Clare

The Day Grid Balancer is a printable guide to help people who work too much bring back some living into their life. The author is open about the fact that it won’t work for everyone so he encourages you to download the source files and edit the document to reflect your thinking, luckily he posted it under a creative commons license.

Now could be a good time to review your life/work balance so you can make sure that everyday is a good day.

For my initial pass, I created a single sheet of paper to act as the focus of your day throughout the entire week. It’s really just a glorified to-do list, designed around the idea of noting when you’re doing the kind of things that you’d like to be doing every day. By the end of the week, you should get an idea of whether or not you were successful. Since it’s a single sheet, you can keep it on a handy clip-board and carry it around with you.

Collaborate for a Clean Energy Revolution

- Adam Clare

Business Week has a short editorial on why collaboration is needed for future sustainable economic growth. Essentially, in order to make the future a better place we ought to share our knowledge – sounds good to me!

“The key to our prosperity in the 21st century lies in our ability to nurture our intellectual capital in science and engineering” to produce “breakthroughs on energy,” Energy Dept. chief Chu said earlier this year, as we did with semiconductors, computers, and biotech. But entrepreneurs hoping to capitalize on this international nurturing—even those with killer IP—face a ticking clock and fierce competition. As VantagePoint Venture Partners CEO and Managing Partner Alan Salzman told us recently, “In a world that’s innovating quickly, the life cycle of IP is short.”

Tiny Home for a Big Planet

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

Tiny House Design is a blog about living in a physically small place in a healthy and awesome way. I urge you to take a look at the blog because there’s only so much room for homes on this planet and we should make the most of our space.

In a nutshell, tiny houses give you back freedom in the form of time, money, and peace of mind. Why? How? Simply because they cost less to own, clean, heat, cool, etc. The less money you spend on your home the less you have to earn or the more you keep in the bank. The less time you spend cleaning and maintaining your house the more time you have to for the things you like to do.
…
This blog is simply going to focus on making the mental transition to living lighter and smaller. I’ll also post ideas I have for house design, hence the name. I’m not an architect but I am a designer and who knows, maybe someday, when I have enough time, I’ll go back and get a Master’s in Architecture… just for fun of course. But for now I’ll draw tiny pictures of tiny houses and post them online.

Thanks, Trevor!

Device Helps Paralyzed Regain Hand Control

- Adam Clare

People who have been paralyzed (from a stroke or spinal injury) now have a new tool to help them regain control over their hands and arms thanks to a Canadian researcher. A wand that stimulates muscles using electricity combined with a video game has produced impressive results.

“We can now offer people with spinal cord injury and stroke continued therapy for many weeks in their homes,” said the device’s designer, Arthur Prochazka.

Physiotherapist Su Ling Chong works with patients for an hour each day. Using a videoconferencing link, she sees and talks to them and is able to gauge their progress accurately.

“We get the user to go through the range [of movement], and it actually records how strong their grip is, how much their range is, and then from there we can modify the games to challenge them even more.”

People with serious injuries, like paralysis, should speak with Neinstein and Associates, the best personal injury lawyers in Toronto.

African Sunlight for European Power

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

Blue chip companies in Germany are looking at using solar energy to power the European markets, the really neat thing is that all the solar energy stations will be in northern Africa. This will help the EU become more efficient with power generation and help the northern African countries with more revenue.

The energy potential in the deserts south of the Mediterranean is enormous.

According to the European Commission’s Institute for Energy, if just 0.3% of the light falling on the Sahara and Middle Eastern deserts was captured, it could provide all of Europe’s energy needs.

The Desertec project aims to build solar power plants in several locations in north Africa. Jeworrek said the “most important criteria” was that the locations were “situated in politically stable lands”. Morocco, as well as Libya and Algeria have been cited as potential sites, where land is also cheap.

The technique called “concentrating solar power” or CSP, uses banks of mirrors to focus the sun’s rays in a central column filled with water. The rays heat the water, vaporising the it into a steam which is then used to drive turbines which generate carbon-free electricity.

Scroll To Top