Archive for December, 2011

Happy holidays

Friday, December 30th, 2011

“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!

irre repair

Friday, December 30th, 2011

Just to inform you about recent randform activities – my macbook is still at the repairshop.

translation

Wednesday, December 21st, 2011

I decided to translate the part in the last randform comment, which deals with democracy and social media, because it is of a more general nature.

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comment to gema-vs-youtube on Spreeblick

Saturday, December 10th, 2011


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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ausmalfunctions

Thursday, December 8th, 2011

bad news from my laptop problem: The Macbook which we bought in Spring 2008 had a broken logic board in Summer 2010 and since then rather regular malfunctions of logic boards and hard disks happened. Now the logic board of my laptop was again replaced, but then it turned out that in addition the system structure of my hard disk has now irrepairable malfunctions.