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Petitions for action - verbs used in e-petitions

What is industrial nutrition?

The balance between economy and environment has recently been cast in very negative terms.  The language of climate change compels us to "reduce our carbon footprint", lead "low impact lives", and protect the environment.

Clearly this is only one part of the story.  There are also examples of a positive relationship between economy and environment. Tradable pollution permits, for example, create incentives for private industry to invest in and develop technology to protect the environmental.  The development of a green infrastructure will be vital ingredient in the recipe for economic recovery.

The video below provides another viewpoint.  The film's producers (Christopher Bronsart and Daniel Migg) realise that recycling is too often an after-thought, a process applied to materials that were never meant to be re-used.  Instead they suggest that we design products to be nutrition for industry, in the same way that, for example, nitrogen is recycled in nature through decomposition.

When policy makers see the recession as an opportunity for restructuring then they'll be better able to help their economy adapt and succeed.

The 2008 credit crunch has stemmed the flow of money through the UK economy. We can only restore liquidity by re-building the global financial system (through actions that ensure we have accurate and trustworthy asset valuations). Meanwhile our Councils and RDAs have to respond to the repercussions facing UK plc.

People-managed Place is an idea introduced by Robin Gower in an article published by the Journal of Place Management and Development.

The "place management problem" arises because:

"People can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. 40% of all people know that." Homer Simpson

Statistics are confusing. Any science that spawns phrase like "the presence of heteroskedasticty indicates that the disturbances are non-spherical" is bound to be mis-interpreted at some stage. Of course the same might be said of many technical disciplines but the fact that I don't understand the ins-and-outs of neuro-science presents me with little difficulty in my daily life. Statistics on the other hand, are everywhere! The following tips are aimed as the non-statisticians who's work requires them to interpret statistics.

Introducing information markets

This article explains how information markets can assist policy developers by estimating predictions and making decisions. Economists have long been convinced by the power of markets to allocate resources efficiently. Markets are, so the theory goes, able to condense all available information about a particular product into one measure: the price. But what if the commodity you're trading is itself information? Information markets are designed to put the power of trade to work on information: predictions, decisions and estimates more generally.