What is energy illiteracy?
This can be explained as follows: Imagine a person who is 3 meters tall (9feet) and has a bodyweight of 40kg (80pounds); your mind will directly be able to visualize this person’s body shape……right? This means you are length and weight literate!
If I tell you that this morning I ate 5kJ (kiloJoule) of food for breakfast; for sure you will be puzzled about this information; you probably have no clue about if that amount is a lot or a little. The same when I tell you that my car is very energy efficient because it consumes only 5MJ ((MegaJoule) per km. You will again probably have no clue if it is really efficient or instead extremely inefficient. You are simply not able to determine if this energy amount is a lot or a little because we never talk about a car’s energy performance in Joules per km. The fact that most people have no clue about if a certain amount of energy is a lot or a little can be called energy illiteracy.
Even the energy-people are energy illiterate because they never look outside their own industries. The oil-guys talk in barrels; the power-guys in watts, mega and GigaWatts, the coal-guys talk Metric Tons; the gas-guys talk in Cubic Feet or meter, Alternative-fuel –guys talk Mtoes, Solar-guys talk Wattpeaks, battery-guys talk Amp-hours, wind-guys talk watts although they should talk wind-watt-peaks to be fair to solar guys……..and the list goes on and on…..
No wonder that most people are energy illiterate; the right unit for energy is never used!
No wonder we are ending up in a huge worldwide energy-crisis while continuing to burn everything we can find and even specifically grow stuff for the purpose of burning it….energy illiterate energy experts are advising energy illiterate politicians who in turn try to tell the energy illiterate public what to do…..
It’s time to start addressing the energy illiteracy problem!
The first step towards eradicating Energy illiteracy is introducing a standard:
That should be obvious! The reason why people are length and weight literate is because we always measure those properties with the same standardized units; no matter if we measure a door or the length of a room or a table. So in order to eradicate energy illiteracy we have to start using a standard unit for all energy forms.
The most obvious unit for Energy is Joule for the following Reasons:
1) Joule is already standardized as the unit for energy in the metric system.
2) Joule is already widely used all over the world in electricity (you probably never heard of that because Joule always has gone under cover of Watt; the definition of Watt is Joule per second.) Most electric enegineers do not know that because they only learn one definition that Watt = Current x Voltage…and thus even electric engineers are energy illiterate…
Watt Cheats the energy conscious customer…..
If you were an energy conscious customer and had a choice between 2 refrigerators that look exactly the same but have a different wattage; which one would you choose.
Let’s say fridge 1 has a 70 Watt compressor and fridge 2 a 100Watt compressor:
Most people will without second thought go for the 70Watt thinking that it consumes less energy.
That’s the way you get cheated; Watt gives you only information about how many Joules it consumes per second while most of the appliances in and around our house consume electricity the whole day with a continuously varying pattern. Information about a second is for sure not enough to determine if something is energy efficient or not.
What is more important to know is how many Joules per hour per day or per year are consumed.
Let’s assume the 70W fridge has a compressor that runs for 3.000 seconds per hour; this means that the fridge consumes 70 x 3000 x 24 = 5.040.000 Joules per day ( = 5 MJ per day). It could be possible that with a new more efficient compressor of 100W the compressor only runs for 1.000 seconds per hour; this means that the fridge will consumes 100 x 1000 x 24 = 2.400.000 Joules per day ( = 2,4 MJ per day).
You see the wattage does not say anything about how much energy is consumed; in above sample the 100W fridge consumed less than half of the 70Watt fridge. This means you can be badly cheated as an energy conscious customers’ when you focus on a low Wattage.
What should be mentioned on all energy consuming devices is how many kJ, MJ it consumes per hour, day or year or certain result. Lamps and TVs are used on hourly basis and thus should be labeled in MJ or kJ per hour. Fridges are used on daily or monthly basis and so should be labeled with how many MJ’s are consumed per day or month.
In fact Watt should be eradicated all together because it is misleading information; and it has no importance at all for the operation of a certain device.
What we really need to know is energy and current to determine if the electrical wiring can stand the current draw. Wattage is completely irrelevant.
Read more on this subject on www.kajul.org (under construction)
Here is somebody to break down the odds for you .
Rock Your Presentation with the Right Tools and Apps
At some point in your career as a student or professional, you’re going to have to give a presentation—and when you do, you want to be prepared with the right content and applications. Whether your demo’ing software or explicating Melville, a computer hooked up to a projector can either give an audience a great audio/visual experience, or a bullet-studded snoozer. Whether you’re using a Mac or Windows, PowerPoint or Keynote, or simply presenting straight from your web browser, there are a few power tips, apps, and tools that can make your slideshow or demonstration smooth, entertaining and memorable. Photo by jurvetson.
Ditch the Bullet Points
If you’re doing a straight PowerPoint or Keynote slideshow, do your audience a favor: forget bullet points. While they’re easy to write and easy to read off your screen, they’re hard on your audience. Pick up a copy of Clif Atkinson’s Beyond Bullet Points and make yourself fill in the template he offers for download, to structure your presentation into an engaging story, not a lifeless collection of bulleted lists. See our original review of Beyond Bullet Points.
Pre-program Typing with Text Substitution
If you’re showing off software or doing any sort of interactive demonstration that involves typing, don’t waste your audience’s time watching you fumble with the keys because you’re nervous under the pressure of your their collective gaze. Pre-script any text entry you have to do using text substitution, with free software like Texter on Windows, TextExpander on the Mac or Snippits on Linux. Not only will your audience be impressed with your efficiency (and lightning-fast typing), they’ll love you for being prepared and keeping things moving along with ease.
Zoom and Call Out Sections of Your Screen
Want to show off a detail in an image, enlarge a small video or draw on screen like a football coach choreographing a play? There are a few ways you can zoom into and freehand draw right onto areas on screen while you present.
- See closeups of screen areas with ZoomIt (Windows)—free software with configurable keyboard shortcuts zooms in on areas on screen and draws on it with different-colored pens.
- Zoom into any area of your Mac’s screen—using an accessibility option built into OS X, zoom into an area of the screen, no additional software required.
- Call out anything on your screen with Highlight (Mac)—draw on your Mac’s screen.
Tip: consider screencasting these types of show and tell techniques to ensure no operator error during the live presentation.
Dim the Background Clutter
Want your audience to focus on the foreground application, dialog box or maybe just the video playing in the middle of the screen? Both the Clutter Cloak for Windows and Doodim for Mac are free apps that can darken everything on-screen except what’s important.
Increase a Web Page’s Font Size
If you’re presenting a web page with text on it, assume it’ll be illegible to your audience unless it’s enlarged. In Firefox, a simple Ctrl++ can increase font size after a page is loaded; even better, preset your presentation pages to more legible sizes using the excellent NoSquint Firefox extension.
Before You Leave the House: The Hardware Checklist
This should go without saying, but I showed up at my last public speaking gig without my Mac’s DVI to VGA adapter. So before you head out to your presentation, make sure you’ve got:
- An extra ethernet cable (as lengthy as possible)
- A DVI to VGA adapter to hook up your laptop to the projector (if necessary)
- A thumb drive with your presentation file stored on it
More Presentation Power Tips
A few more tips for making your presentation great:
- Split the screen and use your computer as a giant clock or to simply display the notes view of your slide show
- Get your PowerPoint keyboard shortcuts straight
- Publish and share your slides with SlideShare
- While you should be prepared for your venue having faulty or no internet connectivity at all, you can host and give your presentation on the web with Google Documents (now with Presentations), Zoho Show or Preezo
- Check out Merlin Mann’s roundup of tools he used to perfect his recent Inbox Zero presentation
What are your favorite presentation tricks and tips? Let us know in the comments.
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