After many years of blogging, and consistent with my desire to move toward retirement, we have ended the Insights blog. Thanks to Doug Bedell for his years of blog support.

Power Unimpeded, When the Sun Shines

Posted on May 23, 2013
Filed Under Business, Technology | Leave a Comment

A massive shift is underway in how Germany generates its electricity – from conventional power plants, including nuclear, to largely renewable energies. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s goal is to have Germany nuclear-free by 2022, an aim she established after Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant disaster in 2011. She envisions renewables producing 80 percent of  Germany’s electric power by 2050.

anemployechecksProgress toward those goals, though, is making for some tense moments in the control rooms of the German generation system, as when, Mathilde Richter reports on phys.org, clouds obscure the sun for a few minutes.  (The photo shows an array of solar panels at the airport in Finowfurt city in eastern Germany. Richter notes that Merkel is a physicist by training.)

“The situation changes fast, it’s very volatile,” says Christoph Schneiders, planning head at a monitoring center for the German power company Amprion. One would think so. Screens at the station update every three seconds as they monitor 11,000 kilometres (7,000 miles) of high-voltage power lines criss-crossing much of western Germany and extending into other European countries.

Emergency planning needs to be a primary discipline in such a bold (and at the same time seemingly tenuous) approach to generation, and we suspect it is. “It’s quite an experiment,” observes Encore’s Dennis Owen. “There’s a big upside if it succeeds and big problems if it fails.  It will probably fall somewhere in between.  It’s impressive that the Germans have been able to meet all their energy needs under optimal solar and wind conditions.”

Phys.org explains that “When clouds cover the sun over the solar plants that have mushroomed across Germany in recent years, the engineers see an instant drop in output. The sharp falls reverse just as quickly when the sky clears again. ‘It goes up, it goes down, it is very difficult to predict’ said Schneiders. And unlike a gas plant, he said, solar power can’t just be switched off when there is an overload.”

Moreover, while her clean energy goal is admirable, there’s irony in Chancellor Merkel’s plans. To accomplish them, Germany is planning “several new north-south ‘power highways’ which, ironically, often face opposition from environmentalists who don’t want unsightly power lines cutting through forests.'”

Apparently, there never will be a way to get completely compatible produced anywhere. If not in the actual generation, moving it hither and yon will be objectionable to someone along the way. Lets hope, though, that the sun shines in Germany more often than not.

(A column in The Wall Street Journal, incidentally, takes an opposite view of the role of nuclear power in generating electricity and reducing greenhouse gasses. Sure, nuclear plants cost a lot to build. But they’ll have far longer lifetimes than solar plants, which operate with diminishing efficiency. Solar may become more efficient, but don’t rule out nuclear power in Germany or anywhere else is the warning.) – Doug Bedell  

Technical Writing as a ‘Newsbeat’ of Old

Posted on January 8, 2013
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It struck us recently that technical writing is a lot like covering a newspaper beat, which we did many years ago. Only now you don’t need to leave your desk and computer screen. Then, you had to pop on a telephone headset or hop in you car and head for wherever your latest story might be unfolding.

imgresThese reminiscent thoughts occurred on happening upon on an article, “How to Master Technical Writing,” on the eHow website. We once covered the police beat, then the labor beat, for a big metropolitan daily. The labor beat began evolving primarily from covering labor unions to workplaces, and worklife, in general. And that’s when the parallel with technical writing becomes most apt.

“Understand proper technical writing format” goes almost without saying, but it heads eHow’s list. You need to know who you’re writing for (Point No. 2) and what their expectations are. There’s a difference between reporting for a family newspaper (which ours was) and a tabloid (the competition). You need to be clear on your readers’ expectations. Basically, we suspect, they’re involve accuracy and pertinence to workaday needs or aspirations.
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Good Tech Writers Set Their Own Lean Limits

Posted on December 15, 2012
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Writers need readers or their writing may not exist. Unless you’re a diarist or a personal blogger, you want assurance that someone will be reading your work. Technical writing  has a leg up in that regard. You won’t be writing unless you have a setting or a process to describe – a specific purpose is built into your output.

Okay. But what if you’re writing for a publisher with strict formatting requirements? Could that seriously cramp your style? Might a template or word limit deflect your motivation for even getting started? It certainly could, Jeffrey Way, editor of the Nettuts+ blog confirms.  Potential publishers shouldn’t be setting limits on technical writers if they can possibly avoid them. (That’s assuming, of course, given writers are orderly and efficient in the first place. But what competent technical writer wouldn’t be?)

For a while, Way had word count and formatting requirements for Nettuts+, but he dropped them.
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Appraising An Organization’s Communication Climate

Posted on December 7, 2012
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Here’s a writing blog I’ve come across and intend to follow – it’s by Clay Spinuzzi, a specialist in organizational communication, and is simply called “Clay Spinuzzi.” He’s got a new book on communicating in workplaces titled Topsight. (It may not be quite published yet.)

What’s so compelling about organizational communication? A lot, if the discipline is taken seriously and practiced well. Technical writers can contribute to assessing and improving the state of communication in their own organizations. That’s because good communication is a systematic discipline – it doesn’t just happen.  It requires processes and procedures, not stultifying rule books, but simple, readily understood and maintained roles and methods for communicating effectively across an organization.

Like, “Keep listening” to what an organization is saying and yielding as it goes about its daily business. Are its activities and achievements in line with its goals and objectives? That’s where good organizational communication starts. You need to have goals and objectives, as well as an organizational vision and values, to light the way.
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No Generation Gap During Today’s Space Jump

Posted on October 14, 2012
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Felix Baumgartner’s jump from the edge of space this afternoon demonstrated a lot of things, but one, surely, was the potential of the Internet as a real-time TV channel for the entire world. This time it was Red Bull energy drink and its space-jump team taking advantage of the new worldwide web “channel.” Who might it be in the future?

That’s a question worth considering, but there’s no ready answer, because we can’t predict the future. Yet it struck me that, at least during the brief time I checked before Baumgartner stepped into space, the usual Sunday chatter was continuing on the regular TV channels, as though they had suddenly become irrelevant. Nobody but RedBullStratos.com on the Internet was covering the space adventure live.

There a daredevil Austrian athlete was climbing to an altitude of 128,100 feet, or 24-plus miles, dangling in his capsule from a tear-dropped-shaped balloon. Anticipation kept building as Red Bull’s broadcast furnished the steadily increasing distance from Earth.

As my colleague Dennis Owen noted later, NASA served up some pretty exciting adventuring with its early space flights. But there, the astronauts remained confined to their cabins until they landed, whether on the moon or back on earth. Here, after a two-hours-plus ascent, Felix Baumgartner stepped into the sky from a platform hardly wider than a skateboard with a parachute strapped to his spacesuit. We bet NASA’s entire staff was watching from whatever computers they had at hand on a Sunday.
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Keep Promising Young Immigrants With Us

Posted on October 7, 2012
Filed Under Business, Government, Technology | Leave a Comment

Whichever candidates win these elections, when we get back to governing, it can be hoped that a high priority will be given to sensible immigration reform. We keep reading about talented people, capable of contributing greatly to U.S. fortunes, who have returned home because their visas expired. It simply doesn’t figure that skillful, inventive people would be sent packing by a country – the U.S. – that needs them.

The latest such report we’ve seen comes on the Venturebeat.com site by Samantha Huang, a research assistant at Stanford Law School. She leads into a new book, published by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, reporting that “high-tech, immigrant-founded startups – a critical source of fuel for the U.S. economy – has (stet) stagnated and is on the verge of decline.” Press release grammar aside, this book appears to pull together the dire evidence that we are starting to send more foreign-born entrepreneurs home than we are welcoming. How can that be in a nation that needs every source of brainpower available to it?
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Good Communication Matters Most

Posted on July 6, 2012
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What does it take to get on in the world if you’re a technically inclined person? Why, knowledge of your theories, equipment and processes – that should be obvious, shouldn’t it? Well yes, but it’s not the heart of the question. There lies something else – the ability to relate well to others and to communicate well. (It’s like a dentist who does excellent root canal work but neglects to explain to the patient beforehand what the cost will be and why.)

Dennis Owen and myself at Encore Technical Resources have known that good relational communication matters most for some time, even before our years of working together at the post-accident Three Mile Island Unit 2. (Dennis was a recovery engineer and I was the communication manager.)

And here’s a Penn State instructor emphasizing anew the primacy of good communication in technical settings. Myron Hartman teaches biomedical engineering technology. He gives his third semester students a questionnaire that asks them   to rank the skills an entry level technician needs.

He lists them as “troubleshooting electronic components, computer skills, people skills (verbal), communication skills (writing), equipment function and operation, and clinical application of medical equipment.”
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Communicating From a Kitchen Table

Posted on June 27, 2012
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It’s amazing how resourceful people can be in this ready-access virtual world with all the Internet-related tools at our disposal. Claire Broadley, of Leeds, England, explains on The Huffington Post how she runs her technical writing/web development business, Red Robot Media, virtually from her kitchen table.

Claire recommends using the cloud as a virtual office and storage space. That certainly frees up kitchen space for tasks having more directly to do with survival. Then Claire uses Teamwork web-based project management software.

At Encore, we typically use clients’ office space, so kitchen countertops aren’t an issue for us. But, we have to cheer on a competitor who makes such resourceful use of the space available to her. We’re living in a keyboard-prompted world, and the keyboards – battery-powered or not, portable or not – are becoming so readily available that  they’re leading to debates, as in our last post, about whether we even need to learn handwriting anymore. (We think we do.)
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‘Evacuation’ a Loaded Crisis Word

Posted on June 15, 2012
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It’s interesting how much added, sometimes mistaken, power words seem to gain in a crisis, when people are fearing the worst of a situation or are anxious about those in charge of dealing with it. The tendency of concerned, frightened people to escalate meaning helps explain why staying cool during an emergency and being very careful with words at such times is so important.

From Japan, in the aftermath of last year’s Fukushima nuclear disaster, comes an acknowledgement by Masataka Shimizu, the former President of Tokyo Electric Power, of his actions during the crisis: “I remember mentioning an ‘evacuation’ but I’m not sure whether I used the term ‘partial.'” Oh dear.

It would be a normal response to evacuate nonessential workers from an accident-stricken plant. Some of them would be needed later to relieve crews on duty. Plus, a partial evacuation is a means of reducing the risk to unneeded employees. Members of the public can also be evacuated, depending on calculations of expected releases of radiation and likely wind directions. (At Fukushima, the evacuation was eventually extended to 20 kilometers from the plant and is still in effect. Controversy over relaxing the evacuation limits and the level of compensation for residents who will be returning to their homes is delaying relaxation of the evacuation zone.) Read more

‘Discovery’ Helped Bring the Universe Home

Posted on May 17, 2012
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Now it’s a museum piece. After 39 space missions and 5,830 Earth orbits, the Space Shuttle Discovery is completing its first month on display in the James S. McDonnell Space Hanger at the Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, VA, the air and space extension of the Smithsonian Institution. At least the shuttle’s hanger has an august name – Discovery hasn’t been consigned to an oversized garage.

Gary Cameron/Reuters

John Glenn, who in 1962 was the first American astronaut to orbit the Earth and returned to space on Discovery in 1998, was on hand to welcome the shuttle to the Udvar-Hazy center, which is just outside Washington.
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