Business & management:
• Even a small office or business can have some kind of impact on the environment, by better use of recycling and re-examining how the business handles its waste.
• A win-win situation is possible with work-life balance, according to a company that specialises in attitude research.
• A group of leading newspaper executives will gather to discuss their list of 66 current trends, that they see having a future impact on the newspaper industry.
• Hays, a specialist recruiting company have identified the top 10 trends it believes will influence the recruitment market in 2008.
• The Reserve Bank’s first discussion papers for 2008 have just been released.
Education
• A Canadian educational expert has praised the Ministry of Education-funded Best Evidence Synthesis (BES) programme, which gathers evidence of what works in education from local and overseas studies, saying it is “the smartest intellectual property in the world”.
• On the other hand, a British education expert has criticised the NZ education system over its handling of children with learning disabilities and the fact that there is no screening system to pick up such problems.
Environment & sustainability:
• Communities and Local Government in the UK has released its first Sustainable Development Action Plan (SDAP) for 2007/2008.
• The first government in the world to introduce serious sustainability reporting measures is Sweden - all 55 state owned companies will have to file an annual sustainability report from 2009, using the Global Reporting Initiative Guidelines.
• An alternative approach to sustainability reporting is the Social Footprint Method from the Centre for Sustainable Innovation – a pilot with US ice cream company Ben and Jerry’s has recently been completed.
• A report from Britain’s Royal Society has stated that there is a need to avoid becoming locked into inefficient biofuel supply chains that potentially create harmful environmental and social impacts.
• Solar water heating is becoming increasingly popular in NZ, with a significant increase in installations towards the end of 2007.
• A recent national survey by BRANZ on heat pumps has shown that they are becoming the preferred way to both heat and cool NZ houses, although use during summer months could increase the annual cost of electricity to homeowners.
Health & wellbeing:
• A UK report on the government’s Supporting People programme that has just been released indicates that the government funding provided in the programme has produced double the financial benefits back in the community, through reduced costs in health services, tenancy failure, crime and residential care.
• A new study from Queensland has confirmed that using a sun-bed early in life, doubles the risk of developing melanoma.
Law & Government:
• Regional Improvement and Efficiency Partnerships (RIEPs) in the UK are to receive £185m in funds to support councils to deliver better services and make 3 per cent efficiency savings over the next three years. RIEPs are local government-led partnerships that work to support better, more efficient local services.
• The UK Audit Commission published a report “Healthy competition” at the end of last year that considers the potential for councils to use competition and contestability to generate cost savings and service improvements.
People, culture & diversity:
• 2008 is the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue (EYID), which recognises that Europe’s great cultural diversity is a unique advantage. The Year will encourage an exploration of a rich cultural heritage and opportunities to learn from different cultural traditions.
• Social networking sites are predicted to increasingly become the target of high-tech criminals who will use them to gather information e.g. details about bank accounts, as in an attacks on the accounts of Brazilian users of the Google Orkut social networking site in 2007.
•Sociologists are now using social networking sites like Facebook to gather or mine data on relationships with the intention of tracking people long term for studies.
• According to a survey by a home equity release company and a website for 50+ NZers, 40% of seniors felt that they were financially worse off than 5 years ago.
• The Human Rights Commission has released the report from the Transgender Inquiry: “To be who I am”. A summary of the submissions is also available.
Science, technology & transport:
• The top 5 technologies that could become big in 2008 in the UK, according to the BBC are: the Web-to-go, ultra mobile PCs, IPTV, Wimax, and mobile VoIP, while Bill Gates is predicting that the keyboard and mouse will give way in the future to touch, vision and speech interfaces.
• The founder of Wikipedia has just launched an open source search engine, Wikia Search that will operate as a result of a community of users, in the same way that Wikipedia does. Wikia Search’s four guiding principles are transparency, community, quality and privacy.
• A Windows virus called Mebroot (named by Symantec), has affected about 5000 people in Europe – the virus waits until the user logs onto their online banking account and steals the bank login information. Mebroot is not detected by many commercial anti-virus packages.
Friday, 18 January 2008
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