From the LOGIS news alert subscriptions (ending 27/06):

Business & management:
• As part of the NZ Tourism Strategy 2015, a series of guides have been produced that help tourism operators ensure that their businesses are sustainable.
• The international snow sports community is backing the Winter Games NZ planned to take place next year, with about 800 athletes from around the world projected to attend.
• The way people manage their documentation at work is rapidly changing. Increasing amounts of data and documentation are being stored online, and the new name for digital document storage and use is “cloud computing”.
• eBay is going to the European Parliament in an attempt to get what it considers to be outdated trading laws changed, because they allow traditional manufacturers to limit the impact of online trading.
• There are plans in Dubai to build the world’s first “moving” building – an 80 storey tower with rotating floors that will change the shape of the building.
• Sustainable procurement is an approach that many businesses are taking not just because it’s good for the environment, but because it can lower costs and result in more valuable business practices.
• The UK’s Idea and Development Agency has a series of web pages on strategic workforce planning, including a section on producing a workforce development plan.

Environment & sustainability:
• Water calculators are increasingly seen on websites looking at sustainability issues, and now local bodies here in NZ are using them as well – North Shore City offers one, and Rodney links you through to a very detailed Australian water calculator. (According to NIWA, the mean annual rainfall for Auckland from 1971-2000 was 1240 mm, if you feel like checking your water use.)
• A UN meeting on waste management has discussed the safe disposal of old cell phones and computers and given consideration to writing new guidelines for the disposal of “e-waste”.
• Floods, drought and disease are resulting in increasing numbers of “climate refugees” around the world, with people being forced to leave regions or countries as a result of the impact of climate change.
• Sales of heat pumps have risen sharply in NZ in recent years. The Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority want users to remember some “smart tips” to ensure that they don’t waste electricity unnecessarily in the way they use heat pumps.
• The sites to go on a shortlist for Britain’s first eco-towns are being criticised due to a series of issues, including inadequate public transport links.

Health & wellbeing:
• Both NZ & international research shows that tobacco displays are an unhealthy influence on children and on people trying to quit.
• The Legal Services Agency has produced an education kit “The Law and Mental Health”, which provides information from acts like the Mental Health Act, the Privacy Act, etc.
• A global opinion poll covering people from 19 countries, shows that a high proportion are against the use of torture, even in the case of terrorists who have information that could save innocent lives.
• RFID technology is increasing in use (many libraries use it now to make issues and returns faster). Dutch scientists say that they may interfere with lifesaving hospital equipment, while UK computer scientists say that they could actually help patients.

Law & Government:
• As part of the Thames / Coromandel Blueprint Project, almost 150 children have supplied the project partners with some definite themes and in-depth submissions on what they feel the future should be like for the Coromandel area.
• Community engagement and community cohesion is a UK report that looks at the challenges of bringing together government policies on getting people involved in their community and promoting cohesion rather than conflict between newer and more established communities.
• The UK’s Local Government Association is urging councils and their staff to avoid clichés and jargon and was prompted to publish a list of such words by the news that one council had advised staff to stop using “brainstorming” because it might offend epileptics, and start using “thought shower”.
• A UK government working group is proposing that all radio stations transfer from analogue to digital by 2020. But while 90% of households in the UK have a digital TV, some people are still buying analogue sets because they are unaware that they need extra equipment to allow the TV to receive digital signals.
• UK researchers are working on CCTV cameras that can “hear” sounds like a window smashing or that can react to crowd noise.
• The UK Ministry of Defence is concerned that young recruits from the Facebook generation don’t take data security seriously enough.

People, culture & diversity:
• A recent US survey of the baby boomer generation, shows that of those not already working in them, over half are interested in “encore careers” – ie jobs that combine income, personal meaning and social impact.
• Arguments about whether or not climate change is real are meaningless for a Colombian culture that has survived for centuries, but can see every day that nature is changing all around them.

Science, technology & transport:
• The International Civil Aviation Organisation has produced a carbon footprint calculator that will allow travellers to estimate the carbon footprint of any flight that they make.
• Backlogs in the patent system are bad for business and create uncertainty for innovators – there are between five and ten million inventions globally queuing for approval.
• The Internet’s regulator ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) has approved a proposal to relax rules around “top-level” domain names, such as .com or .nz, and has also approved domain names in Asian, Arabic or other scripts.
• “Green, clean and never seen” may be the nanotechnology motto, but researchers have only just started to look into whether it may pose risks to environmental or human health, and any damage may take years to become obvious.