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  • Home > Articles by: Robert W. "Doc" Hall
Posts by: Robert W. "Doc" Hall

The Age of Connectivity

On May 2, 2012 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
monkeybrains-wireless-isp

Besides our complex environmental challenges, businesses are entering a new Age of Connectivity. The technology of connection, while baffling at times, is easier to foresee than the human changes they might entail. The engineers of network growth are ebullient indeed. A recent forecast suggests that in only four [...]

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Food Packaging You Can Eat

On May 2, 2012 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
Postcard_Front_Jelloware7

No estimate of how much food is wasted is precise, but the EPA says that 14% of landfill waste is food scraps. Waste of food packaging (contrasted with food scraps) is hard to classify, but one can assume that much of the plastic and glass in [...]

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Social Trust

On April 10, 2012 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
hand_shake_2

Social trust is confidence that others we meet will not try to harm or cheat us, and that they will at least try to do what they say. To live well using a lot less, new business models have to increase resource sharing, which presumes more social trust than most of us [...]

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Antibiotic-Resistant Microbes

On April 10, 2012 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
coli

This political as well as scientific issue has hung around for more than 50 years. About 80% of all antibiotics in the United States are fed to animals as disease prophylactics and as a growth stimulant. Recent developments promise to revive this dispute.

Antibiotics have been used in animals as long as [...]

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Building Microbiomes?

On March 22, 2012 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
Indoor air quality

Leading edge research in the Built Environment is exploring the distribution of microbes found inside buildings. Many researchers have investigated other contaminants, but not microbes. Because we spend 90 percent of our time in buildings, the Built Environment has a major influence on health. Learning about it cuts across many fields, but [...]

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Getting Our Act Together

On February 22, 2012 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
Compression Institute

We had a board meeting on February 18. Like everyone, we had to work to avoid being sucked into the mire of finance and legalities, and concentrate on how to promote our mission. We did make a little progress.

If you have not visited our reworked web page, please visit Read Full Article →

Spectrum Crunch

On February 22, 2012 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
smart-phone-use

CNN is running a series on the impending shortage of spectrum to carry the increasing demands of smart phones. Without action, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) anticipates the shortfall to be serious by 2014. Fast growth in phone traffic presages the issues of Compression in many other domains, but happening in [...]

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Indoor Air Environments

On February 22, 2012 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
Indoor air quality

Indoor environments have opportunities to use Compression Thinking. Indoors is where we live, where the EPA estimates that we spend 90% of our time  – not counting time in vehicles. Inside most buildings, air is more polluted than outside.Hazards are serious enough that the EPA has an Indoor Environments Division. [...]

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Water Treatment

On February 6, 2012 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
Waster Water

Will Rogers once advised audiences to “drink upstream from the herd.” That usually worked in a thinly populated world. Running water and soil percolation remediated low bioloads. Heavy metal contaminants weren’t as widely distributed.

Today we have to help nature deal with high bioloads and pervasive industrial chemicals, but Read Full Article →

Compression Institute Activity

On February 6, 2012 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
PageLines- CompressionLogo_FINAL_web.jpg

The Institute holds its first live board meeting on February 18, reviewing where we are going and how fast. We’re well aware of the uphill nature of our mission. Afterward, we intend to begin revving up activity to report regularly. In the meantime:

Check out our revised Compression [...]

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Reinventing Business

On January 20, 2012 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
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The challenge of the Compression Institute is to find adventurers willing to reinvent some basic concepts of business, for real – by actually doing. In effect, they would “put to sea” not in big cruise ships, but in little boats closer to reality. That’s what we’re looking for in Action Learning [...]

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District Energy

On January 20, 2012 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
District energy systems produce steam, hot water or chilled water at a central plant. The steam, hot water or chilled water is then piped underground to individual buildings for space heating, domestic hot water heating and air conditioning. As a result, individual buildings served by a district energy system don't need their own boilers or furnaces, chillers or air conditioners.

One of the oldest ways to save energy is district energy, formerly district heating. Many old cities, campuses, and other big building complexes used district heating, often as steam piped from an on-site boiler house or as turbine steam from a community electrical generating plant. In an energy-cheap economy, this came to be [...]

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Biomes and Biodiversity

On January 4, 2012 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
Microbe

Other than “cute” animals going extinct, biodiversity gets little public attention. Preserving biodiversity is essential for many reasons that sum up to life itself being unable to exist without it (yawn). Publicized studies cover macro-diversity we can see, but implications are so opaque that we’re angry if countermeasures crimp our livelihood. For [...]

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The Missing Link

On January 4, 2012 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
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We issue environmental blurbs like many of our posts because those leading a normal life can’t keep up with the state of the earth. Full time environmentalists can’t keep up either.

Compression refers to squeezing human consumption back within the limits of a finite earth supporting it. Compression also refers to the [...]

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Our Dropping Energy Yields

On December 15, 2011 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
Screen Shot 2011-12-17 at 1.20.12 PM

Energy return on energy invested (EROEI) is well known, but not widely practiced. Applied to an oil well, EROEI is the ratio of energy represented in crude oil at a wellhead divided by the energy used to drill the well and pump up the oil.

Estimating this ratio for a strictly bounded system is not [...]

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Action Learning Groups

On December 15, 2011 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
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The mission of the Compression Institute is to create and support action learning groups to transform work organizations and communities using Compression Thinking. That is, we’re seeking how people at the action level can aggressively cope with a fast-changing world, learning by doing. Of course, we want people to learn how to think differently, [...]

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The Art of the Question

On November 30, 2011 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
Compression-Thinking-the-art-of-the-question-640-441x640

Every one of us is subject to confirmation bias. That is, we pay more attention to evidence that confirms past beliefs than to evidence that these beliefs are untrue. Our neural processes just work this way, even in scientific logic, where it is said that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. While confirmation bias keeps [...]

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Structuring Compression Thinking

On November 30, 2011 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
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The Compression Institute is inching closer to feet-on-the ground experimentation. We’ve long harbored the idea of forming local learning groups that would foster real experiments doing more using less by real work organizations. By prevailing thinking, just volunteering to think about this is a somewhat gutsy move.

Nonetheless, by March we [...]

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Compression Institute Update

On November 15, 2011 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
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The Institute has formed a board of directors: Doc Hall, Chairman; Jack Ward, V.P. Fund Raising; Dave Veech, V.P. Finance; Jason McVay, V.P. Operations; Marvin Klein, Founder of PortionPac Chemical; Wayne [...]

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Compression Thinking

On November 15, 2011 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
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Compression Thinking is collectively learning to enjoy living on our spaceship planet by becoming much wiser much faster. Compression Thinking differs from most initiatives to improve ecological sustainability in three primary ways:

1. Make huge reductions in total global resource use, not just fossil fuels.

2. Reverse the growth in use [...]

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Compression Thinking Groups

On October 31, 2011 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
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The mission of the institute is to create and support action learning groups to transform work organizations and communities using Compression Thinking.

To appreciate the difficulty of this mission, reflect on it, which will begin your Compression Thinking. We’ve described action learning groups by a variety of names, like consortia. Let’s [...]

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The Chinese Enigma

On October 31, 2011 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
China-economic-finances-6401-300x291

October 31, 2011

China’s mass of contradictions may even be enigmatic to Chinese leaders. Chinese government secrecy inhibits fact checking. It is riding a growth tiger and must eventually dismount, but like all of us, appears fearful of being chewed up when it gets off.

Export earnings finance most of China’s 9% compound annual [...]

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Compressed on Spaceship Earth

On October 13, 2011 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
PageLines- CompressionLogo_FINAL_web.jpg

October 13, 2011

Concern is rising that the economy will never revert to a pattern resembling the past, but enter a New Reality. It’s trying to re-inflate, but only huffs and puffs financial bubbles instead. Looking at the world as physical systems rather than financial ones offers clues. Limits are pushing us toward a zero [...]

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Water, Water…

On October 13, 2011 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
Galaxy-08279-5255-surrounded-by-140-trillion-times-water-in-oceans-6402-300x225

October 13, 2011

In the last 40 years we discovered water in space. We expect to find much more water deep on the moon, Mars, and elsewhere. Water on Asteroid 24 Themis closely matches our ocean water. Scientists speculate that much of earth’s water wafted in from comets [...]

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