The news on renewables -- particularly biofuels -- is popping all around us.

Here's a good article on renewable fuels in Minnesota. As one participant in the conference noted, "The future is going to be exciting. We're just starting to scratch the surface with renewables." Read more.

At the Dec. 8 "Art of Cool" conference in Lansing, MI, the Michgan Department of History, Arts and Libraries released a strategy for leveraging arts and culture to produce new tax revenue, provide good-paying jobs and create sustainable businesses.

Certain buzzwords in the Sustainability community are used widely but not clearly understood - I thought I'd address two of those here - sustainability and triple-bottom-line focus.  Sustainability is most commonly defined as 'Meeting the Needs of the present generation in such a way as not to compromise future generation's abilities to meet their own needs' (Bruntland Definition). This speaks to methods which not only maintain quality of life but preferably improve it.

Over at Brewed Fresh Daily, George Nemeth asks an important question. Why is the PD's series on innovation only a week long? That prompted me to comment:

Here are some economic development preditions for 2006:

The County will continue to develop its new strategy outlined by the Blue Ribbon Task Force. The Task Force will become CuyahogaNext Advisors. Look for new initiatives -- innovation zones -- around Baldwin Wallace and the Euclid Avenue Corridor. We will also see productive negotiations between the County and other entities such as JumpStart, BioEnterprise, and the newly renamed CAMP.

Philadelphia is promoting the creative economy as an economic development strategy. Read more. Cleveland can follow the same strategy.

The Cuyahoga County Commission has adopted an economic development strategy that calls for expanded investment in early childhood development as an economic development strategy. In an

Nashville is taking steps to leverage its health care assets into another, related cluster of companies. What are the lessons for Cleveland? Do we have any organization that can step forward and look at the Nashville strategy?

Some of the most intereesting regional collaborations in the country are emerging in Wisconsin. Civic leaders from eighteen Wisconsin counties are banding together to market the region as the "New North."

In the last month, Wisconsin, Georgia and Iowa have released important reports on the future of manufacturing. The reports include a common theme: for manufacturing to advance, promoting innovation is critical.

Cities are competing for young knowledge workers. CEOs for Cities, has issued a new report that explores the issue. It's another example of how economic development is shifting from a focus on recruiting companies to a focus on recruiting people.

A recent report by the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education warns that if current trends continue, the proportion of workers with high school diplomas and college degrees will decrease and the personal income of Americans will decline over the next 15 years.

Great article. Having just come from Japan
where alot of effort is to expended to deal provide web accessibility to cell phones. Friend of mine would read
the news on his cell phone at red lights on his way to work every morning.

Well, that title is a bit misleading perhaps. I have been looking at the foaf thingie in the edit form for a user's
account. What this thing does, basically, is to grab the information from your profile, and your buddy list and create a
foaf file out of it. The first question is what, exactly, is a foaf file?

        I have many thoughts on this topic, but let's start with the clear facts - secondhand smoke greatly increases the liklihood of a number of diseases not only for the smoker but all of those exposed to it.  So we can clearly prevent loss of life and years of people's lives who don't smoke by not allowing smoking in venues shared by non-smokers.  Having smoking and non-smoking sections cannot completely protect non-smokers- smoke diffuses across the border and still does harm.  And people in a rush will take 'first available' and simiply deal with the smoke or hope nobody actually smokes.

      Though it may be an inconvenience to make smokers go outside, especially in cold weather - this can actually have positive benefits for the smoker.  Not only will they likely smoke less, they will be more likely to connect with others as they congregate outside and finish their smokes.  I've seen this personally in States like New York where it is enforced as well as local establishments like AJ Rocco's, which incidentally was the first bar to go smoke free in Cleveland. 

Saw over this over on Slashdot but apparently Guido Van Rossum, the benevolent dictator of Python is now
working for Google.

the Cleveland Colectivo is a group of like-minded friends, neighbors, and colleagues who have joined together for the purpose of collective giving.

Our mission is to strengthen our community through collective investments that identify and nurture innovative projects. We pool our funds and share our energy to invest it back into projects that we see as worthwhile and exciting in Cleveland. Each member contributes to The Colectivo quarterly and together we choose projects to support. Every month we gather to discuss ideas, learn about area initiatives and organizations, network with a growing circle of members, and continue building The Colectivo.

We hope that if you have an idea to build a stronger community or want to invest in new ideas, that you will join us.

Sherwin-Williams, the NEO based paint company is also known throughtout the Open Source community as one of the first major companies in the U.S. to rollout Linux for their retail infrastructure. IBM has them listed on their site with one page description of what they have done. Needless to say, IBM was the system integrator and hardware supplier for the deployment of the system.

昨日の日本語での投稿が本当はテストだった。でも、問題なく投稿が出来たので、少しずつ日本語でのブログ投稿しようかなと思っている。きっと頻度が少ないかもしれないけど、一応やってみようかなと思っている。

Went out to dinner with my mom and George Mateyo, Chairman of Carnegie Capital Asset Management Company. George apparently handles my mom's financial affairs and had been kind enough to take a look at my resume and
provide some advice as I was planning to move back to Cleveland from Japan. So we thought it would be nice to take him out to dinner, and I actually got a chance to meet him for the first time. Great guy. Funny, intelligent, direct.

今朝のPDのビジネスセクションに、日本や中国関連記事があった。その記事では、 日本はオハイオ州に投資している国として最大であることを知った。もちろん、その一つの理由は車や鉄の クォータや輸入税などを避けるためだった。車や鉄をアメリカで製造すると、Made in USAをいえるわけで、 日本バッシングの対策だった。

Read in the Arts & Life section of the Plain Dealer that the Ohio Ballet is cancelling concerts, laying off its dancers and cutting its staff to a
barebones two. Apparently, the article was posted on Cleveland.com on December 16th, but I didn't see the article until today's paper.

I was reading over at Groklaw, PJ's analysis of Microsoft's Alan Yates' comments at a meeting to discuss the State of Massachussetts decision to transition to plain text, pdf, and ODF(open document format) as standards for all State of Massachussetts documents.

Checking out my Planet Case RSS feed, saw two posts by Brian Gray which struck me as interesting in juxtaposition. Well, actually three posts.

Okay, I need to use my reading glasses more....