MICE (Meeting, Incentive, Convetion, Exhibition)

Embodied energy is the energy required to extract, transport, process, install, and dispose of, or recycle the materials that make up the building.

For this study, the total embodied energy was not used to compare the two construction types, only the energy for the material manufacture was used, because energies used to transport, install etc. would in most instances be the same for both construction types and cancel each other out, and because almost 70% of the total energy invested in a building’s construction (Embodied energy) is embodied in the materials themselves, one can compile a rather accurate comparison with using just the energy used for the material manufacture alone, however, when referred to the energy used to manufacture the materials I will refer to the “Embodied energy”.
Materials which will be more or less the same in quantity / volume eg. ceiling boards, cornices, skirtings, floor slab & finishes, because of the same floor area, have been omitted for they will have no impact on the embodied energy outcome.

Construction
To compare the two types of construction, I started with a 12000mm x 6000mm brick building and included 2 bedrooms, a bathroom, open plan kitchen & living and a garage. To justify the comparison, I designed the strawbale dwelling with the same rooms and exactly the same floor area for each room, but because of the bales’ rather wide (approx. 480mm) module width I ended up with a 13200mm x 7250mm external envelope for the straw bale dwelling. This made quite a difference on the material volume of the roof and roof trusses. Both the dwellings’ received one plaster coat, but vary in thickness. Conventional brick wall plaster width vary from apprx. 12mm – 18mm, compared to the 30mm plaster coat for strawbale walls because of the greater surface un-evenness among other reasons.

The foundation details differs from conventional brick buildings. The straw bales are laid on a bed of stone so they will not retain moisture. A cement screed is cast in the bottom of the trenches on the conc. footing to be sure that any water that might find its way into the trench would be directed away through the weep holes on the sides. These are the only bricks used in the strawbale dwelling, thus embodied energy values for mortar and bricks are a lot less for this type of construction. The foundations for strawbale buildings are shallower (200mm deep), thus less conc. Is used as well.

The last main difference is, of course, the wall material which differs hugely in the amount of embodied energy to produce & install them. Embodied energy for straw bales is 31MJ/m3 compared to the 5200MJ/m3 of stock bricks, thus because the walls have the greatest material volume of all the building components, it is understandable that the strawbale dwelling will have a much lower total embodied energy value than it’s rival as is indicated below.

Conclusion
Straw is a viable building alternative, plentiful and inexpensive. Straw-bale buildings boast super-insulated walls simple construction, low costs, and the conversion of an agricultural byproduct into a valued building material. Properly constructed and maintained, the straw-bale walls, plaster exterior and interior remain water proof, fire resistant, and pest free. Because only limited skill is required, a community house-raising effort can build most of a straw-bale house in a single day. This effort yields a low-cost, elegant, and energy-efficient living space for the owners, a graceful addition to the community, and a desirable boost to local farm income. I think, especially in this country, residential straw bale buildings could be a very sustainable viable alternative to residential architecture.

Written by Jere Botes, architect & founder of http://www.dreamhouses.co.za, a website dedicated to provide home builders, home renovators, home owners & developers with free professional advice on all aspects of home design, building & diy. Reproductions of this article are encouraged but must include a link pointing to http://www.dreamhouses.co.za.

Think about the last meeting you attended at work. After the meeting, did you feel that everyone heard what you had to say and your ideas were taken seriously? Or did you leave frustrated because louder or more forceful people dominated the meeting? If so, you need to take control of the role you play in meetings. Here are 7 quick tips to get your ideas heard in your next meeting:

1) Prepare before the meeting. Know what you’re going to say. If you’re a person that gets tongue-tied in a meeting, make sure you prepare your comments in advance. Look at the agenda and plan the key points you want to cover.

2) Get on the agenda. Don’t wait until the meeting. Ask the meeting leader to put your topic on the agenda so you have a scheduled time to share your ideas.

3) Run the meeting. Talk to the meeting leader and offer to help by running the next meeting. That way you can control the conversation.

4) Offer to take notes on a flip chart. If you’re not comfortable running the meeting, you can offer to stand up and capture the ideas on a flip chart. That will make it easier for you to add to the ideas, since you’re the one recording them.

5) Interrupt other people. For many of us this is very uncomfortable. We want to be polite and wait our turn. Unfortunately, in some meetings, only the loud and pushy people get heard. Realize that sometimes, you can’t wait for a break in the conversation and interrupting is the only way to get your point across.

6) When you don’t get a response to an idea, repeat it again. In some meetings, so much is going on at the same time, you may need to say your comments again. Or you may need to rephrase then so people understand their importance.

7) Take credit for your ideas. If someone else repeats something you’ve said as their idea, don’t get upset. You can remind the group that it was your idea by thanking the other person for supporting it. You can say, “John, that ties right into what I said a few minutes about the delivery problem. As I mentioned, this is a key area we need to address. Thanks for your suggestion.”

If you really want to get heard in meetings, you need to work at it. Try new strategies and see what works best for you. At the end of every meeting, ask yourself what went well and what else you could have done. Make notes and use those ideas to prepare for the next meeting to make sure that you get heard.

This article comes with reprint rights providing no changes are made and the resource box below accompanies it.

Laura Browne is the author of a practical & easy-to-use book for women, Why Can’t You Communicate Like Me? How Smart Women Get Results At Work. To register for her Free Teleconference on How To Deal With Difficult People, go to http://www.inyourfaceink.com (This book is available at the website and at Barnes & Noble online.)

When Laura isn’t writing, she helps women be more successful through WOMEN Unlimited, a nationally recognized resource for cultivating leadership excellence, http://www.women-unlimited.com

[Erie, Pennsylvania]

Chris Wright, between the his release from the Army in 1971, at the end of his Vietnam tour, and his reactivation into the Armed Forces in 1974, and his Army career, he had met Ms O ‘Day and they had chummed about, living together now and then. She was quite young and he seven years older, and during this time when she was of legal age to live with Chris, she seventeen, moved in. It would prove to be an ongoing entanglement, a moody one, yet for her it was a battle also, not knowing where the moods came from.

During this time, she’d break the relationship off a number of times only to return for lack of direction, which was, perhaps an issue on both their parts; yet they would both reunite.

It was in the fall of 1973, while they both were living in Erie, Pennsylvania, by their sisters’ house, Veronica, that it all came apart. Veronica had invited them up to her house, and in the course of doing so, both sold all their things to start a new life up there. Chris being a traveler at heart grabbed the opportunity. But while living their, and working for Malibu Iron, and then shifting to Pennsylvania Electric, Veronica asked them both to leave their house, having one kid, and one on the way. And so they did, after finding a house a few miles away, things smoothed out a bit. This is also where Chris started to see her peculiarities; her odd moods, behavior, such things he could not account for. At times her moods were up, other times racy, and still on other occasions down right depressing. She had rages like her brother, and her thinking was distorted.

In the mists of not having much money, and Katie wanting to remain in the house at times, Chris adapted a lost police dog, joined the Russian Club, even meeting Jack Benny one night there, just trying to avoid an unpleasant romance, yet not letting go, and not knowing why he wasn’t, perhaps he was as ill as her, he concluded somewhere along the way.

Things did get a little bad for them, money wise, so bad once they had to count their pennies and take them to the supermarket to buy some hot dogs, the cashier told them to go to the bank and put them in some penny wrappers, and then she’d sell them the hot dogs, in which they did, and the Bank teller told them to go outside the bank and do it, it was too much of a bother to do it inside: put the pennies in the rollers, and they did, and then bring it back in, and then they gave him the pennies, and then they brought the roll of pennies back to the supermarket and bought the hot dogs: it was an odyssey at best.

After a struggling year, he returned with Katie, back to Minnesota, and moved out, finding an apartment of his own, with his friend Kevin, a younger lad than he, but a fine one. They both seemed to have drinking problems during those days, but who was watching, no one so they of course kept on drinking. And their small apartment was quite suitable for two bachelors. But Katie kept coming around, trying to fix things up. And Chris for some odd reason didn’t put a halt to it, but Kevin tried, telling her to leave Chris alone, and so that broke up Kevin and Chris’s relationship.

It was then, in 1974, Chris decided to go back into the Army, build a career, go to college, and become what he wanted to become, all he could become, possibly do some traveling, with the Army paying the way. And he did just that, ending back in Germany, where he had been prior to Vietnam, in 1971, that is to say, he was in Augsburg Germany for ten-months during that year. And so Mu

There are no rules, which dictate the number of different groups of people who can be included in any one incentive program. Each additional group requires its own special treatment.

When the target group has been selected, you must:

Keep participation simple

Talk to some members of the intended group before finalising your planning and, without specifying your particular plans, seek their views, their objectives, their needs and their likely response.

Too many assumptions should not be made without crossing checking them with the target group.

It’s essential to research the size of the group and this is quite simple if it is an internal program. However, if outside your own organisation, you will need to ensure that you have the most accurate figures possible.

You should not proceed until you have carefully calculated the size of your participating audience.

The options available on how to motivate people are almost limitless, and are as varied as the imagination will allow.

Here’s a list of important criteria that are equally relevant to any group you choose:

Activities should be chosen that are of mutual advantage to both your organisation and the participant, even if that advantage is not immediately obvious. People will be more contented and receptive to other incentive schemes, if they can see tangible benefits from the previous program.

It must be made easy for people to participate by:

Keeping the rules simple
Clearly explaining to them how they can participate and what they must do to enter the program
Sending more than one message to the target audience, to aid recall of what you are going to do.
Building up anticipation by releasing the details of incentives and the conditions in stages, if you can’t get your groups together in the one place, at the same time.
“Selling the value” of the rewards and not taking for granted that potential participants will readily agree with your enthusiasm for the rewards of the plan.

These activities are a necessary part of the action to get people into the program enthusiastically, and they must not be short-cut.

When should you commence the incentive program?

There is no doubt that an incentive program must be carefully timed. Unless that occurs, incentives can work against you and ‘anytime’ can be extremely harmful.

Many otherwise sound incentive schemes founder only on that one aspect of timing. Timing is the segment of the total program you have most control over.

You need to consider the needs of all the participants before an attempt is made to submit the ‘best’ time.

Also, you need to make sure that your own house is in order and be certain that you can supply your products and services at the planned time.

Too often, an incentive period is chosen and elementary, important activities are overlooked. Public holidays, machinery maintenance periods and staff leave are all potential, but identifiable, interruptions to the flow of goods and services that are the subject of your incentive program.

The loss of credibility, caused by these oversights, can be irretrievable, the cost in expenses high, and both your planning and ambitions frustrated.

Ken MacKenzie’s web site “The Marketing Update” is at http://www.themarketingupdate.com. He has had some 30 years experience in small business marketing and public relations and, prior to establishing Ken MacKenzie Communications in 1993, he was a Senior Consultant for over five years with International Public Relations Pty Ltd. He has also consulted to the United States Foreign Commercial Service, based in Sydney Australia. As a Consultant, Ken has managed many accounts including Monier Roofing Limited, NUS International Pty Ltd, MasterFoods of Australia, the Jakarta Promotion Board, the Australian Made Campaign, Boral Roofing, Boral Bricks, Boral Plasterboard, Frontline Business Services and Sydney Point of Sale. In his consulting capacity to the United States Department of Commerce in Sydney, Ken served as Principal Advisor to the United States Trade Centre Director on major U.S. trade event planning and implementation of numerous U.S. Government sponsored trade shows covering many different industry groups.