Buildings and the appliances within them account for 40 percent of America's energy use and a third of our global warming emissions. A home energy audit is often the first step in making a home more efficient. But getting an audit done properly is not necessarily an easy process.

The rain was falling sideways when I landed last week at Logan Airport from Colorado, where I live. The January thaw had arrived in the guise of a major tropical storm, with high winds and temperatures near 60. Dressed for winter, I was sweating as soon as I got off the plane. For the two days that followed, I spent most of my time asking people to turn down their thermostats. Though the weather was balmy, the places I visited, from a Boston restaurant to a business in Waltham to the friends’ house in Belmont where I was staying, were still being heated as if it were freezing outside. That it was in fact nearly thirty degrees warmer didn’t seem to matter.

After eight years of making education systems use a one-size-fits-all, simplistically linear model for judging a school's performance, known as Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), the federal government is searching for a new form of accountability. The Obama administration recently said it wants to ditch the AYP provision in the No Child Left Behind law, which judges annually whether a school is succeeding or failing based mostly on achieving pre-set targets for student test scores. AYP has been the target of endless complaint and opposition. According to a New York Times report, the administration concluded the AYP system "fails to differentiate among chaotic schools in chronic failure, schools that are helping low-scoring students improve and high-performing suburban schools that nonetheless appear to be neglecting some low-scoring students. Instead, under the administration’s proposals, a new accountability system would divide schools into more categories, offering recognition to those that are succeeding and providing large new amounts of money to help improve or close failing schools."

We've spent much of the last few years working with foundations--and whining about them (with our partners and with many of the people we know who work in foundations). From time to time we have reflected on what it is about the foundations that often makes them frustrating to engage. Our conclusion is that usually it's not a particular individual or an irrational process; it's a particular type of modern organizational culture. And, we've learned from philosopher Ken Wilber, the culture reflects a certain level of consciousness (the "Green/Consensus" level) that impedes strategic decision making. We thought our friends in Foundationland might be interested in this analysis of the "power and pathology" of foundation culture.

Our colleague Richard Anderson attended the recent U.S. Soldier Technology Conference, along with the entire military industrial complex. The Marine commander responsible for rapid acquisition of critical technologies said the Marines most need a low-cost, distributive alternative energy technology to deploy in forward command locations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Back in the 1980s I arranged for a delegation of Michigan state government officials and business leaders to travel to Sweden and Germany to check out the workforce development systems. Meanwhile, economic development staffers traveled to northern Italy to learn about the entrepreneurial manufacturing system that had grown up. So I'm a believer in "seeing it to understand it and be inspired by it."

Michigan's state government recently approved an expansion of the number of charter schools in the state but only as long as they are high-performing schools. It was part of a political compromise needed so the state could qualify for federal education-innovation grants.  But it was a quite different move from the usual charter movement calls for more charter schools. It was also a smart move on the part of the state's charter school players, who already have a larger "market penetration" than almost any other state. Here's a brief explanation of why the turn to a focus on quality matters:

When Barack Obama officially became president one year ago today, we at nuPOLIS inaugurated him as America's First Transnational President. We argued that his global roots and ideals exemplify a new type of American experience and identity. We speculated that "the nation’s changing demographics and culture, and perhaps its changing politics—as well as the unprecedented blood lines and experiences of its new president—suggested that an American experience and identity were emerging that included, but also transcended, what being an 'American' has meant."

The jury is out on just how Web 2.0 technologies will enhance the development of networks for social impact. Will they be tools that increase the effectiveness and efficiency of networks? Will they be disruptive capacities—greatly broadening effective participation in, for instance, public policy making and communities of practice or ushering in an era of widespread “bottom up” user-generated, rather than “top down” filtered, information?

James Cameron's Avatar tells a story of global sustainability in which the good guys win. The heroes are resisters--a handful of scientists and soldiers who take up arms, commit sabotage, and recruit others to defeat a ruthless industrial-military complex bent on mining a fortune and trampeling the natives. Not a compromiser in sight. In other words, no politicians.

Our partners in Urban Sustainability Associates have generated new knowledge, practices, and innovations in many sustainability issue areas:

America’s push to become greener revolves around buying new, greener replacement products – with “green” meaning that they use less energy than the old products. This ignores the fact that there are energy and emissions costs in producing both the old and the new products – and sometimes production of the new products can be more environmentally costly than the old ones they replace.

"Some nations are blessed with self-reliant families, social trust and fairly enforced regulations, while others are cursed by distrust, corruption and fatalistic attitudes about the future. It is very hard to transfer the protocols of one culture onto those of another."

We started nuPOLIS.com on President Barack Obama’s Inauguration Day. A year later we highlight recent work:

Here are some of the people and some their work: