 | The real reason why diversity is good for business- and why we don't see enough
We keep hearing that diversity is a good thing at the workplace. Beyond the fact that it "is the right thing to do", which it is; there is also a strong business reason for it. This is explained by Katherine Phillips (professor at Columbia University), who has been studying organizational and leadership behaviour for nearly two decades.
"I bring people into a room, and I videotape their discussions so that I can understand exactly who's saying what and to whom. And what I've discovered is that when you have a group that has some social diversity present - everyone knows that there are some differences between the individuals in the room - they are more likely to share their information, that unique information that's in their heads. They are more likely to utilize that information, and they're more likely to get the right answer than the homogeneous groups - the groups where everyone in the room thinks that they're the same, they're from the same social group. Now one of the things that was really striking about that research is that when you ask people, after they have gone through this group discussion and they've made their decision about what they think the right answer is, the homogeneous groups consistently say that they were more effective. That they are more confident that they have the right answer, despite the fact that the objective data tells us the complete opposite - that the diverse groups performed more effectively. So I know that there's potential for diversity to be beneficial, but people don't see it."
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|  | Nuclear goes retro- with a much greener outlook
Returning to designs abandoned in the 1970s, start-ups are developing a new kind of reactor that promises to be much safer and cleaner than current ones.
Troels Schonfeldt can trace his path to becoming a nuclear energy entrepreneur back to 2009, when he and other young physicists at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen started getting together for an occasional "beer and nuclear" meetup. The beer was an India pale ale that they brewed themselves in an old, junk-filled lab space in the institute's basement. The "nuclear" part was usually a bull session about their options for fighting two of humanity's biggest problems: global poverty and climate change. "If you want poor countries to become richer," says Schonfeldt, "you need a cheap and abundant power source." But if you want to avoid spewing out enough extra carbon dioxide to fry the planet, you need to provide that power without using coal and gas.
It seemed clear to Schonfeldt and the others that the standard alternatives simply wouldn't be sufficient. Wind and solar power by themselves couldn't offer nearly enough energy, not with billions of poor people trying to join the global middle class. Yet conventional nuclear reactors - which could meet the need, in principle - were massively expensive, potentially dangerous and anathema to much of the public. And if anyone needed a reminder of why, the catastrophic meltdown at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi plant came along to provide it in March 2011.
On the other hand, says Schonfeldt, the worldwide nuclear engineering community was beginning to get fired up about unconventional reactor designs - technologies that had been sidelined 40 or 50 years before, but that might have a lot fewer problems than existing reactors. And the beer-and-nuclear group found that one such design, the molten salt reactor, had a simplicity, elegance and, well, weirdness that especially appealed.
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