Wildfires are a common and costly phenomenon in warm climates. On the island of Sardinia alone there are 3,000 wildfires every year. On worldwide scale dozens of lives are lost every year while the infrastructure damage is counted in billions of dollars.

At World in a Box we have been creating a new wildfire simulation model with a special focus on fire perimeter evolution. The model is simple, fast and reversible. Our hope is for the new model to better assist communities in reducing the risk and cost of wildfires. We call our perimeter model Tirailleur, a shooting skirmisher in French, as it closely reflects the nature of our model.

Together with our academic partners we presented Tirailleur research poster in the 2nd International Conference on Fire Behaviour and Risk. It was well received and our work on fire simulation is continuing with application deployments to Southern and Central Europe. Our core perimeter model is open sourced and available on Codeplex.

Email remains the main tool for many organizations. You can drastically affect your career by having excellent email and communication skills. Too few really understand how important such skills are. For me this is an infinite journey of improvement. Far from drudgery I consider this journey a privilege and an immense source of enjoyment.

Please take my gift of tips from below and use them well. May your journey of improvement never end.

• Always be improving your email skills

• Email is not good for complicated or emotional discussions

• Clear and direct subject line. There are so many who haven’t reached even this simple level.

• Try to understand your message from recipient point of view. Change your message so that the few core items you want to highlight are immediately crystal clear for the recipient.

• Send your message only to those who really need to know or decide

• Write your message so that maximum number of people can stop reading as soon as possible

• Unnecessary participants in the discussion? Just drop them out. Please.

• Divergent discussion? Split to child discussion so that each has less participants.

• Reading about X while wanting to discuss about unrelated Y? Give each a fighting chance. Give each their very own discussion. They deserve it.

• Too complex discussion? Too many participants? Consider using something else than email. Become a hero and invent something new which massively improves life for everyone.

And finally….

• Have an actual email process. It really doesn’t matter much which process you use. Just make sure you never drop or forget the important balls which are constantly given to you. Whatever method works for you is OK. It really is. But you must use something or you will forever remain a child in the land of email giants.