A quick look around the wide world of better building performance in cities. Including a live-streaming virtual conference from London, an innovative Heat Map, the intserection of art and data, our own datalyzer updated, and a musing on the chemical rewards of 'disclosure.'

Is it sensible, or realistic, to push the envelope ever further in the pursuit of greater indoor thermal comfort, and at what cost? If we succeed, will it make us happier? On returning from an international conference grappling with these issues it seems there is still a lot of work to do in balancing energy consumption with providing a building comfort level that goes unnoticed.

The Modi Research Group at Columbia University have published a heat map of New York City's power use, using a predictive computer model. Residents, workers and engineers alike can check how buildings compare to the neighbours. Can we make any comparisons between power use in New York and in Sydney? Is this a mark of a worldwide trend into online sharing of environmental data?

Want to drill deeper into the new Pulse tool? Lodge your questions for the team who will be online Friday March 16, 11am Sydney time (UTC +11). ...

The new Pulse tool provides a window into the operations of real office towers and the team will be available online on Friday March 16 (Thursday March 15 for Americas) to answer questions and hear your views. Pulse has grown out of a trial focused on human factors in making buildings greener. Our discussions here focus on: changes that cost little; regular feedback to building operators; and trial and error. The premise is 'find out if something works', and if it does - do it again. We're keen to hear what other similar innovations are taking place elsewhere.

Today we unveiled our latest visualisation tool. Pulse updates daily and lets you explore fine-grained energy information from real Australian office buildings. The new tool lets you pick a building, and see what happened inside it yesterday.

Green Buildings Alive researchers will be presenting at the Australian Alliance to Save Energy Summer Study on Thursday this week.

Complaints about office building air conditioning surge every weekday morning. Does this reflect serious thermal comfort and productivity concerns? Or could it be that most of us would just rather be somewhere else?

An analysis of 500 million Tweets showed most of us are happiest each weekday at 8am and our mood steadily declines until we’re heading for home in the afternoon. The study published in Science also concluded that people feel generally more positive heading into summer and we’re happier on weekends after a sleep in. However, the buildings complaints database containing 59,494 requests from occupants of buildings logged between July 2008 and yesterday shows people are most irritated by their temperature late morning and we complain less at hometime. Do the two studies contradict each other? What's going on? What can we do to respond for building energy efficiency?

The ultimate adaptive building with features like a moveable skin or a sweat response in high humidity is still a way off, though it appears from our portfolio wide trials that using more dynamic temperature setpoints in existing buildings is a good early step to more responsive building management.

The goal isn't efficiency, it's resource productivity...

GreenBuild Expo was in Toronto this year, the largest gathering of green buildings professionals in the world. We presented a number of lessons learnt from our work with Green Buildings Alive and experiences with the Investa portfolio, and noted where performance management and data are an emerging theme of discussions. Questions and comments are welcome.