Association for Environment Conscious Building

The Association for Environment Conscious Building (AECB) is the leading network for sustainable building professionals in the United Kingdom. Membership of the AECB includes local authorities, housing associations, builders, architects, designers, consultants and manufacturers. The Association was Founded in 1989 to increase awareness within the construction industry of the need to respect, protect, preserve and enhance the environment and to develop, share and promote best practice in environmentally sustainable building.

Less is More

This report has been published at the end of an unprecedented fifteen years in UK energy policy history. It began with the formal acceptance of the need for a climate change policy by the last Conservative Government in 1997 and culminated with the Climate Change Act 2008 and the 4th Carbon Budget. Less is More is a significant new contribution to the debate and offers an alternative to the emerging orthodoxy of large-scale electrification of heat and road transport as a way to achieve or beat the UK's 2050 CO₂ emissions target. This is based on more vigorous and systematic pursuit of energy efficiency throughout the economy; on technologies such as large-scale solar heat, piped to urban buildings; a road and air transport system synthesising liquid fuels in part from renewable electricity, supplementing the biofuel resource; a small electricity supply system, supplied largely by despatchable sources, assisting with network security; and the more vigorous pursuit of carbon dioxide (CO₂) sequestration options, particularly in the biosphere.

AECB

AECB may refer to:

God object

In object-oriented programming, a god object is an object that knows too much or does too much. The god object is an example of an anti-pattern.

A common programming technique is to separate a large problem into several smaller problems (a divide and conquer strategy) and create solutions for each of them. Once the smaller problems are solved, the big problem as a whole has been solved. Therefore a given object for a small problem need only know about itself. Likewise, there is only one set of problems an object needs to solve: its own problems.

In contrast, a program that employs a god object does not follow this approach. Most of such a program's overall functionality is coded into a single "all-knowing" object, which maintains most of the information about the entire program, and also provides most of the methods for manipulating this data. Because this object holds so much data and requires so many methods, its role in the program becomes god-like (all-knowing and all-encompassing). Instead of program objects communicating among themselves directly, the other objects within the program rely on the single god object for most of their information and interaction. Since this object is tightly coupled to (referenced by) so much of the other code, maintenance becomes more difficult than it would be in a more evenly divided programming design. Changes made to the object for the benefit of one routine can have unintended effects on other unrelated routines.