Via LostatEMinor
Breathing Earth is an online world map that gives you
a country’s population, birth and death rates, and how much CO2 it
emits.There’s a ticker on the side showing the number of people that have been born, how many have died, and how
much CO2 has been emitted since you opened the URL. As you watch, the
countries change from beige to yellow, to flashing red as they emit
more CO2.
From Kevin Kelly's Blog - The Technium
I wrote a book, Out of Control,
heralding the immense power of bottom up systems. You know: smart mobs,
hive mind, web power, amateur hour, decentralized webs, network
effects, and collaborative work. Twenty years ago Out of Control made a
wide-ranging and exhaustive case for the remarkable things which
decentralized, out-of-control systems can accomplish in biology,
technology, and cultural realms. Two decades later I'm still keen on
the untapped potential of emergent bottom-up systems.
But throughout my boosterism I have tried to temper my celebration of the bottom with my belief that the bottom is not enough for what we really want. To get to the best we need some top down intelligence, too. I have always claimed that nuanced view. And now that crowd-sourcing and social webs are all the rage, it's worth repeating: the bottom is not enough. You need a bit of top-down as well.
The reason every bottom-up crowd-source hive-mind needs some top-down control is because of time. The bottom runs on a different time scale than our instant culture.
...
Article continued here
From the NYT
Bottom Line for (RED)
By Ron Nixon for the New York Times
Published 6 February 2008
Excerpt:
Just over a year ago, the rock star Bono started Red, a campaign that combined consumerism and altruism. Since then, consumers have generated more than $22 million to fight H.I.V. and AIDS in Rwanda by buying iPods, T-shirts, watches, cologne and most recently — as anyone who watched the Super Bowl knows — laptops, with all of them branded “(Product)RED.”
According to Rwandan officials, Red contributions have built 33 testing and treatment centers, supplied medicine for more than 6,000 women to keep them from transmitting H.I.V. to their babies, and financed counseling and testing for thousands more patients.
Yet detractors say Red has fallen short. They criticize a lack of transparency at the company and its partners over how much they make from Red products, and whether they spend more money on Africa or advertising.
Full article here
From Global Denim Project via Josh Spear
''The intention behind the global denim project is to provide a meeting place for anyone from any discipline who wants to carry out academic research on the topic of denim. We hope to provide on this site individual web-pages for each of these projects so that anyone carrying out denim research can describe it and update it with news of its progress.''
Topics include branding, the denim supply chain, globalization, fair trade, technology and many more..
