CHI'S

Breathing Earth

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.

The World As 100 People

From 100 People.org via CEO Blog (Jim Estill) and Wikinomics (Thusenth Dhavaloganathan)

Understanding the world population is hindered by the sheer size of the task. We can measure numbers and statistics, but the reality of 6.5 billion people is infinitely more difficult to comprehend. While no project could accurately portray the life experiences of each one of us, looking at a representative sample of 100 is a more manageable place to begin, and is a figure we can actually visualize. It is our hope that this work will inspire others to see the world in a new way. Who are the people each of us shares our neighborhood, community, town, school, and country with? Where does each of us fit in?

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The project will find and capture in film, photography, music and text 100 individuals who represent the global population, proportionate to annual global surveys and statistics. This World Portrait will be used to make an introduction between the peoples of the earth and to facilitate a greater understanding of the diversity and the commonalities among us.

Gender

• 50 would be female
• 50 would be male

First Languages

• 17 would speak Chinese
• 8 would speak Hindustani
• 8 would speak English
• 7 would speak Spanish
• 4 would speak Arabic
• 4 would speak Russian
• 3 would speak Bengali
• 2 would speak Malay-Indonesian
• 2 would speak French
• 45 would speak other languages (this one suprised me)

Drinking Water

• 83 would have access to safe drinking water
• 17 would use unimproved water 
• 50 would live in poverty 

Religion

• 31 would be Christian
• 21 would be Muslim
• 14 would be Hindu
• 6 would be Buddhist
• 12 would believe in other religions
• 16 would not be religious or identify themselves as being aligned with a particular faith

Technology

• 34 would be cell phone subscribers
• 17 would be active internet users
• 1 would own a computer

More here

 

Amy Tan on Creativity

Boston Globe: How Business Can Save The World

From The Boston Globe

How Business Can Save The World
A provocative study suggests that enlightened management philosopies can spread from the office -- and change societies
By Matthew Battles for The Boston Globe
Published 17 February 2008

When Milton Friedman famously stated that "the social responsibility of business is to increase profits," he furnished ammunition to both free market evangelists and their critics. Where libertarians see profit as the basis of stability and opportunity, others see only greed and rapine. The relationship between the bottom line and the betterment of society is a fraught one, and politicians, social critics, and tycoons have long battled over where the proper nexus of ethics, philanthropy, and profitability lies.

All have tended to agree, however, that the effects of business are primarily driven by economics: nations that are trading partners are unlikely to risk wealth by waging war on one another; rising salaries offer workers welfare and security; increased profits lead to flourishing philanthropy.

But new research suggests that business can have an important -- and positive -- cultural impact as well. Companies that empower their employees to cut costs in the workplace not only improve their bottom lines, but also may foster civic engagement and contribute to peace in the societies where they operate, according to research published in the November 2007 issue of the Journal of Organizational Behavior.

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Full article here

Quantum Physics Mario Style

From MSM

''…So what’s this about quantum physics? Oh, right. Well, I kind of identify the branching-paths effect in the video with the Everett-Wheeler “Many Worlds Interpretation” of quantum physics. Quantum physics does this weird thing where instead of things being in one knowable place or one knowable state, something that is quantum (like, say, an electron) exists in sort of this cloud of potentials, where there’s this mathematical object called a wavefunction that describes the probabilities of the places the electron might be at a given moment. Quantum physics is really all about the way this wavefunction behaves. There’s this thing that happens though where when a quantum thing interacts with something else, the wavefunction “collapses” to a single state vector and the (say) electron suddenly goes from being this potential cloud to being one single thing in a single place, with that one single thing randomly selected from the different probabilities in the wavefunction. Then the wavefunction takes back over and the cloud of potentials starts spreading out again from that randomly selected point.

A lot of scientists really don’t like this “collapse” thing, because they’re uncomfortable with the idea of nature doing something “at random”. Physics was used to dealing with randomness before quantum physics came along– the physics of gases are all about the statistics of randomly moving gas particles, for example– but those kinds of randomness aren’t assumed to be actually random, just “effectively random” because the interactions of air molecules are so chaotic and complicated that they’re too unpredictable for humans to track. Think about what happens when you roll a die: the number that comes up when the die lands isn’t strictly speaking “random”, it’s absolutely determined by the physics of motion and the velocity at which you let go of the die and so forth. The “randomness” of a die roll isn’t about actual indeterminacy, but rather just a way of talking about your ignorance of how the deterministic processes that control the die operate. Quantum physics, on the other hand, has things that as far as anyone can tell are really, objectively random, with no mechanism producing that randomness and nowhere apparent to stick one.

Since this makes some physicists uncomfortable, they came up with a sort of a philosophical trick: they interpret quantum physics in such a way that they say when there’s more than one possible random outcome of some quantum process, then the different possibilities all happen, in alternate universes. They can’t prove or disprove that this idea is true– from the perspective of someone inside one of these universes, everything behaves exactly the same as if the “wavefunction collapse” really was just picking a random option. But it’s one way of looking at the equations of quantum mechanics, and as far as the mathematics cares it’s as valid as any other. Looking at things this way, if there’s a 3/4 chance of a quantum process doing one thing and a 1/4 chance of it doing the other, then we get three universes where the one thing happens and one universe where the other one does. This does mean that there’s some universe where two seconds ago all of the atoms in your heart spontaneously decided to quantum-tunnel two feet to the left, but in almost every universe this doesn’t happen so we don’t worry about that.

Science fiction authors love this. There’s a bunch of stories out there exploring this idea of a multiverse of infinite possibilities all occurring side by side (the best of these I’ve ever read being Robert Anton Wilson’s Schrödinger’s Cat). Most of these stories get things totally wrong. Science fiction authors like to look at many-worlds like, this morning you could either take the bus to work or walk, so the universe splits in two and there’s one universe where you decided to walk and one universe where you decided to take the bus. This is great for purposes of telling a story, but it doesn’t really work like that. The many-worlds interpretation is all about the behavior of quantum things– like, when does this atom decay, or what angle is this photon emitted at. Whereas human brains are big wet sloppy macroscopic things whose behavior is mostly governed by lots of non-quantum processes like neurotransmitters releasing chemicals.

This said, tiny quantum events can create ripples that have big effects on non-quantum systems. One good example of this is the Quantum Suicide “experiment” that some proponents of the Many-Worlds Interpretation claim (I think jokingly) could actually be used to test the MWI. The way it works is, you basically run the Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment on yourself– you set up an apparatus whereby an atom has a 50% chance of decaying each second, and there’s a detector which waits for the atom to decay. When the detector goes off, it triggers a gun, which shoots you in the head and kills you. So all you have to do is set up this experiment, and sit in front of it for awhile. If after sixty seconds you find you are still alive, then the many-worlds interpretation is true, because there is only about a one in 10¹⁸ chance of surviving in front of the Quantum Suicide machine for a full minute, so the only plausible explanation for your survival is that the MWI is true and you just happen to be the one universe where the atom’s 50% chance of decay turned up “no” sixty times in a row. Now, given, in order to do this, you had to create about 10¹⁸ universes where the Quantum Suicide machine did kill you, or copies of you, and your one surviving consciousness doesn’t have any way of telling the people in the other 10¹⁸ universes that you survived and MWI is true. This is, of course, roughly as silly as the thing about there being a universe where all the atoms in your heart randomly decided to tunnel out of your body.

But, we can kind of think of the multi-playthrough Kaizo Mario World video as a silly, sci-fi style demonstration of the Quantum Suicide experiment. At each moment of the playthrough there’s a lot of different things Mario could have done, and almost all of them lead to horrible death. The anthropic principle, in the form of the emulator’s save/restore feature, postselects for the possibilities where Mario actually survives and ensures that although a lot of possible paths have to get discarded, the camera remains fixed on the one path where after one minute and fifty-six seconds some observer still exists.''

TED Talks - Howard Rheingold: Way-new collaboration

Cooperation is wealth? (Shot Feb 2005)

Bluetooth Enabled Burka

From the University of Arts in Berlin via Boing Boing

The CharmingBurka sends a self-defined picture of the wearing person to every mobile phone next to it.
More info here.

Love In A Backward World

The 5 minute film tells the story of a couple who spot each other across a crowded street and fall in love. Although everyone else in the world around them moves backwards, the couple moves forward as they find each other.

Anti-Social Website Behaviour

Via The Joy of Tech

Discover interviews Danah Boyd

Dana Boyd is a PhD Candidate at the School of Information at Berkeley and a Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society. She has a blog called apophenia.

Click here to see her interview with Discover about how social networks democratize influence and the role of The Internet and new technology in our society.

The Bottom Is Not Enough

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

NYT: The Slow Life Picks Up Speed

From the NYT

The slow life picks up speed
By Penelop Green for the NYT
Published 31 January
Image by Leigh Wells for the NYT

Excerpt:

While Slow Food is now in its third decade, an established global movement with an official manifesto and about 85,000 members in over 100 countries, Slow Design is still in its infancy. But it does have an increasing number of proselytizers, like John Brown, an architect in Calgary, Alberta, whose year-old Web site, theslowhome.com, urges consumers to say no to “fast-food architecture,” and Geir Berthelsen, a Norwegian motivational speaker whose Web site slowplanet.com, which is to go online in mid-March, has as its goal to be a hub for all things slow, from slow travel to slow shopping to slow design, he said. Ms. Chanin, meanwhile, has a book, “Alabama Stitch Book: Projects and Stories Celebrating Hand-Sewing, Quilting, and Embroidery for Contemporary Sustainable Design” (Stewart, Tabori & Chang) due out in March. It gives instructions on how to make her stenciled, poetry-embellished sheets and teaches her Slow credo, which is to use discarded materials to make something new — and to take as long as necessary doing it.
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In a world on hyperdrive, science is proving him to be right. A 2005 study sponsored by Hewlett-Packard showed that the I.Q.s of workers who responded quickly to the constant barrage of e-mails they received during the day fell 10 points, more than double the I.Q. drop of someone smoking marijuana.
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Full article here

Worldometer: World Statistics Updated in Real-time

From Worldometer

As the title say...real-time statistics on the world's population, economics, food, military and many more topics.

''Sources are carefully selected to include only data published by the most prestigious institutions in the world, such as the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization, its data branch FAOstat, the OECD and others. Data is updated periodically as new reports are made available. We are currently working on dedicated pages where you can learn more and find sources for each topic.''

Frozen NYC Grand Central

From Improv Everywhere

On a cold Saturday in New York City, the world’s largest train station came to a sudden halt. Over 200 Improv Everywhere Agents froze in place at the exact same second for five minutes in the Main Concourse of Grand Central Station. Over 500,000 people rush through Grand Central every day, but today, things slowed down just a bit as commuters and tourists alike stopped to notice what was happening around them. Enjoy the video first and then go behind the scenes with our mission report and photos.

Click here for more.

Seriously funny...

Benetton's Fabrica: A Creative Utopia

Via Pingmag

Fabrica is Benetton's creative research centre and most well-known for its magazine COLORS.
Pingmag interviews Fabrica's General Manager Alfio Pozzoni at the opening of its ''Les Yeux Ouvert'' exhibition at the Shiodome Italia in Tokyo.

Fabrica! Do we need to say more? Since 1994, the legendary Italian research centre has invited forty bright young artists from all over to its vast villa in Treviso (that just got a new makeover from acclaimed architect Tadao Ando.) Established by Benetton group founder Luciano Benetton and photographer and its then art director Oliviero Toscani, the institution serves as breeding ground for artists who devote themselves entirely to creative studies for one year. Now, after making a stopover in Milan and Shanghai, you can see Fabrica’s Les Yeux Ouvert (“Eyes Open to the World and the Future”) exhibition at Shiodome Italia in Tokyo, organised by the Pompidou Centre. It was a perfect opportunity for PingMag to grab Fabrica General Manager Alfio Pozzoni for a chat.

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Click here for the full interview

The Country Brand Index 2007

Via the Hidden Persuader

Download the full report here

TIME: Why Davos Doesn't Matter

Via TIME Magazine

Why Davos Doesn't Matter
By Tony Karon of TIME Magazine
Published 24 January 2008

A decade ago, Davos was the most coveted invitation among the aspirants, wannabes and star-struck hangers-on of the world's power players. The annual shindig of the World Economic Forum in the Swiss Alpine ski resort assembled the corporate and political elites of the West — and those from the developing and former socialist worlds who were ready to accept their tutelage — to plot the future of globalization. The free market had become the uncontested economic model, free trade was the order of the day and dot-com visionaries promised that stock market exuberance was no longer irrational. The future seemed to belong to what Samuel Huntington (yes, he of the "Clash of Civilizations" fame) dubbed "Davos Man."

The fact that this year's gathering opened under the cloud of a precipitous global stock market slide and creeping recession may be symbolically apt, but it is not the only reason for the absence of triumphalist illusions at Davos 2008. The markets are telling us that the U.S. economy, and all whose wagons are hitched to it, are in for some very nasty times whose depth and duration nobody can predict. And the stalled global talks on extending free trade (the "Doha Round," which began seven years ago and remains unfinished) are a further sign that faith in free markets has its limits. But even outside of his immediate economic woes, it has become increasingly clear that Davos Man's authority is in decline.

The choice of the event's opening speaker and one of its co-chairs — respectively, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair — suggests that Davos Man is either out of touch, or else in a state of melancholic denial. For one thing, Rice and Blair arguably bear substantial personal responsibility for the catastrophic policies that have exacerbated the violent chaos spanning an "arc of instability" from Palestine to Pakistan. Their track record alone suggests that neither has much new, or interesting, to offer in a discussion about managing an increasingly dangerous world.

Track record aside, though, neither Rice nor Blair is a significant player going forward. Blair lost his leadership of Britain precisely because of his foreign policy choices, and is now confined to a role on the margins of a Middle East peace process that has the proverbial snowball's chance in hell of succeeding — and even then, he serves at the pleasure of a U.S. Administration whose lame-duck status is quickly rendering it largely irrelevant on the global stage.

Rice's recent tour of the Middle East along with President Bush confirmed that, politeness aside, Washington is now being substantially ignored by both friend and foe in that troubled region. Neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians, Saudis, Syrians and Iranians appear to set any store by the threats, promises and prescriptions of Washington. Israeli Prime Minister Olmert may flatter Bush with exaggerated praise, but he's not heeding the Administration on the question of settlements. The Saudis may shower Bush with bling, but they also firmly rebuff any suggestion that they should be isolating Hamas or Iran. And so on.

The decline of Davos Man is not simply related to a credit crunch or a U.S. election year. Even if America elects a new Administration dedicated to reversing the mistakes of the Bush team, it is unlikely to restore U.S. and Western primacy such as it existed in the golden years of Davos. The policy failures of the Bush years may have accelerated the decline of U.S. influence, but they are not its sole cause. In the years during which the U.S. became distracted by the "global war on terror," China's economy has grown to twice the size it was when President Bush first took office. It is to China — guarantor, by virtue of the trillion dollars and growing line of credit it makes available to the American consumer, of the American way of life — that U.S. investment banks turn for help when confronted by their losses in the subprime loan crisis. The very success of capitalism in developing and former socialist countries has inevitably weakened the grip of the West on the global political economy.

Today, market analysts contemplate whether the best hope for the global economy avoiding being dragged into the vortex of recession by the U.S . slowdown may be the "decoupling" from the U.S. economy that some believe could allow economies such as China and India to continue growing by virtue of momentum in their own economies. It's a theory, untested in crisis — and clearly the wobbles hitting India's stock market this week suggest its own investors are not convinced. Still, China has already become the key trading and investment partner in both Africa and in some key Latin American countries, offering a model of development quite different from the "Washington consensus" on issues of governance and economic management that might, as easily, have been dubbed the "Davos consensus." China is certainly not going to take direction from its debtors, and global energy prices have transformed Russia from obedient supplicant to swaggering challenger to the West.

The U.S. and its allies remain immensely powerful, but the limits of their ability to influence events have been laid bare in Iraq. Today, long-term traditional U.S. allies in Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and Europe can no longer be counted on to follow Washington's lead. At the same time, the Davos crowd has lost its near-monopoly on global political and economic power, which is increasingly being diffused across a variety of different power centers with shifting alliances. French foreign policy intellectuals of the 1990s, fearful of what they called the American "hyperpower," fantasized about a "multipolar world" where power was balanced across a variety of different power centers and interests. While economic "decoupling" remains an untested hypothesis, geopolitical "multipolarity" is today increasingly plain to see. And nowhere more so than at Davos.

Anti-Aids Film

From Sidaction

Click here or on the image to go see the short film.

The Davos Questions

Played in the opening plenary of Davos. Several attendees are already posting responses on Youtube. More later...

How to spread your idea: Make it a good one!

Social network theorists Duncan J. Watts of Columbia University and Peter Sheridan Dodds have tested The Tipping Point's theory that trends or epidemics are driven by few influential people who convince others of their opinions.

Their findings are perhaps not revolutionary, but they do shed light on the role of the influenced rather than the influencers.

Excerpt from the article on Science News Online:

More important than the influencers, the researchers found, were the influenced. Once an idea spread to a critical mass of easily influenced individuals, it took hold and continued to spread to other easily influenced individuals. In some networks, it was far easier to get an idea established this way than in others. The entire structure of the network mattered, not just the few influential people.

Dodds compares the spread of ideas to the spread of a forest fire. When a fire turns into a conflagration, no one says that it was because the spark that began it was so potent. "If it had been raining," Dodds says, "that same match wouldn't have had an effect." Instead, a fire takes off because of the properties of the larger forest environment: the dryness, the density, the wind, the temperature.

The upshot of the study, Dodds says, is that "in the end, you don't have control over how people spread your message." The best way to increase the odds of person-to-person transmission of an idea is to make it a good idea and to give it "social worth," he says. "Some things are just fun to talk about."

Click here for the full research report.
Picture from Mediaspin