No Gift Baskets, Please.

Last year, the NYC office of Z Plus Partners in DUMBO (located down under the Brooklyn Bridge) was inundated with holiday gift baskets.

While they definitely enjoyed the treats, it got them thinking-- there is a lot of cost associated with sending these items -- money that could be more meaningfully spent.

So they came up with a website for the holiday season that offers up some gift alternatives: NoBasketsPlease.com.

The site includes items chosen to promote sustainability and social responsibility:

For your literary friends... Worldchanging: a Users Guide for the 21st Century
For the chocoholic in your life... greenandblacks.com
For those who want to green the earth... self.org
For communities across the globe... heifer.org
And if you must send a gift basket, why not send one to support our troops in Iraq... ecarepackage.com

Z Plus also commisioned a song for the season, specially written by official Pop!Tech bard, Ethan Lipton, aptly titled "Gift Basket". You can download it for free from the Z+ Blog.

Z + Partners > Weblog > Some Gifts That Keep On Giving

Sterling Spime and the Golden Rooster

In his 2002 book, Tomorrow Now, Bruce Sterling dedicates a rollicking chapter to the evolution of modern narco-terrorism that morphs as the connected economy meets the societal dissolution of former empires.

Here is a dispatch from closer to home in the US. Of course, we still kick it Old School, Capone-style, along the Mexican-American border. But, come on! Killing cock-crowing crooners?

How Not to Be a Border-Crossing Pop Star

It's not like pop-stars don't get shot when they've got ties to the drug trade. Gangsta rappers get shot with grim regularity. Even Bob Marley got winged once. But the "Golden Rooster" here -- he and his two top posse henchmen were wiped out, in their car, in a hail of *armor-piercing bullets.* Ay de mi. [read original article]

~ from Beyond the Beyond

As an ex-pat science fiction writer living in Belgrade--the capital of Eastern Europe's least favored, gansta-governed, Serbia--Sterling is fascinated with the methods and madness of almost-failed states.

His blog on WIRED covers the colorful chaos of blackmarket worlds, the economic mash-ups of the drug-addled digerati, and the Bollywoodification of the emerging world.

His recent little work of non-fiction,Shaping Things, he defines the emerging neologisms of intelligent object mediascape filled with spime and blobjects.

From When Blobjects Rule the Earth:

A Blobject is commonly defined as "an object with a curvilinear, flowing design, such as the Apple iMac computer and the Volkswagen Beetle." But computers and cars are just end products, they're not the process. The truth about a blobject is that is a physical object that has suffered a remake through computer graphics. It was designed on a screen with a graphics program. A blobject is what a standard 20th century industrial product, a consumer item, looks like after your crowd has beaten it into shape with a mouse.

Blobjects are blob-shaped objects, because of NURBS and meshes and splines and injection molding and CAD-CAM. They're highly curvilinear consumer items designed on workstations, and then they're generally blasted into being in a burst of injection-molded goo. ~from BoingBoing

Listen to Bruce Sterling describe the Internet of Things at this keynote address from the 2006 O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference.

Epic 2014

In the year 2014, The New York Times has gone offline, the Fourth Estate's fortunes have waned. What happened to the news? Watch this for a glimpse of the devolution of the mediascape into the Google grid, in which everyone creates and consumes.

Epic 2014 is a flash movie that was created in 2004 by Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson about a hypothesized future where the prevalence of public information from sources like Google and NewsBot come head to head with traditional news media like The New York Times.

Via Z + Partners - Weblog

One Laptop Per Child

After the coming holiday season, the US will have ostensibly reached the point of one iPod per child. It may be time to focus on the goal of One Laptop per Child.

The founder of OLPC is Nicholas Negroponte, a civil architect and computer scientist best known as the founder and Chairman Emeritus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab. (He is the younger brother of John Negroponte, United States Director of National Intelligence.)

Listen to a presentation by Negroponte from Pop!Tech 2005

Nicholas Negroponte wants to give every school child in the developing world a laptop computer. He has established the non-profit organization OLPC to design and produce $100 laptops for sale to governments in quantities of no less than 1 million machines on the condition that they are given to school children.

Negroponte feels the solution to any large world problem – peace, poverty, the environment, etc. – involves education, and he sees this as an education project that happens to use computers as a tool. The project is grounded in the studies of Seymour Papert, a pioneer in computing for children and the inventor of the Logo programming language. Negroponte and Papert have worked with computers in schools in developing nations since 1988.

At half the size of a conventional laptop PC (see photo), these machines are meant to serve those children who may live far from power stations and in often harsh climates. The rugged little computers have streamlined hardware, open source software and uses low-energy CPUs. Early estimates on UV lifetime of the LCD screens are encouraging and OLPC is now more confident that their target of 22K-hour lifetime can be achieved even under harsh conditions, such as the Libyan desert.

Founder of Worldchanging.com, Alex Steffan, got to unwrap one of these wind-up wonders for Thanksgiving. see article

From One Laptop per Child:

Introducing the children's laptop from One Laptop per Child—a potent learning tool created expressly for the world's poorest children living in its most remote environments. The laptop was designed collaboratively by experts from both academia and industry, bringing to bear both extraordinary talent and many decades of collective field experience in every aspect of this non-profit humanitarian project. The result is a unique harmony of form and function; a flexible, ultra low-cost, power-efficient, responsive, and durable machine with which nations of the emerging world can leapfrog decades of development—immediately transforming the content and quality of their children's learning.

technorati tags:technology, Negroponte, leapfrogging

Weird Al and JibJab's Love Child Creeps Me Out

Do I Creep You Out | Send To Friends | Funny Animations at JibJab

The boys from JibJab are back with a new paperdoll animation, Do I Creep You Out.

Departing from their right-on-target political musical satire genre, this collaboration with Weird Al Yankovic lampoons American Idol, Starbucks and the American tradition of stalker love.

Check out other classics--This Land, Second Term and Big Box Mart--at JibJab.com.

Saturn's Shadow

At Pop!Tech, when I asked Carolyn Porco, of NASA's Cassini Mission at the Space Science Institute, what I can do as a father to encourage my daughter to explore the sciences, she answered: "Show her the pictures!"

What she was refering to are the humbling and mysterious photos that her team is collecting of Saturn and his moons. Carolyn heads up Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS (CICLOPS) part of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

see slideshow: Saturn & Moons from the Cassini Probe

An article at Space.com reveals that Carolyn Porco was 13 years old when she experienced her first ‘cosmic connection’. She was on a rooftop in the Bronx, of all the unlikely places, peering through a friend’s telescope when she caught her first glimpse of Saturn.

Just this week, Porco sent out an excited dispatch: "Cassini has sighted on Saturn a phenomenon that has never before been seen on another planet: a wall of towering clouds that ring the eye of an immense hurricane-like vortex whirling around the planet's south pole."

I hope my daughter catches a bit of that excitement as well!

From the Cassini Mission's site, ciclops.org:

With giant Saturn hanging in the blackness and sheltering Cassini from the Sun’s blinding glare, the spacecraft viewed the rings as never before, revealing previously unknown faint rings and even glimpsing its home world.

This marvelous panoramic view was created by combining a total of 165 images taken by the Cassini wide-angle camera over nearly three hours on Sept. 15, 2006. The full mosaic consists of three rows of nine wide-angle camera footprints; only a portion of the full mosaic is shown here. Color in the view was created by digitally compositing ultraviolet, infrared and clear filter images and was then adjusted to resemble natural color.

The mosaic images were acquired as the spacecraft drifted in the darkness of Saturn’s shadow for about 12 hours, allowing a multitude of unique observations of the microscopic particles that comprise Saturn’s faint rings.

Poodle... Sphinx... Milkshake, Yo!

Whew!

The election is over. We're still in Iraq, the sun still shines and my daughter still loves Polly Pockets.

So! Back to business. Monkey business, that is. Leah Silverman send us this link that makes as much sense as anything else going on in the media.

From Zap2It:

I always figured poodles were up to no good.

AdultSwim.com offers a sneak peek of this coiffed menace seen in the upcoming Aqua Teen Hunger Force Movie. The 90-second clip features Master Shake, Frylock and Meatwad "engaged in an epic battle that could well determine the very future of civilization."

Presumably, the "epic battle" is with the poodle since in the clip it's breathing fire and shooting laser beams from its eyes. Of course, this might be a red herring, but I'd like to think if that were the case, they'd literally be fighting off a giant herring with powers to teleport or maybe knit an afghan (the dog, not the blanket).

If, like Leah, you have a giant poodle in your life--or need to disguise your Dobberman like one--might I suggest a gander at an earlier post: A Wolf in Poodle's Clothing.

Iraq Photographs

mica grain & Marie-Helene Carleton
at the Hudson Opera House
West Room
327 Warren Street, Hudson, NY
Nov. 18-Dec. 3, 2006
Click here to see more of their photographs.
photograph above, British and Italian soldiers in a ceremony marking the transition
to Iraqi sovereignty, in front of the jiggered at URI. Nosier, Iraq, June 2004

Reading and discussion of their recent memoir American Hostage and opening reception on Saturday, Nov. 18 at 8PM.

From Pop!Tech:

Documentary filmmaker Micah Garen was taken hostage by a radical Shiite group in Iraq and cut off from friends, colleagues, family and his own government.

Marie-Helene Carleton rallied friends and colleagues to jump-start a rescue mission, while at the same time helping to manage the delicate negotiations for his release.

Their book, American Hostage, was released in September 2005, and became an instant bestseller. It is both a moving and suspenseful account of political intrigue and a modern love story.

More at: http://fourcornersmedia.net/

GOP Babes

The elections are tight. Many GOP leaders are tense. But fear not! There are plenty of reasons to be happy. Namely, the hard-working, conservative--and h*o*t!--conservative women.

Among those listed at JerseyGOP.com?

Condi Rice (no brainer!), Anne Coulter (a bit mannish, but OK), Dolly Parton (!?), Miss America (Erika Harold).

GOP Babe, Courtney Reagan sums up the general sentiment:

"Gosh, I'm flattered to be included with these amazing women. Of everything, my proud pro-life stance connects me most with the Republican Party, the party that values morality and a strong work ethic. Plus, George W. Bush is not only my personal hero, a genius, and a true humanitarian... but a babe. I love that George!!!"

Chimpanzees: An Unnatural History

In 1959, the United States Air Force captured dozens of baby chimpanzees in Africa, transporting them to Alamogordo, New Mexico, where they and their offspring were to endure a grueling life as the ultimate human stand-ins. From experiments in space travel and high-velocity crash tests, to pharmaceutical testing and hepatitis and AIDS research, to roles on the silver and small screens, these original Air Force chimpanzees and others that followed gave their lives to benefit humankind - and now a few extraordinary people are working to give those lives back.

~ from Chimpanzees: An Unnatural History, on the PBS program Nature,

This documentary shows some of the dedicated humans who are trying to rescue our closest cousins, the chimps. Far from Equidorial Africa, these chimps have spent their lives in captivity, as entertainers and as research animals. Outside Montreal, Gloria Grow has built a private sanctuary for chimps infected with HIV.

The organization, Save the Chimps, is currently rescuing 266 chimpanzees from the Coulston Lab from a lifelong plight in cages. With the acquisition of the Coulston Lab, planning began for the expansion of the Florida facility to accommodate the New Mexico chimps.

Construction of 11 additional three-acre islands, each linked to indoor accommodations by a land bridge, is under way. The natural environment gives the chimpanzees a comfortable home in which to socialize and rebuild confidence shattered by countless years spent in small cages.

See a video clip of award-winning filmmaker Allison Argo takes us behind the scenes of the film. This clip features the filmmaker discussing her motivation and some of the challenges she faced while filming.

Spore

You have to check out the Spore website, if, for no other reason, to see the fantasticly fun Flash animation that tells the alternate version of evolution.

At Pop!Tech, I witnessed Intelligent Design in the flesh. As WNYC's On the Media puts it on their November 3rd show:

Will Wright, creator of “The Sims,” has a brand new game on the way. In “Spore,” gamers begin as a single-cell organism, and evolve, over time, by earning and spending DNA points.

Jonathan Seabruck writes about Wright, the God of God Games, in this week's New Yorker:

At the first level of the game, you are a single-celled organism in a drop of water, which is represented on the screen as a two-dimensional environment, like a slide under a microscope. By successfully avoiding predators, which are represented as different-colored cells, you get to reproduce, and that earns you DNA points (a double helix appears over your character). DNA is the currency in the early levels of Spore, and as you evolve you can acquire better parts—larger flippers for faster swimming, say, or sharper claws for defeating predators. Eventually, you emerge from the water onto the second level—dry land—and your creature must compete with other creatures, and mate with those of your own kind which the computer generates, until you form a tribe. You can play a violent game of conquest over other tribes or you can play a social game of conciliation. If you make clever choices, according to the logic of the simulation, you will survive and continue to evolve. Along the way, you get to acquire ever more powerful tools and weapons, and to create dwellings, towns, cities. When your city has conquered the other cities in your world, you can build a spaceship and launch into space. By the final level, you have evolved into an intergalactic god who can travel throughout the universe conducting interplanetary diplomacy and warfare.

From Pop!Tech:

From Will Wright’s point of view, we can gain a complex way of understanding the world, using very simple rules. Ever since we have had the ability to customize our desktops, we’ve been creating expressions of our identities, creating a “curve” of creation that started at crap and ended at something better. The trend in game development started the same way.

Wright uses the term “player” to describe those of us who create. According to his experience, players love making and sharing their content, but instead of the players building static models that participate in a game, today the paradigm is one of the games creating the players. Games become a measurable, formalized environment that offers loads of data that suggest players spend much more time building complexity into their models. In that sense, computers become a creative amplifier for the player.

In a demonstration of his new game Spore, Wright created a creature with a few mouse clicks, and the computer fills in the basics of evolution. The game takes it from there. In the space of a few minutes, Wright not only hunted and mated, but he created a vehicle that was able to explore other lands, planets and galaxies.

See a video of Will Wright demonstrating the evolutionary properties of Spore.

The Thirteenth Tipping Point

Understandably, my eye is caught by any magazine cover with a chimp on it.

Now when a publication combines chimpanzee iconography with Malcolm Gladwell, well now you got required reading!

The core article of this issue of Mother Jones Magazine asks the same question that peaceniks and dyed-in-the-wool Goldwater Republicans alike shout into the stratosphere: "What is is going to take for us to survive?"

Dolphins, cockroaches, and vampire bats understand that cooperation is the key to survival. Why don't we?

From The Thirteenth Tipping Point by Julia Whitty

Science shows that we are born with powerful tools for overcoming our perilous complacency. We have the genetic smarts and the cultural smarts. We have the technological know-how. We even have the inclination. The truth is we can change with breathtaking speed, sculpting even "immutable" human nature. Forty years ago many people believed human nature required blacks and whites to live in segregation; 30 years ago human nature divided men and women into separate economies; 20 years ago human nature prevented us from defusing a global nuclear standoff. Nowadays we blame human nature for the insolvable hazards of global warming.

The 18th-century taxonomist Carolus Linnaeus named us Homo sapiens, from the Latin sapiens, meaning "prudent, wise." History shows we are not born with wisdom. We evolve into it.

Zoom Out

I was kindly invited to be a guest writer at GodbeyWorks this week. Here is the article...

In addition to our regular columnists, we offer other members of our community a chance to voice their thoughts as well. Now, when faced with your next Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG), remember to zoom out. Draw big. Map out relationships and connections. ~Rob Godbey

[Photo: 1917 SPAD XIIIc.I from the Owls Head Transportation Museum, http://www.ohtm.org]

Zoom Out
by Peter Durand

Imagine the experience of the first generation of pilots.

Wedged into those wacky machines belching greasy smoke, with wings of shellacked canvas, bound together by tension wires, straining poles and hope.

Ah, but the view!

As the elevation increased, the individual structures of barns and airplane hangers receded to reveal vast networks: canal systems, topographic complexity, patchworks of natural and artificial boundaries etched into the skin of the earth.

This, my friends, is the 20,000-foot view sited so often in boardrooms and consulting documents; it is the elevation that explodes the perception of “seperateness” and “silos” as mere texture in the rich tapestry of the earth.

Now, imagine being that early pilot coming back to earth. Imagine their frustration when explaining to the farmers and truck drivers and milkmaids the wonder of seeing all that connected complexity. (How easy and elegant it looked!) Then, those pilots had to walk home. Uphill. In the snow.

[photo: Peter Durand]

This is the experience that may be shared by many of us in our own work.

As individuals and small groups––with help from research, collaboration, imagination––we’ve caught a glimpse of that futurescape, the possible horizons, the beauty and complexity that knits all the manic activities together.

So, what is essential in sharing the vision with others, those farmers, trucker drivers, milk maids, executives, board members?

It is a map to go along with the story.

This requires a tiny bit of work and ingenuity. Mostly, it requires moving away from the linear and becoming comfortable with the non-linear, away from the bullet-point list and towards systems thinking.

As a graphically minded visual learner myself, I have to admit full-disclosure: I can’t work any other way now!

I mean, after those early flights, when the topography of the countryside was revealed to the pilots’ eyes, well, after that, there’s no going back.

Now, when faced with your next Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG), remember to zoom out. Draw big. Map out relationships and connections. Examine the whole topography of the situation.

Take that flight. And, this time, bring along some passengers.

References

You Are Here
by Katharine Harmon — Amazon

Else/Where: Mapping—New Cartographies of Networks and Territories
by Janet Abrams and Peter Hall — Amazon

The Mind Map Book
by Tony Buzan and Barry Buzan — Amazon

Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative
by Edward R. Tufte — Amazon

Peter Durand is a graphic facilitator who runs his business Alphachimp Studio, Inc. from Pittsburgh. You can learn more about Peter and his work, and find more of his writing on his Website.

[Photo: Team members map out issues. Credit: Peter Durand]

Jonathan Coulton's "Flickr"

Pop!Tech bard, Jonathan Coulton, combines the sweetest of melodies with bizarrely captivating lyrics inspired by random photos downloaded from Flickr.

A freight train passes
Someone’s grandma owns a gun
A dog with glasses
A strange balloon man has too much fun
Thumbs up for Slurpees
If you’re receiving then you’re not gay
A case of herpes
As it turns out the eyepatch is A-OK

Watch the video of Coulton's "Flickr" music video to make sense of these wackaddodle images. Stick with it as the song slowly slips from sickly sweet into subversively surreal.

IFVP 2006

Below is a final list of posts capturing much of the conten from The International Forum of Visual Practitioner’s Conference 2006 in Lake Tahoe.

You can see the originals at the blog, The Center for Graphic Facilitation: http://www.graphicfacilitation.com

Special thanks goes out to all the organizers and lecturers who volunteered their time and energy to make this year a rich and rewarding experience for newbies and old-timers.

Perhaps a special recognition goes out to the group of US Coast Guard members who spent the weekend becoming comfortable with using pastels to defend the nation!

The decision isn't final, but things are looking good for next year's conference to be held in beautiful Santa Fe, New Mexico!

If you are interested in learning more about the IFVP or becoming a member, visit http://www.ifvp.org

IVFP 2006: Photogallery

There is a whole lotta learning going on in Lake Tahoe!

In one room, we have Newbies who are learning the basics of graphic capture.

In the other room we have a group of "experienced" graphic professionals who are having their minds blown by the possibilities of emerging technologies.

Click below to check out photos of the action...

• PHOTOS
• SLIDESHOW

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IFVP 2006: Evolution from Scribe to Strategy Partners

Peter Durand of Alphachimp Studio Inc. presented a list of free (and almost free) tools for managing the business of the business of being a scribe.

The main messages:

1. Success is dependent upon proving value to your client and their stakeholders.
2. Mastering technology is a key differentiator.
3. As small businesses, we need to improve the level of service and increase the efficiency of our back office processes.

Click link below for a list of the services and products reviewed...

Continue reading "IFVP 2006: Evolution from Scribe to Strategy Partners" »

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Adkins' Calligraphy Pens

Jan Adkins' workshop on letterforms introduced us to a fantastic set of calligraphy pens: Copic Markers.

They are refillable and affordable. Perfectly made for the human hand to hold super steady and produce large-scale letterforms.

Wide Set 12C
Price: $166.8

---------------------

Folk Art Letter Forms

As graphic facilitators and illustrators, the history of lettering is a vast museum there for us to pillage. The front door is unlocked and the rewards are infinite!

Here are a couple of examples of letter-looters and the whimsical results of their creative process:

Ray Fenwick is an illustrator, artist, letterer and letterpress printer living in Halifax, Nova Scotia. His full-time day job is as manager for a soon-to-be-open letterpress printshop, so he wakes up early to work on Hall of Best Knowledge, an award-winning typographic comic. He makes all kinds of things, but to be honest, most of them include lettering in some way. His work has appeared in numerous exhibitions, and will soon be seen in Steven Heller's Old Type/new Type.

Yee-Haw Industries has been covering America with unique, art-like products since 1996. Partners Kevin Bradley & Julie Belcher opened up shop from a back-40 barn in Corbin, Kentucky, with salvaged, antique equipment previously put to rust. Their vibrant, folk art, wood cut prints of country music's classic stars, such as Hank Williams, Sr. and Loretta Lynn, caught eyes and told stories. Handmade posters featured stranger-than-fiction characters, like ass-whooping grocer Cas Walker and daredevil icon Evel Kenevil. Soon, modern music acts, including Steve Earle, Buddy Guy, Trey Anastasio, Lucinda Williams and Southern Culture on the Skids began commissioning promotional posters and album art.

In the early 1990s, renowned graphic designer Paula Scher began painting small, opinionated maps—colorful depictions of continents and regions, covered from top to bottom by a scrawl of words. Within a few years, the maps grew larger and more elaborate. “I began painting these things sort of in a silly way,” Scher, a partner at the Pentagram design firm, said in a recent conversation. “And I think at one point I realized they would be amazing big. And I wondered if I could even do it. If I could actually paint these things on such a grand scale, what would happen?”

See a beautiful video by Flash innovator, Hillman Curtis, of Scher describing her creative process and love of letter forms.

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IFVP 2006: Jan Adkins on Symbols

In order to bring your work to life, there are essential skills to creating and capturing ideas through icons, symbols and letterforms. Jan Adkins, professional illustrator and educator, demonstrated the evolution of signs and symbols from human experience.

Adkins says, "Our modern letter forms evolved from the symbols created by our ancestors, who drew meaning from natural forms."

For example, Apis the Bull => letter A

But he also laments, "Our cultural symbols have become more and more meaningful... and less and less meaningful. Mostly because the power and resonance has been lost over the years."

Over the course of two hours, Jan walked the group through the history of type from the Babylonians, Romans, Holy Roman Empire and Guttenburg.

So what is the key difference between icons and symbols?

• An icon is a graphic device that represents some object or action, the graphic device being ascribed symbolic meaning(s) beyond the object represented.
• A symbol has only the meanings abscribed to itself, representing only a concept and not recognizable as a particular object.

Read more for links, images and references to more on the history of images and lettering.

Continue reading "IFVP 2006: Jan Adkins on Symbols" »

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IFVP 2006: Keith Bendis, Basic Drawing

Many of us were crippled in Middle School when teachers began to teach that maturity means not drawing any more! At the IFVP 2006 conference, accomplish illustrator Keith Bendis, from Upstate New York, led a session for those fearful of drawing (especially in public!).

Participants rediscovered the freedom of marking marks without intention, creating images on demand, and creating stories from the resulting collage of images.

As Keith points out, "It is a lot easier with kids. Because they don't judge themselves so harshly."

Visit Keith's site: www.keithbendis.com

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IFVP 2006: Jan Adkins, Illustrator

KEYNOTE SPEAKER

Jan Adkins is an illustrator, museum designer, educator and expert in the profession as an artist.

For nine years he was the associate art director at National Geographic Magazine, explaining the space shuttle, lasers, submarines, Soviet rockets, satellites, nuclear physics, marine archaeology, forest fires, volcanoes and the voyages of Christopher Columbus. Directing a team of researchers and doing original field research himself, he unraveled some of the most interesting topics ever addressed by Geographic during its golden age. Jan's job, according to his editor-in-chief Bill Garrett, "was like getting a doctorate every third month."

He has written scripts and treatments for the Discovery Channel, NOVA, and the BBC, and narrative voiceover for interactive corporate training programs. He taught editorial illustration at the Rhode Island School of Design for several years, and taught illustration and graphic design at Maryland Institute, College of Art, in Baltimore. He’s associated with several exhibit design firms and frequently consults on exhibits for zoos, art museums, science and natural history museums.

Continue reading "IFVP 2006: Jan Adkins, Illustrator" »

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IFVP 2006: Spiral Dynamics

Download spiral_dynamics.pdf

Graphic facilitator, Brandy Agerbeck of Loosetooth.com, presented the basics of Integral Theory. This theory arises out of the body of work generated by philospher Ken Wilbur.

Continue reading "IFVP 2006: Spiral Dynamics" »

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The Great IFVP Tech Debate: When and What to Use

The Tech Group at the IVFP 2006 conference is wrestling with technology. Within the group, there are folks who blog daily, are well-versed in digital photography, build PowerPoint presentations and live-or-die on the web.

Then there are those who are experts in the magic that happens when people gather together in person to tell strories and create large-scale maps and drawings.

Continue reading "The Great IFVP Tech Debate: When and What to Use" »

Pop!Tech X Concludes

One opera house, 3 days, 500 participants, hundreds of "dangerous" ideas... this was Pop!Tech X.

As official Pop!Tech artist, I built out a mobile paint studio, perched up in the loge box above the opera house stage.

I managed to crank out 36 paintings totalling 43,200 square inches of art to give form to the ideas propogated by the superstar speakers.

PHOTO: Pop!Tech curator Andrew Zolli with members of the Sinikithemba Choir.
Credit: Asa Mathat

The amazing roster included musician Brian Eno, futurist Kevin Kelly, science fiction writer Bruce Sterling, military strategist Tom Barnett, historian Juan Enriquez, culinary scientist Homaro Cantu and the longtailed Chris Anderson.

The original works (all 30" x 40" acrylic paintings on archival posterboard) are up for auction to raise money for the Pop!Tech Scholarship Fund. This will enable more students, women and minorities from other parts of the country and the world to attend this amazing event held each year in Camden, Maine.

My favorite presentations:

Sinikithemba Choir,
an HIV-positive singing group from Durbin South Africa, spreading the
word about AIDS and medication around the world: "If you're negative,
stay negative! If you're positive, think positive!"

The presentation by the creator of Ask A Ninja.

HP was one of the corporate sponsors and a team of writers and designers were on-site to compile a 300+ full-color book incorporating photos, artwork, scibbles, post-its, wiki posts, blog posts and random submissions. The book is currently printing and will reach each of the 500+ participants at their homes within 3 days of the event's conclusion!

I used our new web-based tool for capturing events, MissingLink, to publish the results in almost real time.

See results: http://alphachimp.missinglink.biz/poptech/poptech-2006-dangerous-ideas

Live at Pop!Tech 10

Today is the first day of Pop!Tech, a three-day conference featuring the most creative, innovative and dangerous thinkers on the planet.

Yahoo has a giant satellite truck out front of the quaint Opera House here in Camden, Maine. They are beaming the audio and video of the presentations and musical performances directly to Houston, parsing the files and streaming to viewers on-line in real-time.

This morning you can listen presentations for free by such luminaries as musicisn Brian Eno, the inventor of SimCity Will Wright, columnist Tom Freidman and futurist Kevin Kelly.

To listen in and to contribute to the conversation, visit http://live.poptech.org/

I'll be inside the Opera House, with a mobile paint studio set up way up in the loge seats producing large graffiti works for each speaker. All paintings created during the conference can be seen on MissingLink at: http://alphachimp.missinglink.biz/poptech/poptech-2006-dangerous-ideas

You can see the results from past years at
/poptech/simpleviewer2005/

Click below to see the schedule of speakers, with times listed being US Eastern Standard. Hope you catch some of the show!

=====================
POP!TECH SCHEDULE
=====================

Thursday, October 19
-------------------
9:00 AM Emergence with Brian Eno and Will Wright
10:30 AM Break
11:00 AM Technology's Embrace with Kevin Kelly,
Marianne Weems, and Hasan Elahi
12:30 PM Lunch Break
2:00 PM GreenShift with Tom Friedman, Steward Brand,
Lester Brown, and Robert Freling
4:00 PM Break
4:30 PM Fabricating the Future with Bruce Sterling,
Blaine Brownell, and Alex Steffen
6:30 PM Free time for dinner and friends
9:00 PM Three-Minute Miracles: Open Mic Night

Friday, October 20
-------------------
9:00 AM Taking on Superpowers with Juan Enriquez,
Tom Barnett, and The Yes Men
10:30 AM Break
11:00 AM Identity Reframed with Ayaan Hirsi Ali
and Kwame Anthony Appiah
12:30 PM Lunch Break
2:00 PM On Faith with Martin Marty and Richard Dawkins
3:00 PM
3:30 PM Pop!Tech Social
4:30 PM The Edge of Learning with Education Fellows,
Erin McKean, and Losang Rabgey

Saturday, October 21
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9:00 AM Tails and Tales with Chris Anderson, Kent Nichols, and Ze Frank
10:30 AM Break
11:00 AM Community Cures with Victoria Hale, Neema Mgana, and Zinhle Thabethe
12:30 PM Lunch Break
2:00 PM Artful Invention with Clifford Ross and Homaro Cantu
3:30 PM The Neo-Futurists
4:00 PM Break
4:30 PM Risk and Revolution with Roger Brent and Craig Venter
5:30 PM Wrap-up with Bob Metcalfe and John Sculley

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Monkey on the Move

From Jarrell McAlister:

Robot Vacuum + Animatronic Chimp = Sheer Terror

Some experiements should never see the light of day!

From YouTube. Where else?

Tri-Dave & Operation Caterpillar

Life in the Middle East is no bowl of cherries for the US military. But that doesn't mean that a life without access to wine, women, water, trees, bathrooms, shopping malls or ice cream parlors needs to be boring.

Just witness the results of the moustache-growing competition (code named Operation Caterpillar) launched by the comrades of our good friend and Navy SeeBee, Tri-Dave.

Other extreme sports experienced by the crew: catching up on LOST episodes on DVD, watching a broadcast football game in the middle of the night, and betting on another soldier's attempt to eat an entire block of cheese for $50.

Get more of an insight into life at http://www.tridave.blogspot.com/:

Overall the base has everything you could ask for and in some instances the amenities are better than most stateside bases. I live in a PCB (Pre-Constructed Building) in the “1400 Block” neighborhood. It is like a “suburb” of tract housing with a bunch of buildings, all exactly the same, for berthing. Each one holds up to 50+ people so the troops are really packed in. As an Officer, we have more room and I even get a corner since I am the senior person in my building. There are bunk beds galore and a bunk of wall lockers that I was able to use for privacy screening. I created a little pod and even put my Seabee Flag over the entry for a little more privacy. All the lights are on one switch so you have to get used to sleeping with lights on or getting ready in the dark, but it should not be too terrible.

[The outside temperature this August: 120 degrees Fahrenheit]

D.I.R.T.: The Art and Science of Bioremediation

Update on April 2, 2018.

Few experiences top the drive from Northern Indiana into South Chicago. First, you are hit by the noxious exhalations from putrescent organic matter; this is the massive methane-belching dump. [photo by vailmarston]

Then the Skyway takes you and your vehicle a hundred feet in the air, affording an exhilerating view of Gary, Indiana: deserted mills, refineries sending flames into the night sky, expanses of industrial miasma, abandoned by the knowledge economy.

Take the route through Northern New Jersey that flies by the car window of Tony Soprano, and you too may feel a drop in your gut and an exhileration in your chest. There are few sights more disheartening or inspiring than driving through America's industrial wastelands.

It was here that landscape architect and vanguard of the bioremediation movement, Julie Bargmann, grew up -- cruising through the New Jersey Turnpike, under powerlines, past the oil refineries and through America's dumping ground, The Meadowlands.

According to Wikipedia, Bioremediation can be defined as any process that uses microorganisms, fungi, green plants or their enzymes to return the environment altered by contaminants to its original condition.

It is the biological flip-side of adding chlorine to the water of swimming pools so that it can break down into lots of bacteria-fighting chemical compounds.

Bioremediation may be employed to attack specific soil contaminants, such as chlorinated hydrocarbons that are degraded by bacteria, or a more general approach may be taken, such as oil spills that are broken down by multiple techniques including the addition of nitrate and/or sulfate fertilizers to facilitate the decomposition of crude oil by indigenous or exogenous bacteria.

Archinect writer and landscape architect Heather Ring, interviews Bargmann who is collaborating with others to reclaim some of the millions of acres in America currently considered industrial blight. [read interview]

Now she dedicates her research and practice, D.I.R.T. (Dump It Right There) Studio, to taking on abandoned railyards, closed quarries and landfills, disused factories and former coal mines. And with more than half a million contaminated sites in the US alone, there's a strong argument for remediating what's been used, rather than sprawling out and building new. Her practice is a critical one, which means there's no erasing the evidence. Instead, she works to transform the waste produced by a century of manufacturing and consumption into something culturally and ecologically productive. She's got a pink hard-hat and a quick wit, and a willingness to get her hands dirty and talk about things like "beauty," in a way that redefines it for us all.

From University of Virginia faculty profile

Julie Bargmann is internationally recognized as an innovative designer in building regenerative landscapes and with interdisciplinary design education. Her on-going design research Project D.I.R.T. (Design Investigations Reclaiming Terrain) continues to excavate the creative potential of disturbed landscapes.

Design research infuses projects at the D.I.R.T. studio (Dump It Right There) where past and present industrial along with urban processes lay the groundwork for ecological systems, cultural constructs and emerging technologies. From closed quarries to abandoned coal mines, fallow factories and urban railyards, Bargmann joins teams of architects, artists, engineers, historians and scientists to imagine the next evolution of these working landscapes.

From

Worldchanging

, Sarah Rich writes on the nature of transformation (from nature to industry to art):

"That experience of profound beauty amidst industrial decay encapsulates our changing perception of land. It's unmistakable in contemporary art such as Ed Burtynsky's Manufactured Landscapes or The Canary Project's photos of altered geographies, which portray places we'd once have concealed from public view, and surely never granted status as art."