News aggregatorYear in Review 2008: Best in Essays
As we look forward to the new year, we've also reflected on the old, and rediscovered some of the great events, innovations, interviews and debates that 2008 had to offer. For the next week, we will be sharing our picks from the Worldchanging team's best work from the last 12 months. Come back each day for a new collection of posts on topics from climate change to transportation, energy to health and society. Today's Topic: Best in Essays What's No Longer Impossible? The Ninja Gap Letter from Tällberg: Let's Talk about Transformation The Outquisition Imagine What Comes After Green The Apocalypse Makes Us Dumb The Problem With Walk Score, the Possibilities of Carbon Goggles Tiny Science, Big Implications An Invisible Solution to the 'Quiet Crisis' Letter from Stockholm Moving Beyond Sustainability to Environmental Effectiveness Chop Wood, Carry Water Evolution of the Web This piece is part of our Year in Review series. Use the following links to view more of our favorites from 2008: Best in Climate Change Help us change the world - DONATE NOW! (Posted by WorldChanging Team in Features at 4:52 PM) Passive-Solar Gem Wins Build Green Award - istockAnalyst.com (press release)Passive-Solar Gem Wins Build Green Award istockAnalyst.com (press release), OR - Jan 4, 2009 I'm a Bucky [the visionary architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller] freak. Always have been. I met him a number of times. I even understand his books. ... Q&A: Martinez keeps up tradition at Albany Center Gallery - Schenectady GazetteQ&A: Martinez keeps up tradition at Albany Center Gallery Schenectady Gazette, NY - Jan 4, 2009 “I like trying to figure out how to put shapes together,” said Martinez, whose three-dimensional art is inspired by Buckminster Fuller, the inventor of the ... Year in Review 2008: Best in Politics
As we look forward to the new year, we've also reflected on the old, and rediscovered some of the great events, innovations, interviews and debates that 2008 had to offer. For the next week, we will be sharing our picks for the Worldchanging team's best work from the last 12 months. Come back each day for a new collection of posts on topics from climate change to transportation, energy to health and society. Today's Topic: Politics Photo credit: flickr/selena marie, Creative Commons license.Here at Worldchanging, we believe that the right leadership, especially in the form of smart regulations and policies, is an indispensable tool for supporting needed shifts in systems from energy to smart growth to transportation. During the past year we've witnessed and written a lot about the glimmers of hope that have shone from the global political arena. Today, we look back at our coverage of political events that have sparked ideas and stirred up action, from the election of Barack Obama as the next American president to a series of eloquent and passionate pleas for change from our society's greatest thinkers. Below is a collection of our best posts on politics from 2008: Can We Solve It Like This? Why the We Campaign Needs Change Using Disasters for Systemic Change One Approach To Sustainability: Work Less Grassroots Lobbying: Use Ideas, Not One-Click Campaigns Al Gore, Clean Energy and A Better Nation The Candidates and Climate: A Persistent Air of Surreality Climate, Energy and Environment Secretary? The Real Problem With Foreign Oil? Climate Change To The Next U.S. President: 100 Words for 100 Days Inaugurate Change Charting a Course for the First US CTO Jim Hansen's Letter to Obama This piece is part of our Year in Review series. Use the following links to view more of our favorites from 2008: Best in Climate Change Help us change the world - DONATE NOW! (Posted by WorldChanging Team in Features at 7:13 AM) Trentemøller - Live in Concert EP - Pensatos.comTrentemøller - Live in Concert EP Pensatos.com, IL - Jan 2, 2009 ... more or less with that of Buckminster Fuller) —shows that the mavens of European dance music have been showering this man with awards for many years. ... Make New Friends, Keep Track of the Old
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Help us change the world - DONATE NOW! (Posted by WorldChanging Team in About Worldchanging at 10:49 AM) Year in Review 2008: Best in Transportation
As we look forward to the new year, we've also reflected on the old, and rediscovered some of the great events, innovations, interviews and debates that 2008 had to offer. For the next week, we will be sharing our picks from the Worldchanging team's best work from the last 12 months. Come back each day for a new collection of posts on topics from climate change to transportation, energy to health and society. Today's Topic: Transportation The way we get around impacts numerous other big-picture systems, including the way we use energy, the health of our bodies and our communities, the growth patterns that can protect or degrade our land, and our economy. For this reason, the transportation sector has always been one of our favorite places to look for new innovations. This year, we covered how these innovations, like bike sharing and bus rapid transit, have continued to become widespread and popular; and looked more closely at what transportation will look like in the future. Below is a collection of our best posts on transportation from 2008: Taking Aloft With Sustainable Biojet The Nexus of Peak Oil, Climate Change and Infrastructure The Autobahn's Future and One-Liter Class Racing San Francisco Goes Wireless and Real-Time to Reduce Traffic Bike, Meet the City. City, This is the Bike. Crunching Some Numbers on Paris Bike-Sharing Program Does the Water-Powered Car Really Work? Cut Your Carbon and Save on Auto Insurance How Much Does Transportation Really Cost Copenhagen, Melbourne & The Reconquest of the City Could Cell Phones Enable Bike-Sharing in the Developed World?
Best in Climate Change Help us change the world - DONATE NOW! (Posted by WorldChanging Team in Features at 10:05 AM) Anti-Gold:Usura Socialism - The Market OracleAnti-Gold:Usura Socialism The Market Oracle, UK - 23 hours ago With regard to the accounting theory writers such as EC Riegel, Buckminster Fuller, CH Douglas and Ezra Pound all saw that an unstable inflating dollar made ... Johnny Loves...Buckminster Fuller - Football365.comJohnny Loves...Buckminster Fuller Football365.com, UK - Jan 2, 2009 That's where the improbably named Buckminster Fuller comes in. Not on your missus breasts, no, he's responsible for the ball as we came to know it. ... World-famous photo inspires 'Earthrise,' an ode to man's planet - Contra Costa TimesWorld-famous photo inspires 'Earthrise,' an ode to man's planet Contra Costa Times, CA - 18 hours ago He walks the reader through Buckminster Fuller's vision of the "spaceship Earth"; James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, in which the Earth is a complex system, ... BREAK THROUGHS - Urbanite BaltimoreBREAK THROUGHS Urbanite Baltimore, MD - Jan 1, 2009 Ecological engineer John Todd, a researcher at the University of Vermont and a winner of the 2008 Buckminster Fuller Challenge, is cleaning sewer systems ... Year in Review 2008: Best in Health, Food and Society
As we look forward to the new year, we've also reflected on the old, and rediscovered some of the great events, innovations, interviews and debates that 2008 had to offer. For the next week, we will be sharing our picks from the Worldchanging team's best work from the last 12 months. Come back each day for a new collection of posts on topics from climate change to transportation, energy to health and society. Today's Topic: Health, Food and Society How will the future affect our health and our societies? Perhaps more importantly, how can we begin to change our approaches to social and civic life now, in order to create the kind of future that we want? In the past year, many of our posts discussed what the future might hold for what we eat, what we learn, how we spend our time and how we relate to one another. Today we look at the best posts from 2008 that discuss health, food and society: Neighborliness, Innovation and Sustainability Gin, Television, and Social Surplus Scenius, Innovation and Epicenters Facebook, Coca-Cola and Medical Aid in Africa Can Sustainability Save the Midwest? Locavore Valley: The Next Big Boom? New School Sustainability: Majors Making a Difference Making Social Equity an Issue of Public Health The Transformative 120: Text Messages Prove a South African HIV Lifeline The Future of Public Lands in the United States Peak Population and Generation X Local Food Plus: A Model for Food Citizenship in North America
">Students, Seniors and Social Biodiversity Worldchanging Interview: Dr. Sanjay Gupta on Health Solutions This piece is part of our Year in Review series. Use the following links to view more of our favorites from 2008: Best in Climate Change Help us change the world - DONATE NOW! (Posted by WorldChanging Team in Features at 11:19 AM) 24 Off Campus Trips to 17 Countries Among 2009's Winter Term Projects - DePauw University24 Off Campus Trips to 17 Countries Among 2009's Winter Term Projects DePauw University, IN - Dec 31, 2008 The University's first Winter Term in 1971 included visits to campus by Buckminster Fuller and Aaron Copland. Details can be found in this story. Year in Review 2008: Best in Energy
As we look forward to the new year, we've also reflected on the old, and rediscovered some of the great events, innovations, interviews and debates that 2008 had to offer. For the next week, we will be sharing our picks for the Worldchanging team's best work from the last 12 months. Come back each day for a new collection of posts on topics from climate change to transportation, energy to health and society. Today's Topic: Energy We read numerous reports this year making the compelling argument that the world's energy markets are slowly shifting to take advantage of what we get for free from nature: wind, sun and heat. In 2008, we saw the markets for wind power, solar energy and geothermal heat starting to compete with dirtier, harsher, more (truly) expensive sources of energy, and we were encouraged by predictions for a more dynamic, interactive, smarter grid. And we told many stories about the smart entrepreneurs who will help push these game-changing innovations along. Below is a collection of our best posts on energy from 2008: Green Buildings and Smart Grids Gasification Experimenter's Kit Decoding the World's Best Energy Policies Human Ingenuity at the World Wind Energy Summit Staking the Vampire: The Future of Recharging Pop!Tech: Rice Power to the People With Husk Power Systems Smart Garage: An Integration Revolution What Would An Optimistic Forecast for Renewable Energy Look Like? This piece is part of our Year in Review series. Use the following links to view more of our favorites from 2008: Best in Climate Change Help us change the world - DONATE NOW! (Posted by WorldChanging Team in Features at 5:00 AM) Did You Know: Apple Fired a Guy for Standing on His Head - SoftpediaDid You Know: Apple Fired a Guy for Standing on His Head Softpedia, Romania - 21 hours ago Those included taped-up pictures of Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Einstein, and R. Buckminster Fuller, a painted red question mark on the side of his monitor, ... Mapping: Infrastructure and Flow
I love airline route maps. I’ve fallen asleep staring at the tangle of possible journeys so often that I sometimes confuse the capillaries I see with my eyes closed with the red paths of Northwest flights hubbed out of Detroit and Minneapolis. I love the questions the maps raise: why is there a direct flight on Air Canada from Halifax to Fort McMurray in Northern Alberta? (Lots of Nova workers in the oil sands, I suspect, but I never would have asked the question without the map.) Why is Chengdu such an important Chinese air hub? Why does MIAT (Mongolia’s airline, affectionately known as “maybe I’ll arrive tomorrow” by regular customers) fly to Berlin, and no other western European cities? Does a direct Air Madagascar flight to Milan imply a strong Italian-Malagasy connection, or was Malpensa just one of the few airports where they could buy a landing slot? These maps are deceptive in a way. They let you know what’s possible, but not what actually happens. The Northwest map will show you flights from Detroit to both Albany and Bozeman. While it’s good to know that it’s possible to get between those cities by flying Northwest, it doesn’t tell you how easy or difficult it might be to make that trip, how often those flights run, or how many people choose to make that trip. That’s okay - the job of maps is to tell a traveler where she can go, not where other travelers choose to go. But trying to extrapolate too much from a map of infrastructure may be a mistake - is the Ulaanbataar/Berlin link the sign of close governmental and trade ties between Mongolia and Berlin? Or an accident of history, airport capacity or other factors? This lovely video gives a different picture from the route maps. It’s a simulation of global air traffic from the fine folks at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences. The map uses data from Flightstats.com, and overlays their position on a Miller cylindrical projection. Compared to some of the other flight data porn the folks at ZHAW have churned out - like their amazing Radar mashup of flights over Zurich, using live transponder data from aircraft - this was a pretty simple hack. I’ve watched the video half a dozen times today, getting different insights each time. Popular routes become apparent - the arc of travel from the Northeastern US to London, Paris and Amsterdam runs west to east as night falls, and reverses as morning breaks. The popularity of that ocean crossing vastly outpaces traffic across the Pacific, connecting Tokyo, Manila and Beijing to Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle. There’s more traffic from Brazil to western Europe than I would have guessed, and virtually no traffic across the southern Atlantic or Pacific. Domestic traffic in the US, India and China, and intra-EU travel is vastly more common than trans-oceanic travel. As the US is covered with yellow dots representing airplanes, international travel looks like a rounding error in comparison to domestic flights. It’s not a map you’d want to use in planning your vacation, perhaps, but it would be a useful one to turn to if you were tracking the spread of an epidemic, for instance. If you’re studying SARS, it’s useful to know that you can, theoretically, get from Guangdong to Johannesburg - it’s lots more useful to know that most of those travellers are heading to Hong Kong, Toronto and New York City. It’s a map of flow, not of infrastructure. It reveals infrastructure - the location of airports, the preferred air routes followed - because they appear as bright spots, places where lots of flow originates. A map of infrastructure - a map of potentials - shows every airport as co-equal; a map of flow shows you which airports are heavily used, which are pivotal nodes in a network. If you’re an executive at a fast food company, an infrastructure map of highways is moderately helpful - it’s obviously wise to place your stores in places where drivers could theoretically reach them, rather than in the middle of a desert. (No one told Pacific Bell this, obviously, before they erected the legendary Mojave Phone Booth.) But a map of flow is what you really need, showing where drivers are likely to go, and where they’re likely to come purchase your grease-laden wares. It’s hard to map flow. Infrastructure tends to stay put. But people, cars, and shipping containers move all the time. To build accurate maps, you can’t simply plot the location of an airport once - you’ve got to map each plane that flies during some period of time. Things that don’t stay put aren’t always happy about being mapped. In simplest terms, maps of flow are a form of surveillance. Mapping your personal “flow” - in the way that the BBC is tracking a shipping container around the world - would likely be a gross violation of your privacy, as it would probably reveal more about you than you’re strictly comfortable sharing. My friends Sandy Pentland and Nathan Eagle have been experimenting with something Pentland is calling “reality mining“, using surveillance of individuals via their mobile phones to extrapolate information about social networks, individual health and events in the news. Eagle tells me that the system was so effective, it could determine which of the anonymous participants were dating, and was able to correlate behavior to events like the Red Sox World Series victory, during which cellphone users clustered in bars and crossed the river to celebrate near Fenway. Unsurprisingly, a lot of sponsors are interested in this research, including mobile phone companies and advertisers - it’s not unrealistic to believe that mobile phone companies might, at some point, offer you free basic phone service in exchange for your behavioral data (collected by tracking your phone) and the opportunity to target ads to you based on your location. (See Blyk, a free mobile phone service in the UK, targetted to young people and ad sponsored…) The maps Pentland and others are making tend to make us the most nervous when we place ourselves in them as individuals. We wonder what a map of our actions will tell others. We’re generally more comfortable with them in aggregate. Leaving the Berkman Center, I look at Google Maps to see whether the traffic heading west on Route 2 or I-90 is lighter. This is a useful thing and I’m very glad that someone is monitoring road conditions and letting me make intelligent decisions about which way to drive. On some level, I realize that my beat-up black truck is part of the overall picture represented as a green, yellow or red line. But that map generally doesn’t make me uneasy in the way that a map that allowed you to click on it and see “1999 Toyota Tacoma, 27 mph, heading west on Massachusetts Ave, MA license plate 345 GDF”. The former reads to me as mapping of flow, the latter as surveillance, but it’s not entirely clear to me where the line should be drawn between the two ideas. The map above is called “In Transit” and is part of the Cabspotting program run by the Exploratorium, using data from Yellow Cab and visualisations by the folks at Stamen Design. All yellow cabs in San Francisco are equipped with GPS and report their location to dispatchers, automatically, once a minute - they’re being surveilled so that dispatchers can respond to requests for cabs or deploy cabs to another part of town. In this visualization, those minute-by-minute accretion of data points are blurred into lines, showing the paths that cabs take. And these paths can reveal some interesting things about how people flow through the city of San Francisco. Those who know San Francisco will immediately pick out the major highways - 101, 280 and 80 - and the paths across the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate. It’s not hard to intuit where downtown is, to get a sense for the comparative popularity of various routes in and out of the city. The blank spots, on the other hand, are a little confusing. The area near #5 on the map is the Presidio, a former military base that’s now a park… which helps explain why there’s not much cab traffic through it. The areas just south of #4 and #7 aren’t parks - they’re Potrero Hill and Dogpatch, neighborhoods that are better known for industry and low-income housing than for tourist attractions or dot.com startups. To their southeast is a large blank patch on the map: Bayview and Hunter’s Point, a predominantly African-American neighborhood that surrounds a former naval shipyard. In other words, some areas are blank because there’s no good way to drive a taxi there. In other cases, they’re the neighborhoods where few people call for a taxi… or where the taxi drivers aren’t willing to go. The street map helps you figure out how to get from 3rd Street and Evans Avenue to Union Square, while the flow map makes it clear that you probably shouldn’t count on hailing a taxi to make the trip. Maps of infrastructure visualize what it’s possible for people to do. Maps of flow show what they actually do. The two may diverge sharply. A few years ago, if you wanted to send an email to a friend across the street in Accra, there’s a good chance the message would travel through the US or the UK on the way. Ghana had several competing internet service providers, and each provider bought internet connectivity from a different vendor. The vendors’ networks connected, just not in Ghana. So sending email across town meant sending a message on one ISP, to the US, transferring over to the other ISP, and back to Ghana, a journey that involved two satellite hops to cross the Atlantic. This is called “trombone routing”, and it’s generally something to be avoided. If you mapped the network traffic of Ghanaian internet users - the flow - it sure looked like they were sending a lot of bits to and from the US. This might have been a result of trombone routing of emails between Ghanaians. Or it might have been because many websites are hosted in the US, and Ghanaian users wanted to read cnn.com, espn.com, etc. Knowing which it was mattered - if lots of traffic was local, it would make sense to construct an Internet Exchange Point (IXP), a crossing point for local ISPs to exchange traffic. If it was mostly requests to US webservers, the IXP wouldn’t save much money and probably shouldn’t be built. An infrastructure map would be no help - almost all traffic needed to go through the US, even if the intent was to communicate locally. To build a map of flow, Ghanaian ISPs would need to monitor their traffic, distinguish between domestic and foreign requests, share this information with fellow ISPs and make a decision regarding the utility of an IXP. Ghanaian ISPs made the decision to build the Ghana Internet Exchange not based on understanding their own flow, but by looking at the behavior of other African exchange points. When ISPs in Johannesburg started exchanging traffic directly, they discovered that roughly 50% of their traffic was local to South Africa. The administrators who set up an exchange point in Nairobi saw roughly 25-30% local traffic. The disparity? There’s a lot more web servers hosted in South Africa than in Kenya, and hence more local traffic. To make the decision to build an IXP on a rational basis, you need to know not just the flow of internet traffic, but the flow the traffic would take if it were routed via an IXP. You need to know not just what users are doing, but what their intention is. This is a tough enough mapping challenge that you end up guessing, not analyzing. The distinction between maps of infrastructure and maps of flow matters to me because I think it can help explain certain misconceptions and misunderstandings about our connected world. My contention - with very little to support it, frankly - is that we tend to assume more connections than actually exist. We see a map of infrastructure that shows it’s possible to fly from Antananarivo to Albania and assume, on an unconcious level, that the connection is routine, frequent, common. We look at maps of the internet - a near-worldwide tangle of undersea cables - and assume that data flows everywhere, connecting every one of us. A map of flow would help us understand a more complicated reality. You can fly from Antananarivo to Albania, but you might be the only person this year to make the trip. Traffic flows between Ghana and the US via the Internet. We can see a cable - SAT-3 - that connects West Africa to the global internet through Europe and India. A map of flow could tell us whether that connection is symmetric, whether Americans are looking for information from Ghanaweb as often as Ghanaians are looking at ESPN or CNN. If we could see flow, we might detect the dark spots, the places reached by infrastructure but disconnected - through language, economics, or force of habit - from global flows. This piece originally appeared on Ethan Zuckerman's personal blog, My Heart's In Accra.Help us change the world - DONATE NOW! (Posted by Ethan Zuckerman in Big Systems - Global Institutions, Governance and History at 8:35 AM) Year in Review 2008: Best in Business
As we look forward to the new year, we've also reflected on the old, and rediscovered some of the great events, innovations, interviews and debates that 2008 had to offer. For the next week, we will be sharing our picks from the Worldchanging team's best work from the last 12 months. Come back each day for a new collection of posts on topics from climate change to transportation, energy to health and society. Today's Topic: Business Photo source: Flickr, Creative Commons license.In 2008, we saw more businesses than ever before asking how they could improve their bottom lines while decreasing their negative environmental and social impacts. Companies producing everything from automobiles to iPhones are reassessing their business models as sustainability continues to prove itself as the new shrewd tactic for making business better, improving the lives of millions around the world, and building a better future where companies can thrive. And as smart entrepreneurs search for this elusive balance, the way the world does business will be forever changed. Below is a collection of our best posts on business from 2008: Nau: An Elegy "B" is for Beneficial: The B Corporation Proudly Made in China: NEST Collective Missing the Market Meltdown From Sampling to Monitoring to Gulping Data Down in Great Big Chunks The Problem with Big Green Interview: Kavita Ramdas, Global Fund for Women The iPhone, Now in Green(er) Could Globalization Be Going In Reverse? PIG 05049, a Conversation with Christien Meindertsma Alternative Trade Networks and the Coffee System Advance Market Commitments: Bringing Medicines to Developing Nations Is 'The Old Economy of Car Dependence' Over? This piece is part of our Year in Review series. Use the following links to view more of our favorites from 2008: Best in Climate Change Help us change the world - DONATE NOW! (Posted by WorldChanging Team in Features at 7:08 AM) TIMES STAFF HOT SEAT : Richard Davis Times Page Designer/Copy Editor - Northwest Arkansas TimesTIMES STAFF HOT SEAT : Richard Davis Times Page Designer/Copy Editor Northwest Arkansas Times, AR - Dec 30, 2008 Favorite historical figure: Buckminster Fuller. If I were a cartoon character, I would be: Captain Murphy from "Sealab 2021" or Space Ghost a la "Space ... Lazy Dystopias
Recently, I've been buried in a bumper crop of lazy dystopias. Now, I'm not against dystopian fiction as a means of social critique. Not at all. I think showing how present intentions may come to grief is necessary art. Not every creative act needs to embrace the politics of optimism. But I am bored by imaginings of collapse that follow tired patterns. I am even more bored by futures that refuse even to invent a new visual aesthetic. Just to pick (no doubt unjustly) on one example: Why is the dystopian future always literally dark? Why is it always raining or overcast? Why is the architecture always a mix of hyper-modernism, brutalism and squatter slum? Why is the politics always so transparently totalitarian, so fascist-plus-rebels? Why is it so retro and abstract? Why doesn't the dystopian vision ever include sunshine and children playing in its ruins? Why does it not include the constant, untiring efforts of most people to do what they can with what they have to improve their situations? Why are most people in the dystopian future always powerless to change anything? I could go on, but you get the point. The biggest problem with dystopian fiction is not its pessimism. I do think there's a serious issue about who's interests are best served by making people fear the future, but I think the biggest problem with most dystopian fiction is its laziness and derivative quality. Lazy futures act like visionary static, crackling and dirtying the signal-to-noise ratio, making it harder not only for truly insightful futures to be found, but corrupting the ability of normal people to see why those visions are worth understanding. Better by far to not envision the future at all, than to make a lazy dystopia. Give us the new stuff! Help us change the world - DONATE NOW! (Posted by Alex Steffen in Imagining the Future at 9:02 PM) Younge was a visionary, leaves legacy for E. St. Louis - St. Louis Post-DispatchYounge was a visionary, leaves legacy for E. St. Louis St. Louis Post-Dispatch, United States - Dec 29, 2008 Younge helped add the cooperative to revive and expand an East St. Louis renaissance plan developed in the 1970s by famed architect R. Buckminster Fuller. ... |
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BFI Community Content | Who is R. Buckminster Fuller?
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BFI Community Content | Who is R. Buckminster Fuller?
This site © 2005-7 Buckminster Fuller Institute | Built and designed by Quilted | Powered by drupal.