Defiant Imagination

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June, 2008 Monthly archive
Environment
June 30, 2008
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When governments try to be green

The British government is trying to be green, but considering the demonstrations that take place against the “eco-towns,” it’s not very successful.

Ten to 15 eco-towns have been planned to be built by 2020 in various sites through the country, but concerns have emerged as to their sustainability. The Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) would like the government to bring back the plans to the drawing table and concentrate on a couple of exemplary towns instead of “mass-producing” the green sites.

Source: BBC News.

Business and Economics
June 30, 2008
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Beat the oil price hikes, one milk jug at a time

As oil prices rise, so do transportation and fabrication costs. Plastic is already more expensive to manufacture. How long will producers and consumers be able to bear the hikes for? An American manufacturer has dared to do the unthinkable and gone ahead to redesign the sacred gallon milked jug.

An article published today in the New York Times describes how Superior Dairy, a company based in Ohio, has introduced new milk jugs in Wal-Mart and Costco stores. The new jugs are easier to stack and can be transported by bigger quantities, allowing the number of delivery trips to the stores to be reduced. The company saves time, energy and labor. According to customers, the jugs are a bit difficult to handle at first but hey, can anyone come up with a better idea?

Learn more about milk jugs on greenUPGRADER and Design Research.

Environment
June 24, 2008
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Paris to launch electric car-sharing system

Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoë announced last week the creation of an electric car sharing system. Autolib’, as it is called, will allow its users to have access to a pool of 4000 electric cars in Paris and its immediate outskirts, and use them for short trips. They will be able to pick up a car from one out of 700 parking spaces and drop them off at any other one. Membership will cost about €200-250.

This initiative was born out of the success of the Vélib’, Paris’s bike-sharing system. Delanoë is riding the wave of environment awareness and is known for his original and ambitious municipal projects — he also launched Nuit Blanche and Paris-Plage — whose concepts have been reused by other cities around the world.

But the idea is being criticized by the Green party, whose officials say that promoting the use of cars to get around is not ideal, even if they’re electric.

Several cities have already implemented some sort of carpooling system. In Montreal, Canada, members of Communauto can book a vehicle anytime during the day and use it for several hours. They receive a bill at the end of the month. The company has teamed up with the local public transportation network to offers its users reduced membership rates. But these services usually rely on a pool of gas-runned cars and are less flexible than the proposed Autolib’ system.

Read more about Autolib’ in this Guardian article.

Design
June 23, 2008
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What your PC will look like

The 2007-2008 Next-Gen PC Design Competition results are out. Once again, the candidates of this contest organized by Microsoft had to come up with their vision of a futurist PC, which would be designed for a specific application. The results are diverse and target all sorts of fields, from the office to childhood education and fantasy games. One has even been designed especially for online social networking purposes.

The first and second prizes were awarded to collaboration-oriented projects: the Napkin PC targets creative professionals who need a way to share their ideas, while WITHUS acts as a tool of socialization for preschool kids.

I love all these ideas, but wouldn’t they be better used with a Linux OS?

Media
June 22, 2008
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New and serious media: will it work?

ProPublica is now up and running. This new online news resource was put together by a team of journalists coming from some of the most respectable newspapers in the United States. The website was created in reaction to the increasing lack of quality investigative reporting in the media. It relies on private funding — philantropic organizations for the most part — to operate.

The website includes a “Breaking on the web” section, which gathers some news bulletins published by other news organizations, and divides its own articles between traditional categories, such as business, politics, or health and science.

ProPublica is far from being the only media of its kind. A number of online newspapers have popped up on the web, with different orientations and different ways to gather funding to sustain themselves.

In France, at least four have been created in the last couple of years, in direct reaction to the evolution of traditionnal media. All of their editors and most of their collaborators previously worked in the most important French publications, such as Le Monde or Libération.

Bakchich is an openly leftist website and hosts articles, blogs and videos. It addresses various issues but concentrates on national politics. It is funded by private investors and subscription to its weekly edition.

Rue89 is definitely more objective. Like a traditional media, it deals with the usual sections and includes a good dose of culture reporting, but in the same time it really delves into the possibilities offered by its online format. Small sound pieces and videos are interspersed in the articles, sometimes replacing in a very efficient and interactive way the use of transcribed quotes. It also hosts a number of blogs and gives a large part to the readers’ participation (they can get their own articles published.) The site is funded by advertising and an online boutique.

Mediapart is slightly more elitist and doesn’t give as many opportunities to the public to express themselves. It operates on a different basis, since its relies on subscriptions. So far, over 5000 people have subscribed. The website is updated three times a day. It also has a “club,” which hosts blogs edited by readers and journalists.

Arrêt sur Images is one of the most interesting online experiments. Formerly a TV program broadcasted on one of the public channels, it was suppressed in 2007 in spite of satisfying audience results. Its host, Daniel Schneidermann, decided to continue the show online. Like the TV show, the website analyses the content of the media in order to determine if news coverage was fair and objective.

Business and Economics
June 11, 2008
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Microcredit comes to North America

Grameen Bank and its founder Muhammad Yunus won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for their microcredit activities in the Third World. And since it worked so well over there, they’re now bringing their services to North America. Grameen America recently started lending small amounts of money to prospective entrepreneurs in Queens, N.Y., while other cities in the United States and Canada are intending to launch similar programs.

While the New York Times dedicated an article in April to Grameen’s operations in Queens, the Globe and Mail published today the summary and some excerpts of an interview with Yunus.

Business and Economics
June 11, 2008
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Branding more powerful than ever: book

Rob Walker knows everything about our relationship with brands and advertising and why we (almost) always fall for it. Or at least, the blogger and New York Times columnist tries to dig deeper into the subject in his new book Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are. The book analyzes branding in its traditional and newest forms, acting as a little brother to No Logo.

Walker created the term “murkering” to define a new genre of subtle and disguised marketing and “the blurring of the line between art and commerce.”

A Globe and Mail article about the book mentions a recent ad campaign for Vespa in the streets of Montreal made by the agency Dentsu, which consisted of life-size black-and-white posters representing hipsters whose heads had been replaced by the front of the iconic scooter (the campaign was also launched in Toronto.) The posters were directly pasted on the walls of buildings, without any other indication of what the ad was for except for the Scooter head.

Read on another review of the book in Time magazine.

Science and Tech
June 10, 2008
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Another great misallocation of resources

IBM and the Los Alamos National Laboratory unveiled yesterday the most powerful supercomputer in the world. Roadrunner, as it was nicknamed, is able to perform the same tasks as 100,000 laptops combined. But its main applications will be in the military—the New York Times even chose to directly call it a “military supercomputer”—it will be used by the National Nuclear Securtity Administration for nuclear research, although it could very well be used in various other fields in desperate need of such technology, from medicine to environmental engineering.

Source: The Globe and Mail

Web technologies
June 9, 2008
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All Things Digital, 6th edition

The Wall Street Journal published today the sixth edition of All Things Digital, which is usually available as an online magazine/blog at AllThingsD.
It includes an interview with media tycoon Rupert Murdoch. He talks about the future of newspapers, the importance of social networking websites (his company News Corp. owns MySpace) and the evolution of the media in general.
Another interview with Robert Kotick of the company Activision addresses the socialization of video games and an article describes how the next generation of networking websites gathers all the services subscribed to by the user, from emailing to Facebook, on a single page.

Read and watch more about this special tab on AllThingsD and D: Notebook.

Urbanism and architecture
June 8, 2008
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Suburbia: The Economist got it wrong

Here’s another occasion to bug you with my interest for suburbia. The Economist has an article this week on America’s suburbs. It talks about their transformation, from homogeneous to heterogeneous. Whereas in the ’50s, most inhabitants of suburbia where twenty- and thirty-something white couples who were just sarting a family, it now includes a muti-ethnic population, as well as seniors and gay couples.
But the suburbs have also seen their roles changed and have become the center of the attention. More businesses and offices are moving there and some residents have abandonned their daily commute to the city centres.
Now the most interesting part of the article — in my opinion — is this little passage about suburbia’s detractors:

James Kunstler, an American urbanist, says they represent “the greatest misallocation of resources the world has ever known.” Richard Florida, an influential writer, sees them as incidental, at best, to cities’ highest purpose, which is to concentrate the young, creative folk who will come up with brilliant innovations. Now that America worries about global warming, the acres of bungalows and freeway exit ramps seem not just pointless but harmful.
Although much of it is nonsense, it cannot be denied that a little sheen has come off America’s suburbs in the past year.

Well, that’s a smart way to quickly go over what some urbanists and researchers have been dedicating their work to and spend the rest of this 2600-word article trying to persuade us that there’s nothing so wrong with the suburbs (“Walk around Willingboro in the evening and you will see homeowners mowing their lawns and children squirting each other with water pistols, just as they did when the neighbourhood was much more homogenous.” Oh well then where’s the problem?) So if the author is allowed to introduce Richard Florida as nothing more than “an influential writer,” then I can say without regret that this article is useless, shallow and plainly wrong. If you want to write about the suburbs, then write something meaningful.

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Defiant Imagination showcases inspiring ideas and provides analysis on the intersection between culture, modernity and change. Written and curated by Flavie Halais.

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