Z+Blog!

Some Gifts That Keep On Giving

June — 2006-12-08T17:52:00Z

Last year, our offices were inundated with gift baskets. And while we definitely enjoyed the treats, it got us thinking-- there is a lot of costs associated with sending these item -- money that could be more meaningfully spent.

So we came up with a website for the holiday season that offers up some gift alternatives to the traditional gift basket. It's called NoBasketsPlease.com. The items featured on the site were chosen because they promote sustainability and social responsibility.

But we are super excited about a very special holiday song that you can download for free on the website. Its a song for the season, specially written by our friend and bandleader Ethan Lipton, aptly titled "Gift Basket".

We encourage you to share the website with your colleagues, friends and family and give a gift that may or may not fit under the Christmas tree, but will definitley last well into the New Year and beyond

Google To The People!

June — 2006-11-01T15:55:00Z

Huzzah! The Populace will own Google! And in a mere 202,345,125 years. At least that is the estimate that the folks behind Google Will Eat Itself have calculated for the Imperial Search Engine to be completely bought out.

GWEI is a web project created by the collective Ubermorgen featuring Alessandro Ludovico and Paolo Cirio. Here is how the project works in the artists' own words:

We generate money by serving Google text advertisements on a network of hidden Websites. With this money we automatically buy Google shares. We buy Google via their own advertisement! Google eats itself - but in the end "we" own it!

All shares are held under the name GTTP, Ltd. [Google To The People] and redistributed to the public. GWEI is a critique of the Google's growing information monopoly as well poking a whole, miniscule though it may be, into the economic bubble that Google Adsense has created for itself.

In a similar "War of the Web" vein, 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.

But, GWEI points out that the downfall of these giant corporations is not equally giant corporations but rather "...the parasite. If enough parasites suck small amounts of money in this self-referentialism embodiment, they will empty this artificial mountain of data and its inner risk of digital totalitarianism." (-GWEI Press Release, 2005)

Iceland Chooses Darkness

Andrew — 2006-09-29T00:15:00Z

This is profound and poetic:

The lights are going out in Iceland this week so people can gaze at the night sky.
Authorities in the capital Reykjavik will turn off street lights on Thursday evening and people are also being encouraged to sit in their houses in the dark, writer Andri Snaer Magnason said on Wednesday. While the lights are out, an astronomer will describe the night sky over national radio.
The event is part of a film festival taking place on the small north Atlantic island, which gets most of its electricity from abundant thermal energy. The lights are due to go off at 10 p.m. (2200 GMT), about two hours after nightfall, for half an hour.
Magnason said the capital's population of around 250,000 might be able to see the Northern Lights, a flickering curtain of light often seen in northern climes which is caused by solar particles being caught in the Earth's magnetic field. Two other Icelandic towns will also turn off their lights.

I wonder what it would take to get Americans to do the same thing?

Carbon Positive, Carbon Negative, or Carbon Responsible?

Cordelia Lindgren — 2006-08-28T18:25:00Z

To some the glass is half empty, to others half full. It appears this question of perspective is also afflicting those looking at going beyond carbon neutral. Two terms are being used interchangeably despite being opposites: carbon positive & carbon negative.

In both cases people are referring to offsetting or sequestering more carbon dioxide than is emitted. To date, neither Wikipedia nor Google definitions has weighed in on this matter.

As the point is to leave less CO₂ in the atmosphere than you put in, we at Z+ think it makes sense to call it carbon negative.

We are however willing to concede that offsetting beyond neutrality is a positive thing to do!

Carpet Invaders

Andrew — 2006-07-06T00:30:00Z

Polish artist Janek Simon blends the narrative and aesthetic form of two media, one ancient, one merely nostalgic: Caucasian carpets and late-70's videogames. This line, from project's accompanying text is particularly illuminating, even in mixed English:

The collector carpet furnishing the ethnic-design, world-cuisine magazine becomes a new shopping item for the homecoming marines and the kid back home. It is the Oriental rug for your portable arcade mosque. Follow the voice of the Joystick prophet.

Brainstorm's Best Quotes

Andrew — 2006-06-29T16:24:00Z

At the 2006 Fortune Brainstorm conference in Aspen, CO, corporate approaches to climate change, ecological sustainability and carbon neutrality are all at the forefront of the conversation. Here are the two best quotes from the meeting:

"Socialism failed because it couldn't tell the economic truth; capitalism may fail because it couldn't tell the ecological truth."

- Legendary environmental thinker Lester Brown, of the Earth Policy Institute and the WorldWatch Institute

And in response to a question from GBN's Peter Schwartz on why some green thinkers neglect to mention nuclear energy as a viable renewable energy source:

"Don't get me wrong: I love nuclear energy! It's just that I prefer fusion to fission. And it just so happens that there's an enormous fusion reactor safely banked a few million miles from us. It delivers more than we could ever use in just about 8 minutes. And it's wireless!"

- Leading ecological thinker, architect and Cradle-to-Cradle author William McDonough

A Gamer's Guild Self-Trademarks

Andrew — 2006-06-21T03:40:00Z

Game designer Ralph Koster provides the latest indication that the metaverse and meatspace are being ground into indisinguishable pulp. A group of gamers (collectively known as a guild) who are currently playing World of Warcraft and Ultima Online, have decided to trademark their guild The Syndicate "with regards to all things online gaming related". If you and your friends want to call play by that name, you could presumably find yourself forking over more than gold pieces.
Of course, this really only works on a metaphorical level only -- The Syndicate isn't an incorporated commercial venture, it's membership is fluid, and its unclear whether or not playing a game is intrinsically a commercial activity on behalf of the gamer -- but it's another indication of the widening chasm beween existing law and contemporary practice in gamespace. As Koster points out, this is certainly a harbinger of things to come: as more gamer/user-generated activity and "Virtual IP" is monetized, we'll see all kinds of novel (and occasionally half-baked) uses of the legal system by gamers to self-legitimize.

(I wonder what the equivalent of "business process patents" will look like: "Nobody can press UP UP LEFT ABUTTON DOWN RIGHT" without paying The Mighty Minions Guild a royalty!")

Biodiversity on Ice

Andrew — 2006-06-05T03:32:00Z

We've written previously about efforts to catalogue the world's genetic biodiveristy. Now Reuters is reporting on a remarkble effort to create a frozen "Noah's Ark" seed vault to safeguard a vital part of that biodiversity -- the the world's crop seeds -- from cataclyms, climate change, bioengineering and unchecked human expansion. Construction of the Global Seed Vault, which will built beneath a mountain on the remote, frozen island of Svalbard 1,000 km (600 miles) from the North Pole, will start this June and could be completed by September 2007. Whne complete, it will hold three million varieties of seeds from around the world. Collection is being organized by the Global Crop Diversity Trust (pdf).

You might ask: is such a vault really necessary? Rice, wheat, corn and soy -- never mind barley and hopps -- are so widely used, and their genomes are so heavily influenced by artificial selection pressures already, that it seems unlikely that even a grand cataclysm could make such a repository needed. In fact, it's just this kind of monoculture, (along with relentless agricultural expansion, environmentally-destructive practices such as slash-and-burn agriculture, environmental degradation and large-scale conversion of habitats) that compose the greatest threats to biodiversity, and make such seed vaults necessary. The Svalbard installation is intended as a kind of global "backup" for many seed banks around the world, particularly those in developing regions prone to power outages, interruptions due to civil strife, etc.

Psychedelic Pong Played in Plasma

Andrew — 2006-05-28T05:43:00Z

Here's a fabulously trippy and free update to the classic 1970's Ur-game Pong created by George Mason University's Steve Taylor. PlasmaPong introduces several new concepts into the game, including the ability inject plasma into the field of play (and dramatically change the course of the ball or puck), the ability to create a vacuum from your paddle (and thus suck your ball towards it), and the ability to send a blast of shockwaves onto the field. Sounds all very academic (and it is, nerd-liciously so) but the stunning, hallucenogenic visuals will have you playing and tripping for hours. It's a must-download.

I (heart) my CO2!

Andrew — 2006-05-23T00:53:00Z

Want to hear the latest in Orwellian newspeak? At first hearing, these delightfully craven, "pro-CO2" advertisements, put out by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, seem to be the kind of laughable parodies you'd expect to see on Saturday Night Live or The Colbert Report.

(Here's a little background on the CEI; as neutrally as possible: they are a pro-business non-profit public policy organization which has aggressively challenged the science behind global warming, and which has received significant financial backing from a number of large corporations with vital interests in emissions-intensive businesses. Read the wikipedia entry and make up your mind from there.)

The tagline of the commercials about CO2 emissions is, bizarro-world-style, "They call it pollution; we call it life." One of the ads, which claims that climate change is most certainly not causing glaciers to melt, cites the work of Curt Davis, director of the Center for Geospatial Intelligence at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Davis has since gone on the record demanding CEI stop misrepresenting his research:

Davis said that three points in his study unequivocally demonstrate the misleading aspect of the CEI ads:

- His study only reported growth for the East Antarctic ice sheet, not the entire Antarctic ice sheet.
- Growth of the ice sheet was only noted on the interior of the ice sheet and did not include coastal areas. Coastal areas are known to be losing mass, and these losses could offset or even outweigh the gains in the interior areas.
- The fact that the interior ice sheet is growing is a predicted consequence of global climate warming.

You'd think CEI would have had the common sense to check with the folks they were citing before doing so.

Anti-Japanese Print Advertisements in China

Ann Marie Healy — 2006-05-19T21:19:00Z

The amazing blog EastSouthWestNorth has been featuring examples of growing Anti-Japanese sentiments appearing in Chinese ads. I spoke with Jonathan Spence, one of the foremost scholars of Chinese civilization from the 16th century to the present and Sterling Professor of History at Yale University, about the historical context behind these most recent eruptions of anti-Japanese fervor:

I think Japan is a genuine wound. I see it in terms of humiliation just as much as the amount of deaths and suffering involved. Japan humiliated China in an almost unique way from the 1880s to the 1940s. Few people have ever gone through that kind of experience. With a wound like that, one can re-encourage or re-open types of historical memory. They can be suppressed or stimulated. Competitions in sports or economics can often lead into a re-evaluation of that past.

A very complicated area is how the China-Japan relationship plays off into a kind of Holocaust memory and how that, itself, feeds into either anti-Israeli or anti-Palestinian sentiments. The War of 1894-95 was fought mainly in Korea and the North China Sea, but Japan unleashed the equivalent of a modern military naval force against China and it took Taiwan as the fruit of that war. Hence Taiwan’s complex and complicated history; it was a result of Japanese colonialism and history.

Throughout the nineteen-teens and nineteen-twenties, they placed more and more political and economic demands on China that were not merely practical. They were uniquely humiliating and they eventually led to the outbreak of the big war in 1937. There was a consistent on-going attempt to bring China into a Japanese cultural orbit.

Of course other countries have experienced this but it was the prolonged nature and the concentration of it that made it all the worse. And then, added on top of all that was the previous grandeur of China’s imperial history and that made it all that much worse. The suffering was terrible and the behavior of troops was hideous. It was a savage and protracted war.

So there is plenty of reason for reawakening this wound. People can just shrug and say, “C’mon it was sixty years ago. Let’s let it go.” Or they can say, “Let’s rise again!” If you have a tooth pain, you can ignore it or, even more extreme, you can get a tranquilizer. On the other hand, you can stick your fingers along your gum and feel the pain a bit more. I think that’s what they’re doing. They’re making it worse to make themselves aware of it. I think they’re fascinated and horrified by some of the shame and suffering of what happened with Japan. It’s a rallying cry.

One theory, of course, is that the Chinese government is reawakening all of this so that Japan doesn’t get a permanent seat on the Security Council. To do that, they want to reawaken the world’s view of Japan’s atrocities and insure that they’re not lost alongside Nazi Germany’s atrocities.

And then there was also a flicker of the same kind of anti-Americanism over the Belgrade bombing. But I don’t see the same sort of seething rage towards the United States.

Cabaret Scientifique

Ann Marie Healy — 2006-05-12T18:56:00Z

There's nothing like a little booze and bright lights for creating fruitful cross-pollination. That's the theory behind the fantastic Cabaret Scientifique, an evening of songs, dance and comedy acts commissioned by Ensemble Studio Theatre and their scientific partners in crime, the Sloan Foundation. The two organizations are celebrating the culmination of their FirstLight Festival with an evening of quirky, hilarious and endearing tributes to the merging of art and science.

Commissioned companies include: Les Freres Corbusier, Alec Duffy, Silent Voice, The Organ Donors & The Percodettes, and more.

Monday night, May 15 at Ensemble Studio Theatre in Manhattan.

Las Vegas/ Olivo Barbieri

Ann Marie Healy — 2006-04-21T14:31:00Z

Jennifer Fiore, one of our Z+ photographers (and fantastic artist to boot!), just tipped us off to the work of Olivo Barbieri. Photographing from a helicopter 300-500 feet above the ground with a large-format camera and a tilt-focus lens, Barbieri captures the artifice of cities while also rendering their emotional legacy in our minds and our culture. These shots of Las Vegas look and feel like tiny toy models. How appropriate given a city constructed solely to fulfill the American ambition to play hard.

Barbieri's work will be on exhibit here in New York at the Yancey Richardson Gallery until May 13th.

Thanks Jen!

In the Continuum

Ann Marie Healy — 2006-04-13T19:07:00Z

Art has a way of articulating something that the libraries full of statistics can never seem to manage. That's probably why the new play In The Continuum, dramatizing the devastating problem of HIV/AIDS among African and African-American women, is such a profound experience. The play, written by playwright-actors Danai Gurira and Nikkole Salter (pictured above), follows the stories of a married Zimbabwean woman and a 19-year-old girl from South Central Los Angeles over the course of 48 hours. It opened at Primary Stages in New York this past fall and now, after numerous extensions, the critically acclaimed show is going on the road. The next stops will be Harare, Zimbabwe at the Harare International Festival of the Arts, Cape Town and Johannesburg, South Africa and then back to the States for runs in Washington, Cincinnati, New Haven, Philadelphia and Chicago.

Two Amazing Statistics

Andrew — 2006-04-06T08:17:00Z

It's a rarity and a delight to hear CEOs say something that is truly memorable. Yesterday, I heard two.

I'm in Rome attending IBM's Business Leadership Forum, a private conference of 500 CEOs and senior government leaders from around the world. The theme of the event is innovation, and in his opening remarks, Sam Palmisano, the CEO of IBM came up with this chestnut:

"Last year, human beings produced more transistors (and at lower cost) than they did grains of rice.

It turns out that statistic is from an LA Times article dated April 17, 2005, entitled "A Law of Continuing Returns" (which unfortunately is no longer available online). The full quote is even more impressive:

Last year more transistors were produced, and at a lower cost, than grains of rice, according to the Semiconductor Industry Assn. Moore estimates that the number of transistors shipped in 2003 was 10 quintillion, or 10 to the 18th power -- about 100 times the number of ants estimated to be stalking the planet.

The second quote came from Lord Browne, Chairman of BP Shell. In a wide-ranging talk that covered everything from climate change and true-cost-economics to the limitations of traditional measures of both shareholder return and corporate social responsibility, Browne said:

The science of climate change is provisional, but then, all science is provisional. The scientific consensus is real. The time for action is now.

He also said:

In some parts of Uganda, electricity costs many times more per a kilowatt hour than it does in the most developed nations, despite the poverty of the citizens. The reason is that the electricity must be stored in batteries. This is a problem we must solve if we are to address poverty and development.

More good quotes to follow.