Yarn Bombing: Creating Graffiti with Yarn

I like it! Woolly Bully indeed!

Reposted in full from New York Times, 18 May 2011

'The bronze statue of Rocky near the Philadelphia Museum of Art irked Jessie Hemmons. She found the statue too big, too macho and too touristy, so last month Ms. Hemmons, a 24-year-old artist, bombed him. With pinkish yarn.

Using a stepladder and a needle, Ms. Hemmons stitched a fuchsia-colored hooded vest on the fictional boxer with the words “Go See the Art” emblazoned across the front, to prod tourists to visit the museum that so many skip after snapping their photo with the statue.

She calls the act of artistic vandalism “yarn bombing,” adapting a term for plastering an area with graffiti tags.

“Street art and graffiti are usually so male dominated,” Ms. Hemmons said. “Yarn bombing is more feminine. It’s like graffiti with grandma sweaters.”

Yarn bombing takes that most matronly craft (knitting) and that most maternal of gestures (wrapping something cold in a warm blanket) and transfers it to the concrete and steel wilds of the urban streetscape. Hydrants, lampposts, mailboxes, bicycles, cars — even objects as big as buses and bridges — have all been bombed in recent years, ever so softly and usually at night.

It is a global phenomenon, with yarn bombers taking their brightly colored fuzzy work to Europe, Asia and beyond. In Paris, a yarn culprit has filled sidewalk cracks with colorful knots of yarn. In Denver, a group called Ladies Fancywork Society has crocheted tree trunks, park benches and public telephones. Seattle has the YarnCore collective (“Hardcore Chicks With Sharp Sticks”) and Stockholm has the knit crew Masquerade. In London, Knit the City has “yarnstormed” fountains and fences. And in Melbourne, Australia, a woman known as Bali conjures up cozies for bike racks and bus stops.

To record their ephemeral works (the fragile pieces begin to fray within weeks), yarn bombers photograph and videotape their creations and upload them to blogs, social networks and Web sites for all the world to see.

Sometimes called grandma graffiti, the movement got a boost, and a manifesto, in 2009 with the publication of the book “Yarn Bombing: The Art of Crochet and Knit Graffiti,” by Mandy Moore and Leanne Prain, knitters from Vancouver, Canada. It is part coffee-table book, with color photographs of creative bombs, and part tutorial, with tips like wearing “ninja” black to avoid capture.

The book borrows from the vernacular of street graffiti and half-jokingly positions yarn bombing as an illicit alternative for knitters bored making yet another Christmas sweater. It asks readers to get off their rocking chairs and “take back the knit.”

Since the book’s publication, Ms. Prain said, she has been getting dozens of e-mails a week from yarn bombers from as far away as Russia, Morocco and Iran. The last month has been particularly busy ever since a Canadian knitter declared June 11 International Yarn Bombing Day on Facebook.

Three film crews contacted her about making yarn bombing documentaries, and several graduate students e-mailed her about writing theses on the subject.

Many of these people also reached out to Magda Sayeg, a 37-year-old Texan who is considered by many to be the mother of yarn bombing. By her recollection, it started on a slow day in 2005 at Raye, her quirky boutique in Houston. On a lark, she knitted a blue-and-pink cozy for the shop’s door handle, a piece she now calls “alpha.”

Passers-by loved it, stopping to admire her handiwork. “People got out of their cars just to come look at it,” she said.

Next, she knitted what looked like a leg warmer for a stop sign down the street; from there she slowly infiltrated Houston with her stitchery. Within a few years, she had tagged dozens of lampposts and stop signs and assembled a crew of fellow yarn bombers she called Knitta Please.

Soon, Ms. Sayeg was commissioned to do larger projects. Photographs of her pieces spread online, inciting other knitters to take up the budding art form.

Yarn bombing grows out of the larger D.I.Y. movement, which seeks to resurrect traditional handicrafts “more typically associated with grandmothers, like knitting, canning, gardening and even raising chickens,” said Annette DiMeo Carlozzi, a curator at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Tex. In March it commissioned Ms. Sayeg to cover the trunks of 99 trees in front of the museum.

“You see the resurgence of handicrafts in art, too,” Ms. Carlozzi said. “It is part of the appeal of yarn bombing: the surprising juxtaposition of something that is clearly personal, labor-intensive and handmade in an urban, industrial environment.”

Not all artists who use yarn in their work are thrilled with the woolly trend.

“I don’t yarn bomb, I make art,” said Agata Oleksiak, 33, an artist in New York who has been enshrouding humans, bicycles and swimming pools in neon-colored crochet since 2003. Last Christmas Eve, Olek, as she prefers to be called, blanketed the “Charging Bull” statue near Wall Street in a pink and purple cozy, and uploaded a video of it to YouTube. “If someone calls my bull a yarn bomb, I get really upset,” she added.

Olek, whose work has been shown in museums and galleries worldwide, considers yarn bombing to be the trite work of amateurs and exhibitionists.

“Lots of people have aunts or grandmas who paint,” she said. “Do you want to see that work in the galleries? No. The street is an extension of the gallery. Not everyone’s work deserves to be in public.”

Whether yarn bombing is the work of artists or glorified knitters, the view of law enforcement is clear: it is considered vandalism or littering. Still, the police seem to tolerate it. Yarn bombers say they rarely have run-ins with the law. And in the few instances when they are stopped, yarn bombers say, the police are more likely to laugh at them than issue a summons.

Ms. Prain once tried to yarn bomb a sign post in Washington, in front of F.B.I. headquarters. A security guard wearing a bulletproof vest approached her, she said, and demanded that she stop immediately. “Ma’am,” she recalled him saying, “step away with the knitting.”

Still, yarn bombing seems to be having its moment in pop culture. Fortune 500 companies have paid Ms. Sayeg as much as $20,000 to wrap their wares in yarn. Toyota hired her to knit a Prius a Christmas sweater last year for a promotional video. The makers of the Smart car flew her to Rome to wrap a car in what looked like 1970s-inspired throw blankets, and Mini Cooper recently commissioned a similar ad.

Ms. Sayeg has so much work that she closed her shop in 2009, moved to Austin and turned her hobby into a full-time job. Clients have included the Montague Street Business Improvement District in Brooklyn, which paid Ms. Sayeg to knit covers for 69 parking meters, and Insight, an Australian company that sells surfing clothing, which has an ad featuring a scantly clad woman riding a yarn-covered scooter. Last month, Ms. Sayeg wrapped all the heating ducts at the Brooklyn offices of Etsy.com.

Companies seem to be attracted to the retro handcrafted cheeriness of yarn. Toyota chose Ms. Sayeg for the Prius sweater project because her work is “optimistic and community oriented,” Sona Iliffe-Moon, a marketing executive for Toyota, wrote in an e-mail.

Ms. Sayeg now has five assistants to help her knit, which she now does primarily on looms rather than needles to meet the demand.

“In the early years I identified with underground graffiti artists,” she said. “Now the very people I feared I would get in trouble with are the ones inviting me to do this work for them.”'

Tasks vs Work - Why Work Doesn't Happen At Work

This all sounds horribly familiar! Anyone who has ever worked in an office will appreciate this - and laugh out loud in a number of places!

Sourced/excerpt from TED, November 2010

'So I'm going to talk about work, specifically why people can't seem to get work done at work, which is a problem we all kind of have...we have companies and non-profits and charities and all these groups that have employees or volunteers of some sort...

And so what they typically do is they decide that all these people need to come together in one place to do that work...And so these companies, they build offices. They go out and they buy a building, or they rent a building, or they lease some space, and they fill the space with stuff. They fill it with with tables, or desks, chairs, computer equipment, software, internet access, maybe a fridge, maybe a few other things, and they expect their employees, or their volunteers, to come to that location every day to do great work. It seems like it's perfectly reasonable to ask that.

However, if you actually talk to people and even question yourself, and you ask yourself, where do you really want to go when you really need to get something done? you'll find out that people don't say what businesses think they would say. If you ask people the question: where do you really need to go when you need to get something done? Typically you get three different kinds of answers. One is kind of a place or a location or a room. Another one is a moving object. And a third is a time.

So here's some examples. When I ask people - and I've been asking people this question for about 10 years - I ask them, "Where do you go when you really need to get something done?" I'll hear things like, the porch, the deck, the kitchen. I'll hear things like like an extra room in the house, the basement, the coffee shop, the library. And then you'll hear things like the train, a plane, a car - so the commute. And then you'll hear people say, "Well, it doesn't really matter where I am, as long as it's really early in the morning or really late at night or on the weekends." You almost never hear someone say the office. But businesses are spending all this money on this place called the office, and they're making people go to it all the time, yet people don't do work in the office.

What is that about? Why is that? Why is that happening? And what you find out is that, if you dig a little bit deeper, you find out that people - this is what happens - people go to work, and they're basically trading in their work day for a series of work moments. That's what happens at the office. You don't have a work day anymore; you have work moments. It's like the front door of the office is like a Cuisinart, and you walk in and your day is shredded to bits, because you have 15 minutes here and 30 minutes there, and then something else happens and you're pulled off your work, and you've got to do something else, then you have 20 minutes, then it's lunch. Then you have something else to do, then you've got 15 minutes, and someone pulls you aside and asks you this question. And before you know it, it's 5:00 pm, and you look back on day, and you realize that you didn't get anything done. I mean, we've all been through this. We probably went through it yesterday, or the day before, or the day before that. You look back on your day, and you're like, I got nothing done today. I was at work. I sat at my desk. I used my expensive computer. I used the software they told my to use. I went to these meetings I was asked to go to. I did these conference calls. I did all this stuff. But I didn't actually do anything. I just did tasks. I didn't actually get meaningful work done.

And what you find is that, especially with creative people - designers, programmers, writers, engineers, thinkers - that people really need long stretches of uninterrupted time to get something done. You cannot ask somebody to be creative in 15 minutes and really think about a problem. You might have a quick idea, but to be in deep thought about a problem and really consider a problem carefully, you need long stretches of uninterrupted time. And even though the work day is typically eight hours, how many people here have ever had eight hours to themselves at the office? How about seven hours? Six? Five? Four? When's the last time you had three hours to yourself at the office? Two hours? One, maybe. Very, very few people actually have long stretches of uninterrupted time at an office. And this is why people chose to do work at home, or they might go to the office, but they might go to the office really early in the day, or late at night when no one's around, or they stick around after everyone's left, or they go in on the weekends, or they get work done on the plane, or they get work done in the car or in the train because there are no distractions.

Now there are different kinds of distractions, but there aren't the really bad kinds of distractions that I'll talk about in just a minute. And this sort of whole phenomenon of having short bursts of time to get things done reminds me of another thing that doesn't work when you're interrupted, and that is sleep. I think sleep and work are very closely related. And it's not just that you can work while you're sleeping and you can sleep while you're working. That's not really what I mean. I'm talking specifically about the fact that sleep and work are phased based, or stage based events. So sleep is about sleep phases, or stages - some people call them different things. There's five of them, and in order to get to the really deep ones, the really meaningful ones, you have to go through the early ones. And if you're interrupted while you're going through the early ones - if someone bumps you in bed, or if there's a sound, or whatever happens - you don't just pick up where you left off.

If you're interrupted and woken up, you have to start again. So you have to go back a few phases and start again. And what ends up happening - sometimes you might have days like this where you wake up at eight in the morning, or seven in the morning, or whenever you get up, and you're like, man, I didn't really sleep very well. I did the sleep thing - I went to bed, I laid down - but I didn't really sleep. People say you go to sleep, but you really don't go to sleep, you go towards sleep. It just takes a while; you've got to go through these phases and stuff. And if you're interrupted, you don't sleep well. So how do we expect - does anyone here expect someone to sleep well if they're interrupted all night? I don't think anyone would say yes. Why do we expect people to work well if they're being interrupted all day at the office? How can we possibly expect people to do their job if they're going to the office to be interrupted? That doesn't really seem like it makes a lot of sense to me.

So what are these interruptions that happen at the office that don't happen at other places? Because in other places, you can have interruptions, like, you can have the TV, or you could go for a walk, or there's a fridge downstairs, or you've got your own couch, or whatever you want to do. And if you talk to certain managers, they'll tell you that they don't want their employees to work at home because of these distractions. They'll also say - sometimes they'll also say, "Well, if I can't see the person, how do I know they're working?" which is ridiculous of course, but that's one of the excuses that managers give. And I'm one of these managers. I understand; I know how this goes. We all have to improve on this sort of thing. But oftentimes they'll cite distractions. "I can't let someone work at home. They'll watch TV. They'll do this other thing." It turns out that those aren't the things that are really distracting. Because those are voluntary distractions. You decide when you want to be distracted by the TV. You decide when you want to turn something on. You decide when you want to go downstairs or go for a walk. At the office, most of the interruptions and distractions that really cause people not to get work done are involuntary. So let's go through a couple of those.

Now, managers and bosses will often have you think that the real distractions at work are things like Facebook and Twitter and Youtube and other websites. And in fact, they'll go so far as to actually ban these sites at work. Some of you may work at places where you can't get to these certain sites. I mean, is this China? What the hell is going on here? You can't go to a website at work, and that's the problem, that's why people aren't getting work done, because they're going to Facebook and they're going to Twitter? That's kind of ridiculous. It's a total decoy. And today's Facebook and Twitter and Youtube, these things are just modern-day smoke breaks. No one cared about letting people take a smoke break for 15 minutes 10 years ago, so why does everyone care about someone going to Facebook here and there, or Twitter here and there, or Youtube here and there? Those aren't the real problems in the office.

The real problems are what I like to call the M&M's, the managers and the meetings. Those are the real problems in the modern office today. And this is why things don't get done at work, it's because of the M&M's. Now what's interesting is, if you listen to all the places that people talk about doing work - like at home, or in a car, or on a plane, or late at night, or early in the morning - you don't find managers and meetings; you find a lot of other distractions, but you don't find managers and meetings. So these are the things that you don't find elsewhere, but you do find at the office. And managers are basically people whose job it is to interrupt people. That's pretty much what managers are for, they're for interrupting people. They don't really do the work, so they have to make sure everyone else is doing the work, which is an interruption. And we have a lot of managers in the world now. And there's a lot of people in the world now. And there's a lot of interruptions in the world now because of these managers. They have to check in: "Hey, how's it going? Show me what's up," and this sort of thing. And they keep interrupting you at the wrong time, while you're actually trying to do something they're paying you to do, they tend to interrupt you.

That's kind of bad. But what's even worse is the thing that managers do most of all, which is call meetings. And meetings are just toxic, terrible, poisonous things during the day at work. We all know this to be true. And you would never see a spontaneous meeting called by employees; it doesn't work that way. The manager calls the meeting, so the employees can all come together, and it's an incredibly disruptive thing to do to people - is to say, "Hey look, we're going to bring 10 people together right now and have a meeting. I don't care what you're doing. Just, you've got to stop doing what you're doing, so you can have this meeting." I mean, what are the chances that all 10 people are ready to stop? What if they're thinking about something important? What if they're doing important work? All of a sudden you're telling them that they have to stop doing that to do something else. So they go into a meeting room, they get together, and they talk about stuff that doesn't really matter usually. Because meetings aren't work. Meetings are places to go to talk about things you're supposed to be doing later.

But meetings also procreate. So one meeting tends to lead to another meeting and tends to lead to another meeting. There's often too many people in the meetings, and they're very, very expensive to the organization. Companies often think of a one-hour meeting as a one-hour meeting, but that's not true, unless there's only one person in that meeting. If there are 10 people in the meeting, it's a 10-hour meeting, it's not a one-hour meeting. It's 10 hours of productivity taken from the rest of the organization to have this one one-hour meeting, which probably should have been handled by two or three people talking for a few minutes. But instead, there's a long scheduled meeting, because meetings are scheduled the way software works, which is in increments of 15 minutes, or 30 minutes, or an hour. You don't schedule an eight-hour meeting with Outlook. You can't. I don't even know if you can. You can go 15 minutes or 30 minutes or 45 minutes or an hour. And so we tend to fill these times up when things should really go really quickly.

So meetings and managers are two major problems in businesses today, especially to offices. These things don't exist outside of the office. So I have some suggestions to remedy the situation. What can managers do -- enlightened managers, hopefully -- what can they do to make the office a better place for people to work, so it's not the last resort, but it's the first resort? It's that people start to say, "When I really want to get stuff done, I go to the office." Because the offices are well-equipped, everything should be there for them to do their work, but they don't want to go there right now, so how do we change that? I have three suggestions I'll share with you guys. I have about three minutes, so that'll fit perfectly.

We've all heard of the casual Friday thing. I don't know if people still do that. But how about no-talk Thursdays...nobody in the office can talk to each other. Just silence, that's it. And what you'll find is that a tremendous amount of work actually gets done when nobody talks to each other. This is when people actually get stuff done, is when no one's bothering them, when no one's interrupting them. And you can give someone - giving someone four hours of uninterrupted time is the best gift you can give anybody at work. It's better than a computer. It's better than a new monitor. It's better than new software, or whatever people typically use. Giving them four hours of quiet time at the office is going to be incredibly valuable...'

Being Yourselves

Neuroscientist David Eagleman's talk on the multiple selves of the brain - some great stories and insights in this one!

Sourced from The School of Life, April 2011

'If the conscious mind—the part you consider you—is just the tip of the iceberg in the brain, what is all the rest doing? Why can you argue with yourself, cajole yourself, and get angry at yourself? Who, exactly, is dealing with whom? Is there a single true you, or is that just an illusion?

Neuroscientist David Eagleman, is here to show how your brain is like a conflicted democracy engaged in civil war. Perhaps more importantly, he’ll also tell you how you can learn strategies to manage the battles.'

Non-Geographic Mapping

click on link below to access interactive map

Sourced from Princeton University

'The International Networks Archive is a worldwide alliance of scholars interested in developing a new system of mapping our world, based on global transactions instead of geography.'

Tallest Mountain to Deepest Ocean Trench

Sourced from Our Amazing Planet, 7 June 2010

Escaping from Civilisation Only a Remote Possibility

Travel time to anywhere in the world...

Sourced from the New Scientist, 2 April 2009

'Very little of the world's land can now be thought of as inaccessible, according to a new map of connectedness.

The maps are based on a model which calculated how long it would take to travel to the nearest city of 50,000 or more people by land or water.

The model combines information on terrain and access to road, rail and rivernetworks. It also considers how factors like altitude, steepness of terrain and hold-ups like border crossings slow travel.

Plotted onto a map, the results throw up surprises. First, less than 10% of the world's land is more than 48 hours of ground-based travel from the nearest city.

What's more, many areas considered remote and inaccessible are not as far from civilisation as you might think. In the Amazon, for example, extensive river networks and an increasing number of roads mean that only 20% of the land is more than two days from a city - around the same proportion as Canada's Quebec province.'

How travel time was calculated

Shipping Lanes

Road Networks

Before I Die

This is just gorgeous...the pictures say it all.

Sourced from Candy Chang, April 2011

'Candy Chang is a public installation artist, designer, urban planner, and co-founder of Civic Center who likes to make cities more comfortable for people.

With a lot of support from old and new friends, I turned the side of an abandoned house in my neighborhood into a giant chalkboard where residents can write on the wall and remember what is important to them. Before I Die transforms neglected spaces into constructive ones where we can learn the hopes and aspirations of the people around us.'

Bring on the Participatory Sensing

Crowdsourcing environmental protection with IT...

Reposted in full from Shareable, 15 March 2011

'For decades, Congress has delegated the fate of our public lands, the air, water, and wildlife to federal agencies, where a familiar dynamic of regulatory capture and corruption quickly takes root. It’s depressingly routine: Industry foxes are appointed to guard the chicken house; they make politically motivated judgments about scientific data; they engage in legalistic subterfuges and throw blankets of secrecy over the data and decisionmaking. A complicit Congress cuts budgets in order to cripple regulatory effectiveness.

So here’s an interesting idea for changing the political ecosystem of regulation: Use Web 2.0 platforms to let citizens participate directly, and let the data be seen by everyone, in near-real time, on the web. Reinvent regulation as an open-source project, as it were, so that everyone can participate, and industry money and interventions cannot so easily corrupt the process.

This is the implication of a series of experiments in “participatory sensing,” or “eco-crowdsourcing.” The rise of online social networks, wikis, smart phones, and other digitally networked devices and platforms are enabling dispersed bits of information to be aggregated and sifted in amazingly fast and complex ways. Marketers already comb through vast databases of web traffic, cell phone geo-location data, and credit card purchases to make highly specific inferences about you and your behavior.

Why not use these same capabilities to improve environmental regulation? All you need is a cell phone, laptop computer, or wireless device, and enterprising regulatory agencies willing to reach out to the public and change their procedures in innovative ways.

The idea is to take the Wikipedia model of distributed participation to new levels, and give people the chance to make a difference. Already the North American Butterfly Association invites people to submit counts of butterflies in their locality in order to monitor the health of various butterfly species. The result is a rich databse of empirical, on-the-ground, timely data. Similarly, Rarebirds.com invites volunteers to submit data to a location-based database of rare bird sightings.

Some of the possibilities for using Web 2.0 platforms to improve regulation are detailed in a short report called “Participatory Sensing: A Citizen-Powered Approach to Illuminating the Patterns That Shape Our World,” published by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in 2009. The report notes that, with the proliferation of cameras on inexpensive mobile phones, motion sensors, and GPS systems — and with pervasive connectivity to telephone and Internet systems — it is possible for new forms of collective knowledge to be gathered and analyzed.

This has enormous implications for how distributed communities of people can help monitor natural systems in direct, reliable, and real-time ways, facilitating rapid identification of patterns and trends affecting the environment.

Citizen-scientists (as they are often called) have collected valuable environmental data for such events as the Audubon Society's Christmas Bird Count, World Water Monitoring Day, and the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research's Project BudBurst, a national field campaign to harness the power of citizen-scientists to observe plant responses to climate and record environmental conditions. In one study, participants took cell phone photos of plants at the fruiting stage of their life-cycle, which on a large scale can yield important information about the state of climate change.

“Using people’s everyday mobile phones to collect data in a coordinated manner could be applied to scientific studies of various sorts, such as accessing fishermen’s extensive knowledge to identify and locate fish pathologies in the field,” the report notes. It could document the spread of an invasive species. GPS-equipped mobile phones might be used to photograph diesel trucks as part of a campaign to understand community exposure to air pollution.

WeTap is an Android application that enables people collectively to contribute to a map of public drinking fountains and other free water sources. The idea is that people should be able to find free water supplies, and rate them, instead of having to buy wasteful and expensive bottled water. The information could also help improve the public infrastructure for water foundations.

In India, the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library is a repository of traditional knowledge about medicinal plants and formulations used in Indian systems of medicine. The website invites people to contribute to the Library in order to document the existence of various traditional remedies, and classify them. Once they are so documented, no one will be able to use the international patent system to claim proprietary intellectual property rights in the knowledge. The database serves as a massive body of “prior art” that can be used to challenge patent applications that seek to privatize traditional knowledge.

The problem with centralized bureaucracies is that they think they know everything and can control everything. They don’t and they can’t. They are often inefficient, and they simply cannot be as versatile and responsive as decentralized networks. If they could, then the recording, broadcasting, book publishing, and newspaper industries would not be in such bad shape. The State Department would not be surprised by insurgent movements in Egypt.

So why not leverage the power of distributed networks and invite citizens to participate in abating environmental harms and protect the commons? The U.S. Government is constantly consulting the high tech giants to develop new forms of surveillance and national security systems. Why not use these technologies to remake the regulatory system and take advantage of some powerful eco-crowdsourcing?

Types of data that were once too expensive or unreliable to collect, could be gathered and applied in conventional policymaking and standards enforcement. New types of wiki-style knowledge could be conjured into existence. Citizens could even self-organize their own commons' management systems to assert some measure of control over a local stream or mountain or lake. They could identify and call out corporate polluters through social shaming, and pressure regulatory agencies that fail to do their jobs.

Oops. Now I understand why there might be little enthusiasm within regulatory agencies for some of these innovations — they just might work too well.'

Hans Rosling: Visualizing Mortality History

Part Minority Report, part storyteller, part magician - the brilliance of Hans Rosling

Sourced from the BBC and Cool Infographics, 15 March 2011

'Hans Rosling, known for some of his famous TED Talks, here tries a little augmented reality with his animated charts showing life expectancy and wealth all over the world for the last 200 years. 120,000 data visualized in this 4 minute video clip from his The Joy of Stats documentary for the BBC.Hans Rosling’s famous lectures combine enormous quantities of public data with a sport’s commentator’s style to reveal the story of the world’s past, present and future development.

Now he explores stats in a way he has never done before - using augmented reality animation. In this spectacular section of ‘The Joy of Stats’ he tells the story of the world in 200 countries over 200 years using 120,000 numbers - in just four minutes. Plotting life expectancy against income for every country since 1810, Hans shows how the world we live in is radically different from the world most of us imagine.'

Lost City Of Atlantis, Swamped By Tsunami, May Be Found

Ole! I do believe there was some kind of ancient - as in, ANCIENT (mega thousands of years ago) super-smart civilisation, and that some catastrophic event almost destroyed it, but seeds of that knowledge lived on and found its way into cultures all over the world. That could have been Atlantis.

Reposted in full from Planet Ark News, 15 March 2011

'A U.S.-led research team may have finally located the lost city of Atlantis, the legendary metropolis believed swamped by a tsunami thousands of years ago in mud flats in southern Spain.

"This is the power of tsunamis," head researcher Richard Freund told Reuters.

"It is just so hard to understand that it can wipe out 60 miles inland, and that's pretty much what we're talking about," said Freund, a University of Hartford, Connecticut, professor who lead an international team searching for the true site of Atlantis.

To solve the age-old mystery, the team used a satellite photo of a suspected submerged city to find the site just north of Cadiz, Spain. There, buried in the vast marshlands of the Dona Ana Park, they believe that they pinpointed the ancient, multi-ringed dominion known as Atlantis.

The team of archeologists and geologists in 2009 and 2010 used a combination of deep-ground radar, digital mapping, and underwater technology to survey the site.

Freund's discovery in central Spain of a strange series of "memorial cities," built in Atlantis' image by its refugees after the city's likely destruction by a tsunami, gave researchers added proof and confidence, he said.

Atlantis residents who did not perish in the tsunami fled inland and built new cities there, he added.

The team's findings will be unveiled on Sunday in "Finding Atlantis," a new National Geographic Channel special.

While it is hard to know with certainty that the site in Spain in Atlantis, Freund said the "twist" of finding the memorial cities makes him confident Atlantis was buried in the mud flats on Spain's southern coast.

"We found something that no one else has ever seen before, which gives it a layer of credibility, especially for archeology, that makes a lot more sense," Freund said.

Greek philosopher Plato wrote about Atlantis some 2,600 years ago, describing it as "an island situated in front of the straits which are by you called the Pillars of Hercules," as the Straits of Gibraltar were known in antiquity. Using Plato's detailed account of Atlantis as a map, searches have focused on the Mediterranean and Atlantic as the best possible sites for the city.

Tsunamis in the region have been documented for centuries, Freund says. One of the largest was a reported 10-story tidal wave that slammed Lisbon in November, 1755.

Debate about whether Atlantis truly existed has lasted for thousands of years. Plato's "dialogues" from around 360 B.C. are the only known historical sources of information about the iconic city. Plato said the island he called Atlantis "in a single day and night...disappeared into the depths of the sea."

Experts plan further excavations are planned at the site where they believe Atlantis is located and at the mysterious "cities" in central Spain 150 miles away to more closely study geological formations and to date artifacts.'

Mapping Africa

Fascinating look at Africa through its cartological history...note the point about how the Sahara was not always desert, it was the breadbasket of the Roman Empire.

The audio slideshow cannot be embedded, so watch it here:

www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-12675464

Sourced from the BBC, 14 March 2011

'From one of the earliest depictions of the continent - to the colonial scramble for land - the maps of Africa reveal a great deal about the people who have lived there through the centuries.

To try to shed new light on the African archives held by the Royal Geographical Society, London-based African community groups were asked for their views on the documents.They spoke to Cliff Pereira and Zagba Oyortey - both African-born - who explain here how the maps tell the story of a changing continent.'

Journalism in the Age of Data

Sourced from Datajournalism, Stanford University

'Journalists are coping with the rising information flood by borrowing data visualization techniques from computer scientists, researchers and artists. Some newsrooms are already beginning to retool their staffs and systems to prepare for a future in which data becomes a medium. But how do we communicate with data, how can traditional narratives be fused with sophisticated, interactive information displays?'

Journalism in the Age of Data from Geoff McGhee on Vimeo.

Speed Camera Lottery

Sourced from Social Creatives, 11 December 2010

'Can we solve social problems more easily if we inject an element of fun? That’s the question behind The Fun Theory competition.

The finalists and winner in this global competition seem to suggest: Yes!

The overall winner of the competition is The Speed Camera Lottery, which got drivers to obey the speed limit by entering those who obey the limit in a lottery. At the same time, those who exceed the limit pay into a fund that goes to law abiding drivers.'

Triggering Behaviour Change with Game Dynamics

In Seth Priebatsch's talk at TEDxBoston he makes a mind-blowing observation about Farmville - which has more users than Twitter! - in relation to 'appointment dynamics', or the need to return to water virtual crops; if the makers wanted to grind world productivity to a halt, they could change the cycle from 24 hours or 8 hours to 30 minutes!!

He also makes the amusing observation:

'School is a game - it's just not a very well designed one; if we called Valedictorian 'White Knight Level 20', people would probably work a lot harder...'

Sourced from Social Creatives, 18 January 2011



"Human beings are not rational actors. We rarely make decisions based on logic alone. That’s why social change can be so frustratingly complex. People won’t act even if their own well-being is at stake.

That’s why social innovators have learned to look to neuroscience and psychology for pointers. Some key insights into human behavior have shown up in games people play – online and offline.

To learn how to effect change, we need to learn “game dynamics” and how to use them.'

Clothes Made From Used Blow-Up Dolls: Has Recycling Gone Too Far?

...highly amusing!

Sourced from Ecouterre, 7 December 2009

'Consider this NSFW attire: A Dutch artist by the name of Sander Reijgers is recycling inflatable sex dolls into clothing. Instead of shying away from the more anatomically correct “bits” (so to speak), however, he’s placing all the parts that make a blow-up doll a blow-up doll front and center. His raunchy, waterproof windbreakers and tracksuits are not for the prudish, but if you’re looking to make waves at your local Starbucks or, better yet, next PTA meeting, sporting one of these should draw some stares.

To make the clothing, Reijgers customized existing tracksuit tops with heads, breasts and other pieces from 50 blow-up dolls that he received from a “sponsor.”

“These dolls are so ugly and vulgar that turning them into something beautiful has become a challenge for me,” he says of the process. His inspiration came from reading The Malady of Death by Marguerite Duras, in which the main character is incapable of feelings for people. Reijgers says his goal was to allow the dolls to perform normal day-to-day tasks—and free them from their original purpose—by turning them into clothing...'

Landshare Australia

...like a dating service for landholders and people who want to work the land!

Sourced from Landshare Australia, 18 February 2010

'Landshare Australia brings together people who have a passion for home-grown food, connecting those who have land to share with those who need land for cultivating food. The concept of Landshare began in the UK, launched through the River Cottage television program in 2009, and has since grown into a thriving community of more than 57,000 growers, sharers and helpers across the country. Now that Landshare is here in Australia, we welcome you to come and take part in this fantastic initiative.

Landshare is for people who:

• Want to grow vegetables but don't have anywhere to do it
• Have a spare bit of land they're prepared to share
• Can help in some way – from sharing knowledge and lending tools to helping out on the plot itself
• Support the idea of freeing up more land for growing
• Are already growing and want to join in the community...'

The Beauty of Data Visualisation

Sourced from TED, July 2010

'David McCandless turns complex data sets (like worldwide military spending, media buzz, Facebook status updates) into beautiful, simple diagrams that tease out unseen patterns and connections. Good design, he suggests, is the best way to navigate information glut — and it may just change the way we see the world.'

Crematorium To Heat Water For Town's Swimmers

A friend of mine has suggested this project be dubbed 'Ashes to Splashes'!

Reposted in full from Planet Ark News, 14 February 2011

'A local authority in England has given the go ahead for a swimming pool to use energy created by the next-door crematorium to heat its water.

The plan, the first of its kind in Britain, will see waste heat from the incinerator chimney used to warm up the neighboring leisure center and its new pool.

"The cremation process is a sensitive matter and we wanted to be sure our proposals had widespread support," said Councilor Carole Gandy, the leader of Redditch Borough Council in central England.

Eighty to 90 percent of people who contacted the council had backed the scheme, she said.

"Throughout we have been careful to explain how the technology would work, that it is tried and trusted, and that the practice is quite common in parts of Europe and especially in Sweden," she said.

"We already support our residents to insulate their homes and be energy-efficient, so it seemed only right for us to explore this re-use of energy."

However, local trade union officials are less than impressed with the plan, saying it was a reflection of the massive public spending cuts being implemented by the government.

"These proposals ... are sick and an insult to local residents," said Roger McKenzie, regional secretary for Unison, Britain's biggest public sector labor union.'

Human Planet - BBC

Sourced from the BBC, 11 January 2011



'Human Planet is an awe-inspiring, jaw-dropping, heart-stopping landmark series that marvels at mankind's incredible relationship with nature in the world today.

Uniquely in the animal kingdom, humans have managed to adapt and thrive in every environment on Earth. Each episode takes you to the extremes of our planet: the arctic, mountains, oceans, jungles, grasslands, deserts, rivers and even the urban jungle. Here you will meet people who survive by building complex, exciting and often mutually beneficial relationships with their animal neighbours and the hostile elements of the natural world.

Human Planet crews have filmed in around 80 locations, bringing you many stories that have never been told on television before. The team has trekked with HD cameras and state of the art gear to film from the air, from the ground and underwater. The result: a "cinematic experience" created by world-class natural history and documentary camera crews and programme makers.'

Driveby Culture and the Endless Search for Wow

More words of wisdom from Seth...

Reposted in full from Seth Godin's Blog, 16 March 2010

'The net has spawned two new ways to create and consume culture.

The first is the wide-open door for amateurs to create. This is blogging and online art, wikipedia and the maker movement. These guys get a lot of press, and deservedly so, because they're changing everything.

The second, though, is distracting and ultimately a waste. We're creating a culture of clickers, stumblers and jaded spectators who decide in the space of a moment whether to watch and participate (or not).

Imagine if people went to the theatre or the movies and stood up and walked out after the first six seconds. Imagine if people went to the senior prom and bailed on their date three seconds after the car pulled away from the curb.

The majority of people who sign up for a new online service rarely or never use it. The majority of YouTube videos are watched for just a few seconds. Chatroulette institutionalizes the glance and click mentality. I'm guessing that more than half the people who started reading this post never finished it.

This is all easy to measure. And it drives people with something to accomplish crazy, because they want visits to go up, clicks to go up, eyeballs to go up.

Should I write blog posts that increase my traffic or that help change the way (a few) people think?

Should a charity focus on instant donations by texting from a million people or is it better to seek dedicated attention and support from a few who understand the mission and are there for the long haul?

More and more often, we're seeing products and services coming to market designed to appeal to the momentary attention of the clickers. The Huffington Post has downgraded itself, pushing thoughtful stories down the page in exchange for linkbait and sensational celebrity riffs. This strategy gets page views, but does it generate thought or change?

If you create (or market) should you be chasing the people who click and leave? Or is it like trying to turn a cheetah into a house pet? Is manipulating the high-voltage attention stream of millions of caffeinated web surfers a viable long-term strategy?

Mass marketing used to be able to have it both ways. Money bought you audience. Now, all that buys you a mass market is wow and speed. Wow keeps getting harder and dives for the lowest common denominator at the same time.

Time magazine started manipulating the cover and then the contents in order to boost newsstand sales. They may have found a short-term solution, but the magazine is doomed precisely because the people they are pandering to don't really pay attention and aren't attractive to advertisers.

My fear is that the endless search for wow further coarsens our culture at the same time it encourages marketers to get ever more shallow. That's where the first trend comes in... the artists, idea merchants and marketers that are having the most success are ignoring those that would rubberneck and drive on, focusing instead on cadres of fans that matter. Fans that will give permission, fans that will return tomorrow, fans that will spread the word to others that can also take action.

Culture has been getting faster and shallower for hundreds of years, and I'm not the first crusty pundit to decry the demise of thoughtful inquiry and deep experiences. The interesting question here, though, is not how fast is too fast, but what works? What works to change mindsets, to spread important ideas and to create an audience for work that matters? What's worth your effort and investment as a marketer or creator?

The difference this time is that driveby culture is both fast and free. When there's no commitment of money or time in the interaction, can change or commerce really happen? Just because you can measure eyeballs and pageviews doesn't mean you should.

In the race between 'who' and 'how many', who usually wins--if action is your goal. Find the right people, those that are willing to listen to what you have to say, and ignore the masses that are just going to race on, unchanged.'