"You have certainly heard that buying local is "greener". You have probably also heard counter-arguments: a product made more efficiently but shipped some distance may beat out a local product. But all that talk is merely theoretical if you don't know where your stuff comes from anyhow. And in the new global economy, the "made in" tag on a product does not tell half the story. What is the discerning consumer to do? Imagine a future in which pointing a PDA at a product bar code returns an instant readout of product source and environmental footprint to inform the buyer's decision. This future could be reality with SourceMap. Designed as a "collective tool for transparency and sustainability," SourceMap aims to be the Wiki of visualizing supply chains.
SourceMap is a project of Media Labs, a division of MIT. Developers have adapted the Google Earth geotagging capabilities to the purpose of charting the components that go into products. After two years in develpment, the site is live in beta, and a SourceMap pilot project is underway in Scotland, where businesses can input data on sourcing and supply to share with customers. SourceMap hopes to show that a marketing and social networking advantage justifies the effort of businesses to create transparent reports..."
"Boobs. The Femme Den talks about them easily and often -- and about the challenges they present to designers. Backpack makers don't seem to have a clue what to do about boobs. Ditto designers of unisex hospital scrubs, famous for their gaping V-necks. "One surgeon told me there wasn't a woman at the hospital whose boobs he hadn't seen," says Femme Den member Whitney Hopkins. A design engineer at Smart Design, Hopkins is also one of four members of the Den, an internal collective at the firm that's devoted to thinking about the bodies and brains of women and how to design -- smartly -- for them. I ask the group, which consists of Hopkins, Agnete Enga, Erica Eden, and Yvonne Lin, if that means razors and sports bras or if it means rethinking everything. "Both," they answer in unison, from a nook of Smart's loftlike Chelsea offices. Women are not a niche market, they insist ("No one likes to be targeted," sniffs Eden), but companies should also be careful not to confuse equality with sameness.
"When most people think of designing for women, they automatically think of tampons and birth control," Lin says. (It doesn't help that in industrial design, females make up just 20% of the field.) "Even when a lot of companies think that a product is for both genders, in reality they're just designing for men. Design is male-biased. Designers are working with male procedurals, probably going back to the beginning of time." Now, the Femme Den is looking to inject some femininity into those procedurals, everywhere from U.S. Army bases to Target, BP, and Nike..."
"E.ON Climate and Renewables said on Thursday it has built the world's biggest wind farm by completing the final phase of its Roscoe, Texas wind farm, bringing the installed capacity to 781.5 megawatts. The more than $1 billion project, about 200 miles (320 kilometers) west of Fort Worth, surpasses the nearby 735.5 MW Horse Hollow wind farm, owned by FPL Group's NextEra Energy Resources, as the largest in the world.
"Completing the world's biggest wind farm took more than a $1 billion investment, coordination with more than 300 landowners and management of more than 500 workers," Steve Trenholm, chief executive of German-based E.ON AG's renewable unit in North America, said in a release..."
"The French government Thursday said it plans to spend €1.5 billion (about $2.2 billion) on creating a battery-charging network for electric vehicles as part of a broader state plan to encourage the development of clean vehicle technology and battery manufacturing. It also said it would seek financing of €900 million for its €1.5 billion plan from a state loan that's planned to be launched next year.
The government will make the installation of charging sockets obligatory in office parking lots by 2015, and new apartment blocks with parking lots will have to include charging stations starting in 2012..."
"...The IgNobel prizes - a play on the name of the Nobel prizes awarded every October from Stockholm and Oslo - are given out by the Harvard-based humour magazine Annals of Improbable Research and co-sponsored by the Harvard-Radcliffe Science Fiction Association, the Harvard-Radcliffe Society of Physics Students and the Harvard Computer Society.
The Hippo Water Roller
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