events

Olympics achievement on a per capita basis.

by Eric de Place

Forget the showdown between the United States and China, the real battle was between the Bahamas and Iceland.

Certainly nobody reported the Olympics that way, but isn't there something unfair about tallying medals without regard to population? China's athletes, drawn from a pool of 1.3 billion people, match up against American athletes from a pool about one-quarter as big. Though of course we Americans love to lionize our athletic prowess -- measured in total medals won -- against nations only a fraction of our size.

I mean, is it really fair to compare the medal count between, say, 300 million Americans and 30 million Canadians? Not hardly. In fact, the Olympics exemplify our tendency to measure the wrong thing.

Last night, I touched down just north of Jackson Hole, Wyo., in the Grand Tetons. The landing strip -- the only airport inside of a national park -- lies just within the shadow of the jagged mountain range.

I am headed to Yellowstone for a tour of the Whitebark Pine Ecosystem. Yellowstone is the world’s first national park, and one of the largest relatively intact temperate zone ecosystems left on Earth. It’s home to iconic species such as the Grizzly, Bison and elk; geologic features like geysers and hot springs; and the headwaters of the Yellowstone, Snake and Green rivers.

This October, renowned ideas summit Pop!Tech will once again bring the world's social innovation network to the seaside town of Camden, Maine. (Check out our archives for Worldchanging coverage of past Pop!Tech conferences here and here.)

Trying to impart the idea that our planet has a serious water shortage is a real challenge. It's most especially difficult to convince those of us that have hot and cold running water day and night that we really need to conserve this precious resource. A new exhibition at the Z33 Gallery in Belgium aims to bring the message home using creative installations from artists and designers discussing cultural attitudes towards water and the many ways in which it is used and often abused. The show's title '1% Water' relates to the fact that while 70% of our planet's s...

New Leaf Film & Dinner Experience - July 15th

If you're in New York City and weren't fortunate enough to get tickets to Transportation Alternatives sold out Summer Benefit tomorrow night (way to go T.A.!), you have instead the unique opportunity to dine under the stars while viewing an advanced screening of the

This years Coachella festival was the first of its kind with its own train and train station. To help reduce the carbon footprint of a 3-day music festival held in the desert, organizers found a way to make one giant carpool – that came in the form of the Coachella Express. After a year of planning between Coachella, Global Inheritance, Golden Voice and Amtrak, this train idea got, well, rolling....

Four years ago I was invited to speak about prefab housing at a conference in Austin, Texas. I was building prefabs at the time, and was one of the early bloggers about modern prefab; I thought I knew just about all there was to know about the subject.

Then Steven Kieran and James Timberlake got up to speak and I quickly learned how little I really knew, how they were a generation ahead in sophistication. I first learned terms like "mass customization" and "chunking"; followed analogies to the automotive, aircraft and shipbuilding industries, and fell in love with the first drawings of the Loblolly house, which I have followed in these pages ever since. I saw that pref...

Richard Horden of Horden Cherry Lee Architects, one of the designers of the Micro Compact home, has it easy compared to the others; at 2.6 meters square (8'-8") it was designed to go down any road, and he could just ship the unit to New York.

"At a mere 76 square feet, this perfect cubic form packs a remarkable amount of muscle into its tiny envelope. The project is intended as a modern "machine for living," providing functioning spaces of sleeping, working/dining, cooking and hygiene for one or two people. Taking inspiration from the aerospace and automobile industries, the architects fashion a "high performance" cocoon primarily geared toward single p...

We have been showing each of the houses being built for the MoMA's Home Delivery exhibition, opening next week; The New York Times has a good slideshow of the houses. I think it is going to be really down to the wire for these...::New York Times

Other Prefabs in this Series So Far:
Home Delivery : BURST*008 : TreeHugger
Home Delivery : Digitally Fabricated Housing : TreeHugger

In 1996 Oscar Leo Kaufmann and Albert Ruf designed and built Su-Si, a small modern prefab; in 2002 Allison Arieff and Bryan Burkhart put it on the cover of their book Prefab and it became an icon, the poster boy for the modern prefab movement.

For the MoMA exhibition Home Delivery, they contribute SYSTEM3. Watch the incredible video where the house arrives in two containers at 6:00 AM and they compl...

We look at the five prefabs being installed at the MOMA for Home Delivery.

Douglas Gauthier and Jeremy Edmiston of SYSTEMarchitects in New York are building the BURST*008 which they consider to be more of a kit home than a prefab. Like Lawrence Sass's New Orleans home, it is cut out of plywood with a CNC machine, but there the similarity ends. They describe it as " a tension-based structure. The ribs provide the sub-structure but are not complete without the skin to lock them down. The skin—the floors, the walls, and the roof—is...

It is getting awfully close to the July 20 opening of Home Delivery at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where five architects are building and displaying seriously cutting-edge prefabs. We will be looking at each of them this week.

Lawrence Sass of MIT has been working with the idea of the digitally fabricated house for a few years; we first met him at Prefab Now two years ago, but it has evolved significantly since then. Imagine a flatpack house that you assemble like a kid's toy....

You can find a few second hand markets in Barcelona, such as Antiguos Encantes, but finding cool stuff at a decent price is not easy, especially when you are not a local. On the other hand however, we all (Barcelonians are no exception) have a few too many objects sitting at home that we grew tired of, while constantly looking for new gift ideas or a special something for ourselves. So while the idea of second hand is attractive to many (cheap, more pers...

It's the time of year where, as regular as the Fourth of July, we point out that "fireworks are often propelled by gunpowder, and the accelerants and heavy metals used for coloration can leave traces in the air and water for days or even weeks after the party is over." and "fireworks heavily contribute to perchlorate contamination of surrounding water bodies. Perchlorate is well-known to pose risks for both human health and wildlife." The EPA studied a lake in Oklahoma last year and found ...

This year’s Sea No Evil event , also known as the Sea Shepherd Art Show aims to bring art, music and the environment together under one roof in Riverside, CA. The location – The Riverside Art Musem. The date – Saturday, July 12, 2008. The acts – recording artist Matt Costa, DJ Shephard Fairey and art by over 53 artists will be on display. The event is co-hosted by RVCA, the Artist Network Program and Monster Media.

For those of you in the LA or Riverside area, mark your calendars now to come out to Riverside for a good cause. Musical acts include Mat...

"Let's talk about transformation for a couple of minutes" says the moderator, John Kao (a San Francisco-based consultant who also plays a mean jazz piano). Apparently, that's all the time they have.

At the moment, three business leaders are on the stage, representing a major car company, a big bank, and a smaller, socially responsible bank. We've heard some good stories, and some good marketing messages of course, the highlight of which was the origin of the Carbon Principles: one big bank actually listened to Jim Hansen, and put a chokehold on new funding for coal-fired power plants in the United States.

The former President of Costa Rica, Jose Maria Figueres, has just congratulated another Latin American leader (a government minister in Equador -- her name is not in the program) who was recounting a success story that had lifted farmers in her country from one dollar per day to $3.50 per day in income.

"Your farmers," says Figueres, "have just surpassed the income of a European cow. They earn roughly $3.00 per day, in subsidies from the European Union."

By Jessica Chapman

1 p.m.

The PUSH conference kicked off this morning at the Walker Art Museum in downtown Minneapolis, with short presentations by Chandran Nair, founder of the Global Institute for Tomorrow (GIFT) and Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of Good Magazine and co-founder of Ethos Water (and Worldchanging contributor and friend).

By Jessica Chapman

This is the first entry of a series of daily blogs from Jessica Chapman, who is reporting live for Worldchanging from this year's PUSH conference.

The PUSH conference taking place this week in Minneapolis bills itself as the most fun you'll have had since college. It's a bold statement, but one that past conference attendees unabashedly endorse. Previous conference-goers enthusiastically describe this Midwestern meeting of minds as an "unconference" and a "mini-Davos."

I'm back from Asturias which was as lovely as ever. We even had real vegetable to eat this time. The LAboral Art and Industrial Creation Centre in Gijón was opening Banquete_nodos y redes, Interactions Between Art, Science, Technology and Society in Spain's Digital Culture, an exhibition initiated by Karin Ohlenschläger and Luis Rico.

View of the LABoral shop and of the inauguration party right above it

The Influencers is a Barcelona-based event which explores controversial forms of art and communication guerrilla, presenting independent projects that play with global popular culture, infiltrate the mass media, and transform fashions, consumption and technological fetishism.

One of Paglen's patches

First of all a little present. I've got one free pass for a reader interested in attending Mediabistro Circus which takes place in New York on May 20 and 21. The two-day conference focuses on the digital platforms and trends that are changing media today. Just send me an email (reg at this domain's address) explaining why you'd like to go and i'll forward the details of the most charming/desperate/convincing reader to the organizers of the event.

An overview of the programme: May 20: the publishing industry's transition to new media, successful business models, blog power and finally video and social media. May 21: mobile media, the editor of digital news for the New York Times discussing the passage to online publication and user experience design (believe it or not i'm taking part to that panel!)

“Go easy on me,” Tommy Lee said in a whisper. “You know I’m a green virgin.”

“Sorry Tommy,” I said with a smile. “I like to go deep.”

Earth Day celebration in San Francisco is probably the perfect place to give Tommy Lee and Ludacris the Green 101. The artists, (both who are participants in Planet Green’s Battleground Earth), paid a visit to the Bay Area during the Green Apple Festival. They may have well been on another planet though, because y...