1. What's the carbon footprint of Fiji Water delivered to San Francisco (it comes via LA, right?) How does that compare to the footprint of Dasani -- or any other brand that is from municipal water?
   
   Stuei: We have a triple-negative carbon footprint! We've bought options for future forestation on the land that we are now clearcutting. Given our assumption that carbon sequestration will be 10x more valuable in 20 years, we are going to replant 30 percent of the current area in 10 years, allowing us to make money now and you to drink our water guilt-free. Dasani? Crap from the tap -- don't drink that poison!
   
   
2. How much water does FW extract from the aquifer in Fiji per year? How many bottles is that? How much comes out of the spring (it's artesian, right) in the average year?
   
   Stuei: We take about 50 percent of that aquifer. 80% of our extractions go for the water slide (employee perks!); the rest goes into bottles that are handblown with the finest plastic, giving our water a fresh, new-car taste. The spring's flows go up and down, but our extractions don't. This is a business, not a nature show!
   
   
3. How much FW is sold/donated in Fiji? What are the top five countries, with share of your total sales?
   
   Stuei: We donate over 400 bottles of water per year in Fiji. The President Dictator Our Friend love those little bottles. We sell water in Fiji, at the same low price that LA celebs pay. Most of our water sells in the US, where people are too worried about their health to exercise, too paranoid to believe that tap water is drinkable, and too uneducated to see through our clean crisp marketing. My favorite place to sell Fiji is in Aspen -- I love to ski on that snow, but hate to drink it.
   
   
4. How much does FW pay the Govt of Fiji per bottle for water? If not per bottle, is there an annual license fee? Does FW pay taxes (income, property) in addition to this?
   
   Stuei: Nothing. Duh. We pay bribes, but only to people. Governments are NOT people. Get that straight. Our license fee of $1,000 is quite expensive, but our tax credit of $50,000 more than makes up for it. Since we employ 200 workers, that rebate allows us to pay them $250/year more. (We don't, of course. Have you seen the unemployment stats for Fiji?) We pay property taxes based on our land-footprint. It's about 500 sq feet around our pumping facilities. The rest of our facilities are on stilts, so we only pay taxes on "unimproved land." (I got that idea from the kosher pig folks; their pigs don't touch the ground, so they are "clean." Get it?)
   
   
5. How many Fijian citizens work for FW? How many non-Fijians (in Fiji and LA...)
   
   Stuei: We bought passports for our foreign staff, so we are 100% Fijian on the ground. Even I celebrate on October 10th. 90 percent of our wages go to the 20 people who work in marketing in LA. The other 10 percent of our wages go to the day-laborers we have in Fiji. I understand that some of them work upto 50 days a year, so we even remember their names. (Well, we remember who gets what nametag.) Employees who pass 200 days of employment with us are "retired" -- they get a free bottle of Fiji water and a place on our shoot on sight list.
   
   
6. What's the most-common question from anti-bottled water people? What's your answer?
   
   Stuei: "Why are you evil?" I kinda like its directness, but I don't tell them that. I just say Fuck You -- and the horse you rode in on. Hahhaaha
   
   
7. What's the hardest question for FW to answer from anti-bottled water people? What's your answer?
   
   Stuei: "Which do you love more: money or marketing?" I still flip coins on that one, but our marketing is so bad-ass that Eskimos buy our ice! Fiji-ice, of course!
   
   
8. Where are your plastic bottles made? Virgin or recycled plastic? Is there a bottle recycling program on Fiji? What % of bottles does it pickup? Any recycling stats for FW bottles in the US?
   
   Stuei: We make 'em in China, where it's easy to get 8 year olds on the lines, and we can dump our waste next to the road. Although I hate to say "Virgin" (Fucking Branson), I LOOOVE virgin costs. We take blood oil from Iran and Sudan, refine it in to bottles with slave labor from Burma, and then ship the empties to our plant on North Korean ships that just delivered missiles to Yemeni freedom fighters. How are the bottles so clear and square? We take crutches from all those one-legged Afghanis and use them to pull the bottles through a solution of butterfly wings, shark fins and rhino feet. Gotta love that quality. Recycling? Yeah, we do that. We dump the bottles in the ocean and then wait 400 million years for plate-tectonics to turn those suckers into new oil. Bam!
   
   
9. What's the relationship between FW and the government of Fiji? Does FW have any position on political coups? Does FW have any formal or informal relationships with police, military or other security branches of the Fiji Government?
   
   Stuei: They're our bitches. All of them. The only crime that we don't control is that $12 mai-tai at the resorts. We tend to do quite well off the pedophiles and guys fencing stolen cameras and laptops, but we need to pull back on supply a bit. Low prices do not help the bottom line at FABS (Fiji's Ass Belongs to Stuei).
   
   
10. What % of FW costs are for production, transportation, head office, marketing/sales, science. Do these sum to 100%?
    
    Stuei: Science? Damn, this is just water. There's no science! We spend 80% of our money on packaging, marketing and transport. We break-even on wages. Those costs eat into our profits, but we are able to maintain those at 75 percent of revenues. The only boys who make money than us (water! it's just water!) are Bill Gates ($200 cds!) and the US Mint ($100 for $0.01?! Awesome!).
    
    
11. Why should people buy FW? Why FW instead of Aquafina (muni water) or Perrier (spring)
    
    Stuei: Because they are shallow poseurs afraid of their plumbing. Oh, and our bottles are square!
    
    
12. Thanks Mr. Resnick Stuei!
    
    Stuei: No worries kid. I love the media. Have a bottle to go, 50 percent off for you, amigo.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange

WikiLeaks, the crusading anti-secrecy organization that just published 90,000 pages of secret government documents about the war in Afghanistan, has gotten a lot of attention for its campaign to become the world's repository of whistle-blowing and embargo-busting information, and leader Julian Assange has become the star of the political talk show circuit. But the most interesting thing about WikiLeaks and the release of the secret Afghan documents isn't the details of the U.S. campaign it's what the incident says about the evolution of a truly distributed and dis-aggregated new media ecosystem.

Shadowy sources have been disclosing secret information of all kinds to newspapers and magazines for decades, ever since Watergate made it seem like a public service to do so. But in this case, there was a middleman in the process, and one with a considerable amount of power far more than any other source in a similar situation. WikiLeaks didn't get the documents directly, but was given them by another unnamed source (possibly Bradley Manning, who was the source of an earlier secret video of a U.S. military attack on civilians in Iraq). The site then proceeded to broker a deal with the New York Times, The Guardian and Germany's Der Spiegel, whereby the media outlets could have access to the documents and publish stories based on them simultaneously. Columbia Journalism Review has a detailed step-by-step account of how it happened.

Not everyone thinks WikiLeaks represents a fundamental transformation of journalism in the Internet age, mind you. Doug Saunders, the European bureau chief for the Globe and Mail newspaper, said on Twitter that Wikileaks gave us the War Logs scoop in same way the brown-envelope industry gave us Pentagon Papers or parking garages uncovered Watergate (although he later conceded that WikiLeaks was a useful vehicle). But comparing WikiLeaks and what it was able to accomplish to a source with a brown envelope in a parking garage as Deep Throat was for the Washington Post reporters who broke the Watergate scandal in the 1970s misses the larger point.

As New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen has noted, even after it provided the documents to the media outlets, WikiLeaks still maintained the ultimate control over them including the ability to publish all 90,000 of them at the same time that the stories based on them appeared in the NYT, Guardian and Der Spiegel. This, Rosen says, provided an almost unprecedented check on the traditional media, since any gaps or omissions from their stories would become obvious. Typically, sources cut exclusive deals with a single outlet, and that entity has the final say over what appears but WikiLeaks has altered that traditional balance of power.

You can get a sense of how shaken up this new arrangement has made some traditional journalists, by looking at the response from the NYT reporter who worked with WikiLeaks on the documents, and from NYT editor Bill Keller. The latter defended the newspaper's decision not to link to the full storehouse of WikiLeaks documents, and also said that he felt compelled to pass on to the group the government's displeasure at the publication of U.S. government informants' names and other information, which Keller said he did at the request of the White House. Meanwhile, reporter Eric Schmitt seemed to recoil at the idea that the incident was any kind of partnership between the newspaper of record and the shadowy info-hacker organization:

I've seen Julian Assange in the last couple of days kind of flouncing around talking about this collaboration like the four of us were working all this together but we were not in any kind of partnership or collaboration with him. This was a source relationship. He's making it sound like this was some sort of journalistic enterprise between WikiLeaks, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Der Spiegel, and that's not what it was.

Regardless of whether Schmitt or Keller are comfortable with the existence of what Rosen has called the world's first stateless news organization, however, the fact remains that the Internet not only allows an entity such as WikiLeaks to exist, but gives it far more power than any previous non-journalistic organization when it comes to affecting the news cycle. The fact that sources with secret data can now go to an entity that doesn't have to answer to any state or even international authority gives WikiLeaks a leg up on even the New York Times, which has made questionable decisions about significant news stories in the past (such as the lead-up to the war in Iraq, for example) for a variety of reasons. As Steve Myers at the Poynter Institute put it:

In inserting itself between source and publisher, WikiLeaks has shifted power away from the monoliths that once determined what is news and toward the people who, before the Web, would have been stopped in the newspaper lobby before they could see a reporter.

Media writer David Carr of the New York Times called the WikiLeaks case an example of asymmetric journalism, in which the source of information is also a publisher, but also works together with traditional media to make secret data public for society's benefit. C.W. Anderson at the Nieman Journalism Lab called it a classic case study of the new ecosystem of news diffusion:

from new fact-gatherers, to news organizations in a different position in the informational chain, all the way to the Twittersphere in which conversation about the story was occurring in real-time, back to the bloggers, the opinion makers, the partisans, the politicians, and the hacks. This is how news works in 2010.

British journalism professor George Brock calls what happened with WikiLeaks and the two newspapers and magazine a mutualisation of journalism a term that has also been used by The Guardian to describe the newspaper's approach to modern media, which includes an open platform that allows developers to re-use its content, and blog plug-ins that allow bloggers and The Guardian to share content. And WikiLeaks has in mind its own kind of plug-in: an embeddable disclosure and upload form that would allow newspapers to solicit secret documents and then hand them over to WikiLeaks for safe-keeping.

The New York Times and other traditional media entities may not like it, but it isn't just the business model of journalism and the media that is changing; it's the fundamental structure of the industry and how it functions. And they had better get used to it. Yes, WikiLeaks needed the Times and The Guardian and Der Spiegel to draw attention to and filter some of the information deluge it had on its hands, but the balance of power between source and publication has clearly been altered, and journalism will likely never be the same.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req'd): What We Can Learn From the Guardian's Open Platform

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users New Media Days, Menage a Moi and Yan Arief

Content farms have been in the spotlight over the past year. They're companies that generate hundreds or thousands of new pieces of content on a daily basis. Much of their traffic comes from Google search, so the aim of content farms is to rake in the money with online advertising. Demand Media has been the most ambitious of these companies, but even the big portals are doing it nowadays. Yahoo! recently acquired Associated Content and AOL launched an initiative earlier this year disingeniously called Seed.

In our content farms coverage so far, we've focused mostly on textual content farms. But video may well be the next frontier. A startup called Howcast specializes in mass production of video content.

Sponsor

I spoke to Sanjay Raman, Chief Product Officer at Howcast, to find out what its strategy is and what he thinks of Demand Media and other competitors.

How Howcast Works

As the name suggests, Howcast is all about how-to videos. As with other 'content farm' companies, Howcast has identified a big opportunity to provide so-called "evergreen" informational content on the Web across hundreds of thousands of categories. The rationale being that people search, mostly on Google, for instructional content. How To Shuck an Oyster, How to Save Water in Your Garden, How to Avoid Dropped Calls on the iPhone 4, and so on.

Howcast is betting that how-to videos will have more relevance to searchers in the near future, than textual how-to articles. And given that YouTube is already the 2nd largest search engine in the world, behind only Google, that seems a solid business assumption.

Distribution

Howcast launched in February 2008 and now has nearly 200,000 instructional videos. It streams 25 million videos each month on both its own web site and across a network that includes web portals like AOL and Yahoo, and TV-on-demand sites like Hulu and Dailymotion. Its biggest distribution platform though is YouTube, where it has over 150,000 channel subscribers. Raman said that around 80% of its videos are viewed offsite, with 20% being viewed on Howcast's web site.

It also has a strong mobile presence, which Raman said was key to Howcast's future growth. He noted that Howcast has had over 2 million app downloads across the iPhone, iPad, Android, and BlackBerry devices. The Howcast for iPad app alone has been installed by 150,000 iPad users (approximately 5% of global iPad users) and was for a time the number 2 free iPad app in Apple's App Store.

Raman noted that user engagement is very good on mobile - for example users watch videos on average twice a day and watch two videos per session. Perhaps for this reason, Raman said that the value of users on mobile is much higher than on other platforms.

The Quality Question

In my discussion with Sanjay Raman, Chief Product Officer at Howcast, the word "quality" came up a number of times.

Every time I talk to 'content farm' companies, they insist that the aim is to produce quality content. That's because the most common criticism of content farms is that they clog up search engines with poor quality content.

In Howcast's case, the content appears to be professionally produced. It outputs about 400 how-to videos each month, most of which flows through its Emerging Filmmakers Program. Raman said that the program attracts wanna-be filmmakers, who are looking for a place to prove their skills. Howcast pays between $50-$300 per video.

Raman told me that Howcast wants to keep the content bar high. He claimed that Howcast has a much higher ratio of subscribers per video than Demand Media. Howcast is "not necessarily playing the volume game," he added.

Comparison to Demand Media

Who is the top YouTube provider, measured by views? You guessed it, Demand Media. This is because it produces far more video content per month than Howcast (Demand competes directly with Howcast with its property eHow). While Sanjay Raman didn't have exact figures, he estimated that Demand Media produces about 10 times more videos every month than Howcast. However he implied that this resulted in lower quality videos.

"Demand Media takes tasks and makes them smaller than they need to be," said Raman.

He also claimed that Howcast's playbacks per video are higher than Demand Media's. Howcast averages 44-50,000 playbacks per video, he told me, whereas Demand is around 7,000 per video.

Despite Demand Media Threat, Howcast Well Positioned

Many questions about content farms seem to center around whether other companies can compete with Demand Media, which operates on a much larger scale than its competitors. Perhaps the only company capable of stopping Demand's relentless growth is Google, which is reportedly tweaking its algorithms to better account for quality over quantity.

Howcast is hoping that its focus on professional video-making, via its filmmakers program, will lead to high search results. That remains to be seen. One thing that Howcast definitely has going for it is its positioning in the mobile space, which is increasingly where video content is consumed.

There's no better time to be alive than right now as far as I'm concerned. The food is awesome, there's great music being made all over the world and we have this fantastic little thing called the Internet, which allows me to work with good friends from all over the planet.

Yep, 2010 is the best year yet.

This deep love I have for today doesn't mean I don't occasionally wish awesome things from the past would come back, however. In the early 80's most of the best games were text-based, meaning the graphics were provided by the player's imagination. Just as film-making will never match books in my opinion, modern graphics haven't yet caught up to the power of well-written text games and their ability to harness the imagination. But today such games are all gone, right?

Nope. Like I said, the best time to be alive is right now, and a big part of why is the Internet. There are countless text interactive fiction games being made now, three decades past the medium's commercial prime, and they're almost all freely available on the Internet. Called Interactive Fiction today, a list of the best games in this field would take ages to compile, so I'll just show you a sampling of my favorite games that can be freely played online.

Lost Pig And Place Underground by Grunk

Pig lost! Boss say that it Grunk fault. Say Grunk forget about closing gate. Maybe boss right. Grunk not remember forgetting, but maybe Grunk just forget. Boss say Grunk go find pig, bring it back. Him say, if Grunk not bring back pig, not bring back Grunk either. Grunk like working at pig farm, so now Grunk need find pig.

So begins this less-than-epic quest, in which our hero attempts to find a pig.

No, really: that's the plot. And it's amazing.

This short game's narrative voice is deceptively simple, and will have you laughing out loud more than once as you play it. It also features some pretty good adventure-game-style puzzles, but don't give up too quickly: you can deduce everything easily, making this a great game for beginners.

You can play Lost Pig online right now or find more information about Lost Pig at the Interactive Fiction Database (IFDB.)

The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams

Like many geeks I'm an avid devotee of Douglas Adams' writing in general and the famous Hitchhiker's Guide media franchise in particular. I love the radio series, the television show, the books and even tolerated the movie. I'm also quite fond of the classic Infocom game of the same title.

Happily this classic is playable online today. Find a version of the interactive fiction game with some graphics at the BBC's website or the text version at Douglas Adam's website.

The real charm of this game is its narrative voice the text was written by Adams himself. This game is not easy, and includes no hint system, but devotees of Adams' work should struggle through it's worth it just for the one-liners.

For A Change by Dan Schmidt

The sun has gone. It must be brought. You have a rock.

If you think that reads more like poetry than it does a game you're probably right. This is a game as well as a poem, and a pretty good one at that.

A surrealistic adventure featuring an invented vocabulary provides an experience no other medium possibly could, and makes a strong case for the continued existence of text games. Be sure to check this one out.

Play For a Change' online or find out more about the game and download links at IFDB.

Photopia by Adam Cadre

Less a game than it is a story, Photopia is considered by many to be the most influential piece of interactive fiction in the post-Infocom era.

For this reason I highly recommend trying it out, although I fear talking too much about the plot will give too much away. I personally find this game beautiful, though there has always been controversy surrounding it so make up your own mind.

Check out Photopia now or find out more about the game over at IFDB.

Whom The Telling Changed by Aaron A. Reed

As your village in ancient Mesopotamia decides whether or not to go to war the legendary story of Gilgamesh is told. Your role is to, by asking the right questions, manipulate public opinion toward fighting or not fighting. This game is great if you have a working knowledge of the Gilgamesh epic (read it free here) and even better for repeat playing, as there are multiple possible endings.

Click here to play Who The Telling Changed now or read more about the game at IFDB.

Infocom Games

If you're wondering where Zork is, the answer is that it's hard to say. Technically Activision owns the rights to the Zork trilogy and the rest of the (amazing) Infocom library, which fueled the 80's text game craze. They've not released any of these titles recently so far as I know.

This website seems to feature pretty much all of them, however, and you can play them in your browser. I'm not sure how legal this is, but it's there and working.

Conclusion

This is but a small number of the text-based games you can find online, of course. You can find many more over at the IFDB, which serves as an online database of the many free games available. You'll also find downloading instructions for any particular game there.

Well, do you think text games could be funor do you lack the attention span for them? Do any Interactive Fiction fans recommend games that I missed here? Comment away; we won't tell you that you can't.

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RIM takes control of blackpad.com, laughter takes control of our minds originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 28 Jul 2010 17:05:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

(In July, I went on a family vacation to Japan. Here are my posts about the trip: The Ghibli Museum | Watermelons in the shape of cubes, hearts, and pyramids | What happened to the Burgie Beer UFO of Melrose Avenue?)

Having been to Tokyo three times previous to our recent vacation, I was excited to take my daughters to Harajuku, a popular teen shopping area in the city. To get there, we took a short ride on the JR Line to Harajuku Station, which has a neat Tudor-esque building built in 1925.

(Harajuku Station photo by Shiny Things. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.)

We took the Takeshita Exit from the station, which lead us to Takeshita Dori, a narrow pedestrian street filled with teen fashion boutiques and creperies.

Many more photos after the jump.

I didn't see anyone smorking (or smoking, for that matter), but I saw plenty of "touts" -- young African men who follow shoppers down the street to try to convince them to shop in stores that hire them to tout their wares. No one seemed to pay any attention to the touts. I wonder how they make a living?

Cheap trinkets were in abundance near the top of the street, giving this part of Takeshita Dori a slightly seedy, past-it's-prime vibe, much the way I remember London's Carnaby Street in the 1980s.

I liked these luggage tags.

My kids had fun shopping in the Tamagotchi store, which has this happy exterior.

Further down Takeshita Dori, the stores get more interesting and less garish.

This store had an airplane fuselage running through it.

Kawaii desu ne!

The little alleys that ran off Takeshita Dori had quiet and intriguing little businesses. This is a hair salon.

As much as I liked climbing the colored stairs and visiting the wee Hide A Way Tree House Concept Salon Cafe & Bar -- which sold drinks, clothes, books, and other select products -- everyone was smoking so we beat a hasty retreat back outside.

Stores in Tokyo have lots of vending machines in them. Some dispense products. Others accepted our 100 yen coins, flashed several screens of Japanese at us, and returned to a dormant state.

My 12-year-old daughter was intrigued by this establishment, which was filled with space-age photo booths. Girls can get their photos taken here, and the photos are automatically altered to make them look like manga characters, with big eyes and washed out complexions.

The photo booth shop had a sign that said "GIRLS ONLY!" but the manager of the store said to us, "Family OK!"

My daughter had some photos taken, and when they came out of the printer, they were tiny. So tiny, in fact, that we seemed to have lost them. (If I find them I will add them to the post.)

More kawaiiness.

A nearby street in Harajuku, called Omotesando, is more upscale than Takeshita Dori. This shady, tree-lined avenue is one of my favorite streets in Tokyo for sitting down, cooling off, and watching the never-ending parade of people go by.

We spent a long time at Kiddy Land, a toy story with six floors.

I can't remember which floor of Kiddy Land was selling these little anatomical models, but aren't they great? I wonder if Audrey Kawasaki used this line of models as reference in the painting we bought from her last year, "I Want to Play?"

Near the Harajuku Station is Yoyogi Park, where cosplayers happily pose for photos.

And where friendly folks give free hugs (we all got hugs!).

We went to the Hello Kitty Ice Cream Stand three times while we were in Japan.

Fabulous crepes abound!

My favorite snack was the hot waffles made on the spot in Yoyogi Park.

The answer is yes, it does. If it didn't, I wouldn't be able to justify getting out of bed in the morning and charging the outrageous fees that we charge our clients, which they willingly pay.

-A former regulator, now corporate lobbyist, as to whether he had an inside edge in lobbying his ex-colleagues

>

Well, don't let it be said that this Congress isn't creating jobs: The 2,300 page financial reform bill seems to be generating demand for more of what we surely don't need: Corporate Lobbyists.

150 lobbyists that used to work in the executive branch lawyers for the Securities and Exchange Commission, Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Federal Reserve bankers, and other regulatory agencies have registered as lobbyists. Add to that 100s of attorneys scouring the financial regulations on behalf of corporate clients, and you have the makings of a small army of former Federal employees. They are now working for the firms they used to regulate.

The lobbyist's goal? Now that finreg legislation has passed, they seek to influence the future rule making that has been written into the new law. According to a NYT:

The law firm of Davis Polk determined that 243 new financial rules and 67 new studies are required by the legislation.

The S.E.C. must developing 95 rules (derivative trading, credit rating agencies standards, executive bonus disclosure).

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission must develop 61 rules.

Federal Reserve is required to develop 54 specific rules.

The 2 new agencies created by Congress Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Financial Stability Oversight Council will create 80 new financial oversight and disclosure rules.

The firms that will be covered by these rules are seeking to influence them before they are even written: Water them down, reduce disclosure requirements, soften oversight, neuter penalties.

As we previously discussed, the bang these firms get for their bucks is extraordinary.

The battle continues . . .

>

Previously:
Government for Sale: 2009 Lobbying $3.49 Billion (July 14th, 2010)

Source:
Ex-Regulators Get Set to Lobby on New Financial Rules
ERIC LICHTBLAU
NYT, July 27, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/28/business/28lobby.html

via http://www.karinandraoul.com/2009/07/19/underwater-digital-photography-by-valerie-morignat/#more-7161

Bottled water is healthy water -- or so marketers would have us believe. Just look at the bottled water labels or ads: deep, pristine pools of spring water; majestic alpine peaks ... In reality, bottled water is just water; however, that fact isn't stopping people from buying a lot of it.

Here are some solid reasons to kick the bottled water habit from our friends at Term Life Insurance.

Source: Term Life Insurance

EMBED THE IMAGE ABOVE ON YOUR SITE

Via: Term Life Insurance

I have just returned to the US from a couple of weeks vacation in Ireland and England. I was more than usually struck by my bookstore (aka book shop) experiences, and this prompted the curation entry I have just written.

First of all, an interesting note that I have quoted before about the management of supply and demand. Gavin Potter was a competitor in the competition to improve the Netflix recommendation algorithm. He was interviewed by Wired Magazine:

"The 20th century was about sorting out supply," Potter says. "The 21st is going to be about sorting out demand." The Internet makes everything available, but mere availability is meaningless if the products remain unknown to potential buyers. [This Psychologist Might Outsmart the Math Brains Competing for the Netflix Prize]

In the physical world, sorting out supply meant providing large aggregations of materials local to potential customers/users. For many, this function has shifted to the network where Amazon and others can provide large aggregations, improved by ranking, relating and recommending based on usage data. This suggests that a role for the physical retailer may shift from managing supply to managing demand or consumption, seeking to identify and meet particular needs. Here are some examples. I should note that my remarks are those of a consumer - I certainly don't have an internal perspective of the book retail business!

• Herne Hill Books is the smallest book shop I have been in! Put several people in it and it is crowded. It is in a plot of cafes and other shops beside the busy Herne Hill train station in South East London. I did not see its bigger sibling, Clapham Books. Like other small independent shops, it has stuff covered in the reviews, some materials of local interest, some stuff reflecting the manager's view of what might be of interest, and Scandinavian crime fiction. Here is an appreciative note about it which points to its art, photography, travel and cookery books. It caters for the gift buyer, the impulse buyer, and in this case it is well placed to cater for the traveller. And stocks some tasteful cards or other small items. Similar, if bigger, was the Rathgar Bookshop in Dublin, which had a range of gardening books in the mix. Such shops are likely to survive based on the strength of their curation, providing enough of distinctive interest alongside a selection of more general materials to draw in customers. (And in looking at them I am reminded of a comment from a while ago about the curation skills of public librarians, which I adapt slightly here: Books live in the lives of their readers. Readers also live in the lives of their books. And, in the libraries that he is talking about, I always thought that the mark of very good library staff was that they understood their collection based on the readers in the lives of its books, but also understood their readers based on the books in their lives.)
• We spent some time in Royal Festival Hall branch of Foyle's. Larger than the shops above, it much smaller than the Charing Cross branch (which is distinctive in the breadth of its stock). However, we were struck by what appeared to be a selection very well suited to its location, and which had some interesting features, including a table of books published in the 1950s.
• I spent some time in the large Waterstone's on Dawson St in Dublin. I was interested to see a greater emphasis than I have noticed before on staff selections and presentations. For example, in addition to straightforward staff picks, there were desert island reads and summer crime selections. The pattern was repeated throughout the store. And there is a large cafe. Across the street, Hodges Figgis is a large store, but is distinctive in that it has a large selection of materials of Irish interest. (Waterstone's and Hodges Figgis are both owned by the HMV Group.)

I am very fond of our local Border's. We spent a lot of time in it when we first moved to the States and our children were younger. It was comfortable and welcoming. In recent years its stock has got smaller, so, from a supply perspective, it more often than not will be lacking what I am looking for. We used to buy CDs there, but it no longer has a large collection, presumably because other people's pattern of consumption - towards online - has changed in ways similar to our own. I used to buy English and Irish newspapers there, but it gets them late and, again, online reading has replaced some of this need. I sometimes wonder how it should develop to better 'sort out demand'.

Related:

• On the discrimination of curations and curators ...
• Recommendation and Ranganathan
• Aura again: habent sua fata libelli
• Libraries and the long tail (considers how the long tail argument is about better matching supply and demand through aggregation in a network environment)

BEIJING (Reuters) - Almost a quarter of China's surface water remains so polluted that it is unfit even for industrial use, while less than half of total supplies are drinkable, data from the environment watchdog showed on Monday.

Inspectors from China's Ministry of Environmental Protection tested water samples from the country's major rivers and lakes in the first half of the year and declared just 49.3 percent to be safe for drinking, up from 48 percent last year, the ministry said in a notice posted on its website (www.mep.gov.cn).

Shared by Jesse Stay
I'm curious how this relates in scope to what Daniel Ellsberg did, where he leaked similar info to the New York Times, who subsequently published it. This leak led to one of the most important 1st amendment court battles in this Nation's History, leading to the ruling that NYT was in the right to publish information that was to the benefit of the American people (but perhaps painted the government in a bad light). This leak ended up leading to the Watergate scandal and impeachment of Nixon.

Is this anywhere similar in scope?

An archive of classified U.S. military logs spanning six years, more than 91,000 documents, and 200,000 pages, was today made available by WikiLeaks. The papers show a picture of the war in Afghanistan that is far more grim, and far less hopeful, than previously portrayed.

The New York Times, London's Guardian newspaper and Der Spiegel in Germany were offered early access to the archive, the contents of which show "why, after the United Sates has spent almost $300 billion on the war in Afghanistan, the Taliban are stronger than at any time since 2001," according to the NYT.

This classified military information release by WikiLeaks is its first since publishing a video in April that shows a 2007 US Apache helicopter attack which killed a dozen people in Baghdad, including two Reuters photojournalists.

The NYT notes the following focal points in this massive leak:

* Americans fighting the war in Afghanistan have long harbored strong suspicions that Pakistan's military spy service guides the Afghan insurgency that fights American troops, even as Pakistan receives more than $1 billion in U.S. aid.

* The C.I.A.'s paramilitary operations are expanding in Afghanistan.

* The Taliban has used portable, heat-seeking missiles against Western aircraft -- weapons that helped defeat the Soviet occupation in the 1980s.

The "War Diary" page at Wikileaks states:

We have delayed the release of some 15,000 reports from the total archive as part of a harm minimization process demanded by our source. After further review, these reports will be released, with occasional redactions, and eventually, in full, as the security situation in Afghanistan permits.

The White House has issued a response. The statement from national security adviser Gen. James Jones emphasizes two points: first, the administration asserts that this leak of classified information endangers the lives of Americans and America's war allies. Second, the administration points out that the logs cover actions between January 2004 (when Bush was in power) and December 2009 (when President Obama announced a "new approach" to the war in Afghanistan).

"Afghan War Diary, 2004-2010" in CSV, SQL, KML formats. (Wikileaks)

"The War Logs" (NYT)

"Inside the Fog of War: Reports From the Ground in Afghanistan" (NYT)

"Text From a Selection of the Secret Dispatches" (NYT)

"In Disclosing Secret Documents, WikiLeaks Seeks 'Transparency'" (NYT)

"Piecing Together the Reports, and Deciding What to Publish" (NYT)

"Julian Assange on the Afghanistan war logs: 'They show the true nature of this war'" (Guardian)

"Wikileaks Afghanistan files: download the key incidents as a spreadsheet" (Guardian)

"Afghanistan war logs: Story behind biggest leak in intelligence history" (Guardian)

"Afghanistan war logs: the glossary" (Guardian)

[video] "Secret files: Wikileaks exposes 'unseen war'" (Channel 4 News)

Image: An interactive map available at the Guardian website shows locations and dates tied to documents in the leaked Afghanistan war logs.

A federal judge ruled this week that Vitaminwater will not, as its labels promise, keep you "healthy as a horse." Nor will it bring about a "healthy state of physical or mental being". Instead, Vitaminwater is really just a sugary snack food; non-carbonated fruit coke disguised as a sports drink. Because it's composed mostly of sugar and not vitamin-laden water, judge John Gleeson held that Vitaminwater's absurd marketing claims were likely to mislead consumers.

Coke tried to explain away claims like "vitamins + water = all you need" as "only puffery." The judge disagreed.

By including the suggestion that the product will keep you healthy or help bring about a healthy state of physical and mental being alongside such statements, the quoted language implies that the nutrient content of vitaminwater may help consumers maintain healthy dietary practices. I conclude, therefore, in light of the language and context in which they are used, that the statements on the defense and B- Relaxed labels constitute implied nutrient content claims which use the word healthy. Such claims are in violation of violation of FDA regulations because . . . vitaminwater achieves its nutritional content solely through fortification that violates FDA policy.

Lawsuit Over Deceptive Vitaminwater Claims to Proceed [CSPI] (Press Release)
Order on Motion to Dismiss [U.S. District Court] (pdf)

If the new cap on the BP wellhead continues to hold we may be moving from containment to consequences. Still, it's hard to measure the long term impacts of the Deepwater Horizon Disaster on the Gulf of Mexico. By my second trip to the region last week there were over 45,000 people and 6,000 vessels and aircraft involved in the response.

Still, some of the clean up effects are questionable. Off Ocean Springs Mississippi with Gulf Coast Research Lab Director Bill Hawkins I watched a crew of ten men with three flat boats trying to spray wash about 80 feet of oiled marsh grass to little effect. Nearby they were protecting a rock jetty rather than wetlands. In Louisiana's Barataria Bay I've seen miles of oiled wetlands that act as the nurseries and filters of the sea and provide a livelihood for fishermen and their communities.

Flying over the Gulf in June with Waterkeeper John Wathen and SouthWings conservation pilot Tom Hutchings I'd seen 100 dolphins and a sperm whale trapped and dying in the oil. Off Mississippi I saw dozens of brown pelicans. Their return to the Gulf in the past decade, years after DDT was banned is considered a huge environmental success story. Now these birds are threatened by the oil and chemical dispersants as are sea turtles, tuna and whale sharks.

I went out with scientists Jim Franks and Steve Curran from the lab sampling possible toxic impacts on juvenile tripletail fish. These baby fish live under floating sargassum algae. Some change their colors to
gold and green to look like the weedy algae. Others are now living under floating oil blobs and camouflage themselves by turning black and brown like the oil. Our nets and boat bottom were soon splashed with oil.

At the entry to Biloxi Bay there are extensive booms to try and protect the estuary and a fleet of shrimp boats skimming oil. Nearby Horn Island has already been hit by the oil as have many of the Gulf's barrier islands. Last time I was here less than five years ago many of these shrimp boats were driven ashore by Hurricane Katrina along with floating Casino Barges. The beaches that I once saw covered in debris are now clean and empty in mid-July as tourists are flocking away from the oil-threatened Gulf to other safer sands.

I drive from Louisiana and Mississippi to Pensacola Florida where the sugar white sands of local beaches are also boomed off and clean up crews are removing tar balls that have also washed ashore.

Here I board the Coast Guard Cutter Resolve heading out to the Deepwater Horizon spill site where a new cap is being placed that will hopefully stop the ongoing eruption of oil from the wellhead until a relief well can kill it.

Steaming to the source we pass through different kinds of ugly, oil that looks brown as maple syrup in our wake and oil sheens in deep purple and gold and aged orange oil and new black oil. The last time I flew over this part of the Gulf there were oil slicks out to the horizon.

The BP source has become a floating city of some 75 rigs and ships and workboats and a giant supertanker. The Q-4000 rig is burning off 6,000 barrels of oil a day in a black plume of oily smoke while collector ships like the Helix Producer are flaring natural gas and controlled burns of surface oil are being set off on the horizon. This reminds me of oil terminals off Iraq I visited in the Persian Gulf war zone -- only this is more like cancer than war, with the metastasizing oil spreading across the water.

We visit BP's Command and Control ship Seacor Lee where I'm told the cap is now in place and ready for testing (the tests will prove inconclusive but the cap will hold for now).

A Coast Guard Dolphin Helicopter flies me and a crew from CNN back to Air Station New Orleans where their helicopter crews saved over 6,000 people during hurricane Katrina. On the way we fly over streaks of aging oil spread for miles across the Gulf.

Though fewer have died this is a longer lasting and potentially more destructive disaster than Katrina for the Gulf's people and marine wildlife.

And if this hurricane season is as bad as predicted it could also be raining oil and blackening beaches from Florida to Texas by the fall. Our efforts to boom off bird rookeries and protect the coastline may be valiant but still seem feeble more than 80 days into this mess.

Among other needed changes we have to end our dependence on coal and oil, energy systems of the 16th and 19th centuries and develop clean offshore energy. After all no coastline or culture was ever destroyed by a wind spill or a turning tide.

As a writer I realize we're also entering the age of multiplatform media. You can watch the video version of this report I narrated and shot. My friend Ted Woerner edited it together.

Every disaster is always bigger than the last one. Newspapers and tv anchors have to say that, don't they? Otherwise it wouldn't be news. But those slick-covered birds look the same every time. A bit distressing, but what's a pelican for, at the end of the day? To be honest, this disaster is getting a bit boring. Haven't they capped that well yet?

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill (1) is the worst environmental disaster in US history. But it's a catastrophe of the creeping, cumulative kind, composed of images familiar from earlier ecocides. How to get a grip on its width and breadth? Obviously: a map. Ingeniously: a map of the area affected by the oil spill transposed on your geographic location of choice your home, for optimum shock effect.

This simple act of teleportation, by the almost appropriately named website www.ifitwasmyhome.com (2) , puts a stark perspective on the disaster's geographic impact, now stretching from the coast of Louisiana to the Florida Panhandle. The immediate, visual result is immensely more powerful than crude statistics (3):

Since the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig on April 20 (killing 11 crew), over 1 million US gallons have been spilling into the Gulf of Mexico every day, by now adding up to almost 50 million gallons. A recent study by the University of Miami puts the surface of the oil spill at about 10,000 square miles (almost 26,000 square km), or triple its size on May 1st. This means the affected area is rapidly approaching that oft-cited (4) unit of large-surface measurement, the size of Belgium (11,787 sq mi, or 30,528 km2).

The spill's size is less abstract (and more ominous) if transported from its aquatic domain to a land-based vantage point. Centred on London (placing the gushing wellhead somewhere below Westminster), the area affected by the spill covers most of southern England, almost touching Swansea in Wales and nearly spilling over onto the French coast at Dunkirk. The area does look a lot larger than Belgium, to the spill's east. One assumes that the calculations of Miami U refer to the darker-shaded areas within the total affected region.

You too can centre the spillage on your hometown. Go to the website (cf. sup.) See how far you would have to travel to stay clear of the oily mess. Then zoom out to see how large it is on a global scale (spoiler: quite large!) Maybe not the most uplifting of pastimes, but an intelligent way to impress the scale of this disaster on our minds, saturated as they are by superlatives.

Many thanks to Stannous Flouride for sending in this link.

-

(1) Or the BP oil spill, if you insist on naming, shaming and/or blaming the guilty.

(2) If it were my home, indeed. There is no need to compound ecocide with grammaticrime.

(3) excusez le pun.

(4) an entire website is dedicated to the recurrence of this rather unusual unit of surface.

As part of a new campaign launched by Toyota of Sweden, the company is asking all drivers, regardless of their allegiance to the Toyota brand, to imagine that they have a cup of water on their dashboard when driving. In so doing, Toyota says you can lower your fuel consumption by 10%.

(more)

Shared by Mihai
Related fun fact: I always identified with the mechanic/guy who keeps things running in Mad Max/Waterworld/other post-apocalyptic movies.

There's a deceptively simple question that's been bugging me this week, and it is this:

What is the minimum number of people you need in order to maintain (not necessarily to extend) our current level of technological civilization?

There are huge political ramifications hiding behind this question. Let me unpack them for you.

Conservative politicians in the US and elsewhere get a lot of mileage from appeals to false nostalgia, to a yearning for a time when things were simpler, everyone was sturdily self-sufficient or knew their place (or both), and government was small (sometimes small enough to drown in a bathtub). Nostalgia trips manifest themselves in all sorts of curious places. In SF (the literary field I know most about) we have the perennial libertarian/space colonization nexus.We have Ayn Rand, and her wish-fulfilment nerd fantasy of a world sustained by a tiny, overworked minority of geniuses who, if only they could demand a level of rewards corresponding to their work, would be rich beyond dreams of avarice (and able to make the trains run on time). Outside it, we have the peculiarly rustic aspirations of the green fringe, who'd like to see a world of five million or so pre-industrial humans living in harmony with nature. In the Republican party of the United States we see rhetoric couched in hatred for "big government", and among the UK's conservatives we see an almost masochistic addiction to cuts in public spending framed with calls for a big society in which many current government services will be delivered by voluntary citizens groups instead.

I think these ideas are mostly delusional because they rely on a fundamental misapprehension about the world around us namely that we live in a society that can be made simple enough to comprehend.

Let's take a look at the superficial structures around us. How many people does it take to design a new automobile? Back in Henry Ford's day, it needed an office full of draughtsmen, a handle of senior engineers to sort out each major mechanical subsystem (gear train, engine, electrics, brakes, suspension, bodywork), and experts on coachbuilding to dictate the shape of the bodywork. There would be time and motion men to dictate the speed and sequence of assembly line activities, and more drafting work to design the tools the production line workers would use ... it took the effort of a few hundred men.

But modern cars are different. A typical 2010 automobile may contain roughly 20-30 electric motors and actuators (for everything from the central locking system to the air conditioning and the motorized seats and windows). There's a similar number of microprocessors involved in everything from the engine and gearbox management systems to the entertainment, navigation, communication, and accident mitigation systems (for example, the sensors and microprocessors that control the sequence of pyrotechnic detonators that inflate air bags, tension seat belts, and collapse the steering column in event of a collision). The in-car electronics alone require on the order of 10-20 million lines of code to run all these services which implies the combined efforts of thousands of software developers, never mind the small army who design not only the body panels but the handling tools the production line robots use to install them. Cars are no longer user-serviceable because they're nearly as complex as 1960s airliners.

And as for your smartphone? The damned thing has a component count somewhere between ten major subsystems and frame components and a hundred billion (if you go down to the smallest scale and count the capacitors in its FLASH memory). The number of fab lines on the planet that can make memory chips of that density is limited, and they rely on rare elements mined only in exotic locations and in tiny abundance.

Medicine: let's not go there. Back in the late 19th century, we had doctors, nurses, surgeons, pharmacists, and dentists. Today, each of those professions has exploded into platoons and battalions of sub-specialities, and their roles are supported in turn by complex industries full of strange niches.

Around 1900, it took the effort of about 20-30% of a nation's work-force to provide food for everybody; and another 30-50% working in factories to produce clothing, machinery, and processed materials like bricks and billets of pig iron. Today, we only need 0.5-1% of the work force to feed everyone, and another 1-4% working in industry to produce the basics but the microspecialities have exploded, to the extent that a lot of our needs seem to require a trans-national economy to provide. There are only two vendors of wide-body airliners on any scale today, Boeing and Airbus, and both of them are effectively multinational consortia (more than half the components of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner are produced overseas, and shipped to Seattle for final assembly). There seems to only be room for one vendor of super-Jumbo airliners if Boeing and Airbus tried to exploit that niche simultaneously, they'd both starve so they appear to be avoiding conflict in that (and some other) area(s). And so on.

So. I ask: how many people does it take, as a minimum, to maintain our current level of technological civilization?

I'd put an upper bound of about one billion on the range, because that encompasses basically the entire population of NAFTA and the EU, with Japan, Taiwan, and the industrial enterprise zones of China thrown in for good measure. (While China is significant, more than half of its population is still agrarian, hence not providing inputs to this system).

I'd put a lower bound of 100 million on the range, too. The specialities required for a civil aviation sector alone may well run to half a million people; let's not underestimate the needs of raw material extraction and processing (from crude oil to yttrium and lanthanum), of a higher education/research sector to keep training the people we need in order to replenish small pools of working expertise, and so on. Hypothetically, we may only need 500 people in one particular niche, but that means training 20 of them a year to keep the pool going, plus future trainers, and an allowance for wastage and drop-outs by people who made a bad career choice. Higher education accounts for 1.8-3% of gross spending in the developed world, with primary and secondary education taking a whopping chunk on top of that (if you spent 10 years in a school with a staff:pupil ratio of 1:10, then you soaked up a person-year of time; there may be more labour going into pre-university education than goes into agriculture and industry combined).

As to those political implications ...

Firstly: no, you can't simplify a complex society that runs on just-in-time delivery and a host of specialities. You need a huge training back-end to provide for the thousands of skilled graduate-entry niche occupations. You need an efficient just-in-time delivery system to keep everyone supplied with food, water, power, shelter and whatever else they need it's that, or accept huge inefficiencies in your supply chain that wipe out the gains produced elsewhere.

Secondly, seemingly similar artefacts (cars, phones, airliners) have invisibly accreted complexity. The complexity makes them better (safer, more economical, more luxurious) than their predecessors, but vastly more difficult to engineer; stuff that used to be fixable by shade-tree mechanics and jobbing electricians has receded over the horizon. Back in the early 19th century, the complement of a sailing ship could expect to maintain the ship in every significant way using tools and expertise that they could carry aboard the ship. Today in the early 21st century, that's not an option with airliners or probably even automobiles.

Thirdly, the complexity embodies in these new products means that their production is dependent on a complex web of lower-level specialities.

Fourthly, there are more side-effects to keep track of. Exotic materials mean exotic contamination events from waste dumping, for example.

Fifthly: space colonization? Get back to me when you've tracked down how many people it takes to design and build a space suit. (The number is in the hundreds, if not the thousands.) More realistically, we won't have autonomous off-world colonies unless and until they can cover all the numerous specialities of the complex civilization that spawned the non-autonomous, dependent-on-resupply space program. Or, to put it another way: colonizing Mars might well be practical, but only if we can start out by plonking a hundred million people down there.

Shared by phillip
@Shannon Lucas, this website doesn't make me want to spend time in the great outdoors. :P

As far as stunt activism goes, dropping a dirty-water vending machine in the middle of Manhattan during World Water Week is one helluva attention-grabber. For UNICEF's Tap Project, however, it also distilled the global water crisis in a way New Yorkers could not sidestep: by bottling and selling Dirty Water for a dollar a pop. Available flavors? Typhoid, malaria, cholera, or hepatitis.

Read the rest of UNICEF's Dirty Water Vending Machine Has 8 Flavors of Diseasehttp://www.inhabitat.com/wp-admin/ohttp://www.inhabitat.com/wp-admin/options-general.php?page=better_feedptions-general.php?page=better_feed

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