Nov 22, 09
The Future of Environmental Law Mapping
By Laurent Granier Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and mapping offer great opportunities for the transfer of legal data from books to maps. GIS applications have been evolving in many directions, well beyond geography. Many fields such as environmental economics, social science, health science and administration are now aggregated with scientific representations. The methods for environmental and social mapping are now participatory too. Together, these tools offer new, integrated...
CFCM Show and Tell: Making Change
Ryan Toole is designing a platform called Red Ink, a tool designed to enable secure, collective financial action. He points out that there are existing tools – wesabe, mint.com, yodlee – which unify your online financial information. The bleeding edge in this field is financial tools for collective action – carrotmob, groupon, merry miser, buy it like you mean it. Red Ink fits into this latter category. It’s a “social financial platform” designed to let...
Can Finance Save Forests?
By Martin Wright If rainforests are so valuable, why can’t we make them pay? For years, that was a rhetorical question. Not any more. Martin Wright on our last, best hope of saving forests – and the climate. It’s a gorgeous June day, 2040, deep in the Amazon rainforest. Peering through the clouds, you can see your pension plan – the vibrant greens of the canopy, reassuringly intact. Panning left, you can just make out the line of the last logging road, long swallowed up by the...
Neri Oxman: Design is Truly Alive
Ethan Zuckerman is blogging from Camden, Maine, at the wonderful Pop!Tech conference. Celebrated designer Neri Oxman wonders what is the origin of form? How do we invent form? Is it a preconcieved image of narrative? Intelligent design? Getting rid of the stone in the way, as Michelangelo speculated? If form is to follow function, how is that function tested and evaluated? It has been my assumption that design by shift of perspective may be, perhaps, considered a second nature. ...
Mapping Main Street
US politicians talk a lot about Main Street. But what does Main Street actually look like in contemporary America? That’s what Harvard PhD students Jesse Shapins and James Burns, and journalist Kara Oehler, along with public radio producer Ann Heppermann, are doing with their “collaborative documentary”, “Mapping Main Street“. Shapins, Burns and Oehler are speaking at Berkman today explaining the nature of a documentary which is attempting to document...
Two Big Steps For Walkability
Big progress in mapping walkable neighborhoods. It's been a big week for walkability, with two steps forward for online mapping of pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods:Walk Score -- which has become North America's most prevalent gauge of neighborhood walkability -- is going open source, so that anyone can see how their rankings work and (just as importantly) suggest improvements. This has a real potential to lead to some major breakthroughs, since it will let academics and others add...
Google Earth 3D Climate Change Simulator Unveiled - Starring Al Gore
Google is using its Google Earth mapping tool to simulate on a 3D map of the world the predicted effects of climate change until the year 2100. Using data provided by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the search giant created new layers for Google Earth showing the range of expected temperature and precipitation changes under different global emissions scenarios that could occur throughout the century. The Sydney Morning Herald further reports these “new tools were...
The Backstory of Stuff: New Sites Enable More Transparency in the Supply Chain
by Kirstin Butler In simpler times, just checking the tag inside a t-shirt was enough to qualify you as a discerning consumer. Choosing goods “made in the USA” over countries with more lenient labor laws meant that you’d done your due diligence as a shopper. As geopolitics have become more complex, though, so too has the supply and demand of stuff; and now making even the most basic purchases can be fraught with considerably more anxiety. The good news is that while the times have...
How Much Would Most People Pay For a Shorter Commute?
by Elana Schor As Washington conventional wisdom has it, raising gas taxes or creating a vehicle miles traveled tax to pay for transportation is impossible during the current recession. After all, who would want to squeeze cash-strapped commuters during tough economic times? As it turns out, the public is very willing to pay for the shorter commuting times that result from less traffic -- and they're willing to pay top dollar, as IBM's new Commuter Pain Index (CPI) shows. When asked what...
57 Million Chances to Get Housing Right
by Lisa Stiffler Here's why and how to build "new urbanist" housing. Two new papers dig into the whys and hows of building higher-density communities, reaching useful and interesting conclusions.First, the whys. The National Research Council's Transportation Research Board calculated the greenhouse gas savings if new housing was more compact and put homes close to jobs and other amenities. "Driving and the Built Environment: Effects of Compact Development on Motorized Travel, Energy...
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