Questioning your predispositions and biases
Harvard has a pretty neat site - www.implicit.Harvard.edu - that offers people the opportunity to take tests that may surprise us with insights into subconscious biases we all have…
BPA Harm
Industry spin nothwithstanding, the prevalence and consequences of BPA in our food are alarming, as noted in this article by Nick Kristof.
Elephant Giving Birth
This video is so remarkable. Elephants are such noble and wise creatures. And nature is the wisest of all.
About Van Jones and Partisan Politics
Very few people in my life have struck me as much as Van Jones for being as exceptionally inspiring, as extraordinarily sincere in their commitment to help improve the lot of others, and as leaders with such well rounded qualifications as Van’s.
Van is a fellow "Young Global Leader" from the World Economic Forum and the subject of a Skoll/Sundance "Stories of Change" documentary. I have known him for many years in very intimate settings, including in international settings where someone else could have been negative about the US or extreme in some sense, but this was never the case with Van Jones.
Van is all about positively inspiring others - and he does that like few others. There is not one bone in Van that is not authentic.
His resignation from the US Administration today - apparently provoked by dirty partisan politics - is a sad step for all Americans. He had been appointed as the "Green Czar" with a brilliant concept of tackling two problems at once with an entrepreneurial solution: overcome disenfranchisement and unemployment of inner-city youth, and address climate change challenges and lack of US competitiveness in the green industry by building programs that train young people with green manufacturing and green industry skills.
Whoever engineered these silly attacks may have won a battle but will lose the war: Van will not be stopped from doing great work for America and the world, and this forced attention at least puts a spotlight on an extraordinary public leader that deserves our support.
People ask me why I hate partisan politics - this is Exhibit #1.
Government 2.0
My friend Andrew McLaughlin had pointed me to this very cool video and this post a while back - re Technology and the White House transition - and I only now got to see it. The way the new techies in the White House are thinking about government and governance is really innovative - they are literally finding ways to increase transparency, efficiency and value-creation by combining the power of government with technology and entrepreneurial thinking. Take a look at the idea in minute 1:55:
Bridging the Real and Virtual Worlds in Gaming
Interesting article on an effort to bridge the frontier between the real and virtual worlds of gaming and entertainment, an area that interests me a lot.
Progression of Information
In an interesting note about the gap between knowledge and learning, Gidi Grinstein pointed me to this amazing video that highlights the quick pace at which information is growing. This year, more information will be created than was generated in the prior 5,000 years.
Spam Crime
Governments should be a lot more assertive about rooting out spam, phishing, viruses, and scams. While private sector solutions address this, the amount of waste that it is creating on the system - and just the environmental cost of added server activity for all this dirty trash - is enormous.
Below is a picture of the amount of good content (24%) VS. Spam and Threats that were blocked by our company recently. It is staggering.
Ecological Footprint for One Planet
One of the best efforts I have seen at explaining the way we are consuming and living beyond sustainability in this world comes from The Global Footprint Network. At the Skoll World Forum a couple weeks ago, Mathis Wackernagel handed me a business-card sized brochure that very poignantly and clearly explains how consumption in the developed and oil-producing world is depleting our globe in measurably dangerous ways. You should visit the page tracking human development growth and related ecological footprint growth. Their solution, not easy to implement but succintly showing the only way forward, is to aim for sustainable human development.
You can take a quiz to establish and track your own human footprint.
Compostable Packaging Making Progress
The holy grail for environmentally conscious manufacturers and consumers is truly bio-degradable effective packaging. While the biggest threat is in plastic bottles and packaging materials that overwhelm our landfills, even small wrappers add up.
The challenge to manufacturers is that the very things that make wrappers good - impermeability, sealing out oxygen to prevent oxidation and decomposition - are also what makes the wrappers hard to decompose. And if you try to use corn-based bio-degradable wrappers, exposure to moisture can make the wrapper protection degrade and be ineffective. At KIND we keep looking for solutions that could enable us to use bio-degradable wrappers but have yet to find the answer (if anyone has any technology or ideas, please let me know).
Frito-Lay just announced that the outer layer of its Sun Chips will use compostable packaging. That is nice, but what is really interesting is their commitment that within 1 year, they aim to also use compostable packaging for the bags’ interior. If they really achieve it, that will be a remarkable step.
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