This article from Reason posits that eating local may sometimes produce more carbon emissions that shipping food from other countries. Here is an excerpt as some food for thought:

via Arts & Letters Daily

From the Associated Press:

Read more here.

On a side note, the U.S. presidential election wrapped on the night of November 4th, but it took until November 16, for the major news outlets to report on the rise of hate crimes in the U.S.

Recyclable plastics, bamboo cases and reduced power consumption all go along way to making computers more environmentally friendly. According to this article, Dell, HP and other companies have taken big steps to making better for the environment. However, as Forrester Research analyst Christopher Mines says, probably the best thing would be to extend the lifespan of a computer. Technojunk certainly does not help our planet.

That said, one should still not deride energy efficiency.

Bloomberg reports that recent economic changes in China, the rising yuan and increasing labour costs, are leading to textile and other manufacturing jobs moving to cheaper areas like India and Vietnam.

Vietnam’s laborers earn an average of 1.669 million dong ($104) a month, 41 percent less than China’s lowest-paid workers in the central province of Jiangxi, according to World Bank data.

India’s wages are lower than Vietnam’s, averaging 3,843 rupees ($87) a month, according to CEIC. India is copying China’s special economic zones, building more than 400 that will provide low-cost land and rents, five- to 10-year tax breaks and duty-free imports.

IHT reports about the growing conflict that many 2008 Summer Olympic athletes have between their personal social conscious and the desire to compete and win at the games. Note, though, that this is not just about the recent Tibet action, but also over China influence in Darfur.

Whether speaking to a group of young softball players or plying her teammates with literature, Jessica Mendoza, a 27-year-old outfielder on the United States Olympic softball team, does not hesitate to speak her mind about the killings in Darfur.

But Mendoza stops short of publicly condemning China, which has close ties to the government of Sudan, because she says it is impolite to criticize her Olympic hosts and because one of her sponsors, Nike, has a major marketing presence in China.

With growing protests in Tibet and pressure mounting on Olympic sponsors to denounce China for its policy on Darfur, socially conscious athletes said they were struggling to figure out how to honor their beliefs while also respecting the purpose of the Olympic Games — the celebration of athletic excellence.

The complexity of this comes not only from internal views, but external pressures such as a country’s own Olympic body or perhaps even an athlete’s sponsor:

Rule 51 of the Olympic charter, the constitution of the Olympic movement, forbids athletes from participating in a “demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda” at Olympic sites. When the International Olympic Committee identifies a possible violation of Rule 51, it asks the Olympic Committee of the athlete’s country to investigate. Depending on the outcome, Olympians can be disqualified or sent home.

The question of whether Olympic athletes will have the right to express political views in Beijing erupted in February, after news that Britain and New Zealand were planning to require that athletes sign contracts barring them from speaking about politically sensitive issues. Both countries quickly reversed course.

This New Yorker article wonders why the penny is still around in the U.S. We Canadians wonder the same thing.

Paul Makovsky posits in Metropolis Magazine about recent shifts in gendered design in architecture and design.

The principles of universal design tell us that products should be functional for the broadest possible spectrum of users. But designers and manufacturers have long targeted two distinct niche markets: men and women. (Just think of razors: women’s versions look like plastic flowers, men’s like props from The Terminator.) Lately, however, we’ve noticed a handful of products and projects that toy with traditional gender roles.

While the thesis is intriguing and raises an interesting question, this mini-mini essay comes up short in its execution and rationale.

With yesterday’s election of Dmitry Medvedev as President of Russia the expectation is that he will be answering to Putin, who will become the country’s prime minister. This, however, may not be the case according to Bloomberg.

Barred from a third four-year term, Putin said in his last annual presidential press conference on Feb. 14 that the prime minister will have the “highest executive power.” He had arranged for Medvedev to promise him that job to retain his influence, and said he plans to keep it as long as his protege is in the Kremlin.

Four days later, Medvedev insisted he’ll have ultimate authority. “The president rules Russia, and according to the constitution, there’s only one president,” he said in an interview that his campaign paid Itogi magazine to publish and posted on his Web site.

“The conflict has already started,” said Alexei Mukhin, director of the Moscow-based Center for Political Information, an independent research group. While Putin allies still occupy key government posts, Mukhin predicted that Medvedev will be in a stronger position before long.

That’s because Russia has been governed by strong centralized authority for centuries. In czarist times, the monarch had absolute power. After 10-year-old Peter the Great and Ivan V both were given the title in 1682, Ivan’s sister Sophia ran things until Peter asserted himself in 1689. In the Soviet era, the Communist Party general secretary was supreme.

Under Russia’s current constitution, the president controls both domestic and foreign policy and presents his nominee for prime minister to parliament for approval. The president has the power to dismiss that premier at any time.

Treehugger has put together this fantastic overview of the carbon footprint. Learn what the carbon footprint is, why it is such an important metric and a couple of ideas on how to reduce yours.

TechCruch reports that recent data indicates that there is a socio-economic divide between the frequent users of Google and Yahoo. They even have a graph!

The differences between the groups aren’t great, but the results do go some way in explaining the Yahoo conundrum. Although a distance second in search, Yahoo has remained the number one traffic destination online ahead of Google, so you’d think with more traffic Yahoo would convert that traffic into similar returns to Google. But alas we know that not to be the case, and that would appear in part to be related to people using Yahoo not spending as much online and being in poorer demographic categories than Google users, providing a lower return per user.

via Smart Mobs

According to the Daily Mail, British athletes who will be competing in this year’s Summer Olympics in Beijing are being forced to enter into agreement whereby they must not comment on human rights abuse in China.

The controversial clause has been inserted into athletes’ contracts for the first time and forbids them from making any political comment about countries staging the Olympic Games.

It is contained in a 32-page document that will be presented to all those who reach the qualifying standard and are chosen for the team.

From the moment they sign up, the competitors – likely to include the Queen’s granddaughter Zara Phillips and world record holder Paula Radcliffe – will be effectively gagged from commenting on China’s politics, human rights abuses or illegal occupation of Tibet.

This is simply astounding.

This article from Men’s Health questions whether saturated fats are really that bad for us. The thesis is that no one has actually proved their ill effects.

While Mahmoud Ahmadinejad disbelieves that there are homosexuals in Iran, it may surprise you to know that country’s religious mullahs are not only tolerant of transsexuals, but the government pays health care costs to provide the operations.

In Iran, where men and women are segregated, and homosexuality is punishable by death, the government plans to spend 6 billion rials ($647,000) this year to help pay for sex- change operations. The policies aren’t as contradictory as they seem, because in traditional societies there is more pressure to conform to standard gender roles, says Mahdis Kamkar, a Tehran psychologist who works with transsexuals.

Iran authorized such operations in 1984 under a decree issued by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The government considers transsexuals to be people who are “trapped” in a body of the wrong sex, says Mohammad Mehdi Kariminia, a cleric who wrote a thesis on the rights and duties of transsexuals.

“It’s extremely enlightened thinking, and it’s most welcome,” says Bernard Reed, who founded the Gender Identity Research and Education Society in Surrey, England, which promotes transgender issues in the U.K. “Would you see President Bush or Tony Blair making such a statement?”

via Bloomberg

The New York Times reports that Bono’s (red) initiative is coming under scrutiny as some are beginning to question how much the organization raises versus the marketing costs that have been spent.

They criticize a lack of transparency at the company and its partners over how much they make from Red products, and whether they spend more money on Africa or advertising.

“Look at all the promotions they’ve put out,” said Inger L. Stole, a communications professor at the University of Illinois. “The ads seem to be more about promoting the companies and how good they are than the issue of AIDS.”

In the Super Bowl ad Sunday, which promoted Dell’s recent Red debut, a man buys a Red laptop and finds himself cheered in the street by strangers and kissed by a beautiful woman. At the end of the commercial, three screens flash in rapid succession: “Buy Dell. Join (RED). Save Lives.”

In its March 2007 issue, Advertising Age magazine reported that Red companies had collectively spent as much as $100 million in advertising and raised only $18 million. Officials of the campaign said then that the companies had spent $50 million on advertising and that the amount raised was $25 million. Advertising Age stood by its article.

To the best of my knowledge, Red does not do any marketing of its own. Any marketing is done by the partner companies who incorporate Red in their marketing. What cannot be questioned is the fact that Red has raised millions for its causes, which have benefited many lives.

Over all, more than $59 million has been contributed by Red and its corporate partners to the Global Fund. Red-financed projects have helped put more than 30,000 people on antiretroviral treatment and provided more than 300,000 H.I.V.-positive pregnant women with counseling and treatment, according to data from Red and the fund.

Red and its donors have contributed nearly all the corporate money that has gone to the fund, which had $2.4 billion in 2007. This made Red the 15th-largest donor — more than Russia has given so far, and more than China, Saudi Arabia and Switzerland have pledged.

Jason Stanley pontificates, on Leiter Reports, as to what it takes for the media to discuss/report on philosophy.

Lately, a good deal of philosophical research is reaching a larger public. It seems like every month a major newspaper or magazine publishes an article on the tremendous progress philosophers have been making on the problem of consciousness. The New York Times magazine just published an article by Stephen Pinker on moral grammar that has become wildly popular, though my sense of the article is that much of its interest to the lay public in fact consists of its lucid explanations of basic material about meta-ethics. Experimental philosophy has also recently crossed the boundary into the popular press. But obviously, there is a ton of philosophy that, by its very nature, is never going to be reported on in such a medium. Indeed, much philosophy that philosophers themselves consider to be extremely interesting and innovative is of this character.

The Christian Science Monitor reports on a protest that started on Facebook and ended up on the streets of Colombia:

Hundreds of thousands of Colombians are expected to march throughout the country and in major cities around the world Monday to protest against this nation’s oldest and most powerful rebel group.

What began as a group of young people venting their rage at the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) on Facebook, an Internet social-networking site, has ballooned into an international event called “One Million Voices Against FARC.”

“We expected the idea to resound with a lot of people but not so much and not so quickly,” says Oscar Morales, who started the Facebook group against the FARC, which now has 230,000 members. Organizers are expecting marches in 185 cities around the world.

The event is another example of how technology – such as text messaging on cellphones – can be used to rally large numbers of people to a cause. Some observers say it’s less a response to the FARC’s ideology than it is global public outrage over kidnapping as a weapon.

via Smart Mobs

From the Globe and Mail:

Three people in balaclavas hold their fists in the air and stand between two flags: The flag in front boasts the symbol of the Native Warrior Society; the one behind, too big to fit in the frame, offers a partial glimpse of the Olympic rings.

This photograph, by Vancouver artist Alex Morrison, is a restaging of a shot sent to the media last year. It came with a statement from the Native Warrior Society revealing that the group had seized the Olympic flag from outside Vancouver City Hall to protest against the actions of the government and the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (VANOC). “We stand in solidarity with all those fighting the destruction caused by the 2010 Olympic Games,” the statement read. “No Olympics on Stolen Land!”

Morrison’s reproduction of one of VANOC’s less glorious moments, called Friday, March 9th, 2007, is hanging right now at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, part of a show called Exponential Future – and part of VANOC’s Cultural Olympiad.

If there’s irony in a restaged anti-Olympic protest photo being part of VANOC’s much-touted Cultural Olympiad (which gets under way Friday), VANOC officials prefer to see it another way: as proof that their event is artistically sound, not just a cheery diversion.

via artsjournal

changethemargins.com promotes the idea that if we reduce the margins in our Word documents we can save paper. Serious amounts of paper. Good Magazine puts it nicely and bluntly:

…changing their margins from the current luxurious standard 1.25 inches to a the more modest .75 inches. It may sound like a small change, but if everyone in the nation did it, we’d save a little less than a Rhode Island’s worth of trees every year.

This is a great, simple idea that could effect change. So do it! Cut your margins and tell the others.

Last summer, Karl Helge Hampus Svensson, 31, was among the 180 students admitted to the freshman class after receiving top grades in high school and courses he took online over the previous six years.

But last fall, institute officials received two anonymous letters claiming that Svensson had been a Nazi sympathizer who was paroled from a maximum-security prison after being convicted in 2000 of murder, a killing the police called a hate crime.

After confirming the information, the institute had to decide: should Svensson be allowed to become a doctor?

As the International Herald Tribune reports, that the decision on Svensson’s fate came down to a technicality.

In re-examining his application forms recently, an institute official noticed that Svensson’s high school transcript, dated 1995, was under his current surname, Svensson, not what is believed to be his family name, Hellekant. Svensson changed his name after being convicted of the crime.

Bloomberg reports that French President Nicolas Sarkozy is starting to lose favour with the French public in light of his recent public love life. Sarkozy’s approval rate is at an all time low since he took office.

France’s politicians, including former presidents Jacques Chirac and Francois Mitterrand, traditionally have been discreet about such matters. Since Sarkozy and his second wife divorced in October, he has traveled openly with Bruni to exotic locales, even as polls showed rising public concern about the economy and accelerating inflation.

“Nicolas Sarkozy in his Ray-Ban aviator sunglasses, vacationing while the French have trouble going on holiday and have cut back on their Christmas spending, doesn’t come across well,” said Laurent Dubois, a political science professor at Sorbonne University in Paris. “It’s taken as arrogance.”