Interesting to see the science now developing around this "play" space...
The PlayOn project at PARC is an investigation into the social dimensions of massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) and virtual worlds - extensive, persistent 3D environments that are populated by thousands of players at any given moment. We have explored several virtual worlds including Star Wars Galaxies, EverQuest Online Adventures, Second Life, World of Warcraft, and EverQuest II. These and others represent the most successful virtual worlds to date and are laying the foundations for future environments which may be used for more than entertainment and sociability. In our studies, we are generally concerned with three basic issues: community, interaction, and culture.
Pretty clever article that actually discusses some of the disparities and although doesnt provide a solution to high prices, does open up a few avenues of investigation.
AlterNet: Natural Food, Unnatural Prices
Natural Food, Unnatural Prices
By Stan Cox, AlterNet. Posted January 25, 2006.
Is it possible to eat well without breaking the bank? Our correspondent goes shopping at Whole Foods and comes away hungry.
Roaming the parking lot of a San Antonio shopping center last month, my wife Priti and I came upon a Whole Foods Market. I couldn't resist hitting the brakes. For years, from our home in Kansas, we'd been reading and hearing about this king-of-the-hill among natural food retailers, and we wanted to see what all the fuss was about.
I found a parking spot between an Outback and a Prius. In moments, we had left the land of steel and asphalt behind and stepped into a world of biological wonders. The robust-looking bread, in all the right shades of toasty brown, was clearly far more than an inert sandwich-support medium; even the few lonely white-bread specimens looked good. The fruits and vegetables actually looked and smelled like fruits and vegetables. The bulk bins formed a solid base for the best of food pyramids. In the deli and packaged-food sections, it was an invigorating experience simply to read the labels.
The work day was just starting, and the employees, most of them anyway, were genuinely friendly and seemingly delighted with their lot in life -- to be young, healthy and working at Whole Foods. These "team members," as they're known in company lingo, have signed on with a major-league powerhouse. With 180 stores in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, annual sales of $4.6 billion and profits of $160 million, Whole Foods recently moved into the Fortune 500.
But then we started looking around for something to buy. As we stared bug-eyed at the lofty price tags, I wondered aloud what sort of income it would take to become a regular Whole Foods shopper. Priti had an idea: Why not give Whole Foods the Wal-Mart test?
Return of the cashier-shopper
Priti was referring to a June 2003 AlterNet article in which I asked this seemingly simple question: In view of Wal-Mart's vast range of merchandise and "Always Low Prices," could a family whose breadwinner worked at the Wal-Mart Supercenter in Salina, Kan., afford to supply its minimum needs by shopping there?
I'd relied on published studies that computed the cost of an "adequate but austere" life for a family with one adult and two children in Salina. The budget included only the basics: shelter, transportation, food, routine toiletries and medicines, and not much more. Housing and transportation can't be bought at Wal-Mart (yet), but almost all other necessities can be.
The bottom line: Our Wal-Mart cashier could not satisfy such a bare-survival budget even if she worked 40 hours per week, more hours than a typical Wal-Mart workweek. And as you might expect, in trying to keep the family within such a budget, I condemned them to an array of foods that were boring, unappealing, and not very nutritious -- and produced in ways that most customers would prefer not to know about.
But is that inevitable? Or is the nation's corporate food system capable of supplying people at all income levels with products of the quality we saw at Whole Foods?
Salina to San Antonio
I took Priti up on her suggestion, moving the hypothetical family from Salina to San Antonio, and having my cashier work and buy groceries at Whole Foods. I used the same list of foods -- a minimal, USDA-recommended "low-cost food plan" -- that I'd used at the Salina Wal-Mart.
Back at Whole Foods, we followed the same simulated-shopping rules, selecting the cheapest food in each food category and the cheapest brand of that type. Using those prices, I computed the monthly cost of feeding an adult female, a 12-year-old boy and a 4-year-old child.
At Salina's Wal-Mart, the bill had been $232, plus sales tax. At Whole Foods, the same basket of food cost $564. Texas has no sales tax on food, and Whole Foods employees get a 20 percent discount, bringing the cost for the San Antonio cashier all the way down to $451. That monthly price tag includes only the cheapest foods in each category, and none of the store's popular luxury items.
The starting wage for a cashier at Salina's Wal-Mart in 2003 was $6.25, which fell $146 per month short of meeting her family's survival budget. Whole Foods employees in three states told me that a starting cashier's wages tend to be between $7 and $8, but according to Whole Foods spokesperson Ashley Hawkins, a poll of all company regions showed a starting wage of $8 to $10.
Let's assume that the cost of nonfood necessities in present-day San Antonio is similar to Salina circa 2003 (although it's undoubtedly higher, and the San Antonio cashier might not have access to the full day-care subsidy that low-income Kansas workers get). A $10-per-hour employee determined to shop at Whole Foods could manage to do so. An $8-per-hour employee could meet the bare-survival food budget, but with nothing left over. At $7, she would miss the mark by more than the Wal-Mart cashier-shopper. The situation would be worse in a state like Kansas that taxes food sales.
Hawkins says Whole Foods' full-time turnover rate is 24.7 percent, so the above wages would apply to approximately one-fourth of employees. She says the companywide average wage is $15, and that health care, 401(k), stock option and stock purchase plans (after about 10-12 months' employment) have helped earn Whole Foods a place on Fortune magazine's list of the "100 best companies to work for" for the past nine years.
Blinded by uniqueness
But not all employees agree with Fortune's assessment. Jeremy Plague was among the Madison, Wis., Whole Foods employees who managed to form a union (the only one in the company's history) for a period between 2002 and 2004, eventually succumbing to Whole Foods' fierce anti-union policies.
Says Plague, "In my experience, most people really liked working at Whole Foods for the first few months, blinded by the uniqueness of the store and by their hippie rhetoric of how we all mattered. But then people hit the six-month wall where they realize that it's all a bunch of BS, and Whole Foods is just like every other money-hungry corporation … It's all a great, worker- and environment-friendly system until you get to the actual people working in the stores, stocking the shelves and ringing you up at the register."
A website created by the Madison organizing effort, wholeworkersunite.org, remains active as a gathering place for current and former Whole Foods employees critical of company policies.
Critics of my cashier-shopper analysis argue that jobs with retailers like Whole Foods or Wal-Mart aren't meant to support families. But to the extent that that's true, neither employer can be viewed as a model for the economy at large. And given the wage and price policies of the two companies, one thing is clear: Customers who frequent Whole Foods are unlikely to be Wal-Mart cashiers or other low-income earners.
Whole Foods CEO John Mackey is frank about that. He recently told The Independent (UK), "You can't have it both ways. If you want the highest quality, it costs more. It's like complaining that a BMW is more expensive than a Hyundai. Yes, but you're getting a better car."
And few Whole Foods Markets are situated in economy-car country. Of the 170 stores in the U.S., none are located in zip codes with average 2003 household incomes at or below $31,000 -- the approximate income earned by a full-time employee earning the average Whole Foods wage.
Only nine of the 170 stores are in zip codes with incomes of $43,300 or lower. That was the median income in the United States that year (that is, half of U.S. households had incomes lower, and half of them higher, than $43,300).
Half of the zip codes with Whole Foods stores lie above $72,000 in average income. A fourth of them exceed $100,000.
Mackey's defense of high prices is mirrored in Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott's defense of his company's low wages, which he summed up in an address to employees last October: "I ask anyone to do the math. Even slight overall adjustments to wages eliminate our thin profit margin." And, said Scott, price increases are out of the question because even as it is, "our customers simply don't have the money to buy necessities between paychecks."
Is it possible for a corporation that sells everyday, necessary products like food to do three things at once: (1) pay a living wage, (2) charge prices that most people can afford and (3) provide an acceptable return to its shareholders?
Clearly, Wal-Mart gives top priority to shareholders. Then come customers and, bringing up the rear, workers. As expected, its degrees of success follow in that same order, with workers sacrificed to satisfy the first two priorities. But what would happen to its wages and prices if Wal-Mart, notorious for putting the price squeeze on its suppliers, were to commit itself to marketing only sustainably produced, high-quality goods?
And, returning to Whole Foods, the same question can be put another way: Does it manage to make the list of "best companies to work for" only because of the premium prices paid by its customers? How would Whole Foods' merchandise quality, pay and benefits look if it tried to match Wal-Mart's customer base, maybe not in size but in socioeconomic diversity?
Whole-food, nonmarket solutions
Many academics and grassroots activists in the sustainable-agriculture movement are asking those kinds of questions, doing some hard thinking about how society can pay farmers (preferably noncorporate farmers) adequately to raise nutritious food in less ecologically destructive ways while keeping the end products affordable for all.
Clearly, our hypothetical cashiers, wherever they work, would benefit from having their own vegetable garden. But unless, against all odds, they also managed to raise a lot of staple foods on their own -- wheat, dry beans, maybe some chickens or dairy animals -- or had plenty of time for fishing, they would still be largely reliant on purchased food of some kind.
Like many in her profession, Rhonda Janke, associate professor of horticulture and a sustainable cropping systems specialist at Kansas State University, is a big advocate of locally produced food, farmers' markets and community supported agriculture, or CSA. (In a typical CSA arrangement, consumers contract with a farmer in their area to deliver a certain quantity of food on an agreed schedule during the growing season. The kinds of foods delivered depends on what's in season.)
As for making good, locally produced food affordable, Janke notes that "many CSAs have provisions for 'work shares' and reduced cost shares for low-income families, and that can be part of a 'local safety net'. But that doesn't eliminate the need for the grower to get full price from a minimum number of full-paying customers."
Janke asks, "What do you consider a living wage for a farmer, and does that make the price of food go up? If all farmers got $10 per hour, not counting [federal subsidies], what would food cost? Would the price at Wal-Mart go up? Whole Foods?"
She believes that leaving it up to the big retailers would put food out of reach for a lot of people: "I think the only conclusion one can logically come to is that market forces alone are not going to provide enough healthy food to everyone in our society."
In that spirit, a growing number of pioneering nonprofit organizations are working to put good food within economic reach of their local communities. One of them is People's Grocery in Oakland, Calif. The nonprofit, community-based organization sells fresh produce and staples through its store and Mobile Market -- a "grocery store on wheels" that travels through West Oakland making regular stops. The organization also has extensive educational programs and has helped establish a growing network of community gardens that currently provide 25 percent of the produce it sells.
I asked co-founder Brahm Ahmadi what makes it possible for People's Grocery to sell good, natural food that low-income families can afford, while Whole Foods can't. He said the fundamental difference is that "they're pursuing profit and we aren't."
Ahmadi says good food doesn't have to be expensive. "Because of its huge size, Whole Foods receives a deeper discount from its suppliers than any other natural-food retailer. Yet the prices in its stores are among the most expensive. They are purely profit-driven, so they do not allow that cost benefit to go to the customer."
Once, says Ahmadi, a Whole Foods executive told him, "We could not market food the way you do, because our shareholders simply wouldn't allow it."
People's Grocery subsidizes its efforts through charitable funding, with the understanding that the donated money will go to hold prices down. But as the low-income market strengthens, says Ahmadi, People's Grocery will try to reduce its dependency on contributions by marketing food that it obtains directly from producers, cutting out as many steps of the expensive supply chain as possible.
The growth of the natural-food industry may have been phenomenal in recent years, but Ahmadi predicts that its relatively affluent target market cannot avoid saturation: "Companies will have to project what new markets they can turn to. And there's substantial growth potential among low-income shoppers. They account for almost half of food retail in the U.S. -- that's $85 billion."
Indirectly echoing Rhonda Janke's conclusion that "market forces alone are not enough," Ahmadi says, "We need to build demand that can thrive and grow on its own," but in low-income areas "it has to be done differently. It requires a grassroots approach with community organizations that have track records."
And community organizations working in not-so-posh urban zip codes from coast to coast are establishing just such track records. They include, among others, Garden-Raised Bounty in Olympia, Wash., Growing Power in Milwaukee and Added Value in Brooklyn, N.Y.
But a more thoroughgoing overhaul of the nation's food systems may be needed to reach the majority of city dwellers, as well as vast, less densely populated rural regions between the coasts. Of the 500 poorest counties in the United States, more than 450 are rural. Ironically, it is in highly productive, ecologically threatened agricultural regions that sustainably produced, nutritious food is least widely available.
To organizations like People's Grocery, it's unacceptable that such food is accessible to some families and not to others simply on the basis of where they live or how much they earn. As Brahm Ahmadi puts it, "We're not talking about a luxury item here. Good food is a basic need."
Stan Cox is a plant breeder and writer in Salina, Kan.
In my junior year of College, I took a class on Media and Democracy in which we learned many of the horrors of media communications on society due to lack of control or foresight by producers of such media.
Many of us decided then that we wanted to start a Happy News Network to be the CNN of happy uplifting news for people to balance the "bleeds it leads" mentality of local news and much of the mainstream press.
Now it is real:
HappyNews.com - All The News That's Fun To Print
http://www.positivenews.net/news.html
http://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/
http://www.upbeat.net/
http://participate.net/
and the list goes on.... YEAH!
So glad I am not a teenager, and not sure if I was a concerned parent, if I would really want to MONITOR my children's driving behavior THAT CLOSELY.
As a wise teacher once said, "Children are meant to be SEEN, not WATCHED."
Foursprung - GPS: tracking system provides detailed driving analysis
Results are viewed by detaching the data key from the receiver unit and inserting it into a computer USB port. The vehicle tracking results are uploaded to a DriveSync(TM) server where the data is interpreted and consolidated into customized reports. These reports, including trip logs, route maps and usage alerts, are viewed via a secure, password-protected website.
"DriveSync(TM) enables parents and commercial fleet owners to track when, where, how far, how fast and how aggressively a vehicle is being driven. This information is tracked passively via GPS satellites and recorded on an in-vehicle DriveSync(TM) receiver and USB data key. Because the information is tracked off-line, DriveSync(TM) eliminates the high monthly service fees associated with other GPS vehicle tracking systems. Results are viewed by detaching the data key from the receiver unit and inserting it into a computer USB port. The vehicle tracking results are uploaded to a DriveSync(TM) server where the data is interpreted and consolidated into customized reports. These reports, including trip logs, route maps and usage alerts, are viewed via a secure, password-protected website. The results provide a detailed analysis of vehicle use and driver behavior.
DriveSync(TM) provides parents with a clear picture of their teen's driving behavior, including speeding and aggressive driving habits. Prepared with this information, parents can discuss with their teen issues of driving safety, responsibility and accountability. Likewise, DriveSync(TM) can help parents measure their teen's driving progress, and set driving privileges accordingly.
The same training applications can be used for fleet drivers. By highlighting risky driving behavior, DriveSync(TM) allows fleet owners to identify, and correct, unsafe driving practices. DriveSync(TM) can also facilitate more efficient driving behavior. The accurate tracking of routes, mileage and speed enables fleet owners to anticipate and effectively manage vehicle insurance, gas and maintenance costs. That same data can further be used for forecasting and budgeting purposes.
"DriveSync(TM) is an affordable, secure and comprehensive GPS vehicle tracking system", says John Reynolds, Vice President of Business Development at IMS. "In addition to providing a conclusive analysis of driver behavior, DriveSync(TM) units are encrypted to ensure privacy of personal information. So you can track your vehicle with confidence knowing your information remains protected and confidential."
DriveSync(TM) will be available to retailers and distributors beginning February 2006."
Was checking out Treehugger.com for the first time and found this.
WOW.
Founded five years ago by Douglas Repetto, the director of research at Columbia University's computer music center, dorkbot is an informal club of artists, techies and geeks who do "strange things with electricity," according to their motto.
At every New York meeting, Mr. Repetto invites three people to deliver 20- to 30- minute presentations of their work, which tends to inhabit a no-man's land between science and art.
Original Article at New York Times
When Art and Science Collide, a Dorkbot Meeting Begins
Published: January 17, 2006
The artists may have ceded SoHo to swanky shops and million-dollar digs, but once a month the scene at one of its remaining galleries might best be described as Revenge of the Nerds.
On a recent Wednesday, "dorkbot" was holding the first meeting of its sixth year at the Location One gallery. Scruffy hipsters toting six-packs, blinky Web developers arguing the merits of their preferred P.D.A. and an inordinate number of dreadlocked heads packed the gallery beyond capacity to hear three brief, charmingly unpolished lectures.
Founded five years ago by Douglas Repetto, the director of research at Columbia University's computer music center, dorkbot is an informal club of artists, techies and geeks who do "strange things with electricity," according to their motto. In five years, chapters of the club have sprung up in nearly 30 cities around the world, from Seattle to Rotterdam to Mumbai.
At every New York meeting, Mr. Repetto invites three people to deliver 20- to 30- minute presentations of their work, which tends to inhabit a no-man's land between science and art. A question-and-answer session follows, which serves as an informal peer review to help presenters hone their ideas, Mr. Repetto said.
"They're doing things, but they're not quite sure, What is this? Where does it fit?" Mr. Repetto said. "It doesn't belong in a gallery, and they can't write a paper on it."
This month's meeting was held on what may or may not have been Sir Isaac Newton's 363rd birthday, but the fact that history is unclear on that matter did not dissuade Mr. Repetto, 35, from enlisting him as the evening's mascot. Slides of Newton and Newton-related arcana flashed across a screen before the lectures began.
But what would Sir Isaac have made of Mikey Sklar?
Mr. Sklar, a UNIX engineer presenting at dorkbot for the second time, demonstrated how he had a $2 chip surgically implanted into his left hand - and why he did it. The Radio Frequency Identification tag under his skin uses the same technology that the E-ZPass system employs to identify cars on toll roads. Mr. Sklar, 28, said his tag unlocks his computer and accesses news feeds as part of an art project.
"This is a pretty crude attempt at becoming a little more cyborg," he explained to the audience, only half joking.
As for why he chose dorkbot for the debut of his body-hack, Mr. Sklar wrote in an e-mail message: "This forces me to get my act together. By that I mean I have to clearly document my project and come up with an explanation of why I did this work."
Also at the dorkbot meeting were Alyce Santoro, an artist who weaves funky textiles out of a "sonic fabric" of audiotape and cotton, and Luke DuBois, a composer and "computational artist," who discussed a process he developed called "time-lapse phonography."
Mr. DuBois used his application, essentially time-lapse photography for sound, to create a new piece of music out of the 857 songs that have appeared at the top of the Billboard charts since 1958. The result, called "Billboard," is a 37-minute-long drone: each hit song is reduced to its average timbre and key by an algorithm that speeds up the original work without giving it a chipmunk chirpiness.
"It's a great way to get a gestalt of a piece of music," Mr. DuBois explained.
With popular tech and culture Web sites like boingboing.net and gothamist.com linking to dorkbot listings (at dorkbot.org) and even presenters' home pages, the monthly event has also become one way for artists and engineers to generate publicity.
"I've gotten more links from dorkbot than from any other Web site," said Michelle Rosenberg, an artist who delivered a lecture on the history of hearing aids and presented her own headphone sculptures at a meeting last January.
"It was a group critique," she said. "The questions asked were informal and curious. You have a different group of people coming to dorkbot than would come to an art lecture."
And that, said Mr. Repetto, is the whole point.
"If you have to tell people you're giving a presentation at something called dorkbot," he added, "you can't be too serious."
Thanks to the causemarketingforum.com newsletter, I learned about this interesting list... Reputation Institute 2005 Corporate Rankings
Reputation Institute 2005 Corporate Rankings
New York, NY. 6 December 2005. The results of the RQ 2005 study of corporate reputations conducted each year since 1999 by Harris Interactive and the Reputation Institute demonstrate both the enduring character of corporate reputations and their ability to change quickly. According to Dr. Charles Fombrun, Executive Director of the Reputation Institute and co-creator of the annual RQ study, “corporate reputations are Janus-faced. Companies like Johnson & Johnson and Coca-Cola have consistently dominated our public rankings, whereas oil, tobacco, and scandal plagued companies have anchored the bottom of the distribution. At the same time, reputations can change quickly, with autos and pharmaceuticals taking a big hit this year, but technology companies like Google skyrocketing to the top of the list.”
This year's list is the 6th annual ranking of companies released by Harris Interactive and the Reputation Institute in the U.S. The rated companies are determined on the basis of a preliminary sampling of over 6000 respondents who are asked to name two companies with the best corporate reputations in the U.S. and two companies with the worst reputations. The open-ended nominations are summed to create a list of the “most visible companies”. Some 20,000 people are then asked to rate the companies on the 20 attributes of the Harris-Fombrun Reputation Quotient, a scientifically developed instrument designed to measure corporate reputations in six key areas: Emotional appeal, product/service quality, financial performance, social responsibility, vision and leadership, and workplace environment. Since its creation, the RQ has been used to measure how members of the public rate companies in over 20 countries.
The 60 most visible companies in the US were rated by 19,564 people between August 30 and September 26. The companies were nominated by 6,977 respondents from the general public in a separate study conducted between March and June, 2005. The companies were all evaluated using the Harris-Fombrun Reputation Quotient® model which measures reputation on 6 dimensions and 20 attributes.
The overall results are:
05/04__Company___05 RQ Score (highest possible score=100)
1 1 Johnson & Johnson 80.56
2 3 Coca-Cola 79.69
3 -- Google 79.52
4 5 UPS 79.37
5 2 3M 78.78
6 7 Sony 78.75
7 6 Microsoft 78.11
8 9 General Mills 78.03
9 8 FedEx 77.79
10 11 Intel 77.27
11 13 Toyota 77.27
12 15 Home Depot 76.50
13 4 Procter & Gamble 75.91
14 16 Walt Disney 75.88
15 12 Dell 75.73
16 10 Honda 75.60
17 24 PepsiCo 75.26
18 -- Costco 74.03
19 25 IBM 73.42
20 22 General Electric 73.39
21 21 Southwest Airlines 73.20
22 30 Boeing 73.10
23 17 Starbucks 72.93
24 27 Nike 72.11
25 18 Target 71.83
26 -- DuPont 71.56
27 34 Apple Computer 70.59
28 23 Unilever 70.28
29 28 Wal-Mart Stores 69.99
30 32 Best Buy 69.74
31 20 Hewlett-Packard 69.44
32 26 Pfizer 69.10
33 37 J.C. Penney 68.81
34 36 Verizon Communications 67.01
35 33 McDonald's 66.83
36 40 SBC Communications* 66.67
37 38 Ford Motor 66.14
38 35 General Motors 66.07
39 43 Bank of America 66.00
40 45 Allstate 65.82
41 31** Sears Holdings 65.26
42 46 Gateway 65.17
43 41 Citigroup 65.00
44 39 DaimlerChrysler 64.47
45 -- Merck 64.07
46 42 Time Warner 63.85
47 47 Chevron 62.46
48 49 AT&T* 62.37
49 -- Comcast 62.08
50 48 Altria Group 61.62
51 51 Sprint 61.01
52 53 Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia 60.99
53 44 Exxon Mobil 59.57
54 -- Royal Dutch Shell 59.45
55 52 Tyco International 58.39
56 -- UAL/United Airlines 53.09
57 58 Halliburton 52.22
58 56 Adelphia Communications 49.75
59 59 MCI (formerly WorldCom) 46.80
60 60 Enron 30.05
* Merged in 2005 -ratings were done prior to merger.
Survey Methodology
The study was carried out in two phases: a nominations phase, from March to June, 2005, and a ratings phase, from Aug. 30 to Sept. 26, 2005.
In the nominations phase, Harris Interactive conducted 6,977 interviews throughout the U.S., using a combined online and telephone methodology. The online respondents were randomly selected from the Harris Interactive online panel. All respondents were asked to nominate two companies that they feel have the best reputations overall and two companies that they feel have the worst reputations overall. Nominations were open-ended, and all responses were tallied, placing subsidiaries and brand names within the parent company.
By totaling the mentions for best and worst companies provided during the nominations phase, Harris Interactive identified the list of 60 most visible companies in the U.S. to be measured in the ratings phase.
In the ratings phase, 19,564 respondents were randomly selected to complete a detailed rating of one or two companies with which they were "very or somewhat familiar." All interviews were conducted online. Respondents rated companies on 20 attributes in the six key dimensions of the Harris-Fombrun Reputation Quotient (RQ), including products and services, financial performance, workplace environment, social responsibility, vision and leadership, and emotional appeal. After the first company rating was completed, a respondent was given the option to rate a second company.
Each of the 60 companies was rated by at least 253 people; the average number of respondents per company was 650. All data were weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population. Weighting variables for this study included demographic variables (i.e., age, sex, education, race, ethnicity, household income and region) and some non-demographic variables to project findings to the U.S. adult population.
Finally, reputation quotient (RQ) figures were calculated for each company to determine the rankings. Each company's RQ is based on the respondents' ratings of each company on the 20 attributes. RQs are calculated by summing the ratings on the individual RQ attributes, dividing by the total possible score (i.e., 7 x the total number of attributes answered) and multiplying by 100. The highest possible score is 100. In comparing any two RQ scores, a t-test was used to determine statistically significant differences at a confidence level of 95%.
About The Reputation Institute
Reputation Institute helps companies create value through strategic reputation management, and is devoted to advancing research and applicable knowledge about corporate reputation. Reputation Institute brings together a global network of academics and practitioners to continuously progress thought leadership within the field of reputation. On a quarterly basis the Reputation Institute publishes the journal Corporate Reputation Review.
Always a big fan of projects that directly apply new technologies to specific problems for people around the world, I loved this one at first site (Wired's Nextfest).
NOMADS AND NANOMATERIALS
Sheila Kennedy, Principal Investigator, Saarinen Professor, University of Michigan
Frano Violich, Saarinen Professor, University of Michigan
Keith VanderSys, Lecturer, University of Michigan
The NOMADS & NANOMATERIALS project at the University of Michigan explores the intersection of design research, technology development and social action. The project focuses on the needs of the nomadic Huichol (Wirrárica) people who live in the Sierra Madre Mountains of Mexico. Visiting Professors Sheila Kennedy and Frano Violich along with 13 graduate students from the University of Michigan embarked on a journey into the remote Sierra Madre mountains of Mexico to meet the nomadic Huichol people and develop prototypes for solid state lighting in the rugged Huichol territories. There, they confronted a series of paradoxes: how to address the need for affordable electrical lighting that would require no fixed installations, how to re-imagine the form and materiality of electrical infrastructure, and how to both transform and optimize solid state technology through design strategies that promote its adaptation and use by a different culture.
The PORTABLE LIGHT project takes a pragmatic approach to these questions; considering how existing HBLED technology in high volume, low cost "first world" markets can be adapted and used to benefit daily life in the "third world". Working directly with high brightness light emitting diodes (HBLEDs) and photo-voltaic materials, students combined ancient Mesoamerican textile weaving traditions and recent advances in solid state electronic technologies to create cost-effective new models for a portable, energy-harvesting textiles--a radically sustainable form of solid state lighting that is integrated into a textile medium. The Nomads project will continue this fall at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.