When the E.coli spinach scare swept the nation, we talked a bit about the importance of knowing the backstory about the things we eat and buy. The best way most of us have to do this is by purchasing food directly from the grower at farmer's markets and through CSAs.
But in Japan, it's becoming more and more common to be able to trace the history of your food using your cell phone. The Japanese Food Safety Commission, which was established in 2001 after a Mad Cow Disease (BSE) outbreak, has been working to put food safety in the hands of the consumer by tagging products (even fresh farm produce) with RFID or QR codes that can be read with a cell phone (most Japanese phones produced today come equipped with a QR code reader). According to FOODEX JAPAN's Trend & Info page:
Consumers...
Sustainable innovation needs information, and information needs computing. David Douglas, VP of Eco-responsibility at Sun Microsystems, reminds us at Sustainable Innovation 06 that virtually nothing we were discussing
- from new design and utility grids to carbon trading and climate modeling - were done without the aid of computing power. 300 million computers are already obsolete, brimming with over 700 esoteric compounds - "a lot of wild stuff goes into them".
The US also still uses 90 billion Kilowatt-hours a year in data centers, which cause between 100 and 200 million tonnes of CO2 emissions a year. This is a slice of what amounts to more like a billion tonnes of CO2 a year, globally. This impact is partly caused by burning coal - and partly it's a result of enormous...
Chris Anderson - Mr. Long Tail, editor of Wired Magazine - makes a great decision here at Pop!tech: assuming that everyone in the audience has either read The Long Tail or knows the argument, he gives a different talk: What Happens When Things Get Free? (It covers much of the same ground as the book, but draws a different narrative through many of the same examples.)
He starts with a photo of Dr. Carver Mead. Mead started thinking about what happens as semiconductors get cheap to the point where theyre free. The answer is, you should waste them. This insight led to VLSI - Very Large Scale Intergration - chips that included thousands of transitors, not just single ones.
Alan Kay figured out what you might do with these plentiful, free transistors - be wasteful on the screen....