In this fascinating exploration into the curious world of packaged foods, Twinkie, Deconstructed takes us from phosphate mines in Idaho to corn fields in Iowa, from gypsum mines in Oklahoma to oil fields in China, to demystify some of America’s most common processed food ingredients—where they come from, how they are made, how they are used—and why. Beginning at the source (hint: they’re often more closely linked to rocks and petroleum than any of the four food groups), Steve Ettlinger reveals how each Twinkie ingredient goes through the process of being crushed, baked, fermented, refined, and/or reacted into a totally unrecognizable goo or powder with a strange name—all for the sake of creating a simple snack cake.
Graphic: “The True Cost of Coal”
01 Agriculture, 03 Economy, 03 Environmental Degradation, 05 Energy, 07 Health, 10 Security, 12 Water, Civil Society, Earth Intelligence, Graphics, Peace Intelligence, True Cost, True Cost
After two years of collaborative research, storysharing, metaphor crafting, and meticulous illustrating, the bees have completed an epic illustration about mountaintop removal coal mining.
Related:
+ True Cost Meme
+ True Cost T-Shirt
Building an Audio Collection for All the World’s Languages
04 Education, Academia, Audio, Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Languages-TranslationThe Rosetta Project is pleased to announce the Parallel Speech Corpus Project, a year-long volunteer-based effort to collect parallel recordings in languages representing at least 95% of the world’s speakers. The resulting corpus will include audio recordings in hundreds of languages of the same set of texts, each accompanied by a transcription. This will provide a platform for creating new educational and preservation-oriented tools as well as technologies that may one day allow artificial systems to comprehend, translate, and generate them.
Continue reading “Building an Audio Collection for All the World’s Languages”
U.S. Geological Survey: Twitter Earthquake Detector (TED)
03 Environmental Degradation, 10 Security, Citizen-Centered, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Geospatial, Geospatial, Government, Graphics, MediaPeople can receive earthquake data from the @USGSTED Twitter account. The site sends maps of earthquake zones to account holders.
U.S. Geological Survey: Twitter Earthquake Detector (TED)
The U.S. Geological Survey is using funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to support a student who’s investigating social Internet technologies as a way to quickly gather information about recent earthquakes.
In this exploratory effort, the USGS is developing a system that gathers real-time, earthquake-related messages from the social networking site Twitter and applies place, time, and key word filtering to gather geo-located accounts of shaking. This approach provides rapid first-impression narratives and, potentially, photos from people at the hazard’s location. The potential for earthquake detection in populated but sparsely seismicly-instrumented regions is also being investigated.
Social Internet technologies are providing the general public with anecdotal earthquake hazard information before scientific information has been published from authoritative sources. People local to an event are able to publish information via these technologies within seconds of their occurrence. In contrast, depending on the location of the earthquake, scientific alerts can take between 2 to 20 minutes. By adopting and embracing these new technologies, the USGS potentially can augment its earthquake response products and the delivery of hazard information.
CEO Study: Creativity (not Integrity) as the Most Important Leadership Quality for CEOs
Commerce, Corporations, Graphics, Leadership-Integrity, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth
Reference: Mini-Atlas of Human Security
01 Poverty, 06 Family, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Immigration, 10 Security, 11 Society, Academia, Cultural Intelligence, Non-Governmental, Peace Intelligence, Strategy-Holistic CoherencePhi Beta Iota: One day the World Map ofConflict & Human Rights pioneered by Berto Jongman will return–it is a travesty that his official duties do not allow him to continue this hugely significant endeavor. In the interim, he recommends, as do we, the below effort.
An at-a-glance illustrated guide to global and regional trends in human insecurity, the miniAtlas provides a succinct introduction to today’s most pressing security challenges. It maps political violence, the links between poverty and conflict, assaults on human rights—including the use of child soldiers—and the causes of war and peace.
The miniAtlas is available in print and online in English, French and Spanish. The miniAtlas is also available in print in Russian and Japanese. It will be available online in these languages in the summer of 2010.
Graphic: Simplified World Conflict Map
Graphic: Global Threats to Local Survival (1990′s)
Search: world map with 8 conflicts
Graphic: Political Factions 001
PoliticalInside front cover of Robert Steele, ELECTION 2008: Lipstick on the Pig (EIN, 2008).