A Treehugger article from earlier today warns against the dangers of supposedly “local” farmers selling very un-local products. The writer, somewhere “on highway 11 just North of Orillia”, stopped at a farm stand with signs promising “Ontario Corn” and “Ontario Blueberries” only to discover a California label on one of the plums at the bottom of the basket he had purchased.
The lesson: pay attention to what you buy. Remember that not everyone is looking out for your best interests.
Is that Farmer Really Selling Local Food?

Because digital cameras can distinguish colors the human eye can’t even see, the company Kameraflage has developed technology which allows them to insert these invisible shades into anything from fabrics to billboards to movies. This will allow anyone to catch a glimpse of hidden shapes like the lightning-strike in the adjacent photo with their digital cameras or cell-phones. The business opportunities are potentially limitless.
Kamerflage
[via Coolhunting]

If the world were a swirling vortex of conflicting emotions, We Feel Fine would be its pictorial representation. An “artwork authored by everyone”, the website is a shifting database of emotional registers built off the blogosphere’s daily lexicon of phrases, ranging anywhere from the ‘I feel fines’ to the heaviest heartbreaks imaginable. Constantly compiled from the diverse corners of the internet, the site is structured around six formal sections – Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics and Mounds – each of which offers a different visual representation of the general sentiments occurring around the world at any given moment. Their [...]

For all you ladies out there, has the prospect of taking a cab late-night ever sounded in any way unappealing? Well, certain cities are taking back the streets and making them a little more amenable to the needs of modern women, offering cab services run exclusively by the fair sex. Trendwatching’s recent roundup of cool products for women, gays and boomers have a short piece on these new services, and they do indeed sound pretty useful. In London, Pink Ladies is a new private car franchise that one can join and pay for via a special “pink account”, and offers [...]

Fellow trendspotters Coolhunting published an article yesterday about certain social networking sites that have departed from the norm set by their earlier, more ostentatious cousins (i.e. MySpace & Facebook’s well-known worlds of party updates and unabashed time-wasting), and are instead concerned with the more pressing but less tantalizing prospects of social change.
They have compiled several prime examples, including Friction TV, the “YouTube for social activists”, H.E.L.P, a “telemedecine-based online community of physicians and financial donors bringing advanced medical assistance to disaster zones and areas of humanitarian need around the world” and Kiva, “a site that connects the world’s poorer populations [...]

Designed in anticipation of the Discovery Channel’s 20th Anniversary Shark Week, Sharkrunners is a new “big game” of “oceanic exploration and high stakes shark research” developed by area/code. It works as follows:
In the game, players control their ships, but the sharks are controlled by real-world white sharks with GPS units attached to their fins. Real-world telemetry data provides the position and movement of actual great white sharks in the game, so every shark that players encounter corresponds to a real shark in the real world.
Ships in the game move in real-time, so players receive email and/or SMS alerts during [...]

In another bizarre turn of events for the music industry, a new company is offering fans a chance to take band management into their own hands. The folks over at VIP Band Manager have invited 50,000 people to get involved with a new group’s entire musical future, allegedly harnessing the “power of the internet to enable people to become managers”.
NME reports:
Each member will take on the role of manager for the company’s new band and the members then get to vote online to decide on each detail of the band – like who are the members, and what tracks will [...]

Touted as “the best shopping experience in London”, the famous Covent Garden Market will now be open every Thursday evening in August from 5 – 10pm, luring visitors with a spectacular array of gourmet food and the possibility of dining “alfresco style” in “the atmospheric surroundings of hops and hay bails”. Add some great live music and you’ve got a night market that should be enticing to foodies and newbies alike .
Bringing together the best of London’s food markets – traders from Borough to Broadway, Exmouth to Islington will set their stalls out alongside premium food producers never before available [...]

In the ever-increasing cross-pollination between real events and their online doppelgängers, music festivals have made leaps and bounds in their attempts to integrate actual shows with the interactive tools of new media.
One such example is Playstation’s 3Rooms, a 9m sq cube that appeared at this month’s Manchester International Festival. The conspicuous metal box contained a veritable laboratory of high-tech, aesthetically pleasing equipment operated by a host of net-savvy students – “the cream of local art and film schools and universities” – all of whom worked towards making the festival more than just a few days of good music.
The [...]

Every city has its secrets. Most of them are right there before our eyes, obscured perhaps by force of habit or by grime, but they are there nonetheless, in the very bones of the buildings, waiting to be revealed.
To discover them is the self-imposed role of an emerging breed of thrill seekers looking for a new kind of fix – urban explorers. These modern day adventurers are the pioneers of a new final frontier, whose borders lie not in space or at the bottom of the ocean, but in the deepest recesses of the city itself with its seemingly endless [...]

Can art change the world? This is the question posed by an exhibit which opened recently in Oslo, Norway as part of the World Environment Day 2007, and the answer seems to be in the affirmative. The exhibit, called “Envisioning Change”, gathers a collection of different art and design work from a variety of media to showcase what a sustainable future might look like. Here are some thoughts on the exhibit by sponsor Autodesk:
The “Envisioning Change” exhibit looks at climate change from a worldwide perspective, chronicling the effect of global warming on the ecosystems and communities of the polar regions, [...]

This year’s IDEA produced, as per usual, some fascinating forays into the future of design. For the student awards, the bronze medal went to Julia Burke of the University of Notre Dame, who created a system called Green Air, a “low-cost, space-efficient air purification system that uses plants to reduce toxins in the air”. The system works as such:
The wall-mounted ceramic planter contains a small 115 VAC fan that slowly pushes air through the soil to the plant’s roots, a process that breaks down toxins equal to that of 15 regular plants. A conical bottom allows users to easily replace [...]

Endgadget reports on a new initiative that will supply up to 37 Silicon Valley cities with WiFi. It should stand, once completed, as the largest WiFi network in the country.
Endgadget writes:
Reportedly, a group of firms (including IBM and Cisco) are looking to build a $85- to $150-million outdoor WiFi network that could connect up 37 cities in Silicon Valley. The initiative will not only provide basic, free internet to those willing to deal with the ad-supported service, but it will also dish out subscriber-based signals to residents, high-speed service to businesses, and uber-secure communications to police / firefighters. As of [...]

The inhabitants of Silicon Valley, the heartland of the so-called “creative class”, have opted for the Prius as their collective car of choice. This past June more of Toyota’s hybrids were sold in the high-tech metro area than any other vehicle, far surpassing the national standards. The Creative Class Group reports:
“Are we ahead of the curve, or what?” asked Rod Diridon, executive director of the Mineta Transportation Institute at San Jose State University, and a Prius owner.
The Prius’ newfound status reflects the continued greening of Silicon Valley. Diridon listed sustained higher gas prices, the availability of carpool-lane stickers for [...]

A recent Reuters survey finds that most young people don’t really consider the role of technology in their lives, and that, according to them, they “don’t like it”.
This may seem strange considering the ubiquity of mobile phone and internet usage, but the point is that kids see the specific aspects of technology rather than the macro “concept” of it; they may talk about “downloading” or “burning”, “consoles” or “myspace”, but rarely does technology as a whole appear as a specified interest or concern.
The statistics, however, vary considerably. Far more youths from countries like Brazil, India and China tend to admit [...]