Tomorrow I’m participating in a “Breaching Boundaries” conversation at the American Anthropological Association’s yearly event. Here are my thoughts as a layperson and fan of anthropology; I went for a whole 10 years once without anthropology. After a few ethnography and anthropology classes in undergrad to support a comparative religion major, I took what I
We tend to tell the story of developing world crisis in numbers: Almost 1 billion people on the planet don’t have access to clean, safe drinking water. That’s one in eight of us. Every day more than 4,000 children around the world die from diseases caused by poor water sanitation In Africa alone, people spend
At Open Forum: For years scientists have been arguing that the rest of us do not see what they see when we look at data about climate change. While the documentary An Inconvenient Truth provided a compelling narrative, few feel that awareness of these issues has led to wide scale behavior change. It seems that it is natural human behavior
At Open Forum for Inhabitat: Let’s imagine two business leaders, both entrepreneurs, both looking to create an environmentally friendly and efficiently produced sunscreen. Entrepreneur One is a green purist. Inspired to start a business after failing to findeffective non-toxic sunscreens for her first baby, and she decided to create thehealthiest, most environmentally friendly sunscreen in the
You CAN measure the ROI of relationships – personally, and professionally, and this seminar will show you how. No spreadsheets needed for this lecture, and only minimal algebra. Bring a cocktail napkin, a flair ink pen, and learn how to calculate the net present value of your future mate, your pet, or the 8,299 followers
At Open Forum for Inhabitat: The recent weak news on the unemployment front leaves some of us wondering: Where are all of the green jobs? The U.S. Department of Commerce made an attempt to answer this very question and set a benchmark to measure the size of the emerging green economy by the number of
ROI, EPS, and GDP are acronyms under attack. From big picture to smaller picture, these acronyms all give order of magnitude value to the financial return of our efforts as humans on this earth. I’m going to start with the big picture, GDP, and look at the developing alternatives to a one number view of a country’s well
Talk at ITP Summer Camp for Makers: ITP Summer Camp 2010: MAKERS KNOW WHAT'S IN YOUR STUFF from Jen van der Meer Secret tricks for learning about how stuff is made. Be a responsible maker: know where your stuff comes from, who makes it, how it affects the earth and the people that make
This is my third installment in a series I’m titling “The Measurement of Us” – measuring the impact of the time and attention we pay to social media in our lives, companies, and communities. In this post I dissect what is meant by “earned media.” The social media sector is at a crossroads. Two competing mental models for
This is my second installment in a series I’m titling “The Measurement of Us” – measuring the impact of the time and attention we pay to social media in our lives, companies, and communities. First I’ll take a look at the easiest things to measure – financial ROI. Of course you can measure the ROI of