Ahhhh, another year…another tax season.

But the IRS offers us this temporary relief to the sting of paying taxes by instating the Telephone Excise Tax Refund. I know, sounds exciting right? Well, actually it kind of is. The government owes tax payers approximately 20 billion dollars in illegally collected taxes on telephone bills (this was a law created to help fund the Spanish American War). It may seem like a measly 20 bucks that you get back, but you can do something really exciting with that refund. Refunds for Good is an internet marketing campaign that is focused on educating Americans about this tax refund and enouraging taxpayers to consider supporting one of three nonprofit organizations.

Our friend, The Solar Electric Light Fund, is one of the organizations to which you can donate.

The great thing about refundsforgood.com is how simple they make the process. The website takes you through the entire process so that donating to organizations working towards world peace, population control and sustainable development is a snap.

Here is a YouTube video clip about the project and a feature article from the Boston Globe as well as the official press release from SELF

Pop!Tech encourages you to visit the Refunds for Good website and support one of these causes with your long awaited telephone refund.

I flew up to Camden, ME this week to meet up with my fellow Pop!Techers. As I waited for my flight at New York’s JFK, I decided to ease myself into an outdoorsy frame of mind and bought the latest issue of Outside Magazine.

The banner across cover model, Governor Schwarzenegger’s chest, reads The Green Issue. In the magazine, they list some of the Green leaders and innovators from politics, health care, architecture and Hollywood.

Entrepreneur, explorer, eligible bachelor and Pop!Tech friend David de Rothschild is featured as one of these Enviro All-Stars. David is the founder of Adventure Ecology, a program that gets kids excited about adventure and fosters an appreciation for global responsibility.

“The environment is an area that requires a great deal of energy and optimism,” David says, “and, to my mind, kids have these features in abundance.”

Here is another feature from 2006 on David and how he started Adventure Ecology (also from Outside Magazine).

Motion graphics studio and beloved motion designer for Pop!Tech (and our forthcoming podcast) Trollback + Company has recently created a stunning video called Moonlight in Glory. It’s a really cool treatment using light and typography.Moonlight in Glory comes off the 1981 album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Brian Eno (Pop!Tech 2006 Speaker) and David Byrne.The albums was one of the first non-rap albums to heavily feature sampling techniques.

Great news! The installation of the solar panels in Benin, made possible by the Carbon Negative initiative from Pop!Tech 2006, will commence in the next few months.

Robert Freling, Executive Director of The Solar Electric Light Fund, has sent us some wonderful pictures from Benin, where 44 villages that are currently off the grid will receive clean, renewable energy to homes, schools, health care clinics thanks to the partnership between SELF, Lexus, and Pop!Tech.

The first image is of Bona Kida Setamou, the mother of Mamoudou Setamou, the person who first introduced Freling to the Benin Project opportunity. Note that she is holding a soon to be obsolute kerosene lantern.

Below the pictures is the original letter from Mamoudou. It’s a wonderful account of how SELF first got involved and it is always so rewarding to see the faces of those who are directly benefiting from these types of initiatives.

Dear Friend of SELF,

Mamoudou Setamou, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Citrus Entomology
Texas A&M University – Kingsville

Between every Pop!Tech session we show some of the coolest video interstitials as a mental sorbet of sorts. We look for music videos, advertisements or video art pieces that have caught our eye for their stunning visuals, social commentary or just plain hilarity.

One group that we consistently turn to for video fodder, and often meet all the above criteria, is the Paris collective, Pleix. They are relatively well known now, (Their piece, Birds, circulated like made around the web) but the individuals behind Pleix remains a mystery to many.

At the recent ENSAD conference in Paris, Eric Augier, one of the artists of Pleix, took the spotlight to share their personal and commercial work. An overview of some of their works is given here.

Here is a description of the Netlag project which we showed at the 2006 Pop!Tech.

In 2004, they created another project especially for the Ferme du Buisson: Netlag. The first step was to develop a custom-built software that grabs on the internet movies from surveillance webcams all around the world (up to 3000 webcams because of the limitations of the program). One frame every 10 minutes was then recorded during a 24-hour span in January 2004. The films were then mapped on a representation of the world, the images were accelerated to give a better feeling of their night/day evolution and the result is pretty impressive: the African continent is nearly invisible while certain European countries and the US appear to be very active because, as we know it, surveillance is pretty well developed there.

What makes the work even more fascinating is that it was conceived before the launch of Google Earth.

The idea attracted the interest of the commercial world. Adidas bought the right to reproduce the concept for a year. They used the money to finance other “personal” projects.

via:: We Make Money Not Art

CoolHunting had a nice feature on Pop!Tech friend Edward Burtynsky. The award winning documentary about Burtnysky’s work Manufactured Landscapes has just been released on DVD on March 6th. In conjuction with the release, Mongrel Media is holding a contest with the Grand Prize being an original Burtynsky print.

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Edward Burtynsky’s photographs a world changing for the purposes of industrial development. His most recent book, China, is a glimpse into the massive social and economic transformation currently underway as China tries to join the ranks of more industrialized nations.

Burtynsky says that “these images are meant as metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence; they search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear. We are drawn by desire, a chance at good living, yet we are consciously or unconsciously aware that the world is suffering for our success. Our dependence on nature to provide the materials for our consumption and our concern for the health of our planet sets us into an uneasy contradiction. For me, these images function as reflecting pools of our times.”

His images of the Three Gorges Dam project on the Yangtze River (which is bigger by 50% than any other dam in the world, displacing more than one million people) look post-apocalyptic. Pictures of factories and the people who work in them are filled with endlessly repeating patterns and colors. In cities like Shanghai, massive urban renewal can be seen as countless skyscrapers and roadways replace traditional dwellings. See more images here.

Jennifer Baichwal followed Burtynsky as he traveled through China making these pictures and produced an award-winning documentary called Manufactured Landscapes, a riveting film that was just released on DVD. You can see a trailer for it here.

You can also visit Edward Burtynsky’s website for a very organized introduction to his work, including images, links, videoclips, and a schedule of exhibitions worldwide throughout 2007-2008. Signed copies of the book are available through Photoeye, unsigned copies from Amazon.

by Jonah Samson

By the time this post is written, we will be even closer to a day that some will greet with jubilation and that others (myself included) cringe at the very thought of. March 24th 2007 is–Shutdown Day.

Two ambitious gentlemen from Canada, Denis Bystrov and Michael Taylor began the project as an experiment to:

get people to think about how their lives have changed with the increasing use of the home computer, how society is changing and whether or not any good things are being lost because of this. It is obvious that computers are an extremely important and vital part of society these days.

Within the first 5 days of launching the project, 10,000 individuals pledged their support. On the website there are two camps: the “I Can”s and the “I Can’t”s.

On March 24th, those in support will shut off their computers, silence their cell phones and forget their PDA’s in the name of taking a break from technology and conserving energy.

Do you think you could do it? Pledge your support or admit your undying allegiance to connectivity. On March 25th, the creators of Shutdown day will show a chart displaying internet traffic on the previous day as well as opening the forum for comments on how people found their day without technology.

How would you spend your day?

Architecture for Humanity has announced that they have selected a winning logo from their online design competition. They gathered 65 jurors from across the globe to select finalists from more than 800 entries. The coolest part of it all…the whole competition was conducted on Flickr. You can see the work of all the finalists online. And it’s really interesting to read visitors’ comments on each logo.

The winning entry was made by Oregon based designer Michael DiTullo with his simple design featuring a nice dimensional measurement reference.

Here were the criteria established by AFH:

Criteria

We are looking for a logo that will reflect both the mission and spirit of the organization. A good fit for us would include the following:

1. The logo should be able to be understood globally and inoffensive to all cultures.

2. A logo that is not overly representational as our work overlaps so many aspects of design i.e. Definitely no houses, no people, no people in houses and no houses in people.

3. Neither the mark nor the logotype would use the abbreviation “AFH.” there are too many organizations with abbreviations in the development and reconstruction world you end up getting lost in alphabet soup. Please use our full name, ‘Architecture for Humanity’ in the logotype.

4. The logo must be replicable for all Architecture for Humanity chapters. Therefore the logotype must accommodate everything from ‘Architecture for Humanity Roma’ to ‘Architecture for Humanity San Francisco.’ It is also suggested that entrants also explore chapter logos using both the local dialect and English. (ie. Architecture for Humanity Tokyo should be able to be read in Japanese and English)

5. The design should be able to be reversible and use both light on dark and dark on light.

6. The logo will be used for a myriad of print and online applications. It must be readable from use on silkscreened T-Shirts to dodgy fax machines in far off countries.

AFH following a growing trend in using sites like Flickr and YouTube to generate content such as Davos’ recent call for submissions. The competition, as it opens its doors to the outside design world, is wonderfully in line with its open-source architectural mission.

During his presentation at Pop!Tech 2006 on Emergent Arts, Will Wright (Creator of The Sims) discussed his feeling that complexity is achieved by the accumulation of very simple, basic elements. That is the premise behind his much anticipated game (about 3 years worth of anticipation) Spore.

Popular Science has an in-depth interview with Wright where the gaming innovator discusses Spore , Wii, Second Life, the value of failure and getting back to the metaphorical “sandbox”.

On Spore as an educational tool, Wright says:

“I think more in terms of deep lessons of things like problem-solving, or just creativity–creativity is a fundamental of education that’s not really taught so much. But giving people tools…what it means to be human is to learn to use tools to basically expand your abilities. And I think computer games are in some sense a fundamental tool for our imagination.”

There is also a quote that stood out in the article that resonated with the Pop!Tech ethos. Wright discusses his plans for a more “relevant” gaming experience in his next endeavors–games that play on cultural parameters such as:

“politics and economics and environmentalism, all these things as these horrendously complicated things with a million variables. But yet there is a limited level of understanding of the climate, of politics, of economics, that we could take anybody and make them five points smarter in any one of these dimensions. And just making everybody in the world five points more educated on each of these dimensions I think would have a tremendous impact on the system as a whole.”

If you missed the sneak peak of the game presented at Pop!Tech, you can see more images here at the Spore Image Gallery.

The game is slated to be released in the Spring of 2007…(fingers crossed).

AND

Don’t miss the Popular Science Podcast with Pop!Tech’s Official Balladeer Jonathan Coulton and Spore designer Chaim Gingold here.