Steelcase—the furniture maker—asked 100 thinkers to describe a wish for the next 100 years. Christopher Mims, writing for the Technology Review, reports that MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito absolutely nailed it in 150 words.

“One hundred years from now, the role of science and technology will be about becoming part of nature rather than trying to control it.

“So much of science and technology has been about pursuing efficiency, scale and ‘exponential growth’ at the expense of our environment and our resources. We have rewarded those who invent technologies that control our triumph over nature in some way. This is clearly not sustainable.

“We must understand that we live in a complex system where everything is interrelated and interdependent and that everything we design impacts a larger system.

“My dream is that 100 years from now, we will be learning from nature, integrating with nature and using science and technology to bring nature into our lives to make human beings and our artifacts not only zero impact but a positive impact to the natural system that we live in.”

Now if the brain trust at the MIT Press would get off its dead ass and publish Howard Rheingold’s Net Smart: How to Thrive Online as a non-DRMed EPUB ebook (as well as the rest of the Rheingold back catalog it has seemed to corral) my faith in MIT would be at least partially restored.

Since the last ice age some 12,000 years ago we’ve been living in what’s referred to the Holocene and may be entering a new epoch called the Anthropocene. In this Anthropocene era, humanity is no longer shaped by the external world; instead the external world is shaped by humanity. Our shaping of the external world naturally affects the planet’s geological record.

Globaia focuses on creating maps and other visualizations of the impact we’re having on the Earth. Earlier this month, Globia released its most recent work, an animation illustrating our collective impact on the planet by clearly showing our transportation routes and power grids.

Globia’s video animation of human impact on the Earth for Welcome to the Anthropocene commissioned for the Planet Under Pressure conference.

We think of the Earth as a water-filled planet. But that’s not so. The US Geological Survey (USGS) has created a stunning and compelling visualization of how much water there is on the planet. Not just fresh water, but all water: Salt water from the oceans, ice caps, ground water, atmospheric water (water vapor), and even water contained in plants and animals (including humans).

Earth’s total water, visualized (from USGS).

It’s a disturbing image because the dot of water stretches only about 332,500,000 cubic miles (with a diameter of only about 860 miles)—“from about Salt Lake City, Utah to Topeka, Kansas.”

In an effort to increase awareness in Germany about the disparity between people on organ transplant waiting lists and organ donors, Ogilvy & Mather Berlin created The Waiting Time Experiment. The short video shows dialysis patient Michael Stapf—who’s been waiting for a kidney for seven years—dialyzing in a concourse at the Frankfurt airport.

It’s quite disturbing to see the healthcare worker, probably a doctor because this is Germany after all, place Stapf’s dialysis needles without gloves.

Last February, the Obama administration’s Interior Department proposed a rule that would require companies that use hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) on public land for oil and gas to disclose the chemicals they use. Most fracking takes place on private land; about 20 percent takes place on public lands. Of course the gas and oil lobbyists responded with the all-too-familiar claims of burdensome paperwork and mandated revelation of trade secrets, according to John M. Broder writing for the New York Times.

The Obama administration response was similarly all-too-familiar. Under the draft rule released by the Interior Department, fracking companies would still have to disclose the chemicals they use, but only after the drilling is completed. Because disclosure after the damage is done magically reduces paperwork and cloaks trade secrets.

Hydraulic fracturing—“fracking”—is the process by which vast quantities of water, sand, and proprietary chemicals are pumped into a well under high pressure, causing the shale to fracture and release natural gas. The process was patented by Halliburton in the 1940s, and Halliburton remains one of the largest manufacturers of the chemicals used in fracking. In 2005, the George W. Bush administration’s energy bill exempted natural gas drilling from the Safe Drinking Water Act and protected the gas and oil companies from disclosing the chemicals they used. Not for nothing, Bush’s vice president was Dick Cheney, who was Halliburton’s chief executive before he was vice president.

While the all-too-ineffective US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has determined that fracking doesn’t threaten drinking water, the study upon which that determination was based is inadequate. In 2005, Earthworks published a report criticizing the EPA’s ineffectiveness. Residents in Alabama, Colorado, New Mexico, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming have reported water problems after fracking near their homes.

The Earthworks report cites the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission statistics finding 90 percent of oil and gas wells in the US use fracking (and wells can be fracked multiple times). Chemicals thought to be used in the fracking process include volatile organic compounds (VOCs) such as benzene, ethylbenzene, toluene, and xylene. These chemicals are added to up to eight million gallons of water in a single fracking process. Only 30-50 percent of the water used is recovered as highly toxic wastewater. Evaporators are then used to release the VOCs into the air and the remaining wastewater is taken to treatment facilities.

Josh Fox’s Gasland (2010; winner of the Sundance special documentary jury prize) brilliantly documents the problems associated with fracking. In one memorable scene, residents of a small Pennsylvania town are seen igniting their drinking water.

Meanwhile, other Obama administration agencies and officials have begun to escalate their ineffective rhetoric (talk’s cheap) with regard to the environment. Days earlier, for example, US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told the Environmental Defense Fund, “the area of climate change has a dramatic impact on national security.” Right hand, meet left hand.

Think we can afford all that water—and all those chemicals going into our water—for fracking? Take a gander at this US Geological Survey image showing the earth’s water volume.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has finally hit upon a sure-fire way to garner widespread attention to itself. The United States has never had a full-blown national general strike. Ever. All that changes on Tuesday, 1 May 2012 when Occupy Wall Street initiates its first major action of 2012: A national general strike.

Occupy May Day general strike.

The premise is simple:

“Building on the international celebration of May Day, past General Strikes in U.S. cities like Seattle and Oakland, the recent May 1st Day Without An Immigrant demonstrations, the national general strikes in Spain this year, and the on-going student strike in Quebec, the Occupy Movement has called for A Day Without the 99% on May 1st, 2012.”

The idea is simpler: Don’t go to work, don’t go to school, and don’t buy anything. If you’re self employed, don’t work or produce anything.

The US has never seen a resistance where everything in the country—work, commerce, education, spending, shopping, everything—simply shuts down.

Occupy May Day general strike Twin Cities.

There are planned actions in more than 125 cities across the US, including Minneapolis and Saint Paul up here on the far edge. A pre-May Day march is planned in the Twin Cities for Friday, 27 April 2012, 4:30PM at Peavey Plaza in Minneapolis.

My good friend Jerry Daniels is once again seeking the ultimate in self-contained online publishing. He’s been doing this—off and on—for the last 25 years or so.

Daniels started with µFilm Reader and Writer for the Mac back in the 1980s. It was software that let an individual publish (µFilm Writer) electronically in a format that closely resembled microfilm. Because the microfilm metaphor was close to exact, it was immediately apparent to the user how to read the publication. These were the days of nine-inch Macintosh screens, CompuServe, and GEnie. Neither AOL, nor the commercial internet, nor the web yet existed.

I published both a weekly and a monthly for several years using µFilm Writer. The process was fairly painless, as I remember. I wrote each issue in MacWrite and fed it into µFilm Writer which converted it. Then I uploaded it to the Mac file libraries on CompuServe and GEnie. They were shareware publications and I enjoyed a reasonably large readership. Daniels and his wife published the original MacWEEK using µFilm Writer and later sold the name to Patch Communications who eventually sold it to Ziff-Davis.

Now Daniels is back with WOLF, a Mac-only self-contained online publishing system. And a self-contained online publication, Wolf Not Dog: Satisfying your thirst for freedom. Delivered as a freestanding Macintosh application, Wolf Not Dog delivers a new article from Daniels just about every day or so. The next day the article is published on a freely accessible website, but seemingly disappears upon publication of the next article. That’s right, no archive and no RSS feed.

If you want to read something Daniels wrote a month ago, or even a day ago, you’ve got to buy the WOLF application for US$5. Then you get the whole shebang accessible via index, search engine, and tag cloud—all of which are internal to WOLF. Also included in WOLF is a three-tab web browser (no more; no less). The first tab contains a Twitter list of people Daniels follows (you can change this to whatever you like); the other two tabs are available for linked content from articles in the main content section of the application. The tabs can be locked and when filled, links will open in the default browser. All of the available webviews are preloaded when the application is launched making navigating content within the WOLF environment quick. There are also buttons to tweet or email links for articles within WOLF.

Why in the world would you want to publish in an environment that isn’t searchable by Google, isn’t findable on the web, and offers only a single article to non-paying readers? Daniels believes the below-cost and free business models that currently dominate publishing on the web are neither disruptive nor differentiated. The result is an overabundance of free, poorly developed content and services that are all pretty much the same. Daniels cites the nut grafs of Alexis Madrigal’s Atlantic article, “The Jig Is Up: Time to Get Past Facebook and Invent a New Future:”

“The point is that every user of a free service costs the service money. Whereas every user for a paid-for service generates money. What that means is that a growing free site is an acquisition waiting to happen because its developers are burning through ever more cash.


“Free applications and services get driven to do other things, too. They must grow quickly and they must collect vast amounts of data and they must acquire your social graph somehow. Even if those things were all good, they would still reduce the variety of startups that seem possible. The only metric that seems to matter with startups is the number of users it has been able to skim from the masses. (Partially because so many can’t get anyone to visit them and partially because so few of them make money.)


“It’s not that I think paid software and services will necessarily be better, but I think they’ll be different.”

Daniels iterates the four tired, possible ways to monetize online publications:

1. Sell advertising
2. Participate in affiliate programs
3. Sell memberships or subscriptions
4. Sell crap like coffee mugs and t-shirts

Really? Almost 20 years into this web thing that was supposed to change everything and we’re still orbiting around the same four possible ways to monetize publications?

Daniels’s current experiment revolves around selling a content-rich, regularly updated application for a pittance and creating similar applications for other premium publishers. I’m not sure what to make of Daniels’s prospects—I certainly wish him the best—at least he’s still pushing and trying new things.

For me, discoverability and open access to the entirety of my work is a huge issue, making WOLF a non-starter. At least for now.

Update: Wednesday, 25 April 2012 2:06PM CDT: Ugh, that last graf makes it sound like I would never purchase WOLF. That’s not true—I willingly paid US$5 for the WOLF application and I’m glad I did. But I probably wouldn’t buy too many of them; I can barely wrangle my RSS feeds, and they’re all in one application. Having a separate WOLF-like application for everyone I want to read that’s publishing interesting stuff would be unwieldy. What I meant to write was that a WOLF-like application for my content doesn’t make sense for me right now. By no means does that mean it shouldn’t/couldn’t/wouldn’t make sense for you—I can think of a lot of folks that aren’t steeped in the web, and don’t want to be, but have quite useful things to write about.

Two years ago, ProPublica—the independent, nonprofit investigative news organization—published a website detailing data on individual dialysis centers, focusing on a dozen quality measures. The website was made possible by data ProPublica received in response to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

Recently, ProPublica obtained and published dialysis facility statistics through 2010 and included a new quality metric: How often dialysis patients of an individual dialysis center are required to go to a hospital emergency room.

ProPublica’s quality metrics for measuring the performance of individual dialysis centers are considerably more extensive than those used by the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which regulates dialysis centers. The ProPublica metrics include:

• Survival rates for dialysis patients overall and in their first year of treatment
• Comparative rates of patient hospitalizations for infections and septicemia
• Comparative rates of patients who receive transplants and patients on transplant waiting lists
• Comparative rates of patients who were not under the care of a nephrologist prior to starting dialysis
• Comparative rates of hospitalizations, length of stays, and now emergency room visits
• Clinical benchmark comparisons including anemia management and dialysis adequacy
• Comparative rates of patients with vascular accesses relative to patients with catheters
• Comparative inspection rates

For example, here’s the comparative data for the available dialysis centers closest to my home.

Statewide, Minnesota’s dialysis facilities had the seventh best mortality rate in the US, according to Christopher Snowbeck and MaryJo Webster, writing for the Pioneer Press. But Minnesota fared not nearly so well when measuring hospitalizations and emergency room visits. DaVita’s facility in Northeast Minneapolis had one of the worst rates of emergency room visits in the country—109 percent higher than expected—as well as one of the worst hospitalization rates—72 percent higher than expected.

CMS can only require deficient dialysis centers to submit and implement corrective action plans; the federal agency cannot fine deficient centers. While CMS cannot levy fines against deficient dialysis providers, it can threaten to drop them from Medicare. Since the vast majority of dialysis patients are covered by Medicare, regardless of age, this is a pretty big stick to wield.

Sandy Kleffman, writing for the San Jose Mercury News, reports one such threat to a Berkeley dialysis clinic in 2010. The Berkeley dialysis clinic, owned by Fresenius Medical Care—one of the two largest corporate dialysis providers in the US—was cited for “‘a severe safety breach’ including failing to wash hands and change gloves while moving from patient to patient, failing to disinfect blood pressure cuffs and other equipment after each treatment, and failing to remove expired medication. In one instance, the survey found, a technician moved from a patient with Hepatitis B to a supply cart and opened drawers without washing his hands.”

In order to make comparisons between facilities fair, CMS adjusts death and hospitalization rates to account for patient risk factors such as age and co-morbidities.

Very few people know that before my family and I landed in Stillwater, MN in 1982, we were headed to Woodstock, NY. We’d already settled on a home on Tinker Street and the local paper had already done a profile on ARTS & FARCES and Karen and me. Our intention was to loosely collaborate with Bart Friedman and Nancy Cain—two of the original Videofreex—and see what happened next.

Just before setting out in our 1970 Volkswagen camper (ingeniously modified at the factory so the refrigerator could be accessed while the bed was folded down) we got cold feet. We decided we would go broke in an inordinate amount of time being that close to New York city.

Instead, we ended up here on the far edge, first in Stillwater and then in Saint Paul.

I find myself wondering from time to time how our lives would have been different had we made the move to the Catskills. The creative community there was unparalleled at the time and incredibly supportive—as was the entire area. The music scene was among the best in the country. Todd Rundgren was just up the road in Bearsville; Pat Metheny was a fixture at various spots around town; and something extra special interesting was always shaking at Levon Helm’s barn. Unlike other musical hot-spots, the area of the Catskills around Woodstock was always known for a vast diversity of musical genres that liked to bump up against each other from time to time and then retreat to their respective corners and think about it. It was (and is I imagine; I haven’t been there in many years), quite simply, a very special place.

Now comes the sad news that Levon Helm is in the final stages of throat cancer. Diagnosed more than 10 years ago, I was pretty sure he had beaten it, but the disease recurred in 2009. His 2010 show with John Hiatt at the Minnesota Zoo sold out within minutes and was stellar, if too short. His 2009 sold-out date at Saint Paul’s Fitzgerald Theater was one of the best shows to take place in that room.

Here’s the setlist from Helm’s 2010 Minnesota Zoo show:

Blind Willie McTell
The Shape I’m In
Ain’t That Good News
Long Black Veil
Opheilia
Bourgeois Blues
Deep Elum Blues
All LA Glory
Tennessee Jed
Mardi Gras Day
The Weight (with John Hiatt)

Here’s the setlist from Helm’s 2009 Fitzgerald Theater show:

Ophelia
Same Thing
Battle Song
Simple Twist of Fate
Bye Bye My Love
Long Black Veil
Got Me a Woman
Ashes of Love
Did You Love Me
Deep Elum Blues
Great Train Robbery
Anna Lee
Rag Mama Rag
Mardi Gras Day
Everybody Loves a Winner
Tennessee Jed
Heaven’s Pearls
Kingfish
I Wish I Knew How
The Shape I’m In
The Genetic Method (Larry Campbell guitar solo)
Chest Fever
The Weight
Stand By Me
Rock ‘n’ Roll Shoes

Update: Wednesday, 18 April 2012 12:22PM CDT: If you don’t do anything else today, please read Charlie Pierce’s “Whip to Grave: Levon Helm, the Real Voice of America” for Esquire. It’s one of the best written pieces I’ve read in quite some time.

Update: Thursday, 19 April 2012 3:11PM CDT: Levon Helm passed a little over an hour ago at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. He was 71. Here’s Jon Pareles’s obituary for the New York Times. And here’s Bob Collins’s round-up for Minnesota Public Radio’s NewsCut.

It’s not news that there’s a tremendous shortage of viable transplant organs across the globe. If Keith Murphy, chief executive of Organovo has his way, transplant organ shortages will be a thing of the past. He plans to print replacement organs on a three-dimensional printer using a patient’s own cells as the biological equivalent of toner or ink.

David Holmes, writing for Fast Company, reports that Organovo’s three-dimensional bioprinter is already capable of creating blood vessels and connective tissue. The device works by creating bioink out of a patient’s own cells and then duplicating and programming the arrangement of the cells with software that works like putting together Lego blocks.

Unlike other companies that use three-dimensional printing technology in this space, Organovo’s device does not require or rely on the construction of underlying scaffolding from artificial materials. Organovo’s approach keeps the cells appropriately arranged without any foreign material; they’re completely biological. “Our system can get you to a fully cellular structure which is important if you’re trying to study the behavior of cells in their natural environment,” Murphy tells Holmes.

Some Republican members of the US House of Representatives may believe House members are “supposed to drive the train,” but I submit that it’s the other branches of government and an informed citizenry that manage to keep that train on the tracks.

That public education, health research, and law-enforcement are all treated like third-class issues exposes a disheartening lack of civil civic discourse, a deficient basic working knowledge of civics in general, and an unmitigated arrogance unbecoming of any public servant at the national, state, or local levels.

Public health, education, and welfare (from Webster’s: a state of health, prosperity, and well-being) is fundamental to a viable, healthy, democratic nation. Both now and historically such remains among the best ways to “raise all boats” floating on any nation’s “currents/currency.”

Perhaps passing a civics test at a higher than seventh-grade level should be mandatory prior to running for public office—regardless of the candidate’s formal education.

JK Rowling recently released all of the titles in her Harry Potter franchise as ebooks. Simultaneously, in all formats for all platforms. The ebooks are available exclusively through Rowling’s Pottermore website.

Of course, Rowling’s Harry Potter franchise is so lucrative that she can dictate terms with just about all the vendors, but simultaneous release on all formats and platforms isn’t the only interesting thing Rowling has done. Each title is available without digital rights management (DRM) restrictions of any kind (although each title will be watermarked). Customers can send the titles they purchase to any device they like. Customers can also download eight digital copies of each title they purchase; either for use on another device, or—wait for it—sharing with up to seven friends. Imagine that.

That sharing bit is so obvious—and costs virtually nothing—but few if any publishers are doing it. Instead, the corporate publishers are either refusing to sell ebooks to libraries (Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin, and Simon & Schuster) or charging outrageous rates (Random House).

Matthew Ingram, writing for GigaOm, cites Charlie Redmayne—who left HarperCollins to run Pottermore for Rowling—who demonstrates just how far ahead of the publishing pack he is:

“My view is that the one thing we should learn from the music industry, is that one of the best ways of fighting back against piracy is making content available to consumers at a platform they want to purchase it on, and at a price they are willing to pay, and if you do that most people will instinctively want to buy it.”

Meanwhile, the corporate publishers and Apple are under the gun for employing the agency model in pricing ebooks. In an agency model, the publisher sets the price of an ebook and the retailer takes a percentage of that. It’s the only really fair way to price ebooks and, as Mark Coker of Smashwords—a large aggregator/distributor of independent book publishing—writes, it’s actually driving down the price of ebooks.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin tells Ian Katz, writing for the Guardian, that the internet’s core foundation of openness and universal access are under greater threat than ever. “Very powerful forces that have lined up against the open internet on all sides and around the world,” Brin tells Katz. “I am more worried than I have been in the past ... it’s scary.”

China, for example, recently implemented a “real identity” program that requires internet users in that country to use their real names. And China now has more internet users than any other country on the planet.

While governments are trying to regulate internet access and control communications by their citizens, the entertainment cartel’s anti-piracy efforts threaten to throw the baby out with the bathwater. And then there’s the walled gardens of the likes of Apple and Facebook that exert ultimate and unwavering control over what software can be used on their products and platforms. The end result, Brin warns, is a balkanized web pointing to information locked inside apps that cannot be searched because it’s not discoverable by web search engines like Google.

Five years ago, when Brin was architecting Google’s partial exit from China, he believed that no government could effectively restrict the internet for more than a brief period of time. He was wrong, Brin now admits, telling Katz, “I thought there was no way to put the genie back in the bottle, but now it seems in certain areas the genie has been put back in the bottle.”

Brin minces no words when it comes to Facebook, telling Katz that he and Larry Page would never have been able to create Google in the Facebook era: “You have to play by their rules, which are really restrictive. The kind of environment that we developed Google in, the reason that we were able to develop a search engine, is the web was so open. Once you get too many rules that will stifle innovation.”

Brin was most critical of the entertainment cartel, telling Katz that it was “shooting itself in the foot, or maybe worse than in the foot” with its lobbying efforts to block infringing websites. The only way to accomplish that goal, according to Brin, is for the US to “the same technology and approach it criticised China and Iran for using.” Brin states the obvious when he tells Katz that people will continue to pirate content until—and probably only until—they can obtain the content legitimately just as frictionlessly and easily. “I haven’t tried it for many years but when you go on a pirate website, you choose what you like, it downloads to the device of your choice and it will just work –- and then when you have to jump through all these hoops [to buy legitimate content], the walls created are disincentives for people to buy,” says Brin.

I spent yesterday with the Twin Cities’ best and brightest at the local BarCamp event, MinneBar. The only tech events I attend any more are the un-conferences like MinneBar. I’m an old and jaded from too many past events where too many hucksters used invitation-only events to sell their (almost always) useless ideas and wares.

This was the seventh annual edition of the MinneBar spring event and it always brings together the best of the technology and design communities in the Twin Cities. This year, some 1,300 people attended; a new record. Passion—not money—drives the content of these events and I go because it makes me feel better about where we’re collectively headed.

One session—Chris Coyier‘s “What we don’t know”—was exceptional. As I tweeted from the session, I deeply wish all web front-end developers had the wisdom, humor, and just plain humanity of Coyier. It was the best tech presentation I’ve seen in more than a few years.

Food was provided by Chow Girls, and it was outstanding. Bagel and fruit for breakfast; pulled pork, pasta, and salad for lunch (I probably should have had the chicken or vegetarian sandwich, but I couldn’t resist). No small feat to feet a crowd of 1,300 well and timely. Hats off.

This morning I woke up with my brain still buzzing from yesterday’s event, took Annabelle Joy out for her morning constitutional, not fully awake but fully aware I was back in the real world. A guy was pawing through the trash in the alley between Summit and Grand Avenues. Now I’ve been known to dumpster dive—it’s truly mind-blowing what the University of St. Thomas and Macalester College kids throw away—so has Karen. But this man was looking mostly for food. I wished him a happy Easter as he trundled on down the alley.

The level of inequality in the United States today is heartbreaking—absolutely crushingly heartbreaking. And the disparity—lots of headhunters and human resource folks were plying their trade at yesterday’s MinneBar—simply takes my breath away. Economic recovery my ass. This was a middle-aged white man foraging in my alley. This is the new normal, brothers and sisters. The new normal.

Something on the order of 600,000 Macintosh computers have been infected by the most recent variation of the Flashback trojan that first surfaced in 2007. The most recent variation of the malware targets Macs with an older version of the Java Runtime software installed. Earlier this week Apple released an update to the software that addresses the flaw, but here’s how to check your machines:

1. Launch Terminal.
2. At the command prompt, enter: defaults read /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/Info LSEnvironment. If the message The domain/default pair of (/Applications/Safari.app/Contents/Info LSEnvironment) does not exist appears, so far so good.
3. At the command prompt, enter: defaults read ~/.MacOSX/environment DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES. If the message: The domain/default pair of (/Users/[username]/MacOSX/environment, DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES) does not exist appears, the machine has not been infected by the Flashback trojan.
4. If anything other than the above messages appear, your computer has been infected by the Flashback trojan. Use the instructions on the F-Secure website to manually remove it.