The Kill Team

With their commanding officers repeatedly failing to investigate, the kill team was starting to feel invulnerable. To encourage soldiers in other units to target unarmed civilians, Gibbs had given one of the “off the books” grenades he had scrounged to a friend from another battalion, Staff Sgt. Robert Stevens. “It showed up in a box on my desk,” recalled Stevens, a senior medic. “When I opened the box, I saw a grenade canister, which had a grenade in it and a dirty green sock.” Figuring the sock was some kind of joke, Stevens threw it away. Later, when he saw Gibbs, he mentioned getting the grenade.

“Did you get the other thing?” Gibbs asked.

“What, the sock?” Stevens said.

“No, what was in the sock,” Gibbs replied.

Inside the sock, Gibbs had placed a severed human finger.

Stevens got the message. On March 10th, as his convoy was driving down Highway 1, the central road connecting Kandahar to the north, Stevens stuck his head out of his Stryker’s open hatch and tossed the grenade. It detonated a few seconds later than he had anticipated, and when it blew, it thudded into the vehicle. Stevens immediately began firing at a nearby compound of huts, yelling at another platoon member to do the same. “Get the fuck up, Morgan!” he screamed. “Let’s go, shoot!”

The Kill Team by Mark Boal, Rolling Stone

How much CO2 does this article produce?

(CNN) — Twenty milligrams; that’s the average amount of carbon emissions generated from the time it took you to read the first two words of this article.
How green is your website? Calculating all the factors involved in a website can be tricky.

Now, depending on how quickly you read, around 80, perhaps even 100 milligrams of C02 have been released. And in the several minutes it will take you to get to the end of this story, the number of milligrams of greenhouse gas emitted could be several thousand, if not more.

This may not seem like a lot: “But in aggregate, if you consider all the people visiting a web site and then all the seconds that each of them spends on it, it turns out to be a large number,” says Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross, an Environmental Fellow at Harvard University who studies the environmental impact of computing.

Read the rest on CNN

We’re not as green as we think

Canadians who look in the mirror and see green may be environmentally colour blind, according to a new study.

Researchers compared how Canadians perceive their commitment to the environment and what they actually do about it in a study commissioned by marketing firm Cossette Communication and Summerhill, an environmental consultancy.

On average, people believed they were 20 per cent greener than their reported behaviour showed, the study found.

For example, close to 80 per cent of respondents said they use reusable drinking containers regularly, Cossette’s Nick Cowling said. “Yet if you are standing in the lineup at Starbucks or Tim Hortons or Second Cup and you look around, of course 80 per cent of people in the lineup are not doing that. They’re going to use the paper cup they’re given.”

Read the rest on CBC

Design with intent

A great read about the role of good design and interaction in behavioral changes.

Over the past several months, I’ve been fortunate to meet and talk to a number of people — among them Jan Chipchase of Nokia, Peter Whybrow of UCLA, and Caroline Hummels of Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands — about the role of the designer in behavior change. Our conversations echoed the pent-up ambitions I’ve often heard from the young designers I teach and work with. They also reinforced my belief that we’re experiencing a sea change in the way designers engage with the world. Instead of aspiring to influence user behavior from a distance, we increasingly want the products we design to have more immediate impact through direct social engagement. Institutions that drive the global social innovation agenda, such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, have shown an interest in this new approach, but many designers hesitate to pursue it. Committing to direct behavior design would mean stepping outside the traditional frame of user-centered design (UCD), which provides the basis of most professional design today.

Read the rest at design mind

“How David beats Goliath” by Malcolm Gladwell

A great article by Malcolm Gladwell on what it means to be a competitive underdog. Gladwell talks about why “common” sense is not always the most successful strategy on the courts, battlefields or in business.

The price that the outsider pays for being so heedless of custom is, of course, the disapproval of the insider. Why did the Ivy League schools of the nineteen-twenties limit the admission of Jewish immigrants? Because they were the establishment and the Jews were the insurgents, scrambling and pressing and playing by immigrant rules that must have seemed to the Wasp élite of the time to be socially horrifying. “Their accomplishment is well over a hundred per cent of their ability on account of their tremendous energy and ambition,” the dean of Columbia College said of the insurgents from Brooklyn, the Bronx, and the Lower East Side. He wasn’t being complimentary. Goliath does not simply dwarf David. He brings the full force of social convention against him; he has contempt for David.

Full article in The New Yorker