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

(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

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

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

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

As I usually do, I first visited TigerDirect and looked at what they had in stock. I found my DNS-323, which was listed at $225.99 + tax and shipping. Ouch. Having heard of Dell on Twitter, I decided to see if I could find a better deal there. After talking to a few Dell Twitter employees using TweetDeck, they located a deal on DNS-323 for $145.99 and $0 shipping. I completed the sale and received the product the next day. What a great brand experience – it took me about 30 minutes to make an educated purchase at a great value, based on a multitude of custom recommendations and personal connections.

A company that has a meaningful dialogue with its customers and provides them with great value will sell.
Bravo, Dell.

P.S. I am in no way affiliated with Dell and have never been their customer.
P.S.S. Today I came across this article, which perfectly reinforced up my experience:

Asked whether they want more stuff, consumers in rich countries have responded with an emphatic “No”. The breathtaking speed with which retail sales have plummeted in both America and Europe (see chart) has caught retailers and manufacturers by surprise. In response, companies have tried desperately to prop up revenues using a variety of promotions, advertising and other marketing ploys, often to no avail.

But as they battle with these immediate problems, marketers are also pondering what longer-term changes in consumer behaviour have been triggered by the recession. It is tempting to conclude that, once economies rebound, customers will start spending again as they did before. Yet there are good reasons to think that what promises to be the worst downturn since the Depression will spark profound shifts in shoppers’ psychology.

…

The downturn will also accelerate the use of social media, such as blogs and social-networking sites, by consumers looking for intelligence on firms and their products. As trust in brands is eroded, people will place more value on recommendations from friends. Social media make it harder for brands to pull the wool over consumers’ eyes, but they also offer canny companies a powerful new channel through which to promote their wares and test new products and pricing strategies.

Marketers ignore the messages that emanate from these groups at their peril. For one thing is clear: this recession has triggered a wholesale reappraisal by shoppers of the value that their habitual brands deliver. The winners will be those that adapt intelligently to the new reality. The losers will be those who think they can win simply by telling consumers to “Want It!”

Read the rest on Economist

On Monday, Adobe’s chief executive, Shantanu Narayen, will announce at the annual National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas that Adobe is extending Flash to the television screen. He expects TVs and set-top boxes that support the Flash format to start selling later this year.

For consumers, what sounds like a bit of inconsequential Internet plumbing actually means that a long overhyped notion is a step closer to reality: viewing a video clip or Internet application on a TV or mobile phone.

Read the rest on NYT and more on BBC

Magazine advertising pages fell almost 26 percent in the first quarter, according to Publishers Information Bureau data released late Tuesday, signaling a difficult beginning to what is expected to be a dismal advertising year.

Only 15 magazines tracked by the bureau had more ad pages this quarter than they did in the period a year ago. Those included the National Journal, up 42.1 percent to 185 pages, and Fitness, up 28 percent to 199 pages.

Read the rest on NYT

Known Gentleman Randy Sarafan decided to make this office chair to help “accurately document and share [his] life as it happens,” which is as admirable a cause as there ever has been to open a Twitter account. The setup is surprisingly complex: A natural gas sensor does the sniffing; an Arduino does the thinking; an Squidbee wireless module does the communicating; Twitter does the sharing. It’s a feat, to be sure.

Read the rest on Gizmodo

P.S. Eric Gill was actually quite a character.
P.S.S. Love the ½ ligature in the issue number.