For open minds
Today from 8:30 to 9:30 it is Earth Hour. The goal is to unite people and protect the planet; turn off your lights to draw attention to the cause.
Organised by the WWF awareness around Earth Hour has grown with each passing year. Today the Earth Hour Twitter account has nearly 100,000 followers but should have a lot more.
In Pure Spirit
When it turns 8:30 in your time zone will you be switching off to mark Earth Hour?
Picture credit: images shared via /r/pics.
At 8:30pm on March 26th we’re turning out lights off for Earth Hour. This isn’t the first time the globe has had an Earth Hour. You should know about it by now.
But what if you don’t know about it? What if you’re the only one who doesn’t turn the lights off at 8:30 in order to draw attention to climate change?
In Australia this is the question that ad agency Leo Burnett tried to answer!
In Pure Spirit
What are you planning to do on the 26th and for Earth Hour? Are you planning on turning the lights out?
The WWF has teamed up with the Royal Mail to celebrate their 50th anniversay. The action charity has had a set of 14 special WFF postage stamps created. There is a different threatened species on each stamp, four stamps appear in the collectable “miniature sheet” to highlight work they’ve done in the Amazon rainforest and two are “intelligent stamps” that can be scanned with a smartphone and the Junaio app.
The stamps are available for purchase from the Royal Mail or the WWF Shop from the 22nd of March.
In Pure Spirit
I’m particularly impressed with the intelligent stamps. If you have the Junaio app and scan either the elephant or tiger stamp then you’ll get access to the exclusive video footage.
Quite a lot of people have dismissed the .WWF format as a joke. A spoof or viral marketing campaign by WWF Germany.
It’s easy to see why. If you pop over to Save as .WWF you’ll be told there’s only a Mac version ready. You have to Facebook Like the page to be alerted once the PC version is ready. That’s not really how the “Like” button works.
I thought that the webpage was pulling a simple trick; telling Mac users that only the PC version was ready and telling PC users that only the Mac version was ready.
As it happens; it’s no joke. WWF Germany really have launched a .WWF format. Turns out it’s just a modified PDF. It’s also already been cracked – by one Hams Bezemer.
Here’s the video:
Here’s a good team up: Sony and the WWF together have an active initiative to gather ideas from around the world on how we can make the world a better place. Why are Sony involved? They want to see how their technology can help.
The program is called Open Planet Ideas and is being run as a community with a challenge. The first step is to read the brief (found at http://bit.ly/aMPzEV), read some of the concepts (found at http://bit.ly/ccvdpd) and then get involved. If you want to you can [join the challenge]. I’ve done so, my idea is called Responsiblity Through Personal Power and is a high science call to action. If you can’t come up with a concept of your own then you can take part by commenting on mine or any of the other ideas in their database. All in all it’s pretty easy to join the challenge so there’s no reason to hold back.
In brief, my idea is that people would use power more responsibility if it was more personal. To achieve this we have to move away from fixtures in the wall and to personal and portable units (think about how personal your mobile phone is to you). It might be far future but it’s not too hard to imagine a bike ride to work charging up a crystal and then that same crystal being used to power the microwave for your lunch time snack.
One of the key aspects to the Open Planet Ideas community is the use of technology. As Sony are involved the obvious source of tech to watch, comment on, poke or otherwise dream and debate around is SonyTech. The good news is that Sony doesn’t shy away from this. There’s a list of current SonyTech you can mention on the site too (here, in fact: http://bit.ly/a4B99P).
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