February 2008 Archives

Apparently, there are over 70 million blogs on the Internet and over 60 more are created every minute. So I thought it was time for me to have my minute in the sun (sharing it with around 59 others of course) and start my own. It really is a blog-eat-blog world out there, so thank you in advance for allowing me to burden you with my point of view.
So why have I jumped on the blogosphere bandwagon? Well, throughout most of my adult life, I have been a reasonably successful, designer, businessman, parent, and philanthropist but I've always been a frustrated activist. This venting arena is the perfect venue for personal expression and for encouraging genuine change (not to mention taking some of the pressure off of my pharmacologist). Over the last 25 years, through my Company and personal pursuits, I've attempted to be topical and relevant to our ever-changing society and raise social awareness, but the fact that you're reading this is proof of how the world is changing. I realize that my monologist approach of the past is as appropriate as wearing socks with sandals - today's must-have is dialog. Sure, I can always help you with what you wear but now you can help us all be more aware.

That's why I want to embrace this freshly released outpouring of opinions, loves, hates, fears and desires under four pillars of discussion that are part of the DNA of my Company and myself: Social Rights, Hard Times, Well-being and Political Landscape.

Just like a cheap, ill-fitting suit, I know you want to get something off your chest, so please sit back, pour yourself a glass of intelligent debate and throw another dialog on the fire.

 -Kenneth Cole
CEO, Kenneth Cole Productions, Inc.
Chairman, The Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR)

P.S. We don't support monopolies so please don't forget to check out the other 59 blogs that were created while you were reading this.

[Image: Shahar Azran]

This week marked another giant leap forward in our awareness of many social issues...

Kenneth Cole model Sonny Caberwal sparked debate with his story of being a Sikh man in a not always welcoming U.S. society

David Alm wondered whether the U.S. subprime housing crisis might eventually lead to a hollowing-out of the McSuburbs

Jenny Buccos shared her insights on how to break the cycle of poverty in Africa

PAPER Magazine editor David Hershkovits proposed a way for everyday citizens to change the world in just one hour

Kenneth Cole marketing VP Robert Genovese shared a few simple tips on how parents can minimize the negative environmental impact of children's toys

Liza Sabater shared pictures of a remarkable dress made from an unlikely source

Marc Schiller celebrated the 50th anniversary of the peace symbol

GOOD Magazine writer Eva Steele-Saccio expanded on her vision for "green schools" across America

Each spring, I have the honor of reading screenplays for the Independent Feature Project, a New York-based non-profit that helps independent filmmakers get their movies made. Our job is to sift through several hundred scripts -- most of them unsolicited -- and find about 20 gems to submit to producers.

Two years ago, a screenplay was handed to me with the rather dull, derivative-sounding title of Frozen River. Its writer, Courtney Hunt, had never directed a feature film before, and this was her first feature-length screenplay. Having already slogged through dozens of unpolished, amateurish efforts, I began this one with a deflating sigh.

Within three pages I was rapt. The story was about two impoverished women on the New York/Quebec border who had begun smuggling illegal immigrants across the border into the US in the trunk of a Dodge Spirit. They'd drive across the frozen river to Canada, load the illegals, and drive back to the US. All in the dead of night. I was impressed with the sympathetic way it dealt with the women who smuggled the immigrants. For them, it was merely a way to earn a living. And in their remote, frigid corner of the world, it seemed like the only way.

As moved as I was by the screenplay, I wondered if it would ever make it to the silver screen. Then I read the reports from this year's Sundance Film Festival: the film won the Grand Jury Prize in the Dramatic category.

I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel a wave of self-satisfaction wash over me for having "green-lighted" the script two years ago, though I'm aware that my review alone probably didn't seal the deal on the project. Nevertheless, I feel I'm in a unique position to encourage people to see this film.

Keep an eye on the art house cinemas in the coming months. The film is bound to have an impact.

Photo: Courtney Hunt at the Sundance Film Festival, AP

The adage "you're never too skinny or too rich" is losing luster at least in Spain.

Three models banned from fashion show in Madrid for being too thin.The week-long Cibeles show in Madrid banned models with a body mass index (BMI) of less than 18, believing them to set an unhealthy ideal for teenage girls. The three models rejected by the organizers had a BMI of less than 16.

"A BMI of 16 is extremely low," said Susana Monereo, a nutritionist and endocrinologist who weighed the 70 models due to appear at the show. Organizers refused to name the models and said that they were not necessarily in danger. "Their health might be OK, but their appearance is extremely thin," Dr. Monereo said.

Spain passed a law in 2006 banning models with a BMI of 18%. This was prompted after several models died of starvation in 2005 and 2006 and based on the the World Health Organization's guidelines for a healthy weight (anything below 18.5% BMI is considered underweight).

Milan has a similar law. London hasn't passed one but they now do not allow catwalk models to be under the age of 16.

Do you think excessively thin models are unhealthy role models? Should we have similar public health laws focusing on the fashion industry here in the United States as a public health measure?

What do you think?

[Image: Pravda]

Good ideas can come from anywhere, especially now that we are all connected in the global digital network. In 2007, Earth Hour was an idea conceived by some people in Sydney, Australia who belieived they could make a difference by organizing the city to turn off its electricity for one hour. The event was such a success that its expanding its reach around the world.

At 8pm on March 29, 2008 millions of people in some of the world's biggest cities including Copenhagen, Toronto, Chicago, Melbourne, Brisbane, Tel Aviv and Manila will unite and switch off for Earth Hour.

There's an interactive web site where people can connect and upload videos and photographs and a pdf file with instructions on how you can create an Earth Hour in your town or community.

When I was about 15, my parents came a hair's breadth from buying a house in a tony subdivision of our town with one of those manufactured names like "Crow Creek Estates," or "Pleasant Meadow Mews." The house featured all the amenities of the day: jacuzzi tubs in all four bathrooms, recessed lights in the chef's kitchen, and a deck with views onto a private golf course. And it was very, very big.

But according to an article in the March issue of the Atlantic, that house -- or at least houses just like it across the country -- could be well on its way to being a bona fide slum. Its floors have probably begun to warp, its asphalt-shingle roof is probably in disrepair, and its thin wooden frame is probably about to collapse. But, the article suggests, just because it's uninhabitable doesn't mean it won't be inhabited.

The author of the article, Christopher Leinberger, suggests that as affluent professionals return to the urban centers their forbears fled just a few decades ago, the suburbs they leave behind will inevitably fall to rat-infested ruin. And the McMansions that CEOs and investment bankers once clamored for will be divided up into low-income rental units.

Meanwhile, American cities will have to provide real estate for this onslaught of new residents. Arthur Nelson, Director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virgina Tech, believes that as much as half of the real-estate development on the ground in 2025 will not have existed in 2000.

Leinberger anticipates such a future with the zeal of a child two weeks before Christmas: "It's exciting to imagine what the country will look like then," he writes.

Exciting is one word for it. Scary is another one. If the suburbs become the new slums, what will become of the people who gravitate there for lack of resources to survive in the city? At least in the cities, they have the luxury of public transportation, proximity to a wide variety of jobs, and access to community support. In the suburbs, they'll be far more alienated than their predecessors -- claims of upper-middle class ennui notwithstanding.

Moreover, what does this mean for our cities? Along 4th Avenue in Brooklyn, a four-lane thoroughfare connecting the borough's downtown to the peripheral neighborhood of Bay Ridge, massive, pre-fab condos are sprouting like mushrooms after a heavy rain. They're enormous and don't appear to have any more structural integrity than the cheap, suburban estates they're replacing. What will happen when they start falling apart?

Photo: Joyce Dopkeen for the New York Times

Ten years ago, if an architect said he was designing a green school, most people would have assumed he had decided to paint the façade a pleasant shade of sage. But now it's 2008, and "green schools" are part of a growing movement that is changing the environments in which students learn by building high-performance facilities that are both better for the planet and for the children who learn in them.

And, backed by parents and buoyed by politicians, school districts across the country are jumping on the bandwagon and hiring some of the best architects in the business to construct sustainable facilities across the country, from Hawaii to Texas to New Jersey.

At their core, green schools are about helping the environment. They are built from recycled materials and use renewable and efficient energy systems. On average, they use 30 percent less energy and 30 to 50 percent less water than conventional school buildings, and they reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 40 percent.

But beyond the obvious environmental concerns, green schools are about saving money. The lower energy use results in savings of more than $100,000 annually per school. In fact, if all new school and renovation construction followed these guidelines, the energy savings would amount to $20 billion over the next 10 years.

Then there is the most important factor in designing a school: education. Green schools create a healthy atmosphere for learning that has measurable results. The combination of natural light, fresh air, open plans, and multi-use facilities that encourage community involvement has helped student test scores rise by 20 percent and reduced asthma rates by 39 percent. In green schools, teacher retention increases and missed school days decrease. The bottom line is that green schools make both students and teachers happier--and they facilitate better learning in the classroom.

Still, the green-school movement faces some formidable obstacles. "The irony here is that the greatest barrier is education," says Bob Kobet, a sustainable-architecture consultant. "There is still the misconception that green buildings cost more, that they are too complicated and take too long to build." School districts' small budgets exacerbate the problem; it's difficult to justify the extra up-front cost when you barely have enough money to replace textbooks.

But the reality is that green schools cost only 2 percent more to build and the potential long-term savings are in the billions of dollars nationally. This becomes an even more meaningful statistic when you consider the lifespan of schools. "If you blow it, you blow it for 35 years," says Kobet. If you consider that school buildings make up the largest sector of nonresidential construction projects in the U.S.--a projected $80 billion from 2006 to 2008--and that each of the country's more than 55 million students attends school for an average of 1,300 hours annually, the small investment makes a lot of sense. Add in all the potential savings, both monetary and physical, and it quickly becomes clear how crucial and timely the green-school movement is.

Last spring, the U.S. Green Building Council officially launched LEED for Schools, a rating system that certifies and grades new K through 12 building projects according to their level of sustainability. Currently, hundreds of schools are on the waiting list for certification--another telling measure of the movement's rapid growth.

Boora Architects, based in Portland, Oregon, helped paved the way with the first LEED-certified, K through 12 project, a high school in Clackamas, Oregon. It rigged an innovative lighting system to provide natural daylight to 90 percent of the school and installed an energy-monitoring-and-control system that measures outdoor and indoor temperatures and CO2 levels to determine which rooms to heat or cool. In all, the planning has saved the school an average of $70,000 per year in energy costs.

The realization of Clackamas--and the hundreds of other LEED certified schools built since--calls attention to another important part of the green school movement: integrating the school buildings themselves into a student's education by having students interact directly with the facilities they use. At Clackamas, the students were enlisted to help develop the plan for the new high school. The shop class built a full-scale plywood mock-up of a classroom on the building site, helping the firm test the natural ventilation and lighting systems.

When the school was finished, the same students experienced the effects of their labor firsthand; they now learn in classrooms filled with fresh air and sunlight instead of in stuffy, dark spaces. Says Hans Rudolf, principal Boora Architect: "We wanted to make the building teacher in itself." Consider this the mark of a quintessential green school.

[image: Clackamas High School via BOORA Architects]

Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences goes Open Access

In recent years, the Open Access movement in academic publishing has been gathering steam, with the growth of open access journals such as PLoS and mandates from funding bodies such as the NIH that require authors to deposit copies of their work into open databases. Now that 800lb. gorilla of academe, Harvard University, has started to throw its weight behind the spread of Open Access publishing. Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences has voted to require faculty to make copies of their research freely available through the Office of Scholarly Communications.

One of the great promises of the internet revolution has been the democratization of knowledge. Armed just with a computer and way of connecting to the internet, it is possible to find information on just about any topic known to humankind. In academia, the spread of the digital age has been most effective. Instead of having to spend hours in dusty stacks looking for the right volume of an obscure periodical, a few seconds using PubMed, Google Scholar, or any one of a number of databases will often yield up an electronic copy.

I give a half amen to the idea that the internet has been brought forth the democratization of knowledge. It's exactly because of the internet that we have had in this country legislation such as the Digital Millenium Copyright Act and the "Mickey Mouse Protection Art".

The DMCA has restricted fair use of digital products. It was created so that, for example, record companies could create MP3s with code that would allow you to listen to a song in only one type of machine while disabling in others, even if it is meant for your own personal use. An example is MP3s designed to only play in one registered computer but not on a phone with digital playback capability or in an iPod or only in PCs running one specific operating system.

Copyright Term Extension Act was primarily lobbied by the Disney Company (which is why it's called the Mickey Mouse Protection Act). It is also known as the Sonny Bono Act and it was meant to deny the public domain (that means you and me) from freely using copyrighted materials for over 100 years after their creation and/or the death (if an individual) or liquidation (if a corporation) of the copyright holder.

Mickey Mouse, along with many other Disney characters, would have become public domain just about now, making it possible for millions of people to use the images freely, without the economic restrictions of licensing agreements. Yet because the law was extended to cover all works published before 1975, millions of novels, textbooks, non-fiction books, dictionaries, educational movies, news casts, photographs, paintings were denied public domain status; making it impossible for anybody to have free access to a lot of cultural, scientific and technological knowledge.

Enter the Open Access Movement.

While opponents to the DMCA and CTA duke it out in the courts and in Congress, many scholars, scientists, artists, software developers and other cultural creatives, have come together for three simple actions: To create content that is accessible 24/7, free of charge and free of copyright and/or licensing restrictions.

Harvard is not the only example of how to successfully produce projects that are accessible all the time on the internet, free of any charge and, more importantly, free to use as however one likes.

The following are 5 internet stops that will make your IQ go a few percentages higher thanks to the Open Access Movement :

1. Creative Commons
Their mantra is "we use private rights to create public goods". What does this mean? They've created a whole licensing system that makes it possible for copyright holders to explain how others may exercise their copyright. Or, as some might like to think of Creative Commons licenses, to copyleft your work. Since millions of creatives have already embraced this type of copyright reinterpretation, they've created a search engine that allows you to scour the internet for copylefted materials.

2. Wikipedia is a crowd-sourced electronic encyclopedia with 9.25 million articles in 253 languages and edited by millions of users from around the world. Whereas encyclopedias have traditionally been the product of scholars and experts given 'official' status by the company that produces them, Wikipedia thrives on the premise of "the wisdom of crowds" and it's one of the reasons why people either praise it or hate it. I, personally, use it constantly. I don't take everything in Wikipedia as 100% factual, but 90% of what I have needed from it has been absolutely outstanding. For many researchers like myself, it is a much needed point of entry to other sources or an excellent quick refresher of dates, statistics, names or facts long forgotten.

3. Archive.org
It was created for the express purpose of preserving the internet. With its 'Wayback Machine' people can go as far back as 1996 and see what the internet looked like at that time. It nowadays offers permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections. It includes now one of the largest collections of public domain texts, audio, moving images, and software on the internet.

4. NASA Multimedia
The beautiful photograph that's at the top of this article comes from NASA's Multimedia Hub. More exactly, its Image Of The Day section. NASA has been at the vanguard of the CopyLeft movement, having been one of the first government agencies to clearly release free of copyright and as part of the public domain, not just their historical archives, but all new and subsequent work and materials created by the agency. In other words, they rawk!

5. Project Guttenberg
Michael Hart, the founder of the project, invented e-books back in 1971. His intention? To make information, books and other materials available to the general public in forms a vast majority of the computers, programs and people can easily read, use, quote, and search. You need all of Shakespeare? Official and doubtful books alike. Mark Twain? You got it. How about some Miguel De Cervantes? In Spanish and in English. Project Gutenberg's work is nothing short of amazing and should be bookmarked by anybody who's always wanted to finish reading that classic they skimmed through in college but wish they had read more closely. With that in mind, go to The History and Philosophy of Project, to read more about how the project was born and how it has been sustained for 36 years.

This is just a teensy bit of all the great Open Access projects that are out in the web. It's just meant to whet your appetite.

If you have your favorite, add them to the comments section. I'll definitely use them (and credit you) in my follow up with more goodies to this post. In the mean time, enjoy getting your nerd on. LOL!


Photo Credit: NASA, Out On A Limb STS-103 payload commander Steven L. Smith retrieved a power tool while standing on the mobile foot restraint at the end of the remote manipulator system during a Hubble servicing mission in 1999.

An edict like "eat your veggies" might seem more appropriate for the Well Being section of this blog. But these days you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who doesn't know about the health benefits of fresh vegetables.

Still, just because everyone knows that veggies are good doesn't mean that everyone eats them. In New York and other cities, this may be simply because not everyone can get them. Then the issue becomes one of social rights. Just as people of all socio-economic statuses deserve a decent education, so too do they deserve to eat a healthy diet.

This is the logic behind a new bill proposed by the New York City mayor's office to license more than 1,000 mobile green grocers -- and dispatch them to poor neighborhoods throughout the city. It makes sense. If you've spent any time in parts of upper Manhattan and large portions of the outer boroughs (in other words, the majority of New York City), you've probably noticed the paucity of bright, fresh produce -- a sight residents of the tonier neighborhoods take for granted.

According to the Columbia Spectator, West, Central, and East Harlem are together home to more than 400 bodegas, which sell lots of cigarettes and processed food but rarely produce. Meanwhile, the Upper East Side has only 46 bodegas, but countless gourmet delis, vegetable stands, and grocery stores.

The proposal, known as the "Green Carts bill", has already raised some quills among those shop-owners who fear their businesses will suffer if the city introduces these green carts. Sunny Kim, who runs a small grocery store with her husband, told the Spectator, "It's unfair. They [vendors] don't pay rent, they don't pay taxes. They can lower their prices, but supermarkets, who pay rent and pay taxes, cannot."

Kim has a point, but so do all the people wondering when some of these green grocers will open a store in Harlem or East New York, in Brooklyn. Until that happens, I say cheers to the mayor's office for proposing this solution.