Monday, January 1, 2007

ZON Dollars Where the Virtual & Real World Collides for Good in the World ZON DOLLARS CONCEPT-JAN 1, 2007 Dear Google Org, Amazon and Linden Labs People: I submit this idea for your consideration: It has been posted to the Internet via Google docs, its URL is: http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dcjvvpr5_2frhqm6 ZON Dollars Where the Virtual & Real World Collides for Good in the World: The idea for ZON dollars has its roots in three things I read as the final moments of 2006 played out: 1. Allision H Fine's wonderful new book: "Momentum-igniting social change in the connected age.", which can be purchased at Amazon. 2. Amazon's new project that uses 37signals Ruby on Rails to build a new application called Unspun , which is based on an application Amazon has called the mechanical Turk. 3.An article called: "What is Second Life?" Of course, the reference to a virtual currency comes directly from Second Life's "The Linden dollar". I guess the challenge delivered by Allision Fine in her book: "Momentum" is how do we harness technology and the economy to do good? ZON dollars is my attempt at doing just that through the creation of a virtual currency that at its core involves both voluteerism and doing good throughout the world. ZON dollars can only be earned by: 1. individuals or corporations donating to recognized charities(those that can issues tax receipts) for conversion into ZON dollars, for the sole purpose of motivating people to do good. through the use of those ZON dollars. 2. doing virtual work through participating companies like Amazon's Mechanical Turk Service, a portion, determined by the worker goes to charities in the form of ZON dollars, while the remainder goes to the virtual worker, to be used as they see fit. 3. corporations who are so confident of the worth of their product that they openly invite comparision by consumers, donate ZON dollars to encourge concensus rankings of their product using Amazon's new Unspun service. People are encouraged to vote on the best products i in those categories, and the ZON dollars are distributed to the charity that the sponsoring corporation names when they open the community concensus on their product category. ZON dollars can be converted to: 1. real currency for use to purchase goods at Amazon.com or via Google's new ecommerce system. 2. they can be converted to Linden dollars for use in Second Life. So I guess those are my inititial thoughts related to the ZON dollar concept, I will now publish this, and also email the concept to the above named entities that could actually implement the concept, a. Google.org, Amazon's Unspun & Second Life. As Allision Fine's book title says, I wonder if this concept will: 'ignite social change in the connected age" Sincerely Gregers Ritzer-January 1, 2007 4:36:47 PM

Saturday, December 30, 2006

Top 10 Astronomy Images of 2006. The Bad Astronomer writes "Astronomical observatories on the ground and in space return many terabytes of data every year. But which bytes are the best? I combed through thousands of pictures to find the Top 10 astronomy images of the year." [Slashdot] 10:18:15 AM

Thursday, November 24, 2005

EcoModo - The Best of Treehugger. This week at Treehugger: A Weapon of Mosquito Destruction: The Mosquito Magnet. A Hand-Powered Night Vision Monocular that allows you to see in the dark without batteries. Hewlett Packard decides that having toxic flame retardant on the outside of its laptop casings might not be such a good idea. Also, from the Crazy But Cool Department, a man builds a private island out of empty soda cans (can this be called a Do-It-Yourself island?), and finally, we have a look at how Google and PowerEscape fight runaway energy consumption. The person who invented this cross between a barbecue and a motorboat really hates mosquitoes! Lucky for us, he or she also had a dislike for insecticide and these glowing traps that vaporize insect dust in the air we breathe. The way this "biting insect trap" works is by emitting a fake "breath" of CO2 with a scent that is attractive to the little vampires (mosquitoes locate their victims primarily with exhaled carbon dioxide). The device then sucks in the bugs in a radius of up to 1.25 acres (around 5,000 square meters) and dehydrates them (and then turns them into MREs?). This device is a night vision scope, and quite fortuitously, it doesn't require any batteries. Instead, it's has a lever-activated power supply, so you can generate your own power ad hoc, and thereby see in the night, without fear of energy failure (that is, unless a sudden lassitude engulfs you). Hewlett Packard has announced that it will remove a bromated flame retardant (BFR) from the outer case parts of all new products released after December of 2006. BFRs have been associated with endocrine disruption and impairment of mental skills, and have been found in women’s breast milk. Bromated flame retardants in electronics can also make e-waste more hazardous. For something that is supposed to make the product safer, it sure seems dangerous. We couldn't make this stuff up: this man, Reishee Sowa of Puerto Aventuras, Mexico, apparently grew tired of trying to live self-sufficiently on dry land, and did what any of us would have done. He built his own island out of used pop bottles. 250,000 of them, plus some construction leftovers and bags of leaves, make up "his island," though he's quick to point out that it's technically not an island by traditional standards. "You see not even the president is allowed his own island in Mexico," he says, "but technically I don’t have an island, I have an eco space-creating ship." Google vice president of operations Urs Hoelzle told us in a TG Daily article a little about Google's energy efficiency problems and how it tries to solve them, and this post is about PowerEscape Insight, a way to optimize software so that the hardware it runs on requires less power. It can of course be applied to computers, but also certainly to all kinds of electronic that might run software that makes chips run hotter than they should. Treehugger’s EcoModo column appears every Tuesday on Gizmodo. [Gizmodo] 5:12:32 PM

Saturday, November 19, 2005

Republicans' wild Western land grab. A historic makeover of mining laws could sell out tens of millions of public acres for drilling, casinos and condos. [Salon salon] 9:54:27 AM

Thursday, December 2, 2004

BBC: Blog picked as word of the year. Slow news day. [Scripting News] 6:57:17 PM

Tuesday, January 6, 2004

Mexico Breaks Ground on Sustainable Tourist Destination [GreenBiz | News Center] 10:43:47 AM

Friday, December 26, 2003

Nature Netwowrk-webcams of animals from around the world 7:54:46 PM     Calculate Your Ecological Footprint 11:11:39 AM

© Copyright 2007 Ted Ritzer. Last update: 1/1/07; 7:45:51 PM.