Live Blogging the CDC

My cohort at Emotion Technology (and husband) Christopher Gandin Le is live blogging for the CDC at the National Environmental Public Health Conference: Healthy People in a Healthy Environment.

Majora Carter, a genius and one of my favorite speakers on this subject, is speaking at this conference along with many other great minds. You can enjoy the highlights of a conference on a vital topic from the comfort of your own computer!

Check it out via Twitter

You can also register to watch a free live webcast here.

Watch My New Short Film: Small Changes

This week, I’m sharing my own work, because I’m so dang proud of it. Chris & I, along with our incredibly talented Austin-area friends, created this 2 minute water conservation PSA in response to RainBird’s “Intelligent Use of Water” film contest. Austin is in the middle of the worst drought in 50 years, and last week, officials announced even tighter water restrictions, so this awareness-raising contest comes at a crucial time.

We had a great time making this film, and I couldn’t be more pleased with how it turned out. Enjoy!

Small Changes from Jennifer Gandin Le on Vimeo.

Written by Jennifer & Christopher Gandin Le
Edited by Matt Donaldson
Music by Liz Clark
Starring our brilliant friends and cohorts!

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Beauty in a Wicked World is a weekly column by Jennifer Gandin Le. It appears on Wednesdays.

The Social Media Moment + Sidelined Communities

This week, I got an exciting e-mail from my friend and fellow 2006 REAL Hot 100 winner, Deanna Zandt. She’s a media technologist and a leading expert in women and technology, and she’s about to add “first-time author” to her resume.

She’s signed with the Berrett-Koehler publishing group to write a book about “the social media moment as a huge opportunity for social change and action.” Women, people of color, queer people, and many more have too often been left in the dust of technological advances (see film, TV, and radio in their formative years). Deanna will use her experience in the feminist community and bring in experts from the fields of racial justice, LGBTQQI organizing, the front lines of the class warfare, and more, to assemble strategies for widening the diversity of voices in social media.

Deanna is a sharp, compassionate, thoughtful person, and her book is going to help women and other sidelined communities release their fear and take advantage of the new technologies. The last thing we need is another place where the dominant culture creates uncontested content that blocks out all other perspectives.

If you’re interested in technology and social justice, you should be reading Deanna’s blog. Also, the publisher doesn’t offer advances, so Deanna is fundraising for living expenses this summer while she writes the book in 4 short months. Even if you have $10 to spare, visit her Feed The Author page and join supporters like the Hightower Lowdown, and Don Hazen and Doug Kreeger (editor and board member of AlterNet). It’s a fantastic project in which to invest.

Her full fundraising letter below the cut.

How We Decide By Jonah Lehrer

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Kimmi
Therapy Thursdays

Buy the book!

National Day of Listening

On Friday, instead of waking up at 4 a.m. to go spend money we don’t have anyway (seriously? What’s with those ads of women stepping into high heels at 4 a.m. for a sale?), consider taking part in StoryCorps’ first annual National Day of Listening. In the last five years, StoryCorps has helped more than 40,000 Americans record their stories, creating a massive oral history project.

On their website, they include instructions with tips on how to spark a meaningful conversation with someone around you and record it, if you can, the day after Thanksgiving — your grandmother, parent, sibling, friend, neighbor. Anyone whose story you would like to hear for one hour on Friday. They’ve got interview examples on the website; I highly recommend sampling them. I’m a personal history nerd, so I love listening to these stories.

Also, I would be remiss if I did not share the live web feed that has swept the internet in the last month: six Shiba Inu puppies, which have garnered over 6 million viewers since they’ve been online. After the cut, you can see why. This is great for entertaining the varied generations gathering at your home for the holiday:

Obama and Technology

I just learned today that President-Elect Obama has an official Flickr page. There’s a set of candid photos of the Obamas on election night, waiting for the results to come in. Obviously, they were taken by an official photographer — it’s not like Obama took them on his camera phone and sent them to Flickr — but there are some very cool shots. (Also, it’s amusing to see Flickr’s standard description at the bottom of his profile page: “I’m male and taken.” In case anyone wasn’t sure.)

This got me thinking about Obama and Technology. (It appears I’m not the only one: GeekDad has a funny post on Wired.com about five reasons that Obama is a geek.) He has a Twitter page. Technology was included as one of the main issues on his campaign website. Obama will appoint the nation’s first Chief Technology Officer.

Can you even imagine?

Crazy In Love

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Kimmi
Therapy Thursdays

With Help Comes Hope: the Lifeline Gallery

This week, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, with a donation from producer James L. Brooks, is launching The Lifeline Gallery, a powerful virtual space where suicide survivors, attempt survivors, and suicide prevention supporters can share their stories.

Basically, you can create an animated avatar that looks like you (or not), then record your two-minute message by phone. The website instantly links your message to your avatar’s lips, and then you can save your story in the gallery. You can also e-mail your story or embed it on your MySpace, Facebook, or other website. (For those not using a U.S.-based number, you can also type your story and the site will transcribe it your words into speech.)

After the cut, I’ll let the project speak for itself (turn on your speakers to hear her story):

Journey Through the Center of the Earth

If someone finally figured out how to dig a hole to China, or to London in this case, and you could be seen through a giant underground telescope on the other side, what would you do for your trans-Atlantic audience? Would you have a message to write on a big posterboard? A flag to wave? Would you use sign language? Blow a kiss? Think fast. You only have until June 15 to go to Paul St. George’s Telectroscope on the Fulton Ferry Landing by the Brooklyn Bridge or to the one on the other side by London’s Tower Bridge on the Thames.

I saw an old man in a Sherlock Holmes hat (I assume he was in London) do a little dance in front of the Telectroscope, kicking his legs out and waving his arms. This was on the news, so maybe that’s why he was hamming it up. But it also struck me that it was as if he thought this was a fleeting opportunity to test technology’s latest limits, in which he needed to be as “big” as possible to be understood. Like when people talked way too loud on their newfangled cordless phones and even louder into their poor cell phones. Or a more apt comparison– when film was first invented and silent movie actors had only their bodies to convey plot, emotion, character. The same must be used for our audience of strangers on the other side of the ocean, who can’t hear us but can see us surprisingly clearly.

Not OK Computer

I have important news for all of you computer users out there. Your current computer is going to die. Maybe sooner than later; who knows? But your data does not have to disappear with it.

This seems obvious, but when my G4 laptop conked out two weeks ago, it was a big surprise to me. I realized that most news stories or ads about backing up your computer data make it sound like, “You should back up just in case your hard drive dies.” What they should say is, “Back up your data because your computer will die.” Americans may like to deny death in all its forms, but, like pretending that each of us will live forever, we can lose a ton of vital information by refusing to believe that our computers are mortal.

Data back-up is like safe sex (with much less dangerous consequences) — you can’t afford NOT to do it. And I’m not just talking about your Word and Excel files. If you’re like me, there’s important data lurking in all corners of your computer. Do any of these places sound familiar?