March 2007
Flood Maps
If we don’t get a handle on runaway greenhouse warming, sea levels are predicted to rise by approximately 20 feet, or 7 meters. If you think this won’t affect Quebec, think again.
Using the Google Maps API and NASA climate projection data, a clever person has put together a site to show exactly what will be flooded when sea levels rise.
In Quebec City, most of Lower Town will be underwater, and significant portions of the islands and riverbanks will be lost.
The region around Sorel-Tracy, mostly farms, will be completely flooded.
Montreal and the South Shore will lose a lot of riverfront, and in general, many of the low-elevation islands such as the Iles de Boucherville will lose huge amounts of their surface area.
Municipalities along the Richelieu will also suffer a good deal of flooding, for instance, near Chambly.
And that’s why I voted Green yesterday. :)
March 27, 2007 in Environment | ✍ 2
Brand Ethics Debate: March 23rd at HEC
The École des Hautes Etudes Commerciales (HEC) at Université de Montréal is hosting the latest edition of their Marketing Consortium, (warning: Flash site with music) a one-day event of speakers, panels, and debates about everything relating to marketing and branding.
The event’s being sponsored by L’Oréal Canada and other participants include the CROP polling firm, Gaz Métro, Deloitte, American Express, and others.
Yours truly has been invited to participate in a debate about brand ethics, along with Caroline Roux, a Ph.D candidate from McGill who also teaches as part of the U of M’s chair in business ethics; Nathalie Chalifour of the Jolicoeur Lacasse law firm, Yanik Deschenes of Wal-Mart (!), Jean-Jacques Streliski of Publicis, and Patrick Beaudoin of Cossette.
Our event comes towards the end of the day, from 2:15 to 3:30pm, but the rest of the schedule looks packed with some excellent panels and speakers.
If you want to attend, it’s $15 for students and $50 for academic staff and professionals. There’s lunch included and a networking wine-and-cheese afterwards.
There’s limited places for the morning sessions, and advance registration via the website ends on Friday the 16th. You can pay via credit card or PayPal right on the site. Hope to see some YULBloggers there!
The eight types of bad creative critics
A very funny cartoon by Tom Fishburne. So, so true.
via SwissMiss via Brand-Em via Tom Fishburne’s Skydeck Cartoons (collected into the book Brand Camp)
Million Dollar Idea: One Hour Suits
I’ve had a longstanding problem with mass-produced retail clothing. Not only does it not really fit anyone properly “off the rack,” what happens to all the unsold clothes at the end of a trend or season? Does anyone really know?
Now the flipside is custom tailoring, made to fit a particular person, but it usually costs as much as a used car to get a single suit made; if you pick premium wools it can cost as much as a car. Which makes sense given the relative rarity of handmade clothes vs. machine-made, if you want to make a living, but also it reflects the labour-intensive nature of the craft.
I’ve always thought that technology can be of great assistance here. There are already full-body laser scanners, mostly used to create action figures and 3D model data for CG animation, but in at least one boutique in Japan, it’s used to generate accurate body measurements.
Computer numeric controlled (CNC) laser fabric cutting machines are probably as accurate, if not more so, than human hands.
Put the two technologies together, under the supervision of traditionally-trained tailors, cutters and finishers, and you can have, in essence, a self-contained clothing factory that can turn out something much better than off-the-rack or even made-to-measure, if not quite as good as handmade Savile Row, in about a week.
Ok, the ‘one hour suit’ is still some time in the future, but if you could bring near-Savile Row quality down to the $500-$1000 mark, many more people could have access to well-fitting clothes.
Why is this posted under Environment? For one thing, it would eliminate a lot of waste in the clothing industry - clothes made on spec that, if unsold, are eventually remaindered or discarded; the energy spent and CO2 created in shipping fabric from country of origin to country of manufacture, and then country of purchase.
It’s one more step towards the reconciliation of atoms vs. bits in our economy — in the future we will download licensed designs from the iTunes Fabric + Clothing Store, to be interpreted in local sustainable materials (or have licensed fabric designs also manufactured locally), then digitally tailored, again at a local facility.
Like any McLuhanesque medium, e-clothing will obsolete the sweatshops of current mass manufacturing, but also bring back something else; the local, trained and highly skilled tailors and weavers.
March 2, 2007 in Environment | ✍ 1
