5 for Friday

1 - From Ronni Bennett writing at Time Goes By

Part of the difference is that those of us who are old don’t need all this friend tracking. We generally don’t spend our evenings looking for love in all the wrong places anymore and are less likely to perhaps cut a dinner short to meet other friends for a drink. But as the kids grow up they will adapt these technologies and the behaviors that go with them to their adult and professional lives. What is rude in the world elders have lived in is becoming acceptable and commonplace – a normal part of the social landscape.

Read the full posting about technical intrusions and courtesy here

2 - From the excellent TED Talks series, Sylvia Earle explains what the problem is with our ocean and how we need to help



3 - From Dave Pollard writing at How to Save the World

From the 1970s and 2008, we have an inkling of the consequence of huge oil price spikes (though the gnomes of Davos still cannot get themselves to acknowledge that the real risk is not a price spike, but the end of oil as the engine of our economy). From the great blackouts we've experienced, we're reluctantly aware that the decaying and neglected infrastructure in our cities everywhere is going to cause us enormous problems, but because we consider it (for now) a low-likelihood catastrophe (and because we can't afford to fix it) we just put it out of our minds. Same thing with pandemics and water crises: we know they're coming, and that they will both cause a horrific economic downturn (and the indirect economic consequences will probably kill more people than the diseases and droughts will kill directly), but because they're still 'unlikely' in any year (and hence 'unlikely' to occur in the 10-year horizon of the charts above), we do nothing.

Read the full posting here

4 - From Ed Cafasso writing at the PR Finishline

The modern message for PR professionals is that worrying about the economy this year is not going to make things better for your company, organization, staff, agency or clients. The only true cure is time.

Read the full posting here

5 - From Jonathan Jarvis via Mark Hurst, this visualization of the credit crisis.


The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

enjoy!