Two bills up for vote in the US senate will threaten innovation and free speech on the internet. Today is a day of protest

SOPA and PIPA are two bills that aim to protect copyright and intellectual property on the internet. But the opposition says this internet censorship will cripple the internet and threaten free speech online (therefore breaking the first amendment), affecting so many of the new/social media companies we know and love.

Today, America wakes up to an online blackout of websites marking a strong protest against the SOPA and PIPA bills, which are up for a vote in the Senate on 24th January. Google, wikipedia and wordpress have all ‘blacked out’, along with many smaller sites.

Strict copyright and intellectual property control, or freedom of information and expression on the web – what do you want?

It’s not clear how long this has been a fear or entirely why some of us are superstitious about this date. Whatever… we’re not taking any chances. Warning signs have been placed around the building. Take care!

This spike in media attention is attributable to a report commissioned by the UK Government and written by a committee led by Lord Davies of Abersoch. We were happy to help this worthwhile cause by designing the report, which you can find on the Department for Business Innovation and Skills website.

Interesting highlights for me in the report are that the UK trails South Africa and Israel in the proportion of women to men on corporate boards, that the top reason cited for this effect is boardroom attitudes (‘bias, prejudice and stereotypical behaviour’), and that at the present rate of change it will take 70 years for the UK to achieve gender-equality on boards.

You can read the report (and enjoy the lovely information graphics) here.

The mystery of phantom traffic jams explained

If you’ve ever wondered why you can spend an aeon in a traffic jam on a motorway with no apparent cause, why we’re so intolerant of each other when we’re driving and why we think it’s ok to speed but never to go through a red light, then I’d recommend the book Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt…

As well as being a compelling account of the crazy paradoxes of the psychology of driving (for example SUV drivers are more likely to be talking on the phone and not be wearing a seatbelt because they feel safer, which means they’re actually much less safe than those in smaller vehicles), I’d also recommend the book to any fans of behavioural economics. In place of conventional economists, the too-rational target in this book are traffic engineers, who continue to plan road systems in the blithe belief that humans are completely rational beings. The book, sometimes hilarious sometimes tragic, shows us that we’re not, and that this has a huge impact on the way people live their lives alongside, and too often under, motor traffic the world over.

The book does have one hero however, in the shape of Hans Monderman who pioneered the ‘shared space’ approach to street design in the Netherlands. This concept of street design compels us as drivers to take more care by manipulating our sub-conscious to respond to a lack of rational information. A powerful example of ‘nudge’ psychology in action, Monderman’s approach is the reason why we now have more raised junctions for example, and that there’s a trend away from the compulsion of signs and markings to more effective ways of shaping driver behaviour. While this type of progressive design is seen mostly in built up environments, it’s the two-way, high-speed country road that’s the world’s biggest killer. This is becoming a massive issue for humanity as tens of millions get into cars for the first time in countries like China and India.

Ultimately, this is a fascinating book about how our pre-historic brains are incredibly bad at calculating risk within the sort of timeframes demanded of them while at the wheel of a car.

This is a project I did last year for the 2008 D&AD student awards. The brief asked if MTV were a virus, how would it behave? We decided to use the general public as virus carriers and created an exponential chain reaction…

Click here to view the embedded video.

For more: http://theessentialist.blogspot.com/2009/01/saks-fifth-avenue-spring-2009-campaign.html