Greenpeace has introducted an Iphone application that gives users a quick and handy guide to finding the greenest toilet paper, tissues, paper towels, and paper napkins sold at the supermarket. Ideally, the best products contain 100 percent recycled content (at least 50 percent of which is from post-consumer materials) and avoid the use of chlorine or chlorine compounds in the whitening process. Products that meet this criteria include Green Forest, Natural Value and Seventh Generation while products from companies like Kleenex, Charmin, Angel Soft, Cottonelle, Brawny, and Scott fall short. The application is free to download.

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Weather Pro is a new weather application for the iPhone that's been unbelievably popular the last weeks. Weather Pro makes complete use of the iPhone's GPS-abilities. For example it shows you the weather forecast for your location, wherever that is. A database with over 300,000 places across the globe are available for this. The forecast is shown in detail for every three-hour period up to seven days in advance, with images and figures. It also has radar-images for the US, the UK, France, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium, and it has satellite-images for Europe. The images can be downloaded and played in movies that allow both zoom and panning (moving the entire displayed image with your fingers).

from mc

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

Brands are working increasingly more global. If you’re somewhere else on earth you no longer need to ask which brand can coach you in a specific area. You just always choose the same. So that you can later be warned of a specific kind of weather you don’t know yet. And especially how you can best deal with it at that time. Coaching brands are at your side anywhere in the world. This creates a nice thought-direction.

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• Coaching brands

It turns out the computer can understand the barking of dogs better than humans, and it can be used to better understand the language of these animals. During a study in the barking of dogs scientists have recorded 6,000 barking sounds of 14 Hungarian Mudi's (a kind of sheep dog). Six different 'barks' were recorded: barking to strangers, barking during a fight, barking 'to take a pee', barking for their ball, barking during playing and barking when it's left behind. After analyzing the digital versions of these 'barks', the computer program connected the right bark to the right action in 43% of the cases. This is almost identical to the score of humans (49%). The computer had a better score with 'walking' and 'ball', while humans scored higher on 'playing' and 'being left alone'. Furthermore the computer could better distinguish which bark belonged to which dog (52%). Earlier, the scientists had determined that humans were practically unable to make this difference.

Future vision by Erwin van Lun

Computers will understand the world better than we do. Currently they get dogs just about equally, soon much better. Then personal environment brands, brands that in future use this kind of advanced forms of this type of technology, to help us understand the world better by saying, for example ‘your dog wants to take a walk’ or ‘this dog wants to greet you and isn’t angry’. Or, in stranger environments, ‘this snake won’t hurt you now. It’s just eaten and is on its way to its lair.’ This kind of insight, this kind of technology, means that we’ll be able to walk a little freer in the world.

Chinese civilians show the practice of child slaves through American video sharing site YouTube.This English video, named 'Child slaves, Shanxi China' is placed by somebody using the name daughterofchina. From a western point of view, it is horrible to see what happens (vc).

Nowadays, Fair Trade is a popular principle. Naomi Klein's book 'No Logo' from 2000 initiated this. Just before that, the term 'company behind the brands' had come up. Companies experience a brand coming out: they operate more open and transparent. English videos will make the western consumer more aware of the welfare of people who produce their products at the other side of the world. People who after all also just want to live a happy life, like we all want. In a next step, personal environment brands will show us at the purchase how something has been produced. In the end this will lead to a more balanced world in which richness, welfare and happiness is for everyone. This however will take at least a (couple of) generation(s). It is a long process which unfortunately will take lots of victims first.

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