“Created in 1944, the Smokey Bear campaign is the longest running public service campaign in US History. Smokey’s forest fire prevention message remained unchanged for 50 years until April 2001, when the Ad Council updated his message to address the increasing number of wildfires in the nation’s wildlands. As one of the world’s most recognizable fictional characters, Smokey’s image is protected by US Federal Law and is administered by the USDA Forest Service, the National Association of State Foresters and the Ad Council.”

The site features notes on the history and real-life inspiration for the character as well as vintage audio and imagery from the campaign. Yet, despite public education to prevent forest fires, fires have become more frequent and more severe. In fact, because of U.S. forest policy. From the U.S. Bureau of Land Management:

“Fire suppression had been the general Government policy for most of this century. A series of very destructive fires from 1871 until about 1945 had a powerful impact on the public, which was alarmed by the destruction of human life, property, and resources (like forest products and livestock food) caused by the conflagrations. The fact that loggers carelessly ignited most of these fires had little sway on public opinion. The Government policy, then, generally called for fires to be suppressed, despite the fact that as early as 1933 research was showing the absolute necessity of periodic fire for ecosystem health. This policy was effectively reinforced by the familiar icon of Smokey the Bear admonishing that ‘only you can prevent forest fires’, and by such potent images as Bambi fleeing from fire.

Yet despite determined efforts over the years to suppress naturally ignited fires, wildfires have become more numerous, severe and difficult to control. Wildland fire experts contend that this is the inevitable result of well-intended but misguided fire suppression efforts, which consequently have created vast tinderboxes in many parts of the West.

Fire ecologists say they expect many more seasons of severe wildfires because there are millions of acres that have been affected by our management actions that have not yet burned. Managers can intervene and begin restoring the natural fire regime. They have two principle tools: letting naturally-caused fires burn, and deliberately setting ‘prescribed’ fires.”

Prevention, of course, is the reason George W. Bush is easing restrictions on logging to “give loggers greater leeway to cut larger, more commercially valuable trees... and deny environmentalists legal tools they have used to block such logging.”

Smokey site found via MetaFilter.

“The worst airport fire in German history occurred on April 11, 1996, when flames broke out in the busy Düsseldorf airport, quickly filling the terminal with acrid, toxic smoke. Travelers frantically looked for exit signs. In the ensuing chaos, 17 people died and 150 were injured. A spokesman for the Düsseldorf fire brigade, quoted in European news accounts, blamed the high number of casualties on passengers ‘ignoring’ emergency exit signs. For airport management, having the signage singled out as a contributor to the disaster underscored the importance of maintaining a clear communications system in a crowded, public space. Prior to the fire, signage at Düsseldorf had become a clutter of airline logos and retail and service ads, with directional signs lost in the cacophony.”

Traveler safety and ease of movement were key considerations, along with establishing a distinct identity for the airport. The design from MetaDesign pegged levels of the importance of information to the levels of color and contrast, designing for legibility during normal visbility as well as in a smokey environment. As for non-disaster usability? “Over the past year, the airport information counter reports a 50% drop in inquiries.” Sample pix: before and after. From @issue, volume 3, number 2.

For the exhibition “We Love New York: Mapping Manhattan with Artists and Activists,” the Institute for Applied Autonomy and the Surveillance Camera Players led workshops on surveillance cameras, public space, and civil liberties. Participants then took to the streets to document the city’s surveillance cameras. The findings were mapped onto an 80 foot map of Manhattan. The group also led walking tours of the City. “Participants [moved] through the city in small groups, using handheld devices to document surveillance camera locations. The cameras will be added to the iSEE community database that allows pedestrians to track the ‘path of least surveillance’ between any two points in Manhattan.”

Two projects from the Institute for Applied Autonomy:

“GraffitiWriter is a tele-operated field programable robot which employs a custom built array of spray cans to write linear text messages on the ground at a rate of 15 kilometers per hour. The printing process is similar to that of a dot matrix printer. GraffitiWriter can be deployed in any highly controlled space or public event from a remote location.” See also instructions on how to build your own.

“The StreetWriter project expands on the research gained from the successful Robotic GraffitiWriter project. The system consists of a custom built, computer controlled industrial spray painting unit that is built into an extended body cargo van. The vehicle prints text messages onto the pavement in a manner much like a dot-matrix printer. The expanded width of StreetWriter allows for messages and simple graphics that are legible from tall buildings and low flying aircraft and is capable of rendering message that are several hundreds of feet in length.” Lots of pix and videos at both sites.

See also Bike Writing, a project to turn any bicycle into a printing, street writing device that prints as you ride.

“The bike writer incorporates interchangeable rubber stamps into the wheels so that while riding, the user can inscribe text into public space. An ink roller is applied to the wheel through a simple mechanism, which is activated by squeezing the rear break handle. This activity is extremely covert and effective.”

Stop your engine.
No smoking.
Return nozzle to pump when finished fueling.
Pre-pay after dark.
Thank you for financing global terror.

Post these official looking ‘Thank You’ stickers at a gas station near you. The stickers (and T-shirts) are being sold at cost directly from Subvert. Over 1200 stickers have been ordered so far.

Google has refused run ads for the project. Google’s letter states: “At this time, Google policy does not permit the advertisement of ‘Hate/anti’ on our website. We also do not permit sites that sell these products to advertise on Google.”

Found via kottke.org

“CompuServe released [image file format format] GIF as a free and open specification in 1987. GIF soon became a world standard, and also played an important role in the internet community. It was well supported by CompuServe’s Information Service, but many developers wrote (or acquired under license) software supporting GIF without even needing to know that a company named CompuServe existed. GIF was relatively simple, and very well documented in books, articles and text files.

GIF images are compressed to reduce the file size. The technique used to compress the image data is called LZW (after Lempel-Ziv-Welch) and was first described by Terry A. Welch in the June 1984 issue of IEEE’s Computer magazine. Unisys [once a well-known computer company with a long history] holds a patent on the procedure described in the article, but the article describing the algorithm had no mention of this. The LZW procedure was simple and very well described, and it soon became a very popular technique for data compression (just as GIF would become a standard in its own field). It appears that neither CompuServe, nor the CompuServe Associate who designed GIF, nor the computer world in general were aware of the patent....

At the end of December 1994, CompuServe Inc. and Unisys Corporation announced to the public that developers would have to pay a license fee in order to continue to use technology patented by Unisys in certain categories of software supporting the GIF format. These first statements caused immediate reactions and some confusion.” From The GIF Controversy: A Software Developer’s Perspective.

“[Currently,] Unisys is charging web sites $5000 or more... if the software originally used to create the GIFs was not covered by a Unisys license.... The catch is that it appears to be difficult or impossible to get a Unisys license to use LZW in free software that complies with the Open Source Definition or in low-volume proprietary software. [Instead, Unysis requires a yearly license fee directly from Web site operators.] The fact that Unisys was able to patent LZW is due to a flaw in the US patent system that makes even pencil-and-paper calculations patentable.... However, Unisys’s actions are legal under US law, so the only reasonable alternative to paying the ‘Unisys tax’ on the web is to upgrade graphics from GIF to PNG format, or MNG format for animations.” From Burn All GIFs.

Burn All GIFs is a campaign encouraging Web developers to stop using the GIF format. Burn All GIFs also promotes Burn All GIFs Day to both further the campaign and to protest Unisys’s licensing practices. Burn All GIFs is a project of the League for Programming Freedom, an organization that opposes software patents and user interface copyrights.

PNG is a lossless image compression format that is free from patents and royalties. It also compresses better than GIF, supports interlacing, and true alpha transparency. It became a W3C standard in 1996 and is supported by most browsers (though some have not implemented full alpha transparency.) You can convert your GIFs to PNGs with some of the tools listed here.

The Ohara Institute for Social Research at Hosei University has an enormous collection of 20th century Japanese poster and propaganda art online: 2600 posters from before 1945, 400 posters of labor and social movements in the post-1945 period, posters and handbills from the 1930’s and an essay on the virbant history of the Japanese social movements between the two World Wars.

Found via coudal partners

Since 1954, the Comics Magazine Association of America has issued a Comics Code Authority Seal to comics submitted by publishers which meet the standards of the Comics Code. In practice, the Code was used as a tool of censorship, since it was nearly impossible to sell unapproved comics to newstands and mass merchandisers. With the rise of specialty comic book stores in the mid-80’s, most publishers have opted out of the Comics Code.

The code was updated in 1971 and again in 1989. The 1989 version adds:

“In general, recognizable national, social, political, cultural, ethnic and racial groups, religious institutions, law enforcement authorities will be portrayed in a positive light. These include the government on the national, state, and municiple levels, including all of its numerous departments, agencies and services; law enforcement agencies such as the FBI, the Secret Service, the CIA, etc.; the military, both United States and foreign; known religious organizations; ethnic advancement agencies; foreign leaders and representatives of other governments and national groups; and social groups identifiable by lifestyle, such as homosexuals, the economically disadvantaged, the economically privileged, the homeless, senior citizens, minors, etc.”

CPB notes, “DC Comics and Archie are the publishers who still abide by the Code to portray the CIA, ethnic advancement agencies and the economically privileged in a positive light.”

Where do old PC’s go to die? In February 2002, the Basel Action Network the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition released the report “Exporting Harm: The High-Tech Trashing of Asia” which reveals that “huge quantities of hazardous electronic wastes are being exported to to China, Pakistan and India where they are processed in operations that are extremely harmful to human health and the environment.”

Four villages in Guiyu, Guangdong province (about 4 hours drive from Hong Kong) have been turned into toxic waste dumps.

“About 100,000 poor migrant workers are employed breaking apart and processing obsolete computers imported primarily from North America.... The operations involve men, women and children toiling under primitive conditions, often unaware of the health and environmental hazards involved in operations which include open burning of plastics and wires, riverbank acid works to extract gold, melting and burning of toxic soldered circuit boards and the cracking and dumping of toxic lead laden cathode ray tubes. The investigative team witnessed many tons of the E-waste simply being dumped along rivers, in open fields and irrigation canals in the rice growing area. Already the pollution in Guiyu has become so devastating that well water is no longer drinkable and thus water has to be trucked in from 30 kilometers away for the entire population.”

The United States is the only developed country in the world that has not ratified the Basel Convention, a UN treaty which bans the export of hazardous wastes from the worlds most developed countries to developing countries.

The report features stunning photographs from Jeroen Bouman. You can find some of his photos and audio commentary as part of the BBC’s Disposable Planet? site.

Found via Slashdot

In 1985, three graduates from the Sarajevo faculty of fine arts formed the design team TRIO Sarajevo. The group created designs for bands, theatre companies and art and culture-based magazines.

“In April 1992 the Bosnian war began, and Sarajevo was besieged. Despite the obvious hardships of life in a city under siege for two and a half years, and although they had many opportunities to continue work outside Bosnia-Herzegovina, TRIO opted to remain in Sarajevo throughout the war. Faced with a market suddenly reduced to a 3km wide stretch of a city under siege, TRIO have nonetheless continued to earn a living as commercial designers, receiving payment for their work in food, cigarettes and (occasionally) small amounts of money. During the war TRIO have managed to assemble a computerised design office put together from various components which were borrowed or begged from friends and colleagues in Sarajevo.... In addition to their regular work, TRIO have also invested a great deal of time putting together a collection of graphic art aimed at raising awareness of the plight of their city throughout Europe. The work which has made them famous in western capitals is based on a series of reworkings of well-known advertising and pop-art images, such as the logos for Speilberg’s Jurassic Park, Coca-Cola, Absolut Vodka, Warhol’s famous Campbell’s Soup, and satirical adaptations of famous posters, such as Monroe’s Some Like it Hot, Your Country Needs You, Wake Up America!, Munch’s Scream, and many more.”

From The Design Group - TRIO SARAJEVO. The visual formula is direct and simplistic, but according to “Ironic Postcards from a City at War” the intent is to inject notice of the crisis into Western pop culture, to attach new associations to strongly recognized brands. My favorite is not one that uses the commercial brands, it is the stamp the group designed in 1995 with an image of one of destroyed post office buildings:

Found via OpenDemocracy