Last night saw the 3rd birthday celebration of one of the most happenin' scenes in town - SOL STUDIOS! A profusion of talent & great company was enjoyed by all! We were also lucky enough to share delicious food provided by Dwipa Kitchen!

The evening reminded me of how lucky we are to live in Wollongong and have access to so much talent; visual artists, performers of all kinds and brilliant musicians!

Don't worry if you missed it, there'll be plenty more events!
Watch this space!

WHAT IS E-WASTE?
Electronic waste, e-waste, e-scrap, or Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) refers to the variety of electrical, electronic or digital devices that are discarded, surplus, obsolete, or broken and disposed of by their owners.

As the use of computers has proliferated, E-waste has increased exponentially. The issue of E-waste is now widely understood to be a major environmental problem with an estimated 40 million tonnes per annum generated globally (StEP 2010).

The disposal of this waste has generated socio-economic, political and environmental issues that include mass consumerism in the field of electronic goods, the environmental implications of the improper disposal of e-waste, the health implications of the improper disposal of e-waste, the international trafficking of e-waste and finally the impact of art in raising cultural awareness of e-waste.


What a waste!
“The government will soon introduce rules to regulate the informal e-waste recycling sector, but the formal sector itself is flouting regulations. An investigation by Down To Earth exposed how a registered firm in Roorkee is selling electronic equipment to junk dealers rather than recycling them.”
Click here to visit ‘DOWN TO EARTH’ – online Science and Environment magazine.

E-WASTE, ART AND CREATIVITY
Chris Jordan is an inspirational visual artist and photographer. His work often documents American mass consumerism and the degradation of the environment. Jordan's series 'Intolerable Beauty: Portraits of American Mass Consumption (2003 - 2005)' is a particularly poignant example.

    "The pervasiveness of our consumerism holds a seductive kind of mob mentality. Collectively we are committing a vast and unsustainable act of taking, but we each are anonymous and no one is in charge or accountable for the consequences. I fear that in this process we are doing irreparable harm to our planet and to our individual spirits."
    ~cj, Seattle, 2005 

Click here to see the works.

E-waste Art Gallery
Click here to check out an image gallery containing some very creative uses of E-waste.


A Positive, Creative Use of E-waste – a 17km bike path!
“It’s no surprise electronic garbage commonly referred to as e-waste is piling up in our nation’s landfills, but the Australian National Park Service has a creative alternative.
Repeat Plastics Australia just opened a new bike path made entirely out of excess plastic materials from discarded printer cartridges.”
Click here to read more.


REFERENCES

Jordan, C, Photographic Arts, posted: 1/11/2009, accessed: 15/3/2010, http://www.chrisjordan.com/

Richter, P 2010, StEP-Solving the E-waste Problem, The initiative: What is e-waste?, accessed: 25/3/2010, http://www.step-initiative.org/initiative/what-is-e-waste.php

JESS' TOP 10 TIPS
It used to be just professionals that received hundreds of emails a day but with the advent of (relatively) affordable Internet and the proliferation of iphones, inboxes are being stretched to the limits. I've written some tips to help your message get through above the clamour of SPAM and fwded jokes.


(1)       Use Relevant Subject Lines
Ensure that your subject line is relevant to the information contained in the email. This allows the email to be tracked at a later date and ‘sets the mood’ or puts the reader in the right frame of mind for the context of the email.

This will assist with the management of information as well as making everyone’s lives easier!

(2)       Quoting Previous Emails/Documents

“If you are referring to a previous email, you should explicitly quote that document to provide context.
Instead of sending email that says:

Yes

Say:
>“Did you get all of the left-handed thromblemeisters that you needed?”  Yes, thank you.

The person you are emailing may not be sitting at their desk, checking their email at the moment you send it or have time to address their emails immediately. As such they may not remember the previous email you are referring to.

(3)       Be Clear and Concise
An email should be clear and concise. State your purpose, make your requests and move on.

Within the workplace or any other formal situation, ALWAYS ensure that your email is professional. There is the tendency to be chatty or colloquial in emails but this is not appropriate for the workplace.

Reasons for being professional:

• You want to be taken seriously
• You want to be understood the first time
• You want to make a good impression. Remember, your communications may be shared with co-workers or senior management

(4)       Intonation
“The most difficult thing to convey in an email is emotion. People frequently get in trouble for typing exactly what they would say out loud. Unfortunately, without the tone of voice to signal their emotion, it is easy to misinterpret their intent.”

Using capital letters is considered ‘yelling’ and is generally inappropriate in formal emails (unless it is used in a heading or for other formatting purposes).


(5)       Your Email May Be Forwarded or shared
ALWAYS REMEMBER… your email can be forwarded to other people! NEVER put anything in a workplace communication that may be read as a slight on another person. Consider how the email will be read if it is, say, forwarded to other colleagues or senior management.


(6)       Web Links
If including a web link, Type in http:// before your URLs and put angle brackets around the URL. Some (but not all) email software will recognise that text inside angle brackets should be kept together. This will ensure the entire link is included.

For example:
“Hi - The URL is
<http://www.webfoot.com/advice/translations/indonesian/email.formality.html>
See if you like it!”


(7)       Attachments

Try to minimise the total size of any attachments – delete any unnecessary images or compress the files (if you want to be really considerate you could include a link to ‘Winzip’ or similar just in case!)

If the attachment is text information only, maybe you can save the recipient some time and simply paste the information straight into the email.


(8)       Reread before sending

Please, REREAD YOUR EMAIL before sending!!! Never ever send an email ‘in the heat of the moment’ or when you are in a rush.

What has been said cannot be unsaid.

• Be careful!
• Be professional and courteous at all times.

(9)       When Replying to an Email
Answer all questions that are asked in an email. If you skip questions it will likely result in further emails for clarification. This is utterly ineffective communication.

An opposing POV:

“In a paper document, it is absolutely essential to make everything completely clear and unambiguous because your audience may not have a chance to ask for clarification. With email documents, your recipient can ask questions immediately. Email thus tends, like conversational speech, to be sloppier than communications on paper.”

I disagree!

If you are maintaining a professional attitude in the workplace it does not matter what form the communication takes. It should always be effective and relatively formal.



(10)     Signature and Logo
Always include your company’s logo and a professional signature in outgoing emails. This lends an air of authority and is an opportunity to reinforce your company’s identity while representing your company via professional correspondence.

Free marketing... BONUS!

Copyright vs community in the age of computer networks’ and activism

I had the pleasure of going to a public meeting to hear Richard Stallman speak about ‘Copyright vs community in the age of computer networks’. Stallman is the founder and president of the Free Software Foundation (fsf.com).

Ostensibly Stallman’s talk was on how copyright was developed in the age of the printing press and was designed to fit with the system of centralised copying imposed by the printing press as an industry standard and not a legal process. But after settling us in with a few jokes it became clear that Stallman is an advocate for free software and quite good at the politics of expressing these ideals. He was very convincing. It took a while before people realised they were being preached to in a sense but eventually people started to peel off (generally well dressed software engineers who didn’t like being told they should be giving their work away for free I imagine ;)

Stallman had some great ideas about the egalitarian distribution of software and I began to wonder who he was to speak on the matter with such authority.

Stallman is himself a software engineer and in fact created an alternative operating system called GNU. He is also quite famous in the ICT world for creating a program called ‘Emax’ in the 80’s as I was later told by a fellow attendee.

Stallman’s talk ended with a question time that he further used to expound his own philosophies rather than engaging on an equal footing with his admiring public. Just when we thought we were free to go he instigated an auction for a small plush toy – an “adorable GNU”. I watched in amazement as the bids went up from $10 to $100 and were still coming in thick and fast. I must admit, I did not understand the cause behind the auction though Stallman told us it was for ‘charity’. In a way he was right I suppose – what if we did all have access to free software of every description? Would it be a Utopian world?

Later I interviewed the winner of the precious GNU toy which sold for $170 to a software engineer. “If you think about all the free software I’ve gotten from them [fsf] over the years, $170 is nothing really. It was worth every cent”.


My advice is, if you’re a hungry student, go to all the public lectures you can! You might learn something, meet people of varying degrees of celebrity but best of all, you can enjoy free triangle sandwiches and fruit platters!!!

WHAT IS GNU?

"Dr Stallman launched the development of the GNU operating system in 1984 which is free software -- everyone has the freedom to copy it and redistribute it, as well as to make changes either large or small.

The GNU/Linux system, basically the GNU operating system with Linux added, is used on tens of millions of computers today.

Dr Stallman has received the ACM Grace Hopper Award, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer award, and the Takeda Award for Social/Economic Betterment, as well as several honorary doctorates"   UOW website, accessed: 12/10/2010 http://media.uow.edu.au/news/UOW088113.html