Recently in North America Category

A group of people in the Washington DC area are hoping to open the first crowdsourced restaurant in the world. The concept? Use the wisdom of the crowds to create a restaurant that people want, in this case a "raw food" style restaurant called Elements.

The online community creating the restaurant is nearly 400 strong. Participants include architects, chefs, servers, and a local nonprofit that promotes green businesses. Each have a vested interest in the business and many have donated money to fund the venture.

The hope is that Elements will be a success because it has so much customer input going into it from the beginning, as well as a built-in customer base from the online community. Restaurant industry insiders are optimistic about the concept, believing that it's a savvy way to succeed in an often cut-throat business.

One founding member of the community is starting a crowdsourcing business to foster other start-up businesses that could be crowdsourced. So, the next logical question is, what other kind of crowdsourcing businesses could be started? We've seen a crowdsourced encyclopedia, of course. What's next? A crowdsourced school, perhaps?

Image: buncheduptv (Flickr)

China's economy just shrank 40%, according to the World Bank. India's did the same.

It's not a catastrophic pan-Asian depression, however. The Bank has recalculated the size of the world's economies based on new and evidently more accurate estimate of the effects of purchasing power, or how much people can actually buy. (Measured by exchange rates, economies in the developing world are typically much smaller, sometimes by a factor of three.)

By the older method, the world looked like this in 2005. China is rapidly closing in on the US, with the rest of the world relegated to secondary orbits around the two giants:

This is how the world looked in 2005 using the new methodology, after the Chinese economy has "lost" about $3.4 trillion (nearly the size of Japan, the world's third-largest economy), and India has been shorn of $1.4 trillion (the whole Brazilian economy):

The US is far more dominant, and Japan and Germany remain near-rivals to China in the size of their economies.

We can take two preliminary conclusions from this:

• The day when China will surpass the United States in economic power -- and the things that flow from it, such as military might -- may just have been pushed back by some years.
• It always pays to remember that models are not reality. They may help to explain it, but are often more about a way of seeing the world than about hard facts.

(Graphics generated with IBM's Many Eyes)

Image: BeketChai (Flickr)Social Technologies' Josh Calder spoke recently to Elisabeth Braw, a reporter for the Swedish newspaper Sydsvenskan, about poll results that revealed that more Americans feel their society is divided by class.

"Increasingly, more are feeling they are on the losing end of that divide," Calder notes.

He told Braw:

"The American mentality is that everybody is middle class and you lift yourself up through hard work, so these results are striking ... The division into 'haves' and 'have-nots' is a psychological phenomenon, but sometimes the loss they are feeling is very real, by the standard of a modern society."

Read the entire article (if you can read Swedish).

It’s fascinating to watch the process of assimilation unfold. As the Hispanic population in America rapidly increases, not only are the Hispanics becoming more “American,” but Americans are becoming more Hispanic.

Some examples found in researching and writing a Global Lifestyles brief on American Rites of Passage:

• When I was growing up, our birthday parties had maybe a treasure hunt or other games. Now you can’t have a party for a young kid without stringing the piñata up in the backyard and letting everybody have a whack at it.
• People are putting up memorial tableaus along highways and roads all over the US. This began as a Mexican Catholic tradition and gradually spread from the Southwest across the country. Now they’re everywhere. In my town (in northern New Jersey), we had one up for three months after a crossing guard was killed by a car last fall.
• Quinceañera—the Latin American celebration of a girl's 15th birthday—is joining the Sweet Sixteen party as a teen rite. Now it’s gone mainstream and you can find quinceañera stickers on crafts sites like Creative Memories. A colleague even sent me a link to a magazine called Quince Girl—a planning and fashion guide for quinceañera that seems to be almost entirely in English, showing assimilation in action. 

We’re going to see more and more crossover of this kind of ethnic rite of passage in the years to come, and the rites will be Americanized in the process—a process that keeps American culture constantly evolving. (Image: sxc.hu)