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Houses of the Future
Four years after the levee failures, New Orleans is seeing an unexpected boom in architectural experimentation. Small, independent developers are succeeding in getting houses built where the government has failed. And the city's unique challenges—among them environmental impediments, an entrenched culture of leisure, and a casual acquaintance with regulation—are spurring design innovations that may redefine American architecture for a generation.
A sturdy bike is a good way to get around the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans. The roads are still pretty rough, the distances between places tend to be too long to walk and too short to drive, and on a bike you can easily stop and chat with the residents who have returned. I moved to New Orleans about a year after Hurricane Katrina, and I've ridden my bike out here every month or two to see how the rebuilding has been faring. Also, I've heard that Brad Pitt likes to bike around when he's in town. Folks tell me he's a pretty regular guy. "Brad was here yesterday," a woman sitting on the front steps of her new and very modern house told me one day last fall. "He was talking to everyone, just checking things out."
He has a lot to check out, as it happens. Next to the levee along the Mississippi River sits the experimental "project house" of Global Green, a nonprofit Pitt has been working with that's trying to replace homes lost in the flood with energy-efficient ones. From there, it takes about 10 minutes to bike to the northern edge of the Ninth Ward, where the Industrial Canal flood wall collapsed in August 2005. Along the way you pass shotgun houses in various stages of repair and disrepair; Fats Domino's home, from which he was rescued; and a large sculpture of empty chairs commemorating the hundreds who died in the storm. As you get closer to the failed flood wall, the land becomes more open and rural-looking, and the blackbirds grow louder. Only concrete steps standing in front of concrete slabs suggest the community that existed before the rushing waters erased it.
And then, suddenly, amid heroically overgrown lawns, you see a cluster of modern, colorful, and modestly sized homes, looking like a farm where they grow houses for Dwell magazine. These are the fruits to date of Pitt's other project, Make It Right New Orleans. New Orleanians refer to these homes collectively as "the Brad Pitt Houses," which gives them the pleasing ring of an ambitious public-housing project from the post–World War II years. But Pitt's ambitions are not merely utilitarian. He hopes to offer displaced residents affordable, cutting-edge, radically green homes designed by name-brand architects like Thom Mayne and Frank Gehry. And he seems to be succeeding.
Four years after Katrina, the rebuilding of New Orleans is not proceeding the way anyone envisioned, nor with the expected cast of characters. (If I may emphasize: Brad Pitt is the city's most innovative and ambitious housing developer.) But it's hard to say what people were expecting, given the magnitude of the disaster and the hopes raised in the weeks immediately following. Seventeen days after the storm, President George W. Bush stood in Jackson Square and promised: "We will stay as long as it takes to help citizens rebuild their communities and their lives."
The terms we, as long as it takes, and help turned out to be fairly elastic. The Federal Emergency Management Agency shuttered its long-term recovery office about six months later, after a squabble with the city over who would pay for the planning process. Since then, depending on whom you talk to, government at all levels has been passive and slow-moving at best, or belligerent and actively harmful at worst. Mayor Ray Nagin occasionally surfaces to advertise a big new scheme (a jazz park, a theater district), about which no one ever hears again. A new 20-year master plan and comprehensive zoning ordinance was being ironed out early this summer, but it remains subject to city-council approval. A post-Katrina master plan has been under discussion since before the floodwaters were pumped out.
In the absence of strong central leadership, the rebuilding has atomized into a series of independent neighborhood projects. And this has turned New Orleans—moist, hot, with a fecund substrate that seems to allow almost anything to propagate—into something of a petri dish for ideas about housing and urban life. An assortment of foundations, church groups, academics, corporate titans, Hollywood celebrities, young people with big ideas, and architects on a mission have been working independently to rebuild the city's neighborhoods, all wholly unconcerned about the missing master plan. It's at once exhilarating and frightening to behold.
"If you look at the way ants behave when they're gathering food, it looks like the stupidest, most irrational thing you've ever seen—they're zigzagging all over the place, they're bumping into other ants. You think, 'What a mess! This is never going to amount to anything,'" says Michael Mehaffy, the head of the Sustasis Foundation, which studies urban life and sustainability and has worked with neighborhood organizations here. "So it's easy to look at New Orleans at the grassroots level and wonder, What's going on here?' But if you step back and look at the big picture, in fact it's the most efficient pattern possible, because all those random activities actually create a very efficient sort of discovery process."
This process is unfolding in a city where the effects of environmental disregard—from disappearing wetlands to rising temperatures to encroaching seas—seem more palpable by the day, and where sustainability seems less like an annoying buzzword and more like a moral imperative. Add to this the sudden collapse of the credit and real-estate markets last year, and the fleeting yet unnerving flirtation with $5-a-gallon gasoline the year before, and one could be forgiven for seeing a cosmic convergence taking shape.
The architectural historian James Marston Fitch wrote more than a half century ago that great leaps forward in architecture occur when three factors—theory, material, and technique—come into alignment under the pressure of social change. Such "golden moments of equilibrium," as he called them, are "brief in time, special in character, delicate in balance." He noted that such moments produced the Crystal Palace, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Eiffel Tower.
We may be in one of those moments now, with notions of modern design, advances in green materials, and the technical imperatives of sustainability all converging toward a great leap in urban architecture. The architecture writer Andrew Blum has asked whether the Brad Pitt Houses could "become for the single-family green house what Seaside was for New Urbanism or Pacific Palisades was for California Modernism"—that is, a project that recasts the possible for the next generation of architects and developers. As seems fitting for such a moment, most of the construction projects under way in New Orleans are informed by seemingly conflicting strands of utopianism. But their designers are coming to some common, and edifying, conclusions.
This summer, I visited five of the new houses. I sat on their porches—New Orleans's original green technology, offering shade in summer and shelter during deluges, connecting the home with the street—and I considered a city in flux.
The front porch of the Global Green project house has an agreeable geometric purity—it's supported by two chopstick-thin columns angled outward on one side, and a shading screen of horizontal wood slats on the other. The porch roof slices at a slight downward angle into a narrow, two-story, pea-green shoebox, which looks as if its solar-paneled lid is being lifted by an unseen hand. Save for two nearly identical houses under construction next door, it resembles nothing else in the neighborhood, which consists of older shotguns and ranch houses.
Mike Lopez was sitting on the porch when I stopped by. He's the construction manager for Global Green, and he's been living in the house since it was completed more than a year ago. Today, it's mostly used as an eco-housing laboratory and visitor center, but eventually a displaced Lower Ninth Ward resident will move in. Until then, Lopez is figuring out what works and what doesn't. (Humidity-triggered bathroom fans, good; a grass roof in subtropical sun, not so good.) This knowledge has already come in handy for the houses next door, and will also inform some of the design when the group breaks ground on an 18-unit green apartment building later this year.
Shortly after Katrina, Matt Petersen, Global Green's president and CEO, met Pitt at a Clinton Global Initiative meeting in New York City. They got to talking about New Orleans. Pitt, as readers of celebrity profiles know, is nutty for architecture. He has tinkered with models in Frank Gehry's studio, bought and restored Craftsman-style bungalows in Southern California, co-authored a book on a historic home, and been asked to help design an eco-hotel in Dubai. Regarding architecture, Pitt once told Oprah, "I'm really gay about the whole thing." When he filmed Interview With the Vampire in New Orleans years ago, he developed an abiding fondness for the place. Peterson and Pitt came up with an idea to stage an architectural competition for a model green house. Pitt put up some money and agreed to serve as the jury chairman, and Global Green acquired a 1.2-acre tract in the Holy Cross neighborhood of the Lower Ninth Ward. The competition attracted 125 entries from around the world. A young architectural team from New York called Workshop/apd won, and Global Green set about building its design.
The resulting house is a fine example of what you might call the Better Living Through Modern Green Design strain of utopianism, whose adherents argue that contemporary design and technology will conspire to free us from our grim, polluted past and usher in an era of efficiency and cleanliness. And I have to say, it's an appealing future. Several days a week, the Global Green house opens for tours, and it's hard not to marvel at all the applied ingenuity, from the dual-flush toilets—number one gets a spritz, number two more hydraulic vigor—to the "green screen" of Carolina jasmine being trained to shade the south wall, to the thousand-gallon cistern intended to supply captured rainwater for toilet-flushing and plant care . The house is designed to be "net zero" energy-wise—that is, it produces as much electricity as it consumes each year. The utility closets are filled with the synapses that control the house's hi-tech appendages, and downstairs near the door is a touch-screen panel—the "Lucid Building Dashboard"—that monitors its brain waves like an EKG. It seemed to me every bit as marvelous as Disney's old House of the Future, but with reclaimed wood rather than white plastic.
Rosemary and Lloyd Griffin's front porch is low and broad, wrapping around two sides of their house and giving it a contemporary Creole-Caribbean feel. Their roof, a shiny steel pyramid lined with solar panels, looks slightly askew, like the Tin Man's hat. Rental cars roll slowly down the street, car windows descend, cameras emerge. A sign reading Private Residence has been hammered into the front lawn to keep the curious at bay—visitors occasionally mistake the house for a pavilion at some sort of world's fair and walk right in. Mrs. Griffin tells me she doesn't mind all the gawkers and the picture-taking. "I thank God for this," she said, nodding at her new house. "This is something to be excited about."
The Global Green project, it turned out, was just the beginning for Pitt. After Katrina he moved his family to New Orleans to film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (and bought an 1830s mansion in the French Quarter). He saw the slow progress of the city's rebuilding firsthand and, looking to do more, picked up the phone.
"I got a call one day out of the blue from Brad Pitt," says architect Bill McDonough. McDonough is the co-author, with the chemist Michael Braungart, of Cradle to Cradle, an influential manifesto calling for manufactured products and building materials that can be fully reused when they no longer serve their initial purpose. Pitt liked his thinking. "He'd read Cradle to Cradle and asked me if I wanted to do something together in New Orleans."
McDonough said yes. So did others who got the call, including Graft, an architecture firm based in Los Angeles, and Cherokee Gives Back, a North Carolina–based foundation. Together, they established Make It Right, with the goal of constructing 150 new houses in the hard-hit area near the ruptured Industrial Canal flood wall—enough housing to feel like a neighborhood, they figured, as well as to entice additional investment along nearby streets. Pitt put up $5million, as did the philanthropist and movie producer Steve Bing. They've since raised enough to build about a hundred houses. Pitt contacted a group of noted architectural firms and asked them to contribute designs. Thirteen did, including Kieran Timberlake, Pugh + Scarpa, Adjaye Associates, MVRDV, and Morphosis. (Seven more firms have since signed on.)
The architects were given conditions hammered out in part during community meetings, some of which Pitt attended, where displaced residents described their vision of a new neighborhood. Among the criteria that emerged: use the city's existing narrow lots (that is, no aggregating lots and building large complexes—rumors had circulated after Katrina that Donald Trump wanted to buy the whole Lower Ninth); elevate houses out of the way of future flooding and include rooftop access to simplify rescue; feature prominent porches or front stoops for socializing; and use materials that are tough enough to survive hurricanes but that also approach "cradle to cradle" reusability. The standard house was to be 1,200 square feet, have three bedrooms and two baths, and cost no more than $150,000. Homeowners would pay what they could, and the foundation would help with the rest. In the meantime, Make It Right started working with Lower Ninth families to clear up property-title issues (historically, many New Orleanians have acquired houses without paperwork showing a clean line of ownership), and to help with insurance settlements, payments from the federally funded Road Home program, and new financing.
The firms presented their preliminary designs for feedback. The people of the Lower Ninth voiced some displeasure—in particular, they didn't care for the flat roofs favored by modern designers. "A lot of residents said they looked like FEMA trailers," said Steven Bingler, the founder of Concordia, a New Orleans architecture-and-planning firm, which designed the house selected by the Griffins. "Don't get me wrong—they were really hip. But the residents said: 'A house has a sloped roof.'"
As the process unfolded—with designers bouncing their ideas off the people who would actually have to live in their creations—Bingler sensed a welcome shift in his style-obsessed profession. "Community has to be the new titanium," he said.
Two houses drew extra attention. Thom Mayne's house was designed to float out of harm's way in a flood. (Mayne's prototype was built by architecture students at UCLA, then trucked to New Orleans and reassembled.) And the Dutch firm MVRDV proposed a high-concept V-shaped house that looked not unlike the houses that had collapsed after Katrina. It's the only design not yet selected by a homebuyer.
Green high-design utopianism is virulent at Make It Right, as at Global Green, and all the houses feature sophisticated systems to achieve net-zero energy use. At an open house last year, a Make It Right organizer insisted that I go down and watch the electric meter running backward as solar energy coursed back into the grid. I stood around with a few others, murmuring appreciatively, as if witnessing a high-tech voodoo ceremony.
New residents undergo training on the operation of their homes, and receive a thick technical notebook and a smaller user's manual. They also get a dedicated phone number to call with problems; at the other end, a staffer will troubleshoot or send out a technician. I suggested to Tom Darden, the project's executive director, that this didn't seem to have much in the way of real-world application. But he shrugged and said it was part of the plan. Make It Right's mission includes testing new approaches and discarding those that fail, a luxury few for-profit developers can afford.
Biking through the neighborhood recently, I was heartened to hear all the hammering and sawing along Tennessee Street—the raspy calls of blackbirds in the overgrown lots of the Lower Ninth are woeful and melancholy. With nearly 20 Make It Right houses occupied or under construction, a certain critical mass was forming. But I had to wonder: Why the need to cluster so many boisterous structures side by side? Any one of these homes would make for a striking neighborhood landmark, but together they just make noise, like an orchestra of timpani. But I suppose it's churlish to raise aesthetic concerns. Brad Pitt for Mayor T-shirts are not uncommon around town. And people marvel at what Pitt has accomplished where so many others have failed, even if they admit, in a footnote, that the houses aren't their style.
"What we call historic design arose out of necessity," said Darden, "and that's happening again."
Not everybody is so circumspect. "Oh, it's all bullshit," Andres Duany said to me last fall, when I brought up Make It Right. "The high design? That has nothing to do with reality. That's just architectural self-indulgence."
Duany, it may come as no surprise, subscribes to another utopian worldview. He is a co-founder of the Congress for New Urbanism, and a persistent advocate for traditional small-town design. A generation ago, Duany and his wife, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, designed the landmark village at Seaside, Florida, and made a seemingly historic beach town suddenly materialize on an empty stretch of seacoast. (It was the setting for the movie The Truman Show.) He built his reputation in part on his porches; at Seaside, all houses were required to have them, to encourage community interaction.
The porch at 3428 Dauphine Street—in the historic Bywater neighborhood, just across the Industrial Canal from the Lower Ninth—is not very Duany-esque. It's more like a small deck, accessible only from the living room and enclosed by a tall wood-plank fence. This is a bit odd, since Duany designed it, but in a historically blue-collar neighborhood of stoops rather than porches, it makes contextual sense.
Duany has been involved with the rebuilding since just days after Katrina, most recently as part of Cypress Cottage Partners, a group that was awarded $74.5million by the state to come up with alternatives to the much-loathed FEMA trailer. The idea was to build prototype villages in communities along the Gulf Coast and see how they work. But the search for sufficiently large building lots has been fraught with headaches, so in the meantime Duany went ahead and built the Bywater houses on an empty corner lot with the help of an investor, in part to learn about how to build quickly and efficiently in New Orleans.
What resulted was a pair of duplexes, variations of what are locally called shotgun doubles. The houses, painted champagne yellow and olive khaki, have gables facing the street and, across the facade, an overhang that shields doors and windows against rain and sun. Duany's overhangs, compared with the ones on older houses in the neighborhood, are placed a bit too high, like someone wearing pants cinched near his chest. But they add a touch of grace to the streetscape, and without them the houses would look as if they were wearing no pants at all.
These homes illuminate the Your Elders Knew Best strain of utopianism, whose adherents argue that historic neighborhoods are sacred texts from which one can learn, provided the language in which they were written is accurately translated. The future and its fancy technology distract from what's really important: building human-scale environments with houses that quietly add to the conversation of the street, rather than yodeling and preening. Duany has largely succeeded in weaving his new homes into the block. One can bike past without noticing them, as I first did. As he explained in a neighborhood-association newsletter, "It is our hope that at least some parts of New Orleans can be rebuilt in the style to which its residents are accustomed—and not as a version of an Alabama trailer park or a suburb of Venice Beach, California."
Duany is sometimes (and unfairly) likened to a monk laboriously transcribing the texts of the ancients without contributing new ideas for a new time. But style wasn't what irked him when I brought up the Make It Right project. It was the whole way New Orleans was approaching rebuilding.
"When I originally thought of New Orleans, I was conditioned by the press to think of it as an extremely ill-governed city, full of ill-educated people, with a great deal of crime, a great deal of dirt, a great deal of poverty," said Duany, who grew up in Cuba. "And when I arrived, I did indeed find it to be all those things. Then one day I was walking down the street and I had this kind of brain thing, and I thought I was in Cuba. Weird! And then I realized at that moment that New Orleans was not an American city, it was a Caribbean city. Once you recalibrate, it becomes the best-governed, cleanest, most efficient, and best-educated city in the Caribbean. New Orleans is actually the Geneva of the Caribbean."
Duany said that many of the shotgun houses in New Orleans were built by the fathers and grandfathers of people living in them today, and few of them meet building codes. But no one worries about paying mortgages or insurance. "The situation is that the housing is essentially paid off, and it allows people to accumulate leisure," he said. "What's special about New Orleans is that it's the only place in the United States where you can have a first-rate urban life for very little money." What happened after Katrina, Duany said, was that FEMA and others came to town with detailed requirements for record-keeping and property titles, then insisted on stringent building codes that would make all the houses hurricane-proof. This might seem like common sense, he said, but it's "essentially unworkable for a Caribbean city."
So the central problem, according to Duany: "All the do-goody people attempting to preserve the culture are the same do-gooders who are raising the standards for the building of houses, and are the same do-gooders who are giving people partial mortgages and putting them in debt," he said. "They have such a profound misunderstanding of the culture of the Caribbean that they're destroying it. The heart of the tragedy is that New Orleans is not being measured by Caribbean standards. It's being measured by Minnesota standards."
As an alternative, Duany argues for "opt-out zones" for some of the hardest-hit areas, including the Lower Ninth. Within these zones, residents could rebuild their homes the way the city was originally constructed: by hand, incrementally, and unencumbered by what Duany calls "gold-plated" building regulations or bank requirements. Such zones exist in rural areas, he says, but haven't been tested in an urban context. He suggested that the money spent on the Better Living Through Modern Green Design homes would be far better spent on a widespread, low-cost self-building program. "The deal is, you can hammer something together any old way, but you won't have debt. That should be an option. Carrying debt requires a great deal of employment, which undermines a culture of leisure. The key is self-building," he told me, and added that it might arise somewhere else in the city, perhaps among the Latino construction workers who arrived on the heels of the storm. "It always emerges."
From his front porch, Mingko Aba can look across the street to the house where he was born 59 years ago. Actually, he's looking slightly downward at it, because his new house is built about five feet up, on piers. He also has a pretty good vantage point for seeing the progress in his Upper Ninth Ward neighborhood, which flooded but was spared the tsunami that swept homes off their foundations across the canal in the Lower Ninth after the levee broke.
Aba rode out Katrina at home, clambering up to his roof when the water reached his ceiling. The next day, a neighbor came with a boat that had drifted by, and the pair helped ferry other stranded people to the top floor of a church, and then went looking for groceries. They picked pink grapefruit and blood oranges from the upper branches of Aba's citrus trees, and at a flooded corner store, they discovered that packaged food has an unadvertised advantage: it's airtight and bobs to the surface.
After spending three years in Alabama, Aba came back for his brother's funeral and decided it was time to rebuild. On a neighbor's suggestion, he contacted Build Now, a nonprofit founded in 2007 that helps homeowners navigate the whole process, from arranging to demolish your old house, to finding financing for the new one, to the actual construction.
Aba's new home, which he moved into earlier this year, is just 14 feet wide, but it has a restrained grandeur, like a miniature Greek temple on a mount. On the outside, with its rectangular columns and tall triangular pediment, it's all but indistinguishable from the Greek Revival shotgun houses found on narrow lots throughout the city's older neighborhoods.
The historic design is not by accident. William Monaghan, the architect and developer who founded Build Now, is another representative of the utopianism that sees salvation in the architectural grammar of a historic city. "There's a place for everything, and it's great that people are doing all kinds of design, but I wanted to fit in with the neighborhood character," he said. "I didn't want to try to get somebody to move back to New Orleans and make all those decisions and sink all that money into something, and then say, 'Oh yes, and you also have to be challenged by unfamiliar architecture.'"
Monaghan, who grew up in New Orleans and is now based in New York, had been appalled at the city's anemic rebuilding efforts during his visits home after Katrina. So he founded a nonprofit with the slogan "Build new. Build high. Build now." The idea was to provide one-stop shopping for traditional, reasonably priced homes for the displaced. Complete houses, including appliances, begin at about $100,000, without land or foundation work.
Monaghan set out to create eight prototype homes based on classic New Orleans styles. "Having lived there so long, I thought I knew everything," he said. "I'm an architect, I've done a lot of historic preservation work. I thought I'd just design some houses that look like New Orleans houses."
That proved trickier than he'd thought. He explored the city with tape measure in hand, conducting a sort of architectural phrenology to figure out the proportions and details that make New Orleans houses so New Orleans—the depths of the porches, the sizes of the pediments, the angles of the hip roofs, the ratios of height to width. It turned out that while these measurements tended to be quirky and irregular, they made a lot of sense for the culture and climate of New Orleans. For instance, almost every old house has tall ceilings that allow residents to live below the worst of the summer heat. Single shotgun cottages lack hallways, allowing for efficient cross-ventilation in every room. And many center-hall cottages use transoms to make the walls porous and keep the air moving. "You sort of take this stuff for granted," Monaghan said, "but it's a tremendous environmental response."
Monaghan built a model house and started staging community events, like crawfish boils, to get the word out. People found him; they've contracted for 16 homes to date, and Monaghan has since designed six new models based on requests from buyers.
The great appeal of Build Now is its utter simplicity. Recreating a home from the past seems a needed balm for this wounded city. Where Duany seems to want to harness his projects to a broader crusade, Monaghan's mission is more straightforward: build houses that New Orleanians have shown, through a process of architectural natural selection spanning more than a century, that they love.
"What we're learning is that these traditions are not just fashions," said Michael Mehaffy of Sustasis. "They're rooted in the real adaptive evolution of a place."
URBANbuild Prototype 04 in New Orleans's Central City neighborhood was completed last spring. You might pass Duany's or Monaghan's homes without noticing them. Not this one. It's a gleaming white box sitting flush against two streets on a corner lot, hung with large sliding panels of polycarbonate plastic. It looks like the package in which one of the Victorian shotguns nearby was delivered, and the sheer incongruity of the thing made me laugh when I first saw it. But loitering on the back porch—basically a deep rectangular cut taken out of one corner of the box—I found it impossible not to feel part of the neighborhood, perhaps more so than at any of the other new houses I'd visited.
This is one of four homes developed since Katrina by the URBANbuild studio at the Tulane School of Architecture. (The third house was featured in a reality-TV series on the Sundance Channel last year.) Some 25 students worked to design and build it; electrical, plumbing, HVAC, and drywall work were contracted out. Standing on a crime-racked block of the city, it has the feel of guerrilla architecture, built in defiance of its surroundings.
The students started with the concept of sliding plastic panels, which, in theory, will withstand the pummeling of a hurricane. They then took some of the common architectural vocabulary of New Orleans—shutters, porch, front stoop—and distilled them to their essential elements, adding exaggerations of scale and splashes of color (the segments of the box cut away for the stoop and porches are painted lime green). Even so, the house is practical, like a cabinet from Ikea—when not locked into position for hurricanes, the panels can be moved around for privacy, or to shade the porches from sun.
"We're trying to get the students to be inventive, creating ideas that maybe other people can mimic," says Byron Mouton, the Tulane professor who directs the studio. All of the houses are aggressively contemporary in style. Reaction has been divided among residents: in general, the older generation hates them, and younger folks think they're fly.
Scott Bernhard, director of the Tulane City Center, which has worked with URBANbuild and other community projects at Tulane, defended the style. "To me, it's respectful of the old buildings to be attentive to scale or urban pattern, but it's not respectful of those old buildings to imitate," he said. "In some ways, imitation and mockery are too close together. To us, having a gabled roof at the front of the building is far less important than engaging the street."
Two years ago, at a conference on traditional building held at the New Orleans convention center, the architect and New Urbanist Steve Mouzon asked a crowd of contractors and architects to think about a basic point. "The very core of sustainability," he said, "can be found in a simple question: 'Can it be loved?'"
All those solar panels from the first eco-boom in the 1970s, and those clunky, angular houses they sat atop? Most are demolished and gone. "The carbon footprint of a building is meaningless once its parts are carted off to a landfill in a generation or two," Mouzon told the crowd. The rebuilding of New Orleans by the people who love it, he suggested, may provide the most lasting green lesson of all.
New Orleans remains a traumatized city: 65,000 homes still sit unoccupied, the population is still down by about a quarter, rents are up by 40 percent, and violent crime is endemic. But the strong and enduring interest in rebuilding here—and the steady trickle of residents moving back, along with the unabated flow of volunteers coming to help out—shows that it is a place people care deeply about. That fact should not be overlooked.
Consider that Habitat for Humanity has nearly completed its high-profile Musicians' Village in the Upper Ninth Ward, including a cluster of 72 attractive, small, traditional-style homes conceived by the New Orleans natives Branford Marsalis and Harry Connick Jr. And that another New Orleanian, the actor Wendell Pierce, has established a nonprofit with plans to build hundreds of environmentally friendly homes in badly flooded Pontchartrain Park, where he grew up. In nearby Gentilly, Project Home Again, founded by Barnes& Noble Chairman Leonard Riggio, has put up $20million to build elevated bungalows for former residents, and the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana has funded the construction of 21 low-cost modern shotguns in Central City.
Meanwhile, the city's 270 or so neighborhood associations, once little more than social clubs dabbling in the occasional crime-watch program, have become increasingly sophisticated in the language of rebuilding and partnering with outside experts—whether from charities, the business world, or even Hollywood. This isn't exactly the bottom-up self-building that Andres Duany envisions. But neither is it Robert Moses–style planning from on high. A community-driven, middle-out planning style has emerged, and the kind of housing it seems to favor fuses smart modern design with the city's traditional notions of space, leisure, and community. As with jazz, gumbo, and some remarkable cocktails, this style illustrates the city's talent for crafting extraordinary things from the ordinary stuff it has at hand.
New Orleans can offer plenty of lessons in green living—and it could have before the storm, had anyone asked. How to build beautiful small houses on narrow lots. How to build compact, walkable neighborhoods. How to adapt buildings to the environment, with deep porches and high ceilings and small, leafy yards. These are the things that people loved about New Orleans—and they're the things that architects interested in sustainable design most want to build right now. The past here has much to inform the future, not just for New Orleans, but for an entire country that needs to rethink the way it designs its cities and homes. New Orleans won't be rushed—it never is—but the chances are good that whatever results here will be loved.


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Neighbor charged with murder of missing Braintree man
A Braintree man faces murder charges after the discovery of his neighbor's body in Connecticut at about 2 a.m. Thursday.
Jeffrey Adam Phillips, 31, was reported missing by his family Monday. His remains were found in woods in Suffield, Conn., Thursday, the Norfolk County district attorney's office said. Police arrested Phillips' neighbor, Lucas E. Walters, 28, Wednesday night and charged him with the murder.
Walters and Phillips lived in separate apartments at 391 Middle St. Investigators believe Phillips may have been killed several days ago in a shed on the property and his body taken to Connecticut.
At about 8 p.m. Wednesday, Walters walked into the Braintree police station and was interviewed.
Police searched Phillips' apartment and the yard outside the house, which has three apartments in it, late into the night Wednesday. The house is at the corner of Union and Middle streets and bears a plaque that reads "Ye Olde Deacon Thayer House" but it is not considered an historic property by the local historical society because of all the changes it has undergone.
When police went to the house earlier Wednesday, Phillips' apartment was unlocked and several items were missing, including a flat-screen TV, an Xbox game system and a laptop computer. Police found Phillips' pickup truck parked outside and his cat inside the apartment.
None of Phillips' family or friends had heard from him since Friday night, when he said he was going to walk to a nearby gas station to buy cigarettes, said Chad Brandolini, a friend and co-worker at Zeta Percussion in Holbrook.
Phillips had talked on the phone with a friend and his mother from his home at about 7:30 p.m. Friday, Brandolini said.
"Jeff had plans to meet his mother Saturday morning, but was never heard from," Brandolini said.
Phillips didn't show up for work Monday, which was also unusual for him, he said.
"Even when he's sick, he comes in and toughs it out," Brandolini said.
Friends and family contacted media outlets Wednesday for help in seeking information about Phillips' whereabouts, and put up posters around the neighborhood offering a $1,000 reward for the information.
Fred Hanson can be reached at email@example.com.

subset: commoncrawl


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September 2009 : Saturday Sep 2009 : Saturday
See More Photos of:  Amsterdam, Netherlands, Travel
A Classic from Amsterdam, the Swirling Sunset over the Canal
I was going through a few old photos and I was not sure if I ever posted this one or not!
I was in Amsterdam for the Reason conference (a gathering of a Libertarian bent). It was really cool because I got to meet Trey Parker and Matt Stone (creators of Southpark), who were also there at the conference. Towards the end of one day, we all got on a private boat to take us around the canals of Amsterdam. I got a chance to talk for a while with the former prime minister of Estonia when they made the transition to the flat tax. Very interesting to me… economics is one of my hobbies, so it was a kick to hang out with all these think-tank guys and gals.
At some point, I left the conversation to climb on top of the boat to take this photo.


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With dozens of social marketing venues for its divisions and subdivisions, General Electric still retains central oversight, largely through its use of analytics.
As new platforms rise and fall, Paul Marcum, director of global digital marketing and programming at GE, keeps a close watch, game to test-drive their effectiveness. But he's just as willing to move on if the venue doesn't attract the desired audience. For instance, the company let its Foursquare presence go when it realized the platform was not a match for GE's marketing needs.
With brand, divisional and subdivisional social media presences on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, Google+ and more, GE found that developing and deploying content and managing every response to each audience was too time-consuming for in-house resources.
Offloading content development has allowed the company to develop an overarching social media strategy that plays to each platform's strength. Marcum considers Facebook as "GE at its most accessible" because it has the most content and fastest response times. YouTube is an avenue to celebrate GE's technology and manufacturing impact with engaging videos.
Taken together these channels "humanize the organization in a way it never had been before," Marcum says.
Outsourcing content
He selects advertising agencies based on their expertise with specific social media formats. For instance, one agency skilled in visual presentation and video deals with Instagram content; another that is known for its ability to generate micro-content is tapped for Facebook and Twitter.
Marcum acknowledges that this "robust mix requires more overhead" in terms of managing it all but ultimately calls it time well-spent.
Marcum continues to finesse GE's social marketing approach, mostly through improved analytics. In the early days, Marcum received a PDF each week with basic results such as likes, fans and followers. But that was inadequate, because "it wasn't tailored to engagement or real time and really didn't reflect the opportunity in social media," he says.
Nowadays, GE uses homegrown analytics and visualization software that pings all social media APIs for data, including Google Analytics, Facebook and Twitter. Managers can access real-time customizable dashboards that illustrate performance on a daily basis.
Marcum says this model is far better for determining the best social media platforms for specific customer segments. His ultimate goal: to have clear visibility into cost per engagement.
Social marketing goes better with IT
Social marketing pioneers know the road to success runs through IT and, therefore, include CIOs and other IT leaders in their strategy sessions. Pam Wickham, vice president of corporate affairs and communications at Raytheon, and Deborah Holland, an executive vice president at Publishers Clearing House, share insights from their own experiences in bringing IT into the social marketing fold.
Which departments are instrumental in gathering social media analytics?
Wickham: Our digital and social media team partners with IT to do this. IT manages our Web Trends analytics software, so we work closely with them to track activity on our website. IT also helps us vet external analytics vendors.
Holland: It's mainly marketing, including statistical analysis, but IT and finance also are involved.
What challenges have marketing and IT faced in working together and how has that relationship evolved?
Wickham: We have always considered IT our strongest partner -- even well before social media became such an important part of our strategy. IT is an enabler of our communications function, whether through hardware, software or social platforms.
Holland: As with any IT project, the challenges in working together include cost/benefit justification, allocation of resources and full communication. Technology is continuing to build loosely coupled frameworks to make it easier to integrate.
At PCH we have successfully implemented an agile development framework to respond to high-value marketing needs and strategies in a more timely and iterative manner. We are also implementing more and more Web services and APIs that tie into our various user engagement platforms (Instant Win, Path Campaigns, Sweeps Entries, etc.), so it is becoming more seamless to introduce new channels to our marketing and customer-acquisition strategies.
How do you expect social marketing analytics to mature and what role will IT play?
Holland: Technology is continuing to be strategic in capturing more and more data to be fed into our data warehouse to better identify customer segments and build better user engagement experiences that traverse all our properties and programs.
Wickham: You need only look to the recent presidential election and the successful use of analytics and micro-targeting to understand that we have a tremendous runway ahead of us to grow and customize analytics.
What advice do you have for your peers venturing into this arena and the role IT can play?
Wickham: Partner early and often. It might sound trite, but for social media marketing to truly succeed, you need your IT partners to help shape and inform your strategy. They are experts on the tools, and you should be the expert on how to deploy them. Combined, this is a powerful alliance.
Holland: Going outside your comfort zone or trying something new can be rewarding and refreshing for a brand, but just make sure your technology team is able to support it, or at least agree to be part of the vetting-out process, especially if it is truly something new and bold.
-- Sandra Gittlen
Social marketing: Early days
Mark Fidelman, author of Socialized!: How the Most Powerful Businesses Harness the Power of Social, has witnessed a lot of confusion in the social marketing arena, stemming mostly from an attachment to traditional marketing strategies.
Marketing gets stuck on lead generation, he says, instead of looking at the real value of social media. "Social marketing is less about converting clicks into deals and more about creating relationships. Eventually the trust built causes people to buy and that's how you monetize social marketing," Fidelman says, although there are no hard-and-fast numbers that prove that assertion.
Before that can happen, businesses must bust up internal roadblocks such as a tendency to hoard information and maintain silos. Social marketing relies on cross-departmental collaboration to extract the most value from feedback and analytics.
For social marketing to reach maximum maturity, IT must be involved in strategy, which is not standard practice in organizations today. Marketing teams either go it alone or hire outsourcers to meet IT needs.
Primarily, IT must be on board because data gathered from social media platforms must be fed into back-end systems for analysis that can be distributed throughout the organization to inform decisions. Keeping that data out of reach defeats its purpose and diminishes its power, according to Fidelman.
By partnering with IT early on, he says, companies can achieve the holy grail of social marketing: providing customers the right message at the right time on the right platform and in the right context.
For more on the marketing/IT relationship, see "Social marketing goes better with IT."
Changing content in response to data
Publishers Clearing House (PCH) shares this vision, already giving social marketing equal visibility with television and online advertising, events and direct marketing.
PCH engages its audience through Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, Google+ and other popular platforms. The company has already amassed more than 1 million fans across its multiple Facebook pages.
"Technology is continuing to be strategic in capturing more and more data to be fed into our data warehouse to better identify customer segments and build better user engagement experiences that traverse all our properties and programs," says Deborah Holland, executive vice president at Publishers Clearing House.
"Our goal is to have a large-scale, highly engaged audience," says Deborah Holland, an executive vice president at PCH. Holland and her team assess the success of social marketing via Salesforce.com's Salesforce Marketing Cloud (formerly Buddy Media) analytics software. Users can analyze comments, tweets and other types of posts based on pre-determined filters and tags, along with popular metrics such as Facebook likes and fans and Twitter followers.
Although PCH's social media reporting tools don't interface with other enterprise systems currently, if a social platform user registers or opts into the PCH email program, then he or she is tracked as having come from the social channel.
PCH relies on the resulting data to target content and respond to customer demand. Analytics recently revealed that consumers enjoy in-depth profiles of winners as well as behind-the-scenes glimpses with employees, so PCH beefed up that type of content.
All social media budget expenses are manually integrated with the enterprise-wide budget management system, providing a comprehensive view of total company budget reporting. Social media engagement analytics are gathered using channel-specific software such as Facebook Insights, Salesforce.com and WordPress. Managers receive a weekly comprehensive report on high-level engagement and volume, while executives receive a manually prepared monthly report that includes social media volumes and engagement levels.
Holland credits corporate structure for the amplified view of social media. Head of promotions for all of PCH, Holland has been able to seamlessly blend social marketing into every aspect of operations.
"We have four people on our social media team and they are networked to other key people throughout the organization, including designers and writers who develop content for all channels," she says. PCH, she adds, has created a fluid network of employees who help out and know that social media is part of their job.
This teamwork is tested often, as PCH awards prizes every 10 minutes. Engagement rates of Facebook fans "talking about this" average 10% to 15%, but can reach as much as 80% just before large prize announcements, such as those bestowed by the popular Prize Patrol. These events have to be coordinated across all marketing channels with social media ready to react in real time.
Divide and conquer
The spontaneous need for human interaction is one of the hardest lessons social media is delivering to companies. Four years ago, when Best Western International first established a Facebook presence, it encouraged the operators for each of its 2,200 North American properties to also set up shop on Facebook.
But the company quickly learned that not all property managers have the time or public relations savvy to handle the nuances of social media such as dealing with an upset customer's post. "If the page doesn't get managed, then you potentially turn a good experience into a bad experience that can damage the brand," says Michael Morton, vice president of member services at Best Western.
Best Western listens in on social media using Medallia's customer experience software. Medallia analyzes the text of what is being said about the brand in general and the hotel experience in particular. Best Western uses this intelligence, gleaned through dashboards and customized reports, to understand its successes and shortcomings, as well as those of its competitors.
"Monitoring social media is a great way for us to understand what is positively impacting a guest and what their greatest concerns are with our hotels," Morton says. "This information, in addition to solicited feedback, helps us set the direction for the brand."
Morton's group built the initial Medallia deployment "without relying on IT," he explains. "Later we wanted to involve them as we rolled this out to more and more properties." IT also played a role in bringing data in from other systems. For example, IT helped the business team include purchasing behavioral information, such as where customer bookings were originating -- directly through the hotel, travel agent, third-party sites and so forth. This information helps answer questions like whether properties with higher scores have more bookings.
Best Western built its initial social media presence "without relying on IT," says Michael Morton, vice president of member services, but later "we wanted to involve them as we rolled this out to more and more properties."
Best Western believes so strongly in the wisdom social marketing provides that it has bumped up the weight given to this feedback versus surveys, which also are conducted by Medallia, and other types of data collection. Morton believes the influence of social media will only get stronger. "We aren't ready to take dollars away from other marketing efforts, but we are investing in this area," he says.
Although Best Western now leaves the decision of whether to be a social media host up to individual owners, nearly all hotels are engaged in social media via Medallia. The software sends alerts to designated hotel staff if a comment, tweet or other post requires immediate attention.
If customers gripe on Facebook about a lack of towels poolside at a property, the on-site manager is alerted so he quickly can restock them. Hotel operators also can access statistics and insight regarding their performance against local competitors. "Initially, hotel operators didn't understand the magnitude or value of an immediate review and response," Morton says, adding social media metrics has given them perspective.
Centralization yields benefits
Defense and aerospace giant Raytheon, with presences primarily on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, is gauging customer interest in Google+, Pinterest and other emerging platforms.
Similar to Best Western, Raytheon made some strategy adjustments since it first entered the social media realm. Namely, the company centralized all social media properties.
"Everything had been owned and operated differently across the enterprise," says Pam Wickham, vice president of corporate affairs and communications. "Human resources owned the Facebook page and their focus was on recruiting college students and other would-be employees."
Meanwhile, the communications team was operating a Twitter feed as a broadcast channel for corporate news. The company's YouTube stream had no central ownership to start, only random uploading of corporate videos.
In the past 18 months, social media oversight has been gathered under Wickham's group, allowing the alignment of social media content and user interaction with the company's carefully crafted brand and reputation strategy.
"We have always considered IT our strongest partner -- even well before social media became such an important part of our strategy," says Pam Wickham, vice president of corporate affairs and communications at Raytheon.
Wickham says the inflection point for true transformation lies in understanding the difference between merely having a presence on social media and engaging in social marketing. "Social marketing is the strategic use of social media channels to deliver and amplify specific brand messaging to a targeted audience," she says. "It's much more deliberate. One is targeting, the other is simply broadcasting your message."
Raytheon uses a combination of homegrown social media analytics tools and those commonly available on social media platforms to keep tabs on messaging and sentiment.
As Raytheon's social media presence grows, so does its risk of exposure to a negative PR event. Therefore, Wickham includes social media managers in all corporate crisis strategy planning and drills. "We've always had a robust emergency response plan within the company but now we've baked in a viral element," she says.
A recent corporate responsibility event put Raytheon's social response to the test. The company had partnered with a major football team to provide free game tickets to a group of veterans. One of the invited veterans posted on the company's Facebook page that he only received one of the two tickets promised, along with a negative comment.
Raytheon's team immediately contacted him directly and found that the distributor, rather than asking for more tickets, only handed out one ticket to each person. Raytheon was able to rectify the situation in time for the game -- something Wickham says wouldn't have happened if the Facebook page weren't so closely monitored.
Improvements needed
To fully realize his vision, GE's Marcum says that social media platforms need to add attribution, so brands can track back content to individuals through re-tweets and shares. "Once we have the total picture, we can better understand where conversion pricing" -- or the cost to acquire a customer -- needs to be, he says.
Best Western's Morton contends that better attribution will help monetize social marketing efforts by showing the origin of sales -- for instance, an influential blogger sharing a hotel discount posting -- and "shorten the bread trail crumb to customers." His group wants to see "when and where the customer is making the purchase," he says.
The one major constraint in this vision is "making sure we can get the operational data included," Morton explains. "IT plays a crucial role here because Medallia gathers a large amount of customer feedback data, but the more we can tie customer feedback to operational metrics, then the more potential there is for insights and focused, impactful action... Hopefully as systems grow more integrated we can better automate some of these processes, allowing us to focus on deriving value from the information."
Ultimately the goal is for this process to be relatively instantaneous, Morton says, so "the second an online review or feedback pops up Medallia is already processing information captured by Best Western on what happened during the customer's stay."
For its part, PCH plans to use attribution not just to evaluate advertising ROI, but to identify influencers in the PCH social media universe as well as the audience members who are most active.
Also because of the company's large mobile following, PCH plans to keep the heat on Facebook to improve the quality of its mobile applications. "A third of our audience is mobile and that number is growing rapidly," Holland says. "Facebook apps are not completely compatible with mobile devices, but we are dependent on their developers to fix that."
Best Western's Morton, meanwhile, is studying ways to integrate social media analytics into the company's property management system. His hope is that someday if a customer tweets that he wishes he had a first-floor room, that information will be recorded as a preference in his customer profile.
Wickham, Holland, Morton and Marcum all are optimistic about the future of social marketing and are sure it will pay off for their brands. "There is a lot of work left to be done, but it's not an area of frustration -- it's one of excitement and anticipation," Marcum says.
Sandra Gittlen is a freelance technology writer in the Boston area. Contact her at firstname.lastname@example.com.
Read more about business intelligence/analytics in Computerworld's Business Intelligence/Analytics Topic Center.


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Decorating & Design
May 20, 2011
Comfortable Patio Entertaining
Ah, summer will be here so very soon, and I can't stop thinking about savouring outdoor meals, reading in the shade and entertaining guests in style.
Now is the ideal time to consider extending your indoor design style into your outdoor space. While planning, don't forget about pest control strategies to keep your backyard or patio free of annoying mosquitoes and other pests. It's not just about comfortable entertaining — limiting your exposure to mosquitoes will reduce your risk of getting West Nile Virus, according to Health Canada.
Here are some outdoor living areas that will have you dreaming of sunshine, good company and fresh meals (without the company of mosquitoes).
Here, vines perfectly frame windows and doors, and turn an otherwise plain wall into a dramatic, green focal point. All that lush greenery can also attract bugs, though, so consider a solution that will avert them. Mega-Catch™ is a system that gets rid of mosquitoes and other pesky flies (including sand flies, black flies and midges) easily.
This May, Mega-Catch™ releases new and improved mosquito traps in Canada: the Pro 900 Series Ultra, Premier XC, Premier and Alpha, all with a wide range of features. The Premier XC, a new addition to the range, can attract mosquitoes and other biting insects from up to 120 feet away. Using unique energy and lighting displays known to attract mosquitoes, it draws them towards the machine and away from your party or dinner. You can enhance any of the systems by using fragrance strips which boost the capture rate. Plus, you can upgrade your Premier XC trap with a feature that replicates human breathing by releasing small doses of carbon dioxide to attract more bugs. That feature is not necessary, but if you have a real mosquito problem you may want to consider it — it increases the area covered by one machine from 1 acre to 1.5 acres, and the capture rates by as much as 300-400 per cent.
This backyard features an outdoor dining room and living room. Using different patio furniture for the two areas defines the spaces, and tall planters create a contemporary backdrop for the table. Position traps away from entertaining areas for effective control that doesn't detract from the decorating. Regardless of which part of the world you reside in, you can still plug in the traps as they have a Universal Voltage system. The traps don't consume a lot of energy, either — the Ultra XC and Premier traps use less power than a 40 watt lightbulb and the Alpha only 20 watts.
And for those concerned with set-up and repairs, all traps come ready to be plugged in, and can be easily fixed if necessary, simply with a screwdriver. Using a trap will turn any indoor-outdoor areas (like the garage above) into a usable entertaining area where you don't have to deal with biting bugs. With a revamped online store, Canadians (and those elsewhere in the world) can purchase a Mega-Catch™ trap from anywhere in the country, just in time for the peak mosquito season from May to September, and the products come with both French and English labels and instructions. For more info on this product, visit the Mega-Catch™ website.
In addition to using traps, there are lots of things you can do to reduce the number of mosquitoes that bug you and your family. For example, every few days, empty or change water in anything that collects liquids, like bird baths, wading pools and potted plant saucers, says Health Canada. This poolside lounge looks like a luxury resort, but when the pool is covered, rain will collect on top, so draining is recommended. Frequently mowing your grass and trimming bushes will also help reduce bugs.
Visit the Mega-Catch™ website to find out how the Pro 900 Series Ultra, Premier XC, Premier and Alpha traps can work in your outdoor space.
For more outdoor living ideas, visit our Gardening & Outdoor Living section. Plus, enjoy these inspiring patio and backyard photos!
Photo credits:
1. House & Home July 2009 issue, photography by Michael Graydon
2. Mega-Catch™
3. House & Home May 2008 issue, photography by Michael Gradyon
4. House & Home June 2008 issue, photography by Donna Griffith
5. House & Home April 2009 issue, photography by Michael Graydon
6. House & Home April 2009 issue, photography by Michael Graydon


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Site Map
LEARN: Guide to Pet Wellness
- Pets and Obesity: What You Need to Know
- Learn How to Pet a Scratch-Happy Cat
- The Right Way to Introduce a Dog and Cat
- Learning Food Puzzles
- Cat Exercise: Keeping Your Kitty in Good Shape
- Heatstroke! Summer Days Can Turn Deadly Quickly for Overheated Dogs
CARE: Keeping Your Pet Healthy
- Avoid Common Cat and Kitten Toy That Can Turn Out to Be Dangerous
- Do All Cats Get High from Catnip?
- Bee Stings in Dogs
- Doggy Dental Care: How to Prevent Broken Teeth in Dogs
- Why Good Oral Care Is Important
- How to Care for Your Senior Cat
TRAIN: Understand Pet Behavior
- Train Your Dog to Do Puppy Pushups
- Using a Clicker for Training
- Dog Agility Training: Is It Right For Your Pet?
- How to Potty-Train a Puppy: 5 Puddle-Proof Tips to Follow
- Puppy Training 101: How to Properly Socialize Your Dog
- How to Stuff a Kong for Your Dog


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Get ready for Mega from the flamboyant Kim Dotcom. The Internet entrepreneur and accused digital outlaw recently launched Mega (short for Mega Encrypted Global Access), a new file storage and sharing service that features 50GB of free storage. Mega is just one component of what Dotcom and his team hope will be a suite of online encrypted services from Mega Ltd. including email, voice calling, instant messaging, and video streaming.
For now, Mega is a Web-based end-to-end encryption file storage service that encrypts your files in the browser before uploading them to Mega's servers. You can also use Mega to share files with others, and add other Mega users to your contact list for easy drag-and-drop sharing.
I've been playing around with Mega recently, and the service is pretty slick. However, it also appears that a few lingering bugs hamper overall functionality of the service. Let's take a look.
Mega browser
Mega says it "pushes the browser to its limits" thanks to the technology it uses for encryption and file transfers. All the current versions of the major browsers (IE, Safari, Firefox, Chrome, and Opera) are supposed to be compatible. The problem is all except one work very poorly.
Use of Internet Explorer 10, for example, has a bug that forces you to close and reopen your Mega tab every hundred megabytes or so worth of uploads, according to Mega. For best results use Google Chrome; Mega says its only deficiency is lower-grade text rendering. Chrome also has the added advantage of allowing you to upload folders with one drag-and-drop action.
Getting started
To get started, click "Register" at the top right-hand side of the page. Then enter your name, email address, and a password. Make sure you use a particularly strong password with sufficient length and random characters, since your password also serves as the master encryption key for your account.
You will then have to click on a confirmation link you receive via email before you can start using the service.
Once you confirm and sign in, Mega will create a 2048-bit RSA public/private key pair for the service's encryption features.
After that's done, you will arrive at your file manager dashboard where you can upload and download files, share public links to files, and share files with other Mega users. At the far right is a drop-down menu aptly titled "Menu" that contains links to Mega's blog, pricing for Pro accounts, help, terms of service, and other informational links. On the left side is the Cloud Drive showing all your uploaded files, and navigation links to the trash bin, your inbox, and contacts.
To add a contact, just click on the contacts section and click "Add contact" at the top of the page. Once the person signs up for Mega they will be automatically added to your contacts list. One of the handier features in Mega is that you can share files with other Mega users by dragging and dropping a file to their name in your contacts section. Mega plans to add Instant Messaging to the service so you will be able to do more than just send and receive files with your contacts.
If someone shares a file with you, it will pop up as a notification in your Mega inbox. You can then decide what to do with the file.
Adding files from your desktop is a pretty straightforward process. You can either drag and drop files right onto your file manager, or you can click the upload buttons at the top of your cloud drive. File uploads are monitored in the lower half of the screen. In my tests, file uploads were a little slow, possibly because of the encryption process, and it took a few minutes before the file was listed on my cloud drive even after the upload was complete. Complete folder uploads are also available and are added the same way files are, but only Chrome users can add folders from their desktop.
Right-clicking a file shows you several menu items, including the capability to download a file; get a link; rename a file; move, copy, remove, and reload. You can also drag and drop your files into new folders.
Similar to Windows Explorer, you can expand folders and subfolders in the left-hand column and then drop files directly into subdirectories.
You can share a file with anyone, regardless whether they have a Mega account. To share a file, you either right-click on the file and select "Get link," or you can click the link icon to the far right of the file name.
Either method will open a window that shows you an extremely long link to your file that includes a secret key (a string of numbers and letters).
Mega URLs are composed like so: https://mega.co.nz/#!FileAddress!SecretKey.
For someone to access this file, they will need both the file's URL and the key. Mega warns that if the secret key is exposed, anyone can access and download your file. If you are concerned about keeping your files private, Mega suggests you should not share the key through insecure channels such as plain email.
To hide the file key, just uncheck the "File key" checkbox and then copy the file's URL to the clipboard. You can then send the link to the file via email, and then send the key in an encrypted email or IM session.
Because files and folders are encrypted on Mega's servers, the site cannot supply thumbnail previews of images or video, offers no online streaming component for video and audio files.
Sharing a folder is a little different from sharing a single file, and you can share folders only with other Mega users. If you share a folder with someone who is not a Mega user, they must sign up for an account in order to access it.
To get started, right-click the folder and select "Sharing." You will then get a pop-up window where you can see a list of users with whom you have already shared the folder, and can add new users. To add someone, enter their email address and choose the level of access you want them to have, which ranges from read-only, read & write, or full access.
Once a folder is shared, the folder icon in your main file manager dashboard will have a hand underneath it to indicate it is a shared folder.
Folders that others have shared with you will appear in a list under your friend's name in the contacts section. Let's say firstname.lastname@example.com shares a file with you. The shared folder will appear under Tom's email address in your contacts section where you can, depending on your level of access, add or delete files. This could be a great feature for group collaboration on a set of files, or to share a photo folder with family and friends, but sharing is where Mega starts running into problems.
Bugs, bugs, and more bugs
I came across many bugs during my Mega tests even while using Chrome. The most obvious problem is an SSL encryption error that denies access to the site or specific pages in the site. A few times I couldn't even open the site's help page because of the SSL issue. You can usually fix the problem by refreshing the page once or several times, but in some cases you may have to close the page and start over.
File sharing is also problematic. Sending files and folders to others is no problem, but once someone receives the file, they may have problems accessing them. I shared a file with one of my dummy accounts for testing as well as to a colleague's account. In both cases the file was "Temporarily unavailable" for download, even up to an hour after the file landed in the other Mega account.
Mega also says that you can stop and restart interrupted uploads and downloads as long as you don't close your current browser tab. In my tests, this didn't appear to the case. Interrupted uploads and downloads are supposed to restart automatically. But when I pulled the wired connection out of my PC and switched to Wi-Fi, that didn't happen. The uploads just stalled and I eventually had to cancel them and restart.
Perhaps the worst bug of all, however, is one that prevents you from signing in to Mega. This caused me to lose access to a dummy account. Even though I entered the password correctly, Mega kept telling me there was a log-in error. I thought I might have forgotten my password, until a colleague said the same thing happened to him. That's a big problem, since Mega does not have an account recovery process.
Part of Mega's setup is that all encryption takes place in the browser and the company doesn't have access to your encryption keys, preventing them from knowing the content of your files. So if you lose access to your account by forgetting your password, which is also your master key, you're out of luck.
Finally, a warning
If you decide to use Mega, whatever you do, do not, I repeat, do not rely on Mega as the sole location for any of your files. You absolutely must have backups on your local hard drive, on another cloud service, on a thumb drive, on Gmail, anywhere. The reasons for this should be obvious for anyone who keeps up with tech news, but in case you're new here, let me spell it out for you.
Kim Dotcom and his Mega co-founders are also the brains behind MegaUpload, which was shut down by U.S. authorities last January. Dotcom and his cohorts were charged with criminal copyright offenses, among other charges, and are currently facing extradition from New Zealand to the United States. MegaUpload, and its complementary services such as Megavideo, were widely seen as havens for pirated content.
It's not clear if Mega will share the same fate as MegaUpload, but it's pretty much a given that law enforcement will be watching Mega very closely. If, one day, Mega is shut down in a similar manner to MegaUpload, all your files could be gone for good. Mega may be a useful service, but there is no way you can trust it as the sole repository of your files on a long-term basis.
Bottom line
Overall, Mega could be a very good service one day; however, several bugs need to be fixed and, considering Kim Dotcom's infamous reputation, you would be crazy not to have copies of your Mega files stored elsewhere.
For now, I would not recommend paying for Pro accounts until some of the service's problems are solved. Once they are, however, you can purchase three different Pro accounts. Pro I provides 500GB of storage for $10 per month. Pro II includes 2TB of storage for $20 per month, and Pro III offers 4TB storage for $30 per month.
Dotcom and his friends have big plans for Mega. Feature enhancements slated for the coming months include mobile apps for multiple platforms; calendar, word processing, and spreadsheet Web applications; instant messaging; and desktop file mounts for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Let's just hope the team fixes Mega's bugs before adding new stuff.


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Get fit with KETTLER. We have been manufacturing an array of exercise equipment since 1970 to enhance your daily workout routine and make you look and feel better. Use our crosstrainers, exercise bikes, rowers, treadmills and other products to challenge your muscles and build your stamina. KETTLER training and exercise equipment will help your become more physically fit, help you lose weight and improve your cardiovascular system. Depending on the type of KETTLER exercise equipment you choose, you can focus on your upper body, arms, legs, stamina and overall body strength.
Bicycles provide exercise, fun and transportation all rolled into one. KETTLER has the right bike to fit your needs and the needs of every member of your family. For basic fun and exercise we have kid's bikes, as well as women's and men's bikes. If you plan to travel a longer distance, consider a touring bike or commuter bicycle. If you want to stow your bike in your car to take a ride while you're at work or on vacation, try a folding bike. Many of our accessories will make every bike ride more enjoyable.


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This web-platform is SDC's instrument for the exchange between development practitioners working towards the creation of employment and income. Them being placed all over the world, the common virtual space will allow, to document experiences and to exchange on insights gained or on open questions. The platform provides access to discussions, news, information, documentation, project examples and working aids on the following thematic areas within the field of employment and income:
It also links you up with the same about the concept of
Making Markets Work for the Poor or as well called market system development.
A simple click on one of the thematic areas above leads you to a gateway from where you can access information, resources, experiences, projects and discussions about that topic or start a search related to the given topic.
SDC staff can access the restricted area where SDC internal documents are available to them.
In addition, the
e+i Glossary provides you with the specific e+i - terms used within SDC in the different languages.
Besides much more, you will find information to the following topics:
Financial Sector Development
MicrofinanceRural Finance
Small Enterprise FinanceMicro- /Agricultural Insurance
Social Performance
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Shows like Teen Mom and The Secret Life Of The American Teenagerare drama-packed and super entertaining, but do watching shows about teen pregnancy actually affect how you think about sex? In conjunction with The National Day To Prevent Teen Pregnancy, Seventeen is releasing never-before-seen stats based on a survey conducted by The National Campaign To Prevent Teen And Unplanned Pregnancy. How do your views compare? Take a look and share your thoughts!
85% of teen girls believe that TV shows about teen pregnancy make them think more about their own risk of becoming pregnant.
46% of teens have talked with their parents about sex, love, and relationships based upon something they saw on TV.
More From Seventeen
70% of teens believe one reason the teen pregnancy rate has dropped over the past two years is because of increased media attention to the issue.
Do you think the media plays a positive or negetive role when it comes to preventing teen pregnancy? Have you ever talked to your parents about sex? Speak up in the comments section!
Click here for more information on birth control.


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brothels, clients, decriminalisation, feminism, law reform, laws, madames, Melbourne, money, personal stories, pimps, Relationships, sex industry, Sex Work, south australia, stigma, the boss, Victoria, worker rights
This is a story about the time I jumped the desk to become the Madame of the house. Its about running a business in the South Australian sex industry, about who has control over who and about the myth of easy money. I wrote this for the feminists who believe our industry is dominated by male bosses that make big bucks by controlling female workers. I wrote it for every 5th client I see who has multiplied the money he spends on sex by the hours in a day and the number of rooms in a house and thinks he has hit jackpot. I wrote it for the politicians who worry about organised crime taking over the sex industry. For the wanna be bikies n thugs that fancy playing boss man to some ladies of the night, for the desperado that thinks owning the business will control the girl and for the saviours that honestly believe they would treat their 'girls' differently to how we are treated anywhere else. And I wrote it for the sex workers that don't like their boss, or are sick of having a boss, or think they could do it better, or just feel like trying something different.
This story is from many years ago, sometime after my second brush with law and before my forced break from the sex industry. I was between jobs when a friend of a friend introduced me to Neil who apparently had an interesting proposition for me. I had heard about Neil the wanna be pimp before. I use the word pimp flippantly, I'm not sure Australia has pimps, but if we do, Neil would probably LIKE to be one. He definitely had the sleaze factor to fit the stereotype but lacked the backbone. Neil had a reputation in the industry as a slimy sucker, with more money than sense and a boner for big talking. Needless to say I was curious about his proposal, but wasn't surprised when he told me he was having another go at opening a brothel. I say another go because, as legend had it, he had tried to open a number of brothels in the past and had failed.
One of the difficulties Neil had always encountered was that he was a man. There is not much of a role for a man in a South Australian brothel, other than client. A lot of female sex workers aren't that keen on having men hanging around on premises and the cops generally aren't that thrilled with it either. So Neil had decided he needed to pay a female manager. In addition to that, clients are generally put off if their phone calls or door bells are answered by a man, so Neil would also need to employ a female receptionist. It struck me as ironic that in order to brag about being a big brothel boss, he had to remove himself from any actual brothel bossing. He was forced to downplay his involvement in the brothel, hand over control of the brothel, stay away from the brothel, and give up a decent amount of profit from the brothel, in order for him own a brothel.
But Neil must have been impressing someone with his brothel bragging because he was determined to try his hand at the game again. When he met me, he already had the lease on a town house in the city and had furnished it simply and adequately. He knew a few workers from other brothels who were ready to jump ship and take advantage of the new businesses honeymoon period, one of which was the friend that had introduced him to me. At the time I was in a relationship with one of those partners that made it difficult for me to do sex work, and I had been missing the industry. So when Neil asked me to manage his new business, I was excited about the opportunity to be involved in the industry in a role that I hoped my partner would find more palatable. I accepted the offer immediately.
From the beginning Neil and I disagreed about everything right down to the goofy name he had given the business. I fought for what I considered to be fair pay for all the workers of the business, I pushed for flexible conditions and I advocated for an increased budget for advertising. But Neil was stubborn or stupid and wouldn't give. He had a bottom line that wouldn't budge. So for those first few weeks, we did it his way. But it didn't take long before Neil was again learning that the sex industry is not easy money and opening a brothel is not a get rich quick scheme.
Business was up and down and Neil was becoming anxious. After paying the manager a cut, the receptionist her wage, the rent, the overpriced advertising, the utilities and essential supplies for the business, Neil quickly discovered 50% of a coupla jobs a day doesn't go far. He responded to his anxiety by reducing the advertising budget further, cutting receptionist wages and introducing 'shift fees' for the workers.
But it's a vicious cycle. Without enough advertising, business became even quieter and without clients bringing in the money, the workers became unhappy. When Neil introduced the shift fee, the workers felt disrespected. Who would be happy about coming to work, sitting around all day for minimal pay with the risk being caught up in a raid AND then being forced to pay an illegal shift fee!??! They began to resent working there and those that stayed were unreliable.
Anyone who fantasises about making easy money off the backs of hookers is going to struggle. Hookers are not that easy. Many of us chose sex work for the flexibility it offers us, so we expect a flexible work place. Many of us chose it for the money we can make, so we expect to make money. Many of us chose sex work because we are good at it, so we expect to be appreciated by our employers. Neil offered his workers none of that.
But an empowered hooker is a powerful force. A hooker that knows there are ten other businesses in the vicinity that need staff (and there usually is) will not settle for anything less than what she expects. A hooker that knows its OUR service that makes the money will expect respect. And if that hooker works for a boss that disrespects her, she will disrespect them right back.
None of Neil's workers respected him, and the business suffered because of it. One typically quiet Saturday I caught out the receptionist and worker on shift doing something dodgy. I knew they had done two jobs, but the bookwork indicated only one. They had decided to not record the second job, splitting the business's 50% cut between them. I couldn't blame them. They were making next to nothing and Neil's decisions were only making it worse.
I was frustrated. I knew Neil was not meeting his target, or even covering costs, but less advertising and unhappy, unreliable and resentful workers was not helping to bring in the clients or the cash. And the expenses were still mounting.
That's when I decided to go around him and do what needed to be done. I started taking the money from one job a day off the books and used the money to pay for more advertising. I also introduced a small retainer for the staff to cover lunch and maybe a cabfare, on those occasions when they didn't do any jobs. And when no workers showed up to shift, I did the jobs.
At the same time Neil seemed to have an epiphany. If he wanted money he needed clients, if he wanted clients he needed workers, and if he wanted to keep the workers, he would have to loosen his rules. Since he couldn't work himself, he was on his knees. He had no choice but to give the workers the flexibility and work conditions they were demanding. Its not unusual for sex industry employers to take advantage of the criminalised setting by attempting to control us like they would an employee but only giving us the pay and conditions of a contract worker. But in a situation where there was little money to be made, not many would accept a bad boss.
So Neil began to back off and let me take a bigger role in managing the rosters and staffing. Sneaking around behind Neils back doing jobs myself and advertising more, started to pay off and I managed to keep the business afloat a little longer. The staff appreciated the token retainer and the more flexible conditions and when I abolished the shift fee that Neil had introduced the mood shifted.
The flexible, fair and friendly work environment resulted in word of mouth reaching the workers of a brothel that had been closed down recently. It was early one quiet weekend when Winnie, an unremarkable woman in her mid 30's came in for an interview. Looking like a proper house wife dressed in ladies floral and a perfect perm, Winnie was an unlikely looking hooker, but she bought a huge loyal and very regular client base with her. And the good fortune Winnie bought us did not stop there. She immediately sent for her two friends who she had worked with at the previous brothel. They were impressed by the guaranteed retainer our business offered and were keen to start work straight away. So at that moment, our luck had changed and business looked up. Winnie had swept in with a hoard of clients and a couple of fresh faced workers under wing and saved the day, and the business.
And so it was, that due to the decision to treat our workers well, my ability to perform ALL the duties necessary, and a little bit of good luck, business began to boom. And Neil didn't know the half of it. His pressure was gone and he was making enough to cover his costs as well as a reasonable profit for doing nothing. He could finaly hold his head up high while he bragged round town about his latest business venture. I kept lying to him about how many jobs we were doing so I could use the extra money to continue paying the staff well, stock the business with nice things, pay for adequate advertising and offcourse I gave myself a bonus.
Everyone was happy, business was flourishing under my management, the workers were all content and making money and even Neil was satisfied. Everyone was happy except my partner. The generous pay packet I was bringing home did not sweeten the deal for them. Running any business is hard work, and clearly a sex industry business is no exception. I was on call 24/7, I was stressed about the threat of police, and I was doing lots of unrostered work relieving staff when needed. Stopping sex work and taking up this new role as manager was meant to appease my partner who was uncomfortable about sex work, but instead I had succeeded in making the sex industry a bigger part of my life than it had ever been before. My partner didn't know about the occasions when Id provided the service myself in order to keep the doors open, but that didn't matter. They didn't want me involved in the industry at all.
My job was beginning to cause problems for my relationship which was probably a good thing. Looking back on this time of my life I'm glad my controlling and jealous partner made my life hell to the point I ended up walking away from the business all together. Because I nearly did something that coulda been mighta not ended well.
Neil was a shmuck. Worse than a shmuck. He was a sleazy roadblock to our success and he made me cringe. I was sick of answering to him, lying to him, even seeing him. Basically, I was sick of having him on the pay role. He was the 'owner' of the business, sure, but what exactly did he own? The workers? No, certainly not, most of them at this point had never even met him, and would never work for him under the conditions he wanted me to apply. Did he own the clientele? Definitely not, some clients will perhaps follow a worker from location to location, but generally clients go everywhere and belong to noone. And the clients we got came from the advertising I DID, and it was the happy skilled workers that kept them coming back. Did he own the business name? well, sure, he owned a ridiculous goofy name he chose, but that wasn't the name that I used in our advertising, or the name that the clients had come to know, or the name that the staff and I used. The name we used, was the name I chose. Did he own premises? Well sure, he had the lease on the townhouse we operated from, but, after being there for 8 months and with a steady stream of business coming and going, it would be time to move on soon before we attracted police attention anyways. So what did he own? Some of the furniture was his, but I had also bought a lot of newer pieces for the business since we opened. And he owned the phone number.
The workers and I began talking about ditching Neil and taking complete control of his business by simply shifting the location to a new premises that was in my name. We even joked about diverting business phone to our newly connected number until Neil noticed and got round to disconnecting it.
A sex industry business, in an illegal setting, is nothing. In an environment where businesses have to move regularly, operate discreetly out of residential properties or under the masquerade of health clinics or massage parlours, a reputation or a name, an address or even a permanent phone number is not something any brothel in South Australia has. Places and faces pop up and get shut down all over town all the time, and while certain individuals may have a reputation in the industry, finding a brothel you like, is largely a case of trial and error for both sex workers and clients. So when people talk about buying a business in our industry, I always wonder what they think they are buying, and when I thought about leaving Neil and setting up shop elsewhere, I didn't feel guilty.
I started looking for a new place to operate from and found a perfect house. It was fully furnished, in a central location and it oozed executive luxury, which was a long way from the plain and simple townhouse Neil had rented. The landlord approved my application and I was excited, nervous and determined to break away from Neil. But the night before I was due to sign the lease, my partner gave me an ultimatum. My relationship or the sex industry.
To be honest, I didn't think too long about it. I was so sick of fighting about this, and the stress at home combined with the stress of running a business was getting too much. I allowed my partner to believe that our relationship won and the sex industry lost the competition for my loyalty. In reality, I knew I wasn't leaving the sex industry, just leaving this role in the industry.
I suddenly realised that while there was some satisfaction and profit in successfully running my own business, it was also hard work, with big legal and financial risks. I reminisced about how easy life was when I just had to suck cocks and count cash. That night spurred on by my partner's ultimatum, I did a 180. The next day I left the business, its workers and Neil to fend for themselves. And the next week I left my partner and went back to fending for myself.
Soon after I heard that Neil's business had been visited by police and had been closed down. I felt a mixture of regret and relief about what was and what could have been.
Now when I reflect on the business owners and employers I have known in our industry I notice that those that have survived in the industry the longest are current or ex workers themselves, and I think that's due to the fact that they willing and able to jump back over the desk and into the bed, in order to keep the doors open when business is tough.
The South Australian sex industry is also made up of lots of collectives of workers and private and independent workers. Having these choices easily available to us is an important aspect in ensuring we have the power to negotiate pay and conditions that suit us.
However, the fear of the police and the law does mean many workers are reluctant to work for themselves, as part of a collective or open their own business. Criminalisation does mean that many workers will not be willing to risk taking out a lease on a property in their own name and instead will opt for working anonymously for a boss. We NEED law reform urgently in this state, but any new laws we consider must support our choice to work in a variety of ways. We do not want laws like those in Victoria that favour big business and make it impossible for the average worker to try out other roles in the industry, or to work for themselves, or that stops a group of sex workers from working together. Any new laws must not take away the power we DO have. That's one of the reasons I advocate for decriminalisation. It is the only model of law reform that protects and empowers sex workers allowing us to work for ourself, in collectives, or even to open our own small business. It's the only model that supports our cottage industry here in SA.
But until we get decriminalisation I will continue to giggle and enjoy the stories I hear about bosses who attempt to rip off workers but end up getting ripped off themselves. Because its true that the most successful businesses are those where the workers are happy and respected.