Hands-On Educational Magic

If metal balls are tipped down a big board filled with vertically-divided rows, they fall into a bell curve. At least that is what my granddaughter and I caused to happen when we participated in a discovery day at the University of Wisconsin. The effect reminded me of the statistics professor who brought our graduate class a large bowl of colored marbles and a scoop that had indentations we each filled with five marbles and then averaged the number of green marbles to demonstrate how sampling works.

     At a middle school, a remedial math teacher brought in a Makey Makey circuit board, sewing kit, and 3Doodler pen. Students grouped themselves by interest to use each device. When students in a regular math class saw what the remedial math students were doing they voluntarily signed up to attend the math support class twice a week.

     What were the remedial math students doing? They played a song on six bananas wired together and to the circuit board. Some students began seeing how they could make a circle in a football team's logo by embroidering an arrangement of the squares made by cross-stitch Xs, the same way pixels do on a computer screen. By using the 3Doodler pen to draw the same 2-dimensional design over and over again on top of each other, students learned how 3D printing is making a wide variety of products, including homes.

     Finally, students in the regular math class saw how the remedial students purchased additional circuit boards and supplies for the sewing basket and 3Doodler pens by perfectly pricing and selling pencils.

     Students everywhere in the world have creative juices. Invite them to illustrate the books they read, figure out how to move heavy rocks, use as little cushioning as possible to prevent an egg from breaking when dropped from different heights, dissect an old watch, not only a frog.

Examples of the Devil in the Details

In Indonesia, the Boeing 737 MAX's tragic loss of 189 lives illustrates how computerized directions prevented a pilot from executing the right decision. Pilots, unlike astronauts with access to mission control, apparently lack hotlines to aircraft manufacturers that could tell them to flip two switches when they experience the problem Indonesia's plane had. Already, suggestions note the missing detail of highlighting important information about new aircraft systems, such as the Boeing MAX has. These changes need to be written in the language most easily read by pilots, not always in English, and illustrated in a brochure or on a card separate from the aircraft's basic manual.

     Bill Gates observed the detail that new medicines and vaccines invented in the lab do nothing to eliminate human suffering, if  they lack a distribution system. I was reminded of the way I walked two blocks to a schoolyard where I received a drop of the polio vaccine on a sugar cube, a distribution system replaced by doctor's offices today. In Africa, where providing patients with medication that requires refrigeration was a problem, drones had to be enlisted to carry them to clinics in remote villages.

     If there is no use for recycled plastic bottles and containers, why bother with the details of collecting them? A TV segment showed what looked like bales of "dirty" plastic stacked ten feet high at a recycling center. Could dirty plastic items be melted for use in 3D printers to make insulation and furniture for the homes 3D printers now construct from concrete?

     China, once a customer for dirty plastic, now only buys pristine plastic with no labels or other irregularities such as moisture. Those requirements certainly leave out the plastic debris long boom arms collect from the ocean in what's known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch or "the blob" between California and Hawaii that forms the mass of warm water that seems to nourish the warm, dry winters that dehydrate forests along the northwest coast of North America.

     Then, there are the new members of the U.S. Congress who want to replace Nancy Pelosi as Speaker. First, they need to master the details of passing legislation..     

   

Launch A Creative Career Search

 I've been noticing job opportunities while reading magazines (and a book) in a variety of fields.

In November's Vogue magazine, editor-in-chief, Anna Wintour, wrote about the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund and awards to new American design talent. If you are a young designer in need of money, mentoring, and magic, look into the qualifications for the fund's competition.

     Actually, all career hunters should get to know the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance (CFDA) now found at cfda.gov. This is a government listing of all the federal programs, services, and activities that assist the U.S. public.

     Vogue's November issue also had an item about non-profit, New Story (newstorycharity.org/careers), founded by Alexandria Lafoi in San Francisco. This is the organization involved in using 3D printers to build low cost concrete homes in places, such as Mexico, Haiti,       El Salvador, and Bolivia.

     The small print at the end of an article in The Economist (Nov. 17, 2018) invited promising and would-be journalists to apply for a three to six month internship in The Economist's New York bureau. To apply, send a cover letter and 500-word article on economics, business, or finance to:
deaneinternny@economist.com by December 14, 2018.

     Large print in The Economist advertised for an "intellectually curious adventurer" with foreign language skills and a desire to live and work for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency abroad.

     Isthmus, our free local paper in Madison, Wisconsin, runs ads for those interested in teaching English in China. Just use "teaching in China" as a keyword, and you will find a full array of information on that opportunity.

     In the book I just read, Storming the Heavens, the author, Gerald Horne, wrote more than a description of the early aviation history of African Americans. His account inspires blacks and young people of all colors to follow the pioneering pilots who found career opportunities when they ventured to Africa. Those motivated to accept a similar challenge should get to know and benefit from the advice offered at facebook.com/smallstarter.

     For positions back home in the U.S., check out promotion and sales positions in Advertising Age.

       

   

     

Necessity: Introduce Students to New Technologies

Bill Gates at age 13 in 1969 got his start using a computer for the first time at General Electric, reports Malcolm Gladwell in his book, Outliers.

     The New Story a non-profit organization, with the help of Icon construction, was using 3D printers to create the houses rolling off an assembly line in 2018. Designers on the "Project Runway" TV show used 3D printers to create their own fabric designs the previous year.

     To get a head start in life, students need access, not only to 3D printers, but also to virtual reality, holography, robotics, green screens, solar panels, and every other new technology. Whether one advanced technology teacher and a sample are allocated to each school or a teacher and sample travel around a school district, the objective is to give students hands-on exposure to the fields of the future.

     The school that wins a contest to name a robot could get the first one. You can imagine how excited students would be about coming to school every day, if a robot greeted them saying, "Good morning, I have a riddle for you...." Pick the toughest kid in the school to escort the robot and make sure no one harms it. The kid might transform into a new Bill Gates.

     Kids will devise all sorts of ways to use virtual reality to illustrate original fantasy stories and to view wonders of the world and rare animals. There must be ways to use holography to resurrect historical characters and to use green screens to produce special effects for the school play.

     What might kids heat or power with solar panels?

Bucket List: Things I Want to Try

My father worked for a company than made point-of-purchase advertising. When you're in a business that looks for new ways to attract the attention of in-store shoppers, you work on the cutting edge of innovation and develop an eye for what's new in all aspects of life.

     At one point, we had a plastic form for displaying bras and motorized roses circling a bottle of liquor on our dining room table. Our dining room table took a beating, when Dad brought home one of the first ball point pens. It came on a pedestal in a see-through cylindrical display container. We immediately took it out to try and gouged our names right through paper into the dining room table.

     When President Eisenhower initiated the Interstate Highway System, Dad drew a picture (not with a ball point pen on the dining room table) of the new type of clover-leaf interchanges it would have. Then, there was his excitement when he told us we'd be taking one of the first passenger jets to see the new Disneyland in California.

     With this kind of background, I realized I had been making a mental bucket list that included the following: (It might be time to make your own and look for ideas from around the world.)

• Flying a dronw
• Using Virtual Reality glasses to see Victoria Falls
• Making something with a 3D printer
• Twirling one of those fidget widget things
• Programming a simple robot
• Seeing how intricate cut paper pop-ups are made for books and cards
• Trying various hearing aid devices
• Playing "The Settlers of Catan" game
• Seeing how a green screen works in movies
• Making all kinds of repairs
• Riding a Hoverboard
• Using all kinds of phones

As I hear about new things, I wish there were somewhere to go to try them. Maybe in abandoned shopping malls.

The Importance of Studying Literature in a Scientific Age

Just after I began reading Siddhartha Mukherjee's engaging and informative book, The Gene, I saw Julia, a new Muppet with autism, joined the characters on Sesame Street. Did a gene cause Julia's deviation from "normalcy" and could she be "fixed" by manipulating her genes? Quickly I realized my line of thinking was the dangerous conclusion Mukherjee warns us all to seriously consider.

     Taken together, the 21,000 to 23,000 genes that live in cells on a human's 46 chromosomes carry a set of genetic instructions that cause proteins to build, repair, and maintain our bodies. Once the particular function of a gene or set of genes is identified, genetic technologies can change a function and produce copies. Voila, genetically modified seeds, food, animals, and humans.

     Like a physicist working with atoms can develop a bomb or a hacker can use code to create fake news, a geneticist can manipulate genes to alter humans permanently. These masters will be able to control our bodies, to make what they consider perfect or imperfect humans. What do they do, when they find an unborn child has Down's syndrome or cystic fibrosis? Who will defend the innocent from the guilty and the guilty from the innocent? And who will define "innocent" and "guilty?"

     Science marches on taking us into an age of robots, artificial intelligence (AI), clones, drones, virtual reality, driverless cars, and more. Looking at the horse's name, "Cloud Computing," of the winner of the Preakness, the second race in the Triple Crown after the Kentucky Derby, you see how technology is reaching into all fields. Could Kellyanne Conway have described the Internet of Things (IoT) in a way that didn't suggest microwave ovens spy on us? Yes, but the ridicule that greeted Rachel Carson's expose of DDT in Silent Spring and the skepticism about the miracles at Fatima did not make the messages they delivered any less real.

     The University of Wisconsin-Madison described Matthew Aliota, one of its "Forward under 40" honorees, as "an expert on tropical mosquito-borne diseases" who believes "scientific communication is an important responsibility." To his way of thinking, research findings that are shared quickly with the public can improve public health. Mukherjee would add that shared research findings also would enable the public to understand and react to potential problems caused by these findings. Laughter, ridicule, and skepticism are hardly the right responses to important breakthroughs.

     Throughout the world, the public depends on communicators (authors, journalists, editors, film and TV directors, advertising copywriters, playwrights, social media content developers, artists, and the like)  to read about and understand the potential and problems of each new technology and to know how to provide an engaging presentation that informs us of our choices.

Teens Find Drought and Zika Remedies

Entering contests and writing to potential mentors not only can help individual students jump start their own careers but these proactive efforts also can help humanity. Dr. Hongjun Song, the mentor who received a letter from the student involved in Zika virus research, observed: "Unencumbered by previous experience, high school students aren't afraid of failure and are freer to try things than graduate students or postdocs."

Help for drought-starved crops

Kiara Nirghin, the 16-year-old South African girl who won the grand prize in Google's Science Fair (googlesciencefair.com), reasoned that a superabsorbent polymer (SAP) used in diapers could help soil retain more water when drought threatens crops. To avoid the pricey, less eco-friendly acrylic acid chemicals used in current SAPs, Ms. Nirghin tried creating a SAP by applying UV light and heat to avocado and orange peels. When sprinkled on fields, her polymer, which holds 300 times its weight in liquid, provides water for crops that would otherwise die from drought.
(Kiara Nirghin is among the world's 30 most influential teens TIME magazine lists at time.com/teens2016.)

Help for studying the Zika virus

At the University of Pennsylvania's School of Engineering and Applied Science, engineers developed a $2 genetic test to detect the Zika virus immediately by using color-changing dye in a device about the size of a soda can. The process requires no electricity or extensive technical training.
     Chris Hadiono, whose parents are U.S. immigrants from Indonesia, was a high school intern at Dr. Hongjun Song's neurology lab at John Hopkins University, when he developed a bioreactor device used to determine how the Zika virus causes the abnormal brain development which results in the small heads of newborn babies, i.e. microcephly, and many more problems.
     Using 3D printing instructions from a YouTube tutorial, Hadiono created a machine with gears that keep 12 "mini-brains" floating and growing in wells, each filled with about one teaspoon of nutrient rich liquid, by constantly stirring the liquid in all the wells at the same time.
     Before Hadiono's contribution, the neural tissue of human brains, "mini-brains," already could be produced by turning human skin cells (3D printers also can create human tissue and bone) into stem cells which could be turned into the neural stem cells that became human neural brain tissue resembling the human cerebral cortex affected by the Zika virus. And a magnetic bar could continuously stir a rich nutrient broth-like medium, or liquid, that enabled "mini-brains" to float and grow in all directions. The problem was the big device required too much costly medium and could only be used once to accommodate a few experiments at a time. With Hadiono's bioreactor device, at a much lower cost, researchers can see how the Zika virus infects and kills neural stem cells in 12 different parts of a human's cerebral cortex at the same time..  With the work of another teen, maybe prevention and a cure for microcephly will not be far behind.

Does the Technological Age Require Too Much Work?

We all know it's easier to take a selfie than to do math homework. Yet this age of rapid technological advances and big data requires close attention.

    But there is a temptation to blindly accept accelerated technological developments, because understanding the pros, and especially the cons, of vaccines, smartphones, and other scientific and engineering marvels is more difficult than doing math. It even is difficult for human subjects of a drug experiment to read, much less understand, things like the side effects they might develop.

     Blind acceptance is a major mistake, especially for kids around the world who have an aptitude and interest in asking questions to help them understand how things work and for kids who want to control what Wendell Wallach calls technology: A Dangerous Master.

     Even without reading Wallach's new book, parents, teachers, and young people can begin observing proposed and implemented new technological developments:

•  self-driving cars
• genetic engineering
• virtual reality
• 3D printers, some of which can create human tissue and bone 
• stem cells
• military robots
• drones
• nanomaterials

What are these gadgets and breakthroughs expected to do? How will they affect each of us? How will a complex sociotechnical system function successfully when it requires technological components to work together with people, institutions, environments, values, and existing social practices?

     Wallach points out how humans are responsible for making the correct responses when a piece of space junk is about to hit the International Space Station or when automated stock trading systems and safety controls for nuclear reactors fail. The trouble is: pressure to derive economic benefits from growth hormones or the desire for political, personal, and other payoffs can cause scientists and engineers to underestimate the probability of unanticipated events and even to have no idea of what the probability of something like an oil spill from drilling in the Arctic might be.

     Wallach stresses the necessity of creating a critical mass of informed citizens and scholars willing and able to raise concerns about technological developments, their impact on society, and the time needed to design adequate safety mechanisms. Informed young people are living at a time when they have opportunities to make their concerns known: in classrooms, at town meetings, through their social media networks, in contacts with political representatives, through call-in programs, in surveys and polls, by writing letters to editors, at science fairs, and by writing blogs.



     

     

 

Robots for Good

Where can techies around the world go to collaborate with other techies? One creative space is Wevolver.com, the web platform where co-founder, Richard Hulskes, offers open-source hardware technology and a way for people with project ideas to collaborate and build physical, tangible products at home. Pascal Jaussi, an engineer and Swiss Air Force military pilot, had a similar idea to make space accessible. His Swiss Space Systems in Payerne, canton Vaud, assembles existing components and uses proven technologies from the United States, Russia, Europe, and Asia to create sub-orbital reusable aircraft that can put commercial satellites into orbit.

      The forces that have come together in Hulskes' "Robots for Good" project illustrate just how powerful technological collaboration can be.

One project provides an example. By combining:

• an Ultimaker 3D printer
• the head and torso of the humanoid InMoov 3D printable robot
• the free, downloadable blueprint and materials for an Open Wheels segway
• Samsung's head-mounted, virtual display oculus rift
• software
• children working with Ultimaker personnel at MakerMovement spaces in London
• seriously ill children at London's Great Ormond Street Hospital

some hospitalized children are about to self-direct a virtual experience at the London Zoo.

     One team in London is using the 3D printer to assemble an InMoov robot and Open Wheels segway that can move. Another in the U.S. is working on software. Kids will drive the robot with a remote control. And, wearing an oculus rift, they will be able to move the robot's head by moving their heads and to see through the robot's eyes.

     Remote controlled drones also are being designed to fly over wildfires to relay information about  sources of water in ponds and wells and escape routes to firefighters on the ground. According to National Geographic Kids (May, 2015), roboticist Thomas Bewley at the University of California at San Diego is already developing a drone like this. Only a little larger than a postage stamp, his drone requires less energy than it takes to power a lightbulb.

(Also see related ideas in earlier blog posts, "Play, Computer Connections, and Pets Come to the Aid of Sick Kids," "I Made This Myself," "Transform Spaces into Creative Places," and "Robot Revolution.")


   

 

Play, Computer Connections, and Pets Come to the Aid of Sick Kids

Years ago when my four-year-old daughter was in the hospital with an infection, there was a room reserved for play, where needles, pills and painful procedures were banned. She really perked up when she learned to play her first video game.

     Nowadays, a new pilot project designed by Gokul Krishman, a Ph.D. candidate at Children's Hospital at Vanderbilt University, is bringing a mobile creative space to young patients who can't leave their hospital rooms. Drawing on the idea of the MakerMovement, a cart carries a 3-D printer, tablet computer on a swivel arm, a circuit board that cycles lights through the rainbow, and bins filled with items kids can use to create solutions to problems they face in the hospital. Of course, patients can communicate room to room using the computer.

     One patient wanted to stop nurses from just entering her room without knocking, so she fitted a tissue box with wires and switches and posted a sign on her door that read, "Ring My Doorbell." Another stopped nurses from waking sleeping patients by making a Nurse Night Light that only lit up the toilet and trash areas of his room.

     Developed in Israel, a new "Sesame" Google Nexus Phone enables those with certain disabilities to mAake telephone calls by using gestures and voice controls.

     The later post, "Want to Reach Global Citizens?" reports on the free AFLAC ducks the insurance company gives hospitalized children to help them use emojis to tell the medical staff and visitors how they feel. 

     Even back in 2002, before there was Skype, Len Forkas worked with a school system's head of technology to equip his sick son's home bedroom and fourth grade classroom with computers and cameras and an internet connection. Microsoft's NetMeeting software enabled the boy with acute lymphoblastic leukemia to see his classroom and to talk with friends every morning and after recess. Based on this initial experience, Hopecam (hopecam.org) now works with schools to cut through red tape to provide kids homebound with
cancer with tablet computers, web cameras, and high speed internet connections that enable them to participate in classroom activities and interact with their friends. Sometimes, even if a child only Skypes for a half hour with classmates each week, parents report that this little spot of sunshine makes a big difference.

     Julia Havey, a nurse at the Marcella Niehoff School of Nursing at Loyola University in Chicago,
observed that brief interactions with pets also could make a big difference for a group of her patients. If they received daily visits from specially trained dogs for five to 15 minutes while they were recovering from total joint-replacement surgery, they required 28% less oral pain medication than those in a group similar in age, gender, ethnicity, length of hospital stay, and the same type of total joint replacement who did not receive animal therapy visits. Havey concluded that therapy animals can have a positive influence on human recovery, because the animal-human connection reduces stress and generates a sense of well-being. Indeed, other research has found that interaction with pets decreases the level of the cortisol stress hormone and increases endorphins, considered the happiness hormone.

      The organization, Dogs on Call (dogsoncall.org), provides pet therapy dogs not only to hospitals, nursing homes, assisted living facilities, and hospices, but also to libraries, dorms, and schools where students are stressed, especially during final exams.

(For other examples of ways to improve the lives of sick kids, see the blog post, "Robots for Good.")

   

 

I Made This Myself

"Don't you love it when a plan comes together?" That saying John "Hannibal" Smith used to use on the "A Team" television show expresses the feeling I got when I read about the MakerMovement that encourages children to build what they imagine and crowdfunding by a Kickstarter, RocketHub, or Kiva. Since there is a way for anyone to find investors, anyone in the world who has an idea for a new app, 3D printer creation, programmable device, or, what one visionary has proposed, an automated factory on the moon, now has an opportunity to raise the money needed to make an innovation a reality.


     In an interview conducted by station KQED (kqed.org) in Northern California, Dale Dougherty, CEO of MakerMedia and editor of MAKE magazine, told how he began promoting hands-on learning at a Maker Faire in 2006 and later at MakerCon conferences. He is devoted to the idea that tinkering with the tools and materials for making things can be fun.

     Project Zero, a research study developed by Harvard's Graduate School of Education and tested by classroom teachers in Oakland, California, aims to inspire students to be curious about the designs that make things and nature work. When students looked at a pencil and a snail, they began to ask questions, not only about how they worked, but also what kind of designs could help them do a better job. Some youngsters even suggested ways to make life better for the snail. And there was a crossover to discover the new words needed to describe a design process and to defend ideas of how things are made.

     Since schools can't do everything, there is a greater role for parents, childcare, Boys and Girls Clubs, 4H, community centers, church youth groups, and scouting programs. They can provide the things kids need to help them create, perform, and learn: blocks, LEGOs, Tinker Toys, Erector Sets, computers, 3D printers, pottery wheels, found objects, cameras, watercolors, easels, musical instruments, a stage, and garden plots. It's rather expensive, but, for $16.95 per month, tinker.kiwicrate,com/inside-a-crate will send students, 9 to 16+, a hands-on STEM (science, engineering, technology) inspired maker project.

    Making all kinds of materials available to students helps them discover new possibilities. That's reason enough to provide a place to cook, bake, sew, make jewelry, and knit. Inspired by puffy sourdough and flatter pizza dough an artist combined them and twisted, carved, and painted them into what became an octopus sculpture. A businessman inspired children to create sculptures out of the shredded documents he dumped into a pail of water.

     According to experiments at Hanyang Cyber University in South Korea, involving the body in learning also helps improve memory needed in any subject. When hands manipulate objects, for example, the brain has more cues to remember what was learned. When my mother was a math consultant for the Chicago Public School System, the first thing she did when she visited a school was observe what manipulative devices were in use. If she saw few or none, her next step was to try to find the supply room or closet where they were kept, because she knew that after the Russians sent up Sputnik, the federal government funded purchases of many such devices to aid learning math. I remember seeing one of my favorites, a scale that allowed kids to balance numbers on one side with those on the other. A big "5", for example, would equal a little "2" and "3" on the other side.

      Earlier blog posts have related ideas. See "Transform Spaces into Creative Places," "Back to the Land," "Tin Can Art," and "Global Drawing Power."

The World of Fashion

The World of Fashion

When designer Marc Jacobs, creative director of Louis Vuitton, was asked what fashion is, he said it was part of the art of living, just like books and good food. It is more. Contrary to those who consider fashion the trivial interest of people like the Kardashians, children who spend their free time making doll clothes might need to understand advanced technology. After all, New York's 2013 Toy Fair introduced Barbie wearing a "Digital Dress" that had a lighted touchscreen to let youngsters change designs. (This Barbie is now available for holiday giving in 2013.) In any case, sewing doll clothes can prepare children to make a number of significant contributions to their countries and the world. Anna Wintour, editor of U.S. Vogue, even was mentioned as a possible next U.S. ambassador to the U.K. or France.

     In England during World War II, the availability of new clothing was considered essential to maintaining civilian morale. While incendiary bombs and V-1 rockets were destroying the House of Commons, homes, and water mains, the Board of Trade authorized the use of scarce material for easy-to-mass-produce stylish clothing. Next summer, as part of the celebration commemorating the 60th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth's coronation, British fashion designers who dress the Royal Family have been invited to present a style show in the garden at Buckingham Palace.

    Museums note the importance of fashion by mounting exhibits devoted to textiles and clothing. The current "Interwoven Globe" exhibit that runs through January 5, 2014 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City features fabrics and garments that influenced cultures around the world when they were traded from 1500 to 1800. A catalogue for this exhibition is available from store.metmuseum.org. During the U.S. African American History Month in February, 2013, exhibits devoted to the meaning and designs of the kente cloth woven by the Asante and Ewe peoples of Ghana, Africa, were on display in Washington, D.C. at the Smithsonian Institute's National Museum of African Art and at its Arts & Industries Building.

     In her book, All We Know, Lisa Cohen, through the eyes of Madge Garland, former editor of British Vogue, tells how English designers were urged to raise funds for the war effort and to pay off debt after World War II by creating couture collections for export to North and South America. Familiarity with the names Dior and Chanel and Giorgio Armani, Valentino, Gucci, Pucci, Prada, Versace, and Missoni indicate France and Italy also recognize the importance of fashion exports. Not satisfied to export its fashions to foreign outlets, Japanese-based Uniqlo (unique clothing) opened its own stores to sell its private label brand thoughout Asia and in the U.S. and France. In 2015, Uniqlo also partnered with Muslim fashion blogger, Hana Tajima, to market a "modest wear collection" of headscarves and dresses.

     The U.S. promotes its couture for domestic and international consumption at New York Fashion Weeks, such as the one from Feb. 6 to Feb. 14, 2013 this year. According to trendwatching.com, new countries are entering the global haute couture market as well. These include China's Zhang Zhifeng's NE-TIGER brand, Masaba Gupta's animal print saris from India, and the Brazilian-California fusion styles of the Osklen fashion house. Trendwatching.com also reports Brazil exports its Amazonas Sandals, made from 80% recycled material and raw material from native rubber trees, to China.

     Brazil's sandals are just one indication that fashion has developed a social conscience. Although some designers still work with real fur, once People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) raised awareness of how animals are raised and the way their pelts are collected, other designers stopped using fur or switched to faux fur. The problem is few people are aware that coats that include less than $150 worth of real animal fur can be labeled faux fir. That means a so-called faux fur garment may include the skins of 30 rabbits, 3 raccoons, 3 red foxes, 3 dogs, or a bear. German sculptor, Iris Schieferstein, draws attention to the way people use and abuse animals by incorporating animal parts from animals that have died of natural causes into her shoe, hat, and umbrella designs. You might see Lady Gaga wearing Schieferstein's hoof shoes made from hoofs reclaimed from a butcher shop.

     Designers in the small island of Sri Lanka, who exhibited at the International Fashion Showcase during London's Fashion Week (February, 2013), are determined to make their country a regional center of sustainable fashion. They foster the use of fabric waste, green manufacturing processes, and the incorporation of handmade traditional crafts in their designs.

     Kids for Kids (kidsforkidsfashion.com) sells T-shirts printed with artwork created by orphans and underprivileged children in lesser developed countries and then donates 10% of sale revenue to the organizations that support these little artists. Brazil's Vitoria soccer club changed its usual black and red striped uniforms to black and white to support a blood drive. The website, trendwatching.com, reported the shirts will gradually return to all red and black during the 2012/2013 soccer season, when red replaces white to show blood donation targets are being met.

     Organizations, such as the International Labour Organization and Conservation International,  are now working to guarantee "economically marginalized" artisans a fair price, to eliminate child labor, and to protect the environment. WFTOMarket.com, a website of the World Fair Trade Organization (WFTO), lists items available to wholesalers from worldwide sources that pay fair prices and operate under safe and healthy working conditions. In North America, the Fair Trade Federation is an association of members that subscribe to WFTO objectives. Before they buy scarves and jewelry, for example, young and older shoppers can look for the WFTO and Fair Trade Federation symbols on catalogs from organizations, such as SERRV International (serrv.org).

     The Sustainable Apparel Coalition (SAC) is just beginning to get clothing companies, such as Gap, Adidas, Nike, Target, North Face, and Timberland, interested in: reducing the billions of pounds of apparel that end up in landfills, finding substitutes for the pesticides that run off into and contaminate water supplies, eliminating the use of  harmful chemicals (coffee grounds can be used as dyes), cutting water consumed in production (cotton is a water intensive crop;1,600 gallons of water can be used to produce a single pair of jeans), and decreasing the energy used to manufacture and transport clothing. Eventually, SAC's Higg Index, higher for the most eco-friendly goods, could appear on clothing hang tags and be approved by the U.S. government.

     Livia Firth, the wife of actor Colin Firth, issued a "Green Carpet Challenge" to the top fashion designers who dress celebrity clients. Working under humane conditions, she asked what haute couture styles they could produce from things like upcycled plastic, discarded ostrich feathers, and fabric remnants. Firth herself has been seen wearing a rubber cuff bracelet made from an old tire and a patchwork jacket made from recycled tweed. Rising to Firth's "Green Carpet Challenge" at the Academy Awards on February 24, 2013, Vivienne Westwood and Michael Badger, the Ghanaian student she mentors, dressed "Skyfall" actress, Naomi Harris, is a gown that incorporated chocolate candy wrappers and reclaimed beads and zippers in its design. Dye from non-chemical goldenrod and chamomile gave the gown its mustard yellow color.

    As Barbie's "Digital Dress" suggests, technology students are finding applications for their skills in the fashion industry. Some work with nanoparticles no bigger than a billionth of a meter to give fabrics stain proof properties. Others have come up with quick-drying textiles, thin insulation for coats and gloves, cool material that stretches vertically and diagonally, and fabrics that shun perspiration. On another front, in the future we are likely to see more garments designed and made of materials created by the 3D printing process.

     One way to keep up with the latest developments in the fashion world is to check into fashionobserved.braveblog.com from time to time. More up-to-date information on sustainable/ethical clothes is available at ecouterre.com. Lately, ecouterre is reporting that marine litter, such as used fishing nets, is being recycled as socks and swimwear. After the collapse of the Bangladesh clothing factory that killed up to 900 workers, ecouterre reminded consumers to continue to patronize the country's ethical fashion companies, such as People Tree, Tulsi Crafts, Bachhara, Bhalo, and KAARU.

     Like a corset in the jazz age, clothes can be out of fashion, if they fail to reflect not only current tastes, but also economic and political conditions. Every since Pope Francis was elected, news coverage about him has noted how he expresses humility and concern for the poor by wearing an iron cross instead of a gold one and how he has dispensed with ermine-trimmed capelets and caps. Similarily, foreign policy experts might gain some useful clues by observing countries where women stop wearing head scarves and military leaders switch to business suits.