Compiled by Jo Phillips

• A sobering New York Times graphic of the 2009 death count (Allied military forces only) in Iraq and Afghanistan
• An alarming case of public sector innovation in South Africa
• Some interesting and successful attempts at behaviour change in Schipol Airport,  from Core 77, demonstrating that humour is important even when the subject is serious
• A talking plate that tells you to eat more slowly, via the iftf
• Stella’s app for finding the nearest pint of the stuff to your location – and a taxi to take you home!
• Bruichladdich’s beautiful bottle for the world’s first organic whiskey. It is possible to push the boundaries even in traditionally stuffy categories
• And a video of an uplifting performance by the singer Bobby McFerrin at the world science festival last year demonstrates the power of the pentatonic scale.

The image at the top is from the Schipol bheaviour change campaign, designed by the Dutch firm Autobahn.

Sophie Stringer writes:

The papers have been talking about ‘Blue Monday’ today – apparently the third Monday in January is the most depressing day of the year.  While the methods used to divine the gloomiest day on the calendar might be suspect to the point of dodginess, some brightening up of a Monday afternoon can never go amiss.

So this Monday, we were lucky to have cake to distract us.  Cake Club is becoming a weekly ritual in the London office; at 4pm tools are downed, tea is served and homemade cake is shared in the kitchen.

This week’s particularly fine offering was the plum and almond tart baked by Gus (yes, that’s the actual cake in the picture at the top of this post), but over the past few months we’ve seen everything from pumpkin bread to rocky road. The idea is simple – each week someone different makes a cake at the weekend, and brings it in on Monday.  Everyone is invited, the only rules of Cake Club are that participants have at least a mild intention to bake, and cake should be consumed seated while chatting (and not about work).

I could say something apposite at this point about Cake Club being indicative of our desire to embrace the authentic and relearn past skills, or evidence of the changing nature of our expectations of the workplace. But it should be enough just to be about cake.

Every fortnight The Futures Company holds an internal breakfast meeting, the MMM (or Monday Morning Meetings), to share knowledge and ideas. In our last meeting before Christmas the MMM team put together a quick brands and advertising quiz to test how much the company had been paying attention to British brands and their ad campaigns during 2009.

Here’s a selection of the questions from the quiz. We think a good score is more than half – the answers are below the fold, if you feel the need to cheat a little. Just click on the right or left hand side of the slides to go forwards and back.

Question 1.

• Dorset Cereals’ award-winning recipes were launched as cereal bars in January 2009.

Question 2.

• Jack Daniels’ advertising push in 2009 included this tube advertisement that put a face to the eponymous distiller.
• No one REALLY knows the date of Mr. Jack’s birth but it is customary to celebrate his birthday in September – yes, he gets the whole month. A town fire destroyed the courthouse records, and conflicting dates on Mr. Jack’s and his mother’s headstones have left his date of birth in question.

Question 3.

• The one time Sex Pistols’ singer John Lydon promotes Country Life as “Just great butter”.

Question 4.

• Volkswagen proves its German efficiency by subbing its print campaign to within an inch of its life to reveal a simple message.
• Each poster reveals over-worded text describing the efficiency of the brand’s BlueMotion technology. The text has either been crossed through or highlighted to leave just a simple statement.

Question 5.

• TEA.
• Yorkshire Tea says it tastes “hundreds of teas a day so you can enjoy a proper cup of tea every time”.

Question 6.

• Have a break, have a FAIRTRADE Kit Kat.
• Kit Kat has announced it’s finally got the Fairtrade stamp of approval for its four finger bar.
• It’s all part of Nestlé’s sustainability initiative – ‘The Cocoa Plan’ – which will see £65m invested over 10 years.

Question 7.

• New ads for Coca-Cola’s sustainability brief will be emerging shortly.
• The Wakefield plant is billed as one of the most environmentally-aware plants in Europe, sending no waste to landfill.
• To tie in with the UN Climate Change Summit, Coca-Cola also announces all its new coolers and vending machines will be free of hydro fluorocarbon by 2015.

Question 8.

• Pampers and Fairy have pledged to donate funds to Unicef for tetanus vaccines for babies and mothers in need worldwide.  One vaccine is promised for each product purchased.
• So far Unicef has received funding for more than 100 million vaccines.

Question 9.

• It’s Vodafone’s ‘World of Difference’ project – part of the Vodafone Foundation.
• In the UK, funding was given to 500 people to spend two and a half months working for their chosen local charity full-time.
• The programme also operates in 13 other countries worldwide.
• In addition, the ‘World of Difference’ international programme funds volunteers to work for charities in other countries for anything from two months to a full year.

Question 10.

• It’s Martin Lewis!
• MoneysavingExpert.com is visited by 8 million people every month.
• 3.8 million people subscribe to the weekly ‘Martin’s Money Tips’ email.
• In 2007, Lewis started providing template letters for consumers to send to banks appealing against ‘unfair’ charges on his website – by summer this year 6 million people had sent them.

Question 11.

• Waitrose Essentials range launched in early 2009.
• Within three months the products accounted for 13% of the store’s food sales.
• Consumers responded to M&S’s comparison ads in November by …. shopping at Waitrose.  Sales for the week of the ads were up 17% on the previous year.
• Waitrose is widely hailed as the UK’s fastest growing supermarket chain, defying the recession.

Question 12.

• Axa UK is considering alternative names for some of its pension products as part of an initiative to tackle negative perceptions among young people.

• A startling look at some London locations, now and in the 1870s. You can catch the full exhibition for free at the British Library until March.

• In the aftermath of the Copenhagen climate summit, come these not so good things we’ve seen; this map starkly shows the globe if countries are resized to represent their fossil-fuel based emmisions:

Whilst this one shows the countries sized proportionately in terms of the predicted distribution of climate-sensitve diseases, such as malaria, malnutrition, and diarrhea:

The maps are from the UN’s State of the World Population 2009 report (Via Global Dashboard).

• The world’s first supercomputer – Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine -  has been rebuilt in California. It’s essentially a very large calculator, but it’s quite spectacular to watch in action.

• Shereen El Feki, an academic from Cairo, talks about the potential for pop culture in the Arab world. And on a similar, but slightly more provocative note, here’s more anecdotal evidence of Western cultural influence in Afghanistan.

• Google Chrome’s new advert shows the latest features for its browser with an ironic twist.

• And finally – on a completely frivolous note -  Bruce Lee plays Table Tennis with Nunchucks, taken from Gawker’s Top 100 viral Youtube videos of 2009. All are shorter than 3 minutes!

Compiled by Oliver Wright

It’s been a little while since we last posted an assortment of links, but this is a selection of some of the things which have been going round the office lately:

• Boris – the London Mayor – officially launches the city’s ‘cycle superhighways’, a cycle hire scheme, and demand for cycle parking in the capital is (apparently) on the rise…
• The inside-out bloody mary – a new take on an old classic!
• By way of previewing a forthcoming post on data visualisation – two great articles discussing the state of the art on CNNtech and Creativity Online
• This fun website from Dutch company Hema (similar to Ikea in the UK) won some awards for its playful approach to household products. Although the site’s in Dutch, the visual gags are pretty universal.
• Portuguese workers are struggling in the recession to find jobs – and some are heading to former colony Angola in search of better fortunes
• The Atlantic publishes a somewhat timid and fairly American list of ‘Brave Thinkers’ – I mean, Steve Jobs? Mark Zuckerberg? We’re working on a list of people who deserve a place but aren’t here. Do you have a contribution?

With thanks to Tom Warren for the graphic

The Futures Company traditionally has a quiz at its Christmas party. These are the questions for this year – unfortunately without the music round, which we can’t share here for copyright reasons. We’ll publish the answers in the New Year.

Round 1: Connections:

There are four sets of four objects in the above table – each object is in only one set. So if you have got the right answer, all the sixteen objects in the table will have been accounted for.

You get one point for each correct set, and one point for identifying correctly what the set is – plus 2 bonus points if you get all the sets and all the explanations correct.

Round 2: In 2008 … (one point per right answer):

1. Who said: ‘I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organisations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms’.
2. Who said at the London School of Economics: “Why did nobody notice it?”
3. What is the address (the street name) of the Bank of England?
4. Norway topped the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Report, having the smallest gender gap. Which country came bottom?
5. Which pianist died in Stockholm Harbour?
6. Which Moses (who also died this year) was a supporter of both the Civil Rights Movement and the National Rifle Association?
7. Who was the first competitor to get a ten in this year’s Strictly Come Dancing competition?
8. Who won the Man-Booker prize this year?
9. Which record won the Nationwide mercury music prize?
10. Which two films received the most nominations at this year’s Oscar awards?
11. In 1908, what opened on the west London site which now hosts Westfield?
12. In 1958, what was invented by Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductors?
13. How long was a single lap of the velodrome at this year’s summer Olympics?
14. Rebecca Adlington won two golds at the Olympics. In what events?
15. Which sportsman made it to a hundred after a bit of a wait – but his team still got relegated?
16. The new British coin design makes a jigsaw out of the Royal Arms. How many coins is the royal crest split across?
17. What is Sarah Palin’s home town?
18. What went off with a big bang under the Alps in September?
19. In 2008, why might it have been dangerous to be in Tskhinvali?
20. Who is the reigning world chess champion?