May 2012
10 posts
Speaking of Ecology and Society, check out the abstract for an upcoming article:
With a worldwide increase in disasters, the effects of climate change are already being felt, and it is the urban poor in developing countries who are most at risk. There is an urgent need to better understand the factors that determine people’s capacity to cope with and adapt to adverse climate conditions. This...
William Deresiewicz in the NYT:
I always found the notion of a business school amusing. What kinds of courses do they offer? Robbing Widows and Orphans? Grinding the Faces of the Poor? Having It Both Ways? Feeding at the Public Trough?
Wow. Things sure have changed since I was in b-school.
I’m teaching an econ class this summer; I’d better update the syllabus.
Also:...
Krugman:
Eddie Lazear has an op-ed in the WSJ on the fiscal cliff that, among other things, pooh-poohs any concerns that sudden cuts in spending might hurt the economy. He weasels a bit, but basically conveys the impression that there’s no evidence for Keynesian effects.
What this signifies to me is the politicization and corruption overtaking the economics profession. I’ll give Eddie the...
Growing into Interdisciplinarity: How to Converge Biology, Economics, and Social Science in Fisheries Research?
Pretty interesting article in the new Ecology & Society that may be worth a skim to anyone doing comparative education, since it is by definition an interdisciplinary field.
Thus, interdisciplinarity requires the tribes to learn how to communicate across the disciplinary...
This weekend the NYT ran an extensive article on student loans. From the opening paragraphs:
Kelsey Griffith graduates on Sunday from Ohio Northern University. To start paying off her $120,000 in student debt, she is already working two restaurant jobs and will soon give up her apartment here to live with her parents…Ms. Griffith, 23, wouldn’t seem a perfect financial fit for a college...
Good schools make good neighbors: Human capital spillovers in early 20th century agriculture:
Formal schooling has a significant impact on modern agricultural productivity but there is little evidence quantifying the historical importance of schools in the early development of the American agricultural sector. I present new data from the Midwest at the start of the twentieth century showing...
April 2012
6 posts
“GOOD. FAST. CHEAP. PICK ONE. (WE THINK YOU KNOW WHICH ONE.)
Exceptional web...”
– Full Stop — Web design from Pittsburgh, PA
Going pro means having the courage to turn away business.
“Who do you think made the first stone spears? The Asperger guy. If you were to...”
– Temple Grandin
David Dow took a break from writing books in favor of judicial activism to complain about judicial activism. I just want to comment on this thing that keeps coming up:
First, Congress’s authority in passing the law rests on an elementary syllogism: You don’t have to drive, but if you do, the government can make you buy insurance. The logical structure at work here is that if you are...
Contingent valuation is a survey-based economic technique for the valuation of non-market resources, such as environmental preservation or the impact of contamination. While these resources do give people utility, certain aspects of them do not have a market price as they are not directly sold – for example, people receive benefit from a beautiful view of a mountain, but it would be tough to...
March 2012
8 posts
“Here’s the thing, Dan. If you’re going to enjoy a sandwich you need...”
– Merlin as Dr. Phil; so good
D’oh:
Do not attend graduate school unless you are fully supported by—at minimum—a multiyear teaching assistantship that provides a tuition waiver, a stipend, and health insurance that covers most of the years of your program. The stipend needs to be generous enough to support your actual living expenses for the location. Do not take out new debt to attend graduate school. Because the...
David Spencer in The Freirean Approach to Adult Literacy Education:
The term “problem posing” is often misunderstood, perhaps because of the negative connotations given the word “problem” and the frequent reference to problem-solving skills in education. In the Freirean approach, cultural themes in the form of open-ended problems are incorporated into materials such as...
Hodgman:
I only ask you, friends of the Internet, as a creator and consumer of culture, to not confuse your enthusiasm for a thing—expressed in tweets and tumbls and comments and torrents and downloads and upthumbs and gifs—with actual support for a thing that you want to last.
He’s talking about last night’s episode of Community, but - good grief - this statement extends to so...
Vare and Scott (2007), meanwhile, identify two complementary approaches to ‘learning for a change’ in education for sustainable development (ESD). The first (ESD 1) promotes learning that focuses on informed and skilled behaviours and ways of thinking in circumstances where needs are clear and agreed. The second (ESD 2) is described as ‘building capacity to think critically about what experts...
Jonathan B. Wight at Economics and Ethics:
Most markets—the ones that you and I frequent every day—do not operate in reality on the “greed is good” philosophy. To do so would be to alienate most customers. Yes, the butcher and the brewer and the baker want their lucre, but they acquire it within the context of a moral understanding—in which their self-interest is held in check by...
Adaptive management in the classroom?
This system encouraged teachers to reflect on their changing practice over a period of time, while trying out new ideas. This is markedly different from most teacher professional development programs, which normally focus on simply introducing new concepts and technologies to teachers, who are then expected to implement them when back in their classrooms....
February 2012
5 posts
Short interview with anthropologist Igor Krupnik over at Science:
Q: What are some of the biggest differences in how indigenous people and scientists look for change or perceive change in the environment?
I.K.: I wouldn’t put it like “indigenous people” and “scientists.” It’s a difference between someone who lives in the environment daily, and someone who studies it [at a distance]. If...
Tipping Toward Sustainability: Emerging Pathways... →
For the list:
This article explores the links between agency, institutions, and innovation in navigating shifts and large-scale transformations toward global sustainability. Our central question is whether social and technical innovations can reverse the trends that are challenging critical thresholds and creating tipping points in the earth system, and if not, what conditions are necessary to...
Felix: philk: “OK, the idea that kids these days... →
philk:
“OK, the idea that kids these days are “digital natives” is a nice, self-serving fairy tale. It makes tech-lovers feel good, because they feel like they are at the front of a curve. It makes educators feel good, because then they don’t have to teach a complicated and multi-level sets…
This is what I’m on about.
David Cameron says Britain is practicing austerity, cutting the budget left and right.
Economists and hackey op-ed writers write about how Cameron’s austerity is hurting the the British economy.
But meanwhile the Brits are running the third highest deficit in the world. ~8.8% of GDP, smaller than only Egypt and Greece. If that is our working definition...
The world can no longer afford to ignore the environmental cost of economic growth and must redefine the very concept of national wealth, a UN panel of heads of state and environment ministers said Monday.
Duh.
source
January 2012
17 posts
For four years now I have read articles and books that attribute much of the world’s suffering to the so-called neo-liberal project. According to these authors a process or marketization took place on a global scale, starting roughly in 1980 (The elections of Thatcher and Reagan are key). These reforms, away from the statism and industrial policy that was common in the 1970s, have lead to...
Susan Cain in the NYT
SOLITUDE is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in.
But there’s a...
“This line of thinking swiftly stumbles into self-contradiction. After lambasting...”
– Matt Yglesias, Slate
Wait. What?
Berkes has published on social-ecological resilience in Cambodia? More than once?
Berkes of Berkes et al. 2003? Berks from the linking book? This guy?
Good grief, I really really should have known that already. And have read those articles already.
Most days I’m only pretending to know what I’m talking about.
At least now I have a plan for this week, right?
If sustainable development should be defined differently in PA and Cambodia, who should do the defining? Is that a proper role for me, as a white guy living in New Jersey? How has UNESCO played the role of development expert in defining education for sustainable development?
In the developed world sustainable development is centered around sustaining current levels of consumption and capital...
A Karl Pilkington classic from the archives.
2 tags
Although there has been some recent scholarship looking at sustainability and social studies, education for sustainable development seems focused on science education.
But UNESCO, among others recommends a more holistic approach to sustainability education. They say:
The overall goal of the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (DESD) is to integrate the principles, values and...
Trent MacNamara’s series on Newt as a professor reads like a cautionary tale: never published in a peer reviewed journal, had too many disjointed ideas, talked a good game but didn’t back it up with research, told by his bosses not to bother seeking tenure, performed no committee work, was good in the classroom but otherwise weak, overly optimistic about his own abilities.
But it is...
2 tags
In the US: COMMUNITY GARDENS AND URBAN AGRICULTURE
The South Side Community Gardens and Urban Agriculture Working Group has several related aims. We enable residents of South Bethlehem and members of the Lehigh community to gain access to convenient, inexpensive plots of land for gardening. By fostering community gardens, we aim to increase access to high quality, affordable fruit and...
Dubey and Rajaram at Information Management:
In this approach, business understanding is used to validate the outcome of analytics — not necessarily the analytics process. A common symptom of this problem is the prevalence of esoteric modeling and data mining techniques without enough inquiry in to their appropriateness and applicability for the problem at hand. Unfortunately, it is...
How to be a political reporter:
Take candidate’s quote and strip all context.
Discuss how quote shows candidate is out of touch with the average American.
Repeat Step 2 for the entire show or article.
Kakaes at Slate:
Obama and the Republicans might disagree on the answers, but they agree on the question: “How can America compete with the rest of the world, especially China?” But this is the wrong question to be asking. We are not actually engaged in economic or technological competition with China or with anyone else. Absent a state of open war, our economic growth helps that...
In the 80s and the 90s “reality distortion field” was used to explain why people clung to Apple’s products against overwhelming Microsoft dominance. Now it is used as an explanation of Apple’s overwhelming domination of the handheld and tablet markets.
So which is it? Are Apple’s customers dumb fanboys who just have to be different and go against the majority? Or...
December 2011
14 posts
Steve Horwitz at BHL:
The paleo strategy was a horrific mistake, both strategically and theoretically, though it apparently made some folks (such as Rockwell and Paul) pretty rich selling newsletters predicting the collapse of Western civilization at the hands of the blacks, gays, and multiculturalists. The explicit strategy was abandoned by around the turn of the century, but not after a lot...
Salant at Businessweek:
Former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson, who has been excluded from most Republican debates, said he will seek the Libertarian nomination for president.
“I am a Libertarian — that is, someone who is fiscally very conservative but holds freedom-based positions on many social issues,” Johnson said in an e-mail to supporters that noted he was making his...
“Persecuted Minority”
Cooperman, 68, said in an interview that he can’t walk through the dining room of St. Andrews Country Club in Boca Raton, Florida, without being thanked for speaking up. At least four people expressed their gratitude on Dec. 5 while he was eating an egg-white omelet, he said.
“You’ll get more out of me,” the billionaire said, “if you treat me with...