February 2012
4 posts
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...
Hodgman:
He said that the bankers were not the bad guys in the subprime mortgage scandal and near financial collapse that they had everything to do with. They were just doing what the government allowed them to do.*
…
*This was his actual argument. It is not an argument an adult makes. It’s the actual argument that TEENAGERS make at prestigious high schools where cheating is...
“So, yes. I am cutting way back on trips to the steam table of half-finished,...”
– Better by Merlin Mann
“In one time at-bat, [Pujols is] going to make more than I made in my 18 years of...”
– Red Schoendienst
“There is nothing wrong with balancing your budget. In fact, European nations...”
– Dr. Paul Krugman, in an article where he also links high unemployment in France with generous benefits. Of course, this was 1997, when he was an economist.
Rush, on OWS and antagonism against the 1%:
It seems to me that if we’re going to start hating people, we’re looking in the wrong direction. Will somebody explain to me where is the valor in sitting on your butt taking money from other people?
I love his assumption that those are two distinct categories.
For all of her faults, what I like about Ayn Rand is how she used large...
Jason Brennan at Bleeding Heart Libertarians is ready to pick a fight:
Dear members of the moderate left,
America is suffering from rampant, run-away corporatism and crony capitalism. We are increasingly a plutocracy in which government serves the interests of elite financiers and CEOs at the expense of everyone else.
You know this and you complain loudly about it. But the problem is...
November 2011
14 posts
“I condemn the political parties. Our politicians have long been incapable of...”
– Habermas, the Last European: A Philosopher’s Mission to Save the EU
“Having an opinion takes work. It means stopping in your tracks and staring...”
– Michael Lopp at Rands In Repose
“When you push to turn intellectual work into factory work (which means more...”
– Seth’s Blog: Your competitive advantage
Gruber outlines the difference between invention and innovation, and explains why both are important:
Some people — most people? — can’t get their heads around the idea that “innovation” doesn’t mean “creating something 100 percent new using never before seen technology, ideas, and concepts”. Yes, there were digital music players before the iPod. There were “smartphones” before the iPhone....
“I was there to take down the names of people who were arrested… As I’m standing...”
– Retired New York Supreme Court Judge Karen Smith, working as a legal observer after the raids on Zucotti Park this Tuesday, via Paramilitary Policing of Occupy Wall Street: Excessive Use of Force amidst the New Military Urbanism (via seriouslyamerica)
The late, great Mitch Hedberg:
If you go to the grocery store and stand in front of the lunch meat section for too long, you start to get pissed off at turkeys. You see turkey ham, turkey pastrami, turkey bologna — somebody needs to tell the turkeys, “Man, just be yourself.”
This is how I feel every time Twitter and Google muck around with their UX to make it more like...
“However what it has in groove it lacks in originality.”
– Bevis
Speaking of Bike and Build: The Bikers and The...
October 2011
10 posts
Yep:
In the press release announcing the results, Muller said, “Our biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely with the warming values published previously by other teams in the US and the UK.” In other words, climate scientists know what they’re doing after all.