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Posted on January 23, 2010 - 11:26am :: ISD-World Affairs | Human
By Matthew B. Crawford
May 24, 2009 | NY Times
The television show "Deadliest Catch" depicts commercial crab fishermen in the Bering Sea. Another, "Dirty Jobs," shows all kinds of grueling work; one episode featured a guy who inseminates turkeys for a living. The weird fascination of these shows must lie partly in the fact that such confrontations with material reality have become exotically unfamiliar. Many of us do work that feels more surreal than real. Working in an office, you often find it difficult to see any tangible result from your efforts. What exactly have you accomplished at the end of any given day? Where the chain of cause and effect is opaque and responsibility diffuse, the experience of individual agency can be elusive. "Dilbert," "The Office" and similar portrayals of cubicle life attest to the dark absurdism with which many Americans have come to view their white-collar jobs.
May 24, 2009 | NY Times
The television show "Deadliest Catch" depicts commercial crab fishermen in the Bering Sea. Another, "Dirty Jobs," shows all kinds of grueling work; one episode featured a guy who inseminates turkeys for a living. The weird fascination of these shows must lie partly in the fact that such confrontations with material reality have become exotically unfamiliar. Many of us do work that feels more surreal than real. Working in an office, you often find it difficult to see any tangible result from your efforts. What exactly have you accomplished at the end of any given day? Where the chain of cause and effect is opaque and responsibility diffuse, the experience of individual agency can be elusive. "Dilbert," "The Office" and similar portrayals of cubicle life attest to the dark absurdism with which many Americans have come to view their white-collar jobs.
Posted on January 17, 2010 - 5:28pm :: ISD-World Affairs | Culture
By Drake Bennett
April 5, 2009 | Boston Globe
FOR MOST OF us, what we were taught in school and what we remember from our school years are two different things. We sat through uncountable hours of lessons about denominators and organelles, about precipitates and dangling participles, about Boo Radley and Shays' Rebellion, and yet the memories that sneak up on us today are more likely to be the humiliations suffered on the school bus or the awkward moments from a pubertal romance, the triumph of a deftly parried insult or the sheltering solidarity we felt in a now long-dispersed clique.
April 5, 2009 | Boston Globe
FOR MOST OF us, what we were taught in school and what we remember from our school years are two different things. We sat through uncountable hours of lessons about denominators and organelles, about precipitates and dangling participles, about Boo Radley and Shays' Rebellion, and yet the memories that sneak up on us today are more likely to be the humiliations suffered on the school bus or the awkward moments from a pubertal romance, the triumph of a deftly parried insult or the sheltering solidarity we felt in a now long-dispersed clique.
Posted on January 14, 2010 - 3:10pm :: ISD-World Affairs | Human
By Matthew Gurewitsch
March 29, 2009 | NY Times
REMEMBER the Mozart Effect? As propounded by the news media, the message was that listening to Mozart made children smarter. The science was full of holes, but the notion appealed, and a growing body of research has since suggested that music, classical music in particular, is somehow good for us. The field is still short on evidence, but it has started a lively conversation between scientists and other experts.
March 29, 2009 | NY Times
REMEMBER the Mozart Effect? As propounded by the news media, the message was that listening to Mozart made children smarter. The science was full of holes, but the notion appealed, and a growing body of research has since suggested that music, classical music in particular, is somehow good for us. The field is still short on evidence, but it has started a lively conversation between scientists and other experts.
Posted on December 30, 2009 - 9:09pm :: ISD-World Affairs | Human | Integral Sustainable Development (ISD)
Julia Levitt
March 23, 2009 | WorldChanging.com
Amory Lovins is a bright green visionary. Lovins and the nonprofit Rocky Mountain Institute he leads have set pace of the debate on a number of critical innovations, from green building to hybrid cars, for almost three decades.
RMI (as it's called) takes an entrepreneurial approach, looking for opportunities to leverage changes in systems and policies to organically encourage people to choose the better car, the better home, etc., on their own.
March 23, 2009 | WorldChanging.com
Amory Lovins is a bright green visionary. Lovins and the nonprofit Rocky Mountain Institute he leads have set pace of the debate on a number of critical innovations, from green building to hybrid cars, for almost three decades.
RMI (as it's called) takes an entrepreneurial approach, looking for opportunities to leverage changes in systems and policies to organically encourage people to choose the better car, the better home, etc., on their own.
Posted on December 30, 2009 - 9:07pm :: Good News | ISD-World Affairs | Economics
By Marci Alboher
March 5, 2009 | NYTimes
It used to be that people who wanted to solve a social problem — like lack of access to clean water or inadequate housing for the poor — created a charity. Today, many start a company instead.
D.light, a company cofounded by Sam Goldman, who spent four years in the Peace Corps in Benin before earning a master's degree in business from Stanford University, is an example. Mr. Goldman started D.light with the mission of replacing millions of kerosene lamps now used in poor, rural parts of the world with solar-powered lamps.
March 5, 2009 | NYTimes
It used to be that people who wanted to solve a social problem — like lack of access to clean water or inadequate housing for the poor — created a charity. Today, many start a company instead.
D.light, a company cofounded by Sam Goldman, who spent four years in the Peace Corps in Benin before earning a master's degree in business from Stanford University, is an example. Mr. Goldman started D.light with the mission of replacing millions of kerosene lamps now used in poor, rural parts of the world with solar-powered lamps.
