Jun 18, 13
Hacking Education
Modern schools are products of the Industrial Age. You don't have to subscribe to the radical critique of Dumbing Us Down author John Taylor Gatto (though his recent Harper's essay is worth reading) to know that schools designed to turn out competent and compliant factory workers might not be the best thing for our economies, our democracies or our kids themselves. But what's the alternative? There's no doubt a huge warehouse somewhere filled with dusty and deteriorating reports on fixing...
WiFi in the Himalayas
Nepali villagers build a wireless network from spare parts, facilitating better education, farmers' swaps and intervillage cooperation: "Since late summer, an 802.11b wireless network has enabled a group of rural villages to send and receive POP mail and use a Web cam to teach high school classes over the villages' intranet. No roads span the distances between these villages, but now farmers looking to discuss trades can hold Net meetings rather than spending two days hiking across mountain...
mySociety
Further tools for networking our democracies: MySociety.org is a new project by the Brits who brought us FaxYourMP and VoxPolitics. The idea is to serve as a clearinghouse for ideas on how to improve British society by connecting people through the Internet. Check out their examples page for an idea of what they're up to. (thanks Cory!)
How the Pentagon Thinks
Don Rumsfeld's leaked memo ("Are we winning or losing the Global War on Terror? Is DoD changing fast enough to deal with the new 21st century security environment?") has got a lot of people asking if the Pentagon has any idea what it's doing. As the US military is, in and of itself, a major driver of world events, those trying to steer global change need to know how the military mindset evolves. Here are two key resources: Pentagon's New Mapdetails the theories of Thomas Barnett of the naval...
Flight of the Creative Class
The "Creative Class" is to our current day what skilled mechanists were to the early Industrial Era - a mobile and much-sought class of people whose skills are vital for a region's economic success. Richard Florida - in his book, The Rise of the Creative Class - has shown not only that cities with large numbers of "creatives" (artists, programmers, engineers, media types, etc.) are more prosperous, but also that cities can work to attract them. This, in turn, has triggered something of a...
Countering the Misuse of Biotechnology
Rob Carlson knows biotech. He should - he's a research fellow at the Molecular Sciences Institute in Berkeley, and a research scientist at the Microscale Life Sciences Center at the University of Washington. When he talks about just how emerging biotechnologies could be misused, and what we can do about it, pay attention. Now, the traditional view among many scientists and science-enthusiasts is that the dangers of people with bad intent getting their hands on powerful biotechnologies are...
Opening up the Open Source concept
It's no secret that we here at WorldChanging.com have an affection for the "open source" concept*. The idea of making the inner workings of a technology or process not just visible, but accessible, is deliriously seductive to those of us who think that collaborative, democratic approaches can change the world. And, although "open source" is commonly understood to be a software-writing practice, it's clearly meant for bigger and even better things. To wit: Thomas Goetz's piece in the November...
Mbira and Traditional Music
Musical traditions, like languages, are unique means of expression. When one dies out, we lose not only the beauty of the music itself, but a way of seeing (and singing) the world. But traditional music has been hit hard over the last century by the twin forces of cultural change (as it sometimes seems backward and irrelevant to younger generations) and the general hardship inflicted on much of the developing world (where it often seems a difficult and not-at-all renumerative art to learn)....
Ecological Economics
Ecological economics is the study of the economic value of intact natural systems, and the true (dollar) cost of their destruction. It's an exploding field, but usually pretty dry stuff, downright desicated even. Lissa Harris has done us all a favor by putting together three profiles of leaders in the field which are not only readable, but somewhat entertaining. "Compared to pork bellies and Palm Pilots, most goods and services provided by the environment are peculiar and ill-behaved: They...
Reducing Poverty and Greening Mega-Cities
Half the people on the planet now live in cities. The trends point to a world which is overwhelmingly urban by the year 2020. Many cities in the developing world - like Jakarta, Mumbai, Mexico City, Lagos and Sao Paolo - can expect millions more residents in the next twenty years. Much rests on the fate of these cities. Recent migration has left many of the people who live there precariously perched on the edge on disaster. Housing, where it can be found at all, often takes the shape of...
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