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|Judy Shapiro
This is why I suspect Google CEO Eric Schmidt, on a recent interview with Fox, discussed how Google was not crossing the "creepy" privacy line with its technologies and called Google Dashboard an empowering way for consumers to manage all their Google-related information.
His comments paid homage to our gauzy, romantic notion that privacy means we control our information, but he sidestepped defining what privacy should look like in the digital world. It's a question worthy of serious scrutiny because all the privacy rhetoric has, imprudently, raised consumers' privacy expectations to a level that may not be possible in today's internet world. While Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy's famous quote, "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it," is one approach, there are better options that can deliver a reasonable level of personal control of personal information.
In searching for this new definition, a quick retrospective on the history of privacy might inform our thinking. It quickly tells us that our modern notion of privacy was simply not operative for most of civilized history (if you didn't guess by now, my early training was in history).
In virtually every society since ancient times, one's identity was fully transparent because "people" were "public assets" of the prevailing rulers. There was a code for conduct and dress that clearly identified everyone by class and depending on variations of this code, by village or clan or family. By default, you could say everyone was "public."
It wasn't until the middle of the 20th century, with the massive expansion of the middle class after World War II, that our modern sensibility of privacy emerged. The war "democratized" lots of things, like a new openness in dress, for instance, which allowed members of the middle class to pass themselves off as anyone. This budding notion of privacy was buoyed as the newly affluent middle class started living in bigger homes, which increased their appetite for privacy because it became a mark of success. Finally, during the paranoia of the Cold War, when the government had aggressive wiretapping programs and Sen. McCarthy has his blacklists, our current notion of privacy hardened into the near-sacred status enjoyed in our popular imagination.
Which brings us back to today. Our attachment to a definition of privacy that was born in a different time and place seems misaligned to the realities of today's internet world. The confusing, ambiguous and inconsistent set of privacy processes across the digital landscape is ample proof. For example, there are verification companies selling web-privacy trust seals to reassure site visitors that the site has a privacy policy. Unfortunately for the site visitor, this privacy "trust seal" makes no judgment about whether the site has a "good" privacy policy based on any objective standards.
And it gets even more confusing. Cookies are handy for end users but they are quite invasive, despite assurances from cookie crumb collectors that they only collect information, not individual user data. Would end users consider a re-marketing campaign as crossing the "privacy" line? The rise of social networks adds new issues: Should we assume the profiles we post in our social networks are private or public? Who should control where my profile is displayed?
That's why I think the introduction of Google Dashboard is an important step in the right direction. It will help us evolve our thinking about digital privacy to focus our attention on managing what is digitally public about us rather than on doggedly focusing solely on keeping information private. This announcement is another way to reorient us to accept that once we are a participant in the digital, social-networked world, we are in the public domain. Similar to listing our phone number in the phone book, we are "defaulted in" unless we opted out.
This move might be even be called bold (after all Google didn't need to launch Dashboard) and worthy of industry support. For those of us who operate social networks, communities or websites, let's continue this momentum by starting to apply a consistent "default public" set of business rules to reflect the new reality that social network participation is acceptance of a public digital life. This shift in the model that encourages users to manage their public digital information well is one that frees us to take full advantage of our newly expanding digital social lives.
In the history of privacy, everything old is new again -- only better.
Judy Shapiro is senior VP at Paltalk and has held senior marketing positions at Comodo, Computer Associates, Lucent Technologies, AT&T and Bell Labs. Her blog, Trench Wars, provides insights on how to create business value on the internet.


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We have been contacted by a colleague who works in Nagpur, India. She told us about the work her NGO is doing with urban spaces. The needs (rights) for children to play can be partly met by making parks safe, pleasant and used. The NGO has worked with the community to upgrade eight parks. Some of the parks have also had further work to make them accessible for disabled kids. This sounds like a great development field which is new to us.
More info: http://www.esafindia.org/livable-cities-india.html and https://livablecitiesindia.wordpress.com

subset: commoncrawl


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Mindful Guide to becoming a morning person: Part 1.
Wake up in the morning a feel sluggish before breakfast is even over? Just about ready to go back to bed within minutes of exiting your morning shower? Doesn't that just set a bad pace for your day? Become a morning warrior by planning before bed.
When you wake up wondering what you need to do next it usually winds up looking something like this.
Hit snooze three or four times, roll out of bed grumping about how you would have liked to hit snooze at least ONE more time before dragging your sorry ass out and getting your day started. You head down to the kitchen, put the kettle / coffee machine on and scroll through the pages of your latest addiction. You half haphazardly put on some toast, because you're already far behind on what you had intended to do for the day. Grump about the time it takes to make a cup of your favourite hot beverage and realise you're out of peanut butter, again.
After going through the motions of wiping the crumbs off the table. You half wonder if you could get away with going back to bed for just another half hour. Laziness goes through the roof, motivation hits rock bottom and you catch yourself wondering if you will be able to sleep tonight if you spend another day watching netflix episodes marathon style. Ah, the guilt.
In an alternate reality there is a second you who wakes up to a tidy little list of actionable items.
This version of you knows exactly what needs to be accomplished. In this life, you wake up and roll out of bed after the first ring of the first alarm.
Get up, stretch, walk over to the kitchen and put on the kettle. You bust out your phone but only to turn on your morning tunes, and maybe even bust a move. Hey, it's so early, no one is watching anyways! As you wait for the water to boil, you take a quick peek at your AM task list. Three items. You can handle this. In fact, you're so in control you won't even need to break out your big girl pants today.
With a sleepy smile plastered on your face, you shimmy over to your computer, cup in hand. You're floating on a cloud and the sun isn't even up yet. This is going to be a good day.


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She'll carry it when it matches
Her luggage I mean. And only then for a few minutes, just to make sure we see the entire outfit.
Victoria Beckham travelled from LA to London yesterday after presenting a united front with husband David during the recent prostitution scandal. The Beckhams, as you know, claim it's all fraud, while the hooker has now countersued David for emotional distress, or something.
In other words, it's still He Said, She said, and as I noted last week, I'd be more inclined to believe what He Said He Didn't Do if he didn't do it in the past.
I've been yelled at the last few weeks since this sh-t broke by staunch Beckham defenders, angry about me not immediately discounting this trick's claims. You know, the Rebecca Loos/Sarah Marbeck/Esther Canadas/Emma Ryan episode(s) only went down 6 years ago. Does that mean that in 6 years people will find it really hard to believe that Tiger Woods and Jesse James could be cheaters again too?
Photos from Wenn.com and TS/Splashnewsonline.com


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Ordinarily, Mary-Kate Olsen, 24, is an extremely private person. But in the September issue of Marie Claire, she opens up in a startlingly revelatory interview about her past and personal life.
This honesty from someone who typically hides behind giant sunglasses refusing to speak to anyone is refreshing. But in the spirit of full disclosure, I should admit that after reading the interview excerpts, I sort of prefer when she's being photographed by the press rather than talking to them ...
In the interview, Mary-Kate complains about having to endure life as a child star on Full House:
"I look at old photos of me, and I don't feel connected to them at all … I would never wish my upbringing on anyone …"
Then she drives the point home by calling herself and her sister Ashley "little monkey performers."
Now, we all know that being a child star sucks. But Mary-Kate seems to be doing OK for herself (and Ashley, too!). Do we really have to listen to someone who's rich, beautiful, famous, a style icon, has two clothing lines, etc. whine about their "awful upbringing"? Sweetie, it could be worse. (Two words: Jodie Sweetin.)
Thankfully the pity party is short-lived, and Mary-Kate is able to move past her painful childhood, speaking about two topics that have been off-limits until now: her eating disorder and her relationship with Heath Ledger. She also reveals the two things that help her get through the rough times: talking and her fashion label, The Row, which she says is a "like a mask to hide behind."
All in all, a pretty candid admission from someone who's so typically tight-lipped. Still, I'll probably bypass the interview when the issue comes out and move on to her photo spread: Mary-Kate's style is what I'm most interested in, after all.
Image via MarieClaire.com


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E.D. Special-Education Report Found Incomplete by Senators
Washington--The chairman and other members of the Senate Subcommittee on the Handicapped have criticized the Education Department's 1983 annual report to the Congress on federally sponsored programs for handicapped children, contending that it fails to fulfill the requirements of the law.
In a letter to Secretary of Education Terrel H. Bell, the three Senators cited numerous examples in the report of noncompliance with statutory requirements and asked that the department submit the missing information by Sept. 30.
The letter was signed by Senators Lowell P. Weicker Jr., Republican of Connecticut and chairman of the subcommittee, Jennings Randolph, Democrat of West Virginia, and Robert Stafford, Republican of Vermont.
Secretary Bell, in responding to the letter, said that the department will review the Senators' concerns about the report.
Under P.L. 94-142, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975, the department is required to prepare the annual report on the number of children served in each state, the states' progress in identifying and providing services for handicapped children, the quality of state programs, and recommendations for improving the federal law.
Decline in Quality
This year's report, which was due to be delivered to the Congress in January, was not sent until May, according to Sue Ellen Walbridge, a spokesman for Senator Stafford. She said the subcommittee members have noticed a decline in the quality of the last two annual reports prepared by the department.
The bulk of this year's report, according to the Senators, provided data but "little analysis and synthesis as compared with [a previous] annual report."
The Senators' letter complained that the section on special-education administration "lacked detail for understanding compliance with the law."
Furthermore, the letter noted, "procedural safeguards are not included" in the report, and "discretionary programs are described, but not anaylzed," making policy decisions difficult.
Also omitted from the report, according to the letter, are the number of handicapped children in each state who need services but are not receiving them; the numbers of handicapped children enrolled in public or private schools in each state who are receiving and not receiving a "free and appropriate public education" as specified by the law; and recommendations for changes in the provisions of the act.
The Senators said in their letter that the department's failure to include the Reagan Administration's proposed regulatory changes was "incomprehensible."
'Public Reaction'
"As you recall, these regulations generated significant controversy," the Senators wrote. "It is imperative for future policymaking that Congress be provided information regarding public reaction to these proposed regulations."
"Any response by the public of such magnitude as that generated by these regulations demands careful scrutiny by those charged with the responsibility of representing the best interest of the handicapped community," the letter continued.
The Senate, by unanimous consent, passed a bill that would change the department's evaluation and data-collection procedures by specifying the type of data to be collected, according to Ms. Walbridge. She said the bill, which also extends discretionary programs under P.L. 94-142 for three years, was drafted before the department submitted its annual report.
A similar bill has not been passed in the House.
Vol. 02, Issue 40
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Choosing homecare support means choosing to maintain independence.
CASA is here to help people to live as independently as possible. This means working in a way that promotes a 'can do' attitude and identifies strengths in each individual. It also means being flexible and willing, giving people as much control as possible over the care and support they receive.
We can deliver anything from a 15 minutes 'pop in call' to 24:7 complex support oversee by a CASA Registered Nurse.
We recognise it is a 'first big step' to consider homecare support for you, a family member, or a friend. This website sets out what we can do – but it is sometimes easier just to ring and request a CASA Discovery meeting. Here, our professional assessment staff will discuss your particular needs and design a bespoke package of support. This is called 'Person Centred Planning'
Try us out. We'd love to come and talk to you about how we can help.
Get in touch to arrange a CASA Discovery Session today.
If you think you've got what we're looking for then we'd love to hear from you.
We'd love to find out how we can help.


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Cuteness Overload with Hello Kitty GlassesAt first, I was hesitant. Then I started to love it too. (^_^)
I got two (2) pieces of these as little gifts from my boss, Mamu Isay. She came from a cosplay convention I wanted to attend - she made it there; I didn't. LOL. I was too overworked so I didn't get the chance to visit. *sobs* She went there with her whole family anyway - and her kids enjoyed it hehe, And now I'm luvin the gifts.
I found it weird initially, as to why these glasses actually don't have glasses at all. It's blank ... it's just a hole. It's a plain glass frame. I didn't even know what these glasses were called until I saw it trending on Facebook from several other otakus and younger cosplayers ... mostly teens. Then I realized ... ahhhh! It's "uso" or "in-style" ngayon hahah. Wow! Didn't know my boss now is up-to-date with these stuff - event kiddie fashion statements. LOLZ.
|My Hello Kitty Spectacles via Instagram
When I first wore it; I thought twice. Of course, I'm no longer a teen hehehe. I'm in my 20s yes, but I work in a corporate environment lah~ So this might distort my "image." LOL. But ... fuhggedaboutimage shiz! Just cracking' this fashion item doesn't mean I'm whacko right? Haha!
When I first posted this pic, my friends were teasing me - that I looked like a little kiddo. Haha. I was just trying to match the look and feel hehe. I think it's appropriate for kids in the younger generation though - so I seldom use this. No offense to Mamu, hehe. I just think it suits a much younger audience.
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#phchurpchurp is the newest social media community!
But admittedly, this piece is definitely a good find. I've seen a post about it from HawaiiKawaii.net and it's uber-loaded with cuteness! It's aptly called Hello Kitty Eyeglasses because it's made in the form and likeness of the ever popular Japanese Sanrio iconic character ... Hello Kitty.
|Pink Overload - Hello Kity
I like this one because the frames are actually ballpens too and I can use them in the office. More function, ei? Smart! I guess I used this pink, animal print, with grey whiskers glasses more than the other more regular type that I got hohoho~ I love the color pink so it matches a lot of my outfits hehe, like this one; my Sandy Tokidoki top. Ain't they such a pair of cuteness? Plus the one wearing them? Ehem! That's me! LOL.
And look at that ... I just said "animal print" - Hello Kitty is a cat ... an animal! Such redundancy! Wahahahaa!
Okay ... enough of that silly thought! (^_^)
I searched in google for Hello Kitty Glasses and there are tons of pages and pictures that popped. Most of them are really cute model-pics or those ulzzang / uljjiang girls. My photos above can pass as "uhljang" right? Bwahahaha! Dream on! Anyway ... I was trying to find a wiki or a page that defines it or its origins. I couldn't find any. I guess I'll leave it at that hehe.
My other pair is equally likeable though it's simpler. It features just the regular black frames and a pink polka-dotted ribbon.
I did wear it in one of our more-casual days hehe. Actually, I think it's fun to bring out the kid in you some times, without hesitation. After all, we're all kids at heart anyway. And as for me, I'm still young anyway. I don't have to pretend to be old just to keep up with the "image" hehe. Of course, I still know the "border lines." I don't need to cross that lah~ Just keep my fashion sense intact and the kid in me at controlled levels. LOL. Still tamed like kitty! Yay!
CHAI'S VERDICT: ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ (4 Stars!!!)
Overall, I love it still. (^_^) But they won't be part of my dailies or staple styles. (^_^)
How about you? What do you think?


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Impact 330
Keystone Impact toy hauler 330 highlights:
- 12' 6" Separate Garage
- Dual Entry
- Two Slides
- Master Suite
- Sleeps Eight
This Keystone Impact toy hauler has a large 12' 6" garage that is separate from the rest of the living space so that you can travel with bigger toys or extra camping essentials. The sliding patio door leads into the living/kitchen area where you can rest on the slide-out sofa while you take in the delicious aromas of dinner being prepared on the 3-burner range top. On a sunshine-filled day, add a few pieces of furniture or a grill to the optional patio and enjoy the beautiful outdoors while keeping your feet off the ground. On a cooler, rainy day, grab a comfy blanket and relax indoors with a movie on the 40" LED TV.
Keystone specifically keeps you, the customer, in mind as they construct and build each Impact toy hauler. From the optional Fast Track Patio System 2.0 that makes it easy to set up your patio quickly in under one minute, to the Impact Sky-Dome that illuminates the interior evenly by transforming natural daylight into a usable light source, each Impact toy hauler has been designed to help you achieve the ultimate camping experience. Every Impact also has frameless windows which keep the interior completely protected from outside elements while adding an extra bit of style to the exterior.Have a question about this floorplan?Contact Us
Sleeps 8 Slides 2 Length 37 ft 6 in Ext Width 8 ft 4 in Ext Height 12 ft 4 in Int Height 0 ft Interior Color Onyx, Brindle Hitch Weight 1415 lbs Dry Weight 9463 lbs Cargo Weight 3537 lbs Fresh Water Capacity 104 gals Grey Water Capacity 60 gals Black Water Capacity 30 gals Tire Size 16 Furnace BTU 35000 btu Fuel Capacity 30 gals Number Of Bunks 1 Available Beds Queen Refrigerator Size 8 cu ft Cooktop Burners 3 Number of Awnings 1 Axle Weight 7000 lbs Garage Size 12 ft 6 in LP Tank Capacity 60 lbs. Water Heater Capacity 6 gal. Water Heater Type DSI Gas/Electric TV Info 40" LED TV Awning Info Electric with LED Lights Axle Count 2 Shower Type Tub/Shower Combo Electrical Service 50 amp
Similar Toy Hauler Travel Trailer Floorplans
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Meat Free Mondays: A Hungry Duck Banquet Event
American author and journalist Michael Pollan, on the subject of living, once wrote: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." Upon this idea, FoodWISE started an initiative called Meat Free Mondays. No, we aren't going all vegetarian (or activist) on you, but we thought that the notion of celebrating dishes that are whole and inspiring on their own (without meat) is a notion worth exploring.
So this December 9, we're hosting a Meat Free Monday banquet. Featuring a delicious 8 course experience, including tempura zucchini flowers with aged soy and citrus, through to organic soba noodles with mush room dashi, nori and crispy garlic, we challenge you to look at the wonderful world of vegetable produce we have at our fingertips here on the south coast…it's truly amazing!
Date: Monday December 9
Cost: $70pp ex matched drinks
Book: here (or simply enquire about more)
The menu…
Tempura zucchini flowers with aged soy and citrus
Kim Chi buns with Chinese red vinegar
Five spiced bean curd with home grown tomatoes and seaweed
Stir fried Mittagong mushrooms with konyaku noodles and truffle powder
Organic soba noodles with mushroom dashi, nori and crispy garlic
Steamed asparagus with a 64"c hens egg and black vinegar dressing
Tumeric curry of root vegetables, fresh herbs, chilli and lime
Coconut tapioca pearls with tofu cream and roast rhubarb


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Percona XtraDB Cluster – installation and setup webinar follow up Q&APeter Boros
Thanks for all, who attended my webinar, I got many questions and I wanted to take this opportunity to answer them.
Q: Even ntp has a delay of 0.3-0.4 between servers does that mean a 0.25 as from logs can be an issue ?
A: My demo vms were running for a few hours before the webinar in my local virtualbox instance, and I tried to show the minimal installation required for XtraDB cluster. Unfortunately enough, I didn't include NTP, which caused SSTs to fail with the tar stream being from the future. The 0.3 – 0.4 second delay seems too much to me. According to the NTP standard, if the delay between the hosts is greater than 128 ms, NTP won't work. So far for background and theory, from the practical point of view, you should have ntpd running, and you should monitor stratum. If you are using ntp servers stratum should be 3 or less, you can monitor it with
echo sysinfo | ntpdc
For the record, when I set the clock on my vms, they were almost off by 90s compared to the reference.
Q: You have to bootsrap it every time a node is down?
A: No. You have to bootstrap every time all nodes in the cluster down when you bring up the first node. If a node is down, when it comes back online, you have to perform a state transfer, which can be IST (Incremental State Transfer) and SST (Snapshot State Transfer). If the node has recent enough data that the write sets that needs to be applied are in the online node's gcache, it will only perform an IST. When I mention bootstrapping here and in the webinar, I mean wsrep_cluster_address='gcomm://' and not 'pc.bootstrap=true'.
Q: Can you quickly show the my.cnf settings again?
A: Sure, see this post or webinar recording.
Q: Fault tolerance: Can you recommend a three node cluster for production use?
A: Yes, that's the recommended configuration. The number of nodes/data centers should be odd, so you can always decide which part is in majority in case of a network split.
Q: How does latency and bandwidth affect performance? Is it practical to buildthe cluster over a wan connection with ~ 5 ms latency?
A: Yes, it can be practical. The response time of your transactions will be affected by latency, but since we are using parallel replication here, with many parallel threads, this means that you can achieve a high throughput despite the response time limitations. Even with parallel replication, the response time limits the number of transactions / second that you can do on a single record. This means that if you have "hot database areas (single records that are modified very frequently)" high latency can potentially be an issue, otherwise this is mitigated by parallel replication. In this case the cost of latency on commit will be 5 ms each time.
Q: Can I change the replication method between servers?
A: If you would like to switch back and forth between galera and built-in mysql replication (asynchronous) for a given node, it's not possible. However, a node in PXC can be a master or a slave on asynchronous replication, galera and built-in mysql replication are independent from each other.
Q: I installed Percona as cluster database working with Zabbix (innodb), do you have a recommended configuration?
A: We don't have any specific recommandations for Zabbix, but general InnoDB tuning recommendations apply here, in large zabbix deployments, you may want to partition your large history tables, so it can keep up with the writes and/or configure and rethink the retention of the raw data.
Q: What are the steps to automatically restart a Percona Cluster after an outage?
A: It depends of the type of failure, first you can try to just restart the nodes. If you can't bring it up, your last resort is bootstrap the first node, and do an SST/IST with the rest of the nodes.
Q: We are missing SST_AUTH parameter, rigth ? It is not possible to do SST without this, as per my testing…or am I wrong here ?
A: In the demo I used a blank root password for all nodes, so it did work without it.
Q: For automatic cluster starting, should it be ok to have in [mysqld_safe] the following: wsrep_urls=gcomm://IP1:4567,gcomm://IP2:4567,gcomm://IP3:4567,gcomm://
A: This will work for automatic cluster starting, but unfortunately it can lead to inconsistency in case of a network split. If a network split happens and a node decides to shut down, and somehow restarts because of this automatic process, it gets bootstrapped because of this option, and you can end up having 2 different clusters serving data to different groups of clients. So, the last gcomm:// option should be avoided. Although it can be helpful when you are testing certain scenarios, don't forget to remove it before going to production.
Q: How would you migrate to XtradbCluster from a traditional Master Slave scenario when the data set is very large? Can you swap in Binaries ?
A: Check out Jay Janssen's webinar about the topic.
Q: When one node in a 3 node cluster is synchronizing with the group, are the other two nodes available to serve data during the synchronization?
A: The node synchronizing should get the data from somewhere, it is from an other node. That node can be available during this process it you are using the xtrabackup SST method. Even if you are using an SST method which is blocking (rsync for example), you will have one node available in this situation.
Q: Does galera async replication fit in with percona XtraDB Cluster? i.e. can I run a production cluster in synchronous, and a disaster recovery location replicated asynchronously?
A: You can use asynchrounous replication between 2 PXC clusters, with one node being the master from the first cluster, and one node being the slave from the second cluster. However, if you lose either of them, you can't get a consistent binlog position in most causes to continue replication.
Q: I hope that one point that is addressed, if not part of the presentation then as a comment near the end, is how to start up a cluster from scratch (i.e. a standalone XtraDB Cluster machine, convert it to a cluster type, and add nodes to it)
A: For details on starting up a cluster from scratch, see my earlier blogpost , for migration see Jay Janssen's webinar about the topic.
Q: Do you recomend this configuration for servers in different datacenters? thanks!
A: Yes, as long as there are at least 3 datacenters, and the total number of the datacenters is odd.
Q: How is configuration for the arbitrator?
A: You should use the garbd binary for that, is takes wsrep_cluster_address and wsrep_cluster_name as an argument. It will join the cluster, but won't store or serve data.
Q: Is the configuration file my.cnf ?
A: Yes.
Q: If the cluster blocks write while it commits to another host, does that not limit write capacity to the "weakest link". Or have i missed something?
A: The cluster doesn't block for the duration of the write, but only for certifying that write. See virtually synchronous replication of the cluster explained here.
Q: What about myisam storage? is it safe to use it? Does xtrabackup works as a sst method for myisam?
A: Yes, but for MyISAM xtrabackup is blocking, since it is backed up by the wrapper script called innobackupex, and not xtrabackup itself while holding a lock using FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK. MyISAM support is experimental. Apart from some very special, edge cases, I would not recommend using MyISAM.
Q: How does write performance scale with an increasing number of nodes?
A: Since all the nodes has to do all the writes, you can't scale writes infinitely by adding nodes. I would expect that writing to a few nodes is faster then writing only to 1, the reason for this is that only 1 node has to parse SQL, the rest just has to apply RBR events.
Q: I saw an rm -rf * in the demo what folder is that in and when is it appropriate to do it?
A: I wanted to show you that during the SST the node is actually rebuilding, also you can force an SST this way (although for forcing an SST it's enough if you delete grastate.dat). So, it is appropriate for demo purposes when you would like to show that the full data is copied when you SST again.
Q: Thanx Peter, I loved the webinar! Especially the fact that that everything is live!
A: Cheers, you are welcome, I am glad you liked it:). Thanks everyone for all these questions, feel free to ask additional ones in comments.


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Home > Programs > Sustainable-Economy
Transition to a Sustainable Economy
Ultimately, the threats of climate change, species extinction, toxic contamination and deforestation are symptoms of a larger problem. The Industrial Revolution delivered comforts and progress beyond the wildest dreams of its pioneers.
But the unquestioned assumptions that economic growth is an end in itself, that a natural area is wasted until a profit-oriented development comes along, that all environmental costs are externalities that need not enter the economic paradigm are the causes of the environmental crisis.
Pursuing the solutions, the economic and institutional shifts to deliver a reduced ecological footprint, reduce population growth and assist countries in the developing world to find a path that avoids our mistakes is the work of SCC's programme for a transition to a sustainable economy.
International Program
Trade and Environment
Ecological Fiscal Reform
People and the Planet: Changing Values for a Sustainable Future
In June 2002, people from across Canada and around the world gathered at Queens University in Kingston to examine progress since the first U.N. Conference on the Human Environment in 1972 and the Rio Earth Summit in 1992.
Proceedings from the conference are now available.
Sierra Club of Canada National Office
Home - Search - Contact Us - Publications - Programs - Get Involved - Media - About Us - Chapters


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Thursday, July 29, 2004
Objectivity and morality
What is the source of this link? Well, one source, historically, is that moral theories have been constructed by men deeply committed to the idea of objective truth. More importantly, though, there seems to be a conceptual link between the idea that moral reasons are authoritative and the idea that they are objective.
Consider this typical case: Mary arrives home and finds two messages on her answering machine. The first is from Joseph, inviting her dancing. The other is from her Rabbi, reminding her that she is scheduled to help out at the soup kitchen. Mary finds that she is conflicted. She wants to go dancing with Joseph and, perhaps, consumate their relationship. But she also feels that she should do as the Rabbi says.
The most natural way of understanding Mary's conflict is as arising between her personal desires and something else. She wants to go dancing, but demands are made on her from outside. Subjective desire is in competition with, well, what? If it's just the desires of the Rabbi, or even of the soup hungry masses, then it's a conflict of like against like. There may be some way of showing that the Rabbi's subjective desires outweigh Mary's, but because they are essentially the same kind of thing the Rabbi's desires can't trump Mary's personal wants in the way that moral concerns are commonly thought to trump merely subjective desires.
Again, there is a natural move. This time it is to the position that the demands of morality are objective. The problem then becomes that of showing that objective concerns trump subjective interests, and the prospects here look better.
That is, the prospects looked better until postmodernism, pragmatism, or Goodman, depending on your predilections. At any rate, the project of defending an objective point of view doesn't look as simple as it once did. Nowadays the challenge is to show that you can get what you wanted out of objectivity from something less.
That's the general project, anyway. In specific contexts you have to deal with the legacy of the old program before you can try to rebuild along different lines.
In The Possibility of Altruism, written about 35 years ago, Thomas Nagel claimed that, "Given any subjective principle, one can construct a corresponding objective principle which accords primary objective value to acts of the sort justified by the subjective one." This was a move in an argument ultimately intended to show, "that the only acceptable reasons are objective ones." Nagel thought that if he could get to that conclusion then the next step, the step linking objective reasons to morality, would be relatively straightforward.
As Nagel notes, the correspondence claim is only interesting if the correpsonding objective principle implies more than the particular subjective principle from which it was derived. Which is to say that Nagel needs the result that there is a set of subjective principles which don't correspond to one another, but do correspond to the objective claim. An example from math might make this more clear. Consider the statements '2=2', '4='4', and '99999=99999'. The objective version of these statements is 'for any x, x=x'. The idea is that you could use your knowledge of, say, '2=2', to arrive at the objective principle. Once you had gotten there you could then derive from the objective principle all of the other equivalencies. So Nagel thinks with reasons that you can use your subjective reason to arrive at an objective formulation, and that for this to be a useful result the subjective reason you actually used must just be one of many that could have been used.
Why is this requirement necessary? Well, if it didn't hold then it would be hard to see the point in making the move to objectivity, since there would be a one to one correspondence between objective and subjective principles. This would mean that objective principles (and hence morality) would be no more general than the subjective principles with which we started. And without such an increase in generality, Nagel thinks, the prospects for additional authority are dim. Put another way, it would make the whole business of deriving objective principles look like a whole lot of hoo haw.
What do these objective principles look like? Something like this:
- Any person P in circumstances C should do act A
- Any person P whose life is threatened may use deadly force to protect her life
Critics want to deny that useful objective principles can be derived. Their most natural course is to point out ways in which proposed objective principles fail to capture the complex particularity of concrete cases. Their maddening problem is that for any concern they raise, Nagel can just say, "I'll pack that into C." The whole debate threatens to become a contest of endurance.
What critics need is some kind of general reason to believe that general reasons aren't possible. But that presents a bit of a paradox, doesn't it?
Wednesday, July 28, 2004
Another query
A query
Tuesday, July 27, 2004
Monday, July 26, 2004
What's in a name?
Writing tools
In our recent conversation The Bellman asked how I had dealt with a problem he had experienced, namely that it had become difficult for him to locate the things he remembered writing. He wondered if I had found any tools that made this easier.
I hadn't, not really. In fact, I've pretty much abandoned the generalized notebook format that I had been using. Instead I keep my notes in a couple dozen themed files. I did say that I wished Apple Computer had ported the System 6 era Notebook program to OS X. (I did find a shareware version, but it seems kind of clunky and I'm not sure if it's worth $50)
The thing I always liked about Notebook was how, well, simple it was. As far as I know it only supported one font. There was a tab in the bottom right corner that you used to jump to the next page. Best of all, you didn't have to worry about saving the file. Once you typed it, it was there come Hell or high voltage.
The thing that has happened to The Bellman and I, writing-wise, since we first had this discussion is that both of us have begun blogging. Nowadays I'd rather write online, in a blog interface, than on a word processor. And that's true even though writing online means messing about with HTML tags.
I think it comes dow to the sheer joy of tabbed browsing. When I'm blogging I can jump between tabs effortlessly, and that means that all of the information I'm trying to tie together is, more or less, in front of me. It's only a little more difficult to switch between windows in a word processor (especially since the advent of Expose in Mac OS X) but that little diffierence is, somehow, a big difference.
It makes me realize what I liked so much about Notebook, and what I want in a word processor. What I liked in Notebook was the ease with which I could jump from one document to the next. What I want is tabbed word processing.
So, if you're listening Mr. Gates, get to it!
America's ass kickingest bluegrass band
On second thought, make that Yee Haw.
Sunday, July 25, 2004
Sunday reading
For in the course of the day we spent together, Major Brinsfield emerged as something of an ethical mole within the stony ramparts of Thayer Hall, an advocate of nuclear freeze, a soldier who believes there can be no such thing as "rules of conduct" in modern warfare, and to whom the modern battlefield is akin to a microwave oven. He spoke in the most disarming fashion about America losing the Vietnam war because its conduct on the battlefield was contrary to the values of American society, and therefore lost the support of the people. These are thoughts for which I believed the walls of Thayer Hall would have very big ears. But the major spoke them unperturbed and felt that so long as his research was solid, he was safe in embracing such ideas. It would not occur to me until later that perhaps Brinsfield's ideas were tolerated because they weren't taken seriously. Moral scruples were not on the minds of military scholars ten years after Vietnam. Rather, they were hallucinating about what American firepower might have done to win in Vietnam, had it not been so constrained by civilian meddlers.Biased? Certainly. Still, I think it offers a clue about Abu Ghraib.
Saturday, July 24, 2004
Hagiography interrupted
There was, though, a little bit of drama early in the stage. Filippo Simeoni, an undistinguished Italian rider, sprinted out of the peloton in an effort to join a group of six low ranked riders on a breakaway. Rather than letting Simeoni go, as good race tactics would dictate, Armstrong took off after him. When the two men reached the breakaway Armstrong explained that he would allow the group to remain in the lead only if Simeoni rejoined the peloton. Simeoni did, Armstrong backed off, and the breakaway group went on to build an eleven minute lead on the peloton.
Simeoni testified in an Italian court in 2002 that one of Armstrong's advisers, Dr. Michele Ferrari, furnished him with illegal performance-enhancing drugs. Armstrong, whose triumphs have been shadowed by doping allegations, subsequently called Simeoni a liar in a French newspaper interview in 2003. Simeoni then sued him in a case that is pending. |link|
Thursday, July 22, 2004
Thinking revolution
It's very difficult for me, reading Dewey one hundred years later, not to bristle at his categorization of aborigines as
No, the problem is that aboriginal society is complex and to say that it is organized around hunting is to oversimplify. What's more, to focus on hunting is to privilege a particular perspective in that society in a way that is both predictable and unfortunate, since hunters are likely to be high status males. To privilege their occupation and to say that it is the source of the categories relevant to an understanding of the aboriginal mind is to adopt a perspective which renders invisible the minds of other groups in aboriginal society, particularly the minds of aboriginal women.
It's not clear to me to what extent this critique undermines Dewey's analysis of the aboriginal mind, but it does seem to me that it points to an underlying barrier to the project of analyzing the habits of thought of any society. The problem illustrated by the critique is the difficulty of picking out a defining occupation given the complexity of any human society.
And yet, there does seem to be something to the idea that each society has a particular way of seeing things, and that this way of seeing things is linked to regularities in the way that members of the society interact with the world. Nor was Dewey the only person who held this view in the early years of the twentieth century. Notably, revolutionary Marxists shared much of Dewey's outlook.
The Marxist term for what Dewey called habits of thought is ideology and the Marxist would say that ideology is closely linked to, and necessary for, the society's means of production. The Marxist will also say that the ideology is a tool of the ruling class and exists for their benefit.
It is this last point which marks disagreement with Dewey, for he would say that the habits of thought of the ruling class must also be a product of material conditions.*
Note that this difference makes it easier for the Marxist to answer our difficult question, since the Marxist can say that one only needs to work backwards from the interests of the ruling class.
Finding easy answers to difficult questions, though, doesn't make the Marxist account superior.
One of the glaring facts about the legacy of communism is that the revolutions didn't happen where they were supposed to. Marx said that industrial capitalism suffered from internal contradictions, and that it was these contradictions that would bring about the revolution. This implied that the revolution would take root in the most highly industrialized states, Britain or Germany, and then spread throughout the industrialized world.
Instead, the first successful revolution was in relatively backward Russia. Since then, the most fertile ground for communist insurgencies has been the developing world. The most successful communist state is China, but though it has made strides towards industrialization, its industrial centers are the regions where support for communist ideology is at its lowest ebb. By contrast, support for the party remains quite strong in the agrarian countryside.
What this history suggests to me is that the revolutionary critique of industrial capitalism has more traction in pre-capitalist agrarian societies** than in societies with a developed economies. This is an embarrassment to Marx, but it is quite consistent with the general thesis shared by Marx and Dewey, the thesis that habits of thought are strongly linked to material conditions.
The Marxist error, I think, is strikingly similar to the mistake Dewey makes in his analysis of the savage mind. Namely, the Marxist attempts to simplify something that is irreducibly complex.
None of this, of course, contributes to solving the difficult question, and I don't have much to add that doesn't amount to the platitude that each society is what it is and not something else.
*--or maybe not. Dewey thought that once we understood the origin of our habits of thought we could utilize intelligence to modify the categories in ways that are useful to us. This modification, though, is going to be constrained by our actual interactions with the world, so this point is unclear.
**--though it should be noted that, with the exception of Russia, all of the pre-industrial agrarian societies that went for communism were, to some extent, colonies of European powers. Clearly the legacy of colonialism is relevant to their critique of capitalism since, for them, communism and nationalism are closely tied together. But this is also a point where an embarrassment for Marx is perfectly consistent with the more general thesis.
Tuesday, July 20, 2004
Anyhow, I just came across the following passage while rereading the introduction to John Dewey's Reconstruction in Philosophy:
As for philosophy, its profession of operating on the basis of the eternal and the immutable is what commits it to a function and a subjectmatter which, more than anything else, are the source of the growing popular disesteem and distrust of its pretensions; for it operates under cover of what is now repudiated in science, and with effective support only from old institutitions whose prestige, influence and emoluments of power depend upon the preservation of the old order; and thi at the very time when human conditions are so disturbed and unsettled as to call more urgently than at any previous time for the kinds of comprehensive and "objective" survey in which historic philosophies have engaged. To the vested interests, maintenance of belief in the transcendence of space and time, and hence the derogation of what is "merely" human, is an indispensible prerequisite of their retention of an authority which in practice is translated into power to regulate human affairs throughout—from top to bottom.It would take a lot of unpacking to make clear precisely what Dewey is saying here and why I think that he's basically right. But the general idea is that those in power typically oppose social change by alleging that certain facts are fixed.
So, for example, it has been claimed that the traditional nuclear family is, somehow, stamped by nature as the ideal building block of human society, and this contention has been used in the defense of all sorts of retrograde social policies. But whether or not the nuclear family is a good thing isn't a timeless natural fact. Rather, it has to do with whether the nuclear family serves the particular interests that we have right now.
Dewey's criticism of philosophy here is that its mistaken assertion that there is some set of timeless natural facts invariably gives ammunition to those whose entrenched power gives them an interest in saying that the status quo is justified in virtue of the commonsense view of what those natural facts are.
(Yes, yes, I know that social progressives often deploy arguments that substitute one set of natural facts for another. The point is that this yields an advantage to conservatives, since their preferred set of facts is the set that everybody grew up with)
Sunday, July 18, 2004
Abortion and coercion
But, as sometimes happens in the real world, things aren't so simple.
The population explosion in China (as in other developing countries) is really serious. If population growth doesn't get under control, and I mean soon, then the world is going to become a much worse place to live. Moreover, it doesn't look like the problem is going to solve itself, since the rational thing for any individual in a developing nation to do is to have a large family.
So what we've got is a looming catastrophe that can only be averted by reducing birth rates in developing nations, but we can't rely on individuals to make the choices that would bring about that result.
This is what philosophers call a Collective Action Problem.
One thing I don't know is how coercive China's policy is. Do the police show up in the middle of the night and drag pregnant women off to abortion clinics? Or, do authorities just do a lot of pestering and threaten not to give the family a voucher for a larger apartment? Such news reports as I've seen suggest the latter, but all of the rhetoric I've heard suggests the former.
I guess it goes without saying that the preferred policy would be to up the incentives for not having children, or for not having more than one. The hope there would be that people would then choose to limit family size of their own free will. But that seems so obvious that I don't know why China wouldn't do it, unless merely economic incentives haven't proved to be sufficient to outweigh the preference for a large family.
In such a case we'd have a true moral dilemma. Allowing the population to continue to grow would be indefensible, but so would any of the policies that might solve the problem.
Hey look, metablogging!
Last night I was talking to a bunch of acquaintances of mine at a bar (my drink? Booker's) and among the topics of conversation that people brought up were the fact that Miami is now the most cosmopolitan city in the world and the the idea that BushCo will try to steal the election by announcing the threat of an imminent attack on the afternoon of election day (just in time to suppress the working class vote in California).
So, basically, we were talking about things on Froomkin's blog. I just didn't know it.
Friday, July 16, 2004
Low hanging Google fruit
Tuesday, July 13, 2004
Scary stuff, continued
Got it? Okay, here comes the scary bit.
While nosing around the web looking for a quote from Curtis LeMay (for use in this post over at TheBellman) I came across this frightening nugget:
The Strategic Air Command (SAC) in Omaha quietly decided to set the "locks" to all zeros in order to circumvent this safeguard. During the early to mid-1970s, during my stint as a Minuteman launch officer, they still had not been changed. Our launch checklist in fact instructed us, the firing crew, to double-check the locking panel in our underground launch bunker to ensure that no digits other than zero had been inadvertently dialed into the panel. SAC remained far less concerned about unauthorized launches than about the potential of these safeguards to interfere with the implementation of wartime launch orders. And so the "secret unlock code" during the height of the nuclear crises of the Cold War remained constant at OOOOOOOO. [link]Pleasant dreams.
Sunday, July 11, 2004
All the right moves
The problem Yalom set out to solve, apparently, is how the queen went from being a relatively weak piece -- able to move only a single space, and only diagonally -- to the most powerful piece on the board. The change occurred in the late middle ages which, you'll recall, is before women's lib. That puzzles Yalom, and while she doesn't have an explanation she outlines three factors that she thinks might be relevant. First there is the fact that the Virgin Mary was venerated in medieval culture, second there was the rise to power of Isabella in Spain, and lastly Yalom notes that in southern Europe (the region where the change took place) women generally had more expansive rights than elsewhere in Europe.
I'm quite skeptical of Yalom's search for an explanation that looks for a strong link between European culture's understandings of women and the rules of chess. Keep in mind that two (or three, depending on how you count) other changes in the rules of chess took place at about the same time. First, the practice of castling was introduced and refined (originally castling took several moves -- you began by moving your king towards the rook and then the rook was allowed to jump the king). Second, pawns were allowed to move two spaces on their first move -- this led to the en passant rule, which is arguably a third change.
Maybe there are grand socio-historical explanations for each of these changes as well. I would argue, however, that the adoption of these rules, together with the increase in the queen's mobility, combined to make chess a better game. So, on this theory, the explanation for why the rules are the way they are now ultimately comes down to playability.
Of course, that's only part of the story. It leaves hanging the question of how the decision was made to try these particular changes in the rules. Was there a medieval John Nash who looked at a chess board and declared that the rules should be thus and so in order to attain strategic parity? Were a number of variants tried and these three settled on based on their success? Did some monk get the rules fortuitously wrong?
These questions may well be unanswerable. But it is here, if anywhere, that work like Yalom's might be able to tell us something. As theories for the changes in the queen's mobility go, I like Yalom's hypothesis that some bright social climber introduced a more powerful queen into the game in an effort to curry favor with Queen Isabella. Unfortunately, Yalom's only proof seems to be that this makes a good story, and that's just not enough.
Friday, July 09, 2004
- The New Republic quotes Pakistani intelligence officers who claim that highly placed figures in the Bush Administration have pushed for the capture of high value al Quaeda targets in late July -- a timetable that would eliminate any electoral bounce the Democrats might see from their convention. (via TPM)
- According to The New York Times the Defense Department's Freedom of Information Office now says that Bush's National Guard payroll records were inadvertently destroyed during a "project to salvage deteriorating microfilm" in 1996 or 1997. A spokesman said that he didn't know why the destruction hadn't been announced before.
- Tom Ridge has warned that al Quaeda plans a massive attack on the U.S. this year in an effort to "disrupt the democratic process."
Ridge's terror warning, like every terror warning I can remember, came at an extremely convenient point in the news cycle. That is, it came right after Kerry tabbed Edwards as his running mate. I'd really like to believe that the Department of Homeland Security is playing it straight, but when it comes down to it I just don't. I think Ridge had this non-specific threat in his pocket and was waiting for a politically advantageous time to announce it.
As far as the TNR story goes, Mathew Yglesias notes that you either have to believe the story, believe that TNR made it up, or believe that the Pakistani sources were lying. I don't think TNR made it up and I don't see any reason for Pakistani sources to lie. Supposing that the story is true, the question is: is the timing calculated for political effect? I'd like to believe that its not, but I don't.
What about the Bush/Guard story? Again, I'd like to believe that the Pentagon is playing it straight when it comes to Freedom of Information requests -- especially FOIA requests that don't have anything to do with national security. But I also remember that the Dept of Justice claimed a little while ago that it couldn't fulfill politically sensitive FOIA requests because its computers are too old (can't find a link, sorry). So I'm inclined to think that this is nothing but a politically convenient cover story.
I mention all of this stuff not to make some point about how evil the Bush crowd is but to make a point about me. In each case there's an interpretation available that reflects well -- or at any rate, doesn't reflect badly -- on the Bush Administration. But in each case I'm strongly inclined to accept a more negative interpretation.
The fact is that I just don't trust these guys even a teensy weensy little bit. One thing that worries me about this is that it's not too far from where I'm at now to the kind of cognitive space occupied by people who thought Bill Clinton murdered Vincent Foster.
This just in
Wednesday, July 07, 2004
Some colonial situations are inherently unworkable. Nothing France did short of genocide could have made Algeria into an integral part of the Republic. British policies in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, however, demonstrate that there were approaches that the United Kingdom could have taken to the thirteen colonies that would have led to a workable form of political association. [link]Ouch. So what happened in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand was short of genocide. I'll be sure to let the natives know.
I know this is just a blind spot, and I don't think it means that Yglesias is some terrible racist or anything like that. But I will say that Yglesias often remarks that his readers are further to the left than he is and I'd suggest that maybe some of that has to do with blind spots like this one. Just a thought.
Tuesday, July 06, 2004
Practical intersubjectivity for the sophisticated gentleman
I figure spiders play an important role in the ecosystem of my house. They eat bugs. Some people prefer cats or exterminators, but spiders are free and they don't sit on your keyboard when you're trying to type.
Spiders offer you very clear terms of cooperation.
"Let me live," the spider says, "and I'll kill bugs."
Thinking about spiders and nukes has got me thinking about Robert McNamara and strategic bargaining.
Strategic bargaining, you'll recall, was the centerpiece of the McNamara Doctrine -- the American nuclear doctrine that replaced Massive Retaliation and preceded Mutually Assured Destruction. The idea of strategic bargaining is that you would have a series of limited nuclear exchanges with a cooling off period between each during which belligerents could negotiate an end to hostilities. So, if the Russians nuked New York we'd take out Moscow, but if they only took out Dallas then we'd only vaporize Vladivostok.
It always seemed to me that the problem with strategic bargaining as a nuclear doctrine is that it makes it look like limited nuclear war is possible and might sometimes be a viable option. But, as W.O.P.R. taught a generation of school children, when it comes to nuclear war, "The only winning move is not to play."
Those pesky spiders have made me reconsider. I had always thought of military doctrines as kind of a crib sheet for generals and Presidents. You know, something they could use as a guide to action in case they got flustered during wartime.
This is dead wrong.
The point of a military doctrine is to communicate to potential enemies the terms on which you're willing to co-exist. Or not.
So the McNamara Doctrine said to the Soviets that we were willing to fight a limited nuclear war. We were willing, for example, to absorb a nuclear hit or two in Florida as the cost of doing business if we felt the need to flatten Havana.
The Soviets took a look at this, said "I don't think so, buddy" and Mutual Assured Destruction was born.
All of which reminds me of a joke a friend of mine told. He called the Iraqi insurgents the 'coalition of the willing.' Pretty funny, huh?
Sunday, July 04, 2004
Patriotism and the flag
But Jonah Goldberg's July 4 column is fine and dandy. Here are most of the good bits:
Meanwhile sometimes out of angry reaction to America-bashing, sometimes out of political opportunism and sometimes simply because no one else would bother conservatives claimed patriotism as the exclusive province of the right. In our defense, we conservatives believe in, well, conserving. And if upholding the goodness and nobility of the American experiment when others will not isn't conservative, I don't know what is.
The high-water mark of this polarization was probably the 1988 presidential election, in which the senior George Bush wrapped himself in the flag, while Michael Dukakis seemed to consider patriotism a lower priority than agricultural subsidies. In the 1990s, Bill Clinton recognized that patriotic people take voting a bit more seriously than unpatriotic people and focused his campaign accordingly. Today's candidates assert their patriotism daily, with John F. Kerry insisting that if you question his votes, his past positions or perhaps even his haircut you are questioning his patriotism.
Although I think it's absurd to argue that questioning a candidate's positions is the same as questioning his patriotism, it's all to the good that Democrats are fighting Republicans for the mantle of who's more patriotic. Indeed, something similar has been taking place on the academic left. Even the left's dashboard saint, Ralph Nader, can speak eloquently about the grand patriotic tradition of citizen activism that stems from the American founding.
What the left is slowly discovering or rediscovering is the difference between patriotism and nationalism. A nationalist gives his undying devotion to a people. A patriot gives his devotion to an ideal. " 'My country right or wrong' is a thing no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case," the essayist G.K. Chesterton observed. "It is like saying, 'My mother, drunk or sober.' " Although we can debate how much of an atrocity the abuses at Abu Ghraib were, one reassuring sign was the near unanimity of opinion here at home that such acts were "un-American." In the past, the left was so contemptuous of what America stood for that the idea of something being un-American would have been considered a badge of honor.
Back during the Afghan War a not-yet friend of mine sent postcards to all of the merchants in her neighborhood noting that they had recently begun displaying the flag and asking them what sort of symbolic message they meant to send by doing so. This struck me as an interesting thing to do and I talked to her about it at some length. She was, more than most of the merchants, aware of atrocities and abuses that had been perpetrated by conspicuously flag-waving Americans. Because she had this knowledge and expressed it to those merchants who agreed to discuss the matter with her, it was pretty widely assumed that she was a frothing America hater.
Her position as she explained it to me, however, seemed more complex. She wanted to make a distinction similar to Goldberg's between patriotism and nationalism. The difficulty, she thought, comes from the fact that both ideologies make use of the same symbol. So how do you use that symbol, the flag, to express approval of the noble ideals of the patriot without also expressing approval of nationalism? She thought this was a practical question that anyone who displayed the flag faced, and what she was asking the merchants to do was engage it.
It is, I think, a really difficult question. Part of the answer is suggested by Goldberg. That is, those who want to use the symbol for the purposes of patriotism have to take ownership of the symbol and repudiate its nationalist uses.
I don't know whether or not this can be done. The nationalist use of the flag is entrenched, and I'm not sure that entrenchment is avoidable. All the same, it's probably a battle worth fighting so long as the American nation is a going concern.
(Contrast with the confederate flag. Those who display it today sometimes claim that it has nothing to do with slavery or the maintenance of white privilege. Even if they are sincere in these claims, the entrenchment of those meanings is so thorough that they can't be expunged.)
Scary stuff
The Davy Crockett was developed to give U.S. Army units an effective nuclear capability against potentially larger units of Soviet armored forces. The Davy Crockett was designed in the late 1950's primarily for frontline use by the U.S. infantry in Europe against Soviet troop formations. The Davy Crockett, a recoilless launcher, was the third artillery piece deployed, those earlier being a l55mm piece designed to fire a nuclear round and a 280mm mobile piece, commonly called an "atomic cannon." Nuclear-capable ground artillery pieces were gradually replaced by increasingly accurate, nuclear carrying missiles and aircraft.
The weapon system used a spin-stabilized, unguided rocket fired from a recoilless rifle. It's 51-pound nuclear warhead had an explosive yield of 0.18 kilotons (equivalent to 18 tons of TNT, with an added radiation effect). As a secondary design feature, the system could also fire a conventional high-explosive round for other use, such as an anti-tank weapon.
The Davy Crockett's warhead was launched from either a 120-millimeter (M-28) or 155-millimeter (M-29) recoilless rifle. The 155 millimeter version, which became the standard issue, had a maximum range of 2.49 miles and could be fired from either a ground tripod mount or from a specially designed jeep mount. The system was deployed with U.S. Army from 1961 to 1971, and over 2,100 were produced. [Source]
So, the U.S. had 2100 nukes that were, basically, infantry weapons. That's one hell of an RPG.


text:
18 minutes
Source: Out of print
Catherine Hanf Noren is the photographer and narrator of the original book on which this film is based. Noren came from a middle-class German-Jewish family, and she has created here a photographic essay that describes the members of her family before and during the Holocaust. Born in Germany in 1938, she and her parents escaped when she was only a few months old. Other members of her family remained in Germany; 26 were sent to concentration camps, where 19 of them died. Her only knowledge of these relatives comes from old family photographs.


text:
Lucie Cheng, former director of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center and a professor emeritus of sociology, died Jan. 27 in Taipei, Taiwan, after battling cancer for several years. She was 70.
A groundbreaking social researcher, Cheng served as the first permanent director of the center, from 1972 to 1987.
"Lucie Cheng was, without question, one of the most significant pioneering social scientists and program leaders in the field of Asian American studies, at UCLA and globally," said Don Nakanishi, current director of the Asian American Studies Center and a professor emeritus of education. "She contributed her many talents, leadership and vision to developing the UCLA Asian American Studies Center during a period when there was considerable opposition to our center and the other three ethnic studies research centers at the university.
"She also played an indispensable role in building research and other meaningful relationships within the entire Asia–Pacific region, most notably between the United States and China," Nakanishi said. "She leaves an enormous legacy."
Cheng received her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Hawaii, Manoa, in 1970. She came to work at UCLA as an assistant professor of sociology that same year.
Two years later, she took the helm of the Asian American Studies Center, which had been created in 1969, succeeding the center's interim director, Harry Kitano, another Asian American studies pioneer. She developed key areas of the center's programming and structure, including the master of arts program. The program has since produced hundreds of scholars, writers and community leaders throughout the United States.
Cheng hired many of the center's founding core faculty and scholars, some of whom still remain at UCLA. In addition to Nakanishi, they include professor of English King-kok Cheung, professor of history and Asian American studies Valerie Matsumoto, professor of Asian American studies and pioneering filmmaker Robert Nakamura, and urban planning professor Paul Ong. She also hired Russell Leong, editor of the center's Amerasia Journal, which remains a leading periodical in Asian American studies.
During Cheng's tenure, the center produced various publications that served as curriculum material for Asian American studies courses. They included "Roots: An Asian American Reader" (1971), edited by poet Amy Uyematsu and other scholars, and "Counterpoint: Perspectives on Asian America" (1976), edited by Emma Gee.
She also helped establish UCLA's first endowed chair in Japanese American studies.
As a sociology scholar, Cheng was a pioneering social scientist who helped place the field of Asian American studies within a trans-Pacific context. Among her many publications, she edited, along with UC Riverside sociologist Edna Bonacich, the classic "Labor Immigration Under Capitalism" (University of California Press, 1984), which situated the study of early Asian Americans within the context of international labor migration. With Ong and Bonacich, she also edited "The New Asian Immigration in Los Angeles and Global Restructuring" (Temple University Press, 1994).
She went on to serve as founding director of the Center of Pacific Rim Studies at UCLA from 1985 to 1990.
Cheng established a research team consisting of scholars June Mei, Renqiu Yu and Zheng Dehua and became one of the first American scholars to engage in joint research with Chinese universities, brokering fieldwork projects between China's Sun Yat-sen University and UCLA. Her team did research in the emigrant-sending area of Toison and published research on Chinese Americans' contributions to building railroads in Guangzhou and on remittances, language, bachelor society and early female migrants.
Cheng also grounded her research in the local Los Angeles community. She was an active presence at the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California, working with others to support programming and publications. Along with several UCLA Asian American Studies Center staff members, she produced a pathbreaking publication on Chinese American women in Los Angeles, "Linking Our Lives" (1984). In the book, Cheng portrayed the courage of these pioneering women, who overcame geographic, political and cultural adversity to settle and build their communities.
The courage to forge new thinking also characterized her life and work. Cheng broke new scholarly ground, linking Asian Americans to their countries of origin and analyzing their experience from the perspectives of class, gender and labor, Nakanishi said. Her research broke away from traditional motifs of assimilation and modes of acculturation that had characterized the conventional frameworks previously applied to Asian Americans.
After leaving UCLA in the mid-1990s, Cheng remained an active scholar on both sides of the Pacific. She served as founding dean of the Graduate School for Social Transformation Studies at Shih Hsin University in Taipei in 1997 and worked as a publisher and journalist for two newspapers in Taiwan, including the Lipao Newspaper, which had been founded by her father, Cheng She-Wo. In 2006, she established the Cheng She-Wo Institute for Chinese Journalism at Shih Hsin University, an archive dedicated to the history of journalism in China.
Cheng officially retired from UCLA in 2001.
The UCLA Asian American Studies Center and the UCLA Department of Sociology are planning a memorial/tribute. Details are available on the center's website or by calling 310-825-2974.
For more news, visit the UCLA Newsroom and follow us on Twitter.


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|CPC graphics on the Neo Geo
I still need to tweak the palette for the panel display, which is a juggling exercise on the FIX layer palette, but it's almost there. In the above, of the panel portion of the display, only the scrolls are the correct colour.
Looking pretty nice... just need to update the Amiga port for CPC graphics rendering.


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Things I think about and drawings I drew.
posted by Michael Arthur at 3:00 PM
I love how Bernie's pictures make me feel like I am right there right now! I could look at his pictures all day long. Looks like a great show.XOXOXOXO!
Lauren Balthrop is the new Stevie Nicks!
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All my drawings are drawn directly in ink; they are live reactions to whatever I'm listening to or going through or watching.
Lately, I watch a lot of music. I am currently the official artist for Joe's Pub in New York--all Pub drawings are drawn during the artist's set.
I've also been performing with Balthrop, Alabama--doing live drawings that are projected while they play songs about love and dead people. Click on the "Next Show" link to see where we're playing next.
If you want to know more about me, check out my web site: www.MichaelDArthur.com
View my complete profile


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HCL's Metal Banding (Steel Strapping) is a high quality band and buckle system, suitable for almost any sized application where superior strength is required. This steel strap is often used in sign fixing and other onshore applications.
Manufactured in Italy to the very highest standard the steel band and buckles can be purchased in small quantities online but for large volumes please contact us for discounted pricing.
For further information including sizes and drawings please download the Technical Sheet.


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The San Francisco Bike Coalition has been flooding Facebook and Twitter with posts supporting Proposaition B in San Francisco, a bill which would use a $260 million bond to pave roads. The population of San Franciso is 800 thousand, so that works out to a around $300 per person in the city.
Now if you got a bill in the mail for $300 so the city could upgrade its roads, on top of the city's rapidly growing budget presently at $6.6 billion (according to last night's mayor candidate debate at UCSF), you might be disturbed. It's extremely unlikely if there was a proposition asking each citizen of the city to pay $300 for roads that it would pass. You can even pro-rate it as you will, make those with higher income, more property, even bigger cars pay more and you'd rightly ask: "but I already pay taxes for a city spending money at an all-time record rate, even adjusting for inflation, why should I pay more for such a basic service?" The proposition would crumble and fail.
But bonds are different. People face them with glassy-eyed innumeracy, ignoring the number of digits, and instead evaluate them on a benefit-benefit basis. Paved roads? Sure! I'm for that!
Proponants argue that even with the interest associated with bond debt, the "interest" on potholes is higher. Leave a pothole in place for unit time dt, and there will be a cost of K dt. However, if you need to borrow L at an interest rate r, they argue, the payment on the debt, r L dt, is still less than K dt. So it's a good investment.
But the problem with this logic is it assumes you're in a position to pay back the debt. The interest rate is only the immediate cost of a bond. Bonds also contribute to the debt load of the city, and if the debt load gets too high, the bond rating for the city will drop and there will be a huge cost increment. This second-order effect can have an enormous impact on the true cost of a bond.
It would be as if I took out a loan to brush my teeth each morning. Sure, not brushing my teeth will result in much higher dental treatment costs, but the choice isn't between borrowing and not brushing. The solution is to get a job and pay for toothpaste out of my salary. If I were to rely on debt for my daily dental care, eventually the collection agency would come and reclaim the gold from my mouth (perhaps my best financical investment lately, but I digress...)
San Francisco needs the discipline to pay its bills. It's exponentially increasing budget, even discounted but whatever reasonable inflation rate you choose, is clearly unsustainable. Bonds are clearly not the answer. San Francisco Bike Coalition is dreadfully off-base on this. This is especially true because cyclists cause so much less road damage than cars and trucks, yet with a bond cyclists are footing as much, or in the case of commercial truck operators, more of the bill to fix it.


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An insight into the magic formula of how your online T-shirt store can deliver your client satisfaction is a time well spent. Is your store on top of the things that will make your clients coming back for more? If in doubt, check out this inforgraphics.
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Brock (right) scored a hat trick and forced a DOGSO to lead Maryland to victory (file photo courtesy of Ken Harriford)
There were just eight minutes left in the game and despite 17th-ranked Maryland being a player up for most of the second half, they were still down, 2-1. Then senior Hayley Brock took over.
In the 83rd minute she corralled a flip pass from sophomore Ashley Spivey, dodged around Wildcats senior goalkeeper Jami Kranich on the right, and slotted it in to tie the score. Under two minutes later she settled the ball in the left side of the Terrapins defensive end and charged forward. She kept the ball despite open players on either side of her, brought it toward the top right corner of the box, and again fired it in to give Maryland the lead. And as if that weren't enough, she drove in on a clearance by Maryland sophomore goalkeeper Rachelle Beanlands, got behind her mark, again got around Kranich and put the ball in from a tough angle on the right. According to the official scoresheet, the hat trick took her all of four minutes and fourteen seconds.
The late goals turned around a game that had not been going Maryland's way, at least not on the scoreboard where it counted. In the 19th minute, Villanova sophomore Reanna Marino pounced on a Maryland turnover, made a run down the right, and fired it into the lower left corner. Four minutes later Wildcats freshman Katie Martin outdueled sophomore defender Erika Nelson to a ball over the top. Beanlands could have come out and likely stopped the whole business in its tracks but uncharacteristically stayed back until Martin was through. She then came out, but that just gave Martin the chance to get around her and put the ball away.
Maryland got one back in the 40th minute when junior Cory Ryan took a ball from sophomore Shannon Collins, drove to the end line, and then fired it to her right from what seemed like an impossible angle, but somehow it slipped between Kranich and the near post.
At the half the score was 2-1 in favor of the visitors despite the home team outshooting them 10-2, with Kranich – who's played for the US U-20 and U-23 national teams – called upon to make four saves.
Maryland came out strong to start the second half. Six minutes gone, and it looked like an instant replay of Villanova's second goal, though with the teams reversed, as Brock dueled with Wildcats junior defender Kathryn Rayner and got past her. She was coming in open on goal when Rayner tripped her from behind just outside the box. No one was surprised when center referee Peter Dhima reached into his pocket, but there was surprise even from the home staff when the card that came out was red, not yellow. Even though sophomore Erika Joab's free kick went just high, it seemed inevitable that Maryland would score enough against their shorthanded opposition to come back and win, particularly given NCAA's rules about ties and overtime.
However, a combination of Maryland inconsistency, strong defensive play by the Wildcats – including a Lillyesque header clearance off the line by sophomore Hayley Wilson – and heroics from Kranich – most notably on a point-blank toe-poke redirect from freshman Lauren Berman on a feed from Spivey – made the suspense last until Brock started her heroics with under eight minutes to go. Kranich would finish with eight saves to Beanlands' one, with Maryland firing 22 shots in all to Villanova's 4.
Maryland stays at home to play George Mason on Friday and Navy on Sunday, with both games at 7, then heads out west to play Santa Clara and Stanford the following weekend.
Villanova, by contrast, plays on the road that weekend, Friday at 7 against Drexel, and Sunday at 1 against Lehigh.


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Monday, January 25, 2010
Comic Cuts: 2009 Wrap Party
What they don't mention is that if Watchmen accounts for a million, that still leaves increases of over £500,000 spread across the rest of its output, some of which was admittedly Watchmen-related. But hopefully a good sign.
The best-selling comics'-related book was, of course, the Beano Annual, with sales of 227,949. The new year deep discounting will boost that number in January 2010, as it will have for all annuals.
In other annual-related news, Pedigree had 24 titles break the £50,000 barrier in 2009, up from 18 in 2008, and showed a growth in revenue of 42%, reaching £5.26 million in 2009. Their leading titles were X-Factor and WWE and, although I've not found precise figures, 155,000 and 115,000 respectively are probably in the right ballpark.
Egmont's biggest selling annual was Hannah Montana, with a total sale in the region of 157,000, a long way down on last year's big seller, High School Musical, which probably sold around 260,000.
I've no figures for magazine sales in 2009 as the Audit Bureau of Circulations website now requires a subscription to access figures. Oddly enough, this now makes D. C. Thomson—traditionally seen as the most secretive of British publishers when it came to circulation information—the easiest to find figures for. Circulation figures relating to the period January to June 2009 show that The Beano sold an average 53,964 copies a week, Dandy Xtreme 20,403 a fortnight and Beano Max 42,565 a month. All three saw changes in comparison to the previous six monthly figures (covering July to December 2008), The Beano down almost 8,000 (a drop of 12.8%), Dandy Xtreme down by 6,000 (-23.6%) and BeanoMax actually seeing a small rise, up 2.6%. With the Commando books selling approximately 40,000 a month (Thomson's own figure for 2008, so possibly out of date), it is easy to see that comics—always considered a minor part of Thomson's output, even in the heady days of sales in the millions—would now be little more than a sideline for D. C. Thomson were it not for the sales of annuals. The Beano's weekly sale pales in comparison to Thomson's other famous weekly magazine, The People's Friend, which continues to sell 313,711 per issue.
The most interesting experiment of the year was Egmont's four specials, something I hope has proven successful (although I had some problems getting hold of the Misty Special). It might lead to more experiments on the newsstand in the future. The number of reprint books was down on 2008, primarily due to projects delayed at Titan and the low number of titles put out by Prion. The 2010 titles, from Prion at least, are likely to be slimmer and cheaper in the hope of broadening their appeal and getting them into shops that have previously not taken them. With any luck, the economy will pick up and we will start to see more titles planned for 2011.
4 comments:
- Mike WJan 25, 2010, 3:34:00 PM
For years, the Rupert Annual was up at the top of the best sellers' list with The Beano and The Dandy. Now it appears to have completely dropped off the radar - any news of it?ReplyDelete
- AnonymousJan 25, 2010, 7:08:00 PM
It's a nosy, rude and invading question I know but I've always wondered what kind of ongoing payment the royalties from the Watchmen graphic novel provide Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons with these days?ReplyDelete
What percentage of the final sale price would you reckon they both receive, Steve? 1% each? 2%? More?
As Arthur Daley would no doubt say, it's been a "nice little earner"!
To be perfectly honest, I'd hope it's more than 1-2% but I have no idea of the real figure on what is effectively a foreign edition of the book (as it was originally published in the USA).ReplyDelete
I've not found any figures at all for Rupert Annual but my resources are very limited. I'd love to be able to supply more accurate info. but Nielsen (like ABC nowadays) only supply info. to subscribers.


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Day 1: Life After Adjunct
I have been transitioning from an Adjunct Professor of Art into a full-time Ceramic Studio Artist for several months now. The day has finally come when grades have been submitted, keys have been handed in, my office and supplies have been moved back home and studio work begins in earnest. I've been thinking about this work for so long I just want to burst. It may not seem very exciting. I made coffee mugs all day, but I made all day. I made things I like with my hands.
I even made an impromptu sculpture that I was very pleased with.
There are people out there making a living from their studio work. If they can do it, so can I.
You will have questions, I'm sure. Who am I talking to? Good question. I will have questions. I may use this space to ask and answer my own questions in a way that may reach others. I think the teacher in my heart (who has just settled down for a nap) needs an outlet to continue communicating.


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Valence Industries Limited: Australian Graphite Producer Places Rights Issue Shortfall
January 30, 2014 (Source: Valence Industries) — Valence Industries Limited (ASX:VXL) is pleased to announce that it has successfully placed the remainder of the shortfall available under the recent rights issue undertaken by the Company. The shortfall placement will raise a further $3.40 million (before costs) to fund the Company's activities as outlined in the Prospectus. With completion of the shortfall placement, the Company's Placement and Rights Issue is now fully subscribed, raising a total of approximately $10.14 million before costs.
Operations Update
The program for near term graphite production from the Company's Uley operations near Port Lincoln in South Australia is progressing rapidly. Valence Industries has mobilised further personnel to site and orders for the key plant and equipment components have been placed with deliveries scheduled over coming weeks. In the interim, site infrastructure upgrades are underway.
With this rapid development program, Valence Industries is pleased to announce additions to its senior operations team under the leadership of David J. Salari, P.Eng., Chief Operating Officer.
Ian McLean has been appointed as Valence Industries' Project Manager at Uley. Ian has worked on the delivery of a number of advanced processing and manufacturing projects around the world. Christopher Darby, Managing Director & CEO, said "We are fortunate to have secured the services of a professional of Ian McLean's caliber including his site team members. He brings with him proven leadership ability and the required experience in getting projects like ours delivered." Mr McLean has previously worked as global operations manager for significant mining, manufacturing and process operations and that capability is a valuable asset for the program at Uley.
The operations management at site has been bolstered with Valence Industries mobilising its experienced team. This program supports the phased development of the Company's established facilities as Valence Industries takes the operation off care and maintenance and restarting its graphite manufacturing and sales.
Get our daily investorintel update
Senior roles filled to date include:
- Construction Manager
- Site Manager
- Senior Geologist
- Environmental Manager
- Procurement & Logistics Manager
Discussions and negotiations with key cornerstone customers are progressing ahead of plan. The Company is confident that customer demand will exceed available supply from the Company's planned production capacity. Christopher Darby, Managing Director & CEO, said "we expect to finalise formal sales agreements prior to commencement of production, which remains in accordance with our timetable for delivery early this year".
Under the shortfall placement, the Company will issue 17,024,453 fully paid ordinary shares at a price of $0.20 per share following receipt of cleared funds. Valence will also issue 17,024,453 options, being one free attaching option for every share issued, with an exercise price of $0.25 on or before 31 July 2016. The issue is made under the replacement prospectus (Prospectus) dated 15 November 2013 and is made under listing rule 7.2, Exception 3. This exception means that shareholder approval does not need to be sought.
The Company expects to receive the proceeds by the end of this week. Valence will issue the shares once it has received cleared funds for the entire ~$3.40 million. An Appendix 3B will be lodged with ASX upon the issue seeking quotation of the shares and options. The purpose of the issue is in accordance with and detailed in the Company's Prospectus. In summary:
- Taking the existing Phase 1 manufacturing facility off care and maintenance and for associated plant and infrastructure
- Engineering, design and metallurgical optimisation work
- Processing of previously mined material
- Costs of the offer
- Working capital
- Exploration related activities
About Valence Industries
Valence Industries (ASX:VXL) is the owner and operator of the only graphite manufacturing facilities in Australia located at Uley in South Australia near the regional centre of Port Lincoln. The company is bringing existing infrastructure into production with a focus on global markets across multiple graphite product ranges. Graphite production is expected to commence in early 2014, with plans for expanded production by the end of 2014.
Raj Shah has professional experience working for over a half a dozen years at financial firms such as Merrill Lynch and First Allied Securities Inc., ... <Read more about Raj Shah>


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I spent much of today working with a client that had accounts payable challenges. They were receiving more paper invoices than they could manage. I (being an EDI/B2B guy) immediately thought that converting the paper invoices into EDI or other B2B formats for electronic invoices might be the easy answer. I was wrong. The primary problem was not the numbers of paper invoices, it was a problem of what to do with the data on the invoices.
Many of these invoices were from small service providers and their services were not associated with a purchase order. As a result the Accounts Payable department struggled with the time and effort it took to track down the original person that requested these services. Once found, the person needed to review the details of the invoice and approve it. This process was manual and took huge amounts of time and effort from many different people involved in the AP process. Although the calories burned were a blessing, the problem was real.
The solution to the problem was to implement a "pre-authorization" process so invoices could be associated with a person and approval process. There needed to be a better business process implemented and an automated work flow applied to move the inbound invoices through an approval process efficiently.
The secondary problem was how to handle the large number of vendor inquiries and complaints that resulted from inefficient invoice processing. The solution was to get these suppliers of services on a Supplier Self Service portal where they could monitor the progress and status of their own invoices without overwhelming the Accounts Payable department with calls.


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Cast your filthy minds back to summer, and you might recall the suggestion that Microsoft was limiting Windows 8 RT OEMs till 2013, and that resultantly HTC was denied a place in the first wave.
Well, space year 2013AD is right around the corner, and that effectively gives HTC the green light to charge ahead with its Windows 8 RT tablet plans. Word on the street tells us to prep for two such devices.
It's none other than Bloomberg dishing the dirt on HTC's Windows 8 RT goodies, crediting "a person familiar with the company's plans".
Said person specifically promises a "12in device" and a "7-inch version that can also make phone calls". Oddly enough, just a couple of days ago, Martin suggested that being "first in line to release a 7in Windows RT tablet" might be an idea for Nokia.
Both of HTC's Windows 8 RT tablets will reportedly be powered by Qualcomm processors. HTC specifically chose not to go for full-fat Intel-fuelled Windows 8 tablets on account of price, estimating that they'd cost "around $1,000".
We're not told when to expect HTC's Windows 8 RT tablets, only that'll they'll "debut in 2013" and boldly aim to take on the Amazon Kindle Fire, Google Nexus 7 and iPad mini. Er, and the big iPads.


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PSBMB Planning, 2017
A PLANNING MEETING was held on 19 May for Philippine Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology 44th PSBMB Convention. This is to be held on Nov 29 to Dec 1, 2017 at the Ritz Hotel Garden Oases, Davao City. At the meeting were Assoc. Prof. Annabelle Novero, Chancellor Sylvia Concepcion, Dr. Grace Yu, Dr. Frank Heralde [both of Dept. of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, UP Manila], with Dr. James Namocatcat [Mindanao State University-General Santos City], Asst. Prof. Cyrose Silvosa-Millado, Assoc. Prof. Aleyla de Cadiz, and Assoc. Prof. Lyre Anni Murao [all of Dept. of Biological Science and Environmental Studies, UP Mindanao]. See the photo here: https://www.facebook.com/UPMindanao/photos/a.523745071031432.1073741834.280108772061731/1542749402464322/?type=3&theater