Here’s a report from La Republica on a paper Andrea Filippeti and I are working on. More details (in English) when it’s finished.
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Richard Evans, writing about the University of California system:
He suggests that this might have contributed more than a little to with the financial crisis in those universities, which has been seen in temporary salary cuts (which earn the nice euphamism “employee furloughs”) and higher student fees. He provides the gruesome graphic seen below. (Note: all from a website run by that Council of UC Faculty Associations – so no dog in the fight, right?)  University of California: the cutting edge of red tape Where I work we do worry a bit about future finances. To preview that future I naturally look to California, where I grew up, since we always liked to think of ourselves as leading the way in everything from psychedelics to electronics. And certainly it has been leading the way of late in the field of problematic public finances, so perhaps this is the shape of things to come. (A prediction I can make with more confidence is that somebody will write to say that this is not the shape of things to come, but what we have now. About that, I really can’t say.) Resource wars. On the occasion of the USA’s Veterans Day, Joe Romm reflects on forthcoming food and water shortages, and the prospect of resource wars. Good discussion, good links. That conflicts over food or other resources can lead to war is not new news, of course: it is in the history of every empire. Last summer in the New York Review of Books, Timothy Snyder reminded us that in the cases of Stalin in the 1930s and Hitler in the 1940s, most of the killing of civilians took place neither in the gulag of Siberia nor death camps in or near Germany, but in the wheat fields of eastern Poland, Ukraine and environs. Whatever the contributions of ideology and madness to those events, Russian and German desires to control that breadbasket had a big hand in the deaths of millions. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Britain kept food exports flowing from India, in the midst of famine; Mike Davis’s Late Victorian Holocausts gives a gripping account of this, and of the link between El Niño, drought, and famine. So when you think of climate change, don’t think of hot weather, hurricanes or dead polar bears: think of just how nasty human society can become when there is a conflict over food. Carbon dioxide and methane. Recent attention to the warming role of methane has led some in the denial community to use this – as they use everything – to claim that carbon dioxide isn’t so important. At RealClimate.org, Gavin Schmidt of NASA details the relative contributions of these and other agents to the problem. Electoral reform is back on the British political agenda, which is good. There are some very important things that the British state simply cannot do properly because of its present electoral system, and which it would stand a good chance of doing if it had a well-designed proportional representation (PR) system. Arne Duncan, Obama’s Secretary of Education, has announced a plan to provide states with money to provide to school districts which undertake certain “rigorous interventions” in schools deemed to be failing. The program is said to be based on that employed when Duncan was “CEO” of the Chicago schools. I don’t know, but I’ll assume that his rigorous interventions in Chicago were a success (Seyward Darby, writing in The New Republic, certainly thinks so) and that’s why they’re being used as a national model. Unfortunately, we can expect this new, federally-funded effort to be far less successful. There are four models of intervention on Duncan’s menu: Continue reading Principals as agents: “failing” schools and illusions of remote control Yesterday we visited Athens’ new Acropolis Museum. Not a beautiful building from the outside, but a terrific display space and plainly designed as an argument for the return of those parts of the frieze appropriated by Lord Elgin and now held in London. The argument is made through a demonstration of the power of context. Continue reading Museum and lost marbles A brief and cogent talk by Philippines legislator / sociologist Walden Bello. The FT’s report on the de-globalization of supply chains will come as no surprise to those who have read my book (especially chapters 2 and 15), he said smugly. If your view of international trade is framed by the dichotomy of protected national markets vs. global free trade, then bi-lateral trade agreements and regional trade blocs look pretty much alike: an in-between situtation involving liberalization of trade within small (two or more) groups of countries, beyond whatever has been agreed at the global (WTO) level. Standard trade theory evaluates both by weighing trade creation (within the group) against trade diversion (trade that other countries would have had with members of the group, had the bi-lateral or regional agreement not gone into effect). If, on the other hand, you see regional blocs in the developing world as instruments for the growth and empowerment of poor countries (h/t Norman Girvan), it’s a difference of night and day. The most visible aspect of the US military is its role as what Tom Lehrer called America’s “number-one instrument of diplomacy“. Whatever your views of it in that capacity, it is best not to overlook the fact that this very large, well-funded and technologically ambitious organization also affects our lives through its procurement and management practices. You know some of the stories: the invention of the Internet; bringing the production of transistors quickly to a commercially viable scale by mandating their widespread adoption; creating the ISO 9000 quality assurance system for use by its contractors – who, since they included many of the world’s largest corporations, passed them on to thousands of other companies upstream on the supply chain; or, if we go back a couple of centuries, roughly fifty years spent making the concept of interchangeable parts – until then, an un-implementable item of French military doctrine – into an industrial reality (for details on this last, see Hounshell’s great book From the American System to Mass Production, 1800-1932). So if the Pentagon really is shifting toward an open-source approach to software development, you know where to lay your bets. |
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Copyright © 2012 Frederick Guy - All Rights Reserved |
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