"Sustainability, in a broad sense is the ability to maintain a certain process or state. It is now most frequently used in connection with biological and human systems. In an ecological context, sustainability can be defined as the ability of an ecosystem to maintain ecological processes, functions, biodiversity and productivity into the future [...]"
This piece addresses the best of engineering: through research of a material (or problem) and its implementation on a case-by-case basis, optimal results are produced. In this article, one learns about the serious CO2 contribution inherent with cement production. However with abundant research, solutions do exist which can even render its production carbon neutral or even negative, thus helping combat today's overwhelming problem of climate change. Furthermore, its approach by using different "cement recipes" to meet present conditions, emphasize the sincere understanding and engineering mindset of customizing a solution to fit distinct problems -- problems which are still under the same discipline. This framework, if applied appropriately, is the same understanding much needed to confront poverty or any policy issue: which require distinguishing the problem and acknowledging that each case is different, with each one requiring a different solution, much like a "cement recipe".
"Following this infamous statement made by Pope Benedict XVI before his recent trip to Africa, questions have arisen over the role that religion and morally-based policies have in the field of public health. The flippant yet globally resonant remark from Pontiff is just one example where evidence-based policy and programming has been trumped by the religious and moral persuasions of a powerful few [...]"
Next on view at Space 47:
Participant Observer
Susannah Slocum
Exhibition Dates: April 3 - 24, 2009
Opening reception: First Friday, April 3, 2009, 7 - 9pm
Susannah Slocum is an artist based in New York City whose photographic work is inspired by social science research methods. Her typologies utilize increased social interconnectivity as both a means and an end. Participant observation is a type of research strategy that usually involves a range of methods: informal interviews, direct observation, participation in the life of a group, analysis of personal documents produced within a group, self-analysis, and life histories. Its aim is to gain a close and intimate familiarity with a given group of individuals (such as an occupational or subcultural group, or a particular community). Influenced by this strategy, Slocum’s art practice is concentrated on photographic portraiture with a personalized twist that includes intensive involvement with people in their natural environment. Her formally straightforward images depict persons who share something that is not immediately apparent. Are they a group or fierce individualists?
Image credit: Susannah Slocum, Detail from Participant Observer, lightjet print, 2006-08
About space 47:
Gallery Hours:
Thursday-Friday, 12noon to 4pm
& by special appointment
info@space47.org
Free Admission
SPACE 47 is located at:
47 E. William Street (between 1st & 2nd Streets)
San Jose, CA 95112
info@space47.org
www.space47.orgmapSpace 47 is an independent project space that aims to foster new ideas and experiences, support artistic exchange and development, and inspire a larger community of cultural entrepreneurs.
gallery hours
during exhibition dates:
Thursday and Saturday, noon to 4pm
and by appointment
admission freecontact:
Upcoming: Stay Gold: New work by Shizu Saldamando
_________________________________________________
"Shortly after the first Harlem Success Academy opened in August 2006, it became apparent that sending notes home in backpacks, stickers on students, or sending information through the post were not going to achieve the desired communication and parental involvement results. Harlem Success Academy determined it needed a technology partner to bridge the gap and help students, teachers, parents and administrators create an environment of success for the children attending the school [...] By implementing an SMS program for parents and teachers to stay connected regarding information, homework, events and general expectations, the technology revolution in the Harlem Success Academy has greatly assisted in the school�’s success."
"The Ugandan government, academia and NGOs need to change their attitudes towards customary law if rural women are to have equal rights to land, argue Judy Adoko and Simon Levine, from the Land and Equity Movement in Uganda"
"The study, a randomized clinical trial published Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine, assigned more than 3,000 uncircumcised Ugandan men who were not infected with H.S.V.-2 to undergo immediate circumcision or to be circumcised 24 months from the start of the investigation. A subgroup was similarly evaluated for H.P.V. infection.
At 24 months, 114 men of the men initially circumcised and 153 of the noncircumcised tested positive for H.S.V.-2. After controlling for various health and behavioral factors, the researchers estimated that circumcised men had a 25 percent reduced risk of infection. The results do not apply to their partners."
"Part sustainable water company, part art project, part philanthropic project, and completely curious. Boxed Water Is Better, is a boxed water company.
Started with the simple idea of creating a new bottled water brand that is kinder to the environment and gives back a bit - we found that it shouldn't be bottled at all, but instead, boxed. So we looked to the past for inspiration in the century old beverage container and decided to keep things simple, sustainable, and beautiful."
"When, on this Saturday on 28 March 2009 from 8:30-9:30 pm local time, people around the world switch off the lights, they will be participating in Earth Hour. Created and organized by the World Wildlife Fund, the goal is to raise awareness about the climate crisis and how it's affecting the world we live in. For one hour, with the participation of millions, Earth Hour is an effort to help push critical legislation that pertains to the global climate treaty. This year Human Scale is joining to help the cause as well. Click here for more information about Earth Hour and sign up to be apart of this amazing effort."
Like a dozen or so other cities across the nation, Fresno is dealing with an unhappy déjà vu: the arrival of modern-day Hoovervilles, illegal encampments of homeless people that are reminiscent, on a far smaller scale, of Depression-era shanty towns. At his news conference on Tuesday night, President Obama was asked directly about the tent cities and responded by saying that it was “not acceptable for children and families to be without a roof over their heads in a country as wealthy as ours.”
While encampments and street living have always been a part of the landscape in big cities like Los Angeles and New York, these new tent cities have taken root — or grown from smaller homeless enclaves as more people lose jobs and housing — in such disparate places as Nashville, Olympia, Wash., and St. Petersburg, Fla.
After reading the article on the founding of Brazil’s health care system, I looked to Brazil for examples of progressive policies that have sought to scale up slum improvements. In “Rio de Janeiro to spend US$1 billion on
innovative slum improvement programme”, the author details the steps taken under the program Favela-Bairro, which has actually inspired similar programs in other Latin American cities. In “Closing the divide between those who
are starving and those who waste food”, programs to combat food insecurity in Belo Horizonte, Brazil are described with particular emphasis on poor residents living in slums.
In the article, “Slums are ‘Economically Rational’”, by the Affordable Housing Institute, the author shows how slums inevitably arise in the absence of government intervention and the process by which the private housing sector contributes to their creation.
On a side note, before policy makers devise new programs for scaling up slum improvements, it could be helpful to analyze the successes of slum communities in different sectors, like security and the environment. The article, “What Slums Can Teach Us About Sustainability”, briefly shows how slums are also learning opportunities for urban planners.
The goal is to sow wildflower seeds on every single patch of abandoned soil in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bed Stuy this April. By early summer, there should be so many wildflowers growing in the untended treepits, vacant lots, half-built developments and other tiny scraps of neglected soil in Bed Stuy that the whole neighborhood effectively turns into a meadow.
Wildflower seeds are very easy to plant, and they grow well in poor, shallow soils without human attention, so it's going to be relatively easy to make a huge visual impact over the entire neighborhood. The profusion of wildflowers that result from this minimal effort will be relentless and visually unifying, and this relentless unity of wildflowers will make anyone walking down the street feel good.
The Meadow is going to work because it doesn't work against what Bed Stuy is. Bed Stuy's low-slung, long-blocked character and the expansiveness of its territory are not like an urban jungle or forest as much as an urban prairie. The effort of the meadow is another chapter in the community gardening history of the neighborhood. Wildflowers are beautiful in the way that the architecture here is beautiful, the way the people who go out of their way to say good morning on the streets here are beautiful. And wildflowers are tough enough to grow wherever the seeds are cast.
Find out more here."...Now, thanks to a health kit disseminated by UNDP and known as the 'Maama' Kit, the number of medically-supervised deliveries in Ruhiira has increased to 75%, up from 8% in December 2007. That's 263 births per months, up from 51.
The 'Maama' Kits are designed to help women deliver in clean conditions. They include baby sheets; soap; pads; gloves; a surgical blade; a sterilized chord for tying the umbilical cord and rehydration packages.
The pack reduces the risk of vaginal and eye infections, tetanus and diarrhea, all of which may occur in bad hygiene conditions [...]"
"The government of Haiti is being urged to take action to stop the wave of sexual violence that is blighting the lives of young women in one of the world's poorest nations."
"The design competition at this year's Greener Gadgets Conference showcased ten innovative finalists, each utilizing technology to facilitate greener lifestyles. By and large, the majority of the conceptual gadgets functioned on energy 'metering' ideas, including the winning design, The Tweet-a-Watt (pictured above right), a power meter that automatically publishes your power usage wirelessly via Twitter for friends and followers to see. The Power-Hog took second place with its own unique 'metering' concept: it's an energy-consumption piggy bank that teaches kids the monetary value of electricity [...]"
"Freedom From Want is BRAC’s incredible adventure story that takes you from distant villages in Bangladesh to war-torn Southern Sudan as told by Ian Smillie, a consultant and writer with over 30 years of development experience."
"Neuroscience has shown that brains develop faster between birth and age 3 than during any other period of life, and that social interaction fosters such neurological development. So, if babies spend a significant amount of time during their early years in forward-facing strollers, might it impede their language learning? [...]
Meanwhile, the findings already encourage us to think again about how babies experience stroller rides — and other forms of transportation like car seats, shopping carts and slings. Parents needn’t feel worried, but instead curious about the elements of the environment that attract their children’s interest. The core message of our findings is simple: Talk to your baby whenever you get the chance — and whichever direction your stroller faces...
"Most college students will admit to searching their couch cushions for extra coins to do laundry. But Jon McKinney's cushion hunt isn't about finding money. He wants to help epidemiologists identify what's triggering diseases like asthma in children, and he's got the backing of the Environmental Protection Agency."
"As I wrote yesterday, there were a couple paths that Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir could have chosen after being indicted by the International Criminal Court for his role in atrocities in Darfur. Let's just say he chosie the more confrontational of the two: Immediately after the decision, the President expelled 13 NGOs from the country, condemned the ruling as neocolonialism, and looked set to ratchet up his reign. Rebel groups in Darfur announced that they would back out of peacetalks, claiming that Bashir is no longer a legitimate negotiator. Fear about what comes next is palpable.
But what is most disturbing of all is how similar the Sudan situation has just become to that of another African conundrum -- Zimbabwe. Bashir is taking a page straight from Robert Mugabe's book, framing himself as a hero of sovereignty, victim to persecution by the West [...]"
The concept of the “living wage” as perhaps a more appropriate policy in alleviating poverty surfaced in a couple of the articles. I am attracted to this concept because it explicitly considers the family in determining adequate wage level to counter the disincentive in having children under our economic system. A professor at Penn Sate University, Dr. Amy K. Glasmeier, started a project that allows users to calculate the living wage of their home city/town. The “Living Wage Calculator” for New York City is the link here, but you can also change the criteria for your own home city.
I also found an article, “Do Living Wage Ordinances Reduce Urban Poverty?” (that can be accessed through CLIO) that showed how living wage policies in cities around the US modestly reduced poverty.
Hi, all.
I am very interested in this week's reading because I have been thinking myself how economics could approach poverty for a long time.
After reading the article of Blank (2003), I have been fascinated with the following two points. First, she described that poverty is present due to the social and political process that occur outside market mechanisms. This is not new for me, but I got interested that well designed market structure can influence the social norm and political structure so that we can reduce poverty indirectly. This claim leads me to recognize the importance of interdisciplinary intervention to eradicate poverty.
Second, the article proposes the importance of taking risk to balance the critical economist with the caring economist. It suggests that when not only researching a poverty issue but also implementing an anti-poverty programs, economist should take a risk to accept more type II error in statistical term, which means avoid inaction. Inaction does not only keep current poverty unsolved but also produce poverty in the future. I am deeply impressed with this view point because I did not know what criteria I should be based on. Economics values efficiency as a criteria. However, we should consider other criteria such as moral when we are engaged in anti-poverty program.
"For a glimpse of agriculture in a land of high-rise apartment buildings, busloads of New York City schoolchildren have come for years to the Queens County Farm Museum. There they have petted Daisy the cow, walked through the cornfield maze, ridden the hay wagon and examined pens and fields that seemed just like those of a real farm.
But over the past year, the museum has become a real farm. Since Michael Grady Robertson was hired as its director of agriculture a year ago, it has been raising more crops and animals, using sustainable methods, and plans to expand.
For the first time, the farm is running a stand at the Union Square Greenmarket [...]"
"More than half the world's population now pay to use a mobile phone and nearly a quarter use the internet, as developing countries rapidly adopt new communications technologies.
By the end of last year there were an estimated 4.1bn mobile subscriptions, up from 1bn in 2002, according to a report published today by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), an agency of the UN.
That represents six-in-ten of the world's population, with developing countries accounting for about two-thirds of the mobile phones in use, compared with less than half of subscriptions in 2002.
Over the same period, fixed-line subscriptions rose more modestly, from 1bn to 1.27bn, indicating that many people in the developing world are bypassing the older technology altogether [...]"
"It prides itself on being one of Britain’s greenest supermarkets, but when it comes to packaging, Waitrose scores surprisingly badly.
A study by the Local Government Association found that Waitrose had the heaviest packaging per shopping basket, although Lidl, the German-owned budget retailer, had the worst record on recyclable materials.
The report said that while the total weight of supermarket food packaging had reduced in the past two years, almost 40 per cent still cannot be easily recycled [...]"
"Many of you -- those who've enjoyed the magazine's book review section by the same name -- are already well acquainted with our dedication to bringing our readers the world's most noteworthy books, a mission we wanted to expand to ForeignPolicy.com. Only online, we're able to offer an expanded literary forum, one open to outside contributors, to our bloggers, and to you, our readers.
Here's the idea: We will regularly highlight a new book of note. For one week we'll bring you provocative critiques, reviews, thoughts, and questions from our contributors and bloggers (and of course the author). And we invite you to chime in via the comments section.
The inaugural In Other Words 'virtual book club' will look at The Gamble, the latest bestseller by our own Best Defense blogger, Tom Ricks."
"For the 4th successive year, 1 The Lancet and the Global Forum for Health Research are co-sponsoring an essay competition for young authors and researchers: Young voices in research for health. This year's theme is innovating for the health of all."
