The bottom line is that no handbook relieves a professional counterinsurgent from the personal obligation to study, internalize and interpret the physical, human, informational and ideological setting in which the conflict takes place. Conflict ethnography is key; to borrow a literary term, there is no substitute for a “close reading” of the environment. But it is a reading that resides in no book, but around you; in the terrain, the people, their social and cultural institutions, the way they act and think. You have to be a participant observer. And the key is to see beyond the surface differences between our societies and these environments (of which religious orientation is one key element) to the deeper social and cultural drivers of conflict, drivers that locals would understand on their own terms.
This paper proposes an alternative approach to addressing the complex problems of climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions. The author, who won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, argues that single policies adopted only at a global scale are unlikely to generate sufficient trust among citizens and firms so that collective action can take place in a comprehensive and transparent manner that will effectively reduce global warming. Furthermore, simply recommending a single governmental unit to solve global collective action problems is inherently weak because of free-rider problems. For example, the Carbon Development Mechanism (CDM) can be gamed in ways that hike up prices of natural resources and in some cases can lead to further natural resource exploitation. Some flaws are also noticeable in the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (REDD) program. Both the CDM and REDD are vulnerable to the free-rider problem. As an alternative, the paper proposes a polycentric approach at various levels with active oversight of local, regional, and national stakeholders. Efforts to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions are a classic collective action problem that is best addressed at multiple scales and levels. Given the slowness and conflict involved in achieving a global solution to climate change, recognizing the potential for building a more effective way of reducing green house gas emissions at multiple levels is an important step forward. A polycentric approach has the main advantage of encouraging experimental efforts at multiple levels, leading to the development of methods for assessing the benefits and costs of particular strategies adopted in one type of ecosystem and compared to results obtained in other ecosystems. Building a strong commitment to find ways of reducing individual emissions is an important element for coping with this problem, and having others also take responsibility can be more effectively undertaken in small- to medium-scale governance units that are linked together through information networks and monitoring at all levels. This paper was prepared as a background paper for the 2010 World Development Report on Climate Change.
We’re living in a stylistic tropics. There’s a whole generation of people able to access almost anything from almost anywhere, and they don’t have the same localised stylistic sense that my generation grew up with. It’s all alive, all “now,” in an ever-expanding present, be it Hildegard of Bingen or a Bollywood soundtrack. The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.
I think this is good news. As people become increasingly comfortable with drawing their culture from a rich range of sources—cherry-picking whatever makes sense to them—it becomes more natural to do the same thing with their social, political and other cultural ideas. The sharing of art is a precursor to the sharing of other human experiences, for what is pleasurable in art becomes thinkable in life.
… the most inspirational statement I have read in questioning my role as an architect, the skills we are trained to enact as professional designers. This inspirational quote came from the least expected place: the first report to the US congress by General Petraeus, the chief US general in charge, in those days, of the war strategy in Irak. In this report Petraeus suggested to congress that after the experience in Irak, the contemporary US soldier should transform. Not anymore a high tech robot like figure armed with the latest gadgets that can dominate the Warfield from a distance. The contemporary soldier should instead engage the critical proximity of neighborhoods, transforming into an anthropologist, a social worker and versed in many languages! Now, even though this can sound scary, I thought, if the contemporary soldier is transforming why can’t we as architects… we need to appropriate the procedures of the other… not becoming necessarily anthropologists or social workers… but borrowing their procedures so as to operate differently in constructing critical observational research and alternative spatial strategies… In my mind, this is the most fundamental meaning of inter-disciplinarity: not only to share our points of view from the sanctity of our specializations, across the round table of discussion, as we usually do, but to actually contaminate each other with the alternative procedures of each other. In my case, at the border, is has been important to re-observe the actual hidden dynamics of socio-economic and political vectors embedded invisibly in the territory, learning from the actual conditions that have shaped the oddity of these sites of conflict. We need to challenge our reductive and limited ways of working, by which we continue seeing the world as a tabula rasa, on which to install the autonomy of architecture… we need to reorient our gaze towards the drama of such reality. This new realities, as Roemer Van Toorn told me, demand a new theory, a new practice.
… The report “The impact of Social Computing on the EU Information Society and Economy”, published today by the JRC Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS), finds that in 2008, 41% of EU Internet users were engaged in social computing activities through Social Networking Sites (SNS), blogs, photo and video sharing, online multi-player games and collaborative platforms for content creation and sharing. This percentage rises to 64% if users aged under 24 only are considered.
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P2P Foundation » Free Software and Free Culture in Brazil
The 20 minute video bellow is a passionate speech given by Brazilian President Lula da Silva about the importance of Free Software and the Internet at the 10th Free Softaware Internacional Forum, in Porto Alegre, Brazil - June 26th, 2009.
“The free software somehow is this, I say, it is giving people the opportunity to do new things, create new things, as there is no thing that guarantees freedom most than to ensure individual expression, allowing people to enhance their creativity, their intelligence, especially in a new country like Brazil”
Today, people with power and influence derive their power from their centrality within self-organizing networks that might or might not correspond to any plan on the part of designated leaders. Organization structure in vanguard companies involves multi-directional responsibilities, with an increasing emphasis on horizontal relationships rather than vertical reporting as the center of action that shapes daily tasks and one’s portfolio of projects, in order to focus on serving customers and society. Circles of influence replace chains of command, as in the councils and boards at Cisco which draw from many levels to drive new strategies. Distributed leadership — consisting of many ears to the ground in many places — is more effective than centralized or concentrated leadership. Fewer people act as power-holders monopolizing information or decision-making, and more people serve as integrators using relationships and persuasion to get things done.
This changes the nature of career success. It is not enough to be technically adept or even to be interpersonally pleasant. Power goes to the “connectors”: those people who actively seek relationships and then serve as bridges between and among groups. Their personal contacts are often as important as their formal assignment. In essence, “She who has the best network wins.”
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Vía metacool. |
How to Conserve Art That Lives in a Lake? - The New York Times
In 1972, a year before his death in a plane crash at 35, the artist Robert Smithson wrote, “I am for an art that takes into account the direct effect of the elements as they exist from day to day.” And with the creation of his greatest work — “Spiral Jetty,” the huge counterclockwise curlicue of black basalt rock that juts into the Great Salt Lake in rural Utah — he certainly put that conviction to the test.
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Preservation concerns about “Spiral Jetty” have arisen lately not only because of the work’s re-emergence from the water but also because of plans announced in the last two and a half years by companies to initiate industrial projects near the site. One is a large expansion of a field of solar evaporation ponds used to extract potassium sulfate from the water for fertilizer. Another is a plan for exploratory oil drilling …
Eco.acequia. 3er Premio. Concurso para la ladera del Vinalopó en Elche.
Nuestro proyecto, Eco.acequia, ha recibido el tercer premio del concurso para la remodelación de la ladera del Vinalopó en Elche.
La idea principal del proyecto consiste en recuperar la relación que siempre había tenido Elche con el agua del río y las acequías que riegan los palmerales.
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La eco.acequia crea un bulbo de humedad en el terreno arcilloso que riega los árboles de ribera que situamos en toda su longitud. El resto de vegetación que planteamos no necesita riego: esto lo logramos estructurando la vegetación de la misma manera que la vegetación que ya existe en la ladera, tal y como se explica en la imagen de arriba…
Scenarios are a powerful tool in the strategist’s armory. They are particularly useful in developing strategies to navigate the kinds of extreme events we have recently seen in the world economy. Scenarios enable the strategist to steer a course between the false certainty of a single forecast and the confused paralysis that often strike in troubled times. When well executed, scenarios boast a range of advantages—but they can also set traps for the unwary.
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Scenarios protect against ‘groupthink’
Often, the power structure within companies inhibits the free flow of debate. People in meetings typically agree with whatever the most senior person in the room says. In particularly hierarchical companies, employees will wait for the most senior executive to state an opinion before venturing their own—which then magically mirrors that of the senior person. Scenarios allow companies to break out of this trap by providing a political “safe haven” for contrarian thinking.
Scenarios allow people to challenge conventional wisdom
In large corporations, there is typically a very strong status quo bias. After all, large sums of money, and many senior executives’ careers, have been invested in the core assumptions underpinning the current strategy—which means that challenging these assumptions can be difficult. Scenarios provide a less threatening way to lay out alternative futures in which the these assumptions underpinning today’s strategy may no longer be true.
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Here’s a thought experiment: try to imagine what it would have been like to create Google before the era of the Internet and open standards. You would probably have had to pay millions of dollars to create the necessary software on a proprietary operating system. The effort would have required a huge team of people taking many years. Since Google is a search engine, it most likely would have been given to the phone company to design and run. If you were using X.25, the international networking standard (the Internet equivalent of its time), you would have been charged for each packet of information that you sent or received, in a network in which each network operator had a bilateral agreement with every other network operator. This total project probably would have taken a decade, cost a billion dollars, and not have worked very well.
In fact, the actual cost of building and launching the first Google server was probably only thousands of dollars using standard PC components, mostly open-source software as the base, and connecting to the Stanford University network, which immediately made the service available, at no additional cost, to everyone else on the Internet.
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Roger Martin: “The business world is full of two kinds of people—builders and traders. Over the past 20-30 years, traders have increasingly ruled. They receive the highest compensation. We need to tame the traders.”
Tim Brown: Paraphrase here—“We can use analytics to generate new questions, not just answers. Data visualization is very powerful.”
