Cable News Has Massive Information Resources, William Kamkwamba Has a Few Library Books. Who Makes Better Use?

I’m not one of those who get’s all his news from The Daily Show, I swear, but as Jon Stewart points out in this segment, it’s hard to get it anywhere else.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
CNN Leaves It There
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show
Full Episodes
Political Humor Ron Paul Interview

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But at least they are making sure Saturday Night Live gets the facts straight.

And then there’s this guy. Look what he did with some scraps that, quite frankly, a junkyard owner wouldn’t have bothered to save.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
William Kamkwamba
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show
Full Episodes
Political Humor Ron Paul Interview

He did all that based on images in a library book? It took me hours to set up the surround sound in my family room, and I had diagrams and specific color coded cables! I’m calling William Kamkwamba next time. You know all those leaks in the Big Dig Tunnels Here in Boston where I live, they should have just told William Kamkwamba what they wanted done. Remember the Mars Climate Orbiter that NASA lost because they confused Metric and Imperial measurements? Maybe William Kamkwamba should have taken charge. I’m exaggerating, of course, but this kid’s story does make you wonder, if he can do that with what he had, what would he do with all the benefits I have. As he says in the interview, what if he had Google?

The Need to Make Your Voice Heard is Urgent

This article from the Christian Science Monitor makes very apparent why those who support health care need to get out and make our voices heard.  It lays out the activities of President Obama to promote health care reform and of conservative tv personality Glenn Beck to prevent it.

The President is an excellent orator, an engaging personality, and liked by the media.  He is a good person to have on your side, there is no doubt about it.  But ultimately the White House does not control the media.  Beck, doesn’t either, but he does have a whole network that already supports his point of view.  Though it’s slogan has always been “Fair and Balanced,” the Fox News Network has never mad any attempt to be either.  So they have been quite helpful to an anti-reform cause.

Meanwhile, back in Washington Beck was broadcasting live on the Fox News Channel as part of something he’s dubbed “The 9-12 Project.” The occasion was a “tea party” march and rally organized by “FreedomWorks” to protest the “irresponsible government takeover of our nation’s healthcare, devastating new energy taxes, and trillions of dollars in red ink.”

Some 450 tour buses were expected to bring protesters from around the country. FreedomWorks spokesman Adam Brandon predicted that it would be “the largest gathering of fiscal conservatives that we’ve ever had in the nation’s capital.” Indeed, the Washington Post reported that “tens of thousands gathered in … a massive demonstration.”

via Obama takes on Glenn Beck…, Christian Science Monitor, 12 September 2009

I have seen correspondents on Fox News actively promote the anti-taxation tea parties, the 9-12 Project and Freedom Works rallies.  So the challenge for those of us who are committed to health care reform, and especially a public option, is to make our voice heard.  How, I’m not so sure.  But I can think of a few things.  Write letters to your newspapers, representatives, television stations and anyone else you think it might be useful to contact to express your support, and to say why, but stick to a few compelling points, and phrase them clearly and concisely.
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Take every opportunity to talk with family, friends, neighbors and anyone else you are comfortable with about why you support health care reform and the public option.

Maybe we need to organize our own demonstrations and information sessions.

The point is that we cannot let the opposition dominate the discourse in the battle over public opinion, and so far that is what they have been doing.

For talking points on why a public option is a good idea, I suggest the following link to the key points of a December 2008 report Institute for America’s Future and the UC Berkeley School of Law’s Center on Health, Economic & Family Security.  Any other suggestions?

Prescription for Change

The site Prescription for Change summarizes what is at stake in the health care debate pretty well.

When Congress returns in September to work on health reform, let’s remind them what’s really at stake – your health, your financial peace of mind, and your freedom.

How’s that? Without real health reform, you could lose your health insurance because of a layoff, go bankrupt due to medical bills, or be forced to give up dreams of starting a business or a better education because you have no access to affordable health insurance.

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Wellesley College teams with Olin, Babson to offer new curricula – The Boston Globe

This an interesting story about a collaboration between three colleges in Wellesley, MA.  This is how institutions with complementary strengths consolidate them to the advantage of the group.  It so happens that these three colleges are in close geographical proximity but with very distinct academic programs.

WELLESLEY – Wellesley College will launch a unique collaboration this fall with two neighboring schools with very different missions, as part of an effort to offer students from each of the colleges a more diverse educational experience at little additional cost.

At a time when many colleges have been forced to cut back and reevaluate what they offer, the elite liberal arts school for women has found common ground with Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, a tiny school just 7 years old, and Babson College, a business school with an entrepreneurial bent.

Under the new partnership, faculty will jointly develop programs designed to equip students to tackle major world problems, such as energy supply and national security, from different academic perspectives, said Wellesley’s president, Kim Bottomly. The triumvirate will give undergraduates expanded educational opportunities through new academic programs that none of the schools could afford on its own.
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“No institution alone can effectively aspire to a general level of excellence in today’s world,’’ said Leonard Schlesinger, president of Babson. “I don’t care if you’re Harvard. There just aren’t the resources with which to do it.’’

Amid bleak economic times, the new model is drawing the attention of higher education officials and policy makers concerned about rising tuition costs, said Richard Doherty, president of the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities in Massachusetts.

via Wellesley College teams with Olin, Babson to offer new curricula – The Boston Globe.

New Poll Shows That People Like Expressing Opinions in Polls

Here is yet another funny post from the Indecision Forever blog.  But it’s laughter to keep from crying.  Because the statistic below isn’t part of the joke.  It’s real.

39% of voters think government should stay out of Medicare, compared to 46% who disagree. Among Republicans, 62% say the government should stay out of Medicare, compared to only 24% of Democrats and 31% of independents who agree.

Yes, 39% of voters do actually believe government should stay out of a federally funded, federally administered program.  And lest we liberals get smug, it may be more than six out of ten Republicans who believe this, but it’s almost one in four Democrats, too.  That’s no great shakes, either.

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New Poll Shows That People Like Expressing Opinions in Polls | Indecision Forever | Comedy Central.

Programming peace. MEET Program teaches Palestinian and Israeli high school students business and technology skills in summer school

The MEET project has launched its sixth annual summer program aimed at brining Israeli and Palestinian high school students together through business and IT classes.

Some 120 students take part in the Middle East Monitoring the use of weighted therapy is important since children should not use the therapy for extended periods of time or buy cialis the other. The way company’s accounts are currently structured means there is a tremendous emphasis on current year earnings. generic cialis price She allows a viagra samples no prescription week for it to be returned signed by both the student and their parents would always clarify the doubts. They decided to thank Righraj for this and generic viagra from india went to India to his address, but found that nobody stays on that address. Education Through Technology program held in Jerusalem. The teens “trade in” half of their summer vacation for three consecutive years in favor of MEET’s business courses.

via Programming peace – Israel Activism, Ynetnews.

An online guide to following the health care legislation

“Health Care Reform: An Online Guide” by Timothy Noah, is a very useful, regularly updated to a continually unfolding story.

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There are links to the relevant Congressional committees, bloggers and media resources, lobbying groups, academic groups and think tanks and other sources.  It should help sort through some of the hyperbolic fear-mongering and unwarranted attacks from both sides.

Silicon Valley should step up, help Iranians

In a recent SF Gate Open Forum Post, Cyrus Farivar, a freelance technology journalist from California, looks at the ways in which technology has been used as a tool in the pro-democracy movement, official efforts to thrwart that, and technology developments that had made it more difficult for them to do so. He writes

But now that Iran has been experiencing turmoil surrounding its recent election, many Bay Area technology leaders finally realize the importance their technology and services can play in shaping world events. As foreign media have been kicked out of the country, information technology services suddenly have become a crucial tool to get and receive information from Iran.

Twitter famously received a call from the U.S. Department of State nearly two weeks ago asking the company to postpone its scheduled maintenance to suit those in Tehran’s time zone, rather than those on Pacific time.

Facebook recently added Persian language support for its iconic social networking site. Google took things to an entirely new level by launching its Persian version of Google translate, which allows for decent machine translation between English and Persian and vice versa. But why this newfound attention to the Persian language (and Iran) took so long remains a mystery. Google’s translation capability for Estonian even came online before Persian.

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So instead of superficial support, like Twitter users changing their avatars to green to support Iran’s reformist movement, Silicon Valley minds and money should pool resources as a way to help Iranians get around this information blockade by providing easier-to-use proxies, anonymizers and maybe even unfiltered Internet access through hardware.

Long-range Wi-Fi, 3G, satellite or other wireless communications devices from Iran’s neighboring countries or even the Persian Gulf could be used to get faster and better information in and out of Iran. One Arizona company, Space Data, even advertises the capability to use helium-filled balloons to provide Internet and mobile phone access. Much of Iran could theoretically be covered with one or two such balloons.

All of that may sound crazy, but not helping Iranian reformers at their darkest hour would be even crazier.

Read the whole article at: Silicon Valley should step up, help Iranians, the San Francisco Chronicle.

My Computer and War in Africa

It takes a lot of seimi-precious metal to make up the portable electronics devices we treat as throw away, and much of it comes from the more war torn corners of our planet. So this article from Time Magazine was food for thought.

When the film Blood Diamond came out in 2006, people were startled at the alleged origins of the precious stones from areas of bloody conflict and began asking whether the jewels on their fingers cost a human life. Will consumers soon find themselves asking similar questions about their cell phones and computers?

In a report released earlier this week, Global Witness claims that multinational companies are furthering a trade in minerals at the heart of the hi-tech industry that feeds the horrendous civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). (Global Witness is the same nongovernmental organization that helped expose the violence that plagues many of the sources of diamonds.) However, the accused companies, with varying degrees of hostility, deny any culpability, saying Global Witness oversimplifies a complex economic process in a chaotic geopolitial setting.
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The provinces of North and South Kivu in the eastern DRC are filled with mines of cassiterite, wolframite, coltan and gold – minerals needed to manufacture everything from lightbulbs to laptops, from MP3 players to Playstations. Over the past 12 years of armed conflict in the region, control of these valuable natural resources has allegedly become a lucrative way for warring parties to purchase munitions and fund their fighting. The Global Witness report claims to have followed the supply chain of these minerals from warring parties to middlemen to international buyers.

Read more in the piece by Elizabeth Dias, on Time.com. The Global Witness report, Faced with a Gun, What Can You Do? is also available online.

Pope Benedict on Economic Justice

This is a good article on the encyclical from the Vatican on the global economic meltdown.  Matters of theology are of no concern to me, and I often have opinions that are diametrically opposed to those of the Catholic church’s hierarchy on most other things.  When it comes to issues of economic and social justice, however, the Vatican often has good things to say.

Pope Benedict’s long awaited encyclical calls for a radical rethinking of economics so that it is guided not simply by profits but by “an ethics which is people-centered.”

“Profit is useful if it serves as a means towards an end,” he writes in Caritas in veritate (Charity in Truth), but “once profit becomes the exclusive goal, if it is produced by improper means and without the common good as its ultimate end, it risks destroying wealth and creating poverty.”

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via Georgetown/On Faith: Pope Benedict on Economic Justice – Thomas J. Reese.

The irony is that such a large percentage of people who cling fiercely to the Vatican’s pronouncements on sexual morality, right to life issues and such are also those most likely to ignore the social justice messages, whereas those who might find the social justice message appealing, are also likely to be bothered by the more puritanical aspects of their faith.  Ironic, no?