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This article not only suggests that education in excellent public schools is beneficial to end poverty, but learning comes in the form of new ideas in jobs. Workers are able to learn on the job and apply these skills to an even better, more qualified job. Furthermore, the article says that equality is another key to economic success.

Terrific article, Sophia. Did you watch the accompanying video? Pretty darn inspiring!

About a soldier who returns from Iraq and deals with some of his traumatic experiences by learning Arabic to better understand the culture.

In the past 16 years the World Bank has committed more than $2 billion to education in India. Attendance of primary school, which was the first goal, has dramatically improved, however secondary education is still struggling, so India is now turning its focus to that.

Overview of a project to improve elementary education in India I've looked into. Pretty cool because it mentions increasing accountability a lot as did the MENA article.

"The Story of Catherine's iPod"

The disconnect here is so weird. It begins with people digging in the mountainside with sticks, and ends with a tiny, sleek, lightweight computer that makes images flick past at the swipe of your finger and makes music. It's like magic, except instead of the instead of using "toe of newt and eye of frog" the world is making these products by allowing people to be greatly mistreated. Beyond educating people, as Arshia and Alison said, it seems we must either: find other materials to make electronics out of (although that doesn't strike me as very likely?) or pressure companies (who have the money and the leverage) to enforce better regulation. To follow up on Catherine's video, I put three t's into google and got an article about an investigation into the mining in the Congo (maybe Catherine has already seen this): http://africarising2010.blogspot.com/2009/11/tracing-3-ts-from-congo.html. It says: "Even though they found that it is relatively easy to determine the source of minerals based on different coloration and texture based on the source mine, there is insufficient regulation to make this work....Export companies are required to register with the government, but their method of determining the source of minerals they buy is to merely ask the seller whether their goods are from conflict mines. There is no system of confirming what the seller says."

This presentation kept shocking me. I was surprised to hear that basic parts of the iPod (the Three Ts) originate in the Congo rather than China. I was then shocked (and horrified) by the rape statistics. I had heard the statistics before, but not in relation to the acquisition of the Three Ts and production of products that we use. The story about the woman whose brother was ordered to rape her and then stabbed to death when he refused was particularly awful. I was also In summary, I was appalled at all the crimes that took place in the Congo- before the Three Ts even got to the factories in China that Catherine talked about. When Catherine started talking about the factories in China, I was again shocked at the working conditions- 100 workers sleeping to a room and clothes locked in a bucket with no visitors allowed (to protect the secrecy of Apple's product plans) while workers worked 15 hour days. The suicide reports from the FoxCon (spelling) factories were also shocking, as was the revelation that workers make just half of what they did in the 1800s. It was sad that the factory earns only $4 per iPod sold- while Apple earns $80. This presentation was very thought provoking- I had never assumed that Apple would be one of the "bad" companies with very questionable labor and humanitarian practices (a la Wal-Mart). Thanks for bringing it up, Catherine. I'm now thinking about it in a whole new light.

Bullet services to 'stay slow' during checks-investigation of "I've also learned from the investigation of the (Wenzhou) accident that many workers were actually working 24-7 (to meet deadlines), and multitasking can cause a series of problems," he said.

This article discussed the plans for reopening college football within the United States amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. I was drawn to the article because I was interested in learning about the guidelines and restrictions the United States was using to reopening recreational activities, such as college football. Through reading the article, I thought it was interesting that there was no coherent reopening plan, like with the NBA, but rather that different states and universities had very differing plans regarding what guidelines and restrictions will be in-place for reopening this activity. I would be interested in taking a deeper look into how other countries have attempted to reopen recreational activities and how their methods were different from those taken here.

Following up to the other comments on this post, I am curious how these universities expect to pull off this bubble, since there have been many outbreaks in colleges due to parties and general disregard for safety. I think this will only make an outbreak within college teams more likely and it is extremely worrying that there is not a unified plan to address these issues.

I agree with what Luke and Aaron have said. I think that attempting to create a "bubble" won't work for such large teams and at the college level. It's irresponsible of the officials to attempt to move forward with the season and risk the lives of the students. In my opinion, they should just scrap the entire season because they have no unified plans.

On Monday, Uganda reopened schools after the longest pandemic-prompted shutdown in the world. Schools have been closed since March of 2020, and despite attempts at remote learning, many students effectively stopped learning after classrooms closed and many students may not return to their education. Certain educators and critics claim the decision may have eroded decades of progress the country has made in regard to education. I'm curious what prompted the government to make such a harsh decision, and what impact it will have on the country's development considering many students are lacking two years of education and may never return to school. (Years of schooling are a part of the calculations for HDI).

I'm also interested in the long term impact of education in the shutdown but also on covid cases and how this move either helped/hindered recovery.

This article provides a slightly more positive outlook on the crisis in Spain. As property prices have fallen, people are much more motivated to buy property now that hugely discounted prices are being offered. If this continues to happen, it might help to solve some of the real estate excess that is occurring in Spain.

I think it will be interesting to see whether this turns out to be a positive for Spain's economy. It appears that with these new sales, Spanish banks are giving the same kinds of indiscriminate mortgages that helped kill the economy in the first place. It seems like banks would have learned their lesson and would be more cautious about this kind of thing. Hopefully there won't be another collapse, but this kind of thing seems to be asking for trouble.

Really cool representation of India's rise, but also the inequality when the article mentions the "unconnected billion"

It will be interesting to see what type of role India plays diplomatically as the United States begins to favor the Indian economy.

Interesting to see how globalization has affected indian society. From what we learned about their protective economy to their shift to a more liberalized one.

This article was incredible informative about the current major areas that are sucking up a lot of Japan's spending like social benefits and military spending. But it also gives a detailed outline on how Japan aims to combat their debt but I'm unsure if these predictions are too optimistic?

It's interesting to see how Japan's government is interacting with the market in an attempt to create a flow of money that will ease its deficit. The fact that they raised their sales tax is very interesting when we consider how Japan entered its recession in 1997 because the government raised the national consumption tax to 5% from. Has Japan learned its lesson and will it enter another recession again as a result of their new tax hike?

It is cool to see precisely which sectors are consuming the larger portions of Japan's budget through data. I also liked how Japan thought about balance their budget.

Seeing as how we just finished our discussions on the EU, this article is about Russia's request to formally participate in an EU committee. Russia wants to have more of a say in Europe, and Germany seems open to the idea (note that Germany is a major European ally for Russia). Medvedev, Merkel, and Sarkozy will soon meet up to discuss the idea. Germany carries a lot of influence in the EU, but I'm curious as to how the other member states truly feel about it.

Sorry, but I just have to make the distinction (with Larkin) that Russia isn't trying to join the EU, but rather requesting to participate in an EU committee. The summit that is occurring between the 3 leaders is about strengthening the EU-Russia relationship. The NY Times article I posted was about Russia trying to join the EU political and security committee. Now that the summit has occurred, here are some more recent articles about it. Hopefully they're more clear. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/19/world/europe/19iht-summit.html?src=twrhp http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/world/2010-10/20/c_13565527.htm

To Larkin's comment: Yes, that is very interesting, as we learned in class some countries join the EU for the fiscal benefits or the security benefits; however, they must join the entire EU and that is when we said the benefits that a niation get from the EU should outweight the things that the EU will make the country take part in that they may not want to. It's sort of funny that Russia would try to avoid the EU only in some areas.

The question I would have liked to look into is how the process my computer went through differs from the process a computer from apple or dell goes through

As Harrison said, I'm surprised that circuit boards and such are made by hand. I always assumed they were produced by machines. Maybe it's on a size scale where human work is better quality? For really tiny things, machines are of course much more accurate, and for big things it's more efficient to use machines. But on this scale, it's feasible for people to do it, and humans can perhaps do it better than machines can(?), since we can adjust things properly and take things case-by-case. Or maybe it's just cheaper.

Unfortunately it stops working for me after the first 40 seconds as well (I think that this is the end of the first slide). Like Greg, though, I am interested in the specifics of recycling computer parts and how exactly this takes place.