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Bill Fulkerson

Gulf Stream System at its weakest in over a millennium - 0 views

phys.org/...stream-weakest-millennium.html

ocean Gulf Stream currents

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 25 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 25 Feb 21
     
    In more than 1,000 years, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), also known as Gulf Stream System, has not been as weak as in recent decades. This is the result of a new study by scientists from Ireland, Britain and Germany. The researchers compiled so-called proxy data, taken mainly from natural archives like ocean sediments or ice cores, reaching back many hundreds of years to reconstruct the flow history of the AMOC. They found consistent evidence that its slowdown in the 20th century is unprecedented in the past millennium; it is likely linked to human-caused climate change. The giant ocean circulation system is relevant for weather patterns in Europe and regional sea levels in the U.S.; its slowdown is also associated with an observed cold blob in the northern Atlantic.
Bill Fulkerson

COVID19 and the Indo-Pacific Decade | ORF - 0 views

www.orfonline.org/...-the-indo-pacific-decade-69356

decade China COVID-19 US

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 15 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 15 Jul 20
     
    Great powers rise and fall, shaping each transitional period of global power shift and its geographic concentration. Currently, the world is witnessing a profound transformation in the geopolitical arena of international affairs. For the past years, the pundits have been propagating the emergence of an Asian multipolar century, with a shift from the Atlantic to the Pacific realm. However, following the COVID-19 virus outbreak, this year marks the obvious manifestation of an Indo-Pacific decade, with the US, China, and potentially India being the main protagonists in an emerging competition. This time, it is the unfolding of regional centres of power, which create the delusive impression of multipolarity, while in fact a new systemic bipolarity between the US and China comes to light. In the post-COVID-19 global context, the virus has become a catalyst of multiple systemic changes, inducing ad hoc constellations of regional actors-shaped by their geopolitical and geoeconomic interests-in a changing global order with eroding multilateral structures.
Steve Bosserman

Jane Jacobs's Theories on Urban Planning-and Democracy in America - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...501104

democracy urban design ecosystems diversity neighborhoods

shared by Steve Bosserman on 17 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • Urban life was Jacobs’s great subject. But her great theme was the fragility of democracy—how difficult it is to maintain, how easily it can crumble. A city offered the perfect laboratory in which to study democracy’s intricate, interconnected gears and ballistics. “When we deal with cities,” she wrote in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), “we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense.” When cities succeed, they represent the purest manifestation of democratic ideals: “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” When cities fail, they fail for the same reasons democracies fail: corruption, tyranny, homogenization, overspecialization, cultural drift and atrophy.
  • I was encouraged to believe that simple conformity results in stagnation for a society, and that American progress has been largely owing to the opportunity for experimentation, the leeway given initiative, and to a gusto and a freedom for chewing over odd ideas. I was taught that the American’s right to be a free individual, not at the mercy of the state, was hard-won and that its price was eternal vigilance, that I too would have to be vigilant.
  • Her 1,500-word speech, a version of which appears in Vital Little Plans, became the basis for The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Her main argument was Kirk’s: Small neighborhood stores, ignored by the planners in their grim demolition derby, were essential social hubs. She added that sidewalks, stoops, laundries, and mailbox areas were also indispensable centers of community activity, and that sterile, vacant outdoor space served nobody. “The least we can do,” she said, “is to respect—in the deepest sense—strips of chaos that have a weird wisdom of their own.”
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Reduced to a word, Jacobs’s argument is that a city, or neighborhood, or block, cannot succeed without diversity: diversity of residential and commercial use, racial and socioeconomic diversity, diversity of governing bodies (from local wards to state agencies), diverse modes of transportation, diversity of public and private institutional support, diversity of architectural style. Great numbers of people concentrated in relatively small areas should not be considered a health or safety hazard; they are the foundation of a healthy community. Dense, varied populations are “desirable,” Jacobs wrote,
  • Madison argued that as you increase the “variety of parties and interests” contained within a republic, “you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens.”
  • “We need all kinds of diversity,” Jacobs concluded in Death and Life, “so the people of cities can sustain (and further develop) their society and civilization.”
  • In her comparative study of fallen empires, Jacobs identifies common early indicators of decline: “cultural xenophobia,” “self-imposed isolation,” and “a shift from faith in logos, reason, with its future-oriented spirit … to mythos, meaning conservatism that looks backwards to fundamentalist beliefs for guidance and a worldview.” She warns of the profligate use of plausible denial in American politics, the idea that “a presentable image makes substance immaterial,” allowing political campaigns “to construct new reality.” She finds further evidence of our hardening cultural sclerosis in the rise of the prison-industrial complex, the prioritization of credentials over critical thinking in the educational system, low voter turnout, and the reluctance to develop renewable forms of energy in the face of global ecological collapse.
  • In the foreword to the 1992 Modern Library edition of Death and Life, Jacobs likens cities to natural ecosystems. “Both types of ecosystems,” she writes, “require much diversity to sustain themselves … and because of their complex interdependencies of components, both kinds of ecosystems are vulnerable and fragile, easily disrupted or destroyed.”
Bill Fulkerson

Should I Major in the Humanities? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...567565

humanities education

shared by Bill Fulkerson on 27 Aug 18 - No Cached
  • Bill Fulkerson on 27 Aug 18
     
    "Right now, the biggest impediment to thinking about the future of the humanities is that, thanks to this entrenched narrative of decline-because we've been crying wolf for so long-we already think we know what's going on. The usual suspects-student debt, postmodern relativism, vanishing jobs-are once again being trotted out. But the data suggest something far more interesting may be at work. The plunge seems not to reflect a sudden decline of interest in the humanities, or any sharp drop in the actual career prospects of humanities majors. Instead, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, students seem to have shifted their view of what they should be studying-in a largely misguided effort to enhance their chances on the job market. And something essential is being lost in the process."
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