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Benjamin McKeown

Advertising and Global Culture | Cultural Survival - 0 views

www.culturalsurvival.org/...advertising-and-global-culture

culture HL TNC

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 26 Feb 19 - No Cached
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  • Author Janus Noreen No one can travel to Africa, Asia, or Latin America and not be struck by the Western elements of urban life. The symbols of transnational culture - automobiles, advertising, supermarkets, shopping centers, hotels, fast food chains, credit cards, and Hollywood movies - give the, feeling of being at home. Behind these tangible symbols are a corresponding set of values and attitudes about time, consumption, work relations, etc. Some believe global culture has resulted from gradual spontaneous processes that depended solely on technological innovations - increased international trade, global mass communications, jet travel. Recent studies show that the processes are anything but spontaneous; that they are the result of tremendous investments of time, energy and money by transnational corporations. This "transnational culture" is a direct outcome of the internationalization of production and accumulation promoted through standardized development models and cultural forms.
  • The common theme of transnational culture is consumption. Advertising expresses this ideology of consumption in its most synthetic and visual form.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • Advertisers rely on few themes: happiness, youth, success, status, luxury, fashion, and beauty. In advertising, social contradictions and class differences are masked and workplace conflicts are not shown. Advertising campaigns suggest that solutions to human problems are to be found in individual consumption, presented as an ideal outlet for mass energies...a socially acceptable form of action and participation which can be used to defuse potential political unrest. "Consumer democracy" is held out to the poor around the world as a substitute for political democracy.
  • Transnational advertising is one of the major reasons both for the spread of transnational culture and the breakdown of traditional cultures.
  • Transnational culture strives to eliminate local cultural variations. Barnett and Muller discuss the social impact of this process:
  • What are the long range social effects of advertising on people who earn less than $200 a year? (Peasants, domestic workers, and laborers) learn of the outside world through the images and slogans of advertising. One message that comes through clearly is that happiness, achievement, and being white have something to do with one another
  • In mestizo countries (sic) such as Mexico and Venezuela where most of the population still bear strong traces of their Indian origin, billboards depicting the good life for sale invariably feature blond, blue-eyed American-looking men and women. One effect of such "white is beautiful" advertising is to reinforce feelings of inferiority which are the essence of a politically immobilizing colonial mentality...The subtle message of the global advertiser in poor countries is "Neither you nor what you create are worth very much, we will sell you a civilization (emphasis added).
  • Transnational firms and global advertising agencies are clearly aware of the role of advertising in the creation of a new consumer culture in Third World countries
  • Television antennas are gradually taking the plac
  • tom-tom drums across the vast stretches of Africa. Catchy jingles are replacing tribal calls in the Andes of Latin America. Spic-and-span supermarkets stand, on the grounds where colorful wares of an Oriental Bazaar were once spread throughout Asia. Across vast continents hundreds of millions of people are awakening to the beat of modern times.
  • Increasingly advertising campaigns are aimed at the vast numbers of poor in Third World countries
  • As one U.S. advertising executive observes about the Mexican consumer market, even poor families, when living together and pooling their incomes, can add up to a household income of more than $10,000 per year
  • The use of television to spread transnational culture is especially effective with illiterates
  • By consuming Coca-Cola, Nestle products, Marlboro, Maggi, Colgate or Revlon, Ivorians are not only fulfilling unnecessary needs but also progressively relinquishing their authentic world outlook in favor of the transnational way of life.
  • In trying to be as white as possible, that is to say, in becoming ashamed of their traditional being, the Ivorians are at the same time relinquishing one of the most powerful weapons at their disposal for safeguarding their dignity as human beings: their racial identify. And advertising is not neutral in such a state of affairs.
  • Yet, the advertising of Coca-Cola and Heinekens portrays drinking as an individual act rather than a collective one.
  • Santoro concluded that these stereotypes held by children were largely the same ones to be found in typical Venezuelan television and advertising contents.
  • These results, while very tentative, suggest that the impact of transnational culture is greater among the poor - the very people who cannot afford to buy the lifestyle it represents. The poor are more likely to associate consumption with happiness and feel that industrialized products are better than the locally made ones. But at the same time they are painfully aware that only the rich have access to the lifestyle portrayed.
  • Virtually every child showed an acute awareness of the different access to these products by class.
  • Again, poor children more often answered that Nescafe is coffee, and Tang is orange juice
  • poorer children were significantly more likely to associate the luxury possessions with happiness than the rich children.
  • What political impact does the spread of transnational culture have on the poor for whom luxury lifestyles are not possible? How do they deal with the daily contradictions that this awareness implies? How much will they accept and how much will they reject? How can they maintain their own identities in the face of transnational culture
  • Benjamin McKeown on 26 Feb 19
     
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Benjamin McKeown

USGS NWRC Fact Sheet 2004-3126: Belowground Dynamics in Mangrove Ecosystems - 0 views

www.nwrc.usgs.gov/...2004-3126.htm

mangrove

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 21 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • Benjamin McKeown on 21 Aug 15
     
    "mangrove soils develop through a combination of two processes: mineral sediment deposition and organic matter accumulation "
Benjamin McKeown

Tropical Cyclones - 0 views

www.tulane.edu/...tropical_cyclones.htm

hurricanes hazards

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 17 Sep 14 - No Cached
  • In the western Pacific they are called typhoons, and in the southern hemisphere they are called cyclones.  But, no matter where they occur they represent the same process.
  • Tropical cyclones are dangerous because of their high winds, the storm surge produced as they approach a coast, and the severe thunderstorms associated with them. Although death due to hurricanes has decreased in recent years due to better methods of forecasting and establishment of early warning systems, the economic damage from hurricanes has increased as more and more development takes place along coastlines.
  • Warm ocean waters (of at least 26.5°C [80°F]) throughout about the upper 50 m of the tropical ocean must be present.  The heat in these warm waters is necessary to fuel the tropical cyclone. The atmosphere must cool fast enough with height, such that it is potentially unstable to moist convection. It is the thunderstorm activity which allows the heat stored in the ocean waters to be liberated and used for tropical cyclone development. The mid-troposphere (5 km [3 mi] altitude), must contain enough moisture to sustain the thunderstorms. Dry mid levels are not conducive to the continuing development of widespread thunderstorm activity. The disturbance must occur at a minimum distance of at least 500 km [300 mi] from the equator. For tropical cyclonic storms to occur, there is a requirement that the Coriolis force must be present.  Remember that the Coriolis effect is zero near the equator and increases to the north and south of the equator.  Without the Coriolis force, the low pressure of the disturbance cannot be maintained.
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  • There must be a pre-existing near-surface disturbance that shows convergence of moist air and is beginning to rotate. Tropical cyclones cannot be generated spontaneously. They require a weakly organized system that begins to spin and has low level inflow of moist air. There must be low values (less than about 10 m/s [20 mph]) of vertical wind shear between the surface and the upper troposphere. Vertical wind shear is the rate of change of wind velocity with altitude.  Large values of vertical wind shear disrupt the incipient tropical cyclone by removing the rising moist air too quickly, preventing the development of the tropical cyclone. Or, if a tropical cyclone has already formed, large vertical shear can weaken or destroy it by interfering with the organization around the cyclone center.
  • unstable atmosphere
  • his instability increases the likelihood of convection, which leads to strong updrafts that lift the air and moisture upwards, creating an environment favorable for the development of high, towering clouds.
  • Surface convergence (indicated by the small horizontal arrows in the diagram below) causes rising motion around a surface cyclone (labeled as "L"). The air cools as it rises (vertical arrows) and condensation occurs.  The condensation of water vapor to liquid water releases the latent heat of condensation into the atmosphere. This heating causes the air to expand, forcing the air to diverge at the upper levels (horizontal arrows at cloud tops).
  • Since pressure is a measure of the weight of the air above an area, removal of air at the upper levels subsequently reduces pressure at the surface. A further reduction in surface pressure leads to increasing convergence (due to an higher pressure gradient), which further intensifies the rising motion, latent heat release, and so on. As long as favorable conditions exist, this process continues to build upon itself
  • When cyclonic circulation begins around the central low pressure area, and wind speeds reach 62 km/hr (39 mi/hr) the disturbance is considered a tropical storm and is given a name.  When wind speeds reach 119 km/hr (74 mi/hr) it becomes a hurricane.
Benjamin McKeown

Japan's Rural Aging Population - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...537375

pop density ageing japan

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 24 Aug 17 - No Cached
  • , young people have been fleeing this rural village, lured by the pull of Japan’s big cities like Tokyo and Osaka
  • Tochikubo’s school now has eight children, and more than half of the town’s 170 people are over the age of 50
  • Japan is slowly becoming something like one big city-state
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  • with the majority of the population centered in an urban belt that runs through the cluster of Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya,
  • bullet train.
  • n 1950, 53 percent of Japan’s population lived in urban regions; by 2014, 93 percent did.
  • It is mostly young people who move to the cities
  • Bear attacks near settlements in Japan’s north are increasing as humans stop pruning back trees and maintaining their land. Wild boars have been ravaging farmland across the island of Honshu.
  • predicted that 896 cities, towns, and villages would be extinct by 2040. Dozens of towns will see the number of young people drop significantly, as the share of elderly people grows, he predicted. Overall, Japan’s population is expected to shrink from a peak of 128 million in 2010 to 97 million by 2050.
  • apanese towns are wrestling with dilemmas like how to run their governments with fewer tax dollars, and how to provide services for an increasingly needy population with fewer workers. To make this all the more challenging, governance is strained by the population decline as well: In Yamagata Prefecture, 45 percent of seats in the local assembly race in 2015 were uncontested because of a lack of candidates.
  • Other regions of the world will soon have to face these challenges, too. Just about every developed country is aging and urbanizing, though Japan is doing so the fastest
  • The reasons that Japan’s rural population is shrinking
  • Jobs are increasingly clustered in cities, and the jobs that remain in the countryside require fewer workers than they did half a century ago. “There are very few economic opportunities outside major cities,
  • Japan has few major learning centers located outside major cities, Mock said. That means as young people increasingly pursue college educations, they leave for the cities, and often don’t return.
  • “They graduate high school, they go to university in Tokyo, they start working in Tokyo, and they set up their lives in Tokyo and never come back,
  • Of the 500 or so teenagers who graduate high school in Minamiuonuma every year, only about 100 remain in the city after graduating. Everybody else goes off to college, and only 40 come back after graduating from college on average, the mayor, Shigeo Hayashi, told me.
  • the country’s falling fertility rate. Japan's fertility rate fell by a third between 1972 and 2015;
  • When a population is shrinking and most of that population lives in urban centers, that spells problems for rural areas like Tochikubo and Minamiuonuma, unless there is a lot of immigration.
  • The problem is not necessarily that Japan will run out of money t
  • someone needs to be around to provide these services.
  • Right now, the decline of these places is happening fast, within a generation or two. If it can be a more gradual process, perhaps then basic social services can at least survive for long enough to provide for the remaining residents.
  • One obvious solution to reversing, or at least slowing, rural Japan’s decline would be to open up the country to immigration
  • Just 1.8 percent of the country’s population is foreign-born, compared to 13 percent of the population in the United States.
  • But Japan is a country whose national identity is, in some ways, based upon racial homogeneity. Proposals to significantly increase immigration have gone nowhere, and polls consistently find that two-thirds of Japanese are against large-scale immigration.
  • And it’s unlikely that immigrants, even if they were allowed in, would move to rural areas where there are few jobs even for the people who want to stay.
  • In Minamiuonuma, for instance, city leaders talk about their newly-built global IT park, where start-ups can set up offices for low rent, and a business academy for people interested in creating their own business. They built a brand-new hospital and medical college to attract doctors and nurses, and are in the process of building a series of homes for active retired people in the hope that retirees will want to relocate to the city. Like almost every other shrinking city, Minamiuonuma sends brochures to young people from the region to try to get them to come home. But still, the population continues to shrink
  • Other areas are trying to grow the population they have by increasing the birth rate.
  • Niigata Prefecture, which is expected to be among the regions hardest-hit by population decline.
  • Niigata will lose 40 percent of its women aged 20 to 40 by 2040
  • Declining Birthrate Countermeasures Division
  • Niigata sponsors matchmaking events for its young people, and even invited a matchmaking company to come in and pair rural men with women living in cities like Tokyo. “For our division, one of the most important things is making couples,”
  • The fertility rate of women in Niigata has fallen from nearly four babies per woman in 1950 to 1.43 babies per woman in more recent years.
  • Niigata is focusing on making it easier for women to have babies and still work. The prefecture is giving certifications to companies that have good parental leave policies in the hope that doing so will motivate companies to be more flexible, but it has no real sway over what companies decide
  • reducing interest payments for families who borrow money to pay for their children’s education
  • But the prefecture hasn’t seen a significant uptick in marriages,
  • or in births.
  • When I asked them about supporting births outside of marriage, officials told me such a thing wouldn’t be acceptable in Japan. Even telling couples to get married doesn’t necessarily go over well. “We are the public sector. It’s difficult for us to say, ‘You should marry as soon as possible, you’re mature enough to have babies,’” she said.
  • Yubari, for instance, a town on the northern island of Hokkaido, which lost 90 percent of its population between 1960 and 2014, declared bankruptcy in 2007
  • Since then, it has drastically cut back on services such as public buses and snow removal, merged schools, laid off government employees, and cut funds for public parks. It relocated residents from public housing on the outskirts of town to apartments close to the city center.
  • In some places, adapting has meant that elderly people are working for longer
  • people who might have wanted to retire at 65 are still tilling the fields at 75.
  • “Sixty is the new 40. The question is, will 80 be the new 60?”
  • They’re most concerned about the disappearance of a way of life—that no young people will come to the village and learn how to farm rice without machines or how to weave cloth or make sake. “It’s difficult for us to give knowledge to the younger generation,” F
Benjamin McKeown

The effects of subsidies | Global Subsidies Initiative - 0 views

www.iisd.org/...effects-subsidies

subsidies resources

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 01 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • the benefits to society of that money, if it had been spent otherwise, or left in the pockets of taxpayers, might have been even greater.
  • heory shows that these depend on a number of factors, among which are the responsiveness of producers and consumers to changes in prices (what economists call the own-price elasticities of supply and demand), the form of the subsidy, the conditions attached to it, and how the subsidy interacts with other policies.
  • such subsidies tend to divert resources from more productive to less productive uses, thus reducing economic efficiency.
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  • Those who take a more benign view argue that subsidies can serve redistributive goals, or can help to correct market failures. But, as the public-finance economist Ronald Gerritse once warned, subsides defended on such grounds "may have externalities that we did not bargain for." Indeed it is such second-order effects that have come under attack by environmental economists in recent years.
  • any subsidies are defended as benefiting disadvantaged groups, or groups the politicians like to make us believe are disadvantaged.
  • tend to favour larger producing units. Recently, for example, the Environmental Working Group, an American non-profit organization, counted up all the direct payments made by the U.S. Government to farmers between 1994 and 2005 and found that ten percent of subsidy recipients collected 73 percent of all subsidies, amounting to $120.5 billion Analyses of agricultural support programmes in other countries appear to lend credence to the 80:20 rule - the impression that 80% of support goes to 20% of the beneficiaries.
  • environmentally harmful subsidies" they generally mean subsidies that support production, transport or consumption that ends up damaging the environment. The environmental consequences of subsidies to extractive industries are closely linked to the activity being subsidized, like fishing or logging.
  • Subsidies to promote offshore fishing are a commonly cited example of environmentally harmful subsidies, with support that increases fishing capacity (i.e., subsidies toward constructing new boats) linked to the depletion of important fishery stocks. In other industries, subsidies that promote consumption or production have led to higher volumes of waste or emissions. For example, irrigation subsidies often encourage crops that are farmed intensively, which in turn leads to higher levels of fertilizer use than would occur otherwise. Moreover, irrigation subsidies can lead to the under pricing of irrigated water, which in turn fosters the overuse and inefficient use of water. While many subsidies have unintended negative consequences on the environment, well designed subsidies can be beneficial when they work to mitigate an environmental problem. In the context of fisheries, for instance, these would include subsidies to management programs that help ensure that fisheries resources are appropriately managed and that regulations are enforced, or to research and development (R&D) designed to promote less environmentally destructive forms of fish catching and processing.    
Benjamin McKeown

Ocean Resources - MarineBio.org - 0 views

marinebio.org/...ocean-resources

biotic abiotic ocean coasts resources

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 16 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • Humans began to mine the ocean floor for diamonds, gold, silver, metal ores like manganese nodules and gravel mines in the 1950's when the company Tidal Diamonds was established by Sam Collins.
  • Diamonds are found in greater number and quality in the ocean than on land, but are much harder to mine. When diamonds are mined, the ocean floor is dredged to bring it up to the boat and sift through the sediment for valuable gems. The process is difficult as sediment is not easy to bring up to the surface, but will probably become a huge industry once technology evolves to solve the logistical problem.
  • Metal compounds, gravels, sands and gas hydrates are also mined in the ocean. Mining of manganese nodules containing nickel, copper and cobalt began in the 1960's and soon after it was discovered that Papua New Guinea was one of the few places where nodules were located in shallow waters rather than deep waters. Although manganese nodules could be found in shallow waters in significant quantities, the expense of bringing the ore up to the surface proved to be expensive. Sands and gravels are often mined for in the United States and are used to protect beaches and reduce the effects of erosion.
Benjamin McKeown

The Senate GOP is naming its two most anti-immigrant members to run its immigration sub... - 0 views

www.vox.com/...sessions-vitter-immigration

migration HL response anti-globalization

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 18 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) has just been named the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on immigration. Sessions is the most outspoken opponent of immigration in the Senate — not just unauthorized immigration, but legal immigration as well.
  • Congressional Republicans in both chambers are relatively united in wanting to shut down President Obama's 2014 executive actions on immigration, which would allow millions of unauthorized immigrants to apply for temporary protection from deportation.
  • what they're for: border security and expanded legal immigration for skilled workers.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • That's because he doesn't want to increase any immigration, skilled or not, legal or unauthorized
  • put strict limits on the number of immigrants let into the country.
  • harder for them to claim that they have a plan for reform of their own.
Benjamin McKeown

[Letter From the Sea of Cortez] | Emptying the World's Aquarium, by Erik Vance | Harper... - 0 views

harpers.org/...7

fisheries overfishing Environment

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 16 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • What he has realized is that to save the aquarium of the world, you have to help the fishermen help themselves.
  • “It’s cabrilla.” Cabrilla is a cheap seabass sold in tacos on Mexico City streets that I wolf down on my way to the subway.
  • It sells for sixteen cents a pound and is piled into trucks, eventually to be chopped into indistinguishable bits, mixed with lemon juice to hide the stink, and labeled fish.
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  • Puerto Adolfo López Mateos is a town on the Pacific Coast similar to Kino. But the López Mateos fisherman didn’t toss this fish from the net to the beach and then to a truck. It was caught by hook and line, placed in ice water, and processed by the fisherman’s wife in an air-conditioned plant. The fisherman earns many times as much money as Kino fishermen, doesn’t have bycatch, and the fish makes for an amazing meal. Peckham says that when he first showed the fish to this restaurant, they refused to believe it was cabrilla. He’s become a cheerleader for something he calls “value rescue”; that is, if the fishermen can cut out some of the middlemen, care for and market their fish better, and make more money per fish, they can be better stewards of their coastline.
  • ProMar
Benjamin McKeown

Fact Sheet: Attaining the Demographic Dividend - 0 views

www.prb.org/...raphic-dividend-factsheet.aspx

population dividend

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 06 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • The demographic dividend is the accelerated economic growth that may result from a decline in a country's birth and death rates and the subsequent change in the age structure of the population. With fewer births each year, a country's young dependent population declines in relation to the working-age population. With fewer people to support, a country has a window of opportunity for rapid economic growth if the right social and economic policies are developed and investments made.
  • The first step, in fact, is a transition from high birth and death rates to low birth rates and child death rates—a process referred to as the "demographic transition."
  • While child survival has greatly improved in developing countries, birth rates remain high in many of them. To achieve the economic benefits of the demographic dividend, developing countries must substantially lower both birth and child death rates.
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  • One in four women in developing countries wants to avoid becoming pregnant or delay or space their births but is not using a modern family planning method.
  • sub-Saharan Africa, women in the region today have on average 5.1 children
  • Investment in voluntary family planning helped Thailand accelerate economic growth and provides a model for sub-Saharan African countries.
  • his shifted the age structure of Thailand's population, providing a critical first step toward achieving the economic benefits of a demographic dividend.
  • Rwanda is one of several countries in eastern and southern Africa where investments in voluntary family planning and child survival have led to significantly lower fertility.
  • If the impressive progress continues, Rwanda will, by 2030, have achieved the demographic conditions necessary for accelerated economic growth.
  • While family planning is necessary for establishing the conditions for a demographic dividend, investments in child health, education, and gender equality are critical additional steps that contribute to family planning use and economic growth.
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