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Charles van der Haegen

Event: Fiscal Crises and Imperial Collapses: Historical Perspective on Current Predicam... - 1 views

www.iie.com/...event_detail.cfm

money history financial crisis debt geopolitics niall ferguson geoeconomic

shared by Charles van der Haegen on 14 Jun 11 - Cached
  • Charles van der Haegen on 14 Jun 11
     
    Stavros S. Niarchos Lecture Fiscal Crises and Imperial Collapses: Historical Perspective on Current Predicaments Ninth Annual Niarchos Lecture Niall Ferguson, Harvard University Peterson Institute for International Economics, Washington, DC May 13, 2010 « Previous | Index | Next » Summary 1 of 3 Niall Ferguson, Harvard University, delivered the Peterson Institute's ninth annual Niarchos Lecture on May 13, 2010, on the topic "Fiscal Crises and Imperial Collapses: Historical Perspectives on Current Predicaments." Niall Ferguson is one of the world's leading thinkers and writers on geoeconomic, global systemic, and other key international strategic issues. Time has named him one of the world's 100 most influential people, and two of his books, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (2003) and The War of the World: Twentieth Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (2008) have been converted into television series. His most recent book is the best-selling Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World (2008), from which he has drawn numerous lessons for analyzing and responding to the current global crisis. His earlier The World's Banker: The History of the House of Rothschild won the Wadsworth Prize for Business History.
Charles van der Haegen

Global Voices · About - 0 views

globalvoicesonline.org/about

bloggers blogs reporting world international community citizen media uncomfortable knowledge

shared by Charles van der Haegen on 26 Jun 11 - Cached
  • Charles van der Haegen on 26 Jun 11
     
    "Global Voices is a community of more than 300 bloggers and translators around the world who work together to bring you reports from blogs and citizen media everywhere, with emphasis on voices that are not ordinarily heard in international mainstream media. Global Voices seeks to aggregate, curate, and amplify the global conversation online - shining light on places and people other media often ignore. We work to develop tools, institutions and relationships that will help all voices, everywhere, to be heard. Millions of people are blogging, podcasting, and uploading photos, videos, and information across the globe, but unless you know where to look, it can be difficult to find respected and credible voices. Our international team of volunteer authors and part-time editors are active participants in the blogospheres they write about on Global Voices. Global Voices is incorporated in the Netherlands as Stichting Global Voices, a nonprofit foundation. We do not have an office, but work as a virtual community across multiple time zones, meeting in person only when the opportunity arises (usually during our Summits). We rely on grants, sponsorships, editorial commissions, and donations to cover our costs. Our Projects Global Voices is translated into more than 30 languages by volunteer translators, who have formed the Lingua project. Additionally, Global Voices has an Advocacy website and network to help people speak out online in places where their voices are censored. We also have an outreach project called Rising Voices to help marginalized communities use citizen media to be heard, with an emphasis on the developing world. Read more about our projects. Our History Global Voices was founded in 2005 by former CNN Beijing and Tokyo Bureau Chief, Rebecca MacKinnon and technologist and Africa expert, Ethan Zuckerman while they were both fellows at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. The idea for the project grew out of an internat
  • Charles van der Haegen on 26 Jun 11
     
    Sourcing uncomfortable knowledge, buried under the avalange of info overload, or repressed from appearing??? To be verified
Charles van der Haegen

The Saguaro Seminar: Civic Engagement in America - 0 views

www.hks.harvard.edu/...aboutus.htm

civic engagement USA putnam social capital networks community bettertogether

shared by Charles van der Haegen on 08 May 11 - No Cached
  • Charles van der Haegen on 08 May 11
     
    "THE SAGUARO SEMINAR: CIVIC ENGAGEMENT IN AMERICA is an initiative of Professor Robert D. Putnam at John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University focused on the study of "social capital" (the value of social networks) and community engagement. Our eponymous seminar from 1995-2000 involved 30 talented scholars and practitioners from across America (including then civil-rights-lawyer Barack Obama) in developing strategies for increasing American civic engagement and led to the bettertogether report. "Bettertogether" the final report of the Saguaro Seminar is now available at www.BetterTogether.org The Seminar participants were a diverse, exceptional group of 33 thinkers and doers, including articulate leaders from all parts of the country - from coast to coast, from small town and suburb to the inner city - and from all walks of life - from government officials to religious leaders, from labor union activists to high-tech and business executives, from elected officials to street workers. All participants demonstrate a deep commitment to improving the infrastructure of national civic life. These twenty-five practitioners and eight academic thinkers met for two-day sessions through late-1999 to develop a handful of practical strategies with national applicability for increasing Americans' connections with one another. "
Charles van der Haegen

YouTube - Jonathan Zittrain - Civic Technologies and the Future of the Internet - 1 views

www.youtube.com/watch

participative technologies generative singularity university

shared by Charles van der Haegen on 05 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Charles van der Haegen on 05 Jun 11
     
    Harvard law professor and author Jonathan Zittrain discusses the unusual and distinctive technologies whose power increases in proportion to the people participating in them, contrasted with other technologies that leverage what the few can impose on the many -- whether a PC virus maker who crashes millions of machines or a law enforcement officer who can use new consumer platforms to spy far easier than before. Filmed at Singularity University, part of the November 2009 Executive Program.
  • Charles van der Haegen on 05 Jun 11
     
    civic technologies - an interesting concept developed by the author of The Future of Intyernet Jonathan Zittrain for Singularity University
David McGavock

BPS Research Digest: Has the Internet become an external hard drive for the brain? - 2 views

bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/...ecome-external-hard-drive.html

shared by David McGavock on 03 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • It's as if we've become adept at using computers to store knowledge for us, and we're better at remembering where information is stored than the information itself.
  • it's important to keep these new findings in perspective: they hint at how the Internet could be altering our memory habits, but they haven't demonstrated that this is any different from other forms of memory support.
  • similar results might have been obtained if trivia statements had been written in notebooks or told to friends, as opposed to typed into a computer.
  • David McGavock on 03 Aug 11
     
    Last year's annual question posed by Edge was "How is the Internet changing the way you think?" Several psychologists answered that it was becoming an extension of their minds. "The Internet is a kind of collective memory,' wrote Stephen Kosslyn (Harvard University). "When I write with a browser open in the background, it feels like the browser is an extension of myself."
Charles van der Haegen

PICNIC : // Help U.S.: Lawrence Lessig - 2 views

www.picnicnetwork.org/lawrence-lessig-on-help-us

shared by Charles van der Haegen on 24 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • Charles van der Haegen on 24 Sep 11
     
    "How are governments responding to the entitlement, engagement and sharing brought about by the Internet? How can policy "mistakes" be fixed in "high functioning democracies"? Harvard law professor and Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig describes how policy errors in the United States are having unintended negative consequences and he implores "outsiders" to help US to correct its mistakes with balanced, sensible policy alternatives"
  • Charles van der Haegen on 24 Sep 11
     
    May interest you, Laurence Lessig forcefull speach at Picbnic in Amsterdam in September 2011
  • Bryan Alexander on 26 Sep 11
     
    Very fine talk, as usual with Lessig. I wonder where this anti-corruption drive will go.
David McGavock

Tip for Getting More Organized: Don't - Michael Schrage - Harvard Business Review | Diigo - 0 views

www.diigo.com/cached

Infotention harvard business tip affordance promptware thinking tools

shared by David McGavock on 29 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • David McGavock on 29 Jun 14
     
    Interesting counter argument to the old ways of organizing to "just in time" use of tools built into search.
David McGavock

Tip for Getting More Organized: Don't - Michael Schrage - Harvard Business Review - 1 views

blogs.hbr.org/...tip-for-getting-more-organized

augmentation affordance thinking tools harvard business tip Infotention

shared by David McGavock on 29 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • When it comes to investing time, thought and effort into productively organizing oneself, less is more. In fact, not only is less more, research suggests it may be faster, better and cheaper.
  • IBM researchers observed that email users who “searched” rather than set up files and folders for their correspondence typically found what they were looking for faster and with fewer errors. Time and overhead associated with creating and managing email folders were, effectively, a waste.
  • The personal productivity issue knowledge workers and effective executives need to ponder is whether habits of efficiency that once improved performance have decayed into mindless ruts that delay or undermine desired outcomes.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • what would really prove more personally productive — folders that sort 15% faster? Or key phrase search capabilities that were 20% better?
  • Ongoing improvement in email/document/desktop and cloud-centric search frees them from legacy information management behaviors like filing.
  • They’re “organizing” for flexibility, adaptiveness and immediate response. More accurately, their technologies exist to give them greater speed and flexibility. Their personal organizational ethos reflects a Toyota Production System “just-in-time” attitude.
  • nstead of better tools for better organizing, people want their organization done for them. Organizing is wasteful; getting its benefits is productivity.
  • They want what I’ve described earlier as “promptware” — a cue and intervention that creates measurable value in the moment, rather than promised efficiencies in the future.
  • We’ll likely get more done better if we give less time and thought to organization and greater reflection and care to desired outcomes. Our job today and tomorrow isn’t to organize ourselves better; it’s to get the right technologies that respond to our personal productivity needs. It’s not that we’re becoming too dependent on our technologies to organize us; it’s that we haven’t become dependent enough.
  • David McGavock on 29 Jun 14
     
    Suggests that we use just-in-time features built into our smart devices rather than take time to manually organize files and folders.
David McGavock

Are Babies Born Good? | Science | Smithsonian - 0 views

www.smithsonianmag.com/...are-babies-born-good-165443013

babies moral compass debate neuroscience Cooperation Smithsonian

shared by David McGavock on 06 May 14 - No Cached
  • The study of babies and young toddlers is a perplexing business. Even the most perceptive observers can be tempted to see what isn’t there.
  • “When our infant was only four months old I thought that he tried to imitate sounds; but I may have deceived myself,” Charles Darwin wrote in “A Biographical Sketch of an Infant,” his classic study of his own son.
  • Even well-behaved babies are notoriously tough to read: Their most meditative expressions are often the sign of an impending bowel movement.
  • ...40 more annotations...
  • “People who’ve spent their whole careers studying perception are now turning toward social life, because that’s where the bio-behavioral rubber meets the evolutionary road,” Konner says. “Natural selection has operated as much or more on social behavior as on more basic things like perception. In our evolution, survival and reproduction depended more and more on social competence as you went from basic mammals to primates to human ancestors to humans.”
  • The lab’s initial study along these lines, published in 2007 in the journal Nature, startled the scientific world by showing that in a series of simple morality plays, 6- and 10-month-olds overwhelmingly preferred “good guys” to “bad guys.” “This capacity may serve as the foundation for moral thought and action,” the authors wrote. It “may form an essential basis for...more abstract concepts of right and wrong.”
  • spate of related studies hinting that, far from being born a “perfect idiot,” as Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued, or a selfish brute, as Thomas Hobbes feared, a child arrives in the world provisioned with rich, broadly pro-social tendencies and seems predisposed to care about other people.
  • No seasoned parent can believe that nurture doesn’t make a difference, or that nature trumps all. The question is where the balance lies.
    • David McGavock
      David McGavock on 06 May 14
       
      Key thought - where is the balance?
  • Wynn and her husband, the psychologist Paul Bloom, collaborated on much of Hamlin’s research, and Wynn remembers being a bit more optimistic: “Do babies have attitudes, render judgments? I just found that to be a very intuitively gripping question,” she says.
  • Infant morality studies are so new that the field’s grand dame is 29-year-old J. Kiley Hamlin, who was a graduate student at the Yale lab in the mid-2000s.
  • she stumbled on animated presentations that one of her predecessors had made, in which a “climber” (say, a red circle with goggle eyes) attempted to mount a hill, and a “helper” (a triangle in some trials) assisted him, or a “hinderer” (a square) knocked him down.
  • When I visited, Tasimi was recreating versions of Hamlin’s puppet shows as background work for a new project.
  • The child shot her a woebegone look before dutifully hauling himself out of the ball pit, picking up the pen and returning it to the researcher.
  • When babies at the Yale lab turn 2, their parents are tactfully invited to return to the university after the child’s third birthday.
  • The next lab I visited was at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and it has made this age group something of a specialty, through work on toddler altruism (a phrase that, admittedly, rings rather hollow in parental ears).
  • One advantage of testing slightly older babies and children is that they are able to perform relatively complicated tasks. In the Laboratory for Developmental  Studies, the toddlers don’t watch puppets help: They themselves are asked to help.
  • Warneken was initially interested in how little children read the intentions of others, and the question of whether toddlers would assist others in reaching their goals. He wanted to sound out these behaviors in novel helping experiments—“accidentally” dropping a hat, for instance, and seeing if the kids would return it.
  • prominent psychologists had previously argued that children are selfish until they are socialized; they acquire altruistic behaviors only as childhood progresses and they are rewarded for following civilization’s rules, or punished for breaking them.
  • One day he and a toddler were bouncing a ball together. Truly by accident, the ball rolled away—“the moment of serendipity,” as Warneken now calls it. His first impulse was to retrieve the toy and carry on, but he stopped himself.
  • The little boy watched him struggle, then after a moment heaved himself up, waddled over to the toy and—defying the scientific community’s uncharitable expectations—stretched out his own chubby little arm to hand the ball to his gigantic playmate.
  • In the following months, Warneken designed experiments for 18-month-olds, in which a hapless adult (often played by him) attempted to perform a variety of tasks, to no avail, as the toddlers looked on. The toddlers gallantly rescued Warneken’s dropped teaspoons and clothespins, stacked his books and pried open stubborn cabinet doors so he could reach inside.
  • videotaped experiment of a toddler wallowing in a wading pool full of plastic balls.
  • But the elements that underpin morality—altruism, sympathy for others, the understanding of other people’s goals—are in place much earlier than we thought, and clearly in place before children turn 2.”
  • Because they were manifested in 18-month-olds, Warneken believed that the helping behaviors might be innate, not taught or imitated. To test his assumption, he turned to one of our two nearest primate relatives, the chimpanzee.
  • The first chimps Warneken studied, nursery-raised in a German zoo
  • as the caretaker dropped the first object: As if on cue, the chimp bounded over and breezily handed it back.
  • Warneken wondered if perhaps human-reared chimps had been conditioned to be helpful to their food providers
  • They would consistently help when the person was reaching for the object,” even in the absence of any payoff.
  • The final step was to see if chimps would assist each other. So Warneken rigged apparatuses where one caged chimp could help a neighbor reach an inaccessible banana or piece of watermelon. There was no hope of getting a bite for themselves, yet the empowered chimps fed their fellow apes regardless.
  • But under what circumstances are toddlers altruistic?
  • Some recent chimp studies suggest that chimps won’t help others unless they witness the dismay of the creature in need. Are human children likewise “reactive” helpers, or can they come to another’s assistance without social cues?
  • “You can see the birth of this proactive helping behavior from around 1.5 to 2.5 years of age,” Warneken explains. “The children don’t need solicitation for helping. They do it voluntarily.” Proactive helping may be a uniquely human skill.
  • Criticisms of the “nice baby” research are varied, and the work with the youngest kids is perhaps the most controversial.
  • such method­o­­­logical worries are never far from baby researchers’ minds.
  • Other critics, meanwhile, fault the developmental philosophy behind the experiments.
  • these researchers argue, but actually they start from scratch with only senses and reflexes, and, largely through interaction with their mothers, learn about the social world in an astonishingly short period of time.
  • And still other scientists think the baby studies underestimate the power of regional culture.
  • Ideas of the public good and appropriate punishment, for instance, are not fixed across societies: Among the Matsigenka people of the Peruvian Amazon, where Henrich works, helping rarely occurs outside of the immediate household, if only because members of the tribe tend to live with relatives.
  • Plenty of bleak observations complicate the discovery of children’s nobler impulses. Kids are intensely tribal: 3-month-olds like people of their own race more than others, experiments have shown, and 1-year-olds prefer native speakers to those of another tongue.
  • Babies, in addition, are big fans of punishment. Hamlin likes to show a video of a young vigilante who doesn’t just choose between the good and bad puppets; he whacks the bad guy over the head.
  • Perhaps babies are not really trying to help in a particular moment, per se, as much as they are expressing their obliging nature to the powerful adults who control their worlds—behaving less like Mother Teresa, in a sense, than a Renaissance courtier. Maybe parents really would invest more in a helpful child, who as an adult might contribute to the family’s welfare, than they would in a selfish loafer—or so the evolutionary logic goes.
  • A different interpretation, Warneken says, is that in a simpler world maybe toddlers really could help, pitching in to the productivity of a hunter-gatherer group in proportion to their relatively meager calorie intake.
  • For many researchers, these complexities and contradictions make baby studies all the more worthwhile.
  • “I’m trying to think of a lesser-of-two evils study,” he says. “Yes, we have our categories of good and bad, but those categories involve many different things—stealing $20 versus raping versus killing. Clearly I can’t use those sorts of cases with, you know, 13-month-olds. But you can come up with morality plays along a continuum to see...whether they form preferences about whether they like the guy who wasn’t as bad as the other bad guy.”
  • David McGavock on 06 May 14
     
    "The study of babies and young toddlers is a perplexing business. Even the most perceptive observers can be tempted to see what isn't there."
Alex Grech

Writing, Reading, and Social Media Literacy - Howard Rheingold - Now, New, Next - Harva... - 5 views

blogs.hbr.org/...mportance-of-social-media.html

rheingold Mind Amplifiers

shared by Alex Grech on 11 Sep 11 - Cached
  • When I first faced students in a classroom, I was surprised to discover that the mythology I had believed about "digital natives" was not entirely accurate. Just because they're on Facebook and chat online during class and can send text messages with one hand does not mean that young people are acquainted with the rhetoric of blogging, understand the way wikis can be used collaboratively, or know the techniques necessary for vetting the validity of information discovered online. Just as learning the alphabet requires further education before a literate person can compose a coherent argument, learning the skills of effective social media use requires an education that today's institutions and teachers are ill-prepared to provide.
  • We don't have time for institutions to change, which is why I've worked to provide tools for those educators who are using social media to prepare students for the 21st century.
David McGavock

Multitasking, social media and distraction: Research review Journalist's Resource: Rese... - 0 views

journalistsresource.org/...raction-what-does-research-say

multitasking research Infotention learning culture

shared by David McGavock on 24 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • researchers have tried to assess how humans are coping in this highly connected environment and how “chronic multitasking” may diminish our capacity to function effectively.
  • Clifford Nass, notes that scholarship has remained firm in the overall assessment: “The research is almost unanimous, which is very rare in social science, and it says that people who chronically multitask show an enormous range of deficits. They’re basically terrible at all sorts of cognitive tasks, including multitasking.”
  • Below are more than a dozen representative studies in these areas:
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • The researchers conclude that the experiments “suggest that heavy media multitaskers are distracted by the multiple streams of media they are consuming, or, alternatively, that those who infrequently multitask are more effective at volitionally allocating their attention in the face of distractions.”
  • Members of the ‘Net Generation’ reported more multitasking than members of ‘Generation X,’ who reported more multitasking than members of the ‘Baby Boomer’ generation. The choices of which tasks to combine for multitasking were highly correlated across generations, as were difficulty ratings of specific multitasking combinations.
  • same time, these experts predicted that the impact of networked living on today’s young will drive them to thirst for instant gratification, settle for quick choices, and lack patience
  • The educational implications include allowing students short ‘technology breaks’ to reduce distractions and teaching students metacognitive strategies regarding when interruptions negatively impact learning.”
  • survey about the future of the Internet, technology experts and stakeholders were fairly evenly split as to whether the younger generation’s always-on connection to people and information will turn out to be a net positive or a net negative by 2020.
  • said many of the young people growing up hyperconnected to each other and the mobile Web and counting on the Internet as their external brain will be nimble, quick-acting multitaskers who will do well in key respects.
  • similar mental limitations in the types of tasks that can be multitasked.
  • The data suggest that “using Facebook and texting while doing schoolwork were negatively predictive of overall GPA.” However, “emailing, talking on the phone, and using IM were not related to overall GPA.”
  • Regression analyses revealed that increased media multitasking was associated with higher depression and social anxiety symptoms, even after controlling for overall media use and the personality traits of neuroticism and extraversion.
  • David McGavock on 24 Jul 14
     
    Clifford Nass, notes that scholarship has remained firm in the overall assessment: "The research is almost unanimous, which is very rare in social science, and it says that people who chronically multitask show an enormous range of deficits. They're basically terrible at all sorts of cognitive tasks, including multitasking." - See more at: http://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/social-media/multitasking-social-media-distraction-what-does-research-say#sthash.I21dv2wV.dpuf
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