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Reading Bauman helps people to insulate themselves from these false solutions to their difficulties.

might say that the problem for people today is how to resist consumer society, to find ways of caring for others, and to find a new politics that is above the nation-state. The globalisation phenomenon requires this if it is to be encountered by humanity in a more balanced form than at present when its negative side predominates over its positive side. The European integration project may offer some guidance.

The political institutions of this are parliamentary democracy and the public sphere; the former has been eroded and the latter hollowed out.

The Energy Department's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy funds research at national labs and private companies, and recently offered $4 billion in loan guarantees to 16 clean-tech companies, including three in or near Silicon Valley. It also helps sponsor trade missions to China and India that have included energy start-ups, such as MiaSole, a Santa Clara solar-cell maker.

In the new version, only edits made by a separate class of "trusted" users will be instantly implemented. To earn this trusted status, users will have to show some commitment to Wikipedia, by making 30 edits in 30 days, say. Other users will have to wait until a trusted editor has given the article a brief look, enough to confirm that the edit is not vandalism, before their changes can be viewed by readers.

It allows select groups of editors, probably associated with specific subject areas, to vote on whether an article should be flagged as high quality. Readers would still see the latest version of an article by default, but a link to a high-quality version, if it exists, would also be available.

Contributors whose edits tend to remain in place are awarded high trust ratings; those whose changes are quickly altered get a low score. The rationale is that if a change is useful and accurate, it is likely to remain intact during subsequent edits, but if it is inaccurate or malicious, it is likely to be changed. Therefore, users who make long-lasting edits are likely to be trustworthy. New users automatically start with a low rating.

It was one of the more fascinating, odd and troubling scientific ventures of the last century. An outline reads like some pulp sci-fi tale: During the 1930s, a hero pilot teams up with a brilliant surgeon in a spooky, black-walled lab to unlock the secret of eternal life to save the West. It sounds a bit nutty, but this isn't fiction.

Andrew Puddephatt on media reform from a human rights perspective This morning I attended a very broad and interesting side-event on “Global Information and Communication Policy” organized by Consumer’s Union.  The event featured an international panel of speakers including : Luiz Fernando Marrey Moncau, Instituto Brasileiro de Defesa do Consumidor, Brazil Rosemary Okello-Orlale, African Woman and Child Feature Service, Kenya Bjarne Pedersen, Consumers International Andrew Puddephatt, Global Partners UK Jamie Love, CPTech Andrew issued a provocative challenge to the media reform community to show the evidence of their claims. 

We are interested in moving toward a curating model of information.  Information needs to be curated in  a way that shows the information that you want similar to how a museum curates a large body of information into discrete exhibits and presentations that people can understand and digest.

who is doing the curating?  Is it going to be bottom-up or done by Bill Gates and Google.

Friction tends to lead to interest, and that's what reporters and editors want.  Ultimately, they want a story that will cause their readers, listeners, or viewers to sit up and pay attention.

Welcome to NewAssignment.Net by Jay Rosen on August 19, 2006 - 10:41pm. What is NewAssignment.Net? New Assignment.Net is a non-profit site that tries to spark innovation in journalism by showing that open collaboration over the Internet among reporters, editors and large groups of users can produce high-quality work that serves the public interest, holds up under scrutiny, and builds trust.

And let me say that commitment to international action on justice means today to prevent genocide, the world must through the U.N, urgently act in Darfur.

Most of all my parents taught me that each of us should live by a moral compass.It was a simple faith with a fundamental optimism.That each and every one of us has a talent.Each of us a duty to use that talent.And each of us should have the chance to develop that talent. And my parents thought we should use whatever talent we had to help people least able to help themselves. And as I grew up surrounded by books, sports, music and encouragement, I saw at school and beyond how some flourished and others, denied these opportunities, fell behind. They had talent, they had ability. But they did not have the chance to fulfil their promise. They needed someone to champion them. They needed the support of people on their side. And is not our history the story of yes, progress through the fulfilled talents, even genius, of some but, yes, also of the wasted potential of millions for too many, their talents lost and forever unfulfilled?

Strip away the rhetoric about globalisation and it comes down to one essential truth: You can buy raw materials from anywhere,You can borrow capital form anywhere,You can engage with technology half way across the world,But you cannot buy from elsewhere what in the global economy you need most; the skills and the creativity of all our people – and that means that in education we must aim to be number one.

New forms of communication would provide new outlets to by-pass the increasingly shrill tenor of the traditional media. In fact, the new forms can be even more pernicious, less balanced, more intent on the latest conspiracy theory multiplied by five.

But here is also the opportunity. At present, we are all being dragged down by the way media and public life interact. Trust in journalists is not much above that in politicians. There is a market in providing serious, balanced news. There is a desire for impartiality. The way that people get their news may be changing; but the thirst for the news being real news is not.

It is sometimes said that the media is accountable daily through the choice of readers and viewers. That is true up to a point. But the reality is that the viewers or readers have no objective yardstick to measure what they are being told. In every other walk of life in our society that exercises power, there are external forms of accountability, not least through the media itself. So it is true politicians are accountable through the ballot box every few years. But they are also profoundly accountable, daily, through the media, which is why a free press is so important.

Nick Pearce objects to my joining those who deny the possibility of state neutrality in relation to culture and identity. He says that I thereby regrettably place myself outside the liberal egalitarian tradition, but then adds that "in reality few believe that the state can or should embody one version of the good life". So, it is unclear to me what the objection about neutrality is.

Some critics of multiculturalism worry about "where it will all end", and so deny that multiculturalism is compatible with individual rights, with equality before the law, with civic belonging.

Britain’s future: Labour candidates’s view

I am agnostic on the need for a written constitution, because of the power it hands to the judges.

so I let's have a national debate.

Global Trade and Conflicting National Interest

"Our objective," Baumol told a policy conference last summer, "is to show how outsourcing can indeed reduce the share of benefits of trade, not only for those who lose their jobs and suffer a direct reduction in wages but can wind up making the average American worse off than he or she would have been."