Category Archives: General

General

Haurki Murakami on people and stories

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From Haruki Murakami‘s acceptance of the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society – The novelist in wartime:

Please do allow me to deliver one very personal message. It is something that I always keep in mind while I am writing fiction. I have never gone so far as to write it on a piece of paper and paste it to the wall: rather, it is carved into the wall of my mind, and it goes something like this:

“Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg.”

Yes, no matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg, I will stand with the egg. Someone else will have to decide what is right and what is wrong; perhaps time or history will decide. If there were a novelist who, for whatever reason, wrote works standing with the wall, of what value would such works be?

What is the meaning of this metaphor? In some cases, it is all too simple and clear. Bombers and tanks and rockets and white phosphorus shells are that high, solid wall. The eggs are the unarmed civilians who are crushed and burned and shot by them.

This is not all, though. It carries a deeper meaning. Think of it this way. Each of us is, more or less, an egg. Each of us is a unique, irreplaceable soul enclosed in a fragile shell. This is true of me, and it is true of each of you. And each of us, to a greater or lesser degree, is confronting a high, solid wall. The wall has a name: it is “the System.” The System is supposed to protect us, but sometimes it takes on a life of its own, and then it begins to kill us and cause us to kill others — coldly, efficiently, systematically.

I have only one reason to write novels, and that is to bring the dignity of the individual soul to the surface and shine a light upon it. The purpose of a story is to sound an alarm, to keep a light trained on the System in order to prevent it from tangling our souls in its web and demeaning them. I fully believe it is the novelist’s job to keep trying to clarify the uniqueness of each individual soul by writing stories — stories of life and death, stories of love, stories that make people cry and quake with fear and shake with laughter. This is why we go on, day after day, concocting fictions with utter seriousness.

My father died last year at the age of 90. He was a retired teacher and a part-time Buddhist priest. When he was in graduate school, he was drafted into the army and sent to fight in China. As a child born after the war, I used to see him every morning before breakfast offering up long, deeply felt prayers at the Buddhist altar in our house. One time I asked him why he did this, and he told me he was praying for the people who had died in the battlefield. He was praying for all the people who died, he said, both ally and enemy alike. Staring at his back as he knelt at the altar, I seemed to feel the shadow of death hovering around him.

My father died, and with him he took his memories, memories that I can never know. But the presence of death that lurked about him remains in my own memory. It is one of the few things I carry on from him, and one of the most important.

I have only one thing I hope to convey to you today. We are all human beings, individuals transcending nationality and race and religion, fragile eggs faced with a solid wall called the System. To all appearances, we have no hope of winning. The wall is too high, too strong — and too cold. If we have any hope of victory at all, it will have to come from our believing in the utter uniqueness and irreplaceability of our own and others’ souls and from the warmth we gain by joining souls together.

Take a moment to think about this. Each of us possesses a tangible, living soul. The System has no such thing. We must not allow the System to exploit us. We must not allow the System to take on a life of its own. The System did not make us: We made the System. That is all I have to say to you.

General

A regional resilience assessment of the Goulburn-Broken Catchment

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Earlier this month one of the first integrated assessments of regional resilience based on the workbooks developed by the Resilience Alliance was published in Ecology and Society.

Resilience, Adaptability and Transformability in the Goulburn-Broken Catchment, Australia, by Brian Walker, Nick Abel, John Anderies and Paul Ryan uses an approach that follows and also builds upon the workbook guide.

One important aspect of the approach used by Walker and colleagues was to deal with both specified and general resilience. After identifying ten thresholds in the Goulburn-Broken catchment the authors go on to consider the overall resilience of the social-ecological system and offer the following explanation and word of caution about responding solely to specific and known potential system shocks:

“Because of uncertainty about the specified thresholds, regions must be prepared for a wide range of disturbances. By building targeted resilience, regions may inadvertently be reducing other kinds of resilience. It is well known that in feedback systems (of which social–ecological systems are an example) increasing robustness to disturbances at a particular frequency range may reduce robustness to disturbances at another range. It was shown long ago that this is necessarily the case for linear, time-invariant systems (Bode 1945). This idea has been extended to more complex systems recently. For example, Carlson and Doyle (2000) illustrate that biophysical systems that become robust to frequent disturbances become necessarily less resilient to those that are very infrequent. Anderies et al. (2007) have applied these ideas to simple, nonlinear, renewable-resource management problems and illustrated fundamental robustness trade-offs to different types of disturbances. It is, therefore, sensible to consider, in addition to resilience to specified thresholds, whether general resilience is declining.”

General

Global building boom implodes

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Photo REUTERS/David GrayFrom BLDGBLOG: The Boom is Over:

Amongst many, many signs that the building boom has come to an end, from gridlocks of cars abandoned at the Dubai airport by fleeing workers to massive holes in the urban surface of Chicago, to entire architectural firms going out of business, to delayed towers and theme parks on pause, none seem quite as explicitly apocalyptic as the sight of OMA’s CCTV complex – that is, the part of it known as TVCC, containing a luxury hotel – roaring with flames.

The boom ended long ago, but its icon are now on fire.

General

Bus Rapid Transit vs. Light Rail

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Worldchanging interviews WRI researchers on a recent report they did comparing bus rapid transit (BRT) to light rail.  There is an interesting discussion in the comments on the article WRI on Bus Rapid Transit v. Light Rail:

A team of researchers at the World Resources Institute (WRI) recently produced a report that goes against the grain. WRI analyzed and compared BRT and light rail as two options for Maryland’s Purple Line Project, a 16-mile transit corridor that will connect the D.C. suburbs. In January, the Institute came down in favor of BRT, with a statement announcing that “enhanced buses … would cost less, offer similar services, and fight global warming better than light-rail cars.”

Our main question related not to what’s in the study, but rather, what seems to be left out. It’s a common observation that light rail delivers benefit beyond transit alone, in the form of transit-oriented development that springs up as a result of developers, business owners and homebuyers seeking proximity to the train stations.

The team at WRI was happy to share their take on this and other issues. I interviewed the study’s lead author, Greg Fuhs, and WRI’s senior transport engineer Dario Hidalgo, about BRT/LRT, transit prejudices, and how other cities can apply this analysis to their own planning process.

General

Nigeriatown

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chinaphotoIn a New Yorker article – the promised land – Evan Osnos about African merchants living in China. He also narrates an Audio Slide Show about the economic, social, and religious life of African migrants in Guangzhou.  On his blog he writes:

Prof. Adams Bodomo is a Ghanaian linguist at the University of Hong Kong and one of the first scholars to write in English about the African community in Hong Kong and Guangzhou.

… As Bodomo and other scholars see it, immigration, like other byproducts of prosperity, is an unfamiliar issue in China. For most of its history, China was so poor that hardly anyone but missionaries or marauders wanted to stay. China’s posture toward foreigners was erratic; it oscillated between the xenophobia that produced the Great Wall to the zealous overture of the Beijing Olympics. But China is still ambivalent about people settling down permanently, and Bodomo sees that as a the big question about whether these communities survive.

There is also a podcast interview with Osnos.

General

PhD position at Stockholm Resilience Centre

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The research program “Governance of the Baltic Sea – a response to ecological regime shifts” at the Baltic Nest Institute and Stockholm Resilience Center is looking for a Political Science PhD student.

The project runs from 2009-2012, andaims to develop guidelines for adaptive  management of both coastal and marine environments (with special focus on the Baltic Sea). The application deadline is very soon – Feb 14th, 2009.

The project is run by associate Professor Christoph Humborg and Professor Carl Folke.  For more information about the research project and information on the position contact
Associate Professor Christoph Humborg (christoph.humborg @ itm.su.se).

More information on training at postgraduate level in science and application procedure are available on
http://www.statsvet.su.se/Student/ansokan_forskarutb.htm

The project is described below:

Continue reading →

General

Reflections on Obama and Science

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Dennis Overbye writes in the New York Times essay Elevating Science, Elevating Democracy

To be honest, the restoration of science was the least of it, but when Barack Obama proclaimed during his Inaugural Address that he would “restore science to its rightful place,” you could feel a dark cloud lifting like a sigh from the shoulders of the scientific community in this country. …

Science is not a monument of received Truth but something that people do to look for truth.

That endeavor, which has transformed the world in the last few centuries, does indeed teach values. Those values, among others, are honesty, doubt, respect for evidence, openness, accountability and tolerance and indeed hunger for opposing points of view. These are the unabashedly pragmatic working principles that guide the buzzing, testing, poking, probing, argumentative, gossiping, gadgety, joking, dreaming and tendentious cloud of activity — the writer and biologist Lewis Thomas once likened it to an anthill — that is slowly and thoroughly penetrating every nook and cranny of the world.

Nobody appeared in a cloud of smoke and taught scientists these virtues. This behavior simply evolved because it worked.

It requires no metaphysical commitment to a God or any conception of human origin or nature to join in this game, just the hypothesis that nature can be interrogated and that nature is the final arbiter. …

And indeed there is no leader, no grand plan, for this hive. It is in many ways utopian anarchy, a virtual community that lives as much on the Internet and in airport coffee shops as in any one place or time. Or at least it is as utopian as any community largely dependent on government and corporate financing can be.

Arguably science is the most successful human activity of all time. Which is not to say that life within it is always utopian, as several of my colleagues have pointed out in articles about pharmaceutical industry payments to medical researchers.

General

Shared pre-analytical vision, and groupthink and economics

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On the Economix Blog, economist Uwe Reinhardt writes An Economist’s Mea Culpa that argues that economists have become locked into a too narrow pre-analytical vison of how the world works:

Fewer than a dozen prominent economists saw this economic train wreck coming — and the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, an economist famous for his academic research on the Great Depression, was notably not among them. Alas, for the real world, the few who did warn us about the train wreck got no more respect from the rest of their colleagues or from decision-makers in business and government than prophets usually do.

How could the economics profession have slept so soundly right into the middle of the economic mayhem all around us? Robert J. Shiller of Yale University, one of the sage prophets, addressed that question an earlier commentary in this paper. Professor Shiller finds an explanation in groupthink, a term popularized by the social psychologist Irving L. Janis. In his book “Groupthink” (1972), the latter had theorized that most people, even professionals whose careers ostensibly thrive on originality, hesitate to deviate too much from the conventional wisdom, lest they be marginalized or even ostracized.

If groupthink is the cause, it most likely is anchored in what my former Yale economics professor Richard Nelson (now at Columbia University) has called a ”vested interest in an analytic structure,” the prism through which economists behold the world.

This analytic structure, formally called “neoclassical economics,” depends crucially on certain unquestioned axioms and basic assumptions about the behavior of markets and the human decisions that drive them. After years of arduous study to master the paradigm, these axioms and assumptions simply become part of a professional credo. Indeed, a good part of the scholarly work of modern economists reminds one of the medieval scholastics who followed St. Anselm’s dictum “credo ut intellegam”: “I believe, in order that I may understand.”

General, Inequality

Oil Pirates of Nigeria

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From the BBC Fighting for Nigeria’s oil wealth:

The Niger Delta, a region the size of England, is littered with violence and gas flares – the offshoot of oil extraction – whose roar and heat you can feel for hundreds of metres around.

The flares have become symbols of the region and the paradox that exists in an area where you find one of the world’s richest oil regions alongside some of the poorest people.

…
With unemployment at 90%, many people of the Delta are tempted to join the criminal gangs who terrorise the area, kidnapping foreign oil workers and launching raids on oil platforms.
…
Maintenance of the gangs, their boats and weapons is expensive and is funded by the theft of oil on a huge scale – up to 200,000 barrels a day.
…
The gangs are well-armed and the Joint Task Force is ill-equipped for the challenge.

They’ve managed to seize only a few of the barges used to ferry the stolen oil to huge tankers waiting offshore to take it on to the world’s refineries. It’s a huge and sophisticated operation on an international scale.

For more information on oil piracy see the Christian Science Monitor, PBS Newshour, and the BBC who write “Nigeria’s oil production has been cut by around a fifth since 2006, partly as a result of the violence by criminal gangs and militants. “