Step Right Up! Git 'Yer College Education Here!

For the longest time I have been suspicious of the quality of college education. There have been plenty of Americans going to colleges and universities, but I haven't seen much of the amazing futures promised in commencement speeches. In fact, it seems like the vast majority of college graduates exhibit the same small mindedness and lack of imagination of past generations.

Seth Godin seems to agree. In a recent blog post he decries the coming meltdown in higher education. These seem to be his major gripes (mine, too).

1. Most colleges are organized to give an average education to average students.
2. College has gotten expensive far faster than wages have gone up.
3. The definition of 'best' [school] is under siege.
4. The correlation between a typical college degree and success is suspect.
5. Accreditation isn't the solution, it's the problem.

I'd add to that, that I think colleges and universities are far more concerned about their reputations and continued growth than they are their student's educations and futures.

His solution? Get out, meet interesting and effective people. Learn things from them. Use libraries. Gap years, research internships and entrepreneurial or social ventures after (or during) high school are good ideas, too. We're sending our daughter to Costa Rica this summer.

Here's a link to Godin's post on the issue.

Cheap Homegrown Energy

One of the worries today is getting electrical power to the developing world without burning stuff (coal, oil, trash) to do it.

The folks at Catapult Design in San Francisco have one answer.  Tiny wind turbines built with materials easily found at the place where the power is needed.  Check out this video of people solving the problem.

Growing My Own

Close ups of the lettuce seeds that are growing in my garden.  Don't ask what kind they are.  They came from a packet of mixed seeds.

 Can't wait to taste the final product.  It'll be a few weeks though.

More On What To Do About Your Collapsing City

I always find it perplexing when people resist change that is inevitable and attempt to cling to something that is already gone. Many of our cities are shrinking and there is continual blow-back from some quarters that suggest that this reality be ignored and we move on with an endless growth scenario.

These two articles discuss other options. The first from Dan Kildee entitled "Bulldozing Cities" deals with the notion that shrinking your city might the appropriate response.

The second by Roberta Brandes Gratz, "Shrinking Cities: Urban Renewal Revisited?" suggests that forestalling the collapse of an urban area starts with offering opportunities that attract new small businesses and investment to the blighted area. Even though these two articles are at odds with each other, I think each contain strategic points that are complimentary.

Have a look.

Meet Your Neighbors Without Seeming Like A Crazy Person

How often do we ignore each other in our own communities? How often do we pass by each other on the street and say nothing? Why do we constantly miss opportunities to connect with our neighbors?

The disease of distancing ourselves from each other is the slow death of civility and community. The cure is simple and painless. It begins by just saying hello.

In a time when we are becoming more fractured as a society and alienated from each other as a result, this short article from GOOD.IS is something we should all take to heart. Then the healing can begin. The article covers five ways to start....

1. Say "Hi"
2. Spruce up your outdoor space, and spend time there
3. Practice common courtesies
4. Hang out in your neighborhood, and shop locally
5. Get involved with your neighborhood in a formalized way

Read the article. It's short and the advice is timely.

Hello, Children, I’m Your (12-year-old) Headmistress

Here is a story in the Times of London about a brave 12 year old girl in India who has started her own school to pass on what she learns to the other children in her impoverished village.  She attends classes between 10am  and 3pm, then comes home and shares her lessons with her less fortunate peers.  All this in the face of Maoist rebels who, in the past four months have blown up 30 schools and community buildings.

That's courage.

Buy Local, Invest Local

We want to keep our communities vibrant and strong, right? We want to build places that our children will want to live in and not run away from, right?

What better way to do that than to buy local? Invest local. That's right, sink your investment money into opportunities in your own town.

In the 9,000-person town of Port Townsend, Washington, the residents plan to buy stock in their own community. Although securities law makes it next to impossible for small businesses to issue stock and accept investment, this innovative program they've cooked up has found a way to skirt this obstacle.

Change the future, right at home.

I Love Books

I love reading and one of my life goals has been to have a home library that covers as many subjects as possible. My wife and I have been mostly successful in this regard. Our library has taken over our living room and includes extensive and eclectic selections on religion, the sciences, art, gardening, geography, history, world cultures, architecture, theater and (of course) music.

Now comes confirmation that this endeavour was not simply hubris or whimsy. According to a study in the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, children growing up in homes with a large library of books will do better in school and go farther in life.

The study states that children who grow up surrounded by books are 20 percent more likely to finish college than those who do not and that kids living in a home with a library of 500 books get 3.2 more years of education than his or her peer raised in a book-less home.

I always knew that buying all these books was a good idea. Now I know why.

Dirt - The Movie

Industrial farming, mining, and urban development have endangered our soil. The result: cataclysmic droughts, starvation, floods, and climate change. We take the soil under our feet for granted, but it is what sustains us, not the economy of consumer stuff that we spend most of our time and money on. Disregarding something so essential to our survival can only end in tragedy. This PBS film, premiering on April 20th from Independent Lens, shows us our connection to the land and how tenuous it is.

Heads up, this is our future.

You Take The East Road And I'll Take The West Road

Yesterday I read an account of two cities on opposite coasts that may be pointing the way to a future with significantly fewer automobiles.

First, in Portland, Oregon, the city council voted 5-0 to accept a new bike plan with the ambitious goal of increasing the percentage of people riding bikes from 6% (the highest of any big city in the country) to 25%. Then on the East Coast, in none other than our great megalopolis NYC, the New York City Department of Transportation announced that they will permanently close Broadway to vehicle traffic.

Wow.

This might be prescient as I also read another article that states that the US military is warning that surplus oil production capacity could disappear within two years and there could be serious shortages by 2015 with significant economic and political impact.

So, do you think the movers and shakers of Portland and NYC have read that second article?

The Writer's Almanac

I love poetry and I start (almost) every day with The Writer's Almanac, a website/podcast provided by The Poetry Foundation.

Each daily entry includes the literary history of the day, authors birthdays, anniversaries of first printings and readings, capped off with a poem, all read by none other than Garrison Keillor , in his resonant baritone voice. It's a lovely start to each day.

How To Avert The Collapse Of Your Shrinking City

How do you save your city when it's shrinking due to economic circumstances? Listen up Detroit because you can take a lesson from what's going on in East Germany right now.

By re-purposing abandoned buildings and suggesting that "city islands" be created with urban green zones and huge outdoor art projects, the International Building Exhibition (IBA) focuses on how a shrinking city can be transformed.

This photo essay and article in Speigel Online suggests how your city can withstand the departure of it's population and the economic collapse that follows and still thrive.

How To Avert The Collapse Of Civilization #7

DON'T WASTE THINGS!

This important perspective is one that people overlook again and again. In fact, many think that it's the mark of an advanced and prosperous culture; "Got so much we can throw it away!"

In How To Achieve Zero Waste At Home Ben Jervey outlines the basic rules for eliminating waste in your home.

This is actually part of #6, "Try not to run out of energy."

Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto

Following up on the last few days of posts, I am encouraging all to read this fine book by...wait for it...Stewart Brand.

Brand is one of the original tree huggers and one of the founders of the so-called ecology movement.  To see him come full circle to embrace nuclear energy and genetic engineering as means to avert a looming global crisis is not only satisfying, but also breathtaking.  In a time when wisdom is often measured by one's ability to ignore facts and stick steadfastly to one's failed ideas and ideology, to see someone of Brand's stature change course to achieve his lifelong goals is encouraging.  If only the rest of us would examine our ideas and challenge our sacred cows to the same ends.

Recently, no less than renowned climate scientist James Lovelock stated that humans are too stupid to prevent climate change from radically impacting on our lives over the coming decades.

He said, "I don't think we're yet evolved to the point where we're clever enough to handle a complex a situation as climate change.  The inertia of humans is so huge that you can't really do anything meaningful."

Brand's book not only argues that we can, it spells out how.

I enjoyed reading it enormously and I hope you will read it, too.

How To Avert The Collapse Of Civilization

This was in my email today from Stewart Brand.  It summarizes David Eagleman's recent talk at the Long Now Foundation.  Here is Brand's email....

Civilizations always think they're immortal, Eagleman noted, but they nearly always perish, leaving "nothing but runes and scattered genetics."  It takes luck and new technology to survive.  We may be particularly lucky to have Internet technology to help manage the six requirements of a durable civilization:

1. "Try not to cough on one another."  More humans have died from epidemics than from all famines and wars.  Disease precipitated the fall of Greece, Rome, and the civilizations of the Americas.  People used to bunch up around the infected, which pushed local disease into universal plague.  Now we can head that off with Net telepresence, telemedicine, and medical alert networks.  All businesses should develop a work-from-home capability for their workforce.

2. "Don't lose things."  As proved by the destruction of the Alexandria Library and of the literature of Mayans and Minoans, "knowledge is hard won but easily lost."  Plumbing disappeared for a thousand years when Rome fell.  Innoculation was invented in China and India 700 years before Europeans rediscovered it.  These days Michaelangelo's David has been safely digitized in detail.  Eagleman has direct access to all the literature he needs via PubMed, JSTOR, and Google Books.  "Distribute, don't revinvent."

3. "Tell each other faster."  Don't let natural disasters cascade.  The Minoans perished for lack of the kind of tsunami alert system we now have.  Countless Haitians in the recent earthquake were saved by Ushahidi.com, which aggregated cellphone field reports in real time.

4. "Mitigate tyranny."  The USSR's collapse was made inevitable by state-controlled media and state-mandated mistakes such as Lysenkoism, which forced a wrong theory of wheat farming on 13 time zones, and starved millions.  Now crowd-sourced cellphone users can sleuth out vote tampering.  We should reward companies that stand up against censorship, as Google has done in China.

5. "Get more brains involved in solving problems."  Undertapping human capital endangers the future.  Open courseware from colleges is making higher education universally accessible.  Crowd-sourced problem solving is being advanced by sites such as PatientsLikeMe, Foldit (protein folding), and Cstart (moon exploration).  Perhaps the next step is "society sourcing."

6. "Try not to run out of energy."  When energy expenditure outweighs energy return, collapse ensues.  Email saves trees and trucking.  Online shopping is a net energy gain, with UPS optimizing delivery routes and never turning left.  We need to expand the ability to hold meetings and conferences online.

But if the Net is so crucial, what happens if the Net goes down?  It may have to go down a few times before we learn how to defend it properly, before we catch on that civilization depends on it for survival.

--SB

Thinking In Ten Dimensions

Want to think BIG thoughts?  Tired of one dimensional thinking in others (and yourself)?

Watch this........

How Buildings Learn Part Six - Shearing Layers

In the final instalment of How Buildings Learn, Brand talks about how buildings live in time and the pressures that they undergo. The layers are perpertually changing; outer shell, framework and the inner shell all exist in a relationship that runs in different time scales, so they "rub" against each other as they pass through time together.  And as Brand says, buildings that last do so because they are loved and able to be refined and their architect is time.

The Romance of Maintenance Part Two - The Reality of Decay

Some buildings that have been seriously neglected.

How Buildings Learn Part Five: The Romance of Maintenance

Things fall apart. The only thing keeping a building up is maintenance. Boring, mundane, day to day, endless tasks that keep a building from falling in on itself. In the fifth edition of How Buildings Learn, Brand talks about how to care for your home/office/sactuary.

Oh and he talks about water a lot. Remember my comment about Wright's Falling Waters?

How Buildings Learn Part Four - Unreal Estate

Zoning, which was designed to improve city life, eventually stifles it. Zoning laws keep people, their work and the services they need, apart from each other, creating islands of specificity that resist change.

Often times zoning laws keep you from doing the very things that you want a home and property for in the first place. Zoning is also designed to separate classes. Rich from poor and high from low. It's no wonder that most folks (except planning commissions) dislike their zoning laws.

In part four of How Buildings Learn, Brand explores these limitations and how people do (or don't) get around them.