YakShaving

I forget where I heard this quote recently: “The bugs are winning” (I think it was a CDC officer in reference to malaria and insect borne pathogens.

Hopefully not much longer.
Die, malaria. Die.

I just realized I didn’t blog about the Oxford style economist debate hosted at the Harris theater a few nights ago. Luckily, Vince had some tickets to it, so I decided to head over with him.

The title of the debate is “Will China’s Rise Lead to an Environmental Catastrophe?“.
Prior to the event, and both the affirmative and negative both had about the same votes. After the night concluded, however, the Affirmative side had picked up more votes. (Pessimists!).

I disagree entirely: Design and innovation comes with constraint and observing workarounds. Constraint is exactly what you have in areas like developing China and India. Whether we like it or not here in the US, other countries are not tied to old decisions manifested in existing infrastructure. They can pave new paths, and try new things to be more environmentally friendly. Their government is tantamount to a benevolent dictatorship, and their governmental fiat will dictate citizens’ eco-decisions. If not directly, they will use propaganda.

And we’ll save ourselves from catastrophe.

Check this out!

Smart idea, I’m still surprised that the government is okay with it though. It seems like it creates an incentive for authorities to clean the streets more than anything.

What might be interesting in this supremely cheap and potentially very effective form of advertising is to actually use it as for political advertising and make voters aware of issues (as if that would happen, huh?).

I imagine this might be dangerous to read though, while someone is walking up the street. They could of course try it 3D style like Julian Beever. Now that would be slick.

• EPROM – Entrepreneurial Programming and Research On Mobiles
  (tags: mobile research programming africa mit)

Tonight, we have a Futurist Meetup in Chicago, so come on out if you’re free from the shackles of doing Systems work or Structured planning class with Chuck. We’re going to have a special meetup– meeting at Intelligentsia on Randolph at 6:30pm and then walking on over to Harris Theater to listen to an Oxford style debate hosted by Chicago Public Radio, with the topic being: “Will China’s Rise Lead to an Environmental Catastrophe?“. It’s a topic that I have a particular area of interest in, as I am a firm believer that ecological sustainability and poverty alleviation/addressing markets at the BOP go directly hand-in-hand.

The speakers sound great…

Team members negating the statement:

Vijay Vaitheeswaran, Global Correspondent for The Economist

Kelly Sims Gallagher, Director of the Energy Technology Innovation Project

Team members in support of the statement:

Orville Schell, Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society

Barry Weisberg, Executive Director of the Violence Prevention Peace Promotion Strategy

Hope you can come out and make it to the Meetup!

Classic case of business, Microplace, entering the social sphere. Yikes! I wonder if the increased competition will help Kiva, or hurt it?

Here are a few points of differentiation between MicroPlace and Kiva from a user perspective:

Brand independent of eBay, but retains association to legal entity, so consumers may feel safer (has “eBay company at the top”

Slick user interface–I can drill down on a map and see where people have businesses that I can invest in, and the economic demographics of a particular region/country. Wow, can you imagine if VCs had this for startups? Neat.

According to P2P lending news, you’re going to be able to trade loans using MicroPlace, since they’re securitized. I wonder if people will actually do this?

I don’t think either of these features are clinchers. I suspect more people would prefer to stick with Kiva because it feels more socially conscious. They are the incumbent “media darlings¹“. Let’s wait and see!

1 – from P2P lending news

…So I can have kids later in life. So that they can be freakin’ geniuses.

No, but seriously, I have a strong conviction that a vast preponderance of the Flynn effect, if it still exists (see here) can be attributed to the proliferation of visual media, ample and diverse in forms.

From Wikipedia:

Still another is that the general environment is today much more complex and stimulating. One of the most striking 20th-century change in the human intellectual environment has come from the increase in exposure to many types of visual media. From pictures on the wall to movies to television to video games to computers, each successive generation has been exposed to far richer optical displays than the one before and may have become more adept at visual analysis.

What precipitated me writing about this? Flynn wrote an article in the latest Scientific American Mind where he discusses theories and his latest thinking.

Getting back to visual media and learning, why is it that so many models of higher learning and vocational/professional learning haven’t taken advantage of the disparities between generational learning styles? I’m not an expert in this field, but it is peculiar and interesting to me.

Technorati Tags:
flynn, learning, IQ, visual

• Economist Confused About the Semantic Web?
  (tags: semanticweb web2.0 oreilly)
• Flynn effect – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  (tags: psychology intelligence iq)

The world seems to be a lot smaller (to use a now cliche, flatter?) when it seems that generational peers in completely different geographic regions with different socio-economic circumstances tend to share the same consumer preferences. I could be overstating this point, but my gut tells me there is something here.

This Sepia Mutiny article, Keep the Gold, I Want a New Nokia for Diwali, references the notion that gold is no longer favored by the Generation Y in India.

Gold is “flaunty”. It reminds people of gaudy old aunty-jii’s that wear too much perfume. It’s certainly not understated, and people prefer to reflect tech-hipster i’m-not-trying-that-hard fashion, not aunty-jii chic. Actually, I might be wrong, since it appears from the comments on that post that diamonds are still very popular among Gen Y South Asian Americans.

I will stand by one point: the similarities in tastes are apparent between ethnic minorities in the US and their native brethren (in the same generation).

The fact that mass transit needs to be saved, is, in my opinion, hokey. What kind of city/state/country are we living in?? One that cannot afford to reasonably improve and upkeep its public transportation to a post-1980s level. The subway lines are in such a state of disrepair– And to top it off, they’re going to start limiting service and just completely eliminate bus lines in November.

This weekend for the first time, I traveled on METRA to Evanston. Usually, I used to take the blue line to the red line to the purple line. When I learned that the Metra station was only about a mile and a half from me, and that it only takes about 20 minutes from the North/Clybourne stop to Evanston-Davis, I was all about trying it out.

Apart from a small snafu involving my bike to be “secured” — by a tiny bungee cord that luckily another woman lent me, the Metra was an extremely pleasurable experience. The clientele are largely middle-class to affluent suburbanites. I would assume that the price for a ticket on the train would vastly exceed that of the CTA. Here, I’d be wrong. Only $3.05, compared to $2. 20 minutes to Evanston, vs 2 hours–more like 2.5 hours with delays. Pretty easy choice.

Why can’t the CTA just get it right? Really poor management and oversight is no longer an excuse. The vibrancy of a city and the entire infrastructure for commuting and thus, working, depends on it.

I suppose I should plug this site until there is a better fix, Save ChicagoLand transit.