Watch the intro video on the idea of imagining that you, as president, have instigated an initiative in 2020 to collect ideas and participation from throughout the world to help cure an incurable disease 100 million Americans are infected with http://foresight.breakthroughstocures.org
Did you know that Raleigh, N.C. had the highest rate of population growth in the last decade of any large metropolitan area?
Metropolitan population growth is just one of more than a thousand topics addressed in the U.S. Census Bureau's Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2011. The Abstract is perennially the federal government's best-selling reference book. When it was first published in 1878, the nation had only 38 states, people usually got around using a horse and buggy, Miami and Las Vegas did not yet exist, and Franklin D. Roosevelt had yet to be born. The Abstract has been published nearly every year since then.
Contained in the 130th edition are 1,407 tables of social, political and economic facts that collectively describe the state of our nation and the world. Included this year are 65 new tables, covering topics such as insufficient rest or sleep, nursing home occupancy, homeschooling, earthquakes, U.S. Border Patrol apprehensions, organic farmland, honey bee colonies, crashes involving distracted drivers and cities with the highest transit savings.
The statistics come not only from the Census Bureau but also from other governmental agencies and private organizations. The data generally represent the most recent year or period available by summer 2010. Most are national-level data, but some tables present state- and even city- and metropolitan-level data as well.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau
+ Thanks to those posting to the ResourceShelf Twitter feed
On January 11 at 9 a.m. EST, Google will host a live event on its brand new Science Fair YouTube Channel. More details about the fair will be announced then; we’re assuming the site will be fleshed out at that time, as well.
The global science competition is being hosted in partnership with CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), LEGO, National Geographic and Scientific American. The goal is “to create a new kind of online science competition that is more global, open and inclusive than ever before.”
Teachers who want to receive classroom materials, including posters, stickers and bookmarks, as well as get registration information, can start signing up now.
Thanks to those posting to Mashable's Twitter feed (source article).
Phi Beta Iota: The existence of double sets of books is now coming to light. As best we can tell from various public discussions, the operating budgets are deliberately in the red and used to borrow money, at the same time that out-sourced services and “asset rents” are in the black. We honestly do not know what the true situation is, but we do know that the amount of falsehood and fraud in the “system” is deep.
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Overdrawn American cities could face financial collapse in 2011, defaulting on hundreds of billions of dollars of borrowings and derailing the US economic recovery. Nor are European cities safe – Florence, Barcelona, Madrid, Venice: all are in trouble
Elena Moya, guardian.co.uk, Monday 20 December 2010
More than 100 American cities could go bust next year as the debt crisis that has taken down banks and countries threatens next to spark a municipal meltdown, a leading analyst has warned.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you,
then they fight you, then it appears in the Harvard Business Review,
and then you win while Harvard claims it was their idea…
The capitalist system is under siege. In recent years business increasingly has been viewed as a major cause of social, environmental, and economic problems. Companies are widely perceived to be prospering at the expense of the broader community.
Even worse, the more business has begun to embrace corporate responsibility, the more it has been blamed for society’s failures. The legitimacy of business has fallen to levels not seen in recent history. This diminished trust in business leads political leaders to set policies that undermine competitiveness and sap economic growth. Business is caught in a vicious circle. [Emphasis added.]
Phi Beta Iota: Legitimacy is the foundation of good order and commerce. That Harvard is beginning to get this is a very good sign. The authors also skirt the most interesting point, which is that “who does what” is changing, and we (this they do not address) are moving toward HYBRID networks that accomplish things together, on the basis of SHARED INFORMATION and consensus sense-making. When Alvin Toffler introduced in detail the concept of PowerShift, the most powerful concept he brought forward was that of information being a substitute for time, space, capital, and labor–and violence over the same–he was setting the stage for moving beyond the age of date or information, and into the age of cyber-collaboration to create shared value–what one author calls Non-Zero. NOW we are finally starting to get somewhere…toward what Tom Altee calls Evolutionary Activism driven by advanced cyber-information operations: creating shared value begins with creating shared information.
I'm afraid I don't have much useful to offer to Robert's initiative at this time. But I wanted to briefly note, for you and others, that evolutionary science writer Connie Barlow and former fundamentalist evangelical Christian minister Michael Dowd offer another, complementary, angle on evolution and religion (including their own thoughts on the relevance of evolutionary psychology) at Thank God for Evolution and The Great Story.
Michael is translating Christian theology into terms not only consistent with but expressive of a sacred understanding of science-based evolution. (He half jokes that he is a CreaTHEist, while Connie is a CreAtheist!) He is currently doing some remarkable interviews with luminaries in the field of Evolutionary Christianity. At the very least, their work should provide you with some additional juicy quotes…
Well said. And I rather suspect that the core of the matter is deeper than Culture – and that would be an extended conversation. But it is certainly not about rule change and redesign, I think.
Right on, as your imminent study of evolutionary psychology will confirm. I reckon we don't have time for evolutions in our Pleistocene genome to catch up to (and get ahead of) our impact on the planet, so we're just gonna hafta run what we brung. That means cultural engineering and we already have been shown how to do it by the Oligarchy. What's it gonna take to shift the values-balance from hegemonistic concentration at any cost to something closer to sustainability? But then, that's a whole ‘nother conversation barely touched-on in the message below…