Wednesday, December 17, 2014

Some Notes on Sustainable Development and Climate Change

One of the biggest global challenges is economic inequality --the gap between the rich and the poor.  How to improve the life of the poor?  Education and access to information?  Creating markets for the poor?  Giving the poor a chance to enter the economic system, to get out of poverty, diseases and lack of education, and to climb up the social ladder?  Provide the poor with adequate social opportunities, basic healthcare (e.g., vaccination, antibiotics, toilets and clean water...), so that they may be able to help each other, control their own lives, and climb up the social ladder.  "With adequate social opportunities, individuals can effectively shape their own destiny, and help each other."  (Amartya Sen)   

In 2013 the median net worth of upper-income families in the USA reached $639,400, nearly 7 times as much of those in the middle, and nearly 70 times the level of those at the bottom of the income ladder.  From the data of the Federal Reserve, the middle income for a family of four is $44,000/year, and the yearly income of $132,000 for the same family size pushed the household into the upper ranks. (NY Times Business, B3, Dec 18, 2014)

Wealth inequality hurts economic growth.  The latest increases in wealth.are the result of existing assets ballooning in value --like a penthouse apartment with a river view --rather than productive investments.(Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz)
Another huge challenge to humankind is climate change.  "No nation will be immune to the impact of climate change.  However, the distribution of impact is likely to be inherently unequal and tilted against many of the world's poorest regions, which have the least economic, institutional, scientific, and technical ability to react."  (The World Bank)
There are many levels of actions: international level, national level, community level, societal level, individual and home owner level.  How to change?  Create a social consensus; provoke care; marshal resources; design patterns of intervention.  A non-violent process that requires everybody's universal responsibility, determination and perseverance.

Sources:
www.worldbank.org/climatechange
Patricia Cohen. "Fuel by Recession, US Wealth Gap Is Widest in Decades, Study Finds." The New York Times Business, B3, Thursday December 18, 2014.

Thursday, December 11, 2014

Trash in the World's Oceans




If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito.
                                                                                 The Dalai Lama
  • According to a report published on Wednesday in the scientific journal PLOS ONE, "[p]lastics of all sizes were found in all ocean regions."
  • Nearly 270,000 tons of plastic are floating in the world's oceans....
  • [A]t least 5.25 trillion plastic pieces... enough to fill more than 38,500 garbage trucks, the Associated Press reported.  
This file 2008 photo provided by NOAA Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center shows debris in Hanauma Bay, Hawaii.



Juvenile Herring Gull with plastic rubbish in its beak, Newquay, Cornwall, England



 A small island formed by the accumulation of trash is pictured in Tanjung Burung, on the coast of Indonesia's Banten province June 5, 2013.
 

Source: 
Rheana Murray, "Startling Images of the Tons of Trash in the World's Oceans." Dec 11, 2014 
http://abcnews.go.com/International/startling-images-tons-trash-worlds-oceans/story?id=27531402

Related link:


 
When the mind becomes the practices, one is a practitioner of religion.
                                                                                 The Dalai Lama

Friday, December 5, 2014

The Everything Store

...[Amazon.love memo]... lays out a vision for how the Amazon founder wants his company to conduct itself and be perceived by the world.  It reflects Bezos's values and determination, and perhaps even his blind spots.
"Some big companies develop ardent fan bases, are widely loved by their customers, and are even perceived as cool....For different reasons, in different ways and to different degrees, companies like Apple, Nike, Disney, Google, Whole Foods, Costco and even UPS strike me as examples of large companies that are well-liked by their customers."  On the other end of spectrum, [Bezos] added, companies like Walmart, Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, and ExxonMobil tended to be feared.
Bezos postulates that this second set of companies was viewed, perhaps unfairly, as engaging in exploitative behavior.  (p.317)

 ....But Bezos was dissatisfied with that simplistic conclusion and applied his usual analytical sensibility to parse out why some companies were loved and others feared.
....On an attached spreadsheet, Bezos listed seventeen attributes, including polite, reliable, risk taking, and thinking big, and he ranked a dozen companies on each particular characteristic.  His methodology was highly subjective, he conceded, but his conclusions, laid out at the end of the Amazon.love memo, were aimed at increasing Amazon's odds of standing out among the loved companies.  Being polite and reliable or customer-obsessed was not sufficient.  Being perceived as inventive, as an explorer rather than a conqueror, was critically important.  "I actually believe the four "unloved" companies are inventive as a matter of substance.  But they are not perceived as inventors or pioneers.  It is not enough to be inventive --that pioneering spirit must also come across and be perceived by the customer base," he wrote. (pp. 318-319)
 
Source:
Brad Stone, The Everything Store --Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (New York, NY: Little, Brown, and Company, 2013).

Tuesday, December 2, 2014

Some Notes on Internet Security



To search the Web anonymously: www.torproject.org

To make your hard drive snoop-proof, encrypt its content by:
·         BitLocker (Window 7 and Vista)
·        The Pro and Enterprise version (of Window 8).  Go to Control panel>System & Security>BitLocker Drive Encryption
·        
          For free encryption, use TrueCrypt (www.truecrypt.org)

To destroy a file, use Eraser (go.pcworld.com/eraser6).  It overrides that data and ensures that no one can resurrect it.  Remember that Recura can often retrieve trashed data.

Tails OS (go.pcworld.com/tailsos) is part of the TorProject.
Install Tails OS on a DVD or a USB drive and run it on any computer.

Source:
PC World, June 2014, Vol. 32(6), pp. 33-37.