While we still have some summer left (my vacation takes place in a couple weeks), it is often near the end of summer that many of us begin to figure out what exactly we will be doing for our Fall classes. The Chronicle of Higher Education’s “ProfHacker” blog, has a couple useful posts on just this topic:
Subjects
Jessica Posner, Wesleyan ’09, wins the top prize!
I definitely recommend that you go to the Huffington Post site (see below) and watch the video of her win.
Congratulations Jessica and Kennedy for all of your success!
The 2010 Do Something Awards ceremony, hosted by actress Jane Lynch, was a star-studded affair, with appearances by Megan Fox, Snoop Dog, the Jonas Brothers, Alyssa Milano, and a bevy of other household names. The biggest name of the night, however, was Jessica Posner, who won the ceremony’s $100,000 grand prize to expand a girls’ school in Kibera, Kenya.
Posner moved to Kenya at age 20 to teach theater to children there. She was shocked by the poverty she saw in Kenya’s largest slum — according to the Denver Post, 1.5 million people live in this area the size of Central Park.
Inspired to change lives in this area, she founded Shining Hope for Communities, a nonprofit that builds tuition-free girls schools.
WATCH Posner win the award on VH1.com:
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Children Carry Guns for a U.S. Ally, Somalia – NYTimes.com
Disturbing, to say the least. But of course the US is not doing this intentionally. The question is, what are our real policy options here?
Find the story here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/world/africa/14somalia.html?scp=1&sq=child%20soldiers&st=cse#
Course Websites: the Schedule
Since I began teaching at Wesleyan, I’ve experimented with different ways of presenting my course syllabus and materials. I began with the standard syllabus PDF and an implementation of Blackboard. But I quickly moved onto using WordPress to make a course website. Examples from last term: International Law and Africa in World Politics. Note the “Schedule” page on those which includes a calendar I painstakingly made. Kevin, our IT guy, kept telling me there is an easier way to do this with Google Calendar. And seeing the post below, I believe this could definitely be the case. I just might have to try it next term.
Create Your Syllabus With a Spreadsheet and a Calendar App
In my post today, I’m going to show you how to use GoogleDocs and Google Calendar to create a dynamic calendar for a course. This calendar can be displayed as a web page or embedded in a course web site. Why would you want to do this? Well, if you’re happy with using a printed syllabus only—which is perfectly fine, of course—then there’s no reason for you to try this. However, the method I explain below is useful if you’d like a little added flexibility and efficiency when updating a course syllabus from semester to semester. Plus it’s kind of nice to have an online syllabus that will always show the immediately upcoming events and assignments for your course.
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Cote d’Ivoire Toxic Waste Trial
Thanks to Robin Turner for the link to this story.
Trafigura accused over Ivory Coast toxic waste
Dutch prosecutors have accused multi-national oil trading firm Trafigura of illegally exporting hazardous waste to Ivory Coast in 2006.
The allegations came at the start of a trial in which the firm is accused of breaking Dutch export and environmental laws and forging official documents.
Tens of thousands of people in Ivory Coast said the waste made them ill.
Trafigura rejects the charges. It denies the waste was dangerous, or that it knew the chemicals would be dumped.
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There are worse oil spills out there: A Spill Afar: Should It Matter? – Green Blog – NYTimes.com
A Spill Afar: Should It Matter?
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
Green: Living
For the last month, Americans have watched with growing horror as a huge leak on a BP oil rig has poured millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. As I wrote on Sunday in the Week in Review section of The Times, there is also shock that technology has so far not been able to control it.
But it is important to remember that this mammoth polluting event, so extraordinary here, is not so unusual in some parts of the world. In an article published Sunday in The Guardian of London, John Vidal, the paper’s environment editor, movingly recalls a trip to the Niger Delta a few years ago, where he literally swam in “pools of light Nigerian crude.”
via A Spill Afar: Should It Matter? – Green Blog – NYTimes.com.
What is our responsibility to alleviate poverty around the world?
I noticed today that Yahoo! News (yes, I know, not a very impressive source for news, but I still have an email account with them and visit their website daily) had a link to Poke’s Global Rich List:
This list will tell you just how rich you are compared to the rest of the world. Most Americans are easily within the top 10%. If you have an income of $50,000 or so, you are easily within the top 1%. They use World Bank data to source their numbers. Now, there are a number of problems with their methodology. It doesn’t, for instance, take into account relative purchasing power ($50,000 would buy me a lot more in Ghana than it does in the US). But it does remind me of a great article I often have my students read, one that was introduced to me by Amy Gurowtiz at UC Berkeley.
Peter Singer’s “Solution to World Poverty”, which appeared in the New York Times Magazine over a decade ago, presents a fantastic version of a cosmopolitan argument for our individual responsibility towards others in the word.
There are alternative views on individual and collective responsibility, and I won’t relate them all here. But I offer these today as interesting food for thought.
And if you do feel inspired to donate something somewhere, I might suggest that the Kibera School for Girls, a project founded by Wesleyan students I have had the privilege to teach, might be a good place to start.
The environment and Africa: recent stories
Treehugger often feels like a pretty random “environmentalist” website. Half the time, I feel like they are trying to sell me something I don’t need (eco-consumerism is not necessarily a good thing). That said, they also occasionally have very interesting stories.
This week I noticed they had a couple posts about Africa.
One does a fantastic job of playing into the stereotype of “Africa as exotic”. It is a series of photos about “Socotra: The Most Alien-Looking Place on Earth”? That said, it clearly is a beautiful and unique place. And I’m surprised I had never heard of it before.
The other post is on the trade in Rosewood from Madagascar. The title mentions that the Rosewood is headed to China but the text never discusses that point. What it does suggest (but not really substantiate) is that the coup last year created an opportunity for outsiders to step in and exploit Madagascar’s natural resources. Once again, a familiar portrayal of Africa, this time as “victim”.
Africa as the exotic victim, plagued–in these cases–by environmental problems, is a refrain that persists. My question is whether — as Lakoff argued for liberals — this is a frame that can be changed.
Ushahidi: NY Times story on a great web technology… from Kenya!
I remember reading about this first about a year ago or so. Glad to see that word of the innovation is spreading.
Ushahidi – Africa’s Gift to Silicon Valley – How to Track a Crisis – NYTimes.com.
FT on US intelligence: great article
The Financial Times has a great article on US intelligence. I especially like the chart depicting how the various intelligence agencies relate to each other. Apparently, they still don’t relate very well…
FT.com / Comment / Analysis – US intelligence: Tribal warfare.
Michael Nelson 