Category: Outlook

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Appropriate Technology

A nice article on someone I have long admired. I do not want to get all ranty, but
I am from a very poor nation, and most people in my country survive with less than two dollars a day.
I also have been blessed enough to study at two Great institutions of learning in my country, PSHS and UP .
What studying in those institutions allowed me is to interact with a lot of people involved in Science, Technology and Engineering in my country.  What I is disheartening me a little is what I feel whenever I interact with a lot of them.
I don’t know what to call this but I’d christen it “If I Only Had” mentality. Many of my country’s STE people always think that they’d be able to do do (…. insert research etc) if “they only had” (…. insert state of the art equipment here). Its so frustrating hearing these people bemoaning the fact that they do not have the latest anything.
People need to remember that the constraints shape the outcome, but it cannot shape what is never started , what is never tried. I hear and see a lot of people acting like children trying to ask their parents for the newest toys and not doing what we used to do when I was a kid, either use my imagination to conjure castles and horses etc.
I wish they take the article below to heart.
PS: There are a lot of researchers who fall into the can do attitude group, I commend their efforts and wish them luck in their pursuits.
do read the whole thing ;
from here:

The Peruvian village of Compone lies 11,000 ft. above sea level in El Valle Sagrado de los Incas, the Sacred Valley of the Incas. Flat but ringed by mountains, the tallest capped year-round in snow and ice, the valley is graced with a mild climate and mineral-rich soil that for centuries has produced what the Incas called sara—corn.
The farmers of Compone feed corn to their livestock, grind it into meal, boil it for breakfast, lunch and dinner and stockpile it as insurance against future unknowns. They burn the corncobs, stripped of kernels, in the earthen stoves they use for cooking and to heat their homes.
It’s the stoves that worry Amy Smith. One morning, the 45-year-old inventor stands on the front lawn of the town’s community center, beside a 55-gal. drum packed with corncobs that is billowing smoke, a box of matches in her hand and dressed for comfort in faded jeans, avocado T-shirt and a baseball cap pulled over a thick curtain of dirty-blond hair. Smith is ringed by three dozen campesinos who make no move to dodge the lung-burning, eye-stinging cloud. If she just waited a few minutes, the embers would burst into flame on their own and the smoke would dissipate in the intense heat. Instead, she drops a match into the barrel, then jerks her hand back. Nothing happens.
Smith is trying to turn the cobs into charcoal. For an award-winning engineer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, this would seem to be a humble goal. Wood charcoal has been in use for thousands of years. However, for many of the world’s poor, it can be a life-saving technology. Compone’s farmers are among the 800 million people worldwide who use raw biomass—agricultural waste, dung, straw—for fuel. Globally, smoke from indoor fires makes respiratory infections the leading cause of death for children under the age of 5, claiming more than a million young lives a year. Charcoal burns much more cleanly. “I don’t know how quickly we can change cooking habits here,” Smith says, “but I’d like to see people breathing less smoke inside their homes.”
A well-liked instructor at MIT and member of the Popular Mechanics editorial advisory board, Smith is a rising star in a field known as appropriate technology, which focuses on practical, usually small-scale designs to solve problems in the developing world. She has brought four undergrads to Compone, along with Jesse Austin-Breneman, an MIT graduate who works for a community organization in Peru, and one of her engineering collaborators, 53-year-old Gwyndaf Jones. To get here, the team has lugged bags of tools and low-tech gadgets, water-testing equipment and a heavy wooden crate bearing a pedal-powered grain mill more than 3500 miles in taxis, airplanes and buses.

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MOA

I think I need to follow local news more closely.
here is a nice intro to the MOA between the MILF Rebels and The Government Representatives.
I think the MOA is unconstitutional and may be there for two reasons.
The current government is trying to railroad a Charter Change, I pray they don’t succeed.
Why Can’t We Have A Better Class Of Politicians?

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rePost: Gratitude

The takeaway is that if you are not going to be mindful of what you are doing 24/7 why don’t you make helping people a default reaction. Remember maybe helping one people directly may mean really helping 2-3 people.
from here:

Consider the following experiment conducted by Monica Bartlett and myself. We brought people into the lab and set up 2 situations: One in which they confronted a problem which would require them to complete an onerous task and one where they didn’t face any problem. In the first case, a confederate, at some cost to herself in terms of time and effort, helped the participant solve the problem, which led to measurable feelings of gratitude. In the second, the confederate was just another person in the session.
After leaving the lab, all participants just happened to encounter someone asking for help on a different onerous task. This person was either the known confederate (labeled benefactor in the figure) or someone who was a complete stranger.
Looking at the first two bars, you can see that grateful participants helped the known confederate much more than neutral participants.
Ok, I know what you’re thinking. This doesn’t prove anything! They may just be following a reciprocity norm. Fair enough. But look at the second set of bars. If it were really reciprocity, then no increased helping should occur when a stranger requests help, as participants don’t owe this stranger anything. Yet, those who were feeling grateful still helped more. Simply put, gratitude functioned to push people to acquiesce to requests for help — even onerous ones from unknown others.

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Importantly, another study showed that if we reminded the participants before they left that they were helped by the confederate, they didn’t help the stranger any more than control participants. By binding the emotional state so saliently to one person, it couldn’t be misattributed as a cue to help another, thereby indicating that the increased helping isn’t just adherence to a “pay-it-forward” norm. Yet participants still were paying-it-forward.

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Live Life!

Thanks to pk here:

To be truly challenging, a voyage, like a life, must rest on a firm foundation of financial unrest. Otherwise you are doomed to a routine traverse, the kind known to yachtsmen, who play with their boats at sea–“cruising”, it is called. Voyaging belongs to seamen, and to the wanderers of the world who cannot, or will not, fit in. If you are contemplating a voyage and you have the means, abandon the venture until your fortunes change. Only then will you know what the sea is all about.
Little has been said or written about the ways a man may blast himself free. Why? I don’t know, unless the answer lies in our diseased values. A man seldom hesitates to describe his work; he gladly divulges the privacies of alleged sexual conquests. But ask him how much he has in the bank and he recoils into a shocked and stubborn silence.
“I’ve always wanted to sail to the South Seas, but I can’t afford it.” What these men can’t afford is not to go. They are enmeshed in the cancerous discipline of “security”. And in the worship of security we fling our lives beneath the wheels of routine—and before we know it our lives are gone.
What does a man need—really need? A few pounds of food each day, heat and shelter, six feet to lie down in—and some form of working activity that will yield a sense of accomplishment. That’s all—in the material sense. And we know it. But we are brainwashed by our economic system until we end up beneath a pyramid of time payments, mortgages, preposterous gadgetry, playthings that divert our attention from the sheer idiocy of the charade.
The years thunder by. The dreams of youth grow dim where they lie caked in dust on the shelves of patience. Before we know it, the tomb is sealed.
Where, then, lies the answer? In choice. Which shall it be: bankruptcy of purse or bankruptcy of life?

It pains me when I see friends whose youthful dreams fade into the oblivion of getting caught up in reality!

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Oppressed Mentality

thanks to brad delong from his excerpt here:

Though via a paradox: the greater their power, the more they felt oppressed. When the people who felt like losers united around their shared psychological sense of grievance, their enemies felt somehow more overwhelming, not less; even if the Franklins weren’t always really so powerful at all, Franklin “power” often being merely a self-perpetuating effect of an Orthogonian sense of victimization. Martyrs who were not really martyrs, oppressors who were not really oppressors: a class politics for the white middle class. The keynote of the new, Nixonian politics…though we are getting ahead of ourselves. For first we must send Richard Nixon to law school, where he was a monk….

I see this with a lot of my countrymen and women. its like so many people feel that they are so special as to believe that everyone is trying to oppress them. Damn. We are all special that’s why Nobody is special.
What I’d be honest enough to admit is what I continuously see. People are so caught up (except those people whom I know to have so much as to be ble to give so much of themselves, I wouldn’t name names so the few people who read this end up thinking I am referring to them) in the little drama of their own lives that most of the time your boss doesn’t hate you. The jeepney driver who gave you the wrong change didn’t actually try to cheat you. The lady who slightly nudged you while getting off the MRT(like the BART) didn’t really intend to shove you. Get Over Your Cult Of ME!

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Raising The Tide

ht to  Bill Scher
ty Brad Delong here:
This is conservatism. The dismissal of economic burdens from others making less money than you. The belief that an ideal economy can thrive with a small boat of winners and a giant sinking ship of losers. The insistence that your economic dissatisfaction is illegitimate, and can only be explained by a brainwashing from the media or politicians.
I’ve written my belief that the circumstances of one’s life affects the things one achieves  and although I believe that people can break free from the constraints of their environment(this I am trying to prove personally) I will always be thankful for whatever break that comes my way. Always realizing that what often we call hardwork may just be a different sort of luck. This is why the quote resonates with me deeply.
We should not think of ourselves to highly.  Always remember the cognitive biases.

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Why "Wise" Self Made Introspective People Give

from here an article on discussing Nassim Taleb’s book “The Black Swan”:
There are various things you can do. The first is to realize that if you succeed, it’s probably not exclusively due to your brilliant mind. More than anything else it is luck. You still need a brilliant mind of course to help guide you at every step, just don’t pretend that it alone will get you where you want to be.
most self made people realize that there was someone just as smart and just as driven as them that wasn’t as successful as they are. They see people far more intelligent and far more “better” in less enticing situations.  They realize that given how much they know about how precarious their success actually was, a little missed connection here and a little bad timing there and the whole thing collapse like a corrupt politician’s bridge. Because of this Randomness the “Wise” Self Made Introspective person cannot but be the philanthropists who helps less fortunate people at least achieve a decent kind of life.
I hope, I pray, I will become, Someday, Someday!

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Reminder To Start Helping

from here:
The economic growth in a country like South Korea, which has made much more educational progress than the United States, clearly demonstrates this. “If you look across countries,” says Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard, “education is the strongest predictor for how quickly the pie grows.”

Hope I can find the time to contribute in the community with increasing literacy and helping people find a track towards getting educated in my country. I don’t know. I promised myself I’d get more involve a around January next year. Posting this as a reminder.

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Oil

from here:
Americans fell in love with vehicles like the Ford pickup trucks in the 1990s, back when gas didn’t cost much more than $1 a gallon. That seemed normal at the time, because gas prices had remained in a narrow range — roughly 90 cents to $1.25 a gallon — going back to the early 1980s.
But this stability was actually a sign of something deeply unusual. The cost of most everything else was rising, as was the size of people’s nominal paychecks. So in practical terms, gas was becoming cheaper. By 1999, it had effectively fallen to its lowest point on record, about 30 percent lower than few people in my country realize this.
The over all sentiment is that we should go back to the regulated oil days. The fact is we have a weak government that can’t seem to reign in the profiteering.

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Nice Post on Happiness and Wealth Creation and Success

Once you’ve found your happiness, all that other stuff is just scenery.
from a post by Michael Parkatti title: Happiness, Not Wealth Creation, is the Sole Measure of Success here:

I don’t know I feel that this might be true but with things like this the only way to really know is to experience these things.