With the tragic typhoon that hit the Philippines on Friday November 8, 2013 and having family there I found it an importance to myself to watch this conference clip which took place on Tuesday November 19 of Climate Chief “Yeb” Sano who Demands Rich Nations to Pay for Global Pollution. As of now the death toll due to the devastating typhoon tolls to about 4,000 people, Sano feels that if developed nations observe the environment and support countries that are undeveloped such as the Philippines both financially and technologically with this climate change that is happening. The Climate Change conference that is taking place in Warsaw, Poland is a huge matter for climate Chief Sano, as he is on his ninth day of a hunger fast to demonstrate a political message for immediate action to help and feed the people of the Philippines. His overall standpoint is that the world needs to find the courage to take the responsibility to prepare for our future. With the Philippines going through a climate madness, Sano speaks about how the climate changes from developed, rich nations such as the United States is affecting our civil society throughout the world. The U.S is the largest (one fourth) of human emissions in the world due to: fossil fuel burning, greenhouse gas emission, and low renewable energy providers; Sano feels that we need to address these climate changes for undeveloped countries and help them adapt to this environment. Sano along with the Philippines is in a Movement for Climate Justice and asks for human sustained development from richer nations. I really was intrigued watching this conference clip, I could not believe that Sano was on his ninth day of fasting to display a message for the Philippines. It was compelling to see that importance to pursue renewable energy from developed countries such as ours. I feel that the U.S needs to try to reduce global pollution and help support other less developed countries technologically to prepare for these climate changes that Sano speaks of.
Monthly Archives: November 2013
Culture Emergent Effort
During Wednesday’s class towards the end we separated into our discussion groups to talk about how emergent efforts are taking place today within our society. We were given the option to discuss cultural, economic, and political “reality” emergent efforts. As my group and I looked at various aspects within these topics, I really found the cultural effort to be a big impact within our day and age as college students. I have a friend who works for Apple and he values the importance of sustainable energy. He along with myself view sustainable energy and living as an important part of life that should be taken more seriously within our world. He also works for Live Nation as a computer technician, and helps to prepare events such as Coachella, Hard Summer, EDC and any other type of music festivals. As part of a cultural emergent effort he was explaining to me that Live Nation is in the process of developing solar panel cell phone charging stations throughout these music festivals. Basically they would set up tents that would have lockers which would be powered by solar panels which will provide the energy needed to charge a cell phone. Spectators could plug in their phones in the locker during the event, take the key and then come back within a few hours to pick up their charged phones and leave the locker for another person. During these events which typically last all day, the importance of having a charged cell phone is a huge deal. With the way our society is technologically accustomed to their cell phones this has become a huge part of our reality, and I feel Live Nation’s idea is genius. This is just a small effort towards a culture emergent effort for sustainability but I do think that with the right organization and systematic thinking towards a sustainable “reality” we all could participate in these developments.
Green Club’s Free Store Thursday Nov.21,2013
This week for community service hours I came out to help out the Green Club set up their free store on the pancake stacks. It was a great opportunity to display free items that many students were able to use. The free store is an excellent idea because it is a system that allows clothing, books, posters, appliances a chance to be recycled and reused. This store services a great purpose to recycle and sustain our environment. Overall it was a great experience and turnout for a rainy day(:
Implicit Association Test
After taking a quick ten minute test online https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/Study?tid=-1 to learn my results on my preference for European Americans compared to African Americans, I was quite astonished to learn my results. According to my results from this test I learned that my data suggested I had a moderate automatic preference to European Americans compared to African Americans. I do not consider myself o be racist or preferential towards a race, so I found it quite surprising to have these results. In the result portion of the test it had mentioned that some of my answers are influenced by my culture or environmental upbringing. This might in fact be correct because where I grew up in Santa Fe Springs and the Montebello area there were not that many African American residents in my city. I feel that my results are negative in a sense that I do not prefer one race over the other, I could be able to correct my result association by becoming involved within school on a more culturally diversed level.
The Corporation
After viewing today in class The Corporation and the roots to these profit driven entities I was mind blown to learn how corporations were born. Corporations began when an association of people coming together to build a function, these were known as charter corporations. However as money became powerful and great profits were the big idea, these corporations learned to gain protection to become powerful entities to continue to generate and gain the most profit at the cheapest labor. Corporations eventually have only learned to care for their stockholders (the rich), and have no soul to its stakeholders (the rest of us). As money has been the main driving force in America, corporations have grown into externalizing machines. The externalities that are being affected from these multi-billion dollar corporations are its workers. Many of the harms that corporations have brought to its workers and stakeholders are layoffs, infrastructure building that has led to the over crowd ness of skyscrapers in downtown cities, sweat shops in third world countries, and union busting. There are factories in Bangledish where the poor there area starving to death, and all they have to offer in order to survive is low cost labor. Yes, these residents have no other option but to work for as low as ten cents an hour in the factories of “the corporation” just to earn enough to not starve to death. This is sad to see this science of explotation within corporations. These workers rarely make enough money to feed their families, let alone their economies and corporations and industries know this and take advantage of these circumstances to maximize profits. Years ago there was a cancer epidemic in factories, toxic waste and pollution from synthetic chemicals exposed to workers killed many. However these industries that were responsible for deaths and birth defects had no remorse and continued the habitat destruction. The sad thing about all this is that no matter how much we are aware of these resistances to sustainability, they will probably never be fixed because in the end profit motivation and maximization is what drives American money.
“BLink:THe Power of Thinking, Without Thinking”
After reading Malcolm Gladwell, “The Warren Harding Error: Why We Fall for Tall, Dark, and Handsome Men” I have gained a better insight as to why society behaves and judges in the systems that it does. I feel that the reason why we stereotype is due to our unconscious behavior and decisions. In this chapter I learned that error is the dark side of rapid cognition, a root of a good deal of prejudice and discrimination. In this chapter it opened up discussing the election of Warren Harding and how he was acknowledge based on the simple fact that his charisma and charm of being a tall, dark , and handsome man was the underlying reason to his election. An once he was in office, the reality of the matter was that he was not suitable for the position and these stereotypical judgments are what society sometimes ends up making in positions of enormous responsibilities. This whole act of rating people off of first impressions leads to the fact that sometimes we can know more about someone or something in the blink of an eye, rather than with months of studying. This rapid cognition acknowledges and understands this. There have been Implicit Assessment Tests created by psychologists Anthony G. Greenwald and Brian Nosek that has led to the idea that “we make connections quickly on ideas we know rather than what is unfamiliar”. Their tests have led to the idea of “Pro-White Associations” within our world. With these tests we can see that our attitudes towards race and gender operate on two levels: conscious level (what we choose to believe, what we use to direct our behavior deliberatley) and unconscious level. The test also shows that our unconscious attitude maybe utterly incompatible with our state conscious values. As with the Harding story society automatically associates leadership ability with imposing physical structure. This is sad because we have began to think less rational and make prejudgments of people. As with sustainability I feel that we sometimes consciously do not participate in sustaining our environment but also a lot of it has to do with our unconscious behavior. We can be wasteful at many times without even realizing the wrongful doing. I feel we can alter this thin-slicing of our enviroment by changing the experiences that comprise our impressions of our natural world.
“Drive The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us” Dan Pink
After viewing Dan Pink’s “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us”, I have a new knowledge on the brilliant idea of the purpose motive. In his short film he explains how incentives given to employees as a profit motive has led to the finding of the astonishing idea of the “purpose motive”. This purpose motive is the new and better work ethic characteristic to have in the work field. The examples of giving a first, second, third place monetary reward to the top three performers seemed like a brilliant task however as Dan has learned this type of incentive theory did not work for conceptual thinking. In my opinion and from what I have learned in class I feel that this type of profit motive that involves monetary rewards is a linear type of thinking. One must be told the task, achieve the task, and receive the reward resulting in a linear system. This experiment was then taken to another part of the world where the participants actually needed the money and would result in better performance. The experiment was taken to Madurai, a rural part of India where money was a drastic necessity and found that again higher incentives led to worse behavior and really did not challenge a person’s thinking or talent. So at the end of the day Dan Pink found that in order to have better results corporations should pay their workers a salary where people do not have to worry about money and they will spend their time and effort to produce the highest innovations throughout the work field. He found that autonomy and mastery among individuals in a work place are two great qualities to have when top innovations are needed. Autonomy is the desire to be self directed, and is better for producing engagement within a work place. Along with autonomy, people also need mastery the urge to get better at something for their specific talent within their career field. There is a software company named Atlassian, overseas that once a month it allows their staff to get together, without any specific task given by the company and they have seen that with this their staff emerges with better innovations and ideas for the company. This is a perfect example of the purpose motive, we can see that these skilled professionals when given the time and ability will freely produce the best results due to a purpose motive rather than a profit motive. Within the profit motive when it becomes unhitched from a purpose things usually go bad and poor results. If society starts treating people as people and look at the science that makes people better off which we see here as the “purpose motive” then we will start to have a better world.
Introduction: Here Comes Everybody! by Steven Johnson
In this chapter I was introduced with the Toshiyuki Nakagaki a Japanese scientist who in August 2000, “solved” the maze puzzle. He had placed an amoebalike organism which was slime mold in a maze to find the shortest route possible to find its food. Evelyn Fox Keller, a Harvard Ph.D in physics had written her dissertation on molecular biology, she too was wondering what happens to slime and mold, does it vanish into the air or evaporate? She learned that slime spends most of its life as thousands of distinct single-celled units, moving separately from its comrades. “It” now becomes “they”. This slime mold aggregation was used as a model for thinking about development named “morphogenesis”. The cells in the mold follow trails of other cells, creating a positive feedback loop; that encouraged more cells to join the cluster thus representing a study for “self organization studies”. These clusters of cells joining from a bottom up system, is the same type of idea used in the bottom up software which helped organize the Web’s most lively virtual communities. Keller’s challenges did more than trigger a series of intellectual trends, it led to decentralized thinking. Along with this thinking we have complex adaptive systems within the mold that displays emergent behavior. Just as the mold has learned to adapt and grow through complexity in all its diverse forms, we too ecologically and socially have built emergent systems. We have stopped analyzing our systems and are now turning to emergent systems.
In the Next Industrial Revolution, Atoms are the New Bits
After reading this article I was intrigued to learn how large manufactures are now designing and producing technological items and resources for society that is interested in building their own inventions and creations. With the advancements in the computer and mailing system, individuals can now go online browse catalogs and visit different sites to design their own prototypes and purchase the tools necessary for these inventions. The home garage renaissance is emerging and society is starting to become thinkers and fix things instead of throwing them out. This is a perfect example of sustainment with the resources one has. Another advantage for this movement is the cost of these resources, ” today those tools of production are getting so cheap that they are once again within the reach of many individuals. State-of-the-art milling machines that once cost $150,000 are now close to $4,000, thanks to Chinese copies. Everybody’s garage is a potential high-tech factory”.This concept of individuals being able to create inventions in small batches, gives the accomplishment to one that quality is better than quantity. In the end these ‘“small batch,” a term most often applied to bourbon, in the spirits world, this implies handcrafted care. But it can broadly refer to businesses focused more on the quality of their products than the size of the market. They’d rather do something they were passionate about than go mass. And these days, when anyone can get access to manufacturing and distribution, that is actually a viable choice’. Through the process of creating your own technological replica, one is using elements within a system to eventually have a finished product. These systems are similar to an ecological worldview, for the mere fact that within ecology there are many elements and participants that work in a system to maintain or build a finished product and most importantly its environment.
rs450flores 