Tag: citizenship

Hat Tips (↬) and Vias (ᔥ): The Subtler Side of Citation on the Web

ᔥ Curator’s Code ↬ On The Media

The Curator’s Code suggests symbols to help give credit for things on the web.

  • Vias (ᔥ) go to the link where you actually found the information you’re using,
  • Hat tips (↬) credit the sites that pointed you in the right direction.

For example, I found out about the Curator’s Code on the On The Media program, so I should give them a hat tip like this:

I got the actual symbols off the Curator’s Code website so I could say the symbols come via them:

My standard form will be to stick these reference types at the bottom of each post or citation when they’re applicable. Like so:

ᔥ Curator’s Code ↬ On The Media

Appropriate Technology: Innovation with Light

Not a lot of light penetrates the galvanized steel roofs that are ubiquitous in slums around the world. Alfredo Moser came up with one ridiculously cheap solution (via the World Social Forum, 2011).

While this the kind of cheap, elegant solution I would go for in a heartbeat, I’m pretty sure my wife would veto. For the more stylistically conscious – and for people with a bit more money in their pockets – there are $2.00 LED lights advocated by The Appropriate Technology Collaborative (ATC). A lot of people in dire poverty live in the slums, but that’s not the case for everyone.

The ATC’s seems to focus on projects designed by university students and implemented in the third world. If they work, the designs are published with a Creative Commons license so that other Non Governmental Organizations (NGO’s) that work in poorer countries can use and distribute them. Their blog has a lot of good information. And, there’s also the Global Bucket project that I’m still keeping an eye on.

Living in the Slums

From The Places We Live (by Jonas Bendiksen)

Jonas Bendiksen has an amazing website of photos, sounds and stories from life in slums in South America, Africa and Asia. It’s quite a poignant. You get wide-angled photos from far away and then the photographer steps closer to his subjects until you’re in a panorama of someone’s small apartment, hearing their story.

This cycle we’re working on social action.

Bendiksen’s work ties in well with Mollison’s Where Children Sleep.

Image from a household in Mumbai. Notice how Photo by Jonas Bendiksen

The Economy and Revolution

Vali Nasr’s interview on NPR’s Morning Edition talks about what it takes to make a successful revolution. Particularly, they focus on the need for a vibrant, educated, middle-class for a successful transition to democracy.

Another key, and I think essential point, is that the Egyptian protesters share the same global-citizenship values that Brazilians, South Koreans, and even Europeans and American, share. That they have these values, from years of communication with the outside world, offers the best chance that this revolution will be successful.

Edmund Burke supported the American Revolution, but opposed the French Revolution because the former was a conservative revolution, the colonists were fighting to regain rights that had lost, while the latter were trying to impose an ideal of democracy and equality that they had no experience with. He was right; the French revolution lead to the Terror then eventually to Napoleon and the restoration of the aristocracy.