Social Innovation Conversations

The Stanford graduate school of business has a Center for Social Innovation, which publishes, among others, a podcast called Social Innovation Conversations. The center searches for social innovations that can help solve the major problems the world faces today, from poverty to environmental breakdown. The publications, hence also the podcast, are considered to be a means for spreading the various ideas and make them more fruitful.

In the podcast series, quite a number of lectures are carrying the caption: Making Supply Chains Socially Responsible. The latest of these features Willard Hay of Starbucks. Hay lays out the structure Starbucks is building under the name C.A.F.E. Practices, by which they attempt to purchase the best of coffee under the best conditions.

C.A.F.E. Practices is a program that covers the entire supply chain of Starbucks's coffee. The intent is to make sure workers and farmers can earn a good living as well as the middle men and the company and its employees. The program involves heavy auditing in order to make completely transparent where all coffee comes from and it is produced and sold properly. In addition the company engages in health care and education on the ground as well as agricultural advice. The aim is to make for a good and sustainable business. We can only hope it works as wonderful as Hay makes it sound.

The Social Innovation Conversations podcast is produced by The Conversations Network a non-profit organization that publishes podcasts from various lecture and conference realms that otherwise would not have had their audio content on line, let alone be syndicated. I learned of the Conversations Network when Doug Kaye was on the podcast expo and had himself interviewed on Shrinkrapradio.

My review of that Shrinkrap.
More Doug Kaye.

Berkeley's Spring 2008 courses

It is only January and spring is in the air. Why? University of California Berkeley has just published the courses that will be podcast (and vodcast) this semester.

Spring 2008 naturally serves some good oldies such as Physics 10, otherwise known as Descriptive Physics or even better: Physics for Future Presidents.
See also the reviews Nukes and Roswell)

As every semester we also have the incomparable History 5, European Civilization from the Renaissance to the Present, this semester delivered by Margaret Lavinia Anderson. I am planning to actively blog about History 5 this semester.
More History 5 on this blog: From the Renaissance Until Today, Agricultural revolution first, Thomas Laqueur.
More Professor Anderson: Antisemitism, The genitals of Christ (1 and 2).


New courses that I plan to follow are:

• English 117S Shakespeare
• History 181B Modern Physics: From The Atom to Big Science
• Geog 130 Natural Resources and Population

The American Constitution's British roots - BTHP

The Binge Thinking History podcast (BTHP) claims to have been inspired by Dan Carlin's Hardcore History. Host Tony Cocks follows Dan Carlin's example in his relatively natural speech. He doesn't read from a piece of paper. Or if he does, he does it really well. He also follows Dan's example in combining history telling with analysis. His first project: showing the British roots of the American constitution.

Tony argues the American Constitution is thoroughly British in its origins and takes us in the first four podcasts through the political history of England and Britain to show this is so. Already before the Magna Carta, in the charter of liberties he finds the starting point for the political thinking and organization that will ultimately lead to the American Constitution as we know it. Hence, he three Brits to be added to the list of founding fathers.

His first nominee is Henry VIII. The king that founded the Anglican Church and thus caused the Americans to be Protestants. The second is Oliver Cromwell, who showed the head of state need not be in a hereditary line. The third and the first to star in the cast is Simon de Montfort (who actually has a plaque at the United States House of Representatives), who made a point that the state need not be lead by a king.

Has Tony succeeded in emulating Dan? In a way he has. He delivers a bit more history and thus founds his points more solidly. He also is an engaging speaker and delivers a good audio quality in his podcast. What is left to be desired is to prevent this cast from turning into a monologue podcasts, such as British History 101 and the podfaded Medieval Podcast. There are many of those and, as shown by the examples, ones that already cover British History. Monologue style is hard to pull off, even for talents like Bob Packett. Tony could invite a female voice on the podcast and dialog with her. He could record in front of an audience. He could try to keep the podcast short - 20 minutes or less.

From Dan Carlin's Hardcore History:
Meeting James Burke,
Assyrians,
Depression,
Succession in Macedon,
The Plague.

On Time and on Counting - The Missing Link

The monthly podcast of The Missing Link had a bump in its schedule on account of the holiday, but it is back. As usual with two essays. One by host Elizabeth Green Musselman (EGM) and the other by a guest. EGM has been inviting listeners to offer their essays and here we have the first to take on the challenge. Listener Scott Lough talks to us about time. This is the first installment, the second part will come in a consecutive issue of the Missing Link.

Time is hard to understand. Difficult to hook into or get a grip on. Biologically we are in sync with the daily and the lunar cycle, but hardly the yearly. And when we somehow try to fathom at least that, what we could not imagine is time flowing backwards. However, physics allow that. What physics and even astronomy also allow is: the end of time. Also hardly fathomable.

Green Musselman offers an essay about quantities. (A follow-up on the previous program) Our modern culture puts heavy emphasis - EGM explains our quantifications with our economical nature. The homo economicus is a quantifier. Is the homo sapiens, necessarily a homo economicus and thus always counting. EGM takes us to the pastoral cultures of Africa, where economy works entirely differently, or, pot otherwise, culture that is not commercial at all. What is an amazing find is that the African peoples are not counting. The Europeans who arrived in South Africa in the 18th and 19th century found to their astonishment that the Xhosa, Zulu and Botswana did not count. They herded sizable amounts of cattle, but they couldn't tell how many of them they had. Alternately, they were able to tell in an instant, even of a herd hundreds strong, whether individual animals were mssing. They had a way of knowing the individuals, without knowing the numbers.

More Missing Link:
Strength in Numbers,
Constant Companions,
From Berlin,
History of Science.

More Elizabeth Green Musselman:
Environmental History in South Africa (Exploring Environmental History Podcast).

The Economist in New Hampshire

Christopher Hitchens pondered on the American caucus in KQED forum (I blogged about this yesterday). He argued as follows: the system in Iowa works such that there is a tendency towards the extreme. That is how Huckabee could win there. For New Hampshire he predicted a more moderate result, implying what nobody expected: Hillary Clinton would win for the Democrats.

The Economist's blog and podcast Democracy in America put a podcast this morning in the feed where the New Hampshire independet voters were interviewed. No indication for a win in any direction. Maybe it was clear that Huckabee was not going to be a factor, but that was to be expected. The Republican leaning voter was in doubt between McCain and Ron Paul. The one to vote for a Democrat was undecided between Obama and Clinton. I detected a slight preference for Clinton, I must say.

I wonder why The Economist didn't wait yet another couple of hours with that podcast. What news agent would deliver before the dead line? Who'd be interested in the cast now? However, between you and me, the interviews were fascinating and possibly representative for more Americans - this is not necessarily about New Hampshire alone. I'd say, listen anyway.

More from the Economist and about the 2008 elections:
A biography for Barack Obama and one for Hillary Clinton,
The Economist podcast,
Bush - Clinton - Bush - Clinton (UC Podcast),
Religiousness of American Presidents (UC Podcast).

Philosophy Bites on Wittgenstein

I love philosophy and at the same time, very frequently, when I read or hear philosophers or about them, I seriously lose track. When I wrote my masters and finished a good deal of the work, my mentor threw a book at me about the effect of Wittgensteinian thought on sociology. See if I could incorporate that in my thesis, to top it off. I couldn't. Wittgenstein had me baffled and I obtained my masters without him.

So Wittgenstein has become the symbol of where I feel I need philosophy, but fail to wrap my mind around it. Hence, with a mixed sense of urgency and intimidation, I set out to listen to the latest Philosophy Bites podcast. Nigel Warburton and David Edmonds speak with Barry Smith about Wittgenstein.

Early Wittgenstein is briefly discussed. Already Wittgenstein is heavily interested in language, but still uses what is named a picture theory of language; our language in one way or another tries to picture our world. This is the approach that investigates how we can improve the accuracy of language in order to picture the world more effectively. Wittgenstein takes it to logic: how logic will allow us to analyze the arguments (essentially the pictures of the world) and thus find the limits of what could be. What is logically incorrect cannot be. What is correct could - though need not be.

By 1929 he returns to England and sets out to radically alter this approach. No matter how inaccurate our language is, we seem to do well with it. What is more, we cannot start thinking, unless we have language, hence language is not the instrument to picture the world, but rather what ties us to it. This makes it very difficult to catch the essence of language. Here is where we are not even half way the podcast and I am in my third run of listening to it. Very fascinating and catching, but unbelievably hard to really deeply dig into.

More Philosophy Bites:
Friendship,
Egalitarianism,
Skepticism ,
Thought experiments (and Avicenna).