ACG 5 Peter Schneider – The American Council on Germany, Keynote Speaker, “Reinventing the Industrial Heartland” from Tracy Will on Vimeo.
I enjoyed Schneider’s October talk. Here’s his Wikipedia entry, and website.
Mr. Daisey & The Apple Factory
Act One. Mister Daisey Goes to China.
Mike Daisey performs an excerpt that was adapted for radio from his one-man show “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.” A lifelong Apple superfan, Daisey sees some photos online from the inside of a factory that makes iPhones, starts to wonder about the people working there, and flies to China to meet them. His show restarts a run at New York’s Public Theater later this month. (39 minutes)
Act Two. Act One.
What should we make of what Mike Daisey saw in China? Our staff did weeks of fact checking to corroborate Daisey’s findings. Ira talks with Ian Spaulding, founder and managing director of INFACT Global Partners, which goes into Chinese factories and helps them meet social responsibility standards set by Western companies (Apple’s Supplier Responsibility page is here), and with Nicholas Kristof, columnist for The New York Times who has reported in Asian factories. In the podcast and streaming versions of the program he also speaks with Debby Chan Sze Wan, a project manager at the advocacy group SACOM, Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior, based in Hong Kong. They’ve put out three reports investigating conditions at Foxconn (October 2010, May 2011, Sept 2011). Each report surveyed over 100 Foxconn workers, and they even had a researcher go undercover and take a job at the Shenzhen plant. (15 minutes)
Remembering Gordon Hirabayashi
Dorothy M. Ehrlich, Deputy Executive Director, ACLU:
Gordon Hirabayashi was an American-born student at the University of Washington in 1942, when he was ordered in his senior year to report to an internment camp in northern California. He refused.
Only a handful of remarkably courageous individuals defied the internment orders. Hirabayashi was not only the youngest; his decision was a clear act of civil disobedience based on his deeply held pacifist beliefs.
In every respect, Hirobayashi’s defiance made him a civil rights hero. He died last week in Edmonton, Alberta, at the age of 93.
Some 120,000 Japanese Americans were interned in America’s concentration camps — a shameful act of wartime hysteria based on racial prejudice. Hirabayashi challenged the curfew he was subject to and the internment order.“If I were to register and cooperate… I would be giving helpless consent to the denial of practically all of the things which give me incentive to live,” he said then. “I must maintain the democratic standards for which this nation lives. I am objecting to the principle of this order which denies the right of human beings, including citizens.”
Lunch with the FT: Zbigniew Brzezinski
“Americans don’t learn about the world, they don’t study world history, other than American history in a very one-sided fashion, and they don’t study geography,” Brzezinski says. “In that context of widespread ignorance, the ongoing and deliberately fanned fear about the outside world, which is connected with this grandiose war on jihadi terrorism, makes the American public extremely susceptible to extremist appeals.” But surely most Americans are tired of overseas adventures, I say. “There is more scepticism,” Brzezinski concedes. “But the susceptibility to demagoguery is still there.”
Stopping SOPA
The freedom, innovation, and economic opportunity that the Internet enables is in jeopardy. Congress is considering legislation that will dramatically change your Internet experience and put an end to reddit and many other sites you use everyday. Internet experts, organizations, companies, entrepreneurs, legal experts, journalists, and individuals have repeatedly expressed how dangerous this bill is. If we do nothing, Congress will likely pass the Protect IP Act (in the Senate) or the Stop Online Piracy Act (in the House), and then the President will probably sign it into law. There are powerful forces trying to censor the Internet, and a few months ago many people thought this legislation would surely pass. However, there’s a new hope that we can defeat this dangerous legislation.
We’ve seen some amazing activism organized by redditors at /r/sopa and across the reddit community at large. You have made a difference in this fight; and as we near the next stage, and after much thought, talking with experts, and hearing the overwhelming voices from the reddit community, we have decided that we will be blacking out reddit on January 18th from 8am–8pm EST (1300–0100 UTC).
How Luther went viral: Five centuries before Facebook and the Arab spring, social media helped bring about the Reformation
IT IS a familiar-sounding tale: after decades of simmering discontent a new form of media gives opponents of an authoritarian regime a way to express their views, register their solidarity and co-ordinate their actions. The protesters’ message spreads virally through social networks, making it impossible to suppress and highlighting the extent of public support for revolution. The combination of improved publishing technology and social networks is a catalyst for social change where previous efforts had failed.
That’s what happened in the Arab spring. It’s also what happened during the Reformation, nearly 500 years ago, when Martin Luther and his allies took the new media of their day—pamphlets, ballads and woodcuts—and circulated them through social networks to promote their message of religious reform.
Computerized Pathology
LOOKING for needles in haystacks is boring. But computers do not get bored. Contracting out to machines the tedious business of assessing the dangerousness of cancer cells in histological microscope slides ought thus to be an obvious thing to do. Cervical-cancer smear tests aside, however, such electronic intrusions into the pathology laboratory are limited. Grading cancer cells into “indolent” and “aggressive”, and hazarding an opinion about whether they spell a treatable condition or an untreatable one, has remained the realm of the human expert.
But not for much longer, if Daphne Koller, a computer scientist at Stanford University, and her colleagues have their way. They recently reported in Science Translational Medicine that they have written a program which can distinguish between grades of breast-cancer cell—and in a way that provides a more accurate prognosis than a human pathologist can.
Most print newspapers will be gone in five years, The desktop PC is dead; long live the tablet.
Over the next three years, according to Cole, the tablet will become the primary tool for personal computing. Use of a desktop PC will dwindle to only 4-6 percent of computer users – writers, gamers, programmers, analysts, scientists, and financial planners – and laptop use will decline as well.
“The tablet is such an inviting gadget,” said Cole. “The desktop PC is a ‘lean forward’ device – a tool that sits on a desk and forces uses to come to it. The tablet has a ‘lean-back’ allure — more convenient and accessible than laptops and much more engaging to use. For the vast majority of Americans, the tablet will be the computer tool of choice by the middle of the decade, while the desktop PC fades away.
“We don’t see a negative consequence in the move to tablets,” said Cole, “but the coming dominance of tablets will create major shifts in how, when, and why Americans go online – changes even more significant than the emergence of the laptop.”……..
“Circulation of print newspapers continues to plummet, and we believe that the only print newspapers that will survive will be at the extremes of the medium – the largest and the smallest,” said Cole. It’s likely that only four major daily newspapers will continue in print form: The New York Times, USA Today, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. At the other extreme, local weekly newspapers may still survive.
“The impending death of the American print newspaper continues to raise many questions,” Cole said. “Will media organizations survive and thrive when they move exclusively to online availability? How will the changing delivery of content affect the quality and depth of journalism?”
Father Vincent Capodanno and the Meaning of “Sacrifice”
If you have never visited Semper Fidelis Memorial Chapel on the grounds of the National Museum of the Marine Corps, you have missed visiting a truly inspirational place. It is a breathtakingly beautiful building, an edifice of stone, rich wood and soaring glass that derives much of its beauty from the surrounding landscape. It is also breathtakingly simple. Nestled in the woods, it was designed to pay homage to the improvised chapels found in the field, attended by those who bear the burden of war.
Last Wednesday was nothing short of a glorious spring day in Virginia. The skies were crystal clear, without a cloud, and vibrant blue. A warm breeze stirred the air. Springtime had brought the grounds surrounding the chapel to life. I was struck by how green the trees were, and by the sound of birds singing. And on this glorious spring day, several people had gathered for a private ceremony to dedicate the “Sacrifice” window in memory of Navy chaplain, and Medal of Honor recipient, Father Vincent Capodanno.
As a former theology student, and a Marine Corps historian, I have long had an interest in those chaplains who have chosen to serve with the Fleet Marine Force. Of particular interest to me were those who served in Vietnam. It was many years ago that I first heard of the “Grunt Padre,” Father Capodanno.
Enduring lessons of Stalin’s little sparrow
Svetlana Stalina, who died last week, always said that Stalin, her father, “broke my life”. Her troubled life illustrates how power coarsens, corrupts and corrodes family itself. Even in democracies, the relentless demands of power are wearying, then coarsening then corrupting. In the long reigns of despots, the more absolute, the more corrosive. The gentle ties of family are ground to dust by steel wheels of power. Men of power such as a Stalin or Hitler usually see themselves as selfless, lone knights riding with swords drawn into hostile territory. Even for those such as Colonel Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein or the Assads for whom politics is dynastic, power is paramount.
In the end, as we saw in Gaddafi’s downfall, the sons were expected to sacrifice themselves on the pyre of his narcissistic megalomania. Saddam struggled to hold the balance between the rivalries of his own diabolical princelings – his daughters were squeezed in this filial vice and in the ultimate poisoning of family life, he allowed his sons to murder his sons-in-law. The Assads have been cursed by familial rivalries. Gaddafi groomed several atrocious sons for power, even when they plotted against him – but all were sacrificed in his Bedouin hybrid of Saharan götterdämerung and Arabic King Lear.