the emerald city?

According to the Washington Post, the D.C. city council is considering a measure that would require all new city construction to comply with "green" building standards:

"...within two years all new District-owned projects, including schools, would have to meet the green standards, and in 2009, any building receiving more than 20 percent public financing would have to do the same. By 2012, every new commercial building over 50,000 square feet -- about the size of a medium-size retail store -- would have to meet the guidelines. The rules would also apply to affordable housing."

Very cool.

Room to Read

From the Room to Read website:

"Room to Read partners with local communities throughout the developing world to establish schools, libraries, and other educational infrastructure. We seek to intervene early in the lives of children in the belief that education is a lifelong gift that empowers people to ultimately improve socioeconomic conditions for their families, communities, countries, and future generations. Through the opportunities that only an education can provide, we strive to break the cycle of poverty, one child at a time.
Results to Date

Since our inception in 2000, Room to Read has impacted the lives of over 1,134,000 children by:

* Constructing 221 schools
* Establishing over 3,374 libraries
* Publishing 99 new local language children's titles representing over 930,000 books
* Donating over 1.2 million English language children's books
* Funding 2,344 long-terms girls' scholarships
* Establishing 108 computer and language labs

Vision for the Future

Room to Read's vision is bold - to help 10 million children in the developing world gain the lifelong gift of education. Through our work, we will reach tens of thousands of communities in the developing world through Room to Read schools, scholarships, and libraries, and whole generations will have more opportunity and greater access to education than their parents. Through our work, many more children in the developing world will grow up to have jobs and be able to invest in the future of their own country. Through our work, Room to Read will be among the leaders in building, measuring, and evaluating education programs around the world. Our donors will be continually inspired because they be able to see a direct link between their investment and positive changes in the lives of children.

Strategic planning is core to the ongoing success and sustainability of Room to Read. In 2005 and 2006, the Management Team, Staff and Board of Directors of Room to Read worked diligently to create a plan that will direct our initiatives and energies for the next five years. Adopted in July 2006, the Strategic Plan provides a blueprint for a better world - a world in which millions of children throughout Asia, Africa and Latin America gain access to schools, libraries, books, teachers and computers; a world that is forever changed by the empowerment and self-sufficiency that only education can provide.

Our goals include:
Geographic Expansion

There are more than 770 million illiterate adults in the world - two-thirds of whom are women and girls. In addition, there are over 100 million children not currently enrolled in primary school and millions of others not currently in secondary school. The need for Room to Read's educational programs spans the globe. To respond to this worldwide demand for our programs, Room to Read is committed to expanding geographically. Our expansion plans include:

* Africa - In 2006, Room to Read is launching onto the continent of Africa by opening operations in South Africa. Our goal is to be in at least four countries in Africa by 2010.
* Latin America - Recognizing the need for educational infrastructure throughout the developing world, we plan to launch into Latin America in 2008. Although no countries have been selected yet, our goal is to be in a total of three Latin American countries by 2010.
* Continued Expansion within Asia - As we expand into Africa and Latin America, we will also maintain our commitment to expanding our reach within the countries we are currently operating in Asia. Additionally we will launch into two new countries in Asia by 2010.

Ensuring the Quality of Our Programs

Room to Read is dedicated to transparency, performance and innovation. As we expand into new geographies, it is critical that we ensure our programs are of the highest quality and are run effectively and efficiently. To this end, we will continue to develop and invest in systems to monitor and evaluate our work, while at the same time implement our programs in a flexible manner to best fit the local context. By using international tools that provide a standard monitoring system across the organization and hiring external evaluators to judge our results, Room to Read will continue to invest in the critical components needed to deliver excellent educational programs.

Building Our Capacity

A strong organizational foundation is critical to sustaining Room to Read's growth and impact. We are committed to creating well-codified business processes, ensuring we have the proper management structure and global staff in place to create world-class communications and technology infrastructure. In this way, we will be able to continue to offer quality programs to more children, in more countries, over many generations.

We hope you will join us in this bold new vision for the future of Room to Read!"

Simple software to help you get organized

37signals has created a new set of software designed to enhance your productivity while simplifying your life. Pretty cool.


“Basecamp and Backpack were awarded Best of the Web 2005 awards by the editors of BusinessWeek.”
-BusinessWeek

“37signals is the best little web company of 2005 (Yahoo was the best big web company of 2005)”
-Richard MacManus, Best Web Companies and Innovators of 2005

“37signals’ Basecamp and Backpack are the future of software on the web.”
-Farhad Manjoo, Salon.com Cover Story

“The best example [of online organizer tools] is a service called Backpack (which has been drawing attention among bloggers who focus on productivity tips).”
-Thomas Weber, Wall Street Journal story

Muammar el-Qaddafi buys into $100 laptops

The New York Times reports:

"The government of Libya reached an agreement on Tuesday with One Laptop Per Child, a nonprofit United States group developing an inexpensive, educational laptop computer, with the goal of supplying machines to all 1.2 million Libyan schoolchildren by June 2008."

I've been a fan of Nicholas Negroponte's since I started reading his column in Wired Magazine in the mid-1990s. Negroponte is the founder of the One Laptop Per Child Initiative. What I didn't realize is that United States Intelligence Director, John D. Negroponte, is his brother!

Maybe the Intelligence Director should solicit some of the advice of Nicholas' colleagues at the MIT Media Lab on how to streamline the cumbersome U.S. intelligence computer systems.

[Photo copyright Thomas A. Bass 1995]

the inner life of the cell

via information aesthetics

BumpTop ProtoType

"BumpTop aims to enrich the desktop metaphor with expressive, lightweight techniques found in the real world."

Strange Clouds

check them out

and The Cloud Appreciation Society

UNESCO and the Millennium Development Goals

"World leaders gathered at the Millennium summit agreed on these goals in 2000, and they were reaffirmed last year. They represent a major challenge for the nations of the world, and UNESCO is doing its part to help assure that they are met."

UNESCO In the Spotlight: Education and Culture

Check out the UNESCO website on its support for the MDGs.

Reading Between the Lines

I have been addicted to magazines since I was about twelve. I remember getting Consumer Reports for Kids and then they went bankrupt and I didn't understand how they could just stop sending me their magazine when I had already paid for it. Consumer Reports for Kids, boy that sounds exciting.

I've been a Wired reader for 12 years now. It's fascinating to go back and read issues from the mid-90s. You can also gauge the state of the "new economy" based on how thick the magazine is. In addition to Wired, I read the Economist, Shambala Sun, The Atlantic Monthly, Fast Company, Men's Health, Alternative Medicine, and many others.

There's just something about magazines that captivates me. I like that they're not outdated instantly like a newspaper, yet more easily digestable than a book.

There's also something to the cultural artifact that is the magazine rack. We all know that we could pay soooo much less if we'd just subscribe. Magazine publishers want to guarantee their advertisers a certian number of eyeballs and are willing to save us some cash if we will commit ahead of time, yet part of the fun of magazines is not just reading it, but the practice of selecting a particular magazine among a plethora of options. You walk into your local bookstore and pick out the issue that fits you.

Then again, there's the predictable comfort of knowing your magazine will arrive on a certain day. Your Sports Illustrated in the mailbox on Thursday or your Economist on the front steps on Friday--unless you live in my neighborhood where it's been known to appear anywhere from Friday to Monday. Ahh, the anticipation!

Jack Shafer writes about his relationship with magazines on Slate's site.

What magazines do you love?

Open the box

Pandora:

The Music Genome Project

"On January 6, 2000 a group of musicians and music-loving technologists came together with the idea of creating the most comprehensive analysis of music ever.

Together we set out to capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level. We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or "genes" into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song - everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It's not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records - it's about what each individual song sounds like.

Over the past 6 years, we've carefully listened to the songs of over 10,000 different artists - ranging from popular to obscure - and analyzed the musical qualities of each song one attribute at a time. This work continues each and every day as we endeavor to include all the great new stuff coming out of studios, clubs and garages around the world.

It has been quite an adventure, you could say a little crazy - but now that we've created this extraordinary collection of music analysis, we think we can help be your guide as you explore your favorite parts of the music universe.

We hope you enjoy the journey."

Tim Westergren
Founder
The Music Genome Project

Clinton Global Initiative

Watch webcasts, both live and archived, from the 2006 Clinton Global Initiative.

You should also check out the podcasts available.

Banned books

September 23-30 is banned book week.

Check out the books from the Radcliffe top 100 books of the 20th century that have been banned at one point or another.

Google's even getting into the action.

time is on your side

There's an interesting article on Fuzzy Signals discussing the overall level of violence in the world.

"According to the Human Security Report,
Without new superpower 'proxy wars' starting in the Third World, overall armed conflicts have fallen by more than 40 per cent, and extremely violent conflicts -- those with 1,000 or more battle deaths -- have dropped by 80 per cent... International arms transfers, defence budgets, armed forces personnel and refugee numbers have also all decreased."


"No society that feeds its children on tales of successful violence can expect them not to believe that violence in the end is rewarded." - Margaret Mead

"In some cases non-violence requires more militancy than violence." - Cesar Chavez

Going Global

Princeton has a remarkable website, Mapping Globalization, which provides several tools for visualizing this concept.



From their site:

"With all the talk of globalization it is easy to forget that at the very core of the concept is a notion of geographical location. Globalization involves connections between at least two places and the first step in our understanding must be an appreciation of what this means in a concrete sense of space."

Check it out.

time to move on

so i've taken a new job which has altered my relationship with supposedly.
if anything, i recognize the need for a skeptical mindset now more than ever.

i will do my best to continue to relate to this space on a more regular basis.

the council on foreign relations' site has a number of quality resources available.

in particular, i appreciate the backgrounders. they serve as a touching off point for familiarizing yourself with a particular issue. here's a discussion of the role of evangelical christians in american foreign policy.

Foiled again

Check out Fred Kaplan's article on Slate: "Looking for Intel in All the Wrong Places: What Washington can learn from Britain's foiled terror plot."

Alive in Baghdad

Alive in Baghdad is an attempt by 25 year old journalist and filmmaker, Brian Conley, to give voice to people living in and through the current Iraqi crisis. His idea is that instead of having Americans, or other westerners, in Iraq to tell us what is going on, why not empower Iraqis themselves to tell their stories. A key component of this is the use of sound and video. By seeing the day to day goings on first hand, we are able to remove some of the element of abstraction that is inevitable as a westerner trying to make sense of the current situation in Iraq.

You can access Alive in Baghdad's videos either through their website or the Democracy Player.

They also have a set of photos available through flickr.

Democracy Player

"Want to see the future of Net video? Download the open source Democracy Player"
Wired Magazine, May 2006

Stop squinting at tiny web video. Instead, download and watch all the best internet TV shows in one powerful application: any video RSS feed, video podcast, video blog, or BitTorrent file. Fullscreen, high resolution, 100% free and open source. New channels arrive daily in the built-in Channel Guide.

Gentle Ben

Time magazine profiles new fed chair Ben Bernanke...

"The shift is about more than clearer communication and punch lines. What's really at stake is a plan to make the Fed a more transparent and accessible institution. When Bernanke first showed up at the Fed as a governor in 2002, he started eating in the cafeteria, much to the surprise of younger economists, who weren't used to governors joining them for lunch and talking shop. When he returned as chairman in February after an eight-month stint as head of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, he resumed his lunchtime habits, not locking himself away in the Fed's private dining rooms. He plays pickup basketball at the Fed gym, posted his minivan for sale on the Fed's electronic bulletin board and showed up at the Fed's July 4 barbecue with his wife, who teaches Spanish, and one of his two children, home from college for the summer."

A strategy for resolving the conflict in Lebanon

Former U.S. Ambassador Martin Indyk in today's Financial Times:

"Condoleezza Rice, US secretary of state, will visit the Middle East this week, raising hopes of an American initiative to end the Lebanese-Israeli imbroglio. On the surface, a surprising consensus is forming about the necessary elements of that initiative: a comprehensive ceasefire; the Lebanese government’s authority extended to southern Lebanon; an effective international force to help the Lebanese army keep peace on the border with Israel and prevent Hizbollah’s rearming; a return to the 1949 Israel-Lebanon armistice agreement with a joint border demarcation committee to deal with outstanding territorial disputes; prisoner exchange negotiations between the Israeli and Lebanese governments; an international fund for reconstructing Lebanon; and implementation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1559 on disbanding and disarming all militias.

Most of these elements were outlined in the Group of Eight communiqué and statements by the Lebanese and Israeli prime ministers. It would not take much US diplomatic muscle to secure agreement among these parties. Missing from this framework, however, is any way to get Hizbollah – instigator of the crisis – to accept it. Hizbollah has been bloodied but not yet bowed. Why should it agree to cede its suzerainty in southern Lebanon as the precursor to its disarmament?"