Creating a World Without Poverty: how social business can transform our lives
Professor Yunus will outline his vision for a new business model that combines the power of free markets with the quest for a more human world - and tell the inspiring stories of companies that are doing this work today. This event marks the launch of his new book Creating a World Without Poverty: how social business can transform our lives. Muhammad Yunus is founder and managing director of Grameen Bank and winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize.
Skills, Rights and Resources in the East Asian Path to Development
This lecture traces evolving relationships among skills, bargaining power, and East Asian economic development. Kenneth Pomeranz is UCI Chancellor's Professor of History at the university of California-Irvine.
The Post American World
Global power is shifting, and wealth and power are bubbling up in unexpected places. Fareed Zakaria considers not so much the decline of America, but the impact of the rise of "the rest". This transition of power will redefine America's role as the arbiter of the world's political, economic, and cultural issues and force it to accommodate new heavyweights. Zakaria offers an illuminating view of our increasingly complicated future, the growing influence of rapidly developing nations, and how thes
21A.260 Culture, Embodiment and the Senses (MIT)
Culture, Embodiment, and the Senses will provide an historical and cross-cultural analysis of the politics of sensory experience. The subject will address western philosophical debates about mind, brain, emotion, and the body and the historical value placed upon sight, reason, and rationality, versus smell, taste, and touch as acceptable modes of knowing and knowledge production. We will assess cultural traditions that challenge scientific interpretations of experience arising from western philo
Sustainable Housing: how can we save 80 per cent of our energy use in existing homes?
This lecture addresses how we can drastically reduce energy consumption and consequent carbon emissions by considering existing buildings. Anne Power, professor of social policy, is head of LSE Housing and Communities, a research group in the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion.
Geopolitics and Imperialism: the British Empire and Halford Mackinder 1890-1940
It was perhaps no coincidence that Halford Mackinder, the most famous exponent of geopolitical theory, wrote his seminal essay in 1904 when British world power seemed on the verge of a secular crisis. This lecture examines how far the insights contained in Mackinder's four major works explain the geopolitical fortunes of the British world system in its age of blood and iron.
The Grid Shared Desktop for CSCL
The Grid Shared Desktop (GSD) is a collaborative environment that provides a multidimensional humans-to-machine-to-humans interface by the means of multiples cleverly intricated desktops. The GSD is a platform independent solution that benefits of the intrinsic advantages of the Grid technology such as scalability and security. In order to verify that our GSD solution meets CSCL requirements, we have conducted experiments in the context of the ELeGI project. As part of the project use cases, the
Star Library: What is the Significance of a Kiss?
This article describes an interactive activity illustrating general properties of hypothesis testing and hypothesis tests for proportions. Students generate, collect, and analyze data. Through simulation, students explore hypothesis testing concepts. Concepts illustrated are: interpretation of p-values, type I error rate, type II error rate, power, and the relationship between type I and type II error rates and power. This activity is appropriate for use in an introductory college or high school
The Photoshop Crop Tool
The Photoshop Crop Tool. Part of the series: Photoshop Toolbox Tips. There is almost nothing you can't do to a picture in Photoshop. Learn how to use the crop tool in this video clip (01:13).
Stalin’s Consolidation of Power, 1924-41
Stalin’s Consolidation of Power, 1924-41
Architecture and the Culture of Contingency
A culture is a set of behaviours, attitudes and values that are shared, sustained and transformed by an identifi able community. Currently, we are bound up in a culture of consumerism, and of terror; there are also retro cultures and utopian cultures. What?s happening now that?s interesting is that many, if not all of these diff erent tendencies, tastes and persuasions are being re-aligned, interconnected and hybridised by a vast global community of online users, who are transdisciplinary in the
Final report: Accommodating students of Drexel University
A significant problem for Drexel University is insufficient quality student housing and the inadequate capacity and inconvenient location of the Handshumacher Dining Center. WLHK2 has proposed a new dormitory and food court on the existing volleyball courts at the southwest corner of 33rd and Arch Streets. The site encompasses approximately 26,000 square feet, with a grade difference of 10 feet from the high elevation at the north to the low elevation at the south. The grade difference is utiliz
Architectural Applications of Complex Adaptive Systems
This paper presents methods and case studies of approaching architectural design and fabrication utilizing Complex Adaptive Systems (CASs). The case studies and observations described here are findings from a continuing body of research investigating applications of computational systems to architectural practice. CASs are computational mechanisms from the computer science field of Artificial Life that provide frameworks for managing large numbers of elements and their inter-relationships. The a
Diretrizez Geom?tricas de Aux?lio ao Processo de Projeto de Edif?cios Residenciais [Geometrical Guid
This paper discusses the basic principles of a geometric method to aid the design process of residential buildings. It makes part of the initial phases of a research whose aim is to develop a computer system to aid the sketching and evaluation of floor plant design of multi-storied residential buildings. The fundamental idea of the research is the existence of some basic patterns of floor plants that reflect the designer?s mental models in this category of building. The models are regarding the
Study on the collaborative design process over the internet: A case study on VRML 2.0 specification
In this paper, we analyze the process of VRML 2.0 (Virtual Reality Modeling Language, Version 2.0) specification design for the deeper understanding of Internet-based collaboration. The VRML design process has the characteristics of being open to the public, geographically distributed, long-term, large-scale, and diverse. First, we examine the overall features of the design process by analyzing the VRML mailing list archive statistically. Secondly, we extract prototyping vocabulary (operational
How to Predict the Future(s)
Over the last century, there have been many spectacularly bad predictions of how technology will evolve and how it will be used—and a few almost clairvoyant forecasts of technology trends. This course will investigate both. By examining predictions made about the Internet, video on demand, cellular telephony, nuclear power, and other technologies, students will attempt to discern why some predictions work and most don’t. Much of the course will be devoted to techniques in scenario planning a
Powering the Planet: The Challenge for Science in the 21st Century
The supply of secure, clean, sustainable energy is arguably the most important scientific and technical challenge facing humanity in the 21st century. Rising living standards of a growing world population will cause global energy consumption to increase dramatically over the next half century. Within our lifetimes, energy consumption will increase at least two-fold. This additional energy needed is not attainable from long discussed sources, the global appetite for energy is simply too much. Pet
The Defence White Paper and Australia’s Future in Asia: Will We Remain a Middle Power?
This year's Defence White Paper is more than a shopping list for the military. Behind the force priorities and budget estimates lie key judgments about the kind of regional we expect to live in, and the kind of role Australia expects to play in it. This lecture explored the underlying policy logic of the White Paper, and discussed where it might take Australia. Will it equip Australia to remain a middle power in the Asian Century, or mark our acceptance of a future as a small p
The Next 100 Years - A Forecast for the 21st Century
In his book The Next 100 Years, George Friedman offers a lucid, highly readable forecast of the changes we can expect around the world during the twenty-first century. He explains where and why future wars will erupt (and how they will be fought), which nations will gain and lose economic and political power, and how new technologies and cultural trends will alter the way we live in the new century.
Drawing on history and geopolitical patterns dating back hundreds of years, Friedman shows that w
Falling Water
Students drop water from different heights to demonstrate the conversion of water's potential energy to kinetic energy. They see how varying the height from which water is dropped affects the splash size. They follow good experiment protocol, take measurements, calculate averages and graph results. In seeing how falling water can be used to do work, they also learn how this energy transformation figures into the engineering design and construction of hydroelectric power plants, dams and reservoi
