a novel covering history of philosophy from Socrates to Sartre on a background of a story of a 14 year old girl.
Philosophy for general public kind of book.
Vunka said I must read.
COOPERATIVES promoted by USDA
http://www.rurdev.usda.gov/SupportDocuments/rdRuralCoop_Sept_Oct13Vr_Web.pdf
newsletter of US Department of Agriculture summarising progress of agricultural cooperatives in 2013 in rural America.
Cooperatives might just be the way to go forward in rural colonias.
alternative energy
http://mashable.com/2013/12/10/alternative-energy-products/?utm_cid=mash-com-fb-main-link#gallery/gadgets-powered-by-unusual-means/52a6e715b589e42bf5002074
Shermeen's blog
http://yousifshermeen.blogspot.com/
Wei Yan's class:
http://faculty.arch.tamu.edu/wyan/ARCH689/students.html
Wei Yan's class:
http://faculty.arch.tamu.edu/wyan/ARCH689/students.html
lean construction - games
Zofia Rybkowski described that as part of lean construction course she runs an assignment to create a game. As an example she mentioned one of the students' designed games:
Everyone gets given a letter size piece of paper and is told to make a paper plane in three minutes. Follows a competition and which plane flies the furthest is the winner. The winner then teaches everyone how s/he built her/his plane and round two of building/testing is on. Then the best few get to share their techniques. The cycle goes on.
The result is that everyone in the group progresses, everyone becomes quite confident and no-one in the team/company gets fired.
This is such a clever idea.
I like it so much better than just pure capitalist competition.
I do wonder whether this can work in the colonias and how.
Everyone gets given a letter size piece of paper and is told to make a paper plane in three minutes. Follows a competition and which plane flies the furthest is the winner. The winner then teaches everyone how s/he built her/his plane and round two of building/testing is on. Then the best few get to share their techniques. The cycle goes on.
The result is that everyone in the group progresses, everyone becomes quite confident and no-one in the team/company gets fired.
This is such a clever idea.
I like it so much better than just pure capitalist competition.
I do wonder whether this can work in the colonias and how.
immigration hackathon
I wonder whether a hackathon in Las Lomas with planners, transport engineers, construction scientists,
urban designers, lawyers, etc. would be just the thing to do.
Or perhaps do hackathons work when there is a specific issue - like immigration and a specific tool - online/tech and the convergence of what the two have to offer is the most fruitful.
people with first hand experience on one side - people with skills to create apps and websites on the other.
So the hackers provide a public space where the 'clients' can make themselves visible and support their cause by lobbying the right people.
Does this encourage illegal immigration? When the invitees were undocumented immigrants?
Are the state boundaries essentially illegal?
This is an event organized by private firm.
How will the government respond? Can it 'regulate' events like this?
Would this be handy for colonias?
http://mashable.com/2013/11/22/hackathon-for-immigration-reform/?utm_cid=mash-com-fb-main-link
It is hour 22 of a 24-hour hackathon, where coders join together to build new products and programs from scratch in a short amount of time. The scene is not uncommon in Silicon Valley. Every startup and tech company worth its weight in code has hosted at least one internal hackathon. (LinkedIn, for example, has a company-wide one every month.)
But the scene in building No. 3 is different. Many of the coders are undocumented immigrants, and the projects they are working on could very well change their lives.
LinkedIn played host to the first known DREAMer Hackathon on Thursday, bringing together 20 to 25 undocumented immigrants to join Silicon Valley tech veterans in a quest to further immigration reform. The teams created projects like websites and apps, some meant to educate citizens about immigration issues, others meant to connect constituents with the congressional leaders who represent them. (A few actually do both.)
Roaming the Boundaries: The Less Explored Roles of Architects in the Low-Income Settlements of Texas.
CARLOS A. REIMERS
The Catholic University of America
Roaming the Boundaries: The Less Explored Roles of Architects in the Low-Income Settlements of Texas.
- colonias are periurban settlements
- extra legal development
- architecture and low-income housing - in US: contemporary efforts date back to work of
Charles Abrams:
- http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-11950-4/
- book on social policy and state expansion in the early 20th Century U.S.
Oil production in America - example of brilliant infographic
http://www.oilposter.org/images/oil-age-2010-ve-xlg-outlined.jpg
Urban observatory
http://www.urbanobservatory.org/compare/index.html
comparison of cities' maps including land-use, transport, and other indicators.
comparison of cities' maps including land-use, transport, and other indicators.
d3 infographics
https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Gallery
a gallery of open source codes for animated, interactive data visualisation tools and graphs.
a gallery of open source codes for animated, interactive data visualisation tools and graphs.
Carl Sagan - podcasts of American Museum of Natural History
The American Museum of Natural History holds a series of podcasts about science.
http://www.amnh.org/podcast/snc/
The particular podcast I listened to was 1hr and 22 minutes long and was about the approach of Peter Sagan to science and religion and the overlaps, differences and Carl's overall opinions on the topic of god, God and science.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sagan
It is a fascinating, gentle and calm discussion of Carl's former colleague, wife and the moderator. They manage to portray Carl's own position, the way he argued for it and the way he would answer to classic rebuttals. His thesis was that intelligent design (new name for creationism) is not correct, however that the science itself - in its mere 4000 years of studying the Earth - is perhaps as close to some Truth about the cosmos as is religion. The difference is that science does not claim it knows the unknown, where else most religions do.
Microcredit for Americans
Microcredit for Americans
New York Times
By SHAILA DEWAN
Published: October 28, 2013
Colonias program promotoras help Socorro flooding victims
Colonias program promotoras help Socorro flooding victims
http://one.arch.tamu.edu/news/2013/10/29/colonias-program-promotoras-help-socorro-flooding-victims/
The Texas A&M Colonias Program came to the aid of flood-stricken West Texans last September when heavy rain and rising water drove many colonia residents in Socorro, a suburb of El Paso, from their homes.
The local community center, operated by the Colonias Program and the city of Socorro, was transformed into an emergency operations center, and the program’s community workers, known as promotoras, were dispersed around the community to check on residents threatened by the floodwaters.
http://one.arch.tamu.edu/news/2013/10/29/colonias-program-promotoras-help-socorro-flooding-victims/
Colonias and Public Policy in Texas and Mexico Urbanization by Stealth
Peter Ward:
Colonias and Public Policy in Texas and Mexico Urbanization by Stealth
This book is about the phenomenon of colonias in Texas and in northern Mexican border states. While the focus is upon the Texas-Mexico border, the findings will bear scrutiny in all of the border states, given that throughout the border region colonias are important low-income housing areas, the principal characteristics of which are cheaply acquired land, inadequate infrastructure, and self-help dwelling construction. But despite the enormous social costs associated with living and raising a family under these conditions, colonias are home for a large number of people—indeed, in Mexico, for the majority of the population in many cities. Fortunately, the physical conditions in colonias improve over time. They are, in the words of one author, "Slums of hope" (Lloyd 1979), such that between fifteen and twenty years after their establishment they have often become integrated working-class districts with paved roads, services installed, and consolidated dwellings, many with two stories. They are, then, both a problem and a solution—at least if one takes a long-term perspective (Mangin 1967).
http://utpress.utexas.edu/index.php/books/warcol
Colonias and Public Policy in Texas and Mexico Urbanization by Stealth
This book is about the phenomenon of colonias in Texas and in northern Mexican border states. While the focus is upon the Texas-Mexico border, the findings will bear scrutiny in all of the border states, given that throughout the border region colonias are important low-income housing areas, the principal characteristics of which are cheaply acquired land, inadequate infrastructure, and self-help dwelling construction. But despite the enormous social costs associated with living and raising a family under these conditions, colonias are home for a large number of people—indeed, in Mexico, for the majority of the population in many cities. Fortunately, the physical conditions in colonias improve over time. They are, in the words of one author, "Slums of hope" (Lloyd 1979), such that between fifteen and twenty years after their establishment they have often become integrated working-class districts with paved roads, services installed, and consolidated dwellings, many with two stories. They are, then, both a problem and a solution—at least if one takes a long-term perspective (Mangin 1967).
http://utpress.utexas.edu/index.php/books/warcol
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