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Cultural Imperialism
1. The idea of cultural imperialism does not come up very often any more. If anything, it seems to be about exporting ideas, than anything else– think, America making the world safe for democracy. And in a way, that’s right: cultural imperialism is the deliberate imposition of one society’s values/practices/beliefs/culture on another. In extreme cases, ...
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Meaningful design? The future of the artificial
So, perhaps this may be a little bit off topic, but in some sense it is actually very relevant. I was having a conversation with a friend of mine yesterday, a product designer. The conversation veered towards sustainability and what that could actually be. The friend recently injured his arm so he could no longer ...
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Learning, Part 1
A few ideas and opinions about learning, so argue with me: the modern academic classroom learning experience rests on three major foundations: the organization of information, and the presentation/digestion of information and the practical application of information. I want to put forward a few ideas discussing these aspects, as well as compare them to other ...
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Alternative Approaches to Disaster Analysis – A Survey
Generally speaking, disasters are totalizing events, disrupting every part of a routine society. As such, academic fields studying the nature of disasters focus on the different aspects pertaining to the respective fields. In this survey, we cover five significant approaches to analyzing disasters and how they coexist and interact in the field of disaster research: ...
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Incentivizing Education
While browsing the web today, i came upon a recent post on GOOD design that was about incentive programs for education. The gist of it was about some programs that are happening in schools in the US in which kids are payed to learn. This is in some cases money for good test results, money ...
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Roland Barthes – Myth Today
In “Myth Today”, Roland Barthes analyses the rhetoric of the modern myth making process: he examines myth as a form of language, and how language forms an alternative reality. He does this in the context of the bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie, but having read only a selection, I’m not really sure how that ties in. Nonetheless: Barthes defines ...
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Open source education
So following up now, i just wanted to share some instances of what i hope education will begin to look like, and what this blog is about partially. It is the open dissemination of ideas. One of my professors, Cameron Tonkinwise also has a blog. Here is the link to the latest post. In which ...
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Education
So following along with Romans initial post, to that i would like to add a couple of my own thoughts. Education is a very interesting subject for me, myself being a student at 2 colleges at the same time, Eugene Lang and Parsons. A while ago i watched an interesting Ted talk by Ken Robinson ...
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Disaster and the Media
Unless someone is caught at in the immediate vicinity of a disaster or is personally affected by it, almost all perception and reaction to the event in question will be second hand, passed down through mass media (and a negligible amount through word of mouth). However, not all media is the same, conveying different messages, ...
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Historical Contributions of Epidemiology
Baron Joseph Lister and the Antiseptic Method One of the great contributions of Epidemiology to preventing and controlling disease was the invention, if it may be called that, of antiseptic methods, culminating in a grand implementation by Baron Joseph Lister. The result of this advance were control of suppuration (pussing) of wounds, healthy wound recovery, ...
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An Introduction to Epidemiology & the Measures of Disease Frequency and Incidence
What is epidemiology? Its the study of the distributions of disease in populations and the application of that research into controlling health problems, as opposed to the study of your epidermis, or your skin. The assumptions fundemental to this field are as follows: Diseases do not occur at random, and Diseases have causal and preventive ...
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What is a Disaster?
What is a disaster? Its something we see on the news all the time applying usually to large scale negative events, but thats a really vague idea. Differentiating between different types of calamities helps us figure out how to best deal with them– just as you would deal different with train wrecks versus earthquakes, mass civil ...