Ken Robinson discusses education at TEDTalks.
“No one has a clue about what the world will look like in 5 years, yet we’re educating our children for it… Creativity is as important in education as literacy and we should treat it with the same status.”
From Technology Review: Sun + Water = Fuel
With catalysts created by an MIT chemist, sunlight can turn water into
hydrogen. If the process can scale up, it could make solar power a
dominant source of energy.
Storing energy from the sun by mimicking photosynthesis is something
scientists have been trying to do since the early 1970s. In particular,
they have tried to replicate the way green plants break down water.
Chemists, of course, can already split water. But the process has
required high temperatures, harsh alkaline solutions, or rare and
expensive catalysts such as platinum. What Nocera has devised is an
inexpensive catalyst that produces oxygen from water at room
temperature and without caustic chemicals–the same benign conditions
found in plants. Several other promising catalysts, including another
that Nocera developed, could be used to complete the process and
produce hydrogen gas.
From Scientific American: Does Consumerism Make Us Crazy?
The term ecopsychology, first coined by writer and theorist Theodore Roszak in his 1992 book, Voice of the Earth, is loosely defined as the connection between ecology and human psychology. Roszak argues that humans can heal what he calls their “psychological alienation” from nature and build a more sustainable
society if they recognize that we all have an innate emotional bond with the natural world.
Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder, by Richard Louv, argues that kids are so plugged into television and video games that they’ve lost their connection to the natural world.
When the available spiritual space is not filled by some higher motivations, then it will necessarily be filled by something lower - by the small, mean, calculating attitude to life which is rationalized in the economic calculus.
Schmacher. E.F. Small is Beautiful. New York: Harper & Row, 1989. 10.
A writer’s work is important to the extent that the ideal bookshelf on which he would like to be placed is still an improbable shelf, containing books that we do not usually put side by side, the juxtaposition of which can produce electric shocks, short circuits.
Calvino, Italo. The Uses of Literature. Orlando: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986. 82.
