Change.gov; my small contribution to a vision: synergy.

Doing more than one thing at once. Synergy.

I’d like to play off this theme that came up during the financial crisis and offer some ideas.

a. The agenda is not full of separate and unrelated items. Why not build health care infrastructure with an emphasis on sustainability? This is stimulating to jobs, helps advance health care reform, and helps advance energy reform all at the same time.  Build hospitals, build schools of nursing, build clinics.

b. Build a system of public debate that is non-partisan and has a path to influence. Include community and educational segments of the population. This advances the agenda of changing politics and also can develop support for policies that get adopted. It also provides leverage on school reform since speech and debate are democratic AND academic, and they are not controlled by schools of education or any other particular authority. Debate has great academic outcomes, even better when it is about real public issues. If we funded teachers to take the lead on debating societies, that would be another path to job creation that also advances other important agenda items.

There’s my $.02.

Ending Famine, Simply by Ignoring the Experts – New York Times

Ending Famine, Simply by Ignoring the Experts – New York Times

Do anti-subsidy advocates count as experts? Since subsidies are a hotly debated subject, it seems the article is confounding a debate winner with an expert. The gist is that fertilizer subsidies (vital to American farming) have been discouraged in Africa under an ideal of free trade and privatization, arguably exacerbating famine risk as indicated by the huge success of Malawi when they decided to embrace subsidies last year.

The “experts” in the title simply represent a journalistic attempt at adding excitement to a tired old storyline. There is no evidence in the article that the issue was anything but a political problem. Those advocates may have been experts on free trade, but they were not experts on farming, fertilizers, or famine prevention. If there was debate, the winner was not decided by any neutral third party.

As much as I would like an article that illustrated a big gaff from the experts, this is not one of them. It raises a question however; how much of the social construction of expertise turns on the same political process?

A Zen Approach to Anxiety

Zen of Throwing it Away

Neat article with a useful principle. If you have some hangup causing you trouble, one way to deal with it is simply to abandon it. I think the principle works well with speech anxiety and perhaps other forms of anxiety as well.

Clipboard Recorder – Windows Clipboard Extender

Clipboard Recorder – Windows Clipboard Extender | LW-WORKS

I have been using the basic free version for a few months now. Sadly, many people are thrilled to learn about basic things like ctrl-x, ctrl-c, and ctrl-v in the existing Windows or Mac clipboard, but a clipboard recorder like this one (see link above) is a whole new level of utility. I have been using it in writing, tabulating contact info, etc.

Debaters might really find a clipboard recorder useful in brief construction (just be careful not to forget you are copying direct quotations).  In an electronic source, just copy all the necessary citation elements one at a time (no need to paste anywhere yet), then copy selected quotations.  Finally, inside a word processor, paste the citations elements in, paste the quotations in whatever order you thing makes the most sense and then insert your arguments and paraphrases; this creates a nice grouping of the “cards” that you cut from that source.  Format accordingly, put the whole brief where you need it (file it, put it in Endnote, or whatever you do),  and there you have processed a complete source into a usable form. Now, say you want to make a brief or outline a paper using multiple sources, you can do that too by working from your newly created individual source files or database, copying the cards you want to use, and then pasting them into a new document. If you like working with real paper, just make sure the source citation is on every quotation and you can print your source documents and cut them up into cards.

20th WCP: Virtue and the Practice of Medicine

20th WCP: Virtue and the Practice of Medicine (1998; Paul Hoyt-O’Connor)

Interesting definition of “practice” as “cooperative endeavor.”  Not sure if it’s consistent with Aristotle or MacIntyre, but this article does deal with the important sense of the word as it interests me and cites the key sources. I am intrigued by the emphasis that practices are not private and depend on collaboration with others and with institutional reality. The article also seems to avoid virtue in favor of competence, as in the sentence here:

“Practices demand the regular and recurrent performance of certain tasks, and their swift, adept, if not masterful performance depends upon the acquisition of the appropriate competences.”