Category: Other
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Fiction reduces reoffending criminal convictions
The class would meet every two weeks. Convicts would discuss literature alongside the judge who had sentenced them and their probation officers. Failures to show up to class or do the reading would count as parole violations. This was not your average book club. After half an hour of silent reading, the discussion began. It…
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Culture Creep
I was born in the late 80s, which means I grew up playing Starcraft. For those of you not born in the 80s Starcraft is a computer game where you’d build little armies and conquer the map. There were the future humans called Terrans. There were fancy hi-tech aliens with their spaceships and laser beams…
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Memetic dynamite
“The technological enthusiasm and hobbyism of today is strikingly similar to at the turn of the 19th century, and it has led a comparable degree of willful blindness about the risks. In 1903, the managers of a big New York dynamite manufacturing company begged publicly to The New York Times for new laws to abide…
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Regenerative Systems
Extractive systems exhaust resources by removing them faster than they replenish. These systems are parasitic, while regenerative systems are symbiotic. Regenerative systems protect and enrich what they depend on. Consider a few regenerative examples: – A regenerative economy would protect the natural energy systems that power it. – In a regenerative system, social media would…
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Respecting Human Nature
Human biases and vulnerabilities are inherent and hardwired. They have evolved to help us survive in an ancient environment, not our modern one. These evolutionary tendencies are now being exploited by technology. It’s important that we begin to see products in terms of human vulnerabilities. Just because we look at something, or we click on…
Josh Pitzalis 