Frenetic mindlessness

"... According to Thomas Eriksen of the University of Oslo, author of Tyranny of the Moment, the electronic environment systematically favors "fast time" activities that require instant, urgent responses (email, cell phone calls, etc.) Such stimuli tend to crowd out "slow time activities" such as "reflection, play and long-term love relationships," said Levy.

Levy pointed out that this dynamic has an especially perverse effect in academia, which is supposed to be somewhat insulated from the larger society so that students and scholars can think more broadly and with longer range perspectives. But in fact, universities mirror the rest of society, and the dwindling time to think is as much a problem within the academy as anywhere else. As instrumental, short-term, applied goals take center-stage, our society has less access to the wisdom and complexity that deep, reflective thinking can provide. This is a major loss.

The ancients had a word for it: "leisure." In the original sense of the word, leisure was not a consumer-oriented activity like golfing or movie-going, or even "relaxation." It involved having time to ponder and reflect on the world. The words "school" and "scholar" have their etymological roots in the Greek and Latin words for these activities, Levy noted.

According to Josef Pieper, a German Catholic philosopher, "leisure is a form of stillness that is the necessary preparation for accepting reality; only the person who is still can hear, and whoever is not still cannot hear." Pieper, writing in the 1940s, worried about a world of "total work" that would make a "total claim upon the whole of human nature."

It's safe to say that that future has arrived. The very coinage of the term 24/7 and "real time" (usually as a virtue!) confirms the ubiquitous social reality of "total work." Fast-time activities absolutely crowd out slow-time alternatives. The now eclipses the timeless. And we are becoming diminished creatures in the process..." --

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Próxima reunião

Para completar a roda das apresentações, nos encontramos novamente no 1. de Julho as 14:00 horas.

Fim da aposentadoria

"WHEN Otto von Bismarck introduced the first pension for workers over 70 in 1889, the life expectancy of a Prussian was 45. In 1908, when Lloyd George bullied through a payment of five shillings a week for poor men who had reached 70, Britons, especially poor ones, were lucky to survive much past 50. By 1935, when America set up its Social Security system, the official pension age was 65—three years beyond the lifespan of the typical American. State-sponsored retirement was designed to be a brief sunset to life, for a few hardy souls.

Now retirement is for everyone, and often as long as whole lives once were. In some European countries the average retirement lasts more than a quarter of a century. In America the official pension age is 66, but the average American retires at 64 and can then expect to live for another 16 years. Average spending on public pensions across the OECD is now the equivalent of more than 7% of GDP (they cost America just 0.2% back in 1935). In some countries the current figure could double by 2050, to say nothing of the cost of private pensions and extra spending on health and long-term care..."

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Fragmentação - A desintegração do Estado

April & May 2009
Table of Contents

FEATURES:
The Power of Statelessness

By Jakub Grygiel

The withering appeal of governing

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Most political groups in modern history have wanted to build and control a state. Whether movements of self-determination in the 19th century, of decolonization in the post–World War II decades, or political parties advocating separatism in several Western states in the 1990s (e.g., Italy and Quebec) — all aimed at one thing: to have a separate state that they could call their own. The means they employed to achieve this end ranged from terrorism and guerilla warfare to political pressure and electoral campaigns, but the ultimate goal was the same — creation of its own state. It is the ultimate goal no longer, and it is likely to be even less so in the future. Many of today’s nonstate groups do not aspire to have a state. In fact, they are considerably more capable of achieving their objectives and maintaining their social cohesion without a state apparatus. The state is a burden for them, while statelessness is not only very feasible but also a source of enormous power. Modern technologies allow these groups to organize themselves, seek financing, and plan and implement actions against their targets — almost always other states — without ever establishing a state of their own. They seek power without the responsibility of governing. The result is the opposite of what we came to know over the past two or three centuries: Instead of groups seeking statehood through a variety of means, they now pursue a range of objectives while actively avoiding statehood. Statelessness is no longer eschewed as a source of weakness but embraced as an asset... Fonte

Educação ruim

O problema com a educação de hoje é falta completa de fragmentação e diferenciação. Enquanto no resto da sociedade temos mais e mais produtos e estilos de vida diferenciada, o sistema educacional (seja no Brasil ou, veja abaixo, nos Estado Unidos) ainda segue o modelo unitário do passado com a meta da clonagem das crianças individuais (neste contexto vale ver o filme de Pink Floyd "The Wall").

As Karen De Coster noted in her own discussion of the Bryce Harper story,

"The public education system, which is a disastrous, wealth-destroying, failed endeavor, is held up as the standard by which we must all live. You go where they tell you to go, stay at the educational level they put you at, advance when they tell you to advance, slog through what they put in front of you, believe what they tell you to believe, and finish your "education" at a chronological age that somebody somewhere determined should be the age when you should be set free to live out your life. Your innate ability, your desire, your interests, your foundational knowledge - none of that matters because public education is set up to equalize and collectivize children so that they are all on the same pre-determined schedule. Still, people are surprised each time they hear about a 15-year-old attending college or an 18-year-old graduating from college. They were taught that children should all advance together through the education system based on chronological age and do exactly what every other kid their age is doing. The masses never question the irrationality of such nonsense. And you wonder why the American educational system is producing mostly professional consumers, couch potatoes, and TV-watching, amusement-demanding, non-reading robots."

Ciência modesta

O físico francês Carlo Rovelli relativa o "progresso científico" em sua área.
Vale ler o pequeno texto. É em alemão, mas com "google translate" se pode facilmente ser traduzido:

"Wir können Tiere klonen, träumen von Stringtheorie und Parallelwelten. Doch was hat all das wirklich verändert? Nicht viel, meint der Physiker Carlo Rovelli. Echte Revolutionen passieren im Stillen - so wie die Erfindung des Traktors, der einst die Landwirtschaft und das gesamte Leben umkrempelte."

http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/mensch/0,1518,druck-622717,00.html

Eu recomendo fortemente este artigo para vocês para ajudar perder a "adoração da ciência" que muitos brasileiros (com certeza aplica para CAPES) tem como uma fruta do ensino do positivismo nas escolas.

Use google's tradutor para ler o texto em Português: google translate.

O novo mundo de "citações"

1 - 10 of 750,000 for "The Bailout Reader"
veja neste e-book dois artigos de mim
- What's behind the financial market crisis?
- Mr. Bailout
Link: http://search.yahoo.com/search?fr=ytff1-yff3&p=%22The%20Bailout%20Reader&ei=UTF-8&type=

Estrutura de raza e casamento nos Estados Unidos

Fonte

Plano

1. Não vai ter aula nesta quarta. O tempo é preservado para preparar os trabalhos. Se tem perguntas, use e-mail antonymueller@gmail.com
2. Na próxima aula começamos com as apresentações
3. Entrega do texto completo é no final do semestre

Inovação

Seize the Silver Lining: A Checklist for Innovation

02:02 PM Monday June 08, 2009

By Susy Jackson

It's tough out there, but companies that think their choice is to innovate or to survive are missing the point. Innovation is a corporate necessity, not a nicety.

There's little doubt that innovation is going to become harder as resources become tighter and competition becomes fiercer. But, those companies that continue to focus on innovation have a rare chance to create substantial space between themselves and their competitors — those that don't will fall further and further behind.

The Silver Lining: An Innovation Playbook for Uncertain Times makes the case that today's turbulent times make mastering innovation a competitive necessity. The book aims to provide corporate innovators and entrepreneurs with practical guidance to seize the ample opportunities that still exist in today's markets.

The following 10-point checklist synthesizes The Silver Lining's key messages and provides practical guidance for leaders looking to realize opportunities in their markets. Each item links to a blog post describing the item in more depth.

Does your organization:

1. Recognize today's transformation imperative?
2. Have a handle on the future potential of innovation?
3. Have a process to prudently prune its innovation portfolio on a regular basis
4. Have clear consensus on the 1-3 top growth opportunities?
5. Always ask, "How does the customer define more?" before asking people to do more with less?
6. Match technological experiments ("can we?") with strategic experiments ("should we?")?
7. Constantly search to share the innovation load to de-risk innovation?
8. Have a plan to "love the low end" in existing and emerging markets?
9. Run an innovation factory with systems and structures to make innovation repeatable?
10. Have a plan to help leaders transform themselves?

History shows us that innovation flourishes, no matter how dark the times. Whether your company looks back and remembers today's troubled times as the beginning of the end or a kick-start to transformation depends on your actions. The choice is yours.

Fonte