Steve Goulet » Everything Else

Sugata Mitra

Steve — Sun, 12 Sep 2010 22:58:17 +0000

Professor Mitra is suggesting an innovative way to bring education to the millions of children who have no schools and no teachers. The idea is to provide them with tools to teach themselves, in the form of Self Organised Learning Environments. “A self-organising system is one where the system structure appears without explicit intervention from outside the system.”

He’s already gotten some amazing results.

Share/Save

Michael Pollan at MSU

Steve — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 17:26:53 +0000

We saw Michael Pollan speak at MSU last night. This article does a good job of summarizing his talk at Tufts, which looks like it was very similar to the one we heard at MSU: http://tuftsjournal.tufts.edu/2009/04_1/features/01/.

He caught me off guard with his criticism of nutritional science: “Nutritional science is fascinating, but sort of where surgery was in 1650. It’s interesting and promising, but are you ready to get on the table?” He thinks we need to simplify the way we eat by following a few basic rules: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

Our focus on various nutrients in food is part of the problem: “There is always some satanic nutrient we are trying to drive from the food supply, such as trans fat or sodium. At the same time, there is always a blessed nutrient that if we ate enough of, we would live forever, such as omega-3 fatty acids or fiber.”

It was disturbing to hear how hard this nutrition science mono culture has been on our farmers. They get a tiny fraction of the money that is spent on our so called “food”. Even the packagers make more than the farmers. Most of our grocery dollars go to the marketing and manufacture of food like substances that barely resemble the real food that farmers grow/raise. The message was clear to me — get to know your local farmer and buy directly from him/her whenever possible.

He also discussed how different cultures handle the concept of eating enough at a meal. In America we eat quickly and keep eating until we are “full”. Other cultures have settled on a different strategy — they eat until they are no longer hungry. This requires that you eat more slowly, and take time to listen to your body.

Share/Save

Leap

Steve — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 00:06:31 +0000

I’m looking forward to reading Leap, based on what I’ve read so far at the Blog of Tim Ferriss. According to Leap, Bill Gates and many other seemingly crazy entrepreneurs didn’t really risk much at all when they started their companies. They took calculated risks and leveraged opportunities while simultaneously working their arses off. I never new that Mary Gates (Bill’s mom) was connected to IBM through her relationship to other execs while sitting as committee chair on the board of national committee for the United Way. Bill Gates was not taking much of a leap when he dropped out of Harvard to start MS. The stars were already aligned.

This passage is similar to the descriptions of Gates (in his early years) from Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, one of my all time favorite books.

Share/Save

Me and the Boy

Steve — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 20:38:06 +0000

Nine years ago — time sure does fly. Now he’s blogging, and his latest post is not for the faint of heart.

Share/Save

Family Photos

Steve — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 14:47:13 +0000

Terri Vruggink has posted a sampling of the photos she did for our family this summer on her blog. I was skeptical when Holly first suggested we do this. Now I stand corrected, and amazed at how a talented photographer was able to make our family look pretty darn good!

Share/Save

Big and Bad – Malcolm Gladwell on the SUV Craze

Steve — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 16:44:35 +0000

Malcolm Gladwell, author of “The Tipping Point”, and “Blink”, wrote this article for the New Yorker back in 2004:

http://www.gladwell.com/2004/2004_01_12_a_suv.html

As is usually the case with Malcolm’s writing, his perspective on the SUV phenomenon is unique, informative, and entertaining.

Share/Save

President Gerald Ford

Steve — Wed, 27 Dec 2006 23:59:45 +0000

WGVU has posted a video documentary of Gerald Fords life, including interviews with Peter Sechia, Jennifer Granholm, Henry Kissinger, and former President Bush. President Ford will be remembered for his integrity, leadership and humility. He helped end the Vietnam war and heal the country.

Favorite son, remembered here.

Share/Save

Wikiality

Steve — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 17:08:20 +0000

Stephen Colbert has coined yet another word that will soon become a part of your vocabulary: Wikiality. Earlier this year he turned heads with is addition of “Truthiness” to the global lexicon.

In my humble opinion there is a degree of truthiness in Stephen’s definition of wikiality. We are indeed entering a new phase of consensus building via Blogs, Wikis (in particular Wikipedia), and the Web in general. And it’s a democratic process for the most part, although those individuals who are less inclined to participate in this revolution have become somewhat marginalized.

Dinner table arguements can have some sense of finality now that we can consult a medium which allows for consensus and majority views to bubble to the top of the endless chatter. I would submit that the very fabric of our democracy and cultural decision making processes may be forever changed as these systems mature.

There is something very humbling about exposing your beliefs and values to the criticism and review that is built in to these consensus building systems. Your ideas are quickly challenged and you are forced to defend them or face the consequences. And if you lose interest, there is always someone there to fill the void and possibly render your ideas obsolete. So the end product, or consensus, typcially ends up being dominated by those who are most engaged, persistent, and convincing in their particular area of expertise. Welcome to the age of wikiality.

Share/Save

RED

Steve — Tue, 16 May 2006 19:16:53 +0000

This article is from the (RED) edition of The Independent, guest-edited for 16 May 2006 by Bono. Half the revenue from the edition will be donated to the Global Fund to Fight Aids.

Bono, Guest Editor: I am a witness. What can I do?

Published: 16 May 2006

May I say without guile, I am as sick of messianic rock stars as the next man, woman and child. I am also tired of average work being given extra weight because it’s attached to something with real gravitas, like the Aids emergency. So I truly try to tread carefully as I walk over the dreams of dignity under my feet in our work for the terrible beauty that is the continent of Africa. I’m used to the custard pies. I’ve even learnt to like the taste of them. But before you are tempted to let fly with your understandable invective, allow me to contextualise. Not for the sake of my vanity, but for the sake of people who are depending on you – the reader – to respond to the precariousness of their lives.

Picture this: a village where the disappearance of a whole generation has left children to bring up children (the Lord of the Flies syndrome).

I’m a witness to this. What can I do?

Or this: my new friend Prudence, who even if she had access to anti-retroviral therapies would not have shared them with her now dead sister or best friend Janny, because her fellow activists were more important to keep alive.

Why? Because picture this: most activists and trained nurses cannot afford the drugs available to us in any corner chemist.

I am a witness to this. I have watched these brave and beautiful souls who are fighting a forest fire of a pandemic with watering cans, knowing they will not see the light of a day when their work will be honoured. I have been a witness to their conversations around canteen tables, deciding who will live or die, because they do not have enough pills to go round. I’ve seen Zackie Achmat refuse his medications until he won his action against the South African government, forcing their hand on universal access. What a witness he was. And so I testify.

These firefighters deserve fire engines with sirens and low-flying aircraft with bellies full of of rain. At the very least, they deserve their situation to merit the classification of an emergency. Code Red, like Hurricane Katrina or the tsunami in south Asia, which swept away a hundred and fifty thousand lives. These were natural catastrophes. Africa loses a hundred and fifty thousand men, women, and children every month to Aids, a wholly avoidable disaster, a preventable, treatable disease.

(click here to read the rest)

Share/Save

Car swerves into marchers, injures 10 en route to Capitol

Steve — Thu, 04 May 2006 20:17:45 +0000

Since this is the 36th anniversary of the shootings at Kent State, I thought I would link to this article about an incident that occurred several days after the shootings, in which a drunken motorist ran his car into a group of peace protesters marching from MSU to the capital in Lansing.

“A motorist injured 10 young people when he swerved his red Falcon into a crowd of marchers near the intersection of Michigan and LaSalle Boulevard. Lansing police chief Derold Husby said late Thursday afternoon that the motorist has been charged with driving under the influence of alcohol.

… Admitted to Olin Health Center for observation and treatment of an ankle injury was Mary K. Goulet, Greenville sophomore.”

Mary is my sister. Here is a link to the full article:

Link

Share/Save