One of the leading causes of artistic and creative decline is the
modern view of mental illness, and the treatment methods used to
prevent or minimize it. If one views creativity as a form of madness
(or deviance), then the modern view that all forms of psychopathology
must be eradicated will be detrimental to societies body of great
artistic works.
Sequoia Pharmaceuticals Secures Funding to Test its Unique AIDS Drug
Sequoia Pharmaceuticals Secures Funding to Test its Unique AIDS Drug03/22/2005 03:39 PM Sequoia Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a company focused on discovering novel
drugs to combat drug-resistant viral infections, today announced that
it closed on a $22 million Series B round of financing. The financing
is expected to fund early stage clinical trials of the Company’s novel
drug designed to combat wild-type- and multi-drug-resistant strains of
HIV. [PRWEB Mar 20, 2005]
Transatlantic Group to Discuss European View of Plant-Made Pharmaceuticals
Nitto Denko Corporation and Isis Pharmaceuticals, Inc. Announce Development of a High Performance Synthesis Product for the Manufacture of Oligonucleotides
Academic Community Supports Plant-Made Pharmaceuticals in CaliforniaScientists Critique Misleading Claims in Advocacy Group Report
Academic Community Supports Plant-Made Pharmaceuticals in CaliforniaScientists Critique Misleading Claims in Advocacy Group Report08/11/2004 02:32 AM Drawing upon the expertise of their community of more than 120
academics, researchers, and other life sciences professionals, an
online coalition of academics (http://www.PlantPharma.org) have
refuted a report that claims biotechnology-improved rice being grown
to help produce new life-saving therapeutic drugs may pose a risk to
human or environmental health. [PRWEB Aug 11, 2004]
Plant-made Pharmaceuticals Show Promise for Disease Treatment - IAPO Takes Lead to Inform Patients’ Organizations of Associated Benefits and Risks
PC Mag Says Death to 802.11b (Almost)04/29/2004 04:15 PM PC Magazine rounds up several 802.11g routers, and says they're cheap
enough, they're good enough: 802.11b no longer enjoys a large enough
(or any) price differential for quality Wi-Fi gateways that include
WPA encryption support, PC Mag says. So while you can still find
802.11b devices on the market, they recommend new gear have 802.11g
built in. The overall package of reviews and related stories in the
issue starts here; use the table of contents at the right of that
story to navigate through their guide to 802.11g, advice for buying,
and reviews of individual routers. The Linksys WRT54G gets top marks
for 802.11g with a score of 4.5 out of 5 points; but six other
gateways received 4 of 5 points, showing how the entire Wi-Fi world
has matured into more usability....
Being towards death06/25/2004 10:37 AM Being towards death Hanan Cohen intertwines the mortality of blogs
with our own mortality: We think that we will live forever. We think
that the files we have stored on machines powered by electricity will
also live forever. Our files have no other purpose than to be online.
We think that if our files are not available to the web, they are
dead. In a way, thinking about the death of our files is like thinking
about our own death. Meanwhile, over at Ereignis, the English-language
Heidegger site, there's a link to Christopher Ellis' article that
argues that Heidegger's ideas...
to the death!07/02/2004 07:50 PM battle for the sudan -
some friday flash fun for your playing pleasure. this is a fun game,
but it takes a little practice to figure out the strategy. i
recommend playing the computer until you can always beat it before
playing other people. also, try out the suggested starting positions
before trying to make your own.
Some of you are probably
wondering why I didn't follow through with my promise to publish my Green
Movement Manifesto on ChangeThis!,
the new and wildly popular site for the posting of manifestos and
other
lengthy and provocative 'thought pieces' on urgent and fundamental
issues. There are two reasons:
When I ran the Green Movement Manifesto by a number of
people, the 'environmentalists' liked it, the progressives who don't
have the environment at the top of their agenda were neutral to it,
and
the conservatives didn't like it at all. So I worried I was just
preaching to the choir.
When I went to ChangeThis! I found another
manifesto called The Death of Environmentalism
already there. As much as the title infuriated me, I read it and I
basically agree with the authors. In light of their arguments, which I
summarize below, the Green Movement
Manifesto needs some serious work.
The authors of The Death of
Environmentalism, Michael Schellenberger
and Ted Nordhaus,
have worked for various environmental organizations most of their
lives, and featured prominently in some of the environmental
movement's
greatest successes in the 1960s and 1970s, which brought in
legislation
that is only now being seriously undermined by Bush and others. They
have taken a candid look at the almost uninterrupted history of
failure
of the movement since the mid-1970s -- thirty years -- and its
increasing marginalization and inability to galvanize public opinion.
Though you should read the whole 50-page manifesto, here's the gist of
it:
Support for environmental protection is broad but
shallow
-- the large majority believe it's a good thing to do, but very few
list it in their 'top 10' priorities for needed change.
The
movement has erred by defining, in people's minds, the 'environment'
as a thing, separate and apart from the human world.
Framing
problems as 'environmental' problems doesn't work
since in most people's minds it has the effect of trivializing them,
making them abstract and impersonal.
Focusing political effort on technical remedies and
tactics
doesn't work -- it fails to engage people, provide a sense of urgency
and immediacy to the problems, or define them as political, 'people'
problems.
As a result, the three mainstay activities of
environmental
organizations -- analysis, organization and PR -- are increasingly
ineffective: In a world that is in a moral war over core values, our
rational appeal to be good
stewards of this 'other' thing called the environment just gets
lost.
The media therefore have largely stopped covering the
movement, so radical environmentalists (PETA, ELF) have used
anti-social acts as a means to get attention, and garnered some
(mostly
unfavourable) media coverage, while mainstream environmentalists have
been unable to get any media coverage at all.
While the
environmental movement therefore blames the media
(unfairly -- if the people don't care about the issue, why should the
media?), the consequence of the invisibility of the mainstream
movement
has been that nearly half of
Americans surveyed now agree that "most people active in
environmental groups are extremists, not reasonable
people."
Environmentalists, who are rationalists at heart,
have a
propensity to be reductionist and stop their analysis at root causes:
"The global warming problem is at root a carbon emissions problem, so
we must have legislation to reduce these emissions", when what they
should be doing is identifying the practical, real-world obstacles to
achieving such legislation, and how to overcome these obstacles, such
as:
the control of all three branches of government in the
US by the extreme right
trade policies that undermine
environmental protections
their own failure to articulate an
inspiring and positive vision
overpopulation
the
influence of money in US politics
failure to craft
'environmental' legislation that shapes the debate around core
values
poverty
acceptance of dubious assumptions about
what the real problem is, and isn't
In 1991, the
environmental movement stupidly agreed to
withdraw its drive for a much-needed US fuel efficiency standard in
return for an auto industry agreement to oppose drilling in the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge (which is now likely to be drilled anyway) --
this was because of short-range, tactical thinking and mis-framing the
debate as about 'protecting the environment' when it should have been
framed as about salvaging the viability of the US auto industry.
The movement has been too short-sighted and
idealistic to
form practical alliances: The #1 reason the US auto industry is less
profitable than the Japanese industry is the exploding cost of health
care, which in the US is paid for by the industry ($5B/year by GM
alone), yet environmentalists have never considered helping the auto
industry lobby for universal public health care in return for an
agreement to raise fuel efficiency, because "health care isn't an
environmental issue".
So the movement is now in a quandary:
It's focusing its
effort on short-term, tactical efforts and technical solutions that it
believes could be politically successful even in the current US
political climate, while at the same time acknowledging that even if
these quick fixes and incremental improvements succeed they will be
far
short of the change that is needed immediately to avert ecological
catastrophe.
The authors co-founded the New
Apollo Project (which my fellow environmental blogger Richard Kahn
criticized
as idealistic) which they say provides an "inclusive and hopeful
vision" and is at least an intelligent first step to get
environmentalists out of the 'special interest' mold and into the
practice of building win-win alliances -- and not just with other
environmentalists and progressives. "It is our contention", they say,
"that the strength of any given political proposal turns more on its
vision for the future and the values it carries within it than on its
technical policy specifications".
The best way to achieve
significant change in the
environment is to focus less on regulation and more on investment:
Encouraging planet-friendly investments siphons dollars away from
polluting and wasteful investments.
What especially backfires
is environmentalists' PR focus on
raising awareness of the problem: Bombarding the public with bleak
news
when they are desperately seeking reassurance and less to worry about
(that's why I rarely report environmental set-backs and other bad news
on this blog -- it doesn't accomplish anything).
So: Vision and values first, and then build the movement and its
agenda on that. In my Green Movement
Manifesto
I really started with the agenda for what I described as a coalition
of
the disenfranchised. That agenda was about communicating, teaching,
recruiting, political (proportional representation), social (boycotts,
think-tanks, demonstrations) and economic (tax shifts, new measures of
well-being) activities, and creating Model Intentional Communities,
new
progressive media and Natural Enterprises. I used the term 'Green'
instead of Environmental or Ecology because I thought it was more
inclusive, more about us than
just about it.
Suppose we take a step back and describe the vision and values of the
Green Movement first, and then review the agenda and see if it
fits?
Yesterday I produced what I believe to be a statement of universal
human values:
Happiness as a product of good Health, Home (including Environment,
Belonging, Self-Sufficiency), Connection (Community, Relationships,
Family, Love), Discovery (Learning, Creating, Forming Beliefs), Work,
Peace (Freedom, Justice, Absence of Stress), Play, Awareness and
Self-Esteem. I freely admit that these may not be the best terms,
which, along with their organization have an implicit progressive
'frame' to them. But whether you want to combine Home and Connection
into one core value (as environmentalists are wont to do), or elevate
Family from an aspect of Home and Connection to a core value in its
own
right, I think you'll agree that this is a reasonable broad-brush
summary of human values (and, if you're an environmentalist, of the
values of all life on Earth).
If we're going to build a Green Movement on values and vision, do we
need to focus on or emphasize certain values, the ones that are
currently least fulfilled by today's non-sustainable and devastating
culture? The New Apollo Project report focuses on two values: good
jobs
(Work) and energy self-sufficiency (Self-Sufficiency being an aspect
of
Home). Its thesis is that two massive current problems in the US -- a
lousy job market and energy dependence -- can be solved by a single
set
of solutions, a single agenda. That agenda is about encouraging
investment in renewable energy innovation and development. Its
side-benefits include Health, a better Environment, and greater
security (Peace).
But New Apollo is a project, not a movement. It seems to me a movement
needs to be built on a strong and cohesive, relatively complete
set of values. So I'm tempted to keep the entire set. We need of
course
to go beyond the 'shorthand' of these one-word terms and explain
exactly what these values mean. So the first part of the Green
Movement
Manifesto should be about these values. We need to try to articulate
their meaning and reinforce their universality by expressing them in
new 'frames' that are compelling to all -- progressive and
conservative, libertarian, environmentalist, fundamentalist and
agnostic alike. No easy task.
The next part, the Vision, will be easier. The vision is ultimately an
achievablestory in which the Values are
realized and fully manifest. Hence, Manifesto.
The key challenge here is to create a sense of urgency. The Vision
needs to transport us into the realm of the possible, and make us long
for its realization, ready and eager to be part of making it
happen.
Another challenge will be ensuring that a wide variety of people
perceive the Vision to be achievable. We live in such a cynical
society
that it's become easy to shrug off our responsibility, and our lack of
courage, by simply saying "It can't be done, so there's no point
trying." An unachievable Vision is worse than no Vision, because it
merely raises anxiety and brands its authors as hopeless idealists.
The
line between a vision that is too incremental, and one that is
perceived to be impossible, is often a fine one.
Is that enough for the Manifesto? While setting out the Agenda would
certainly be beneficial -- it would show How the vision could be
achieved -- it would also be controversial because, as I mentioned
yesterday, the 'How' is extremely frame-dependent. My sense is that
we're over-burdening the Manifesto by putting the Agenda in it. The
Agenda is Stage Two. Besides, stories are subversive -- we may be able
to use the Vision as a tool to allow people with different frames to
see the 'Value(s)' of achieving the Vision -- and that Vision alone
may
be enough to get them thinking about other, imaginative ways to
realize
it -- changing their own frames.
And there remains the problem of the name -- Green Movement. I like
the
name, because it's simple, visual, positive, instinctively resonant.
It's also tailor-made as a brand, something people can associate with,
call themselves, belong to, talk about, even wear (a woman I know
makes
unisex bracelets, and is intrigued by the idea of making something
that
Green Movement members could wear, give, share -- a conversation
piece). And what's more, Green is neither Red nor Blue.
But it does have associations with the Green Party, which, in North
America at least, is associated with the left, with fringe thinking,
and with single-issue politics. We need to think about whether on
balance it's an asset or a liability, and if it's the latter we need
another name. We also probably need a logo and a catchphrase.
Why am I saying 'we'? Because tomorrow I'm going to present a draft of
a new Green Movement Manifesto, with a Value statement, a Vision, and
possibly a new name, logo and catchphrase. And no Agenda, at least
yet.
But I wouldn't presume that my draft will be more than something for
the rest of us -- you -- to
shoot at. If the Green Movement Manifesto is going to be enough to
galvanize a billion or two people into thinking about, believing in,
and striving for, a better, sustainable way to live, it's going to
need
an enormous amount of collaborative effort -- the Wisdom of Crowds,
the
Power of Many, and the Magic of the Collective Mind and Soul. From the
ashes of Environmentalism we will build something new. So sharpen your
critical and creative thinking, here we go!
Death in the family
Death in the family06/07/2004 10:42 AM In "The Sopranos" season finale, Tony preserves the peace in his
kingdom the only way he knows how.
Straight out of a (low-budget) Bond
flick is the Solar Death Ray, a combination of particle board, 112
mirrors and, of course, Sol. Each of the mirrors are pointed towards
one area, focusing the sun's rays onto a target easily heated up to
930-1100 degrees Fahrenheit. The project page contains bunches of
science facts and enough instruction to build your own, Popular
Science style. In all seriousness, though, watching it melt through
some of the "targets" in their gallery is a bit disconcerting as I
imagine hundreds of maladjusted youth attempting to build their own as
an easy yet tragic way to score a new cat.
Downloading death05/13/2004 06:18 PM Millions will watch Nicholas Berg's tragic murder online not for
prurient reasons or to gain insight into evil. They will watch because
of the overwhelming urge to be in the know.
Orkut Death
Orkut Death03/06/2004 02:09 AM Huy
Zing: My Orkut.com death was a slow painful one that lasted
1.5 hours starting at 20:44 on Monday, February 23, 2004. [via
Danah Boyd]
The Death Of Macworld
The Death Of Macworld01/07/2004 06:16 PM Sure, there was a lot of new and improved, but that is an everyday
event at Apple. By Steve Consilvio (MyMac.com via MyAppleMenu)
Budgeting for death
Budgeting for death02/01/2005 10:02 PM There's good news today for U.S. troops serving in Iraq. No, the
president won't offer a timetable for bringing the troops home when he delivers his
State of the Union address Wednesday. But at least the Pentagon wants
to pay more to the families of soldiers who die fighting there. Grok Description matches for Pharmaceuticals and the Death of Art GrokA matches for Pharmaceuticals and the Death of Art
Pharmaceuticals and the Death of Art
The following phrases have been identified by the grok system as matching this entry:
Some of you are probably
wondering why I didn't follow through with my promise to publish my Green
Movement Manifesto on ChangeThis!,
the new and wildly popular site for the posting of manifestos and
other
lengthy and provocative 'thought pieces' on urgent and fundamental
issues. There are two reasons:
Straight out of a (low-budget) Bond
flick is the Solar Death Ray, a combination of particle board, 112
mirrors and, of course, Sol. Each of the mirrors are pointed towards
one area, focusing the sun's rays onto a target easily heated up to
930-1100 degrees Fahrenheit. The project page contains bunches of
science facts and enough instruction to build your own, Popular
Science style. In all seriousness, though, watching it melt through
some of the "targets" in their gallery is a bit disconcerting as I
imagine hundreds of maladjusted youth attempting to build their own as
an easy yet tragic way to score a new cat.