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Latest read: Our Choice

Al Gore’s latest book Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis should be considered by anyone interested in learning how the world can conserve resources with next generation technologies to reduce the globe’s carbon footprint.

 Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate CrisisIts easy to think this book is a political sequel to An Inconvenient Truth. That would be a mistake. The book has set off all the political rhetoric one would expect.

I found Chapter 11: Population rather interesting and worth the read alone.  Clearly we live in a world that is experiencing a sustained population boom in China and India.

This brings ultra-large scale social responsibility as well.  The impact of population on energy and food is obviously critical but the underlying issue on this still taboo subject must be moved to the forefront.

How will China and India care, feed and shelter their children?  More importantly how can green fuels be utilized in favor of coal and other cheap, outdated solutions?  There are options.

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Visualization changes everything

Tags: Visualization, information, Chart Wars, politics, trends

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Education Globalization Innovation OpenSource Reading Technology

Latest read: The Post-American World

Most recognize Fareed Zakaria from his CNN show Fareed Zakaria GPS. His book The Post-American World is an enjoyable read. The bottom line:  The US is not falling behind but rather (quite simply) the world is catching up.  Some amazing technologies are lifting the citizens of the poorest third world countries.
The biggest elephant called out in his book is America’s educational system. It needs a much required re-boot in order to compete against tomorrow’s globalized students who have access to free, powerful computing tools including Linux, or new technology like water pumps in Africa.  He references Tom Friedman‘s The World is Flat: a Brief History of the Twenty-First Century which I found to be a great read as well.

Zakaria is able to simply convey that America remains the top country for innovation, technology and intellectual property but India and China are catching up fast by introducing more of their citizens to the global economy.  India is first only in population growth while their level of poverty slowly dropped.

While true to some extent the reader may be surprised to see the detail about how splintered Al-Qaeda has become.  In Iraq for example the aim of this terrorist group has moved from targeting American and Israel to fighting other Muslim warlords and religious groups for control of Al-Qaeda’s future.

It should be noted Zakaria also addresses the issues of global climante and energy.  But to again point to Friedman’s Hot, Flat, and Crowded 2.0: Why We Need a Green Revolution–and How It Can Renew America not a lot of new ideas or information.

Overall Zakaria’s book is a gentle wake up call for America and is much smoother on the American reader than Mark Steyn’s America Alone.  The war in Iraq and Afghanistan while critical, reveals Al-Qaeda‘s struggle since 9/11 to deliver any significant violence on American soil.  Why?  Zakaria’s position is that Bin Laden has been so tightly curtailed, his organization still under a microscope has evolved into a communications company and is no longer a true terrorist organization.

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Social media by the numbers

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Education Globalization Reading

Latest read: The Assault on Reason

Must admit the timing at first seemed strange. I was reading Al Gore’s book The Assault on Reason when Michael Jackson died. Gore has written a book about what has gone wrong in our country. Yet I was able to watch it simply unfold right in front of me. The non-stop media coverage of Jackson’s death will not be forgotten.
Ultimately Gore’s book addresses the change in American values and repeated failures of the Bush Administration yet outlines an opportunity for our country to correct the ship.  The impact of the environment to no surprise is also a strong part of his book.  Gore sets the “mood” right from page one – where he addresses loss of conversation regarding our government’s role to launch the war in Iraq:

Not long before our nation launched the invasion of Iraq, our longest-serving senator, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, stood on the Senate floor and said: “This Chamber is, for the most part, silent – ominously, dreadfully silent.  There is no debate, no discussion, no attempt to lay out for the nation the pros and cons of this particular war.  There is nothing.  We stand passively mute in the United States Senate.

Gore is right on the mark when he wrote “Why do reason, logic and truth seem to play a sharply diminished role in the way America now makes important decisions?”  In some ways this book is a case study in the loss of reason, the foundation of our political democracy.  He has modeled this from Thomas Paine‘s The Age of Reason written in 1793. Ultimately Gore wants to bring back core values of our democracy to our fellow countrymen.