Tag: tipping point

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Latest Read: How the World Really Works

How the World Really Works: A Scientist’s Guide to Our Past, Present and Future by Vaclav Smil. Vaclav a Czech-Canadian scientist and policy analyst. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg Canada.

How the World Really Works: A Scientist’s Guide to Our Past, Present and Future by Vaclav Smil

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the 2000 recipient of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Award for Public Understanding of Science and Technology.

In addition, Vaclav was named by Foreign Policy magazine to its 2010 list of FP Top 100 Global Thinkers. In 2013, he was appointed by the Governor General to the Order of Canada. Finally, he was the 2013 EADS Distinguished Visitor at the American Academy in Berlin.

So, What really makes our modern world work? Vaclav proposes the answers in four grand transitions of civilization: populations, agriculture, energy, and economics. In fact, he outlines how each transition has greatly transformed our world and how our global society functions.

Vaclav is relying upon today’s computing ability to tap into vast amounts of data to tell powerful stories and he succeeds. This book has become a world wide bestseller and certainly is addressing the impact future climate change will have upon our world and global societies. Furthermore, Vaclav is delivering somewhat startling statistics throughout the book.

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Education Milwaukee Reading

Latest Read: Race for Profit

Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. Dr. Taylor is a professor of African American Studies at Princeton University.

Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

Her 2013 PhD dissertation in African-American Studies from Northwestern is titled Race for Profit: Black Housing and the Urban Crisis in the 1970s which moreover serves as the core of this book.

As a result of reading Evicted by Matthew Desmond, Keeanga’s book offers very powerful insights to housing in society from the Housing and Urban Development Act (HUD) of 1968 under the Johnson Administration to the 1974 Ford Administration Housing and Community Development Act which created uneven block grants and shared revenue with federal oversight to social welfare.

However, in contrast to Evicted, Race for Profit reveals deep, historical racism within the housing market that continues today and certainly accelerated under COVID. These forces obviously created downstream impacts at state and local levels, along with private financial firms including banks and real estate.

Keeanga in fact documents those failings were simply accelerating via “public/private partnerships” by Real Estate and Banking firms. This provided another opportunity to fleece poor African American women.

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Education Milwaukee Reading

Latest Read: Evicted

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond. Matthew is a sociologist at Princeton University. He is also the principal investigator of the Eviction Lab.

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

Evicted was the 2017 winner of the Pulitzer Prize, In addition, Time Magazine named Evicted one of the ten best nonfiction books of the decade.

Matthew follows eight families across greater Milwaukee who indeed are struggling to live in apartments. For many readers, Evicted should dramatically change our country’s limited understanding of real poverty, impacting both Caucasian and African American families. One can only imagine the acceleration of evictions since COVID derailed the economy.

It is certainly remarkable to be living in Milwaukee and being able to see the apartments around the greater Milwaukee area in person on trips. Some small cities outside Milwaukee including Cudahy are also written into family stories.

Furthermore, Matthew documents that a common notion is that rent should equate to 30 percent of income. However multiple stories of families reveal they are spending up to 80 percent of income on rent. This certainly leaves so many with almost no money for food, clothing, or basic amenities.

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Cyberinfrastructure Education Network Ransomware Technology

Harvard Cybersecurity

Harvard’s cybersecurity course is certainly a demanding slice of your life. However, I gained valuable insights from Eric Rosenbach and cybersecurity leaders from National Security Agency, Akamai, and Google. In addition, this offered me an opportunity to connect with cybersecurity leaders across wide ranging business and geographic locations.harvard cybersecurity2018 proved a challenge, looking beyond repeated megabreaches that dominated news headlines. Did you suffer from breach fatigue? It was like the movie Groundhog Day.

At some point (probably sooner than we think) all the data impacting all the users connected to the global internet will all be available on the dark web. All for a price…

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Blockchain Cloud Cyberinfrastructure Design Education Globalization Innovation IoT Network OpenSource Reading Technology

Latest Read: Blockchain – Blueprint for a New Economy

When Melanie Swan’s book Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy written under the O’Reilly series was available I was eager to start reading. This is a thoughtful overview to the Blockchain. There is much to learn about the role of cryptocurrency and the blockchain but this is not the sole focus of her work.

Blockchain - Blueprint for a New EconomyMelanie, like Tapscott paints a wide brush across the Blockchain. Too similar to Tapscott perhaps? No. If the blockchain’s focus was just security then it would command a smaller, narrow focus on IT infrastructure. Yet Melanie provides a wider arena to learn how Blockchains especially in healthcare hold enormous possibilities.

My first book Don Tapscott’s The Blockchain Revolution was interesting. William Mougayar’s The Business Blockchain was better. My thirst for knowledge continues.This is possibly the best of the three at providing a deeper dive to the possibilities of a truly changing technology.

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