NYT: Danish Welfare
While much of southern Europe has been racked by strikes and protests as its creditors force austerity measures, Denmark still has a coveted AAA bond rating. But Denmark’s long-term outlook is troubling. With little fuss or political protest — or notice abroad — Denmark has been at work overhauling entitlements, trying to prod Danes into working more or longer or both.
Smithsonian: Life in the City
Cities are shaped by their histories and by accidents of geography and climate but they are also universal, the products of social, economic and physical principles that transcend space and time. “Quantitative urbanism” is an effort to reduce to mathematical formulas the chaotic, exuberant, extravagant nature of one of humanity’s oldest and most important inventions, the city. The birth of this new field can be dated to 2003, when researchers convened a workshop on ways to “model”—in the scientific sense of reducing to equations—aspects of human society. With the technology to know virtually anything that goes on in an urban society, the question becomes how to leverage it to do good, to make the city run better, enhance security and safety and promote the private sector. While urbanization gave the world Athens and Paris, it also gave the chaos of Mumbai and the poverty of Dickens’ London.
NYT: 401(k) World
Something really big happened in the world’s wiring in the last decade, we went from a connected world to a hyperconnected world. Connectivity and creativity has created a global education, commercial, communication and innovation platform on which more people can start stuff, collaborate on stuff, learn stuff, make stuff (and destroy stuff) with more other people than ever before.
Sustainable Investment Alliance
The Global Sustainable Investment Alliance’s mission is to deepen the impact and visibility of sustainable investment organizations at the global level. Its vision is a world where sustainable investment is integrated into financial systems and the investment chain and where all regions of the world have coverage through membership institutions that advance sustainable investing.
The Economist: Green Wheels
Some carmakers try harder than others to be green. Besides making their models cleaner to run, many carmakers are also trying to reduce the environmental impact of manufacturing them. Having been depicted as environmental villains since the 1950s, cars and their makers may soon be able to move out of the spotlight.
Academic Earth
Academic Earth is an organization founded with the goal of giving everyone on earth access to a world-class education. We are building a user-friendly educational ecosystem that will give internet users around the world the ability to learn from full video courses and lectures from the world’s leading scholars.
NatGeo: Curse of Fertilizer
Without nitrogen, the machinery of photosynthesis cannot function. Corn, wheat, and rice, the crops on which humanity depends for survival, are among the most nitrogen hungry of all plants. Yet, runaway nitrogen is suffocating wildlife in lakes and estuaries, contaminating groundwater, and even warming the globe’s climate.
NYT: Electric Cars Earn Money
A line of Mini Coopers, each attached to the regional power grid by a thick cable plugged in where a gasoline filler pipe used to be, no longer just draws energy. The power now flows two ways between the cars and the electric grid, as the cars inject and suck power in tiny jolts, and get paid for it.
Brookings: Postsecondary Student Learning
College completion rates in the U.S. are stubbornly low despite the large and rising returns to a college degree. Efforts to increase student success in college have largely ignored a potentially key factor: the instruction that students receive in the sequence of courses that add up to a college education.
Brookings: Importance of Manufacturing
Manufacturing—or rather advanced manufacturing—is essential to the U.S. economy because it is the main source of innovation and global competitiveness for the United States. Simply put, advanced manufacturing is the U.S. pipeline for new products and productivity-enhancing processes.
Brookings: American Future
As politicians in Washington focus on reining in America’s worrisome deficit, they tend to have attitudes of doom and gloom. They convey fears of shortchanging future generations, overtaxing workers, depriving the needy, killing the fragile economic recovery and failing to make crucial investments.
NYT: Engineering Serendipity
Silicon Valley is obsessed with serendipity. Armed with social network maps, managers can spot isolated teams and structural holes, tweaking the organizational structure in real time. Rather than wait for their employees to cross paths, they could simply make the necessary introductions.
Economist: Biomedical Scaffolding
Many of the scaffolds that have already been commercialised for wound repair, bone grafts and surgical aids are comparatively simple. Moving to the next generation of scaffolds for the delivery of drugs, cells and eventually genes will require extensive safety testing and lengthy clinical trials.
Economist: Sharing Economy
Why pay through the nose for something when you can rent it more cheaply from a stranger online? That is the principle behind a range of online services that enable people to share cars, accommodation, bicycles, household appliances and other items, connecting owners of underused assets with others willing to pay to use them.
NYT: America the Innovative?
Although America has accounted for a sizable share of all technological innovations that have shaped our modern world, the wider historical evidence is disappointing for anyone who thinks political freedom is a fundamental precondition for innovation. Even the evidence of America’s own history undercuts the “all you need is freedom” story.
Wired: Science of Swarms
For more than a century people have tried to understand how individuals become unified groups. The secrets of the swarm hinted at a whole new way of looking at the world. But those secrets were hidden for decades. When it came to figuring out collectives, nobody had the methods or the math.
Wired: Clayton Christensen
Sixteen years ago a book by Clayton Christensen changed business thinking forever. The Innovator’s Dilemma looked at industries and exposed a surprising phenomenon: When big companies fail, it’s often not because they do something wrong but because they do everything right.
Brookings: American Education
This is the twelfth edition of the Brown Center Report. Part I examines the latest data from state, national, or international assessments. Part II explores the controversial topics of tracking and ability grouping. Part III is on the national push for eighth graders to take algebra and other high school math courses.
Patagonia
Patagonia wants to be in business for a good long time, and a healthy planet is necessary for a healthy business. We want to leave behind not only a habitable planet, but an Earth whose beauty and biodiversity is protected for those who come after us. We think that business can inspire solutions to the environmental crisis.
Global Witness
Global Witness investigates and campaigns to prevent natural resource related conflict and corruption, and associated environmental and human rights abuses. From undercover investigations, to high level lobby meetings, we aim to engage on every level where we might make a difference and bring about change.
NYT: Riddle of Human Species
The task of understanding humanity is too important and too daunting to leave to the humanities. Their many branches have not explained why we possess our special nature and not some other out of a vast number of conceivable possibilities. In that sense, the humanities have not accounted for a full understanding of our species’ existence.
Desertec Foundation
All kinds of renewables will be used in the DESERTEC Concept, in centralized and decentralized solutions alike, but the sun-rich deserts of the world play a central role: within six hours deserts receive more energy from the sun than humankind consumes within a year. 90 percent of the world’s population lives within 3,000 km of deserts.
FLOW
FLOW refers to an optimal state of human experience in which individuals are fully engaged in creative endeavors, experiencing fulfillment, happiness, and well-being; and the means by which increases in the free global flow of goods, services, capital, people, and information will accelerate human progress and well-being.
Economist: Cost of Air Conditioning
Critics counts air conditioning as more a curse than a miracle. Cooling buildings and vehicles pumps out almost half a billion tonnes of carbon dioxide annually. Between 1995 and 2004 the proportion of homes in Chinese cities with air conditioning rose from 8% to 70%.
Economist: Higher Education
There is growing anxiety in America about higher education. A degree has always been considered the key to a good job. But rising fees and increasing student debt, combined with shrinking financial and educational returns, are undermining at least the perception that university is a good investment.
THNK: Creative Leadership
Social inequality, evolution of technology, dwindling resources, climate change, the collapse of financial institutions. THNK, the Amsterdam School of Creative Leadership, is on a mission to develop the next generation of creative leaders that will have a significant societal impact in our world.
Economist: Uses of Difficulty
Compared with a hundred years ago, our lives are less tightly bound by social mores and physical constraints. Obstacles are everywhere disappearing. Few of us wish to turn the clock back, but perhaps we need to remind ourselves how useful the right obstacles can be. Sometimes, the best route to fulfilment is the path of more resistance.
Industrial Ecology
Industrial ecology (IE) is the study of material and energy flows through industrial systems. It is concerned with the shifting of industrial process from linear (open loop) systems, in which resource and capital investments move through the system to become waste, to a closed loop system where wastes can become inputs for new processes.
CERES
Ceres has been working for more than 20 years to advocate for sustainability leadership. Ceres mobilizes a powerful network of investors, companies and public interest groups to accelerate and expand the adoption of sustainable business practices to build a healthy global economy.
IGLHR
The mission of the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights is to promote and defend human, women’s and worker’s rights in the global economy. With a highly experienced team of international advocates, the IGLHR supports exploited workers all over the developing world.
What You (Really) Need to Know
The world is changing very rapidly, but it may be that inertia in the education system is appropriate. Suppose the educational system is drastically altered to reflect the structure of society and what we now understand about how people learn. How will what universities teach be different?
NYT: Let’s Be Less Productive
Professor Tim Jackson argues for slowing down. He describes how our relentless drive for economic growth undermines not only our economic system, through encouraging behavior that gives rise to financial crises, but also our quality of life and the environment we live in.
Thomas Friedman: Journalist
Thomas L. Friedman is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, and author of the books: “That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind In The World It Invented and How We Can Come Back” and “Hot, Flat, and Crowded; Why We Need A Green Revolution – And How It Can Renew America”.
Trucost
Over the last 10 years, Trucost has researched, standardised and validated the world’s most comprehensive data on corporate environmental impacts, including carbon, water, waste and pollutants. Trucost helps its clients understand the true cost of business.
CBO: Agriculture
The Congressional Budget Office regularly analyzes the federal government’s agricultural policies. It also studies the budgetary and economic impacts of proposed changes to agricultural policies and related policies, such as ones promoting biofuels and affecting the allocation of water supplies.
CBO: Economy
The Congressional Budget Office “regularly assesses the state of the economy and the impact on the economy of proposed changes in federal spending and taxes. Analysts prepare economic projections for the federal budget, study major aspects of the economy such as productivity and unemployment.