“User experience is everything” – Evan Williams, Twitter CEO- 90 Percent of Everything
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Finally, monoculture is based on the principles of trade and comparative advantage. It’s supposed to work like this: Enormous areas specialize in growing, say, corn and soy; they then sell those crops and use the cash they get in return to buy a wide variety of foods.
This works in the United States, but it doesn’t work well in the rest of the world, where trade barriers are often high, and selling crops for money and then exchanging that money for food is a complex and fraught process. Farmers growing cash crops in remote areas are often taken advantage of by middlemen, who take a cut of the profit and pay the growers much less than the market rate.
” —How Locavores Could Save the World | Foreign Policy
‘Free Trade’ and agriculture-by-monoculture has converted the farming class of 3rd world countries into cheap labor for Agribusiness Multinationals at the expense of the health and economic security of the people.
“Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.” — ~Japanese Proverb via: Twitter / Tiny Buddha
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*There are more African Americans under correctional control today—in prison or jail, on probation or parole—than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.
*As of 2004, more African American men were disenfranchised (due to felon disenfranchisement laws) than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race.
” — The New Jim Crow | Mother Jones (via ziatroyano:robot-heart-politics: ericmortensen) (via vruz)
Usability alone does not create great webservices…
“We must stop looking at education as a product – in which we turn out every student giving the same answer – to a process, in which every student looks for new answers. Life is a beta.” — TEDxNYed: This is bullshit « BuzzMachine (via kareem)
“But the problem is that we start at the end, at what we think students should learn, prescribing and preordaining the outcome: We have the list of right answers. We tell them our answers before they’ve asked the questions. We drill them and test them and tell them they’ve failed if they don’t regurgitate back our lectures as lessons learned. That is a system built for the industrial age, for the assembly line, stamping out everything the same: students as widgets, all the same.” — TEDxNYed: This is bullshit « BuzzMachine
“Does it still make sense for countless teachers to rewrite the same essential lecture about, say, capillary action? Used to be, they had to. But not now, not since open curricula and YouTube. Just as journalists must become more curator than creator, so must educators.” — TEDxNYed: This is bullshit « BuzzMachine
“I’ll give the same advice to the academy that I give to news media: Do what you do best and link to the rest.” — TEDxNYed: This is bullshit « BuzzMachine