How to: Get around slow walkers

Bicycle bells are surprisingly effective. Caveat: this was tested in Japan. Will it work in the USA?

On Stereotypes and Snap Judgements

The Psyche on Automatic
By Craig Lambert (Harvard Magazine)
November-December 2010

A profile of Amy Cuddy, a social psychologist at Harvard Business School, and her work.

One Person's Trash...

At the end of the academic year, college students dump a plethora of objects in the rush after finals to move out and leave campus. Items that get thrown out include appliances, furniture, books, clothing, and a variety of other objects that have real value but are often tossed into the dumpster.

Gradually, colleges and universities have become aware of the problem and have instituted programs that sell, reuse and/or donate stuff back to the community. Among the voices out there is Lisa Heller Boragine, founder of the nonprofit Dump & Run. Dump & Run advises schools on how to collect items and give them to charity.

A partial list of these reuse programs follows. I could not find any list like it online, so I am currently building one.

• Alfred University (news)
  
• Give & Go Green at Barnard College (news)
  
• Clean Sweep at Bates College, started in 2001
• Cleansweep at Boston College
• Give and Go at Bowdoin College, started in 2002
• "When You Move Out, Don't Throw It Out" at Bowling Green State University (news)
• Give and Go at Brandeis University
• University of California, Berkeley (2008 administration announcement, and a flyer from the City of Berkeley, but no reports of current support found)
  
• The Resource Recovery Drive at the University of California, Davis
• The Clothes-Out Drive at the University of California, Los Angeles (news)
  
• The G.I.V.E. Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara
• Clark University (DOC Flyer)
• Give + Go Green at Columbia University
  
• Give & Go at the University of Connecticut
  
• Dump & Run at Cornell University
• Sustainable Move-Out at Dartmouth University
• The Move Out Donation Program at the University of Dayton (news)
• Move Out for Charity at Duke University (news and more news)
  
• Project Move-Out at Fairleigh Dickinson College
  
• Patriot Pack Out at George Mason University
  
• Green Move Out at George Washington University, started in 2006
• Sustainable Move Out at the Georgia Institute of Technology, started in 1998 (news)
  
• Haverford College (PDF flyer)
• Donation Dash (2009 link) at Humboldt State University
  
• Move Out at Lehigh University
• Think Green and Give at Loyola University Chicago
  
• Terrapin JUNKtion at the University of Maryland, started in 2005 (news)
  
• MICA Swap and Drop at the Maryland Institute College of Art
• Unnamed at Merrimack College
  
• Don't Dump It, Donate It! at the University of Michigan
• Green Apple Move Out at New York University (news)
• Unnamed at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington
  
• Dump and Run at the Ohio State University
  
• Ohio University (news)
• Unnamed at the University of Oregon
• Oregon State University (news)
  
• PennMOVES at the University of Pennsylvania, started in 2008
• Unnamed at Princeton University
• Student Move-out Recycling at Rice University
• Rutgers Recovering Our Resources at Rutgers University, started in 2009 (news)
• “Go Green, Then Go Home” at Saint Joseph's College of Maine (news)
• Sustainable Move Out at San Francisco State University, started in 2007 (news and more news)
• Unnamed at Santa Clara University
  
• Seattle University (PDF flyer)
• Project Move-Out at Simmons College (last updated 2008)
  
• Give It Up at the University of South Carolina, started in 2001 (news)
• Green Move Out at Stanford University
  
• Dump and Run at Suffolk University, started in 2007 (news)
  
• Unnamed at Texas A&M University
  
• Trash to Treasure at Texas Christian University, officialized in 2006
• Unnamed at Tulane University
• Donation Day at Union College
• Unnamed at University of Vermont (news)
• YMCA at Virginia Tech’s Ytoss? at the Virginia Institute of Technology
  
• Move Out Pitch In at Washington State University
  
• Share Our Stuff at Washington University in St. Louis, started by the fraternity Tau Kappa Epsilon, officialized in 2008
• Unnamed at University of Wisconsin - Stout
  
• Spring Salvage at Yale University, informally started in the 1990s, officialized by the administration in 2006

Sources:
Colleges turn students’ trash into cash for charity
By Bridget Huber, Christian Science Monitor, 2009.05.26 Tue

Advanced Dumpster Diving: Colleges Get Smart on Salvage
By Gilbert Cruz, Time, 2009.06.07 Sun

College Students Dump 'n Run – Sustainability
By Andrew Webster2009.06.12 Fri

Google search for summer discard programs (often difficult because they're all named differently)

Finding Free Fruit and Sharing It With Others

Neighbor, Can You Spare a Plum?
By Kim Severson, New York Times, 2009.06.10 Wed

Fruit trees provide a yearly supply of fresh edibles, and they're found in the oddest places: parks, cities and yards. Sometimes the fruit goes unwanted and unused, left on the ground.

People are paying attention and starting ways to make sure that this bounty isn't going to waste. Neighborhood fruit exchanges and co-ops share and distribute fruit to members, so that someone with an apple tree can trade a portion of their crop for a variety of oranges, pears and limes. Sites like Neighborhood Fruit, VeggieTrader, The Portland Fruit Tree Project and Fallen Fruit cover everything from listings of public fruit to tree-owners who looking to exchange one kind of fruit to another. Some people try to use these opportunities to give back; one woman mentioned in the article invites the needy on her group fruit-picking events. Others donate part or all of their crop to local food banks.

Supporters of this movement hold two basic principles. One, it’s a shame to let fruit go to waste. And two, neighborhood fruit tastes best when it’s free.

“There have always been people harvesting fallen fruit,” Ms. Wadud said, “but there’s a whole new counterculture about gathering and eating public fruit. This tremendous resource is growing everywhere if people just start looking around.”

[from the NYT article]

The article and some of the comments on the article deal with the shadier side of fruit-picking: people who take privately owned fruit without asking (i.e. stealing) and people who do not take fruit from public areas responsibly (leaving nothing for others in a tragedy of the commons).

The websites that I've seen have users mainly on US West Coast cities and Honolulu, though there probably are other efforts around the country that I haven't looked into closely yet.

Bringing the Power of the Internet to the Poorest

Here's an interesting question: how do you bring the power of information from the internet to communities that lack access to the internet? Obstructions include infrastructure: power availability may fluctuate, and there are no internet service providers in the area. Affordability may be an issue. People may not be computer-literate – or even literate.

One nonprofit, Open Mind, led by Rose Shuman, is experimenting with bridging this information gap through the Question Box Project. A Question Box is a telephone intercom located in a common accessible area, like in the center of a village next to the shop. Pressing the green button on the intercom connects a person with an operator who knows English and the local language. Equipped with an internet connection, the operator can answer questions such as "cricket scores, paddy farming advice, codes to download songs on their mobiles, homework questions, University exam results, train schedules, commodity prices, and where to get a personal loan". Solar-powered Question Boxes can operate in the poorer places where power lines don't run.

As of January, 2009, 2 question boxes were in operation in greater Pune, India. There is also a pilot project in Uganda, where instead of a physical box people can call in via ubiquitous cell phones and ask operators questions.

Other coverage:
From BoingBoing, by Cory Doctorow, 2008.03.04 Tue
From ABC News, by Ned Potter, 2008.03.05 Wed
From The Telegraph, by Peter Lyle, 2008.03.30 Sun
From Indian Express, by Devjani Roy, 2009.01.05 Mon
From Doomsday Labs, 2009.01.28 Wed

Online Social Networking: Health and Wellness Benefits for Seniors

Online, 'a Reason to Keep on Going'
By Stephanie Clifford, New York Times, 2009.06.02 Tue

There seems to be a growing consensus online that connections to friends and social networks are the key to happiness and longevity. In the past, as people became older, their personal connections tended to decay as friends physcially moved, died or became incapacitated. But online social networks have the ability to reverse that trend, so that older people can meet new people and connect to their peers.

Recognizing a need, Chris McWade co-founded MyWay Village, which runs a social network targeted specifically for older people. Members can upload photos, send messages, play games, and post stories with family members and other members. But seniors are also on more traditional social networking sites. One senior woman, Mollie Bourne, stays connected with her grandchildren through Facebook.

At College, a World in a Rodeo Arena

When college students reinvent the world
By Stacy Teicher Khadaroo 2009.01.12 Mon

At Kansas State, Professer of Anthropology Michael Wesch teaches his students to understand peoples and cultures by simulating them, not with dry facts and figures. They learn about power imbalances, colonization, and what happens when different cultures interact, nearly as firsthand as they can get.

For weeks, 400 World Sim students work in groups of 20 to invent cultures – whose often-silly names belie serious values outlined in everything from government structures to gender relations. Then they come together in a giant space – like the cold and pungent rodeo arena – to discover what happens to their societies when confronted with trade systems, war, and depletion of natural resources.

Although about half of the rules are fixed, the students of every class have to make up the rest of the rules of how their world and simulation will work. The simulation often re-enacts events such as the colonial period, instances of genocide and times of empire. Students say they come out of the class with a better understanding of cross-cultural situations and globalization.

Groups Helping Teens

When a Surrogate Family Improves on the Original
By JENNIFER 8. LEE, Published 2009.01.06T

I'm a sucker for heart-touching stories, but I like to be reminded of the good that's in the world.

Jun Chen was abandoned by her disconnected father, who left to go back to China, when she was starting her senior year of high school this past September. But thankfully, she had other support in New York City: the staff and community at the Edgies Teen Center at the Educational Alliance. She has been to the center for three years after a librarian told her about it. The center does help Jun with paying for rent and food, but equally important are the social connections that the center and Jun have made.

“This is my first home; I don’t call it a second home, because my family is here,” she said. “There are so many nights when I stay until the building closes down.”

On a yellow sheet of paper, she drew an alternative family tree: Lily, her girlfriend; Sonia, the mom; Chino, the dad; Ami, the older sister. The last three are all staff at the center.

It is through them that she built her personal identity. “I wrote my college essay bout being a quarter Chinese, quarter black, quarter Dominican, and quarter Indian,” she said. It helped her earn a full scholarship to Middlebury College in Vermont.

At the bottom of the news page is a donation link to help fund organizations like these.

Cash for Good Behavior: A New Welfare Model

New York Times Magazine: A Payoff Out of Poverty?
By Tina Rosenberg, Published 2008-12-21 Sunday

Instead of the welfare state, which does not incentivize the poor to improve their position, Oportunidades, the "de facto welfare system in Mexico", gives the poor money in exchange for a wide variety of good behaviors, including going to a clinic, children's school attendance, and attending educational workshops. They publish all the data they collect, and it is working by nearly every standard: malnutrition is on the decrease, less people are in poverty, illness frequencies have dropped and more children are staying in school. In personal interviews, Tina Rosenberg says that Oportunidades has also changed the culture of alcoholism, victimhood, machismo and thinking only in the present that promotes poverty.

The fancy name for the program is "conditional cash transfers", supported both by the World Bank and the Inter-American development bank.

At least 30 countries have now adopted Oportunidades, most of them in Latin America, but not all: countries now using or experimenting with some form of conditional payments include Turkey, Cambodia and Bangladesh. Last year, officials from Indonesia, South Africa, Ethiopia and China contacted or visited Mexico to investigate. Perhaps the most startling iteration is in New York City. Opportunity NYC, a pilot program begun last year after Mayor Michael Bloomberg visited Mexico, will test whether the Oportunidades model can help the New York neighborhoods where poverty is passed down from parent to child. Britain has been successfully using a form of conditional cash transfers to keep teenagers in school and is now running pilots to broaden the program to other areas.

In addition to the results, some of the ideas here are also interesting in terms of what people think about the causes of poverty and whether it can be solved.

Liberals have largely abandoned entitlements — the so-called nanny state — that took care of people with welfare and other payments while demanding little or nothing on their part. And most conservatives now acknowledge that government must play a role in fighting poverty. But that role is taking a new form. Lawrence M. Mead, a political-science professor at New York University and a former Republican Congressional staff member, calls it “the new paternalism.” The nanny state offered unconditional love; the new paternalism is tough love, directly aimed at smashing the culture of poverty. Paul Starobin, a staff correspondent for The National Journal, has coined the term “daddy state” — government as lifestyle supervisor and enforcer of civic responsibilities...

Conditional-cash-transfer programs, part of the new paternalism, defy the traditional poverty wisdom on both left and right. But intriguingly, they are postideological in another sense too. Do the poor fall into the culture of poverty for structural reasons, or behavioral ones? Oportunidades and Opportunity NYC have a novel answer to that question: maybe it doesn’t matter.

Who knew that trees were such responsible citizens?

By expanding the urban forest by some 20 percent to cover more than one - third of the city, leaders hope to reap a range of benefits, including... increased psychological well-being among residents.

Increased psychological well-being? That's something I haven't heard of before. I looked into it on Google and found:

The conventional wisdom has been that trees and other vegetation have a negative impact on crime because they provide cover for criminals and reduce opportunities for casual surveillance.

Research in a particularly deprived area of inner city Chicago has suggested that this is in fact not the case and that appropriate vegetation cover can lead to reduced crime rates (Kuo and Sullivan, 2001(a)). The study dealt largely with mown grass and high canopy trees, which do not provide cover in the same way as, for example, shrub planting. It looked at an area with relatively homogenous architecture and a relatively homogenous population but with differing levels of vegetation. Areas with higher vegetation cover were found to have lower rates of crime, as measured by reports to the police.

Crime-fighting trees? That's interesting. There's even a website that helps people reduce crime by strategic landscaping. What's more, the International Herald Tribune sources the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Forest Service to say, "for every dollar invested in planting one, there's a more than $5 return" in property value, air quality, storm water management, energy savings, and carbon dioxide removal.

City greening projects seem to abound: in Boston, New York City, Kansas City, and Toronto, to name the few examples I could find. The US Forestry Service has developed a new tool to determine how many trees there are in a given city, giving rise to an "urban tree canopy cover" percentage (Boston's is 29%, New York City 24%, Baltimore 20%, Annapolis 41%).

Of course, you can't just go planting trees willy-nilly. You have to consider biodiversity, how the trees are planted, proper care, etc. Boston hired arborists to help them.

With so many benefits and such a high rate of return, I hope other cities take a look into this.