Ros and I had another long deep thought conversation today while Irene was out with her mom at the temple. She gave me some food for thought about non-profit int'l ag development work like UN-Women and participatory research. I think the important thing for me (if I were to do research) is to not have that research just sit in a library somewhere, ( Read more... )

100% Melbourne: I went to see this really awesome performance on Fri with reehamification called 100 Percent Melbourne. It's part theatrics, part reality performance, part game, and has everything to do with the population intersection. 100 random people were taken from Melbourne as representatives of the entire Melbourne population by statistics (so 4 people ( Read more... )

Some of the research fellows were having a pretty heated discussion on racism on Thurs and Fri. One, a well intentioned older Caucasian lady, was telling us about this TV show host who got into a lot of trouble for making racist comments. The TV host was talking about this man who had himself all covered up to protect his identity and said "Oh, ( Read more... )

A two hour long talk with Xiao later, I think I've made some conclusions over the HP deal.

( thinking about Harry Potterism )

Notes from the event on sunday- Self control: two different methods by reward substitution (making people care about the long term by having a middle term or short term reward or goal to reach for)and "knowing you'll be tempted so you do something to prevent that" ie by an alarm clock that donates money to charity you hate for every minute you ( Read more... )

Post human Earth: How the planet will recover from us

WHEN Nobel prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen coined the word Anthropocene around 10 years ago, he gave birth to a powerful idea: that human activity is now affecting the Earth so profoundly that we are entering a new geological epoch.discussing big environmental ideas and how we ( Read more... )