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Related: jturn037Why we need to be more emotional to save the world - BBC Future But for all its power, empathy is also fragile, often going missing just when we need it most. For instance, people find it difficult to empathise with those who differ from them politically, racially, or ideologically. Similarly, empathy comes more naturally when we have direct access to people’s emotional cues – their faces, voices, and stories. As a result, people tend to empathise preferentially with others who are close to themselves: spatially, socially, and temporally. Urban Bricolage anniekoh: The temporary public art work Loaded Text has made me more obsessed with ways of making planning public. The artists Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler “hand wrote the entire 65-page text of the Downtown Durham Revitalization Plan on a 150-foot stretch of damaged sidewalk” (source) Description from the Museum of Durham History on a retrospective of the work created in June 1989 by artists Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler in downtown Durham: The work was one of two temporary public art projects commissioned by the Durham Arts Council to coincide with Public Art Dialogue Southeast, a conference on public art. When Ericson and Ziegler read in a Durham newspaper that only two copies of the city’s Downtown Durham Revitalization Plan would be available for public review at the Durham Library they began developing a work with that plan at the center, which became Loaded Text, a four-stage work.
10 grand challenges we'll face by 2050 - BBC Future You don’t need to look very hard in a place like Miami to see how cities are changing in the 21st Century – rising sea levels are gradually making some of them disappear. Fuelled by climate change, not only are floods becoming more common in the streets, but the changing weather patterns have also influenced building design. Aside from more seawalls, the city is requiring all new buildings be built with their first floor built higher. But that’s all a sticking plaster – if current trends continue, we may have to come to terms with losing whole swathes of cities, islands and low-lying regions such as Bangladesh. Social Values in Canada: Consensus on assisted dying & LGBTQ2 rights, division over abortion rights, diversity Political divide, common for most issues, largely absent from assisted-dying discussion January 24, 2020 – With the federal government set to end its consultation process on possible changes to assisted dying legislation Monday, Canadians have only a short window left to comment. But new data from the non-profit Angus Reid Institute already indicates support for fewer regulations associated with doctor assisted dying has increased in recent years. Indeed, four-in-five (80%) Canadians now say it should be easier to make their own end-of-life decisions, compared to nearly three-quarters (73%) in 2016.
Resilient Cities - ICLEI: Home 15 April 2014 Together with eight international organizations ICLEI joined a new urban resilience partnership which was announced at the World Urban Forum in Medellin, Colombia last week. “There has been a tremendous outpouring of support for urban resilience in recent years. This new collaboration represents a consolidation of those efforts as we prepare for an explosion of urbanization in the 21st century” said Margareta Wahlström, UNISDR Chief and Co-patron of the Resilient Cities congress 2012 and 2013. The partnership has been established by UN-Habitat, UNISDR, The World Bank Group, the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR); the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB); the Rockefeller Foundation; the 100 Resilient Cities Centennial Challenge Programme, pioneered by the Rockefeller Foundation; the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group; and ICLEI - Local Governments for Sustainability.
GE Workers Protest: We Want To Build Ventilators, Let Us Build Ventilators Mass Protest On Monday, General Electric workers staged a mass protest and walked off the job. Their demands for the company: stop going about business as usual and start mass-producing ventilators for coronavirus patients, according to The Independent. Ventilators are in extremely short supply, especially in cities hit hardest by the pandemic, so the GE workers reasonably posit that the country needs them more than their usual output of jet engines right now. War Effort
Metadesigners Open Network An early prototype of The Lovers' Clock artwork See this set of notes on finding a more synergistic form of temporality : GE workers protest and demand company build ventilators General Electric factory workers protested on Monday in an act of solidarity to demand the company use its factories to produce ventilators for use in the fight against the coronavirus. As the peak of coronavirus infections and deaths is still nearly two weeks away, GE workers have demanded the company convert its jet engine factories to begin producing ventilators. Vice News reported that workers at the company’s Massachusetts aviation facility stood six feet apart and held a silent protest. Union members at the Boston headquarters marched six feet apart and said the company should retrofit its spaces to fight the pandemic.
Celebration of the 40th anniversary of the launching of Limits to Growth in Washington, DC On Thursday March 1st 2012, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the launching of Limits to Growth, the first report to the Club of Rome, a symposium entitled “Perspectives on Limits to Growth: Challenges to Building a Sustainable Planet” was hosted in Washington, DC by the Club of Rome and the Smithsonian Institution’s Consortium for Understanding and Sustaining a Biodiverse Planet. The joint symposium of Club of Rome and the Smithsonian Institution celebrated the 40th anniversary of the launching of Limits to Growth, the first report of the Club of Rome published in 1972. This book, which sold over ten million copies in various languages, was one of the earliest scholarly works to recognize that the world was fast approaching its sustainable limits.
Scientists develop AI that can turn brain activity into text Reading minds has just come a step closer to reality: scientists have developed artificial intelligence that can turn brain activity into text. While the system currently works on neural patterns detected while someone is speaking aloud, experts say it could eventually aid communication for patients who are unable to speak or type, such as those with locked in syndrome. “We are not there yet but we think this could be the basis of a speech prosthesis,” said Dr Joseph Makin, co-author of the research from the University of California, San Francisco. Struggling homeowners not your typical landlord: The case for rent forgiveness In the age of COVID-19, where the unemployment rate is now estimated at 13.5% and many are struggling to pay next month’s rent, the necessity of suspending evictions, providing income supports for low-income households, and having a serious conversation about rent forgiveness couldn’t be clearer. A number of government measures to address the first two issues have been announced, but rent forgiveness has proven to be a more delicate topic—not everyone seems willing to consider the notion that landlords might have to forgive arrears at the end of this crisis. One of the challenges in discussing rent forgiveness is that people think of different things when they hear the term landlord. Are we talking about the widow down the street, on a fixed income, who rents a room to students? A couple with children, living in an expensive city, who lives on one floor of their home and rents the other floors out to pay the mortgage? A family who owns a few condos?