Windows that work as solar cells

Gratzel wants his solar cells to go big time, and dreams of the windows in New York high-rise buildings being transformed into electricity-generating panels. That sure beats sticking solar energy facilities in the middle of the desert and transporting that energy to places where people actually live. Progress!

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Source :  Discovery 

Quote of the week

University of Maryland reported that Americans, on average, believed that foreign aid accounts for 20 percent of the federal budget, roughly twenty-four times the actual figure.
— The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs

International suffering – Thinking allowed

Also on the programme, the suffering of strangers: What is it that makes us care for people we have never met and have very different lives from our own? A sense of justice or an impulse for charity? Laurie talks to Kate Nash

Listen from about 20 mins 15 secs into the podcast..

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Source : BBC

Quote of the week

To curb as if in fetters unbridled hopes and a mind obsessed with the future, and to aim to acquire riches from ourselves rather than from Fortune. – Seneca

The Dumbest Idea In The World: Maximizing Shareholder Value – Forbes

“It isn’t just about the money for shareholders,” writes Martin, “or even the dubious CEO behavior that our theories encourage. It’s much bigger than that. Our theories of shareholder value maximization and stock-based compensation have the ability to destroy our economy and rot out the core of American capitalism.

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Source : Forbes

Democracy and Education: an introduction to the philosophy of education

There is always a danger that increased personal independence will decrease the social capacity of an individual. In making him more self-reliant, it may make him more self-sufficient; it may lead to aloofness and indifference. It often makes an individual so insensitive in his relations to others as to develop an illusion of being really able to stand and act alone—an unnamed form of insanity which is responsible for a large part of the remediable suffering of the world.

by John Dewey

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Climate Strategists: To Cut Emissions, Focus On Forests

“Hans Brasker, foreign minister of Norway, thinks it’s a great idea, and not just to slow warming. “We very strongly believe that we will have established a genuine global partnership to save the treasures of the remaining tropical forest,” he told the delegates at the South African climate talks. Norway is spending about $3 billion to make REDD happen.”

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Source : NPR

Quote of the week

The Third World today faces Europe like a colossal mass whose project should be to try to resolve the problems to which Europe has not been able to find the answers. -Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

Capitalism vs. the Climate

A 2007 Harris poll found that 71 percent of Americans believed that the continued burning of fossil fuels would cause the climate to change. By 2009 the figure had dropped to 51 percent. In June 2011 the number of Americans who agreed was down to 44 percent —well under half the population.

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Source : The Nation