Combine this with how well movies with female leads have been doing lately, and you have a powerful argument for diversity that doesn’t even rely on principle.
I suspect the reason is that women and minorities now have more economic power and self-confidence, and want to see themselves represented in the media they consume.
Originally shared by Fred Hicks
The time when universal basic income goes from an interesting idea to a pressing priority may be rapidly approaching.
We need to start thinking about what that world will look like. Seems like an anthology with that theme would be good about now, yes?
Via Samuel Smith.
Originally shared by Alex Howlett
“If machines are performing most of our jobs and not getting paid, where does that money go instead? And what does that unpaid money no longer buy?”
I think this kind of decentralized, bottom-up solution will be something we see more and more often.
Originally shared by Greg Batmarx
The women wielding soldering irons in this rustic solar engineering workshop may not know how to read or write, but they know their way around their circuit boards. This is the shunt coil Jansya Devi says, with a proud smile. This is an eight-pin connector, and this is a drum coil.
These technical words were not in Devi’s vocabulary a few months ago. She hails from Bihar, a state in eastern India known mainly for its rural poverty. Her village doesn’t get electricity from the national power grid, she says, and after dark she typically does her housework by the light of a kerosene lantern and candles. She dreads the monsoon season, when high winds make it difficult to keep the wicks lit. She has a mobile phone, but to charge it she has to send it along with someone making a trip to the nearest town.
Her situation will soon change, thanks to the Barefoot College, a nonprofit school that trains barefoot solar engineers like Devi, using color-coded parts and hands-on lessons. After six months at the peaceful campus in the northwestern state of Rajasthan, the new technicians will return to their home villages, bringing with them solar power equipment and know-how. They’ll install solar panels, charging stations, and small LED lights in houses, and they’ll stand ready to deal with breakdowns. While these systems offer only the most basic amenities of modern life, they also bring independence from India’s dysfunctional national power grid.
The program initially enrolled men, but these students proved disinclined to return to their villages once they had marketable skills. When the school began recruiting grandmothers instead, the program took off. As of 2015, the college’s graduates have brought light to some 20,000 houses in more than 300 villages across India, Barefoot administrators say. This very literal campaign of rural empowerment shows the untapped potential of women who are often passed over, says program manager Gloria Jonathan. These women may be illiterate, but that doesn’t mean they’re uneducated she says. They have skills and they have intelligence.
The Barefoot College believes that such women can solve a very big problem. In India, 240 million people don’t have access to electricity, according to the 2015 report India Energy Outlook, from the International Energy Agency and that’s a low estimate. A 2014 World Bank report put the figure at 300 million people. Yet the founder and director of Barefoot College, Bunker Roy, doesn’t sound daunted. His school’s decentralized and off-grid approach to providing electricity is the only answer for India, he says.
Mahatma Gandhi said the ultimate solution for fighting poverty in India was not mass production but production by the masses Roy says. “We have to apply the Gandhian model to solar-electrifying villages.”
India’s government, however, has a very different plan. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has pledged to give every citizen access to electricity by 2022. To meet this deadline, the government plans to rely heavily on solar power but not off-grid projects run by local people. Last year, the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy announced an ambitious goal for building utility-scale solar facilities, including “ultra mega solar power projects” of 500 megawatts each, and establishing grid-connected rooftop solar projects in cities. With these two components, the government aims to reach 100 gigawatts of installed solar power capacity by 2022. Many experts are frankly skeptical of the government’s ability to reach this goal, given that installed solar capacity in 2014 was less than 4 GW. Such a rapid scale-up will be “very difficult to achieve,” states a report by Bloomberg New Energy Finance, adding that the 100-GW goal may be more “aspirational” than realistic. The International Energy Agency report agrees, listing challenges relating to land acquisition, solar panel manufacturing, and finances. The report projects that by 2020 solar capacity will reach only 40 GW.
How the country solves its electrification problem is a pressing concern not only to rural Indians living in dark villages but to the whole world. India was estimated to account for 6 percent of global carbon dioxide output in 2014, and the country’s rapid economic growth could double its emissions by 2030. At the Paris climate change conference last December, Indian officials alternated between making bold promises to invest in solar power and claiming their right to continue building coal-fired power plants. India currently generates 61 percent of its electricity from coal, according to government reports. If the Indian government can’t meet its solar power pledges and provide clean electricity to all its citizens, the world’s best hope may be that those citizens will provide it for themselves.
The Barefoot College began its pioneering work to bring off-grid solar power to India’s villages in the 1990s. In the last decade it has been joined by similar philanthropic efforts as well as dozens of “social enterprise” companies, which operate microgrids or lease solar-powered lights to villagers in an effort to do good while making a profit.
The people who run these scrappy organizations have little faith in the government’s pledge to provide reliable grid power to all Indians. Debajit Palit, who directs the “Lighting a Billion Lives” project at the nonprofit Energy and Resources Institute, in New Delhi, notes that previous administrations have made such pledges, and that target dates have been repeatedly pushed back. Much of the delay comes from India’s chronically troubled electricity distribution companies, which have operated at a loss due mainly to low power prices and widespread electricity theft. These state-run utility companies together have accumulated US $65 billion (4.3 trillion rupees) in debts.
Last November, the central government approved a rescue plan for the distribution utilities that would clear their debts, freeing up resources to address the theft problem and improve infrastructure. It sounds good in theory, says Palit, “but the central government made the program, and the provincial governments have to implement it.” He’s seen enough mismanagement to question whether the state governments and companies will follow through with reforms.
Experts who study India’s electricity gap say these companies’ financial woes have not only stalled “last mile” efforts to electrify rural hamlets, they’ve also made grid power less attractive to everyone. The distribution companies often can’t afford to buy power from generation stations, making long power cuts an everyday occurrence in some parts of the country. Many villagers think, ‘I won’t get electricity during peak hours, so why should I connect?’ says Palit. He believes that off-grid solar kits, although they provide only a few watts of electricity, are a better solution for India’s villages. If I promise small, but keep my promise by providing a reliable supply, the villagers are happy he says.
There may be a sweet spot where these businesses can run profitably for a little while, but it’s hard to find.
However, the financial models of off-grid solar efforts have also come under scrutiny. At Barefoot, for example, the bulk of the funding needed to keep its campus running comes from government and philanthropic sources. So scaling up its solar lighting program would require more and more largesse. But program manager Jonathan says that dependency doesn’t extend to villages that already have their solar systems up and running, because each community pays its resident solar technician a small salary and funds her rural electronics workshop. This money would otherwise be spent on kerosene and other fuels, Jonathan says. We consider this a sustainable model she says. Even if we were to pull out, the community effort would still continue. …
http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/barefoot-matriarchs-take-on-indias-electricity-gap
This (hour-long, fascinating) talk by Daniel Siegel covers nine functions of integrated minds, definitive of mental health (all located in the middle prefrontal cortex, which is physically close to and very integrated with all other parts of the brain):
1. Body regulation (rebalancing the body after stress).
2. Attuned communication with others (feeling close and connected).
3. Emotional balance/affect regulation (being able to feel negative emotions without being overwhelmed, and change your own emotional state).
4. Response flexibility (being able to pause before acting and choose a response).
5. Empathy (conscious awareness of another’s perspective).
6. Self-insight.
7. Modulation and calming of fear.
8. Intuition (registering the input from neurons in the heart and gut).
9. Morality (being able to think of, and act for, the larger social good, even when alone).
“Mindfulness training” focuses on these as both goal and path. Regular practice of an integrated state – being aware of your awareness, paying attention to your intention – creates an integrated trait.
The alternatives to integration are rigidity or chaos – various forms of mental illness are characterized by a lack of integration, and manifest as a disturbance in the nine functions.
A fine example of mythopoeic fantasy: the protagonists don’t so much solve problems as come to realizations about themselves.
Another of my reviews, republished (by permission) on Fantasy Literature.
Originally shared by Fantasy Literature (FanLit)
Unexpected Stories: Challenging science fiction – Unexpected Stories by Octavia Butler The late Octavia Butler wrote brilliant, challenging science fiction along more or less the same lines as Ursula K. Le Guin: the speculations are often anthropological, and she’s fascinated by how people interact. I read one of her XENOGENESIS novels years ago and found it the kind of powerful, disturbing book that I can only read occasionally. I was excited to hear that a couple of her unpublished storie…
“Series” is a poorly chosen name for this approach (since it already has a commonly used meaning – a number of books connected by characters and events – and that is not what is being talked about here). What this author is calling a “series” could be referred to less confusingly as a plot strand.
I’ve used this technique, without having heard of it, and combined it with the Seven Point System popularised by Dan Wells (Google for it, he has a series of excellent videos on YouTube), so that each strand is developing in a logical way. A spreadsheet (or a big piece of paper, if you’re old-school) is all you need to use this.
Originally shared by Deborah Teramis Christian
If, like me, you have ever struggled with plot in a book you’re writing, here’s a new(ish) paradigm for thinking of story-things that might be very useful. I’m intrigued by this approach and am going to give it a try with some WIPs. http://www.betternovelproject.com/blog/series-outline/
I’m not quite old enough to qualify, and don’t need it in any case, but I thought I’d pass this around.
Originally shared by Kat Richardson
If you’re a Spec Fic writer, fifty years old or older, and just getting started in your career, take a look at this:
#SLF #SpecFic #writer #sfwriters
So, on the one hand, readership of SF/fantasy short stories through the traditional magazines seems to be declining year on year, in general.
On the other hand, there are still plenty around. I counted more than 100 pro and semipro markets for SFF last time I checked.
On the gripping hand (we are talking about SFF here), there’s a revival in people reading short fiction, snatching moments when they’re waiting in line or waiting to pick up the kids from school to read on their phone, tablet, or ereader. Amazon have a special section of their ebook store based on how long it will take you to read something.
Maybe (I thought last night) we need an app that will connect SFF (and maybe other?) readers with stories.
Sign up the magazines, which act as curators of content, and maybe some of the anthologies, too. Allow authors to put their own stories in directly, if they’ve previously sold the story to at least a semipro market and the rights have reverted.
Enable the users to choose what to read by magazine/antho, or by author, or by editor, or by length, or by (user-generated) tag, or a combination.
Charge a small monthly subscription, and track which stories people read, and pay the source magazine/anthology/author proportionately (kind of the Kindle Unlimited model).
Yes?
Well, this theory would help to explain why I dislike post-apocalyptic stories and much prefer utopias. Plenty of flaws left in it, but some interesting ideas.
(Via Deb Chachra.)
http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/04/a-thrivesurvive-theory-of-the-political-spectrum/