Category: News

Although people living in poverty are among the most vulnerable to a warming planet, some of the world’s poor could end up winners in the climate change shuffle. As heat and drought drive crop yields down, basic commodity prices will go up. That will harm some—and help others. “There are really very different effects on poverty depending on which poor people you look at,” says David Lobell, an assistant professor of environmental earth system science at Stanford University. “Farmers are getting hit with lower yields, but the prices of the things that they’re selling go up enough that they actually become less poor as a result.” The effects could be large enough to lift many agriculture-specialized households in Asia and Latin America out of poverty. And it could happen quite soon. “It’s not implausible that even in the next 20 years, climate change could drive prices up considerably.” These projections differ from most in that Lobell and colleagues consider a range of possible productivity scenarios instead of just the most likely one. As an agricultural ecologist, Lobell compiled plausible yields for six different crops in the year 2030. He used as the worst case scenario not what happens “if things…

Fifteen years ago, I started doing research on the challenges of taking nonprofits to scale. The topic was still under the radar both in the university and out in the field. My focus was growth through replication, and when I presented papers and case studies, nonprofit audiences often dismissed the ideas as “too corporate.” As one audience member said to me: “We are not McDonald’s. You cannot use a cookie cutter to replicate the work we do.” At almost exactly the same time, however, social entrepreneurs began developing new models for expanding organizations through replication in new locations. Their organizations grew to become nationally recognized nonprofits such as Teach for America and Habitat for Humanity, as well as internationally known nongovernmental organizations such as Bangladesh-based BRAC. These organizations have found that scaling is anything but an exercise in cutting cookies, as it requires not only fidelity to core processes and programs, but also constant adjustments to local needs and resources. Today, there may be no idea with greater currency in the social sector than “scaling what works.” In its first year, the Obama administration announced several multimillion- or billion-dollar programs that focus on expanding proven-effective programs to new locations. As…

Earthquakes, hurricanes, and other disasters are terrible—pain and suffering abounding, lives and homes destroyed. Rebecca Solnit’s brilliant new book documents and explains the other side of disasters: how they often sweep away the barriers that isolate people from each other under normal times, inspiring “the better angels of our nature” that President Abraham Lincoln evoked in our nation’s darkest days. Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell investigates the social consequences of five major disasters: the 1906 San Francisco earthquake; the gargantuan 1917 explosion in Halifax, Nova Scotia; the devastating 1985 Mexico City quake; Lower Manhattan after the 9/11 terrorist attacks; and Hurricane Katrina’s 2005 deluge of New Orleans. Each case study provides a thick description of what surviving residents themselves understand to be a temporary utopian society naturally arising in the midst of casualties, disorientation, homelessness, and great loss of all kinds. Solnit tells many poignant stories of altruism, courage, and compassionate social action. In 1906 San Francisco, for example, we meet Amelia Hoshouser, a middle-class woman who fed thousands of people in her makeshift “Mizpah Café,” while throughout the city soup kitchens, shelters, and relief projects emerged from collective human spirit as if spontaneously from the ruins. The quake…

Nineteen-year-old Stephen Mensah has a junior high education, but no real home or assets. He had lost any hope of attaining the additional education that he wanted until six months ago, when he became a Fan Milk microfranchisee. Fan Milk is Ghana’s leading producer and distributor of dairy products. Scandinavian investors founded the company in 1960 to produce milk for Ghanaians, many of whom suffered from protein deficiencies. Today, Fan Milk is listed on the Ghana stock exchange and employs some 8,500 microfranchisees, who sell milk, ice cream, yogurt, and popsicles from atop their carts or bicycles throughout Ghana. Fan Milk has sister companies in Nigeria, Togo, and the Ivory Coast, but the business remains most developed in Ghana. Now, almost every morning, Mensah wakes up on a thin mat at the White Park Fan Milk Depot in Accra, Ghana. He cleans his cart and stocks his cooler with the variety of products he thinks will sell best. He then heads into the sun and weaves through crowded streets to deliver dairy products to Accra’s residents. Each week, top sellers earn roughly 80 Ghana cedis ($53) in profit. Partly because Fan Milk requires franchisees to save about 10 percent of…

Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) has been in existence for more than 40 years, with an impressive track record of policy victories and influential corporate partnerships. In 2009, the organization began a new experiment. Under the leadership of Dave Witzel, a veteran social media strategist, EDF launched a network called the Innovation Exchange, focused on bringing together companies interested in sharing ideas and approaches to creating environmentally sustainable businesses. Since it started, the Innovation Exchange has used networks and social media tools as core elements of its strategy. For example, the organization made its internal strategy documents available to everyone by sharing them on a Google Group, and then solicited public feedback. In one instance, the Innovation Exchange posted a draft version of its elevator pitch on its blog; a university professor picked it up and shared it with her students, who proceeded to edit the statement. The result was a better pitch that the Innovation Exchange now uses.1 The Innovation Exchange’s efforts are at the forefront of a new way of working that is now being tested throughout EDF. At last year’s all-staff retreat, 350 EDF employees—including lawyers, scientists, and economists—participated in two days of intensive social media training and…

Si Kahn’s latest book, Creative Community Organizing, is a reflective collection of stories and songs from Kahn’s long and venerable history as a community organizer. He tells riveting tales from his experiences as an organizer with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Arkansas in the 1960s, with the Brookside Strike and other campaigns fighting for the rights of mine workers in Kentucky and mill workers throughout the South in the 1970s and 1980s, and, finally, with Grassroots Leadership, an organization he founded that fights for the abolition of for-profit prisons and an end to immigrant family detention. Kahn’s objective in writing the book is to help interested readers answer a question he often hears: “So do you think I should become an organizer?” By writing the book, he hopes to provide an inspirational, but honest picture of what it means to be an organizer so that idealists can make their own choices about whether this is the path for them. Like any good organizer, Kahn teaches through storytelling. His narrative voice is affable, inspirational, and humorous. The book is strongest when Kahn illustrates some of the complex ethical and strategic challenges organizers face through vivid examples from his own…

Nobody thought it would work. Padma Venkataraman, in New Delhi on business for the United Nations, wanted to do something more than just hand out rupees to the disfigured beggars with leprosy. She wanted to give them microloans to start their own businesses—something no bank or charity had ever attempted. Critics said the “untouchables” in India’s 700 leprosy colonies would not be able to exchange a lifetime of begging for work, let alone be able to repay loans. They also asked who would be willing to do business with leprosy patients in a country where people consider the disease to be a curse. Although the World Health Organization (WHO) deemed leprosy an “eliminated health problem” in 2000 because its prevalence had dropped to less than one case per 10,000, an estimated 12 million people in India are still suffering from the disease. For them, poverty and social stigma block their access to the free drug therapies that can cure leprosy, which is caused by a bacterium and damages skin, nerves, the upper respiratory tract, and eyes. Following rejection by families and coworkers, many people with leprosy band together in colonies centered in five southern Indian states. That’s where Venkataraman, the…

Jehan Ratnatunga, a 26-yearold Australian, thinks the best strategy for underwriting water sanitation projects in the developing world is to launch a nonprofit toilet paper company called Who Gives a Crap. Silly? Perhaps. But the idea proved just intriguing enough to earn Ratnatunga a spot as one of 25 fellows in the first-ever Unreasonable Institute taking place this summer in Boulder, Colo. Some 284 applicants from 46 countries vied for the chance to take part in this new social enterprise incubator. They first had to earn their way—and demonstrate their entrepreneurship chops—by competing for sponsors in a social media marketplace. Ratnatunga’s venture was one of the first to get funded, thanks to 228 sponsors who contributed a total of $6,500 to kick-start his idea. Daniel Epstein, one of four founders of the Unreasonable Institute, says the program is intended to fill two critical gaps facing many young social entrepreneurs: mentoring and access to capital. High-profile mentors who have signed on to help this summer include Bob Pattillo, founder of Gray Ghost Ventures; Dennis Whittle, CEO of GlobalGiving; Kjerstin Erickson, founder of FORGE; and David Bornstein, author of How to Change the World. In August, at the close of the institute,…

As a first-generation immigrant, I’ve always said that it’s difficult to know Americans and not fall in love with them. I know this from personal experience. On my first day at Stanford University in September 1974, my freshman roommate gave her only blanket to a lost, drenched, and freezing foreign student. I still hold a very special place in my heart for her. Fast-forward almost 30 years, and my job as U.S. assistant secretary of state at the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) was to bring about many happy introductions between Americans and people from all over the world. Through its prestigious Fulbright scholarships and other programs, ECA has facilitated training and exchanges for more than 300 current or former heads of state, 1,500 cabinet-level ministers, 50 Nobel laureates, and 1 million other community leaders. Although ECA’s annual budget of $520 million seems sizable, it turns into a trickle when divvied up between 165 countries. I decided to stretch our dollars by forming partnerships with the many private corporations that could potentially benefit from ECA’s programs. I thought my strategy was logical. But I quickly learned that just because something is logical doesn’t mean that a government bureaucracy…

On Jan. 12 at 4:30 a.m., James Eberhard was woken by a telephone call from a U.S. State Department representative with the news that a 7.0 magnitude earthquake had struck Haiti. “Can we turn up a text relief effort?” asked the representative. Eberhard called his colleagues at the Denver-based company Mobile Accord and its nonprofit division mGive. Eberhard is founder and chairman of both organizations, which work together to create cell phone text donation campaigns for charities. Within hours, Mobile Accord, mGive, and the American Red Cross had raised $170,000 for earthquake victims in Haiti. A flurry of text-giving promotions soon followed during the Super Bowl and Grammy Awards and in a public service announcement by first lady Michelle Obama. Appeals also spiraled through social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook. The results shattered records. Within 72 hours of the earthquake, donations from text messaging exceeded $8 million, according to CNN. By March 4, the Red Cross had raised a total of $50 million for victims of the Haiti earthquake, $32.5 million of which came from text giving. The Haiti earthquake marked a tipping point in the evolution of text giving. Cell phones are now ubiquitous in the United States,…

As any comic book reader knows, the citizens of Gotham City have a handy way to call for help. Just power up the Bat-Signal and Batman will swoop to the rescue. It turns out that superheroesin- training are just as ready to answer the help call in communities around the world. A new online game called Evoke, promising “a crash course in changing the world,” had attracted more than 13,500 players from 130 countries soon after it launched in March. Their mission during the 10-week game: Learn about social innovation strategies to solve global crises— and then put their own good ideas into action close to home. Evoke is intended to leverage the enormous popularity of online gaming to engage a broader audience. The game grew out of conversations between African university leaders and the World Bank Institute, said Robert Hawkins, senior education specialist for the institute. Educators in Africa are eager “to prepare their young people to think more creatively about solutions to issues in their own communities,” Hawkins says. That’s challenging in an educational system that “emphasizes rote learning over innovative thinking.” Enter Jane McGonigal, award-winning alternate reality game designer and director of game research at the Institute…

In God’s Economy, Lew Daly has written perhaps the most complete chronicle of the legal and policy foundations of former President George W. Bush’s Faith-Based Initiative. Eschewing polarizing diatribe for rigorous historical scholarship, he provides deep insights into the Catholic and Dutch Reformed philosophies that guided the initiative, and puts forth a plausible framework for future faith-based policy. But like the Faith-Based Initiative itself, God’s Economy is driven by a deep faith in the superior efficacy of religious transformative services—and there is simply very little evidence to justify that faith. There are no scientifically valid studies—none whatsoever—showing that faith-based social service providers are more effective than their secular counterparts. That includes the works of conservative scholar Stephen Monsma, which form the empirical foundation for God’s Economy and have been lauded as a validation of the Faith-Based Initiative. It is Daly’s reliance on such ideologically driven research that ultimately bankrupts God’s Economy, which lacks a realistic grasp of how social services actually operate in America’s approximately 19,000 cities and 3,000 counties. It is an analysis conducted by aerial reconnaissance with little verification from facts on the ground, and as such, it is unlikely to have much of an impact on those…

In 1986, former British motorcycle racer Andrea Coleman was managing public relations for American motorcycle race champion Randy Mamola. Mamola wanted to lend his prestige to help fundraise for a children’s cause in Africa. Andrea and her husband, Barry Coleman, formerly a motorcycling correspondent and feature writer for the British Guardian newspaper, joined Mamola in raising funds through motorcycling events. They donated the money they raised to U.K.-based Save the Children, which used the funds to immunize children in Africa. In 1988, Save the Children invited Mamola and the Colemans to witness how the money they had raised was helping a remote community in Somalia. Barry Coleman and Mamola made the visit and noticed that the majority of health workers’ motorcycles had completely broken down, making it impossible to reach people in many rural villages. In some cases, the motorcycles just needed a new fuel filter. For want of simple maintenance and repairs, the two realized, motorcycles stayed grounded and people sickened and died. Soon after, Save the Children and the World Health Organization (WHO) asked Barry Coleman to visit Gambia in West Africa to assess its fleet of 86 health delivery motorcycles. He found that a single Save the…

Whenever Elizabeth Sheehan drives into Boston, she makes a mental note of how many shipping containers she spots near the harbor. “There’s a wall of them, and some haven’t moved in months,” says the Massachusetts resident. If Sheehan gets her way, many of these surplus metal boxes will soon be transformed into clean, efficient health care centers outfitted to serve the most vulnerable people throughout the Caribbean, Africa, and Southeast Asia. That’s the idea behind Containers to Clinics (C2C). Sheehan, a physician’s assistant with a decade of health care experience in the developing world, founded the nonprofit in hopes of “delivering lifesaving medicine and health care to the last mile.” She has seen what happens when there is no access to basic medical care. “The most vulnerable populations—rural women and children—die in droves,” she says, often from treatable illnesses like diarrhea and pneumonia. The prototype C2C design, developed in collaboration with sustainable building specialists and public health experts, combines two retrofitted containers in an “L” shape. One side contains private, well-lighted examination rooms and basic diagnostic equipment; the other houses a pharmacy and medical laboratory. Solar-powered fans keep the metal boxes from overheating, and a canopy offers shade for waiting…

We rarely write about coding projects, but this particular one is too wonderful to keep to ourselves. It basically makes any song swing by “time-stretching the first half of each beat while time-shrinking the second half.” The results sound fantastic: More »










Python – Programming – Languages – Development Tools – Modules

Shall we play a game?

Global Thermonuclear War!

A fast-action, high-strategy game with full color graphics, exciting animation, and realistic sound effects. Features include HAL™ speech synthesis (without special hardware), option to play as enemy or defender, and top ten score display.

Action begins with you at the controls of the Defense Command Computer. A random error causes the Computer to secure your nation’s defense for full scale nuclear attack. You have 30 seconds before the first ICBM is launched at your enemy’s capital. Decipher the secret code for aborting missile launch or prepare to fight World War III.

At launch, you discover the computer has deleted all targeting data for your weapons. Presented with NORAD style strategic displays, you watch the

trajectory of the missile track across the globe as you frantically retarget your weapon systems and prepare for your enemy’s attack. Do you strike before or after the enemy launches its first wave? Do you target for military, industrial, or civilian targets? Perhaps some combination? You watch enemy strikes against your homeland and the casualties grow to staggering proportions as you attempt to deter or conquer the enemy before you are completely destroyed. The war has begun and your nation’s destiny, even the destiny of the world, is in your hands.

Ask for Global Thermonuclear War™: $34.95 at your local dealer or order direct. Visa, MasterCard, Money Orders, Checks accepted (Calif, residents please add 6-1/2% sales tax), foreign orders add 15%, U.S. currency only. Dealer inquiries invited.

Global Thermonuclear War™ is available for your IBM PC or XT (64K, disk drive), Apple II + or Ile (48K, disk drive, DOS 3.3), Commodore 64 (cassette or disk drive), Atari 400 and 800 (48K, disk drive). Joystick play optional in each version. TRS-80 version to be released soon.

Starfire Games

Division Omnisoft Corporation

Dept. B1, 9960 Owensmouth Avenue, Suite 32 Chatswonth, CA 91311

Hobnobbing with Harbaugh
The Office Monster

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A Minister Discusses SELF-GRATIFICATION

Self-gratification is an important aspect of an individual’s development. Eliminating misinformation and guilt about this practice is important preparation for a healthy sexual relationship in marriage.

by the Rev. H. Walter Yoder

An ordained minister, Rev. Yoder is secretary of the Michigan Association of Religious Counselors. Recognized as a distinguished pioneer and leader in church marriage counseling, he was recently hailed as “Man of the Month” by the churchman’s publication, “Pastoral Psychology.” *All case names are fictitious.

ALMOST every magazine today bears evidence of people’s strong feelings and great concern about self – gratification.

A pastors’ journal carries the request of a college pastoral counselor for an article on “masturbation” because “it is a major problem of my college students.” Sexology publishes a constant barrage of questions from troubled young people and parents about this same problem.

Fifteen years of intensive counseling experience has revealed to the author some of the reasons for the very ^reat importance of self-gratification in individual lives.

Gary Anderson* gratified himself sexually rather often, but he also deeply deplored the act and felt continuously guilty about it.

Gary had found his way into the practice accidentally. As a young boy he had discovered a gratifying sensation in rubbing certain parts of his body. He had always practiced it alone and had very little knowledge of what part the practice played in the lives of other people. This encouraged the sense of aloneness and difference.

Several times he read references in some book or heard some chance remark which he assumed referred to self-gratification and which led to a guilty feeling on his part. As usually happens among people who experience desire and who also have powerful repressive forces working, Gary developed a great deal of conflict and guilt.

Helen Williams belongs to a some-what different group of people troubled about masturbation. As a child she became aware of agreeable sensations in touching and rubbing her clitoris and continued the practice as a relief of tension.

She had no name for the act and was not aware of any further significance in it. For her it was simply soothing and provided relief at times when she was tired or tense.

One day, however, she was caught in the act by an older sister whom she greatly admired. The older sister expressed great horror and hostility. Her mother was called and her father informed and she was given a severe scolding.

The hostile looks on the faces she loved and the distasteful terms used to label her acts made her feel unclean. A great deal of energy in her life is now used in repressing her desire for self-gratification. The tension formerly released in this way often turns into resentment and angry explosions.

Still another kind of experience is illustrated in the case of Harley Smith. Harley was initiated into the practice at an early age among a gang of boys. Curiosity then led him to experiment himself.

This learning of the practice took place in a group and therefore did not seem to him to be unusual or different. However, Harley soon heard the practice of self – gratification described as a “childish” one. Some of the reading and instruction which he had made him feel that continuing the habit is a sign that he is “immature.”

As a result he is torn between his ambition to grow into a fully rounded and mature adult and his continuing desires for this form of sexual expression.

While most popular literature has gotten beyond the stage of predicting horrifying consequences of masturbation, much popular literature does condemn the practice by labeling it “immature” This arouses a somewhat different conflict, but in a way a more severe one, for the young person whose great ambition is to become a mature adult.

For Bill Brown the practice has still a different kind of meaning. He grew up in a family which made a very sharp distinction between the premarital and marital status. All sexual feelings and expressions were to be accepted in the married state, but great restriction was placed upon any acknowledgment of such desires or feelings or acts before marriage.

As he grew up and began to experience sexual feeling and desire, it was channeled into his feeling that any form of sex expression must come only in marriage. Even though he is too young to enter into marriage, he feels that he must get married immediately and seeks to find some girl who will marry him.

Masturbation has a very repulsive meaning to him and therefore all such stimulation or desire that might be released in this form now feeds into his mad rush to become married.

Something of a combination of the last two persons is represented by Amy Gray, a college student who has the freedom to know something about her own sexual experience and feelings. Since she felt that masturbation is regarded as an immature form of sexual expression, she therefore concluded that sexual intercourse was the only mature and acceptable release of an individual’s sexual feeling.

Not finding other avenues of satisfying release of these feelings, she has been led into a life of promiscuity. However, she is not personally ready for the experience of intercourse and inevitably finds it dissatisfying and frustrating. Instead of examining the reason for this she plunges on from affair to affair.

To each of these cases the practice of self-gratification has had a different meaning. However, they all share something in common. Each of them feels the impact of the sexual drive toward creation and growth. Each of them also has become snagged, though in different ways, in his sexual development.

In all cases, troubled feelings about self-gratification were an important factor in this snag in their growth. Whether because of lack of information, hostile and resentful attitudes, condemnation of the act as “immature,” or whatever the cause may be, a very real problem has occurred and it may involve a good deal of guilt and suffering on the part of the individual.

When fear, hostility, hurt, and embarrassment are linked with the feeling of exposure and vulnerability that comes with the growth of new sensitive feelings—particularly in the area of sex—there is a temptation to “cover over” or to neglect working through the problem.

The mature and responsible person, however, when he begins to experience the awakening of sexual desires, will study the available knowledge about sexual growth and development. When questions and conflicts arise he will seek out the help of a counselor so that he can find the channel and the means of sexual expression which will be helpful to himself and harmful to no one.

He will not want to approach the sexual relationship with another with the idea of dumping upon another his sexual conflicts. Rather he will try to prepare himself so that he can not only handle his own life well but also enter into the added satisfactions of marital relationships as a privilege and as a bonus in life.

Competent leaders in this field have tried to make clear, as this magazine has, that it is not the act of self-gratification,which might be of harm but only possibly the feelings or attitudes that go with it- They agree with this statement made by Lester Dearborn, former head of the Association of Marriage Counselors: “Masturbation, according to the best medical authorities, causes no harm physically or mentally. Any harm resulting from masturbation is caused entirely by worry or by a sense of guilt due to misinformation.”

Leaders in the field feel also that it is essential to make clear that the sexual drive is an important part of a larger creative drive which can enhance and enrich life.

One significant channel of expression during the course of an individual’s sexual development may be the practice of self-gratification. It is important then for that person to understand its meaning and how it fits into his creative growth. All feelings of fear and guilt and anxiety and hostility connected with the act of self-relief must be studied and resolved.

Since self-gratification deals with strong personal feelings, it very often precipitates or reveals underlying attitudes of the personality. Resolving conflicting feelings about self-gratification is at the same time working through basic feelings about sex itself and constitutes an important preparation for a healthy sexual relationship when marriage takes place.

The whole series of ads is like this. Just bizarre.

anti-aircraft fire control… AND FORD INSTRUMENT COMPANY

In World War I, anti-aircraft fire against slow, low flying planes, could be managed by optical sighting and correcting from observed air bursts. Today’s supersonic planes, flying at great altitudes must be tracked by radar and the guns directed by complex computers.

The Navy Bureau of Ordnance and Ford Instrument Company perfected the first successful naval anti-aircraft gun director (Mk 19) back in 1926 and Ford Instrument Company has been one of the outstanding leaders in this field ever since.

Precision equipment for the exacting problems of computers and controls for both the military and industry, has been the specialty of Ford Instrument Company since 1915.

Ever since Hannibal C.: Ford built the first gunfire computers for the U. S. Navy forty years ago, Ford Instrument Company has been a leader in applying the science of automatic control to American defense and peacetime industry. For more information about Ford’s products, services, and facilities, write for free illustrated brochure.

FORD INSTRUMENT COMPANY DIVISION OF THE SPERRY CORPORATION 31-10 Thomson Ave., Long Island City 1, N. Y.

Long time PlayStation developer Insomniac Games is going multiplatform. Yes folks, you heard it right. Famed for its highly successful Resistance and Ratchet & Clank game series on the PlayStation platform, the developers has officially confirmed that