Perspectives
An offbeat, refreshing look at solutions brought to you by the business leaders and academics, policy makers and designers who are in the field.
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“With the move from an agrarian to an industrial economy, the small rural schoolhouse was supplanted by the big brick schoolhouse. Four decades ago we began to move to another economy but we have yet to develop a new educational paradigm, let alone create the ‘schoolhouse’ of the future, which may be neither school nor house.”
Stan Davis and Jim Botkin, The Monster Under the Bed
Our evolving system of higher education has been undergoing a paradigm shift since the 1980s. Some universities have moved away from unidirectional, instructor-focused teaching to a more distributed, student experience. Likewise, most medical schools in the United States began using problem-based curricula decades ago and improved results in student performance followed.1...
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Indian power companies have their hands full generating and transporting power to cities and large factories—the current peak power deficit is 13 percent and growing. The problem isn’t just that the energy need is much larger than the production capacity; the existing electricity distribution and transmission infrastructure is also hugely inefficient, with up to 50 percent of the electricity generated lost in transport.
The solution has been to reframe India’s power shortage. Rural citizens do have money to spend on power, but neither they nor the power company have the money or time to lay cables to every home. And so, electricity has to become portable, to be sold in a sachet, “pay as you go” model. Such has been the thinking behind OMC’s community power initiative with one of...
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Other Perspectives
What connects a group of Bayaka pygmy hunters in the Congo Basin, opposed to illegal loggers encroaching on their land; residents of Deptford, in South London, concerned about a noisy scrapyard across the road from a school; and members of...
The landscape of postsecondary textbook publishing is undergoing a significant makeover with the introduction of high-quality digital textbooks. As with the introduction of most technology, there is resistance, not the least arising from...
On a cool day last December, the eminent Swedish scientist Johan Rockström stood in front of a large audience at the European Parliament in Brussels and pleaded his case. “This is what we could call ‘the scientist’s nightmare,’” Rockström...
In 2010 David Letterman asked Hollywood actress Salma Hayek if she routinely eats bugs. “Look,” she responded. “I'm salivating! They’re delicious!”
Insect eating, officially called entomophagy, is an age-old custom found throughout the...
A four-year-old arrives at school and starts crying when she realizes her lunch is packed in a generic plastic bag, not the usual Disney Princess lunchbox she so loves. A friend tells her she won’t be able to sit at the princess lunch...
Improved cookstoves ought to be one of the easy wins in global health. Inefficient, old-fashioned cookstoves do real damage to human health and family incomes. Traditional cookstoves are generally open fires in the middle of three stones,...
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