rowing these trees required several doses of insecticides, which were manufactured in the Rhine River Valley of Europe. Effluents from the pesticides plants had helped turn the Rhine into one of the most polluted rivers in the world, destroying much of the wildlife that had once abounded in the marshlands downstream. In Colombia, when the coffee trees were sprayed, some of the pesticides got into the lungs of farmers. Residues from the trees washed down the mountainsides and collected in streams. There, as in Germany, the pollutants were spread to downstream ecosystems. The beans were shipped to New Orleans in a freighter constructed in Japan, of steel made in Korea. The steel was made of iron mined on tribal lands in Papua New Guinea. The people there received little or no compensation for their lost resources and contaminated water. The mining was encouraged by the Papua New Guinea government, which promotes exports to boost its short-term revenue-even when the exported commodities diminish the long-term prospects of some of its own endangered peoples. In New Orleans, the beans were unloaded and roasted at 400 degrees for 13 minutes. They were packaged in four-layer bags constructed of polyethylene, nylon, aluminum foil, and polyester. The three layers of plastics were made of oil shipped by tanker from Saudi Arabia. The tanker was fueled by still more oil. The plastics were fabricated in factories in Louisiana's "Cancer Corridor," where toxic industries have been disproportionately concentrated in areas where the residents are black. The aluminum layer of the coffee bag was made in the Pacific North-west, from bauxite strip-mined in Australia and shipped across the Pacific on a barge fueled by oil from Indonesia. The mining of the bauxite had violated the ancestral land of aborigines. The refining of the aluminum was powered by a hydroelectric dam on the Columbia River, construction of which had destroyed the salmon-fishing subsistence economy of native Americans. The bags of roasted beans were then trucked to San Francisco. The gasoline for the trucks was processed from oil extracted from the Gulf of Mexico. The refining was done at a plant near Philadelphia, where heavy air and water pollution have been linked to cancer clusters, contaminated fish, and a decline of marine w

First, if nobody buys the product, then all else is irrelevant. The product design has to provide support for all the factors people use in making purchase decisions. Second, once the product has been purchased and is put into use, it must support real needs so that people can use, understand, and take pleasure from it.

and always include natives in the team

those activities

Note that traditional measures of people, such as age, education, and income, are not always important

Encourage their free exploration, but hold them to the schedule (and budget) constraints.

only about 5 percent of the total public expenditure on education,

let us assume that it happens because schools give ev- ery one of their students his or her own powerful personal comput- er.

The children in these studies are not exceptional, or rather, they are exceptional in every conceivable way

My inter- est is in the process of invention of "objects-to-think-with," objects in which there is an intersection of cultural presence, embedded knowledge, and the possibility for personal identification.

without creating a dependence on machines

Difficulty with school math is of- ten the first step of an invasive intellectual process that leads us all to define ourselves as bundles of aptitudes and ineptitudes, as being ' artistic" or "not artis- "mathematical" or "not mathematical,' " tic," "musical" or "not musical," "profound" or "superficial," "in- telligent" or "dumb."

I see the critical factor as the relative poverty of the cul- ture in those materials that would make the concept simple and concrete

The first is that it is possible to design computers so that learning to communicate with them can be a natural process, more like learning French by living in France than like trying to learn it through the unnatural process of American foreign-language instruction in classrooms

It looks at some of the forces of change and of reaction to those forces that are called into play as the computer presence begins to enter the politi- cally charged world of education

urn computers into instruments flexible enough so that many children can each create for themselves something like what the gears were for me.

one cannot assume that it would be repeated for other children in exactly the same form.

If you can't, anything can _ be paiu ~ i c_u t._Rere too I _was developing a way of thinking that would be resonant with Piaget's. The understanding of learning must be genetic. It must refer to the g

One account, Army of Jesus, published an illustration of an arm-wrestling match between Christ and the devil. “Satan: If I win, Clinton wins!” the headline read.

he announced that he would delete Spagnuolo’s post, not because “feminists” hated it, but because it wasn’t funny and Spagnuolo is a shitty writer

senior director of editorial strategy and growth—this does not sound like a real job

a blog for dipshits, by dipshits

Should our hesitation be moral as well as medical