Passing Comments

Jane McGonigal (PhD, UC, Berkeley) believes that we can best change what’s broken in the world by playing games.

In a Q&A interview with WIRED last month, McGonigal explains her thinking. She also talks about her new game EVOKE — launched yesterday — that puts her saving-the-world premise into action (“TED 2010: Reality Is Broken. Game Designers Must Fix It” Feb 11, 2010).

Video of how-to play the game, below. McGonigal’s personal website is here.

From Putumayo World Music, a video spotlight on musician Kiran Ahluwalia. She was born in India, grew up in Canada and now lives in New York City. With the streets of India as background, Ahluwalia talks about her music.

In an interview last week with France24, Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi said she does not share the view that the resistance in Iran is growing weak (Feb 23, 2010).

The Iranian lawyer said that the protest movement is “as strong as ever” but is now varying in its forms. The interviewer asked Ebadi what could cause the present regime to yield to the resistance. Ebadi responded:

What exasperates this regime really is that the demonstrations are continuing and they are continuing to be extremely peaceful in the protests, and they are not giving the state any excuses to justify its violence.

Moreover, amongst the religious authorities there are very strong disagreements. A great number of the clerics have taken a position in favor of the people and are protesting against the government, and have condemned the violence of government saying that this could lead to the fall of the regime which would be harmful to all the authorities including the clergy, and they are taking a stand against violence. This disagreement among the clergy is very important.

In 2009, Elinor Ostrom became the first woman ever to win a Nobel Prize in Economics. Ostrom received the great honor because she took a master scientist’s interest in situations such as this one:

…consider the management of grasslands in the interior of Asia. Scientists have studied satellite images of Mongolia and neighboring areas in China and Russia, where livestock has been feeding on large grassland areas for centuries. Historically, the region was dominated by nomads, who moved their herds on a seasonal basis.

In Mongolia, these traditions were largely intact in the mid-1990s, while neighboring areas in China and Russia – with closely similar initial conditions – had been exposed to radically different governance regimes. There, central government imposed state-owned agricultural collectives, where most users settled permanently. As a result, the land was heavily degraded in both China and Russia.

And this one:

. ..user-management of local resources has been more successful than management by outsiders. A striking case is that of irrigation systems in Nepal, where locally managed irrigation systems have successfully allocated water between users for a long time. However, the dams – built from stone, mud and trees – have often been primitive and small.

In several places, the Nepalese government, with assistance from foreign donors, has therefore built modern dams of concrete and steel. Despite flawless engineering, many of these projects have ended in failure.

These two examples are from the Nobel Foundation’s press release describing the unique value of Ostrom’s life work. Over several decades, the economist gathered information that illuminated the complexities and successes of problem solving related to shared resources, according to the release.

In particular, Ostrom challenged the conventional wisdom that the only solution to public problems is either to turn them over to the state to manage or hand them off to privatization. There’s a third way that often can trump both of these, according to Ostrom — let the users themselves create and run their own systems at a local level.

What’s more, the Nobel release noted, Ostrom’s work also has shown that there is a much greater willingness of individuals to participate in their own shared systems — for little or minor reward — than is commonly believed.

This month in the online edition of The Solutions Journal, Ostrom brings this same perspective to the problem of global warming. In the aftermath of the disappointment of Copenhagen 2009, the economist says it is important to recognize that climate change problems can be solved in other ways:

Acknowledging the complexity of global warming, as well as the relatively recent agreement among scientists about the human causes of climate change, leads to the recognition that waiting for effective policies to be established at the global level is unreasonable.

Instead, it would be better to self-consciously adopt a multi-scale approach to the problem of climate change, starting at the local level. This approach serves to maximize the benefits at varying levels and encourages experimentation and learning from diverse policies…

Read the full article here.

The traditional, pre-dominantly Catholic society of Poland is being revolutionized by some of the country’s strong women, according to an article by Jan Puhl last week in Spiegel Online International (“‘Turbo-Emancipation’/
Polish Women Enjoy Post-Communist Success” Feb 18, 2010).

The article profiles a few of these leaders. One is Ewa Wieczorek, the editor-in-chief of the leading women’s magazine in Poland, Wysokie Obcasy (High Heels). Puhl describes the publication as “a cross between a high-brow cultural magazine and Cosmopolitan.”

“Articles describe people cheating on their spouses and women taking on traditionally male professions. They are about abortion, pornography and sex during pregnancy. They write headlines like “A Woman is Not a Lamp,” an opinion piece in which the writer argues that women should not have to respond to demands of sex, like a light being switched on.

They are the kinds of subjects that still shock many in a deeply Catholic country like Poland.”

Puhl writes that the magazine’s success signifies the huge, post-communist change in Poland:

In the last 20 years, Polish women have achieved as much as women in the West took many decades to achieve. For women in Poland, the end of communism translated into a sort of turbo-emancipation.

The article also includes interviews with a leader of the women’s rights movement in Poland, Agnieszka Graff, and with one of the country’s business icons, Irena Eris.

In a question and answer interview at Davos, Der Spiegel online talked to Laura Liswood about the gender gap (“Men Who Have Daughters Tend to See Better” Feb 2, 2010).  Liswood is the founder of the Council of World Women Leaders.

All of the answers are super, but my favorite: Question — why are so few women running countries and big companies?

I think in most cases it is not that men don’t want women to make a career. Most of the dynamics between dominant and non-dominant group members happens unconsciously. I’ve written a book on that topic called “The Loudest Duck.” It talks about the question of where we get our images about what a leader is, what a woman is, what other groups are. Our parents teach us, our teachers, our religion, experiences. I remember talking to the first female president of Iceland, Vigdís Finnbogadóttir. She was president for 16 years. After she had been in office for eight years children in Iceland thought that only women could be president.

Great quote from Liswood’s website: “There’s no such thing as a glass ceiling for women, it’s just a thick layer of men.”

“There’s no such thing as an innocent bystander anywhere on earth,” Iranian artist Parastou Forouhar says, explaining why she uses art to challenge others to join her in acts of political provocation. From Deutsche Welle, Germany’s international broadcaster.

Video intro:

Her parents were opposition politicians who were murdered in Tehran in 1998. Since then,their daughter Parastou Forouhar has used both judicial and artistic means to fight for an investigation into their murder.Her struggle has put Forouhar,an installation artist living in Germany,under increasing pressure. She is met by Iran’s secret police each time she visits her parents’ graves. Forouhar talks with ARTS.21 about recent developments in Iran,the power of the opposition movement and the future of the Islamic state.

One of the youngest guests at the World Economic Forum this week is 18-year-old Sarah, from Sri Lanka. Sarah is one of  six young community activists chosen to go to Davos as part of the program, British Council Global Changemakers.

This month the French Parliament is debating a bill that would mandate that at least 40 percent of corporate board members are women. Deadline for compliance would be 2016 (“Shaking up the corporate world” France 24, Jan 20, 2010).

France is playing catch up. It now lags far behind some of its European neighbors in regard to more gender balanced board rooms, according to the news video below.

Though at the cost of beatings, being thrown in jail and killed, women in Iran are taking the lead in the ongoing protest movement there. This, according to Haleh Esfandiari, an Iranian-American scholar. Esfandiari is Director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars.

In 2007, Esfandiari herself was arrested and imprisoned briefly when she traveled to Iran to visit her mother. This week she writes a post on the protest activities of Iranian women for The New York Review of Books blog:

Excerpt:

The participation by women in the latest series of protests marks another notable development. Women have shown themselves ready to do what had generally been regarded as ‘men’s work.” Despite the risk of beatings, injury, arrest, even death, they have continued to take a leading part in protests and demonstrations. The demonstrators’ chant, “we are men of war,” has changed to “we are men and women of war.”

When I was held in solitary confinement in Tehran’s Evin Prison in 2007, I was questioned at length about the women’s rights movement; my two interrogators seemed alarmed and befuddled by it. They certainly feared its potential: how else to explain the harsh way in which officials have dealt with the women collecting signatures for a simple petition? But my interrogators also told me they feared a backlash if they used excessive force to disperse female demonstrators.

That was three years ago. Now, the gloves are off. The sight of tens of thousands of women marching alongside men in demonstrations last June seems to have unnerved the authorities. Under the increasingly brutal regime of Ahmadinejad’s second term, Iranians have seen young and middle-aged women clubbed, dragged across pavements, and hustled into vans by police and official thugs in plain clothes…

In this Foreign Exchange TV interview in August 2009, Esfandiari talks about her 2007 arrest: