Healthcare

06/24/2012

Reads for June 24

It's been a while since my last round-up of interesting posts, so here is a reading list for this weekend (updated).

Economics & Finance

Energy & Environment, Climate Change

Healthcare

Miscellaneous

That's it for today.

Posted at 09:08 AM in China, Economics, Energy & Environment, Europe, Finance, Food Security, Government, Healthcare, India, Private Enterprise, Public Policy, United States, Wall Street | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

|

01/14/2012

Reads for Jan 14

Economics & Finance

Energy & Environment, Food Security, Climate Change

Healthcare and Education

Miscellaneous

That's it for today.

Posted at 11:50 AM in Companies, Economics, Education, Energy & Environment, Finance, Government, Healthcare, India, Private Enterprise, Public Policy, Science, Trade, United States, Wall Street | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

|

01/01/2012

Reads for 1 Jan 2012

A very happy new year to everyone! Here are some readings to ring in the new year...

Economics & Finance

Energy & Environment, Food Security, Climate Change

Continue reading "Reads for 1 Jan 2012" »

Posted at 12:47 PM in Books, China, Companies, Economics, Education, Energy & Environment, Europe, Finance, Government, Healthcare, India, Innovation, Private Enterprise, Public Policy, Science, Technology, Trade, United States, Wall Street | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

|

12/18/2011

Reads for Dec 18

Economics & Finance

To wrap up this section, here's an interesting comment by William Cohan in this FDL Book Salon on his book "Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World":

Goldman actually almost went out of business many times in its history; it is very good at getting into trouble — and also very good at getting out of trouble

...and he also notes:

actually i go through chapter and verse of the many frauds that Goldman has committed or participated in over the years

Should make for some interesting reading.

Energy & Environment, Food Security, Climate Change

Continue reading "Reads for Dec 18" »

Posted at 08:28 AM in Books, Companies, Economics, Education, Energy & Environment, Europe, Finance, Government, Healthcare, Private Enterprise, Public Policy, Science, Trade, United States, Wall Street | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

|

12/04/2011

Reads for Dec 4/5

Economics & Finance

On that last article....I agree with much of Wadhwa's observations about India based on my experience - in particular, these passages:

India’s information technology sector may have started by running call centers and maintaining old computer code for American companies. But, today, instead of starting more I.T. services companies, a new breed of Indian entrepreneurs are developing high-value technology products based on intellectual property.

[...]

But something is missing in India: The angel investors, venture capitalists, and, most critically, experienced mentors. This problem will fix itself as more companies achieve success and seasoned entrepreneurs decide to give back to the next generation. When that happens, Silicon Valley better watch out. It is in for some very real competition.

Energy & Environment, Food Security, Climate Change

Continue reading "Reads for Dec 4/5" »

Posted at 07:57 PM in China, Companies, Economics, Education, Energy & Environment, Europe, Finance, Food Security, Government, Healthcare, India, Innovation, Private Enterprise, Public Policy, Science, Technology, Trade, United States, Wall Street | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

|

11/19/2011

Reads for Nov 19

Economy, Unemployment, Finance

P.S. Don't miss this Jon Stewart video on MF Global and Jon Corzine

Stock Markets

Continue reading "Reads for Nov 19" »

Posted at 10:15 AM in Companies, Economics, Finance, Government, Healthcare, Private Enterprise, Public Policy, United States, Wall Street | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

|

10/02/2011

Q&A with President Bill Clinton at the 2011 Clinton Global Initiative

UPDATE: Part 2 is here discussing the financial crisis in Europe...more coming in the next week.

Like last year, I had the opportunity to participate in a Q&A session with former President Bill Clinton, along with a handful of journalists and bloggers, on the sidelines of the 2011 Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting in New York. A variety of topics were discussed during this meeting and Tom Watson at Cause Wired has some overall commentary. Some of the other attendees of the Q&A have published articles based on the discussion and I'll mention some excerpts here.

1) Amanda Terkel at The Huffington Post: Bill Clinton weighs in on Troy Davis execution

2) Josh Rogin at The Cable, one of the foreign policy blogs at Foreign Policy Magazine, initially posted this - Bill Clinton: Netanyahu Killed the Peace Process; Rogin then wrote about the initial response of Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu here and another response here. I don't have time to get into parsing the he-said she said, but I'll make one quick comment. One of President Netanyahu's comments was the following:

You know, I regretfully and respectfully disagree with former President Clinton. He should know, more than anyone else, that in the peace conference he presided in at Camp David in 2000 with [Yasir] Arafat and former Prime Minister [Ehud] Barak, it was the Palestinian side who walked away from his own parameters...

In fact, during the Q&A, President Clinton did blame Yasser Arafat for the failure of the 2000 peace conference.

3) Brian Merchant at Treehugger: Creating 1 Million Energy Efficiency Jobs is a No Brainer - Bill Clinton

4) Penelope Chester at UN Dispatch: President Clinton: "We've Got a Shot in Haiti"

5) Eli Clifton at Think Progress: Clinton: ‘There Is Not A Single Solitary Example’ Of A Country That Has Succeeded With A Tea Party Philosophy

[Clinton] responded to a question from ThinkProgress about Texas Gov., and GOP presidential frontrunner, Rick Perry’s position that Social Security is unconstitutional, and about the Tea Party’s anti-social spending sentiment more generally. Clinton blamed the “continuing dominance of non-fact based political debate,” saying:

You can stand up and say anything and nobody rings a bell if the facts are wrong. There’s no bell ringing. It’s crazy, we’re living in a time when it’s more important than ever to know things. And not just to know facts but to put them in a coherent. sensible pattern. And we live in a time, if you just want to talk about the economy, where the model that works for economic growth and prosperity is cooperation. But the model that works in politics is conflict.

Clinton went on to challenge the emerging GOP consensus that government size and spending require dramatic cuts, observing that the most prosperous parts of the U.S. “look nothing like the anti-government ideal of the Tea Party crowd”:

You know, there’s not a single solitary example on the planet, not one, of a country that is succesful [sic] because the economy has triumphed over the government and choked it off and driven the tax rates to zero, driven the regulations to nonexistent and abolished all government programs, except for defense, so people in my income group never have to pay a nickel to see a cow jump over the moon. There is no example of a succesful [sic] country that looks like that.

6) Brad Johnson at Think Progress: Bill Clinton On Claims That Solyndra Means All Green Energy Is Bad: ‘Don’t Insult My Intelligence’

Asked by ThinkProgress Green about how to fight the corrupting influence of climate deniers, Clinton said that people need to defend the facts about the green economy as vigorously as the opponents of the clean economy promote lies:

They can take nothing like Solyndra and say that proves all green energy is bad. Why? Because those of us on the other side don’t say: Whatever the truth is, here’s the mega truth. We can’t burn up the planet. We’ve got to find an economically sustainable way to save it. Green energy jobs have grown at twice the rate of overall economy jobs in the last decade, they pay 20 to 30 percent more, they’re directly responsible for a $60 billion trade surplus.
Do whatever you want about Solyndra, but do not insult my intelligence by trying to say that the big oil [companies] are right and the green tech people are wrong.

Clinton was citing the analysis by the Brookings Institution of the clean energy economy, which found that employment in the clean-tech sector, which includes companies like Solyndra, grew at 8.3 percent from 2003 to 2010, twice as fast the overall economy.

[...]

Later in the roundtable, Clinton offered some thoughtful analysis of why the government is “picking winners and losers,” as some have described the loan guarantee program that supported Solyndra. He explained that the understanding that corporations have a responsibility to all stakeholders has been lost to the idea that they only answer to shareholders. The role of government in setting market fundamentals has been attacked relentlessly. So government policies that define the market — like clean energy standards, cap and trade, or carbon taxes — can’t get passed, even though those are the most efficient at supporting economic innovation.

People need to understand that the government should play a role in making markets, Clinton said, and “part of the market making should be designed be create a mentality of shared value rather than just shareholder value.”

Note: The last bit on shared value was in response to a question I asked and I'll write about that in a separate post.

7) Morra Aarons Mele at BlogHer: What President Clinton, Maternal Health and Blogging Have in Common

Posted at 10:12 AM in Clinton Global Initiative, Companies, Economics, Energy & Environment, Finance, Foreign Policy, Government, Healthcare, Non-profits and NGOs, Private Enterprise, Public Policy, Science, United States, Women | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

|

10/01/2011

Around the Blogosphere (Oct 1)

Some interesting articles....(UPDATED Oct 2)

Jobs, Economy and Financial Markets

Healthcare

Education

Environment (Cost of Natural Disasters and Pollution)

Food

Miscellaneous

That's it for this Saturday.

Posted at 10:35 AM in Companies, Economics, Education, Energy & Environment, Europe, Finance, Food Security, Government, Healthcare, Private Enterprise, Public Policy, Trade, United States, Wall Street | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

|

09/26/2010

CGI: Notes on Panels on Women and Girls, Market Based Solutions, Environment, Haiti

In my two previous posts, I discussed comments on the American job market by former President Clinton at the Clinton Global Initiative. In this post, I'd like to briefly comment on some of the panel discussions on other topics.

Women and Girls

President Clinton's remark that it is amazing that we even need panels discussing the protection and empowerment of women and girls in the year 2010 set the stage for CGI's focus on this topic. The panel discussion on Empowering Girls and Women (see Michelle Kraus' piece at the Huffington Post and Ken Houghton's notes at Angry Bear) was one of the better ones in my view. A superb video worth watching and sharing - The Girl Effect - was aired during this session. Joan Walsh at Salon.com wrote more about this and about Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's announcement on a new initiative:

I'm attending the first day of the Clinton Global Initiative, where Secretary of State Hillary Clinton just announced the launch of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, a public-private partnership. Before you shake your head at the former president's powerful wife being confined to the kitchen, the toxins released by open fires and inefficient stoves create one of the five most serious health risks to people in developing countries, putting them at risk for pneumonia and lung cancer.

The participants on the main panel were Queen Rania Al Abdullah from Jordan, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia and Muhtar Kent, CEO of the Coca Cola Company, with Katie Couric of CBS moderating. I was particularly impressed by Queen Rania Al Abdullah (her outspokenness and willingness to take strong positions), although President Sirleaf was engaging as well.

The breakout session on Securing the Heath and Safety of Girls and Women, moderated by The Daily Beast's Tina Brown, was interesting as well (see Ken Houghton's notes at Angry Bear). The panelists were Gary Cohen, EVP of BD, Geeta Rao Gupta, Senior Fellow at the Gates Foundation, Richard Holbrooke, Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan (US State Department), and actress Ashley Judd, Board Member of Population Services International (PSI). Holbrooke was vocal about what he felt were some shortcomings in traditional approaches to deal with women's rights and security in countries where women face suppression or sexual violence. He said that we also have to address the men in order to fix the problem of violence against women, that he rarely sees programs where men are the target of appropriate outreach - he gave an example of police training (not sure if he was referring to Pakistan) where he said there was nothing in the training really about how women need to be shown respect. He mentioned that both he and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton see eye to eye on this topic. Gupta countered this by stating that there are programs that target men and boys - not just women - and with a broader community-level focus these programs aim to show how the men and the community can benefit (especially in terms of growing their income or wealth) if women are allowed more freedom to pursue their goals and are respected. Holbrooke also spent some time discussing the recent devastating floods in Pakistan and what he thought it would take to help Pakistan recover from this unprecedented calamity. He cautioned that any aid given to Pakistan should not be linked to any commitments on social re-engineering because it would be counter-productive - he said, aid should be provided to save lives and livelihoods, not just for security alone. Judd spoke passionately about her travels and experiences in Africa.

(NOTE: I was unable to attend the session on Profiting From The Poor? A Discussion on Microfinance IPOs - where Muhammad Yunus (Nobel-Prize winning Founder of Grameen Bank) and Vikram Akula (Founder of SKS Microfinance) evidently had an energetic debate. Megha Bahree of Forbes has a brief write-up on the debate in her blog and Rina Chandran has more at Reuters).

Continue reading "CGI: Notes on Panels on Women and Girls, Market Based Solutions, Environment, Haiti" »

Posted at 05:19 PM in Clinton Global Initiative, Companies, Economics, Education, Energy & Environment, Finance, Foreign Policy, Government, Healthcare, Non-profits and NGOs, Private Enterprise, Public Policy, Technology, United States, Women | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

|

Why Yotta Point?

As Wikipedia states:

Yotta is the largest unit prefix in the International System of Units (SI) denoting a factor of 1024 or 1000000000000000000000000. It has the unit symbol Y.

The prefix name is derived from the Greek ὀκτώ (októ), meaning eight, because it is equal to 10008. It was added to the SI in 1991. [1]

I started this blog because of my interest in challenges of immense scale and designing and implementing solutions to such challenges. For example:

  • How do Governments devise solid policies to address a problem impacting tens to hundreds of millions to billions of people?
  • How do non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and non-profits take solutions that might work within small populations and scale them to address much larger populations?
  • How do businesses that are growing (either organically or inorganically) scale everything they do successfully to meet the demands of growth?

...and so on.

I consider these challenges ones of scaling. As the world grows, the challenges of scaling get more pronounced. Solving real-life problems of scaling excites me. Hence, the use of the term Yotta Point to denote a place where issues tied to scale will be discussed.

Welcome!

Posted at 12:24 PM in Economics, Energy & Environment, Finance, Food Security, Foreign Policy, Government, Healthcare, Non-profits and NGOs, Private Enterprise, Public Policy, Science, Technology, Trade | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

|

Yotta_Wikipedia
Why Yotta?

Archives

Search

Twitter Updates

    follow me on Twitter

    Categories