Mark Mulkerin's Blog – April 2010 Archive (10)

SARS, H1N1, bird flu, dengue, the list goes on. Living in a large city in Asia (Singapore), epidemics and pandemics are the biggest things I worry about ... of course, that could come from living through SARS in Hong Kong a few years back. Continue

2067 - Geez, I'm old. The little ones gather around. I gave the talk to their parents before them, maybe even their grandparents. Of course, there were fewer pictures then. More of the world and its inhabitants untouched by our mistakes. Continue

Okay friends and neighbors, we committed a grievous act over at the First Bank of Evoke and started (gasp) sharing jokes, poems, and such without exchanging EVs. To prevent such anarchy from undermining the capitalist principles of said bank, we are opening the Second Bank of Evoke. Continue

Synopsis: Increasingly academic institutions, governments, nonprofits, and individuals are putting out high quality, free educational material for students from kindergarten to college; however, it can take a great bit of digging and searching to find it even for someone who is web literate. To increase the availability of educational opportunities for anyone with internet access, I hope to create a site through which volunteers can add and index educational resources creating a easy to use… Continue

It had begun so simply. Too many years working in libraries colliding in my head with this wh*** new open source education idea. Perhaps it has always been naive of me to believe that the right lever could move the world, but the right book in the right hands could make a huge difference. The website did okay. And perhaps the team that put together the later version had seen mine first or heard about it. And the things that happened then. Continue

For my act this week, I want to share my sister-in-law, Sandra, with Evoke. A few years back, she and other members of her church in Arkansas began a partnership with the Pwoje Fanm women’s vocational program on the island of La Gonâve in Haiti. In addition to offering financial assistance, crafting expertise (from beading to quilting and beyond), and friendship,… Continue

with the face of a young girl from India, China, or Pakistan. Only one word is beneath her picture. Missing. No name. No contact details. No plea for help. She wasn't wanted in the first place. Continue

In the last few days, Evoke has been making me feel like I'm part of Raphael's School of Athens with Plato and Aristotle arguing in the center over idealism versus realism. Plato points towards the heavens and in that gesture he incorporates his entire view, his belief that a perfect society could be created, that perfect knowledge could be had. Aristotle, his former student, points to the ground and towards a way of knowing and acting in the world that comes from experience. I'm in Aristotle's… Continue

As any economist will insist, economic behavior is about allocating limited resources - limited resources including giving your fellow Agents a hand with this or that aspect of preparing their Evokation or some other aspect of their involvement on Evoke. To that end and to promote the exchange of goods and services among Evoke Agents (strictly within the Terms of Service), I'd like to invite interested parties to step forward and bank some Evokians to make this market… Continue

Around the world money sloshes through stock markets and banks and businesses crashing like waves upon shore as get rich investors swim in massive schools following the tail in front of them into the mouth of a shark or onto the rocks. Anyone in finance honest enough will tell you that it is all fear and greed and with technology and globalization and open capital markets, the world's monetary system has the perpetual jitters like an air traffic control working a triple shift on a holiday… Continue