The Core Algorithm is the practical applications model to my conceptual framework - Theory of Algorithms. It is a meta-methodology, that is, a smart, adaptable method for identifying the methods that best serve whatever your purpose, issue or target. In brief, an algorithm is a way of solving a problem or steps for accomplishing a task, and is mathematical and non-mathematical (i.e., conceptual and practical). This blog is my introduction of its seminal applications.
Take a cozy green screen studio, built inside a tent, to any place in the world. Then start collecting stories by asking random bypassers: what do you have in your heart? These are the stories from Bolivia.
These stories may stitch together as heartbreak of love, but it seems poverty is never quite far away. I find the monologue an impassioned girl delivers at the beginning to be quite poignant:
Listen to my voice. Beware! I am the fury of the abandoned. Melancholy is my father, hunger is my mother, the frontier is my home. In the square I can see happy and sad people. And some people begging.
An estimated 5 million people are homeless in Russia. An estimated 1 million of them are children. Those numbers are rapidly growing.
This short film was published on November 7th 2012, and with the plunge in oil prices this past year, I find it horrible to imagine how much worse the economic impact is on scores of Russians. Still, amid the heartbreak of poverty, these children say
U.S. EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy says the the new carbon rules will tell the international community that the U.S. is serious about reducing emissions.
It's hard to speak for the international community, McCarthy seems to say, and certainly she has no mandate or authority to regulate their efforts, or lack thereof, on climate change. However, there is real precedent that the US can set for the world to see and some real progress to forge on our climate action plan. It isn't about fighting domestically either, she adds, rather about acknowledging how bound up ecology and economics are (hence, Wall Street Journal ECO:nomics conference). Everyone has to acknowledge that environment must be part and parcel of how countries grow their economies. Very well said!
U.S. EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy says that if the states refuse to participate with the agency’s new carbon rules, it will regulate emissions directly.
Ah, of course, nothing is ever really straightforward when it comes to human endeavors, andany endeavor is inviolably human. Specifically, political interests, namely those of Republicans, apparently muster resistance among certain states to the Supreme Court mandate and EPA initiative on carbon reductions. Again I really like McCarthy's earnest, collaborative, no nonsense stance with these states. That is, if states don't play ball responsibly, then the EPA will dish it back with some hardball.
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy makes the case for the constitutionality of the new carbon rules at the [Wall Street Journal] ECO:nomics conference.
I fundamentally like what McCarthy relates here on EPA expectations of states: It isn't necessarily a mandate to hit target carbon reductions, but instead an effort to work collaboratively with states to start where they are, review their current situations vis-a-vis workable goals, and put plans for reductions. I don't imagine that is an allowance for states to sandbag their efforts, however. Collectively the states' plans ought to indicate a 30% target reduction by 2030, but I gather that McCarthy has yet to see all of their plans and therefore isn't in a position (yet) to set definitive targets. Regardless, the mandate from the Supreme Court is that the EPA and the states must acknowledge that carbon is an official pollutant and that together they must do something about it.
One school of thought, I suppose, is to buck what may be a dysfunctional, archaic system and undermine it and ultimately overthrow it. Another school of thought, however, bears serious consideration, as Saadia Zahidi suggests: Work within a system, find best fit solutions for a culture, and leverage media and technology for this purpose. Some companies in Saudi Arabia apparently find ways that work well.
Brilliant!
But the work is far from complete. Large gaps between women and men’s labor-force participation remain: for example, about 47 percent of women in the United Arab Emirates that could be working are employed, compared with about 92 percent of men. If, during the next 15 years, the participation of women in the workforce across the Middle East and North Africa simply reaches that of two-thirds of men—around 60 percent—it has the potential to spike regional GDP by 20 percent or more. As businesses and policy makers recognize the benefits and momentum gathers to eliminate the barriers blocking Muslim women from full economic participation, this largely unseen population will truly become a force to be reckoned with.
Saadia Zahidi is... head of the Gender Parity Programme and head of Employment, Skills and Human Capital. In November 2014, the proposal for her book, Womenomics in the Muslim World, won the inaugural FT/McKinsey Bracken Bower Prize for business writers under age 35.
McDonald's in Pakistan deliberately set a policy to bring in educated women from lower income families. The notion of their working is perhaps at best a foreign concept and at worst a target of resistance. But because these young women have a safe workplace, get transportation between work and home, and (not to mention) earn an income, their families are evidently coming to accept their new normal.
Hooray to McDonald's for overcoming a barrier for women!
All of this underlines the conscious, often deeply personal and brave decision of millions of ordinary Muslim women and men to break family tradition and sometimes shun cultural pressures. As a result, a new segment of the labor market has emerged—and unprecedented consumer power.
Saadia Zahidi is... head of the Gender Parity Programme and head of Employment, Skills and Human Capital. In November 2014, the proposal for her book, Womenomics in the Muslim World, won the inaugural FT/McKinsey Bracken Bower Prize for business writers under age 35.
