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High tech bridges or waste pipelines

Ok, well this story is rather sad. It highlights our troubling practice of dumping waste on others (a common and old practice). Why recyle and better yet build machines that last longer and are comprised of more easily recycled materials when we can just “donate” our junk to developing countries. Of course, we could do this better. That is, we could better manage the lifecycle of our IT equipment, and we could better build “technological bridges” in developing countries.

Would regulating the export of hazardous materials be a sufficient spur? Maybe, maybe not, but it certainly seems like a necessary first step. I have not looked at the Basel Convention and the other relevant international legal instruments in a long time, so I will not discuss their application now. But this is an important area for further study.

The report mentioned in the article is here.
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Why We Blog

Michael Berube hits the nail on the head with this insightful post about academia and the blogosphere:

What is true of “public intellectuals,” in [Laura] Kipnis’ sense, is true a fortiori of bloggers: the mediating skills that we knowledge-merchants have to learn, in order to write for magazines, newspapers, and general-audience journals, are on even more immediate display in blog format—and, of course, the response from readers is more immediate as well.

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