2012 conventions 2012 election 2013 session arts arts and culture author ballot measures basketball bomb books boy scouts budget bullying business charlie hales children clackamas climate change coal college courts crime culture culture club democrats drugs economy education environment family film fluoride food gay rights guns handguns health health care health insurance high school history housing immigration internet kitzhaber language law legislature lgbt literary arts living marijuana marriage media medicine mental health military minor parties mohamed mohamud movies music native americans news newspaper obama olympics oregon our town parenting pers photography police politcs politics port portland portland business journal president prevention public safety religion republicans rnc romney rural salem sam adams sandy hook schools science shooting sports suicide supreme court taxes technology television terrorism theater third parties transportation union university of oregon washington wildfire women

"Deep-dives" into different political or social ideologies (maybe this blends with or extends your "as we are" series?).

To give a little background in this, I recently decided that it was going to be important for me to understand the religious right as a philosophy because they're such an important voting block. I did a lot of research and so far I've not seen the value, but it's my hope that greater understanding leads to greater empathy and a greater ability to negotiate and compromise. A good jumping-off point for learning about the religious right is a study by Penny Edgell found here: http://www.boulderatheists.org/resources/AtheistAsOther.pdf Here are a couple of ideas for groups that it might be interesting to explore:
[list]Religious right[/list]
[list]Libertarians[/list]
[list]hard-line capitalists/free-market-ists[/list]
[list]socialists (specifically, how have the multiple failures of national socialism in recent history changed the philosophy and belief structure)?[/list]
[list]Religious left[/list]
[list]Atheists/non-religious[/list]
[list]Anarchists (from personal experience, this is a *really* interesting group and not at all what most people think they are)[/list]
[list]Environmentalists[/list]
[list]Rapture-ists (Tim LaHay's, Left Behind, etc.)[/list]

posted 4 years, 7 months ago
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Green show:
[list]What are Portlanders doing to "go green?"[/list]
[list]What are our options for doing it? Is it all about buying better light bulbs and more fuel efficient cars? Are there behavioral changes that make a difference?[/list]
[list]How can we estimate our own energy use, carbon footprint, trash footprint, etc?[/list]

posted 4 years, 7 months ago
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Follow up to "public confrontation" show.
Your philosopher panelist had a lot to say about when it's worthwhile and when it isn't to confront someone in public and how to make that calculation. On the whole, she advocated a very light-touch approach to public confrontation that involved avoiding it except in the most severe cases. I bristled a lot at that because I thought she was urging me to "roll over" and accept abuse. However, the more I think about it, the more I've come to agree with her because a public confrontation puts people on the defensive and it's not likely anything positive will come out. However, that leaves me wondering about how to affect social change. For example, how might I start a campaign to convince people not to let their dogs drink out of public water fountains so I didn't have to bring a water bottle on my run?
[list]What are Portlanders doing to affect change?[/list]
[list]What are Portlanders trying to change?[/list]
[list]What works and what doesn't?[/list]

posted 4 years, 7 months ago
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Follow up to open source show:

I'm an open source developer and I advocate the model but I keep hearing about an anti-open source viewpoint that I've had trouble wrapping my mind around. For example, Microsoft's Jim Allchin says that the low purchase price of open source software could chill R&D spending and slow innovation in the industry. Jaron Lanier of Discover magazine says (http://discovermagazine.com/2007/dec/long-live-closed-source-software) a couple of different things.
[list]Because of the lack of funding for OSS (open source software), it will always be copies of dull, old technology like Unix. He admits that Linux is a very polished copy, but a copy none the less.[/list]
[list]There is inherent value in encapsulation & secrecy. He makes this argument based on a thought experiment he runs which, in turn, is based on a Synthetic Biology paper by Freeman Dyson. The argument comes down to an organizational smear that OSS efforts are too diverse; that there are too many possibilities to possibly try them all out so the only way to make big advances is to "tie down" a bunch of variables together and advance in chunks. The free sharing of information will result in too much fragmentation and not enough effort on any one avenue. Fir example, there is only one iPhone but hundreds of Linux releases.[/list]

posted 4 years, 7 months ago
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Hello. I've been listening to your show for a while now and I really enjoy it. I listen to it on podcast after the broadcast or you might hear from me more. I hear through the grapevine that you might be running thin on ideas for new shows. Although it certainly doesn't seem like that from a "content consumer's" perspective, I thought I could help out with some ideas of shows I'd like to hear. I hesitated a long time before sending this email because a lot of these ideas are half-baked and not fully researched but as it doesn't appear that I'm going to get around to more research any time soon, I decided to send them off, maybe they'll be useful anyway.

I have a couple of ideas for follow-ups to shows you've already done, things I didn't hear that I'd like to. Formatting in this forum is an issue so I'll post each idea in its own reply

posted 4 years, 7 months ago
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