Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago Review

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Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago ReviewDo you remember the heat wave in Chicago in 1995? The rail lines folded, electricity went out with rolling blackouts, some streets even buckled. The heat was over 100 degrees, rarely dipping below the 80's at night, and the humidity near 100%. But what most people don't remember is the horrific human death toll during that time. Over 700 people were killed in that heat wave that lasted nearly a week. But while the author looks deeply into the horror of this natural disaster, he mainly concentrates with precision on a few separate areas:
First, that heat waves kill more people annualy than all other types of natural disasters combined. Yet they receive little public attention mostly because they fail to generate the massive property damage and fantastic images produced by other weather-related disasters.
Second, most of the people that died were the elderly and poor, who died at home, with their windows often sealed or even nailed shut to prevent rampant crime in their areas. They had no air conditioning because they could not afford it, and little or any access to any social help because of their economic situation.
The author also looks into how the city of Chicago didn't come to grips with what had happened until the heat wave was well over, and that because of the social structure where the affluent have ample protection from such massive natural disasters, the elderly, infirm and poor will likely remain having none. And while dealing with the aftermath is much more costly, governments choose not to prepare for them with social programs which are often viewed as liberal pork or government waste.
A fascinating, well written book. It also contains many images, some of which appear is if taken from somewhere like Somalia. Eric Klinenberg is an sociology professor at Northwestern University.Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago Overview

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Competing for the Future: How Digital Innovations are Changing the World Review

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Competing for the Future: How Digital Innovations are Changing the World ReviewDr Kressel has captured the disruptions in society caused by fundamental shifts in the technology base dating from 1948 with the invention of the transistor and culminating in the recent emergence of IP networks as the dominant technological force behind our data and communications network. The early chapters deal with the history and impact of these important technologies and for those readers with a need to understand these technologies in greater detail, appendices are provided that take those interested into a journey of discovery into the important fundamental technology discontinuities such as Integrated Circuits, their scalability and limits, logic gates, semiconductor memories, semiconductor lasers and LEDs, photodetectors, fiber optics, and LCD displays which are used throughout the networks of today. These early parts of the book also point out the importance of the protocols that are used to transport data as well as the underpinning software methods that are used to build the networks without which engineers would not have been able to build today's Internet. Again, appendices are provided on these topics for the enquiring reader.
The book takes the reader through the early technology shifts that have enabled the knowledge economy and the author has mapped these changes to very basic but nonetheless revolutionary shifts in software, semiconductors, wireless and fiber optics. These dislocations taken together with the emergence of the venture capital industry and the entrepreneurial spirit fostered in the technology centers in Silicon valley and elsewhere, provided the mix for the revolutionary data networks to emerge which would have far reaching societal changes in later years. The book describes this journey and along the way the author draws our attention to the demise of the industrial central laboratories that nurtured the early inventions that gave birth to these technology dislocations and whose gradual disappearance in the 1960s and 1970s released large numbers of very bright scientists and engineers into both government laboratories and most importantly, small business start-ups. These in turn provided the incubators that gave birth to such technology behemoths as DEC, Intel and others.
Dr Kressel then shows us that the improvements in the secondary education system in the United States fuelled these new companies and together with significant venture capital, nurtured a large number of new companies. These companies had the heft to eventually produce the high performance optical systems, computers and servers necessary to populate early distributed data networks. These were born out of US government-sponsored activities to devise resilient data networks that could survive potential threats emerging from the Cold War of the 1970s and 1980s. These networks eventually were to become the Internet, a pervasive network that now has affected us all and which provides us with the infrastructure today to instantly communicate on a global scale and to provide an easily searchable database that enriches both our work and home lives. The author shows how the technology has disrupted many industries and has resulted in the loss of many companies who have not been able to respond to change in a timely fashion. He demonstrates that the Internet has given birth to countless companies that capitalize on the network to provide new services and industries but also points out that it also threatens today's telecommunication companies since the high available bandwidth agnostic to the flow of voice, data and video provides new opportunities for a new breed of service providers to bypass the legacy voice networks.
These technology shifts also bring about the emergence of knowledge and capability in other parts of the world and provide the infrastructure to transfer the manufacture of these key products and in some cases, their design. This in turn could threaten the developed economies by hollowing-out the industrial sector of these developed nations and stimulating the economies of the developing nations, which now can service their own needs. Dr Kressel concludes by pointing out that developed economies must develop internal policies that protect their important leading products and their manufacture while still providing a competitive framework that fosters new products to renew the cycle.Competing for the Future: How Digital Innovations are Changing the World Overview

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Becoming an Effective Policy Advocate: From Policy Practice to Social Justice Review

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Becoming an Effective Policy Advocate: From Policy Practice to Social Justice ReviewI have adopted this text for my social policy course since the first edition.
The hallmark to Jansson text is that he offers the best framework for generalist practice. Other policy textbooks perceive policy-making as an enterprise dominated by great persons who direct great ideas on a macro level. Policy, in this sense, is the development and maintenance of programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Jansson makes it clear that policy encompasses all aspects of social work intervention. For example, Jansson offers students a framework to comprehend the lack of adequate parking spaces on campus and -- what to do about it. Thus, Jansson enables the student to understand that policies operate on the micro, mezzo and macro levels.
Jansson spends most of his energy on the application of micro policy issues. This is most appropriate for two reasons. First, I estimate that 90% of social work graduates who are required to read this text will face micro policy issues on a daily basis. Unless they reflect back on what they learn from Jansson, they won't realize it. Second, for those who actually obtain policy positions, it is unlikely that they will be involved in making grand decisions in the arena of what is thought to be classic policies (e.g. Social Security). They are most likely to be making policy decisions regarding the use of the copy machine, discharging staff, hiring (including issues like affirmation action for the agency staff) etc. No other text will assist the student in these areas as much as Jansson.
There is no doubt in my mind that Jansson offers the BEST text for a social policy course. However, he has one serious limitation. His writing is terrible. He can't seem to write in an economical manner. In a discussion in an open forum, I made this observation. Other professors thanked me. Everyone in the room knew it was true, but no one wanted to say it aloud - except perhaps me.
The bottom line is, Jansson offers the best text for a social policy course. However, his writing is overly sophisticated, students must be spoon-fed this framework. Once students comprehend his essential points, they have a clear understanding of policy development and maintenance. Some of them, because of Jansson, decide to pursue a career in policy rather than clinical social work.Becoming an Effective Policy Advocate: From Policy Practice to Social Justice Overview

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Radical Possibilities: Public Policy, Urban Education, and A New Social Movement (Critical Social Thought) Review

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Radical Possibilities: Public Policy, Urban Education, and A New Social Movement (Critical Social Thought) ReviewRadical Possibilities is a well written description of several of the current crises in our nation, focusing on public education. Prof. Anyon excels at placing the public school crisis in its appropriate and complex economic context. I recommend the book to the well informed, well read reader. The book is well written and clearly organized.
The later chapters offer a hope for change including an emphasis on working with Community Based organizations.
I teach in a graduate program in Multi lingual Multicultural Education at Calif. State University-Sacramento. We have the good fortune of working with hundreds of teachers, over two thirds Latino and/or Asian. We used this book for the first time this year in a course on Advocacy and Change in Education.
The Anyon book served well along with my own book, Choosing Democracy: a Practical guide to Multicultural Education (2004)
We live in a very changing time from the era of the active Civil Rights movement. Teachers, and other educational workers, need to understand the complex interactions between social science analysis of the communities and school reform and/or school renewal. The Anyon book does this very well. She introduces important economics data in an understandable manner. In most settings readers will need assistance and further explanations of the basic economic concepts and relationships.

Duane Campbell
www.choosingdemocracy.blogspot.comRadical Possibilities: Public Policy, Urban Education, and A New Social Movement (Critical Social Thought) Overview

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