Trendspotting: Evidence-Based Planning

Driving to the airport a few days ago, I heard a report about how “primitive” cultures that do not use a paper or coin currency make decisions about the value of goods and services without using numbers. Since every transaction, and many interactions, we have every day involves numbers, I found the discussion intriguing.

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Safe & Humane

Many of my recent articles have chronicled a worldwide decline in prison population. Today, however, I want to present why this current trend is not a universal characteristic.

 
On the wall in one of our conference rooms is a map of the world prepared by The Interdisciplinary Research Programme on Causes of Human Rights Violations, located at Leiden University in the Netherlands. I often stare at that map during internal meetings because the conflict areas in the globe are noted in red.

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Reformation Realities

As serious as the healthcare reform debate is, information dissemination has a saturation point. In the history of the republic, I don’t believe we have ever blogged something to death, but, alas, we did seek new frontiers. Our elected representatives seem to be much better at dealing with the acute problems produced by the recent Haitian and Chilean disasters than sustaining the journey toward systemic cures for chronic ills.

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Trendspotting: Assisting Haiti

Mostly we are unable to comprehend how something this horrific was visited upon people who had so little already. A principle of grieving (and healing) is the notion of shared sacrifice, yet we are hard pressed to imagine this level of loss. Even the ravages of Katrina did not leave us with the sense that we must start over in practically every sense.

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Trendspotting

Happy New Year! It’s hard to imagine that we were so concerned about Y2K and the simultaneous meltdown of global ATMs a decade ago when now it’s what is not in the bank’s vaults that seems to be of greater concern.
A lot of things have changed in the last 10 years — especially economic connectivity — but at the same time, human conflict is no less prolific than a decade, a century or even a millennium ago. 

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Trendspotting: The Footprints of David Parrish

Carter

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Trendspotting: Protective Exclusions

Carter

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