Robert W. "Doc" Hall
Author Archives
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Call of The Reed Warbler: A New Agriculture, A New Earth by Charles Massy
Call of The Reed Warbler: A New Agriculture, A New Earth by Charles Massy Review by Don Stewart Massy is an Australian farmer who earned a mid-life PhD in Human Ecology. In the course of doing the research for his dissertation, he met and studied the methods used by many “regenerative’ farmers,” mostly in Australia, and […]
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Deep Change
Deep Change (video 4 minutes) Deep Diving into Deep Everything “Deep” describes change so complete that we lose our reference points to the past, and struggle to understand. We may have to dredge up unarticulated assumptions about how the world works, and we can’t question beliefs so deep that we were unaware of them. The […]
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Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again, by Eric Topol
Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again, by Eric Topol Eric Topol hit the news big time in 2004 as the chief whistleblower questioning the validity of research that led the FDA to approve the Merck drug, Vioxx. Amid scandal, Merck withdrew Vioxx and paid a big fine. The New York Timesinvestigated Topol’s […]
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Big Other
Big Other (video 5 minutes) Big Other by Robert W. “Doc” Hall During the first few hundred years of industrial expansion, mankind profited by learning to control nature. During the last 20 years or so, we have learned to profit big time by controlling – or manipulating – human nature. Let’s call this new phenomenon […]
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The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for the Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for the Future at the New Frontier of Power, by Shoshana Zuboff Shoshana Zuboff is Professor Emerita from Harvard Business School. Her research career began by studying the history of work, and she gradually focused on how the digital world was changing the work world. It’s a long […]
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Can We Learn to Think Like Nature?
Nature’s Business (6 minute video) Can We Learn to Think Like Nature? Industrial societies can’t keep living the way they do now because their systems make the environment unnatural. Climate change draws the most attention, but were the climate not changing, many other problems, some poorly understood, might be just as perilous. An example is […]
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The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra
The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra Fritjof Capra is well known for scientifically proposing that the universe, including humans, is a complex web of relationships, and for examining the concept of universal unity in religious beliefs, especially Buddhism. Originally written in 1975, The Tao of Physics is the classic book about the integration of everything. This […]
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Compression as Symbiosis
(24 minute video and article) From Compression to Symbiosis. By Doc Hall. Evolution is geological as well as biological. Predictions of geologic evolution are that life on Earth will continue in some form for perhaps 600 million more years. Whether human life will continue to evolve that long is doubtful, but working with nature instead […]
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Unsavory Truth, by Marion Nestle
Commercial Thinking vs. Scientific Thinking Unsavory Truth, by Marion Nestle Except for political propaganda, hardly any field is more laden with misleading BS than nutrition. It comes from purveyors of food all wanting to sell their products. Those most influential are big food corporations. They can and do influence nutrition research. Marion Nestlé (no relation to […]
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A Rough Ride to the Future, by James Lovelock
Background for Environmental Symbiosis A Rough Ride to the Future, by James Lovelock This book is a fun read by a scientific maverick, written at age 95. He’s now 99, still going strong. A prolific scientist and inventor, Lovelock is best known for two things: 1) inventing the electron capture detector, which detects particles in […]
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To Deal With Big Stuff, Sweat the Small Stuff
Biomes (6 minute video) The Complexity of the ‘Omes’ [or To Deal With Big Stuff, Sweat the Small Stuff] How do we deal with complexity? Surveying the omes reveals microbiological research communities struggling to pull together, much like those of us concerned with the complexity of the macro environment that we can see. The masses of […]
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Environmental Chemicals, the Human Microbiome, and Health Risk: A Research Strategy
Environmental Chemicals, the Human Microbiome, and Health Risk: A Research Strategy, by the National Academies of Sciences This report is a short book in length, but a slow read if like me, you do not have extensive background in microbiome research. Absorbing a minimum of terminology used in the field is necessary to follow it, […]
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Learning Groups – Join Our Teleconference Series on Mondays
Learning Groups Teleconference Series on Mondays 8 pm Eastern Standard Time; dial 203-408-3665; that’s it! We started a teleconference series on Mondays. Each call-in starts at 8 pm Eastern Standard Time, and lasts one hour. To join all you have to do is dial 203-408-3665. We’ll have one every Monday evening at 8 pm EST […]
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The Greatest Compression
The Greatest Compression (Video 5 minutes) The Greatest Compression Economists occasionally use the phrase, “The Great Compression” to describe the leveling of income inequality during the period 1914-1950. That covers the World Wars, the great depression of the 1930s, and the effects of Communist revolutions. A historian that summarizes this in remarkable detail is Walter […]
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The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century, by Walter Scheidel
The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century, by Walter Scheidel In this book, Walter Scheidel displays an overwhelming grasp of history, his field of study. His conclusion is that wealth, income, and status inequalities have always been with us, and they won’t go away because […]
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Learning Groups
Learning Groups Teleconference Series Beginning Monday, Nov. 19, 2018 8 pm Eastern Standard Time; dial 203-408-3665; that’s it! We are starting a teleconference series. The first one will be Monday, November 19, 2018, starting at 8 pm Eastern Standard Time, lasting one hour. To join all you have to do is dial 203-408-3665 at that hour. […]
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Unforeseen, Unintended Consequences
Untold Stories of Diapers (Video 8 minutes) Disposable Diapers Deep in Doo-Doo Disposable diapers are one of the hardest items to recycle. Almost all go to landfill. How did we wind up in this mess? How It Began In the summer of 1961, I was a young junior engineer for Union Carbide Polymers Division. Proctor […]
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After the Education Wars: How Smart Schools Upend the Business of Reform, by Andrea Gabor
Schools Done the W. Edwards Deming Way? After the Education Wars: How Smart Schools Upend the Business of Reform, by Andrea Gabor Andrea Gabor is the Bloomberg chair of business journalism at the Baruch School, CUNY. Having published in The Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Business Week, and The New York Times, she is well grounded […]
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What Box Are You In?
Or What’s Objectivity in Journalism, Science, and Life? The ending of Propaganda Blitz, reviewed previously, digs deep into objectivity in journalism. What is it? To answer this question, the authors, David Edwards and David Cromwell, cite ancient philosophers, mainly Oriental ones. They conclude that commercially funded journalism is trapped in the box of business rationality. […]
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Imagining the Unimaginable
Tribe of the Whole (7 minute video) Or, Toward a Better Learning Civilization Imagine transforming into something very different, like a werewolf. That we can imagine. Now, imagine living very differently in a completely changed world. That’s more complex. Every detail of life changes. We can only imagine them from analogies to our past. The […]
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Propaganda Blitz: How the Corporate Media Distort Reality, by David Edwards and David Cromwell
Fuzz: Implying by Not Talking Propaganda Blitz: How the Corporate Media Distort Reality, by David Edwards and David Cromwell Neither Edwards nor Cromwell are practicing journalists. One was a teacher, the other a scientist. Perhaps that qualifies them to be objective media critics. That’s what they do through a British website called Media Lens that I’d […]
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Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, by Anand Giriharadas
Keeping Up Appearances Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, by Anand Giriharadas This new book is stirring a mini-storm in the world of non-profits, provoked by a guy who has inhabited the institutions he criticizes, Anand Giriharadas. He refers to business thinking as a pattern of logic of business he calls […]
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The Predicament of Mankind: Searching for Causality
Predicament of Mankind (Video 7 minutes) The Predicament of Mankind: Searching for Causality by Doc Hall Many more issues threaten the environment than climate change, although that one exacerbates all others, and it dominates environmental reporting. The enormity of the social upheaval to mitigate these threats boggles the mind, and imagining Armageddon is depressing. Most […]
