Owen Coyle, a friend of over thirty years duration, passed away a week ago and the time since has been filled with memories of political collaborations and stories shared about our other adventures. The collaborations started with sharing the same office at the...
The Opinion section of CNN's website has just published a short piece, How to Keep Wall Street Under Control, by IF Fellows Adolf Gundersen and Jeff Prudhomme, with editorial and other assistance from IF Fellow Natalie Hopkinson. You can read the full article by...
Praising partisanship might seem like a strange thing to do—at least for a non-partisan organization like the Interactivity Foundation. In the discussions we facilitate, whether in our “Discussion Projects” or our ensuing “Public Discussions,” we don’t seek to...
A policy dust-up was in the news recently in the form of Congressional action to end the US military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” stance on gays and lesbians serving in the armed forces. Opponents of ending current discriminatory policies have been making much of the...
A recent NOVA episode (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/money/) pits the rational actor theorists within the discipline of Economics against the behaviorists. As a sociologist, I've always been more partial to the behaviorists' approaches (like Gladwell and the ...
One of the things that a discussion can sometimes do is to help us to see ourselves from the outside. This happened at a recent citizen panel meeting that I facilitated on ‘What are some of the different dimensions of democracy?’ My panelists had mentioned most of...
Earlier last year, I came across a striking passage in a book on how computer “games” should be re-shaping education. One needn’t be familiar with the specifics of the game mentioned in the passage’s first sentence to follow the author’s thinking. However, it is...