great news from Tremont

Plain Press: The Community Newspaper Serving Cleveland's West Side Neighborhoods -- great article here about Sammy Catania providing new leadership at the Tremont nonprofit, news about reinvolving the neighbors, expanding wi-fi using local contractors, security cameras to enhance safety, branding with a logo that sounds attractive and cool, fostering transparency and communication, building out the community, strengthening the networks already there. This bears watching, perhaps emulating.

alternative investments and a moral imperative

For Yale’s Money Man, a Higher Calling - New York Times -- Here's a good read about a guy who revolutionized portfolio management in general by looking beyond the traditional mix of stocks and bonds, making Yale's endowment the standard against which all others are measured. The article also gives you a glimpse of the philosophy behind Yale, and an idea of why so many Yale graduates focus on quality of life issues and wind up in positions of public service. Around here, a cataloguing of Yalies who serve includes the Morrison brothers, Ed and Hunter; David Pogue; Sherrod Brown; and Oliver "Pudge" Henkel. On a national level, we have Garry Trudeau and Sir John Templeton, William F. Buckley and Bill Clinton, George Pataki, and the current president and his most recent competitor. It seems to be an interesting school, and Mr. Swenson has made it possible for everybody who qualifies to receive an education there. It's a long article, but take time to read the whole thing. Here's the section on the move to alternative investments:

Yale has every reason to want him to stay. After joining the university’s investment office when he was just 31, Mr. Swensen moved Yale’s portfolio away from a strict menu of stocks and bonds, favoring instead more diverse instruments like hedge funds, commodities like oil and timber, and private company investments.

That strategy revolutionized endowment investing, and other schools have followed suit. Mr. Swensen’s track record and his growing cachet have helped Yale attract donors who believe that their gifts to the university will be well deployed. Although his two books, “Pioneering Portfolio Management” and the more recent “Unconventional Success,” have helped raise his profile as an investment guru, he remains ambivalent about promoting himself. He notes that there are thousands of university professors who have also forgone more lucrative careers to put their skills to work in the academic world.

noosphere vs. cyberspace

Noosphere - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia--I'd noticed in grazing through Chris Corrigan's material that he has a fondness for the term "noosphere," as did Teilhard de Chardin. The wikipedia entry is a good place to start on a refresher, or an introduction, as the case may be. I find it comforting to find people who have similar ideas on their back burners.

The noosphere can be seen as the "sphere of human thought" being derived from the Greek νους ("nous") meaning "mind" in the style of "atmosphere" and "biosphere". In the original theory of Vernadsky, the noosphere is the third in a succession of phases of development of the Earth, after the geosphere (inanimate matter) and the biosphere (biological life). Just as the emergence of life fundamentally transformed the geosphere, the emergence of human cognition fundamentally transforms the biosphere. In contrast to the conceptions of the Gaia theorists, or the promoters of cyberspace, Vernadsky's noosphere emerges at the point where humankind, through the mastery of nuclear processes, begins to create resources through the transmutation of elements.
The word is also sometimes used to refer to a transhuman consciousness emerging from the interactions of human minds. This is the view proposed by the theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who added that the noosphere is evolving towards an ever greater integration, culminating in the Omega Point—which he saw as the ultimate goal of history. The noosphere concept of 'unification' was elaborated in popular science fiction by Julian May in the Galactic Milieu Series. (more)