Word: scaling
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...more than 10 years I have been an agronomist and food-processing technologist in several African countries, India and Indonesia [Oct. 26]. I completely agree that Western countries, development organizations and the Food and Agriculture Organization have neglected small-scale farming in the developing world, destroying rural economies under a growing population (thanks to health programs, better drinking water, etc., where so much of the money went). This is the single most important reason why 50 years of development aid did not work in Africa. But the agricultural policy, the food-aid policy and the trade barriers of the European...
Giving small farmers seeds, dams and ploughs allows them to improve their lot enough to raise more children, extending the poverty base for yet more generations. India and similar countries face more agricultural crises as family land divisions become ridiculously small. The solution is large-scale, privately owned farming corporations that are legally bound to provide housing, medical, pension and educational facilities for all employees and their families. This lifts the agricultural peasantry into the middle class where they produce fewer, better educated children; it allows larger profits which results in better R&D and farming methods, better forecasting...
...trade system). It's packed with scientific data explained in painstaking detail--including a full-page graphic on how a wind turbine works--but it reads like a homework assignment. Gore's excellent lessons--why biofuel isn't as environmentally friendly as you'd think; why large-scale, sustainable changes won't occur until financial markets take climate costs into account--are presented as tedious lectures. As with flossing every day or eating healthier foods, Americans should make an effort to understand and solve the climate crisis. But a whole chapter about wind turbines? Maybe we'll just wait...
...acknowledgment by students, professors, and the media. This may be because the obvious solution—grade deflation—is both unpalatable and difficult to implement. Instead, a more positive way to combat grade inflation and reward students for exemplary academic work would be to raise the grading scale to include A-pluses...
...glut of As and A-minuses currently awarded by the college is not that they make students’ GPAs too high, but that they make their GPAs too similar. Grades lose meaning when everyone gets the same ones, whether they are As or Cs. Extending the GPA scale higher to 4.3 would differentiate grades a substantial amount and accomplish much of what grade deflation would...