USC helping preserve Atayal tribal language in Taiwan

Cool program sending university students and faculty to the rural mountain regions of Taiwan to help learn and preserve an endangered language Atayal. Part of USC's Problems Without Passports program.

Taiwan is a super-dense island country yet still has major rural areas in its mountainous interior with tribes.

Saving an Endangered Language - USC Dornsife
https://dornsife.usc.edu/news/stories/1219/saving-an-endangered-language/

Pennsylvania natural gas is #3--in the world

Heard on the news this morning that if Pennsylvania was a country it would be the #3 gas producer in the world. This map shows the gas is all in the western part of the state which lies in the Appalachians, stretching out from Pittsburgh. This is the Marcellus Shale region, which is by far the largest natural gas producing region in the US and one of the top five natural gas fields in the world.

Notice on this map below of US natural gas pipelines that there is a major cluster in western Pennsylvania along with its neighbor West Virginia.

What's up at the poles

This video discusses both myths and recommendations for the polar regions.

Laurence Smith is also author of The World in 2050 an excellent book which I used a few years ago in a class I made up called Geography of the Future.

Laurence Smith at the Arctic Circle 2014 Conference
https://vimeo.com/111328012

Big time

Occured to me in the car: add up

Big Energy (oil, gas, coal)
Big Ag (Monsanta, Cargill, etc.)
Big Pharma (Pfizer, Roche, etc.)
Big Auto (GM, Ford)    +
= what % of our economy?

Also add Big Telecom (Verizon, Sprint, etc.), Big Food (Nabisco, Nestle) and Big Ed--the massive education industry in which most of the money goes to administrators, not to teachers.

But a lesson from Seth Godin: if you want to compete as a small guy entrepreneur, there's room if you do something the big guys don't/can't. Ex.:

-be a middleman for some smaller-market product like import/export
-set up in smaller market where the big guys don't go
-provide a customized product or service beyond what the cookie-cutter world of mass production can

Japan in Cambodia

Japan is investing in high quality infrastructure in Cambodia. Amid the rush to modernize in Asia, quality is often left by the wayside, with long term consequences. The video mentions that Japanese projects are sometimes thought of as "slow" but they do quality work.

Infrastructure Funding Puts Cambodia on Front Line of Global Politics
http://www.voanews.com/a/infrastructure-funding-puts-cambodia-on-front-line-of-international-politics/3338556.html