TED Community » Claudette Cohen

More About Me

I'm passionate about

helping Iraq/Afghanistan veterans establish a sustainable way of life.

An idea worth spreading

The Joie de Vivre Independence Project is working to establish self-sustaining colonies of veterans interested in finding workable ways to live. In JVIP, a rotating roster of green building experts, artisans, and other teachers will help a core group of Marines build the first colony.

Talk to me about

sustainable living, art, music, permaculture, self-sustaining housing, ecological living, military suicide, homeless veterans, community building, dignity, independence, green building, home gardening

My TED Story

At ECU's Arts Leadership Conference last summer, Emil Kang, Executive Director for the Arts at UNC-Chapel Hill, talked very animatedly about this wonderful Web experience called TED Talks. When I got home I looked into it and have been watching ever since.

Comments

• TEDCred score: +3.10 TEDCred reflects your contribution to the TED community.

• A comment on Talk: Dan Pallotta: The way we think about charity is dead wrong

  Mar 15 2013: My favorite part of this talk was the charitable giving pie chart that pitted the 20% going to Health and Human Services against the 80% going to Religion, Hospitals, and Higher Education, which serve, I'm sorry, what species again?

• A comment on Conversation: What makes us human?

  Feb 1 2012: Ask Robert Sapolsky: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/robert_sapolsky_the_uniqueness_of_humans.html
• +1

  A comment on Conversation: Has language limited our capacity of thought?

  Jan 31 2012: Language is a hacksaw dealt on the ocean of experience.
  
  If it enlightens, it also enshrouds. If it clarifies, it also obscures. It is a tool of oppression as much as it is an agent of liberation. It is a loom and the bluntest pair of shears. If we have a heavily dichotomous language, we are more likely to fall prey to dichotomous thinking. Language is the beam from whatever brand of socio-historic flashlight we happen to possess, and many of those could stand an overhaul.
  
  Language sends currents of meaning that heavily influence our interpretation of experience. Blindfolded, we will react differently to the smell of a block of cheese depending on whether someone calls it gourmet cheese or an old pair of socks.
  
  Even so, language can never be the thing itself. The best you can do with language is keep asking for definitions. For example, what do you mean by "language"? Thomas Sebeok observes, "Any form of energy propagation can be utilized for communication. Therefore, visual and auditory signaling do not exhaustively characterize the devices at the disposal of living things, for these include tactile, thermal, and electric physical patterns as well" ("On Chemical Signs"). More poetically, Rachel Carson, speaks of phosphorescent plankton as "lights that flash and fade away, lights that come and go for reasons meaningless to man, lights that have been doing this very thing over the eons of time in which there were no men to stir in vague disquiet."
  
  Moreover, what do you mean by "thought"? Are insights gained through language the most valuable of all insights? In contrast to any traditional Anglo-European/Judeo-Christian anthropic hegemony, "the more abstractionist and less intellectually vain Indian sees human intelligence as rising out of the very nature of being, which is of necessity intelligent in and of itself, as an attribute of being" (Paula Gunn Allen).
  
  In the words of Lao Tzu, "Nature is not human-hearted. The sage is not human-hearted."

• A comment on Conversation: Can playground equipment be rigged up to generators/ dynamos to harvest energy that a school could then use?

  Jan 23 2012: Wow, what a great idea! That would be SO cool. You know, I think I'll build it into some plans I'm already working up. Thanks!

• A comment on Conversation: How do we promote free open access to knowledge arising out of quality peer-review published research?

  Jan 23 2012: "I think we/they need to look at alternative funding models." --I agree, and I would love to see what these look like..

• A comment on Conversation: How do we promote free open access to knowledge arising out of quality peer-review published research?

  Jan 23 2012: Well, I'll be honest with you, Huw. I was the managing editor for a peer-reviewed scientific journal. It took months of work to put out something worthy to be published. So I can clearly see the arguments on requiring some sort of compensation somehow for what it takes to be a gatekeeper and producer of a professional publication. Coordinating a peer review is no picnic; nor is putting all the material together into a coherent, impeccable, and impressive whole. Would you expect an editor to do all this while homeless and starving? And at the same time, having been an author for decades, I can also see where the old way of disseminating information is clearly on the way out and publishing is hardly what it used to be. I don't know how EBSCO and JSTOR are surviving. I suppose a reader's rating system that puts the most voted-for material on top can help to make editors unnecessary. Some sites actually enable the author to be paid directly by readers, which is a nice idea, but I've never seen an actual monetary exchange. Still, to a large extent, a good idea is its own promotion. A quick googling shows that open source journals are already coming about (OSJ and DOAJ, for instance). I'm trying also to think of situations where one cannot access research. Universities, colleges, libraries, and NGOs are excellent sources in addition to one's own computer, and if a book or article costs something, one can apply for a research grant. Barring these, a call put in to an expert can save months of poking about. It's a good question, though, and something to ponder.

• A comment on Conversation: How do we promote free open access to knowledge arising out of quality peer-review published research?

  Jan 22 2012: Promote free open access among whom: those who would use it or those who would post it or those who would build it?

• A comment on Conversation: Can playground equipment be rigged up to generators/ dynamos to harvest energy that a school could then use?

  Jan 22 2012: If I owned a gym, I'd have already devised a way to plug into every stairmaster and stationary bike so as not to have a single electric bill and perhaps even to power my entire block.
• +1

  A reply on Conversation: TEDBEDS, a quick easy to assemble shelter using existing supplies to provide disaster relief.

  Jan 21 2012: Indeed, I've already looked and liked, and I am cheering this project on. I've also been handing out hand warmers, rain ponchos, and info-flyers about overflow shelters to those for whom disaster has already struck. The number of homeless grows daily.

• A reply on Conversation: If we were to build a new society from scratch, how can we find the best designs to do so - and what are they?

  Jan 21 2012: Tor, I believe these self-reliant, mutually-dependent coagulations of people figuring out how to live are popping up all over the place. The thing is, it's all quite a messy process and for the dozen that vanished yesterday, two dozen appear today. So trying to capture this general evolution in adopting the modes of operation you specify will be quite a challenge. There is the virtual canvas like this, then there is the agricultural canvas, the urban canvas, the political canvas--systemically, we are undergoing an overhaul of every corner of our lives by people with vision. It's just simply not a single narrative and certainly not a linear one. Nevertheless, it is breath-taking to watch renaissance in the midst of colossal decay.