Why Fukushima made me stop worrying and love nuclear power
Exerpt:
- A crappy old plant with inadequate safety features was hit by a monster earthquake and a vast tsunami. The electricity supply failed, knocking out the cooling system. The reactors began to explode and melt down. The disaster exposed a familiar legacy of poor design and corner-cutting. Yet, as far as we know, no one has yet received a lethal dose of radiation.
- Some greens have wildly exaggerated the dangers of radioactive pollution. For a clearer view, look at the graphic published by xkcd.com. It shows that the average total dose from the Three Mile Island disaster for someone living within 10 miles of the plant was one 625th of the maximum yearly amount permitted for US radiation workers. This, in turn, is half of the lowest one-year dose clearly linked to an increased cancer risk, which, in its turn, is one 80th of an invariably fatal exposure. I'm not proposing complacency here. I am proposing perspective.
There are some things that money simply can't buy and influence on high can't arrange, because people get in the way. You know, people. As in democracy? As in the Internet? As in bloggers, for example. — Pamela Jones on the subject of Microsoft opposing the open document standard OpenDocument.
Welcome to my Wikipedia page. My nick in the #Wikipedia channel is either ShaunMacPherson or Synonymous in case you wanted to know :). I have been a member of Wikipedia since January, 2004. Some describe me as an inclusionist although I dislike (being imprisoned by) labels.
My background: I am a 2003 cum laude graduate from Laurentian University with an honours Bachelor of Arts in economics / psychology. I have ~50% more courses in economics than psychology so one could possibly say I have a major in economics.
I like science fiction, organizing data, video and computer games, reading books, and reading online articles, news, columns, blogs and reports.
I've contributed large lists of information for List of SNES games and List of video game music. I am especially good at collecting and manuplating spreadsheet information, and then converting it into Wiki format.
I was on the List of Wikipedians by number of edits and was sliding down due to having limited internet access. However now I do :).
Resources a
Online research, journals, academic periodicals, and sourcebooks[edit]Some of the links below are helpful for finding references online. I'm also listing some journals found in JSTOR in particular that come with the benefit of free access.
Research
- JSTOR online archives "Established in August 1995, JSTOR is an independent not-for-profit organization created with the assistance of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in information technology. In pursuing this mission, JSTOR has adopted a system-wide perspective, taking into account the sometimes conflicting needs of scholars, libraries and publishers." 1
- Lexis-Nexis
- Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (free access for general social survey and national election survey)
- Paul Hensel's International Relations Data Site
- United Nations Human Development Report Office
- World Values Survey ("The World Values Survey is a worldwide investigation of sociocultural and political change. It has carried out representative national surveys of the basic values and beliefs of publics in more than 65 societies on all six inhabited continents, containing almost 80 percent of the world's population." 1)
- Eldis Country profiles (focus on information related to development)
- Eurostat (Statistics on European Union countries)
- OECD (Economic, social, and infrastructure data on industrialized countries)
- UNICEF
- World Bank (World Development Indicators database)
- International Monetary Fund (IMF research and links to World Economic Outlook)
- UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) FAOSTAT International data on food production, land use, nutrition.
- UN World Health Organization Statistical Information System (WHOSIS) "The WHO Statistical Information System is the guide to health and health-related epidemiological and statistical information available from the World Health Organization." 2
- UNDP World Income Inequality Database
- UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs Population Division (World population data and trends)
- The Association for History and Computing "an organisation dedicated to the use of computers in historical research 3
- EuroDocs: Primary Historical Documents From Western Europe
- THE INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY World Wide Web site
- History of Economics Internet References
- NON-WESTERN SOURCES ON CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL ISSUES from the Political Science Department and the Bartle Library Collaboratory at Binghamton University "The purpose of this continuously developing web page is to allow Americans to see how people who live in non -Western, or less industrialized societies view a variety of contemporary political issues. It was constructed to meet the teaching and research needs of political science. We believe that it will also be useful for students and teachers in other disciplines." 4
- Library of Congress Handbook of Latin American Studies
Sourcebooks, encyclopedias, and archives
Academic journals and periodicals
- Foreign Policy (a leading quarterly of international affairs)
- Foreign Affairs (published by the Council on Foreign Relations)
- Journal of Democracy (free access)
- Web page of The Economist
- Social Forces "Social Forces is a journal of social research highlighting sociological inquiry but also exploring realms shared with social psychology, anthropology, political science, history, and economics. The journal's intended academic readers include sociologists, social psychologists, criminologists, economists, political scientists, anthropologists, and students of urban studies, race/ethnic relations, and religious studies." 2
- Comparative Studies in Society and History "Comparative Studies in Society and History" is an international forum for new research and interpretation concerning problems of recurrent patterning and change in human societies through time and the contemporary world." 3
- FERNAND BRAUDEL CENTER for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, and Civilizations
- Review, A Journal of the Fernand Braudel Center
- World-Systems Archive
- Journal of World-Systems Research (free access)
- New Left Review (see "A BRIEF HISTORY OF NEW LEFT REVIEW")
- Monthly Review (free access)
- American Sociological Association Marxist Section
- The Socialist Register
- Review ofRadical Political Economics "The Review of Radical Political Economics (RRPE) publishes articles onradical political economic theory and applied analysis from a wide variety of theoreticaltraditions: Marxist, institutionalist, post Keynesian, and feminist. RRPE is published by Sage Publications." 4
Policy think-tanks, advocacy, other
Thanks to User:172 for this list.
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Inside joke: I am starting to use this inside joke more around Wikipedia so I will uninside it. Since I do not spell that great sometimes, I've accussed people of following me around fixing my articles and spelling, and I call them my posse, or the mob :).