Neophyte Humanitarian
(Note to self: URL decoration to temporarily change language preference: uselang=xx.)
- I am an admin here at Appropedia, and one of the founding directors.
- I am also on the board of Village Hope, which works in Sierra Leone.
- I am also on the board of LeapingStone, which is working in Togo.
- I twitter / dent at neophytehuman
- Please help out Village Hope (and others!) by improving this proto-article which I started: Expanding peanut production in West Africa. (Thanks. :-) )
Leave me a note on my talk page!
Personal:
- Married with kids
- Live in Los Gatos, CA
Contact:
- blogs:
- Twitter: http://twitter.com/neophytehuman
- email: Click "E-mail this user" in the toolbox at left
Day job:
- Product architecture / engineering management
Schooling:
- BS Physics with Math minor, CSU Fullerton, 1991 (or was it 1990?)
- MBA, Santa Clara University, 1999
Experience in Appropriate Technology:
- Only on the web... You're all miles ahead of me! Working on Appropedia provides me a way to chip in without leaving the country, but the third world is where I really want to make a difference. I think there are a million people like me in that respect, and one of the barriers for us is the difficulty in finding information. See my blog for more discussion of all this.
- I am a recent member of EWB-SFP. (That's Engineers Without Borders, San Francisco Professionals chapter.) The first meeting I showed up for was a fundraising committee meeting, so I'm kind of a member. That's fine, actually; I'm not in a position to travel or contribute much expertise yet, so fundraising is a way to help out. I'm also going to work with them to publish some content that is currently on their internal Twiki onto Appropedia.
Porting Help:
- I'm a "registered Porting Helper". If you've got content, I'm willing to help port it to Appropedia. Send me an email (see toolbox at left), or click on discussion above.
- If you would like to "register" as a Porting Helper, copy/paste the following at the bottom of your user page:
- [[Category:Porting helper]]
- If you would like to "register" as a Porting Helper, copy/paste the following at the bottom of your user page:
Conviction:
- Humanity is on a treacherous path. It's up to us to make the difference!
- See User:Curtbeckmann/Mission, where I'm working on my answers to the Appropedia Mission questions.
Favorite books
In no particular order (I'll add these to the book reviews over time):
- Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely
- A Billion Bootstraps, Phil Smith and Eric Thurman
- True Enough, Farhad Manjoo
- The Post American World, Fareed Zakaria
- Deep Economy, Bill McKibben
- Collapse, Jared Diamond
- Nonzero, Robert Wright
- The Mystery of Capital, Hernando de Soto
- The End of Poverty, Jeffrey Sachs
- Globalization and Its Discontents, Joseph Stiglitz
- Mountains Beyond Mountains, Tracy Kidder (interesting "dig" at Appropriate Technology in there)
- Confessions of an Economic Hitman, John Perkins
- Banker to the Poor, Muhammad Yunus
- The Elusive Quest for Growth, William Easterly
- The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver
- Confucius Lives Next Door, TR Reid
- A Fortune Teller Told Me, Tiziano Terzani
- All the Harry Potter series (by You-Know-Who, escapism, helps enable imagining something different)
On my list:
- The Foundation, Joel Fleishman
- The Blue Sweater, Jacqueline Novogratz
- Development as Freedom, Amartya Sen
- Numerous books on peace (halfway through about 6 books)