"Naval Captain Porter and Col. Mykleby of the Marines, military strategists working at the highest level of government, present highlights from their paper, “A National Strategic Narrative.” Their ideas—less military force, more social capital and more sustainable practices in energy and agriculture—have caused a recent stir in policy communities."

[See also: http://poptech.org/popcasts/a_grand_strategy_for_the_nation ]

"I then realized that the educational process happens not just inside the school walls, but in three different places: school, family and community.<br />
<br />
When I came back to São Paulo - a chaotic metropolitan area with 20 million people - I decided to do an experiment using this knowledge. The city was going through its worst period of violence and degradation. In my neighborhood, Vila Madalena, we developed the learning-neighborhood project in cooperation with a group of communicators, psychologists and educators. The core idea was to map the community's resources: theater, schools, cultural centers, companies, parks, etc. We created a network and trained the community to take advantage of all these assets, turning them into social capital. With this model, the school is trained to function as a hub, connecting itself to the neighborhood, and then, to the city."

"Intensive, early interventions, by contrast, genuinely seem to work. They aren't cheap, and they aren't easy. And they don't necessarily boost IQ scores or get kids into Harvard. But they produce children who learn better, develop critical life skills, have fewer problems in childhood and adolescence, commit fewer crimes, earn more money, and just generally live happier, stabler, more productive lives. If we spent $50 billion less on K-12 education—in both public and private money—and instead spent $50 billion more on early intervention programs, we'd almost certainly get a way bigger bang for the buck.

Maybe somebody ought to make a documentary about that."

"Social isolation can be as harmful to your health as smoking or a sedentary lifestyle. A large part of this effect is driven by the subjective sense of social isolation we call loneliness. New research shows that human beings are simply far more intertwined and interdependent—physiologically as well as psychologically—than our cultural prejudices have allowed us to acknowledge. “If you want to go fast,” says an African proverb, “go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”"

"now feels natural to incorporate our friends into photo management, encyclopaedias & tracking our finances...social software are part of everyday Web design discourse. But it’s important to remember that for 10 years the Web was not a naturally social space, where conversations & creativity could flourish...and for many, now, it’s still not. That we’re prepared to give away our rights & privacy in exchange for leaving comments or joining a chat system in a game tells me that we’re still starved for social connection online. The fact that our hobbies are social again is great. Flickr builds social capital, Twitter builds social capital. The fact that are hobbies are social again is important. Social means showing off & sharing, & politeness & play. But social also means healthier, wealthier & happier & that’s a big, big deal. I believe that’s why social matters."

"article evaluates cosmopolitan theory by exploring how parents perceive cosmopolitanism. Interviews with parents whose children attend an internationalized form of education revealed that parents viewed cosmopolitanism as a form of cultural and social capital, rather than feelings of global connectedness or curiosity in the Other. Dedicated cosmopolitan parents were distinguished from pragmatic cosmopolitans.The former taught their children to explore the world and to take a global perspective on their course of life, while the latter thought that globalizing processes required cosmopolitan competencies. Analyses of survey data showed that parents' inclination to provide children w/ cosmopolitan capital was related to their own cosmopolitan capital & their level of ambitions, but not to their social class position. The article concludes that cosmopolitanism should be viewed as an expression of agency, which is acted out when people are forced to deal with processes of globalization."