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Paul Farmer introduced the second week of the January Series with a talk entitled " Pathologies of Power: Rethinking Health and Human Rights in the Global Era". Farmer works with Partners In Health seeking “to provide a preferential option for the poor in health care”. His primary work has been in Haiti and many of his examples were drawn from the successful community health programmes his team has initiated there, but also peppered with anecdotes from extensive travelling exploring the multi-faceted issues of healthcare. ...

A few months back I registered for the Technorati Developers’ Contest with a vague idea of a tool to help people track blog conversations about bills currently before various legislative bodies. I never got myself organised enough to build anything, but it seems other people had similar ideas. They actually got as far as refining those ideas and implementing them rather effectively. Check out the winners here (contrary to some expectations, I suspect this will be of interest to at least a few non-techies). ...

With all the changes that 2004 brought I didn’t get to nearly as many new records as I usually would, and I’m still trying to catch up so this list is very much in flux. But then, I’ve never written such a list without a disclaimer of some sort… This list is in a rough order, but not a fixed one. It also does not contain Julie Lee’s Stillhouse Road purely because I listened to it so much in 2003. For a more accurate picture of what I’ve actually been listening to this year, there’s audioscrobbler. ...

Via Jeremy Zawodny’s linkblog I discovered this piece at arstechnica reporting that CNN has cancelled Crossfire, the ‘debate’ show that Jon Stewart very publicly dissed a couple of months back. Of particular note are these comments from Jonathan Klein, new President of CNN: Mr. Klein specifically cited the criticism that the comedian Jon Stewart leveled at “Crossfire” when he was a guest on the program during the presidential campaign. Mr. Stewart said that ranting partisan political shows on cable were “hurting America.” Mr. Klein said last night, “I agree wholeheartedly with Jon Stewart’s overall premise.” He said he believed that especially after the terror attacks on 9/11, viewers are interested in information, not opinion. ...

Salon is one of a number of outlets that has discussed the imminent departure of James Wolfensohn from his position as President of the World Bank. I had often wondered why the Bank always had USian presidents, but the article explains that: The United States is the bank’s largest shareholder. The bank traditionally has had an American president. Its sister institution, the International Monetary Fund, traditionally has been headed by a European. ...

The introduction for Kathleen DeBoer at today’s January Series lecture ( Gender & Competition: How Men & Women Approach Work & Play Differently) had me a little worried. Before working in local government, Ms. DeBoer had a relatively high-profile career in the world of sports and the thought of sitting for an hour hearing tales from the field left this non-sportsman a little concerned. But while there were many, many stories from that world, she is a dynamic enough speaker and grounded enough to spin a presentation that I could identify with. ...

Alan Wolfe was the speaker for the second in the January Series at Calvin, discussing the topic of “American Greatness.” Starting off with some well placed comments on the disgraceful response that followed Jan Egeland’s criticism of western countries’ ‘stinginess’, Wolfe aptly built his thesis that more fundamental than the liberal/conservative divide within American politics is that between those who are focussed on America as ‘good’ and those who think the nation should strive for ‘greatness.’ ...

It’s been a long time since I last heard Vladimir Putin described as ‘a liberal’, yet that was the label Vsevolod A Marinov put on him during his inaugural lecture in Calvin’s January Series: “Russia In Search of Democracy”. Marinov set out to make a case for democracy and then to map the state of democracy’s development in Russia. He was an engaging speaker who’s clearly thought in detail about his subject. Unfortunately, his talk left me feeling rather uncomfortable more than once. ...

As if to ensure his own entry after I linked to other friends’ new blogs yesterday, Graeme has just posted his second entry at Everything In Its Right Place, making a customarily interesting observation on how silences are observed at times of tragedy.

A few links I meant to blog over the Christmas period, but didn’t quite get to: Two more friends, Paul Northup and Jim Stewart (aka the Fat Controller, not a close relative) have started blogging. Fred over at Slacktivist points out why there’s more to fear from the Left Behind phenomenon than simply bad literature, and on a much lighter note larknews lampoon the mega-church trend, by suggesting more people are commuting to church — by airplane ...