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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:
http://wannaresolution.blogspot.com
http://blogs.appropedia.org/tag/curts-posts/


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]]


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[edit | edit source]

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)
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