Mother Earth News Looking For Editor-In-Chief

15 years after resurrecting and refining Mother Earth News, Cheryl Long is retiring, and they are looking for a new editor-in-chief, as follows:

"Topeka, Kansas-based Ogden Publications is looking for an experienced professional with passion for, and knowledge of, all things sustainable to lead its flagship media brand, Mother Earth News into the future. Ideally this person will have first-hand experience as a sustainable lifestyle community member as well as an impeccable record of innovation and leadership in the publishing business - or other closely related media area. But don't let us define you too narrowly. If you have related experiences and the drive to lead a highly collaborative team devoted to creating and delivering the best, most relevant sustainable lifestyle content possible, we'd like to hear from you.

Mother Earth News is the most popular and longest-running sustainable-lifestyle brand, and provides wide-ranging, expert editorial coverage of organic gardening, organic foods, country living, homesteading, green transportation, renewable energy, natural health and green building. Lively, insightful and on the cutting edge, Mother Earth News is the definitive source for the growing number of Americans who choose wisely and live well. The brand encompasses print and digital content products, several websites and events. Its Facebook page boasts nearly 2.25 million highly engaged community members and the discussion is lively.

Ogden Publications Inc. is the leading information resource serving the sustainable living, rural lifestyle, farm memorabilia and classic motorcycle communities. Key brands include Mother Earth News, Mother Earth Living, Utne Reader and Grit. Ogden Publications also provides insurance and financial services through its Capper's Insurance Service division.

If you envision your future with a growing media company as the leader of Mother Earth News, please forward a resume (up to 2 pages maximum), a critique of the magazine and website,  and a letter of interest that describes why you should take the brand into the future (word document or .pdf preferred) to our editorial director, Hank Will -- hwill@ogdenpubs.com."

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Posted by Sexy Girls 21+ in animals, farming, food, gardening, homesteading, media, small homes, the earth

Mother Earth News Looking For Editor-In-Chief

Superforecasting — Stewart Brand's Summary of SALT Talk by Philip Tetlock

Will Syria’s President Assad still be in power at the end of next year?  Will Russia and China hold joint naval exercises in the Mediterranean in the next six months?  Will the Oil Volatility Index fall below 25 in 2016?  Will the Arctic sea ice mass be lower next summer than it was last summer?

Five hundred such questions of geopolitical import were posed in tournament mode to thousands of amateur forecasters by IARPA—the Inatelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity--between 2011 and 2015.  (Tetlock mentioned that senior US intelligence officials opposed the project, but younger-generation staff were able to push it through.)  Extremely careful score was kept, and before long the most adept amateur “superforecasters” were doing 30 percent better than professional intelligence officers with access to classified information.  They were also better than prediction markets and drastically better than famous pundits and politicians, who Tetlock described as engaging in deliberately vague “ideological kabuki dance."


What made the amateurs so powerful was Tetlock’s insistence that they score geopolitical predictions the way meteorologists score weather predictions and then learn how to improve their scores accordingly.  Meteorologists predict in percentages—“there is a 70 percent chance of rain on Thursday.”  It takes time and statistics to find out how good a particular meteorologist is.  If 7 out of 10 such times it in fact rained, the meteorologist gets a high score for calibration (the right percentage) and for resolution (it mostly did rain).  Superforecasters, remarkably, assigned probability estimates of 72-76 percent to things that happened and 24-28 percent to things that didn’t.

How did they do that?  They learned, Tetlock said, to avoid falling for the “gambler’s fallacy”—detecting nonexistent patterns.  They learned objectivity—the aggressive open-mindedness it takes to set aside personal theories of public events.  They learned to not overcompensate for previous mistakes—the way American intelligence professionals overcompensated for the false negative of 9/11 with the false positive of mass weapons in Saddam’s Iraq.  They learned to analyze from the outside in—Assad is a dictator; most dictators stay in office a very long time; consider any current news out of Syria in that light.  And they learned to balance between over-adjustment to new evidence (“This changes everything”) and under-adjustment (“This is just a blip”), and between over-confidence ("100 percent!”) and over-timidity (“Um, 50 percent”).  “You only win a forecasting tournament,” Tetlock said, “by being decisive—justifiably decisive."

Much of the best forecasting came from teams that learned to collaborate adroitly.  Diversity on the teams helped.  One important trick was to give extra weight to the best individual forecasters.  Another was to “extremize” to compensate for the conservatism of aggregate forecasts—if everyone says the chances are around 66 percent, then the real chances are probably higher.

In the Q & A following his talk Tetlock was asked if the US intelligence community would incorporate the lessons of its forecasting tournament.  He said he is cautiously optimistic.  Pressed for a number, he declared, “Ten years from now I would offer the probability of .7 that there will be ten times more numerical probability estimates in national intelligence estimates than there were in 2005.”

Asked about long-term forecasting, he replied, “Here’s my long-term prediction for Long Now.  When the Long Now audience of 2515 looks back on the audience of 2015, their level of contempt for how we go about judging political debate will be roughly comparable to the level of contempt we have for the 1692 Salem witch trials."

—Stewart Brand, Seminars About Long-term Thinking
Tetlock audio and video

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Posted by Sexy Girls 21+ in books, communication, media, politics, the economy

Superforecasting — Stewart Brand's Summary of SALT Talk by Philip Tetlock

Why So Few Blog Posts of Late?

1. Working on Small Homes.
2. Doing the "social media" thing. A lot of effort in these early stages, what with coordinating Instagram, Twitter, et al. Still some rough edges to smooth out. I'm not sure if this will pay off, but we'll give it a try in the next year.

http://www.theshelterblog.com/

Just rebuilt by Rick

https://instagram.com/lloyd.kahn/

Shooting on my new iPhone 6s Plus. What a tool!

http://lloydkahn.com

https://twitter.com/lloydkahn

https://www.facebook.com/Lloyd-Kahn-110048295717073/

Check this out on your phone:

http://shelterpub.tumblr.com/

managed bySean Hellfritsch

And, our new website, also by Sean (Squarespace format):

http://www.shelterpub.com/

3. Riding my new "Overland" from my sponsors, Loaded Boards. Skateboard of my dreams. More on this to follow. http://loadedboards.com/

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Posted by Sexy Girls 21+ in books, media, photography, small homes

Why So Few Blog Posts of Late?

Why I'm a Publisher -- 3 Minute LK Interview By Yuichi Takeuchi

Last April, I was visited by Yuichi Takeuchi, an artist, carpenter and treehouse builder from Japan.

Yuichi said he'd been heavily inspired by our book Shelter. He was making a movie called Simplife and wanted to interview me.

Here's the result, 3 minutes long. In the last part, I say, "I like to tell people what I see going on in the world..." Yeah!

I've had a lot of Japanese people come here -- media, builders, artists, publishers --  in recent years and they've all been wonderful -- kindred spirits of the Pacific Ocean.


Yuichi's website and on Flickr:
http://www.treeheads.com/
https://www.flickr.com/photos/treeheads/sets/

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Posted by Sexy Girls 21+ in builders, carpentry, media, tree houses

Why I'm a Publisher -- 3 Minute LK Interview By Yuichi Takeuchi

We're Up On Tumblr!

The first part of the complete reorganization of our "social media" is now up and running: http://shelterpub.tumblr.com/. To start, we've posted 10 photos from our building books. This was set up by Sean Hellfritsch. Tumblr will be our photography platform.
We have over 7,000 photos in our 6 building books, and I have something like 15,000 photos (film and digital) dating back to the '60s, maybe 1/3rd of them on building(s).
We are currently working on redesign of my blog, the Shelter blog, Twitter and FaceBook pages, Shelter's website, and getting Instagram rolling.
With all this going on, I'm not posting very often these days, but I intend to get rolling with Instagram soon, and coordinate my Instagram photos with this blog.
Stay tuned.

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Posted by Sexy Girls 21+ in media

We're Up On Tumblr!

It's A New Dawn, It's A New Day…

This is the most vital, vibrant time of my life. A lot of things are falling in to place, or about to.

I look around these days, at the garden, or the book production process, or attempts to gather, hunt, or fish for food, or my workshop—and think, this is pretty good. A lot of it a long time in the making.



The book SMALL HOMES continues to unfold before my eyes. I'm in daily touch with, typically 4-5 contributors (as many as 25 emails in some of the folders), getting large enough photo files, editing text, doing pasteup. Not in any special order -- well actually, in the order in which it comes in.

I'm really excited about getting a new iPhone 6 (s Plus) (hoping tyo make my way through the AT&T maze so as not to pay full price -- I have another year to go on my present contract). I think Instagram will be perfect for my daily photos, I may be wrong, but it seems Instagram is replacing blogs -- at least with the millennials. BTW, there's a good article on this age group (11-33-year-olds)by James Wolcott (an excellent writer) in this month's Vanity Fair. I think I can get a journalistic flow going this way, and use blog for the writing impulse-- like here (and link them together).

We're revamping our website (being built in SquareSpace as we speak by Sean Hellfritsch) and it's lookin elegant. By the end of the year, we'll have a completely different looking internet "presence." It's important for us because we have so much"content" -- maybe 15,000 photos, a good portion of these on homes and building. We're also going to redesign theshelterblog and make good on my promise of getting mostly original stuff there, rather than recycled material that's already been posted (much of which, however, is great and worth sharing).We're going to build it, with the hope they will come.

I'm negotiating with publishers in Russia,China, and Brazil about foreign translation rights for our book Stretching (now in 24 languages).

Got my (12' Klamath aluminum) boat with15 HP 2-stroke recently rebuilt Evinrude motor working well and improving my lame backing-up-of-trailer technique.

Going to build a sleeping platform. I got really excited yesterday laying it out -- 10'x10', -- just putting 4x4's on pier blocks, 2x6 joists on top of them made me realize that I miss building. This is gonna be fun!

The Monarch butterflies are back in greater number than years, there are big flocks of quail patrolling every corner of the garden, a beautiful young fox appeared this morning, scaring the chickens, and them scaring him too. At the beach yesterday, windy, high tide, I got 3 weathered 2x4s, 3 bird skulls -- each a different bird -- a lot of dead birds the last month, big bag of seaweed for garden, and check out this bit of avian skeletal artistry, what is I believe the sternum with cortacoid/clavicle still attached by one remaining tendon.

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Posted by Sexy Girls 21+ in adventures, Beach, boats, books, communication, media, ocean, photography

It's A New Dawn, It's A New Day…

Less Blog Posts These Days

To tell the truth, it's a great relief, not feeling the pressure of getting out a post every day. Almost 5,000 of 'em -- time for a change

My main focus these days is on the new book, SMALL HOMES; I've got over 50 pages roughly laid out, am in daily contact with a slew of contributors. I figure making books is how I can reach the most people, the best use of my time right now.

We're plotting a new online strategy. Right now, I'm thinking of doingTwitter and Instagram, with occasional blog posts. Right now there are 5 steps to getting a photo out there:
1. Shoot photo.
2. Load into MacAir.
3. Fiddle a bit with it in Photoshop.
4. Find Wi-Fi (or be in office)
5. Post it

My intention is to shoot photos with an iPhone 6, post on Instagram right then. If this works out, I'll be able to communicate way quicker. Right now, am waiting to see what Apple's got coming with the iPhone 7, maybe the 6's will be cheaper.

Found a nearly deserted beach yesterday, clothes off, warm sand, swimming, the only time I've experienced NorCal water so warm was the last El Niño, so unusual to be in this ocean and feel comfortable. Gathered a big bag full of purple/green seaweed for the garden. Like my neighbor, surfer/fisherman Andrew said the other day (down at the beach), "We're so lucky."

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Posted by Sexy Girls 21+ in Beach, books, computers, internet, media, ocean

Less Blog Posts These Days