Course in Sustainable Knowledge Dissemination through OER and Open Science

This summer I took a short course in Sustainable Knowledge Dissemination through OER and Open Science 2.0 ECTS credits, remotely at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. The course was fully self-paced through an LMS. I have to admit, I mostly took the course to formalize the knowledge I had already acquired by being active in the open movement for a long while and through my work at Open By Default. The grades have now been reported to the central system, LADOK, and I passed!

While I perhaps didn’t learn so much for myself, I still recommend the course for anyone wanting to get the basics of Open Educational Resources and Open Science. Clear and concise information, and a plus for the self-pacing.

Course in Climate Leadership in Politics and Public Administration

This spring I took a short course in Climate Leadership in Politics and Public Administrations (archived), 3.0 ECTS credits, remotely at Uppsala University. The course was inspiring, and some of the professors were excellent. The grades have now been reported to the central system, LADOK, and I passed!

It feels good to know a bit about possible regulatory instruments, and even if this may not be directly applicable in any of my current assignments in Open By Default, I would love to help on issues in this topic space in the future.

Re-launching Open By Default

In 2016, I started a sole proprietorship in Sweden that I called Open By Default. It was a lot of fun, but when I got full-time employment in the European Parliament and moved to Brussels, I closed it down.

But recently, on 15 May, I started it up again, now as an “eenmanszaak” in the Netherlands. So if you need any help with anything related to openness, you can hire me.

We Should All Be Vegans

This essay was an assignment I wrote last year at the course English: Writing Texts about Facts and Opinions.

Veganism is the philosophy of not exploiting animals in any way. It entails excluding all animal products and by-products from the consumption and all parts of the production. Or, put another way, a product is vegan if no animals were exploited during its production. By only using vegan products, many advantages can be achieved. You might ask yourself: Since veganism is still a fringe lifestyle, can these advantages really make a difference? If you value good public health, justice and equality and want to do something about global warming, yes they can. In fact, these advantages are so beneficial for society, we should all be vegans.

Eating vegan has a number of positive effects on health, which, of course, is good on a personal level, but it also has positive effects on the public health. Heart diseases, type-2 diabetes and cancer are common and a strain on the healthcare system. As a vegan diet has been shown to decrease all these diseases through various studies, there is an opportunity to free up resources. Those resources could instead be used to improve the situation for healthcare workers in general, resulting in better care for patients, or to treat diseases that today are somewhat neglected. Of course, increasing the quality of life for many people by allowing them to live longer and healthier lives should not be neglected either.

Another aspect that cannot be neglected is the ethical argument. Exploiting animals and causing them severe suffering for our gain is hard to justify. It is a kind of slavery and represents an idea that we, since long should have abandoned in our modern society. Especially recent progress in consciousness in animals, their capacity for suffering and having emotional lives, makes it easy to draw parallels to how society previously treated different human races. This speciesism is a remnant of an ungrounded belief in human moral superiority, which is not fitting for a civilized and enlightened society. In essence, keeping this practice preserves the thinking of some races and species being worth more than others and is fertile ground for similar thinking being applied to humans, i.e. that some people are worth less. Discarding this practice would therefore not only be morally just to the animals, but also make it easier to fully transition into a humane and kind civilization where all humans are equal.

Furthermore, if we want to keep our civilization as habitable as we have become used to, we quickly need to solve many environmental issues, and in particular address the rising levels of greenhouse gases causing climate change. Production of meat causes enormous emissions, mostly of methane from animals. While cattle are the largest emitters, pigs and poultry also compare unfavorably to vegetable protein sources. The way land is treated, both for keeping the animals, and also for the production of animal feed, is having a devastating effect on biodiversity. Declining biodiversity is a factor that causes ecosystems to perish, which in turn can speed up climate change through loss of carbon in the biomass. By using the land directly for human food, less area would be needed to produce the same amount of nutritional value and more could be saved in nature preserves.

The lack of nutritional value is a common counterargument to veganism, meaning that it would be hard to obtain enough minerals and vitamins through a strictly vegan diet. This is mostly an old myth, augmented through stories in popular culture of vegans being pale and weak. In reality, with a varied and planned diet, it is straightforward to keep a fully adequate diet and obtain all the nutrients needed for healthy bodily functions. Even without a properly planned diet, supplements can make up for the lack of the nutrients that are hard to include in a vegan diet, such as vitamin B12.

To summarize, there is much to be won for society if everyone switched to a vegan diet. Public health would greatly benefit, as well as the health level of many individuals. We would live morally sound lives while also removing fertile ground for racism and other injustices. Finally, we would make huge steps towards mitigating the worst effects of climate change. These advantages have such a potential that, anyone should agree that we all should be vegans.

New CV page

I used to have a page on this blog with my curriculum vitae. It was a plugin that extracted certain data from my LinkedIn page. Unfortunately, it stopped working, and I removed the page a few years ago.

Recently, I had reason to update my CV/LinkedIn page and I felt inspired to create a new page. As a small coincidence, I also had just come across a one-page theme that I thought looked good. So I got started and working on a new page, obviously incorporating what was on LinkedIn, but also with greater control, added a few custom sections and embedded media and linked generously.

For a bit more than a week, the site is up on aina.li/cv, and it is also linked from the menu here. Feedback is appreciated, either here or on GitHub.

2024 podcast listening update

In 2022, I wrote a blog post about my podcast listening. Since I recently switched podcast player, and with that did a big cleanse, I thought it was time for an update.

I used to use the Podcast addict app for listening to podcasts. And it was actually quite good and had all the features I wanted. But it was one thing itching, it wasn’t open source. So last year I finally did some research and installed AntennaPod, an open source solution that I saw was getting good reviews.

The migration was as easy as one could hope for, and one neat feature was that it asked which of my subscriptions I wanted to keep. This made me contemplate the ones I were enjoying, and now I have updated my listening page (archiving my previous feed). Most of the changes, though, are for podcasts that stopped producing new episodes and where I gave up hope of them returning.

One small thing that I have not figured out yet, is how to add episodes without subscribing to the podcast. But I guess I will figure that out, or make a feature request. Their contributing page looks inviting, and I have requested access to help translate the app.

On the positive note, I am already glad to not be bothered by the animated ads that pestered me in the Podcast addict app.

Resolutions for 2024

A few years back, I got inspired by Daniel Mietchen for New Year’s resolutions. While inspiring and important, the way I did it was not really what I imagined, and I did not continue in 2022. Basically, I hadn’t thought through how I wanted to document it, and it all became a bit too ad hoc to feel like I was doing it with purpose.

Themes

Now I have given it quite some thought and have two new themes that I am inspired about. The themes are Wikimedians for Sustainable Development and Fediverse. To read about my ambitions in detail and see the progress overview, check this dashboard for my 2024 New Year’s Resolutions.

Documentation

I have also figured out that the way I want to document my progress is by monthly blog posts here, one for each theme. I’ll create a tag for each of them so that they all can be found easily later (fediverse 2024 and sustainability 2024).

Running

While not really a resolution as such this year, with the results from the last two years, I will keep my ambition of running 5 km every second day.

EDIT (2024-01-19): As I am also planning to do a lot more hiking this year, and that usually “eats up” running days even though it is also beneficial for general health, I will allow for those to be counted as a third of the distance. For example, a hike of 15 km would be counted as a 5 km run.

Review of 2023 goals

It’s the end of the year, and time to reflect. I didn’t have any resolutions like in 2021, but I did have some smaller ones. Or smaller might not be quite the right word, since they were ambitious. But they were more narrow.

Running

My first personal goal was to keep up with running, with the goal of averaging 2.5 km per day, or 5 km every second day to be precise. Last year, I was not sick once and kind of crushed it. But this year I was sick twice, so I lost many running days. In the end, I still racked up 882 km. That is about 2.42 km per day and a bit shy of my goal. Another way to look at it is that I managed to keep my average on more than 352 days. So not even two weeks short in total. I’ll give myself a pass on this considering the circumstances. Adding the hiking I did, I am just above 1,000 km, but that was not part of my original target.

365 climate edits

My second goal was, yet again, a Wikipedia related one. But this time it was very different and aimed to be habit building. My goal was to make one climate related edit every day, and I called it #365climateedits. This one was also hard, mainly because life is complex. I found a few kinds of edits on Wikidata that I could do even when I was short on time. But It didn’t help because, as it happened, I fell in love this year and that sometimes makes you lose track of both time and place. Still, I only missed 3 days on the full year and to make up for it, I will continue a bit into 2024. Some of my edits, but not those from Wikidata, can be seen in the hashtag tool (along with everyone else’s doing the challenge).

What I learned from this was that even though it was somewhat habit building, it was also stressful to have it hanging over me, and despite knowing that I was adding value, it never felt satisfying to do these small edits.

Therefore, my goal for 2024 will be something quite different, and if I do some challenges, I think I will be very lenient when it comes to streaks.

Retorik och klimatomställningskurs

I somras gick jag kursen Retorik och klimatomställning 7,5 hp på distans på Södertörns högskola. Det var en lärorik kurs och det var i den som jag skrev debattinlägget om koranbränning som blev publicerad i Expressen. Jag har ju gått en kort retorikkurs för cirka 15 år sedan så det var både skönt att fräscha upp det, men också att gå in djupare på teorin, det var en väldigt praktisk kurs. Nu har betygen skickats in och jag kan se i Ladok att jag blev godkänd på kursen. Hurra!

Förutom att det alltid är roligt att få bättre verktyg i verktygslådan så hoppas jag att det här kan vara mig behjälpligt i mitt engagemang i Wikimedians for Sustainable Development. (Och nu när jag tänkte länka till ett blogginlägg om det så ser jag att jag inte har publicerat något dedikerat inlägg om det, så det blir en ny punkt på att-göra-listan.)

Debattartikel i Expressen om klimatet och koranbränning

Idag har jag en debattartikel om klimatet i Expressen. Det var en idé som jag har grunnat på sedan länge, men som med den senaste debatten om koranbränning bubblade upp till ytan igen. Det är en ganska kontroversiell idé i sin enkelhet, att det inte bör vara tillåtet att okontrollerat elda något alls, så det ska bli spännande att se vad responsen blir.

Bild genererad med leonardo.ai.

Det finns ju egentligen mycket mer att säga om detta än vad som får plats i 3 500 tecken, som är formatet för en debattartikel så det blir ju en del som blir implicit i den. Men ja, min tanke är verkligen ett generellt eldningsförbud. Vilket bland annat innebär slutet för nöjesgrillning vilket jag tror kanske är det som kommer att uppröra mest. Lite mindre implicit, och här tänker jag på hänvisningen till Naturvårdsverkets rapport, är att även braskaminer eller vedeldning i hemmet i tätorter borde förbjudas. Utöver koldioxiden så blir luftkvaliteten riktigt dålig. Självklart bör en tidsbegränsad dispens ges till de som idag inte har ett alternativt uppvärmningssätt i hemmet.

Att jag just nu läser sommarkursen Retorik och kostomställning blev vad som fick mig att gå från tanke till handling. Det här blir en del av min slutuppgift och nu ska jag skriva ihop en rapport om det till nästa vecka och sen är den klar. Det blir nog minst en uppföljningspost på det här.