Martin Schell is a native New Yorker who got lost on the subway a quarter of a century ago and ended up in Central Java, where he spends a large part of each year in his wife’s hometown. He fancies himself an independent scholar, having published a handful of articles in fields as diverse as gemology, knowledge management, sociolinguistics, and the endogenous development of Indonesian villages.
Martin Schell
Articles by Martin Schell
Live Trees and Dead Wood in the Tropics
A tended garden inevitably involves some choices, as well as planning which tree species will fruit better with more sunshine.
An Appeal to Millennials: Don’t Waste your Vote on the Lesser of Two Evils
Supporting a third party is one way of advocating for long-term, structural change.
A Primer on Digital Thinking Part 3:
Rise of the Robots?
Using money to measure a person’s worth is a product of an early version of the digital mindset that attempts to quantify all aspects of life.
A Primer on Digital Thinking Part 2: Eliminating the Human Element
In Part 1, I outlined the basic difference between counting and measuring and gave some examples of how data is not always objectively derived. Now I want to move the…
A Primer on Digital Thinking: Part 1 Counting and Measuring
The basic distinction between digital and analog is that digital means you count something and analog means you measure something. We can easily count discrete objects like apples, oranges, and…