The crowdfunding movement has long flown a patchwork banner. There’s the Kickstarter variety, in which funders give money to worthy projects, sometimes for rewards.  Peer-to-peer lending is sometimes described as crowdfundingi for loans, and some companies have already used crowdfunding to sell shares to accredited (aka wealthy) investors. Others await U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission rules to open equity crowdfunding to a broader pool of investors.  Crowdfunding for Real Estate

The decentralized 19th-century agricultural model, in which farms and food production were integrated into communities, may be one ironically progressive solution to righting the wobbly petroleum-wheeled food cart. And if the peak-oil scenarios are right, and $300-a-barrel oil is in our imminent future, a 2,000-mile salad from the Salinas Valley of California will be considered a luxury food item, right up there with Perigord black truffles and foie gras. The environmental awakening of the past decade has been encouraging,   Doing Good by Doing Good in the Food Business

The Hong Kong entertainment magnate and philanthropist Run Run Shaw, who died today at 106 or 107, isn’t that well known in the West. But his fans, from Quentin Tarantino to the Wu-Tang Clan, sure are.

Shaw was the producer of many a classic of the wuxia, or martial-arts, genre: Come Drink with Me, The One-Armed Swordsman and The 36th Chamber of Shaolin. Ang Lee’sCrouching Tiger, Hidden Dragonsurprised Western viewers in 2000, but Asian filmgoers had seen it all before, in movies directed by King Hu and produced by Shaw.

Shaw also invested in some Western movies, notably 1982’sBlade Runner, in which director Ridley Scott offered a vision of Asianized future.

The entrepreneur’s Shaw Brothers Studio declined in the 1970s, after he guessed wrong on the commercial prospects of a guy named Bruce Lee. But by then he had already founded Television Broadcasts Limited, a successful company he ran until 2011. It launched the careers of many performers who became movie stars, including Chow Yun-fat, Maggie Cheung, Stephen Chow and Leslie Cheung.

Like many of Hong Kong’s leading cinematic figures, Shaw was born in mainland China. (The date was in 1906 or 1907, confusion engendered by differences between Chinese and Western calendars of the time.) Then known as Shao Ren Leng, he entered the movie distribution business in Singapore in 1927, when he was 19, working for one of his older brothers.

The family had started making movies in 1924 — Run Run Shaw directed one,Country Bumpkin Visits his In-Laws, in 1937 — and moved the operation from Shanghai to Hong Kong in 1936. After World War II, Shaw claimed, he restarted the company with $4 million in gold, jewelry and cash he and a brother had buried in their backyard.

When Shaw Movietown opened in Hong Kong in 1961, it was the world’s largest privately owned film production facility. At Shaw Brothers’ 1974 peak, it made 50 movies annually.

Over the years, Shaw donated billions to arts, education and medicine, and endowed the Shaw Prize, an Asian counterpart to the Nobels. Generous as it was, though, his philanthropy may never eclipse such landmark cinematic moments as the multi-level teahouse brawl in Come Drink with Me.

As Janet Yellen assumes the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve Bank, her main competitor for the job, Larry Summers, comments on the current US economy.   The questions he raises will surely have to be addressed by Yellin.

Summers’s argument is that there are deeper problems afoot in the U.S. economy, and that so long as the Fed keeps trying to coax growth through easy money policies, without corresponding efforts by fiscal policymakers to increase demand in the economy or structural reforms to boost the country’s longer-term economic potential, we are consigned to a cycle of endlessly expanding credit and asset bubbles.

“If the United States were to enjoy several years of healthy growth under anything like current credit conditions, there is every reason to expect a return to the kind of problems of bubbles and excess lending seen in 2005 to 2007,” Summers writes, “long before output and employment returned to normal trend growth or inflation picked up again.”  Future Fed Policy

Women in Morocco are already riding the wave of more than a decade of social advances that Americans who lived through the 1960s and ’70s would find familiar.  Girls in Morocco have more education and women can speak freely. There is less and less taboo in Moroccan society about women. And job accessibility. It’s far better. than in my mother’s age.

A leading entrepreneur says, “We have a new version of Islamic law for the family. I can go and ask for divorce if I am not satisfied with my couple. Can you think about that happening in any other Islamic country?”

“There is some financial independence for women. You are a woman, and you can go and get this job. And this is due to just the last ten years.  Doing Business in Morocco

Deborah Jackson, founder of Plum Alley, talks about this need:

Plum Alley Fund was not created to be another niche crowdfunding site. It arose from a problem we saw with women’s access to capital, and was a natural extension of Plum Alley’s mission to support and advance women economically.  For years I have been watching women as they go about raising money for their ideas and companies. It has not been easy and data shows there is huge disparity in women raising capital versus their male counterpart. Time and time again, I hear women say “if I just had enough money to build that prototype or buy the materials I need, I would go for it.” So many women, including some of our entrepreneurs featured on Plum Alley Commerce, have visions and ideas yet to be translated into creations. At the same time, I know so many women and men (husbands, fathers, boyfriends and brothers) who want to support women in reaching their dreams or doing good for the world.

For women creators, there are distinct advantages of using Plum Alley Fund over other crowdfunding platforms. Many projects will be created to solve problems and needs that are unique to women.   Crowdfunding for Women Only

IT workplaces can become hostile or even toxic environments for women. Not only are they more male-dominated than other types of firms but they also tend to be governed by “cultures of engineering” in which male technical prowess is an organizing principle for social relations. The following project seeks to expand on this important theoretical field to address the implications of these cultures of engineering in an increasingly global era. Little attention has been directed, first of all, to the issue of whether there might be different kinds of discriminating environments across national contexts. Common types of discrimination experienced by women engineers in the Global North may be less prevalent in other parts of the world. Moreover, there may be hidden advantages for women engineers in Global South settings, which are useful in alleviating tensions in the Global North, and vice versa. Second, there has been surprisingly little research attention given to the global dynamics of IT workplaces, even though the high tech industry is in a stage of rapid change.   Global Circuits of Gender- Women and High Tech Work

Of the more than a dozen women Philippine President Benigno Aquino appointed to senior administration posts since gaining power in June 2010, one of the most diplomatically sensitive was Miriam Coronel-Ferrer.

Coronel-Ferrer’s credentials for the position of chief negotiator with rebels from the embattled island of Mindanao were excellent: A member of the peace panel since 2010, she was a political-science professor at the University of the Philippines in Quezon City near Manila and an advocate of a negotiated settlement for more than a decade. The problem was whether her gender would be an issue with the rebels.

“I’m not anti-women, but is your counterpart ready?” Coronel-Ferrer, 54, recalls Aquino saying. At that time, the all-male team of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, or MILF, assured Aquino it would accept anyone he appointed.

Success after four decades of conflict would help reintegrate the Muslim-majority region with the largely Catholic nation and boost incentives for investment in an estimated $300 billion of minerals and resources. Failure would risk a resurgence of fighting that has cost as many as 200,000 lives. Coronel-Ferrer has won agreements in the past year on the key issues of wealth- and power-sharing and aims for a final accord with the biggest rebel group in talks scheduled for next month.   Women Unlock 300 Billion in Resources in the Phillipines