Jessica Jackley: Poverty, money — and love

Children Under Ground – Mongolia

The talent of Raymond Crowe

A very talented piece by Raymond Crowe: what a wonderful world
enjoy 🙂

The Story of India by Michael Wood

India gives me so many impressions about the way humanity, culture, civilization, language and faith have evolved over the ages of world history. Truly a “land of mystery”, and even for me being a native, there is always more to know. Michael Wood, travels through India and discovers all the diverse impressions that a country could probably reveal. One of the nicest documentary that i have ever seen about India. Please beware this should not stereotype your impressions about India, travelling a country by self has its own rich impressions.

have a look yourself:

part 2 part 3 part 4 part 5 part 6 part 7

freezing Heerlen

What a wonderful winter experience in Heerlen, also my first experience to see snow fall in the Netherlands. The Dutchies always complain about weather, atleast now it seems all serene and silence. -12 C today, should be surely added to winter history record of Heerlen. A view of Terworm Castle in the vicinity of OU.

Happy Season Greetings!

to all my dear readers… I am off  to Berlin if you are around, shoot me an email… wish you all Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year 2009 🙂

Hunger in India

No matter how progressive the Indian economy is becoming, there are still highly impoverished people who need world’s attention. Can we make the changes? Yes, We can In just a click!

some sad facts about hunger in India:

1. Hunger remains the No.1 cause of death in the world. Aids, Cancer etc. follow.
2. There are 820 million chronically hungry people in the world.
3. 1/3% of the world’s hungry live in India
4. 836 million Indians survive on less than Rs. 20 (less than half-a-dollar) a day
5. Over 200 millions Indians will sleep hungry tonight
6. 10 million people die every year of chronic hunger and hunger-related diseases. Only eight percent are the victims of hunger caused by high-profile earthquakes, floods, droughts and wars
7. India has 212 million undernourished people – only marginally below the 215 million estimated for1990–92
8. 99% of the 1000 Adivasi households from 40 villages in the two states, who comprised the total sample, experienced chronic hunger (unable to get two square meals, or at least one square meal and one poor/partial meal, on even one day in the week prior to the survey). Almost as many (24.1 per cent) had lived in conditions of semi-starvation during the previous month
9. Over 7000 Indians die of hunger every day
10. Over 2.5 millions Indians die of hunger every year
11. Despite substantial improvement in health since independence and a growth rate of 8 percent in recent years, under-nutrition remains a silent emergency in India, with almost 50 percent of Indian children underweight and more than 70 percent of the women and children with serious nutritional deficiencies as anemia.
12. The 1998 – 99 Indian survey shows 57 percent of the children aged 0 – 3 years to be either severely or moderately stunted and/or underweight
13. During 2006 – 2007, malnutrition contributed to seven million Indian children dying, nearly two million before the age of one
14. 30% of newborn are of low birth weight, 56% of married women are anaemic and 79% of children age 6-35 months are anaemic
15. The number of hungry people in India is always more than the number of people below official poverty line (while around 37% of rural households were below the poverty line in 1993-94, 80% of households suffered under nutrition)

Sources :

UN World Food Programme
UN World Health Organization: Global Database on Child Growth and Malnutrition, 2006
UN Food and Agriculture Organization: SOFI 2006 Report
National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganized Sector (India)
National Family Health Survey 2005 – 06 (NFHS-3) (India)
Centre for Environment and Food Security (India)

CFP TENCompetence Winter School ’09 Innsbrück, Austria

TENCompetence Winter School – Call for Participation (CFP)

1-6 February 2009, Innsbruck (Austria)

http://www.tencompetence.org/node/167

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EXTENDED DEADLINE FOR APPLICATIONS: 16 November 2008
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OBJECTIVES

The TENCompetence Winter School is considered as an intense training
and collaboration on the core topics related to the TENCompetence
project (http://www.tencompetence.org), building the European Network
for lifelong competence development. The first two TENCompetence
Winter Schools received a positive feedback from the attendees. The
main theme of the third one will be Competence Management in Learning
Networks. The programme includes lectures and hands-on sessions from
leading experts in the field. We want to offer enough space for
interactive sessions, informal discussions, group work, and students’
presentations. Our ambition is to stimulate emergence of communities
of practice and learning networks as well as to support joint research
opportunities. PhD students and other interested people are invited to
participate and contribute to creation of an exciting learning
experience.

TOPICS

Personal Competence Development
Replacing Teachers with Crowds
Networks for Learning Professionals
Learning Activity Design
Simulation & Game Based Learning
Educational Theories, Concepts, Methods
Mash-Up Personal Learning Environments
Competence Development Networks
Disagreement Management
Telepresence & Streaming Media Systems
Personalized Adaptive Learning
Oranizing Project Dissemination

LECTURERS

Albert Angehrn, INSEAD, France
Jon Dron, Athabasca University, Canada
Dai Griffiths, University of Bolton, United Kingdom
Hannes Ebner, Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
Davinia Hernández-Leo, Pompeu Fabra University, Spain
Wolf Hilzensauer, Salzburg Research, Austria
Rob Koper, Open University, Netherlands
Ruud Lemmers, LogicaCMG, Netherlands
Jocelyn Manderveld, SURF Foundation, Netherlands
Ambjörn Naeve, Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
Sandra Schaffert, Salzburg Research, Austria
Peter Scott, Open University, United Kingdom
Peter Sloep, Open University, Netherlands
Fridolin Wild, Vienna University of Economics and Business
Administration, Austria
Scott Wilson, University of Bolton, United Kingdom

ORGANISATION

Milos Kravcik, Open University, Netherlands
Christian Glahn, Open University, Netherlands
Wolfgang Greller, Open University, Netherlands
Sebastian Kelle, Open University, Netherlands
Mieke Haemers, Open University, Netherlands
Sabine Maassen, Open University, Netherlands

VENUE

The winter school will take place nearby Innsbruck, an internationally
renowned winter sport centre in western Austria. The participants will
stay in the Tiroler Bildungsinstitut – Grillhof
(http://www.tirol.gv.at/themen/bildung/einrichtungen/grillhof).

COST

EUR 550 (including accommodation and meals, excluding traveling
expenses). TENCompetence is not allowed to provide any grants to
external students. We encourage especially the project partners from
the PRO-LC Cluster (http://www.professional-learning-cluster.org) to
enable their members attending the event and support exchange of
knowledge among these closely related projects.

APPLICATIONS

The winter school is intended for PhD students and other researchers
investigating the issues related to lifelong competence development
and technology enhanced learning. People are invited to submit
applications to milos.kravcik«at»ou.nl. The application should include a
Curriculum Vitae and an abstract describing the research objective.
The extended deadline for submissions is 16 November 2008. The school
will be limited to 40 participants.

Custom search for my delicious bookmark

…probably many of you know the yahoo’s social bookmarking site del.icio.us is now re-designed in its look and feel. del.icio.us is now moved to standard url delicious.com

But when I read Delicious 2.0 Who bookmarks any more I just wondered as we are so much addicted to revert to google for search, how useful it would be to customize Google search on my delicious bookmarks.

It took me just a few minutes to quickly setup google custom search of my delicious bookmark.

The steps i followed is rather simple even my mom would claim no difficulty. (well i ‘ve made her computer savvy 😉 )

1. Exported delicious bookmark saved  it to my desktop (an html)
2. Composed an email to post[at]posterous.com from my gmail
3. Send email with delicious bookmark (html file) as attachment
4. In an eye blick i got email back from Postereous with one link to my delicious bookmark
5. Used this link in google custom search using their wizard

Cheers!!!!… here is the result

Bella Italia

…two days off from work and a lifelong lasting experience to cherish… It was truly an awesome trip to the northern Alps (Verbano-Cusio-Ossola province) in Italy. Blogging is the least i could express the beauty i have seen in the mountains, valleys, lakes and most important the Italian hospitality. Me and Tim started our train journey from Aachen (Germany) to Domodossola (Italy), we were so excited that the journey of 8 hours to destination with 3 DB changes and the maximum speed of 303 km/hr in ICE, passed just in the discussion of our expectations. At domodossola we received a warm welcome from the dear friend Agnese and her cute sis Ariana (Ari), giving us the little gift packs of welcome. The rest of impression was too good to express as we already started talking with the mix and re-mix of German, Dutch, Hindi, English and Italian. We all bumped into the car (although I had some prejudices against the italian driving, as i believed that rest of the europe people drive on right or left side of road, italians go in the middle :), still i was not too afraid given my experience of Indian driving ;). Driving through the beautiful valleys of Antigorio we reached Cravegnia, where we took Mariana (Mari) another best friend of Agnese and drove directly to Formazza waterfall. Although it started to rain, the view gave us silent awwwwwwww. At Formazza we had real Italian Cappuccino, a sip of it would already made you feel it is no ordinary. Later, we arrived Croveo a small little village in the valley where Agnese lives with her Grandma. Then the family experiences started, we dropped in our bags, and headed towards another village to Agnese parents uphill (they call it summer house, since it is not possible to live there in winter, cold and several meters high snow being the reasons). We were treated with Lazania for dinner, another taste which is speically associated with Italian recipe… too good. The next morning we left for Alpe Devero, one of the valleys in the vicinity. We took ice-cream, and followed the trail as lead by Ari, our cute little guide ;). The walk was under the bright sun which regulated itself at 26 C… rest was the journey one would imagine with the mouth open and motionless tounge just enjoying the view :).

Well said: pictures speak louder than words…

Bella Italia

Thanks to our dear Agnese and even more to bella Ari and Mari, you all simply rock 🙂 Grazie!!