The talent of Raymond Crowe

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

Best of Leo Tolstoy

Some the best classical writings of [Leo Tolstoy] in English.

Currently, I am reading [Master and Man],Offcourse some of you remember him from our high school War and Peace

Short [TIMELINE] of [Leo Tolstoy]

Koinobori in Kaiserslautern

Koinobori are carp (fish-shaped) flags traditionally flown in Japan to celebrate Children's day. Traditionally, the Japanese associate carp with boys because of the strength associated with carp that swim upstream.The length of 100 m and wieght of 300 kg gave some spectacular sky view over kaiserslautern sports ground.get some impressions here…

Pearl Jam ‘Life Wasted’ latest Music Video

Pearl Jam's latest music video 'Life Wasted' is now available on Google Video It will only be available until Wednesday the 1st of June 2006, use the Google Video Player or download in a format for your iPOD or PSP

Hindi

आज कुछ नया नही है लिखने के लिए,बस इस हफ़ते कृकेट खेलने का इरादा है ।

दानिश नदीम

… Madagascar

…Friederike sent me some picutres of her trip to Madagaskar,what she calls Paradise … more sun and less work unlike Germany

having “Knowledge” but lacking “Wisdom”

…this is a serious Contradiction which could be perceived in todays information highways and network of social collaborations which provides an uncontrolled acces to expression of personal experiences.

The present world opinoin and thoughts are being driven by "Knowledge", in principle, there is a common sense in humanity which is understandable beyond cultural boundaries,race-origin and faith,but the Only un-common sense of human differences is the level of information among us.So,the better informed we are, the better we control cyberspace and society we live in,now the idea of bringing Cyberspace to Society with social softwares,internet,and so called semantically enhanced internet (Semantic Web) there is a need to know who is informing whom,prevailing not only the knowledge but also the wisdom and to save the socitey from the threat of information hijacking.

The sharing of meta-data about knowledge and experience is interesting,but there is need to follow some principles when collaborating in social environment,something like politeness principles [pdf] or Grice's Conversational Maxims and Principles of Language, knowledge is useful if it is learned from un-biased collaborations,trustable sources and non-invasive implications.

since "Geeks" keep reputation for their "Social-Retardness" ,it is needed to know the "role" they play in making techno-society.

Interestingly, Kofi Annan's 2000 speech to the Australian Press Club, where he said "Half the world's population has never made or received a phone call."quoted from Clay Shirky,we believe without checking the accuracy of this statistics because we trust the informer and could infer from our knowledge of world "demography" .

Knowledge about internet and social collaborations on an information highway demands wisdom and priciples of collaborations,specially when knowledge is shared and recommended.

Japan:”suicide pacts”

…quite often in news about Japan’s suicidal pact,when people make contacts over internet to die together,the issue is highlighted and exaggerated more in media,but even keeping a minimal attention on media’s prejudicial comments there is a necessity to give an insight of the cause for such an event,this issue challenges the ethical meaning of human development limits with pace of science and technologies.

Japan is a country with “long existing eastern” values and “invaded western” values with modern social and economic advances.It is most developed,officially claimed to be the second largest economy in the world and yet socially it is incredibly traditional now the point is how much individual life and freedom of personal expressions is important for the development of a society. My concern is to look for the missing way of life, family values and understanding the devine moral responsibility for each person,as too much freedom of expression and behaviour is a real threat to a societal development,here is one such comment :

” Japan is a western country with a traditional eastern culture. Japan doesn’t know where it sits in the world. Developing at a relatively rapid rate it finds itself betwixt and between two worlds and the young live a life of mixed messages; western individuality and expression of feelings and emotions (to a degree) and traditional community identity, compliance and the non expression (overtly) of feelings of sadness, loss and, some may say, love. Japanese people obviously love each other but there is little physical expression, it seems. Maybe the young want to see the status quo change. It will change, but in the meantime the young may be lost in an east-west void. Suicide could be the only exit from that void”.
David Fisher, Tatsuno, Nagano Japan