According to an old
story, a lord of ancient China once asked his physician, a member
of a family of healers, which of them is the most skilled in the
art.
The physician, whose
reputation was such, that his name became synonymous with medical
science in China, replied: My eldest brother sees the spirit
of sickness and removes it before it takes shape, so his name
does not go out of the house.
My elder brother
cures sickness when it is still extremely minute, so his name
does not get out of the neighbourhood.
As for me,
I puncture veins, prescribe potions, and massage skin, so from
time to time my name gets out and is heard among the lords.
As in the story of
the ancient healers, in Sun Tzus philosophy about the art
of war the peak efficiency of knowledge and structure is to make
conflict altogether unnecessary. (Source: Sun Tzu: The Art of
War translated by Thomas Cleary)
Dealing with the
future can be described in a similar fashion the Club of
Amsterdam facilitates knowledge driven dialogues that can initiate,
challenge and strategise preferred futures.
What are the ingredients
that prepare better for the future and allow to influence and
create it?
Profound exchange of ideas about our origin, about life, mankinds
role on this planet form the basics of a dialogue between Thought
Leaders, specialists, generalists and everybody interested. This
dialogue about preferred futures embraces all aspects of life,
includes diverse cultures, age groups and educational backgrounds,
is multi-disciplinary and is independent from religious and political
believe.
There are several
hidden treasures that even though mostly known in parts
are rarely implemented in full. We are at the beginning
of discovering the collective power of minds strong knowledge,
combined with solutions that dare tackle issues in a larger and
global context guided by science, business and political
leadership as well as spirituality, ethics, values and by bringing
together people from all angles of the planet and cultural background
those that are willing to share for a meaningful future.
.Chronicle
and Reflexions of the Women in the World Summit .Experience
in New York
By
Rosana Agudo. Founder of the NGOs Lur Gozoa and Mirra
Spring 2013
For some time now,
in my presentations and in some of my articles, I have been signaling
important points for perceiving and responding to situations that
are shaking the world -situations that are causing every society
in every country to tremble, be they developed or not, be they
at war (sometimes permanently) or in peace (perhaps only apparently).
In every case, the victims are key elements, and should form part
of the solution. And the victims we are talking about here are
victims twice over, because they are not allowed a seat at the
tables where discussions and negotiations take place. I am talking
about women and children.
Hillary Clinton,
in the splendid speech she gave in the Women in the World Summit
in NYC, 5.4.13, emphasized:
"World
issues are women's issues. Human rights are women's rights.
Women are not victims but agents of change. When women participate
in the economy, everything goes better
Women are part
of the revolution and cannot be denied a place at the negotiating
table. We are in a moment of convergence. Men are at war but
women all over the world, including those from warring countries,
are talking to each other. We are maintaining a dialog."
A few years back,
during another visit to New York for another great gathering of
women of the world (the Global NGO Forum for Women, Beijing +
15),I visited the United Nations and I had a photo of myself taken
next to the UN Millennium Development Goals:
During the following
years, I have presented this photograph in every meeting, speech
and presentation that I have participated in and I always ask
the same question to those present, the same question I asked
myself when I took the photo and that I ask myself whenever I
see it: ¿How do we suppose to achieve these goals without
women being able to participate actively at the decision making
tables?
1. End poverty
and hunger
2. Education for all
3. Equality for women
4. Save children's lives
5. Make motherhood safe
6. Stop HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases
7. Protect the environment
8. Build a global partnership for development.
Considering the order
in which the different objectives are listed, there is no doubt
that they were written down and decided upon at a table in which
the feminine voice was either present but not taken into consideration
or wasn't there at all. The integrated, global vision required
to commit to these goals is nonexistent. They seem to be independent
and disconnected one from the other, as though they could be treated
in a linear fashion.
What we need to affront
these challenges is a global strategy, an integral vision and great
discerning perception, fruit of our trained attention. We also need
great courage to comprehend the sheer magnitude of the task ahead.
The next evolutionary step is for us to set off on the path of change
in our mental model that will secure the intelligent critical mass
needed to put things in order and begin to give form to this new
society that cares for its surroundings. We must do this not only
to insure our own survival on the planet with its resources, but
also to care properly for all life that shares in the inheritance
under our stewardship.
We expect exceptional
capabilities of our leaders or, if not, the intelligence necessary
to let themselves be guided or to invite dialog with those who
can supply the ingredients, solutions or nuances necessary to
create those threads that will unite and give shape to realities
when we want to weave them together in a global fashion.
As Hillary Clinton
said in her speech and as I have been able to confirm and transmit
many times, whether our countries are at war, or not, whether
we are"friends" or "enemies", we women talk
among ourselves, we listen, we empathize, and we cry for our sons
and daughters. We feel deeply the cries of the child in pain and
the cries of the child with nothing to eat. Any child is our child
when we see him or her suffer, when we see him or her deprived
of affection . We feel the humiliation and the pain of those
thousands of women who are raped each day because they live in
a "culture of rape" that knows no bounds; we feel the
frustration, the hate, the rage towards our sex -and the indifference.
We feel the pain of the earth because our bodies are being used
as the battlefields of so many, many wars . in so many, many
ways
In this sense, the
care of women would be the inarguable basis for the care of children.
But in societies in which women are only valued as payment of
the family debt, for example, in which their lives have no value
whatsoever, in which women have the same status as animals, and
are treated as such, the idea of caring for women is a hopeless
task. In Africa alone, more than 17 million orphans exist, just
barely surviving, because their mothers, more often than not children
themselves, have not survived childbirth, anemia, infections,
hemorrhages, starvation, HIV/AIDS How can we expect to save
the lives of so many children if we don't care for their mothers,
who so often give birth as a consequence of rape but, in spite
of that, love and want to care for their innocent children?!
How is one to demand
"education for all - including girls" (my addition,
of course) as an objective for women's equality when women-girls
are shot at point blank rage when they go to school, just because
the men (and this writer heard it straight from the source) believe
that " when women go to school, we lose our authority;
the best thing for women who want to study is the bullet."?!
When the valiant
woman-girl, who made the video-recorded interview shown during
the Summit, was asked how she was able to listen to these words
and remain calm; she responded that at that moment she was thinking:
"One day these men will be working for me." She was
able to acknowledge the ignorance and fear of those men as well
as the power of education, she didn't think of vengeance but instead,
showed the grandeur of her humanity.
Malala Yousafzai,
the Pakistani girl who was shot at point blank range in her school
bus assured us that for every Malala shot, ten more Malalas rise
up, eager to go to school. More importantly, I read in the news
today that Malala has begun her mission to secure access to education
for every Pakistani girl. All girls in Pakistan want to emulate
Malala and stand like rocks against all resistance.Swat
girls vow to continue Malala's mission
Women from these lands
must also be educated such that they comprehend that there is
another way of doing things and of understanding things and that
they begin to respect themselves. This work is also being realized;
groups of women meet to talk and to inform and to give each other
courage. In this sense, the leadership that these very young women
are exercising is worthy of our respect and admiration for their
courage, the force of their convictions and their sense of justice
and compassion.
As I have been saying
and as we have been confirming time and time again, it is useless
to limit ourselves to clamor for women's rights. We must engage
men, open up their mental model; they are the ones who need to
listen but they don't concur. They have hidden themselves in a
hard, dark place, pretending that we are talking about "women's
issues" and that all we do is complain and make them feel
guilty.
But are these issues
"women's issues"? If that is the case, what kind of
vulgar hypocrisy do the Millennium Objectives represent by being
so pretentiously displayed in the United Nations hall?
It is essential that
women take part in the negotiation tables and world forums that
are deciding strategies that entail all of us, and especially
those involving women, children and Mother Earth, who embraces
us all and who is our source of shelter and sustenance.
If, in Pakistan,
the repression of women is appalling: " if this revolution
doesn't wear stockings, it will wear guns", they say. In
Afghanistan, it unspeakable; we have heard first hand accounts
from the protagonists but I cannot repeat them here because my
heart fills with pain to the bursting point and my mind refuses
to acknowledge such atrocities. Let us not forget that in these
countries and such others, war is not so much against other countries
or enemies as it is against women -one's own wives, daughters,
innocent victims, vulnerable caretakers and nurturers whose only
weapon is a gentle heart. At this moment, I do not wish to forget
my sisters in Ciudad Juárez, in Guatemala and so
many others nor those here, in our midst.
If in the United States,
we women from around the world have been able to talk with each
other, without regards to the political situation of our respective
countries (although some women, have had to remain in the shadow
in order to avoid being identified), is it not of vital importance
that we take our seats at the tables where global decisions are
being made? We know how to dialog and we know what is primordial
for all the women of the world, for all the mothers of the world.
We are at a decisive
and determining moment for humanity; more than half of the human
beings on the Earth cannot permit ourselves to be excluded. This
is our time to be protagonists, to give our natural talents, it
is the time of co-creation. We must admit no more excuses. Women
like Malala are showing us the way. More than ever we should say,
"This is not good, this is not the world we want for our
children", and act in consequence; we are part of the solution.
On 9 May 2013 The National Sustainability Council presented
Sustainable Australia Report 2013 to Minister Burke.
The report provides
a picture of Australia - what we look like and who we are. It
tells the story of how we have changed as a nation over the
last 30 years. We have made great progress in many areas. Australians
are living longer, our health and levels of educational attainment
have improved. We have benefited from a strong economy, with
low unemployment and increasing incomes. However, inequality
has increased and the health of our natural environment has
continued to decline in some key areas.
The report provides
an evidence base for decision-making and planning about the
future. It highlights a number of trends in Australia and the
world that are set to have a significant impact on the next
generation of Australians. We need to plan for an ageing population,
rising health costs, growing cities and changes in traditional
work and family roles.
The National Sustainability
Council intends to use the report, the first of its kind in
Australia, as a starting point for a national conversation about
our future.
Each year, UNICEFs flagship publication, The State of
the World's Children, closely examines a key issue affecting
children. The
State of the Words Children
website includes digital versions of report component such as
supporting data, statistics and stories in addition to online
only features.
International commitment to building more inclusive societies
has resulted in improvements in the situation of children with
disabilities and their families, but too many of them continue
to face barriers to their participation in the civic, social and
cultural affairs of their communities. Realizing the promise of
equity through inclusion will require action.
.Time
Reborn
Lee Smolin is a theoretical physicist
who works mainly on the problem of quantum gravity. He also has
contributed to cosmology, the foundations of quantum mechanics,
astrophysics, theoretical biology, philosophy of science and,
recently, economics.
In
his newly published book Time
Reborn, he makes the case that although its
a popular notion our universe is part of a vast or infinite multiverse;
its based on a methodological error. One which
he says cannot lead to any real scientific progress, because
we cannot conform or falsify any hypothesis about universes causally
disconnected from our own.
Jaron Lanier is the bestselling author
of You
Are Not a Gadget, the father
of virtual reality, and one of the most influential thinkers of
our time. For decades, Lanier has drawn on his expertise and experience
as a computer scientist, musician, and digital media pioneer to
predict the revolutionary ways in which technology is transforming
our culture.
Who Owns the Future?
is a visionary reckoning with the effects network technologies
have had on our economy. Lanier asserts that the rise of digital
networks led our economy into recession and decimated the middle
class. Now, as technology flattens more and more industries -
from media to medicine to manufacturing - we are facing even greater
challenges to employment and personal wealth.
But there is an alternative
to allowing technology to own our future. In this ambitious and
deeply humane book, Lanier charts the path toward a new information
economy that will stabilize the middle class and allow it to grow.
It is time for ordinary people to be rewarded for what they do
and share on the web.
Insightful, original,
and provocative, Who Owns the Future? is necessary reading
for everyone who lives a part of their lives online.
.Sustainable
connected cities
TheIntel
Collaborative Research Institute - ICRI -
is concerned with how to enhance the social, economic and environmental
well being of cities by advancing compute, communication and social
constructs to deliver innovations in system architecture, algorithms
and societal participation.
To enhance the social,
economic and environmental well being of cities by advancing computer,
communication and social constructs to deliver innovations in
system architecture, algorithms, and societal participation.
This new institute
is concerned with how to enable future cities to be more connected
and sustainable. This will entail investigating, developing and
deploying adaptive technologies that can optimize resource efficiency,
and enable new services that support and enhance the quality of
life of urban inhabitants and city visitors. There are many fundamental
technical, social and urban challenges and opportunities that
need to be addressed to accomplish this. Our approach is interdisciplinary,
combining methods from computer science, the social sciences,
interaction design and architecture to improve how cities are
managed and maintained in order to ensure and enhance citizen
well-being.
Themes
City as a Platform What techniques and schemes can be used to make the notion
of an elastic City Platform that offers scalable, safe, reliable
and cost-effective ways of monitoring, supporting and enhancing
urban infrastructures and ecosystems?
The city-wide computer
is viewed as a protected yet shared asset; this is beyond todays
notion of cloud computing. Imagine a dynamic technical infrastructure
across the city, some parts manage the water network, some belong
to transport, or the citys cafes etc. The networks are
owner managed and individual. However, what if an accident caused
some parts of the city management networks to fail? Could we
build a cross-city membrane that allows data to be relayed via
internet cafes, or be gathered by transport systems or even
by motivated citizens? Can we do this reliably, securely and
on demand?
Recently there
has been a move away from sparse high-precision city sensing,
to embedding highly dense networks to cost effectively monitor
city eco systems, which feed data to models in a near-real-time
fashion, but from lower quality sensing systems. However, though
the cost issues are being resolved to a degree, deployment issues
remain. Sensing placement is problematic and political so alternatives
to solely fixed deployments are required.
A solution would be to view city sensing as a combination
of fixed, mobile and soft-sensors (crowd sourced), that come
together to provide the sensed information. Data about atmospheric
conditions can be monitored but also can other city data. For
example, a logistics company travelling the city delivering
(e.g. food) will require real-time traffic updates to minimise
the delivery time, costs and carbon foot-print. These routes
will be calculated on demand from traffic reports (many such
companies have their own Sat Navigation systems). They also
carry some sensors what if this array of sensors was
extended and the data shared? Instead of requiring many fixed
sensing and base-station units, mobility can be exploited. This
can be combined with data coming in from sensor augmented phones
and other soft-sensing sources.
There are the obvious issues of reliability, in terms of how
reliable the data is and how reliable the platform is. To this
end we need to have metrics that communicate notions that represent
data provenance, its source, precision and potential degree
of trustworthiness. Further, what guarantees can be made when
one interest is relying on another interests hardware
computing infrastructure when these infrastructures are assumed
to be composed from dynamic, low-end, heterogeneous components?
Finally, what are the incentivisation schemes that can be used
to drive this diverse market of computing services, the interaction
and collaboration? Such schemes should not only incentivise
companies to share resources, but the public also.
Harnessing the
Invisible City
How can technology help recognize, leverage, visualise and support
the out-of-sight, hidden or forgotten resources and data flows
of urban environments for optimization and informed decision making
by city managers, businesses and citizens?
This theme focuses
on how technology can help recognize, leverage, and support
the out-of-sight, hidden or forgotten resources of urban environments
from volunteer communities to subterranean water systems and
other underlying city infrastructures. In future cities a lot
of data streams and information will be embedded and stored
within diverse infrastructures. Besides determining new ways
of how to store, save and update all this information within
complex infrastructures, new ways of thinking about and analysing
information will need to be developed. A fundamental question
is what novel multimodal interfaces and interactions are required
to encourage participation of citizens, business and government?
Over the last few years, advances in graphical interfaces (e.g.,
the iPhone UI), speech recognition (e.g. Siri), gesture and
handwriting recognition (e.g., Kinect), together with the arrival
of the mobile broadband, smartphones, sensor technologies, and
an assortment of other new technologies providing large and
small interactive displays, have changed the face of humancomputer
interaction [Rogers 2009].
A challenge is
to develop displays, services and applications that can visualize
the invisible information flows in future cities and help people
to make informed decisions during their daily routines. We will
investigate and develop a framework for Human Environment Interfaces
(HEI) that lets individuals and groups engage with the information
available in the city. But how do we visualize the HEI? What
resources are visible/invisible? What actors are invisible/invisible?
How and where should city information be represented? Possible
visualisations include aggregation of quantified self and community
data, via ambient displays, mobile devices and public signage.
Our research will
focus on the following topics:
The development of novel interaction techniques, which will
afford interaction, to help participants to discover services
and data around them.
The development of services or interfaces that turn data into
information and help people to make better informed decisions.
The development of technologies to encourage sustainable behaviour
through ambient and invisible interfaces which capture information
relating to citizens behaviour.
The development of interaction techniques that connect people
to their cities.
The topics are wide-ranging from making invisible data visible,
turning data into useful information, supporting sustainable
practices and helping citizens to experience their cities in
new ways. We will focus on providing information and experiences
instead of pure data and facts. The recent range of technological
developments described above has encouraged different ways of
thinking about interaction design. Researchers and developers
have combined the physical and digital in novel ways, resulting
in mixed realities, augmented realities, tangible interfaces,
and wearable computing. Overall, it is important to design multi-modal
techniques (addressing the visual, hearing, and haptic senses),
which provide the right degree of abstraction for each citizen
in each context.
Enabling Connected
Communities
How can technologies across the compute continuum give us an opportunity
to innovate with emerging ideas of community, work, leisure, place
and identity yet protect privacy in a city of a billion sensors?
Cities are places
where people, meet, exchange and interact. They bring people
with different interests, experiences and knowledge close together.
They are the centres of culture, economic development and social
change. They offer many opportunities to continually innovate
with technologies, from the infrastructures that underlie the
sewers to computing in the cloud. But sustainable living in
cities will require communal engagement and action. Cities are
very heterogeneous with differences in interests and backgrounds
starkly evident. Arguably, a key feature of city living, particularly
in global cities such as London, is the fragmentation and changing
of community from communities of locality to communities of
interest. Notions of neigbourhood and of place appear be changing
and there are often perceptions of limited local personal interaction.
Computing technologies may give us an opportunity to reinvent
or rethink neighbourhood and city politics, while
increasing the quality of living and lowering the barriers for
mobility in our future cities. Imagine a city where your neighbourhood
moves beyond those physically located in your immediate area.
The overarching
goal of ICRI-Cities is to integrate the technological, economic
and social needs of cities in ways that are sustainable and
human-centered. But how do we achieve this? In particular, how
can we exploit new and existing technologies to enhance the
benefits of connected living in cities while minimizing the
costs? For example, how can we provide context-awareness and
adaptive services for city-dwellers to let them make better-informed
decisions, as individuals and members of a community?
Computing technologies
are now pervasive in our cities; they are intruding and extending
our physical bodies, cognitive minds and social lives. But what
does it mean to have 500+ friends online but not a best friend
to hang out with every day after school and share deep secrets
with? What does it mean to know how many calories someone has
burned, hours slept, or energy consumed but not know how to
cook, sleep properly, or be able to switch a light on or off
manually? These are the concerns that the HCI community is beginning
to wrestle with; explicating what it means to be human in an
age of ubiquitous computing (Harper et al., 2008; Rogers, 2009).
Many of these concerns are highly relevant to the vision of
sustainable and connected cities.
Thinking about
enabling connected communities requires us to think differently
about the many relationships people have with technology, from
how they shop, learn, keep fit and move around. The objectives
of this theme are to explore how technology can help enable
communities and individuals to be:
Better connected
with each other, families, neighbors, councils, local
governments, in their own and other cities More aware of the latest news, the buzz, where
others are, how much energy the city is using, to when the next
bus is coming Creative using the resources urban communities
offer in sustainable and innovative ways Keeping safe and protected feeling homes, schools
and communities are secure, safe from prying eyes. Trusting
that ones data is safe Feeling proud the achievements and successes of
living and being part of a city, be it saving energy, helping
with poverty, loneliness or winning gold medals.
Sustaining Sustainable
Practices
How can novel human-environment interfaces encourage sustainable
behaviours in the long term after the subsidies run out?
Much of the research
and council-led initiatives to change peoples behaviour
to have less environmental impact (such as reducing energy consumption
or changing mode of transport) have been able to show only short-term
effects. Moreover, there is a tendency to return to old
habits once the champion, publicity, intervention, etc.,
have been taken away. A key question is how can sustainable
behaviour in its various forms be sustained over a long
period of time, preferably indefinitely? What mix of policies
and technologies can be used to best effect? Which behaviours
are most amenable? How do communities take on the sustainable
challenge themselves and understand what it takes?
We intend to develop a science of behavioural change that is
predictive and generalizable to different contexts; longitudinal
empirical studies will be carried out to investigate long-term
effects. We further argue that the efficacy of the techniques
and methods used will be affected by how ethical they are. The
aim of this theme is to investigate how behaviour can be changed
effectively; is socially acceptable and will persist over a
variety of contexts and settings. The overarching goal is to
engage citizens proactively with new kinds of technologically-augmented
information in different aspect of their lives and cities. Moreover,
we intend to involve them directly in identifying problem behaviours
they care about in city life, generating prototype designs and
actively participating in the evaluation studies.
The research intends to push the frontiers of the science of
behavioural change by systematically addressing many of the
assumptions and unknowns in this new field, using a three-pronged
approach:
Designing and implementing a range of new pervasive technologies
that can facilitate behaviour change by operationalizing theories
from behavioural economics and social psychology
Assessing how new kinds of information and multimodal real-time
feedback are best delivered by pervasive technologies and which
are the most effective techniques for different contexts and
behaviours
Ascertaining whether and how salient information can lead people
to change their behaviour in both the short-term and the long-term.
A key objective is to be show how different combinations of
technologies, behaviour techniques and salient information can
systematically facilitate behaviour change, with a focus on
those behaviours that either have not been considered before
or have been resistant to change using other methods. A further
goal is to design technologies that are affordable and customisable
so that they can be adopted by individuals and communities who
have a problem they wish to address for example, they
may wish to reduce vandalism in their neighbourhood, encourage
more volunteering or increase local shopping.
Specific objectives are:
To demonstrate
how different kinds of salient information, provided through
pervasive technologies, can facilitate behaviour change
To propose new
design principles and a framework for using salient information
to facilitate behaviour change that matches technology type
with behavioural technique in the context of use for particular
behaviours
To build and implement
affordable prototype systems
To analyse a large
corpus of empirical data collected by user communities over
long periods of time to assess sustainable behaviours
To demonstrate
how the empirical findings can be built into current policy-making
practices
.Futurist
Portrait: John L. Petersen
John
L. Petersen is considered by many to be one of the most informed
futurists in the world. He is best-known for writing and thinking
about high impact surprises - wild cards - and the process of
surprise anticipation. His current professional involvements include
the development of sophisticated tools for anticipatory analysis
and surprise anticipation, long-range strategic planning and helping
leadership design new approaches for dealing with the future.
He has led national
non-profit organizations, worked in sales, manufacturing, real
estate development, and marketing and advertising, mostly for
companies he founded. A graduate electrical engineer, he has also
promoted rock concerts; produced conventions; and worked as a
disc jockey among other things.
Mr. Petersen's government
and political experience include stints at the National War College,
the Institute for National Security Studies, the Office of the
Secretary of Defense, and the National Security Council staff
at the White House. He was a naval flight officer in the U.S.
Navy and Navy Reserve and is a decorated veteran of both the Vietnam
and Persian Gulf wars. He has served in senior positions for a
number of presidential political campaigns and was an elected
delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1984.
In 1989 Petersen
founded The
Arlington Institute
(TAI), a non-profit, future-oriented research institute. TAI operates
on the premise that effective thinking about the future is impossible
without casting a very wide net. The think tank serves
as a global agent for change by developing new concepts, processes
and tools for anticipating the future and translating that knowledge
into better present-day decisions. Using advanced information
technology, a core group of bright thinkers and an international
network of exceptionally curious people along with simulations,
modeling, scenario building, polling and analysis, Arlington helps
equip leaders and organizations from many disciplines with tools
and actionable perspectives for dealing with uncertain times.
An award-winning
writer, Petersen's first book, The
Road to 2015: Profiles of the Future
was awarded Outstanding Academic Book of 1995 by CHOICE Academic
Review, and remained on The World Future Society's best-seller
list for more than a year. His latest book, Out
of the Blue: How to Anticipate Wild Cards and Big Future Surprises,
was also a WFS best-seller. His coauthored article, The
Year 2000: Social Chaos or Social Transformation? was one
of the most highly acclaimed writings on Y2K. His 1988 book-length
report The Diffusion of Power: An Era of Realignment
was used at the highest levels of American government as a basis
for strategic planning. He has also written papers on the future
of national security and the military, the future of energy and
the future of the media.
Petersen is a past
board member of the World Future Society, writes on the future
of aviation for Professional Pilot magazine and is a member of
the board of directors of the Charles A. and Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Foundation. He is a network member of the Global Business Network
and a fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science. A provocative
public speaker, he addresses a wide array of audiences around
the world on a variety of future subjects. When he is not writing
or speaking, Petersen invests in and develops resources for large,
international projects and advanced technology start-up companies
and is the developer of a significant multi-use real estate project.
He lives in the Washington, D.C. area and the eastern panhandle
of West Virginia with his wife, Diane.
John L. Petersen:
" When one realizes that in the entangled quantum universe
one is literally 'in touch' with the entire rest of the universe,
the experience of it can be a sensation of Cosmic Love. At the
bottom of physical reality is really love. If we had generators
that could access and concentrate this energy we could change
basic human relations."
"If we humans
could get to the place where we really believed that we were all
connected to each other, particularly in nonphysical -- but very
real -- ways, then it would change everything. We would look at
other individuals differently, knowing that through our current
physical eyes we certainly seem separate but we are otherwise
very much connected, and injuring someone else always produces
self-inflicted problems."
.Agenda
Season Events
2013 / 2014
The Club of Amsterdam
wishes you a fantastic summer!
Please check out the program after the summer break.