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.Aspects
of Mobility |
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By Arnab B. Chowdhury
Arnab B. Chowdhury is
founder and CEO of Ninad (www.ninad.biz) an international e-Learning
consulting firm, headquartered at Pondichéry, South India.
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What is the most perceptible
differentiator between plants and us? What enabled Babur to cross
the Hindukush mountains to establish the Moghul dynasty in India,
Columbus to discover the New World in an ad-hoc fashion or Neil
Armstrong to take that small first step on the moon? Is there a
common phenomenon that underlies these questions?
The answer perhaps
lies in that basic instinct called - mobility.Over the past two
hundred odd years, the fundamental pattern of human mobility has
changed. Physical mobility has begun to be superseded by logical
mobility that relates more towards our emotional and intellectual
needs rather than solely our physical wants. For millennia, we have
been physically mobile whether in the form of individual, family,
tribe or army moving in search of better sustenance - better arable
land, water, wealth, power or simply aspiring for better quality
of life.
Logical mobility was
founded more recently in 1830 when Joseph Henry demonstrated the
potential of using electromagnetic phenomenon of electricity for
long distance communication by sending an electronic current over
one mile of wire to activate an electromagnet which caused a bell
to ring. Later in 1844, Samuel F. B. Morse used this property of
electricity to invent the telegraph and transmitted his famous message
"What hath God wrought?" from Washington to Baltimore
a distance of 40 miles. Then followed, the epoch making first
voice call over wire -- "Mr. Watson, come here, I want you!
by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876. Logical mobility evolved from
ringing a bell to telegraph to telephone, which in turn led to the
television.
Later, in 1957 in retaliation
to the launching of Sputnik the first artificial satellite
by the USSR, the United States formed the Advanced Research Projects
Agency (ARPA) within the Department of Defence. The mandate for
Paul Baran of RAND corporation was to maintain its command and control
over its missiles and bombers with a decentralized communication
network in case of a Soviet nuclear attack. His final proposal was
a packet switched network wherein packets of data (datagrams) were
labelled to indicate the origin and destination of the information
to be sent to the destination computer in the network. Multiple
flavours of packet-switched networks including TCP/IP and X.25 emerged.
TCP/IP, driven by education and defence in the United States, grew
as a data network for computer users community - while the European
industry nurtured X.25 that grew as the network offered by the telecom
operators.
Add to it the development
of the World Wide Web (WWW) started by Tim Berners-Lee as a text
processing software in European Particle Physics Laboratory in Switzerland
back in 1989. This phenomenon converged communication technology
with information technology, which ushered in the digital economy.
With the World Wide Web, three societal needs were given the appropriate
media platform to nurture: communication, commerce and entertainment.
In all, this convergent development met the basic aspiration of
logical mobility the need and ability to access data, information
and knowledge from anywhere, anytime.
But is logical mobility
really making a difference to the quality of human life from a socio-economic
perspective? The answer is 'yes' among the digital divide 'haves'.
We, as distant learning student, sales professional, retail investor,
digital entertainment consumer or anybody labelled as mobile worker,
are already leveraging upon near-instant wireless and wireline information
on the fly with networked devices such as cell phones, PDAs (Personal
Digital Assistant) and a host of smart mobile devices like the iPod.
But what about the
'have-nots'? What about that eighty percent of the global population
that lives on less than one dollar a day, most of whom -- according
to the World Resources Institute -- have never made a telephone
call, let alone used the Internet? The answer is an almost inaudible
'yes' with a booming 'no'.
We still have to imagine
how the benefits of mobile computing can percolate down to the larger
bottom-tier of humankind when much larger issues such as health,
literacy, and economic sustenance-related issues are looming ahead.
A total sceptic might snigger hey if we cannot supply decent
electricity can we have PCs or cell phones that don't use electricity
instead? Or look at the Dot Com boom and bust wherein we simply
ignorantly labelled the 'have-nots' as 'have-laters'?
However, the optimist
in us says that all is not lost. We aren't talking about the Wi-Fi
hotspots and satellite telephones in the digital 'haves' world but
about a couple of pioneering instances closer home in the Indian
subcontinent where the digital economy landscape is as diverse from
the hi-tech hub of Bangalore to Balasore district and where logical
mobility has changed the lives from 'have-nots' to 'haves-now'.
One shining example
is the Village Phone Program by GrameenPhone in cooperation with
Grameen Bank Bangladesh's internationally renowned micro-credit
lending institution. This Program is a unique effort that provides
telecommunications facilities in rural areas while providing the
Village Phone operators, mostly poor rural women, a good earning
opportunity with the commitment of "good development is good
business". As an owner-operated pay phone, the Village Phone
Program provides telephone services in rural areas where no such
facilities existed before. It allows the rural poor, who cannot
afford to become a regular subscriber, to avail the service. Typically,
a borrower of Grameen Bank takes a loan of around 12,000 Taka and
buys a handset and subscription of the mobile service while she
is also trained on to how to operate it and how to charge the users
for it. As of October 2003, there were more than 39,000 Village
Phones in operation operating in nearly 28,000 villages of some
58 districts encompassing more than 50 million people living in
remote rural areas!
Technologically, High
Gain Antenna ensures smooth call completion in areas of weak signal
while extending coverage for the Village Phone operation without
further investment in network expansion. To counter remote villages
without electricity, solar panel and DC batteries are being used
for charging the cell phones. As a business, the average revenue
per user (ARPU) of Village Phone subscribers is double that of the
average business user. So imagine the difference in quality of life
this Program can create in terms of being an essential communication
channel during relief operations in the context of natural disasters,
and in future when GrameenPhone integrates content services such
as distance education, health assistance and adult education via
fax, e-mail and Internet.
Another potential case
is a project called 'Open Source Simple Computer for Agriculture
in Rural Areas' or OSCAR that has the objective of developing a
decision-making tool for weed identification and control that will
address the issue of the declining agricultural productivity in
South Asia. And that decision-making tool is essentially logically
moulding agronomy know-how software onto a 'Simputer' - a hand-held
32MB Linux-based computer using smartcard technology that runs on
three AAA batteries with a price tag of about Rs.10,000. Imagine
Baldev Singh, a wheat farmer, instead of relying on his Doordarshan-fed
Krishidarshan capsule, checking out his crop to evaluate his quality
of wheat output with an easy-to-interface species identification
software program in Hindi! A joint effort by French Institute of
Pondicherry, Rice Wheat Consortium for the Indo-Gangetic Plains
(Delhi), University of Wageningen (the Netherlands), and Centre
de Coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour
le Développement (CIRADFrance), OSCAR has the potential
to make a difference to the quality of agro-output, mindset and
finally the quality of life for the millions of farmers and in turn
millions of consumers in the Indo-Gangetic Plains and beyond.
With the digital economy,
a new mobility paradigm has evolved from a physical mobility of
goods (atoms and molecules) to logical objects (bits). Actual information
and business workflows have changed in terms of operations leveraging
upon the four essential characteristics of the digital economy
digitisation, immediacy, globalisation and virtualisation.
Economic divide in the
society-at-large between the rich and the poor has always been an
age-old issue that thinkers, philosophers and politicians have been
trying to bridge with severe lack of success. In the digital context,
the economic divide continues to lie in the ability to find, create,
develop and utilize the right information at the right time in a cost-effective
manner. Is logical mobility as a phenomenon going to help us to bridge
that divide or is it going to be a grand global case of technological
apartheid? |
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.News
about the future of Success |
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Parents
Influence Children's Success, Duke Social Psychologist Says
Research shows that parents do matter, especially in adolescence,
when children decide whether or not they want to go to college and
what jobs they want as adults.
Students whose parents are involved in their schooling have higher
career and educational goals, according to a new Duke University
study of middle- and high-schoolers.
And parents' influence on how their children think about the future
and perform in school continues through adolescence, according to
the study, which followed nearly 500 black and white children from
seventh through 11th grades.
"Some previous research
has indicated that parents' involvement isn't that significant as
children move into adolescence," said Nancy E. Hill, associate
professor of social psychology at Duke. "But our research shows
that parents do matter, especially in adolescence, when children decide
whether or not they want to go to college and begin thinking about
what jobs they'd like to have as adults."
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SUCCESS
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Positive
thinking: A skill for stress relief
by Mayo Clinic
Stress management requires a positive perspective knowing
how to turn pessimism into optimism.
Is your glass half-empty or half-full? How you answer this age-old
question may reflect your outlook on life and whether you're optimistic
or pessimistic.
In fact, studies show
that these personality traits optimism and pessimism
can affect how well you live and even how long you live.
Need an attitude adjustment?
Find out how to reduce your stress by halting negative thoughts
and practicing positive self-talk.
Be positive: Live
longer, live healthier
Self-talk is the endless stream of thoughts that run through your
head every day. These automatic thoughts can be positive or negative.
If the thoughts that run through your head are mostly negative,
your outlook on life is likely pessimistic. If your thoughts are
mostly positive, you're likely an optimist.
Some of your self-talk
comes from logic and reason. Other self-talk may arise from misconceptions
that you create because of lack of information.
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.Club
of Amsterdam blog |
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of Amsterdam blog
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April
20:
Aspects
of Mobility
April 4:
Lifestyle
and New Media
March 20:
The
Future of the Web
March 13:
"We
Media"
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.News
about the Future |
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Jaman
Jaman is the way people discover, enjoy and share world cinema.
Jaman's global online community is pioneering social cinema. It
is a new destination for moviegoers to watch and discuss the world's
best films. Having curated and assembled one of the world's largest
online libraries of feature films and documentaries, Jaman provides
filmmakers and studios a secure way to distribute and market films
worldwide. Cascade, Jaman's global peer to peer network, delivers
movies with better-than-DVD quality to Macs, PCs or home entertainment
systems via a sleek, device-independent player.
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Measuring
Innovation
The US Commerce
Department is seeking public input on ways to measure innovation in
the economy.
"Input from innovators,
entrepreneurs from businesses of all sizes, and academics is very
important to the Committee as it develops ideas for innovation metrics,"
Gutierrez said. "Innovation is a driver of our economy and
we need to help policymakers and the business community better measure
innovation for the purpose of developing appropriate public policy."
The Committee anticipates
the recommendations will cover the following four major categories
identified by the participants during the initial meeting:
1. Improvement
of the underlying architecture of the U.S. System of National Accounts
to facilitate development of improved and more granular measures of
innovation and productivity;
2. Identification of appropriate economy-wide and sector-specific
statistical series or other indicators that could be used to quantify
innovation and/or its impacts;
3. Identification of firm-specific data items that could enable comparisons
and aggregation; and
4. Identification of specific "holes" in the current data
collection system that limit our ability to measure innovation.
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.CitySense |
CitySense
is an urban scale sensor network testbed and will consist of 100
wireless sensors deployed on light poles around the city of Cambridge,
MA. Each node will consist of an embedded PC, 802.11a/b/g interface,
and various sensors for monitoring weather conditions and air pollutants.
Most importantly, CitySense is intended to be an open testbed that
researchers from all over the world can use to evaluate wireless
networking and sensor network applications in a large-scale urban
setting.
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A CitySense
node gathers weather data on the rooftop of BBN Technologies Inc.
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"An open test bed
lets people reprogram the network to run their own experiments,"
Matt Welsh said, head of the project and assistant professor of computer
science at Harvard University. Each node contains a tiny computer
that can upload programs. "Researchers can then have access remotely
over the Internet," he said.
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.Next
Season Event |
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the
future of the
Success
Thursday, April
26, 2007
Registration: 18:30-19:00,
Conference: 19:00-21:15
Where:
Info.nl,
Sint Antoniesbreestraat 16, 1011 HB Amsterdam [Next to Nieuwmarkt]
Tickets
for € 30, € 20 [discount] or € 10 [students]
With
Nisandeh Neta, Founder, Open Circles
Academy:
Beyond Success
Huib Wursten, Managing Partner, ITIM International:
The Meaning of Success in Different Cultures
Moderated by Homme Heida, Promedia, Member of the Club of Amsterdam
Round
Supporter
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.Recommended
Book |
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Elements
of Success
by Nisandeh Neta
This book reveals the ingredients that make up every successful result.
It offers a five-step process of creating success, with in-depth explanations
on each step and tips how to work with them.
It teaches you how to manage every step of the way to your personal
success, with little effort and maximum results.
Often we are not aware
of what the elements are of the process of creation. Once we're
good at something, we think it is because of our talent, or because
of being lucky, without investigating what the process was that
moved us from the state of "hunger" to the state of "fulfilment".
If we don't know what the recipe for success is, it is difficult
to repeat it.
The book "Elements
of Success" teaches you all you need to know about the recipe
for success.
Becoming successful
is easy, if you know what to do...
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.First
Deep-Sea Observatory |
Providing electrical
power and data connections for new research instruments in the deep-sea.
That's the vision behind the
Monterey
Accelerated Research System
(MARS). The system, currently under construction, consists of a
52-km (32-mile) undersea cable that carries data and power to a
"science node" 891 meters (2,923 feet) below the surface
of Monterey Bay. Up to eight different science experiments can be
attached to this central hub.
Most oceanographic instruments on the seafloor have no connections
with the surface, so they have to run on batteries and store their
own data. A cabled observatory like MARS removes those restrictions,
allowing scientists to design new types of oceanographic equipment
and study the ocean in new ways.
The MARS observatory will place advanced science instruments in
deep water near the rim of the Monterey undersea canyon. Scientists
on land will have constant access to their equipment through a seafloor
cable that carries both electrical power and data.
The MARS project marks a major step toward realizing a long-held
dream in ocean science. Because radio waves barely penetrate water,
it is easier to get data from an interplanetary probe than from
an instrument in the deep sea. Cabled undersea observatories are
beginning to change this, linking seafloor instruments directly
to scientists' desktops.
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.Media
LAB |
LAB
on MEDIA and Human Experience
An immersed experience of a
Do-Tank
May 29 & 30, 2007
Location:
Girona
near Barcelona,
Spain
Max. 20 Delegates
Please
use our
Media
LAB Registration at
http://www.clubofamsterdam.com/contentevents/lab_registration_002media.htm
Moderated by Humberto
Schwab, Director, Club of Amsterdam, Innovation
Philosopher and the Thought Leaders
Laurence Desarzens, urban communicator, beatmap.com
Media & communication specialist for lifestyle companies
Paul F.M.J. Verschure, ICREA research professor, Technology
Department, University Pompeu Fabra
Psychologist. Specialist for wheeled and flying robots, interactive
spaces and avatars
Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Director, Yahoo! Research
Specialist for content and structure organization of a website
and for blogs, vlogs and social networks
Rudy de Waele, Founder, M-trends.org
Wireless communication expert
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.From
water into wine into ... dresses? |
A biologist and artist
make clothing out of the slimy films from wine contaminated with
bacteria
We're looking at [the
dresses] to provoke some discussion about future fashions, about
the possibility of other material we can use instead of our normal
cottons and silks," says Gary Cass, who works on the
Micro'be'
project at the University of Western Australia.
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Micro'be'
Seamless Wear investigates the practical and cultural biosynthesis
of clothing
- to explore the possible forms and cultural implications of futuristic
dress-making and textile technologies.
Instead of inanimate
weaving machines producing the textile, living microbes will ferment
a garment.
A grown seamless
garment will not only rupture the meaning of traditional interactions
with body and clothing;
but also raise questions around the contentious nature of the living
materials themselves.
grown seamless garment will not only rupture the meaning of traditional
interactions with body and clothing;
but will also raise questions around the contentious nature of the
living materials themselves.
This project
redefines the production of woven materials.
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Fermented
fashion, cavewoman style. The dress is made from fermented red wine
and must be kept wet otherwise it tears (Images: Micro'be' project)
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.Agenda |
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Tickets
for Seasons Events:
€ 30,
€ 20 [discount] or € 10 [students]
Our Season Events for 2006/2007 are on Thursdays:
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the
future of Success
April 26,
2007, 18:30 - 21:15
the
future of Tourism
May 31,
2007, 18:30 - 21:15
Taste
of Diversity
June 28,
2007, 18:30 - 21:15
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LAB in Girona
near Barcelona, Spain, moderated by Humberto
Schwab:
LAB
on
MEDIA and
Human Experience
May
29 & 30, 2007
Please use
the
Media
LAB Registration
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.Club
of Amsterdam Open Business Club |
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Club
of Amsterdam Open Business Club
Are you interested in networking, sharing visions,
ideas about your future, the future of your industry, society, discussing
issues, which are relevant for yourself as well as for the 'global'
community? The future starts now - join our
online platform
...:
http://www.openbc.com/go/invuid/Felix_Bopp2
CIWI
- Creative Minds Worldwide
CIWI
Club of Amsterdam Forum
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.Contact |
Your
comments, ideas, articles are welcome!
Please write to Felix Bopp, Editor-in-Chief:
editor@clubofamsterdam.com
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