Dalia Labadi from OneVoice Palestine and Itamar Cohen from OneVoice Israel did a great job representing OneVoice in Tulsa Oklahoma, on campuses and community centers, as well as on this TV interview.
Roger Cohen reported about a remarkable group of US statesmen urging a more assertive US role towards Israeli-Palestinian peace… …and recommending specific steps to ensure progress…
Here is a link to the Opening Plenary at the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship where I participated:
http://www.socialedge.org/features/skoll-world-forum
Click on Opening Plenary video
Panel discussion starts around minute 36-ends around min 79. Entire plenary agenda below:
Musical Performance – Taiko Meantime, An enthralling show combining traditional Japanese rythms and techniques with eclectic, original compositions Opening Remarks – Stephan Chambers, Chairman, Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship Delegate Address – Jeff Skoll, Founder and Chairman, Skoll Foundation Framing Power – Roger L. Martin, Dean, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto Panel Discussion: Power to the people:Citizen Engagement and Social Transformation
- Ray Suarez (Moderator), Senior Correspondent, The NewsHour, PBS
- Kailash Satyarthi, President, Global Campaign for Education, Chairman, Global March Against Child Labour
- The Honorable Mary Robinson, President, Realizing Rights: The Ethical Globalization Initiative
- Daniel Lubetzky, Founder and President, PeaceWorks Group
Personal Power: A Call to Responsibility – Kenneth S. Brecher, Executive Director, Sundance Institute
In reply to my post, Mapping Your Life’s Journey, I got a really interesting email from my friend Jonathan Harris, the cool artist whose work is as fascinating as this note:
There is a centuries-old idea coming from the Hindu tradition, of "The Akashic Record", which is said to be metaphysical plane where all information is stored — every thought, action, interaction, and idea that has ever occurred. A kind of cosmic filing system.
There is debate over whether The Akashic Record is already completely written (and we simply follow it, like actors following a script), or whether it gets updated every instant with new information (and free will exists).
It is believed that when we dream, we access the Akashic Record, and that this is why dreams often contain either future prophecies, or seemingly random events from long ago that haven’t been thought of for years (because in the Akashic Record, all things are equally simple to access, like searching on Google, or, perhaps more appropriately to dreams, clicking "random page").
It is also believed that tapping into the Akashic Record is our source of energy, and that this is why our bodies need REM sleep to function (REM sleep being the time we access this record).
Whether you believe in this stuff or not, I agree with Daniel that we are fast approaching a time when our technology will essentially create the Akashic Record for us. You could say that this will happen in "another dimension", as the meta-layer of aggregate online information could be considered as such.
I am very interested in seeing this happen, and believe that it will (if the world doesn’t end first, that is).
Jonathan
P.S. Apologies to any purely deductive rationalists on this list
Seeing the sugar lobby take up the Corn Refiners Association is amusing. Each peddles empty calories in the form of sugar or high fructose corn syrup. HFCS should be appropriately avoided as it’s artificial construct and introduction in the early 80s correlates too closely to the rise of obesity and the diabetis epidemic. It is downright dishonest to call HFCS natural, as the refiners aim to do.
But it is also true that ‘an empty calorie is an empty calorie’ and while some sweet in moderation can add to our taste, people aiming for a healthy diet should focus on wholesome ingredients that have nutritional depth. Hence KIND.
Here is an article about a neat re-discovery of a "Miracle Fruit" that makes sour things sweet, and alters the taste buds to make things seem far sweeter. It could have applications for cancer patients to regain appetite, for dieting, or just for fun.
Often in life I am sure you wonder if you had met a person before. Have our lives crossed paths before a more recent episode? When was the first time we met? Where we together in a particular place – whether at school, or at a conference, or talk, or during our childhoods? Could you even rewind a part of your brain and see what you said to that person when you first met them? I daydreamed about a sci-fi future where the “grid” could keep all your information about every place you’ve been, and what your thoughts and experiences and interactions were like.
Then I realized that a lot of this could already be done rather easily NOW.
All you need is a GPS mapping device with a time-mapping database. Your iphone or blackberry could have an application that every 5 minutes or every hour or every day (depending on your preferred settings and subscription/storage capacity) could store your GPS location at that particular time.
Three or thirty years later, you could wonder openly with your date, or an employee or a colleague if you had met before, or where your lives had intersected before, and you’d just sync your databases to find the crossing points, if any, that exist. You could make some pieces private or public, open or closed. But you’d have the ability to trace back steps at important points, quite simply.
At a formative moment, you could even connect a blog journal or video entry to your geo-time-map.
This would not only be fun and functional, but also existentially transformative.
We always are “surprised” at how small this world is, and how enormous a coincidence it is that you find a friend in a far away random place.
In fact, I have always thought that the laws of numbers make these encounters quite probable, and most likely there are many more opportunities for interactions among people you know, whose paths you cross by milliseconds without knowing it. If you could look at your grid and compare it with a friend’s, or with all your universe of friends, how many amazing “coincidences” wouldn’t you find – when you opted to?
Perhaps Doppler or GoogleMaps or Facebook or a new web/business platform you have could take advantage of this idea.
I don’t think I’ve ever laughed harder at an interview about PeaceWorks. This is HILARIOUS – I don’t understand it, but I love the part when they start poking fun at all our mistakes. As well as when the guy shows up with the title "Non Style." What is that? Definitely lost in translation!
Change-Maker was the first episode on a Social Entrepreneurship Series by NHK Japan, which is like the BBC of Asia.
Roger Martin, Dean at the Rotman School of Management at University of Toronto, gave an interesting presentation at the Opening Plenary at the Skoll World Forum today:
Whether or not Barack Obama is your President or, as is the case for me, another country’s leader, most of you, I suspect, watched the President’s inauguration speech and did so with rapt attention. It was certainly a lovely, inspiring and motivating speech. I cried a few times, even though guys aren’t supposed to do that. I suspect each listener took away something special and unique to you from the speech. For me, one sentence grabbed my attention; that riveted me:
“As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.”
I study and write about leadership, which of course makes it a privilege for me to be among all the great leaders in this room. And in my study of highly successful leaders across a wide variety of organizations, I found the most common theme – the most universal characteristic – to be a form of thinking exemplified by President Obama’s quote.
That common theme was when highly successful leaders are faced with an apparent choice between two opposing and unsatisfying options, they show the inclination to refuse to choose and the capacity to instead engineer a course of action that is superior to each of the apparent options.
…
...In my work, I found that great leaders harness the inherent power in the tension between opposing ideas, options or models to forge a new better model. That is the Power of Paradox.
Marco Berrebi (Face2Face) emailed me an insight I thought was worth sharing:
PS : the more I think about the Middle-East conflict, the more I think about the theory of Gauss (mathematician of the early 19th century) saying that equations with several variables evolving within a wide range of possible values cannot be solved until we limit the range of the possible values. This would mean that until it becomes widely accepted that peace will happen within a space limited by Clinton Parameters / Arab Peace Plan / Geneva Initiative / Ayalon-Nusseibeh negotiation, nothing can happen. Just mathematics …
It is true that complexity makes it harder to narrow down choices. That only gets worse when you add the Mideast bargaining mentality that most Israeli and Palestinian politicians have, and the pandering to each side that has made people assume they can get peace without making compromises.