Ron

 I think for sake of the KC project it may do us well to join SOL (society for organizational learning ) at MIT. It could I believe facilitate a good basis for interaction. we'd have to explore cost and other issues involved as there are differing levels of participation, I believe we would do well on the consultant level.

here is the sol site:
http://www.solonline.org/aboutsol/

here is info on consultant level memberships

http://www.solonline.org/aboutsol/membership/consultant_membership/   more »

CHENNAI: Ayesha Kapoor, who shot into limelight with her laurel-winning performance as a deaf, mute and blind girl in Sanjay Leela Bhansali's bollywood blockbuster "Black", is more keen to become a writer than an actress.

Ayesha, who received the International Indian Film Academy (IIFA) award recently for the best supporting artiste for her role in the film, says she had acted only in a few school plays prior to landing the role in "Black". ...   more »

Here are the official reports on the impact of the "One-to-One Laptop Program" that has been underway in the USA state of Maine for the past several years. -- Imho, the actual measured results cast serious doubt on the veracity of India's educational bureaucracy's justification ("...there weren't any proved benefits of providing children with their own laptops.") of their recent rejection of the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) initiative ...   more »

To understand (ba) Basho is is essential to understand Fields, or the creative space from which ideas arise.
This entails a way of seeing  fields since they are not readily visibile and in fact are invisible to the human eye.
To even envision this way of seeing takes some rewriing of the manner in which we normally view the world. This involves a non-analytical approach to seeing which operates by taking structures apart to know ...   more »

All is not yet lost ...

The OLPC (One Laptop per Child) initiative for the developing world, the brainchild of Nicholas Negroponte, is gaining ground in Africa, with Nigeria announcing the acquisition of one million laptops.

The OLPC, however, has a competitor: a consortium led by Microsoft and Intel. ...   more »

Well, India has just dealt itself out of the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project, a real mistake in my opinion. ...

The government of India's previous plans of buying laptop computers developed by the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project have been abandoned. The reason: the project is "pedagogically suspect". -- According to the Kaumudi newspaper, India's Ministry of Human Resource Development said there weren't any proved benefits of providing children with their own laptops. Therefore, such a costly expense could not be justified, as other education-related issues were also in need of attention. ...    more »

Here are some more links on Ba from the real innovators Nonaka and Ohasi.

The last article is how Ba can be employed in large organizations . In this case to facilitate the creation of Toyota Prius ...   more »

...Since 1987, nine Chinese satellites and several of China's six Shenzhou spacecraft have carried seeds for experiments and a number of new species of plant seeds have been bred in space, but never before has the country launched a satellite exclusively for seed breeding. By last October, China had approved large-scale plantation of 43 species of space seeds. ...

...between 2001 and 2004, space-bred rice and wheat varieties ... had been planted in about 566,600 hectares, producing an additional 340,000 tons of grain. ...   more »

These comments by Peter Senge, the Founding Chair of the Society for Organizational Learning (SoL) have helped provide me with further context to understand Rich's previously posted papers re "Creative Imagination and a Theory of Strategy Formation." As I read them, I found myself flashing on many fond memories of the inspriing dialogues Peter and I had in the mid-70s when he was my doctoral thesis advisor at the MIT System Dynamics Group. Here's an example of his incisive thinking:

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I came across this white paper while following up on some of the references in Rich's fascinating 3-part work in progress, "Creative Imagination and a Theory of Strategy Creation," which he posted to SCIY earlier this week. Reading this summary white paper from the "dialog on leadership" website has helped provide a context for me to better understand Rich's perspective.

If Pine and Gilmore are right that we have moved from product- and service-driven stages of the economy to an era that is driven by staging and co-creating customer experiences, then the capacity to facilitate the co-creation of experience along the lines that John Kao described above are of the utmost importance for the future of leading and organizing. ...    more »

    I've been playing with Google Earth for the past hour and am very impressed indeed!
    I highly recommend you check it out (it's free); you can download the new Beta v.4 here: ...
    One of the neat things about this new Beta version is that it integrates with Google's newly acquired, easy-to-use 3D application, SketchUp, which you can download (free) from here: ...

     Imagine using Google Earth to show the bird's eye view of the current buildings & roads at Auroville and then using SketchUp to overlay a transparent layer modeling the architectural drawings of the Galaxy Plan. ...   more »

Bloggers are a mostly young, racially diverse group of people who have never been published anywhere else and who most often use cyberspace to talk about their personal lives, according to a report on blogging released yesterday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

The report also said that 8 percent of Internet users, or about 12 million American adults, keep a blog, and that 39 percent of Internet users, or about 57 million American adults, read blogs. ...    more »

from Mauna:

This is to inform the community that Nirodbaran quietly slipped into other
regions this evening, July 17th, at 7.50 pm, at the age of 102.
 
Dr. Nirodbaran, a real friend and supporter of Auroville, has been living
some 70 years in the Ashram, as personal physician of Sri Aurobindo, as well
as his scribe and correspondent, and as poet in his own right. Through his
written work he was, and is, for many a door into Sri Aurobindo's worlds..,
- a door through which he now may enter to join THEM to whom he dedicated
his entire life..
 
OM ~
 
A last homage can be paid to this dear friend and remarkable being during
the entire day tomorrow, Wednesday 18th, when his body will lay in state in
his premises in the Ashram's main compound.
 
Farewell, dear Nirod'da, we will always remember you, with deep gratitude
and love. 

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    Volunteers who tried the hallucinogenic ingredient in psychedelic mushrooms during a controlled study funded by the U.S. government had "mystical" experiences, and many of them still felt unusually happy months later.
    The aims of the Johns Hopkins researchers were simple: to explore the neurological mechanisms and effects of the compound, as well as its potential as a therapeutic agent.
    Although psilocybin -- the hallucinogenic agent in the Psilocybefamily of mushrooms -- first gained notoriety more than 40 years ago, it has rarely been studied because of the controversy surrounding its use.
    This latest finding, which sprang from a rigorously designed trial, moves the hallucinogen's effect closer to the hazy border separating hard science and religious mysticism. ...   more »

This statement was developed by the Board governing the MA [Millennium Ecosystem Assessment] process... The statement from the Board identifies 10 key messages and conclusions that can be drawn from the assessment: ...   more »

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) is an international work program designed to meet the needs of decision makers and the public for scientific information concerning the consequences of ecosystem change for human well-being and options for responding to those changes. The MA was launched by U.N. Secretary- General Kofi Annan in June 2001 and was completed in March 2005. ...   more »

    Fires now raging in the U.S. West may be stoked in part by climate change.

    Major forest fires are both more numerous and more devastating than they were a generation ago in the region. The culprit, according to a new report, is warmer temperatures.
    Spring is arriving sooner than before, and snowpack is melting as much as a month earlier. One result: Snow-fed rivers that used to quench parched earth tend to run low as the summer wears on.
    That makes the land vulnerable, says fire ecologist Thomas Swetnam of the University of Arizona in Tucson.

    "An earlier spring," he said, means "a longer time for the fuels [trees, brush, grasses] to dry out."

    Since 1987 average temperatures in the West have been nearly 2°F (1°C) warmer than they were from 1970 to 1986, he and his colleagues found.
    During that same 1987-2003 period, "we had more large fires," said climate scientist and study leader Anthony Westerling.
    The later period had four times as many major fires as the slightly cooler 1970-to-1986 period. In addition, the average amount of land burned annually during the 1987-to-2003 period was 6.5 times greater than during the earlier period. ...
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    A strange new fungus disease that kills frogs and toads and every other species of amphibian is spreading around the globe and -- combined with pollution and overdevelopment -- is driving more and more of the creatures to extinction, a coalition of the world's top biologists warns.
    At least one-third of the world's known amphibians are threatened by the combination of attacks, and up to 122 species have become extinct within the past 25 years, the international team of specialists is reported Friday in the journal Science.

    "Amphibian declines and extinctions are global and rapid," 50 of the world's leading specialists on water-dwelling animals declared in a joint report. At least 427 species are "critically endangered," they said.

    ..the fungus, a unique species called Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, could start taking on a larger role in the increasing extinction because of global warming, which scientists suspect is lowering amphibians' resistance to the disease. ...   more »

The escalating level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is making the world's oceans more acidic, government and independent scientists say. They warn that, by the end of the century, the trend could decimate coral reefs and creatures that underpin the sea's food web.
Although scientists and some politicians have just begun to focus on the question of ocean acidification, they describe it as one of the most pressing environmental threats facing Earth.

"It's just been an absolute time bomb that's gone off both in the scientific community and, ultimately, in our public policymaking," said Rep. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.), who received a two-hour briefing on the subject in May with five other House members. "It's another example of when you put gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, you have these results none of us would have predicted." ...   more »

    In this update to our December 2005 annual security threat management report, we look at how the threat landscape has changed in the first six months of 2006 and what the likely trends are for the rest of the year. ...
     The demands being placed on IT have continued to be challenging as cybercriminals invent new ways to exploit human and computer vulnerabilities to steal and extort money from computer users and companies.
     The numbers of malware increased, and the growing emphasis on secrecy and stealth that we saw at the end of last year has continued to siral upwards. Spyware and phishing remain two of the biggest threats that businesses now face, and malware attacks are almost universally targeted...
     The Global Security Survey released in June 2000 by the Financial Services Industry and conducted by Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu reported that more than three-quarters (78%, up from 26% in 2005) of respondents confirmed a security breach from outside the organization. The survey called identity theft the "crime of the 21st century." ...
     Although the first malware for Mac OS X was seen in February 2006, it has not spread in the wild and not heralded an avalanche of new malicious code for Apple's operating system. Hackers remain happy to primarily target Microsoft Windows users and not spread their wings to other platforms. It seems likely that Macintosh will continue to be a safer place for computer users to be for some time to come. ...   more »