Archive for February, 2008

Foto del dia 2.23

The World in 2050

We tend to be so busy with our everyday work and enjoying our lives that we forget to look through the windows of our lives to find out where we are right now in our journey, and take time off to reflect where we wish to go ultimately. Once we know where we want to go, getting there will be so much easier.

Each of us should draw up a wish list of our own a€" to reflect on what kind of world we would like to see when we retire. Once it is done, we should hang it on our walls to remind us daily whether we are getting closer to the destination. via

What is Masdar’s Special Free Zone?

Masdar’s Special Free Zone (SFZ) is a unique, integrated 'Green Community’ in the heart of Abu Dhabi.

This new energy and technology Community will open in 2009, covering six square kilometers and offering the finest practical facilities for the Masdar Institute, the Research Network, light industry, development units and laboratories, plus a carefully selected pool of international tenants.

The Zone is an inspirational expression of Masdar’s vision, hosting an iconic campus leveraging the fullest use of innovation in energy-efficiency, sustainable practices, resource recycling, biodiversity, transportation and green building standards. Every building in the Zone will be designed and constructed to provide a model for sustainable living and working.

The Masdar SFZ will offer opportunities unique in the Middle East for synergy between academic resources, research facilities, industry, the financial community, entrepreneurs and family businesses. The Zone will provide up to 1,500 companies with an attractive package of incentives, including a one-stop-shop program of government services, transparent laws, 100% foreign ownership, tax-free environment and intellectual property protection. Proximity to nearby manufacturers, suppliers and markets rounds out the Zone’s unique value proposition.

As the Zone is developed, Masdar intends to leverage elsewhere the knowledge gained in developing the SFZ with a minimum carbon footprint, by building other sustainable communities that can also serve as showcases of environmental urban achievement.

via masdaruae : further reading at architecture.mnp

The Incense Keeper

Undercurrents in the Floating World

Ping News Presents (PNP) - Restos del U.S.S. Maine, Habana

Sec of the sec

"It’s Time for a Progressive Vision of Education!"

The primary debates are an exceptional vehicle to make, as the educational philosopher Maxine Greene put it, a€oethe familiar strange and the strange familiar.a€A They are, in other words, an opportunity to pose serious questions about the conventional wisdom that guides our public policies and practices, as well as a time to suggest radically different visions for how we might do things in our society and in our world. At least as far as education goes, the candidates have failed miserably in both regards. They have neglected to ask the deep questions about what is really happening in our schools. Nor have they even begun to offer imaginative possibilities for what education might be about in these early but difficult years of the 21st century. This is both sad and troubling, not merely because of the limitations of what these individuals have had to say about this one sector of our culture, but, more importantly, because education in many ways instantiates the root metaphors that guide and structure how we think about the purposes of human life and social relationships. What we have to say about education is intimately bound up with what we say to the young about the meaning of our lives, the aspirations we value for them, and how they should understand their relationships and responsibilities towards other human beings. In this sense education is always about the qualities we favor in human beings as reasoning, moral, and spiritual beings, and about our capacity to teach these to young people. Sadly, the candidates a€™ shallow banalities and overwhelmingly predictable discourse about schools has done little to point the public in new and more meaningful directions in thinking about what it means to educate the young in these turbulent times.

read the rest at tikkun

PhotonQ - Multiverse Bubble theory