Philosophers, futurists, authors, writers and even an American president are calling for a rethink of how modern society works or, more to the point, why it doesn’t seem to work. This video provides an overview of what has gone wrong and what needs to be done to create a different type of society.
Publicerad den 13 mar 2013
Professor David Grayson CBE, director of the Doughty Centre for Corporate Responsibility, visits the RSA to demonstrate how a new wave of corporate responsibility coalitions are collectively self-regulating, promoting good behaviour and responding to societal challenges.
Chair: John Morrison, executive director, the Institute for Human Rights and Business
Source: http://www.thersa.org/
Posted in Societal!
Posted in Alerts!, HealthMath!, Hot Topics!, Re-Act!, Societal!
Puplished 9 of mai 2012
The Aokigahara Forest is the most popular site for suicides in Japan. After the novel Kuroi Jukai was published, in which a young lover commits suicide in the forest, people started taking their own lives there at a rate of 50 to 100 deaths a year. The site holds so many bodies that the Yakuza pays homeless people to sneak into the forest and rob the corpses. The authorities sweep for bodies only on an annual basis, as the forest sits at the base of Mt. Fuji and is too dense to patrol more frequently.
Originally released in 2011 at http://vice.com
Posted in Societal!
Locksmiths and firemen in Spain are rebelling against a wave of evictions in the economic crisis by refusing to help bailiffs open ruined homeowners’ doors to throw them out.
AFP – Locksmiths and firemen in Spain are rebelling against a wave of evictions in the economic crisis by refusing to help bailiffs open ruined homeowners’ doors to throw them out.
“Families’ lives were being ruined and we were acting as executioners,” David Ormaechea, president of the Locksmiths Union, told AFP. “It was causing us tension and unease.”
A wave of evictions of mortgage-holders ruined by the recession has prompted several suicides and sparked a protest movement that last week brought a motion to parliament for a law to end the procedure.
With the locksmiths refusing to take part, some authorities have been asking the fire service to step in and break open the doors of those resisting eviction.
On Tuesday in the northwestern city of A Coruna, firefighters were called to help evict an 85-year-old woman who had defaulted on her rent.
A crowd of protestors gathered outside the apartment to block the eviction. When the firefighters arrived they refused to open the door and some of them joined in the protest.
Firefighters in other regions such as Catalonia and Madrid have since followed their example.
“We come to the aid of people in emergencies. It is contradictory to help the banks that are putting people’s lives in danger” by evicting them, Antonio del Rio, a labour union representative for the Catalonia fire service, told AFP.
“The only thing we do is help citizens,” said another Madrid fireman, Pedro Campos.
“We only enter a home when there is danger inside. Getting a woman of 85 out of her home is not a situation of danger.”
PAH, the campaign movement that brought the proposed law to parliament, says hundreds of thousands of people face eviction following the collapse of Spain’s housing boom in 2008.
The resulting recession has driven the unemployment rate over 26 percent, leaving many unable to pay mortgages on houses that have lost much of their value.
Regularly demonstrating on evictees’ doorsteps, PAH says it has blocked half a million evictions since 2009, in some cases enabling families to stay in their homes and pay rent.
Its bill, backed by a petition with 1.4 million signatures, proposes to end evictions and let insolvent homeowners write off their debts by surrendering their home.
Under the current law, a bank can pursue a borrower for the remaining balance of a loan if the value of the seized property does not cover it.
Source: France24
Posted in Societal!
Sustainability: Everything that we need for our survival and well-being depends, either directly or indirectly, on our behaviors towards our natural environment. We are able to create and maintain the conditions under which we, humans and nature can coexist in productive harmony. In sustainability we do permit fulfilling our social, economic and other requirements for present and future generations.
Sustainability is important to making sure that we have and will continue to have life; the air, the water, materials and resources to protect human health, our environment and life itself.
Posted in Societal!
“Eeny Meeny Miny Moe”
Where to be born in 2013
Nov 21st 2012 |From The World In 2013 print edition
Warren Buffett, probably the world’s most successful investor, has said that anything good that happened to him could be traced back to the fact that he was born in the right country, the United States, at the right time (1930). A quarter of a century ago, when The World in 1988 light-heartedly ranked 50 countries according to where would be the best place to be born in 1988, America indeed came top. But which country will be the best for a baby born in 2013?
To answer this, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), a sister company of The Economist, has this time turned deadly serious. It earnestly attempts to measure which country will provide the best opportunities for a healthy, safe and prosperous life in the years ahead.
Its quality-of-life index links the results of subjective life-satisfaction surveys—how happy people say they are—to objective determinants of the quality of life across countries. Being rich helps more than anything else, but it is not all that counts; things like crime, trust in public institutions and the health of family life matter too. In all, the index takes 11 statistically significant indicators into account. They are a mixed bunch: some are fixed factors, such as geography; others change only very slowly over time (demography, many social and cultural characteristics); and some factors depend on policies and the state of the world economy.
Related topics
A forward-looking element comes into play, too. Although many of the drivers of the quality of life are slow-changing, for this ranking some variables, such as income per head, need to be forecast. We use the EIU’s economic forecasts to 2030, which is roughly when children born in 2013 will reach adulthood.
Despite the global economic crisis, times have in certain respects never been so good. Output growth rates have been declining across the world, but income levels are at or near historic highs. Life expectancy continues to increase steadily and political freedoms have spread across the globe, most recently in north Africa and the Middle East. In other ways, however, the crisis has left a deep imprint—in the euro zone, but also elsewhere—particularly on unemployment and personal security. In doing so, it has eroded both family and community life.
– Where to be born in 1988
What does all this, and likely developments in the years to come, mean for where a baby might be luckiest to be born in 2013? After crunching its numbers, the EIU has Switzerland comfortably in the top spot, with Australia second.
Small economies dominate the top ten. Half of these are European, but only one, the Netherlands, is from the euro zone. The Nordic countries shine, whereas the crisis-ridden south of Europe (Greece, Portugal and Spain) lags behind despite the advantage of a favourable climate. The largest European economies (Germany, France and Britain) do not do particularly well.
America, where babies will inherit the large debts of the boomer generation, languishes back in 16th place. Despite their economic dynamism, none of the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) scores impressively. Among the 80 countries covered, Nigeria comes last: it is the worst place for a baby to enter the world in 2013.
Boring is best
Quibblers will, of course, find more holes in all this than there are in a chunk of Swiss cheese. America was helped to the top spot back in 1988 by the inclusion in the ranking of a “philistine factor” (for cultural poverty) and a “yawn index” (the degree to which a country might, despite all its virtues, be irredeemably boring). Switzerland scored terribly on both counts. In the film “The Third Man”, Orson Welles’s character, the rogue Harry Lime, famously says that Italy for 30 years had war, terror and murder under the Borgias but in that time produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance; Switzerland had 500 years of peace and democracy—and produced the cuckoo clock.
However, there is surely a lot to be said for boring stability in today’s (and no doubt tomorrow’s) uncertain times. A description of the methodology is available here: food for debate all the way from Lucerne to Lagos.
Laza Kekic: director, country forecasting services, Economist Intelligence Unit
Posted in Societal!
Tagged care, future, health, prosperity, responsilbility, vulnerability
Israel’s high-tech industry has 85,000 Jewish software developers, but only 70 Arab women. Four discuss how the obstacles they face could be overcome
By Hila Weisberg – haaretz.com
Israel is losing $30 billion a year because certain population groups − such as Israeli-Arab women and Israeli women in general − are not fulfilling their job market potential, recently noted Matthew Gould, Britain’s ambassador to Israel.
As an impartial observer, Gould was accurately analyzing a problem that has not been given much media attention. Although everyone talks about Israel’s high-tech success and calls it a “start-up nation,” the percentage of Israeli Arabs in this sector is simply too low, he said, speaking at an Equal Employment Opportunities Commission conference in Tel Aviv.
Gould is right: There are only 700 Arab software developers employed in the country’s flourishing high-tech industry, and 1,000 Israeli Arabs in this sector overall, even though thousands of Israeli Arabs have degrees in the exact sciences. In comparison, there are 85,000 Jewish software developers.
Smadar Nehab is CEO of Tsofen High Technology Centers, which is dedicated to advancing Arabs in high tech. She says only one-sixth of Arabs who graduate with exact science degrees find jobs in Israel’s high-tech industry, compared to nearly all Jewish graduates. What happens to the many Arab graduates? Some leave Israel, while many settle for jobs that do not require a college degree. In 2010, only half of Israeli-Arab college graduates were employed in jobs related to their degrees, found Kav Mashve – Employers’ Coalition for Equality for Arab University Graduates.
In 2011, 30% of Arab job seekers reported feeling subject to discrimination, according to a survey conducted by the Industry, Trade and Labor Ministry’s Research and Economics Administration. That, coupled with geographic and cultural obstacles, is apparently keeping Arab graduates − particularly engineers − from fulfilling their potential.
“High tech is a homogeneous industry that tends to hire look-alikes,” says Nehab. “The average Israeli Arab’s background is foreign to the interviewer, who isn’t familiar with the schools the candidate attended and sees Arab interviewees through the stereotype of the ‘semi-trained service provider.’ Of course, Israeli Arabs also have their own prejudices and fears.”
If Arab engineers in general are having a tough time, then female Arab engineers are even worse off. They have an almost microscopic presence in Israel’s high-tech industry. Some estimates say there are no more than 70 Arab women working in Israeli high tech.
“Israeli-Arab women are more exposed to the pressures of tradition and family,” says Nehab. “A job that involves working around the clock and occasional travel abroad could seriously challenge a family’s expectations that an Arab woman should stay in her village and put her family first.”
‘Be a doctor’
Weaker communities also tend to encourage their young to seek jobs in professions considered “stable,” such as law, medicine or teaching.
“My mother wanted me to be a doctor,” says Basma Khalaf-Joubran, a software engineer at Intel, from the Galilee village of Kfar Rama. Now, she is married and lives in Tel Aviv.
“All the excellent Arab students are automatically encouraged to become doctors,” she says. “This is inefficient, even though not everyone should go into high tech. It would be far more sensible to aim for a heterogeneous Arab community that includes dancers, artists and salesmen, as well as women in high tech.”
It is no coincidence that all four women interviewed for this article are secular and liberal, and live in a major urban center. Nor is it a coincidence that three are married or engaged, and have no children. All four have their own car, and thus are not dependent on public transportation.
Israeli-Arab women who come from a different background and live, say, in an Arab village in the north, have almost no chance of working in Haifa or Tel Aviv, simply due to logistics. Juna Khaleel is a quality assurance engineer at Activiews, a medical equipment company, and lives in Haifa.
“Israeli-Arab women want to work, but they lack a way to get from their village to the office, because public transportation is inadequate,” she says. “External intervention is needed. How many bus lines connect villages in northern Israel to the major technology centers in Haifa and Tel Aviv, and how often do these buses run? In addition, the roads in these villages are in such poor condition that even driving is tough.”
Khalaf-Joubran says another factor is discouraging Arab women from joining the high-tech industry: the lack of role models. She began working at Intel during her final year as an undergraduate, and has been there ever since. “Intel has Arabs in senior positions, and that gives you a good feeling,” she says. “Generally, Intel is the first company young Arabs look into.”
Arabs in senior positions are a key factor, because they serve as role models for young Arab professionals, she says. “What we need is an Arab counterpart to Yossi Vardi,” an entrepreneur who has helped many start-ups, she says.
She was strongly influenced by a mentor from her village, Ziyad Hanna, who founded Jasper Design Automation’s international R&D center in Haifa and is now its development manager.
“We do have some role models,” Khalaf-Joubran notes, “but they are not well enough known or given enough credit. Moreover, there are no successful Arab women in high tech who could serve as role models. We are the first generation of Arab women who are working in Israel’s high-tech industry and we all grew up in families where our mother would be waiting for us after school with a hot lunch.”
When the role model is in your own family, the road to success is somewhat easier. For instance, Khaleel’s mother is a graduate of the computer science faculty at the Technion – Institute of Technology, Haifa, and her aunt and uncle, Rim and Imad Younis, founded neuroscience technology company Alpha Omega in Nazareth in 1993. Khaleel’s father is a pharmacist.
“From an early age, I knew I would be studying at the Technion,” she says. But she knows that not all Israeli-Arab women were so fortunate to grow up in this kind of environment.
Nonetheless, circumstances are not enough, she says – you need the drive to succeed. “I would never have made it if I weren’t a fighter,” she says.
In order to promote a greater awareness of her profession – biomedical engineering – she regularly lectures students at her old high school. “I offer presentations on biomedical engineering. It is important to promote and explain this field,” she says.Do Israeli-Arab women fear that working in high tech will make it harder for them to find a spouse?
Khalaf-Joubran: “Half of my girlfriends are their households’ main breadwinner, and men might consider that a threat. But I believe this is a global phenomenon. Arab society is more traditional, and that means the men without college degrees may not want wives with degrees.”
Bring friends
Duaa Jahshan, who has been working for the past 11 years at Marvell Israel in Yokne’am, is the only one of the four interviewees with children. She returned from maternity leave a year and a half ago.
“Any woman who has to spend four hours commuting and picking up a child from nursery school will not want such a job, and will choose to work close to home,” she says.
Jahshan studied electronics and computers in high school, and then enrolled at the Technion. While a student, she started working at the on-campus office of Galileo Technology.
Young Israeli-Arab college graduates face both geographic and mental obstacles, she says.
“In high-tech companies in northern Israel, which already employ Arab engineers, the approach is ‘Tell your friends to join us.’ There is more openness in such companies because the Arab employees have already proven themselves,” she says.
“However, firms in central Israel employ fewer Arabs and thus have more stigmas. This vicious cycle must be broken, although there is the additional problem that companies in central Israel are far from the Galilee, where most of Israel’s Arabs live,” she says.
Rana Faran’s journey to the Technion and then on to Marvell and Intel began at a chess club within her village, Ilyeh. The club was launched by a young, motivated teacher.
“He recruited children who showed an aptitude for mathematics and physics,” she recalls. “I was part of the club until 9th grade. The club’s instructor was so dedicated he was even willing to accept students who didn’t have the money to pay the membership fee. He taught us how to use software programs and encouraged me to buy a computer.”
For Faran, this personal anecdote proves how a childhood mentor can lead to a promising career. Her parents, of course, wanted her to be a doctor.
“Part of the trouble is my community’s traditions,” she believes. “Even young women who choose to swim against the tide and study exact sciences frequently are called on to return to the village after they have finished their degree. Women who are expected to be primarily housewives simply do not choose to study engineering, while women who have engineering degrees and return to their village face the obstacle of geographic distance.”
What should a young Israeli-Arab woman who wants to work in Israel’s high-tech industry do?
Khalaf-Joubran: “She should draw encouragement from the success stories and pay little attention to those who did not make it. Some say that anyone who chooses to go into high tech is taking a risk. The truth is that no matter where, someone can tell you how they didn’t find a job. So what? You have to think positive and do what you are good at.
“And then there’s the issue of age. Arabs go to university, study like crazy and then immediately go looking for work, as opposed to Jews, who first serve in the army and start interviewing for jobs at age 28, when they’re already quite mature.”
She sees the difference when interviewing job candidates, she says.
“I can see the gap. The communities simply have different starting points. Arab candidates need to be prepped for interviews.”
Khaleel adds: “The language of high tech is English and, for Arabs, English is a third language. For instance, when being interviewed, I was asked to switch to English, and that wasn’t easy. It’s like telling an Israeli Jew that the interview will be conducted in German. The Arab community needs to improve its English-language studies.”
How does society treat these four Arab women, whose profession demands that they work around the clock, and what price do they pay? Faran says others in her village respond positively.
“Older men stop me in the street and tell me, ‘We are proud of you,’” she says. However, her brothers still do not know how to react.
Some families are just beginning to address the issue of gender equality, she says.
“At home, I am asked, half-jokingly, to clear the dishes from the table and I refuse, saying I work just as hard as they do. Why should I be expected to do that chore? They respond, ‘No one is forcing you to work so hard.’”
Posted in Societal!
A project known as Robot Companions, “which will develop soft-bodied ‛perceptive’ robots as companions for the lonely,” has been selected as a finalist for an EU competition, that will award one billion Euros over ten years for two huge flagship projects that will apply information and communication technologies to social problems. The Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) Flagships aim to unite Europe’s scattered academic forces around well-defined missions that feed directly into the European Union’s social or political goals. “It’s like ‛mars-landing’ projects”.
Who knew it was one of the EU’s social and political goals to deal with the problem of loneliness?
Recently I spoke with an organizer of Christmas events in the Pyrenees Orientales, and I suddenly realized how much loneliness fills in the single people’s everyday life. An invitation list of 300 people is often reduced by half, most of which arise from the lonely, young as well…
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“My mission is the Humanity, my nation is the Earth and my religion is the Peace!”
IQuote!
all is about how we do choose to see things, to interprete them and so on …. Much might seem illusive for someone but can be very real for someone else! I also think …. it might be about “Limited nonations” – Since I think even “nobodies” might be somebodies in one or an other context! Walls and walls …. The biggest walls are those (sometimes such kind of checkpoints, lines or any other limitating obstacles) we do create for ourselves and between each ….. Ah I am Just trying to keep as free as I possibly can within a decent and responsible “liberty”!
Bricks and bricks to build walls and let us keep in mind that there are good bricks and bad bricks … So for good and sustainable walls it is very important to choose the right bricks, have the right talks and take the right walks!
So what Am I? What Are We? Walls and walls … and walls again! Who to blame? Blame me, blame you, blame US! Might be the only reasonable option to restore and save what save might be possible…..
AraBelle! 