Russia Competitiveness Report

Very detailed report on sustainable prospects of Russia. Looks good on paper, but is it implementable in the real world? My views of Russian global perspective are still rather pessimistic, but this is something worth researching into, as Russia seems to start getting involved in many 'green' projects in collaboration with Scandinavian countries, so it could have a positive impact on Russian politics? - big question mark.
The Russia Competitiveness Report 2011

THE FUTURE LABORATORY

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Something worth going to: Trend Briefing by Future Laboratory

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DATE : Wednesday 9th March 2011
VENUE : Roundhouse, Chalk Farm Road, London, NW1 8EH
PRICE : £495 per seat

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A FEW EXTRACTS FROM THEIR PROGRAM:

At the spring/summer Trend Briefing in 2010 we named the decade the Turbulent Teens, predicting how it would be a period of highs, lows and revolution. Now, we reveal the decade’s first revolution – the anarconomy – a shift from passive acceptance to affirmative, anarchic collaboration in politics, culture, business, retail and leisure, even in how we generate ideas for these industries. Against this backdrop, open-source, open-book policies are set to become the norm in the new punkonomic era.

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Instead of withholding information, the new winners are sharing their information and knowledge first. Instead of Betapreneurs trying things out, today’s change-makers are laying down new rules and producing manifestos that describe and define the new ways in which they want the world to work. More than anything, however, disruption has become their new mantra, dissonance their new way to market. We look at the tools, techniques and ‘unlearning habits’ you will need to acquire to survive in the Transformation Economy.

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‘Not everybody wants revolution,’ says The Future Laboratory co-founder Martin Raymond. ‘For many, the recession has been a stress too far. Hence, we are witnessing the rise of Revivalist thinking, a nostalgic yearning for all things past and comforting. Folk themes, folklore, folk fashions and the re-appearance of furniture and products with a quasi-nostalgic theme and a rose-tinted nostalgic viewpoint are all becoming more prominent.’

OUR PLANET'S FUTURE DEPENDS ON SUSTAINABLE DESIGN

Our planet cannot hold its waste forever. We have to rethink the way we use materials and the way we dispose waste. Sustainability - studying the ways nature solves problems will provide a lot of solutions.

‘If you want to build a fleet of ships you don’t sit around talking about carpentry, but you rather need to set people souls ablaze with visions of exploring distant shores’

HESSE

Goodbye, small farmhouse and my native country. I leave you as a young man leaves his mother: he knows it is time for him to leave her, and he knows, too, he can never leave her completely, even though he wants to.

SMALL TOWN

Here the true life of wandering begins, the life I love, wandering without any specific direction, taking it easy in sunlight, the life of a vagabond wholly free.

We wanderers are very much cunning - we develop those feelings which are impossible to fulfill; and the love which actually should belong to a woman, we lightly scatter among small towns and mountains, lakes and valleys, children by the side of the road, beggars on the bridge, cows in the pasture, birds and butterflies. We separate love from its object, love alone is enough for us, in the same way that, in wandering, we don’t look for a goal, we only look for the happiness of wandering, only the wandering.

RECTORY

I feel life trembling within me, in my tongue, on the soles of my feet, in my desire or my suffering, I want my soul to be a wandering thing, able to move back into a hundred forms, I want to dream myself into priests and wanderers, female cooks and murderers, children and animals, and, more than anything else, birds and trees; that is necessary, I want it, I need it so I can go on living, and if something I were to lose these possibilities and be caught in so-called reality, then I would rather die.

Great talk by Ken Robinson on creativity and education

Excellent talk, here are a few most interesting and witty quotes from this wonderful, highly entertaining speaker.

- Creativity is as important as literacy

- If you are not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original

- We are educating people out of their creative capacities

- All children are born artists (Picasso). The problem is that we are educated out of it.

- How annoying would that be, to have a 7 year old Shakespeare in your class : stop speaking like that, its confusing everybody!

- Our son had a girlfriend, Sara, a love of his life.. he has known her for a month. He said: “I will never find another girl like Sara”. We were rather pleased about it. Actually she was the main reason why we were leaving the country.

- Professors look at their bodies as transport for their heads. It s a way to bring their heads to meetings.

- We have to radically rethink our view on intelligence. 1. Intelligence is diverse – we think about the world in all ways we are experiencing it: visually, we think in sound, we think kinaesthetically, we think in abstract terms, we think in movement. 2. Intelligence in dynamic – intelligence is interactive: creativity (i.e. having original ideas that have value) comes through interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things.

- Women are better at multitasking. This is true: if my wife is cooking a meal, which is not often (thankfully), she is also dealing with things on the phone, she is talking to kids, painting the ceiling, she is doing an open heart surgery. If I am cooking, the door is shut, the kids are out, if she walks in, I get annoyed- I say, ‘Terrty, please, I am trying to fry an egg in here, give me a break’.

- If the tree falls in the forest, and nobody seen/heard it fall, did it actually fall. If a man speaks his mind in the forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?

- Most people would describe her (Jilian Lynn) rather fugitive behaviour as ADHD nowadays, but it was in 30s, and ADHD was not invented yet, it wasn’t an available condition, people were not aware they could have that.

- The doctor said she was not sick but she was a dancer. She was taken to a dance school where she met people like her, who had to move in order to think. She entered Royal Ballet School, she graduated and had a wonderful dance career, she was involved in the world-known musicals. She is a multi-millionaire now. Somebody else might have put her on medication (when she was young), and told her to calm down.

- We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we are educating our children.

- "If all the insects were to disappear from the earth, within 50 years all life on earth would end. If all human beings disappeared from the earth, within 50 years all forms of life would flourish." Jonas Salk

Hermann Hesse

I just cannot get enough of him.. his mind is like mine.. for the first time in my life there is that feeling that someone might understand, might have same thoughts, feelings as myself. Deep down there, there is that desire to see it as a sign, as myself finally moving in the direction, making the right decisions towards finding the Self and maybe finding that happiness that all philosophers and thinkers seem to be talking about, and peace.

This is one of my favorite poems of his: beautiful, sensual and very close to my heart

Rain (from Wandering 'Farm')

Soft rain, summer rain
Whispers from bushes, whispers from trees,
Oh, how lovely and full of blessing
To dream and be satisfied.

I was so long in the outer brightness,
I am not used to this upheaval:
Being at home in my own soul,
Never to be lead elsewhere.

I want nothing, I long for nothing,
I hum gently the sounds of childhood
And I reach home astounded
In the warm beauty of dreams.

Heart, how torn are you,
How blessed to plow down blindly,
To think nothing, to know nothing,
Only to breathe, only to feel.

Two extracts from "Kierkegaard and Japanese Thought"

p.89. " The difficulty, however, says Kierkegaard, is that the wanderer, who has only accidentally come upon the quiet place, feels he is surrounded by a nature that does not understand him 'even though it always seems as f an understanding must be arrived at'. Therefore he says, the wanderer can see the stars, but the stars cannot see him, 'thus there is no agreement between him and the stars.' With the person who confesses, however, things are different: 'the environment knows well enough what that stillness means and that is asks for earnestness. It knows that it is its wish to be understood' (p.26 original text)

p.90 " For Dogen, our suffering stems not so much from the nature of existence as from a false perception of existence. That is, it stems from delusion. This delusional awareness then leads us to form attachments to non-existent or misconstrued objects, including the idea of an unchanging self, and ties us into a cycle of suffering when the world does not fit with our misperceptions and attachments. The way out of this cycle is to see through one's delusions and thus break these attachments.
This much of Dogen's thought is supported by the core of the Buddha's philosophy [...] Selfish desire is based on the delusion of a persisting self, which in turn leads to attachments to things which one misperceives as one's own or as having the potential for being one's own. The way out of this problem is to give up selfish desire."