Have a look at the attached photo and let me know where you think I am:
A) A bar B) A hotel lobby C) The Microsoft VIP Centre D) A high-end home design centre E) A high-end movie theatre F) A high-end airport lounge G) A wine boutique.
Hint ... I am in the Seattle area, my flight is in about six hours, I am done with work for the day and they serve wine.
For three days I have attended the annual Engineers Without Borders conference where 600 student and professional chapter members were probing the challenges of effective international development and the continued growth of EWB. Unlike a typical cheerleader conferences, the folks at EWB actively pursue the limits and limitations of their efforts. They promote Fair Trade as a strategic direction by spending Thursday evening on the streets of Toronto talking to thousands of commuters while inviting vocal opponents to speak at the conference. Every breakout session is at least two-thirds participant workshop rather than speaker monologue. Their founders & co-CEOs ask "where are we going" and literally set flame to their published mission statement without an immediate roll out of a replacement solution and encourage a decentralized analysis of future direction.
World leading physicist and Perimeter Institute director Neil Turuk gave the Gala dinner talk about his African Institute for Mathematical Sciences and Jim Balsillie opened Friday by suggesting EWB take advantage of his Centre for International Governance Innovation's IGLOO information sharing platform. Roy Steiner, Deputy Director of the Gates Foundation opened Thursday with a 45 minute talk but stayed an extra day to gather data from EWB's oversea volunteers.
SD = (HC x SP x EE) ** Women where, SD = Sustainable Development HC = Human Condition (basic needs such as shelter, food, clean water, medicine) SP = Social Position (such as cast or cultural prosecution) EE = Enabling Environment (everything from climate & weather to agriculture policy, land ownership rights , business start-up complexity , access to investment funds)
This is a very interesting equation presented by Kevin McCort, the CEO at CARE Canada, to help describe the complexity in international development. Note the three factors HC, SP and EE are all interacting functions and the product is then raised to the power of women. A few women will have a small change in development, but a lot will cause an enormous change. And a zero in any factor, no matter how many women are involved will generate no results.
I have heard George Roter, co-founder of Engineers Without Borders comment that if you monitored just one single factor in a society as a proxy for development it would be women's education level. For a society to have more women with more education will require a cascade of things to have occurred which in total will minimize the systemic problems associated with poverty such as access to healthcare, social imbalance, etc - in essence HC, SP & EE.
A group of twelve national conservation and environmental groups submitted six questions to the leaders of all the national parties. The 90-second per question video response from each party is interesting in part due to the absence of any response from the Conservatives.
The Liberals are showing steady increases to NSERC; the Green Party would invest in "green" technology and remove funding to the oil industry. But I would like to hear how the Conservatives justify the elimination of the National Science Advisor earlier this year. Who is advising the PM? Maybe Stockwell Day who thinks humans lived with dinosaurs within the last few thousand years? Mr. Harper and other cabinet members seem to follow the George Bush school of anti-science. While 22% of Canadians polled believe "God created human beings in their present form within the last 10,000 years," is it really too much to ask for our elected officials to have a better education?
Our economy isn't going to make it too far into the 21st century unless we have a more science-literate population. And that requires appropriate political understanding and foresight. The natural resource extraction industries which were the foundation of Canada need to be eclipsed by value added industries that will require substantial understanding of science and technology by the workforce and by politicians.
Near Venice is the famous Murano glass factory. In fact you can buy the glass all over the place around here. But you would be hard pressed to find anything equal to the colourful village of Burano where every little house is painted some wild or vibrant colour. And they have canals too. And a leaning tower. _______________________ Sent from my BlackBerry
Editing video is both fun and time consuming. With about ten hours of video and a few hundred photos to work with I am slowly working towards a 10-15 minute video. I will also assemble a bunch of other clips together to make a DVD to distribute to the crew members and other crews. This is a link to my .mac account which will eventually morph into my mcmurtry.ca site.
Like everyone involved with the David Thompson Brigade, I am struggling to decide what is my single best photo. At this point, this blurred-in-camera shot of the Canadian Voyageur crew doing a switch is my favourite. For me, this captures the essence of the experience - a blur of people working together in complete synchronization. Often it wasn't obvious who was doing the work. Often you only saw it briefly while you were focused on something else. Often it seemed like others were able to effortlessly do something you could not.
In the beginning it was frustrating to see a crew like the Voyageurs slip past at what seemed an impossible rate while we struggled to make our boat respond to clumsy efforts. The first revelation was a clean switch which in time became simple even in high winds, big waves and rapids. One day on the Rainy River we snuck up on the Canadian Voyageurs and beat them to shore at a crew change - it wasn't really a race, but to everyone on the crew it was a small victory which we will probably remember (and boasted of) for a long time.
Research in Motion was the top-selling wireless handset maker in the U.S. in July, marking the third consecutive month the company has held the position, according to Avian Securities' monthly U.S. wireless handset survey. The BlackBerry Curve was the best-selling device. LG ranked second in the survey . . . The study is based on a survey of service representatives at retail stores of the four major wireless operators--AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile.
