World Economic Forum- This Indian state has gone 100% organic- By Thomson Reuters Foundation trust

Sikkim has been fully organic since 2016.            Image: REUTERS/Tim Chong

India’s first fully organic state won top prize in a U.N.-backed award on Friday, with organisers saying its policies had helped more than 66,000 farmers, boosted tourism and set an example to other countries.

The small Himalayan state of Sikkim on India’s border with Tibet was declared fully organic in 2016 after phasing out chemical fertilisers and pesticides and substituting them with sustainable alternatives.

Sikkim’s experience shows that « 100 percent organic is no longer a pipe dream but a reality, » said Maria-Helena Semedo, deputy director-general of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), which co-organises the Future Policy Awards.

The awards have previously honoured policies combating desertification, violence against women and girls, nuclear weapons and pollution of the oceans.

This year’s was for agroecology, which includes shunning chemicals, using crop residues as compost, planting trees on farms and rotating crops to improve the soil and protect against pests.

Proponents say agroecology could increase farmers’ earnings and make farms more resilient to climate change as erratic rainfall and extended dry periods hamper food production.

Tourism numbers in Sikkim rose by 50 percent between 2014 and 2017, according to the World Future Council, another co-organiser.

« Sikkim sets an excellent example of how other countries worldwide can successfully upscale agroecology, » said Alexandra Wandel, director of the World Future Council.

« We urgently need to shift to more sustainable food systems. Agroecology is absolutely vital to make our food systems sustainable and inclusive, » she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by email.

The second prize was split three ways, with Brazil honoured for a policy of buying food for school meals from family farms; Denmark for a successful plan to get people buying more organic food, and Ecuador’s capital Quito for boosting urban gardening.

The prizes honour « exceptional policies adopted by political leaders who have decided to act, no longer accepting widespread hunger, poverty or environmental degradation, » added FAO’s Semedo.

World Economic Forum – Europe’s dirty air kills 400,000 people every year – Written by Sean Fleming, Senior Writer, Formative Content

This hidden health crisis has been brought about by a combination of factors.

Image: REUTERS/Philippe Wojazer

In Europe, the air you breathe could be the death of you. In fact, it could be killing as many as 400,000 people a year prematurely. As well as bringing about the early demise of almost half a million people, there are associated health costs that run into hundreds of billions of euros.

Image: Berkeley Earth

Poor air quality in wealthy economies like those in Europe is a hidden health crisis that has been brought about by a combination of factors, according to the EU Court of Auditors, and now presents the continent with its greatest environmental health risk. The court’s report – Air pollution: Our health still insufficiently protected – makes for bleak reading and highlights a number of key problem areas.

EU air quality standards were set 20 years ago. But despite having been around for such a long time they are still not uniformly adopted across Europe. What counts as clean air in Krakow would be deemed unacceptable in Brussels. But perhaps more alarming is that even where they are implemented, the EU air pollution targets fall short of those recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO).

WHO estimates that each year around 2 million people around the world die before their time due to air pollution, and has published detailed guidance on acceptable levels of nitrogen dioxide, sulphur dioxide, ground-level ozone, and airborne particulate matter.

Janusz Wojciechowski, the audit’s lead reporter, told the Guardian newspaper that the findings were unacceptable: “We have a public health crisis in Europe because of air pollution.” He added that there were more than 1,000 premature deaths every day across the EU accounting for “more than 1% of the daily total of deaths in the EU. This is 10 times higher than the number of car accident [deaths].”

Wojciechowski also told the Guardian that the EU spends €3.4bn on highly polluting biomass fuel – almost double the €1.8bn spent on fighting air pollution. “Air pollution should be treated as a priority by the EU,” he added. “We hope that in the next financial period it will be.”

The extent of Europe’s air pollution problem was highlighted by research undertaken by Queen Mary University of London, which found that tiny particles of carbon, typically created by burning fossil fuels, has been found in placentas.

“We do not know whether the particles we found could also move across into the foetus, but our evidence suggests that this is indeed possible, » said Dr Norrice Liu, a paediatrician and clinical research fellow at Queen Mary University. « We also know that the particles do not need to get into the baby’s body to have an adverse effect, because if they have an effect on the placenta, this will have a direct impact on the foetus.”

The air quality in London is currently such that by the end of January the city had breached its 2018 pollution limit. And across Europe there are calls for more action to be taken. An analysis from Berkeley Earth concluded that in the most polluted parts of Europe, the air quality was as harmful as smoking seven cigarettes a day. Pascal Smet, the minister for Transport and Public Works in Brussels, took to Twitter to call for a car-free day in an attempt to draw attention to the issue and help with a solution.

Taking cars off the roads of Europe’s polluted cities for a day would provide a symbolic gesture about the scale of the problem. But making sure that people can feel safe with every breath that they take will take a much greater effort.

World Economic Forum – 10 reasons why Finland’s education system is the best in the world- By Mike Colagrossi Writer

Time and time again, American students continually rank near the middle or bottom among industrialized nations when it comes to performance in math and science. The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) which in conjunction with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) routinely releases data which shows that Americans are seriously lagging behind in a number of educational performance assessments.

Despite calls for education reform and a continual lackluster performance on the international scale, not a lot is being done or changing within the educational system. Many private and public schools run on the same antiquated systems and schedules that were once conducive to an agrarian society. The mechanization and rigid assembly-line methods we use today are spitting out ill-prepared worker clones, rudderless adults and an uninformed populace.

But no amount of pontificating will change what we already know. The American education system needs to be completely revamped – from the first grade to the Ph.D. It’s going to take a lot more than a well-meaning celebrity project to do that…

Many people are familiar with the stereotype of the hard-working, rote memorization, myopic tunnel vision of Eastern Asian study and work ethics. Many of these countries, like China, Singapore, and Japan amongst others routinely rank in the number one spots in both math and science.

Some pundits point towards this model of exhaustive brain draining as something Americans should aspire to become. Work more! Study harder! Live less. The facts and figures don’t lie – these countries are outperforming us, but there might be a better and healthier way to go about this.

Finland is the answer – a country rich in intellectual and educational reform has initiated over the years a number of novel and simple changes that have completely revolutionized their educational system. They outrank the United States and are gaining on Eastern Asian countries.

 

Are they cramming in dimly-lit rooms on robotic schedules? Nope. Stressing over standardized tests enacted by the government? No way. Finland is leading the way because of common-sense practices and a holistic teaching environment that strives for equity over excellence. Here are 10 reasons why Finland’s education system is dominating America and the world stage.

No standardized testing

Staying in line with our print-minded sensibilities, standardized testing is the blanket way we test for subject comprehension. Filling in little bubbles on a scantron and answering pre-canned questions is somehow supposed to be a way to determine mastery or at least competence of a subject. What often happens is that students will learn to cram just to pass a test and teachers will be teaching with the sole purpose of students passing a test. Learning has been thrown out of the equation.

Finland has no standardized tests. Their only exception is something called the National Matriculation Exam, which is a voluntary test for students at the end of an upper-secondary school (equivalent to an American high school.) All children throughout Finland are graded on an individualized basis and grading system set by their teacher. Tracking overall progress is done by the Ministry of Education, which samples groups across different ranges of schools.

Accountability for teachers (not required)

A lot of the blame goes to the teachers and rightfully so sometimes. But in Finland, the bar is set so high for teachers, that there is often no reason to have a rigorous “grading” system for teachers. Pasi Sahlberg, director of the Finnish Ministry of Education and writer of Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland? Said that following about teachers’ accountability:

« There’s no word for accountability in Finnish… Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted. »— Pasi Sahlberg

All teachers are required to have a master’s degree before entering the profession. Teaching programs are the most rigorous and selective professional schools in the entire country. If a teacher isn’t performing well, it’s the individual principal’s responsibility to do something about it.

The concept of the pupil-teacher dynamic that was once the master to apprentice cannot be distilled down to a few bureaucratic checks and standardized testing measures. It needs to be dealt with on an individual basis.

Cooperation not competition

While most Americans and other countries see the educational system as one big Darwinian competition, the Finns see it differently. Sahlberg quotes a line from a writer named Samuli Paronen which says that:

“Real winners do not compete.” — Samuli Paronen

Ironically, this attitude has put them at the head of the international pack. Finland’s educational system doesn’t worry about artificial or arbitrary merit-based systems. There are no lists of top performing schools or teachers. It’s not an environment of competition – instead, cooperation is the norm.

Make the basics a priority

Many school systems are so concerned with increasing test scores and comprehension in math and science, they tend to forget what constitutes a happy, harmonious and healthy student and learning environment. Many years ago, the Finnish school system was in need of some serious reforms.

The program that Finland put together focused on returning back to the basics. It wasn’t about dominating with excellent marks or upping the ante. Instead, they looked to make the school environment a more equitable place.

Since the 1980s, Finnish educators have focused on making these basics a priority:

Education should be an instrument to balance out social inequality.

All students receive free school meals.

Ease of access to health care.

Psychological counseling

Individualised guidance

Beginning with the individual in a collective environment of equality is Finland’s way.

Starting school at an older age

Here the Finns again start by changing very minute details. Students start school when they are seven years old. They’re given free reign in the developing childhood years to not be chained to compulsory education. It’s simply just a way to let a kid be a kid.

There are only 9 years of compulsory school that Finnish children are required to attend. Everything past the ninth grade or at the age of 16 is optional.

Just from a psychological standpoint, this is a freeing ideal. Although it may anecdotal, many students really feel like they’re stuck in a prison. Finland alleviates this forced ideal and instead opts to prepare its children for the real world.

Providing professional options past a traditional college degree

The current pipeline for education in America is incredibly stagnant and immutable. Children are stuck in the K-12 circuit jumping from teacher to teacher. Each grade a preparation for the next, all ending in the grand culmination of college, which then prepares you for the next grand thing on the conveyor belt. Many students don’t need to go to college and get a worthless degree or flounder about trying to find purpose and incur massive debt.

Finland solves this dilemma by offering options that are equally advantageous for the student continuing their education. There is a lesser focused dichotomy of college-educated versus trade-school or working class. Both can be equally professional and fulfilling for a career.

In Finland, there is the Upper Secondary School which is a three-year program that prepares students for the Matriculation Test that determines their acceptance into a University. This is usually based off of specialties they’ve acquired during their time in “high-school”

Next, there is vocational education, which is a three-year program that trains students for various careers. They have the option to take the Matriculation test if they want to then apply to University.

Finns wake up later for less strenuous schooldays

Waking up early, catching a bus or ride, participating in morning and after school extracurriculars are huge time sinks for a student. Add to the fact that some classes start anywhere from 6am to 8am and you’ve got sleepy, uninspired adolescents on your hands.

Students in Finland usually start school anywhere from 9:00 – 9:45 AM. Research has shown that early start times are detrimental to students’ well-being, health, and maturation. Finnish schools start the day later and usually end by 2:00 – 2:45 AM. They have longer class periods and much longer breaks in between. The overall system isn’t there to ram and cram information to their students, but to create an environment of holistic learning.

Consistent instruction from the same teachers

There are fewer teachers and students in Finnish schools. You can’t expect to teach an auditorium of invisible faces and breakthrough to them on an individual level. Students in Finland often have the same teacher for up to six years of their education. During this time, the teacher can take on the role of a mentor or even a family member. During those years, mutual trust and bonding are built so that both parties know and respect each other.

Different needs and learning styles vary on an individual basis. Finnish teachers can account for this because they’ve figured out the student’s own idiosyncratic needs. They can accurately chart and care for their progress and help them reach their goals. There is no passing along to the next teacher because there isn’t one.

A more relaxed atmosphere

There is a general trend in what Finland is doing with its schools. Less stress, less unneeded regimentation and more caring. Students usually only have a couple of classes a day. They have several times to eat their food, enjoy recreational activities and generally just relax. Spread throughout the day are 15 to 20-minute intervals where the kids can get up and stretch, grab some fresh air and decompress.

This type of environment is also needed by the teachers. Teacher rooms are set up all over Finnish schools, where they can lounge about and relax, prepare for the day or just simply socialize. Teachers are people too and need to be functional so they can operate at the best of their abilities.

Less homework and outside work required

According to the OECD, students in Finland have the least amount of outside work and homework than any other student in the world. They spend only half an hour a night working on stuff from school. Finnish students also don’t have tutors. Yet they’re outperforming cultures that have toxic school-to-life balances without the unneeded or unnecessary stress.

Finnish students are getting everything they need to get done in school without the added pressures that come with excelling at a subject. Without having to worry about grades and busy-work they are able to focus on the true task at hand – learning and growing as a human being.

World Economic Forum – Why water is a women’s issue – Written by Eleanor Allen, CEO, Water For People, in collaboration with Skoll.

Image: REUTERS/Benoit Tessier

I met Maria when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic. She was three years old—smiley, pudgy, and fun. I lived with her grandparents. We spent a lot of time together, playing games like hide-and-seek, chase the chickens, and her favorite: imitating la gringa.

Then one Thursday, Maria died. Of diarrhea, from drinking dirty water contaminated with human waste.

Every day, 1,500 children under five die from diarrhea. That’s about 500,000 a year, or about seven football stadiums.

Maria’s death changed my life. I learned about the critical role that water plays in the tenuous balance between life and death. I decided to dedicate my life to clean water. Today I head an organization called Water For People, and our mission is to bring clean water and toilets to everyone, forever.

Most of us have clean, safe water, and we don’t think twice about it—we take it for granted. But a quarter of the world’s population doesn’t have access to clean water, and more than a third doesn’t have access to toilets. This is a global water and sanitation crisis. It affects billions of men, women, and children all over the world.

But water and sanitation is mostly a women’s issue. The greatest impact of this crisis falls on them. There are three reasons for this.

The first reason is time: the burden that falls on women of collecting water and bringing it home. This happens in the majority of households in developing countries. For hours a day, miles a day, women go to creeks, community wells, or—in the best situations—community taps. They collect and carry water with their babies on their backs, and with the help of their daughters.

The water they collect may be clean, dirty, or somewhere in between. They don’t know if they or their families will get sick from drinking it.

Take Giselle, a mother I met in Rwanda. Every day she walks a dusty, dirty road in bare feet—a mile in each direction, twice a day. That’s four hours of walking for water. At the well she fills her five-gallon jerry can with water, and someone helps her lift the 40-pound load onto her head for the journey back.

Image: Skoll

We need to get water closer to where people live—ideally in their homes and schools, just like we have it. Why should anyone have anything less?

The second reason why water is a women’s issue is education. Imagine what these kinds of conditions would do to your daughter’s education, if she had to walk for water every day, day in and day out.

Kate, who runs our program in Malawi, had to walk for water every morning when she was growing up—three hours a day. She was fortunate enough to also get an education, while many of her peers could not. Today, Kate wants her daughter, Taku, and all the other girls in Malawi, never to have to walk for water. She wants them to use their heads for thinking, not for carrying water.

If we can get girls like Taku to go to school, and stay in school, then the dreams mothers have for their daughters—to have even better lives than they had—can become a reality.

The third reason why water is a women’s issue is toilets—or lack thereof. Most schools in the developing world don’t have toilets. That means that when girls hit puberty and get their periods, they often drop out of school because there’s no place to change their pads.

Image: Skoll

A third of the world has no access to toilets. So where do people go? Wherever they can. In the bush, in the fields, on railway tracks—they’re forced to engage in open defecation.

Then when it rains, all this human waste washes into the community water supply. People end up washing in it, cooking with it, and drinking it.

This is exactly what killed Maria—for me, that’s the most infuriating part of this story. And the worst part is that her mother probably gave her the contaminated water that killed her, because she didn’t know the consequences of her actions.

There’s another compelling reason why toilets are important: safety. Women who don’t have a toilet may wait all day to go to the bathroom. At night, they slip out under cover of darkness, and confront the risk of being raped as they go out to relieve themselves. Everyone deserves the safety and the dignity of a toilet, especially women.

Time, education, and toilets—these are three reasons why water is a women’s issue. So how are we going to solve this crisis? The solution is to educate, build, and invest.

We need to educate people all over the world about why toilets are important. We need to build both the missing water and sanitation infrastructure, and also the institutions that can operate and maintain this infrastructure for generations to come.

That’s exactly what we did in my country, the United States, over the past two hundred years. I think we need to pay it forward, and I hope you’ll agree.

We need to pay it forward through investment, to the tune of $50 billion a year between now and the year 2030. That’s the year that the nations of the world have agreed on as the deadline for delivering water and toilets for everyone, as part of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.

Today, government, corporate, and philanthropic investment in water and sanitation totals only about $10 billion a year. So we need to step things up. We all need to work to close the gap.

Fifty billion dollars may sound like a lot of money, but it’s not. It’s what shoppers spend in the US every Black Friday, the annual national shopping spree that coincides with the Thanksgiving holiday. I think water and toilets are a better investment.

In the countries where Water For People works, people certainly understand the value of investing in water and sanitation. Take Elizabeth, a woman who lives with her two daughters and four grandchildren in a village in Uganda. We were developing a water system quite far from her home, and she saved up a lot of money to connect her village to the system.

I went to meet Elizabeth, and I asked her why she was willing to spend so much on water. She told me she had a vision for a business—a chicken farm, that would only be viable with access to clean water. Today she supplies her entire village with eggs—and the village children don’t walk to get water, they have better hygiene, and they stay in the school. Clean water transforms the lives of individuals and communities.

What are you going to do to solve the global water and sanitation crisis?

I’d like you to spread the word. Share the virtues of toilets and taps—how they improve people’s quality of life, save lives, and create livelihoods. Talk about Maria, dying of diarrhea. About Giselle, and her long walk for water. Kate, bringing access to clean water and education for girls. Elizabeth, and how clean water helped her lift her family out of poverty.

The year 2030—the date the world has agreed on to provide water and toilets for everyone—isn’t that far away. I believe we can solve this crisis, but it’s going to take determination to educate, build, and invest.

Our goal is simple: toilet and taps—and triumph for women. Let’s do it together for everyone, forever.

 

World Economic Forum – 200 years after his birth, what’s Karl Marx’s legacy? – Written by Peter Singer, Professor, Princeton University. This article is published in collaboration with Project Syndicate.

« From 1949, when Mao Zedong’s communists triumphed in China’s civil war, until the collapse of the Berlin Wall 40 years later, Karl Marx’s historical significance was unsurpassed. » Image: REUTERS/Wolfgang Rattay

On the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth on May 5, 1818, it isn’t far-fetched to suggest that his predictions have been falsified, his theories discredited, and his ideas rendered obsolete. So why should we care about his legacy in the twenty-first century?

From 1949, when Mao Zedong’s communists triumphed in China’s civil war, until the collapse of the Berlin Wall 40 years later, Karl Marx’s historical significance was unsurpassed. Nearly four of every ten people on earth lived under governments that claimed to be Marxist, and in many other countries Marxism was the dominant ideology of the left, while the policies of the right were often based on how to counter Marxism.1

Once communism collapsed in the Soviet Union and its satellites, however, Marx’s influence plummeted. On the 200th anniversary of Marx’s birth on May 5, 1818, it isn’t far-fetched to suggest that his predictions have been falsified, his theories discredited, and his ideas rendered obsolete. So why should we care about his legacy in the twenty-first century?

Marx’s reputation was severely damaged by the atrocities committed by regimes that called themselves Marxist, although there is no evidence that Marx himself would have supported such crimes. But communism collapsed largely because, as practiced in the Soviet bloc and in China under Mao, it failed to provide people with a standard of living that could compete with that of most people in the capitalist economies.

These failures do not reflect flaws in Marx’s depiction of communism, because Marx never depicted it: he showed not the slightest interest in the details of how a communist society would function. Instead, the failures of communism point to a deeper flaw: Marx’s false view of human nature.

There is, Marx thought, no such thing as an inherent or biological human nature. The human essence is, he wrote in his Theses on Feuerbach, “the ensemble of the social relations.” It follows then, that if you change the social relations – for example, by changing the economic basis of society and abolishing the relationship between capitalist and worker – people in the new society will be very different from the way they were under capitalism.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Marx did not arrive at this conviction through detailed studies of human nature under different economic systems. It was, rather, an application of Hegel’s view of history. According to Hegel, the goal of history is the liberation of the human spirit, which will occur when we all understand that we are part of a universal human mind. Marx transformed this “idealist” account into a “materialist” one, in which the driving force of history is the satisfaction of our material needs, and liberation is achieved by class struggle. The working class will be the means to universal liberation because it is the negation of private property, and hence will usher in collective ownership of the means of production.

Once workers owned the means of production collectively, Marx thought, the “springs of cooperative wealth” would flow more abundantly than those of private wealth – so abundantly, in fact, that distribution would cease to be a problem. That is why he saw no need to go into detail about how income or goods would be distributed. In fact, when Marx read a proposed platform for a merger of two German socialist parties, he described phrases like “fair distribution” and “equal right” as “obsolete verbal rubbish.” They belonged, he thought, to an era of scarcity that the revolution would bring to an end.

The Soviet Union proved that abolishing private ownership of the means of production does not change human nature. Most humans, instead of devoting themselves to the common good, continue to seek power, privilege, and luxury for themselves and those close to them. Ironically, the clearest demonstration that the springs of private wealth flow more abundantly than those of collective wealth can be seen in the history of the one major country that still proclaims its adherence to Marxism.

Under Mao, most Chinese lived in poverty. China’s economy started to grow rapidly only after 1978, when Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping (who had proclaimed that, “It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice”) allowed private enterprises to be established. Deng’s reforms eventually lifted 800 million people out of extreme poverty, but also created a society with greater income inequality than any European country (and much greater than the United States). Although China still proclaims that it is building “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” it is not easy to see what is socialist, let alone Marxist, about its economy.5

If China is no longer significantly influenced by Marx’s thought, we can conclude that in politics, as in economics, he is indeed irrelevant. Yet his intellectual influence remains. His materialist theory of history has, in an attenuated form, become part of our understanding of the forces that determine the direction of human society. We do not have to believe that, as Marx once incautiously put it, the hand-mill gives us a society with feudal lords, and the steam-mill a society with industrial capitalists. In other writings, Marx suggested a more complex view, in which there is interaction among all aspects of society.

The most important takeaway from Marx’s view of history is negative: the evolution of ideas, religions, and political institutions is not independent of the tools we use to satisfy our needs, nor of the economic structures we organize around those tools, and the financial interests they create. If this seems too obvious to need stating, it is because we have internalized this view. In that sense, we are all Marxists now.

 

World Economic Forum – India is using facial-recognition to reunite missing children with their families – Written by Alex Gray Formative Content

Biometric tech has helped police identify 3,000 lost children in just four days.

Image: REUTERS/Mansi Thapliyal

The 2017 Oscar-nominated film Lion tells the story of Saroo Brierley, who at age five was separated from his family.

One dark night, while searching for his brother at a train station in the Indian city of Burhanpur, near his rural home, Saroo accidentally ended up on a train bound for Kolkata, more than 1,000 kilometres away.

Unable to speak the local language, Bengali (he spoke Hindi), and not knowing the name of his home village, Saroo ended up surviving on the streets of Kolkata before being placed in an orphanage. He was eventually adopted by an Australian couple and grew up in Tasmania.

It was 25 years before he managed to pinpoint his Indian hometown on a map, thanks to patchy childhood memories and Google Earth.

Actors Sunny Pawar and Dev Patel, who both portray Saroo. Image: REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni

New tech, different story

Had Saroo had gone missing today, he might have been found almost immediately. India has begun to use technology to reunite lost children with their families, and the process can be as swift as a few days.

Police in New Delhi recently trialled facial recognition technology and identified almost 3,000 missing children in four days.

The software scanned the pictures of 45,000 children living in children’s homes and orphanages. Between April 6 and 10, it was able to match 2,930 children with photographs held on the lost child database run by the government.

The Track Child portal is a national tracking system for India’s lost and vulnerable children. It holds details of the children as well as their photographs.

Figures from TrackChild reported by the New York Times suggest 237,040 children went missing in India between 2012 and 2014.

Reuniting refugees

Technology is also helping refugees to track down their families.

In 2005, Danish brothers David and Christopher Mikkelsen met a young Afghan refugee called Mansour. Four months after fleeing Kabul and the Taliban with his parents and five siblings, Mansour became separated from them, ending up in Denmark with no idea what had happened to his family or where they were.

While helping Mansour search for his family, the Mikkelsens realized that the technology to share information about separated families between agencies and across borders didn’t exist. So in 2008 they launched REFUNITE.

REFUNITE is an online database that allows users to search for family at the click of a button. It allows refugees to take the search into their own hands rather than relying on agencies for help.

Almost 10 million searches have been performed so far by over 600,000 registered users.

The technology has reunited mothers and sons, sisters and brothers, nephews and aunts.

Refugees hold their REUNITE cards in transit. Image: REFUNITE

The importance of data

But technology is only as good as the data behind it.

To this end, the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the World Bank Group recently signed an agreement to establish a new centre that aims to improve the collection, analysis and dissemination of data around refugees.

The Joint Data Centre on Forced Displacement will collect information on (among other things) gender, age, income, skills and health.

The data will be made available to help aid groups and policy-makers. It will also promote the innovative use of technology in order to help refugees, internally displaced and stateless people, returnees, asylum-seekers and host populations.

World Economic Forum – Artificial intelligence is going to completely change your life – Written by Knowledge@Wharton , Republished with permission from Knowledge@Wharton, the online research and business analysis journal of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Our lives could transform in 100 years because of AI, just as electricity has changed how we live today. – Image: REUTERS/Issei Kato

Just as electricity transformed the way industries functioned in the past century, artificial intelligence — the science of programming cognitive abilities into machines — has the power to substantially change society in the next 100 years. AI is being harnessed to enable such things as home robots, robo-taxis and mental health chatbots to make you feel better. A startup is developing robots with AI that brings them closer to human level intelligence. Already, AI has been embedding itself in daily life — such as powering the brains of digital assistants Siri and Alexa. It lets consumers shop and search online more accurately and efficiently, among other tasks that people take for granted.

“AI is the new electricity,” said Andrew Ng, co-founder of Coursera and an adjunct Stanford professor who founded the Google Brain Deep Learning Project, in a keynote speech at the AI Frontiers conference that was held this past weekend in Silicon Valley. “About 100 years ago, electricity transformed every major industry. AI has advanced to the point where it has the power to transform” every major sector in coming years. And even though there’s a perception that AI was a fairly new development, it has actually been around for decades, he said. But it is taking off now because of the ability to scale data and computation.

Ng said most of the value created through AI today has been through supervised learning, in which an input of X leads to Y. But there have been two major waves of progress: One wave leverages deep learning to enable such things as predicting whether a consumer will click on an online ad after the algorithm gets some information about him. The second wave came when the output no longer has to be a number or integer but things like speech recognition, a sentence structure in another language or audio. For example, in self-driving cars, the input of an image can lead to an output of the positions of other cars on the road.

Indeed, deep learning — where a computer learns from datasets to perform functions, instead of just executing specific tasks it was programmed to do — was instrumental in achieving human parity in speech recognition, said Xuedong Huang, who led the team at Microsoft on the historic achievement in 2016 when their system booked a 5.9% error rate, the same as a human transcriptionist. “Thanks to deep learning, we were able to reach human parity after 20 years,” he said at the conference. The team has since lowered the error rate even more, to 5.1%.

The Rise of Digital Assistants

Starting in 2010, the quality of speech recognition began to improve for the industry, eventually leading to the creation of Siri and Alexa. “Now, you almost take it for granted,” Ng said. That’s not all; speech is expected to replace touch-typing for input, said Ruhi Sarikaya, director of Amazon Alexa. The key to greater accuracy is to understand the context. For example, if a person asks Alexa what he should do for dinner, the digital assistant has to assess his intent. Is he asking Alexa to make a restaurant reservation, order food or find a recipe? If he asks Alexa to find ‘Hunger Games,’ does he want the music, video or audiobook?

And what’s next for the digital assistant is an even more advanced undertaking — to understand “meaning beyond words,” said Dilek Hakkani-Tur, a research scientist at Google. For example, if the user uses the words “later today,” it could mean 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. for dinner or 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. for meetings. This next level up also calls for more complex and lively conversations, multi-domain tasks and interactions beyond domain boundaries, she said. Moreover, Hakkani-Tur said, digital assistants should be able to do things such as easily read and summarize emails.

After the speech, ‘computer vision’ — or the ability of computers to recognize images and categorize them — was the next to leap, speakers said. With many people uploading images and video, it became cumbersome to add metadata to all content as a way to categorize them. Facebook built an AI to understand and categorize videos at scale called Lumos, said Manohar Paluri, a research lead at the company. Facebook uses Lumos to do data collection of, for example, fireworks images and videos. The platform can also use people’s poses to identify a video, such as categorizing people lounging around on couches as hanging out.

What’s critical is to ascertain the primary semantic content of the uploaded video, added Rahul Sukthankar, head of video understanding at Google. And to help the computer correctly identify what’s in the video — for example, whether professionals or amateurs are dancing — his team mines YouTube for similar content that AI can learn from, such as having a certain frame rate for non-professional content. Sukthankar adds that a promising direction for future research is to do computer training using videos. So if a robot is shown a video of a person pouring cereal into a bowl at multiple angles, it should learn by watching.

At Alibaba, AI is used to boost sales. For example, shoppers of its Taobao e-commerce site can upload a picture of a product they would like to buy, like a trendy handbag sported by a stranger on the street, and the website will come up with handbags for sale that come closest to the photo. Alibaba also uses augmented reality/virtual reality to make people see and shop from stores like Costco. On its Youku video site, which is similar to YouTube, Alibaba is working on a way to insert virtual 3D objects into people’s uploaded videos, as a way to increase revenue. That’s because many video sites struggle with profitability. “YouTube still loses money,” said Xiaofeng Ren, a chief scientist at Alibaba.

Image: BCG

Rosie and the Home Robot

But with all the advances in AI, it’s still no match for the human brain. Vicarious is a startup that aims to close the gap by developing human level intelligence in robots. Co-founder Dileep George said that the components are there for smarter robots. “We have cheap motors, sensors, batteries, plastics and processors … why don’t we have Rosie?” He was referring to the multipurpose robot maid in the 1960s space-age cartoon The Jetsons. George said the current level of AI is like what he calls the “old brain,” similar to the cognitive ability of rats. The “new brain” is more developed such as what’s seen in primates and whales.

George said the “old brain” AI gets confused when small inputs are changed. For example, a robot that can play a video game goes awry when the colors are made just 2% brighter. “AI today is not ready,” he said. Vicarious uses deep learning to get the robot closer to human cognitive ability. In the same test, a robot with Vicarious’s AI kept playing the game even though the brightness had changed. Another thing that confuses “old brain” AI is putting two objects together. People can see two things superimposed on each other, such as a coffee mug partly obscuring a vase in a photo, but robots mistake it for one unidentified object. Vicarious, which counts Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg as an investor, aims to solve such problems.

The intelligence inside Kuri, a robot companion and videographer meant for the home, is different. Kaijen Hsiao, chief technology officer of creator Mayfield Robotics, said there is a camera behind the robot’s left eye that gathers video in HD. Kuri has depth sensors to map the home and uses images to improve navigation. She also has pet and person detection features so she can smile or react when they are around. Kuri has place recognition as well, so she will remember she has been to a place before even if the lighting has changed, such as the kitchen during the day or night. Moment selection is another feature of the robot, which lets her recognize similar videos she records — such as dad playing with the baby in the living room — and eliminates redundant ones.

“Her job is to bring a spot of life to your home. She provides entertainment — she can play music, podcasts, audiobooks. You can check your home from anywhere,” Hsiao said. Kuri is the family’s videographer, going around the house recording so no one is left out. The robot will curate the videos and show the best ones. For this, Kuri uses vision and deep learning algorithms. “Her point is her personality … [as] an adorable companion,” Hsiao said. Kuri will hit the market in December at $799.

“About 100 years ago, electricity transformed every major industry. AI has advanced to the point where it has the power to transform” every major sector in coming years.–Andrew Ng

Business Response to AI

The U.S. and China lead the world in investments in AI, according to James Manyika, chairman and director of the McKinsey Global Institute. Last year, AI investment in North America ranged from $15 billion to $23 billion, Asia (mainly China) was $8 billion to $12 billion, and Europe lagged at $3 billion to $4 billion. Tech giants are the primary investors in AI, pouring in between $20 billion and $30 billion, with another $6 billion to $9 billion from others, such as venture capitalists and private equity firms.

Where did they put their money? Machine learning took 56% of the investments with computer vision second at 28%. Natural language garnered 7%, autonomous vehicles was at 6% and virtual assistants made up the rest. But despite the level of investment, actual business adoption of AI remains limited, even among firms that know its capabilities, Manyika said. Around 40% of firms are thinking about it, 40% experiment with it and only 20% actually adopt AI in a few areas.

The reason for such reticence is that 41% of companies surveyed are not convinced they can see a return on their investment, 30% said the business case isn’t quite there and the rest said they don’t have the skills to handle AI. However, McKinsey believes that AI can more than double the impact of other analytics and has the potential to materially raise corporate performance.

There are companies that get it. Among sectors leading in AI are telecom and tech companies, financial institutions and automakers. Manyika said these early adopters tend to be larger and digitally mature companies that incorporate AI into core activities, focus on growth and innovation over cost savings and enjoy the support of C-suite level executives. The slowest adopters are companies in health care, travel, professional services, education and construction. However, as AI becomes widespread, it’s a matter of time before firms get on board, experts said.

 

World economic forum – Is the era of management over? – By Andrew Chakhoyan Founder and Managing Partner, Strategic Narrative Consulting

Trying to control people in a corporate environment can be counterproductive

Image: REUTERS/Jason Reed

« The key to management is to get rid of the managers, » advised Ricardo Semler, whose TED Talk went viral, introducing terms such as “industrial democracy” and “corporate re-engineering”. It’s important to point out that Mr. Semler isn’t an academic or an expert in management theory, he is the CEO of a successful industrial company. His views are unlikely to represent mainstream thinking on organizational design. But perhaps it is time we redefine the term “manager”, and question whether the idea of “management” as it was inherited from the industrial era, has outlived its usefulness. ​​

The World Bank estimates the size of the global workforce at about 3.5 billion people, and by no means would I expect, much less advocate, that those who are employed today will transition into a management-free structure in the near or even medium term. The vast majority of work involving human labour is still best carried out in a traditional organisational structure.

In a world of VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity), it is the tech unicorns that will be the early adopters of a post-hierarchical model. In fact, some have already embraced it. Today’s competitive landscape is defined by one word: disruption. The ideas of incremental progress, continuous improvement, and process optimizations just don’t cut the mustard anymore; those practices are necessary, but insufficient. It is now impossible to build enduring success without “intrapreneurship” – creating new ideas from within an organisation.

The organisational dilemmas faced by ambitious disruptors are best exemplified by Netflix. Their human resources guru, Patty McCord, identified a problem that appears obvious in retrospect: as businesses grow, so does their complexity. But that comes at a cost of shrinking talent density: the proportion of high-performers within an organistion.

The slide deck she developed with the CEO of Netflix, Reed Hastings, went viral, and Sheryl Sandberg referred to it as possibly the most important document to come out of Silicon Valley. That said, Patty McCord did not earn her accolades by identifying problems. What captivated everyone’s imagination were the unorthodox solutions that she offered: “Over the years we learned that if we asked people to rely on logic and common sense instead of on formal policies, most of the time we would get better results, and at lower cost.”

The commentary on Netflix’s corporate culture often focuses on its concrete HR policies, such as self-allotted vacations, and the absence of travel expense reports. But these are just derivatives of a larger vision: high business complexity need not be managed with standard processes and ever-growing rulebook. Patty McCord advocated the exact opposite: limit the tyranny of procedures, bring on board high-performers, and let them self-manage in an environment of maximum flexibility.

Today, we define management as the process of dealing with or controlling things or people. And if this is not a red flag to a CEO running anything other than a widget factory, I don’t know what is. Controlling things no longer appears plausible, and controlling people is downright counterproductive. Steve Jobs hit the nail on the head when he said: “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”

Apple’s co-founder is rightfully considered one of the greatest visionaries of our time, but had he been born in, say, the 17th century – or even 50 years earlier than he was – I doubt such a pronouncement would have resonated with his contemporaries. The post-management era is only just beginning to dawn. And it is the ever-accelerating pace of technological progress that is responsible for destroying old paradigms.

Having smart people tell landowners what to do in a pre-industrial society would not have led to better economic outcomes. In the best-case scenario, it would have invited ridicule. There was no evidence to suggest, at the time, that the production and population growth were not one of the same.

While the division of labour was the hallmark of the industrial era, it is becoming increasingly difficult today to parse out and allocate white-collar work in the form of specific tasks. Regardless of how we describe the present, be it the digital epoch, the Fourth Industrial Revolution era, or the “second machine age”, what it boils down to is that all work that requires supervision is being outsourced to robots and algorithms. Non-standard, creative, experimental work, on the other hand, doesn’t naturally lend itself to management.

The second fundamental shift we see now is that a strategy of making a plan and then executing it is no longer viable. What used to be known as “muddling through” is now seen as adapting to the fast-changing environment. Strategy, as we know it, is dead. Dealing with uncertainty is the number one challenge and, as the cliché goes, it’s the number one opportunity too. If your company isn’t the disruptor, it’s a clear sign that it’s about to be disrupted.

The bottom line is that the hierarchical management mode is no longer suited for the challenges of the modern economy. Every pillar of a traditional organization is now in flux, as was brilliantly conceptualized by Tanmay Vora.

 

The status quo is often protected by the vocabulary of business: directors direct, presidents preside, and managers manage. But all those activities are adding much less value than they used to be. They constrain innovation and stifle creativity in the pursuit of order.

Contextual awareness, peripheral vision, design thinking and a multi-disciplinary approach – these are all terms that are trending in modern office-speak. And deservedly so. A project-based and titles-free organization — where yesterday’s team member is today’s team lead — can deliver the flexibility and agility that businesses yearn for.

“Context Curator” is the term I’d like to introduce to the business dictionary. To lead a project is not to assign tasks and monitor performance, but to empower, to define the broader context, and to organically link the work of one team with the rest of the business. Following the example of Netflix and striving for higher talent density is only half the battle. Curating the context in which high performers can excel – rather than attempting to manage them – is the key to unleashing their full potential.

 

World Economic Forum – To play is to learn. Time to step back and let kids be kids – By John GoodwinChief Executive Officer of The LEGO Foundation, Paul Polman Chief Executive Officer of Unilever, Jesper BrodinChief Executive Officer of IKEA Group and Gary Knell Chief Executive Officer of National Geographic Society

Play is crucial to building skills – and yet children have less and less time for it in the modern world – Image: Frank McKenna/Unplash

Real play is the freedom for children to engage with and learn from the world that surrounds them. By mentally and physically connecting children to the world, play empowers them to create and grow for the rest of their lives. It is a fundamental right for all children.

Research shows that play is vital to a child’s development, equipping them with the skills necessary to tackle humanity’s future, such as emotional intelligence, creativity and problem solving. To be a superhero is to lead; to host a teddy for tea is to organise; to build a fort is to innovate: to play is to learn.

We, Unilever through its Dirt is Good brands including OMO and Persil, the LEGO Foundation and IKEA Group, the founding members of the Real Play Coalition in partnership with National Geographic, are committed to create a movement that prioritises the importance of play as not only something that lets kids be kids, but as something that sparks the fire for a child’s development and learning. Partnering with children, parents, teachers, business, NGOs, stakeholders and society, our Real Play Coalition will empower and facilitate children’s opportunities to grow and learn through play.

These opportunities should be granted to children wherever and whenever possible. But millions of youngsters around the world lack safe spaces for exploratory, hands-on play. In fact, 78% of parents agree that, during their childhood, the world was safer. It is critical that the freedom to play safely is not lost. Children who can play in a safe and supportive environment develop face-to-face communication, teamwork and negotiation skills, allowing them to become more resilient to life’s challenges.

Many more children continue to miss out on play as it becomes less of a priority amid the pressures and distractions of our scheduled, test scored and technology-driven world. Sadly, our belief in the vital importance of play, both in and outside of the classroom, is not shared by as many as we would like. Studies have shown that, over the last 30 years, the time that children spend playing at school is fast reducing. In some countries, as many as two in three children complain that their parents organize too many activities for them outside of school, and nearly half (49%) of parents feel they struggle to find time to play with their children.

So long as our ever-changing world continues to pose new challenges to play, children’s ability to develop skills that are essential to their future – and to the future of society as a whole – will be hindered. If 56% of children continue to spend less time outdoors than maximum security prisoners in the US, then the harder the search for our future leaders, creators and explorers will become.

Our fast-changing world, including the growth of technologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence, means that children entering primary school today will be working in jobs that are yet to exist. This means we need to rethink and evolve our education systems, our on-the-job training programmes and our evaluation processes so that the children of tomorrow are poised for what the future may hold. The importance of the skills play promotes in the face of our changing world has never been higher. When children play, for instance, they practice original thinking, which is one of the main cognitive processes in creativity. Construction play in early childhood correlates to the development of spatial visualisation skills, which are strongly connected to mathematic capabilities and problem-solving skills in later life.

The more our children play today, the more prepared future generations will be. Play is needed to endow us with leaders who can resolve conflict, problem solve, build socially connected communities and inspire society to flourish. We are committed to the idea that any child, wherever they are in the world, could be such a leader. Join us in protecting their real play.

 

World Economic Forum – To play is to learn. Time to step back and let kids be kids – Written by: John GoodwinChief Executive Officer, The LEGO Foundation Paul PolmanChief Executive Officer, Unilever Jesper BrodinChief Executive Officer, IKEA Group Gary KnellChief Executive Officer, National Geographic Society

Play is crucial to building skills – and yet children have less and less time for it in the modern world

Image: Frank McKenna/Unplash

This article is part of the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting

Real play is the freedom for children to engage with and learn from the world that surrounds them. By mentally and physically connecting children to the world, play empowers them to create and grow for the rest of their lives. It is a fundamental right for all children.

Research shows that play is vital to a child’s development, equipping them with the skills necessary to tackle humanity’s future, such as emotional intelligence, creativity and problem solving. To be a superhero is to lead; to host a teddy for tea is to organise; to build a fort is to innovate: to play is to learn.

We, Unilever through its Dirt is Good brands including OMO and Persil, the LEGO Foundation and IKEA Group, the founding members of the Real Play Coalition in partnership with National Geographic, are committed to create a movement that prioritises the importance of play as not only something that lets kids be kids, but as something that sparks the fire for a child’s development and learning. Partnering with children, parents, teachers, business, NGOs, stakeholders and society, our Real Play Coalition will empower and facilitate children’s opportunities to grow and learn through play.

These opportunities should be granted to children wherever and whenever possible. But millions of youngsters around the world lack safe spaces for exploratory, hands-on play. In fact, 78% of parents agree that, during their childhood, the world was safer. It is critical that the freedom to play safely is not lost. Children who can play in a safe and supportive environment develop face-to-face communication, teamwork and negotiation skills, allowing them to become more resilient to life’s challenges.

Many more children continue to miss out on play as it becomes less of a priority amid the pressures and distractions of our scheduled, test scored and technology-driven world. Sadly, our belief in the vital importance of play, both in and outside of the classroom, is not shared by as many as we would like. Studies have shown that, over the last 30 years, the time that children spend playing at school is fast reducing. In some countries, as many as two in three children complain that their parents organize too many activities for them outside of school, and nearly half (49%) of parents feel they struggle to find time to play with their children.

So long as our ever-changing world continues to pose new challenges to play, children’s ability to develop skills that are essential to their future – and to the future of society as a whole – will be hindered. If 56% of children continue to spend less time outdoors than maximum security prisoners in the US, then the harder the search for our future leaders, creators and explorers will become.

Our fast-changing world, including the growth of technologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence, means that children entering primary school today will be working in jobs that are yet to exist. This means we need to rethink and evolve our education systems, our on-the-job training programmes and our evaluation processes so that the children of tomorrow are poised for what the future may hold. The importance of the skills play promotes in the face of our changing world has never been higher. When children play, for instance, they practice original thinking, which is one of the main cognitive processes in creativity. Construction play in early childhood correlates to the development of spatial visualisation skills, which are strongly connected to mathematic capabilities and problem-solving skills in later life.

The more our children play today, the more prepared future generations will be. Play is needed to endow us with leaders who can resolve conflict, problem solve, build socially connected communities and inspire society to flourish. We are committed to the idea that any child, wherever they are in the world, could be such a leader. Join us in protecting their real play.