This section contains Special Features of general interest on a number of varied topics.  

i * Donald Trump * Britain's greener at the expense of the rest of the world * Pakistan floods *UNICEF: Child poverty fight threatened by west's cuts * Graduates picking up the tab (bill) * Haiti's disastrous history in pictures * Knowledge is power + Knowledge Management & Quotations * Peru's mountain people face  fight for survival * 2020 Vision * Extreme Fear - could you handle it? * The Brothers grim * British dead and wounded in Afghanistan month by month * The Last Nomads * Records of Achievement - The Progress File - Personal Development Planning * Alternative Education: Earn As You Learn * Link to 'Archive'  www.enjoyingenglish2008.org

Donald Trump Born in New York, billionaire Donald Trump, 64, acquired his no-nonsense approach to life from his Scottish mother, Mary , and his property developer father.  After graduating in the 1960's he joined his father's company, and made a fortune through property speculation.  When the world economic recession took hold in the 80's, he suffered a $900million personal liability, and a $ 3.5million business debt. He restructured his finances and rebuilt his empire.  He now lives with his 3rd wife in Trump Tower, Manhattan (NY).  He says, 'When people know you fight back, it makes them think twice about messing with you.' I believe in the racehorse theory of doing well in life.  Some people are naturally cut out for success, based on the head start their parents and upbringing gave them.  Sure, you can be taught things and improve yourself, but there's a point where some people have to accept that their natural ability lies elsewhere. Show me someone without an ego (thinks highly of themselves), and I'll show you a loser.  A strong, healthy ego goes a long way to ensuring your success, because it sends a clear message to the world that you mean business.  If you don't believe in yourself, no one else will. Never get bored, or be boring.  I've remained curious, which keeps me motivated.  Whenever I get involved in a new project, I know I have a lot to learn, but I don't let that discourage me.  Being a know-it-all shuts you off from new opportunities.  I don't set borders on myself or my interests. Failing to plan is planning to fail.  When I started out, I spent a lot of time researching every detail of the things relevant to the deal I was interested in.  I still do that today.  People often comment on how quickly I operate, but the reason I can do this is because I have done the background work first. Be your own brand.  Even if you are lower down the rungs at work, remember everything you say and do is important.  Be conscientious and pay attention to detail, because it will set you apart.  A business based on quality and integrity will sell itself. Get the best people, but don't trust them.  I look for people with instinct, tenacity and intellectual capacity.  If you have smart people working for you, they'll try to screw (cheat) you if they think they can do better without you.  Hit people hard when they take advantage of you.  If people know you'll fight back, it makes them think twice about messing with you. Watch, listen and dream.  I've succeeded where others haven't because I have a better imagination, coupled with a great sense of location.  I've always been able to get the best location for whatever reason.  To be big, think big - really big.  It's very easy to sit back and let life just happen, and settle for what you've got.  Thinking big is all about reinforcement for accomplishing you goals.  The biggest obstacle to building wealth, is to think that it is beyond your reach. I hear from the past, but plan for the future by focusing on the present.  If you worry too much about the future, you can't possibly take the steps in the present to ensure your future is successful.  The past is just a guide for helping you make better decisions in the present.  By focusing what you can do today to change your life, you are ensuring that you'll reach your goals. Deflect criticism by doing a good job.  You need to be bigger than your problems in order to handle what's being levelled at you..  Be proactive and just take the next step to even greater places.  Success is an endurance race, you have to be tougher than the others and go that extra mile.  If you can't handle the heat, you're not going to survive long-term.  I was hundreds of millions in debt and beat bankrupts twice - so what?  To me it was a blip, not a catastrophe.  I didn't underestimate the problems, but I refused to give in to them.  I knew I was destined to succeed and I kept focused on that belief.  I got through it because I made sure I didn't lose my momentum. Learn how to handle setbacks.  No matter how well you're doing, or how good you are, there will always be bumps in the road.  I have a lot of friends who don't have this ability, including people who were very successful, but when they had a setback, they immediately failed.  Embrace risk - everything in life is risky. There are no fears, just concerns.  Labelling something as a fear is reactive, but framing it as a concern gives you back control, and allows you to address it more pro-actively.  It's easier to break down a concern, whereas fear creates a block that hinders your creative thinking. 'Think Like A Champion'  and  'Think Big:Make it Happen in Business and Life-' by Donald Trump are available in bookshops and on-line. Britain is growing greener at the expense of the rest of the world While we comfort ourselves with our conservation and recycling, we pollute other nations through our greed   Tony Juniper   The Observer,  17.10.2010   The impending extinction of tigers, the melting icecaps and the ravaging of the rainforests are symptoms of an emerging global crisis. A new World Wildlife Fund report out maps its scale and concludes that if we don't change course by 2030, we will need a second Earth to meet our needs.   But does all this ring true? After all, in the UK we are greener than ever. Our air quality has improved dramatically – "pea soup" killer smog has been consigned to the history books. We have cleaned up power stations and banned ozone-destroying chemicals. We have nature reserves and some of our most polluted rivers have enjoyed a dramatic renaissance. We are planting more trees and many toxic pesticides have been banned. We have even made progress in improving household recycling rates. So what is the problem?  Part of the trouble is that we have simply exported a lot of the environmental damage we cause. In the age of globalisation, we can live greener here because we have sent the pollution and habitat destruction somewhere else. For the past few years, it has become fashionable to close down conversations about what we need to do to protect the environment by asking: "What about China?", the implication being that China is causing such vast environmental impact as to render our efforts pointless.   There is no doubt that China's footprint, and those of several other fast developing economies, has increased hugely and in a short time. But a lot of the pollution and environmental damage is being done in order to supply us, and other western countries, with consumer goods, chemicals, ships, steel and other modern essentials. The point is underlined by the fact that Denmark, to many eyes a "green" country, comes out in the WWF report as third in a world league table of the highest impact countries. Like us, they look greener because they have exported their environmental problems elsewhere.   There is a harsh reality behind all this that people everywhere, and in the west in particular, need to get their collective minds around. It is the fact that the Earth is finite and that our current patterns of consumption and waste generation are overwhelming its ability to cope. We are confronted with a choice: either change how we live or face grave consequences arising from a kind of ecological credit crunch.  The emerging crisis has three main parts. The first relates to the vast quantities of greenhouse gases we are releasing. We need to cut these by about four-fifths in the next 40 years or so, starting now. If we don't, the impact of climate change and ocean acidification might lead to massive economic damage.   The second crisis is linked to the loss of nature – animals, plants, ecosystems, and all the things they do for us, caused by habitat clearance and farm pollution. On top of this is a third crisis of rapid resource depletion. Fisheries, oil reserves, fresh water and soil are among key assets now facing planet-wide depletion.   Projections on how these different aspects map out under business-as-usual scenarios later in the 21st century do not paint a pretty picture, especially when one considers the vast momentum added by population increase and the effects of economic growth. There will be more people and they will be richer, with more cars and flights, demanding more products and eating more meat. There are 200,000 more of us each day and the vast majority want to live more like most Europeans and Americans than most Africans. If the developing world takes on our lifestyle, where will it export its environmental problems? So much for the problem; what is the solution? Technology is vital, but will not be enough on its own. There is a need for culture change and to look hard at how we measure economic progress. At the moment, we judge success basically in terms of how much economic growth we can achieve, which in turn is often a proxy for how much stuff we are using up. It's a big challenge, but then it is a big problem. By doing small things, we will get only small improvements and small improvements will still lead to disaster.   We need leadership for big change from all quarters and we need it fast. And we especially need leadership from the richer and better-off countries to show how it really is possible to do things differently. There is no point telling China it is behaving badly while continuing to import its pollution. That will take us nowhere.   Tomorrow, governments will again gather for another of their crucial environmental summits. This time it is in Japan and is about biodiversity. Having failed to meet earlier targets to cut the rate of biodiversity loss, it is to be hoped that they will set new ones. But if these are to be met, then the changes agreed must go far beyond how many national parks we can designate. When natural resources really start to get scarce, such lines on maps will be worthless as a final scramble for the Earth's resources gets underway. If there is to be salvation from the eco-crunch, then deeper change is required. Some gloomily conclude that the impending collision of the big environmental crunches is part of humanity's natural destiny. Like a global analogue of Easter Island, we will simply use up all the resources and degrade the environment until collapse becomes inevitable. Many of us take a different view, however, pointing to humans' unique ability to co-operate and to use inventiveness to overcome the most challenging problems. The response to the eco-crunch is not only about stopping things we like doing. There is huge energy going into how a greener economy could work. Part of it is about creating jobs in the cutting-edge clean technologies of the future. Social scientists are also beginning to better understand how the human psychology that so readily lends itself to consumerism might be harnessed instead for sustainability. It can be done.   There is, however, a danger that the size of the task can create paralysis and we end up doing nothing. But in thinking big and seeking major change there is nothing to be lost, only to be gained. And we must all be part of the solution, because this is everyone's job, not just governments. Culture can change from the bottom up and all of us can be leaders. For our children's sake, we really do need to promise the Earth and to start living like we mean it. What else do we have to offer the future? I don't think too many history books will praise us for continuing with business as usual.   'Harmony' by HRH the Prince of Wales, Tony Juniper and Ian Skelly is published by Harper Collins Pakistan floods: 'When the children come running, it makes my heart drop' Special report: Two months ago, the Indus flooded, killing 1,700 Pakistanis and displacing millions. In the first of a four-part series, Declan Walsh travels the river, and asks if the country can survive Swat valley: the road to recovery - Interactive map Pakistan floods: from Swat to the sea  - images   Two months ago, the Indus flooded, killing 1,700 Pakistanis and displacing millions. In the first of a four-part series, Declan Walsh travels the river, and asks whether the country can survive Declan Walsh in Swat   guardian.co.uk,   01.10. 2010.   Declan Walsh travels to the source of the Indus river, high up in the Swat valley Link to this video   The Chinook helicopters, travelling in pairs, swooped and curled between the lush valley walls of the Hindu Kush. The aftermath of Pakistan's epic flood scrolled underneath: torn bridges, crushed houses, entire fields swept away by the racing waters. Inside the helicopters about 70 highland peasants, mostly fathers and their sons, gripping one another in terror and wonderment. Some poked fingers in their ears against the deafening engine roar; others peered out of the open hatch, awestruck – they had never seen their homeland like this before. At a small military base the villagers stumbled out of the Chinooks, clothes pressed to their skin by the powerful rotorwash. Then their rescuers – silent American soldiers in black, bug-like helmets, eyes hidden behind mysterious looking black visors, turned around and headed back up the valley for more. The sight of US soldiers in the Swat valley, which only last year was a Taliban stronghold, is one of the many effects of Pakistan's superflood. Swat was the starting point of the calamity, where a biblical downpour of rain lasting three days gave birth to a torrent that would sweep across the length of Pakistan. Downstream, the waters moved relatively slowly, smothering fields and houses. But in Swat the flood moved with raw and destructive power, a high-velocity train that demolished everything in its path – aid workers compared it to the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami in Indonesia – and left tens of thousands of people cut off from the outside world. That is where the Americans stepped in. The US has spent $362m (£229m) on flood aid, dispatching 26 helicopters to deliver food and evacuate stranded villagers in Swat and Sindh. Some of the choppers have been flown in from Alaska, others hop off an aircraft carrier, the USS Peleliu, anchored in the Arabian Sea. Between four and six cargo aircraft arrive with more aid every day. The Americans say their airlift is a mercy mission – "When all those children come running to us, it just makes my heart drop," said Specialist Eric Schmidt, one of the Chinook-borne soldiers – but it also has a strategic component. Americans are despised across Pakistan, with the latest Pes survey showing that 60% of Pakistanis view them as an enemy. The American embassy in Islamabad is churning out press releases about the assistance, hoping to make a dent in that figure. "We want to get the good news out," says one press officer. On the ground, though, it is not so easy. Co-operation with their Pakistani counterparts can be stiff, even tense. Americans are not allowed to carry guns; so the only weapons are borne by Pakistani commandos. At Ghazi airbase a Pakistani sentry said he admired the money and resources they brought to the aid effort. "But what they really want is to take our nuclear bombs," he added. In the choppers US soldiers wear helmet patches commemorating other soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, wars that are viewed with great hostility in Pakistan. The Americans struggle to understand Pakistani priorities. One flight filled with aid was diverted to pick up a Pakistani general, who hopped on board, gripping his wooden baton. The food aid was not delivered. "All that, just to give the general a joyride," grumbled one American. At least they were not fighting – something that could not be said of the alliance further south, along the border. Today Nato supply trucks were blocked on the Khyber Pass for a second day in retaliation for a Nato helicopter attack on a Pakistani border post that killed three soldiers. It was the fourth such cross-border strike in a week – last weekend, US Apache helicopters killed up to 50 militants inside Pakistan as they fled across the border from Afghanistan. Meanwhile, in the tribal belt armed CIA drones carried out 21 strikes in September – the highest number since the cloaked campaign started six years ago. But gratitude to America has risen. In Jare, midway up the valley, thousands of people clambered along a riverbank because the road had been swept away. About 60 metres above them, half-houses protruded from a cliff-face that had been shorn off by the water; a shattered toilet and kitchen sink lay among the river rocks below. A pair of US Chinooks whizzed overhead. "We don't like the drones when they target innocents," said Izhar Ali, an 18-year-old student. "But our people need help now, and we don't care where it comes from." Last July Swatis might have been forgiven for thinking their misfortune was over. The army offensive in 2009 cleared the Taliban from much of the valley; the stone-faced insurgent leader Maulvi Fazlullah had fled to Afghanistan. Shopkeepers painted Pakistan flags on their shutters; this summer the authorities dared to organise a tourist festival. Few visitors came, but it was a sign of hope. In more than 60 hours of non-stop torrential rainfall, the floods washed all that away. The north-west normally receives 500mm (20in) of rain in the month of July; over one five-day period 5,000mm fell. "It was incredible," said Sameenullah Afridi, a local United Nations official. Environmental neglect exacerbated the damage. Decades of deforestation, driven by a "timber mafia" that includes the Taliban, had denuded most valley slopes. So the racing downpour funnelled into the middle of the valley. Salim Ahmed was among the victims. Described as a softly-spoken labourer recently returned from the building sites of Dubai, Salim rushed out to save his animals. But as the waters gushed around him, he could not save himself. He became trapped under a tree. In a quiet glade by their riverside home, Salim's teenage sons described the agony of watching their father cling desperately to life. "We had a pair of binoculars and we could see him trying to keep busy, climbing up the tree," said Jamil, 17. They begged the army to send a helicopter but the rain was too much. A day later Salim slipped away; his body was recovered 10 miles downstream. He left behind six boys and one girl. "We don't know how we will survive now," said his son. For most Swatis, the focus has turned to reconstruction. The scale of the task is daunting: 45 bridges destroyed, at least 10,000 acres of land washed away, countless houses and shops destroyed. Further north large chunks of the famed Karakoram highway, a celebrated feat of engineering built by the Chinese over 20 years, have simply melted away; it may take years to re-open. In Madyan, about halfway up the valley, half of the district hospital was swept away. The remainder is stranded in the middle of the riverbed, like something that dropped from the sky. Leaving Madyan bearded men and burka-clad women clamber over hills and take rickety chairlifts across the river. One is powered with an ingenious contraption rigged up to a parked car. Along the way they pass Pakistani soldiers at the controls of earthmovers, cutting a makeshift road. The Taliban tried to claim the floods were a curse from Allah, but even they were not safe. At the once proud militant headquarters in Imam Dheri, across from the main town Mingora, the courtyard where bearded men flogged accused criminals is layered with soft sand. The mosque itself – a pile of rubble since last year's fighting - is coated in slime. The scene resembles an ancient ruin. But the Taliban are by no means history. In August militants torched two schools in Kalam – the highland district where the US helicopters are dropping aid, and a major pocket of resistance. Sameen, a 22-year-old fleeing the area, said the army rounded up a number of suspects afterwards. "They got the wrong people. They were locked up for a day, without tea or food. Later we paid a bribe and they were freed," he said with a shrug. Has Pakistan's army been overstretched by the flood effort? In the southern part of the valley bazaars are thriving and giggly uniformed children – girls and boys – rush to class. But under the patina of normality lies tensions. In some areas farmers are not allowed grow tall maize – a potential source of cover for militants. In the nearby villages walls are daubed with army phone numbers – informer hotlines. There are army checkposts every few miles, even in remote areas, cars slalom through concrete barriers watched by closed circuit television cameras. The patriotic fever suggested by the proliferation of green and white flags is not entirely voluntary. One of the few traders, speaking on condition of anonymity, said they had been forced to paint the flags. Suspected militant sympathisers disappear from their homes at night; some are found dead. A video on the internet this week purported to show soldiers executing Taliban militants in Swat. The army says it is a fake. Inside the offices of an international aid agency, one manager warns that "around here, nobody will tell you the truth". He said: "They're too scared to talk. If I say something to you, someone may be listening. And if they go to the army, then who will protect me?" Will the flood make the Americans more popular? The precedents are not encouraging. After the 2005 earthquake the US military also dispatched a fleet of Chinooks into the mountains. A year later, US popularity ratings nudged up by four points. But 12 months after that, as the Bush administration clung to the floundering dictator Pervez Musharraf, the numbers plunged to their lowest level since 2001. In Pakistan, there are some things that aid just cannot fix.   http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/01/pakistan-floods-us-military

UNICEF: Child poverty fight threatened by west's cost cuts

Unicef millennium development goals report highlights threat of government austerity measures, food crisis and climate change

• Larry Elliott   The Guardian,  07.09.2010 

Schoolchildren in the village of Molesti, Moldova welcome the opening of their school, which Unicef is hoping will be a model for future schools there. Universal primary education is one of the goals under threat.

Photograph: John McConnico/AP

The United Nations warned today that the patchy global struggle to lift children out of poverty was being threatened by budget cuts in the west, soaring food prices and climate change.

In a report prepared for a New York summit this month to measure progress in meeting the 2015 millennium development goals, Unicef said the pressures on aid budgets would have knock-on effects in the world's poorest countries. "Fiscal constraints in industrialised economies will likely have reverberations for developing nations, particularly those dependent on external assistance," the report noted. "Fiscal retrenchment may undermine social progress, particularly if the global recovery is uneven and halting."

It added: "The austerity measures currently being introduced in some European Union countries call for sharp cuts in spending, and it is not fully clear how these reductions will affect child-related expenditures, either at home or abroad.

Unicef said there were four other global threats that could undermine progress: the food and financial crises; rapid urbanisation; climate change and ecosystem degradation; and escalating human crises.

"High food prices in 2008 and 2009 and falling real household incomes have reduced consumer purchasing power; poor consumers have less money to spend on food," it said.

The UN millennium development goals are eight separate targets for reducing global poverty. They include a halving of the number of people living on less than $2 (£1.30) a day, universal primary education, a two-thirds cut in deaths of children under five and a 75% reduction in maternal mortality 

Unicef said in the report that despite some impressive gains in child survival in several countries in sub-Saharan Africa between 1990 and 2008, the gap in child mortality with other regions was growing. "In 1990, a child born in sub-Saharan Africa faced a probability of dying before his or her fifth birthday that was 1.5 times higher than in South Asia, 3.5 times higher than in Latin America and the Caribbean and 18.4 times higher than in the industrialised countries. By 2008, these gaps had widened markedly, owing to faster progress elsewhere.

"Now a child born in sub-Saharan Africa faces an under-five mortality rate that is 1.9 times higher than in South Asia, 6.3 times higher than in Latin America and the Caribbean, and 24 times higher than in the industrialised nations."

There were big disparities for children within poor countries. A child born in one of the world's poorest communities was "two times less likely to have been born to a mother who received antenatal care and three times less likely to have come into the world with a skilled attendant present".

Poor children were also far less likely to be treated for pneumonia and diarrhoea, two of the biggest killers during the first five years of life.

It noted that in all developing regions, child mortality was notably higher among poor families, while children in rural areas tended to suffer more than those in urban areas. "The urban-rural divide in human development is perhaps most marked in the case of access to improved drinking water and sanitation facilities. Of the 884 million people who continue to lack access to improved drinking water sources, 84% live in rural areas."

Anthony Lake, Unicef's executive director, said there had been significant progress towards in meeting the millennium Ddevelopment goals, "but it is increasingly evident that our progress is uneven in many key areas." "In fact, compelling data suggest that in the global push to achieve the MDGs, we are leaving behind millions of the world's most disadvantaged, vulnerable and marginalised children: the children who are facing the longest odds."

How graduates are picking up the tab for their parents' lives

Our parents had free education, fat pensions, and second homes. We've got student debt and a property ladder with rotten rungs. Thanks very much, says Andrew Hankinson, BSc

• Andrew Hankinson   The Observer, Sunday 31.01.2010

Andrew Hankinson with his father Barry at his home in Darras Hall near Newcastle. Photograph: Richard Rayner/NNP

Last week a man in the jobcentre handed me a letter summoning me to a Back to Work session – come on! Back to work! Break's over! A week later, I sit on a blue settee and wait to be called into a meeting room. A man with a goatee beard and ponytail sits on the blue settee opposite. He's reading a book. To my left is another man on another blue settee, reading a newspaper. I flick through some notes. We share the daunted look of the new unemployed. I look at a poster on the wall – "You can find a job" – next to a picture of an ecstatic woman. Finally, the three of us are ushered into a room. The man who was reading the newspaper claims he attended a session last week and is immediately excused. Smart move.

 

Two of us remain. A few minutes later a third claimant/loafer/tax thief enters. There were supposed to be 12 of us – damn buses and slow shoes. I sit with a bundle of government leaflets in my lap and one of the three staff members explains the Job Vacancy Pie. It's impressive – a big chart showing where the jobs are. Hidden, apparently. No longer advertised. We should ask contacts instead, or come to the recruitment drives by the armed services and the new Morrisons down the road.

 

"We can also help with business plans," a man in a beige suit adds, "though whether you'd be thinking of that in this climate, I don't know."

 

The claimant who arrived late opens a bottle of Coke and poses a theoretical question about what would happen if he had worked for McDonald's and quit after three weeks because he didn't like it. I decide to treat it all as research and start scribbling, detaching myself from the drudgery; unemployment is like being locked in a room with Tim Lovejoy and no gun. A university-­educated man shouldn't experience this. I amassed student debt in the belief that graduation would be followed by a huge bubble bath filled with sexy young jobs and beautiful, cigar-smoking status symbols. Not joblessness. I did my year working at a Newcastle-based call centre (where a degree was a requisite). I stuck it out, asking the team leader for permission to use the toilet. I did my time. I got a journalism qualification from Darlington College. I chased that job I wanted: working on Arena magazine (now defunct) in the dazzling capital. But then came redundancy. I took a job at another magazine. Redundant again – unemployment down south! Now I live with my girlfriend in a one-bedroom rental with collapsing ceilings (the landlord won't fix a leak) and pillowcases for curtains.

 

The Back to Work session finishes. The goody bags are disappointing – forms to fill in and badly photocopied brochures. It's time to get away from the jobcentre's sour odour of bad hygiene, bureaucracy and mass failure. I head past the security guards and sidestep the terror dog tied to the railing. There's goatee man. I say hello and ask his story. He's 22 years old and called Alan. He lives with his parents in south London and got an A and two Bs at A-level. After that he went to Lancaster University to study English literature. This is his second stint on the dole. As we walk, I tell Alan I've been unemployed for 13 weeks.

 

It's easy to sympathise with Alan. I'm 29, so I had some good years before my income (the dole) and assets (nothing) became a tiny fraction of my debt (£10,000 in student loans). But those arriving now are being shellacked. They already have a nickname – the lost generation, due to the 1 million 16- to 24-year-olds who are looking for work. It's even hitting those traditionally saved by educational life rafts – one in every five graduate recruitment schemes has been scrapped and an estimated 40,000 of last year's graduates were expected to be signing on six months after returning their mortarboards. The government's answer is the Future Jobs Fund (a promise of 150,000 jobs for 18- to 24-year-olds who are unemployed for a year) and the Graduate Talent Pool (a website enabling firms to recruit 2008 and 2009's graduates on minimum wage or unpaid internships).

"People are feeling incredibly angry," Wes Streeting, president of the National Union of Students, told me. "They have debts in excess of £20,000 after being told they would get a job at the end of their degree and earn more money. Instead they're just heavily indebted."

The anger is due to intergenerational unfairness. Baby boomers had free education, affordable houses, fat pensions, early retirement and second homes (150,000 at the last census), but when we got to the buffet table – oh look, a couple of manhandled sandwiches. We've been left with education on the never-never and a property ladder with rotten rungs. Our work ethic is slurred and our salaries are stagnant. Any hope of promotion is paralysed by the comatose grey ceiling clogging every hierarchy. Overtime is unpaid and pensions are miserly. And the financial system which made our parents rich has left us choosing between crap job or no job. It's like we've been handed the keys to the family castle only to discover the family sold it to Starbucks. And we're going to have to work there.

 

The most vociferous complaint came from 23-year-old George Lewkowicz after the CBI proposed raising tuition fees. His furious letter to the Guardian last September roared that his generation has been "shafted". He attacked unaffordable housing and unemployment, and suggested that those who received their university education for free – like the CBI's Richard Lambert – forgo their "patio heaters" and pay a university windfall tax, applying interest since they graduated. He appeared on Jeremy Vine's Radio 2 show twice and was written about in newspaper columns. The letter was posted on dozens of blogs and forums. "You've made this mess," he concluded, "so you can pay to clear it up."

 

In Newcastle we call that a proper radge. I meet him for a pint, and he's still angry and stands by his letter. He says his friends are equally riled and he's considering formalising his campaign: the credit-crunch generation's Robin Hood. Asking around friends, it's not hard to find him a gang of angry followers: Olivia, 23, philosophy graduate, currently studying a business skills course – "I'm furious at paying another £4,000 on top of university fees merely in the hope of getting a job";

 

Catherine, 27, psychologist – "I got a first-class degree and ended up serving frothy soya milk to posh mums"; Ali, 24, anthropology and sociology – "I got my degree but everywhere needed more: more experience, more qualifications. So now I teach English in Japan"; Will, 25, unemployed –"A degree from a good university counts for nothing, as universities are flooded with people who shouldn't be there"; Hollie, 24, fashion graduate – "I lost my job and live in a crummy house share with my landlord's Thai bride. Yes, I'm miffed."

 

I widen my hunt and find internet forums and blogs venting intergenerational bitterness. And OK, the internet is just a massive two fingers from everyone to everyone, but it indicates which way the mad herd is stampeding: "baby boomers reveal themselves to be simply the most spoilt generation in the history of the entire planet", "a parasitic generation", "thanks for looking the other way", "it's a generational mugging". Even playwright David Hare noted it in The Power of Yes when a 24-year-old banker reproaches the baby boomers with: "You've taken everything and left us with nothing."

 

But before we work ourselves into a mob, maybe I should double-check. Take George Lewkowicz. It turns out he's doing OK: private education, a job in the City, parents paid for his university costs. And there's me: got a 2:2, refusing to change industry despite publishing hitting the iceberg years ago. And take Alan. I thought he was the perfect specimen – student debt, lives at home, unemployed – but he wouldn't stop talking and he spoiled it. He told me he quit university after a year and went to Australia because he "wasn't inspired by" his studies. He got a job at a solicitor's office but couldn't get his "head around Microsoft Office" (despite a grammar school education). He doesn't have "the right sort of mind" to fix electronics like his dad. And he was a roadie, but got fired. It seems as if Alan has had a few chances, and perhaps he's just not that keen on work (the boring kind that our parents did). And it's this fundamental reassessment of what is required to make money (ie, that boring work) that we have to face up to. I ask Alan what he wants to be.

"A poet," he replies.

 

Our generation: inculcated with dreams, hampered by the economy, scuppered by our own ineffectiveness. And then there's our spending. We do spend. I'm told that in the past, people would save for years to buy a house, then live with no carpets and save again. Now we splurge on the Ikea elves who fly around on a giant credit card, furnishing our homes in time for house-warming parties. Student loans = textbooks? Incorrect. A duck-feather jacket was my folly. Mobile phones and iPods, DVDs and Uggs, ISPs and olive bars. And then there's the holiday epidemic. Above my desk is a photograph of a baseballer (£12 for a large print and £55 to frame), which I took in Central Park (£1,500 for flights, hotels and spending money). I expect a large chunk of mortgage deposits is circulating the bars of New York and the hash dens of Morocco. But we learned to spend in childhood and it's become instinctual, like disliking Ashley Cole. And the instinct has been amplified through the generations – Grandma shopped around for the cheapest meat, Mum went to Marks & Spencer, I ask the waiter for medium-rare. Unfortunately, we're struggling to fund the habit.

Which is why the woman at the jobcentre sent me on a compulsory seminar for "unemployed professionals" (code for: been to university, probably owns a suit).

 

The sessions are occurring all over the country as part of the government's effort to get people like me working again. This one is near London's Liverpool Street and is being run by a recruitment firm called GR Law. I'm expecting the usual stuff about formatting CVs and not swearing too much during the interview, but John, the presenter… Well, I'm shocked. The jobs market has changed vastly since the recession hit. I pull a face when John mentions Twitter, but he says 346,683 jobs were uploaded on Twitter in the past 30 days worldwide. That's compared with no jobs on Twitter nine months ago. And the Job Vacancy Pie was right – around 70% of jobs are not advertised. Facebook is a necessity. LinkedIn is a necessity. And we shouldn't wait until the application deadline, because recruiters stop opening emails after the initial 20 CVs.

 

"You've never looked for a job in a market like this," says John. "Even if there's nothing wrong with your CV, you're up against 50 others who have nothing wrong with theirs either." I sit slack-jawed, like John's just played the Zapruder tape and pointed out a guy on the sidewalk with a smoking gun and a big clown hat. The seven others in the seminar are a lawyer, a digital media graduate, a young offenders worker, a fashion graduate, a property researcher, a former British Gas call centre manager and a criminology graduate. They're smart and confident.

 

Rajiv Nawbatt is one of them. He's a recruiter's dream: studied law at Sheffield University (2:1), worked in the City for a year, did a postgraduate legal practice course, worked as a paralegal for a year and completed his two-year training contract with a "silver circle" law firm. But they didn't hire him permanently, and now he's 27 and has been claiming the dole for two months. I pour myself a cup of tea (life support, mini-break and Christmas bonus for the unemployed). The criminology graduate is Christine Babicz, 22, from Essex. After graduating, she worked at the National Centre for Social Research, but temporary staff were let go and now she's doing a research internship at the Magistrates' Association. She's been on the dole for a month and hates it. The jobcentre says she has to give up the internship. Her student debt is £21,000 and she's getting desperate. Unfortunately there aren't enough jobs to go round.

 

Economist David Blanchflower, a labour expert and former member of the Monetary Policy Committee (and sage of the recession), is equally worried about our prospects. He explains what needs to be done: raise the education leaving age to 18, more teachers, no National Insurance for under-25s, and guaranteed work for the long-term unemployed. Most worrying for graduates is his final bit of advice. "Young people have not seen anything like this before," he says. "Their expectations were different, but they will have to adapt to this new world. If they have to lower their expectations, that's what they have to do. If that means less money, that's what you do. If that means delivering pizza, that's what you do."

Delivering pizza? I ask Rajiv if he'd deliver pizza, considering the time and money he and his family have spent. He says he might, but not at the moment. Christine says she would if she could drive. But even if she learns to ride a scooter, is that work even available? I phone my local pizza takeaway and ask – "No, no jobs, sorry Sir." I'm not disappointed, because there are acceptable down-jobs (labouring on a building site, helping an old man strip narrow boats, acting) and there's delivering pizza. I would have to work nights. My boss would be… not a graduate. I'd have to chat with other deliverers – is that the job title? – who stack deodorants and empty beer cans on their bookshelves rather than books. Who probably don't even have bookshelves. Who probably think a digestif is a biscuit. And then there's my friends: they'd show interest initially, but after four weeks, three months… What if they ordered pizza? And what if I were unable to claw my way back out of the social quicksand?

 

No. I'm part of the digital generation. I'm an email and adjustable-seat kind of worker. Maybe I can invent an iPhone app to deliver pizzas. Perhaps an entire series of iPhone apps. One of them could scoop cigarette ends out of urinals, another could be polite to customers. What's wrong with me? Why am I not like Dad? Dad would deliver pizzas. I remember when his building business folded in the 1990s. He didn't sign on. He knew he was going to end up in a flat above a shop, but he stacked Thomson directories in the front garden and asked for help delivering them. I said no, because friends might see us schlepping up those long driveways. Life was easier when he had a Mercedes and Mum had a Porsche. Instead, he was riding a bicycle to the paper shop; not to buy a paper, to work there – the shop where I had a round! He was furious when I said no, but he delivered the directories himself, worked in the paper shop, bought a van, started another building business, paid for my university accommodation, had a stroke, got walking again, went back to work, bought a nice house and built a large pond in his massive garden. And I will never forgive myself for not helping with those directories. Nice work, son.

 

"You're a Geordie. They've got a strong work ethic in that part of the country."

That's Lord Tebbit, and he's talking about people like my dad, rather than me, but I steal the compliment. For those who weren't born in the olden days, Tebbit was employment secretary from 1981-83, then trade and industry secretary, before becoming Conservative party chairman until 1987. He was also Thatcherism's boogie man (not the dancing kind).

"I don't think you could make the case that there's been some generational change in the youngsters themselves," he says. "Given good leadership, good advice and good education they could be every bit as good as their fathers and grandfathers. But an awful lot have been misled into acquiring a pile of debt and finishing with a qualification which is not of very much value, at universities which don't have a great deal of credibility with employers."

I ask who misled them.

 

"The schools. False expectations were raised. I also think there's an element of young Brits wanting the job they want and not being willing to take a job. They haven't got from their schools the idea that the best way to get to the top of the ladder is to get on one of the lower rungs and start climbing, as opposed to expecting someone to lift you up and pop you halfway up the ladder.

 

"A bit of personal experience here. We have carers for my wife and we advertise on an internet site called Gumtree. It's quite an instructive thing to do, to find out who replies to an advert for that sort of job. It's not badly paid – £350 a week, and they get good live-in accommodation. Far more people from central Europe are applying for these sorts of jobs than Brits, and I wonder where the equivalent Brits are – the 20- to 25-year-olds who say they can't get work."

 

I phoned Tebbit because in 1981 he famously suggested rioters should get on their bikes and find a job. We don't have proper riots any more, but I thought he might have some advice for today's equivalent – the angry internet commentators and grumbling graduates.

"It was much easier to set up in self-employment in the 80s," he says. "The regulatory environment was much easier. I find it surprising how many people come up to me and say: 'I took your advice to get on my bike' – advice which I never actually gave, but that's the way it came out – 'and I made a great success of it.' I think perhaps that's lacking from the ambience now. There's a lack of belief in one's ability to change one's own circumstances."

I have a coffee with Martin Bright, ex-home affairs editor of the Observer and currently political editor of the Jewish Chronicle. He's been campaigning for the revival of the Enterprise Allowance Scheme (the 1980s' most lamented policy) since the recession started, having benefited from it during two years of continual unemployment, despite a 2:1 from Cambridge.

 

"I found being unemployed and not meaningfully employed really demoralising," he says. "It knocks your confidence. What stopped me from being totally demoralised was the Enterprise Allowance Scheme, which I went on twice. The first time was as a printer. We did an advert for a taxi firm and that was it. Failing was fantastic experience, though. Then I was a self-employed journalist. The scheme gave me the freedom not to have to sign on every week, and to call myself a journalist."

 

Or a dance instructor, builder, pizza chef or a poet. The rules were: if you were unemployed for 13 weeks (later eight) and had £1,000 capital, you could stop signing on, start a business and for a year you'd receive a slightly higher allowance than the dole. Hundreds of thousands of businesses were created, including Creation Records (which signed Oasis) and the Superdry fashion label, and everyone could be their own boss – "That's the third shoulder pad I've sold today; might knock off early and catch Crocodile Dundee at the Odeon."

 

Bright wants to make sure (through his creative industry coalition, New Deal of the Mind) that the Future Jobs Fund isn't simply about cheap labour. He cites Franklin D Roosevelt's New Deal, which was formed during America's Great Depression, when writers wrote public pamphlets and builders built public buildings, rather than everyone immediately queuing for a shovel and pretending they never listen to Radio 4. He suggests today's unemployed graduates could be hired to collate Britain's oral history or work on similar projects. I ask about delivering pizzas.

 

"I think that's a defeatist attitude," he says. "It's precisely the wrong message. People should raise their expectations. My fear is, if there are fewer jobs across the board and people want graduates to do the shittier jobs, those who would have done those jobs are going to do even worse ones. And those below them will spend even longer on the dole. That's a recipe for social breakdown."

 

After coffee I sign on. My appointments have become weekly; the assessors are stroking the "any job" trigger. There are more claimants bearing iPhones than there were three months ago. Back then, everybody looked like the boy sitting next to me, a flat look on his face and dirty clothes – in 40 years' time I'll realise I would have gone double, treble, quadruple on my student loan not to be him. I ask a member of staff about a self-employment credit Bright told me about. Apparently you need six months of unemployment and it's only £50 per week (£14 less than the dole) over 16 weeks – "Even then it's far from straightforward," says the woman. Not great. Unfortunately the Department for Work and Pensions says there are no plans to expand it.

 

In fact there are no plans to do anything ambitious, despite the hardship ahead (Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, prophesied it will be 2011 before the economy is full-blooded again). I ask Dad how he coped with recession. He left school at 14, started as an office boy ("fetching the senior partner's tobacco"), learned his trade and created a company from nothing. Then suddenly his business was liquidated in 1993 and he was working in a paper shop and delivering Thomson directories.

 

"Absolutely. Anything to get cash," he says. "Any number of smaller jobs – put them together and make a decent living. Then I started again, just me on the tools with a van."

I ask him why younger people think it's harder these days. "Aspirations are greater. You lads go to university these days and come out full of hope, but you end up full of debt and the job market crashes. It's hard. You've tasted redundancy twice and you're only 29. It doesn't bode well for the way this country's performing. You've got to keep that entrepreneurial spirit going."

 

But I'm struggling. My industry is collapsing and jobs are scarce – I've applied for dozens, with no interviews. Instead I've been focusing on hundreds of pitches for freelance work, grafting day and night. So far I've had £2,000 of commissions. That's in four months. And an email has already arrived cancelling £500 of that, with no compensation, but a note asking if I have any celebrity contacts they could use. Also, a £600 portion has been cut to £200, once again with no compensation. And a big chunk of what is left has been pushed back two months. Suddenly no money for rent. And I start crying before breakfast. Never done that before. Can't sleep either. I rip a chunk of hair out of my head because I'm so angry and helpless. And each morning before my girlfriend goes to work she sincerely asks me not to kill myself. I won't, but I consider going to one of the commissioning editors' offices to punch (throttle, gouge, thump so hard, stamp on, scream at) him. I don't though. I'm too worried he might tell acquaintances and cost me further work. I've abandoned my dignity.

Someone takes me for a drink and asks how long I'll give it before trying something else. I don't know how to answer. I've put in years on the bottom rung. I never got off the bottom rung. I started out doing captions at a property magazine, and did horrible shifts for a pittance before I got myself on the bottom rung at big magazines and earned praise. I sat with a literary agent who was taking my book to publishers. Now he doesn't even answer my phone calls, and nor does anyone else. I'm tortured by the drip-drip of unanswered emails. The industry doesn't want me. I should do something else, but even David Blanchflower, a labour specialist, says nobody knows what people should train in yet – the future is unknown. And how do you afford retraining anyway? But more than that, I fought hard to get here. Really hard. I'm not from this kind of background. Why should I abandon it all to those with posh parents, posh educations and posh voices? I earned it. So when people ask how long I'll give it, I tell them I'll stop when I'm dead.

 

And OK, I realise refusing to switch industry is my fault, not the older generation's. But me being unemployed is their fault. It's the fault of rotten managers who coasted in a cushy economy, relying on the nation's growth and rising house prices to make them rich rather than learning how to make better products. They made us casualties of balance-sheet adjustment while keeping fat pensions to themselves. They sold every small company to a bigger one for a few bits of silver, leaving it to be milked dry by shareholders. Where's the moral integrity? And regarding university, it was the older generation who opened up the financial markets, which meant we had to compete against globalised labour. Now it's even more of a necessity – what else do you do if even call centres require university education? All of which makes it hard not to be bitter.

 

No doubt the older generation will have a good time with their free bus passes and villas in Spain. They'll enjoy the pensions and property. Shame about the smashed unions that might have got us decent wages and pensions. Shame about houses only being affordable to trust-funders. Shame about the abandonment of industry and its replacement with… coffee? Shoes? Credit? We're just cheap labour, here to fund a bit more wealth. We know that now. And don't worry, we'll pay off the debt.

Have a nice life.★

Haiti: enslaved by its dark history.  14.01.2010 

For 200 years the Caribbean nation has suffered from natural disasters and violent rulers, says Ian Thomson. 

 During the Carnival of the Ferocious, people paint themselves to symbolise the island's first slave inhabitants.  Photo: Oliver Coret/Corbis

 

By any standards, Haiti represents a very great concentration of misery and dashed hopes. In January 1804 – a key date in the history of a bedevilled country – the African slaves overthrew their French masters and declared the world’s first black republic. Haiti became an emblem of slavery’s longed-for abolition. And the slave leader, Toussaint L’Ouverture, was hailed by William Wordsworth, among other Romantics, as a “morning star” of the Americas.

 

Since independence, however, emperors, kings and presidents-for-life have misruled the Caribbean nation through violence and theft of public funds. The constitution is made of paper, they say, but the bayonet is made of steel.

 

In January 2004, I returned to Haiti for the first time in 13 years. Preparations were under way for the independence bicentenary, but no one felt much like celebrating. The capital, Port-au-Prince, looked even more dilapidated and the streets round Toussaint L’Ouverture airport appeared to have degenerated into a slum.

 

Familiar smells of drainage and burning rubbish hit me as I made my way to the Hotel Oloffson, a gingerbread mansion disguised as the “Hotel Trianon” in Graham Greene’s novel The Comedians. Laughably, a room had been named after me as the author of a book on Haiti, but I was unable to stay in it as the ceiling had warped dangerously.

 

By some chance, the Hotel Oloffson survived Tuesday’s earthquake, but the National Palace nearby collapsed. A more graphic image of municipal chaos would be hard to imagine: the heart of Haiti’s national and civic life has been reduced to rubble.

 

Now more than ever, the motto of the Haitian republic, “L’Union Fait la Force” (Strength Through Union) seems a grim joke. For two centuries since independence Haiti has been split on every side. Mulatto against black; the military against democracy; African animism against Christianity. Aid workers may now try to maintain a semblance of law and order in Port-au-Prince, but looting is likely as the city jails have reportedly broken open.

 

Haitians say they are hard to understand, but all nations enjoy that vanity. The truth is, Haiti is a country that was never meant to be. Forged in the crucible of French colonialism, it was once the most profitable slave colony the world had ever known. The glittering prosperity of Nantes and Bordeaux, Marseilles and Dieppe, derived in part from commerce with this sugar-rich dependency of the ancien regime.

 

The prospect of a free black state founded on the expulsion and possible murder of its white community by Toussaint L’Ouverture horrified French colonials, as it did the whole of the Western world. As Talleyrand wrote to a French general in Washington: “The existence of a negro people in arms, occupying a country which it has soiled by the most criminal acts, is a horrible spectacle for all white nations.”

 

It was not until 1862 that the United States acknowledged Haiti’s independence. The country had become a dangerous symbol of redemption for African peoples, of racial equality and – most unforgivable – of anti-colonialism. So Haiti became a pariah, excluded from the family of nations and trapped in a time warp where there was little room for progress. Haitians were thought to be incapable of self-government because they were black. In fact, Haiti may yet prove to be ungovernable.

 

The 1957-1971 dictatorship of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier instilled fear in the population. Indeed, Duvalier entertained more than an anthropological interest in Vodou (or voodoo, in the old orthography). His wardrobe of black suits and bowler hats lent him the aspect, it was believed, of the animist divinity Baron Samedi, who haunts the cemeteries in a top hat and tails, smoking a large cheroot like a graveyard Groucho Marx.

 

Duvalier’s private militia – the dreaded Tontons Macoute – earned him the nickname “Lucifer of the Antilles”. Yet many Haitians mourn his loss and still plot to restore his son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, to power from his exile in Paris. In the aftermath of the earthquake it is likely that increasing numbers will clamour for the return of a strong man.

Democracy could hardly arrive overnight for a people whose ancestors were snatched from Africa to slave for Europe. Duplicity or cunning are considered heroic virtues in Haiti. To overcome your adversity is the great affair in life and the pity of the country is that it thrives on the survival of the fittest.

 

Bill Clinton, the UN’s special envoy to Haiti, might do well to study the Haitian folk tales known as Brother Bouki and Ti Malice. Haitians admire Ti Malice because he is the smart guy (so shrewd his stomach is always “full of pig and rum”), while Brother Bouki is the coarse, clumsy butt of his jokes and unworthy of respect. In the wake of the earthquake, Haitians may seek to emulate Ti Malice as they scrabble for food, and seek to play a poor hand well.

 

However, Haitians are just as likely to show extraordinary resilience and selflessness as they rally together and find consolation in Vodou. Haitians are 80 per cent Catholic and – so they say – 100 per cent Vodouist. Vodou (from the Dahomean vodu, “spirit” or “deity”) is a peaceable New World religion that marries elements of Catholicism with the rites and rituals of ancestral Africa.

 

For most Haitians, Vodou is the only way to rise above the misery of poverty and the devastation wreaked by hurricanes, mud slides, storms and now this humanitarian catastrophe. When a Haitian is possessed by a loa (spirit) he is taken out of himself and transformed. At night, Port-au-Prince is now said to flicker with candles, as swaying, homeless Haitians offer prayers to the loas in hope of deliverance.

 

Vodou also reflects the rage and ecstasy that threw off the shackles of slavery. On the night of August 15, 1791, a ceremony was held in the north of Haiti that marked the beginning of the revolt. A rain of burning cane straw, sweet-smelling, drifted over the plantations as the slaves set them ablaze. Toussaint L’Ouverture was said to have taken part in this Vodou-inspired uprising – proof that religion is not always an opium of the people, but a prelude to action.

 

Two centuries after independence, however, Haiti is the battered pauper of the Americas and unimaginably destitute after the earthquake. The world’s first black republic – only 17 years younger than the United States – remains in many ways a police state.

 

Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a president in whom the world invested much hope, was overthrown in 2004 and now lives under police protection in South Africa. His successor, President René Préval, has pledged to restore the rule of law. Yet his home – the National Palace – has been destroyed and now he may have to face the daunting tradition of dechoukaj – the ferocious settling of scores and violence that follows the overthrow of a president. In Haitian creole, dechoukaj means to pull a tree out of the ground, roots and all, so that it will never grow again. There may well be a desire to rid Haiti of the old power structure, once and for all, and bring some hope of change.

 

Meanwhile, during my entire time in Port-au-Prince for the bicentenary, I never saw anyone emerge from the National Palace. At night, a couple of lights would glow like beacons from its snow-white façade. But not a soul, was seen to leave. Only a beggar called Big Daddy was always there. One night he told me: “Haiti, m’sieur, Haiti – c’est un pays tête-en-bas”: a country turned upside down.

 

Ian Thomson’s 'Bonjour Blanc: A Journey Through Haiti’ is published by Vintage  

Haiti's disastrous history in pictures (21 pictures)

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/gallery/2010/jan/14/haiti-history-in-pictures 

 Scientia potentia est - Knowledge is power    The phrase is used on the seal of the Information Awareness Office.  

"Education is learning what you didn't even know you didn't know." Daniel Boorstin 

The famous phrase scientia potentia est is a Latin maxim "For also knowledge itself is power" stated originally by Francis Bacon in Meditationes Sacrae (1597), which in modern times is often paraphrased as "knowledge is power." 

 

The phrase implies that with knowledge or education one's potential or abilities in life will certainly increase. Having and sharing knowledge is widely recognised as the basis for improving one's reputation and influence, thus power. This phrase may also be used as a justification for a reluctance to share information when a person believes that withholding knowledge can deliver to that person some form of advantage. It is possible that Bacon was paraphrasing Proverbs 24:5: "A wise man has great power, and a man of knowledge increases strength." Another possible meaning for this phrase can be found in philosophical idealism - if the world exists solely as the content of consciousness, then knowledge itself can be used to directly manipulate the content of reality.

Knowledge Management

Emerging Perspectives

By Gene Bellinger

We receive numerous requests as to how to aquire and use knowledge.  Many students assume that learning facts, or gathering and learning information is good enough on its own, particularly to pass examinations.  But its not as simple as that.

 

It is true that some exams only require the assimilation of information or facts.  The answer to a question may be right or wrong.  But many areas of study require an understanding of how to use resources, and apply the information gained, wisely in a given, or different situation. 

 

There is an important relationship between information, knowledge and wisdom.

 

Knowledge management is the hottest subject of the day. The question is: what is this activity called 'Knowledge Management', and why is it so important to each and every one of us?

 

This Special Feature also appears on 'Education' , and we hope the following writings, articles, and links offer some emerging perspectives in response to these questions.  It is a complex topic, and may require reading and re-reading.  It may, we hope, stimulate your own thoughts.  As you read on, you can determine whether it all makes any sense or not, and send us your opinion and reactions.  Alan Cooper.

Content

Developing a Context A Continuum An Example Extending the Concept Knowledge Management: Bah Humbug! The Value of Knowledge Management References

Developing a Context

Like water, this rising tide of data can be viewed as an abundant, vital and necessary resource. With enough preparation, we should be able to tap into that reservoir -- and ride the wave -- by utilizing new ways to channel raw data into meaningful information. That information, in turn, can then become the knowledge that leads to wisdom. Les Alberthal

Before attempting to address the question of knowledge management, it's probably appropriate to develop some perspective regarding this stuff called knowledge, which there seems to be such a desire to manage, really is. Consider this observation made by Neil Fleming as a basis for thought relating to the following diagram.

• A collection of data is not information.
• A collection of information is not knowledge.
• A collection of knowledge is not wisdom.
• A collection of wisdom is not truth.

The idea is that information, knowledge, and wisdom are more than simply collections.

 

Rather, the whole represents more than the sum of its parts and has a synergy of its own.

 

We begin with data, which is just a meaningless point in space and time, without reference to either space or time. It is like an event out of context, a letter out of context, a word out of context.

 

The key concept here being "out of context." And, since it is out of context, it is without a meaningful relation to anything else. When we encounter a piece of data, if it gets our attention at all, our first action is usually to attempt to find a way to attribute meaning to it.

 

We do this by associating it with other things. If I see the number 5, I can immediately associate it with cardinal numbers and relate it to being greater than 4 and less than 6, whether this was implied by this particular instance or not. If I see a single word, such as "time," there is a tendency to immediately form associations with previous contexts within which I have found "time" to be meaningful. This might be, "being on time," "a stitch in time saves nine," "time never stops," etc. The implication here is that when there is no context, there is little or no meaning. So, we create context but, more often than not, that context is somewhat akin to conjecture, yet it fabricates meaning.

 

That a collection of data is not information, as Neil indicated, implies that a collection of data for which there is no relation between the pieces of data is not information. The pieces of data may represent information, yet whether or not it is information depends on the understanding of the one perceiving the data.

 

I would also tend to say that it depends on the knowledge of the interpreter, but I'm probably getting ahead of myself, since I haven't defined knowledge. What I will say at this point is that the extent of my understanding of the collection of data is dependent on the associations I am able to discern within the collection. And, the associations I am able to discern are dependent on all the associations I have ever been able to realize in the past. Information is quite simply an understanding of the relationships between pieces of data, or between pieces of data and other information.

 

While information entails an understanding of the relations between data, it generally does not provide a foundation for why the data is what it is, nor an indication as to how the data is likely to change over time. Information has a tendency to be relatively static in time and linear in nature. Information is a relationship between data and, quite simply, is what it is, with great dependence on context for its meaning and with little implication for the future.

Beyond relation there is pattern, where pattern is more than simply a relation of relations. Pattern embodies both a consistency and completeness of relations which, to an extent, creates its own context. Pattern also serves as an Archetype with both an implied repeatability and predictability.

 

When a pattern relation exists amidst the data and information, the pattern has the potential to represent knowledge. It only becomes knowledge, however, when one is able to realize and understand the patterns and their implications.

 

The patterns representing knowledge have a tendency to be more self-contextualizing. That is, the pattern tends, to a great extent, to create its own context rather than being context dependent to the same extent that information is. A pattern which represents knowledge also provides, when the pattern is understood, a high level of reliability or predictability as to how the pattern will evolve over time, for patterns are seldom static. Patterns which represent knowledge have a completeness to them that information simply does not contain.

 

Wisdom arises when one understands the foundational principles responsible for the patterns representing knowledge being what they are. And wisdom, even more so than knowledge, tends to create its own context. I have a preference for referring to these foundational principles as eternal truths, yet I find people have a tendency to be somewhat uncomfortable with this labeling. These foundational principles are universal and completely context independent. Of course, this last statement is sort of a redundant word game, for if the principle was context dependent, then it couldn't be universally true now could it?

So, in summary the following associations can reasonably be made:

• Information relates to description, definition, or perspective (what, who, when, where).
• Knowledge comprises strategy, practice, method, or approach (how).
• Wisdom embodies principle, insight, moral, or archetype (why).

Now that I have categories I can get hold of, maybe I can figure out what can be managed.

An Example

This example uses a bank savings account to show how data, information, knowledge, and wisdom relate to principal, interest rate, and interest.

 

Data: The numbers 100 or 5%, completely out of context, are just pieces of data. Interest, principal, and interest rate, out of context, are not much more than data as each has multiple meanings which are context dependent.

 

Information: If I establish a bank savings account as the basis for context, then interest, principal, and interest rate become meaningful in that context with specific interpretations.

• Principal is the amount of money, $100, in the savings account.
• Interest rate, 5%, is the factor used by the bank to compute interest on the principal.

Knowledge: If I put $100 in my savings account, and the bank pays 5% interest yearly, then at the end of one year the bank will compute the interest of $5 and add it to my principal and I will have $105 in the bank. This pattern represents knowledge, which, when I understand it, allows me to understand how the pattern will evolve over time and the results it will produce. In understanding the pattern, I know, and what I know is knowledge. If I deposit more money in my account, I will earn more interest, while if I withdraw money from my account, I will earn less interest.

 

Wisdom: Getting wisdom out of this is a bit tricky, and is, in fact, founded in systems principles. The principle is that any action which produces a result which encourages more of the same action produces an emergent characteristic called growth. And, nothing grows forever for sooner or later growth runs into limits.

If one studied all the individual components of this pattern, which represents knowledge, they would never discover the emergent characteristic of growth. Only when the pattern connects, interacts, and evolves over time, does the principle exhibit the characteristic of growth.

 

 

Now, if this knowledge is valid, why doesn't everyone simply become rich by putting money in a savings account and letting it grow?

 

The answer has to do with the fact that the pattern described above is only a small part of a more elaborate pattern which operates over time. People don't get rich because they either don't put money in a savings account in the first place, or when they do, in time, they find things they need or want more than being rich, so they withdraw money. Withdrawing money depletes the principal and subsequently the interest they earn on that principal. Getting into this any deeper is more of a systems thinking exercise than is appropriate to pursue here.

A Continuum

Note that the sequence data -> information -> knowledge -> wisdom represents an emergent continuum. That is, although data is a discrete entity, the progression to information, to knowledge, and finally to wisdom does not occur in discrete stages of development. One progresses along the continuum as one's understanding develops.

 

Everything is relative, and one can have partial understanding of the relations that represent information, partial understanding of the patterns that represent knowledge, and partial understanding of the principles which are the foundation of wisdom. As the partial understanding stage.

Extending the Concept

We learn by connecting new information to patterns that we already understand. In doing so, we extend the patterns. So, in my effort to make sense of this continuum, I searched for something to connect it to that already made sense. And, I related it to Csikszentmihalyi's interpretation of complexity.

Csikszentmihalyi provides a definition of complexity based on the degree to which something is simultaneously differentiated and integrated.

 

His point is that complexity evolves along a corridor and he provides some very interesting examples as to why complexity evolves.

 

The diagram indicates that what is more highly differentiated and integrated is more complex. While high levels of differentiation without integration promote the complicated, that which is highly integrated, without differentiation, produces mundane. And, it should be rather obvious from personal experience that we tend to avoid the complicated and are uninterested in the mundane.

 

The complexity that exists between these two alternatives is the path we generally find most attractive.

 

On 4/27/05 Robert Lamb commented that Csikszentmihalyi's labeling could be is bit clearer if "Differentiation" was replaced by "Many Components" and "Integration" was replaced by Highly Interconnected." Robert also commented that "Common Sense" might be another label for "Mundane." If the mundane is something we seem to avoid paying attention to then "Common Sense" might often be a very appropriate label. Thanks Robert.

 

What I found really interesting was the view that resulted when I dropped this diagram on top of the one at the beginning of this article. It seemed that "Integrated" and "Understanding" immediately correlated to each other. There was also a real awareness that "Context Independence" related to "Differentiated." Overall, the continuum of data to wisdom seemed to correlate exactly to Csikszentmihalyi's model of evolving complexity.

I now end up with a perception that wisdom is sort of simplified complexity.

 

Knowledge Management: Bah Humbug!

When I first became interested in knowledge as a concept, and then knowledge management, it was because of the connections I made between my system studies and the data, information, knowledge, and wisdom descriptions already stated. Saying that I became interested is a bit of an understatement as I'm generally either not interested or obsessed, and seldom anywhere in between.

 

Then, after a couple months I managed to catch myself, with the help of Mike Davidson, as to the indirection I was pursuing.

 

I managed to survive the Formula Fifties, the Sensitive Sixties, the Strategic Seventies, and the Excellent Eighties to exist in the Nanosecond Nineties, and for a time I thought I was headed for the Learning Organizational Oh's of the next decade.

 

The misdirection I was caught up in was a focus on Knowledge Management not as a means, but as an end in itself. Yes, knowledge management is important, and I'll address reasons why shortly. But knowledge management should simply be one of many cooperating means to an end, not the end in itself, unless your job turns out to be corporate knowledge management director or chief knowledge officer. I'm quite sure it will come to this, for in some ways we are predictably consistent.

 

I associate the cause of my indirection with the many companies I have been associated with in the past. These companies had pursued TQM or reengineering, not in support of what they were trying to accomplish, but as ends in themselves because they simply didn't know what they were really trying to accomplish. And, since they didn't know what they were really trying to accomplish, the misdirection was actually a relief, and pursued with a passion­­it just didn't get them anywhere in particular.

 

According to Mike Davidson, and I agree with him, what's really important is:

• Mission: What are we trying to accomplish?
• Competition: How do we gain a competitive edge?
• Performance: How do we deliver the results?
• Change: How do we cope with change?

As such, knowledge management, and everything else for that matter, is important only to the extent that it enhances an organization's ability and capacity to deal with, and develop in, these four dimensions.

The Value of Knowledge Management

In an organizational context, data represents facts or values of results, and relations between data and other relations have the capacity to represent information. Patterns of relations of data and information and other patterns have the capacity to represent knowledge.

 

For the representation to be of any utility it must be understood, and when understood the representation is information or knowledge to the one that understands. Yet, what is the real value of information and knowledge, and what does it mean to manage it?

 

Without associations we have little chance of understanding anything. We understand things based on the associations we are able to discern. If someone says that sales started at $100,000 per quarter and have been rising 20% per quarter for the last four quarters, I am somewhat confident that sales are now about $207,000 per quarter. I am confident because I know what "rising 20% per quarter" means and I can do the maths.

 

Yet, if someone asks what sales are apt to be next quarter, I would have to say, "It depends!" I would have to say this because although I have data and information, I have no knowledge.

 

This is a trap that many fall into, because they don't understand that data doesn't predict trends of data. What predicts trends of data is the activity that is responsible for the data.

 

To be able to estimate the sales for next quarter, I would need information about the competition, market size, extent of market saturation, current backlog, customer satisfaction levels associated with current product delivery, current production capacity, the extent of capacity utilization, and a whole host of other things. When I was able to amass sufficient data and information to form a complete pattern that I understood, I would have knowledge, and would then be somewhat comfortable estimating the sales for next quarter. Anything less would be just fantasy!

 

In this example what needs to be managed to create value is the data that defines past results, the data and information associated with the organization, it's market, it's customers, and it's competition, and the patterns which relate all these items to enable a reliable level of predictability of the future.What I would refer to as knowledge management would be the capture, retention, and reuse of the foundation for imparting an understanding of how all these pieces fit together and how to convey them meaningfully to some other person.

 

The value of Knowledge Management relates directly to the effectiveness with which the managed knowledge enables the members of the organization to deal with today's situations and effectively envision and create their future. Without on-demand access to managed knowledge, every situation is addressed based on what the individual or group brings to the situation with them.

 

With on-demand access to managed knowledge, every situation is addressed with the sum total of everything anyone in the organization has ever learned about a situation of a similar nature. Which approach would you perceive would make a more effective organization?

References

• Alberthal, Les. Remarks to the Financial Executives Institute, October 23, 1995, Dallas, TX
• Bateson, Gregory. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity, Bantam, 1988
• Bellinger, Gene. Systems Thinking: An Operational Perspective of the Universe
• Bellinger, Gene. The Effective Organization
• Bellinger, Gene. The Knowledge Centered Organization
• Csikszentmihalyi, Miahly. The Evolving-Self: A Psychology for the Third Millennium, Harperperennial Library, 1994.
• Davidson, Mike. The Transformation of Management, Butterworth-Heinemann, 1996.
• Fleming, Neil. Coping with a Revolution: Will the Internet Change Learning?, Lincoln University, Canterbury, New Zealand
• Senge, Peter. The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization, Doubleday-Currency, 1990.

theWay of Systems * Feedback * Musings
Copyright © 2004 Gene Bellinger

 

Sir Francis Bacon, "Knowledge is Power"  Knowledge Quotes 
"The dumbest people I know are those who know it all."  Malcolm Forbes 

Albert Einstein:

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For while knowledge defines all we currently know and understand, imagination points to all we might yet discover and create

Alexander Pope:

A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking largely sobers us again.

probably the source of the saying, "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing"

Anais Nin:

The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.

Benjamin Spock:

Trust yourself. You know more than you think you do.

Bertrand Russell:

Three passions have governed my life:
The longings for love, the search for knowledge,
And unbearable pity for the suffering of [humankind].

Love brings ecstasy and relieves loneliness.
In the union of love I have seen
In a mystic miniature the prefiguring vision
Of the heavens that saints and poets have imagined.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge.
I have wished to understand the hearts of [people].
I have wished to know why the stars shine.

Love and knowledge led upwards to the heavens,
But always pity brought me back to earth;
Cries of pain reverberated in my heart
Of children in famine, of victims tortured
And of old people left helpless.
I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot,
And I too suffer.

This has been my life; I found it worth living.

Bertrand Russell:

The good life is inspired by love and guided by knowledge.

Dean William R. Inge:

The aim of education is the knowledge not of fact, but of values.

Epictetus:

It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.

Frank Herbert:

The beginning of knowledge is the discovery of something we do not understand.

Henri Bergson:

The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.

Immanuel Kant:

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

John Locke:

The improvement of understanding is for two ends: first, our own increase of knowledge; secondly, to enable us to deliver that knowledge to others.

John Naisbitt:

We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge.

Malcolm Forbes:

The dumbest people I know are those who know it all.

Margaret Fuller:

If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it.

Mark Twain:

If you don't read the newspaper, you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed.

Martin Fischer:

Knowledge is a process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification.

Plato:

Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.

Richard Cecil:

The first step towards knowledge is to know that we are ignorant.

Vernon Cooper:

These days people seek knowledge, not wisdom. Knowledge is of the past, wisdom is of the future.

 William Shakespeare:

We know what we are, but know not what we may be.

Peru's mountain people face fight for survival in a bitter winter

Climate change is bringing freezing temperatures to poor villages where families have long existed on the margins of survival. Now some must choose whether to save the animals that give them a living, or their children  

A farmer walks with her son during a potato harvest in Huancavelica, southern Peru. Photograph: Martin Mejia/AP

For alpaca farmer Ignacio Beneto Huamani and his young family, life in the Peruvian Andes, at almost 4,700m above sea level, has always been a struggle against the elements. His village of Pichccahuasi, in Peru's Huancavelica region, is little more than a collection of small thatched shelters and herds of alpaca surrounded by beautiful, yet bleakly inhospitable, mountain terrain.

Climate change campaigners and development NGOs say that the failure of Copenhagen has signed the death warrant for hundreds of thousands of the world's poorest and that a quarter of a million children will die before world leaders meet again to try to thrash out another deal at the United Nations next climate change conference in Mexico in December. Among them may be these children of the high mountains. 

2020 vision: where will we be in a decade's time?

Experts from the Daily Telegraph make twenty predictions for the end of the next decade.   02.01.2010

Due to the success of films like Avatar (above), we can expect can expect an explosion in 3D blockbusters

 

Gene therapy

Ten years ago, I would have said that by 2010 gene therapy would be a standard medical treatment – and I would have been wrong. Two years ago, my prediction was that there would be no real impact for at least a decade; but I was probably wrong there, too. My guess is that, for some people, and depending on how it is defined, gene therapy will be an important part of hi-tech medicine by about 2018. But for the health of most people, it will remain irrelevant.

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Prof Steve Jones, Professor of Genetics at University College, London

 

General medicine

We will understand better some of the world’s biggest killers, notably cancer and HIV/Aids. Despite advances in understanding the genetic basis of Alzheimer’s, it probably won’t result in a cure this decade. In surgery, big advances include the increasing involvement of robotics in the operating theatre. Surgeons will use “non-invasive” techniques, entering through the body’s natural orifices rather than using scalpels to enter.

Dr Max Pemberton, author and doctor

 

Science

2010 is likely to see the final flights of NASA’s workhorse, the space shuttle. The forthcoming space race will be among private enterprises. We will see the creation of “synthetic life”. Since 2007, American Craig Venter has been on the verge of unveiling a living bacterium carrying a DNA code made from scratch in the lab. Others are working on an entirely synthetic cell. We will see attempts at a planetary fix (geoengineering), a Manhattan-scale global project to curb harmful climate change.

Dr Roger Highfield, editor of New Scientist

 

Consumer technology

Technology will infiltrate every aspect of our lives – the mobile phone will become a gateway to global communications, and link seamlessly to the web and every screen in homes and offices. Supermarkets will restock your internet-connected fridge automatically. Expect a pervasive sense of being watched – probably not by government, but by big corporations.

Matt Warman, DT technology editor

 

Internet

There are now three times more mobile phone subscribers than internet users. In the decade ahead, mobile and web will collide to fulfil the promise of technology: helping people help themselves. The open exchange of information will lead to a more informed, engaged, and more empathetic global citizenry.

Biz Stone, founder, Twitter

 

Transport

High-speed rail will transform travel in the UK. I am excited about the possibilities it holds in terms of shorter journeys, environmental benefits, encouraging investment and boosting business and jobs.

Andrew Adonis, Secretary of State for Transport

 

Environment

It will be the hottest decade ever as global warming continues, though individual years will vary. Renewables will boom, especially solar power, as new technologies and falling prices kick in. Nuclear power will make no real contribution; any new reactors will not come on stream before the end of the decade. Evidence that mobile phones endanger health will increase. Continued shrinkage of the Arctic ice-cap could provide the first climate “tipping point”.

Geoffrey Lean, DT environment columnist

 

Religion

I’m tempted to say that, in 2020, the Anglican Communion will be poised on the edge of schism, as its 107th openly homosexual bishop is consecrated. Plus ça change … Anglicanism will have fragmented into national and denominational shards. Women bishops will no longer frighten the horses. Pope Benedict XVI may be succeeded by a less ambitiously orthodox pontiff. As for Islam, things will get worse before they get better, through no fault of the vast majority of peace-loving Muslims.

George Pitcher, DT religion editor

 

Sport

A brace of US Open titles for Andy Murray but alas no Wimbledon crown; a stunning London Olympics; Argentina to win football and rugby World Cups; a mind boggling sub-42 seconds 400m world record from Usain Bolt; England to take their first cricket World Cup; Rory McIlroy to challenge Nick Faldo’s British record of six golf Majors; Tiger Woods to “redeem” himself with an Olympic golf gold medal (2016); and Ben Ainslie to win the America’s Cup for Britain. Finally, a Briton to win the Tour de France.

Brendan Gallagher, DT sports writer

 

Literature

Written literature will divide. Disposable celebrity memoirs will be delivered electronically, in tiny bursts. Published works will be delivered with alterations commissioned by the end-user. Pride and Prejudice with more sex and violence? Yours, for £3.99. The audience for serious works will survive. Books may have to prove themselves with an audience before a publisher will print copies. A talent to watch? The novelist Evie Wyld.

Philip Hensher, literary critic

 

Music

We’ll see fewer global stars, more localisation and a dissemination of cross-pollinating musical styles created by bedroom studio wizards. Guitar-based rock will become the preserve of old-school arenas. The decline of the reality TV talent show model will leave a hole, to be filled by fictionalised TV-internet stars. The LP will leap onto a multimedia web-based sound and vision remixing platform – and fail. The fortunes of the music business will decline further; music itself will thrive as a more hands-on activity.

Neil McCormick, DT music critic

 

Architecture

Britain will finally address both its catastrophic undersupply of new housing and the low quality of what it is building. Britain’s architects are having to adjust to the fact that there is less work around and tighter budgets. Add the growing challenge of environmental sustainability, and the next decade will be a highly testing one for the profession.

Ellis Woodman, architecture critic

 

Design

We’ll see a rediscovery of morals in matters of production and consumption. Making things will become more important, both economically and culturally. True value will be separated from mere cost. We will want better, not merely more, and with that will come more dignified consumer behaviour: gross indulgence will soon acquire the stigma currently attached to drink-driving.

Stephen Bayley, design critic

 

Theatre

We will enter a golden age in British theatre. There is enough money, thanks to sustained subsidies and commercial success. Our major theatres are run by the best. Our acting talent is the envy of the world. There are budding playwrights on every street corner. The country is experiencing profound change, which can only energise new writing further. Digital technology will help export this theatre boom on a scale comparable to the pop music revolution of the Fifties and Sixties.

Dominic Cavendish, DT theatre critic

 

Film

Following James Cameron’s Avatar, we can expect an explosion in 3D blockbusters. New ways to see and distribute films will lead to a far broader idea of cinema than Hollywood would like to admit. Already the success of the South African sci-fi thriller District 9 bodes well for the health of large-scale, independent productions from around the world. It will be exciting to see which other countries throw their hats into the ring.

Tim Robey, DT film critic

 

TV

More viewing will take place online and on demand but live TV events such as The X Factor will continue to glue viewers to their sofas. Global marketing will collide with soaring production costs to create truly international dramas, co-produced by many national broadcasters including the BBC, which no government will be foolish enough to abolish. The big winners will be those with the ambition to conquer the world: brace yourselves for the ongoing rise of Simon Cowell.

Neil Midgley, DT media editor

 

Gardening

The UK will be like Havana, with almost all of us growing some of our food. Gardening will be less ornamental and more productive. Expect destructive winds and tropical rain – which will take lots of precious topsoil with it – and very definite winters. We’ll have to bring more in under cover or start with new plants each spring.

Sarah Raven, gardening expert

 

Food

Supermarkets will sell more British food. A packaging revolution will see more compostable bags and fresh foods with longer shelf lives. Labelling will clearly state country of origin. Nutritionally enhanced foods will flourish and obesity decline, but GM foods will get a stronger foothold in Europe. Organic and molecular cuisine will give way to bistro cooking and local food. M&S will lead on ethical sourcing. We’ll eat more quince, tonka beans, emmer (a grain), British olives and spider crab.

Rose Prince, food writer

 

Fashion

The combination of being the most knowing generation ever and one that has to find its place in a wrecked economy should fire up entrepreneurial innovation in the young. Fewer jobs and pricey further education will see sixth formers marketing their own products and leading the generation’s tastes for extreme hair styles, make-up, jewellery, sunglasses and bedroom accessories. The high street will still sell clothes, but the fashion electricity will come from a different direction.

Sarah Mower, fashion critic

 

Shopping

The noughties were defined by fast-fashion for those prepared to buy, wear and bin. The next decade will see well-made, British-made, higher-priced items come to the fore as people cherish, customise and take an interest in how and who made their garments. Disposable fashion will go the way of the battery chicken. Many will order their underwear on their iPhone and delivery vans will clog up the traffic. But the high street will never die, with the best shopkeepers offering tailoring and personalised shopping to beat the internet.

Harry Wallop, DT consumer affairs correspondent

Extreme fear: could you handle it?

When disaster strikes, whether you live or die depends on how you react to the crisis…  

  Illustration: Matt Murphy

If you suddenly found yourself in a life-or-death crisis and had to make a decision that would either save your life or end it, are you confident you'd make the right one? People in the state of Victoria, Australia, faced just such a decision in February and March this year.  

For five weeks, catastrophic brush fires swept across the state. Government policy held that when fire threatened a neighbourhood, homeowners were to make a choice: stay and fight to save their houses, or evacuate early. They were explicitly instructed not to wait until the flames were close. Trying to run from an advancing wildfire is the surest way to die in it.

In Glenburn, a farming community outside the city, Victoria University professor Ian Thomas spent the day listening for weather updates on the radio. An engineer, Thomas specialised in calculating the risk of fire in buildings. His house and lawn were surrounded by trees on all sides and abutted the eucalyptus forest of Kinglake national park: "We didn't need the forecast to tell us that it was dangerous," he says. 
 

What the radio broadcasts had failed to report was that the wildfire had spread all the way to the town of Kinglake, less than 10 miles from Thomas's home. The cooler breeze had fanned the flames to new intensity, and was driving them towards Glenburn at freight-train speeds. The first inkling of trouble came when a couple who lived nearby, Lou and Cheryl Newstead, pulled into the Thomases' driveway. They brought news that their son had just called to tell them the fire was heading their way. As they talked, the wind that was blowing in from the south darkened with smoke. Ash and glowing embers started dropping out of the air. 
 

The first step to dealing with a crisis is acceptance. Studies of disasters have found that many people remain in denial in the face of evident danger. Nightclub patrons continue to dance and order drinks as smoke fills a burning hall; passengers on a sinking ferry sit and smoke cigarettes as it lists ever more ominously to one side. This denial is driven by a mental phenomenon called "normalcy bias". Psychologists say that people who have never experienced a fatal catastrophe have difficulty recognising that one could be unfolding. 

For those who do accept what's happening, the most terrifying part of a crisis is likely to occur at the very beginning, while the full scope of the danger remains unclear. Anticipatory fear is often worse than the experience itself. Performers who throw up before every performance never throw up on the stage itself. The scariest part of jumping out of a plane is the instant before you leave the door. Psychologist Seymour Epstein conducted a study in which novice jumpers were fitted with heart-rate monitors that measured their pulse as their plane climbed upward toward its release point. He found that their heart rates got faster and faster until just before they jumped, declining precipitously once they were actually out of the plane. The most stressful part of the experience was the anticipation. 
 

When we're facing a life-threatening situation for the first time, one of the biggest uncertainties we face is what will happen inside our own minds. Having been in danger before can help. When Dave Boon's car was struck by an avalanche on a road near Denver, US, he benefited from having been in another, very different, life-threatening situation two years earlier. He'd been white-water rafting when his boat was swept by the force of a rapid below an overhanging rock. Boon didn't panic, and the force of the water eventually pulled him free. Two years later, as he found himself tumbling end-over-end inside the avalanche, he knew he wouldn't panic then, either. And that was a powerful piece of information.  

The more control a person has over a threatening situation, the less anxiety it provokes. Numerous experiments have shown that being out of control of a negative situation leads to the release of the stress hormone cortisol. Engaged in useful activity, it's easier to stop thinking about your internal experience of fear and instead focus usefully on external things, such as improving your situation. 
 

These are the sorts of people you want with you when the going gets hairy. In 1967, a raging winter storm trapped mountain climber Art Davidson and two friends in an ice cave near the summit of Denali, Alaska. Days went by as they slowly succumbed to hypothermia and starvation, nearly immobile in their tiny hole. They kept themselves going by making careful plans about the only thing over which they had any control, their meagre rations. When the food ran out, they managed to find another problem to grapple with: how to locate a cache of fuel that one of them remembered was hidden nearby. By stringing together a series of meagre hopes, they managed to survive six days, at which point the weather broke and they escaped down the mountain. 
 

Sir Laurence Olivier was among the most gifted actors of the 20th century. But in 1964, when Olivier was 57 and had been performing for more than four decades, he was gripped by stage fright. On the opening night of Ibsen's The Master Builder, in which he had a starring role, he froze. It was the moment that actors dread. 
 

Cognitive behavioural therapy is a powerful tool in overcoming anxiety disorders. Patients are taught to recognise when they're thinking unrealistically negative thoughts, and then deliberately to reassess the situation in a more positive light. But one doesn't need to go to a professional therapist. Anyone who's trying to get a grip on their emotions in the heat of a crisis can simply find someone to share their feelings with – or even say them aloud to themselves – in order to regain some control over their mental systems.
 

But the fight was not over. With the coming of the dawn, the wind began to build, whipping smouldering embers back into flame. Pockets of unburned vegetation erupted like roman candles. Thomas staggered outside to douse the most threatening flare-ups, but he was weak from the night's fight and suffering from heat stroke. He could not take even a sip of water without throwing up. Gradually, the flare-ups became less menacing and the Thomases began to relax. Except for their house, their property had been incinerated. But they were alive.

The catastrophe of 7 February 2009 dwarfed any of Victoria's past wildfires. But it was just the beginning. The fire season in Victoria would ultimately claim 210 lives, destroy more than 2,000 homes and lay waste to a million acres of countryside. In the aftermath, the people of Victoria were left wondering whether the "stay or go" policy was to blame for unnecessary deaths. Some argued that the policy should be scrapped in favour of mandatory evacuation. Thomas disagrees – in his case, his and his wife's action had saved their house. "Being afraid puts you under stress, and that makes it much more difficult to make completely rational decisions," he concedes. "But in the end most people have a very strong survival instinct. They find ways to deal with the situation."  

• This is an edited extract from Extreme Fear: The Science Of Your Mind In Danger, by Jeff Wise, published by Palgrave Macmillan on 19 January at £16.99. To order a copy for £15.99, with free UK p&p, go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call + 44  (0) 330 333 6846.

The Brothers grim - A scandalous litany of abuse, hiddden under a cloak of Christianity. AC.

  Patrick Barkham  The Guardian,  Saturday 28.11.2009

Once, the Christian Brothers wielded extraordinary power – not only over the lives of the hundreds, if not thousands, of children they abused, but over Ireland itself. Today there are only 250 people left in the Irish order, with an average age of 74 – but its legacy still looms large 

Jim Beresford was 'imprisoned' in Dublin's notorious Artane school when he was 13. 'Never in my worst nightmares had I ever dreamed such a place could exist,' he says. Photograph: Richard Hanson

It is not the memories of the kickings and lashings with a leather strap that make Tom Hayes pause and choke and break down. Nor is it the incessant bullying, the slave labour or the sexual abuse he suffered after dark in the dormitory. The memory that turns the 63-year-old former soldier's voice small with terror is one vivid image from his eight years in Glin industrial school, Limerick. "The first time I saw someone brought back to the school having absconded was one of the most frightening things I've ever witnessed," he says. "His head was shaved as punishment and then he took a really serious beating by two Christian Brothers. I've never forgotten it."

The trauma for Hayes and others has been stirred up again this week by the fourth major report in the past decade investigating the abuse of children by Ireland's Catholic clergy and teachers. A day before the government report made new revelations of the collusion of the Irish police and archbishops in covering up decades of sexual and physical torture, the Christian Brothers, the Catholic lay order at the heart of some of the most disturbing abuses, offered reparations of £145m in cash and land, to be handed over to independent trusts.

 The dark side of the internet  Andy Beckett   The Guardian  26.11.2009 (Unedited)

In the 'deep web', Freenet software allows users complete anonymity as they share viruses, criminal contacts and child pornography.

Freenet means controversial information does not need to be stored in physical data havens such as this one, Sealand. Photograph: Kim Gilmour/Alama

Fourteen years ago, a pasty Irish teenager with a flair for inventions arrived at Edinburgh University to study artificial intelligence and computer science. For his thesis project, Ian Clarke created "a Distributed, Decentralised Information Storage and Retrieval System", or, as a less precise person might put it, a revolutionary new way for people to use the internet without detection. By downloading Clarke's software, which he intended to distribute for free, anyone could chat online, or read or set up a website, or share files, with almost complete anonymity.

"It seemed so obvious that that was what the net was supposed to be about – freedom to communicate," Clarke says now. "But [back then] in the late 90s that simply wasn't the case. The internet could be monitored more quickly, more comprehensively, more cheaply than more old-fashioned communications systems like the mail." His pioneering software was intended to change that.

His tutors were not bowled over. "I would say the response was a bit lukewarm. They gave me a B. They thought the project was a bit wacky … they said, 'You didn't cite enough prior work.'" 

Undaunted, in 2000 Clarke publicly released his software, now more appealingly called Freenet. Nine years on, he has lost count of how many people are using it: "At least 2m copies have been downloaded from the website, primarily in Europe and the US. The website is blocked in [authoritarian] countries like China so there, people tend to get Freenet from friends." Last year Clarke produced an improved version: it hides not only the identities of Freenet users but also, in any online environment, the fact that someone is using Freenet at all.

Installing the software takes barely a couple of minutes and requires minimal computer skills. You find the Freenet website, read a few terse instructions, and answer a few questions ("How much security do you need?" … "NORMAL: I live in a relatively free country" or "MAXIMUM: I intend to access information that could get me arrested, imprisoned, or worse"). Then you enter a previously hidden online world. In utilitarian type and bald capsule descriptions, an official Freenet index lists the hundreds of "freesites" available: "Iran News", "Horny Kate", "The Terrorist's Handbook: A practical guide to explosives and other things of interests to terrorists", "How To Spot A Pedophile [sic]", "Freenet Warez Portal: The source for pirate copies of books, games, movies, music, software, TV series and more", "Arson Around With Auntie: A how-to guide on arson attacks for animal rights activists". There is material written in Russian, Spanish, Dutch, Polish and Italian. There is English-language material from America and Thailand, from Argentina and Japan. There are disconcerting blogs ("Welcome to my first Freenet site. I'm not here because of kiddie porn … [but] I might post some images of naked women") and legally dubious political revelations. There is all the teeming life of the everyday internet, but rendered a little stranger and more intense. One of the Freenet bloggers sums up the difference: "If you're reading this now, then you're on the darkweb."

The modern internet is often thought of as a miracle of openness – its global reach, its outflanking of censors, its seemingly all-seeing search engines. "Many many users think that when they search on Google they're getting all the web pages," says Anand Rajaraman, co-founder of Kosmix, one of a new generation of post-Google search engine companies. But Rajaraman knows different. "I think it's a very small fraction of the deep web which search engines are bringing to the surface. I don't know, to be honest, what fraction. No one has a really good estimate of how big the deep web is. Five hundred times as big as the surface web is the only estimate I know."

Unfathomable and mysterious

"The darkweb"; "the deep web"; beneath "the surface web" – the metaphors alone make the internet feel suddenly more unfathomable and mysterious. Other terms circulate among those in the know: "darknet", "invisible web", "dark address space", "murky address space", "dirty address space". Not all these phrases mean the same thing. While a "darknet" is an online network such as Freenet that is concealed from non-users, with all the potential for transgressive behaviour that implies, much of "the deep web", spooky as it sounds, consists of unremarkable consumer and research data that is beyond the reach of search engines. "Dark address space" often refers to internet addresses that, for purely technical reasons, have simply stopped working.

And yet, in a sense, they are all part of the same picture: beyond the confines of most people's online lives, there is a vast other internet out there, used by millions but largely ignored by the media and properly understood by only a few computer scientists. How was it created? What exactly happens in it? And does it represent the future of life online or the past?

Michael K Bergman, an American academic and entrepreneur, is one of the foremost authorities on this other internet. In the late 90s he undertook research to try to gauge its scale. "I remember saying to my staff, 'It's probably two or three times bigger than the regular web,"' he remembers. "But the vastness of the deep web . . . completely took my breath away. We kept turning over rocks and discovering things."

In 2001 he published a paper on the deep web that is still regularly cited today. "The deep web is currently 400 to 550 times larger than the commonly defined world wide web," he wrote. "The deep web is the fastest growing category of new information on the internet … The value of deep web content is immeasurable … internet searches are searching only 0.03% … of the [total web] pages available." 

In the eight years since, use of the internet has been utterly transformed in many ways, but improvements in search technology by Google, Kosmix and others have only begun to plumb the deep web. "A hidden web [search] engine that's going to have everything – that's not quite practical," says Professor Juliana Freire of the University of Utah, who is leading a deep web search project called Deep Peep. "It's not actually feasible to index the whole deep web. There's just too much data."

But sheer scale is not the only problem. "When we've crawled [searched] several sites, we've gotten blocked," says Freire. "You can actually come up with ways that make it impossible for anyone [searching] to grab all your data." Sometimes the motivation is commercial – "people have spent a lot of time and money building, say, a database of used cars for sale, and don't want you to be able to copy their site"; and sometimes privacy is sought for other reasons. "There's a well-known crime syndicate called the Russian Business Network (RBN)," says Craig Labovitz, chief scientist at Arbor Networks, a leading online security firm, "and they're always jumping around the internet, grabbing bits of [disused] address space, sending out millions of spam emails from there, and then quickly disconnecting."

The RBN also rents temporary websites to other criminals for online identity theft, child pornography and releasing computer viruses. The internet has been infamous for such activities for decades; what has been less understood until recently was how the increasingly complex geography of the internet has aided them. "In 2000 dark and murky address space was a bit of a novelty," says Labovitz. "This is now an entrenched part of the daily life of the internet." Defunct online companies; technical errors and failures; disputes between internet service providers; abandoned addresses once used by the US military in the earliest days of the internet – all these have left the online landscape scattered with derelict or forgotten properties, perfect for illicit exploitation, sometimes for only a few seconds before they are returned to disuse. How easy is it to take over a dark address? "I don't think my mother could do it," says Labovitz. "But it just takes a PC and a connection. The internet has been largely built on trust."

Open or closed?

In fact, the internet has always been driven as much by a desire for secrecy as a desire for transparency. The network was the joint creation of the US defence department and the American counterculture – the WELL, one of the first and most influential online communities, was a spinoff from hippy bible the Whole Earth Catalog – and both groups had reasons to build hidden or semi-hidden online environments as well as open ones. "Strong encryption [code-writing] developed in parallel with the internet," says Danny O'Brien, an activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a long-established pressure group for online privacy.

There are still secretive parts of the internet where this unlikely alliance between hairy libertarians and the cloak-and-dagger military endures. The Onion Router, or Tor, is an American volunteer-run project that offers free software to those seeking anonymous online communication, like a more respectable version of Freenet. Tor's users, according to its website, include US secret service "field agents" and "law enforcement officers . . . Tor allows officials to surf questionable websites and services without leaving tell-tale tracks," but also "activists and whistleblowers", for example "environmental groups [who] are increasingly falling under surveillance in the US under laws meant to protect against terrorism". Tor, in short, is used both by the American state and by some of its fiercest opponents. On the hidden internet, political life can be as labyrinthine as in a novel by Thomas Pynchon.

The hollow legs of Sealand

The often furtive, anarchic quality of life online struck some observers decades ago. In 1975, only half a dozen years after the internet was created, the science-fiction author John Brunner wrote of "so many worms and counter-worms loose in the data-net" in his influential novel The Shockwave Rider. By the 80s "data havens", at first physical then online locations where sensitive computerised information could be concealed, were established in discreet jurisdictions such as Caribbean tax havens. In 2000 an American internet startup called HavenCo set up a much more provocative data haven, in a former second world war sea fort just outside British territorial waters off the Suffolk coast, which since the 60s had housed an eccentric independent "principality" called Sealand. HavenCo announced that it would store any data unless it concerned terrorism or child pornography, on servers built into the hollow legs of Sealand as they extended beneath the waves. A better metaphor for the hidden depths of the internet was hard to imagine.

In 2007 the highly successful Swedish filesharing website The Pirate Bay – the downloading of music and films for free being another booming darknet enterprise – announced its intention to buy Sealand. The plan has come to nothing so far, and last year it was reported that HavenCo had ceased operation, but in truth the need for physical data havens is probably diminishing. Services such as Tor and Freenet perform the same function electronically; and in a sense, even the "open" internet, as online privacy-seekers sometimes slightly contemptuously refer to it, has increasingly become a place for concealment: people posting and blogging under pseudonyms, people walling off their online lives from prying eyes on social networking websites.

"The more people do everything online, the more there's going to be bits of your life that you don't want to be part of your public online persona," says O'Brien. A spokesman for the Police Central e-crime Unit [PCeU] at the Metropolitan Police points out that many internet secrets hide in plain sight: "A lot of internet criminal activity is on online forums that are not hidden, you just have to know where to find them. Like paedophile websites: people who use them might go to an innocent-looking website with a picture of flowers, click on the 18th flower, arrive on another innocent-looking website, click something there, and so on." The paedophile ring convicted this autumn and currently awaiting sentence for offences involving Little Ted's nursery in Plymouth met on Facebook. Such secret criminal networks are not purely a product of the digital age: codes and slang and pathways known only to initiates were granting access to illicit worlds long before the internet.

To libertarians such as O'Brien and Clarke the hidden internet, however you define it, is constantly under threat from restrictive governments and corporations. Its freedoms, they say, must be defended absolutely. "Child pornography does exist on Freenet," says Clarke. "But it exists all over the web, in the post . . . At Freenet we could establish a virus to destroy any child pornography on Freenet – we could implement that technically. But then whoever has the key [to that filtering software] becomes a target. Suddenly we'd start getting served copyright notices; anything suspect on Freenet, we'd get pressure to shut it down. To modify Freenet would be the end of Freenet."

Always recorded

According to the police, for criminal users of services such as Freenet, the end is coming anyway. The PCeU spokesman says, "The anonymity things, there are ways to get round them, and we do get round them. When you use the internet, something's always recorded somewhere. It's a question of identifying who is holding that information." Don't the police find their investigations obstructed by the libertarian culture of so much life online? "No, people tend to be co-operative."

The internet, for all its anarchy, is becoming steadily more commercialised; as internet service providers, for example, become larger and more profit-driven, the spokesman suggests, it is increasingly in their interests to accept a degree of policing. "There has been an increasing centralisation," Ian Clarke acknowledges regretfully.

Meanwhile the search engine companies are restlessly looking for paths into the deep web and the other sections of the internet currently denied to them. "There's a deep implication for privacy," says Anand Rajaraman of Kosmix. "Tonnes and tonnes of stuff out there on the deep web has what I call security through obscurity. But security through obscurity is actually a false security. You [the average internet user] can't find something, but the bad guys can find it if they try hard enough."

As Kosmix and other search engines improve, he says, they will make the internet truly transparent: "You will be on the same level playing field as the bad guys." The internet as a sort of electronic panopticon, everything on it unforgivingly visible and retrievable – suddenly its current murky depths seem in some ways preferable.

Ten years ago Tim Berners-Lee, the British computer scientist credited with inventing the web, wrote: "I have a dream for the web in which computers become capable of analysing all the data on the web – the content, links, and transactions between people … A 'Semantic Web', which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines." Yet this "semantic web" remains the stuff of knotty computer science papers rather than a reality. 

"It's really been the holy grail for 30 years," says Bergman. One obstacle, he continues, is that the internet continues to expand in unpredictable and messy surges. "The boundaries of what the web is have become much more blurred. Is Twitter part of the web or part of something else? Now the web, in a sense, is just everything. In 1998, the NEC laboratory at Princeton published a paper on the size of the internet. Who could get something like that published now? You can't talk about how big the internet is. Because what is the metric?"

Gold Rush

It seems likely that the internet will remain in its Gold Rush phase for some time yet. And in the crevices and corners of its slightly thrown-together structures, darknets and other private online environments will continue to flourish. They can be inspiring places to spend time in, full of dissidents and eccentrics and the internet's original freewheeling spirit. But a darknet is not always somewhere for the squeamish.

On Freenet, there is a currently a "freesite" which makes allegations against supposed paedophiles, complete with names, photographs, extensive details of their lives online, and partial home addresses. In much smaller type underneath runs the disclaimer: "The material contained in this freesite is hearsay . . . It is not admissable in court proceedings and would certainly not reach the burden of proof requirement of a criminal trial." For the time being, when I'm wandering around online, I may stick to Google.

British dead and wounded in Afghanistan, month by month

What is the human cost of the war in Afghanistan for British forces? These are the latest figures - including new wounded statistics

• * Get the data   Information is Beautiful analysis of the data  

B company of the Black Watch in the back of a Viking vehicle Photograph: Sean Smith

As more soldiers die, taking the total number over that in Iraq, these are the numbers of British fatalities for Afghanistan - and Iraq, too - updated as they change. We've broken Afghanistan down month-by-month.

More complicated are the wounded numbers. Rather than one simple set of statistics, the MoD gives us three - all of which are included as a sheet in the dataset below (and summarised down the page).

Firstly, you have the Noticas numbers. These are the most seriously wounded cases, where the family has been informed the wounded person has been "listed"
• Then there are the people registered at field hospitals - which go from the seriously to the lightly wounded, from all causes, violent and otherwise
• Lastly there are the personnel who've been evacuated by air, which could be serious combat injuries or illnesses such as dysentry

This is how the MoD defines it:

'"Very Seriously ill/ Injured/wounded" or VSI is the definition we use where the illness or injury is of such severity that life or reason is imminently endangered. "Seriously ill/Injured/Wounded" or SI is the definition we use where the patient's condition is of such severity that there is cause for immediate concern, but there is no imminent danger to life or reason. The VSI and SI categories are defined by Joint Casualty and Compassionate Policy and Procedures. They are not strictly medical categories but are designed to give an indication of the severity of the illness to inform what the individual's next of kin are told.'

What do you think? Can you do anything with the data?

Download the data

• DATA: British dead and wounded, month by month as a spreadsheet - including names of dead
DATA: how many troops does each country send to Afghanistan
INTERACTIVE: rollcall of the British dead

Can you do something with this data?

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The last nomads: drought drives Kenya's herders to the brink

In the isolated border lands between Kenya and Somalia, families have always clung to a precarious existence. Now a decade of droughts has tested their endurance

Alternative Education: Earn As You Learn.  October, 2009.  Students and their parents often think that College or University Education is the only route to a successful career.  However, as the worldwide economic recession deepens, and the hunt for jobs becomes more competitive, it's worth considering alternatives.  In the UK, this week is National Apprenticeship Week.

Don't let predjudice about apprenticeships or vocational study get in the way of clear thinking.  Andy Powell of 'Edge', which champions practical and vocational learning, including apprenticeships, says that we all need to tackle educational snobbery.

'The tradional bias,' he says', against vocational qualifications results in too many people evaluating personal success by academic achievement.'

An Edge survey found that 35% of parents think that vocational learning is for those who don't do well at school - but, in reality, it's simply an alternative route to career qualifications.  Infact, if you don't want to do any more college-related study, think about an apprenticeship.

As well as workplace training, they involve some study, either in college or your own time.  So, you need to be prepared to put in extra time after work.  see: www.edgecampaign.co.uk 

Like most qualifications, apprenticeships are available at various levels.  In the UK they usually begin at age 16 - 19, but there are no limits - at least one, is being taken by a man aged 60.  Again, in the UK, they cover a range of 80 subjects from accountancy to football, business studies and vetinary (animal) nursing, so forget tht they are only for young boys or people with no academic ability.

 

An apprenticeship lasts for as long as it takes to gain competence in the job.  That's usually 1 - 3 years, but there are no limits.  They are usually 'paid employment', with the company or organisation paying tuition costs.  I think that, although it may not be generally known, similar situations occur in countries worldwide.

 

For an insight into the range of study available in the UK, visit: www.apprenticeships.org.uk

 

Case Studies.  The following are examples of the way 3 young people in the UK have advanced their career opportunities through apprenticeships in different ways. 

 

DT male, aged 25 completed an advanced apprenticeship in Business Administration, whilst working for a large Corporation in northern England.  He is now doing similar studies in Customer Services working as a Customer & Information Addministrator.  He says that his studies had been tailored around his job, and hopes to go on to do a degee. 'I like the mix of work and study,' he said.

 

EE female, aged 26 is a Weapons Technician with the Royal Air Force.  She took an advanced apprenticeship in Aerosystems Engineering.  Her studies have taken 3 years, and she is now qualified to work on operations and abroad.

 

JN male, 19 was very well qualified at 16 when he left school.  His school assumed that he would progress to university, but, 'I wanted to something more practical,' he said, 'and start earning money, without getting into student debt.'  By next August, he will have compled a number of courses with an International Chemical Company.  He says, 'Apprenticeships give you a real chance to show employers whaat you can do.'

 

In conclusion.  There are clearly other roads to career success, other than through university.  Large companies offer opportunities, although there may be an obligation to remain with the company for 2 or 3 years after graduation.  Internationally, The Armed Forces of a country, offer ways of obtaining skills, whilst offering a salary, accommodation and comradeship.

 

Explore all your opportunities, and choose the one which best suits your circumstances.

Compiled from various sources including: Edge, Government & Education information, apprenticeships.org, Linda Whitney (Journalist) and agencies.  AC. 2009.02.28.