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Showing posts from January, 2011

Thoughts about Egypt

The city I was just in about 6 months ago - which owns more than a million years of human history - is now hearing a desperate, angry, and fearless roar of reform from its people, whose voice is reverberating across several Arabic-speaking countries. Egypt is an extremely valuable player on the global playing field. It's ancestors are known to have built one of the first far-reaching ordered civilizations the world has known. Medieval Egypt significantly advanced scholarship in the sciences and philosophy. In contemporary times, it has been looked at as a model of modernization amongst Arab states. Even more recently, Egypt has provided strong support in brokering peace in the Middle East, and negotiating as well as facilitating the transfer of resources from and to the Western world. The people of Egypt, therefore, have witnessed many, many changes in leadership. Moreover, they have experienced diversity in the most deepest historical aspect of the word. Surely, a people with s

Inakwaje?

What's happening? On your end (the world), quite a bit it seems. As the global north has begun to ease out of financial liability over the last 2 years, the global south continues to experience acute economic issues in and amonst civil society institutions. That's one way to look at what's happening on your end. Another way to look at it would be this: The possibilities of mobile technology show strong potential to make life a little easier globally, north and south. Though with highly individualized tools to access this technology, the question arises - in the end, is this helping us interact with one another, or interact with an object? Strangely, that's roughly the same as what's happening on my end. I'll soon be planning my field project for GPISH , and it currently looks as though Dar-es-Salaam would provide the most useful base for research. I am interested in examining what factors influence the interaction of information between community-based instituti

Stationary

Ever get the feeling you're stationary? No, not like in the picture above, but stationary as in you're not moving? It seems that when we define goals for ourselves, they need to substantiate daily actions, because otherwise, it seems we lack purpose. And when we lack purpose, anything we do seems to go to nothing. Why did we start calling stationary (like in the above photo) "stationary", anyway?

Tags cleanup

Unlike Wordress, Blogger only has dynamic tags, whereas Wordpress has both dynamic tags (ie: "tags") and statis tags (ie: "categories"). So when I was reviewing all the tags I had used over the last 4 years for this blog, I realized that they were all over the place. So I spent some time in the last two days cleaning up my tag, thus the much smaller tag cloud on the sidebar. Makes it easier to browse the subjects I talk about :) That is, if anyone is out there...

Hello 2011

A tree near Al-Azhar park, Cairo.