“Philosophy Communication Wins The Spitfire Group Account” plus 3 more |
- Philosophy Communication Wins The Spitfire Group Account
- Dudley visits Senegal
- Comment on A Reminder: Say NO to Racism Everywhere, not just @ The World Cup by AcHoo!
- How to find the right swimsuit, no matter your size
| Philosophy Communication Wins The Spitfire Group Account Posted: 06 Jul 2010 12:01 AM PDT Business and technology consulting firm choose Denver agency for positioning and brand development Denver, CO (PRWEB) July 6, 2010 -- Philosophy Communication, Inc., a Denver-based marketing and public relations agency, was selected by business and technology consulting firm The Spitfire Group to promote the company through positioning and brand development. "The Philosophy team has a history of success working with other technology-centered businesses. We are confident their experience with our industry and their expertise of the Denver market will be a great asset in helping us grow as both our company and brand," said Mark Richtermeyer, chief executive officer of The Spitfire Group. The Spitfire Group is an award-winning IT consulting firm that provides business-driven technology solutions to clients. They work side-by-side with businesses to develop practical processes that promote efficiency and eliminate obstacles. About Philosophy Communication, Inc. About The Spitfire Group ### Philosophy Communication Five Filters featured article: Headshot - Propaganda, State Religion and the Attack On the Gaza Peace Flotilla. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Posted: 06 Jul 2010 01:04 AM PDT David Dudley, a professor and Chair of the Department of Literature and Philosophy at Georgia Southern University, is recently back from a two-week trip to the West African nation of Senegal. The trip was part of a grant won by two GSU History Professors, with the goal of increasing international content and awareness in the curriculum of the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences. Dudley, a resident of Twin City, and about 20 other GSU faculty members left Savannah May 13. After some travel misadventures that took him to Africa by way of Atlanta; New York; Manchester, England; Paris; and Casablanca, Morocco; Dudley arrived in Dakar, the capital of Senegal, on May 16. His luggage caught up with him on the 19th! The first part of the trip centered in Dakar, a city of 2 1/2 million people on the Atlantic Ocean, and the western-most point on the continent of Africa. Highlights of Dudley's time in Dakar included visiting Goree Island, the point of departure for hundreds of thousands of slaves during the era of the international slave trade. The travelers visited the notorious slave house, including the "door of no return"-through which slaves were sent to the waiting ships. The slave house features separate cells for men, children, women, and virgins, who were among the most highly prized slaves for sale. He reports it was sobering to see firsthand the place where so many people were forced to leave their homeland forever. Also in Dakar, the professors visited the capital building and the presidential mansion, the history museum, which features an impressive collection of African masks and native costumes. The also toured the national university, where some 70,000 students attend classes on a campus originally built to accommodate 13,000. A typical lecture class holds 750 students, all of whose exams are graded by one professor. Dudley notes that Senegal is home to many young people desiring an education, but the nation's poverty makes it nearly impossible to give all its students the quality of education we often take for granted here in the States. The university's buildings are not air conditioned, and there are no computers in the library; still, the study areas of the library were absolutely full of students working in complete silence on their course work. A different kind of school offers instruction to young boys who want to learn the Qur'an by heart. Rather than attending public school, these boys (some of whom have come from distant villages) devote themselves to memorizing the Qur'an. In the school the GSU professors visited, there is no building, just an open field in a Dakar neighborhood. The boys live in the open air, with one small latrine for their use. About fifty boys, ranging in age from seven or eight to older teenagers, learn to read and write Arabic and study only the Qur'an. Some schools of this kind compel the boys to beg in the streets to help earn money to pay expenses, including food and clothing for the students. Seeing children begging in the streets of Dakar was perhaps the most disturbing thing Dudley saw on his trip. Everywhere in Senegal, people are making a living by vending from small sidewalk shops or from whatever they can carry with them. Westerners are assumed to have a lot of money to spend, and everywhere the group stopped, vendors crowded around them, offering cell phone minutes cards, sunglasses, watches, shirts, and all kinds of food. He bought socks from a boy who kept his "inventory" in a school backpack. Buying from vendors or from shops in the markets can be both intimidating and after some experience is gained fun. Nothing has a fixed price, and the buyer is expected to haggle over the price of everything. The seller begins by asking a price that he knows is much too high, more than the buyer will pay, and the bargaining goes on from there! Dudley felt that he got better at bargaining as the trip went on, but he's sure he probably paid to much for almost everything he bought. He brought home scarves, necklaces, T-shirts, and wooden sculptures for his family. Outside of Dakar, the GSU professors traveled to the cities of St. Louis, the old French colonial capital, now the home to hundreds of people who make their living fishing the rivers and the ocean in small, colorfully painted traditional boats. Some of the daily catch is sold immediately as fresh fish, but the docks are lined with drying racks for huge numbers of salted fish, which are a staple of the Senegalese diet. Near St. Louis, they visited the bird sanctuary of Djoudj, one of the most important migratory bird sites on earth, and now a World Heritage protected site. During the migration season, millions of birds stop at Djoudj on their way to or from Europe. During a long boat trip, the professors saw many kinds of birds, including large flocks of pelicans, geese, cormorants, herons, and cranes. At Touba, the religious center of Senegal, he and his group toured the Grand Mosque and learned of the enormous power that Islam wields in this nation where about 94% of the people are Muslims. Touba is a virtually autonomous zone within the country, ruled not so much by the national government as by religious leaders who have banned smoking, drinking, and banking from the city limits. There are no hotels and no tourism. Yet once a year, about two million pilgrims from all over the world converge in Touba for a religious festival. The pilgrims live in the open air or are housed by local residents, who sometimes offer hospitality to many other people, most of them strangers. Near the small city of Toubakouta, Dudley and his colleagues toured the enormous mangrove swamps. The river offers world-class sport fishing, which draws tourists to the hotels along the river's banks. The professors visited a traditional fishing village where the people still live in thatch huts and draw water from a communal well, and where they were all greeted with a kiss by the 84-year-old queen of the village. The village has a small but modern school, which is open only about half the year because the teacher has teaching responsibilities in other villages, as well. Two other highlights of the visit to Toubakouta were dancing to traditional music and drums at an evening program of Senegalese dancing, and witnessing a traditional wrestling match. Dudley danced, but he didn't try the wrestling! Dudley reports that the trip was the most extraordinary experience of his life, and that he hopes never to complain about anything in America again, for he now has seen firsthand how wealthy and comfortable we are, compared to millions of other people in our one global family. Despite differences in culture and customs, he found the people of Senegal to be friendly, hospitable, and eager for the same things we Americans value, including good jobs, education, and hope for our children and our nations' futures. Dudley is grateful for the opportunities he experienced on his trip and recommends international travel to everyone who wants a vision of the larger world beyond the boundaries of Georgia and our United States.
Five Filters featured article: Headshot - Propaganda, State Religion and the Attack On the Gaza Peace Flotilla. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Comment on A Reminder: Say NO to Racism Everywhere, not just @ The World Cup by AcHoo! Posted: 05 Jul 2010 08:31 AM PDT
The Narcissism of the Small DifferenceIn ethno-national conflicts, it really is the little things that tick people off.By Christopher Hitchens ( June 28, 2010)
Explanations range from official pandering to Kyrgyz nationalism, to sheer police and army brutality, to provocations from Taliban-style militias hoping to create another Afghanistan, but none go very far in analyzing why inter-communal relations became so vicious so fast. As if to make the question still more opaque, several reports stressed the essential similarity—ethnic, linguistic, cultural—between the Kyrgyz and Uzbek populations. But that in itself could well be the explanation. In numerous cases of apparently ethno-nationalist conflict, the deepest hatreds are manifested between people who—to most outward appearances—exhibit very few significant distinctions. It is one of the great contradictions of civilization and one of the great sources of its discontents, and Sigmund Freud even found a term for it: "the narcissism of the small difference." As he wrote, "It is precisely the minor differences in people who are otherwise alike that form the basis of feelings of hostility between them." The partition of India and Pakistan, for example, which gives us one of the longest-standing and most toxic confrontations extant, involved most of all the partition of the Punjab. Visit Punjab and see if you can detect the remotest difference in people on either side of the border. Language, literature, ethnic heritage, physical appearance—virtually indistinguishable. Here it is mainly religion that symbolizes the narcissism and makes the most of the least discrepancy. I used to work in Northern Ireland, where religion is by no means a minor business either, and at first couldn't tell by looking whether someone was Catholic or Protestant. After a while, I thought I could guess with a fair degree of accuracy, but most of the inhabitants of Belfast seemed able to do it by some kind of instinct. There is a small underlay of ethnic difference there, with the original Gaels being a little darker and smaller than the blonder Scots who were imported as settlers, but to the outsider it is impalpable. It's just that it's the dominant question locally. Likewise in Cyprus, it is extremely hard to tell a Greek from a Turk. The two peoples have been on the same island for so long that they even suffer from a common sickle-cell blood disease called thalassemia. I once interviewed a doctor who specialized in the malady, and he solemnly told me that, from a blood sample, it was not possible to tell if the donor was Greek or Turkish. I had to stop myself from asking him if he had hitherto thought that different nationalities were made out of different genetic material. There have been almost no recorded cases of intermarriage between Greek and Turkish Cypriots, and the island remains sternly partitioned. In his book The Warrior's Honor, Michael Ignatieff spent some time trying to elucidate what it was that made soldiers in the Balkan Wars—physically indistinguishable from one another—so eager to inflict cruelty and contempt upon Serb or Croat or Bosnian, as the case might be. Very often, the expressed hatred took the form of extremely provincial and local rivalries, inflamed by jealousies over supposed small advantages possessed by the other. Of course, here again there are latent nationalist and confessional differences to act as a force multiplier once the nasty business gets started, but the main thing to strike the outsider would be the question of "How can they tell?" In Rwanda and Burundi, even if it is true, as some colonial anthropologists used to claim, that Hutu and Tutsi vary in height and also in the delimitation of their hairlines, it still doesn't seem enough of a difference upon which to base a genocide. In Sri Lanka, where again it takes a long time to notice that Tamils are prone to be slightly smaller and slightly darker than the Sinhala majority, it is somehow the most important information that either population possesses. And it doesn't take long for one population to start saying that the other one has too many children, takes too much leisure, is too casual about hygiene. Every time he heard a Shiites or Sunni Iraqi saying that religion didn't really count, said my friend Patrick Cockburn in his book on Baghdad, he noticed that every single one of them knew the exact faith allegiance of everybody else in the room. And if you want to see an expression of sheer racial disdain, try giving to an Iranian Shiites the impression that you think he and his Iraqi co-religionists are brothers under the skin. The next example of this phenomenon will be among the most serious as well as the least dramatic. One of the most unobtrusive differences in the world—the line that separates French from Flemish-speaking Belgians—is about to be forcefully reasserted in a bid to split Belgium in two. If this secession occurs, then the headquarters country of NATO and the European Union will rather narcissistically cease to exist, undone by one of the smallest distinctions of all. So pity the Uzbeks and Kyrgyz as they peer suspiciously at one another during a sudden time of scarcity and insecurity. Their mutual miseries may be just beginning. And all this contains the true ingredients of tragedy—and of irony. One of the great advantages possessed by Homo sapiens is the amazing lack of variation between its different "branches." Since we left Africa, we have diverged as a species hardly at all. If we were dogs, we would all be the same breed. We do not suffer from the enormous differences that separate other primates, let alone other mammals. As if to spite this huge natural gift, and to disfigure what could be our overwhelming solidarity, we manage to find excuses for chauvinism and racism on the most minor of occasions and then to make the most of them. This is why condemnation of bigotry and superstition is not just a moral question but a matter of survival.–http://www.slate.com/id/2258127 Five Filters featured article: Headshot - Propaganda, State Religion and the Attack On the Gaza Peace Flotilla. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| How to find the right swimsuit, no matter your size Posted: 06 Jul 2010 12:06 AM PDT Waiting to buy a bathing suit until you attain the "perfect" weight doesn't make sense. That philosophy usually ends in another wasted summer. Instead, deciding to buy a bathing suit you like and getting on with the summer festivities can get you closer to getting leaner. After all, hiding doesn't burn many calories, but having fun does. Laughing, walking on the beach and jumping in the water are all activities that require the body to burn energy. Are you ready to buy a bathing suit? Here are some tips for making it a more pleasant experience. 1. Think of your body as a room in a house that you want to redecorate. The size and shape of the room don't matter; just think of what would look best. 2. Select colors that look good on you just as you would choose colors for your new room. Have fun. Painting every room beige would be boring. Remember that when you automatically reach for a basic black suit. 3. Select the style that looks the best on you, just as you would choose the right furniture for your room. 4. Select accessories — a broad-brimmed hat, sandals — that look good with your color palette just as you would choose pictures and pillows. 5 .Consider comfort. It's important to feel comfortable in your swimsuit, just as you want to feel good in your new room. The better the suit feels, the less preoccupied you will feel with your body. It's hard to have fun when the straps are digging into your shoulders. 6. Now that you've selected the best bathing suit for you, forget about it. Go out and have fun. Let that be the end of the issue. Don't worry, be happy It's impossible to be anxious and relaxed at the same time, so by doing everything you can to be more relaxed, you avoid anxiety. Here are tips to help with that:
So don't let a bathing suit get in the way of life. Choose one that works for you, and get on with having the time of your life. Lavinia Rodriguez is a clinical psychologist who specializes in weight management. Five Filters featured article: Headshot - Propaganda, State Religion and the Attack On the Gaza Peace Flotilla. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
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