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The Founding of the Dalai Lama Scholars

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The first Dalai Lama scholars…
with the 14th Dalai Lama

The Dalai Lama Scholars program was envisioned by Vice Chancellor Manuel Gomez of the University of California at Irvine, and formed as an honorarium to His Holiness in conjunction with his appearance there in 2004. The Dalai Lama does not receive any payment for his appearances – instead, all net proceeds from tickets and other sales (after expenses) go to benefit appropriate causes and organizations. [UCI Juniors Rajiv Ramdeo and Aswathi Sreedharan, recipients of the inaugural scholarship 2006, are pictured here with the Dalai Lama.]

Lori Warmington was instrumental in the creation of the scholarships, and in this interview, she describes for us how they came about as well as what they’re about.

Click the arrow to hear the interview:

The Dalai Lama Foundation featured the scholars in its March 2007 newsletter. The University describes the endowed scholarships on its web site. His Holiness gave two talks at the University of California Irvine, both of which are archived online (video/RealPlayer).

The $100 laptop at International Symposium on Digital Earth 5

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The $100 laptop visits ISDE5
The $100 laptop @ ISDE5

The International Symposium on Digital Earth was an opportunity for a few hundred experts and other interested individuals to get together, see and discuss ways in which online information systems are making it possible to explore our planet.

The most obvious, to me, being Google Earth. But there are lots and lots of others.

As I walked into UC Berkeley to register, I stumbled across Ed Cherlin, who I’ve known for a few years as a knowledgeable and good-hearted promoter of the Simputer (Simple Computer). This time he was wearing a volunteer staff shirt for ISDE5 and carrying an XO (the “$100 computer”) in his hand. Hmm, an XO. Time to talk to Ed I think! [Read more…]

University for Peace & the Earth Charter

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upeaceOn June 6th, several of us from the Foundation met with Professor Abelardo Brenes of University for Peace (headquartered in San José, Costa Rica) to discuss the Earth Charter and the principle of universal responsibility.

Brenes described the Earth Charter in a 30-minute monologue which you may play (below).

University for Peace logoUniversity for Peace (UPEACE) is a UN initiative which operates independent of, but was mandated by the UN. “Headquartered in Costa Rica, the United Nations-mandated University for Peace was established in December 1980 as a Treaty Organization by the UN General Assembly. As determined in the Charter of the University and endorsed by the UPEACE Council, the mission of the University for Peace is: “to provide humanity with an international institution of higher education for peace with the aim of promoting among all human beings the spirit of understanding, tolerance and peaceful coexistence, to stimulate cooperation among peoples and to help lessen obstacles and threats to world peace and progress, in keeping with the noble aspirations proclaimed in the Charter of the United Nations.”

In a 2003 online “paper,” Brenes describes (in Spanish) the initiative.

And in a 2003 print interview, as well (on irenees.net, A Website of Resources for Peace).

UPDATE: Abelardo Brenes faculty page at University for Peace

Play the interview:

Free blog hosting

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mashableMashable is a good source of leads – on a bunch of topics related to online activity. Today they’ve put up a post that lists more than 40 “free blog hosting” sites.

I use WordPress and I run it on my own servers, as well as running it for a dozen or so clients. Gives me a lot of control, and more features than I would have if I used wordpress.com as a host.

But I get asked all of the time where one can find a good (and free) blog-hosting site.

So, Mashable has their 40+ answers to the question.

Making WordPress administration easier

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wordpressFound a good post on mashable.com that lists 50+ WordPress plug-ins that come in handy for site administrators. Go read it. Amazingly, I use a bunch of good plug-ins but I did not use even one of those recommended by Mashable. Some of them are a bit lame … the 404-checker sounds really good on the surface of it, though I haven’t figured out why a WordPress page would ever go 404 because they’re basically manufactured on-the-fly.

One that really does sound useful is the Instant-upgrade plug-in, that permits you to perform a WP upgrade automatically with a single click. WP upgrades generally take me around 5 minutes per site to perform and I do about 20 of them each time WP clicks over to the next version, so this could save me a couple of hours here and there! (It requires careful setup by a server admin, but looks like it probably does things correctly.)