World Financial Crisis -- Can it be solved using Mind Mapping?
Released
on: September 18, 2008, 10:23 am
Press
Release Author: World
Mind Network
Industry:
Education
Press
Release Summary: BERKELEY CA Online Think Tank World Mind Network
offers $5000 Prize for the best Plan to solve current banking
crisis which employs common Mind Mapping software
Press
Release Body: The World Mind Network, and its
affiliate Friends Beyond Borders, is offering
a $5000 Prize for the best Collaborative Mind Map
addressing the current financial crisis initiated by the successive
failures of financial giants Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, and
the AIG Insurance Group.
You
don't need to know how to spell Macroeconomics to know that many
factors have led to the current crisis. But traditional industry
and academic methods to track these have lacked the complexity
and subtlety required to comprehend all of these aspects and their
interactions.
Mind
Mapping software, which allows users to develop new concepts
quickly by brainstorming in non-linear ways, has been around for
decades. But collaborative Mind Mapping, epitomized by programs
like MindMeister, is fairly recent. It combines the power of social
networking and web 2.0 tools with traditional Mind Mapping software
to create something like a Human Supercomputer.
The WMN’s contest ends on December 31, and the prize will
be awarded on January 15, 2009.
The newly revised World Mind Network website,
at worldmindnetwork.net,
gives visitors a virtual Time Machine ride from pre-history up
to the Middle Ages and beyond.
Many
things which occurred in the distant past are still occurring
now, and if they are viewable or hearable over the Net, one can
enjoy an experience very much like travelling forward in time.
Thus, the site has links to an audio feed of the background microwave
radiation generated by the Big Bang, live pictures of the sun,
webcams showing gorillas, pandas, and bees, and even live video
of archaic human lifestyles like monks praying in a monastery.
The
site is used in schools in Japan, Macedonia, Kenya, Bhutan, Bolivia,
and Holland.
The
site has other features which embody its theme of the Internet
as 'World Brain': a section called 'Wisdom of the Elders' which
links to short videos of living and dead sages from Carl Jung
to Nellie Red Owl; a listing of prestigious online scientific
experiments which welcome participation by anyone with a PC, and
a group of blogs and forums from Third World countries not normally
encountered in the higher ranks of the Blogosphere. There is an
index of Fair Trade artisans from Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
The
World Mind Network recently completed a project with the Sambaza
Group and Friends Beyond Borders in East Africa, which allows
cellphone users with unused minutes to ‘donate’ them
to a Multimedia ICT education center in Kenya, which can use them
as a kind of legal tender (http://www.africahelpguide.com/article.cfm/id/319009)
Next
in the works is the ‘Rare Languages Institute’. For
all its wonders, the Internet has a certain homogenizing effect
on human culture, and one aspect of this is the tendency to standardize
English as a lingua franca. The WMN is setting up a series of
blogs and social networks on which members can ONLY communicate
in Ewa, Manx, Shoshoni, Maltese, West Javanese, and other fascinating
but threatened languages.
The founders welcome new proposals which relate to the main theme:
How can Web communications address major world problems with something
like the efficiency of a biological brain? Contact them at friendsbeyondborders@gmail.com
or call Evelyn Machiraju, Peter Woolf or John Toomey at US(626)
230-8862.
Web
Site: http://worldmindnetwork.net
Contact
Details: World Mind Network
3179 Bonita Rd.
Bonita, California 91910
(626)230-8862
2009
