Three Penny Review- Cover Art

Imogen Cunningham, Coffee Gallery, 1960

Well Souled- New Age Tourism?

Mitah Shah and Mark Leibowitz at Google;

At the heart of Well Souled is the belief that lasting impressions are those that come naturally through the people you meet on your travels and how they connect you to the context, sharing their perspectives on the attitudes, sounds, colors, and textures that surround you. This is how travel becomes emotional -- soulful. Well Souled translates this kind of cultural immersion into lifestyle products that celebrate the sensory experience of travel.

Predict and Prevent

Narayana Murthy- Bill Gates of India

N. R. Narayana Murthy- a true Indian hero.

"I want to be remembered as a fair person...nicety I don't care"

He attributes the success of the firm to the reforms of 1991.

Related;
Infosys Foundation

Welcome to a New World

"Superclass: The Global Power Elite & the World They Are Making"-David Rothkopf


The New Cold War: Putin's Russia and the Threat to the West
by Edward Lucas

The Global Power Elite

Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making
by David Rothkopf

Related Book- The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills

New York Public Library - can it beat San Francisco Public Library

The New York Public Library’s venerable lion-guarded building on Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street is to be renamed for the Wall Street financier Stephen A. Schwarzman, who has agreed to jump-start a $1 billion expansion of the library system with a guaranteed $100 million of his own.

-A $100 Million Donation to the N.Y. Public Library

SFPL has free online access to JSTORE, if you're a member.

A new model for Philanthropy

Freakonomics in the Times Magazine: Bottom-Line Philanthropy

Brian Mullaney’s epiphany occurred back in 1994 in Vietnam. He was traveling as a board member with Operation Smile, a charity that performed cleft-repair surgery on poor children around the world. Because the organization flew in doctors and surgical equipment from the United States, its time and capacity in a given locale were limited. “On every mission, 500 or 600 children would show up begging for treatment,” Mullaney recalls, “but we could only help 150.” In a small Vietnamese village near the Chinese border, there was one kid who played soccer every day with the volunteers; they took to calling him Soccer Boy. When the mission was over and Mullaney and the others drove away, he saw Soccer Boy chasing after the group’s bus, his cleft lip still unrepaired. “We were in shock — how could he not have been helped?” That’s when Mullaney realized that charities like Operation Smile were badly in need of a new business model — or any business model at all, really — and he set out to invent one.

Stupid in America- Not anymore maybe

Each year, nationwide, about $500 billion is spent on K-12 education, and almost all of it comes from taxpayers. By that measure, this gift is a fraction of 1 percent of total expenditures. But in terms of existing philanthropy, yes, $2 billion actually would be a huge deal. No one has exact figures, but the best estimates are that K-12 educational philanthropy in the United States totals nearly $4 billion a year. So if our billionaire decides to spend the entire $2 billion just in fiscal ’08, that would be a big portion of the national total.

-How Many Billionaires Does It Take to Fix a School System?

My wish for a TED wish- create a Knowledge NGO for Students of poor countries

For a student in a poor country one of the acute problems is the lack of access to proper research materials. I suggest below one way we could assist them.

A poor country student will submit a request for a paper to a group of ‘volunteer’ students in the developed world-the list can be put on a database. The rich country student picks from the list the journal article and emails it to the poor country student. Simple as that.

I think it would be more effective than many of the ‘fads’ that are suggested- things like let us connect the whole of Africa to the internet. Schools and universities often cannot just afford to subscribe to decent databases of journals.

Are we violating copyright? May be. Anybody who’s interested in creating this NGO, leave a comment below.

Blog of the Day

Donor's Choose

Where are they now

Tony Blair at Clinton Global Initiative.

The Brand Clinton Created

The impact of the Clinton brand has been increased considerably by its institutionalisation in the Clinton Foundation. Despite its name, this is really a non-governmental organisation, not a classic grant-making foundation, though there are plans to raise an endowment. It takes to a new level the post-presidential activism pioneered by Jimmy Carter—though the Carter brand occupies a specialist niche by comparison with the Clinton brand's mass-market appeal. Founded in 1997 to oversee the building of the Clinton Presidential Library, the foundation is now a global organisation that both runs programmes in areas such as fighting HIV/AIDS, poverty and climate change, and also helps other philanthropists develop programmes of their own.

Mr Clinton has not reinvented philanthropy, as some claim, but he does espouse a businesslike approach to giving money that is now fashionable among the new rich. He calls these philanthropists “bleeding-heart cheapskates”: they are “not naive, they don't want to waste a lot of money, they like low administrative overhead, they measure pretty ruthlessly for return.”

Mr Clinton's greatest success so far has been cutting the price of anti-retroviral drugs for AIDS victims in poor countries. This involved negotiating bulk-purchase agreements with generic drugmakers. Although critics say that an arrangement of this sort was on the cards before Mr Clinton got involved, at the very least he accelerated it, benefiting many people. Now he is trying to repeat this trick to mitigate climate change by co-ordinating bulk-purchase agreements between the governments of some of the world's biggest cities and makers of low-energy products.

Partnership is the essence of brand Clinton. Anti-retrovirals are supplied to poor children jointly with the Children's Investment Fund Foundation of Chris Hohn, a hedge-fund boss. In 2006 the Clinton Hunter Development Initiative to promote sustainable growth in Africa launched with $100m from Sir Tom Hunter, a British billionaire. This year brought the Clinton Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative to create alternative jobs in mining communities: $100m from Frank Giustra, a mining mogul, inspired matching sums from Lukas Lundin and Carlos Slim of Mexico, the world's richest man. “This ought to be a multi-billion-dollar effort,” says Mr Clinton. “Twenty-four other mining firms want to contribute, so this could get very big in a hurry.”

The CGI, a sort of “Philanthropy Oscars” launched in 2005, is Mr Clinton's annual pulpit to evangelise a philanthropic boom that he says is still only in its early stages. The CGI's 1,000 participants—65% from business—must pledge some good work, which they must accomplish or show progress towards, if they are to be invited back. Most honour their pledges, Mr Clinton insists, though it is hard to be sure since there is no naming and shaming. He says that 14 people were not allowed back last year.

-How Bill Clinton became a leading brand in the giving industry

The Age of Riches

-Big Gifts, Tax Breaks and a Debate on Charity

Bill Gates and Warren Buffet having fun

They seem to make a good pair- rich people should have fun together so that it may benefit the poor more often.

Related and Unrelated;
In Poker Match Against a Machine, Humans Are Better Bluffers

Outsourcing Philanthropy