Translation is the product of a series of processes; it’s not just a matter of converting something written in one language into another.

In this post, we’re going to provide you with some practical steps which will allow you to translate any document in a more methodical and professional manner.

In order to produce a high-quality translation that reads well in your target language, you have to be organised. That’s why it’s extremely useful to follow a well-structured methodology.

Read more on the Mondo Agit blog…

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This is a summary of a tedtalk.
Listen to the talk: www.ted.com/talks/shawn_achor_the_happy_secret_to_better_work

When I was seven and my sister Amy was five, we were playing on our bunk beds, she fell off and I in an attempt to stop her crying so I wouldn’t get into trouble said to her, “Amy, Amy, wait. Don’t cry. Don’t cry. Did you see how you landed? No human lands on all fours like that. Amy, I think this means you’re a unicorn.” At this moment, my poor manipulated sister faced conflict, as her little brain attempted to process the pain and shock she just experienced while contemplating her new found identity as a unicorn. The latter won and she smiled and climbed back onto the bed again despite having a broken leg.

What we stumbled upon here was to be something of a scientific revolution two decades later, something called positive thinking in psychology.

In statistics for example we often are trying to find ways to eliminate the outliers in order to find the line of best fit. However, what I want to do is study that outlier if it is above the curve in order to glean information about them, so people don’t just remain average, but better than that.

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Listen to the TED talk: www.ted.com/talks/stephen_hawking_asks_big_questions_about_the_universe

There is nothing bigger or older than the universe. The questions I would like to talk about are: one, where did we come from? How did the universe come into being? Are we alone in the universe? Is there alien life out there? What is the future of the human race?

-Where did we come from? How did the universe come into being?-

Until the 1920s, everyone thought the universe was essentially unchanging in time. Then it was discovered that the universe was expanding. Distant galaxies were moving away from us. This meant they must have been closer together in the past. If we extrapolate back, we find we must have all been on top of each other about 15 billion years ago. This was the Big Bang, the beginning of the universe.

But was there anything before the Big Bang? If not, what created the universe? Why did the universe emerge from the Big Bang the way it did? We used to think that the theory of the universe could be divided into two parts. First, there were the laws like Maxwell’s equations and general relativity that determined the evolution of the universe, given its state over all of space at one time.

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The official dogma of all Western industrial societies is that in order to maximise the welfare of citizens we must maximise their individual freedom.

The reason for this is both that freedom is in and of itself good, valuable, worthwhile, essential to being human. And because if people have freedom, then each of us can act on our own to do the things that will maximize our welfare, and no one has to decide on our behalf. The way to maximize freedom is to maximize choice.

We have choice in all kinds of domains, at the supermarket and at the electrical store we can choose from a huge range of products. Even in health care we now have choice, instead of the doctor telling you what to do, you go to the doctor, and the doctor tells you, “Well, we could do A, or we could do B. A has these benefits, and these risks. B has these benefits, and these risks. What do you want to do?” We call this “patient autonomy” which makes it sound like a good thing, but what it really is is a shifting of responsibility from someone who knows to someone who doesn’t.

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This is a summary of a tedtalk.

Listen to the talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/philip_evans_how_data_will_transform_business

We tend to think of business strategy as being a rather abstract body of essentially economic thought, perhaps rather timeless. In fact, business strategy has always been premised on assumptions about technology, that those assumptions are changing quite dramatically. What that will drive us to is a different concept of what we mean by business strategy.

The idea of strategy in business owes its origins to two intellectual giants: Bruce Henderson, the founder of BCG, and Michael Porter, professor at the Harvard Business School. Henderson’s central idea was what you might call the Napoleonic idea of concentrating mass against weakness, of overwhelming the enemy. What Henderson recognized was that, in the business world, there are many phenomena which are characterized by what economists would call increasing returns — scale, experience. The more you do of something, disproportionately the better you get. And therefore he found a logic for investing in such kinds of overwhelming mass in order to achieve competitive advantage. And that was the first introduction of essentially a military concept of strategy into the business world.

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We encourage you to read it here or to watch the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NugRZGDbPFU and then to comment on it at the bottom of the article.

Everyone is interested in this question as we all want to be more creative and be more innovative both individually and within our organisations etc.
The speaker looks at this problem from an environmental perspective, what are the spaces that have historically led to great ideas? He has found that there are some recurring patterns which are crucial in allowing good ideas to develop.

Great ideas hardly ever come in a moment of inspiration, most take a long time to evolve. Sometimes ideas take years to mature before becoming accessible or useful to you. This is because good ideas normally come from the collision between smaller hunches. Therefore we see many cases in history of someone who has half an idea, for example with the invention of the Internet. Tim Berners Lee worked on it for 10 years, when he started he didn’t have a full vision of what he was going to invent.

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Over the last 10 years there have been some very interesting developments in evolutionary biology, cognitive neuroscience, child development research and many other fields which are beginning to challenge some of our ideas about human nature and the human journey.

But there is another frame of reference emerging in science which is challenging our assumptions and institutions we have created based on those assumptions: Higher education, business, government. In the early 1990s, in a lab in Parma in Italy, some scientists did an MRI scan on the brain of a monkey whilst it was opening a nut. The first time it tried, its neurons lit up as expected, then, by accident someone came into the room and was hungry so thought they would eat the nuts and whilst the monkey was watching this, the same exact neurons lit up and scientists had no idea how this could be happening.

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All of the different types of existing democracy (participative, representative, direct and their variants) are based on the creation of a State that regulates, coordinates and controls life in society within a determined territory. To summarise, the State is created in order to protect us from aggression, nature and other human beings, those within our borders in addition to those outside of them. It therefore is providing a coactive power, or imposing adherence to it’s principles and norms through the use of force or threat.

The State, legitimised by the power citizens allow it, also acts as a mediator and judge in cases of conflicts and as a regulator in the “market failures.” It’s exactly this acting and intervening in the economy proclaiming to defend general interest that inevitably fails time after time due to the reasons I will put forward in this essay.

Karl Marx said that: “The State isn’t a realm of reason, but of force, it’s not a realm of the common good but of partial interests, it’s purpose isn’t the well being of everyone but of those who unlawfully hold power, it’s not the departure of the state from nature, but it’s continuation in another form.” [1] On the contrary, the State’s departure from nature will coincide with it’s end.

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Humans have gone through innumerable stages throughout existence. Information about our origins is distorted and inaccurate even today. It’s of course difficult to determine in an objective and empirical way the advance or regression of civilisation in a relatively short time frame, but it’s a certain and irrefutable fact that we’ve notably amplified our knowledge throughout history. This must be seen as something positive given that it allows us to cope better with our hostile environment and also with ourselves.

We don’t know if we took our first steps alone, in any case, if we did and had continued to do so, norms and values would be meaningless. Man, to make life easier and to increase chances of survival, decided to set out in group, in society. Values, norms and organisational needs become essential in order to live in society in peace and harmony.

Today, without an omnipotent, omnipresent God that reveals himself inequivocally to each and every conscient being present and future indicating the “true and universal” values that we should submit ourselves to with logic, reason, knowledge and aquired experiences, we’re the only ones responsable for establishing what’s right and wrong in this continual process throughout our existence.

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The issue of the way the banking system functions in general and the privilege commercial or private banks have particularly over other economic agents is a matter that hasn’t been given the broadcasting and publicity it deserves. The lack of interest governments have had in informing citizens as they ought to is unsurprising, as Henry Ford said, “It is well enough that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”

The purpose of this article is to provide the reader with this essential information and to try broadcast this issue of vital importance in a better way, as the crisis we’re all suffering is due, if not completely, in large part to the current banking system. Because in effect, all of the great economic crises of the 19th and 20th century and of course the current one have resulted from excessive credit growth due to payment promises, along with the speculation that this growth has provoked and therefore perpetuated.

For obvious practical reasons, I will explain as concisely as possible the most harmful aspects of the banking system.

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