Second, India is producing far more world-class companies than China. The best known are the wizards of software and “business process outsourcing”—Indian firms have two-thirds of the global market in offshore IT services and nearly half that in BPO. But now they are being joined by manufacturers. Again, unlike China, this manufacturing boom cannot be explained by cheap labour, but by the efficient use of technology. India's merchandise exports grew by a quarter last year.

There has been a meeting at UNESCO about the future fo the CDS ISIS software family. The outcome is more or less a request to UNESCO to act
Citation:
i) UNESCO is expected to take a clear political decision regarding the future of the
CDS/ISIS project and the ISIS family of software. The community should be informed
that there is a future for the CDS/ISIS databases.
ii) To support the development of a Free/Libre and Open Source solution for information
management that is based upon the CDS/ISIS concept and the ISIS family, with

I agree completely with Timothy Garton Ash about the stupidness of constructing a contraposition between good Europe and bad America, or the other way round. But this should not lead to the conclusion that there are no differences of opinions, values and prospects. These differences are not between Europe and America but within both of them . I also feel uncomfortable between the division of the world in " liberal democracies" and the others. ALso within the liberal democracies there is debate about the direction of development.

The Ecoterm meeting 2006 took place at FAO and was co-organized by Margherita Sini from my Group

Self Introduction:

Enormous building full of marble and light and mogano in a still more enourmous town in the centre of the Pearl River Delta, sense of oversizing.

One of the accusations agains globalization is that it would even out differences between cultures and would make the world a boring place of all the same shops, food, music and so on. Only MacDonalds, Bennetton and Hollywood.
Apart from the fact that cultural differences cannot be maintained and defended by ordinances from well meaning lefties (Wine drinking now becomes an abit all over the globe simply because it is a pleasure and why should Asians to be allowed to....) , there are also two important objections against this thesis of cultural flattening.

Another common criticisms of globalization is the the theory of cultural imperialism by western values. But shouldn't we ask before about the values and why some western values are so successful all over the world at least in the sphere of desire? Thinkings like: - a Human Live is a value by itself and to be defended - the law should rule and not the force - individual freedom is a right of everyone have been codified first in the declarance of independence and the American constitution as a consequence of development of political thinking in Europe.

This little drawing documents some of my thoughts about values

Particularly important is the unchalleged conviction that the family is both, natural and good. Unlike Greece, for instance, where the private realm of the family was not given the positive evaluation of the public realm of the polis in China devotion to family was taken as an obvious good. Laozi's utopia is not one that liberates the individuals from the family; but one that lets families operate with little or no pressure from soical or political units much larger than the viallage.