Rustam Qobil reporting for the BBC World Service:
It's after midnight. I'm at a wedding party in a remote village in northern Afghanistan...
Almost everyone's attention is focused on a 15-year-old boy. He's dancing for the crowd in a long and shiny woman's dress, his face covered by a red scarf.
He is wearing fake breasts and bells around his ankles. Someone offers him some US dollars and he grabs them with his teeth.
This is an ancient tradition. People call it bachabaze ]]> Fri, 10 Sep 2010 16:28:11 +0000 http://hotfeeder.com/world/vodafones_future_agenda_forum_2717866

The Future Agenda, sponsored by Vodafone, is a not-for-profit, cross-discipline programme which aims “to unite the best minds from around the globe to address the greatest challenges of the next decade”.

“In doing so, it will map out the major issues, identify and discuss potential solutions, suggest the best ways forward and, we hope, as a consequence, provide a platform for collective innovation at a higher level than has been previously achieved.”

As the first]]> Fri, 10 Sep 2010 16:28:11 +0000 http://hotfeeder.com/world/don_norman_living_with_complexity_book_2717862

Living with Complexity
Norman, Donald A
MIT Press, October 2010
280 pages
Amazon

If only today’s technology were simpler! It’s the universal lament, but it’s wrong. We don’t want simplicity. Simple tools are not up to the task. The world is complex; our tools need to match that complexity.

Simplicity turns out to be more complex than we thought. In this provocative and informative book, Don Norman writes that the complexity of our technology must]]> Fri, 10 Sep 2010 16:28:11 +0000 http://hotfeeder.com/world/cloudforce_2010_review_2717857

To Cloudforce 2010, an industry event hosted by Salesforce, at the Royal Festival Hall, Central London.
I am currently project managing the rollout of a Salesforce database across the various departments of City and Hackney Mind, and attended the event to get a better understanding of the possibilities of Salesforce in particular and cloud computing in general.
Cloud computing is where shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers via the Internet.
The]]> Fri, 10 Sep 2010 16:28:11 +0000