ED: May The Games of Architect Intelligence (AI) be with you & Mother Earth's 8 billion beings & 1BnG & HAI .. breaking sept 2023 one of my fav 5 hours spent at university!!
.chris.macrae@yahoo.co.uk RIGHT OLD MESS
EE: Back in dad's teenage diary as navigator Allied Bomber Command Burma, a day headed ROM meant a friend's flight went missing. In 2023 ROM is politest term we can use for failure to help youth celebrate 73 years of research with von neumann on only good tech can save our species, and 36 years of world class brands architecture research round biggest decison makers started 1988 when dad restored from The Economist: on how bad media can destroy millennials futures. From the last articles we influenced in The Economist Trust has been the exponentially missing metric. Thanks to a chat with Von Neumann's daughter (who's advances for humanity would her dad have trusted most 2025-1950? EconomistDiary.com is launching a game Architect of Intelligence. Dare you play the most urgent cooperation game in sustainability goals hi-tech-trust-touch world?
ED dedication : To Architects Fazle Abed & Steve Jobs -who convened silicon valley's 65 birthday to Abed in 2001 giving 7 years of design foresight to why mobile digital network not seen in his 1984 launch of PC networking
INDUSTRIAL REV 260th GAMES-cards of sdg-gen
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Uni2 :FFL*JOBS*DHgoog
Guterres*JYK*JFK
welcome to AIsdgs.com where media designers help take down fake media wherever its wasting 8 billion peoples time

you may want to join economist dairy in 1951 when The Economist sub-ed  NM was seconded to NYPeinceton for year to listen to John Von Neumann design the number 1 journalism-for-humans quiz, Architecture of Intelligence (AI): it was agreed the most valuable scoop earthlings may e-vision = what goods can humans unite wherever celebrating early access to 100 times more tech per decade? - eg a billion times more 2015=1955

or back from future of 80 years of 2025report: join bard-solar express route 1843 to 2023-4-5: 1843 EconomistDiary.com under 30 queen victoria accepts Economist founder James Wilson help to start mapping commonwealth trading maps replacing britannia ruling all of asia waves round global market of englishmen's tea ; in 1859 victoria charters bank for Wilson to go design financial service for quarter of humans on india's subcontinent; after year 1 celebrations by most of the peopels, james dies of diarhea; it takes 112 years before former shell oil ceo educational intelligence empowers womens lesson plans round oral rehydration, 10 community business of goal 2 2 food, goal 3 health and 90% of the peoples trust in a regional bank for female generations to build nation

SDG 5  4  3   2  1  0 welcome to Asia and the top 5 sdgoals 50 years search scaling the most exciting collaborations women-led communities empower
ED soon after 2010 death of Von Neumann's first journalist of Architect Intelligence The Japan Ambassador to bangladesh hosted 2 brainstorming sessions- since 2001 Steve Jobs and Fazle Abed had united their support of net generations futures : would a moon of the top 30 cooperations visioned by 1billiongirls help bridge human intel until Steve Jobs gift of a university in phone (iphone 2007) might renew interest in man made engines blending human intelligence ... EconomistLearning.com from 2009 stanford's fei-fei li began the new entrereneurial revolution of pretraining computer visiosn (in about 10 different ways from science games deepmind, to 1000language games LLM , to object recognition of autonomous cars are ever needed, to nlp to literature veviews in real time of very covid publication to 2019 stanford hai inviting every human discipline grads spend time on to HAI ,,,,as pretraining of humans rose to 2015 hopes were that high that it was time to declare 17 cooperation dev goals and roadmapping of UN2 comprised of dynamic subystems of above zero-sum human networking. Bangladesh as deepest place branding of SDG5 celebrates being 52 years young in 2023 the 265th year of smithian moral sentiments at Abed's Alma mater Glasgow Universiity. Supporting hi-tech hi-trust Asian place winners include: singapore 2023; hong kong (22.1 Place winners 22.22022 ... Thailand2021 ..) . Abed was not just a world class civil engineer; he dedicated half a century until his death in December 2019 as servant leader. Aligned by HG Wells bon mots: civilisation is a race between education and catastrophe, Abed Bhai preferred to be seen as host of microeducationsummit not financiers summits: his gravitation purpose of 30 women empowered cooperations that of united refugees, villagers and civil societies in ENDING POVERTY. Fortunately for the worlds poorest new nation Bangaldesh 1971- Abed had networks like no other community leader. HIs friends' coop roadmapping reached out to intel vitalised by at least a billion village mothers in tropical inland asia where, a third of infants were dying of diarrhea before Abed's person to person networking became the best news ever chatted. Fro mid 1950s studies in Glasgow he spent nearly 13 years growing to be Royal Dutch Shell Oil Company's regional CEO. So his lifetime searches uniquely capitalised on what UK and Dutch Royal Societies (soon Japan Royals too) knew how to help end the poverty their colonial era had up to 1945 trapped the majority of humans world trade in. Simply put most Asian coastal belts link national borders defined by what these < a href="http://www.kc3.dev">3 kingdoms designed in to trading barriers over nearly half millennium. And which had made the English language that of world class engineering (digital age as well as pre-digital) So by 1970s these nations royal societies (including londons arts green-geographical, medicinie, science, architects ...) were happy that a grounded movement could link them into what they didnt fully know culturally or consciously. From 1970 on Abed linked in global village mapping like no one else - through these relationships and by designing business microfrachises not charity wherever possible for village women to own. To study with abed alumni is to join in the world's most cooperative empowering women movements for good as well as of childrens development.

Saturday, March 6, 2021

 https://www.mcleodgroup.ca/2019/12/sir-fazle-hasan-abed-master-builder/

Sir Fazle Hasan Abed: Master Builder

Sir Fazle Hasan Abed: Master Builder

By Ian Smillie, December 30, 2019

Several members of the McLeod Group had the privilege of knowing and working with Sir Fazle Hasan Abed, the founder of BRAC, one of the world’s top NGOs (see our recent blog). He passed away on December 20, and we wanted to share an appreciation of him with our readers. His biography can be found on the BRAC website. We offer our sincere condolences to his family, to BRAC, and to all those whose lives were touched by him.   

It is impossible to overestimate the importance of BRAC in the global effort to end poverty. It is equally difficult to separate its success from the life and work of the man who created and steered it through almost five decades, Sir Fazle Hasan Abed – “Abed bhai” to his colleagues, “Abed” to his friends.

BRAC’s size and reach are – by any measure – staggering. Its microfinance lending, mostly to poor rural women, exceeds $1 billion a year. Although BRAC is a leader in the field of microfinance – touted for a few years as the miracle remedy for poverty – Abed never saw it as a cure-all. In his mind, the key to ending poverty was new, productive enterprise. Poor people, especially women and especially in rural areas, had to make things. And to do that, they had to be better linked to resources – seeds, fertilizer, knowledge, finance – and to markets. BRAC’s social enterprises in dairy, poultry, silk, handicrafts, seed multiplication, and a dozen other areas, have created hundreds of thousands of livelihoods, and in time they generated income that has made BRAC largely self-financing. Microfinance was the fuel in the tank, but the engine was always innovative, productive enterprise.

The BRAC Bank, completely separate from the microfinance operations, holds deposits of more than $2 billion and has a Moody’s long-term credit rating as good as that of Barclays Bank. Facts like these might catch the eye of a banker. But BRAC was and remains an NGO with its primary focus on social development, ranked for the past four years by the Geneva-based NGO Advisor as Number 1 on a list of 500 global non-profits.

BRAC pioneered non-formal primary education, mostly for girls, aiming to give literacy, dignity and hope to the next generation of mothers. Its groundbreaking oral rehydration training programs in the 1970s reached nine out of ten rural households in Bangladesh. That, along with innovative health, nutrition and sanitation programs, contributed to a seven-fold reduction in the country’s child mortality. Fewer child deaths, better education and more economic opportunity, especially for women, led to a three-fold drop in the fertility rate, ending worries about unchecked population growth.

There’s hardly an area of human development that BRAC hasn’t touched in a meaningful way, taking some of its best lessons to Africa and other parts of Asia. Fazle Hasan Abed did not accomplish this all on his own. But he was able to find and motivate others – individuals, government departments, donor agencies and some of the world’s most powerful and influential policy makers. His ambition was boundless, but it rested on a quiet charisma that inspired devotion and made mountains seem scalable. He listened far more than he spoke.

I first met Abed in 1973, when BRAC was just a handful of people working out of a flat in Motijheel. It was an unlikely, almost accidental enterprise, created by a man whose life until then couldn’t possibly have suggested what was to come. He had lived comfortably for several years in London, and then worked as a senior Shell Oil accountant in Chittagong. There, he took time off to spearhead relief efforts following the 1970 cyclone and the 1971 War of Independence.

Discovering the deeply entrenched poverty he had failed to notice during his privileged youth, he created what he thought would be a small, time-bound demonstration effort to show what might be accomplished with a few farming cooperatives, adult literacy and health training. A lesser man would have run from the resulting failures, but for Abed, they were lessons to be remembered and applied to the much bigger voyage on which he then embarked.

When I was completing research in 2009 for a book about BRAC, Freedom from Want, and trying to think about what had made it so successful, outsiders frequently told me it was Abed’s experience with the private sector. I always doubted that. Shell perhaps gave him useful perspectives on money and management, but it could not have been the source of his ingenuity, his compassion and sense of injustice, his willingness to take risks and his insistence on learning what works, what does not, and why. He told me that a lot of it was luck, and laughed, quoting Napoleon: “Give me lucky generals.”

I investigated the concept of luck and found a good summary: “Being ready for the opportunity.” Abed was always able, better than most, to see and understand opportunity. By that definition, “luck” may well have played a part.

He suggested I talk with an employee who had recently returned from doctoral studies in Britain – she might have a helpful perspective on BRAC’s success. She said she had expected to find a saint or a genius around every corner, but in the end, that wasn’t the case. The answer was “common sense” – everything BRAC has achieved came about, she said, through the application of common sense. I put that in the book, but in truth Abed did have the versatility of genius, a talent for applying common sense in a world where the concept is largely unknown and an ability to unlock doors long closed to innovation, justice and human development.

Abed never rested on well-deserved laurels; he always argued that “big” is essential in confronting poverty. Most ambitious people, however, leave a trail of wreckage and animosity behind them. With Abed, it was quite the opposite, and that too must be part of BRAC’s success – his unflappability in the face of tremendous odds and personal tragedy, his ability to build and to bring diverse people and resources together in common cause.

Sir Christopher Wren, visiting the construction site for St. Paul’s Cathedral, is said to have asked a stonemason what he was doing. “I’m cutting stone,” the man said. Further along, Wren asked another stonemason what he was doing. He replied, “I’m building a cathedral.” Abed was both Christopher Wren and the stonemason, and while BRAC in it many manifestations will continue to thrive, the legacy will always be his: Abed, Master Builder.

Ian Smillie is a development professional and foreign aid critic.

Monday, March 1, 2021