http://eng.21min.org 21 minutes - an innovative format, a container of excellent multi-disciplinary knowledge, created to make a sustainable contribution to improve the quality of life of people of the third millennium. During the event, world leaders will share with a selected audience the vision at the heart of their success story. Wed, 10 Mar 2010 07:45:58 +0100 eng On thursday October 8th 2009 at 19:00, the round table 'Umbria: excellence, sustainability and innovation to inspire change' will be held at Monterone Castle in Perugia. The excellent speeches at the event offer the opportunity to raise awareness and orientation towards the principles of global sustainability. Participants at the conference, organized by InformaAzione include: Patrizio Paoletti, Founder of InformaAzione, leading figure in the international training scene, chairman and inspiration behind 21minuti - the publishing platform where the world's most brilliant minds come together every year to share their best knowledge; Alessandro Brizioli, CEO of Jobnet, Umbrian company, leader in Italy for Human Resource Management consultancy; Enrico Carrara, Managing Director of Assisi Resort, booming tourism enterprise that groups and organizes accommodation of excellence; Alessandro Petruzzi, President of Federconsumatori in the Umbrian Region; Marco Mandarins, CEO of Mandarini Furnishings; Andrea Sisti, President of the Regional Agriculture and Forestry Federation of Umbria. For info contact Barbara Grimoldi, tel. + 44 075 800 24 99, mail ufficiostampa@informaazione.org. http://www.21min.org/01207ottombre09 The forthcoming meetings will be dedicated to the promotion of 21min and the diffusion of a lifestyle that aims towards excellence and sustainability. The tour meetings are open to the public and are held by tutors of InformaAzione who will introduce participants to the key themes that will be explored during the event in November. They will also present some of the international guests who will take to the stage of the Ice Palace's great white space with the Chairman, the strategist, creative and creator of the event, Patrizio Paoletti. Paoletti describes 21min Paoletti as: 'an extraordinary training-ground of ideas, a world-class intellectual meeting space where we will meet people with a clear vision of the whole, who pay attention to every detail and reach important results'. RIMINI - 7 October 2009 at 20.30 - Grand Hotel Rimini - P.co Federico Fellini, 1 MILANO - 9 October 2009 at 21.00 - Crowne Plaza Hotel - Via K. Adenauer, 3 San Donato Milanese http://www.21min.org/01029settembre09 Is beautiful what is beautiful, or is beautiful what we like? Socrates asked this question 2500 years ago and we continue to ask it today. To unravel the mystery of whether our perception of beauty is based entirely on subjective criteria or if it also involves objective factors, Professor Giacomo Rizzolatti (the discoverer or mirror neurons) carried out a specific study. The experiment consisted of showing 14 young volunteers, with no specific expertise in the arts, two sets of images. The first set contained faithful reproductions of classical works, such as the famous 'Spearman' by Policleto, characterized by the presence of harmonious mathematical relationships such as the 'golden ratio'. The other set included the same masterpieces, but after having altered the original dimensions. The volunteers were called from time to time to look at the pictures or simply express their opinion of their aesthetic quality and proportion. At the same time, the volunteers underwent brain MRI, which revealed a significant difference in response. When looking at the original works of art, the area of the volunteers' brain called the 'insula' was activated, in addition to other areas of the cortex that did not 'light up' when the subjects were presented with the copies with distorted proportions. Even the simple act of declaring an image to be 'beautiful' led to the activation of a different area of the brain from when calling an image 'ugly'. http://www.21min.org/01022settembre09 On September 22 the '21min Tour' will depart from Vicenza to promote the event to be held at the Ice Palace in Milan on 19 - 20 - 21 November 2009 which aims to increase awareness of the importance of creativity and innovation as key skills for personal, social and economic development. The 21min Tour meetings will be held by tutors of InformaAzione, who will present some key aspects of 21min, to stimulate and inspire participants to achieve personal and professional excellence by disseminating a social and business culture based on excellence, ethics and values. The topics presented will also include the method F.A.S.E., a course created by Patrizio Paoletti, chairman of the event, based relies on four organizing principles (Philosophy, Art, Science and Economics) to reorganize participants' frames of reference in broader, more practical paradigms, oriented towards 'Excellence'. http://www.21min.org/00917settembre09 The teaching of Ghandi in favour of a more equal society not only led to India becoming an independent country, but to many people emulating him around the world. One of the most faithful of these, and not only because of being his fellow countryman, is without a doubt Sanjit Bunker Roy, who was awarded with a gold medal several months ago in Verona in recognition of his life dedicated principally to solidarity. Sanjit's life is similar to the existential story of Francis of Assisi: despite not being rich, his family had planned for him to have a diplomatic career, sending him to the best schools. In 1965 however, when there was a terrible famine in the region of Bihar, Sanjit experienced the estreme injustice that the caste system creates even today in Indian society. He then announced to his mother that he wished to leave everything, including his familiy's incomprehension and live as a poor man, among the poor. In 1971 Roy managed to create the Barefoot College. It is a sensational experiment, the first university for "the poor" in the world. At Barefoot of course one goes barefoot (including Sanjit), and learns a unique lesson: to live from very little, just 150 dollars per month. One eats, sleeps and works on the ground. The basic philosophy is that to help the poor it is necessary to share their condition, resolving some basic problems in a simple and genial way. For example, to resolve the chronic problem of the lack of water, they collect rain water and there is plenty of it, even in the driest areas. http://www.21min.org/00824luglio09 Davide Oldani is not a typically successful chef: it is true that he has a very trendy and busy restaurant, the D'O, but he created it in an unusual place, in Cornaredo, a small village in the Milanese hinterland. He took on a real challenge: to combine refined cooking with modest prices, in an unpretentious space. He talks about this challenge in his recent book "My Pop kitchen, the art of sweetening dreams" by Rizzoli publishers. The obvious gastronomical reference in the title is not by chance: caramellized unions are a gastronomic experiment started by Oldani, an example of poor, common raw materials typical of our culinary tradition, mixed with the sweet fantasy of a great chef. In his own way, he is revolutionary, far from the very glamorous stereotypes of the world of cooking, and instead close to a "sustainable" vision that has made popular and given value to the most humble (and for this reason less appetizing) ingredients, offered to us by the area in which we live. N.B. la frase in italiano da revisionare: Di questa sfida parla nel suo libro da poco uscito "La mia cucina Pop, l'arte di caramellare i sogni", uscito per i tipi di Rizzoli. http://www.21min.org/00720luglio09 Making decisions takes time, especially for those of an ethical nature. This has been revealed by research carried out by neuroscientists from the Brain and Creativity Institute of the University of Southern California. The study group, lead by Antonio Damasio, came to the conclusion that emotions need time to be "processed" by the brain, especially when related to the ethical dimension. This is particularly true for fear, pain, compassion, and admiration. The slowness required by these operations seems to be in great contrast with the extremely fast reactions needed in this era of social networking which risk leading us to make sudden decisions, with subsequent mistakes on the ethical front. Today's world is characterized by great, sudden changes and by forms of communication in "real time" that favour the spreading of information but at the same time make it difficult to select what true knowledge is made of. This issue is tackled by "21min - The Knowledge of Excellence" which has the central theme of finding a new way to share knowledge in today's world. http://www.21min.org/00626giugno09 The persistence of dietary imbalances and malnutrition continues to pose pressing questions for us: how is it possible that in a society like ours characterized by technological progress, obesity and poverty continue to produce such damage? In "The Masters of Food", Raj Patel attempts the difficult task of answering such questions within the space of a book. On the one hand, some of the data presented by Patel gives us a far from comforting picture of the global food distribution situation (just think of the cost of coffee, sold by large distributors at a price 200 times higher than the profit of the farmer). On the other hand, some examples of "applied sustainability" tell us not to despair, such as the movement of the rural landless workers, a Brazilian organization of farmers who have lost their plot of land, but keep living by farming land in dignified community conditions. Sustainability is the key concept brought to our attention by "21min - The Knowledge of Excellence" , a platform in which 21 figures of worldwide success share the vision at the heart of their story. It offers a new way to share knowledge at a high level and to search for a new shared vision to contribute to improving the quality of life of humanity in the third millennium. http://www.21min.org/00525giugno09 In Milan, on November 19, 20 and 21 2009, the first edition of 21minutes - The knowledge of excellence will take place in the great space of the Palazzo del Ghiaccio. The event is organized by InformaAzione, business training company based in Perugia, sponsored by the European Union for the European Year of Creativity and Innovation - EYCI. During the three days, 21 international protagonists from the world of philosophy, art, science, sports, and economy will take the stage with simultaneous translation for the audience in both Italian and English. The speakers enthusiastically agreed to participate, as never before had they been asked to condense their own human journey into 21 minutes. This is the challenge: to reach the essence of a lifetime, through its processes and strategies, accessing the desire to build wider visions, and reach higher creativity. 21minutes was created from the conviction that today excellence and sustainability are two overlapping ideas: one may not exist without the other, in every walk of life. It is significant that the creation of the event begins in Italy before expanding to areas further afield and not the other way around, contrary to common practice in Italy where seminars and large conferences are often imported as pre-packaged events. 21minutes is much more than an international conference: it is an open thought, a working method to inspire excellence, and a matrix that will produce themed events, seminars, publications, and above all a network of people and organizations. http://www.21min.org/00404giugno09 Agenda 21 is the program (divided into 40 chapters) of the United Nations for sustainable development. It consists of a plan that faces all fields in which human presence has an impact on the environment at a planetary, national, and local level. The number 21 refers to the 21st century, as the priority themes in this program are the climatic-environmental as well as socio-economical emergencies that the beginning of the Third Millennium has undoubtedly placed before the entire human race. The program of Agenda 21 includes four macro-areas: Social and Economic Dimensions - (fight against poverty; change to the structure of consumption, population, and demographic dynamics; promotion of health and sustainable population programs; integration of environment related problems and development of the decision-making process). Conservation and Managing of Resources for Development -(protection of the atmosphere; fight against deforestation; protection of weak environments; preservation of biologic diversity; pollution control). Reinforcement of role of the Major Groups - (involves the roles of the groups representing children and youth, women, non-government organizations, local authorities, commerce and workers). http://www.21min.org/00303giugno09 According to psychologists Christopher Davoli and Richard Abrams, authors of research published in "Psychological Science", prefiguring helps to reach one's goals. To demonstrate this, a group of students underwent an experiment in which they were asked to recognize letters on a screen that had been previously mixed with others to increase the difficulty, with the objective of identifying them in the shortest time possible. The researchers asked the students to imagine themselves operating the screen display with both hands, while others were asked to visualize themselves doing this with their hands behind their backs (they were not to assume these positions, but simply imagine them). The result showed that the simple fact of visualizing an action can have a similar effect to that of actually carrying out that action. Interestingly, the group that was imagining their hands on the monitors spent less time looking for the screen. These tests begin to confirm that prefiguring our actions allows us to interact more effectively with the outside world, having previously organized our data in order to calculate and verify the actions that we will carry out. Prefiguring is one of the themes that InformaAzione has been exploring for years in their seminars, and that you will be able to explore more deeply at the 2009 edition of 21minutes - The Knowledge of Excellence. http://www.21min.org/00202giugno09 Bernardo Di Chartres said that "men are like dwarves on the shoulders of giants. They are smaller than these great masters of knowledge, but are ready to climb on their shoulders to watch their actions from above and shed as much light on them as possible". This simple quote indicates the desire common to all people, to search for excellence. This challenge is characterized by value, that like a compass indicates the way to reach our destination, and sustainability, a global ecological vision that turns our gaze towards the advantage of the whole and no longer of the single individual. I mention "Climbing on the shoulders of giants" because 21min is the place of giants that offer themselves as a springboard for us. Three reasons to be there according to Claudio Luraschi: 21min is the place before that can change the after 21min is the tool that continuously stimulates you to be curious, to follow your curiosity and to have fun while embracing diversity 21min because your capability to be different is what makes the difference. http://www.21min.org/00101giugno09