Education for Peace

Education for peace has become extremely urgent for the world today. For the first time in human history both humans and other living beings in the world face the threat of obliteration. We live in a world where violence has almost become a way of life. We are not only increasingly violent towards each other but also towards nature. We seem to be living in a dark age. The crucial question is: can we save the planet and ourselves? We can if we are willing to re-discover ourselves. Rediscovering ourselves is through reeducating ourselves. Reeducating ourselves means rediscovering a peace that comes ultimately from within

Religious Fundamentalism and an Ethics of Recognition

"Today, fundamentalism is not only alive and kicking in all the world religions including Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism but is also making inroads into politics. (...) I am trying to figure out what factors contributed to fundamentalism. Could they be the growth of science, atheism, agnosticism, secularity, foreign rule and so on? [...]", p.70-71

TOWARDS UNDERSTANDING THE RELATION BETWEEN RELIGIONS AND CULTURES IN SOUTHEAST ASIA

In the face of Modernity and its erosion of traditional values, we need to preserve something of the wisdom of traditional culture. The traditional cultures have taken thousands of years to evolve and are necessary to preserve. They are the carriers of the accumulated wisdom of the people since antiquity. They give man a sense of belonging, acceptance and assurance. They enshrine the values, which define meaning, guide, motivate and lead people to fulfillment. We find cultural traditions still alive in the rural communities of South East Asia. It is to these communities that we need to turn to guide us on our road to the future

Marx and Technology

Karl Marx had spent more than three decades (1849-1883) inEngland, the land of the Industrial Revolution. Steeped in philosophyand political economy, Marx became more and more aware of theexploitative nature of capitalism. He was committed to the discovery ofan alternative to capitalism which would be in keeping with the worthand dignity of human persons. Marx’s attention was drawn to technologyas technology in the hands of capitalists led to greater exploitation ofworkers. Marx was certainly a pioneer in the philosophy of technology.His painstaking analysis of the relation between the machinery and theworker and a host of other revelations concerning the use of machineryin the capitalist system are impressive. This article is an attempt tounderstand Marx’s philosophy of technology

Towards a Critique of Globalization

Globalization heralds a great epoch in human history. Yet, despite certain advantages of globalization, its disadvantages cannot be overlooked. It is necessary to ask certain questions. Is globalization a form of neocolonialism? What is its impact on the southern hemisphere? Is it necessarily linked to violence, militarism and eco-unfriendly technologies? And are these problems essentially moral rather than merely economic and ecological

ASIAN HERITAGE AND THE FUTURE OF CHRISTIANITY

This paper explores the significance and profundity of the Asian heritage and how Christianity finds itself in Asia amidst ancient civilizations. Some important questions like the following need to be answered: What kind of future will Christianity have in Asia? How can Asia benefit from the Christian presence? What would be the distinct contribution of Christianity, if any, to Asia

Trans-Formative Education for the Future of Humanity

Education as information, formation and reformation is inadequate to meet the challenges of the contemporary world. To address such challenges as environmental decay, poverty, injustice, lack of peace, and the degradation of humans, education could become trans-formative. Almost at all levels of education, students need to be made conscientious with regard to these challenges. So it is crucial to incorporate in the regular university curriculum courses (consisting of both theory and field work) which address these challenges. It is not enough for the university to merely produce graduates, professionals, technicians, and administrators, who lack a commitment to protecting the world. If we realize that the world does not belong to us but we belong to it, this will be a first step towards saving ourselves and the world

The Resource Theory of Quantum States Out of Thermal Equilibrium

The ideas of thermodynamics have proved fruitful in the setting of quantum information theory, in particular the notion that when the allowed transformations of a system are restricted, certain states of the system become useful resources with which one can prepare previously inaccessible states. The theory of entanglement is perhaps the best-known and most well-understood resource theory in this sense. Here we return to the basic questions of thermodynamics using the formalism of resource theories developed in quantum information theory and show that the free energy of thermodynamics emerges naturally from the resource theory of energy-preserving transformations. Specifically, the free energy quantifies the amount of useful work which can be extracted from asymptotically-many copies of a quantum system when using only reversible energy-preserving transformations and a thermal bath at fixed temperature. The free energy also quantifies the rate at which resource states can be reversibly interconverted asymptotically, provided that a sublinear amount of coherent superposition over energy levels is available, a situation analogous to the sublinear amount of classical communication required for entanglement dilution.Comment: 4.5 pages main text, 12 pages appendix; v3: improvements to presentation of the main resul

Linewidth of single photon transitions in Mn12_{12}-acetate

We use time-domain terahertz spectroscopy to measure the position and linewidth of single photon transitions in Mn$_{12}$-acetate. This linewidth is compared to the linewidth measured in tunneling experiments. We conclude that local magnetic fields (due to dipole or hyperfine interactions) cannot be responsible for the observed linewidth, and suggest that the linewidth is due to variations in the anisotropy constants for different clusters. We also calculate a lower limit on the dipole field distribution that would be expected due to random orientations of clusters and find that collective effects must narrow this distribution in tunneling measurements.Comment: 5 pages, accepted to Physical Review