<<March 7, 2006>>
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Mike S. Wenger, D. Phil. <mike@wengerandwenger.com>

P. Tapio Varis, Ph.D., Professor <tapio.varis@uta.fi>

Dr. David A. Johnson, AICP <daj@utk.edu>

Kaisa Kautto-Koivula, Lic.Techn., Ph.D. <kaisa.kautto-koivula@kolumbus.fi>


Dear Mike:

(1) Hope everything is going well and fine with you, since I met with you at the conference of American Society for Cybernetics at George Washington University last October.

Utsumi, T.;
"Global e-Learning for Global Peace," Paper for opening speech at the American Society for Cybernetics in Washington, D.C., October 28, 2005, <http://www.asc-cybernetics.org/2005/index.htm>
http://makeashorterlink.com/?F44621BDB

(2) Albeit very short notice, I wonder if you would be interested in attending a seminar “Why is Finland the Most Competitive Economy in the World?” in the evening of March 9th — see ATTACHMENT I below.

I would greatly appreciate it if you can kindly attend it and send me your brief report about it, since it sounds very interesting.

(3) We are very proud of having the headquarters of our Global University System (GUS) at the University of Tampere, Finland, with the world renowned Professor Tapio Varis, as its Acting President.
Takeshi Utsumi, P. Tapio Varis, and W. R. Klemm
"Creating Global University System"
http://makeashorterlink.com/?I2F231019
This is in Part II of the following book — see below.
BTW, I once attended a party at the Embassy of Finland several years ago, which was held in honor of Tapio’s visit to Washington, DC.

When I attended the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis, Tunisia, last November, I had an honor to meet with the former President of Finland, Dr. Martti Ahtisaari, by the kind introduction of Tapio.  I was very delighted to hear of his high praises of our GUS project as well as following book;
Global Peace Through The Global University System
Tapio Varis - Takeshi Utsumi - William Klemm (Eds.)
University of Tampere, Finland 2003
ISBN 951-44-5695-5
The entire contents of this book can be retrieved at;
http://makeashorterlink.com/?M2D252E09
BTW, you can find greetings kindly given to this book by Dr. Ahtisaari and Dr. Erkki Tuomioja, Finnish  Minster of Foreign Affairs at the beginning of Part I of this book.

(4) The choice of Finland for the headquarters of our GUS was made almost a decade ago by the suggestion of David Johnson, the first President of Fulbright Association, who said that the name of Finland has a connotation to global peace.

Now, as Finland is the most competitive economy in the world, his suggestion was also absolutely right, indeed, — he had a very good foresight!!

(5) Pls find out at the seminar how Finland transformed its society from Industrial Age to Knowledge Age with the so-called New Economy — see the following paper in our book;
Kaisa Kautto-Koivula and Marita Huhtaniemi, Nokia Ventures Organization
"Evolution Towards Human-Centric Knowledge Society. Can Societies Learn from Global Corporations?"
http://makeashorterlink.com/?Z17D56259
This paper is in the Part III of our book mentioned above.

(6) You may also be interested in reading ATTACHMENT II below, which was accompanied with;
“Are We Losing Our Edge?”
By Michael D. Lemonick
Time, February 13, 2006

I wonder how Finland is fostering CREATIVITY and its transformation into competitive economy — a good example is Nokia, which predecessor was a small shoe factory in Tampere.

Looking forward to receiving your response,

Best, Tak

ATTACHMENT I


> From: <ke@worldbank.org>
> Reply-To: <ke@worldbank.org>
> Date: Mon, 6 Mar 2006 16:37:51 -0500
> To: <undisclosed-recipients:;>
> Subject: Invitation: Why is Finland the Most Competitive Economy in the
> World?, Thursday, March 9, 2006, 6:30 p.m., Embassy of Finland
>
> World Bank Knowledge Economy Advisory Service
> Why is Finland the Most Competitive Economy in the World?
>                            Thursday,  March 9,  2006
>                                   at 6.30 p.m.
>                                Embassy of Finland
>                          3301 Massachusetts Avenue,  NW
>                                  Washington, DC
>
> Finland has been ranked number one for the fourth time since 2000 in the World
> Competitiveness Index.  What accounts for the success of this small relatively
> isolated country on the topmost fringe of Europe?  How did it manage to
> recover
> quickly from a major financial and trade crisis in the early 1990s?  How did
> it
> transform itself from a natural resource based economy to a word class
> knowledge
> economy? What lessons can be learned from this extraordinary transformation?
> How replicable is it?  Is Finland, along with some other Nordic economies, a
> new
> model for growth and efficiency with equity?
>
> You are invited to participate in a discussion of these issues at the launch
> of
> a new book commissioned by the World Bank on the lessons and implications
> Finland?s success has for other countries.
>
> His Excellency, the Appointed Ambassador of Finland, Pekka Lintu will host the
> discussion.   Professor Carl Dahlman (Georgetown University) and Professor
> Jorma
> Routti (Creative Industries Management), two of the principal editors and
> authors of the book, will present the findings of the study.  The discussion
> will be chaired by Mr. Kari Janhunen, Financial Counselor, Project Advisory
> Services, Embassy of Finland.
>
> The event will take place on Thursday, March 9, at 6:30 pm at the Embassy of
> Finland, 3301 Massachusetts Avenue, NW.    A buffet dinner will be followed by
> the panel discussion.
>
>  If you would like to attend, please send your RSVP to:  
> leila.takala@formin.fi
>                               or call 202-298-5865
>
> Business Attire
> Street Parking
>

------ End of Forwarded Message

ATTACHMENT II

Excerpt from TIME, February 13, 2006, Page 41


Don't Believe the Hype. We're Still No. 1
What the doomsayers don't say: America is a marvel of creativity
By CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER
Sunday, Feb. 05, 2006

What would the most advanced, most forward-looking, most self-assured country in history do without its periodic crises of confidence? In 1957 the Soviets put a tin can into space, and the U.S. thought the sky was falling. In the 1980s we began crying into our soup because Sony was selling so many nifty Trinitrons. "American decline" was all the fashion until the vaunted Japanese model of tight organization and industrial planning took a nosedive and a bunch of twentysomething Americans tinkering in their garages created untold wealth and took over the world.

Now, 20 years later, our newest fix of pessimism. Why? Our economic growth rate is second in the West only to tiny Finland's. It's probably just a symptom of $3 gasoline. Nonetheless, it's back. This time it's not Russia or Japan but other inscrutable foreigners, Indian and Chinese. What was once rather unkindly said about Brazil--"the country of the future and always will be"--I say of them. I'm not worried.

You can pick your statistics. Mine are that the U.S. leads the world by an immense margin in just about every measure of intellectual and technological achievement: Ph.D.s, patents, peer-reviewed articles, Nobel Prizes. But in the end, it's the culture, stupid. The economy follows culture, and American culture is today, as ever, uniquely suited for growth, innovation and advancement.

The most obvious bedrock of success is entrepreneurial spirit. The U.S. has the most risk-taking, most laissez-faire, least regulated economy in the advanced Western world. America is heartily disdained by its coddled and controlled European cousins for its cowboy capitalism. But it is precisely America's tolerance for creative destruction--industries failing, others rising, workers changing jobs and cities and skills with an alacrity and insouciance that Europeans find astonishing--that keeps its economy churning and advancing.

Some are alarmed that government R&D funding has fallen from a 60% to a 30% share of total funding. So what? Does government necessarily make wiser investment decisions than private companies? The mistake of the Soviets, Japanese and so many others was to assume that creativity could be achieved with enough government planning and funding. But the very essence of creativity is spontaneity. A society's creativity is directly proportionate to the rate of free interaction of people and ideas in a vast unplanned national chemical reaction. There is no country anywhere more given to the unencumbered, unfettered, unregulated exchange of ideas than the U.S.

And not just ideas but also the people who give life to them. America is uniquely socially mobile, ethnically mixed and racially tolerant. America is, in Ben Wattenberg's phrase, the first universal nation, indeed the only universal nation. Every street corner in New York City is a rainbow of humanity. The resulting interaction and fusion of cultures produce not just great cuisine and music and art but also great science and technology. Intel was cofounded by a Hungarian, Google by a Russian, Yahoo! by a Taiwanese. We are the world's masters of assimilation. Where else do you see cultures and races so at home with one another? In China?

Those cultural traits create the bottom line of our success: productivity, the closest measure of national efficiency, as well as technological creativity and ultimately wealth creation. In those areas, the U.S. continues to be the wonder of the world. From 1947 to the oil shock of 1973, our productivity grew annually at an average compounding 3% rate. For the next 20 years that rate was mysteriously cut in half, the background for much of the declinist vogue of the '80s. Then in the past decade, when we finally stopped playing with our newfangled computers and figured out how to use them, productivity returned to the magic 3% level of the immediate postwar era when America bestrode the world like a colossus.

Indeed, in the past five years, our productivity hit 3.5%, surpassing those magic years. Our only rivals at the top of the productivity list are the postage-stamp Scandinavians (Finland, Denmark and Sweden), while the lumbering giants we so fear, China and India, rank 49th and 50th.

True, we can ruin our future if we listen to the voices of defeatism and give in to the classic isolationist tendencies of protectionism and xenophobia. Fear could lead us to cut off trade both in goods and in brains, keeping out those wily foreigners who come here to learn our secrets and take them home. Of course, some do. They always have, but the majority are seduced by the openness, tolerance and energy of America and stay here to enrich us.

Our gloom amid boom is a comment more on our national mood swings than on the state of our economy or scientific culture. If we can just keep our heads, take our meds and resist fear itself, we'll do just fine.

List of Distribution


Mike S. Wenger, D. Phil.
9201 Hampton Hunt Drive
Fairfax Station, Virginia 22039
USA
Voice: 703 495-8989
Mobile: 703 628-8726
Fax: 703 495-9191
mike@wengerandwenger.com

P. Tapio Varis, Ph.D., Professor
Acting President, Global University System
UNESCO Chair in Global e-Learning with applications to multiple domains
Professor and Chair of Media Education
Research Center for Vocational Education & Hypermedia Laboratory
University of Tampere
P.O.Box 229
FIN-13101 Hameenlinna
FINLAND
Tel: +358-3-614-5608--office in Hameenlinna
Tel: +358-3-215 6243--mass media lab in Tampere
GSM: +3358-50-567-9833
Fax: +358-3-614-5611
tapio.varis@uta.fi
tapio.varis@hamk.fi
tapio.varis@helsinki.fi
http://www.uta.fi/~titava
www.ecml-eu.org -- about ECML project.
http://www.uta.fi/conference/mediaskills/
and
Principal Research Specialist
Unesco-Unevoc International Centre for Technical and Vocational
Education and Training
Bonn, Germany
t.varis@unevoc.unesco.org
www.unevoc.unesco.org

Dr. David A. Johnson, AICP
Board member of GLOSAS/USA
Former President of Fulbright Association
Lead Faculty Member,
International Honors Program on Globalization, 2002
Professor Emeritus
Department of Urban and Rgional Planning
University of Tennessee
108-I Hoskins Library
Knoxville, TN 37996-4015
USA
Tel: +1-865-974 5227
Fax: +1-865-974 5229
daj@utk.edu
davidj@buncombe.main.nc.us
http://web.utk.edu/~djohnutk/

Kaisa Kautto-Koivula, Lic.Techn., Ph.D.
Docent, New Learning Environments
Tampere University
Finland
Mobile: +358 400 403 632
kaisa.kautto-koivula@kolumbus.fi

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* Takeshi Utsumi, Ph.D., P.E., Chairman, GLOSAS/USA                           *
* (GLObal Systems Analysis and Simulation Association in the U.S.A.)          *
* Laureate of Lord Perry Award for Excellence in Distance Education           *
* Founder and V.P. for Technology and Coordination of                         *
*   Global University System (GUS)                                            *
* 43-23 Colden Street, Flushing, NY 11355-5913, U.S.A.                        *
* Tel: 718-939-0928; Email: utsumi@columbia.edu                               *
* http://www.itu.int/wsis/goldenbook/search/display.asp?Quest=8032562&lang=en *
* http://www.friends-partners.org/GLOSAS/                                     *
* Tax Exempt ID: 11-2999676                                                   *
*******************************************************************************