[gu-new] (08/30/07) Videoconferences for the Mayors for Peace and the 2020 Vision Campaign

[Takeshi Utsumi, Ph.D.]

<<August 30, 2007>>
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Aaron Tovish <aaron.tovish at ipb.org>

Professor Seth G. Neugroschl <SN23 at columbia.edu>

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

Dr. Harold P. Sjursen <hsjursen at duke.poly.edu>

Carl Skelton <cskelton at poly.edu>


Dear Aaron:

(1) Many thanks for your msg (ATTACHMENT I) with kind words.

Yes, I recall you very well when we met at the dinner table with Mayor Akiba
of Hiroshima City, at the occasion of Seth¹s Columbia University Seminar on
³Computers, Man and Society² on May 6th of last year.

I visited your web sites with great interest and fully agree with the vision
of Mayor Akiba.

I. Connection to Hiroshima:

(2) Almost 62 years ago, I was educated by fanatic Japanese militarism as
sending suicide (Kamikaze) bombers (two to three years elder to me) to
Okinawa battle field from a secret army air base in my home town Nagano
Prefecture.  After solemn ceremony with sake wine for toasting, they flew on
bi-planes at only 75 miles/hour or so speed.  We had to see them flew off
for so long hours till disappearing beyond mountain range.  It was really
devastating feeling, but we had to do it for the sake of our Emperor!!

> Later, I learned that they were used as decoys.  They flew toward American
> aircrafts.  All machine guns were aimed at them as finding their coming with
> raider.  At 75 miles, they were easily shot down, but while doing so, Kamikaze
> ZERO fighter plane flew to the other side of the aircraft with torpedo and
> bombs --  simply unthinkable devastation!!

After the war was over, we had a new high school principal.  He was the
student dean of a junior college (a predecessor of Hiroshima University).
He was delivering his talk to about 300 students on an open school field in
the morning of August 6th.  He was then knocked down after strong flash
light.  After gaining his consciousness, he was shocked to find almost all
of his students were dead!!  He was lucky standing behind a corner of a
cement building which shielded him from heat and gasting shock wave.  Later,
he could not find even bones of his beloved wife and infant baby, -- theirs
were all evaporated, since they were almost directly beneath of the bomb.
He got pneumonia every winter because of radiation of the bomb, but never
said any remorse, yet taught us tolerance and compassion of Buddhism.  My US
education and experiences also taught me the value of human right and
democracy.  These experiences are the very basis of my motivation to create
our GUS, since education is the solid foundation necessary for achieving
global peace.

(3) When you meet Mr. Akiba, the Mayor of Hiroshima, next time, pls convey
my best personal regards -- I gave him a copy of our following book when I
met him by your kind introduction at Columbia University seminar;

> 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://tinyurl.com/kofpf

(4) BTW, the president of Hiroshima University was once Dr. Hironaka ‹ He
was the dean of mathematics at Harvard University before when he received a
Field Prize, an equivalent to Nobel Prize.  He kindly participated in our
³Global Lecture Hall (GLH)² multipoint-to-multipoint multimedia, interactive
videoconference in early 1990s.  He advocated the use of Information and
Communication Technologies (ICTs) in 1993 with the official information from
the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs ‹ see
<http://preview.tinyurl.com/27yrre> -- pls visit this URL to view two full
pages of this article;
Our GUS is to realize what he envisioned, i.e., to create the 21st version
of the Fulbright exchange program with intensive use of advanced ICTs.

II. Organizing videoconferences for the 2020 Vision Campaign:

(5) Your desire to have a regular videoconferencing among the board members
of the 2020 Vision Campaign is very interesting and challenging project.

If you have plenty money, you may ask a commercial service vendor, e.g.,
Dentsu, the world largest advertisement company, in Tokyo ‹ they once
charged horrendous amount of money ($2 to 3 million) to an event of a
pharmaceutical company for connecting several sites in Europe with a
conference in Tokyo, which was much smaller scheme than the ones I organized
at free of charge ‹ see Chapter 2 of;

> Draft of of Proposed Book
> "Electronic Global University System and Services"
> <http://preview.tinyurl.com/27ykrf>

As you see in it, I organized once or twice every year for more than a dozen
years since 1986, the so-called ³Global Lecture Hall (GLH)²
multipoint-to-multipoint, multimedia, interactive videoconferencing with
hybrid technologies, which often spanned from New Zealand to Moscow and many
points in between.  Some of them used 11 channels with 9 transponders on
satellites ‹ all at free of charges.

> (a) I firstly worked on the extension of the packet-switching data telecom to
> various Asian countries, including Japan, which became Internet later, and
> then worked on the de-regulation of the Japanese telecom policies for the use
> of email, and the de-monopolization and privatization of Japanese telecom
> industries, which have been emulated by many countries since then,
> 
> (b) However, those were only for text oriented emails, and hence I had to
> combine the uses of email as for a background coordination with video by
> satellite for engineering diagram and medical images, -- I then found that
> those satellite videoconferencing was too expensive and too cumbersome,
> 
> (c) I then started pioneering on the use of videoconferencing through Internet
> in early 1990s, which led me to promote the need for broadband Internet for
> high quality audio and video ‹ which we are now doing with e-learnnig and
> e-healthcare/telemedicine and globally collaborative peace gaming.

Therefore, I would say that your desired videoconferencing can be done
without much difficulties, but I must say that the key point is the very
close coordination on all aspects, telecom, video hard and software, their
management personnel, scheduling the event, etc., etc.

If your mayors can solicit the cooperation of major universities in their
towns, you may be able to conduct such videoconferencing as similar to ours,
-- rather than spending chunk of money to commercial vendors.  The side
effect and benefits would be to foster peace education among those
universities and mutual understanding among participating youngsters at
those universities across continents, oceans and cultures.

Some features as interpretation capability, document handling capability,
and meeting recording capability, may be built up gradually.

(6) You indicated that you wish to have such a videoconference among 20
mayors in this coming November as for the first demonstration ‹ BTW, can you
inform me where are those 20 mayors?

> (08/29/07) Finnish-Japanese videoconference 9 November
> http://preview.tinyurl.com/yr5p8c

As you might have read in our list distribution of the above (which I sent
out last night), we are now planning to have a videoconference between the
University of Tampere, Finland and Higashiyama Art Gallery in Nogano City,
Japan on November 9th.

Tapio Varis in Finland reported me this morning that his mtg with Mr. Honda,
the Japanese Ambassador to Finland, yesterday went very smoothly and
received his strong interest in this event and confirmed his attendance ‹
BTW, I and my wife are also invited to attend it by Tapio.

> We may also have a mini-workshop on the formation of GUS/Turkey with our
> Turkish colleagues who may visit Finland at the same time in the following
> week after this event is over.

Subsequently, my involvement to your videoconferencing would be difficult
till the last week of November.

(7) However, we have already consummated our Memorandum of Understanding
(MOU) with the Polytechnic University in Brooklyn (my alma mater) to conduct
the Quantitative Policy Analysis of Global Socio-Economic-
Energy-Environment Development (GSEEED) project ‹ see;

> (a) (05/19/07) MOU between Polytechnic University and GLOSAS/USA
> http://preview.tinyurl.com/ysw4gb
> 
> (b) (08/21/07) DRAFT: Grant application to Japan Foundation for GSEEED project
> http://preview.tinyurl.com/22odrz

As said in them, President Hultin of the Polytechnic University is a friend
of President Clinton and was a classmate at the Yale University Law School,
and the former Under Secretary of the US Navy.  As said, he conducted
several war gaming for terrorists attack, and thereby, he is very much
interested in our peace gaming project, which term I coined almost three
decades ago.  BTW, war gaming is to win the war once when it happened, and
peace gaming is to avoid the occurrence of war.  President Hultin said to me
that avoiding war is cheaper than waging war.

Subsequently, I suppose that President Hultin would be interested in helping
your videoconferencing project.

Dear Harold and Carl:

(8) Your Polytechnic University now has a broadband Internet access at 100
Mps, so that you may be well equipped with enough videoconferencing gears to
act as the administrative center for the videoconferencing for Aaron.

Pls give your consideration and call me at your earliest convenience for my
visit to discuss this project further prior to reply formerly to Aaron
Tovish.

Looking forward to hearing from you soon,

Best, Tak


ATTACHMENT I 

> From: Aaron Tovish <aaron.tovish at ipb.org>
> Date: Wed, 29 Aug 2007 13:35:49 +0200
> To: <utsumi at columbia.edu>
> Cc: <2020visioncampaign at ieper.be>
> Subject: Re: [gu-new] (08/28/07) (1) Not attending ICT-Learn2007 conference in
> Cairo, Egypt, (2) "World Conference of Education Administration" in Dubai in
> October, 2007, and (3) 10th Global Leadership Forum in Novosibirsk, Siberia
> next year.
> 
> Dear Prof. Takeshi Utsumi,
> You may recall that I was at the side of Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba at the
> dinner honoring him at Columbia University in 2005.
> I continue to work as an Executive Advisor to the Hiroshima Peace
> Culture Foundation, of which he is the Chairman, with responsibility for
> the 2020 Visions Campaign of Mayors for Peace, of which he is the President.
> I have been (very silently) receiving your regular email messages since
> that time, always wondering when it might 'pay off.'  I think the time
> has come!
> In November, the Executive Conference of Mayors for Peace will decide
> upon the future governing structure for the 2020 Vision Campaign.  Part
> of that decision will be a need for the Executive Committee to meet more
> often than biannually, namely annually.  In the 'old' world, this would
> raise serious budgetary issues, so we have been asked to explore the
> 'new' world of video-conferencing.  Would you be willing to advise the
> International Secretariat of the 2020 Vision Campaign on how to manage a
> low cost video conference among 20 people?  Ideally we would be at the
> point in November where we could actually demonstrate the capacity so
> they would have confidence in moving to an annual meeting schedule.
> (Likewise, they will be appointing a Board of Directors which will meet
> twice a year.  Some of its meetings might useful be held by video
> conference.)  It would be good if there could be interpretation
> capability, document handling capability, and meeting recording
> capability as well.
> If you feel that there is another person who could better assist us;
> please feel free to introduce them to us.  To learn more about Mayors
> for Peace and the 2020 Vision Campaign, I think you would find it
> interesting to visit our websites: www.mayorsforpeace.org ;
> www.2020visioncampaign.org .
> I look forward to hearing from you.
> Regards,
> Aaron Tovish
> 
> International Manager
> 2020 Vision Campaign
> Skype: aaron.tovish
> 


List of Distribution

Aaron Tovish
International Campaign Manager
2020 Vision Campaign
Mayors for Peace
c/o, AFSC
15 Rutherford Place
New York, NY 10003
212-598-0963
+41 22 340 3853
Skype: tovron
Fax: 212-529-4603
aaron.tovish at ipb.org
or
Aaron Tovish
Campaign Manager
World Conference of Mayors for Peace
1-2 Nakajima-cho
Naka-ku, Hiroshima 730-0811
Japan
+81-82-241-2352
Fax: +81-82-242-7452
a.tovish at pcf.city.horoshima.jp
http://www.pcf.city.hiroshima.jp/mayors/

Professor Seth G. Neugroschl
Co-chair Columbia University Seminar on Computers, Man and Society
Columbia University
1349 Lexington Avenue
New York, NY 10128
212-876-7674
212-722-4046 -- after 6 pm
SN23 at columbia.edu

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 at uta.fi
tapio.varis at hamk.fi
tapio.varis at 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
Gorresstr 15
53113 Bonn, Germany
Tel: +358-335-51-3608
Fax: +358-335-51-3611
t.varis at unevoc.unesco.org
www.unevoc.unesco.org

Dr. Harold P. Sjursen
Professor of Philosophy
Associate Provost for International Education and Research
Director, Liberal Studies
Polytechnic University
5 Metrotech Center
Brooklyn, New York 11201
USA
Tel: 718-260-3597
Fax: 718-788-4268
Cel: +1 (917) 743-2390
hsjursen at duke.poly.edu
hsjursen at poly.edu
hsjursen at gmail.com
http://www.poly.edu/

Carl Skelton
Director, Integrated Digital Media Institute
idmi.poly.edu
Polytechnic University
Six MetroTech Center, RH 213
Brooklyn, NY 11201
718-260-4018
cskelton at poly.edu

****************************************************************************
***
* 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 at 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
*
****************************************************************************
***


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