Hasta La Gadget!

GNG director Chris Plutte recently brought together Jordanian high school students to talk about their impressions of Washington, D.C.

The Aspen Challenge — launched by the Aspen Institute and the Bezos Family Foundation — provides a platform, inspiration and tools for young people to design solutions to some of the world’s most critical problems by engaging with leading global visionaries, artists and entrepreneurs. District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) will send teams from several schools to compete with each other to present their solutions at the Aspen Ideas Festival. Here, international development expert Chris Plutte shares the Aspen Challenge he’s given to students in Washington, D.C.

Every student needs to have a meaningful cross-cultural exchange during their education. Every student needs to learn to value life differences as deeply as similarities. Because for our youth today, interacting, living and learning to thrive with someone who is different is the norm and is the future. Virtual exchanges are the vessels that can make this happen.

Virtual exchanges are technology-enabled, sustained, people-to-people education programs. Live videoconferencing, online platforms and more are utilized to connect real human beings directly with each other from anywhere in the world to anywhere in the world. Any and all topics for study and greater cross-cultural understanding can be examined and explored. We are only limited by our imagination on who and how we want to engage, learn, and grow.

Across every continent, thousands of youth are going online and connecting with each other, and not simply to share the latest viral video or to tweet the latest craze. Thousands of our young people are harnessing technology to take their cross-cultural education into their own hands. Together, these brave young souls reach beyond borders and seas to break apart the news broadcasts of misrepresentation and misinformation — face to face through virtual exchange. This is good news; for our future, this is necessary news. But it is not enough.

With virtual exchanges, every student, every young human being can have a direct relationship with a peer in a country and culture different than their own. That experience, that direct relationship, that empathy building, research has shown, holds a direct correlation to the reduction of conflict and violence. Once I get to know you, regardless and inclusive of our differences, in short, I am less likely to harm you. I am more likely to make peace with you. This is the power of connection and peace.

We live in an increasingly cross-cultural world. Exponentially the world for our young people today is more cross-cultural than ever imagined. It is and will continue to be the norm that our youth will be challenged to interact with peers who come from cultures quite different from their own. Those with the skills and understanding of how to be curious of others, how to ask questions, how to listen, how to explore and value differences and similarities, and how to articulately communicate their own lives to those variant from themselves, will thrive.

Through the Aspen Challenge, I am turning to the students of Washington, D.C., and calling them to this timely and necessary task. How can we use virtual exchange to provide every student the opportunity to connect with and build peace with students abroad?

Virtual exchanges are currently being used to build bridges between the West and Muslim majority countries. Over the past year, we have seen Islamist extremists challenge freedom of expression in France, abduct young women in Nigeria, and murder school children in Pakistan. With our culture of 24-hour news cycles it can be hard for us in the West to remember that the minority of extremists do not represent the majority 1.6 billion Muslims. On the flip side, it is easy for those living in the Muslim majority countries to think that the recent exposure of the CIA’s torture of Muslims represents American values of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

These cultural misunderstandings are being fueled by the media and are pushing both sides into islands of isolation. What we need to do is bypass the nightly news, show fierce compassion for one another, and engage in authentic ways like we have never done before.

The traditional way of engaging in global educational exchange and international peace building has been through physical exchanges, such as semester abroad programs. No one can understate the value of these important experiences. Yet physical exchanges are expensive and difficult to scale. Despite the US government allocating nearly a half a billion dollars towards physical exchanges annually, less than 1 percent of American students will go abroad. And when they do, they go to Paris, London and Rome. They are not traveling to places with the greatest cultural gap, with the greatest need for peace building — Afghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt, Somalia and Iraq.

Global Nomads Group currently reaches several thousand students in these essential regions and connects them with students in the US through virtual exchange. It is not enough. It is not every student. And every student today deserves and needs a meaningful cross-cultural exchange. Every student today deserves and needs to engage their right, their power in global peace building. How can we leverage technology so that every student gets what he and she needs and deserves? That’s my Aspen Challenge.

Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Al Sharpton were hit last week with a $20 billion lawsuit alleging racial discrimination against black-owned media companies. While Sharpton and Comcast have spoken out against the lawsuit, co-plaintiff Byron Allen stood by his allegations in a HuffPost Live conversation on Friday.

Allen, who is the chairman and CEO of Entertainment Studios, told host Caroline Modarressay-Tehrani that black media companies receive a small share of the annual spending on cable licensing.

“The industry spends about $50 billion a year licensing cable networks in which 100 percent African American-owned media receives less than $3 million per year in revenue from that $50 billion stream of money that is spent to acquire content,” he said.

Allen also said media companies add insult to injury by throwing money at Sharpton, “the least expensive negro,” to “cover” up their track record of “blatant” discrimination.

“Instead of spending real money with real, 100 percent African American-owned media, it is easier to give [Sharpton] $50,000 to give them a cover,” he said.

Allen also implicated President Obama in the messy allegations. With a bit of extra funding, Obama was “bought and paid for” by Comcast, Allen said. He cited former FCC commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker’s job trajectory from commissioner to Comcast/NBCUniversal lobbyist as yet another example of the “price-fixings, collusions and payoffs,” by the company.

“President Obama promised us transparency, hope, and change,” he said. “And what happened in the Obama administration is former commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker voted for the merger of Comcast NBCU and then 90 days later took a much higher paying job with Comcast after granting them the merger. That was betraying the public’s trust as a public service.”

Comcast has not responded to HuffPost Live’s requests for comment on the allegations. Sharpton’s nonprofit organization National Action Network responded with the following statement:

National Action Network has not been served with any papers and considers this claim frivolous. If in fact we were to be served, we would gladly defend our relationship with any company as well as to state on the record why we found these discriminatory accusations made by said party to be less than credible and beneath the standards that we engage in.

Watch the HuffPost Live interview with co-plaintiff Byron Allen in the clip above.

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“Human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights.” Remember that proclamation?

OK, you may not remember. It was twenty years ago when Hillary Clinton said it and produced what some think was a “watershed moment for women in the fight for gender equality across the globe.” It was when she led the U.S. delegation at the 1985 Beijing Fourth United Nations World Conference on Women.

Much has happened on women’s rights — women’s empowerment — since then. And, of course, Secretary Clinton has not exactly been dormant.

Now, as conjecture mounts on her possible 2016 presidential candidacy, she has selected a comfortable upcoming forum for moving in that direction — a major public event recognizing and projecting progress on women’s empowerment. On March 10th, she’ll keynote the 2015 Women’s Empowerment Principles Event at United Nations Headquarters in New York City.

A few months ago, The Washington Post ran a headline, “Women love Hillary Clinton. Men? Not so Much,” in reporting that its public opinion polling showed “that women say that they would support Clinton by a striking 61-33 percent … a 25-point gap between Clinton’s margin among women and among men.” http://wapo.st/1o0wRPL

Fast-forward: Sunday,The New York Times columnist Nate Cohn predicted, “If a candidate as ever been inevitable — for the [presidential] — nomination it is Mrs. Clinton today.” http://nyti.ms/17xDENV Of course, issues remain: Current questions about the Clinton Foundation’s global network of donors and their possible political influence will have to be addressed. And some say that “the women’s vote” is an illusion.

Still…

It’s worth pondering the “UN Women’s Empowerment Principles Event” as an opportunity for Secretary Clinton.

Several hundred women (and men) leaders of the women empowerment movement from around the world will participate; a plethora of national media can be expected to cover it (Business In Society will be there, as we were last year); and the program agenda, “Unlimited Potential: Business Partners For Gender Equality” will resonate with a spectrum of “infuentials” who will have impact on the 2016 campaign.

It’s significant that in recent years the “UN Women’s Empowerment Principles” program has attracted many business leaders in companies committed to corporate social responsibility and sustainable development. Some 860 Chief Executive Officers have signed on to WEP with a “CEO Statement” that concludes:

“Equal treatment of women and men is not just the right thing to do — it is also good for business… The seven steps of the Women’s Empowerment Principles will help us to realize these opportunities.

“We encourage business leaders to join us and use the Principles as guidance for actions we can all take in the workplace, marketplace and community to empower women and benefit our companies and societies.”

In her keynote address Secretary Clinton “will reflect on the progress made in implementing the agenda set in Beijing two decades ago.”

In other words, she will tell a great many of us “What’s Working” in the pursuit of gender equality. Arguably, a female president of the United States wouldn’t hurt.

What started out as a school project about teen dating violence quickly turned into something much larger for six Texas students.

The girls, who are in sixth, seventh and eighth grades, chose the topic for the outreach program Destination Imagination, Jezebel reports. Although they haven’t started dating yet, the students have heard enough stories — from boys calling their girlfriends fat to threats of self-harm — about teen dating violence.

“We started doing more and more research on it and looking around our schools too, and we found that there were multiple cases where the boyfriend was abusing the girlfriend,” Ashlyn Ellgass, an eighth-grader at Lindale ISD, told Jezebel. “And it’s not always physically — it’s usually mentally. Whenever we saw that, we just knew that we needed to help.”

Realizing what a huge problem it was, the girls organized a haunted house to raise money for a PSA called “Channel Your Anger,” which they filmed on Dec. 31. They then contacted the Texas Advocacy Project, an organization that provides legal services to victims of domestic violence and sexual assault in Texas, and the group got on board.

“The girls reached out to us a few months ago. After doing research on their own, they felt that our goals and our mission were most in line with what they wanted to do ultimately, which was to affect change at the legislative level,” Heather Bellino, executive director of the Texas Advocacy Project, told The Huffington Post. “They wanted to use our URL at the end of their PSA to redirect people, and we said ‘absolutely.'”

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Last week, the students went down to the Texas Capitol, where they spent a day discussing amendments to a bill, originally passed in 2007, that required students to be educated about dating violence. A new bill has been filed, according to Jezebel, which will “create a workgroup to analyze these policies and find a better way to implement dating violence programs in schools.”

“One of our contacts said getting them here to the capitol and giving them a chance to speak to one of their representative would be huge,” Bellino explained. “They drummed up all those meetings on their own and they led the conversation.”

The girls have also gotten a strong response from their peers.

“Some of them have asked for help, another friend asked me for a list of things to look for,” Ellgass told KXAN.

Yep, we’re officially inspired.

Visit Jezebel for a Q&A with the six students.

Hey, Apple and NVIDIA: you aren’t going to be the only Silicon Valley giants with outlandish office space. Google has revealed a proposed redesign of its Mountain View campuses (specifically, four sites) that not only doesn’t resemble a traditional w…