Friday, July 31, 2009
Harvard graduates hit it off with peer-to-peer loans for students
The brainchild of Tarun Parikh, Nimay Mehta and Joshua Kushner, the site was launched in May to help out students in need of financial aid.
At the moment, loans are limited to Harvard students, but plans are under way to expand to other institutions in the fall semester.
"The Obama administration is seeking to remove private banks from the federal education lending systems," Parikh notes in a blog entry on UniThrive.org.
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Labels: education loans, harvard grads, harvard graduates launch loan website, Harvard University, innovative solution, loan webisite, students, website
Sunday, July 20, 2008
South African judge Pillay named United Nations Human Rights Commissioner
The daughter of a Tamil bus driver in Durban, Pillay has experienced human-rights violations.
She earned a law degree at Harvard University but was not allowed to set foot in a judge's chambers for 28 years as a lawyer under apartheid because of her South Asian origins.
In 1995, she became the first woman of color to become a judge on the South African High Court.
Pillay, born in 1941, also served on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda to try crimes after the genocide in 1994, and presided over landmark cases in international law in which she established rape as a war crime, convicted a former head of state for atrocities committed during his rule, and prosecuted media for inciting genocide.
She has served for five years on the International Criminal Court at The Hague.
Pillay may not be as outspoken as the current commissioner, Canadian Judge Louise Arbour, who often shamed governments and leaders that the secretary-general would not criticize by name.
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Labels: Durban, first woman, Harvard University, human rights commissioner, law degree, Navanethem Pillay, South Africa High Court, South african Judge, Tamil bus driver, United Nation
Monday, December 3, 2007
The first ‘book' in world may have been 5,500-year-old clay tablet found at Harappa
We saw earlier in this series that the idea of the zero, and the decimal system of numbers, originated in India. What about writing?
It was believed until recently that writing originated in Egypt and Babylon.
Wrong.
A piece of pottery dug from an early stratum of Harappa, one of the two of the world's earliest cities (the other is Mohenjodaro) in the Indus Valley in present day Pakistan, has markings that are clearly not haphazard scratches, not bird's feet or impression of twigs, but were purposely by intelligent humans to signify something.
It is 5,500 years old, and the first preserved record of communication.
The discovery of this specimen of writing was reported by Richard Meadow of Harvard University and Jonathan Mark Kenoyer of the University of Wisconsin Madison.
Meadow, who is the director of the Harappa Archaeological Research Project (HARP), told BBC in a report broadcast in 1999 that the Harappan inscriptions found may predate all other known writing. The BBC report caused a flutter in archeological dovecotes.
An Australian scholar and poet, Peter Knobel, waxed so far as to rhetorically ask: "Maybe the world's first book is a piece of pottery?"
Untril 1998, it was commonly accepted that the oldest writing might have come from Egypt.
Clay tablets containing primitive words were uncovered in southern Egypt at the tomb of a king named Scorpion.
They were carbon-dated to 3300-3200 B.C.. This is about the same time, or slightly earlier than the primitive writing developed by the Sumerians of the Mesopotamian civilization in around 3,100 B.C., Meadow told BBC News Online in the report which upset the chronology of writing accepted by scholars around the world since archeologists traveling with Napoleon Bonaparte in Egypt discovered the Rosetta Stone.
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Image and article source: News India Times
Article taken from the issue: 7 Dec, 2007
Labels: clay tablet, egypt, harappa, Harvard University, Mesopotamian civilization, Napoleon Bonaparte, Rosetta Stone, University of Wisconsin Madison
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