Banfi Days in Davis

The Language Center at UC Davis is a wonderful place. As his director, Bob Blake, told me, it is housed in a basement of the Olson building, a part of the building nobody wants because the rooms don't have windows, but which is ideal for their purposes in terms of security and sound proofing. I was lucky enought to get a guided tour with Bob and  Fuqiang Zhuo, the Associate Director.  The first thing I saw was there latest acquisition: the Active Learning Space. Here are some pictures I took:               Some of these features are the latest in what technology can offer (e.g. bluetooth connection for linking a computer to the interactive whiteboard) but others just seem like good ideas (e.g. special paint on the walls that turn them into whiteboards. Others fall somewhere in between and appear to rely heavily on ingenuity rather than material resources although they are materialised as objects (e.g. the swivel ch...

California being an agricultural state, I kind of expected agricultural produce to be more 'spontaneous', less manicured than I'd seen in places like New York or Washington. What I see when I go to supermarkets, however, is shelves like the ones below with a careful display of fruit and vegetables that almost resembles the shop windows of a jeweler. What is not visible in these photos is the sophisticated water-spray system that is activated periodically and that makes sure that all the produce looks as fresh as possible. Another display format can be found in gas stations were, again, perfectly simple and ordinary pieces of fruit are displayed in carefully tended shelves, trays and other containers. The strange thing in both cases is the fact that the produce goes practically untouched. The supermarkets seem to be empty all the time, or at least  every time we've been there. In the case of the gas station, fruit is overlooked in favour of doughnuts, ...

The first conference I attended was the Global Scholars symposium, a small conference for some practitioners and decision-makers who work with this programme around the world. There were people from most of the many cities where the programmes is implemented: from Warsaw to Astana, from Bogotá to Madrid, from London to Barcelona and from Boston, Fort Lauderdale and many other US Cities to Buenos Aires.         Venue of the conference The event was spotlessly organised and it included guest speakers, panels and there was also a carefully planned cultural component than included visits to the Whitney Museum of American Art and Tenement Museums .         New York City was under the secondary effects of the Polar Vortex hitting most of the country and everyone was very concerned we would be suffering from the cold but, since the coldest days were those when we didn't have to be outside and there were buses that took...