Marketopia was created by Professor Terence Ball of Arizona State University in an article in the magazine Dissent in 2001. He formed it from marketing and utopia to identify and satirise a world in which social responsibility has been lost, all public services have been privatized and market forces rule absolutely. The quality of life experienced by those living in …

Crowdsourcing is the act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, to an undefined, large group of people or community (a “crowd”), through an open call. Jeff Howe, one of the first authors to employ the term, established that the concept of crowdsourcing depends essentially on the fact that because it is an open call to an …

Francis Fukuyama — Renowned for declaring ‘the End of History’ after the fall of the Soviet Union, Yoshihiro Francis Fukuyama is professor of international political economy at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and author most recently of America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy. Fukuyama is best known as the author of …

Erik Weihenmayer (born September 23, 1968) is the first blind person to reach the summit of Mount Everest, on May 25, 2001. He also completed the Seven Summits in September 2002. His story was covered in a Time article in June 2001 titled Blind to Failure. He is the author of Touch the Top of the World: A Blind Man’s …

Elie Wiesel — Eliezer “Elie” Wiesel was born on September 30, 1928. He is a writer, professor at Boston University, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor. He is the author of 57 books, the best known of which is Night, a work based on his experiences as a prisoner in the Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps. His diverse range …

Francois Quesnay was a French economist of the Physiocratic school. The physiocrats were a group of economists who believed that the wealth of nations was derived solely from the value of land agriculture or land development. Their use of the term laissez faire meant that the only legitimate form of government revenue derived from the value of land. Their theories …

What does Eliot’s famous line ‘I have measured out my life with coffee spoons…’ mean? — This line is from the poem ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock‘, in which Prufrock is a mythical person symbolic of the 20th century man. The poem highlights the emotional woes of this man, who has no self-confidence, is indecisive about proposing to …

Edward Osborne Wilson is an American biologist (Myrmecology, a branch of entomology), researcher (sociobiology, biodiversity), theorist (consilience, biophilia), and naturalist (conservationism). A two-time Pulitzer Prizewinner, Wilson argues that human behaviour can largely be explained by biology. He is Pellegrino University professor emeritus of entomology at Harvard University. Wilson is known for his career as a scientist, his advocacy for environmentalism, …

Ehud Olmert was born near Binyamina in the British Mandate of Palestine, Olmert is a graduate of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem with degrees in psychology, philosophy and law. According to Olmert, his parents, Bella and Mordechai escaped “persecution in Ukraine and Russia and found sanctuary in Harbin, China. They emigrated to Israel to fulfill their dream of building a …

Dr. Avtar Singh Paintal M.D., Ph.D. (September 24, 1925 in Mogok, Burma – December 21, 2004 in Delhi, India) was a medical scientist who has made pioneering discoveries in the area of neurosciences and respiratory sciences. When people, whether young or old, climb a mountain, they are easily tired. If they still over exert themselves, breathlessness overcomes them and they …