For over forty years, SOMFY has been at the forefront of developments in motorizing and automating sun protection devices for residential and commercial buildings.  Concerned by environmental issues, Somfy launched a strategy aiming to foresee users’ needs in terms of comfort, security and energy -savings.

As we spend most of our life indoors: the occupant is the centrepiece of bioclimactic designs*.  With sustainable development as a focal point, the aim is to reduce the energy consumption rate required to operate the building by using natural elements such as air and particularly the sun.  Bioclimactic designs depend on many technical solutions: today, automation of shading devices and window openings is an efficient and certified solution, an undeniable application in bioclimactic facades.

1. Facade management
   Facade management allows the user to control all or some of the shading devices and windows using a PC or any other designated control system.Centralized management of shading devices allow users to:
   - Optimize energy efficiency of the building (Dynamic Insulation tm): climate sensors detect weather variations in real-time and shading devices are automatically positioned accordingly.
   - Timer settings optimize the potential of shading devices even while occupants are not present.
   - Optimize the management of natural light and natural ventilation in buildings.
   - Maintain the aesthetic aspect of the facade: shading devices can be programmed to stand perfectly aligned at different times of the day.
   - Make daily use of shading devices easier thanks to the timer settings at a zone or a room level.
   - Provide flexible controls: users can control their blinds from their office at all times through a local control unit.
2. Local controls
   Local controls allow users to take over the central system at any time, using either a fixed or remote control device. Various types of technology can be used in one building: wall-mounted wired controls in public areas and remote controls in offices for example. Today, Somfy can provide control systems with integrated radio, infrared, wired or digital technology.
3. Motorization of openings & closures
   Whatever the end product (indoor or outdoor shading devices, roll shutters, projection screens etc.), Somfy’s motorizations will meet its exact specifications.
   Motorized shading devices allow users to manage natural light, increase the insulation potential of windows and control the air circulation between different rooms, thus contributing to the process of Bioclimatic Facades.

In a step towards reducing the testing lifecycle of exams, Amman Academy has chosen OFFTEC, member of OFFTEC Holding Group (ASE:BDIN), to provide the school with an e-Exam solution that is fully integrated and compatible with the school management system.
This e-Exam solution will allow the school management to guarantee transparency and consistency while conducting exams. This is in addition to providing a better controlled test revision process with shorter response time and consequently a faster decision-making process.

IHF 2009 A MUST ATTEND ANNUAL BUSINESS PLATFORM

With the joint efforts of Events UnLimited (Jordan) and Hospitality Services (Lebanon), the 9th International Hospitality Forum, held under the patronage of H.E. Mrs. Maha Al Khatib, Minister of Tourism and Antiquities, drew in more than 3000 visitors during the 3- day event that was held from the 27th until the 29th of October at Amman Exhibitions Park.

A COLORFUL COLLABORATION BETWEEN LEO BURNETT JORDAN AND SIPES PAINTS

Leo Burnett Jordan the most creative advertising agency in the region, proudly announces its new collaboration with Sipes Paints.
Sipes Paints, one of the largest purveyors of paint in the Middle East, chose to revive its presence back into the Jordanian market with the expertise and knowledge of the multinational agency, Leo Burnett Jordan, to support its aggressive growth strategy and advertise its superior paint products.

LG’s FIRST QUAD-CORE NOTEBOOK OFFERS EXTREME 3D GAMING EXCITING

LG Electronics (LG), a global leader and technology innovator in mobile communications, today unveiled its first quad-core processor notebook, the 15.6 inch LG WIDEBOOK™ R590. The LG R590 packs the performance of a highend desktop PC into a mobile chassis and includes a 1.73GHz Intel Core i7 processor with the PM55 Chipset and a discrete NVIDIA GeForce GT230M with 1GB of dedicated DDR3 video memory.
The combination provides the ultimate in portable performance and enables users to enjoy 3D games and full HD movies on the road.

AIG AWARDED ISO 9001, 10002 AND 14001 CERTIFICATION

Airport International Group, the Jordanian company responsible for rehabilitation, expansion and operation of the Queen Alia International Airport (QAIA), has been awarded the ISO 9001, 10002 and 14001 Certification for QAIA’s Operations management systems.
This certification from ISO is an official recognition of AIG’s ongoing improvement of QAIA Operations and ability to provide quality services meeting customers’ expectations through efficient management systems, which is the prime focus and the long-term commitment of AIG to travellers, airlines and business partners.

During the processing of olive oil, olives are crushed and mixed with water. The oil is then separated out from the dirty water and solid residue.

“The water used in the process and then discarded is often just pumped out onto surrounding land,” environment expert Marwan Dimashki told IRIN.

“This waste water contains polythenols which provide the natural green and black colouring of olives. However, they are chemicals which, when spread in large quantities, change environmental conditions and cause a reduction in soil fertility.”

IMPACT ON HUMAN HEALTH

He said human health could be at risk. «Contaminated water becomes undrinkable. It goes brown and smelly and contains chemicals bad for human consumption, such as some of the polythenols.»

Where processing plants are close to rivers, the waste water can run off into the rivers, harming aquatic life (with toxic chemicals or through compounds in the waste using up supplies of oxygen) and contaminating human drinking water.

If pomace – the solid residue left over from the processing of olive oil – is not properly dried out and disposed of, it too can seep into the soil, changing the acidity and nutrient make-up.

The impact on human health of consuming the chemicals in olive waste water is still unknown. Catechol, one of the chemicals in the waste water thought by some experts to be harmful, is not considered a threat by the World Health Organization (WHO).

“Catechol is not considered by WHO in its guidelines for drinking-water quality and thus there is no proposed drinkingwater recommended maximum limit,” said Bruce Gordon, head of the drinking water safety and quality team at WHO.

However, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) lists catechol as «possibly carcinogenic to humans».

The problem is not a small-scale one. Syria is the world’s fifth largest olive oil producer, contributing 4.6 percent of the world’s supply each year from its 920 mills.

The total waste water from Syria’s olive oil production amounts to 700,000 cubic metres a year, along with 280,000 tonnes of pomace.

Lying as an ageless image and reminder of God’s Will and the perfect execution of Angel Gabriel, the Dead Sea was one of the world’s first ‘health resorts’ for Herod the Great, and a source of various products, from balms for Egyptian mummification to potash for fertilizers. The deepest hypersaline lake in the world is now in the running for a place in the natural wonders list alongside spectacular phenomena such as the Amazon River, the Galapagos Islands, the Grand Canyon and the Great Barrier Reef.

Among other finalists are Venezuela’s Angel Falls, Canada’s Bay of Fundy, the Maldives islands, Italy’s Vesuvius volcano, Halong Bay in Vietnam, Iguazu Falls on the border between Brazil and Argentina, Lebanon’s Jeita Grotto, Indonesia’s Komodo national park and the Puerto Princesa underground river in the Philippines.

These days, visitors of the Dead Sea witness a very different lake from the one that they would have seen before a few decades, the thing which resulted from sharp decline of incoming water from its main affluent, the Jordan River.

In a move to preserve one of the earth’s natural treasures and find a solution for the Dead Sea’s alarming shrinking, ‘Friends of the Earth’, a non-governmental organisation that brings together Jordanian, Palestinian and Israeli environmentalists, has advocated establishing the Dead Sea as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Without a doubt, the Dead Sea is one of the world’s most fascinating landscapes. A mysterious secret that is uncovered only to those who witness this spot of the universe. Flanked by mountains to the east and the rolling hills of Jerusalem to the west, the Dead Sea touches visitors’ souls with heavenly and worldly pleasures, freeing the reins of their minds to surge with serenity.

Mr Nader Al-Dajani CEO, Rayajet

Under His Majesty the late King Hussein, the aviation industry in the kingdom received tremendous support.Jordan’s close proximity to Africa and the Gulf countries, stable environment and productive manpower have carved a favourable niche for the aviation market. Inspired by this royal support and the promising conditions of the country itself, RayaJet’s Chairman and CEO Mr. Nader Al-Dajani felt confident in carrying out his private jet business and made it a reality.

JORDAN PROPERTY: Mr. Dajani, as you come from a prominent business family, what businesses do you own aside from RayaJet?
MR. NADER AL-DAJANI: In addition to RayaJet, I run a cement and clinker trading company known as CTI Group Inc. Founded in 1990, the continuous growth in CTI’s market share and physical assets have situated the company as a leader within its market segment. Today, CTI has become a major player in the cement business and has evolved to cover all aspects of this specialized trade. Horizontal and vertical integration of other lucrative businesses ensure the cost effectiveness and improved performance of its fundamental vocations. CTI operates in 18 countries all over the world and is considered one of the largest independent cement handlers internationally. Currently, the future plans concerning a partnership with Algeria’s CNAN and Greece’s Sekur have expanded my shipping and cement business in the area of cement carriers as 51% of CNAN’s commercial fleet was purchased and incorporated.

JP: What inspired you to establish a private jet business seeing that you were once a frequent-flyer yourself?
Dajani: As a result of my shipping and cement business, I was constantly travelling to remote and distant countries such as Ghana in Africa, Yemen, and Guam in Asia where commercial flights are a bit difficult to find. Faced with this travel inconvenience, I was tempted and encouraged to establish my own private charter enterprise to facilitate my business trips as well as to help other businessmen operating in these countries to travel easily without delays and with minimum inconveniences.

These characteristics range from the simple details of how successful people start their day to the complicated facets of macro and micro management.

Lets be more specific!

A common quality among successful people is their incredible sense of self awareness with respect to the values and capabilities they exhibit. These people can identify the capacity of what they can and can not do and know how to work within these limits.

Successful people often have specific objectives. Most of these people have a well-revised timetable of goals and events, starting with the day-today targets and ending at long-term schemes. Surprisingly, the plans that these distinguished persons have are comprehensive enough to include hide-and-seek time for their children!

Strongly defending and advocating personal beliefs and ideals is essential to the successful person. These beliefs, whether heavenly, worldly, religiously or politically informed are always present in their way of thinking and behaving. In society they are identified as principled persons who share the same will to make a difference, improve life or achieve a collective dream.

Another important attribute of successful people is to keep an open mind by considering any ideas, regardless of its creator. This quality is referred to as “the virtue of the age” since close-minded persons are bitter foes of development and change. Ridding oneself of limiting thoughts is certainly a key to success!

To make something out of nothing! is an old proverb which supports the core philosophy of distinguished people. To always think in terms of possibilities rather than looking at “the half empty glass” breeds abiding optimism. This is essential to a solution-focused way of thinking which is required in order to successfully achieve goals.

Successful people often have strong personal discipline. They respect their time as well as others time, they are truthful of their intentions and methodical in their actions. Accuracy is apparent in how carefully chosen their words are and discipline, as an ideology, is a golden value that they have never given up. They abide by their own rules which have been established through a well-staged story of experience.

The empirical knowledge gained through observing and analyzing successful people in our world, shows that success can be achieved by developing personal qualities and learning simple skills obtainable by anyone. Successful persons are individuals who always make their decisions based on facts and evidence, have faith in their abilities and themselves and neglect negative thinking and nonconstructive programming. By being practical and disciplined successful people prove that it is possible to draw a balance between work and personal social life.

One camp argued that the recession in the United States would be V-shaped – short and shallow. It would last only eight months, like the two previous recessions of 1990 1991 and 2001, and the world would decouple from the US contraction.

Others, including me, argued that, given the excesses of private sector leverage (in households, financial institutions, and corporate firms), this would be a U-shaped recession – long and deep. It would last about 24 months, and the world would not decouple from the US contraction.

Today, 20 months into the US recession – a recession that became global in the summer of 2008 with a massive re-coupling – the V-shaped decoupling view is out the window. This is the worst US and global recession in 60 years. If the US recession were – as most likely – to be over at the end of the year, as is likely, it will have been three times as long and about fives times as deep – in term of the cumulative decline in output – as the previous two.

Today’s consensus among economists is that the recession is already over, that the US and global economy will rapidly return to growth, and that there is no risk of a relapse. Unfortunately, this new consensus could be as wrong now as the defenders of the V-shaped scenario were for the past three years.

Data from the US – rising unemployment, falling household consumption, still declining industrial production, and a weak housing market – suggest that America’s recession is not over yet. A similar analysis of many other advanced economies suggests that, as in the US, the bottom is quite close but it has not yet been reached. Most emerging economies may be returning to growth, but they are performing well below their potential.

Moreover, for a number of reasons, growth in the advanced economies is likely to remain anemic and well below trend for at least a couple of years. The first reason is likely to create a longterm drag on growth: households need to deleverage and save more, which will constrain consumption for years.

Second, the financial system – both banks and non-bank institutions – is severely damaged. Lack of robust credit growth will hamper private consumption and investment spending.

Third, the corporate sector faces a glut of capacity, and a weak recovery of profitability is likely if growth is anemic and deflationary pressures still persist. As a result, businesses are not likely to increase capital spending.

Fourth, the re-leveraging of the public sector through large fiscal deficits and debt accumulation risks crowding out a recovery in private-sector spending. The effects of the policy stimulus, moreover, will fizzle out by early next year, requiring greater private demand to support continued growth.

Domestic private demand, especially consumption, is now weak or falling in over-spending countries (the US, the United Kingdom, Spain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, etc.), while not increasing fast enough in over-saving countries (China, Asia, Germany, Japan, etc.) to compensate for the reduction in these countries’ net exports. Thus, there is a global slackening of aggregate demand relative to the glut of supply capacity, which will impede a robust global economic recovery.

There are also now two reasons to fear a double-dip recession. First, the exit strategy from monetary and fiscal easing could be botched, because policymakers are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. If they take their fiscal deficits (and a potential monetization of these deficits) seriously and raise taxes, reduce spending, and mop up excess liquidity, they could undermine the already weak recovery.

But if they maintain large budget deficits and continue to monetize them, at some point – after the current deflationary forces become more subdued – bond markets will revolt. At this point, inflationary expectations will increase, long-term government bond yields will rise, and the recovery will be crowded out.

A second reason to fear a double-dip recession concerns the fact that oil, energy, and food prices may be rising faster than economic fundamentals warrant, and could be driven higher by the wall of liquidity chasing assets, as well as by speculative demand. Last year, oil at USD145 a barrel was a tipping point for the global economy, as it created a major income shock for the US, Europe, Japan, China, India, and other oil-importing economies. The global economy, barely rising from its knees, could not withstand the contractionary shock if similar speculative forces were to drive oil rapidly towards USD100 a barrel.

So the end of this severe global recession will be closer at the end of this year than it is now, the recovery will be anemic rather than robust in advanced economies, and there is a rising risk of a double-dip recession. The recent market rallies in stocks, commodities, and credit may have gotten ahead of the improvement in the real economy. If so, a correction cannot be too far behind.

Millions of Americans have lost their jobs or had their hours cut, and are now trying to stay current on their mortgage payments.

“As a result, as many as six million families are expected to face foreclosures in the next several years,” said the US Treasury in a press release recently. According to RealtyTrac, a housing listing firm, almost one million foreclosure filings were registered in a three-month period (March, April and May) of this year.

The firm forecasts that four million foreclosure filings will be made this year on about 3.1 households with loans. Last year, it was a record of 3.1 million foreclosure filings on about 2.4 million households.

In a typical year, there would be around 800,000 foreclosure filings on 550,000 households, which are considered a significant change!

States where sales and prices soared most in five-year housing boom, the US witnessed earlier this decade remained the hardest hit. Nevada stayed at the top of the foreclosure rate rankings by state, followed by California, Florida and Arizona.

“Just over half of national foreclosures were in these states, where all had massive population growth in the 1990s and the 2000s, and all are above large Hispanic populations, and all have been the site of much housing speculation,” according to figures by state-line.

Other states hit by the foreclosure included Michigan, Georgia, Colorado, Idaho, and Ohio. “Some of these have been high-growth states, while some have a rapidly growing Hispanic population. Some are industrial states that have been hard, by the collapse of the domestic auto companies.”

Meanwhile, recent analysis by various housing companies in addition to financial institutions, suggest that the housing market in the US is unlikely to witness a solid recovery soon.

Young Innovators Moutaz Huneidi and Omar Khresat

The 17-year-olds, are some of many bucking a trend of indifference of previous generations and are hoping to see a reciprocal commitment on the behalf of the public and private sectors.

For five months, the two students worked to produce a clean energy out of unwanted and untapped resources.

“We looked around and saw that Jordan has a lot of pollution, and there are a lot of cans and metals. We wanted to show you can make something positive with them,” Khresat said.

The two classmates came up with a way to convert fossil fuels and seemingly-useless scrap metal into hydrogen- a potential clean energy source to produce carbon-free electricity.

Under their design, diesel is burned and the exhaust fumes are then conducted with aluminum to produce hydrogen- a resource which could dramatically reduce the Kingdom’s energy billwhich currently accounts for over 20 per cent of the GDP.

Their quest to create clean, renewable energy took them and 10 other Jordanian youths from Amman to Reno, Nevada in May, where their project competed at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF).

Their model, “A Design for the Production of Electricity from Exhaust Gases and Scrap Metals,” went up against 1,500 research projects by high school students from over 50 countries at the world’s largest pre-college science showcase and international competition.

They said that despite facing several rounds of stiff competition during the week-long event, sponsored by the Society for Science and the Public, the competition served as an opportunity to highlight Jordan’s potential and scientific know-how.

“A lot of people at the competition had never even heard of Jordan,” Khresat noted.

Out of the thousands of school students who attended, and thousands more who qualified independent research, Huneidi and Khresat received fourth place in the team projects category- a win they called “special” for the Kingdom.

“A lot of the winners were from American or European schools. To hear Jordan’s name called with the list of winners, that was really an accomplishment,” Khresat said, stressing that he was keen to bring “Jordanian pride” to the stage.

The young innovators returned to the Kingdom shortly following their victory, meeting with Environment Minister Khaled Irani among other officials who hailed their initiative and commitment to bettering the Kingdom.

But with the fanfare over their accomplishment fading, Huneidi and Khresat are now facing a question challenging dozens of other like-minded youths who have shown initiative to save the country’s environment.

Approximately four months ago Norman foster and Zaha Hadid lined up one of the most intricate projects on earth, and one that would be watched by the world step by step – the redevelopment of Mecca, it transforms the city of Mecca into a new structure that with the Central Haram at its centre would make it the “highest occupancy” structure in the world, with a capacity of three million people.

The plans are backed by non other than King Abdullah ben Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia and a few handpicked Super Architects who are entrusted with the creation of establishing a 356,800m² mosque complex, it is expected to be finished by 2018.

While Zaha Hadid has been entrusted with the high honor of coming up with the ideas for the Haram mosque itself. Foster + Partners, and Atkins are some of the names that have been heard buzzing around the rumour mill.

This past month it was announced that a new $80 billion (£49 billion) master plan for King Abdullah Economic City in Saudi Arabia was in the works. The firm saw off three other anonymous practices to land the contract with developer Emaar, The Economic City.

SOM will be responsible for “refining and finalizing the existing concept master plan” for the 168km² site, located in Rabigh, north of Jeddah. The scheme is expected to include a healthcare district, numerous residential zones, an industrial park and a knowledge and media city.

Several phase one projects already under construction, such as the sea port and a raft of housing developments, will not be affected.

King Abdullah Economic City will be connected to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina via a new high-speed rail link, featuring stations which will also be designed by Foster + Partners.