RED HERRING | The hundred-buck PC: "The founder and chairman of the MIT Media Lab wants to create a $100 portable computer for the developing world. Nicholas Negroponte, author of Being Digital and the Wiesner Professor of Media Technology at MIT, says he has obtained promises of support from a number of major companies, including Advanced Micro Devices, Google, Motorola, Samsung, and News Corp.

The low-cost computer will have a 14-inch color screen, AMD chips, and will run Linux software, Mr. Negroponte said during an interview Friday with Red Herring at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. AMD is separately working on a cheap desktop computer for emerging markets. It will be sold to governments for wide distribution."

The New York Times > AP > Technology > Teaching Computers to Read No Simple Task: "The Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, or DARPA, granted a contract worth at least $400,000 last fall to two Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute professors who are trying to build a machine that can learn by reading.
The academics hope to create a machine that can read sections of textbooks and answer questions based on the material. Down the road, professor Selmer Bringsjord believes such artificial intelligence, or A.I., machines might be able to read military plans or manuals and adjust on the fly in the heat of battle."

New Scientist Breaking News - Google's search for meaning: "One of the difficulties has been working out how to represent knowledge in ways that allow computers to use it. But suddenly that is not a problem any more, thanks to the massive body of text that is available, ready indexed, on search engines like Google (which has more than 8 billion pages indexed).
The meaning of a word can usually be gleaned from the words used around it. Take the word 'rider'. Its meaning can be deduced from the fact that it is often found close to words like 'horse' and 'saddle'. Rival attempts to deduce meaning by relating hundreds of thousands of words to each other require the creation of vast, elaborate databases that are taking an enormous amount of work to construct."

The Globe and Mail: Billionaire Bill Gates is betting against U.S. dollar: "The U.S. budget shortfall is 'the No. 1 risk, disregarding geopolitical risks' to the global economy, German deputy finance minister Caio Koch-Weser said in a Jan. 27 interview in Davos. He urged Mr. Bush to present a 'credible' plan for getting the deficit under control.
Chinese central bank adviser Yu Yongding said in Davos that the U.S. government should do more to tackle its record current-account deficit and ease pressure on China to loosen its currency's peg to the dollar. 'The U.S. should take the lead in putting its own house in order,' he said. 'It's the root cause' of global imbalances. "

Terrorism: "Attempts to defeat it by purely military means will fail. So long as the sentiments of frustration and injustice on which it feeds persist, new recruits will be found."

Terrorism: "Analysts see this as part of a shift to a new generation of warfare, so-called fourth-generation warfare. They argue that forces shaping this threat are the nation-state's loss of its monopoly on war; and what they see as the return to a world of cultures in conflict. Combined, these produce an opponent with a non-nation-state base, e.g. ideology or religion, relying on terror and other asymmetrical tactics to do battle. This type of warfare is termed 'fourth generation' in reference to the three previous generations that focused on massed manpower, massed firepower, and maneuver, respectively. Fourth generation warfare attempts to directly change the minds of enemy policymakers by means other than the traditional method of battlefield superiority. For example, it seeks to convince public opinion that the price for supporting a particular policy is too high in terms of human suffering."

Terrorism: "Governments are faced with the daunting task of detecting and preventing attacks on their citizens from an enemy who is intelligent, flexible and opportunistic, while preserving the values of freedom that this enemy often seeks to destroy. Priorities include the need to improve the use of intelligence and not just its acquisition; the need to reduce the vulnerability of social and physical infrastructures; the need to prepare emergency services for rapid, large-scale response at national and international level; and that given the transnational nature of terrorist organisations and actions, there is also a clear need to reinforce international cooperation on risk management more generally."

A Reign On the Wane? (washingtonpost.com): "The basic analysis runs like this: Thanks to aggressive fiscal and monetary stimulus, the United States is consuming about 6 percent more than it produces, resulting in a $600 billion trade deficit last year. To finance this extravagant overconsumption, America is in effect selling off claims on its future income, in the form of U.S. Treasury securities that are purchased by the rest of the world. "

BBC NEWS | UK | UK citizens 'face waste mountain': "Nigel Mattravers, vice chairman of ICE's Waste Management Board, says: 'Private companies are constantly fighting an uphill battle against local government and UK residents over the location of plants.
'The general public need to be educated to allay their fears about the dangers of these facilities and understand that refusing them may lead to the much larger problem of millions of tonnes of rubbish with simply nowhere to go.' "

[InternetActu-ng]: Là aussi, la chose n'est pas nouvelle. Mais la répétition incessante de cette prédiction bien connue prend ici un tour nouveau : ce n'est plus simplement la crainte de voir s'effriter la toute puissance américaine qui s'exprime, mais bien la conviction du caractère inéluctable de l'émergence des grands pays asiatiques, et les bouleversements qu'elle entraînera. Ainsi, en soulignant le fait que "la Chine et l'Inde sont bien placés pour devenir des leaders technologiques", et que tous deux "afficheront des PNB surpassant ceux de la plupart des puissances économiques occidentales", le rapport insiste sur "l'impact majeur, au plan géopolitique, économique ou militaire" de l'émergence de ces pays, engendrant une transformation comparable au développement de l'Allemagne au 19e siècle et à l'apparition de la puissance étasunienne au 20e! siècle. "On estime souvent que le 20e siècle a été le siècle de l'Amérique. Le 21e siècle pourrait bien être celui de l'Asie",

Headlines for Thursday, January 27, 2005: "The Washington Post and The Associated Press further report that British Prime Minister Tony Blair also said Wednesday that the world's most powerful nations must act now to curb global warming. Blair said that the US must do more to address the concerns of the rest of the world if it expects support for its own policies, and cited global warming as a prime example. 'If America wants the rest of the world to be part of the agenda it has set, it must be part of their agenda, too,' he told the WEF. The British leader added, however, that Bush's speech at his second term inauguration last week indicated 'there is a wish to reunify' in Washington."

Headlines for Thursday, January 27, 2005: "Given an unusual opportunity to vote on the top six issues that global leaders -- and the forum -- should tackle most urgently, 64 percent of a core group of 750 participants opted for poverty. Next on the list of issues highlighted by a four-hour 'town hall' assembly of the elite meeting in the Swiss alpine report of Davos was 'equitable globalization' (55 percent), followed by climate change (51 percent). Education, conflict in the Middle East and global governance -- the efficient, democratic and corruption-free functioning of governments and international institutions -- were lower down the top six. The six issues are meant to be the focus of the forum's work over the next year."

North County Times - North San Diego and Southwest Riverside County News: "Following a trend among rich nations, the fertility rate in developing countries has dropped below three children per women for the first time, a United Nations report says...The findings reflect trends, common among many researchers including the U.S. Census Bureau, that suggest the world population boom that had been feared in recent decades would not come to pass. A key factor has been the unexpected drop in the fertility rate. "...The report said that with the fertility rate in 20 developed countries now below the replacement rate, the world was seeing "a major and unprecedented reduction in fertility levels."
Among key findings of the report: In the world's 192 countries, the number of women between the ages of 25 and 29 who are single rose from 15 percent in the 1970s to 24 percent in the 1990s. For men, the increase was from 32 percent to 44 percent.
The report, "World Fertility 2003," said government policies had played a central role in changing reproductive behavior. It cited support by 92 percent of all governments for family planning, and widespread backing for the distribution of contraceptives.
According to the report, the use of contraceptives rose from 38 percent to 52 percent of women. In the developing world, the numbers also rose, from 27 percent to 40 percent.

Scientific American: Seeking Better Web Searches: "Today's search engines have their roots in a research field called information retrieval, a computing topic tracing back nearly 50 years. In a September 1966 Scientific American article, ' Information Storage and Retrieval,' Ben Ami Lipetz described how the most advanced information technologies of the day could handle only routine or clerical tasks. He then concluded perceptively that breakthroughs in information retrieval would come when researchers gained a deeper understanding of how humans process information and then endowed machines with analogous capabilities. Clearly, computers have not yet reached that level of sophistication, but they are certainly taking users' personal interests, habits and needs into greater account when completing tasks. "

InfoWorld: Computer scientists identify future IT challenges: January 25, 2005: By : APPLICATION_DEVELOPMENT : APPLICATIONS : HARDWARE: "Architecture of brain and mind: Once seen as a matter for philosophical debate, explaining the connection between the brain (as computing machinery) and the mind (as a virtual software machine) is increasingly becoming a scientific problem of interest in the development of information processing systems;
-- Memories for life: As we all accumulate personal digital memories such as e-mail and photos, it will become necessary to manage the information gathered over a human lifetime. The challenge is to allow people to gain maximum benefit from these auxiliary memories, while maintaining their privacy;
-- In vivo - in silico: Through the human genome project, IT has already brought life sciences forward by leaps and bounds, but the next step is to make possible the computer simulation of entire living organisms, allowing scientists to examine a plant, animal or colony of cells in virtual reality, from the cellular scale on upwards, and at different speeds from freeze-frame to faster than life; "

Wired News: Information Wants to be Liquid: "Hegland's idea is simple -- he plans to move beyond the basic hypertext linking of the web, and change every word into a 'hyperword.' Instead of one or two links in a document, every single word becomes a link. Further, every link can point to more than one place, pulling up all kinds of background context from the web as a whole.
Click on a politician's name and find out who donated to his or her campaign. Click on a town name in a news story and find out what else has happened there.
'We feel that a large part of the history of technology, digital and otherwise, has been about the production of information,' Hegland said. 'It's time to focus on consumption, to help people navigate through information and get relevant information into their heads.' "

Complexity Digest 2004.06: "Human language is a complex and expressive communication system. Children spontaneously develop a native language from speech they hear in their community. Languages change dramatically and unpredictably by accumulating small changes over time and by interacting with other languages. This paper describes a mathematical model illustrating language change. Children learn their parents' language imperfectly, and in the case presented here, the result is a simulated population that maintains an ever-changing mixture of grammars. This research is part of a growing attempt to use mathematical models to better understand the social and biological history of language."

Complexity Society Journal and Papers: "Organizations of all kinds struggle to understand, adapt, respond and manipulate changing conditions in their internal and external environments. Approaches based on the causal, linear logic of mechanistic sciences and engineering continue to play an important role, given people�s ability to create order. But such approaches are valid only within carefully circumscribed boundaries. They become counterproductive when the same organizations display the highly reflexive, context-dependent, dynamic nature of systems in which agents learn and adapt and new patterns emerge. Then the rapidly expanding discussion about complex systems offers important contributions to the integration of diverse perspectives and ultimately new insights into organizational effectiveness."

Paper Abstract - The growth of knowledge and complexity in an evolving network model of technological innovation: In recent papers, Stan Metcalfe (2000a; 2000b) has highlighted the restless nature of capitalist economies largely spurred by a decentralised process of knowledge production. This cumulative growth of knowledge takes place in an auto-catalytic fashion where one novel idea generally leads to another. In addition, the well-known concept of technological ‘paradigm shifts’ suggests that this cumulative process of knowledge growth is disrupted from time to time. The resulting discontinuity ushers in an era of knowledge growth constrained by a new technological paradigm. Finally, historians of technology have demonstrated the importance of complementary technologies and institutional structures in stimulating and stabilising specific innovations.

Paper Abstract - Collective Knowledge: Knowledge Complexity and Cumulative Evolution: "Collective knowledge is a shared activity that can be implemented only by interactive agents that belong to a community of action and understanding. Collective knowledge is the result of the valorization of the elements of latent complementarity among the bits of knowledge possessed by each localized agent "

PINR - U.S. Retreats from Theory of Democratic Transformation in the Middle East: "The United States has lost over 1000 soldiers in Iraq, and it has been forced to keep over 100,000 troops in the country, with the total troop commitment presently hovering around 150,000. This sort of troop obligation has stretched the U.S. military to the point where its present global commitment is simply unsustainable. The ramifications of the extended troop commitment to Iraq are already evident, seen through the May 2004 decision to withdraw an army brigade from the U.S. Army's 2nd Infantry Division in South Korea to Iraq. Finally, the funds required to sustain present operations in Iraq are exorbitant, helping to swell the U.S. budget deficit to $413 billion. Over the long-term, continued high spending in Iraq could bring economic problems, such as an extended trade deficit and high inflation. "

The Challenge Ahead It is difficult to overestimate the challenges the world faces over the next half-century. Not only are there a projected 3 billion more people to feed, but there are also an estimated 5 billion people who want to diversify their diets by moving up the food chain, eating more grainintensive livestock products.....Ensuring future food security is a formidable challenge.
Can we check the HIV epidemic before it so depletes Africa’s adult population that starvation stalks the land? Can we arrest the steady shrinkage in grainland area per person, eliminate the overgrazing that is converting grasslands to desert, and reduce soil erosion losses below the natural rate of new soil formation? Can we simultaneously halt the advancing deserts that are engulfing cropland, check the rising temperature that threatens to shrink harvests, arrest the fall in water tables, and protect cropland from careless conversion to nonfarm uses?

The world water deficit The world water deficit is historically recent. Only within the last half-century, with the advent of powerful diesel and electrically driven pumps, has the world had the pumping capacity to deplete aquifers. The worldwide spread of these pumps since the late 1960s and the drilling of millions of wells, mostly for irrigation, have in
many cases pushed water withdrawal beyond the aquifer’s recharge from rainfall.As a result, water tables are now falling in countries that are home to more than half of the world’s people, including China, India, and the United States—the three largest grain producers.21

Water,seafood ... Water use tripled, but the capacity of the hydrological system to produce fresh water through evaporation changed little. The demand for seafood increased fivefold, but the sustainable yield of oceanic fisheries was unchanged.

Outgrowing the Earth: The Food Security Challenge in an Age of Falling Water Tables and Rising Temperatures: "While public attention has focused on oil depletion, it is aquifer depletion that poses the more serious threat. There are substitutes for oil, but none for water. "

Outgrowing the Earth: The Food Security Challenge in an Age of Falling Water Tables and Rising Temperatures: "When the history of our age is written, it will undoubtedly be labeled 'the era of growth.' The growth in world population since 1950 exceeds that during the preceding 4 million years since we first stood upright. Perhaps more striking, the world economy has expanded sixfold since 1950.
As the economy grows, its demands are outgrowing the earth, exceeding many of its natural capacities. Evidence of these excessive demands can be seen in collapsing fisheries, shrinking forests, expanding deserts, rising CO 2 levels, eroding soils, rising temperatures, disappearing species, falling water tables, melting glaciers, deteriorating grasslands, rising seas, and rivers running dry."

Water shortageswill shape the evolution of China’s economy in fundamental ways. The gravity of the water situation in the North China Plain can be seen in the frenzy of well drilling in recent years. At the end of 1996,
the five provinces of the North China Plain—Heibei, Henan, Shandong, and the city provinces of Beijing and Tianjin—had 3.6 million wells, the bulk of them for irrigation. A detailed study of the situation in 1997 showed 99,900 wells abandoned as they ran dry. Partly to compensate, some 221,900 new wells were drilled. The desperate quest for water in China is evident as well drillers go to ever greater depths, often using technology borrowed from the oil drilling industry.36 Concerns about the tightening water situation are reflected in a World Bank report: “Anecdotal evidence suggests that deep wells [drilled] around Beijing now have to reach 1,000 meters (more than half a mile) to tap fresh water, adding dramatically to the cost of supply.”37

China’s grain production The phenomenal rise in China’s grain production from 90 million tons in 1950 to 392 million tons in 1998 was one of the great economic success stories of the late twentieth century. But in 1998 production peaked and turned downward, falling to 322 million tons in 2003. As noted in Chapter 1, this drop of 70 million tons exceeds the entire grain harvest of Canada.

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "Otherwise, the picture is more sobering -- the persistence of Islamism, the rising prospects of bio-terror, the possibility of more local wars, the appearance of more failed states, the possibility of nuclear proliferation, possible challenges to globalization in major powers caused by shifts in world labor markets, and conflicts over scarce strategic resources, among many others mentioned in the report, none of which can be managed by Washington alone, and all of which can be addressed successfully only by multinational and international initiatives."

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "If the Council rejects the scenario of U.S.-dominated unipolarity and, along with it -- by implication -- a unilateralist foreign policy, neither does it foresee a return to multilateralism, in which Washington leads a permanent and stable Western-oriented coalition against the opponents of Western-dominated globalization. It is already too late to move toward that scenario, not because of the failures of the U.S. intervention in Iraq, but because other power centers -- including the E.U. -- have grown strong enough not to have to accept Washington's leadership or have it imposed on them."

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "At the same time that U.S. power is eroded, the country will become more sensitive to changes in the global economy and increasingly dependent on foreign oil supplies for which competition for secure access will grow. As it strives to pursue its economic and strategic interests, 'more countries will be in a position to make the United States pay a heavy price for any military action they oppose.' Even success in the 'war on terrorism' will depend on 'the capabilities and resolve of individual countries to fight terrorism on their own soil.' In its closest approach to geostrategic advice, the report notes that Washington 'will have many opportunities to extend its advantages, particularly in shaping a new international order that integrates disparate regions and reconciles divergent interests.'"

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "The relative decline of U.S. power is the most certain political trend identified by the report; it has an air of inevitability that places it beyond decisional control. Here the Council issues an implicit warning to Washington -- attempts to assert U.S. world hegemony are doomed to failure and U.S. interests will be best served by policies of 'balancing' and 'reconciling' the conflicting interests of other great powers, and moving toward intelligent retrenchment.

Although it keeps clear of mentioning the term, the report in so many words adopts the thesis that the configuration of world power is shifting inexorably from unipolarity to multipolarity, in which the U.S. is no longer the undisputed superpower, but becomes, at best, first among equals."

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "Politically, globalization means that everyone everywhere is drawn into the same great game of determining the balance of power in an era of fundamental readjustment: 'At no time since the formation of the Western alliance system in 1949 has the shape and nature of international alignments been in such a state of flux.' Under such conditions, geostrategy becomes the indispensable discipline of political analysis because 'the nation state will continue to be the dominant unit of the global order' and will be charged with mediating the multifarious interests impacted by economic globalization. High politics come to the forefront when the future configuration of world power is indeterminate and multiple actors jockey for advantage, with rising powers seeking their places in the sun and status quo powers trying to avoid being pushed into the shade."

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "the report is informed neither by a coherent analysis of the balance of global power nor by a rigorous assessment of the dominant players' interests"

The New York Times > National > Exposure at Germ Lab Reignites a Public Health Debate: "The tularemia episode, acknowledged by university officials only after inquiries last week from the news media, has outraged opponents of the proposed $178 million laboratory and reignited a national debate over whether the rapid expansion in work with dangerous pathogens is adequately regulated and scientifically justified."

State of the World Trends and Facts: The State of Consumption Today: "While the consumer class thrives, great disparities remain. The 12 percent of the world�s population that lives in North America and Western Europe accounts for 60 percent of private consumption spending, while the one-third living in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa accounts for only 3.2 percent."

State of the World Trends and Facts: The State of Consumption Today
By one calculation, there are now more than 1.7 billion members of “the consumer class”—nearly half of them in the developing world. A lifestyle and culture that became common in Europe, North America, Japan, and a few other pockets of the world in the twentieth century is going global in the twenty-first.
Worldwide, private consumption expenditures—the amount spent on goods and services at the household level—topped $20 trillion in 2000, a four-fold increase over 1960 (in 1995 dollars).
As incomes rise, people are gaining access to a multitude of consumer items associated with greater prosperity:
In 2002, 1.12 billion households—about three quarters of humanity—owned at least one television set.
There were 1.1 billion fixed phone lines in 2002, and another 1.1 billion mobile lines.

Center For Global Development China's explosive economic growth has intensified its need for raw material. Energy resources, and foremost oil, are at the top of its shopping list. As other governments have found, however, the quest for oil can lead to investments in highly abusive countries. Beijing, too, now faces the difficult task of securing its energy future without becoming complicit in some of the world's worst human-rights crimes.

Arlington Institute We intend to examine what is being done - and what could be done - to move all of humanity forward in this time of great change. This is big, historic stuff and we'd like to try to get a handle on the requirements, the successes and the possibilities in this process. We want to look at objects of development - (individual, community, society, and all humans) – the requirements for development (awareness, ability, access and resources) and the levels of development (physiological, safety, belonging, esteem, understanding, aesthetics, self-actualization and transcendence).

Is Collective Intelligence Like Individual Intelligence: "PROBLEM-SOLVING / DELIBERATION / JUDGMENT / DECISION-MAKING - Life or teachers present us with problems to solve, options to weigh, decisions to make. In real-life problems, we need to weigh possible solutions against costs, potential consequences, and our values. Intelligence helps us work all this out. HOW DO WE DO THIS COLLECTIVELY? Most of our society's official, visible problem-solving, option-creating and decision-making are done (allegedly) on our behalf by think-tanks, pundits, elected officials, etc. But many decisions that influence the direction of our society are made -- less visibly -- by unanswerable powerholders and corporate executives, scientists and engineers. Democracy involves more public engagement in collective problem-solving and decision-making. Any institutions that help us do this well -- especially by using our diversity well -- become part of our society's collective intelligence capacity. "

Is Collective Intelligence Like Individual Intelligence: "Eight Capacities that Make Up Intelligence
The capacities I explore here are perception, communication, memory, reflection, problem-solving, creativity, implementation, and feedback. They are listed in a loose order (we perceive first, then think about what we saw, then implement what we decide, etc.). Keep in mind, however, that these capacities are not really separate or linear. Most of them are deeply involved in each other's functioning. For example, our memories influence what we perceive. But I think you will find it interesting to explore them separately with me here..."