Gmail - FUTUREdition Volume 8 Number 9: "Smart Traffic Forecast Offers Seven-day Predictions -- (New Scientist -- June 29, 2005)
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7605
A traffic forecasting system capable of predicting traffic conditions seven days in advance has been released to the public in California. Alongside the weather forecast, viewers of KXTV News 10 in Sacramento can now get 3D animations of their local road network, showing not only where the gridlock is but also where it is likely to be"

Edge 163: "We're adding, as I said, exponentially to the number of genes by just doing shotgun sequencing of the environment. There were 188,000 well-characterized genes in the protein data bases; we're up to close to 8 million new ones just from doing random shotgun sequencing from the oceans. And we took all this combined data set and then we tried to see how many different gene families we have on the planet, really, trying to get down to our basic component sets. The number right now is somewhere between 40 and 50 thousand unique gene families, covering all the species that we know about. But every time we take a new sample from the environment and sequence it, we keep adding to those gene families in a linear fashion, seeing that we know very little of the overall biology of our planet. But each of these new genes � and we have literally several million genes of unknown function � some of these we have families over a thousand related proteins or genes in the same family. They're obviously important to biology, they're important to evolution, and beginning to sort out, using bioinformatic tools, what they may do, is giving us a lot of new tools in different areas."

People's Daily Online -- Shanghai population sees its first "zero growth": "News from Shanghai Population and Family Planning Committee says that after witnessing the first negative population growth (- 1.20 permillage) in China in 1994 Shanghai experienced its first 'zero natural growth rate' of permanent population in 2004. "

People's Daily Online -- Exchange rate reform: Also means being responsible to the world: "The Chinese economy, which has maintained stable, rapid growth in the past 20 years or so, has become an inalienable part of the world economy. China's economic scale has ranked sixth in the world's overall economic scale, its actual economy activity calculated on the basis of real purchasing power is placed third in the world, the openness of China's economy (calculated in accordance with the proportion of import and export to GDP) has reached as high as 70 percent, leading various countries around the world, the impact of a fluctuation in China's economy on the world economy is easily visible, any adjustment or reform of the RMB exchange rate must be conducted in an attitude of being responsible for the stability and development of China's economy and the world economy. "

Edge 163: "we're starting to look at the world in terms of gene space instead of genomes and species, and this gets us down to component analysis. "

Edge 163: "Ray Kurzweil believes 'we are entering a new era. Some of us call it the Singularity. It's a merger between human intelligence and machine intelligence which is going to create something bigger than itself. It's the cutting edge of evolution on our planet. One can make a strong case that it's actually the cutting edge of the evolution of intelligence in general, because there's no indication that it has occurred anywhere else. To me that is what human civilization is all about. It is part of our destiny, and part of the destiny of evolution, to continue to progress ever faster and to grow the power of intelligence exponentially.' "

Edge 163: "Brooks is puzzled that 'we've got all these biological metaphors that we're playing around with � artificial immunology systems, building robots that appear lifelike � but none of them come close to real biological systems in robustness and in performance. They look a little like it, but they're not really like biological systems.' He worries that in looking at biological systems we are missing something that is already there � that has always been there. To Brooks, this might be called 'the essence of life,' but he is talking about a biochemical phenomenon, not a metaphysical one. Brooks is searching for a new conceptual framework that, like computation, does not involve any new physics or chemistry � a framework that gives us a different way of thinking about the stuff that's there. 'We see the biological systems, we see how they operate,' he says, 'but we don't have the right explanatory modes to explain what's going on and therefore we can't reproduce all these sorts of biological processes. That to me right now is the deep question.' "

Edge 163: "Along with two veteran collaborators, Dr. Venter hopes to become the first to whip up a made-to-order bacterium. Normally, new life is created via reproduction, with each generation passing its genes on to the next. But Dr. Venter aims to bypass that process by manufacturing a complete set of genes, or genome, of a single-cell bacterium in his laboratory. This man-made genome would be installed inside a bacterium whose own genes have been removed.
By creating such a life form, Dr. Venter's researchers think they may come closer to understanding what life is and how scientists can manipulate it for the benefit of humankind. New artificial species could open avenues for industrial production of drugs, chemicals or clean energy."

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "The Bush administration's tepid response to the Chinese bids reflects its conflicting commitments to globalized markets, national security and domestic interests that increasingly appear to be irreconcilable. Protectionist sentiment, aimed mainly at China, is rising in Congress and could ultimately threaten the globalization process. In a pattern that is becoming familiar over a broad range of international issues, the Bush administration is facing increasing difficulties in sorting out its priorities, giving the advantage to states with more coherent strategies."

NewsArticleThe researchers isolated the cells in culture dishes and used hormones
and growth factors to coax them into becoming fat, muscle, and bone
cells. Implanted in mice, the cells maintained features consistent with
those specific tissues.

The ability to develop specialized, self-replicating cells offers hope
for repairing damaged cells in patients with spinal cord injuries,
diabetes, Alzheimer's disease, stroke, burns, and other maladies.

New Water Technology Research Center to Address Escalating Wa... 6/23/2005:As the population of California continues to climb — by some estimates Southern California alone is expected to reach a record 8 million people by 2020 — both the infrastructure and the salinity challenges will escalate.

Currently, as the result of the necessary importation of water into California, about 630,000 tons of salt annually accumulates in California aquifers, damaging the state's water infrastructure in the range of $95 million per year. Dealing with the water waste and the disposal of the concentrated pollutants collected from the water also is an expensive challenge.

New Water Technology Research Center to Address Escalating Wa... 6/23/2005: The development of next-generation desalination technologies is critical — saline and brackish waters constitute more than 97 percent of the water in the world. Less than 3 percent of water has a salinity content that can be considered safe for human consumption, according to the National Academies' "Review of the Desalination and Water Purification Technology Roadmap."

Knowledge Center: "The usual approach to environmental policy attempts to take these facts into account. It is based on a number of assumptions, including the urgency of the problems; need for a strong economy; tradeoffs with economic goals, military priorities, etc. Goals include a health-promoting, aesthetically pleasing environment; preservation of a diversity of plant and animal species; halting of desertification and restoration of arable land where feasible; limiting deforestation and restoration by reforesting; reducing the likelihood of unpleasant man-made climate-change surprises; halting impairment of the natural ozone layer."

Knowledge Center: The claim to view things holistically has become quite fashionable. However, it is more often claimed than actualized. To take a truly whole-system view of today's global problems requires a dramatic shift in perspective. One needs to think about the problems—environmental degradation, man-made climate change, punctured ozone layer, chronic hunger and poverty, ever-increasing numbers of marginalized people, and so on—not as problems to be solved, but as symptoms of some more fundamental underlying systemic condition. In the whole-system view it is that underlying condition which must be dealt with; otherwise the solutions to apparent problems will simply continue to lead to other problems.

New Scientist Premium- Half human, half beast? - Breaking News: "A few human cells don't make an animal human. But what if it's 10%, or 50%? Welcome to the moral minefield of human-animal chimeras
ON THE surface, it looked like a dry and somewhat technical report on stem cells. But inside there was something extraordinary. The guidelines for research on embryonic stem cells issued by the US National Academy of Sciences in April took meticulous care to address a kind of experimentation that sounds more like science fiction than science. In a section titled 'Interspecies Mixing', the authors concluded that there were 'valid scientific reasons' for creating chimeras - living entities composed of both human and animal cells. "

Science News Article | Reuters.com: "In an idea straight out of science fiction, robots could soon begin patrolling Japanese offices, shopping malls and banks to keep them safe from intruders. Equipped with a camera and sensors, the 'Guardrobo D1,' developed by Japanese security firm Sohgo Security Services Co., is designed to patrol along pre-programmed paths and keep an eye out for signs of trouble. "

Chinese Oil Giant in Takeover Bid for U.S. Corporation - New York Times: "One of China's largest state-controlled oil companies made a $18.5 billion unsolicited bid Thursday for Unocal, signaling the first big takeover battle by a Chinese company for an American corporation.
The bold bid, by the China National Offshore Oil Corporation ( CNOOC), may be a watershed in Chinese corporate behavior, and it demonstrates the increasing influence on Asia of Wall Street's bare-knuckled takeover tactics.
Seventy-three percent of Unocal's natural gas reserves are in Asia; this platform is in the Gulf of Thailand. The offer is also the latest symbol of China's growing economic power and of the soaring ambitions of its corporate giants, particularly when it comes to the energy resources it needs desperately to continue feeding its rapid growth."

KurzweilAI.net: "We are really at the beginnings of the tissue regeneration revolution,' Colonel Vandre of the Army said. 'Now that we have learned how to manipulate genes and are learning how to influence cell growth and differentiation, we can truly start to think about regenerating whole body organs and parts such as limbs.'"

Foreign Affairs - The Human-Animal Link - William B. Karesh and Robert A. CookIn recent years, outbreaks of diseases such as avian flu, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), the Ebola virus, and mad cow disease have frightened the public, disrupted global commerce, caused massive economic losses, and jeopardized diplomatic relations. These diseases have also shared a worrisome key characteristic: the ability to cross the Darwinian divide between animals and people. None of these illnesses depends on human hosts for its survival; as a result, they all persist today, far beyond the reach of medical intervention.

Foreign Affairs - The Human-Animal Link - William B. Karesh and Robert A. Cook: "Meanwhile, humanity has become vulnerable to cross-species illnesses, thanks to modern advances such as the rapid transportation of both goods and people, increasing population density around the globe, and a growing dependence on intensified livestock production for food. The global transport of animals and animal products, which includes hundreds of species of wildlife, also provides safe passage for the harmful bacteria, viruses, and fungi they carry, not to mention the prion proteins that cause insidious illnesses such as mad cow disease and chronic wasting disease in deer and elk."

Foreign Affairs - The Human-Animal Link - William B. Karesh and Robert A. Cook: "Summary: Recent outbreaks of avian flu, SARS, the Ebola virus, and mad cow disease wreaked havoc on global trade and transport. They also all originated in animals. Humanity today is acutely vulnerable to diseases that start off in other species, yet our health care remains dangerously blinkered. It is time for a new, global approach."

Foreign Affairs - The Next Pandemic? - Laurie Garrett: "Yet this level of damage hardly approaches the catastrophe that the United States would face in a severe flu pandemic. The CDC predicts that a 'medium-level epidemic' could kill up to 207,000 Americans, hospitalize 734,000, and sicken about a third of the U.S. population. Direct medical costs would top $166 billion, not including the costs of vaccination. An H5N1 avian influenza that is transmittable from human to human could be even more devastating: assuming a mortality rate of 20 percent and 80 million illnesses, the United States could be looking at 16 million deaths and unimaginable economic costs. This extreme outcome is a worst-case scenario; it assumes failure to produce an effective vaccine rapidly ... "

Foreign Affairs - The Next Pandemic? - Laurie Garrett: "Scientists have long forecast the appearance of an influenza virus capable of infecting 40 percent of the world's human population and killing unimaginable numbers. Recently, a new strain, H5N1 avian influenza, has shown all the earmarks of becoming that disease. Until now, it has largely been confined to certain bird species, but that may be changing."

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "If the 'second wave' powers consider that the current international mechanisms and laws are unsuitable to dealing with unique pressures prevalent in each country in question, then a new set of political paradigms may emerge that will be better suited to solving problems unique to each country. This possible development demands that Washington and other power centers around the world prepare themselves not just for the more obvious geopolitical challenges stemming from rapidly emerging new powers, but also for the upcoming difficulties and uncertainties in dealing with a dozen new regional players. This new 'multifaceted multipolarity' will generate new sets of both setbacks and opportunities, and today's preparation, far-reaching policy implementation and planning will encourage more peaceful problem solving in the increasingly complex world of the coming decades. "

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "The formula that supports the emergent geopolitical prominence of several countries in the coming decades incorporates solid governance, strong state institutions (not necessarily run along democratic-capitalist lines), government control over military and internal affairs, as well as strong economies capable of competing in global terms. The absence of one or more of such conditions may render the state incapable of providing safety and security for its population, leaving the door open to possible subversion or influence by outside forces. "

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "Based on the way in which each of the major regional power centers perceives its interests, assesses its relative power and calculates its future power, a period of short term stability is likely in global politics. After that, the long term strategic aims of the players have the potential of coming into more intense conflict."

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "Major aims of Washington's current policy include partnering with Tokyo to contain Beijing, restoring its influence in South America in the face of resistance from Brasilia, stabilizing Iraq and Afghanistan, encouraging further pro-Western movements in Russia's near abroad, and leaguing with the peripheral states in the E.U. to balance the Franco-German combine. None of those goals depends for its realization on further military interventions."

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "The short term interest in stability that is apparently shared by all of the major power centers is based on particular circumstances in each case and is actuated either by a perceived need to retrench or by the goal of protecting processes of economic and military development. The restorationist power centers include the United States, the European Union and Russia; the rising power centers are China, India and Brazil."

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "Assessment of the geopolitical future is broken down into short (up to five years), medium (five to ten years) and long term (10-20 years) scenarios, with any projection longer than 20 years sheer guess work. It is obvious that confidence in projections diminishes rapidly when they move beyond the short term because possible contingencies multiply at a geometrical progression. Even the short term prediction of relative stability could be disturbed by current and possible developments, including nuclear proliferation and intimidation, actions by Islamic revolutionaries, local wars in Africa and perhaps the Middle East, a more drastic turn towards the left in South America, increased tensions between India and Pakistan or mainland China and Taiwan, and a more militaristic policy in Russia, to name just a few."

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "The short term likelihood of global stability does not prefigure a similar result in the medium and long terms; it is a consequence of a specific conjuncture in which all the major regional power centers are constrained to turn inwards in order to cope with domestic political strains and to fit themselves for achieving their more ambitious strategic aims in the future. The present moment of stasis is just as likely to be a prelude to a period of intensified conflict as it is to presage long term peace."

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "A year later, the configuration of multipolar world power is coming into focus and shows signs of settling into a stable alignment in the short term that promises a period in which no great power has an interest in taking major military initiatives -- an era of relative peace in which some powers attempt to regroup and retrench to make up for their loss of momentum, and others try to accelerate their ascent by continuing their economic growth and enhancing their military capabilities."

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "Since the U.S. intervention in Iraq revealed the limits of Washington's ability to implement its security strategy of becoming the unquestioned political and military arbiter of the globalizing world economy, the underlying tendencies towards a multipolar configuration of world politics have crystallized into hard and obvious fact.

The scenario of U.S. power dominating in every region of the world for generations to come was always an ideological construction that was bound to be contradicted by the rise of regional power centers with interests at variance with Washington's aims; the difficulties encountered in the occupation of Iraq simply hastened the awareness of competing power centers that Washington could be opposed effectively without incurring unacceptable costs."

KurzweilAI.net: "Major universities like Carnegie Mellon and the University of California at Berkeley, as well as companies and the United States military, are exploring ways in which people can be enhanced by strapping themselves into wearable robotics, or exoskeletons."

The Arlington Institute'Cities in Crisis', Leaders Warn -- (BBC News -- June 5, 2005)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3658752.stm
World leaders and mayors have warned that rapid urbanisation is set to become one of the biggest challenges facing humanity in the 21st Century. Already 50% of the world's population live in an urban setting and that could grow to two-thirds by 2050, the World Urban Forum in Barcelona was told.

The Arlington InstituteThe Mad Genius from the Bottom of the Sea -- (Wired -- June 6, 2005)
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.06/craven.html?pg=1&topic=craven&topic_set=
The new energy system exploits the dramatic temperature difference between ocean water below 3,000 feet - perpetually just above freezing - and the much warmer water and air above it. That temperature gap can be harnessed to create a nearly unlimited supply of energy. Already, 39-degree-Fahrenheit water courses through the Natural Energy Lab's newest pipe - a 55-inch-diameter, 9,000-foot-long polyethylene behemoth - at the rate of 27,000 gallons a minute, 24 hours a day.

The Arlington InstituteArtificial Heart -- (BBC News -- June 1, 2005)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4598751.stm
Peter Houghton was just weeks away from certain death when doctors offered him a radical new treatment - would he like the world's first mechanical heart? The device, costing �60,000 for the device alone and between �100-200,000 for the hospital care, is much smaller than other similar devices and can be left in permanently.

The Arlington InstituteOur North Loses the Pole -- (Edmonton Journal -- June 9, 2005)
http://www.canada.com/edmonton/edmontonjournal/news/story.html?id=658628d5-fc19-48e0-add8-bc0fbebadfe9
The magnetic North Pole's current location has now left Canadian territory and crossed into international waters. The pole, which, unlike the geographic North Pole, is in constant movement- is picking up the pace, suddenly charging ahead toward the edge of Canadian territory. It has been within modern Canadian borders since at least the 1600s -- the time of Shakespeare and Sir Isaac Newton.

The Arlington InstituteTechnology that Imitates Nature -- (Economist -- June 9, 2005)
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=4031083
Surely human intellect, and the deliberate application of design knowledge, can devise better mechanisms than the mindless, random process of evolution? Far from it. In some cases, engineers can spend decades inventing and perfecting a new technology, only to discover that nature beat them to it. For this reason scientists have spent the past three years building a database of biological tricks which engineers will be able to access to find natural solutions to their design problems.

The Arlington InstituteScientists have grown fully mature brain cells in a laboratory for the first time, using a technique that mimics the natural process of brain regeneration.
NASA has used multispectral imaging to decipher lost texts of Sophocles and Euripides as well as some early Christian gospels that do not appear in the New Testament.
Scientists at UCLA have initiated a fusion reaction using a laboratory device that's not much bigger than a breadbox, and works at roughly room temperature.
An effort to create the first computer simulation of the entire human brain, right down to the molecular level, was launched.
The magnetic North Pole is now further from where scientists anticipated, and continues traveling faster, presently outside of its Canadian home and moving through international waters.

Asia Times Online :: Asian news and current affairs: "The monetary value of US pension funds is more than $15 trillion, the bulk of which belongs to average workers. A new form of social capitalism emerged that would gladly eliminate the worker's job in order to give him or her a higher return on his or her pension account. "

Asia Times Online :: Asian news and current affairs: "Market fundamentalism as espoused by the United States, far from being a valid science universally, was increasingly viewed by the rest of the world as merely US national ideology, unsupported even by US historical conditions. "

Asia Times Online :: Asian news and current affairs: "the US can print dollars at will and with immunity. The dollar is a fiat currency not backed by gold, not backed by US productivity, not backed by US export prowess, but backed by US military power. The US military budget request for Fiscal Year 2005 is $420.7 billion. For Fiscal Year 2004, it was $399.1 billion; for 2003, $396.1 billion; for 2002, $343.2 billion; and for 2001, $310 billion. In the first term of George W Bush's presidency, the US spent $1.5 trillion on its military. That is more than the entire gross domestic product of China in 2004. The US trade deficit is about 6% of its GDP, while it military budget is about 4%. In other words, the trading partners of the US are paying for one and a half times the cost of a military that can some day be used against any one of them for any number of reasons, including trade disputes. The anti-dollar crowd has nothing to celebrate about the recurring US trade deficit. "

Asia Times Online :: Asian news and current affairs: "Gibbon estimated that Christians killed more of their own members over religious disputes in the three centuries after coming to secular power than did the Romans in three previous centuries. Persecution of the Jews began in Christianized Rome. The disdain held by early Christianity for centralized government gave rise to monasticism and contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire. "

Asia Times Online :: Asian news and current affairs: "The Romans were faced with a dilemma. Secular Jewish ideas and values were permeating Roman society, but Judaism was an exclusive religion that the Romans were not permitted to join. The Romans could not assimilate the Jews as they did the Greeks. Early Christianity also kept its exclusionary trait until Paul, who opened Christianity to all. Historian Edward Gibbon (1737-94) noted that Rome recognized the Jews as a nation who as such were entitled to religious peculiarities. The Christians, on the other hand, were a sect and, being without a nation, subverted other nations. The Roman Jews were active in government and, when not resisting Rome against social injustice, fought side by side with Roman legionnaires to preserve the empire. Roman Jews were good Roman citizens. By contrast, the early Christians were social dropouts, refused responsibility in government and civic affairs and were conscientious objectors and pacifists in a militant culture. Gibbon noted that Rome felt that the crime of a Christian was not in what he did, but in being who he was. "

Asia Times Online :: Asian news and current affairs: "It is the modern-day monetary equivalent of the brilliant Roman strategy of making a dissident Jew a Christian god to preempt Judaism's rising cultural domination over Roman civilization. "

Asia Times Online :: Asian news and current affairs: "World trade under dollar hegemony is a game in which the US produces paper dollars and the rest of the world produces real things that paper dollars can buy. The world's interlinked economies no longer trade to capture comparative advantage; they compete in exports to capture needed dollars to service dollar-denominated foreign debts and to accumulate dollar reserves to sustain the exchange value of their domestic currencies in foreign-exchange markets. "

Asia Times Online :: Asian news and current affairs: "Price arbitrage is the opposite of wage arbitrage in that producers seek to make their goods in the lowest wage locations and to sell their goods in the highest price markets"

Asia Times Online :: Asian news and current affairs: "Exports of manufactures by low-wage developing countries have increased rapidly over the past three decades due in part to falling tariffs and declining transport costs that enable outsourcing based on wage arbitrage. It grew from 25% in 1965 to nearly 75% over three decades, while agriculture's share of developing-country exports has fallen from 50% to less than 10%. Many developing countries have gained relatively little from increased manufactures trade, with most of the profit going to foreign capital. "

Asia Times Online :: Asian news and current affairs: " 'The language of globalization is all about democracy, free trade and sharing the benefits of technological advance. The reality is about rule by elites, mercantilism and selfishness.' Elliot noted that the process is full of paradoxes: why is it that in a world where human capital is supposed to be the new wealth of nations, labor is treated with such contempt? "

Asia Times Online :: Asian news and current affairs: " Foreign trade and foreign investment have become the prerequisite engines for domestic development. This trade model condemns those economies with trade deficits to perpetual underdevelopment. Because of dollar hegemony, all foreign investment goes only to the export sector where US dollars can be earned. Even the economies with trade surpluses cannot use their dollar trade earnings for domestic development, as they are forced to hold huge dollar reserves to support the exchange rate of their currencies. "

Asia Times Online :: Asian news and current affairs: "The WTO is the only global international organization dealing with the rules of trade among its 148 member nations. At its heart are the WTO agreements, known as the multilateral trading system, negotiated and signed by the majority of the world's trading nations and ratified in their parliaments. The stated goal is to help producers of goods and services, exporters and importers conduct their business, with the dubious assumption that trade automatically brings equal benefits to all participants. The welfare of the people is viewed only as a collateral aim based on the doctrinal fantasy that 'balanced' trade inevitably brings prosperity equally to all, a claim that has been contradicted by facts produced by the very terms of trade promoted by the WTO itself."

Asia Times Online :: Asian news and current affairs: "In fact, protectionism was the economic system believed in and practiced by the framers of our constitution. Protective tariffs were the principal source of revenue for our federal government from its beginning in 1789 until the passage of the 16th Amendment, which created the federal income tax, in 1913. "

Asia Times Online :: Asian news and current affairs: "Since the end of the Cold War some 15 years ago, world economic growth has shifted to rely exclusively on globalized neo-liberal trade engineered and led by the US as the sole remaining superpower, financed with the US dollar as the main reserve currency for trade and anchored by the huge US consumer market made possible by the high wages of US workers."

Asia Times Online :: Asian news and current affairs: "For all its ill effects, the Cold War achieved two formidable ends: it prevented nuclear war and it introduced development as a moral imperative into superpower geopolitical competition with rising economic equality within each bloc. In the years since the end of the Cold War, nuclear terrorism has emerged as a serious threat and domestic development is preempted by global trade, even in the rich economies, while income and wealth disparity has widened everywhere. "

Asia Times Online :: Asian news and current affairs: "During the Cold War, there was no international free trade. The economies of the two contending ideology blocs were completely disconnected. Within each bloc, economies interacted through foreign aid and memorandum trade from their respective superpowers. The competition was not for profit but for the hearts and minds of the people in the two opposing blocs, as well as those in the non-aligned nations in the Third World. The competition between the two superpowers was to give rather than to take from their separate fraternal economies."

Asia Times Online :: Asian news and current affairs: "Barely five years into the 21st century, with a globalized neo-liberal trade regime firmly in place in a world where market economy has become the norm, trade protectionism appears to be fast re-emerging and developing into a new global trade war of complex dimensions. The irony is that this new trade war is being launched not by the poor economies that have been receiving the short end of the trade stick, but by the US, which has been winning more than it has been losing on all counts from globalized neo-liberal trade, with the European Union following suit in lockstep. "

Asia Times Online :: Asian news and current affairs: "Many historians have suggested that the 1929 stock market crash was not the cause of the Great Depression. If anything, the 1929 crash was the technical reflection of the inevitable fate of an overblown bubble economy. Yet stock market crashes can recover within a relatively short time with the help of effective government monetary measures, as demonstrated by the crashes of 1987 (23% drop, recovered in nine months), 1998 (36% drop, recovered in three months) and 2002 (37% drop, recovered in two months). "

New Skin Lets Robots Get Sensitive: "Scientists are working on a type of skin that will allow robots to be more touchy feely.
The high-tech skin has fingernail sized sensors embedded all over its surface. The sensors allow a robot to �feel� changes in its surroundings and move accordingly."

KurzweilAI.net: And creating knowledge is what the human species is all about. We're the only species that has knowledge that we pass down from generation to generation. That’s what you've been doing for the last four years. That’s what you will continue doing indefinitely. We are expanding exponentially human knowledge and that is really what is exciting about the future.

KurzweilAI.net: "The implications of all this is we will extend human longevity. We've already done that. A thousand years ago, human life expectancy was about 23. So most of you would be senior citizens if this were taking place a thousand years ago. In 1800, 200 years ago, human life expectancy was 37. So most of the parents here, including myself, wouldn't be here. It was 50 years in 1900. It�s now pushing 80. Every time there�s been some advance in technology we've pushed it forward.: sanitation, antibiotics. This biotechnology revolution will expand it again. Nanotechnology will solve problems that we don't get around to with biotechnology. "

KurzweilAI.net: If all the AI programs, narrow AI, that’s embedded in our economic infrastructure were to stop today, our human civilization would grind to a halt. So we're already very integrated with our technology. Computer technology used to be very remote. Now we carry it in our pockets. It'll soon be in our clothing. It’s already begun migrating into our bodies and brains. We will become increasingly intimate with our technology.

KurzweilAI.net: "energy. We have a little bit of sunlight here today. If we captured .03 percent, that�s three ten-thousandths of the sunlight that falls on the Earth, we could meet all of our energy needs. We can't do that today because solar panels are very heavy, expensive and inefficient. New nano-engineered designs, designing them at the molecular level will enable us to create very inexpensive, very efficient, light-weight solar panels, store the energy in nano-engineered fuel cells, which are highly decentralized, and meet all of our energy needs."

KurzweilAI.net: The fat insulin receptor gene says, “Hold on to every calorie because the next hunting season may not work out so well.” And that’s a gene we'd like to reprogram. It made sense 20 thousand years ago when calories were few and far between. What would happen if we blocked that? We have a new technology that can turn genes off called RNA interference. So when that gene was turned off in mice, these mice ate ravenously and yet they remained slim. They got the health benefits of being slim. They didn't get diabetes, didn't get heart disease or cancer. They lived 20 to 25 percent longer while eating ravenously. There are several pharmaceutical companies who have noticed that might be a good human drug.

KurzweilAI.net: "We have little software programs inside us called genes, about 23 thousand of them. They were designed or evolved tens of thousands of years ago when conditions were quite different. "

KurzweilAI.net:G, genetics, which is really a term for biotechnology, means that we are gaining the tools to actually understand biology as information processes and reprogram them. Now, 99 percent of the drugs that are on the market today were not done that way. They were done through drug discovery, basically finding something. “Oh, here’s something that lowers blood pressure.” We have no idea why it works or how it works and invariably it has lots of side effects, similar to primitive man and woman when they discovered their first tools. “Oh, here’s a rock, this will make a good hammer.” But we didn't have the means of shaping the tools to actually do a job. We're now understanding the information processes underlying disease and aging and getting the tools to reprogram them.

KurzweilAI.net: The same thing is true in biology. It took us 15 years to sequence HIV. We sequenced SARS in 31 days. We’ll soon be able to sequence a virus in just a few days’ time. We're basically doubling the power of these technologies every year.

And that’s going to lead to three great revolutions that sometimes go by the letters GNR: genetics, nanotechnology and robotics. Let me describe these briefly and talk about the implications for our lives ahead

KurzweilAI.net: "IBM's new Blue Gene Watson performed 91.3 trillion calculations per second, or 91.3 teraflops. That means it's second only to IBM's original Blue Gene/L system, the fastest supercomputer in the world. "

The Connection.org : The Ethics of Creating Consciousness: "But if computer programs start generating these patterns -- these electrical 'thoughts' -- then what separates us from them? Traditionally human beings have reserved words like 'reasoning,' 'self-awareness,' and 'soul' as their exclusive property. But with the stirring of something akin to electronic consciousness -- some argue that human beings need to give up the ghost, and embrace the machine in all of us."

The Connection.org : The Ethics of Creating Consciousness: "Next month, IBM is set to activate the most ambitious simulation of a human brain yet conceived. It's a model they say is accurate down to the molecule."

KurzweilAI.net: "The key to getting robots to perform complex tasks may not be in making them smarter. Instead, it may be in getting a lot of dumb robots to act together.

That's the idea behind a project being led by the University of Pennsylvania, funded by a $5 million grant from the Department of Defense. The purpose of the Scalable Swarms of Autonomous Robots and Sensors project is to create software and tools that enable a person to direct a swarm or swarms of small robots.

If it succeeds, the project would enable the creation of large groups of robots that can act intelligently, even though the robots making up the groups aren't too bright."

EarthTrends: The Environmental Information Portal: "Welcome to EarthTrends, an online collection of information regarding the environmental, social, and economic trends that shape our world. Committed to the principle that accurate information drives responsible decisions by governments and individuals, EarthTrends offers the public a large breadth of statistical, graphic, and analytical data in easily accessible formats. "

BBC - Science & Nature - Cavemen - human evolution - 150,000 years: "One way this can occur is through a catastrophe that wipes out a large proportion of a population. If we compare the genes of modern people from all over the world, they are remarkably similar, suggesting that the ancestors of all living people expanded from a small population that survived a bottleneck. The ancient bottleneck proposed by Professor Goldstein must have occurred in Africa, where modern humans evolved.
'Our data suggests there was a bottleneck that was not that recent,' says Goldstein. The genetic data puts the likely date for this event at just before 100,000 years ago."

People's Daily Online -- Kissinger: Conflict with China not an option: "As a new century begins, the relations between China and the United States may well determine whether our children will live in turmoil even worse than the 20th century or whether they will witness a new world order compatible with universal aspirations for peace and progress. "

People's Daily Online -- Kissinger: Conflict with China not an option: "The rise of China - and Asia - will, over the next decades, bring about a substantial reordering of the international system. The center of gravity of world affairs is shifting from the Atlantic to the Pacific. "

The Times Online guest contributors Opinion: A more plausible theory is that which is emerging from both biology and artificial intelligence. As Daniel Dennett, the philosopher, puts it: “Complex systems can in fact function in what seems to be a thoroughly ‘purposeful and integrated’ way simply by having lots of subsystems doing their own thing without any central supervision.” The self, then, is not what it seems to be. There is no soul, no spirit, no supervisor. There is just a brain, a dull grey collection of neurons and neural pathways — going about its business. The illusion of self is merely a by-product of the brain’s organisational sophistication.

People's Daily Online -- US pays high price for war on terrorism: "But some countries were seeing the benefits of co-operation and it was therefore 'hasty to assume that the unilateral rather than the multilateral approach to wielding power will shape the globe's future,' she said. "

People's Daily Online -- US pays high price for war on terrorism: "

United States' defence expenditure in 2004 accounted for almost half of the global total and exceeded the 32 next most powerful nations combined, a prominent Swedish think-tank said on Tuesday.
US spending had increased rapidly between 2002-04 as a result of massive budgetary allocations for the so-called 'global war on terrorism,' primarily for military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said in its annual report.
US defence spending stood at US$405 billion in 2003 and US$455 billion in the following year, said SIPRI. US defence spending in 2004 was 47 per cent of the global total, which exceeded US$1 trillion dollars for the first time since the end of the Cold War. "

World Trends Research - Ten Trends Reshaping the Global Landscape: "Tenth, the world is in the midst of a long-term spiritual and psychological reorientation that is increasingly generating uncertainty and instability. This trend is best exemplified not by public opinion polls stating what percentage of the population believes in God, but by the character of the Western world�s postmodern culture. To understand the extent of this spiritual reorientation, look at the section on religion in any American bookstore. As well as books on Christianity, there are books on New Age spirituality, Buddhism, Nostradamus, yoga, fundamentalism, channeling, angels, miracles, Eastern philosophy, addiction, psychic health, mysticism, or finding meaning in life. All evidence of a massive spiritual uncertainty, and a search for some new spiritual dispensation."

World Trends Research - Ten Trends Reshaping the Global Landscape: " In Germany, the death rate has exceeded the birth rate for decades, so the government now has to fly in planeloads of technicians from India just to maintain the German high tech structure. "

World Trends Research - Ten Trends Reshaping the Global Landscape: "Ninth, the largest migration in history is changing the face of nations. In China, one hundred million people are moving from the country to the city. In the West, the European Union needs 180 million immigrants in the next three decades simply to keep its population at 1995 levels, as well as to keep the current ratio of retirees to workers."

World Trends Research - Ten Trends Reshaping the Global Landscape: "Eighth, globalization has moved far beyond economics and finance, and has now moved to a stage where western political, social, cultural and philosophical ideas are gradually seeping into the fabric of the rest of the world. While we Americans believe what works for America will work for all nations, we sometimes forget that cultural differences between the U.S. and other nations represent profound psychological differences. "

World Trends Research - Ten Trends Reshaping the Global Landscape: Seventh, science is in the process of redefining our understanding of terms first given us at the dawn of human consciousness: such terms as “life,” “nature” and “human.”

World Trends Research - Ten Trends Reshaping the Global Landscape: "Fourth, the information environment in which the individual lives has been radically altered. Throughout history, the transmission of information, ideas and images took place slowly, taking weeks, even months, to move around the world. Such a slow pace of information travel gave people time to adjust psychologically to a new information environment. Today, we zap information, ideas and images across the globe in nanoseconds. People have no time to adjust, no time to assimilate the new information and shape it into coherent meaning. The result is uncertainty and disorientation."

World Trends Research - Ten Trends Reshaping the Global Landscape: "Third, the accelerating tempo of life has now become a critical issue in mental health. The emphasis on constant change has created a clash of different time scales. The time scales created by technology clash with the time scale required by natural life. Unhurried time is essential for natural growth. Yet speed, which is the forced compression of time, is increasingly necessary for the modern economy. Some suggest that we�ve moved beyond the age of speed and have entered the era of �real time.� There is now, they say, only a single �world time.�"

World Trends Research - Ten Trends Reshaping the Global Landscape: "Second, the world is still seeking a new geopolitical configuration. We are at the end of a 500-year period when the Atlantic-centered nations dominated world economic, political and military affairs. For the first time in modern history, China and Japan both have economies larger than any European national economy, and, along with India, may become the world�s center of technological innovation and production."

ZNet |Terror War | 'War on Terror' Has Indigenous People in Its Sights: "The 'war on terror', identified in Amnesty International's annual report as a new source of human rights abuses, is threatening to expand to Latin America, targeting indigenous movements that are demanding autonomy and protesting free-market policies and 'neo-liberal' globalisation. "

RADIO FREE EUROPE/ RADIO LIBERTY: "These 'elite networks' consist of criminals with high-level contacts within government and regulatory structures throughout Europe and in Russia who are able to influence decision makers to their benefit and to the detriment of the normal commercial process.

'Mapping the Global Future' points out: 'Some organized crime syndicates will form loose alliances with one another. They will attempt to corrupt leaders of unstable, economically fragile, or failing states, insinuate themselves into troubled banks and businesses, exploit information technologies, and cooperate with insurgent movements to control substantial geographic areas.' "

RADIO FREE EUROPE/ RADIO LIBERTY: "This is how the U.S. National Intelligence Council (NIC) described the coming criminal threat in its 'Global Trends 2015' report issued in December 2000: 'Disaffected states, terrorists, proliferators, narcotraffickers, and organized criminals will take advantage of the new high-speed information environment and other advances in technology to integrate their illegal activities and compound their threat to stability and security around the world.' "

RADIO FREE EUROPE/ RADIO LIBERTY: "Globalization of the world's economic and information infrastructure is shaping a new organized criminal elite. And while the organized criminal gangs of the second half of the 20th century have not disappeared, they are preparing to follow the money and adjust to the economic/regional transformations of the new century."

Foreign Affairs - Book Review - Mapping the Global Future: Report of the National Intelligence Council's 2020 Project - National Intelligence Council: " It stresses the crucial importance of globalization as an 'overarching 'mega-trend.'' It puts great emphasis on the rise of China and India as major global players, while forecasting the persistence of American military dominance. It sees great-power war as highly unlikely, but terrorism and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction as ongoing and perhaps deepening challenges."

People's Daily Online -- World culture: Unilateral or pluralistic?: "The previous local and national self-sufficient and self-seclusion state had been replaced by mutual exchange and interdependence in all aspects of various nations. This is true of material production as well as spiritual production. The intellectual products of various nations became public properties. National one-sidedness and limitations have become increasingly impossible, as a result, a kind of world literature was formed out of multiple national and local literatures.
Classical writers' thesis on 'world literature' here can be understood as 'world culture' in a broad sense. As a matter of fact, the crux of the matter does not lie in whether or not there is world culture, but in what kind of world culture humankind is to build in the 21st century. "

New Scientist Breaking News - Mission to build a simulated brain begins: "An effort to create the first computer simulation of the entire human brain, right down to the molecular level, was launched on Monday.
The �Blue Brain� project, a collaboration between IBM and a Swiss university team, will involve building a custom-made supercomputer based on IBM�s Blue Gene design."

CNN.com - The machine that can�copy anything - Jun 2, 2005: "The concept of self-replicating machines dates back to the work of mathematician John von Neumann, who proposed the idea of a 'Universal Constructor' that could copy itself in the 1950s.
Von Neumann suggested that the generational development of a machine would display similar characteristics to Darwinian evolution as users honed and varied its design to suit their needs."

New Global Problems :Eight major challenges confront the international community today. They exceed the capacity to cope of individual countries. They are: poverty and social polarization;
global population growth; failing states; new wars and privatized violence; insuffi cient drinking water supplies; climate change and shrinking biodiversity; volatile international fi nancial markets; and economic marginalization of groups of countries and regions.

Governance
First, we face unprecedented problems at a global level – questions of war and
peace, of climate change, of environmental sustainability, and of poverty.
• Second, these problems cannot be solved by nation states, however powerful,
acting alone – we can only ameliorate our present and safeguard our future
if people and their governments work together.
• Third, that means we need strong international cooperation and a strong
multilateral system.
• Fourth, we do not have a strong system: it does not work well and it lacks
legitimacy.

Sixty years after the creation of the United Nations and the Bretton Woods institutions the world faces some serious old and new global challenges: hunger, poverty, and social polarization are a heavy burden for the idea of justice. Global population growth continues to exacerbate these problems, forcing the international community to focus on sustainability as an organizing principle, not only for environmental policies and strategies but also for economic policy, energy, and the manufacturing industry. Global climate change and the loss of biodiversity has become a serious environmental and security issue. While these and other threats (HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, catastrophic diseases, as well as environmental health risks) continue to grow as global issues, the necessary global governance capacities and institutions are still weak and not up to the task of addressing these threats.

Revealed: The New Scramble for Africa - UN Security Council - Global Policy Forum: "The original Scramble for Africa took place in the late 19th century, when Britain, France and Germany competed to carve Africa into colonies. Today corporations from the US, France, Britain and China are competing to profit from the rulers of often chaotic and corrupt regimes. "

DRCThe northeast corner of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is home to one of Africa’s richest goldfields. Competition to control the gold mines and trading routes has spurred the bloody conflict that has gripped this area since the start of the Congolese war in 1998 and continues to the present.

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "Especially in the 1990s, it was fashionable to say that nation-states were becoming obsolete. A unified world of free markets and international organizations was supposed to rise, thus throwing older policies and theories into history's trash can. Today's political and geopolitical realities tell us that nation-states are still very alive, and that national cultures matter much in shaping our political landscape. Recent attempts to build strong supranational entities such as the European Union have not nurtured the deep cultural changes necessary for their success, even when their formal goals have actually been reached. "

Militarization of Outer Space: "Militarization of Outer Space"
US Air Force pushing for weapons in space. The US Air Force is
pushing for weapons in space. Yet, this would go counter to the
major international agreements such as the Outer Space Treaty and
the Prevention of Outer Space Arms Race resolution. Small update
added.

Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation: "U.S. Military Budget is the World's Largest, and Still Growing "

High Military Expenditure in Some Places

The Arms Trade is Big Business: "Over two years world military spending increased by 18 per cent in real terms, to reach $956 billion (in current dollars) in 2003.
High-income countries account for about 75 per cent of world military spending but only 16 per cent of world population.
The combined military spending of these countries was slightly higher than the aggregate foreign debt of all low-income countries and 10 times higher than their combined levels of official development assistance in 2001. "

Eric Von Hippel's Homepage In this book I have explored how and why users, individually and in firms and in communities, develop and freely reveal innovations. I have also argued that there is a general trend toward a open and distributed innovation process driven by steadily better and cheaper computing and communications.
The net result is an ongoing shift toward the democratization of innovation. This welfare-enhancing shift is forcing major changes in user
and manufacturer innovation practices, and is creating the need for change in government policies. It also, as I noted at the start of the book, presents major new opportunities for us all.

HabitatIn 1950, one-third of the world’s people lived in cities. Just fifty years later, this proportion has risen to one-half and will continue to grow to two-thirds, or six billion people, by 2050. In terms of population densities, spatial distribution, economic activity and social attitude, the world has become urbanized.

GLOBAL TRENDS: "Significant proportions of population increases in the developing countries have been and will be absorbed by urban areas"

GLOBAL TRENDS: "By 2020 about half of the Asian population will be living in urban area whereas in the world as a whole this happens by around 2005. Asia and Africa are behind in the process of urbanizing world."

GLOBAL TRENDS: "The sex composition (male per 100 females) in Asia is higher than that in any region including the world. The composition in 2000 is expected to be 104.4 per 100 females compared to 101.5 in the world. This composition is in reversed order in other regions. In Europe, it is 93.6 and in Africa, it is 99.6 per 100 females in 2000. "

GLOBAL TRENDS: "Asia is the largest continent. Its peoples account for three fifths of the world's population. Total population of Asia in 1995 was 3438 million. By 2000 the population of Asia will be 3688 million which is also about 60 percent of the world's total population. The growth rate for 1995-2000 has been 1.38 percent. The population growth rate is declining and in the next millennium it will be lower than the growth rate of the world population. The growth rate of world population in 2000-2005 is 1.27% whereas for Asia it is 1.26%. "