TrendBlog � Trend: Sense and Simplicity: "Trend: Sense and Simplicity"

Minding the Planet: Collective Intelligence 2.0: "This will in turn enable the human species to function increasingly as an intelligent superorganism, for example, like a beehive, or an ant colony -- but perhaps even more intelligent. But the key to bringing this process about is self-awareness. In short, the planetary supermind cannot become truly intelligent until it evolves a form of collective self-awareness. Self-awareness is the most critical component of human intelligence -- the sophistication of human self-awareness is what makes humans different from dumb machines, and from less intelligent species. "

Foreign Affairs - A Natural History of Peace - Robert M. Sapolsky: "In exploring these subjects, one often encounters a pessimism built around the notion that humans, as primates, are hard-wired for xenophobia. Some brain-imaging studies have appeared to support this view in a particularly discouraging way. There is a structure deep inside the brain called the amygdala, which plays a key role in fear and aggression, and experiments have shown that when subjects are presented with a face of someone from a different race, the amygdala gets metabolically active -- aroused, alert, ready for action. This happens even when the face is presented 'subliminally,' which is to say, so rapidly that the subject does not consciously see it."

Foreign Affairs - A Natural History of Peace - Robert M. Sapolsky: "But the lack of violence within small groups can come at a heavy price. Small homogenous groups with shared values can be a nightmare of conformity. They can also be dangerous for outsiders. Unconsciously emulating the murderous border patrols of closely related male chimps, militaries throughout history have sought to form small, stable units; inculcate them with rituals of pseudokinship; and thereby produce efficient, cooperative killing machines."

Foreign Affairs - A Natural History of Peace - Robert M. Sapolsky: "Game theorists have shown that a small, cohesive group is the perfect setting for the emergence of cooperation: the identities of the other participants are known, there are opportunities for multiple iterations of games (and thus the ability to punish cheaters), and there is open-book play (players can acquire reputations). And so, those hunter-gatherer bands were highly egalitarian. Empirical and experimental data have also shown the cooperative advantages of small groups at the opposite human extreme, namely in the corporate world."

Foreign Affairs - A Natural History of Peace - Robert M. Sapolsky: "Any biological anthropologist opining about human behavior is required by long-established tradition to note that for 99 percent of human history, humans lived in small, stable bands of related hunter-gatherers."

Foreign Affairs - A Natural History of Peace - Robert M. Sapolsky: "As defined by both anthropologists and animal behaviorists, 'culture' consists of local behavioral variations, occurring for nongenetic and nonecological reasons, that last beyond the time of their originators. "

News & Broadcast - Press Reviews: "Adding piquancy to the proceedings was Chinese government data earlier in the day that suggested China may have leapfrogged several European powers to become the world's fourth-largest economy, after the United States, Japan and Germany. Speakers at the debate noted that by embracing market principles, China and India have added hundreds of millions of inexpensive workers to the global labor market at precisely the moment when technology has rendered geographical location less important.

Where Google may be headed: Google is God - Jan. 25, 2006: "In 2005, historian George Dyson was told by an engineer in the Googleplex, 'We are not scanning all these books to be read by people. We are scanning them to be read by an AI.'2 Dyson said at the time, 'We could construct a machine that is more intelligent than we can understand. It's possible Google is that kind of thing already. It scales so fast.'"

Foreign Affairs - A Natural History of Peace - Robert M. Sapolsky: "To some extent, the age-old 'nature versus nurture' debate is silly. The action of genes is completely intertwined with the environment in which they function; in a sense, it is pointless to even discuss what gene X does, and we should consider instead only what gene X does in environment Y. "

Foreign Affairs - A Natural History of Peace - Robert M. Sapolsky: "So primate species with some of the most aggressive and stratified social systems have been seen to cooperate and resolve conflicts -- but not consistently, not necessarily for benign purposes, and not in a cumulative way that could lead to some fundamentally non-Hobbesian social outcomes. The lesson appears to be not that violent primates can transcend their natures, but merely that the natures of these species are subtler and more multifaceted than previously thought. At least that was the lesson until quite recently."

Foreign Affairs - A Natural History of Peace - Robert M. Sapolsky: "Tension-reducing reconciliation, in other words, is most likely to occur among animals who already are in the habit of cooperating and have an incentive to keep doing so."

Foreign Affairs - A Natural History of Peace - Robert M. Sapolsky: "And so the crude picture of combat as the sole path to evolutionary success is wrong. The average male baboon does opt for the combative route, but there are important phases of his life when aggression is less important than social intelligence and restraint, and there are evolutionarily fruitful alternative courses of action."

Foreign Affairs - A Natural History of Peace - Robert M. Sapolsky: "These nice-guy males seem to pass on at least as many copies of their genes as their more aggressive peers, not least because they can go like this for years, without the life-shortening burnout and injuries of the gladiators."

Foreign Affairs - A Natural History of Peace - Robert M. Sapolsky: "According to the standard logic, males compete with one another aggressively in order to achieve and maintain a high rank, which will in turn enable them to dominate reproduction and thus maximize the number of copies of their genes that are passed on to the next generation. "

Foreign Affairs - A Natural History of Peace - Robert M. Sapolsky: "More important, however, some primate species can make peace despite violent traits that seem built into their natures. The challenge now is to figure out under what conditions that can happen, and whether humans can manage the trick themselves."

Foreign Affairs - A Natural History of Peace - Robert M. Sapolsky: "The evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky once said, 'All species are unique, but humans are uniquest.' Humans have long taken pride in their specialness. But the study of other primates is rendering the concept of such human exceptionalism increasingly suspect."

Foreign Affairs - A Natural History of Peace - Robert M. Sapolsky: "Summary: Humans like to think that they are unique, but the study of other primates has called into question the exceptionalism of our species. So what does primatology have to say about war and peace? Contrary to what was believed just a few decades ago, humans are not 'killer apes' destined for violent conflict, but can make their own history."

Amazon.com: Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower: Books: "Regardless, most of this book contains extremely useful and relevant information on US chicanery and violence around the world. Despite the constant predictable sloganeering about freedom and democracy, the US has always been more concerned about preserving corporate interests and a hegemonic domination of power, with an ideology that is unyielding and destructive. Entire peoples and nations around the world have been ruined and exploited. "

KurzweilAI.net: "I would say technology has done more good than harm. You know, 99.9 percent of humanity lived terrible lives 200 or 300 years ago, and life was well-described by Thomas Hobbes as 'nasty, brutish, and short.' Human life expectancy was only 37 in 1800, and if someone got a simple bacterial infection it would plunge that person's whole family into desperation, because there were no social safety nets. Life was extremely difficult, and labor-filled. For example, it took six hours to prepare the evening meal. So we have liberated ourselves to a great extent from these kinds of miseries. Though we still have a lot of suffering in the world, only technology has the scale to solve problems like environmental degradation and poverty. "

KurzweilAI.net: "I describe myself as a patternist, and believe that if you put matter and energy in just the right pattern you create something that transcends it. Technology is a good example of that: you put together lenses and mechanical parts and some computers and some software in just the right combination and you create a reading machine for the blind. It's something that transcends the semblance of parts you've put together. That is the nature of technology, and it's the nature of the human brain. Biological molecules put in a certain combination create the transcending properties of human intelligence; you put notes and sounds together in just the right combination, and you create a Beethoven symphony or a Beatles song. So patterns have a power that transcends the parts of that pattern."

KurzweilAI.net: "Yes, that's a typically human observation, and is how we think: we see patterns. A better coach or sports strategist will be able to have greater insights into those patterns, and be able to anticipate the patterns of the opposition, and then think of some way of superseding that. And historians see patterns in events in the world. Pattern recognition is the essence of what intelligence is."

KurzweilAI.net: "However, machines are getting better, and ultimately machines will be better than humans in all areas of pattern recognition. Of course, at that point, computers will have achieved human levels of intelligence, in the late 2020s. But human pattern recognition, though, is basically hardwired for certain types of patterns. For example, there's actually a region of the brain that recognizes faces, and we're very good at that, because we have a built-in capability. We're very good at recognizing language sounds, and language skill is essentially a pattern recognition capability. Computers can apply pattern recognition principles to other types of patterns that humans are good at, and they're also learning how to do the kinds of pattern recognition that humans are not good at. And ultimately, we'll be able to exceed human intelligence."

KurzweilAI.net: "Pattern recognition is the heart of human intelligence. We're in fact not very good at logical thinking, analytical thinking. Computers are already much better at that than we are�as is clear if you consider a math program like 'Mathematica' that's very hard even for professionals and mathematicians to keep up with. And yet people are still better than machines at recognizing patterns."

KurzweilAI.net: "The 'singularity' is a metaphor borrowed from physics, really referring to the event horizon. We can't easily see beyond the event horizon around the black hole in physics. And here with regard to this historical singularity, we can't easily see beyond that event horizon, because it's so profoundly transformative. We will literally multiple the intelligence of our civilization by merging with, and supplementing our biological intelligence, with this profoundly more capable nonbiological intelligence by a factor of billions, ultimately trillions. And that will dramatically change the nature of human civilization. That in a nutshell is what the singularity is all about."

KurzweilAI.net: "My second point is that nonbiological intelligence, once it achieves human levels, will double in power every year, whereas human intelligence�biological intelligence�is fixed. We have 10 to the 26th power calculations per second in the human species today, and that's not going to change, but ultimately the nonbiological side of our civilization's intelligence will become by the 2030s thousands of times more powerful than human intelligence and by the 2040s billions of times more powerful. And that will be a really profound transformation."

KurzweilAI.net: "One of the answers to that question is that it will be a very powerful combination to combine the subtle and supple powers of human pattern recognition with ways in which machines are already superior. Machines can think more quickly than we can. They're much better at logical thinking and much better at remembering things: a $1000 notebook computer can remember billions of things accurately whereas we're hard-pressed to remember a handful of phone numbers. And most importantly, machines can share their knowledge, their skills, and their insights at electronic speed, which is a million times faster than human language."

KurzweilAI.net: "There are two key aspects to the concept of singularity�the hardware and software sides of emulating human intelligence. We'll have sufficient hardware to recreate human intelligence pretty soon. We'll have it in a supercomputer by 2010. A thousand dollars of computation will equal the 10,000 trillion calculations per second that I estimate is necessary to emulate the human brain by 2020. The software side will take a little longer. In order to achieve the algorithms of human intelligence, we need to actually reverse-engineer the human brain, understand its principles of operation. And there again, not surprisingly, we see exponential growth where we are doubling the spatial resolution of brain scanning every year, and doubling the information that we're gathering about the brain every year. We're showing that we can turn this data into working models and simulations. There's also two dozen regions of the brain, that we have modeled and simulated, including the cerebellum�which is where we do our skill formation and which compromises more than half the neurons in the brain. There's an effective simulation of that."

People's Daily Online -- 'Iran is not Iraq': Comment: "Militarily, Iran is another strong country second only to Israel in the Middle East region. It has modernized missiles and air strike technology and capable to block the Strait of Hormuz and destroy all the oil wells and pipelines in the region. Iran is the fourth oil producer in the world, producing 4 million barrels of crude oil every day. Iraq didn't have these conditions then. "

KurzweilAI.net: "Three thousand years from now, when keen minds review the past, I believe that our ancient time, here at the cusp of the third millennium, will be seen as another such era. In the years roughly coincidental with the Netscape IPO, humans began animating inert objects with tiny slivers of intelligence, connecting them into a global field, and linking their own minds into a single thing. This will be recognized as the largest, most complex, and most surprising event on the planet. Weaving nerves out of glass and radio waves, our species began wiring up all regions, all processes, all facts and notions into a grand network. From this embryonic neural net was born a collaborative interface for our civilization, a sensing, cognitive device with power that exceeded any previous invention. The Machine provided a new way of thinking (perfect search, total recall) and a new mind for an old species. It was the Beginning."

KurzweilAI.net: "There is only one time in the history of each planet when its inhabitants first wire up its innumerable parts to make one large Machine. Later that Machine may run faster, but there is only one time when it is born.
You and I are alive at this moment."

KurzweilAI.net: "What will most surprise us is how dependent we will be on what the Machine knows�about us and about what we want to know. We already find it easier to Google something a second or third time rather than remember it ourselves. The more we teach this megacomputer, the more it will assume responsibility for our knowing. It will become our memory. Then it will become our identity. In 2015 many people, when divorced from the Machine, won't feel like themselves�as if they'd had a lobotomy."

KurzweilAI.net: "The human brain has no department full of programming cells that configure the mind. Rather, brain cells program themselves simply by being used. Likewise, our questions program the Machine to answer questions. We think we are merely wasting time when we surf mindlessly or blog an item, but each time we click a link we strengthen a node somewhere in the Web OS, thereby programming the Machine by using it."

KurzweilAI.net: "In 10 years, the system will contain hundreds of millions of miles of fiber-optic neurons linking the billions of ant-smart chips embedded into manufactured products, buried in environmental sensors, staring out from satellite cameras, guiding cars, and saturating our world with enough complexity to begin to learn. We will live inside this thing."

KurzweilAI.net: "Danny Hillis, a computer scientist who once claimed he wanted to make an AI 'that would be proud of me,' has invented massively parallel supercomputers in part to advance us in that direction. He now believes the first real AI will emerge not in a stand-alone supercomputer like IBM's proposed 23-teraflop Blue Brain, but in the vast digital tangle of the global Machine."

KurzweilAI.net: "Today, the Machine acts like a very large computer with top-level functions that operate at approximately the clock speed of an early PC. It processes 1 million emails each second, which essentially means network email runs at 1 megahertz. Same with Web searches. Instant messaging runs at 100 kilohertz, SMS at 1 kilohertz. The Machine's total external RAM is about 200 terabytes. In any one second, 10 terabits can be coursing through its backbone, and each year it generates nearly 20 exabytes of data. Its distributed 'chip' spans 1 billion active PCs, which is approximately the number of transistors in one PC."

KurzweilAI.net: "As the OS for a megacomputer that encompasses the Internet, all its services, all peripheral chips and affiliated devices from scanners to satellites, and the billions of human minds entangled in this global network. This gargantuan Machine already exists in a primitive form. In the coming decade, it will evolve into an integral extension not only of our senses and bodies but our minds."

KurzweilAI.net: "No one. And that's just fine. A world where production outpaces consumption should not be sustainable; that's a lesson from Economics 101. But online, where many ideas that don't work in theory succeed in practice, the audience increasingly doesn't matter. What matters is the network of social creation, the community of collaborative interaction that futurist Alvin Toffler called prosumption. As with blogging and BitTorrent, prosumers produce and consume at once. The producers are the audience, the act of making is the act of watching, and every link is both a point of departure and a destination."

KurzweilAI.net: "A little over a decade ago, a phone survey by Macworld asked a few hundred people what they thought would be worth $10 per month on the information superhighway. The participants started with uplifting services: educational courses, reference books, electronic voting, and library information. The bottom of the list ended with sports statistics, role-playing games, gambling, and dating. Ten years later what folks actually use the Internet for is inverted. According to a 2004 Stanford study, people use the Internet for (in order): playing games, 'just surfing,' shopping the list ends with responsible activities like politics and banking. (Some even admitted to porn.) "

KurzweilAI.net: "I run a blog about cool tools. I write it for my own delight and for the benefit of friends. The Web extends my passion to a far wider group for no extra cost or effort. In this way, my site is part of a vast and growing gift economy, a visible underground of valuable creations�text, music, film, software, tools, and services�all given away for free. This gift economy fuels an abundance of choices. It spurs the grateful to reciprocate. It permits easy modification and reuse, and thus promotes consumers into producers."

KurzweilAI.net: "Why aren't we more amazed by this fullness? Kings of old would have gone to war to win such abilities. Only small children would have dreamed such a magic window could be real. I have reviewed the expectations of waking adults and wise experts, and I can affirm that this comprehensive wealth of material, available on demand and free of charge, was not in anyone's scenario. Ten years ago, anyone silly enough to trumpet the above list as a vision of the near future would have been confronted by the evidence: There wasn't enough money in all the investment firms in the entire world to fund such a cornucopia. The success of the Web at this scale was impossible."

KurzweilAI.net: "The accretion of tiny marvels can numb us to the arrival of the stupendous. Today, at any Net terminal, you can get: an amazing variety of music and video, an evolving encyclopedia, weather forecasts, help wanted ads, satellite images of anyplace on Earth, up-to-the-minute news from around the globe, tax forms, TV guides, road maps with driving directions, real-time stock quotes, telephone numbers, real estate listings with virtual walk-throughs, pictures of just about anything, sports scores, places to buy almost anything, records of political contributions, library catalogs, appliance manuals, live traffic reports, archives to major newspapers�all wrapped up in an interactive index that really works."

KurzweilAI.net: "How could we create so much, so fast, so well? In fewer than 4,000 days, we have encoded half a trillion versions of our collective story and put them in front of 1 billion people, or one-sixth of the world's population. That remarkable achievement was not in anyone's 10-year plan."

KurzweilAI.net: "The scope of the Web today is hard to fathom. The total number of Web pages, including those that are dynamically created upon request and document files available through links, exceeds 600 billion. That's 100 pages per person alive"

KurzweilAI.net: "The planet-sized 'Web' computer is already more complex than a human brain and has surpassed the 20-petahertz threshold for potential intelligence as calculated by Ray Kurzweil. In 10 years, it will be ubiquitous. So will superintelligence emerge on the Web, not a supercomputer?"

KurzweilAI.net: "It's actually a complicated premise, but there are several key ideas. First of all, there's the idea that technology in general is accelerating rapidly, and information technology in particular is doubling its power, as measured in price performance and bandwidth capacity, every year. We will see the power of information technology multiplied by a factor of a billion in 25 years. If you imagine increasing the power of computers for the same price, computation, communication, as well as our knowledge of biology, and knowledge of intelligence processes in the brain, by a factor of a billion in 25 years, it's quite a formidable result."

KurzweilAI.net: "'If it were up to the Luddites, human life expectancy would still be 37, and we'd still be dying from bacterial infections,' says Ray Kurzweil in this wide-ranging interview. The anti-technology movement 'is fundamentally misguided, because it fails to appreciate the profound benefits technology has brought.'"

BBC - BBC THREE - Exposed: Episode Guide: "Heartbreak
We�ve all been there. It can cut like a knife, tear our lives apart, even make us kill�

In this episode, Exposed investigates the devastating effect that social and romantic rejection can have on our brains, our bodies and our behaviour.

Using the latest neuro-imaging technology, we explore the links between social rejection and physical pain.

Why does rejection lead to crimes of passion and revenge? How do early childhood experiences of rejection affect our ability to form secure relationships as adults? And do men and women respond differently to a broken heart?"

BBC - Science & Nature - Space - Life from a Comet?: "One theory of how life on Earth began is that it didn't start here at all. Life may have arrived from outer space on a comet. This is called the 'panspermia theory'.
During the early period of the Earth's history, collisions with comets were commonplace. Comets have been found which contain amino acids, the building blocks of life. So they could have brought life to Earth."

MIRROR NEURONS AND THE BRAIN IN A VAT By V.S. Ramachandran: "'the fifth revolution' � the 'neuroscience revolution' � the first four being Copernican, Darwinian, Freudian, and the discovery of DNA and the genetic code.'. 'that even our loftiest thoughts and aspirations are mere byproducts of neural activity. We are nothing but a pack of neurons.' Central to this revolution are mirror neurons. "

Opinion & Analysis: "In the longer term a lot hinges on the willingness of the world to hold dollars as the preferred reserve currency. There are no immediate signs of declining confidence but the huge dollar stocks in hands of China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan make the whole system depend on sentiment in a few countries. Could an aggressive US enmeshed in overseas adventures provoke a reaction? What of the possible impact of US domestic debt burden on confidence? If the US cannot finance its balance of payments deficit, major expenditure adjustments will follow in the US government (with implications for its defence posture) or in the private sector (with implications for world exports to the US). But the world needs a reserve currency and the plausibility of this scenario depends on how the euro emerges and whether the principal holders of world reserves, the East Asian countries, develop their monetary co-operation to a point where a new preferred reserve currency emerges. "

Opinion & Analysis: "A country�s foreign and defence policy is generally shaped by what it perceives as threats to its security and integrity where an explicit and hostile intent by specific parties can be identified and countered. But in today�s world a country�s external policy must move beyond direct threat perceptions and take into account two further concepts�competition and vulnerability.

Competition refers to rivalries that fall short of explicit threats in the political, economic, cultural spheres. The tussle to get oil concessions is an example. Vulnerability is a much broader concept. It covers the impact on the possibility of stable progress at home of events/trends/policies in other parts of the world. These may not be directed at us specifically. Yet they have an impact on us, and our external policy must look beyond threat management and provide insurance against vulnerability. "
Vulnerability can come from instability in other countries, its spillover effect, and the effect of responses of regional or global powers to this.

10 global trends to watch in 2006: "1. The article says that although the United States will continue to 'account for the largest share of absolute economic growth' over the next 20 years, major hubs of economic activity worldwide will shift dramatically. Manufacturing and IT services sectors too will witness major shifts. And this trend will not be limited across nations, but will also happen within regions. The authors say that the Asian economy will boom during the next two decades and account for more than 30 per cent of world GDP, like Europe."

Telegraph | News | Ban all schools? That's a dangerous thought: "Biotechnology will be domesticated in 50 years
This means cheap tools and do-it-yourself kits for gardeners to design roses, and for animal-breeders to design lizards and snakes. It means biotech games for children, like computer games but with real eggs and seeds.
There are two dangers. First, smart kids and malicious grown-ups will find ways to convert biotech tools to the manufacture of lethal microbes.
Second, ambitious parents will find ways to apply the tools to the genetic modification of babies.
The unanswered question is, whether we can regulate domesticated biotechnology so that it can be applied to animals and vegetables but not to microbes and humans."

THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2006 � P6: "Since the major absorption of scientific method into the research and practice of medicine in the 1860s, the longevity curve, at least for the white population in industrial countries, took off and has continued fairly constantly. That has been on the whole a benign result, and has begun to introduce the idea of tolerably good health as one of the basic Human Rights. But one now reads of projections to 200 years, and perhaps more. The economic, social and human costs of the increasing fraction of very elderly citizens have begun to be noticed already."

Land of Cliches - New York Times: "The unfortunate fact is that killing has proved to be an effective solution to an array of adaptive problems in the ruthless evolutionary games of survival and reproductive competition: Preventing injury, rape, or death; protecting one's children; eliminating a crucial antagonist; acquiring a rival's resources; securing sexual access to a competitor's mate; preventing an interloper from appropriating one's own mate; and protecting vital resources needed for reproduction. ... "

THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2006: "Something radically new is in the air: new ways of understanding physical systems, new ways of thinking about thinking that call into question many of our basic assumptions. A realistic biology of the mind, advances in evolutionary biology, physics, information technology, genetics, neurobiology, psychology, engineering, the chemistry of materials: all are questions of critical importance with respect to what it means to be human. For the first time, we have the tools and the will to undertake the scientific study of human nature. "

Custom-Made Microbes, at Your Service - New York Times: "Some scientists envision that biological engineers will one day sit at computers writing programs for cells, like software developers. But the code would be written in sequences of DNA, rather than computer language. When finished, the programmer would press the 'print' button, as it were, and the DNA would be made to order."

Custom-Made Microbes, at Your Service - New York Times: " 'We're talking about taking biology and building it for a specific purpose, rather than taking existing biology and adapting it,' Professor Keasling of Berkeley said. 'We don't have to rely on what nature's necessarily created.' "

Legal Applications of Artificial Intelligence -- (University of Texas -- January 10, 2006)
http://www.gslis.utexas.edu/~palmquis/courses/project98/ailaw/ailaw.htm
As Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology develops, the creation of computers that can autonomously reason with the law to determine legal solutions is slowly becoming a reality. Expert systems will one day be able to predict the outcome of litigation with a good degree of accuracy. An important attribute of expert systems is their ability to explain why a particular analysis or recommendation was produced. The process usually involves the assignation of numerical "weights" in relation to case facts. This website is a great starting point for those interested in the future of law and AI.

Why this brain flies on rat cunning - Science - www.theage.com.au: "The goal is to study how cortical networks perform their neural computations. The implications are extremely important,' "

Why this brain flies on rat cunning - Science - www.theage.com.au: "Under the microscope they looked at first like grains of sand, but soon the cells begin to connect to form what scientists are calling a 'live computation device' (a brain). The electrodes measure and stimulate neural activity in the network, allowing researchers to study how the brain processes, transforms and stores information."

Blogs Offer Taste of War in Iraq -- (BBC -- December 29, 2005)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4555590.stm
The war in Vietnam is often referred to as the first war on television, and the wars in Afghanistan and now in Iraq will be known as the first wars to be blogged. A new generation of soldier bloggers in the US, known as milbloggers, are both fighting in the field and writing about their experiences. It is opening up a new window on modern warfare and is creating a new genre of war-time writing.

Will We Merge With Machines? - Popular Science: "Shock Therapy For the Gut
� 0 - 5 years
A pacemaker created by Transneuronix in New Jersey is helping test subjects lose 25 to 40 percent of their body fat. Its mild shocks relax and expand the upper part of the stomach, and the brain interprets the distended stomach as feeling full."

Will We Merge With Machines? - Popular Science: "Four-Dimensional Vision
� � � � 16+ years
Humans have three color-producing cones in our eyes�red, green and blue. What if we had four? Scientists at the Medical College of Wisconsin hope to give us genes for a fourth cone to enable us to see new hues that we can�t even imagine right now."

Will We Merge With Machines? - Popular Science: "Heart of Titanium
� 0 - 5 years
Today�s state-of-the-art artificial heart is the Abiocor. Unfortunately, the device fits just 50 percent of the male population. It also quits working after a year or two. The Abiocor II, due out in 2008, will be 30 percent smaller, fitting most men and 50 percent of women, and will last up to five years."

Will We Merge With Machines? - Popular Science: "Researchers at Brown University and Cyberkinetics in Foxborough, Massachusetts, are devising brain implants that will enable us to communicate with machines. A microchip implanted in the motor cortex just beneath your skull will intercept nerve signals and reroute them to a computer, which will then wirelessly send the command to any of various electronic devices, including computers, stereos and electric wheelchairs."

Harvard Gazette: Is 7-million-year-old skull really human?: "These fossils give researchers and others concerned about our deep past plenty to think, or argue, about. The evolutionary path from ape to man was once compared to a straight ladder. As fossils accumulated, a luxuriantly branching tree became needed to account for all the different hominid skulls, leg bones, arm bones, jaws, and teeth that were discovered. But, notes Pilbeam, 'at the base of this tree, there might well have only been one hominid for the first few million years. And that one may have been like Toumai.' "

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "Russia's international political interests now lay in reasserting its influence in Ukraine, cooperating with China in Central and East Asia, and expanding its influence in the Persian Gulf (as can be seen in Moscow's hostility toward possible coercive actions against Tehran). Such goals -- which appear quite logical from the Russian point of view -- would be at odds with Germany's ambition of becoming Washington's privileged partner in Western Europe. "

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): " Because of geographical realities, Germany needs Russia as an energy supplier. Because of the world's geopolitical configuration, Berlin perceives its interests as being those of a great power which needs to function as a 'bridge' between the dominant Western power -- the United States -- and Europe. "

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "Merkel's statement made clear Berlin's commitment to its common energy strategy with Russia established the year before. However, Germany and the present Austrian E.U. presidency are obviously concerned about Europe's strong energy dependence upon Russia. "

State of the World 2006: China, India, the U.S., Europe, and Japan by the Numbers: Worldwatch Institute News: "These slides offer a glimpse of the rising ecological impact of two populous developing nations, China and India, while illustrating that the per-capita resource consumption and pollution of countries in the industrialized world�including the United States, the European Union and Japan�is much higher. If by 2030, China and India alone were to achieve a per-capita footprint equivalent to that of Japan today, together they would require a full planet earth to meet their needs. "

State of the World 2006: "From the Foreword:

'The western model of growth that India and China wish to emulate is intrinsically toxic. It uses huge resources�energy and materials�and generates enormous waste. The industrialized world has mitigated the adverse impacts of wealth generation by investing huge amounts of money. But... it remains many steps behind the problems it creates. India and China have no choice but to reinvent the development trajectory.'

World Future Society � THE FUTURIST � World Trends & Forecasts: "he economy of China is growing faster than that of any other nation on earth. Chinese manufacturers currently produce more than 70% of the world's toys, 60% of its bicycles, half its shoes, one-third of its television sets and air conditioners, and half of its microwave ovens. Despite the accomplishments of Chinese manufacturing firms on behalf of such recognizable Western brands as Boeing, efforts to market uniquely Chinese brands have thus far stalled. However, that may soon change, according to a new book, The Chinese Century (Wharton 2005). "

World Future Society Book Review: "For all his careful analysis of economics, technology, demography, and ideology, Kelly envisions a future that is guided by no single area of knowledge. Rather, he foresees a future where new and newly efficient organizations, as well as individuals, realize unprecedented power. This vision is at once hopeful and terrifying. History has seen the transfer of power from mobs to empires, and from empires to states, but this final transfer, from states to groups and citizens, may be the last if citizens fail to wield power responsibly. "

World Future Society Book Review: "In Powerful Times, Global Business Network CEO and President Eamonn Kelly lays bare the real and existential conflicts that surround us. He calls these conflicts 'key dynamic tensions,' and, according to Kelly, they are shaping both this age and the next: Human knowledge, in the form of technology, is expanding across the globe. In spite of that positive trend, religious extremism continues to attract followers. Opportunities for economic growth are accelerating, along with economic pitfalls. The Internet has opened up vast virtual frontiers; simultaneously, our ecosystems are straining under ecologically disastrous human behaviors and practices. According to Kelly, how humanity chooses (or does not choose) to resolve these key conflicts will determine the face of the next era of human history"

People's Daily Online -- Beijing to control population within 16 million by 2010: "The Chinese capital will take measures to keep its permanent residents within 16 million by 2010, according to an economic and social development program for 2006-2010 to be discussed at the municipal legislature's annual session. "

SPACE.com -- E-Weapons: Directed Energy Warfare In The 21st Century: "LOS ALAMOS, New Mexico -- There is a new breed of weaponry fast approaching�and at the speed of light no less. They are labeled 'directed-energy weapons' and may well signal a revolution in military hardware�perhaps more so than the atomic bomb. "

G A P M I N D E R: HOME: "HUMAN DEVELOPMENT TRENDS 2005
Gapminder produce an interactive presentation for the 'Human Development Report 2005' by UNDP."

EducationGuardian.co.uk | E-learning | Digging for data that can change our world: "Scientific research is being added to at an alarming rate: the Human Genome Project alone is generating enough documentation to 'sink battleships'. So it's not surprising that academics seeking data to support a new hypothesis are getting swamped with information overload. As data banks build up worldwide, and access gets easier through technology, it has become easier to overlook vital facts and figures that could bring about groundbreaking discoveries."

Cells That Read Minds - New York Times: "The ability to share the emotions of others appears to be intimately linked to the functioning of mirror neurons, said Dr. Christian Keysers, who studies the neural basis of empathy at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and who has published several recent articles on the topic in Neuron.
When you see someone touched in a painful way, your own pain areas are activated, he said. When you see a spider crawl up someone's leg, you feel a creepy sensation because your mirror neurons are firing.
People who rank high on a scale measuring empathy have particularly active mirror neurons systems, Dr. Keysers said. "

Cells That Read Minds - New York Times: "Mirror neurons provide clues to how children learn: they kick in at birth. Dr. Andrew Meltzoff at the University of Washington has published studies showing that infants a few minutes old will stick out their tongues at adults doing the same thing. More than other primates, human children are hard-wired for imitation, he said, their mirror neurons involved in observing what others do and practicing doing the same things. "

Cells That Read Minds - New York Times: "Other animals - monkeys, probably apes and possibly elephants, dolphins and dogs - have rudimentary mirror neurons, several mirror neuron experts said. But humans, with their huge working memory, carry out far more sophisticated imitations. "

Cells That Read Minds - New York Times: "In a study published in March 2005 in Public Library of Science, Dr. Iacoboni and his colleagues reported that mirror neurons could discern if another person who was picking up a cup of tea planned to drink from it or clear it from the table. 'Mirror neurons provide a powerful biological foundation for the evolution of culture,' said Patricia Greenfield, a psychologist at the U.C.L.A. who studies human development.
Until now, scholars have treated culture as fundamentally separate from biology, she said. 'But now we see that mirror neurons absorb culture directly, with each generation teaching the next by social sharing, imitation and observation.' "

The Empire: What It Is and What It Means for All of Us - Empire? - Global Policy Forum: " A majority of Americans now feel that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake. They would like the Bush Administration to set a deadline for the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. It is significant that armed forces recruitment exercises in the last one year or so have consistently recorded shortfalls. In other words, fewer and fewer Americans are prepared to go and fight in Iraq. "

The Empire: What It Is and What It Means for All of Us - Empire? - Global Policy Forum: "However, resistance from outside alone will not be enough to bring down the Empire. It is one of the unerring laws of history that empires collapse partly because of internal weaknesses. "

The Empire: What It Is and What It Means for All of Us - Empire? - Global Policy Forum: "Like other empires in the past, this empire is also being forged through the force of arms. The US today commands overwhelming military power. It is not only more powerful than any other nation on earth. Its strength exceeds that of the next 14 militarily powerful states put together. There has never been a military power as formidable as the US in history. No less than 800 US military bases garrison the globe. Its military strength extends from the depths of the ocean to the outer reaches of space. It aims for �total spectrum dominance�. "

Books from the Earth Policy Institute - Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble: "�If we fail to build a new economy before decline sets in, it will not be because of a lack of fiscal resources, but rather because of obsolete priorities,� adds Brown. �The world is now spending $975 billion annually for military purposes. The U.S. 2006 military budget of $492 billion, accounting for half of the world total, goes largely to the development and production of new weapon systems. Unfortunately, these weapons are of little help in curbing terrorism, nor can they reverse the deforestation of the earth or stabilize climate.
�The military threats to national security today pale beside the trends of environmental destruction and disruption that threaten the economy and thus our early twenty-first century civilization itself. New threats call for new strategies. These threats are environmental degradation, climate change, the persistence of poverty, and the loss of hope.� "

Books from the Earth Policy Institute - Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble: "If China one day has three cars for every four people, U.S. style, it will have 1.1 billion cars. The whole world today has 800 million cars. To provide the roads, highways, and parking lots to accommodate such a vast fleet, China would have to pave an area equal to the land it now plants in rice. It would need 99 million barrels of oil a day. Yet the world currently produces 84 million barrels per day and may never produce much more. "

Books from the Earth Policy Institute - Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble: "Although it is obvious that no society can survive the decline of its environmental support systems, many people are not yet convinced of the need for economic restructuring. But this is changing now that China has eclipsed the United States in the consumption of most basic resources, Brown notes in Plan B 2.0, which was produced with major funding from the Lannan Foundation and the U.N. Population Fund.
Among the basic commodities�grain and meat in the food sector, oil and coal in the energy sector, and steel in the industrial sector�China now consumes more than the United States of each of these except for oil. It consumes nearly twice as much meat (67 million tons compared with 39 million tons) and more than twice as much steel (258 million to 104 million tons). "

IFTF's Future Now: "IFTF's Future Now"

Foreign Affairs - A Natural History of Peace - Robert M. Sapolsky: "The first half of the twentieth century was drenched in the blood spilled by German and Japanese aggression, yet only a few decades later it is hard to think of two countries more pacific. Sweden spent the seventeenth century rampaging through Europe, yet it is now an icon of nurturing tranquility. Humans have invented the small nomadic band and the continental megastate, and have demonstrated a flexibility whereby uprooted descendants of the former can function effectively in the latter. "

Foreign Affairs - A Natural History of Peace - Robert M. Sapolsky: "In other words, adolescent males that enter Forest Troop after having grown up elsewhere wind up adopting the unique behavioral style of the resident males. As defined by both anthropologists and animal behaviorists, 'culture' consists of local behavioral variations, occurring for nongenetic and nonecological reasons, that last beyond the time of their originators."

Foreign Affairs - A Natural History of Peace - Robert M. Sapolsky: "To some extent, the age-old 'nature versus nurture' debate is silly. The action of genes is completely intertwined with the environment in which they function; in a sense, it is pointless to even discuss what gene X does, and we should consider instead only what gene X does in environment Y. Nonetheless, if one had to predict the behavior of some organism on the basis of only one fact, one might still want to know whether the most useful fact would be about genetics or about the environment."

Foreign Affairs - A Natural History of Peace - Robert M. Sapolsky: "And so the crude picture of combat as the sole path to evolutionary success is wrong. The average male baboon does opt for the combative route, but there are important phases of his life when aggression is less important than social intelligence and restraint, and there are evolutionarily fruitful alternative courses of action."

Foreign Affairs - A Natural History of Peace - Robert M. Sapolsky: "More discomfiting is the continuum that has been demonstrated in the realm of cognition. We now know, for example, that other species invent tools and use them with dexterity and local cultural variation. Other primates display 'semanticity' (the use of symbols to refer to objects and actions) in their communication in ways that would impress any linguist. And experiments have shown other primates to possess a 'theory of mind,' that is, the ability to recognize that different individuals can have different thoughts and knowledge."

Foreign Affairs - A Natural History of Peace - Robert M. Sapolsky: "The evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky once said, 'All species are unique, but humans are uniquest.' Humans have long taken pride in their specialness. But the study of other primates is rendering the concept of such human exceptionalism increasingly suspect.
Some of the retrenchment has been relatively palatable, such as with the workings of our bodies. Thus we now know that a baboon heart can be transplanted into a human body and work for a few weeks, and human blood types are coded in Rh factors named after the rhesus monkeys that possess similar blood variability."

News & Broadcast - Press Reviews: "But for all its shortcomings, she writes, the coming-of-age of the politics of global inequality is being driven by an important issue that will ensure it stays on the international agenda: at its heart is a question of legitimacy. The west's global dominance is being challenged as unjust - whether that is by the WTO�s new bloc of leading developing countries or even by the fanatical violence of the Islamist extremists. The huge wealth generated by globalization, with its equally huge ecological footprint, cannot largely be for the benefit of a tiny proportion of the world's population."

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "Therefore, prospects exist for new and enhanced plans for ending such dependence. Already in September 2005, a group of European deputies announced the creation of a broad platform designed to implement a European hydrogen-based economy in the coming decades. Additionally, nuclear energy is, once again, considered to be an economic priority by many players."

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "The Russian president is now in control of the energy giant, guaranteeing that he will remain a key player, at least indirectly, even if he fails to be re-elected in 2008. His main international strategy is to give Russia the status of a great power in a new, multipolar world order in which Russia, China and India will be the main Eurasian powers."