The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "In the 21st century, however, Asia may emerge as the new focal point of water-related conflict given the rapid growth of the region, which is likely to put pressure on water resources, coupled with the concentration of long-standing internal and inter-state tensions, which can act as a spark for turning water-related disputes into full-scale conflicts. Asia is home to 57 international basins, the third largest after Europe and Africa."

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "Water is increasingly emerging as a scarce commodity, fueled by population pressures, intensive irrigation, and erratic weather patterns brought on by global warming. According to the International Water Management Institute, by 2025 one-third of the world's population will lack access to water."

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "hile the world's attention is focused on record high oil prices, water, like oil, is increasingly emerging as a catalyst for international instability and conflict as the recent upsurge in violence in Sri Lanka illustrates. "

Fastest-evolving human gene linked to brain boost - being-human - 16 August 2006 - New Scientist: "The fastest evolving gene in the human genome is one linked to brain development, researchers say.

A study of differences between the human and chimp genomes has identified a gene associated with neural growth in the cerebral cortex – the part of the brain involved in processing thoughts and learning – as having undergone “accelerated evolutionary change”.

Katherine Pollard and colleagues at the University of California Santa Cruz, US, suggest that the fast-changing gene may help explain the dramatic expansion of this part of the brain during the evolution of humans.

They identified the rapidly evolving region of DNA – called human accelerated region 1 (HAR1) – after carrying out an extensive computational comparison between the genomes of humans, chimpanzees and other vertebrates."

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "Due to constant demand for cocaine, heroine, methamphetamines, ecstasy, and other drugs, the Mexican criminal enterprise earns over US$50 billion a year. A considerable amount of this money makes its way back to Colombia to purchase pure cocaine and heroin. Millions of dollars a year land in the hands of policemen, intelligence agents, mayors, port masters, pilots, and many other officials who face the infamous 'plata o plomo' decision."

Lifeboat Foundation FAQ: "As technology continues to advance, it will vastly increase the power of leading nations, leading corporations, and leading individuals. Soon, a set of emerging technologies — Genetics, Robotics, and Nanotechnology — will make more power available than has ever been known in human history."

InformationWeek | Gartner | Gartner Names Hot Technologies With Greatest Potential Impact | ao�t 9, 2006: "Under Web 2.0, social-network analysis and Ajax were rated as 'high impact' and reaching maturity in less than two years. Collective intelligence, on the other hand, was rated as potentially transformational to businesses."

ID21 - communicating development research: "Evidence shows that:

* Since 1992 the number of conflicts leading to over 1,000 battle-deaths has dropped by 80 percent.
* Wars between countries are rare – now less than five percent of all armed conflicts.
* While there were 25 coups or attempted coups in 1963, in 2004 there were only ten and all of them failed.
* The average number of people reported killed per conflict per year in 1950 was 38,000 but in 2002 was 600.
* Since the late 1970s the number of states governed by authoritarian regimes has dropped from 90 to 30."

World Trends Research - Major Trends Shaping Global Context: " 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.” Increasingly, scientists are subordinating humans to technology."

The Parable of the Tribes: Why the Evolution of Civilization Has Been as Tormented and Destructive as it Has Been: "I have just outlined four possible outcomes for the threatened tribes: destruction, absorption and trans
formation, withdrawal, and imitation. In everyone of these outcomes the ways of power are spread throughout the system. This is the parable of the tribes."

The Parable of the Tribes: Why the Evolution of Civilization Has Been as Tormented and Destructive as it Has Been: "But the irony is that successful defense against a power-maximizing aggressor requires a society to become more like the society that threatens it. Power can be stopped only by power, and if the threatening society has discovered ways to magnify its power through innovations in organization or technology (or whatever), the defensive society will have to transform itself into something more like its foe in order to resist the external force."

The Parable of the Tribes: Why the Evolution of Civilization Has Been as Tormented and Destructive as it Has Been: "Power becomes important where two actors (or more) would choose the same thing but cannot both have it; power becomes important when the obstacles to the achievement of one's will come from the will of others. Thus, as the expanding capacities of human societies created an overlap in the range of their grasp and desire, the intersocietal struggle for power arose.
"

The Parable of the Tribes: Why the Evolution of Civilization Has Been as Tormented and Destructive as it Has Been: "The meaning of 'power,' a concept central to this entire work, needs to be explored. Power may be defined as the capacity to achieve one's will against the will of another. The exercise of power thus infringes upon the exercise of choice, for to be the object of another's power is to have his choice substituted for one's own. * "

The Parable of the Tribes: Why the Evolution of Civilization Has Been as Tormented and Destructive as it Has Been: "If an expanding society willingly stops where its growth would infringe upon neighboring societies, it allows death to catch up and overtake its population. If it goes beyond those limits, it commits aggression. With no natural order or overarching power to prevent it, some will surely choose to take what belongs to their neighbors rather than to accept the limits that are compulsory for every other form of life."

The Parable of the Tribes: Why the Evolution of Civilization Has Been as Tormented and Destructive as it Has Been: "Since the labor of a few could now feed many, an extensive division of labor became possible. The breakthrough in food production cleared the way for the rise of civilization. From the narrowly circumscribed conditions of primitive social life, suddenly all things seem to become possible for the cultural animal."

The Parable of the Tribes: Why the Evolution of Civilization Has Been as Tormented and Destructive as it Has Been: "Then came a major cultural innovation in the technology of subsistence. When plants and animals were domesticated, mankind began truly to depart from the place in the living order given it by nature. At first, some ten thousand years ago, the economy of domestication was merely an appendage to the ongoing hunting-and-gathering economy. Gradually, the new way of life supplanted the old. It took several millennia before the power of this breakthrough to usher in a new age became manifest. It was not just that man's role in the ecosystem was forever altered by his unprecedented power to rearrange the living system for his own purposes. Beyond that, the new abundance brought about by developing agriculture made possible open-ended changes in the previously fixed size and structure of human society. Except in a few extraordinary locations, a hunting-and-gathering society was by necessity a small, fairly mobile group. The rise of agriculture made possible a more settled life with far larger populations living in the same territory under a single social organization. "

The Parable of the Tribes: Why the Evolution of Civilization Has Been as Tormented and Destructive as it Has Been: "These primitive bands, in their size and structure and in their means of subsistence, maintained a fundamental kinship with the primate groups from which they emerged. In other words, despite the notion that the beginnings of culture represent the point of radical discontinuity between man and the rest of nature, our ancestors developed culture over hundreds of thousands of years without greatly disrupting the continuity in the relationships among individual, society, and the natural order. As long as human societies sustained their lives with the food that nature spontaneously provided, they could develop culturally only within strict limits.
"

The Parable of the Tribes: Why the Evolution of Civilization Has Been as Tormented and Destructive as it Has Been: "To some, the emergence of culture is the crucial point in the discontinuity between man and the other creatures. According to this view, if the first volume of our Natural History is to be called The Physical World, and the second The Evolution of Life, the third should be entitled The Rise of Culture. Culture introduced the capacity for freedom of choice onto the earth"

The Parable of the Tribes: Why the Evolution of Civilization Has Been as Tormented and Destructive as it Has Been: "Culture opened a gap in the rigid regime of the living order. Gradually, over the last one or several million years, our ancestors widened the range within which human creativity, rather than human genetics, determined the way human life was lived. Tools were invented, manufactured, and used in the basic processes oflife. Language and other symbolic forms were created for the communication and representation of experience. Like the beginnings of learning in the distant evolutionary past, the beginnings of culture were no doubt modest and unobtrusive. And as with learning, the success of the new experiment quickened its development. Over hundreds of thousands of years, culture and genetics acted together to reinforce this acceleration of cultural development. The selection for individuals whose hands were good at tool use led, over the generations, to the evolution of hands better suited to tool use. The advantages of those who could use language well led to brains and mouths better equipped for working with language. More and more the human animal enjoyed an unprecedented freedom. It could create its own way of life."

The Parable of the Tribes: Why the Evolution of Civilization Has Been as Tormented and Destructive as it Has Been: "The cumulative learning of a group of human beings is its culture. *
"

The Parable of the Tribes: Why the Evolution of Civilization Has Been as Tormented and Destructive as it Has Been: "Human learning has changed the world in a way the learning of other animals did not. This is not primarily because we are individually more intelligent than other individual animals, though we are. Rather it is because our intelligence has crossed that threshold where it becomes possible for us to pool our learning
collectively and to transmit its fruits down through the generations. At that point, the capacity to learn became transmuted into the far more potent ability to create culture.
"

The Parable of the Tribes: Why the Evolution of Civilization Has Been as Tormented and Destructive as it Has Been: "With the emergence of learning, the control of organismic behavior by genetic blueprint ceased to be absolute. A creature's own experience --not just the aeons of ancestral experience carved by selection into the genes-- could now play some part in shaping how it acts in the world. The capacity to learn creates a new discontinuity between the living and the inanimate worlds. First came matter and energy obeying physical laws, then came organisms mechanically following laws inscribed by ages of evolution. The animal that can learn is something new in that the determinants of its behavior are not wholly created outside of itself. As long as genetic control remains absolute, the living present is wholly bound by the evolutionary past. With the emergence of learning, the present gains a degree of latitude to shape itself."

The Parable of the Tribes: Why the Evolution of Civilization Has Been as Tormented and Destructive as it Has Been: "That more flexible creatures like mammals have arisen late in the evolutionary process compared with the more rigid reptiles (not to mention the still more primitive forms) is evidence not so much of superiority as of complexity, and of the fact that greater complexity takes longer to evolve. Conceivably, such flexibility could be entirely programmed into the genes. Indeed, in insects some fairly elaborate discriminations are completely, or almost completely, genetically 'wired.' But after a certain level of complexity is reached, such an approach would be terribly cumbersome-- worse than computers that play chess by considering every imaginable move at every point. Selection has therefore favored a more efficient route to behavioral flexibility-- learning."

The Parable of the Tribes: Why the Evolution of Civilization Has Been as Tormented and Destructive as it Has Been: "We can better understand biological evolution if we see it less as a process of change than as a creation of order. Natural selection has molded an order of indescribably complexity from the molecular level to the global. Each piece of the intricate pattern oflife must play its specific and narrow role in the whole. This order is rigid but not coercive, for there is no governing power in the system. Each creature follows its own law, but that law itself has been written by an evolutionary process that secures the orderliness of the overarching system of life. Each creature is free in the sense that none of its impulses are prohibited. But it is a freedom without choice."

The Parable of the Tribes: Why the Evolution of Civilization Has Been as Tormented and Destructive as it Has Been: "For living things to persist, or survive, their environment must provide them with the substances and energy they need to maintain and to reproduce themselves. As life grows denser, the environment on which each organism depends consists increasingly of other living things. The survival of each, therefore, comes to depend upon how well all the others maintain crucial flows of materials and energy throughout the system. Life requires environmental reliability. The implications for natural selection are clear. Selection molds not just individual species but entire ecological communities, favoring those combinations of creatures that most reliably act synergistically to maintain the flows on which all the creatures depend. As life developed on this planet, the networks of interdependence and cooperation expanded until some of the major flows became global in scope. The earth's atmosphere as we know it is a product of the living ecosystem."

The Parable of the Tribes: Why the Evolution of Civilization Has Been as Tormented and Destructive as it Has Been: "History, then, has traditionally not allowed our vision to transcend the civilized condition that needs explaining. But in the last century or so, the perspective of 'natural history' has revealed to us how extremely truncated is that old view of time. Our infancy was not in the cradle of civilization, but far, far back before then. Our human ancestors go back hundreds of thousands, perhaps several millions of years. But our ancestry is still more ancient. Our story, as much as that of any creatures on earth, goes back to the beginning of life, more than three billion years ago. Walking a time line of the earth's history overwhelms our provincial sense of time. From the earth's beginning to the point where life emerges is a number of paces. It is a long walk before mammals have appeared, but only a few steps from there to the appearance of the human animal. The time of recorded history is scarcely visible. What we call history is like a period at the end of the long story of life on earth."

The Parable of the Tribes: Why the Evolution of Civilization Has Been as Tormented and Destructive as it Has Been: "The experience of a lifetime gives an inadequate perspective. Unlike Bibby's ancients of four thousand years ago, we can see change. But we have difficulty seeing what is constant amid the change. We were born into a vehicle already far along on an extended trajectory so that our present experience is intelligible only in terms of forces that acted in the past."

The Parable of the Tribes: Why the Evolution of Civilization Has Been as Tormented and Destructive as it Has Been: "One can add to the shortcomings of the human decision maker the extraordinary difficulty of these decisions. For the progress of civilization has been a continuous advance into uncharted territory. Even the wisest judge needs precedents, and civilized peoples have repeatedly been compelled to deal with unprecedented problems. Even intelligent people, under those circumstances, will adopt solutions which do not work or which work today but sow the seeds of tomorrow's problems. Irrigation brings a miracle of greenness in the short run but leads eventually to the disastrous spread of deserts over salted soils."

The Parable of the Tribes: Why the Evolution of Civilization Has Been as Tormented and Destructive as it Has Been: "This model of selection can account for much of the development and spread of new components of civilized culture. In part, culture is indeed a kind of market in which new possibilities - in making pottery, in telephone service, in musical expressions, in vaccinations - replace or supplement old because people want them. Without making any prejudgment about the nature and complexity of human wants, we may grant that choices based on those wants are important in determining the way our cultural systems evolve."

The Parable of the Tribes: Why the Evolution of Civilization Has Been as Tormented and Destructive as it Has Been: "This theory can be aptly illustrated by the development of a cuisine. In the beginning, people are surrounded by plants and animals, of unknown nutritive value and taste. Over the course of time, everything gets tried. People learn from their experience. They remember what tasted good, what was poisonous, even what diet made them feel healthy. They experiment with new combinations, new ways of preparing, storing, and curing foods. Constantly, they select for the most satisfying cuisine. As people from one region contact people from another, they exchange ideas and ingredients. Each group now benefits from the other's recipes, and altogether new recipes come into being as new combinations of foods become possible - one group's nuts are traded for another's herbs, citrus comes to the New World as the tomato is taken to the Old. Selection continually generates improvement."

The Parable of the Tribes: Why the Evolution of Civilization Has Been as Tormented and Destructive as it Has Been: "This commonsense theory of social evolution offers a benign and reasonable view of human affairs. According to this image, people are continually hunting for ways to better their condition. (One immediately recognizes the Economic Man of capitalist theory). The alternatives are readily generated by this pursuit of improvement. The longer the hunt goes on, the more alternatives are discovered. And, since man is an inventive as well as exploratory creature, what is discovered in the world is increasingly supplemented by what people have created. With the passage of time, therefore, more and more cultural alternatives become available for all aspects of our cultural business - how and what to produce, how to govern ourselves, what to think, how to travel, play, make music, and so on. The process of selection is done by people. The criterion for selection? People choose what they believe will best meet their needs, replacing old cultural forms when new and better ones become available. Again, the resonance with economic theory is striking: social evolution is the product of choices made in the marketplace of cultural possibilities."

The Parable of the Tribes: Why the Evolution of Civilization Has Been as Tormented and Destructive as it Has Been: "History's acceleration has made manifest what has been true from the beginning of civilization: the structure of life for civilized peoples has been constantly subject to profound changes as new cultural ways are developed and replace the old. We can see now that civilization is an evolving system.

The question is: what determines the direction in which civilization evolves? It is a vital question, for if we are shaping our destiny without comprehension, how likely is it we will shape it well? For our power to exceed our understanding is dangerous. What is remarkable about this question besides its fundamental importance is the paucity of attention it receives. There seem to be two principal reasons for this neglect: (1) some do not search for an answer because they believe none can exist; and (2) some do not search for an answer because they assume they already know it.
"

The Parable of the Tribes: Why the Evolution of Civilization Has Been as Tormented and Destructive as it Has Been: "People often do not recognize, much less grasp, the effects of their actions. Four thousand years ago (as Geoffrey Bibby describes in a book of that title, 1961) change in civilized societies was so gradual that people thought that life had always been as it was then. The question of explaining change hardly arose in their minds. Yet they were actively (if inadvertently) effecting one of the great revolutions in the history of life - the evolution of civilization. Change that was cataclysmic by the standards of life's previous development was nonetheless too slow to be visible in the perspective of a single lifetime.

Now, change has so quickened that one cannot help but witness dramatic metamorphoses in civilized societies. Before our eyes, ancient tribal groups are being welded into nations. Whole societies adopt new forms of social and economic organization. Intellectual revolutions and technological innovations constantly alter people's methods of production, transportation, housing. Traditional values and ideologies all over the world are altered or overthrown as they encounter new and unexpected conditions."

World population is currently growing by 1.1 percent annually. As shown in the chart above, nearly all of this population growth is occurring within developing countries. As a result, roughly 9 in 10 children (1.6 billion total children) under the age of 15 currently reside in developing parts of the world, up from 7 in 10 in 1950 (EarthTrends and UNPD). By 2050, total population is expected to reach 9.1 billion (medium projection) despite overall declines in population growth rates. Major growth is expected to occur in developing countries' urban populations; assuming current trends "poor countries will have to build the equivalent of a city of more than one million people each week for the next 45 years" (Cohen, 2005). Limited access to health care, contraception, and educa! tion in many of these countries has resulted in national demographic trends that exhibit stark contrasts to those of the industrialized world (e.g., fertility rates), leading to high population densities in developing regions of Africa and Asia (see map).

Global Population Density. Data are for 1995. For more information, please see the full source notes.

QuickStudy: The Singularity: "Kurzweil identifies exponential growth in the capacity of information technology with a biblical sweep that stretches from the beginning through six epochs:

1. Physics and Chemistry -- from the big bang through the entire prelife era of the universe.

2. Biology and DNA -- stretching from the beginning of life on earth.

3. Brains -- the advent of human dominance.

4. Technology -- approaching culmination in the 20th century.

5. Merger of Human Technology and Human Intelligence -- which is the Singularity.

6. The Universe Wakes Up -- the other side of the Singularity."

QuickStudy: The Singularity: "published in 2001, Kurzweil wrote: 'Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to The Singularity -- technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history. The implications include the merger of biological and non-biological intelligence, immortal software-based humans, and ultrahigh levels of intelligence that expand outward in the universe at the speed of light.'"

According to Ward’s Communications, there were 603 million passenger cars on the world’s roads in 2004, the last year with such data, plus another 223 million commercial vehicles.

Chapter 8. Military expenditure — SIPRI Yearbook 2006: "World military expenditure in 2005 is estimated to have reached $1001 billion at constant (2003) prices and exchange rates, or $1118 billion in current dollars. This corresponds to 2.5 per cent of world GDP or an average spending of $173 per capita. World military expenditure in 2005 presents a real terms increase of 3.4 per cent since 2004, and of 34 per cent over the 10-year period 1996–2005. The USA, responsible for about 80 per cent of the increase in 2005, is the principal determinant of the current world trend, and its military expenditure now accounts for almost half of the world total. "

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "'Ballistic Missiles: A Crucial Strategic Issue for the United States and Europe'"

Seed: Look Around You: "Complexity is everywhere. It's a structural and organizational principle that reaches almost every field imaginable, from genetics and social networks to food webs and stock markets. Contemporary scientific and technological accomplishments—including mapping the human genome, decoding neural networks and opening up the ocean to exploration—have seen our ability to generate and acquire information outpace our ability to make sense of it. With a surfeit of facts and few ways to synthesize them, 'meaningful information' quickly becomes an oxymoron."

Banking & Finance: "The other issue is the fear that China is going to break up (decentralise). The interesting news is, it is already breaking up. China is the most decentralising country in the world. It’s an old Chinese idea that the periphery is the centre. That’s true of China now."

Banking & Finance: "Most things remain constant even when we see lots of change. People say the only thing constant in business is change. That is absolutely ridiculous. Most things do not change. But that does not make news. The only news that gets reported is change. If business develops a mindset only around change, it’s not going to be helpful."

Economics: League leaders - Accountancy Age: "Today, thinking of the Chancellor as the financial director of a company called UK plc is a redundant concept. It is more realistic to regard him as the chief financial officer of a subsidiary company called UK Ltd, while the parent company is now Global Inc. The Chancellor’s role is to ensure that his subsidiary is viewed as a competitive and attractive location for the multinational investment that underpins growth."

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR): "The new strategic context in the region has also posed important challenges for Iran. Although Iran has welcomed the fall of two of its historical enemies -- the Sunni Taliban regime in Afghanistan and the Ba'athist government in Iraq "

People's Daily Online -- The limitation of the Gini Coefficient in China: "Countries, which have finished the urbanization process and industrialization process, enjoy social stability and economic rise under a Gini Coefficient of 0.3-0.4. Those with a Gini Coefficient higher than 0.4 have too large an income gap and suffer from a sluggish economy and serious social problems. In these cases, the criteria and analysis of income gap overlaps with that of the impact of income gap.

In China' case, however, where urbanization and industrialization are far from being finished and urbanization lags far behind industrialization, criteria applied to economies which have completed the processes may not work well.

Theoretically, the industrialization and urbanization process brings about a flow of labor and capital to urban areas and industrialized sectors, which in turn benefits urban residents and capital owners more in the income distribution and deteriorates the income gap.
Once the urbanization and industrialization process has been finished, the capital will return to the agricultural sector to relieve the income inequality."
Therefore, the Gini Coefficient will first go up and then down. It is natural to see countries in the process of urbanization and industrialization with a higher Gini figure than those that have completed the process.

"Half of all Africans live in four countries - Nigeria
(127 million), Ethiopia (64), Democratic Republic of
Congo (51), and South Africa (43). "

ISN Publishing House: Global Responses to Global Threats: Sustainable Security for the 21st Century: "This paper examines threats to global security in the 21st century. The authors argue that international terrorism is a relatively minor threat when compared to other more serious global trends. The report offers an overview of four factors identified as the root causes of conflict and insecurity: climate change, competition over resources, marginalization of the majority world and global militarization. The authors propose a new approach to global security that does not attempt to unilaterally control threats through the use of force, but rather aims to cooperatively resolve the root causes of those threats."

Wired 14.07: People Power: "Previous industrial ages were built on the backs of individuals, too, but in those days labor was just that: labor. Workers were paid for their time, whether on a factory floor or in a cubicle. Today’s peer-production machine runs in a mostly nonmonetary economy. The currency is reputation, expression, karma, “wuffie,” or simply whim.

This can all sound a little like, well, ’60s-style utopianism. After all, Marx himself believed that the industrial proletariat would revolt against the bourgeoisie, creating a state where the workers own the means of industrial production. It’s easy to see an echo of that in blogosphere triumphalism."

Wired 14.07: People Power: "Now we have armies of amateurs, happy to work for free. Call it the Age of Peer Production. From Amazon.com to MySpace to craigslist, the most successful Web companies are building business models based on user-generated content. This is perhaps the most dramatic manifestation of the second-generation Web. The tools of production, from blogging to video-sharing, are fully democratized, and the engine for growth is the spare cycles, talent, and capacity of regular folks, who are, in aggregate, creating a distributed labor force of unprecedented scale."

Wired 14.07: People Power: "First, steam power replaced muscle power and launched the Industrial Revolution. Then Henry Ford’s assembly line, along with advances in steel and plastic, ushered in the Second Industrial Revolution. Next came silicon and the Information Age. Each era was fueled by a faster, cheaper, and more widely available method of production that kicked efficiency to the next level and transformed the world."