2020 computingMilestones in scientific computing : Nature: "1946 ENIAC, widely thought of as the first electronic digital computer, is formally unveiled. Designed to compute ballistics during the Second World War, it performs calculations in a variety of scientific fields including randomnumber studies, wind-tunnel design and weather prediction. Its first 24-hour forecast takes about 24 hours to do."

Asia Times Online :: Middle East News, Iraq, Iran current affairs: "'When all channels are closed to us, we use violence. We don't have jets, we don't have tanks. So we made the decision. It is one of the ways we resist, it is not the only way.' "

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Scientists divided over longevity: "But while the debate continues, all involved do agree that life extension is within the realms of possibility for science; but how exactly we do it, how long we can postpone death for, and whether modern society can handle the burden of an increasingly aged population is still being debated.
'I think we will hopefully be able to get some means to make a significant impact on processes of ageing. These will not necessarily result immediately in substantive life extension, but they may change the profile of health that people experience as they go through [old age]. We haven't begun seriously to discus what should be our priorities and how we should develop strategies,' explained Professor Kirkwood at the conference. "

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Scientists divided over longevity: "The increase in life expectancy enjoyed by many societies is a triumph of modern science.
Our understanding of the human body and how to repair it when it breaks down have continued to push 'old age' into the distance - and researchers intend to keep pushing.
But the claims made by Dr Aubrey de Grey, a scientist at the University of Cambridge, UK, that lifespan can be increased by over 1,000 years, have proven too much for some; and a dispute has now broken out within the gerontology community. "

KurzweilAI.net: "No nation lacking the nanotech advantage will be able to resist a foe�no matter how small or weak in conventional terms�that wields the power of molecular manufacturing.3
It is not certain, of course, that large-scale war will occur within the next few decades. But if it does, and if both (or all) sides are nano-enabled, that event could last a relatively long time, and casualties could be in the billions. If, on the other hand, only one combatant possesses the awesome capabilities of nano-built weapons, computers, and infrastructure, that war might be over very quickly, and could leave the victor in total command of the world."

KurzweilAI.net: "Diamond lists superior military technology based on guns, steel weapons, and horses; infectious diseases; maritime technology; centralized political organization; and writing.
These advantages can be categorized as follows (with items from 1532 in parentheses):
Battle technology (guns, steel weapons, and horses)
Physical fitness (infectious diseases)
Transportation technology (maritime)
Effective command and control (centralized organization)
Communications technology (writing) "

KurzweilAI.net: "Some wars are between opponents of roughly equal fighting ability. As a result, these conflicts tend to drag on, often for years and killing millions, until finally one side emerges victorious. Recent examples include the American Civil War, World War I, and World War II.
Occasionally one adversary will possess huge advantages over the other, in which case the war typically is quite short. A famous instance is the spectacular one-sided victory of Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro over the Incan empire in 1532."

KurzweilAI.net: "We like to look back admiringly on other things our species has produced: great works of art, brilliant inventions, sage philosophers, brave explorers, and selfless peacemakers. But the real star of the human story is war. In fact, very often those things we admire�philosophy, technology, leadership, superb writing and speechmaking�are put to maximum use in the service of war.
The story is not yet over. Within our lifetimes, we are likely to witness battles on a scale never before seen. Powered by molecular manufacturing, an advanced form of nanotechnology, these near-future wars1 may threaten our freedom, our way of life, and even our survival. "

KurzweilAI.net: "Conflicts, clashes, battles, and wars: this is the stuff of which history is made. The world as we know it today is largely a product of wars fought and peoples conquered."

emcc - european monitoring centre on change - home page: "EMCC: understanding,
anticipating and
managing change
The European Monitoring Centre on Change (EMCC) is a place for exchanging practice, information and ideas on the management and anticipation of change."

Political, economic and technological forces are underpinning some longstanding characteristics of employment in the
performing arts sector, namely, the high proportion of part-time and short-term jobs, and of self-employment. At the
same time, technological developments provide greater resources to performing artists, or others, to promote and market
their work, thus facilitating the persistence of micro-enterprises in this sector. However, digitalisation and the Internet
are also bringing the transmission of performing arts products increasingly under the control of wealthy media
companies or broadcasters. Their position, too, may soon be threatened by the transmission of television and films
through the Internet, using enhanced broadband. The overall tendency is towards greater uncertainty for those working
in the sector.

http://www.emcc.eurofound.eu.int/publications/2005/ef0563en1-3.pdf
As discussed in the previous section, the live performing arts cannot cut or control their costs by substituting capital or
technology for the labour of performers. In most European countries, it is a matter of social policy not to have the whole
cost of traditional performances borne through admission prices, as this would greatly restrict the audience. There is also
a long historical tradition of public funding for ‘high culture’, not only in artistic performances but also in museums and
other sources of education. The reasons underlying this tradition are very complex, and are certainly not explained by
considerations of financial return or economic growth.

http://karlalbrecht.com/downloads/Trends-WhitePaper-Albrecht.pdf
Two of the central elements of the strategic conversation are 1) the “environmental
scan,” or “E-scan,” which is the continuous study of the business environment to identify
trends, events, and contingencies which can pose threats or present opportunities; and
2) the “organizational scan,” or “org-scan,” which is the realistic and objective
assessment of the organization’s capacity for achieving its mission and adapting to the
changing demands of its environment.

automates-intelligents-html@kiosqueist.com: "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?"

People's Daily Online -- Why does world oil price soar up?: "Although the two wars the US launched came to an end, the troubles have never stopped. Until now, al-Qaeda still make trouble from time to time in Afghanistan. The situation in Iraq is even worse, American troops, more than one hundred thousand, cannot withdraw, while the civil wars took place constantly. Meanwhile, the US started to shift its attention to Iran on the latter's nuclear issue. Terrorist attacks and threats also happened in Saudi Arabia and Nigeria. These all contribute to the crude oil price hike.
Secondly, the strong world economy promotes the growing world demand for crude oil. Over the past years, although the US has involved in wars, its economy is quite good; the economies of emerging industrial countries including China and India also develop rapidly; Japan and European countries such as Germany, Britain and France also see economic revival. The oil demand of a country, whether developed or develop, is bound to grow as long as its economy develops fast. "

We believe that computer science concepts and tools in science form a third,
and vital component of enabling a ‘golden triangle’ to be formed with novel
mathematical and statistical techniques in science, and scientific computing
platforms and applications integrated into experimental and theoretical
science. This combination is likely to accelerate key breakthroughs in science
and benefits to society, from understanding biology and revolutionising
medicine and healthcare, and from understanding the universe to the origin of
life, and understanding and helping to protect the life-support systems of Earth
on which we all depend for our survival.

news @ nature.com�-� 2020 computingEverything, everywhere�-�Tiny computers that constantly monitor ecosystems, buildings and even human bodies could turn science on its head. Declan Butler investigates.: "The world's stock of computing power, and the number of devices over which it is distributed, has increased exponentially since then, as has the capacity of networking technology. These trends show no sign of slowing down, and that makes pervasive sensor nets not so much possible as inevitable. One does not need to be a visionary to see that soon, tiny devices with the power of today's desktops will be cheap enough to put everywhere.

Gaetano Borriello, a computer scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle, argues that such widely distributed computing power will trigger a paradigm shift as great as that brought about by the development of experimental science itself. 'We will be getting real-time data from the physical world for the first time on a large scale.'"

news @ nature.com�-� 2020 computingEverything, everywhere�-�Tiny computers that constantly monitor ecosystems, buildings and even human bodies could turn science on its head. Declan Butler investigates.: "These new computers would take the form of networks of sensors with data-processing and transmission facilities built in. Millions or billions of tiny computers � called 'motes', 'nodes' or 'pods' � would be embedded into the fabric of the real world. They would act in concert, sharing the data that each of them gathers so as to process them into meaningful digital representations of the world. Researchers could tap into these 'sensor webs' to ask new questions or test hypotheses. Even when the scientists were busy elsewhere, the webs would go on analysing events autonomously, modifying their behaviour to suit their changing experience of the world."

http://research.microsoft.com/towards2020science/downloads/T2020S_Report.pdf
An important development in science is occurring at the intersection of
computer science and the sciences that has the potential to have a profound
impact on science. It is a leap from the application of computing to support
scientists to ‘do’ science (i.e. ‘computational science’) to the integration of
computer science concepts, tools and theorems into the very fabric of science.
While on the face of it, this change may seem subtle, we believe it to be
fundamental to science and the way science is practiced. Indeed,we believe this
development represents the foundations of a new revolution in science.

http://research.microsoft.com/towards2020science/downloads/T2020S_Report.pdf
The urban environments where the majority of people live are complex evolving
ecosystems where the next stage of evolution could be driven by information
and communications technologies which become integral to all parts of our
domestic and shared infrastructure.

The urban environments where the majority of people live are complex evolving
ecosystems where the next stage of evolution could be driven by information
and communications technologies which become integral to all parts of our
domestic and shared infrastructure.

Two key
uncertainties form the framework for those scenarios. The section on challenges
highlights the first: will society embrace a world where we track, and perhaps
control, the movement of all goods and people? The second is whether or not
we develop an alternative source of energy for transport that has minimal impact
on the climate. If we do have this energy source, we would want to use IIS to
support as much movement of goods and people as we desired. If we don’t, we
would want to use IIS to minimise the movement of goods and people, while still
supporting economic growth.

For example, levels of obesity have risen
from 6% in 1980 to 22% today, with an annual health cost to the UK of £3 billion
a year. We might be able to spot the next ‘obesity’ before it reaches such a level
and could seek to act before it imposes such costs on human lives and on the
health service.

Historically, when we have improved the transport system and reduced costs,
people have travelled more. We changed our patterns of behaviour to reflect the
increase in ease of travel – living further away from our place of work, developing
cities and shopping facilities that are based around use of the car, and travelling
for leisure on a national and international basis. While this has supported
economic growth, it has led to congestion, rising costs of maintaining the
infrastructure we already have in place, greater fragility of the system, and
environmental costs.

The UK has an extensive transport infrastructure. We currently have: 724,000 km
of road lanes; 16,600 km of railway track; 47 major ports, of which 20 account
for 87% of traffic across all cargo types; and 28 major airports, 18 with more than
1 million scheduled passengers passing through them each year. As a nation,
we travel approximately 500 billion km by road per year, 50 billion km by rail and
275 billion km by air

Putting a human on the moon was the greatest transport challenge of the past
half-century. The transport challenge of the next 50 years will be to use
technology to deliver infrastructure that will stimulate economic growth, support
social cohesion and be environmentally sustainable.

Just as science and technology gave us the freedom to move, they will play a
key role in helping us to respond to these new challenges. Advances in sensor
technology, computing power and telecommunications can allow us to build
intelligence into the infrastructure.

http://www.foresight.gov.uk/Intelligent Infrastructure Systems/Reports and Publications/Intelligent_Infrastructure_Futures/Project_Overview.pdf
However, we now face the challenges of global warming and limited supplies of oil, set against increasing demands for oil. At a national level, we face increasing congestion on roads and rail.

Challenges to the US Empire - Empire? - Global Policy Forum: "Since the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the US has dominated the globe politically, economically and, above all, militarily. However, analysts increasingly point at a number of challenges to US global preponderance. Geopolitical competitors are rising. China, enjoying unrivalled economic growth, is pursuing diplomatic offensives in Africa and South America and has modernized its military forces. India and Russia, both with rapidly growing economies, are bolstering their geopolitical clout. The European Union, an economic juggernaut, rivals the US with its single currency and seeks to forge a common foreign and security policy to gain more international influence. The economic base on which the US system rests is beginning to show serious weaknesses."

KurzweilAI.net: "Molecular manufacturing will give its wielders extreme power�certainly enough power to overcome all significant non-human limits (at least within the context of the planet; in space, there will be other limits such as scarcity of materials and speed of light). Even if the problem of cheaters could be overcome, we do not have many internal limits these days; the current trend in capitalism is to deny the desirability of all limits except those that arise from competition. What's left?"

KurzweilAI.net: "Any active system without limits will run off the rails. The simplest example is a reproducing population, which will indulge in exponential growth until it exhausts its resources and crashes. Another example can be found in the 'excesses' of behavior that are seen in political revolutions. Humans systems need limits as much as any other system, for all that we try to overcome them.
Through all of history, the presence of limits has been a reasonable assumption. Nations were limited by other nations; populations were limited by geography, climate, or disease; and societies would sometimes be stable long enough to develop and agree on a morality that provided additional useful limits. A society that overstepped its bounds could expect to collapse or be out-competed by other societies."

KurzweilAI.net: "Molecular manufacturing has the potential to remove or bypass many of today's limits. It is not far wrong to say that the most significant remaining limits will be human, and that we will be trying our hardest to bypass even those. To people with faith in humanity's good nature and high potential, this will come as welcome news. For many who have studied history, it will be rather frightening. A near-total lack of limits could lead straight to a planet-wide dictatorship, or to any of several forms of irreversible destruction.
Many of the plans that have been proposed to deal with molecular manufacturing, by CRN and others, assume (usually implicitly) that the plan will be implemented within some bigger system, such as the rule of law. This will be problematic if molecular manufacturing is powerful enough that its users can make their own law. We cannot assume that existing world systems will continue to provide a framework in which molecular manufacturing will play out. Those systems that adopt the new technology will be transformed; those that do not will be comparatively impotent. We will have to find ways for multiple actors empowered by molecular manufacturing to coexist constructively, without reliance on the stabilizing forces provided by today's global institutions."

KurzweilAI.net: "Humans are good at pushing limits. We can survive in scorching deserts and in the frozen Arctic. We have flown faster than sound and sent robots to other planets. We have managed, with help from fossil fuels, to feed six billion people. Even before we had motors and technological navigation equipment, some of us were able to find and colonize islands in the middle of the vast Pacific Ocean.
Pushing limits has its darker side as well. Humans are not good at respecting each other's rights; the ferocity of the Mongol hordes remains legendary, and the 20th century provides multiple examples of state-sponsored mass murder. Natural limits frequently are pushed too far, and whole civilizations have been wiped out by environmental backlash. We are too good at justifying our disrespect of limits, and then we often become increasingly destructive as the problem becomes more acute. More than a century ago, Lord Acton warned that 'absolute power corrupts absolutely.' This can be restated as, 'Complete lack of limits leads to unlimited destruction.'"

KurzweilAI.net: "Within the next 100 years, the growing human influence on earth's climate could lead to a long and irreversible rise in sea levels by eroding Earth's vast polar ice sheets, according to new observations and analysis by several teams of scientists.

One team, using computer models of climate and ice, found that by about 2100, average temperatures could be 4 degrees warmer than today and that over the coming centuries, the world's oceans could rise 13 to 20 feet --conditions last seen 129,000 years ago, between the last two ice ages."

The lesson
here for states is simple: if the opportunity to gain an advantage over another state
arises, take advantage of it.

However, once you marry those five assumptions together, powerful incentives
are created for states to behave aggressively toward each other. Specifically, states
look for opportunities to gain power at the expense of other states, and to make sure
that other states don’t take advantage of them. In other words, states seek to
maximize their power. The system leaves them no choice if they want to survive. It
does not matter whether they are content with the status quo or not.

In brief, the two key factors that underpin the tragic nature of international
politics are anarchy and uncertainty about the intentions of other states.

The reason for this tragic situation is that states cannot discern the intentions of
other states with a high degree of confidence. Moreover, it is almost impossible to
know the future intentions of other states. Therefore, leaders have little choice but
to assume worst case about other great powers’ intentions. The reason for believing
the worst is that there is no higher authority that states can turn to if they guess
wrong about another state’s intentions. States operate in an anarchic system, which
means that they have nobody to turn to if they assume that another state has benign
intentions, but that judgment proves wrong.

I think that many commentators and security experts overestimate the power
of the United States. Despite all the talk about global hegemony, it is especially
difficult to dominate the entire planet, not only because it is very large, but also
because it is necessary to project power over large bodies of water, which is a
formidable task. For sure, the United States is a hegemon in the western hemisphere.
That is because the Americas are its backyard and because there is no state
in the region that has the military power to stand up to the United States in a war.
But dominating the rest of the globe is virtually impossible at this point in time. To
accomplish that end, the United States would need immense power projection
capabilities and lots more land power or boots on the ground than it now has or is
likely to have anytime soon.

There is no doubt that the United States is by far the most powerful state on
the face of the earth. But that does not mean that it is the only great power in the
system, which is by definition what is necessary to have unipolarity or global
hegemony. Remember, bipolarity means two great powers, multipolarity means
three or more, and unipolarity means one. Thus, the key to determining the polarity
of a system is figuring out how many great powers there are around the globe, and
that depends mainly on how one defines a great power.
For me, a great power is a state that has the military wherewithal to put up a
serious fight in an all-out conventional war against the most powerful state in the
system. A modern great power must also have a nuclear deterrent. Today, China and
Russia have the conventional capabilities to give the United States a good fight in
a major war, and they both have nuclear arsenals. Neither country would be easy to
conquer in a conventional war. Thus, both qualify as great powers. Germany and
Japan are not great powers in my account, because they do not have nuclear
weapons. So I think that we live in a multipolar world that has three great powers –
China, Russia, and the United States, the mightiest of them all.

http://mearsheimer.uchicago.edu/pdfs/A0039.pdf
The taproot of our disagreement lies in the assumptions that underpin our
structural theories. Waltz says that his theory is built on two simple assumptions:
(1) the system is anarchic, and (2) states seek to survive. He explicitly says that he
does not assume that states are rational actors. My theory is based on five
assumptions: (1) the system is anarchic, (2) all great powers have some offensive
military capability, (3) states can never be certain about other states’ intentions, (4)
states seek to survive, and (5) great powers are rational actors or strategic
calculators.

http://mearsheimer.uchicago.edu/pdfs/A0039.pdf
It took me a long time, I am embarrassed to say, to recognize that Waltz has
a rather benign theory of international politics. He believes that international
anarchy encourages aggression, but not too much of it, mainly because he thinks
that states balance efficiently against aggressors. If a great power gets too greedy,
according to Waltz, the other great powers will gang up on it and crush it. Still,
Waltz’s theory does allow for moderate levels of aggression. The follow-on wave
of ‘defensive realists’, especially Jack Snyder and Steve Van Evera, go further than
Waltz and argue that war hardly ever pays. Structural factors, according to them,
should discourage aggression altogether and encourage peaceful policies.
Once I fully understood what Randall Schweller calls the ‘status quo bias’ in the
writings of Waltz and his followers, I found myself dissatisfied with their theories.
Simply put, they did not accord with how I saw states behaving over time. I then
began to think about developing a different theory. I found that I agreed with
Morgenthau that states were constantly looking for opportunities to increase their
power, but I did not share his starting assumption that states were hard-wired with
an all-encompassing will to power. With regard to starting assumptions, I was a
structural realist like Waltz, but I did not share his view that states should not
maximize their power. Thus, I recognized that I had to come up with a structural
theory that explained why it is rational for states to pursue hegemony. My efforts
resulted in my theory of offensive realism.

John Mearsheimer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "In this world, there is no such thing as a status quo power, since according to Mearsheimer, 'a great power that has a marked power advantage over its rivals is likely to behave more aggressively because it has the capability as well as the incentive to do so.' He has also dismissed democratic peace theory (which claims that democracies - specifically, liberal democracies - never or rarely go to war with one another)."

John Mearsheimer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Given the difficulty of determining how much power is enough for today and tomorrow, great powers recognize that the best way to ensure their security is to achieve hegemony now, thus eliminating any possibility of a challenge by another great power. Only a misguided state would pass up an opportunity to become hegemon in the system because it thought it already had sufficient power to survive. "

LRB | John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt : The Israel Lobby: "This extraordinary generosity might be understandable if Israel were a vital strategic asset or if there were a compelling moral case for US backing. But neither explanation is convincing. One might argue that Israel was an asset during the Cold War. By serving as America�s proxy after 1967, it helped contain Soviet expansion in the region and inflicted humiliating defeats on Soviet clients like Egypt and Syria. It occasionally helped protect other US allies (like King Hussein of Jordan) and its military prowess forced Moscow to spend more on backing its own client states. It also provided useful intelligence about Soviet capabilities."

FlightAware > Statistics & Analysis > A Day In United States Airspace: "A day (from 4am until midnight) of snapshots of all the radar/radio contact air traffic in US airspace. Timestamps and flight counts are visible in the lower left corner of each image. "

Political Struggles Will Determine Better Globalisation - Globalization - Global Policy Forum: "In any case, the point of this paper is not to prescribe precise blueprints for change, but rather to affirm that major change is possible. Recall, after all, that few people in the 1910s envisioned a fully-fledged welfare state 30 years later. Few people in the 1930s anticipated worldwide decolonization 30 years later. Few people in the 1960s imagined wholesale neoliberalism 30 years later. So it is not fanciful to imagine that substantially different regimes of globalization will have replaced neoliberalism 30 years from now. Whether, in what ways, and how far the new globalizations turn out to be better ones will depend on critical public choices and extended political struggles. "

Political Struggles Will Determine Better Globalisation - Globalization - Global Policy Forum: "It is crucial to combine negative protest with positive proposal, deconstruction with reconstruction. People will be more ready to reject neoliberalism when they see clear and attractive replacements. Efforts to rethink policies can be pursued through a number of channels, including:
official circles that are sympathetic to change, such as much of the UN system;
certain business arenas, like fair trade schemes;
various academic quarters, preferably through interdisciplinary and intercultural enquiry; and
large parts of wider civil society, such as the World Social Forum process. "

Political Struggles Will Determine Better Globalisation - Globalization - Global Policy Forum: "Rises in production and productivity should serve the higher aims and do not become ends in their own right. The transcendence of neoliberalism requires a major shift in prevailing values among policy-making communities and the general public. "

Political Struggles Will Determine Better Globalisation - Globalization - Global Policy Forum: "Good arguments might exist for greater subsidiarity in the governance of global relations, but the notion that globality itself can be eliminated is unsustainable. "