Jeff Bell on Halo 3

Jeff Bell of Microsoft was in charge of the Halo 3 launch and in his WOMMA Summit 3 keynote provided a detailed overview of the program--very impressive. In this interview he touches on the elements of the launch, the relationship between online and offline activities, and taking risks in marketing.

Sea Level Back to Future

In the journal Nature Geoscience, which launches in January 2008, researchers say the true maximum sea level rise could be 164 cm, about twice what the IPCC proposes.

They looked at what happened more than 100,000 years ago - the last time Earth was this warm.

Read the BBC coverage.

THE ICE-FREE ARCTIC

There is much talk of when the ocean will be totally free of ice in summer. Some scientists think it might be as soon as 2013.

Others, who find that date a little early, say ice-free summers almost certainly will come sooner than many people thought possible.

Read it all here.

Al Gore & IPCC Get Nobel Prize

Look here.

Paul Krugman's Razor

The financial crisis took a brief vacation in September and October, but is back with a vengeance.

Never seen financial insiders this spooked — not even in 1997-99, when economic dominoes seemed to be falling all around the world.

This time, market players are truly horrified. Suddenly they realize that no one can grasp the financial system anymore.

Read it all.

Human Development Report 2007/2008

"Climate change is the defining human development challenge of the 21st Century. There is a window of opportunity for avoiding the most damaging climate change impacts, but that window is closing: the world has less than a decade to change course. Actions taken — or not taken — in the years ahead will have a profound bearing on the future course of human development. The world lacks neither the financial resources nor the technological capabilities to act. What is missing is a sense of urgency, human solidarity and collective interest."

Look here.

Click to enlarge. Picture's source is here.

ENERGY VISION 2020: S h a m e l e s s Bush Propaganda

This looks quite interesting, anyone no doubt will agree . . .

"In 2020, world population has grown to 7.5 billion people, the global economy is approaching $80 trillion, and the wireless Internet 4.0 is now connecting almost half of humanity.

Synergies among nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science have dramatically improved the human condition by increasing the availability of energy, food, and water and by connecting people and information anywhere, anytime."

However, it appears to be really shameless propaganda for the Bush dynasty . . .

"Jeb Bush gave his 2020 State of the Union address as the 47th president of the USA. Jeb Bush was the former governor of Florida, younger brother of George W. Bush and second son of George H. W. Bush.

He underlined the great progress made in terms of energy independence and energy diversification in the USA. He highlighted that even though neither the hydrogen economy nor nuclear fusion have yet come to happen, the USA is almost self sufficient in power consumption thanks to advances in biotechnology and nanotechnology."

U N B E L I E V A B L E !

SECRETARY-GENERAL BAN KI-MOON: "Climate Change As Frightening As A Science Fiction Movie"

Today the world's scientists have spoken clearly and with one voice: climate change may bring "abrupt and irreversible" impacts, including the fast melting of glaciers and species extinctions.

Even if levels of CO2 in the atmosphere stayed where they are now, research showed sea levels would rise by between 0.4 and 1.4 metres simply because water expands as it warms.

However, carbon dioxide emissions are rising faster than they were a decade ago.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has just been on a trip to see ice shelves breaking up in Antarctica and the melting Torres del Paine glaciers in Chile. He also visited the Amazon rainforest, which he said was being "suffocated" by global warming.


"These scenes are as frightening as a science fiction movie," Ban said. "But they are even more terrifying, because they are real."

The latest scientific knowledge on the causes and effects of climate change will be put before environment ministers in Bali, Indonesia, next month -- a meeting which is likely to agree a two-year strategy to negotiate a successor to the Kyoto Protocol.

Stiglitz: Worst President Ever

"Bush's fiscal irresponsibility fostered irresponsibility in everyone else. Credit was shoveled out the door, and subprime mortgages were made available to anyone this side of life support. Credit-card debt mounted to a whopping $900 billion by the summer of 2007.

The Federal Reserve Board stepped on the accelerator in a historically unprecedented way, driving interest rates down to 1 percent. In real terms, taking inflation into account, interest rates actually dropped to negative 2 percent. The predictable result was a consumer spending spree."

Read every single word here.

Future America: Jetsons or Waltons?

What happened to the future? Weren’t things supposed to be cooler by now, smarter, safer? Raised on a steady diet of science fiction, overzealous politicians and corporate hype, Americans expected to be living in The Jetsons — but instead find themselves stuck in a scarier version of The Waltons.

Read this interesting Special Report on The Future, brought to us by Forbes Magazine.


Another mustread is this first chapter of the book Future Files: A History of the Next 50 Years.

WAKING LIFE: 1st Artificial Life To Be Announced

Reportedly Dr Craig Venter, the DNA researcher involved in the race to decipher the human genetic code, has built a synthetic chromosome out of laboratory chemicals and is poised to announce the creation of the first new artificial life form on Earth.

Also be sure to watch this extremely cool video prediction: scene 6 from "Waking Life".

LIVING WITHOUT OIL: Now Available In The Dutch Edition

Look here.
The English language edition is under way!
The book was officially introduced at the Shell HQ in Amsterdam.

Adjiedj Bakas and Rob Creemers in "Living Without Oil / Leven Zonder Olie" together present the trends in energy production and energy consumption in today’s world. Is there an energy crisis to be expected and when? How long can we use oil and gas and when is it necessary to change the energy consumption? How to reduce CO2 and prevent the changes in climate we might expect in the near future? This book is the ultimate answer to Al Gore’s book An unconvenient truth. It is visionary, yet practical and inspirational: what are the real energy alternatives? What is the state of the art? What are the future scenario’s and future trends in energy consumption? Which new energy inventions are due? With cases and inspiring examples. The book is designed as a "magazine in a book": it is full colour, richly illustrated, with a foamcover and luxuriously designed.

Also vistit the LivingWithoutOil weblog, which BTW isn't ours.

Greenspan on 2030

From Alan Greenspan's new book "The Age of Turbulence":

"Adaptation is in our nature, a fact that leads me to be deeply optimistic about our future. [ . . . ] Progress is not automatic, however; it will demand future adaptations as yet unimaginable."

Monumental Multimedia Documentary

Here.

Totally New Digital Products Ahead

Cramming more data into less space on a memory chip or a hard drive has been the crucial force propelling consumer electronics companies to make ever smaller devices.

If Stuart Parkin proves successful in his current quest at the San Jose IBM Research Center, he will create a “universal” computer memory, one that can potentially replace dynamic random access memory, or DRAM, and flash memory chips, and even make a “disk drive on a chip” possible.

It could begin to replace flash memory in three to five years. Not only would it allow every consumer to carry data equivalent to a college library on small portable devices, but a tenfold or hundredfold increase in memory would undoubtedly unleash the creativity of engineers who would develop totally new entertainment, communication and information products.

The Worldwide Credit Crunch

From the International Herald Tribune on the US homeowner woes that can be felt throughout the world:

Different lives on different continents. But all of them, in this astonishingly interconnected world, are being swept up in a worldwide credit crunch that have raised fears of a financial meltdown.

Bad lending decisions to ordinary folks in places like Minnesota and New Jersey have been tearing through world economies like a tsunami, causing stock markets to plummet, threatening pensions, and affecting the prices of everything from oil to refrigerators.

The Future Of Work

The U.S. and the global economies are coming to a crossroads that no one could have anticipated just a few years ago. Globalization and technology together are creating the potential for startling changes in how we do our jobs and the offices we do them in. Offshoring, for one, means work can be broken into smaller tasks and redistributed around the world. And the rapid growth of broader, richer channels of communication—including virtual worlds—is transforming what it means to be "at work."

Read this article: "Which Way To The Future?"

The whole "The Future of Work" file is here.

Pumping Money As Markets Slide

Central banks worldwide have injected at least $326.3 billion in the past 48 hours to prevent markets from spinning into a global liquidity squeeze.

Want to know more???

Paul Krugman concedes at the moment "Very Scary Things" are happening.

The Last Oil Shock

David Strahan's provocative book "The Last Oil Shock" is meant to be "A Survival Guide to the Imminent Extinction of Petroleum Man". Homo Petrolicus is finished an we have no alternative. Even Shell's Jeroen van der Veer agrees: "the age of easy oil is over".

Internet Doomsday Scenario

Click here.

Charles Stross: Crystals Will Keep Our Memories

UK science fiction writer Charles Stross, author of novels Accelerando and Singularity Sky, posits a future in which all human experience is recorded on devices the size of a grain of sand.

Consider a carbon crystal, created (and edited) one atom at a time by nanomachinery; there are two stable isotopes of carbon, and we can use a Carbon-12 atom to represent a binary 0 and a Carbon-13 atom to represent a binary 1.

One gram of this substance could store 10 to the power 21 bytes (887,808 petabytes) - the equivalent storage of more than 11 billion typical PCs.

Watch Live Earth on MSN

Just click here to go there.

FROM CNN Al Gore @ Larry King Live

Click here to enjoy Al Gore's comments on the Live Earth event.

LIVE EARTH May Set New Stage for Web Viewing

The Live Earth event this Saturday is set to reach millions more people than previous global productions with its reach boosted by the fast-growing power of Web video sharing and social networks.

Organizers estimate television broadcasts of the live concerts staged to raise awareness about climate change will be available to up to 2 billion people although there is no estimate of how many people will actually watch the shows.

Madonna's 'HEY YOU' is here. Enjoy!

OECD: Offshoring and Cheap Imports May Hurt

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Globalization may be hurting low-skilled workers in the U.S. and Europe enough that politicians in both places may find it increasingly hard to sell voters on the benefits of free trade and open markets, says one of the world's leading economic institutes.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a Paris-based institute backed by the governments of 30 leading industrialized countries, is a staunch believer in free trade, which most economists believe makes all countries richer overall, including those with high wages.

But in its annual labor study, the OECD acknowledges growing popular unease about globalization.

At virtually the same time Der Spiegel addresses the German 'labor paradox' and wonders where all the skilled workers have gone.

'Workers', George Grosz

Web Inventor Gets Queen's Honour

The inventor of the world wide web has been awarded the Order of Merit, one of the UK's most prestigious honours. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who launched the first website in 1991, joins an elite group who have received the honour from the Queen for exceptional contributions in arts, sciences and other areas.

The British academic invented the web's address system and layout in Switzerland in 1991, ultimately revolutionising global communication.

Previously, he was named Greatest Briton at a ceremony in 2004.

Get the whole story here.

Real Cost of Offshoring

U.S. data show that moving jobs overseas hasn't hurt the economy. Here's why those stats are wrong.

China Puts Economy First!

China promises to better control emissions of greenhouse gases, unveiling its first national program to combat global warming, but rejects mandatory caps on emissions as unfair to countries still trying to catch up with the developed West. So to the Chinese, climate targets should in no way spoil their economic growth.

China Conquers Africa

From "Der Spiegel:"

China imports everything the continent produces: tropical hardwoods, oil, metals and even a small amount of cotton. Africa's five most resource-rich countries - Angola, South Africa, Sudan, Equatorial Guinea and Congo - account for more than 80 percent of all African exports to China.

In return Africa gets cheap, mass-produced items, basic consumer goods like household devices, television sets and clothing. From South African supermarket shelves to Uganda's flea markets, the products with the strange characters printed on their packaging are available everywhere. In fact the flood of cheap Chinese goods has already destroyed the textile industries in Swaziland and Lesotho.

NEW GORE BOOK The Assault on Reason

From the book via TIME Magazine:

"The democratization of knowledge by the print medium brought the Enlightenment. Now, broadband interconnection is supporting decentralized processes that reinvigorate democracy. We can see it happening before our eyes: As a society, we are getting smarter. Networked democracy is taking hold. You can feel it. We the people—as Lincoln put it, "even we here"—are collectively still the key to the survival of America's democracy."


"THE ASSAULT ON REASON" is a visionary analysis of how the politics of fear, secrecy, cronyism, and blind faith has combined with the degration of the public sphere to create an environment dangerously hostile to reason
At the time George W. Bush ordered American forces to invade Iraq, 70 percent of Americans believed Saddam Hussein was linked to 9/11. Voters in Ohio, when asked by pollsters to list what stuck in their minds about the campaign, most frequently named two Bush television ads that played to fears of terrorism.

We live in an age when the thirty-second television spot is the most powerful force shaping the electorate's thinking, and America is in the hands of an administration less interested than any previous administration in sharing the truth with the citizenry. Related to this and of even greater concern is this administration's disinterest in the process by which the truth is ascertained, the tenets of fact-based reasoning-first among them an embrace of open inquiry in which unexpected and even inconvenient facts can lead to unexpected conclusions.

How did we get here? How much damage has been done to the functioning of our democracy and its role as steward of our security? Never has there been a worse time for us to lose the capacity to face the reality of our long-term challenges, from national security to the economy, from issues of health and social welfare to the environment. As The Assault on Reason shows us, we have precious little time to waste.

Gore's larger goal in this book is to explain how the public sphere itself has evolved into a place hospitable to reason's enemies, to make us more aware of the forces at work on our own minds, and to lead us to an understanding of what we can do, individually and collectively, to restore the rule of reason and safeguard our future. Drawing on a life's work in politics as well as on the work of experts across a broad range of disciplines, Al Gore has written a farsighted and powerful manifesto for clear thinking.

North Pole Swimming within 13 Years

The Arctic ice cap is melting much faster than expected and is now about 30 years ahead of predictions made by IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

CO2 and Information Technology

The global IT industry accounts for 2 percent of the world's carbon dioxide emissions - the same amount the world's aviation industry churns out, according to analyst house Gartner.

Click here to read the full article.

Greenhouse Effect Predicted in 1953

Click on the picture to enlarge.
The source is here.

Intelligent Energy

Sense some differences in approach between Europe and the US.

Today is Earth Day

Check EarthDay.Net, calling for urgent climate action.

Google had this picture:

Boston Consulting Group Positive on China's Global Potential

Boston Consulting Group's Jim Hemerling says China is emerging as a global R&D and innovation hub in its own right. Sourcing execs take note!

Also read: 'Asia to spawn tech breakthroughs', which lays out Bill Gates's opininion.

Friedman on Green Offshoring

Go read the Friedman interview with YaleGlobal on March 30. The question is who gets to do the work. “If whatever can be done will be done,” he says, “the biggest competition is between you and your imagination.” In the latest edition of his book, Friedman lists nine categories of jobs available to citizens of the flat world. One of those categories, he says, will be green jobs, anything green.

With millions of people pursuing the consumer dream, he says, “we’re going to burn up, heat up, choke up the planet faster than even Al Gore predicts.” According to Friedman, this development has implications: “Green design, green consulting, green manufacturing, green science, is going to have a huge new middle opportunity.”

First Commercial Quantum Computer

D:Wave Systems, the Quantum Computer Company presented the first commercial QC machine on February 13, and made it to the New York Times on Easter Day.

IPCC: Millions at Risk

The first and worst impacts of climate change are being felt by the poor in the developing world. Drought in sub-Saharan Africa, floods in China and India, and a near tripling of people affected by extreme weather and other natural disasters globally in the last two decades, almost all in the developing world, affecting those who are most vulnerable and least able to cope.

A nice two-page overview together with several links is this Greenpeace briefing.

Don't miss the British Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change.

April 6: A new IPCC climate report warns time is running out:

Huge numbers of people will be at risk due to sea level rise, storm surge and river flooding in the Asian Megadeltas such as the Ganges-Brahmaputra (Bangladesh) and the Zhujiang (Pearl River).

Warming of more than another degree could commit the world to multi-metre sea level rise over several centuries from the partial or total loss of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets.

Huge coastal dislocation would result and could be triggered by emissions made in the next several decades.

Made In China

'Is China now poised to turn the 21st century into its century? Or will it, despite its phenomenal nearly two-digit annual growth over the past 15 years, rejoin the human race with a slower economy? Or is it possible that its powerful locomotive will, as Japan’s did, shift into reverse gear?'

Read Jagdish Bhaghwati's book review in the New York Times.

Ice Caps Gone By 2040?

Newsweek reports:
"It's not clear that we can do anything about it. Our only option, it seems, is to study the ice caps before there's far less of them to study."

TOP 100 Most Influential People in IT

The slide show is here.
And this is how they were ranked.

Newclimates.com

New Climates will present new and existing artworks responding to the relationship between art, global climate change and networked culture. This curatorial weblog will create a flexible and open-ended space to address these ideas at a time when climate change has become a vital concern among artists.
Launching March – May 2007

New Focus for Light

Stunning developments in hi-res; MIT Technology Review reports . . .

'Kenneth Crozier and Federico Capasso have created light-focusing optical antennas that could lead to DVDs that hold hundreds of movies.

Capasso and Crozier's optical antennas could have far-reaching and un­predictable implications, from superdense optical storage to ­superhigh-resolution optical microscopes. Enabling engineers to simply and cheaply break the diffraction limit has made the many applications that rely on light shine that much brighter.'
Want to know more? Look for Plasmonic Laser Antenna.

Climate Change in Brief

From the BBC on the following five issues:

Climate forecast

Greenhouse effect

Carbon cycle

Feedback effects

Gulf Stream

Global Warming Swindle?

Make sure to look here and here and here and here to learn about the anti IPCC arguments. Apparently these can be easily refuted.

CALLING ALL ADVENTURE SEEKERS!
Do you lie in bed at night worrying about climate change? Or have you never really given it a second thought?

Channel 4 and Outline Productions are planning a unique eco-challenge, and we're looking for interesting characters from all walks of life to take part. It doesn't matter if you're very green, not green at all or somewhere in the middle.

This is your chance to make a difference and be seen doing it on television!

Filming will take place in June for this exciting new series which will see ten strangers striving for survival in a hostile environment and helping put the world to rights.

The challenge will be tough, but it will be a unique experience. You do not have to be ultra-fit to take part, but all successful applicants will be required to undertake a medical.

There will be a prize for the winner of the series.

From 2004 . . .for the Polar Year that Just Started

Click here to obtain the full report.

CLIMATE CHANGE Impact More Extensive than Thought

Global climate change is happening faster than previously believed and its impact is worse than expected, information from an as-yet unpublished draft of the long-awaited second part of a United Nations report obtained by Spiegel Online reveals. No region of the planet will be spared and some will be hit especially hard.