The city of Oakland is experiencing a deep crisis of conscience, amid what appears to be the moral confusion of its administration. The mayor, who had marched with the Occupy Oakland demonstrators, has now ordered not one but two paramilitary strikes against nonviolent protesters, in which tear gas, “flash-bang” grenades, rubber bullets and powerful sonic pulses were fired directly at unarmed civilians.

An ex-Marine is now in the hospital, reported in critical condition, and authorities say the paramilitary tactics were justified. New video has emerged clearly showing a policeman firing directly at a group of unthreatening unarmed civilians simply attempting to assist a man injured by the attacks. To many, the crisis seems incomprehensible, even moreso because the mayor herself previously marched among them.

There are calls for attempted murder prosecutions against some of the officers. Thousands are now demonstrating against clear violations of constitutional civil liberties, caught on video. The reaction has spread across the country, and some have questioned whether the mayor should resign.

The most vital question, however, is how can the people of Oakland rally to the Occupy cause, without further inflaming tensions in a city where the elected government openly violates basic civil liberties? What strategy should the demonstrators adopt in order to maintain and defend their rights to peaceable assembly, free expression and to seek redress for grievances, that will allow them to show how steadfast nonviolence wins the struggle against brutal aggression?

Join the discussion here

The European Union has reached an agreement to relieve Greece of half of its sovereign debt, and to boost the Eurozone bailout fund to €1 trillion. The agreement may well be funded, in part, by non-European governments, even private investors, but it shows a new commitment to the Union as such, even amid a surge of anti-Union feeling in several key democracies. For years, the leading obstacle to true integration of the European economies has been seen to be cultural and political reluctance to fully embrace political union.

Will this new commitment to shared responsibility and the future of the Euro currency mean the European Union itself will begin to commit more fully to long-term political union? - Join the discussion here

Futurismo Verde :: En servicio al proyecto del Foro sobre Política y Crisis, la Red Hot Spring de innovación y debate plantea una conversación global sobre la seguridad alimenticia y la escasez crónica de agua y comida en África. Las lecciones de este experimento en investigación y brainstorming colaborativos se podrá aplicar a otras situaciones de crisis y escasez alrededor del planeta.

Los temas principales de debate serán:

1. Problemas relacionados con el abastecimiento alimenticio global, sobretodo en aplicación a las poblaciones más necesitadas;
2. La degradación medioambiental: o sea, servicios ecológicos y medidas de bienestar ambiental;
3. Deficiencies en las políticas de uso terrenal: cómo mejorarlas;
4. Caza furtiva de animales y cosecha furtiva de leño;
5. Tendencias corrosivas económicas;
6. La corrupción y la deficiencia urgente de presupuestos;
7. Medidas cooperativas para extender el suministro alimenticio a las zonas de conflicto;
8. Cómo superar los límites de la infraestructura de transporte;
9. Las enfermedades comunicables: tratamiento, educación, efectos socio-económicos;
10. Fallos comunicativos: cómo hacer llegar los datos tanto investigados como anecdóticos a los servicios relevantes.

La meta será idear y modelar soluciones calibradas a los desafíos al parecer imposibles de resolver, en relación a la seguridad alimenticia en diversas regiones del continente africano. Esperamos poder proporcionar ideas nuevas y factibles, prácticas y económicamente virtuosas, para que las poblaciones locales interesadas puedan comenzar a desplegarlas en su entorno.

Click aquí para agregar sus comentarios al foro…

Will viewers more actively select for the content of their media environment, as hyper-convergence moves forward and the news of the world at large is enmeshed in a spreading web of personal information? Will impartial news programming or even generalized mainstream media content disappear from the viewer’s localized media environment?

Do new technologies that allow for choosing what to watch and when, or to customize online content, create playlists and clip and archive articles or combine competing media, have the potential to empower viewers, reduce viewers’ influence over content, or liberate information from the strict control of programming executives and editorial offices?

• Join the discussion now on the Hot Spring Network

The European Commission is considering new rules that would give it far more control over the domestic fiscal policy of member states, including the possibility of fines to countries in distress that do not adopt austerity measures to reduce spending. Today, across Europe, there are protests organized by labor unions and citizens groups who allege austerity is just a veiled way of making the majority of working people, innocent of the financial system’s collapse, pay for the abuse or misjudgment of top executives and reckless investors.

Spain is under a general strike, and unions representing workers in over 30 countries have descended on Brussels to argue that austerity measures are hurting Europe’s economic base and slowing recovery. Will individual European nations rebel against the EC’s claim of control over domestic spending policies? Will a more federal style of union gain traction if budget-related tensions are not diffused?

• Join the discussion now, on the Hot Spring Network

The blow-out (explosion and collapse) of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig and the well 5,000 feet below has brought into high contrast a serious problem inherent in the way we produce energy: we have long refused to calculate the real costs of extracting fossil fuels. Ecological economics is founded on this point: we should calculate the value of the natural ecosystem services disrupted by the after-effects of carbon emissions.

But we now have a clear view of another deficiency in the market economics of oil production: BP did not adequately plan for the eventuality of a catastrophic blow-out and region-wide spill. By not adequately calculating that risk, BP was not able to take as seriously the absolute obligation to ensure the safety and security of its drilling rig at the Deepwater Horizon site. Even now, there is speculation BP still views the potential oil wealth of the failed well to be more valuable to the firm than curbing the catastrophic economic and environmental fallout from the spill.

As David Leonhardt wrote in last week’s New York Times magazine, “The people running BP did a dreadful job of estimating the true chances of events that seemed unlikely — and may even have been unlikely — but that would bring enormous costs.” Leonhardt also points out that this is a generally human quality, the inability to adequately measure the costs of low-probability high-cost events before they occur.

This is why they seem like the rare “black swan”, which changes our thinking about probability and expectation in fundamental ways. The Deepwater Horizon disaster is one of these low-probability high-cost events that was not unforeseeable but whose remoteness made it easy to avoid thinking about, until it happened. Now that we have met the black swan, we can evaluate its true cost and we can plan better.

We need to assess what the real long-term planning costs are, given the obviously inadequate state of the technology needed to address a catastrophic well failure like the Deepwater Horizon blow-out, and how can any enterprise plan to finance such risk? (BP, it must be remembered, lost $17 billion in stock value yesterday alone, and is now reported to be contemplating bankruptcy.)

• Join the discussion now on the Hot Spring Network

It’s not just the intense vibration, noise pollution and toxic contaminants associated with trucking that we need to address, but the broader environmental fallout from depending so heavily on a petroleum-based combustion-centric mode of transport. Heavy overland transport vehicles demand a massive amount of power to move them from place to place; advanced battery technologies may soon allow us to power them using electricity, but we need to build the infrastructure to produce, store and transport all that green energy.

The vehicles could “switch-out” their batteries at “filling stations” of the kind conceived by Shai Agassi’s electric vehicle infrastructure company Better Place, but a business model needs to be applied nationally, and almost universally, in order to enable this new paradigm to fit the trucking industry. We need to look at and hash out the technical and organizational challenges, and try to push for this better, cleaner trucking paradigm, for the health and wellbeing of the truckers themselves, as well as our communities, our environment and our future.

How close are we to something better, quieter, cleaner, which will allow us to improve our quality of life without degrading the environment or our children’s future?

• Join the discussion now on the Hot Spring Network

Malaria Kills Millions Every Year in Africa. It is responsible for anywhere from 1 to 3 million deaths per year, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa. Efforts to eradicate the disease are mounting: in the year 2000, just 3% of children under 5, in sub-Saharan Africa, slept with mosquito nets; by 2008, that figure had risen to 56%. Aid groups now project that aggressive preventive measures can protect 100% of the population by the end of 2010 and reduce the number of deaths to near zero by 2015.

Doing so requires an aggressive and coordinated effort by governments across the region, in concert with world health experts, the UN’s WHO, aid organizations and local communities. Malaria, originally named “the bad air” because it was thought to be airborne, is actually a water and blood-borne disease, transmitted by a particular variety of mosquito. The scarcity of safe drinking water across much of the region leads to ill-advised practices like leaving whatever standing water one can find at hand for human consumption.

This allows mosquitoes to breed and proliferate. Advanced plumbing, with enclosed water systems, could help prevent the constant rampant spread of the disease, but other measures need to be taken first in order to secure the region’s water resources and ensure equitable distribution, to prevent water-linked trade and military conflicts and the further deterioration of troubled civil infrastructure, the collapse of which favors contagion. [Complete text...]

What measures can be most effective for ensuring the solutions best suited to combatting malaria in any given location can reach the people most in need? Can transport, agriculture and hydrological infrastructure all be strengthened simultaneously, or do we need a form of engineering triage aimed at doing the most good as quickly as possible? Which international efforts are doing the best work? What local efforts are most effective?

• Join the discussion now on the Hot Spring Network

The Guardian reports that a proposed piece of legislation up for debate in the Italian senate would mean:

No more reporting of criminal investigations before they come to trial (even if that takes years). No more recording or photographing of anyone, even a Mafia boss, unless that person approves. Only members of the state-approved “National Order of Journalists” allowed to film or record. Fines approaching half-a-million euros for publishers who transgress, with €20,000 per reporter also on the table.

Such extreme limitations on press freedom could undermine the very functioning of democracy in Italy, and may violate basic principles of democratic personal freedom and freedom of information that underpin the European Union and the obligations of its member states to afford and protect basic human rights.

Help inform the debate with specifics about Italian media law, European Union legislation on informational freedom, and the underlying motivations for this proposed radical expansion of the Italian government’s censorship powers…

• Join the discussion now on the Hot Spring Network

The European Union is dealing harshly with nations that are suffering the converging crises of economic downturn, joblessness and swelling budget deficits. Spain is taking aggressive action to reduce public spending, but such “austerity measures” may be deepening, instead of resolving, the economic crisis.

The UK’s Telegraph newspaper is reporting that “[T]he policy of 1930s wage cuts — or ‘internal devaluations’ — being imposed on southern Europe’s humiliated states as a quid pro quo for the EU shield is itself part of the problem. Ultra-austerity will bleed the economy, shrivel tax revenues and fail to close deficit anyway.”

Spain’s El País newspaper says the memo explaining why Fitch Ratings has downgraded Spain from its AAA credit rating reveals the nation is in a “perverse spiral” of negative feedback between policy and practice, noting that “To maintain debt solvency Spain must squeeze public spending: yet this policy undermines the chances of recovery which itself causes further loss of confidence.”

Is an extreme allegiance to the logic of “austerity” undermining the ability of governments to make the reforms and investments necessary to start on the road to sustainable economic recovery?

• Join the discussion now on The Hot Spring Network

The spreading environmental fallout from the gushing Deepwater Horizon BP oil well is likely to continue throughout the summer, barring the discovery of a bold new idea for how to cap a runaway oil well. It appears that BP lied when it allegedly told regulators over a year ago that it had the technology to deal with a rupture resulting in a leak of 300,000 gallons per day. Clearly, none of BP’s standard responses are working.

It is now estimated that between 800,000 and 2 million gallons per day are spewing into the Gulf of Mexico unchecked, making this by far the worst environmental disaster the United States has ever faced. Containment efforts are limited to the surface, and BP appears to have no viable technological strategy for dealing with massive underwater plumes which may migrate by powerful underwater currents throughout the Gulf and the surrounding coastal areas.

Conservation biologists are now reporting the process of ecosystem contamination is well underway, as birds that eat fish caught in the contamination zone spread the toxins, when they die on land or are eaten by larger animals. So the technical response to the crisis must be more strategic than tactical, a widespread, multi-layered technological strategy, not simply one effort to deal with one aspect of the problem: the source.

We need new ideas, from wherever they might emerge, for each of the following:

1. How to overwhelm the massive upward pressure of the well?
2. How to cap the gushing well, pressure reduced or not?
3. How to execute the plan at 5,000 feet below the surface?
4. How to contain 100% of the surface oil slick without toxic chemicals?
5. How to contain 100% of the underwater plumes without toxic chemicals?
6. How to plan for site-relevant immediate response to a blowout?
7. How to clean up the oil in the water, without toxic chemicals?
8. How to clean up the oil on the beaches and in marshlands, without toxic chemicals?
9. How to protect coastal cities from oil arriving by water?
10. How to upgrade all offshore rigs to secure them against similar disaster?

Propose any ideas on these or other technical challenges of the Deepwater Horizon disaster…

In Florida and elsewhere, migrant workers who do not enjoy the legal protections that come with legal paperwork are easily subjected to abuses, near zero pay and even violence. Conditions on some farms amount to slavery, and the US Justice Department has prosecuted at least 7 such farms in the last decade.

There are far more cases of individuals living in slave conditions than there are cases being investigated, and the lack of documentation allows abusive operations to prevent workers from seeking help. A first step for a just society must be to give asylum to any workers that have been subject to such conditions, so a proper criminal investigation can be launched and slavery eradicated in the US.

The very fact that such slave-labor conditions exist within the United States reveals deep economic flaws, suggestive of a nation that cannot meet the pricing demands of its consumers without such abuses. But most people will not tolerate the idea that such operations exist at all, if we can make the choice to bring slave-drivers to justice and free their victims from servitude.

• Discussion on How to Eradicate Modern-day Slavery
• A Campaign for Fair Food: Coalition of Immokalee Workers
• 2010 Florida Modern-Day Slavery Museum

The idea of a “renaissance man” suggests individuals like Leonardo Da Vinci, who not only dabbled in but was himself the pinnacle of the art in painting, physics, engineering and other fields. His depth and breadth of knowledge allowed him to achieve meaningful breakthroughs that might not have been apparent to anyone functioning in any other way. The 21st century demands we reach these kind of insights with unprecedented efficacy, so we find ourselves with the question: how does one train for this way of life?

Da Vinci was a genius who had patrons and whose reputation allowed him to pursue the work he most valued, dedicating himself entirely to learning and doing. In the 21st-century, we have evolved into a society that urges generalism at times, but intense specialization in the professions. A physician with more than one specialization, for example, is often seen as an anomaly, or a surprising case of natural talent or bold ambition.

The idea of a shift to “lifelong learning” as a standard for education funding emerges from an understanding of the need to address this problem: assume people will need to change specializations, learn new skills, throughout their adult lives, and the educational system can be adapted to allow for a more flexible, more open kind of intellectual development, which also turns out to be economically more vibrant.

Can we conceive of the human intellect in general as being designed to operate across disciplines and across cultures, to gather experience and expertise in a dynamic way that allows for rapid adaptability and reframing of technical and social context? Can we, in short, achieve a public policy position on education funding where the human individual is understood as not only free to pursue a life determined by choice and ability, but also intended to pursue a life experience made up of deep experience in distinct and even competing disciplines?

How do we get started on the funding component, to give today’s students the opportunity to grow and develop in such a way, to be the renaissance figures the 21st century demands they be?

• Join the discussion now on the Hot Spring Network

In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is now looking at ways to use legislation that grants the power to regulate traditional phone networks in order to establish a regulatory paradigm of ‘net neutrality’, meaning internet service providers (ISP) who provide connectivity cannot block or slow traffic to some sites while privileging traffic to others. Bandwidth itself is an important limiting factor in the physical environment, and so efforts to expand bandwidth may be crucial to making real net neutrality work.

Legally, it would be difficult for the United States Congress to pass any law that undermines net neutrality, because under the current legal infrastructure, such online access discrimination is illegal, and the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States explicitly warns that “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble…” Each of those rights would be abridged if a law overriding the current net neutral standard were enacted.

But for bandwidth to be expanded, hardware needs to be put in place, all legal nuance aside. So bandwidth multipliers could be the optimal way forward. This would entail a complex array of advanced technological enhancements to existing networks, to allow all wires, cables and transmitters to maximize the bandwidth usage at any given time, without impeding the access of any one household or location to the broader network. If such a smart-connective network could be built, it would require perhaps unprecedented collaboration from ISPs.

To achieve genuine bandwidth multiplier effects, that could benefit remote or underprivileged communities, businesses, and low-budget organizations and publishers, we would need to see the following:

1. More open sharing of traffic flows and traffic-flow data between ISPs;
2. A regulatory framework that allows for this kind of information sharing, but prevents collusion and price-fixing;
3. Technological advances that optimize data flow, minimize energy seepage, and cross-relay traffic across distinct types of network (cable, wire, fiber-optic, wavelength);
4. More powerful, adaptive, remote-hosting servers;
5. A more secure, more easily manipulated cloud-computing environment;
6. Microprocessors able to calculate likely processing time and likely bandwidth time, then compress and decompress files at ‘invisible’ speed, to optimize bandwidth usage.

It is likely that the kind of advances needed to achieve genuine expansion of bandwidth to remote locations will have to do with spontaneous wireless hotspot placement, and physical technical innovations that allow for such solutions, but practice and software can do much of the work to get us started.

Share your ideas here about how best to increase bandwidth and reduce the likelihood of a campaign against comprehensive network neutrality…

• Join our discussion now on the Hot Spring Network

With the digital medium putting down roots and expanding its reach into more and more aspects of everyday life, the risk of identity theft is increasingly of concern and increasingly hard to keep pace with, prevent and reverse. There are deep worries —expressed by every expert from privacy advocates, to civil rights lawyers to Microsoft and its founder Bill Gates— that the use of biometric markers for real-world identification will lead to an irreversibility problem and radical incentivization for identity thieves and fraudsters.

Countering the rise of a global black market in stolen identities will require not just bold, innovative thinking, but a comprehensive awareness of the nature of media hyper-convergence, and the ways in which that process will affect our ability to interact with, judge, manipulate and keep safe from, the world around us. Standardization and atomization both present opportunities for would-be identity thieves, and so the major pro-consumer model must be centered on getting ahead and staying ahead, technologically, of those who seek to steal and misuse personal identity, whether digital, biometric or analog (like one’s signature).

Share the best practices and legal remedies for preventing identity theft, whether by digital means or wireless harvesting, or in the physical realm of paper, plastic and voice. What laws give consumers leverage in reversing fraudulent charges? What pending legislation will do the most to help protect the sanctity of individual identity? How can we leverage consumer technologies to protect against the most aggressive, innovative attackers? What can the credit scoring universe do to assist and protect consumers?

• Join or follow our discussion now, on the Hot Spring Network

How can the Obama administration’s proposed financial regulatory reforms do the best work of preventing the fictionalization of wealth through abstract, unregulated derivatives trading, while allowing the freedom for the private sector to innovate, negotiate and invest boldly and responsibly?

This question may determine the ultimate success of Pres. Obama’s overall economic recovery and reform process, and the degree to which it is possible to say that observed economic expansion is actually part of a reliable, transparent process of investment, reward and sustainable economic health.

Propose your own ideas, or post links and references to existing proposals that may best and most accurately assess the crisis of confidence related to advanced financial derivatives trading, value-measuring conflicts related to overlapping financial interests, and the ethics of financial “innovations”, in the post credit-crash climate…

• Join or follow our discussion now, on the Hot Spring Network…

Swiss-based Solar Impulse has achieved the maiden voyage of its solar-powered aircraft. From here on, the question will no longer be whether solar-powered air travel is possible, but how efficient are the technologies allowing it to compete with combustion-powered air travel.

The craft in this video is extremely lightweight and cannot carry passengers, but now that the combination of technologies necessary to achieve solar-powered flight has been consolidated, researchers across the world can more clearly see what needs to take place to make such a fueling system viable for safe, long-distance collective human transport.

• Join the discussion now on the Hot Spring Network

A central truth in the arduous national debate over health insurance reform legislation, throughout 2009 and up to passage in March 2010, has been the fact that major insurers are unable to provide coverage for the treatment needed by their patients. Either their business model is fundamentally flawed or there is a severe deficit of imagination as to how to implement the business model in a way that benefits all stakeholders.

The intense emotion on all sides of the debate is clearly linked to this problem: the debate was dominate by an extreme division between the views of those who defended the rights of private insurers to avoid paying for care and those who defended the rights of patients, insured or otherwise, to receive fully paid full-spectrum healthcare reform. The one band vehemently opposes any new restrictions on insurers or a shift toward public financing of healthcare, possibly because the insurance industry is not competitive enough in delivering both care and profit; the other refuses to accept that there should be any alternative to automatic full-spectrum care for all people.

The question that seemed to be absent from the debate was: whatever the reforms look like, how can we actually build a better insurance company? Can new health insurance reforms incentivize the creation of more humane, effective, health-oriented health insurance enterprises? Will cooperatives and non-profit insurers be viable? Use this discussion to explore ideas for creating viable insurance providers that do not refuse care or coverage.

• Join the discussion now on the Hot Spring Network

The Great Recession has begun to push through to basic public services that affect us all. Education funding has dried up and across the country, cities facing major budget shortfalls are taking the radical step of shutting down schools in order to address the budget crisis.

Kansas City is closing nearly half of its schools. Detroit is planning to shutter schools strategically, using federal stimulus dollars to finance an overhaul that will streamline and improve the ways schools are managed and operated. According to Crain’s Detroit Business:

The plan aims to shrink district building space by more than 4 million square feet, which should save $31 million in 2010, according to DPS materials.

The plan’s initial phases will be funded by $500.5 million in federal stimulus bonds. A second phase, which involves new and specialized school construction, would be funded by a future $500 million bond sale.

Charlotte Mecklenburg Library, among many others, is planning to close at least 12 branches and lay off 140 workers. The effect would appear to be there is far less access for young people and members of the community to an information-rich learning environment.

In DeKalb County, Georgia, plans are underway to close schools in hopes of closing a projected $88 million budget deficit. The closures would save an estimated $2.3 million, hardly enough to justify such radical measures.

As budget concerns hit one after another state and municipality, we need to think about how to counter the trend, find creative ways to fund public education and related public services, to ensure hard times don’t build hard times into our children’s future…

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The International Museum of Women, an online art gallery, which aims to foster dialogue and promote new educational directions for women and in relation to issues of women’s rights and opportunity, is hosting an exhibit called ‘Ecomomica‘, which explores the role women play in the evolving global economy.

The exhibit explores whether the global economic crisis has in fact created opportunities for women, the question of whether food is a basic human right and how scarcity affects women and what women do to counter it, whether women might be “paying for China’s economic prosperity with their bodies”, the dynamics of leadership and power, and how women may be changing the Arab and Islamic world.

The exhibit’s themes also touch on women’s access to capital, through traditional banking and more innovative micro-lending programs, the practice of linking credit to education and healthcare, which helps to create personal security and future opportunity, and the effect of debt inherited by women from family or deceased husbands and how banking failures in the west have affected communities.

Also of real importance is the response of women around the world to mounting economic pressures: in many communities across the world, women have begun to organize in order to help ensure their families or communities are protected against some of the more severe risks of a global marketplace for goods and services.

• Visit the exhibit at IMOW.org
• Or join our discussion on the Hot Spring Network

‘Psychic numbing‘ is a relatively new term, assigned to the phenomenon which shows people tend to feel less urgent compassion, and tend to give less, when the suffering in question is shown to be more systemic and more pervasive, or affecting larger numbers of people. Some psychologists believe it is linked to our intuitive sense that if one suffers alone, the suffering is worse, but if one is accompanied, there might be some security in numbers, not just emotionally, but practically.

The individual does not actually suffer less, but somehow, human beings —across cultures, ages groups and regions— appear to have an almost inborn tendency to convince themselves that the one who suffers with others is somehow safer. This is, of course, rarely true. While yes, a young boy might survive because his older sister goes without food, two young children in a population beset with pervasive, persistent scarcity or political disorder, may be at significantly heightened risk of violence, or even enslavement.

Others suggest the phenomenon of psychic numbing is more to do with some sort of instinctual calculation of the worth of one’s efforts. If one seeks to help one lone child, one’s actions seem able; if one seeks to send a small amount to help millions, one’s actions may seem less able, less capable of ‘making a difference’.

There is a theory that this might be related to a long “prehistoric” period —far longer than the period which we refer to as “recorded history”— in which smaller tribal bands were the organizing principle of human society. We can understand safety in numbers, but we can’t conceive of how sending a few dollars, or writing a letter, will in any way contribute to easing the suffering of millions of people. Biologically, this just doesn’t compute in a cerebral infrastructure organized around tribal society.

Yet there are alternatives: there is the theory of an informational tipping point. The lone photo, with no information and no statistics, will spark great compassion. Adding statistics or removing the photo, or naming numbers that run into the millions, will lessen the likelihood of compassion across a large population. But when enough information is given so that the reader/viewer can comprehend in intellectually resilient terms the scale of a tragic crisis, the real energy of compassion is again motivated, perhaps more effectively than by any other means.

Social networking has allowed people to share information and to make donations with an ease of effort and on a scale of cooperative endeavor never before possible. This may be helping to ease the transition away from generalized psychic numbing and toward generalized charitable predisposition, as social networking sites help to shrink the size of the planet to the biologically comprehensible “village” scale, familiarizing people with their counterparts across the world.

How much of a role is there for social networking in solving this problem? How much of the problem is about resistance to new information about crises of massive scale? How much is a crisis of imagination? And are there examples of how we can do or are doing better in any given case?

• Join the discussion at The Hot Spring Network’s Crisis Policy Forum

The war in the Democratic Republic of Congo has killed 6.9 million people in 12 years. No war has cost more innocent lives since World War II, and the level of extreme violence, brutality against women, and even the enslavement of families and villages, appears to be escalating. The world’s attention has yet to fully focus on the plight of the Congolese civilians living in a state of perpetual extreme crisis day after day.

With nearly 7 million people killed, this ethnic slaughter of innocents is by far the worst genocide since the Holocaust, yet for its complexity, or its perceived remoteness, the eastern DR Congo has received shockingly little attention. The UN has more peacekeepers deployed there than anywhere else in history, yet the mission is said to be at risk of failure, as the peacekeepers appear not to have a strong enough mandate to protect civilians and combat the warlords.

CafeSentido reported in May 2009 that “A UN commander in Congo says the conflict is unpredictable and sporadic, changing with no warning, like the weather. There are only 17,000 troops in Congo, a nation of 60 million people, with a massive land area, as large as 20 states combined across the eastern US.”

The war needs to be tackled with an aggressive, unified global push on all three fronts opened by the Obama administration’s 3D diplomacy (development, diplomacy, defense). Increased hostilities are considered unlikely to help bring long-term peace, but a credible, forceful, effort needs to be made to stop the killing. 6.9 million lives have been lost while the world has watched.

What can we do to mobilize international resources and consensus, to shape policies that will both help improve the security and quality of life of the Congolese civilians besieged by so much war and catastrophe, and end the killing once and for all?

• Join the discussion on the Hot Spring Network

Apple’s new tablet computer has finally been unveiled, after years of speculation. The iPad will function as a genuine cross-over between the realm of the iPhone and the laptop computer, in a format smaller than a laptop screen, similar to a netbook, and designed to optimize the experience of reading online or working with files and e-publications. It will be able to run over 140,000 of the apps already made for iPhone and iPod Touch, with a whole new class of iPad-optimized apps to come. Perhaps most important of all, it will retail for a starting price of only $499.

Many had expected it would retail for as much as or even more than $1,000, and be designed to compete as a top-flight laptop computer product. But Apple appears to have taken the view that it is really more appropriate as a competitor to less advanced Netbook computers and single-purpose e-reading devices, like Amazon’s Kindle products. At $499, the iPad will use a brand new A4 Apple-made internal processor, designed to streamline processing and prolong battery life, and use the most advanced multitouch screen on the consumer market.

The keyboard is entirely virtual, sliding into position at the base of the screen when needed, in vertical or horizontal mode. In horizontal mode, the keyboard is reported to be nearly as wide as a full laptop keyboard, making the touchscreen work environment far more user-friendly. It will also have an innovative mail client, which will list mails to the left of a viewing window when in horizontal mode and allow for single mail viewing when vertical, again to optimize the ease of use.

The iBooks app will allow for a graphically rich e-reading experience and easy organization of electronic books. There is some hope the device may include an app that will allow e-reading users to organize all of their e-books from different services in one central library, but coordinating this with direct competitors such as Amazon may be asking too much. A multi-touch picture-browing feature allows users to sort through stacks of photos without opening whole albums, achieving something closer to that 3-dimensional content interface that will someday revolutionize ultra-thin touch computing platforms.

• Join our discussion on The Hot Spring Network

The 7.0 magnitude earthquake that struck Haiti two days ago has left an unknown number of thousands of people dead or missing, destroyed the service infrastructure in the capital and left a precarious situation for millions of survivors. The disaster response effort has been swift and international, with rescue and relief teams scrambling from across the world to get to Haiti.

On the night of the quake, US disaster response teams were already touching down in Port-au-Prince and moving out into the affected areas, to help organize the search for survivors and begin to chart the deployment of much-needed medical and food aid. The response has been massive and coordinate, with the US State Dept. working closely with major NGOs and UN agencies to ensure the most effective possible deployment of aid.

The Indian Ocean Tsunami of 2004, which left an estimated 230,000 people dead across 14 countries, was the result of the second most powerful earthquake every scientifically recorded, between 9.1 and 9.3 magnitude. That event concentrated world attention on the nature of disaster relief efforts and the complexity of coordinating an international response.

The Haiti quake was magnitude 7.0, but was close to the shoreline and very shallow, meaning widespread devastation to structures and infrastructure across nearly half of the small nation, with an epicenter strike-zone spanning 70 miles in diameter. The response has clearly shown signs of lessons learned from both the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 and the poor handling of the 2005 Hurricane Katrina disaster along the US coast of the Gulf of Mexico.

What new lessons have helped the international community coordinate a rapid disaster response for Haiti? And where is the disaster relief effort failing to be comprehensive enough, sensitive enough to detail, or far-reaching enough to access all points of need?

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After decades of environmental scientists seeking to raise awareness about the detrimental impacts of burning ever more carbon-based fuels, the Copenhagen Accord shows a global willingness to recognize the gravity of the issue and to take concrete —if as yet unnamed— policy actions to address the challenges of coming decades.

Though the Accord uses language that is admittedly vague, it suggests the parties all agree science shows serious peril if no action is taken, and very explicitly specifies that science should guide the international response, and steep cuts should be achieved “as soon as possible”. This language might lay the groundwork for even more ambitious binding emissions targets for 2020, possibly even enabling the key goal of total emissions peaking before then.

The first move for American citizens interested in helping our nation achieve the cuts necessary should be to find creative ways to steer community-level investment in new energy technologies to places where job-creation and the greening of the energy and transport sectors can converge to generate a new economic dynamism. The Repower America Roadmap offers some insights into how this might best be achieved.

As momentum builds around the clean energy revolution, we can expect governments to be more ambitious about proposing and working to achieve the cuts needed in global greenhouse-gas emissions. An innovation and implementation-based approach may ultimately give local communities more of a say in how emissions policies affect them, and allow them to reap more of the rewards, as they build their own infrastructure.

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That too many people, including policy-makers and media figures “are out of their intellectual depth and easily manipulated” by the bewildering complexity of the financial-political feedback-loop is almost irrefutable, and I agree with comments in this debate it’s “a symptom of the limitations of our neural architecture”. But I don’t know if we should take the question of neural architecture in the biological sense. There’s a cultural and practical response that needs to be considered at least as strongly.

We are also dealing with the limitations of our neural architecture as a global civilization. We are just beginning to understand the implications of what it means to be fully committed members of a global civilization, in which shared values and our common humanity, are driving forces that outstrip historical prejudices and rivalries.

Media technologies have rapidly developed into a kind of planetary neural net, but we are not adequately adept at parsing information or ensuring that needed practical information gets to where it needs to go. So cynics can easily make the case that an informed citizenry is now all but impossible, because information overload as so eroded the value of information as such.

But, we must remember: we are evolved to deal with complexity. As Buckminster Fuller so ably argues in the collection of lectures compiled as Utopia or Oblivion, the human brain is the most powerful ‘anti-entropy machine’ we know of, highly adapted to lend order to universe ruled by entropy and to synthesize astonishingly complex informational subsets.

In short, we can adapt our hyper-literal industrial mindset, so tightly bound by the false dualities stagnation-progress, backward-forward, unproductive-productive, valueless-valued, irrelevant-measurable, to the more difficult, more useful, more far-reaching intellectual project of dynamic evolutionary systems.

Complexity is not beyond us; it’s the challenge we face, just now with more human-generated meta-complexity than ever before.

I think the problem of an overfed, overfunded Congress is central to the practical problem solving that needs to be done, but I think we can make great strides if we get large numbers of people thinking about the practical problem solving, and how it can be done.

A few points:

1. Predatory lending must be treated as a serious offense: lenders should never be rewarded for creating business relationships that fail utterly and ruin lives.
2. Tax credits related to lending should be oriented toward markets and activities that help build community-level sustainable businesses and quality of life increases.
3. Mark-to-market refinancing has to be an option, in part to de-incentivize banks’ pushing the inflation of real estate profits to increase profit projections.
4. Bankruptcy negotiations have to restore balance between lender and borrower; recent “innovations” in bankruptcy laws have shifted power to banks, put consumers at steep disadvantage, helped to drive crisis.
5. Money borrowed from federal government cannot simply be used as buffer against banks’ reserve shortfalls; lending must lead to lending.
6. Restoration of something like Glass-Steagall protections, to keep wealth-focused investment banking from marginalizing small-investor consumer banking.

These are just a few of the practical approaches that we need to be thinking about, however little the average citizen’s understanding of these topics may be. These are concrete steps citizens can pressure Congress to act on.

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The Sandia National Laboratories have achieved a landmark breakthrough in solar-voltaic power-generation technology. The snowflake-like “solar glitter” uses 100 times less material to produce the same amount of electricity as today’s standard 6-inch square solar cells. This achievement of ultra-miniaturization now has the potential to move solar-voltaic power generation to the forefront of the clean energy revolution, and help speed the transition away from carbon-based combustible fuels.

The super-reduced size of these snowflake solar cells means they can be used to create more dependable power-generation solar arrays. As reported by Inhabitat (‘green design will save the world’), when a large solar cell fails, it has a serious impact on the overall productivity of the solar array, already limited by the space it takes up, while these tiny snowflake cells, just 14 to 20 micrometers thick and 0.25 to 1 millimeter in diameter, can fit so much more productivity into the same space, the failure of one flake will have negligible overall impact on output.

The uniquely small size of these powerful electricity-producing cells also means they can deployed in creative new ways that add to the efficiency of their role in power generation. They can be woven into fabrics, spread across tents, added to consumer electronics and to clothing, and could help to make rechargeable devices recharge constantly, so they never need to be plugged in.

According to PhysOrg:

The solar particles, fabricated of crystalline silicon, hold the potential for a variety of new applications. They are expected eventually to be less expensive and have greater efficiencies than current photovoltaic collectors that are pieced together with 6-inch- square solar wafers.

The cells are fabricated using microelectronic and microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) techniques common to today’s electronic foundries.

Among the serious productivity gains inherent in the snowflake solar cell design, they can be harvested from existing industrial-production silicon wafers. What’s more, if one unit is corrupted in production, the rest can still be harvested, finished and deployed, unlike with the larger standard wafers produced from silicon bricks.

Another potential application would be to embed the solar flakes into innovative design materials used to clad the outside of buildings, allowing for structures made of glass or steel, but also stone or brick, to act as solar power generation facilities. There is also great potential for these ultra-miniaturized solar flakes to act as solar-voltaic reception units lining the edges of organic solar concentrators, specially dyed windows that channel light energy to solar cells at the edges.

According to the Sandia National Labs press report:

Other unique features are available because the cells are so small. “The shade tolerance of our units to overhead obstructions is better than conventional PV panels,” said Nielson, “because portions of our units not in shade will keep sending out electricity where a partially shaded conventional panel may turn off entirely.”

Because flexible substrates can be easily fabricated, high-efficiency PV for ubiquitous solar power becomes more feasible, said [Sandia researcher Murat] Okandan.

The cells may also have applications other than solar power generation. The technology could be used to help enhance remote sensing equipment, to better measure weather patterns, environmental trends, including complex ecosystem degradation, and possibly for remote motion tracking and pattern sensing.

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Gordon Brown plans “plan b” 2nd round of talks if Copenhagen conference fails to achieve global pact. The plan would call for a smaller number of nations to meet to agree to concrete steps to curb emissions and move their contribution to the world economy toward a green energy future.

A UK official has said of the stumbling blocks that China is the main hold-out and that “There are not thousands of variables in this, there are a handful. It is only the 2050 target and the issue of how to verify [emission cuts countries pledge].”

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With the US promising to commit $100 billion over ten years to help fund mitigation efforts against the impacts of climate destabilization and China all but refusing outright to agree to any pact that requires international verification of emissions reductions and/or how international funds are spent, the technological solution remains a key priority.

The United States should immediately begin redirecting fuel and energy-production subsidies to help produce not only state of the art, cutting edge clean energy technologies and zero-combustion transport vehicles, but also to aim for the next generation of zero-combustion energy production methods.

Taking the lead in building and deploying such technology will allow the United States to remain at the forefront of the global industrial and energy economy, and to deal with climate change and the rising everyday cost of greenhouse-gas emissions, in the most economic way possible. This sort of industrial technology transition can be achieved at unprecedented speeds, given today’s technology, and would create millions of new jobs across the US, helping to reduce global emissions and spur economic growth.

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Intellectual property laws designed to help protect the ability of researchers to retain compensation for major innovations have led to a uniquely problematic “innovation” in the laws themselves, where specific genes, or the informational access to them, are patented, barring individuals or their physicians from dealing directly with those genes except through the for-profit patent-holders.

There are critics of these patents that say they are actually an impediment to the advance of research in the field. And some patients have already experienced the unenviable situation in which a “risk-of-cancer” diagnosis cannot be double-checked, because the patent-holder for a specific gene will not permit a second opinion to be obtained through any other entity.

There is strong legal theory behind the view that this type of patent is an aberration and possibly even an unconstitutional hijacking of the private biological information of individual citizens.

Patent-law principle: it is a fundamental requirement of US patent law that patents be applied to specific mechanisms that are not naturally occurring and which are “non-obvious” as extensions of existing mechanisms. Genes are, of course, naturally occurring, constitute mechanisms nit created by their discoverers, and should be considered “evident” in themselves, given the now extensive scientific understanding of their composition and function.

What’s more, they not only already exist, but they exist in the native biology of every human being, 100% independent of the labors of scientific researchers. A fair analogy in the way of intellectual property, regardless of natural occurrence, might be copyright law and music. No one is allowed to copyright musical notes themselves, nor “discoveries” made by listening to a specific copyrighted series of notes both would clearly hinder creations or “innovations” reliant on those notes, only specific texts rendering unique sounds in a precise sequence. Copyrighting individual notes would clearly hinder “innovations” reliant on those notes.

US Constitution: the Fourth Amendment reads as follows: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

Those interested in patenting human genes, or securing the sole legal right to test, access or report on specific genes, would argue the Bill of Rights only regulates government actions, but a patent is a legal ban imposed by the government, and supported by law enforcement. Surely, if all people have the right “to be secure in their persons”, placing a government imposed order on something already biologically fundamental to the inner workings of the body could be constituted as a “violation”.

Now, imagine you seek health treatment, but cannot access or control the information about your own genes, due to a patent that gives a for-profit firm exclusive “rights” over your genetic information.

What benefit to society is there in allowing your health treatment to hinge on whether or not you can afford to pay a specific firm a high fee for access to your own biological information? Is it just that your health outcome depend on whether or not they will grant you access or whether their specific mode of treatment is trustworthy and effective, when others might be better able to apply the necessary techniques?

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