A report from the American Medical Association finds the US is not prepared to deal with the public health crisis that would ensue from a major nuclear accident. There is also evidence suggesting that aging nuclear plants are less stable and less secure than the public is led to believe. Indeed, radiation releases are surprisingly and disturbingly common.

Christian Parenti, author of the book Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence, told MSNBC tonight that at least two aging nuclear plants in the northeast —one in Vermont and one in New York— are presently leaking radiation. And as many as 180,000 gallons of radioactive tritium-laced water may have leaked into ground water in one incident.

According to the study, titled State-Level Emergency Preparedness and Response Capabilities:

The extent of planning for epidemiology and surveillance for the human health effects of radiation was assessed for 5 types: syndromic surveillance, clinician reporting, crisis-phase epidemiology, recovery-phase epidemiology, and other types of statistical surveillance (Table 1). A range between 70% and 84% of states reported minimal to no planning completed on the potential human effects of radiation among any of these 5 types of surveillance.

States reported only slightly better planning for providing advice on exposure assessment and environmental sampling combined (42%–50% reporting none to minimal planning) and little planning to provide advice for biological sampling (14% have none and 60% have minimal). Seventy-four percent of states reported having minimal (53%) or no (21%) plans to conduct population-based exposure monitoring.

In response to accidental release of radiation:

Twenty (53%) states reported having a finalized radiation-specific written response plan (Table 5). Four (20%) of the 20 states did not have a nuclear power plant (data not shown). For unintentional releases, half of the states had written or detailed operations plans for all scenarios except for a waterways incident, for which only 6 (15%) states reported having a written or detailed operations plan.

On just one day in April 2010, two different nuclear plants in New Jersey were visited by nuclear inspectors, to deal with possible radiation seepage. According to New Jersey Newsroom, “State and federal inspectors Friday were searching for the cause of a leak of radioactive water into catch basins at the Salem 2 nuclear power plant in Lower Alloways Creek in Salem County.”

Then, shortly after the Salem 2 release was made public:

the state Department of Environmental Protection announced that it had been notified by Exelon, owner of Oyster Creek nuclear generating station in Lacey, Ocean County, that a monitor that measures radiation emissions from the facility was discovered to be inoperable. It is unknown how long the monitor has been out of service.

Exelon, the operator of that Ocean County plant, was forced to pay for clean-up of an estimated 180,000 gallons of radioactive tritium-laced water that leaked from the plant on 9 April 2009. The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection reportedly found evidence that water with contamination levels 50 times legal limits may have reached the Cohansey Aquifer, an important drinking-water source for southern New Jersey.

On Wednesday evening Chris Jansing reported for MSNBC that a report has found that 25% of all nuclear plants in the United States have leaked or are presently leaking radioactive waste.

According to a report from The New York Times, the underregulated practice of hydraulic fracturing (hydro-fracking) is releasing not only high quantities of minerals into the water supply, but also radioactive materials. Regulators are not acting to halt such releases or require full reprocessing of waste water from the drilling sites.

Google yesterday launched a “person finder” for Japan, to help people looking for relatives and loved ones who may be lost in a communications outage or in physical danger, due to the earthquake and tsunami. Facebook also has a disaster relief service at facebook.com/DisasterRelief. There is also a surge in information on Twitter at hash-tags like #tsunami or #sendai or Fukushima.

Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) this week called for a move toward building consensus for a scaled back version of the climate legislation pending in the United States Senate. Two possible models, given the nature of the Kerry-Lieberman proposal, as written, would be to either establish at the federal level the kind of cooperative emissions reduction strategy already adopted by a coalition of states across the northeast or a limit on total carbon emissions from power plants only.

25 states, plus the District of Columbia, have renewable electricity standards, a requirement that a certain percentage of power generation come from clean renewable resources, by a certain year. 3 more states have voluntary RES goals, and there are incentives both at the state and federal level for power utilities to develop expanded renewable generating capacity. The state of New Jersey has quickly risen to 2nd nationwide in solar power generation, behind California, despite having no sun-scorched deserts and little eligible open space which is not protected.

New Jersey is also rapidly expanding its commitment to solar energy, incentivizing installations on private homes, factory and warehouse roof-space and corporate complexes, as with the new 4.1 MW solar power installation slated to go online early next year at Dow Jones’ South Brunswick site. Technology innovation —including R&D, manufacturing, energy efficiency improvements, and local renewable generation schemes— is driving New Jersey’s response to the carbon emissions question.

This model could be translated into something that allows for an array of public-private partnerships and aggressive incentives for enterprises, small and large, to commit to energy innovation and to clean renewables. If Sen. Snowe’s push for a utility-focused emissions protocol is built around the northeastern efficiency and renewables standards, a new round of Recovery Act funding for R&D could help speed the transition to clean energy.

Coal-heavy states consistently face the problem of how carbon-pricing (whether by tax or by cap and trade) will affect people reliant on the coal industry for their livelihoods and for affordable energy. Accelerating the pace of technological innovation for improved alternative energy performance is key to lessening the impact of a transition away from coal, but whatever emissions-reduction strategy becomes law, something will likely have to be done to insulate consumers and protect jobs in coal-dependent states.

The hope of those pushing for a tech-centered bill is that renewable electricity standards and incentives to assist in the transition from carbon-based to clean energy will allow coal-dependent communities to diversify their energy supply and their job markets in meaningful ways that make for a more vibrant local economy.

An alternative proposal is the fee/dividend model —proposed by Citizens Climate Lobby*, and with the support of leading scientists like NASA’s Dr. James Hansen—, which would place a fee on carbon dioxide at the point of entry into the US economy (well, mine or port) and return 100% of the revenues to every American household. This model puts the reins of the marketplace back in the hands of the consumer, by allowing families to cover any additional costs that filter through from the carbon fee.

Whether by technological innovation and direct incentives for investment and retooling or by contextual incentives like the fee/dividend proposal, one key focus for honest policymakers must be planning for the rapid diversification of energy supplies and labor markets in regions and communities that are currently reliant on coal or oil production for their economic sustenance.

The famously oil-driven state of Texas is another good example —like New Jersey, where oil importation and refinery have long been key players in the energy sector— where a transition to renewables has not only been recognized as necessary and potentially lucrative, but where the pace of the transition has been accelerating at a surprising rate. Texas is now the national leader in wind-based power generation, with 9,000 MW installed and plans to install another 40,000 MW.

With 49,000 MW of wind-based power generation, Texas would be producing enough power from wind to replace 41 coal-fired power plants. Oil money is now shifting into wind as oil becomes harder to find and harder to extract and investors recognize that yields from wind don’t decline over time, because the resource is renewable, or rather: constantly flowing.

Such energy innovations are helping to provide new sources of wealth to rural communities, as 1 acre of corn can yield roughly $800 at harvest, and 1 acre with 1 wind turbine installed can produce $300,000 worth of electricity. The efficiency in such a shift in power generation is enhanced by the new technologies’ ability to subsidize farming communities, potentially reducing the need for overall government spending relating to agriculture and energy as a combined total.

Sen. Snowe’s office has been keeping any definitive aim or strategy under wraps, while the senator seeks to rally wavering senators in both parties to the cause of emissions reduction, by one means or another. Her coalition building effort will win favor, many policy analysts and activists believe, as soon as it is clear that the technological transition will be rapid and effective and will allow carbon-reliant communities to prosper in ways they presently cannot.

* NOTE: This reporter is a group leader and citizen volunteer for Citizens Climate Lobby, a non-partisan, non-profit national organization working to build the political will for a sustainable climate. Read more about CCL’s efforts on Capitol Hill, on The Hot Spring Network

TheHotSpring.net :: Pres. Obama addressed the nation last night from the Oval Office, on the tragedy unfolding across the Gulf of Mexico, and issued an impassioned call for the entire nation to rally to the cause of breaking its “addiction to fossil fuels”. The president’s vision goes beyond the question of “energy independence”, which tends to favor expanded offshore drilling, to a push for a comprehensive transition to clean, renewable sources of energy and the phasing out of carbon-based fuels.

For more than a decade, ecological economists have been arguing that the United States needs to make a nationwide effort, “at wartime speed” to innovate and commit to clean, renewable power-generation methods. Last night, Pres. Obama became the first US president to echo this vision, reminding skeptics that no one believed the US could build its military capacity as rapidly or completely as it did to fight World War II on two opposite sides of the globe.

Obama said “The tragedy unfolding on our coast is the most clean and painful reminder yet that the time to embrace a clean energy future is now”. He also noted that a nationwide transition to clean energy is an integral part of the nation’s long-term economic recovery, saying “The transition to clean energy has the potential to grow our economy and create millions of new jobs, but only if we accelerate that transition.”

There are some in Congress who oppose this message, but this appears to be mostly from allegiance to the carbon fuels industry and the outdated view that clean energy solutions are not cost-effective. For many politicians from the Gulf coast region, the prospect of a comprehensive shift away from fossil fuels is not only terrifying, but taboo. There is such a deep fear that jobs tied to the oil industry cannot be replaced by any other means and that no other industry can be so effective at “creating wealth” that it is virtually forbidden for anyone in politics to speak of moving away from oil production.

The generating capacity, however, of wind, solar and wave power, has advanced to a level of efficiency where it is feasible to replace the energy production capacity of the Gulf of Mexico’s oil industry with renewables. What is needed is infrastructure, and building it will create jobs as soon as the first project is launched.

Obstruction from pro-petroleum politicians in Washington and across the Gulf region is linked to the 18th-19th century idea that burning carbon-based fuel is the most efficient way to produce energy. But refusal to pour major investment into the transition to clean, renewable resources and the infrastructure needed to make that system a reality is a direct impediment to immediate, widespread job growth in the very areas under siege from the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

The BP spill is in fact, no matter one’s perspective on clean energy, a watershed moment in thinking about energy and environmental policy: it is now clear the incalculable potential costs to every sector of society from the failed strategy of a devotion to carbon-based fuels far outstrip our ability to easily respond to a disaster of this kind, and the logic of using clean energy has suddenly come into stark relief as an obvious and necessary next step.

The call to arms, part of what the president called his “battle plan” for addressing the crisis in the Gulf of Mexico, comes none too soon, as China and India have joined Europe in pushing the envelope of clean energy innovation. China has made the world’s largest investments in clean energy startup incentives and the EU has poured tens of billions of dollars in solar investment into projects in Africa and elsewhere.

But India has also joined the trend, as reported by Shravya Reddy, for the Natural Resources Defense Council:

On May 24, India unveiled the draft of its National Green Mission, one of the eight missions under its National Action Plan on Climate Change.   This is exciting news, especially for NRDC’s India team which is currently in New Delhi discussing climate change with Indian officials and civil society.   NRDC welcomes the draft and is encouraged to see India’s commitment to addressing the challenge of climate change and managing its greenhouse gas emissions.

India’s national green mission is just the latest major national policy proposal designed to not only build toward a new era of responsible environmental stewardship and reduced carbon emissions, but to transition a major national economy toward the use of clean, renewable resources for power-generation, industry and transport.

A dramatically expanded commitment to clean energy resources is no longer just a matter of environmental responsibility, it is now a very urgent matter of direct international economic competition. Denmark and Japan have become the world leaders in the production of advanced wind turbine technologies, while China is now pushing investment in both innovation and production of cutting edge solar and wind power technologies, for export.

The Gulf of Mexico coastline of the southeastern United States has been hard hit by the ongoing BP oil disaster, with catastrophic environmental damage, the collapse of the local fishing and shrimping industry, and tourism bottoming out in some places near zero, just as summer gets going. There is a moratorium on deepwater exploration and drilling, which is putting a strain on the job market across several states. A serious investment in renewable energy resources would build a more vibrant, more reliable jobs market into the regional economy and help prevent the environmental fallout of offshore drilling.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of early 2009, what many refer to as “the stimulus”, which it was not designed to be, is actually a long-term economic reform and investment program, designed to help steer major sectors of the US economy away from abusive practices which impose long-term costs (‘negative externalities’, in economic jargon) on society. So subsidies for destructive practices are rolled back while subsidies for sustainable practices and innovation-oriented enterprise are expanded. It includes the single largest investment in clean energy in US history, as well as a major investment in infrastructure.

What’s more, the ARRA is phased in over several years, meaning there is still money to be invested. The coastal region of the Gulf of Mexico could develop a highly lucrative, highly productive, clean energy infrastructure, designed to harvest wind, solar and wave power, without any need for incurring the environmental risks of deepwater drilling. With the rapid acceleration of the efficiency of clean energy technologies, the Gulf region could, like California or certain states of the Great Plains, become a net exporter of clean energy.

Why is this not being proposed as an immediate, aggressive, well-thought government response to the crisis involving BP’s blown-out oil well? For one, Republican governors have staked their political fortunes on refusing to cooperate with Pres. Obama’s economic recovery and reinvestment plans, so they have either rejected or sought to impede the spending of the federal money they could otherwise get through the Recovery Act. But there is also the pervasive influence of the drilling industry, from rig operators to oil services companies to the big oil firms like BP, who invest heavily in political campaigns.

Gov. Haley Barbour, of Mississippi, a Republican who has bet his political future on the notion that offshore drilling is the best, or perhaps only, way to go economically, has just about called on the media to stop reporting on the spill, alleging that reporting on the impact of the BP disaster has hurt his state economically. Barbour does not have a clean energy plan; he has opposed the spending of Recovery Act money in his state, yet he has requested federal help in dealing with the oil spill, even as he alleges there is no problem in Mississippi and seeks to blame the media and not the oil industry.

Barbour wants offshore drilling expanded and has put himself forward as something of a mouthpiece for big oil’s interests in the Gulf of Mexico, citing his state’s economic interest in attracting “investment” from the big oil firms. What Barbour has not been able to articulate is: why is he not in favor, then, of an economic recovery strategy, already available to his state prior to the spill, which would help Mississippi diversify its energy economy, produce clean energy, reduce the environmental threat from energy production, and create lasting new jobs?

In Louisiana, Gov. Bobby Jindal, also a Republican who has opposed his state spending any money from Pres. Obama’s Recovery Act, a flagrant act of political grandstanding that was specifically calculated to deprive the people of his state of the investment they needed in hard times, in order to make it appear that Pres. Obama was not addressing the economic crisis, has been playing the populist. But even as he attacks the federal government and demands more assistance, he blames the government for the actions of interests he has supported and whose support he has enjoyed.

The truth, it turns out, is not Gov. Jindal’s friend: he has been a staunch ally of big oil and even now is calling for more drilling off the Louisiana coast. He has no serious plan for energy innovation and no willingness to cooperate with the federal government’s most significant investment in clean energy in history, despite the many ways it could benefit the people of his state. In fact, Jindal has been one of the most persistent champions of BP and other drilling interests, both in Washington and in Louisiana.

As reported by Mother Jones:

[The] media’s panegyrics have ignored Jindal’s own weak response to the oil spill and his outsized role in promoting the kind of regulatory cutbacks and dangerous offshore drilling policies that are now wrecking Louisiana’s economy.

In February, 2006, while serving as a member of the GOP-controlled US House of Representatives, Jindal introduced the Deep Ocean Energy Resources Act. Passed by the House a few months later, the bill would have opened up the entire US coast to offshore oil drilling. States could override the law and ban rigs in their territorial waters, yet the law would let them share lease royalties with the federal government–a strong incentive to drill. Adjacent states would have little say in the matter (clearly a problem, given that BP’s spill has marred several states’ coastlines).

In fact, it is astonishing how closely Jindal’s efforts mirror the history of lax oversight and cozy relations with the oil industry that led to the specific situation of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Using language that is first of all not very legislative in nature and secondly either extremely naive or cynically aligned with big oil, the bill actually asserted that: “(4) it is not reasonably foreseeable that . . . development and production of an oil discovery located more than 50 miles seaward of the coastline will adversely affect resources near the coastline.”

The Deepwater Horizon well is located roughly 50 miles off the Louisiana coast, and Mr. Jindal is now reframing his entire political persona around the notion that this well poses and apocalyptic threat to coastal communities, to local ecosystems, the fishing and tourism industries, the habitability of certain areas and the economic wellbeing of the entire region. What’s more, some observers believe a spill further out would only have resulted in a wider swath of coastline being directly impacted.

Mother Jones goes on to observe that:

As Jindal was pushing to radically increase offshore oil drilling (while accepting more than $100,000 from oil and gas companies), there’s no indication that he saw the slightest need to increase government oversight. His stated governing philosophy is deeply anti-regulatory. In March, 2009, he said: “There has never been a challenge that the American people, with as little interference as possible by the federal government, cannot handle.”

The Jindal saga is common in Gulf coast politics: even now, Gov. Jindal continues to push for expanded offshore drilling, even as he pretends to be a fierce defender of the environmental and quality-of-life interests of the people living along the coast. He wants to have it both ways, to promote the unsupervised abuses of an industry that does not know how to protect the marine or coastal environment, while taking no responsibility for his role in bringing about this catastrophe.

It is this kind of political representation, one could argue, that has left the people of the Gulf coast region without an alternate economic plan to offshore drilling. Jindal, Barbour and many others have long seen oil money as easy money, ignoring the risks and downplaying the very real costs to society at large. But now, the people of the Gulf coast region are faced with a serious challenge to that way of thinking: there is nothing easy or reliable about the offshore drilling economic growth strategy.

What is needed is something new: state of the art offshore windfarms could be built in place of deepwater rigs. New advances in solar-voltaic power-generation technology make it as much as 100 times as efficient as the advanced state of the art over the last decade. The Gulf of Mexico’s strong undersea currents also make it a strong candidate for high-capacity wave-power generation. A combination of the three could make the region into a clean energy powerhouse, if only the political leadership could grasp the nature of the problem and the wisdom of such a solution.

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?

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Geneticist and biotech pioneer Craig Venter unveils the process of experimentation and research that allowed his team to create the “first synthetic cell”. The video includes not only information about how the genetic code was created first on a computer and includes “watermarks” such as the name of the new species’ official website, but also about how the team studied ethical issues relating to the project of creating synthetic life. The project took 15 years and was aimed at creating “error-free genetic code”.

Venter announced that aside from the names of over 40 researchers and a web address, the genetic code for his synthetic organism also contains several quotes, such as “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life”, by James Joyce. The team also included a quote from American Prometheus, a biography about Robert Oppenheimer: “See things not as they are but as they might be”. Observers note that routine cellular mutation will likely cause these watermarks to morph over time.

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…

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Today is the Day of the Book, in part spurred by the urge to recognize two of the great progenitors of modern literature, William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, who both died on 23 April 1616, at least according to the official history. Their work and the various arts that go into making books, as such, are celebrated around the world as staples of modern global civilization and the human element of culture. But the book is more than those sweeping historical energies; it is a concrete, observable register of intent and of meaning, which carries evidence of our humanity forward and informs and improves future worlds.

The book, bound pages imprinted with text in one form or another, is one of the oldest continuously used and still highly relevant technologies, and for good reason. Paper is both a simple and a complicated tool, requiring large amounts of industry and energy to produce, yet is produced in massive quantities and seems endlessly available. Staining it in a way that allows a visual rendering of a given code (a language and its preferred alphabet) allows us to create a record of ideas and thought patterns that holds up remarkably well against time and can be accessed with no technology aside from our own senses and knowledge of the code in question.

Fortunately, the human brain seems to be organically structured to deal fluidly with language as a framework for thought and communication, and acquiring knowledge of an as-yet unlearned language is not too daunting a task. And we have translators for when it is. Language interacts with the human mind in a highly permissive and constructive way, and even seems to provide the brain with structural clues that permit us to acquire knowledge more rapidly than deliberate intention would allow, at least at the earliest stages.

The book is designed to help language do its job, of affording us a more expansive communicative landscape than we could otherwise access, and expand the scope of our intellect and our ability to imagine and to achieve. In the age of digital media, when electronic text is all the rage, and really does offer some major improvements on the static page, it’s worth taking note of the staying power of paper and ink. Having a way to not only access and to share knowledge, but to believe in its consistency, is central to being able to build a society with persistent opportunities to live and enact its ideals.

While the absolute long-term preservation of certain fragile documents, like the original Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States, requires advanced scientific measures to achieve a hermetically sealed environment, such safe conditions have been achieved by less complex methods, as in the case of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The book is a lightweight, portable, personable and everywhere accessible (“always on”) rendition of the graven-in-stone paradigm we find with Hammurabi’s Code or ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. It gives us the constant reference and the confidence of a verifiable authoritative version.

The nature of the digital medium is such that one has a very difficult time checking the authenticity of “original” texts, without a paper original on hand. (This is the logic of the movement for a voter-verifiable paper trail in electronic voting processes in the United States, where accurately registering the “intent of the voter” is mandated by law.) We have to recognize the power of digital technologies, and their ability to liberate us and expand our communicative and productive reach, but we also need to understand the complete story and the genius of the hard copy bound volumes on which all digital publishing is ultimately based.

Can electronic paper replace the paper copy? In many ways, it can… it can give us mobility and freedom of selection, allow us to carry thousands of volumes with us, in an object that weighs less and is far less cumbersome than even one volume of a thousand pages. It can allow us to access huge reserves of text from almost anywhere (Amazon’s ‘Whispernet’ service, for instance, via the Kindle devices). It might even allow us to create distinct, parallel reading environments. And it can certainly keep a book looking “new” and undiminished by overuse.

But then, for those who love reading, isn’t the physical experience of the page part of the enjoyment? Isn’t the physical page’s mortality, its vulnerability, its susceptibility to wear and tear, part of what endears us to a given book, makes us believe we have participated in its ongoing life and that it has infiltrated into ours? Electronic paper does not allow for that kind of organic experience with the written word. And it is not as stable as the printed page.

Ultimately, the book is a powerful technology for delivering information that works without a device or service provider. It can be owned and kept in an intimate setting, without requiring a charge of electricity from a wide-ranging grid. It allows for intimate moments in which writers have succeeded in realizing something uniquely human to interact directly with intimate moments in which readers are realizing something uniquely human. And that, after all, is what we celebrate when we celebrate the book, the literary arts, the dream and daring of what writing is for the human species.

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?

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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.

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In what could be a landmark ruling, a federal court has blocked the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from imposing a network neutrality constraint on internet service providers who own the network they administer. There are serious issues of Constitutionality involved in the ruling, and net neutrality advocates say any move away from absolute neutrality would be a violation of the First Amendment protection of press freedom, and possibly of the freedom to assemble.

According to the Huffington Post:

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that the FCC lacks authority to require broadband providers to give equal treatment to all Internet traffic flowing over their networks. That was a big victory for Comcast Corp., the nation’s largest cable company, which had challenged the FCC’s authority to impose such “network neutrality” obligations on broadband providers.

Supporters of network neutrality, including the FCC chairman, have argued that the policy is necessary to prevent broadband providers from favoring or discriminating against certain Web sites and online services, such as Internet phone programs or software that runs in a Web browser. Advocates contend there is precedent: Nondiscrimination rules have traditionally applied to so-called “common carrier” networks that serve the public, from roads and highways to electrical grids and telephone lines.

It is not yet clear whether the ruling will mean that Comcast or other ISPs could in fact create stratified internet service, with tiered download speeds and/or priority bandwidth for paying content providers, but the ruling does suggest the FCC will not be able to intervene to stop such activity, if a provider does so.

At risk is the right of access of internet end-users to the content they seek, and of content creators to be able to capitalize on the global information-distribution platform of the world wide web.

In response to a recent article, explaining that record snowfall in certain places does not equate to a proof that global warming is not happening, but rather, that global warming is an apt explanation for why the record snowfalls would occur there, a number of climate skeptics chose to attack certain points in the piece, using what they take to be established science. In some cases, the evidence cited was simply misrepresented or misinterpreted, according to the wishes of the skeptics themselves.

For instance, one commenter wrote the following:

What does NASA satellite data tell us? “Unlike the surface-based temperatures, global temperature measurements of the Earth’s lower atmosphere obtained from satellites reveal no definitive warming trend over the past two decades. The slight trend that is in the data actually appears to be downward. The largest fluctuations in the satellite temperature data are not from any man-made activity, but from natural phenomena such as large volcanic eruptions from Mt. Pinatubo, and from El Niño. So the programs which model global warming in a computer say the temperature of the Earth’s lower atmosphere should be going up markedly, but actual measurements of the temperature of the lower atmosphere reveal no such pronounced activity. “

This report from October 1997 was cited in the same comment as proof that in fact global warming is a myth. The report does not say that. In fact, it specifically deals with questions about the accuracy of the very technology the commenter cites as proving the claim that a cooling trend exists while a warming trend does not. It’s important to remember that, first of all, the information is 13 years old, and the purpose of the linked report was to explore whether or not satellite data could be used to track atmospheric temperature fluctuations, at the time, not an entirely proven science.

There is also the problem of the comment’s premise: that lower atmospheric temperatures and surface temperatures cannot be different or that if lower atmospheric temperatures cool, surface temperatures could not warm or the warming would be cancelled out. The truth is that an increased difference between surface temperature (remember, we live at the surface; ocean temperature, glaciers and ice-melt are also at the surface) and temperatures in the lower atmosphere can lead to even more severe storms and climate-related environmental impact.

That temperature difference means stronger winds, and those winds cause climate phenomena to move, which is how we get weather. If surface temperatures are warming, the warming itself will also be more widespread due to increased wind activity. Winds are the engine of climate; they carry masses of low and high pressure, determine monsoon rain patterns and align weather systems over whole regions over extended periods of time.

The commenter fails to even consider this issue, because the intent of the comment was not to illustrate a matter of fact, but to use an apparently unrelated study —one exploring the criticism of the very point he is trying to make—, from 13 years ago, to discredit a vaguely defined “view” held today. In fact, that vaguely defined view is the consensus of the vast majority of scientists involved in climate research the world over, a consensus built on hard evidence and observable fact, and informed with the most advanced scientific peer-review process we have.

The skeptic commenter’s attack on the climate consensus conveniently ignores actual reporting on what is observed in terms of global average temperatures, the warming trend and the human role in driving that trend. It’s worth looking at what NASA’s climate scientists say about warming trends, 13 years after addressing the problem of whether satellite measurements were accurate enough to deliver reliable data.

On 21 January 2010, NASA released a report entitled “2009: Second Warmest Year on Record; End of Warmest Decade”. That warmest decade report shows a clear evidence of a sustained warming trend from the year 1880 through the present. The data come from the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), the most advanced climate measuring scientific institution in the world.

The climate-skeptic commenter alleges there is a proven cooling trend and that “The largest fluctuations in the satellite temperature data are not from any man-made activity, but from natural phenomena such as large volcanic eruptions from Mt. Pinatubo, and from El Niño.”

In fact, NASA’s GISS findings show a marked upward trend in global average temperature, increasing dramatically over the last half-century, with the last decade clearly the warmest ever recorded. Regarding El Niño, there is recognition that the “unusually high temperatures” for 1998 might be in part attributable to that phenomenon, but El Niño shifts weather patterns within a specific latitudinal range, and does not explain long-term global trends in average temperature.

NASA’s warmest-decade report reads:

A deep solar minimum has made sunspots a rarity in the last few years. Such lulls in solar activity, which can cause the total amount of energy given off by the Sun to decrease by about a tenth of a percent, typically spur surface temperature to dip slightly. Overall, solar minimums and maximums are thought to produce no more than 0.1°C (0.18°F) of cooling or warming.

“In 2009, it was clear that even the deepest solar minimum in the period of satellite data hasn’t stopped global warming from continuing,” said [GISS Director James] Hansen.

Small particles in the atmosphere called aerosols can also affect the climate. Volcanoes are powerful sources of sulfate aerosols that counteract global warming by reflecting incoming solar radiation back into space. In the past, large eruptions at Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines and El Chichón in Mexico have caused global dips in surface temperature of as much as 0.3°C (0.54°F). But volcanic eruptions in 2009 have not had a significant impact.”

So, while volcanic eruptions can cause temperature fluctuations, they cause cooling, not warming, and in the period from 1880 to the present, that effect has not overridden the significant warming trend. NASA specifies that in fact the period 2000 to 2009 (not part of the 1997 report) is clearly the warmest decade on record.

The second point raised by the commenter was that my claim that “even as the intensity of solar activity has dipped, the warming trend has continued” is “categorically untrue!” This attack is covered by NASA’s data, from the GISS report, already listed above. The truth is that the ONLY extant data on whether global average temperatures have changed during the recent solar cycle minimum show that in fact WARMING CONTINUED virtually unabated.

The third point of critique offered by this particular climate skeptic was a flawed attempt at rhetorical inversion. I had written “the evidence of newly sensitive solar activity assessment methods does not have a long enough history to accurately determine any long-term relationship to Earth climate”, to which the commenter retorted, “Let me re-phrase this… …the evidence of the newly proclaimed anthropomorphic global warming does not have a long enough history to accurately determine any long-term relationship to Earth climate.”

The rhetorical inversion falls flat, because solar activity assessment methods do not have a long-enough history is a factor, due to the fact that they attempt to measure the specific relationship of activity on a distant celestial body, with no hard surface where any recorded history can be explored or traced. We have no way of determining what the solar surface history was in relation to measurements of Earth climate pre-dating the advent of the solar-activity monitoring technology.

The attempted inversion does not work, because the Earth does have a hard surface, with hundreds of millions of years of climate information recorded in its geological record. Ice and sediment, organic matter and the fossil record, all show us information about the make-up of past climate patterns and even average temperature ranges for specific regions, based on things like the distribution of flora and fauna during a given period in the geological record.

It seems important to note, in a thorough and informed response to such a critique of climate science, that the climate-skeptic comment in question used the term “anthropomorphic global warming”. The term “anthropomorphic” means “in the form of human beings”. It refers to when we see an object as having human qualities, like assigning the value of “face” to a car because of the layout of its headlights and grill.

The term is used by some climate skeptics either out of ignorance or as a way of making the mainstream climate consensus sound foolish. The proper term is “anthropogenic”, meaning “caused by human beings”. Anthropogenic global warming describes the demonstrable connection between human industrial activity, namely the production of unnatural quantities of carbon-based gases, and the observable increase in global average temperature.

The fourth point raised amounts to another flawed rhetorical inversion. This one does not work, because it ignores the rhetorical premise of what it seeks to invert. The claim had been made that:

There is a logical leap involved in much of what is claimed about the link between solar activity and climate; until that logical leap is narrowed to evidentiary verifiability, the global scientific consensus will not treat the claims you cite as truly scientific…

Our climate skeptic —who had proposed that there was a definitive historical link between solar cycle minimums and global cooling, implying that the whole global consensus on climate destabilization is lying about warming— wrote the following in response:

May I re-phrase this… There is a logical leap involved in much of what is claimed about the link between anthropomorphic global warming (i.e. man-made increases in CO2 production) and climate; until that logical leap is narrowed to evidentiary verifiability, the global scientific consensus will not treat the claims you cite as truly scientific.

This rhetorical inversion does not work, because there is a fundamental difference between mainstream climate science and the logical leap involved in the solar-cycle theories cited. The difference is that mainstream climate science is based on the established evidentiary history of climate modeling, temperature study, physics, meteorology and geology. It is a vast, interdisciplinary terrain of fact and evidence, and leaves little room for interpretation or guesswork.

The solar cycle critique the commenter cited has already been shown to NOT illustrate what some scientists say it might illustrate —a comprehensive global cooling trend—; in fact, warming has continued, despite the dip in solar surface activity. And the critique is based wholly on the assumption, entirely in the realm of theory and untested, that reduced sunspot activity means cooler temperatures on the surface of the Earth. (It might mean a reduced warming influence related to sunspot activity, but not necessarily a wholesale cooling of Earth’s surface temperatures.)

The only reliable evidentiary measure of this claim is NASA’s modeling mostly over the last 10 years, after the 1997 report the commenter cited as having some bearing on satellite temperature measures, and what NASA ACTUALLY FOUND during the last ten years is that the solar cycle minimum might reduce global average temperatures by 0.1ºC (in a decade when global average temperatures have risen “to the highest levels ever recorded”, according to NASA’s research).

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

OpenSalon :: The Apple tablet should be an intensely user-friendly device that achieves a paradigm shift in the way we deal with information. That sounds big, but Apple is well-equipped to do this, even by just making a few key upgrades to what it has already made possible with its laptops and touch-sensitive handhelds.

I want the Apple tablet to:

1. store, manage and work with my files (graphic, text and media) more easily;
2. store, manage and play all of my music, with fewer clicks;
3. store and manage a library of content-rich e-publications, including newspaper and magazine subscriptions, automatically downloaded, at no extra cost, if I choose;
4. access and manage all of my online communications platforms;
5. instantly post content to an array of online networking platforms, simply by selecting and clicking;
6. find out the latest information on crisis situations and contribute ideas, research or cash, as quickly as possible, to reputable organizations (iTunes can help with this, or maybe a kind of iTunes-Safari mash-up);
7. manipulate digital files as if they were three-dimensional objects, by the way I interact with the touch-screen;
8. have a camera and allow me to voice conference (across platforms);
9. perform basic wireless internet functions, like GPS, with no need for subscription to any service;
10. be 100% free of any obligation to subscribe to any particular wireless service;
11. have an option to use a desktop environment like the traditional Mac OS X or the more streamlined iPhone homescreen;
12. introduce online back-up (for re-download) for all content purchased through iTunes — at Apple’s iTunes store, in my account;
13. allow me to arrange simultaneously visible workspaces into two columns, three columns or four corners, that fill the screen and allow me to multitask (or multi-chat) effectively;
14. include a tool/widget that allows me to measure not only the tablet’s energy consumption and carbon-efficiency, but to compare options in other activities/services for being greener while saving money, too;
15. be no bigger than the dimensions of a standard “marble” school notebook, and no heavier;
16. have at least 250 GB of hard-drive storage standard;
17. cost no more than twice what the Amazon Kindle costs (they are not direct competitors, but this is a good price measure)…

I can think of a hundred other things I want the Apple tablet to do, and it will probably do most of them, but these above are the key features of a user-friendly, multi-touch, full-computing tablet, revolutionary enough to give the tablet that special qualification of paradigm-shift communications and IT device that really gives the end-user greater flexibility and greater control of information.

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It is a serious question whether distance learning holds virtues that are ignored due to a prejudice that holds that physical presence of the instructor is necessary for learning. Clearly, in some cases, this is entirely untrue, and there may be an over-emphasis in some circles on the idea of physical presence as the metaphysical prerequisite to consider that learning is occurring. However, it is not clear that physical presence and phonocentrism —emphasis on the spoken word as the more effective mode of instruction— amount to the same “fixation”, when it comes to the question of how best to communicate knowledge.

Certainly, there is a different constellation of sensory, psychological and intellectual responses involved in the experience of an actual professor, standing in front of or seated around a table with a group of students, speaking and interacting with them, than is involved in strictly textual distance learning modules. The nature of experience is defined by what limits, or channels, it: face-to-face communication has certain limitations, while peer-to-peer online networks have others.

We are all familiar by now, I assume, with the communicative limitations of chat, sms and email, where plain text in an abstract, electronic setting, requiring a “send” command, and a line-by-line read-out and response, often out of sync with human intent, due to typing and reaction time, can lead to misunderstandings, taking offense, and miscues which all but undermine the possibility of real communication. The absence of physical cues about mood and reaction time is a real obstacle to intuitive electronic communication.

That, ultimately, is a question of 1) how intuitive is a given individual’s grasp of communication via such media, and 2) how well do two or more individuals understand each other, so as to be able to properly read the cues buried in the dense array of structural limitations that comprise these highly “efficient” modes of communication.

Whether we take a Derridean approach or not, we can acknowledge that there is more presence in a face-to-face human interaction in physical space than there is in the “encounter” with text in the abstract, and that quality of “absence” is intensified when our encounter with such text occurs at a time when the person who created or delivered that text is not also online.

So, is it easier to learn by way of face-to-face interactions with one’s professor? Or is distance learning superior, in some unique ways? I think the answer here is to some degree a matter of common sense: it depends on the specifics of the case. Professors can be conduits for illumination, if they are attuned to their students, eloquent, talented and hard-working, but they can also be an obstacle, if certain deep character flaws interfere, or if a student doesn’t do well with that professor’s style of instruction.

Distance learning is mainly a technological fix: it helps close geographical distances and open up available free time that might not otherwise be devoted to study or to instruction. The opening of The question of whether online distance learning can result in a more “intense” learning experience, a more “direct” transfer of knowledge —conceptual or experiential— or more intuitive communication, is a matter of individual cases.

If we start from these premises, we can begin to address the many interferences between the potential virtues of distance learning and the “metaphysics of presence”. If the experiential and perceptual aspects of face-to-face communication, which allow for learning through more intuitive channels to accompany textual learning, can be introduced into any online teaching scenario, the online instruction will be enhanced.

Is this a technological problem? Or a sociological one? Are people who gravitate toward distance learning actively seeking fundamentally different types of instruction than people who feel a personal need for an infusion of physical presence to accompany the introduction of new spaces of knowledge into their way of conceiving the world?

Jim Shimabukuro comments at Ideagora that:

When done right [...] online class discussions can be far more dynamic than F2F. There are many explanations. Here are some that stand out for me: Everyone . . .
(1) can participate — not just the most verbally aggressive,
(2) has the opportunity to carefully review and consider all the posts in the thread,
(3) has as much time as she/he needs to compose and revise thoughts before publishing them,
(4) is free to decide when and how often to participate,
(5) has the option to PM (send private messages to) individuals to expand the parameters of the discussion, and
(6) has the WWW at her fingertips to instantly access a world of info to inform her posts.

For the most part, online discussion fora do have these virtues, depending on the quality of their design and the permissiveness of the course structure. But to properly address the points of interference between the virtues of distance learning and the weight of the metaphysics of presence, it is vital to ask in every case if each of the six points listed above is always a virtue or if there are ways in which the physical demands of presence are conducive to sharper wits and more intuitive grasp of new complexities, in subtle but important ways.

All of these themes are interrelated in ways that determine how information flows between people, in any given case, and lead necessarily to the question of how the strictly online distance-learning scenario and the traditional physical classroom scenario might interact: for instance, many classroom-taught courses now include online components that go beyond email and professors’ websites, up to and including chat rooms, discussion groups and more.

There could also be crossover wherein the online classroom generates study groups that meet or which bring together competing ideas from competing disciplines, to enrich —and hopefully not confuse— both the teaching and learning experience. Some universities have online communities for certain courses, where students and faculty only meet for scheduled cultural events, discussions or interdisciplinary learning opportunities.

The new shape of web-based communication and networking allows for ever more effective collection, transfer and discussion of complex and far-reaching information. This means classroom-taught courses are ever more able to benefit from integration of web-based discussion mechanisms, and the convergence of physical and virtual space is the main issue, not whether face to face or peer to peer is superior.

• For more information, or to join the debate, visit innovate-ideagora.ning.com

Continuing our series on the evolutions that can be expected over the coming decade, we look at new directions in particle physics, media technologies that are enabling not only greater freedom, but a new communicative paradigm which will, in part, help steer us to the great discoveries of this moment in history, and a vital new understanding of global economic patterns, which will revolutionize the way governments around the world plan for domestic spending and trade policy.

Particle Physics

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN —Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire—, outside of Geneva near the French-Swiss border, is the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, the most complex machine ever created, and designed to smash subatomic particles together at rates of speed high enough to mimic the kind of physics that existed nanoseconds after the Big Bang, from which our universe is believed to have emerged.

The big game is the Higgs boson, a particle that is theorized to lend mass to all other particles, and which possibly exists only briefly for this purpose. The Higgs boson, also popularly known as the “God particle”, for its capacity to generate mass for other particles, has never been observed. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is believed to be powerful enough to actually generate, and record information about the behavior of, the elusive Higgs boson.

This breakthrough would confirm vital aspects of the cosmological model of supersymmetry and bring together, for the first time in the history of human science, a comprehensive model of the known universe. Another elusive gap in the standard model —which integrates Einstein’s theory of relativity with the advanced discoveries of quantum physics— that could be tested and demonstrated by the LHC, is quantum gravity.

In December, the LHC achieved a world record for high-energy particle acceleration, reaching 2.36 trillion electron volts (TeV). That threshold moves the LHC closer than any other experiment in human history to being able to reproduce and observe conditions similar to those that would have existed nano-seconds after the Big Bang, when key elements of the physical dynamics of our universe were brought into being and set in motion.

It is also believed the Higgs boson gives rise to dark matter, the theoretical substance, which contains the majority of the mass in the universe and which is clustered around galaxies. Discovering the physics of that process and possibly observing the early physics of the birth of star systems, galaxies and star-forming regions, could help to reorganize our understanding of matter, energy and the universe itself, in ways as yet unprecedented in the history of science.

Media Freedom & Decentralization

The coming decade is already poised to see major breakthroughs in low-energy, high-capacity integrated communications technologies. The complex computational technology that goes into encrypting, sending, decrypting and storing, digitized messages, including text, voice, imagery and video, is increasingly light-weight, efficient and inexpensive. Handheld phones are increasingly powerful and integrated into the world wide web. Some now use remote IP connections to provide voice services.

Social networking is the new standard for high-intensity information exchange online, with global conversations building up around issues of major controversy. The post-election demonstrations in Iran this past summer were one example, where information was shared and testimony published and proliferated around the world, despite extreme measures used to curtail open communications within the nation itself. The Copenhagen Conference on climate policy gave rise to the most extensive global policy debate ever seen, from the government level through the grassroots.

Even as economic policy and environmental science drive a more global view of human activity, the rapid expansion of dispersed information-sharing technologies and the world wide web are helping to create a climate in which a decentralized grassroots conversation emerges around any issue of major import, stripping political leaders of centralized power and requiring them to respond to more diverse views from a more informed public.

The key paradigm-shift involved in the decentralized information-freedom revolution is the decentralized aspect of it. Individuals can join a wide array of networks, for varying purposes, in order to build up and maintain significant relationships in their personal and professional lives. Deprivation of resources within borders can be alleviated through those relationships, and vital information about political leadership, public controversies or events, can be delivered from sources outside the country who also have sources within the country.

Global Consumer Protection

The financial crisis of 2008 occurred at a uniquely pivotal moment in economic history. As the failings of the “globalization” process reached critical mass —a severe widening of the gap between rich and poor, the undermining of labor rights across the world, and perilous lack of transparency and provenance for tracking money flows—, massive systemic manipulations in the financial world were revealed, as trillions of dollars in reported “wealth” evaporated almost overnight.

An integrated global fabric of economic activity and banking relations meant the freeze in lending in the US and other wealthy nations would serve as a contagion of economic stagnation in poorer nations. A global response was needed, and in April, Pres. Obama succeeded in persuading the G20 nations to agree to a global financial rescue process. The IMF would create a $500 billion fund, with $100 billion put up by the United States, over several years, to ensure malfeasance or a risky economic climate would not lead to a contagion of banking collapses around the world.

That agreement was one of the most important economic achievements of 2009, because it allowed two important things to happen: 1) there would be a means of rescuing banking systems on the verge of collapse, around the world, to prevent a deepening of the global financial crisis; and 2) nations that have never had solid records of financial transparency would be incentivized to sign up to a new regime of banking transparency and financial ethics, further shoring up the global financial system against potential abuses.

Issues related to the security of fresh water resources, the human food supply and climate stability, have led to a significant increase in overall international economic negotiation. The virtues of pragmatic shared-interest negotiations have become apparent, and economic incentivization is now part of many crisis-level negotiations. The crisis regarding Iran’s nuclear program, for instance, involves a triangular proposal that would allow Iran’s enrichment process to involve both Russia and France, providing economic benefits to all three nations, but denying Tehran the capacity to develop nuclear weapons.

Job creation is increasingly dependent on global flows of financial and natural resources. China’s enormous consumption of mineral resources has built up its economic clout, and lowered the cost of its massive nationwide industrialization and construction process, but it has also deprived other nations, as well as multinational conglomerate corporations, of the ability to do business in a dependable way trading certain mineral resources, like copper and iron ore.

China is consuming cropland in Africa, in an effort to provide for the basic sustenance of its people, and world grain reserves are being depleted in line with the depletion of fossil aquifers around the planet. These patterns of global economic impact are more than just wave trends; they are part of a new way of negotiating for the sustained prosperity of local populations. The state of California, for instance, the world’s 5th largest economy, negotiates parallel agreements, not waiting for the US to make trade deals to help shore up the California economy.

But consumer protection is the missing component that has made globalization a less flexible process, too heavily oriented toward guaranteed windfalls for big investors. The 2008 global financial crisis, rooted in financial abuses, a property-price inflation bubble and the credit markets, made clear this shortcoming of global economic policy. Transparency is one of the responses, but global consumer protection is another.

It is now likely that over the next decade, negotiations to provide for consumer protection across borders, and to ensure consumers have the ability to distinguish between businesses that negotiate fairly with workers and those that use sweatshops and abusive labor conditions to pad their profits. Improvements to global economic ethics will come from enhanced consumer protection guarantees and a more global awareness of economic activity.

Conclusion

These are just nine fronts on which major paradigm-shifts are either already underway or are likely to occur in the coming decade. The details of each of these nine areas of focus provide extensive room for overlap, and touch on literally thousands of other details of personal quality of life, political and economic stability and human potential.

One of the most critical, and perhaps underreported, aspects of the social networking revolution, is the technological capability of spontaneous alliances of thoughtful individuals to locate information, fashion reports and instigate a culture of vigilance, on virtually any issue, at any time.

There are major political and economic implications tied to this trend, and local and international institutions and governments of nation states, will have to think ahead about how to integrate genuine ethical protections into the fast-changing environment of global policy. New media connectivity and decentralized civic infrastructure have allowed for a kind of de-formalization of policy-shaping events and communications between local communities and world leaders.

There is a “bubbling-up” effect that takes place, where large numbers of people can quickly band together to act as conscience to the broader world and exert pressure on leaders; international development and crisis negotiations will take this into account, as part of a new‘transactional’ cosmology, in which leadership is always under scrutiny and the facts of human life do actually matter.

2nd Decade of the 21st Century: What’s in Store?

1. Denuclearization, Green Tech & Cooperation
2. Gender Equality, Food Security & Counter-extremism
3. Particle Physics, Media Freedom & Global Economics

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.

• Join or follow the discussion at TheHotSpring.net

Apple is reportedly poised to introduce a brand-new device that has the potential to revolutionize not only mobile computing and communication, but also design, workflow and publishing. We’ve written before about the prospective Apple tablet and its capabilities, but as rumor and reporting converge to give us a better picture, we can be a little more certain of the landmark moment in the evolution of computing and communications the device will achieve.

Most importantly, the Apple tablet, with a multi-touch, navigationally enabled touchscreen, like the iPhone, will be the most advanced, most cohesive, most detailed and productive setting in which consumers will be given the ability to physically manipulate digital files. For some, this means only a very advanced graphic-user interface, but for others, it means a fundamental shift in the way we process and organize computable data, a merging of the physical and the virtual.

The Apple tablet will not be as productively amorphous as Pranav Mistry’s Sixth Sense device, which literally pours computable and searchable data out into the physical world, but we can say that the tablet moment will be one that moves our control of digital data in that direction. The device will pool media, computing, communications, in the way full-size computers do, but in an interface that is more fluid, allowing both more freedom and a more complex and intense human-data relationship in everyday settings.

As reported by CNN Money:

If the rumors are true, the tablet will be able to do basically everything a gadget could possibly do. It’s an e-reader, a gaming device, and a music player. You can watch TV and movies on it and surf the Internet (or so we’ve heard). And it will have thousands of third-party apps available for it … or maybe it will run Mac OS X. That’s all still unknown.

In a sense, the goal is to craft a device that combines the convenience and ease of use of an iPhone, an Amazon Kindle and a laptop computer, with the rich media environment one expects from a digital television, only smaller in size. Not properly pocket-sized, it is not a stretch to imagine the Apple tablet wearing a book-style leather cover like the Kindle can, in order to give it easy protection and easy access for the on-the-go browser-reader-music-listening-workflow-managing everyman.

Slash Gear is reporting that Apple registered the domain name islate.com in 2007, a possible indication it will be calling its tablet computer by that name. The iSlate is also rumored to be a revolution in “the way we interact with new media: websites, video, music, magazines, newspaper, and books that are all moving to digital format”.

The Fortune Brainstorm Tech blog lists the following as key specs of the coming Apple tablet:

• Apple has settled on a 10.1-inch multi-touch display using the iPhone’s LTPS LCD technology, not the considerably more expensive OLED technology suggested in earlier reports.
• Apple has been approaching U.S. book publishers with what Reiner describes as “a very attractive proposal” for distributing their content: an App Store-type 30/70 split (30% for Apple) with no exclusivity requirement. [See UPDATE below.]
• According to Reiner, publishers are disgruntled by Amazon’s (AMZN) terms, which force exclusivity, disallow advertising and demand a “wolfish cut” of revenue. The typical Kindle/publisher split, he says, is 50/50, rising to 30/70 if Amazon gets exclusivity.
• Apple’s tablet would make ebooks more attractive for the education market by simplifying functions such as scribbling marginalia.

Yair Reiner, of Oppenheimer, predicts Apple will be able to sell 1 million to 1.5 million units per quarter at an average sale price of $1,000. A lower price would likely mean higher sales, and a more rapid proliferation of the potential paradigm shift through the consumer computing market, including business and university settings.

MG Siegler, writing for TechCrunch, explains:

It’s not a computer with a mess of peripherals and/or physical buttons. If a media and web-centric computer were being designed today with no thought to what the computing norms of the past were, it would be a tablet.

It also points to the future of interacting with computers. The mouse and keyboard will one day die and everything will be touch and gesture-based. We’ll be living in a future with Minority Report, Star Trek, and Avatar interactive technology. To many of us, few things are more exciting. To others, that concept is foreign and as such, scary. Regardless, it will happen and the tablet computer is the latest, and perhaps most important step in a line of technology taking us there.

Apple is clearly not only planning to be on the cutting edge, but is plotting out the cutting edge, where standard consumer market products for mobile computing meet the future of an entirely different kind of human-data interface. Pranav Mistry’s Sixth Sense gets much closer to the Minority Report computing model Siegler cites, but Apple is providing the rich design environment needed to make touch computing truly intuitive and user-friendly.

Its success will likely hinge on whether its market is limited by a binding contract with a mobile communications provider like AT&T. This is fundamental, because while iPhone is a phone, and requires phone service, the iSlate is supposed to be a true computing device, combining some of the best features of the iPhone with the scalability and workflow-relevance of the standard laptop. Requiring people to buy into monthly contracts in order to user a new laptop is a serious drawback, and likely means Apple is busy finding ways to guarantee a level of mobile wireless web access without exclusivity.

Photo Credit: NASA, ESA, and F. Paresce (INAF-IASF, Bologna, Italy), R. O’Connell (University of Virginia, Charlottesville), and the Wide Field Camera 3 Science Oversight Committee.

The above image, captured by and transmitted from the Hubble Space Telescope, in orbit around the Earth, shows the largest star-forming region in the vicinity of our Milky Way galaxy. According to NASA: “The massive, young stellar grouping, called R136, is only a few million years old and resides in the 30 Doradus Nebula, a turbulent star-birth region in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way. There is no known star-forming region in our galaxy as large or as prolific as 30 Doradus.”

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?

• Join the discussion on the Hot Spring Network’s Healthcare Tech & Policy page

The deepest image ever taken of the universe, using the ultra-powerful Hubble Space Telescope, known as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, shows there to be 100 billion galaxies in the universe, some projecting light from a distance of 47 billion light years. A study of the Doppler redshift of galaxies speeding away from the Hubble’s vantage point has allowed astronomers to create a 3-dimensional projection of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field image, the deepest photograph ever taken of the observable universe.

The date was 3 December 1984. The people of Bhopal, India, were the victims of a chemical spill of unprecedented proportions. 40 tons of toxic gas spilled into the city, killing tens of thousands of people. Methyl isocyanate, the substance that caused the mass death, prevents oxygen from entering the blood when inhaled. In just one night, thousands were killed, literally drowning in their own bodily fluids. At least 15,000 more people were killed over the next several weeks, and many believe the total number of those killed from exposure to methyl isocyanate is well above 30,000.

Hundreds of thousands of people are still exposed to the toxin through its presence in ground water and plant life, and there is an international movement to punish those responsible. Now, on the 25th anniversary of the disaster, there are reports the old pesticide factory, owned by the chemical giant Union Carbide, continues to leak lethal toxins into the soil and groundwater. The plant is reported to have been abandoned, with insufficient efforts made to safeguard against the ongoing release of lethal chemicals.

According to the Guardian’s George Monbiot:

After drinking half a glass of water that the people of the city drink every day, the author [of Five Past Midnight in Bhopal] Dominique Lapierre reported that “my mouth, my throat, my tongue instantly got on fire, while my arms and legs suffered an immediate skin rash. This was the simple manifestation of what men, women and children have to endure daily, some 18 years after the tragedy.” Seven years on, nothing has changed. There has been no cleanup, no attempt to prevent the leakage from the site that takes place during every monsoon.

The site of the chemical accident continues to be one of the most toxic and unsafe in the world, yet comprehensive clean-up efforts have never been compelled. Union Carbide, now owned by Dow Chemical, paid a $470 million out-of-court settlement in 1989, in a bid to put avoid further legal responsibility for the tens of thousands of deaths and chronic pollution. The accusation has always been that the chemical plant was poorly maintained, lacked basic standard safeguards and failed to report ongoing containment problems.

There had also been accusations that top executives for Union Carbide may have had direct personal knowledge of the inadequate safety conditions and either did nothing to fix the problem or even deliberately concealed the poor maintenance, assuming it was the best way to keep costs down.

Wikipedia explains:

The Union Carbide India, Limited (UCIL) factory was established in 1969 near Bhopal. 50.9 % was owned by Union Carbide Corporation (UCC) and 49.1 % by various Indian investors, including public sector financial institutions.[2][3] It produced the pesticide carbaryl (trademark Sevin). In 1979 a methyl isocyanate (MIC) production plant was added to the site. MIC, an intermediate in carbaryl manufacture, was used instead of less hazardous but more expensive materials. UCC understood the properties of MIC and how to handle it.[12][13][14]

During the night of December 2–3, 1984, large amounts of water entered tank 610, containing 42 tonnes of methyl isocyanate. The resulting reaction increased the temperature inside the tank to reach over 200 °C (392 °F), raising the pressure to a level the tank was not designed to withstand. This forced the emergency venting of pressure from the MIC holding tank, releasing a large volume of toxic gases. The reaction sped up because of the presence of iron in corroding non-stainless steel pipelines. A mixture of poisonous gases flooded the city of Bhopal, causing great panic as people woke up with a burning sensation in their lungs. Thousands died immediately from the effects of the gas and many were trampled in the panic.

The various attempts to investigate what exactly took place on the night of 2-3 December 1984 have failed to determine the precise cause of the spillage and the ultimate chemical catastrophe. There is a grassroots movement both in India and around the world, that continues to press for answers, for clean-up and for justice for the hundreds of thousands whose lives are intimately affected by the chemical release, seepage from which continues to be a threat to this day.

Scientists have discovered evidence that human hearing is in part dependent on tactile cues that come not from audible sounds, but from pressure fluctuations and air-particle displacement against skin around the ear.

The BBC reports on the findings as follows:

In the latest study, researchers at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver wanted to look at whether tactile sensations also affected how sounds are heard.

They compared sounds which when spoken are accompanied by a small inaudible breath of air, such as “pa” and “ta” with sounds which do not such as “ba” and “da”.

At the same time, participants were given – or not – a small puff of air to the back of the hand or the neck.

They found that “ba” and “da”, known as unaspirated sounds, were heard as the aspirated equivalents, “pa” and “ta”, when presented alongside the puff of air.

The research is new evidence that each of the senses depends in some way on information fed in from other senses to build a complete picture of the information it is focused on detecting. So while the eyes help us hear by giving us visual cues, and our sense of taste is dependent in part on our sense of smell, touch may play a role in how we hear and whether we can make sense of specific environmental cues.

The discovery, if verified in studies of common human interaction, could significantly improve the methods used to compensate for hearing loss, and build better hearing aids. It could also give us an entirely new and far more complex understanding of what the senses do and how they do it.

Pranav Mistry, inventor of the SixthSense physical-to-computation convergence technology, told the TED India conference earlier this month that he is often told his invention could lend itself to a “FifthSense” product that helps to compensate for or restore a diminished sense capacity, as with the hard of hearing or the blind.

What innovations are showing us the multiple and interdependent quality of human sensation? And what new technologies are allowing us to take advantage of that new knowledge to improve treatment, recovery and replacement of sensory ability?

Malaria is one of the 21st century’s great plagues. 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.

Water-related conflict is an increasing threat to political stability across Africa, and ongoing “low-intensity” conflicts, including some that are taking thousands of lives, undermine basic pillars of organized society, like sustained agriculture, water quality, transport infrastructure, communications infrastructure, electricity and public health contact points. Populations deprived of one or more of these basic services are more likely to suffer from epidemic contagion.

Malaria is a disease that “comes back to visit”, according to Dr. Maghan Keita, of Villanova University, who addressed a gathering hosted by the Blood:Water Mission charity organization, on 19 November 2009, on Villanova’s campus. The Blood:Water Mission event was held to highlight both the gravity of the malaria pandemic, including the millions of deaths, but also to report on promising successes in spreading awareness and prevention to some of the most affected populations.

Dr. Keita, a leading Africana studies scholar who has studied epidemiology and migration in Africa, says sickle-cell anemia and other responses and after-effects of malaria infection can migrate in the blood of people never exposed directly to malaria itself, causing debilitating conditions and even death for some people. The malaria patient can also experience the direct return of the infection, even after it is treated, so prevention is the single most necessary mode of combating the disease in human beings.

LLIN (also known as long-lasting insecticidal nets) and other ITN (insecticide-treated nets) are now the front-line preventive measure of choice across sub-Saharan Africa. They can be up to 100% effective in mitigating the threat of mosquito-borne infection during sleep, not only due to the protective barrier they provide, but also as a result of being infused with insecticidal chemicals that can kills mosquitoes on contact, without endangering the health of human beings using them.

A UNICEF report on the subject notes the need to ensure the pesticides are safe for deployment in such proximity to human beings:

• In all cases, national governments must approve the use of insecticides prior to importing them into the country.
• ITNs, LLINs and insecticide treatment kits are for domestic use and can be handled by family members.
• It is advisable to order untreated nets set-packed with an insecticide treatment kit so that the net can be treated prior to use. It is also important that the user is made aware from the beginning that the net needs re-treatment.
• Each insecticide treatment kit is for the treatment of one ITN and consists of a measured dose of insecticide, a measuring bag, protective gloves and instructions on how to impregnate one net.
• The insecticide is public health grade and WHOPES (World Health Organization Pesticide Evaluation Scheme) approved.

The plant variety artemisia annua, a Chinese wormwood, has been found to have strong anti-malarial properties, and is being planted in Africa in hopes it will take to the sub-Saharan climate, and help produce a potent, locally grown pharmaceutical treatment to prevent or treat malaria. According to USAID:

The fight against malaria increasingly uses Chinese sweet wormwood, but demands for the plant have exhausted supplies, leading USAID to promote new plantings in East Africa.

The Agency is working with the World Health Organization (WHO) to transplant the ancient Chinese remedy to Africa, where the soil and climate are suitable. Artemisinin is the extract of wormwood that is useful against malaria.

Planting of 450 hectares of Artemisia annua began in Kenya in January 2005. In spring 2005, 450 hectares will be planted in Tanzania.

“By this time next year, we will be looking at the extraction of 20 metric tons of artemisinin,” said Dr. Dennis Carroll, malaria expert with the Bureau for Global Health (GH). Malaria kills more than one million people each year.

The artemisia annua shrub appears to have been found to also work against certain parasitic worms that can infect human beings leading to a number of disease symptoms. As reported on the Science and Development Network:

Different forms of bilharzia — also known as schistosomiasis — occur throughout the tropics. Together, they kill 15,000 people each year, according to the World Health Organization.

The disease is caused by five species of worm that enter humans through their skin as juveniles, then mature and reproduce in the blood vessels. The worm eggs are usually evacuated from the body in urine or stools but some remain in the body leading to disease symptoms, which include damage to the kidneys, spleen and bladder.

The plant produces extracts that might be able to help combat parasites that are developing a dangerous resistance to current modes of treatment. The hope is that use of the artemisia extract to fight malaria and/or parasitic worms, could also lead to new research as to how to target and eventually eradicate such disease agents.

It is estimated that as many as 15 million cases of malaria infection were treated by way of artemisinin-based combination therapies (ACT), a “cocktail” of drugs that work in sequence and in concert to destroy the parasites that cause the disease. The WHO reported that by the end of 2006, demand had risen to 150 million cases.

Logistical challenges related to treating 150 million to 200 million cases across dozens of countries are one of the chief remaining obstacles to effective global prevention and eradication of malaria. In many countries the response is fourfold: nets, chemical treatments, drugs and landfill, to eliminate standing water. Only nets are minimally problematic in terms of side-effects and environmental fallout.

The Amazon Kindle 2 is ideally sized for one-handed reading. In this category, it beats the traditional book, because it’s single pane is more ergonomic for the purpose of reading with one hand and seeing the text clearly at a consistent angle, than struggling to balance a side-bound traditional book.

In this sense, it is comfortable for holding, but anyone could argue that the traditional book is more rewarding from a sensory perspective, with flipping pages, constant subtle movements that stimulate the eye and hold the reader’s attention, near zero glare and good and reliable contrast.

Comparing the Kindle 2 to the Kindle DX, however, brings a new set of metrics into the discussion. The Kindle 2 has a much smaller screen, which makes it less paper-like and more like a digital device. On its own, with no case or cover, the Kindle 2 is, from this reviewer’s point of view, the most comfortable digital text reading experience I have had.

If the text is too small, you can simply enlarge it, up to something comparable to 24-point Times New Roman (on a Mac laptop). I also find the navigation tools, the keyboard and 5-way navigator button, along with the home, prev page and next page, menu and back buttons, are more flush with the device than on the larger DX, giving it a more subtle, less prone to accidental pressing, kind of feel.

The qwerty keyboard is also ideally sized for two-thumb typing, for most adults’ hands. This makes searching and note-taking far more efficient and enjoyable than on the DX, which really doesn’t lend itself to thumb-only typing, because the keyboard is flatter, wider and gathered near the bottom of the device, which, being larger than the Kindle 2 is also more top-heavy if held near the bottom for typing purposes.

For me, the Kindle 2 is optimal, in terms of e-paper readers as currently produced. It is the right weight, the right size, and it can accompany me and a single thin blank book, without intruding too much into my space. It makes it possible to do a lot of research and a lot of for-pleasure reading without carrying around a lot of weight. This is good for reasons of both logistics and physical health. Remember, ergonomics is not just for comfort, it’s for sustained physical health: the super-light weight makes carrying one’s reading material much less physically taxing, and even the weight difference between the Kindle 2 and the DX matters.

The DX is designed to handle larger-format publications, like textbooks, which may have images and tables and graphics worked into the text. Its larger-format display is useful for this, but the device still suffers the significant disadvantage as compared with paper of its being unable to deliver vivid color. Amazon is right to be considering a foray into more expansive layout environments, like newsprint, magazines and textbooks, but in the age of the iPhone, one is tempted to say the Kindle family of devices needs a more malleable touch-based interface that would allow for actually showing fixed-layout files in their native proportions.

The Kindle 2 is more convenient and comfortable, but the DX gives the reader room to breathe, a little more of the sense of being immersed in the text environment, which enhance the level of engagement. That makes it more like a content-rich magazine or a top-flight printed newspaper.

Both Kindles also have the virtue of being something special to the publishing industry: a way to allow for sales and royalties, in part from impulse buys, and a return to the idea that text well-wrought is meant to exist for its own sake, not as “content value-added” for a multimedia undertaking. This common trait is perhaps their most important contribution to the eReader marketplace. But both devices also need to figure out how to marshal the attraction of free web browsing and free downloads into a mechanism for producing book sales that keep the ePaper platform at the leading edge of the digital content transition.

For someone who does a lot of reading in all media, including online reference and quality newspapers, journals and magazines, I like both devices for the way they facilitate the instant updating of such materials, right to my bedside, kitchen or cafe table-top. It’s also useful to be able to take notes and underline as I read, to go back later and piece together my research and my own ideas about it.

But I’m using an iPod Touch to not only read and do research, but also to do more complex word processing, edit and archive email correspondence, and amass an extensive library of free classics. I can buy from the Kindle Store and read here or on a Kindle registered to my account. I find the versatility of the touch environment conducive to efficiency. But sensory overload is a worry, and certainly a constant distraction from reading text.

For ease of use, comfort and portability, I’d rate the Kindle 2 more of a success than the Kindle DX. Fox text-only, or even single-image plus text, the Kindle 2 is also more comfortable. But one has to recognize the functional benefits of the larger display for certain types of documents. Amazon’s people will need to do better with producing a comfortable viewing environment for PDF documents, let the device be more deferential to the layout and styling of publishers. But, the DX will truly come into its own of and when Amazon is able to deploy a touch-enabled color e-paper display.

Google Voice, an ingenious use of web-based voice communications service, allows users to combine a range of phone numbers under one standard, permanent Google phone number. Any linked phone number can be removed or replaced, and the service is free. All domestic calls inside the US are free, and sms is free. The service even converts voicemail to readable transcripts in an online inbox.

This last feature could mark a shift in the way voice communications interact with the Internet broadly. If indeed Google does achieve something of a paradigm shift by offering not only voice-to-text, and the ability to concentrate a range of numbers in one convenient inbox, but way for voice and text to interact comfortably, voice communication could take an increasingly important role in online activity, even where text and work-output is the aim.

The real potential for Google Voice will depend on every individual’s use of the technology, naturally, but it may also depend on how well Google integrates such services into its Wave platform. Google Wave is a bold reinvention of online messaging and word processing, merging the two into a real-time viral-capable content propagation platform.

Even unfinished works can serve as content in the Wave universe, and that means the potential wikification of all sorts of documents and reports that are currently held to the finish-before-publish model established by print publishing over the millennia. Where Aristotle’s ‘Nichomachean Ethics’ has remained identical, except for the relatively modest alterations introduced by translation, for thousands of years, this century’s great ethical philosopher might ‘initiate’ a work optimally designed to evolve in a wave application, evolving with the consciousness of it’s readers.

The free phone-service paradigm is gaining ground, as new mobile carriers offer “unlimited everything” flat-rate plans, Skype takes over online voice conferencing, and the iPhone has allowed entry for Skype functionality. But there has been stiff opposition from the traditional telecom sector, including major mobile carriers like Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile, who say they cannot maintain their networks (in the case of Verizon) or access to networks (in the case of T-Mobile) for lower prices.

The proliferation, however, of low-cost pay-as-you-go services and flat-rate plans like Boost Mobile’s $50 monthly unlimited plan (with no contract) is changing the game. Google Voice is perhaps the most visible, most direct “piggyback” challenge to traditional phone-service billing, and offers an important clue as to how the convergence of voice and web communications might move forward: a constructive convergence of voice and text, data-transfer and direct person-to-person communication.

Adding Google’s Talk and Video Talk services to a combined overall service could make Google the world leader in piggyback telecommunications services, allowing the web giant to drive pricing standards for mobile communications and help end-users to liberate their personal and textual communications from the constraints imposed by standard telecom pricing models.

An attractive woman, 34-ish, drives a compact station-wagon, late model, over a still-cobblestone side street in the center of Madrid. She advances slowly, toward a red light, and talks on her cell phone. She seems equally concentrated on both activities. Driving an automobile is a potentially dangerous activity, in which one’s own life or the lives of others may be at risk, while a casual conversation is not so much that. Yet she seemed to give equal weight, her body, her manner, seemed to give equal weight to both activities.

Blackberry and Facebook come to mind: email in your pocket and the recorded, manifest social network. Microtechnology and software, combining to give us a boom in communications, are driving us to distraction with the lust to shore up and broaden our social networks. There may be something about this behavior that is inherently tied to how we, as human beings, socialize, and survive.

We are a social, talkative species. We rely on invisible social networks to shape our built environment, to feed us, to give us meaning. Most of us do not take part in the designing or building of roads, bridges, railways, skyscrapers, megafarms, or vehicles of any kind. And most of the people who do possess only a portion of the total knowledge required to successfully achieve such constructions. Most of us do not know how food or energy gets to the places where we consume it, and few of those who play a role know much more than those who don’t about the rest of the process. No individual can make a modern city bus, withut help of some kind, much less an airplane or an ocean-liner.

We expect the built environment to be what it is, at least in the way it appeared when we first learned of it, and we are indignant if it falls into decay. Population is booming and it is all the rage to recite the unproven adage, “Life is all about networking”, or its less helpful cousin, “It’s who ya know”.

So maybe it’s no wonder that the need to be “connected” is also going through a groundswell. We are connective; it’s a fundamental part of normal human functioning to form social bonds beyond the immediate nucleus of our world. We cooperate in systems of language, currency, study or government, in the learning and repetition of cultural constants and assumptions. We need to form a connective tissue of knowledge and expression, and we need to feel that across a broader fabric there are reliable nodes of interest and personal knowledge, were we can be heard, expected, wanted and understood.

And so, the new media incite us to the opportunity (read: temptation, or compulsion) to test, affirm and expand these social fabrics, which however dispersed they may be, give us our “sense of identity”, a kind of proof of constancy, or our identity as such, insofar as such a thing is possible.

An article in the New Scientist magazine, from 24 March 2007, entitled “Future recall: your mind can slip through time”, explored the labors and meaning of what we call ‘memory’. A series of studies had found that the human brain actually seems to have a default setting whose principle preoccupation is time travel, or rather the projection of experience across one’s awareness of time and the stuff of the world. Remembering, and also envisioning the future.

The apparent novelty in this approach to exploring how the mind works is the focus on re-running and re-casting, on a nearly constant basis, the contents of memory, experience and dreaming, in order to form a more or less reliable projection of what to expect in times approaching, how much joy or sorrow, how much danger, boredom or adventure. Dreams are also apparently an integral part of this process, helping to make unexpected connections and to sort through jumbled information abou lived (or desired) experience.

Turning constantly to the newly ubiquitous modes of communication makes sense, evolutionarily, in this light. Our species has evolved an intellectual capacity for surveying and comprehending abstract landscapes, in which we can conceive of, understand and keep track of vast social fabrics, and this is what we aim to do when we seek, at constant intervals, to acquire the latest possible information about the make-up and tenor of our social networks.

One in 91 American children is now reported to be afflicted with autism spectrum disorder. A number of potential culprits has been suggested over the years, as autism figures have steadily risen, including vaccines, antibiotics, hormones, pesticides, coal waste and radiation.

What is now being termed ‘autism spectrum disorder’ is a more inclusive diagnosis than trafitional full-scale debilitating autism, but researchers say within the overall figures, there is a dramatic increase in cases, for which a specific cause or constellation of causes has yet to be identified.

But in the midst if this apparent epidemic of developmental autistic disorders, we need to be asking ourselves what role environmental, chemical and energy regulation might play in rolling back the advance of autism.

As Medscape reports:

[The new study] found that the prevalence of ASD was 110 per 10,000 children, markedly higher than previous estimates. According to background information in the study, prevalence estimates have risen steadily, from the 1960 to the 1980s, when estimates ranged from 2 to 5 in 10,000, to the 2000s, when estimates ranged from 30 to 60 in 10,000; in most recent reports, estimates range from 50 to 90 per 10,000.

With more than one percent of the population now being born diagnosed as falling within the spectrum of autism-related symptomology, we face the prospect of needing to care for over 3 million emotionally and intellectually challenged individuals who may not be able to lead independent fully independent lives.

The figures could soon be so high as to spur the emergence of a new workforce of hundreds of thousands of related specialists and support staff, including special employment management, home-visitation and psychological care services.

Autism is now approaching the level of commonality as more familiar ‘conditions’ that are rare but genetically regular. For instance, only 2% of the US population are natural redheads, compared with roughly 1.1% of this new generation having autism spectrum disorder.

The Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act have been in effect a relatively short time and while taken for granted as cornerstones of a sweeping public health and environmental protection system, remain controversial to some in industry who view such constraints as an insurmountable challenge to their profit scheme.

That open and sometimes combative controversy signals a very strong possibility that laws are being ignored and regulations going unenforced. In many areas of chemical safety regulation, regulatory supervision or intervention amounts to little more than reviewing companies’ reports for irregularities.

We have also heard for decades the all-too-questionable argument that investigation into the possible ill effects of vaccines or chemical compounds on children should not be too far-reaching because it might hamper the ability of industry to do business. If that’s true, of course, It would have to be because the work being done to prevent those ill effects is known to be insufficient.

Now that we know we are in a statistical red zone, in the midst of a generational outbreak of a disease that is not supposed to be contagious, we need to get serious about finding out why it’s happening and how we can reverse the trend. Finding out what causes any of the disorders within the autism spectrum is a complex task, because the nature of what is actually wrong physiologically is not clear and may vary patient to patient.

According to US News and World Report:

We don’t know what causes it, and there’s no good treatment. All the more reason we need to figure out now what’s causing autism and then develop treatments that really work. No one cares more than a parent about that; so why not involve them in that process?

That’s just what the Interactive Autism Network is doing. Parents of children with autism from around the country collaborate in building what has become the largest online autism registry in the world. The IAN registry was launched by Baltimore’s Kennedy Krieger Institute in 2007. By making use of the power of the Internet, it has registered 30,000 people from all 50 states. The database created by this volunteer effort is being used by autism researchers around the world and is also used to match families with individual studies they can join.

That project has now expanded to allow grandparents to feed information into the system specifically from the point of view of grandparents of potentially autistic children. Such information can be helpful for determining what environmental factors may play a role and what behavioral abnormalities are unique to those cases.

Clean, safe drinking water is scarce for over 3 billion people across the world. At least 1 billion literally never have access to clean, safe drinking water, putting them at constant risk of severe thirst-related ill health effects, infectious diseases or toxic contamination. Over 100 countries face either sporadic or chronic crisis-level problems related to clean water scarcity.

As the Innocentive project reports:

Yet, over half of the world’s population is at risk for water shortages, with far-reaching effects. Lack of adequate clean water has serious health implications, including the prevalence of water-borne diseases such as cholera, typhoid, hepatitis A and E, and diarrhea. Globally, diarrhea is the leading cause of illness and death and 88% of those deaths are due to inadequate sanitation and availability of clean water. Water shortages also foment civil unrest and often lead to violence and regional conflicts, as we have seen in Darfur, Somalia, Chad, Nigeria and Sri Lanka, among others. Lack of water perpetuates poverty, increases the risk of political instability, and affects global prosperity.

The Clinton Global Initiative is working to bring water purification packets to remote areas around the world where available water poses a threat of toxic agent or disease transmission, in order to speed the delivery of clean, safe drinking water to affected populations. Innocentive is offering possible financial benefit for solutions to what may be the world’s most severe public health crisis.

Use this discussion to share your ideas and experiences, including links to research and reports about best practices for solving the world’s water crisis…

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