EVOKE is a ten-week crash course in changing the world.
It is free to play and open to anyone, anywhere.
The goal of the social network game is to help empower people all over the world to come up with creative solutions to our most urgent social problems.
VOKE was developed by the World Bank Institute, the learning and knowledge arm of the World Bank Group, and directed by alternate reality game master Jane McGonigal.
A global consortium has been formed that aims to make a new digital soil map of the world using state-of-the-art and emerging technologies for soil mapping and predicting soil properties at fine resolution. This new global soil map will be supplemented by interpretation and functionality options that aim to assist better decisions in a range of global issues like food production and hunger eradication, climate change, and environmental degradation. This is an initiative of the Digital Soil Mapping Working Group of the International Union of Soil Sciences IUSS
In November 2008, an $18 million grant has been obtained from the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation and the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) to map most parts in Sub-Sahara Africa, and make all Sub-Saharan Africa data available. From this grant there are also funds for coordinating global efforts and for the establishment of a global consortium. Several institutions have assumed a leading role in this effort and have made substantial financial and in-kind contributions.
Posted with permission. Provided by Dr. James Spohrer in response to a request from Phi Beta Iota for a “snap-shot” overview of the “soul” of IBM going into the 21st Century.
1. Cities: here is a short IBM video (YouTube 4:15) on cities as the nodes in the planetary system of systems
Features Mike Wing, Irving Wladawsky-Berger, Julia Grace. Cities as planetary accupunture points of intervention. Cities are HUMAN–computers cannot handle the unpredictable. Dominos analogy–everything is interconnected and knowledge or information are the “energy” being exchanged among individual people, the HUMAN element. It is the mixture of people and hardware, and software that is so elegant and exciting.
2. Universities in Cities: My current job at IBM builds from the notion that universities are the knowledge batteries of city/regions… see slide #34 in this presentation on Service Science: Progress and Directions (64 Slides), connected with Handbook of Service Science (Springer, 2010). NOTE: Downloading presentation enables viewing of Notes for each slide.
Click on Image to Enlarge
Overview of IBM University Programs focusing on 5 R's (Research, Readiness, Recruiting, Revenue, Responsibilities); Quality of Life balance between local and global optimization; Ecology–study of all things in relation to all life forms; and Holistic Service Systems with cities and within cities, universities, and the fundamental “intelligent” building blocks. Emphasis on information information exchanges and life-long learning. Slide #34:
3. Connecting Universities and Cities Locally and Globally: My global team at IBM University Programs is funding connecting the universities locally with their cities, and globally with each other – networked improvement communities in Doug's language… Really connecting service systems, see Slide #16 in this presentation.
Interesting, but also fails to mention we do not train our analysts on the
basics, know your enemy……we are so focused on technology we forget
that the basics are still the best way to view the situation…..
When military investigators looked into an attack by American helicopters
last February that left 23 Afghan civilians dead, they found that the
operator of a Predator drone had failed to pass along crucial information
about the makeup of a gathering crowd of villagers.
When military investigators looked into an attack by American helicopters last February that left 23 Afghan civilians dead, they found that the operator of a Predator drone had failed to pass along crucial information about the makeup of a gathering crowd of villagers.
Click on Image to Enlarge
But Air Force and Army officials now say there was also an underlying cause for that mistake: information overload.
