Category: Technologies

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Seed Money for Ideas Addressing Global Health Challenges–and the Fly in the Milk Bowl

01 Poverty, 02 Infectious Disease, 07 Health, 12 Water, Gift Intelligence, Peace Intelligence, Technologies

Unorthodox thinking is essential to overcoming the most persistent challenges in global health. Vaccines were first developed over 200 years ago because revolutionary thinkers took an entirely new approach to preventing disease. Grand Challenges Explorations fosters innovation in global health research.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has committed $100 million to encourage scientists worldwide to expand the pipeline of ideas to fight our greatest health challenges.Launched in 2008, Grand Challenge Explorations grants have already been awarded to 340 researchers from 34 countries.

Open to All Disciplines: Anyone Can Apply
The grant program is open to anyone from any discipline, from student to tenured professor, and from any organization – colleges and universities, government laboratories, research institutions, non-profit organizations and for-profit companies.

Agile, Accelerated Grant-Making
The initiative uses an agile, accelerated grant-making process with short two-page applications and no preliminary data required.

Applications are submitted online, and winning grants are chosen approximately 4 months from the submission deadline.Initial grants of $100,000 are awarded two times a year. Successful projects have the opportunity to receive a follow-on grant of up to $1 million.

Example: Water Sanitation Challenge that earns $100,000

De-compartmentalizing science through Grandchallenges.org

Phi Beta Iota: The problem with this well-intentioned initiative is that it throws money as items in isolation.  All well and good.  It would be much more impressive if it had a strategic analytic model that emphasized healthy lifestyle, healthy environment, and natural/alternative cures; and if it demanded some form of intelligence coordination in relation to all the other policies that impact on health far more negatively that we can solve–the bottom line is that we are killing our species faster than any amount of innovation can help it survive.  In our humble opinion.

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Google, MSoft, IBM, HP, Oracle, Intel (chips), National Security and Perceived Internet Threats

04 Education, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 10 Security, Commerce, Computer/online security, Cyberscams, malware, spam, Government, Military, Misinformation & Propaganda, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Technologies
  • U.S. Strategy: Control The World By Controlling The Internet
    A Chinese Perspective, by Chen Baoguo, August 24, 2010
    In May 2009, Microsoft announced on its website that they would turn off the Windows Live Messenger service for Cuba, Syria, Iran, Sudan and North Korea, in accordance with US legislation. In January 2010, Google, the company which owns the largest Internet information resources, declared that in order to establish a more open Internet environment, they had to abandon the Chinese market.What is even more worrying is that Senator Joseph Lieberman, chairman of US Homeland Security Committee, recently presented to the US Senate a bill titled “Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset. “To control the world by controlling the Internet has been a dominant strategy of the US.From the network infrastructure protection of the Clinton era to the network anti-terrorism of the Bush era and to the “network deterrence” of the Obama era, the national information security strategy of the US has evolved from a preventative strategy to a preemptive one.Meanwhile, the methodology has moved from trying to control Internet hardware to control of Internet content.

  • Video: “The cyber-threat has been grossly exaggerated” debate between Marc Rotenberg & Bruce Schneier VERSUS Mike McConnell & Jonathan Zittrain

  • China Cyber-army Talk Pulled from Black Hat
    By: Brian Prince 2010-07-15
    A presentation on Chinese state-sponsored hacking has been pulled from the Black Hat security conference due to pressure from the Taiwanese government. The talk, titled “The Chinese Cyber Army: An Archaeological Study from 2001 to 2010,” was to be held by Wayne Huang, CTO of Web application security firm Armorize Technologies.
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Google: Post-Geographical, Post-National Super-State (Distorted Multi-Plex Eye)

Civil Society, Commerce, Corporations, Privacy, Technologies

Google’s Earth

By WILLIAM GIBSON
August 31, 2010

“I ACTUALLY think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions,” said the search giant’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, in a recent and controversial interview. “They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.” Do we really desire Google to tell us what we should be doing next? I believe that we do, though with some rather complicated qualifiers.

Science fiction never imagined Google, but it certainly imagined computers that would advise us what to do. HAL 9000, in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” will forever come to mind, his advice, we assume, eminently reliable — before his malfunction. But HAL was a discrete entity, a genie in a bottle, something we imagined owning or being assigned. Google is a distributed entity, a two-way membrane, a game-changing tool on the order of the equally handy flint hand ax, with which we chop our way through the very densest thickets of information. Google is all of those things, and a very large and powerful corporation to boot.

We have yet to take Google’s measure. We’ve seen nothing like it before, and we already perceive much of our world through it. We would all very much like to be sagely and reliably advised by our own private genie; we would like the genie to make the world more transparent, more easily navigable. Google does that for us: it makes everything in the world accessible to everyone, and everyone accessible to the world. But we see everyone looking in, and blame Google.

Continue reading “Google: Post-Geographical, Post-National Super-State (Distorted Multi-Plex Eye)”

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Journal: Open Source Flashes Its Canines

Technologies

August 26, 2010

We’ve already established that open-source technology is entering the mainstream. There are naysayers, and they’re concerned about licensing compliance. An article at zdnet.co.uk entitled “Compliance Scheme Aims to Dispel Open-Source Concerns”  outlines the ‘Open Compliance Program.’ The Linux Foundation launched the program to help companies comply with open-source licenses, partly due to the increasing use of Linux in mobile devices. Foundation Chief Jim Zemlin says the program is backed by “virtually every major player in the world of enterprise and mobile computing,” including Adobe, AMD, Cisco, Google, HP, Intel, Novell, Samsung, and Sony. Even with a few doubts raised, the OCP assures that open source technology has a solid future and is backed by virtually every major player in the world of enterprise and mobile computing.

Bret Quinn, August 26, 2010

Tip of the Hat to Stephen E. Arnold at LinkedIn.

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South America #1, Africa #2, Asia #3 Safest Continents for Web

08 Wild Cards, Computer/online security, Cyberscams, malware, spam, Technologies
Source article (WhiteAfrican.com)

Africa: The 2nd Safest Continent to Surf the Web

by HASH on August 23, 2010

Here’s an interesting study by AVG on internet security, asking “Where in the World are you most likely to be hit by a malicious computer attack or virus?”.

Apparently, and surprisingly to me, the answer is “not Africa” or South America.

“During the last week of July, AVG researchers compiled a list of virus and malware attacks by country picked up by AVG security software. This means we have compiled data from over 127 million computers in 144 countries to determine the incidence rates of virus attacks by country.”

Dirk Singer, of AVG sent over the list of African countries, here they are country-by-country. As you can see, sub-saharan Africa is compatively ‘safe’ compared to other areas of the World. Your chances of being attacked while surfing the web in each country are:

North Africa

  • Egypt 1 in 62.4
  • Algeria 1 in 86.9
  • Libya 1 in 87.7
  • Mauritania 1 in 92.4
  • Tunisia 1 in 110.7
  • Morocco 1 in 112.1

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Bangladesh Farmers + ICT, Increasing Awareness to Increase Income, Model for Other Countries

01 Agriculture, 01 Poverty, 03 Economy, 03 Environmental Degradation, 04 Education, 08 Wild Cards, Civil Society, Commerce, Technologies
source article

eKrishok

Farmers wise up online

by Nahid Akhter (Aug 20, 2010)

(clipped from full article) Bangladeshi farmers have to go through numerous hardships. Natural calamities cannot be avoided. However, if the farmer knew when to expect one and thereby take appropriate preventive measures, maybe some of his crops could be saved. Besides natural calamities, he is always running the risk of crop infestations and rainfall that is either too low or too high, thereby producing poor yields. Due to poor education, many farmers may be following the practices of his fore-fathers blindly, without looking for better agricultural methods or practices.

Without proper information, a farmer whose crops have been infested by pests, for example, would think that this is the end and that his crops are only destined to die. This would mean a bad income that year, and no food for his family.

So what if this farmer was armed with easy access to the correct information at the correct time? This could lighten his load by ridding him of numerous uncertainties during his agricultural process and thereby raise his family's living standards. A better living standard for the farmers would mean a more developed Bangladesh.

BIID , with support from UNDP, has teamed up with Grameenphone by setting up Community Information Centres all over the country. In the pilot phase, 10 Centres had been opened in various locations, but the aim is to scale this up to more than 1000 locations in the country.

Continue reading “Bangladesh Farmers + ICT, Increasing Awareness to Increase Income, Model for Other Countries”