October, 2007

According to BBC, Uruguay has ordered 100,000 of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) “$100 laptops.”  This is the first country to place an official o

An article

Can broadband internet access reach 1/3 of all Africans by 2012, despite the fact that only 4 out of 100 Africans currently use the Internet?

Google’s seeming omnipresence, in particular the widespread use of Google Earth, has caused many to wonder (sometimes with concern) whether technology will soon allow Internet users to visualize us

PriceWaterhouseCoopers released a repor

Although the US has long been considered the country with the world’s greatest obesity problem, recent publications report on the globalization of this trend. According to BBC News, “between half and two-thirds of men and women in 63 countries across five continents – not including the US – were overweight or obese in 2006”. In the UK, 60% of men and 40% of women are expected to be obese by 2050. South and East Asia appears to be the only region with significantly less instances of overweight and BMI abnormality.

“Tackling Obesities: Future Choices” was issued by the UK Government Office for Science in an attempt to lay the basis for a strategic take on this problem. Obesity has taken many years to reach the alarming point it stands at today

Today, the OECD released the latest edition of its Science, Technology and Industry (STI) Scoreboard, which is published every two years. The main finding of the STI report is the trend toward the re-orientation of government policies to foster innovation - away from indirect subsidies and direct spending in R&D and toward tax breaks and reinforcement of industry-science linkages. Indeed, two thirds of the 30 OECD member countries now offer generous tax breaks to businesses, up from 12 countries in 1995. Of these nations, Spain, China, Mexico and Portugal provide the largest tax subsidies. This interesting development signals that governments are increasingly trusting of private business to know what’s best for innovation and are promoting

Yesterday I attended a meeting here at CSIS where I had the opportunity to see a fascinating demonstration of the The Globalization Index 2007

Foreign Policy and A.T. Kearney have constructed a Globalization Index by using data from 2005 to determine where countries stand in terms of their relative openness to the rest of the world. In order to calculate this index, the designers grouped variables into four different categories: economic integration, personal contact, technological connectivity, and political engagement. The twelve variables used include foreign direct investment, travel, and predominance of Internet usage, to name only a few. Viewing the ranking charts, it becomes apparent that the world’s most globalized

Can Britishness be taught? According to a BBC article, the British government is working to place a newly revised curriculum in schools that would include citizenship lessons on the national, regional, ethnic, and religious cultures of Britain in an effort to strengthen national identity and values. According to poll data by the Daily Telegraph, 51% of respondents believed Britishness should be a part of school curriculum. Likewise, the Minister of State for Schools and Learners, Jim Knight, states that “the values of being British as we define them for ourselves can’t be taught but can be cultivated… the whole school ethos should be about tolerance, respect, liberty and fundamental British values." Many officials do not agree, however. One British historian concludes that

Have you ever thought of calculating your individual carbon footprint? Although must people have not, it may become a common thing to do in the future. The technological conference PopTech, currently taking place in Maine, just launched the PopTech Carbon Initiative. This website, powered by eBay, allows people to calculate how many tons of carbon dioxide they produce and subsequently choose to make up for it by “buying” the same amount from one

Latin America and Asia are not the only regions in the world that are suffering from income disparities.  Data from the IRS in 2005 indicates that the U.S.

An article in today’s Washington Post discusses the unveiling of a prototype of the

What will our transportation systems look like in the future? Recent developments at Heathrow Airport in London may offer us a hint. As reported by the Guardian, the inauguration of the new Terminal 5 next year will also see the launch of a system of pod cars to ferry customers from the parking space to the main building, a distance of approximately 2.2 miles. This development is more remarkable than it may sound: small, driverless, and private, these vehicles will run less like the current shuttle systems that we are used to and more like small taxis. Unlike conventional rail, the pods do not follow a schedule or particular route. Personal rapid transport (PRT), as the system is called, is being presented as “a feasible technological solution

A BBC article reports that the Japanese computer firm, Hitachi, wi

In Part III of the New York Times Choking on Growth series, Joseph Kahn documents the travails of Wu Lihong, a Chinese environmental activist, in his crusade against the pollution of Lake Tai, China’s third largest freshwater body and one of its “ecological treasures.” Having long been the source of wealth and natural beauty in the lower Yangtze River Delta, the lake has been under attack since the 1950s, most notably so since the 1980s as the region developed a burgeoning chemical industry. Deeply troubled by the deterioration of the lake, Mr. Wu began to collect water samples, snap photographs, and amass newspaper clippings, all to help him gather local

Much ink has been spent on describing the negative effects that could arise from global warming: resource scarcity, anomalous weather patterns, social and economic instability, among others. Wired reminds us that while a great deal of discussion currently focuses on reducing worldwide dependency on fossil fuels as a way to curb greenhouse emissions, some engineers would rather take a more proactive approach. These individuals point out that man-made pollution contributing to rising temperatures is unlikely to decrease for many decades even if the whole planet were able to rid itself of

This A Visual Aid to Web 2.0

Following on our maps trend, here's a map on web trends.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) announced the launching of the

The Managing Globalization blog of the International Herald Tribune features a Q&A with Jeffrey Sachs a

Last week, the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) released its annual report on international nuclear security, “Securing the Bomb 2007” by Matthew Bunn. The report applauds the progress made in restricting access to nuclear materials over time through initiatives such as the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program and others. However, Bunn also expresses concern over the numerous shortcomings of current nuclear security policies.

The Global Attitudes Project at the Pew Research Center just released its latest water_stories_01.jpg

One of the consequences of the constant flow of people, goods and services in the globalized economy is the ever-increasing importance of remittances. As noted in past entries, migration is one of the trends that will shape the demographic future of the world. Immigrants constantly send money back to their native countries in massive amounts. In 2006, remittances amounted to around $250 billion worldwide, according to the World Bank, with underdeveloped rural areas receiving the bulk of these funds. Remittances significantly contribute to the economies of Mexico and El Salvador, for example, adding up to 3 percent and 16 percent of these countries’ GDP respectively. The following map, provided by the Multilateral Investment Fund of

As the global population continues its rapid growth and thus strains global water availability, Lester Brown argues in his

The Economist features an interesting article on the state of information gathering for surveillance purposes in our present day. The government is only sometimes responsible for collecting this sort of personal information; most of the time, private firms obtain the data and then relay it on to law-enforcement and other government agencies. Developing surveillance methods include closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras, DNA analysis, biometrics, and radio frequency identification (RFID) microchips, among others. These methods range from the ubiquitous to the obscure, and they elicit very diverse responses from the public. On one hand, some champion the advances in technology because they provide increased security and facilitate interactions with businesses. On the other, critics argue over the effectiveness of many

From Foreign Policy, here is an article on five

Check out this interesting article and diagram from the BBC on wave power.  In the rush to find new sources of rene

Project Syndicate features an article written by Jeffr