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.

Full Story Online

Twitter breaks story on Discovery Channel gunman James Lee

Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 2, 2010

The news broke around 1 p.m. with a few sketchy details. Gunman. Shots. Hostages. Discovery building.

Within minutes, there were photos, including an astonishing one of a man clad in shorts, carrying a rifle and stalking through what looked like an office courtyard.

The news of a gunman at the Discovery Channel’s headquarters in Silver Spring indeed traveled fast on Wednesday, but none of it came through radio, TV or newspaper Web sites, at least not at first. As it has with other breaking news events — the landing of a jet on the Hudson River in 2009, the 2008 massacre in Mumbai — the story unfolded first in hiccupping fits and starts on Twitter, the much-hyped micro-blogging service that has turned millions of people into worldwide gossips, opinion-mongers and amateur news reporters.

See Also:
Event Report CORRECTED LINKS: Responding to Real Time Information, Open Systems and the Obama IT Vision [Google-Microsoft Meld]
Graphics: Twitter as an Intelligence Tool
ICT4Peace Kyrgyzstan Crisis Wiki
Journal: DARPA & MIT Discover “Share the Wealth”
Journal: DARPA Tests Twitter
Journal: Free Twitter Rocks, People Rule in Haiti
Journal: Haiti–Twitter Rocks
Journal: IC on Twitter, Still Not Making Sense
Journal: PA & NYPD Criminalize Twitter
Journal: Taming Twitter–Emergence of Baby World Brain?
Journal: Tech ‘has changed foreign policy’
Journal: The Twitter Train Has Left the Station
Journal: Twitter Aggregation Way Cool
Journal: Whither Twitter?
Peace-Building Thru Spotlights on Local Insights
Reference: How to Use Twitter to Build Intelligence
Review: SMS Uprising: Mobile Activism in Africa
Review: The World Is Open–How Web Technology Is Revolutionizing Education
Twitter & SMS Used to Help Election in Kenya
U.S. Geological Survey: Twitter Earthquake Detector (TED)
Worth a Look: CrowdMap (Beta)
Worth a Look: MicroPlace Giving to the Poor
Worth a Look: Talking Plants–Sensor to Shooter

Full Story Online

Full Story Online

09/01/2010

‘Peak Oil’ and the German Government

Military Study Warns of a Potentially Drastic Oil Crisis

By Stefan Schultz

The relationship with Russia, in particular, is of fundamental importance for German access to oil and gas, the study says.   …  Peak oil would also have profound consequences for Berlin’s posture toward the Middle East, according to the study.

Oil will determine power:
Increasing importance of oil exporters:
Politics in place of the market:
Market failures:
Relapse into planned economy:
Global chain reaction:
Crisis of political legitimacy:

The study appears to be deep and honest.  What does surprise us, however, are three things:

1.  Der Spiegel does not make reference to all of the same studies done in the 1970′s that were ignored by policymakers and politicians.

2.  Der Spiegel and the study appear to confuse existing governments with legitimacy, rather than honest effective governance with legitimacy.  If there is a revolution in any of these countries, it will be to throw the corrupt rascals out and re-set democracy.  Revolutions are NOT expected in the Nordic countries or BENELUX.

3.  No one seems to understand that the time has come for a global Manhattan Project to simultaneously address the ten high level threats to humanity by harmonizing spending and policies by all players across the twelve core policies and in consonance with a futures council led by the future powers: Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, and Venezuela as well as Wild Cards such as Malaysia and Turkey.

See Also:

• Complexity & Catastrophe (90)
• Complexity & Resilience (99)
• Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity (69)
• Remixed Review Lists (70)

• 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.

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.

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The New Economics Institute is working to make the new economics, one which supports people and planet, mainstream in the United States. It is a partnership between the E. F. Schumacher Society, the predecessor of the Institute, and the New Economics Foundation from London.

Tip of the Hat to John Steiner.

Major Open Source Business Intelligence Vendors Come Together for a One of a Kind Panel at the Paris Open Source Think Tank

The Olliance Group today announced that the 3rd Annual Open Source Think Tank co-hosted by Olliance Group and DLA Piper, is hosting a panel discussion that brings together the three major open source Business Intelligence (BI) vendors; Actuate (NASDAQ:ACTU), Jaspersoft and Pentaho for the first time. The Paris Open Source Think Tank will be held on September 27^th and 28^th at the Golden Tulip Champs-Elysées Hotel, Paris, France.

“Open source is now an absolutely essential element of the computing environment, but there are challenges to be addressed: business models, intellectual property rights, the impact of the Cloud and more. I am looking forward to hearing how these experts plan on tackling them”

PRESS RELEASE

CONFERENCE INFORMATION (Security Exception Needed, Their Certificate is Valid but Not Harmonized)

Tip of the Hat to Mario Profaca, Cyber-Journalist

See Also:

Dr. Dr. Dave Warner UnityNet, STRONG ANGEL, Synergy Follies, Etc.

2007 Open Everything: We Won, Let’s Self-Govern

Search: OSINT software (what vendors refuse to understand)

(accountable)…

GAO ACCESS TO INTELLIGENCE IN DISPUTE

The continuing controversy over whether the Government Accountability Office will be permitted to participate in intelligence oversight, as some in Congress wish, or whether cleared GAO auditors and investigators will be excluded from intelligence oversight tasks, as the Obama Administration prefers, was discussed in the Washington Post’s Top Secret America blog yesterday.   I [Steven Aftergood] participated in a Q&A on the issue with the Post’s Dana Hedgpeth here.

Secrecy News Home

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Seeking Solutions for Afghanistan: A Report on the Abu Dhabi Process DOI: 31 August 2010

Amazon Page

NEW BOOK: Some analysts and policy makers see these organizations as positive forces encouraging integration. Others cast them as modern-day Trojan horses, feigning moderation while radicalizing Western Muslims.   Lorenzo Vidino brokers a third, more informed view.   DOI:  1 September 2010

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NEW BOOK: Conspiracy theories have become a mainstream cultural phenomenon. This paper considers the role they play in extremist groups and counterterrorism work. It presents the first ever analysis of conspiracy theories in the ideology and propaganda of fifty extremist groups: religious, far-right and left, eco, anarchic and cult-based.   DOI: 27 August 2010.