What if Africa is going to be the next economic power to rise? How that will influence the world is probably one of the first questions that pops up in somebodies mind. Another question would be how Africa will look like? Off course there is a lot to say about this related to the topics of industrialisation, agriculture, infrastructure, ICT and so on. One thing that particularly caught my attention is the way we should see Africa: a continent of diversity. But what is the power of diversity and when should we take profit from the exact opposite: unity?

For centuries and centuries philosophy has been searching for the fundamental concepts of our understanding of the world. Plato introduced his kingdom of ideas, while Aristotle was searching for the absolute truth in the essence of being, beautifully captured in Raphaels ‘School of Athens‘. The strive for a basic principle on which all our knowledge and understanding is funded continued to be the dominant idea in philosophy until the twentieth century, as I wish to claim, had shaken off the burden of this legacy and found the value of understanding the world as a contingent place, with contingent principles. This idea of contingent principles may sound like a paradox, but adds a perspective to our understanding of the network paradigm.

This post is related to this dutch text  that I’ve written before as part of an essay at the University of Amsterdam

by Adam Greenfield
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Isbn-13: 9780321384010

Ubiquitous computing–almost imperceptible, but everywhere around us–is rapidly becoming a reality. How will it change us? how can we shape its emergence?Smart buildings, smart furniture, smart clothing… even smart bathtubs. networked street signs and self-describing soda cans. Gestural interfaces like those seen in Minority Report. The RFID tags now embedded in everything from credit cards to the family pet.All of these are facets of the ubiquitous computing author Adam Greenfield calls “everyware.”…

Yesterday I met up with Doug Neal, who was introduced to me by Pip Coburn, one of our longtime partners in discussions on change. Doug is research fellow at the Leading Edge Forum, and has a focus on innovation through technology. Recently he has been working on developing a holistic view around the challenges and opportunities of sustainability issues. He’s concluded that if we were able to reduce all computer power use to zero, we would have solved only 2% of the problem. So the question now is how can IT help to address the other 98%?

More and more leading journalists are keeping a weblog  as it has become a important distribution channel of news. Leading journalists like George Packer from the The New Yorker, Andrew Sullivan from the The Atlantic, Paul Krugman from the The New York Times are all keeping a weblog. But for weblog to be noticed, its content can be optimized for popular search engine queries and a tool like Google Trends comes in handy.

29 billion what? A loan? The price the US government is willing to pay for AIG? No, it has nothing to do with financial crisis. Last week Amazon reported a growth 30% in storage objects the last quarter, they went up from 22 billion objects to 29 billion objects. It is still a mystery how much total GB (gigabyte) or TB (terabyte) or PB (petabyte) they are storing for their customers. But they revealed that their peak load is 70.000 transactions per second. This is what virtualization looks like, HUGE economies of scale. (Their price plans offers reduced cost per GB for customers storing more than 500 TB!!!)

In our communication it is important for us to have awareness of physical presence in one way or the other. One aspect off course is the role that body language plays. Also we can imagine the way we as human beings are orientated on the world and the influence that has on our understanding of communication done either in person or through modern communication technologies. Apparently this physical awareness is very much of importance in order for us to understand the origin of the message we are interpreting, but what if this context is missing? What if it is replaced by a new one and further more, are our networks contributing to this loss of origin?

Japanese scientists have managed to clone mice which had been frozen for 16 years. When mammals are frozen their cells burst, which has kept scientists from using frozen tissue to clone mammals. Cells can be kept from bursting by applying certain chemicals before they are frozen, so this does not help with anything frozen without this chemical. The cells that have burst can cause the DNA inside to become damaged.

Last Tuesday Kishore Mahbubani lectured at Felix Meritis in Amsterdam. For those of you who have not heard him talk, or are unaware of the basic premise of his book ‘The New Asian Hemisphere‘ check out this episode of the Dutch TV-show Tegenlicht. Mahbubani argues that Asia will be one of the new world dominating powers, because they have now implemented the 7 pilars of Western wisdom. It was a terribly organized event, but still Mahbubani’s idea’s provide for a nice perspective on the growth of Asia. Was it provoking? Not really, to my opinion…