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…

Recently we have had some tough debates in the Nethelands on the effects of large-scale farming of animals, like pigs, in so-called pig-flats. Multiple-stories high buildings to breed pigs. According to animal health specialist a pig will not know the difference between ground-floor or second-floor, but others fear landscape-polution, too much density of traffic or waste or even Sars or birdflue like hotspots. A proposed solution was to move the flats to the harbour where food, breeding and meat-production could concentrate… is this debate rediculous or is it a real scenario by : Vertical Farming

Elections are considered by many the holy grail of democracy. When ever there is an intervention in one of the tragic places on earth, whether or not under the flag of the UN, one of the main aims seems to be the free elections. But how many times have we witnessed countries not reaching the promised utopian state after the democratic vote of its citizens has coloured the little circle in red? It makes you wonder if democracy is truly the great promise we think it is? This weeks class of the legitimacy of the state was dedicated to the theory of democracy by Thomas Christiano.

A couple of weeks ago while traveling I picked up a copy of the Harvard Business Review that had an article in it about creativity at Pixar animation studios written by co-founder Ed Catmull. Although written as an article, to my opinion it might as well have been the most valuable strategic document of the company. Why? Well, it’s a detailed description of the creative process inside the animation studio. And as we often say: the future is not empowered by technology, but by creativity.