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"Climate change could severely reduce the areas suitable for wild Arabica coffee before the end of the century. That is the conclusion of work by a UK-Ethiopian team published in the academic journal Plos One. It supports predictions that a changing climate could damage global production of coffee - the world's second most traded commodity after oil. "

"Before I became a university professor, I had a long career in the entertainment business-first as a concert producer for the likes of Bob Dylan and The Band, and later as producer of motion pictures, including Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets and The Last Waltz. Both the music and movie industries have been utterly transformed by the Internet, in positive and negative ways. But I sense that we're still at the beginning stages of this big shift, and that some of the most interesting developments are yet to come. For example, social sentiment analysis is going to change the game for Hollywood marketing."

If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado haven't convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this summer, here are some hard numbers about climate change: June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere - the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.

Summary:  A series of Executive Orders during the past century has slowly expanded the authority of the Executive Branch.  Now President Hope and Change takes a large step forward toward a new order, issuing a blueprint for tyranny.  Don't worry, it will be implemented slowly.  One cannot boil a frog slowly (it jumps out), but one can bake a Republic.

At least according to Norway's new Minister of International Development, Heikki Holmås. - I started playing with Ian Livingstone's The Forest of Doom when I was 15, the minister from western …

"Salman Khan's dream college looks very different from the typical four-year institution. The founder of Khan Academy, a popular site that offers free online video lectures about a variety of subjects, lays out his thoughts on the future of education in his book, The One World School House: Education Reimagined, released last month. Though most of the work describes Mr. Khan's experiences with Khan Academy and his suggestions for changing elementary- and secondary-school systems, he does devote a few chapters to higher education."

"Bitcoin-Central got the go-ahead thanks to a deal with French financial firms Aqoba and Credit Mutuel. The exchange is one of many that swaps bitcoins, computer generated cash, for real world currencies. The change in status makes it easier to use bitcoins and bestows national protections on balances held at the exchange."

"Big Data is watching you. And it's big business. Credit card companies, for instance, are selling the data about what you're consuming. So why is it that you, as the person manufacturing the data, has no say over who's using it or what they're doing with it? "That's got to change," argues Rick Smolan who co-authored the book The Human Face of Big Data (available for download as a tab let app here) an ambitious project that aims to capture the "men, women, and children whose lives are being transformed by this data revolution.""

"It's got to be one of the coolest names ever for a group: The Kansas Anti Zombie Militia. But the group is real and its members are pretty serious about it. Once the Zombie Apocalypse hits, they'll be ready for it and they want you to be too. "Can a natural person change into this monster that many fear?" Alfredo Carbajal, the militia's main spokesman, said in an interview. "The possibilities are yes, it can happen. We have seen incidents that are very close to it, and we are thinking it is more possible than people think.""

"A Mosque Among The Stars was the first anthology that dealt with the subject of Muslim characters and/or Islamic themes and Science Fiction. It was edited by me (Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad) and the Canadian Muslim author Ahmad Khan. It came out in 2007. Now that it has been years since it was released in printed form, we have decided to release A Mosque Among The Stars to the public as a Creative Commons Licensed (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs) book. This means that you can download it for free and share with others as long as you dont make any changes to it and also do it for free. So without much further ado here is where you can download the book."

Synthesis is a think-tank devoted to using the emerging paradigm of complex networks in the social sciences to tackle social and public policy concerns. Over the past 20 years or so, social scientists have increasingly made use of advances in the natural sciences to make better sense of social systems. Fields such as network theory, non-linear mathematics and systems theory, which we refer to as the study of complex networks, give us much greater insights that help us make sense of social systems. Armed with a greater understanding, this collection of paradigm-changing toolboxes can help us to make better policy decisions, in the public, private, and "third" sectors.

As a child I used to read my grandfather's Popular Science and Popular Mechanics magazines. The constant promise and inevitable disappointment of amazing technologies that mostly never materialized (a problem likely exacerbated by my focus on the amazing and outlandish ones) made me skeptical of futurist predictions. It is somewhat strange then, that I now commonly find myself a proponent of futurist visions equally as grand as those that once made me a cynic. But I'm not alone in seeing the near future as a quickly changing technological landscape. In their recent book Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy, MIT's Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee* offer a similarly sweeping view of how technology is, and will be, shaping our future

Allison sez, "Michael Geist provides some commentary on yesterday's announcement by Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada and Access Copyright. His conclusion: 'For those that sign the model license, the new AUCC - Access Copyright deal is simply more of the same: AUCC and its institutions pass along copyright costs to students, Access Copyright gets millions in revenues despite ongoing questions about its repertoire (with thousands used to lobby against education copyright reforms and most of the money going to foreign collectives and publishers, not authors), and the potential for digitally-oriented changes within Canadian higher education heading back to the back burner.'"

Note-I am going to try this for our blog. If you've ever wondered how some website that looks like it was an early draft from the proverbial infinite number of monkeys on infinite keyboards managed to get to the top of a search result page instead of something you actually want to read (or something you've written), you've been victimized by the dark art of search engine optimization (SEO). In the never-ending battle for the top of the Google search results page, and for advertising click-throughs, marketers and bloggers enlist an ever-changing bag of tricks to game search engine algorithms, often with the help of SEO consultants and a collection of tools that track the best tactics of the moment.

It is rather odd how often I hear the expression paradigm shift during contemporary scientific presentations and seminars. The expression was popularized by Thomas Kuhn's book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In that book, Kuhn referred to ground-breaking and revolutionary changes in scientific thought as paradigm shifts, but the expression is so over-used today that even minor discoveries are sometimes marketed as paradigm shifts.

We are living a unique moment in history. The development of communication technologies has produced a change in the modes of interaction of society, creating new forms of relating which are fundamentally different from those before. These new ways of relating and technologies have contributed to the emergence of new social and political movements. These movements, as exemplified by the Arab Spring, the democratisation movement in Iceland, and the 15M / TakeTheSquare / Occupy movement, are the most strinking examples of the potential of this new phase (together with other phenomena such as Wikileaks and Anonymous).

DARPA is unveiling a portable laser weapons system, HELLADS, which seems like something out of a sci-fi movie. The new laser application, created by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems with a custom power system from Saft Batteries, will help change the way the American military fights future wars. Current military laser systems are bulky contraptions which are mainly the size of a passenger jet, while the proposed DARPA weapon can fit on the back of a flatbed truck. The 150-kilowatt, solid state laser weapon is strong enough to take down drones or other aerial targets; a prototype is expected to be available by the end of 2012.

Here's some bad news for those of you who like to think you can think rationally about risk. You can't. You know all those thoughtfully considered views you have about nuclear power or genetically modified food or climate change? They are really no more than a jumble of facts, and how you feel about those facts. That's right. They're just your opinions. Which is bad news, because no matter how right you feel, you might be wrong. And being wrong about risk is risky, to you AND to others.

The Economist is hosting a debate between Bruce Schneier and former TSA honcho Kip Hawley, on the proposition "This house believes that changes made to airport security since 9/11 have done more harm than good." I'm admittedly biased for Bruce's position (he's for the proposition), but it seems to me that no matter what your bias, Schneier totally crushed Hawley in the opening volley. The first commenter on the debate called Hawley's argument "post hoc reasoning at its most egregious," which sums it all up neatly.