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The past six months have brought scenes from a hungry apocalypse, as at least 14 countries have been wracked by food-related violence. By mid-April UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon acknowledged that "the steeply rising price of food has developed into a real global crisis." It's the product, economists say, of multiple factors: high oil prices, prolonged drought, biofuel production, and burgeoning meat consumption. In the short term, food aid will help. In the medium term, market-distorting trade tariffs and farm subsidies must end. But the long-term task is monumentally harder: transcending the limits of today's global food production.

Drug Ontology is developed by the nosology project at Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research. This project seeks to discover new therapeutic uses and adverse effects of drugs by finding diseases that have gene expression profiles similar to those of the known indications and adverse effects of drugs. The objectives of the Drug Ontology are: * defines a core set of concepts and relationships that allow us to integrate information from multiple sources, * provides classification services along multiple axes, * provides links to external sources so that data not in the ontology can be queried from these sources.

The Cognitive Edge weblog contains an interesting exchange on the nature and role of storytelling in organizations. It was prompted by blog author Dave Snowden's reading of an article by Gabrielle Dolan of One Thousand and One, an Australian consultancy specialising in storytelling as a tool for organisational development. Dave Snowden is well known for his work on the role of narrative and complexity theory in organizational sensemaking.

The Patent and Trademark Office has now made clear that its newly developed position on patentable subject matter will invalidate many and perhaps most software patents, including pioneering patent claims to such innovators as Google, Inc

Theory Garden™ MindDraw™ is the brainchild of Professor Richard J. Boland, Jr. and Dr. Tanvir Y. Goraya, Ph.D.It grows form reserach funded from 1991 to 1994 by the National Science Foundation Porgram on coordination Theory and Collaborative Technology. That award was supplemented by a grant form Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and included development of a software tool named Spider. Publications describing the Spider project are listed below.

S. I. Hayakawa's Language in Thought and Action has been one of the course's handbooks for a memorable number of years already, but the manner in which it has been used has changed somewhat over the years. Although the basic concern of the book is with «informal» semantics (not the formal brand of semantics concerned with, e.g. the computation of truth-value), i.e. the «symbolic» way in which utterances are used to convey meaning, it also raises the more cognitive issue of how language affects human thought and conditions behaviour, and addresses the resulting «ethical» question of how language should be used to achieve cooperation and understanding rather than confrontation and conflict. These questions (though viewed in a somewhat «optimistic» perspective) give the book additional value as one of the pioneering works in «critical linguistics», a discipline which was to develop only much later.

A new Species-Environment Relations (SER) modeling approach depicts key ecological functions (KEFs) and key environmental correlates (KECs) of terrestrial plant and animal species, as part of a regional assessment of the Interior Columbia Basin Ecosystem Management Project. Assessing KEFs of species is one facet of understanding management effects and ecological integrity of ecosystems. A relational database was developed that ties species' KEFs with their key habitats, KECs, and distribution maps. In this way, potential management activities can be evaluated for how they influence: habitats and environmental correlates; associated plant, invertebrate, and vertebrate species; the array of ecological functions associated with those species; geographic functional ecology; and potential effects on ecosystem productivity, diversity, and sustainability.

Open source brings to us the ability to have collaborative and agile development environments....Additionally, open source benefits the Department of Defense through...simplified licensing...and security....Security through obscurity just doesn't work.

The Initiative in Innovative Computing (IIC) is an interdisciplinary research and development center at Harvard dedicated to using innovative computing tools to accelerate discovery across all of the scientific disciplines.

The SOE's combination of gestural i/o, recombinant networking, and real-world pixels brings the first major step in computer interface since 1984; starting today, g-speak will fundamentally change the way people use machines at work, in the living room, in conference rooms, in vehicles. The g-speak platform is a complete application development and execution environment that redresses the dire constriction of human intent imposed by traditional GUIs. Its idiom of spatial immediacy and information responsive to real-world geometry enables a necessary new kind of work: data-intensive, embodied, real-time, predicated on universal human expertise.

OpenCog aims to provide research scientists and software developers with a common platform to build and share artificial intelligence programs.

The 2008 NMC Conference Proceedings features ten papers including case studies; a tutorial; introductions to current topics such as storytelling, digital media, and fair use; descriptions of special services, tools, and information technology support programs developed at member schools; and discussions of new media and pedagogy.

OntoWebber is a Web site management system, which facilitates the creation, generation and maintenance of Web sites. Using OntoWebber, site engineers can build site models for domain-specific Web sites. The site models are based on explicit ontologies including the domain ontology and four distinct site-modeling ontologies. Using a RDF-aware rule engine, rules can be defined to check integrity constraints on the resulting site models, thus enforcing desirable properties of the materialized Web site. Both ontologies and site models are expressed using RDF(S)/XML languages. Rules are defined in the F-logic format. The prototype system provides an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for site engineers to performed all the above tasks for managing Web sites.

DIYbio is a group of people who are interested in doing amateur biotechnology. Amateur, meaning doing something that you love for the sake of doing it. In a broad sense, we're developing an infrastructure that enables people not in traditional institutions to take advantage of the tools that those institutions typically provide.

Rich countries acknowledge their historic role in pushing up global temperatures but they say that emerging giants like China and India must also step up to the plate and take quantifiable action. Developing and poorer nations hit back with the argument that the industrialised world should lead by example, and foot the bill for clean-energy technology and coping with global warming's inevitable impacts.

A quiet land rush is under way among the buttes of southeastern Wyoming, and it is changing the local rancher culture. The whipping winds cursed by descendants of the original homesteaders now have real value for out-of-state developers who dream of wind farms or of selling the rights to bigger companies.

Within the field of astronomy there are many existing vocabularies which have been developed for different purposes by different organisations.

It is now recognised that the developed world is struggling to meet its carbon-reduction targets, while emissions by China and India have soared. Meanwhile, signs suggest that the climate is even more sensitive to atmospheric CO2 levels than was previously thought.

The report, "SMART 2020: Enabling the Low Carbon Economy in the Information Age," was developed by The Climate Group in partnership with the Global e-Sustainbility Initiative (GeSI), and looks at how information technology can play a positive role in fighting climate change.

IBM® LanguageWare® is a set of run-time libraries and an easy-to-use Eclipse-based development environment for building custom text analyzers in various languages. Deployable in Apache UIMA, these analyzers can expose the information buried in text to any application. The Eclipse-based tools makes creating analyzers simple and fast, even for non-technical users. The tools make it easy to build dictionaries, ontologies, and rules for identifying key information, relationships and meaning.