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A twine about the concept of an emerging global brain. What are the similarities and differences between the Internet and the human brain and nervous system? What are the steps that are leading us towards a global brain? What are the implications of the global brain?

World Pulse is an interactive global media enterprise that covers global issues through the eyes of women. We publish a magazine and link it to our global community newswire, called PulseWire, where women from over 130 countries, including from rural villages, are speaking for themselves and connecting to solve global problems.

As it tracks and analyzes thought and actions across the world, the Global Power Barometer (GPB) frequently catches sight of issues that will impact global politics. These are the issues that likely will move the icons in coming weeks. We'll share our peeks at the future as they pass certain momentum thresholds. In future days we'll categorize the "Emerging Issues" and provide snippets about the progress of significant trends.

Current global disease control focuses almost exclusively on responding to epidemics after they have already spread globally. Nevertheless, dramatic failures in such pandemic control, such as the ongoing lack of success in HIV vaccine development twenty-five years into the pandemic, have shown that this wait-and-respond approach is not sufficient, and that the development of systems to prevent novel pandemics before they are established should be considered a human health imperative. Had we had such systems in place thirty years ago we may have averted the HIV pandemic.

"The Institute of the Future will soon be launching what it calls the first massively multiplayer forecast game, billed as The Superstruct Game. According to the game's FAQ, the idea is to 'imagine how we might solve the problems we'll face.' Interestingly, the game itself is meant to be played 'on forums, blogs, videos, wikis, and other familiar online spaces.' From the IFTF website's sneak peak, the game is set in the year 2019, where the Global Extinction Awareness System (GEAS) has forecast the possibility of human extinction by the year 2042 as the result of five simultaneous 'super-threats:' Quarantine, which is a result from 'declining health and pandemic disease;' Ravenous, which relates to the global collapse of the world food system; Power Struggle, related to the flux of power 'as nations fight for energy supremacy and the world searches for alternative energy solutions;' Outlaw Planet, covering increased surveillance and loss of liberties; and, lastly, Generation Exile, which covers the massive increase in refugees."

Ned.com is a global, all-volunteer, member-governed, online social network (in combination with real-world locations) that is made up of social entrepreneurs, activists, artists, social purpose enterprises, grassroots nonprofit, non-governmental, and community-based organizations, and is collaborating and taking action locally, nationally & globally, in order to make the world a better place.

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.

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.

Ashoka is the global association of the world's leading social entrepreneurs-men and women with system changing solutions for the world's most urgent social problems. Since 1981, we have elected over 2,000 leading social entrepreneurs as Ashoka Fellows, providing them with living stipends, professional support, and access to a global network of peers in more than 60 countries.

The World Federation of UN Associations is an independent, non-governmental organization with Category One Consultative Status at the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and consultative or liaison links with many other UN organizations and agencies. The Millennium Project functions under the auspices of WFUNA. The Millennium Project of WFUNA is a global participatory futures research think tank of futurists, scholars, business planners, and policy makers who work for international organizations, governments, corporations, NGOs, and universities. The Millennium Project manages a coherent and cumulative process that collects and assesses judgements from its several hundred participants to produce the annual "State of the Future", "Futures Research Methodology" series, and special studies such as the State of the Future Index, Future Scenarios for Africa, Lessons of History, Environmental Security, Applications of Futures Research to Policy, and a 700+ annotated scenarios bibliography.

HealthMap Global disease alert map

Global Sensemaking Start making sense

The Global Coherence Initiative empowers co-creation with others for the benefit of all.

The global spread of the H5N1 avian influenza has already extensively damaged economies worldwide and food security in developing countries. The spread of infection to new ecosystems results in viral adaptation to new hosts, including humans, which inevitably amplifies the potential for pandemic flu. H5N1 represents an unprecedented model of how influenza infections may become widespread. It is recognized that avian influenza viruses may be the progenitors of the next human pandemic virus, and for this reason their genetic evolution should be monitored and investigated in a timely manner. The full support of the international scientific community is therefore urgently required to better understand the spread and evolution of the virus, and the determinants of its transmissibility and pathogenicity in humans. This in turn demands that scientists with different fields of expertise have full access to comprehensive genetic sequence, clinical, and epidemiological data from both animal and human virus isolates.

Facilitating Knowledge Exchange on Global Issues

Supercourse is a repository of lectures on global health and prevention designed to improve the teaching of prevention. Supercourse has a network of over 55000 scientists in 174 countries who are sharing for free a library of 3557 lectures in 26 languages.

The project will create open content electronic textbooks that will be freely available from a website. Distribution will also be possible via paper, CD, or DVD. Our goal initially is to focus on content development and Web distribution, and we will work with relevant authorities to facilitate dissemination by other means when bandwidth is unavailable or inadequate. The goal is to make textbooks available to the many who cannot afford them.

"This research is grounded in the anthropological understanding that each individual is a unique 'energy source' (Bateson 1972) responsible for acting upon their socially and culturally inflected interpretations in an equally particular way. These indexes capture the actual moments of interaction, of the coming together of individuals in conversational and behavioural exchange (Rapport and Overing 2000). The indexes in this research focus on the socio-cultural field (rather than physical, archaeological or linguistic sub-disciplines), which has been a key element of the discipline since its establishment in the 19th century. Above all, this report highlights how this Cultural Mapping project will offer unparalleled global access into anthropology's own minimal definition: that is, a means to see the Other as Self, and the Self as Other."

Interesting work, based in anthropology

So far, most investments in EI have been driven by a focus on an increase in efficiency and topdown change of business processes in relatively static value chains. Typical deployment of EI has been based on the idea of an enterprise-wide "big bang" transition to a new "best way of working", pre-conceived largely by a corporate elite of engineers and analysts. The resulting system and the related procedures were supposed to enforce this way of working and make sure that the enterprise would reap the benefits (of efficiency) for some time to come, by discouraging subsequent unofficial forms of smaller-scale and/or bottom-up change. This approach was very much enterprise centric and typically weak in accommodating subsequent change. It is however no longer adequate, because enterprises increasingly need to rely on bottom-up initiative, emergence and flexibility, in order to remain competitive. Due to fierce global competition, enterprises can no longer survive with a focus on efficiency and producing more of the same (for a lower price). Instead, enterprises need to concentrate on value innovation and producing more of not the same (with higher margins). To this end enterprises operate increasingly in dynamic value networks.Therefore EI should be geared towards leveraging creativity, collaboration and change in more dynamic networks to release its full potential as an instrument for value creation. A new objective for EI should be: To stimulate value creation based on innovation and co-creation in a context of networked enterprises that is very much defined bottom-up, by creative, committed workers.