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Vannevar Bush's 1945 article, "As We May Think," has been much celebrated as a central inspiration for the development of hypertext and the World Wide Web. Less attention, however, has been paid to Bush's motivation for imagining a new generation of information technologies; it was his hope that more powerful tools, by automating the routine aspects of information processing, would leave researchers and other professionals more time for creative thought. But now, more than sixty years later, it seems clear that the opposite has happened, that the use of the new technologies has contributed to an accelerated mode of working and living that leaves us less to think, not more. In this talk I will explore how this state of affairs has come about and what we can do about it.

This article describes the motivation for and development of a project I have called PepysMap. PepysMap was inspired by the excellent 'blog of the diary of Samuel Pepys run by Phil Gyford 1. Phil posts diary entries day by day (currently for the year 1662). Each blog post contains the text of the diary entry hyperlinked to pages containing detail of people, places and cultural artifacts referenced from the text. The goal of PepysMap is to shadow the development of the Pepys blog by creating a topic map for each diary entry, showing the relationships between people, places and cultural artifacts.

Inspired by Yahoo's Pipes, DERI Web Data Pipes implement a generalization which can also deal with formats such as RDF (RDFa), Microformats and generic XML. DERI Pipes are Open Source Software, ad as such they can be easily extended and applyed in use cases where a local deployment is needed. DERI Pipes provides a rich web GUI where pipes can be graphically edited, debugged and invoked. The execution engine is also available as a standalone JAR, which is ideal for embedded use. DERI Pipes, in general, produce as an output streams of data (e.g. XML, RDF,JSON) that can be used by applications. However, when invoked by a normal browser, they will provide a end user GUI for the user to enter parameter values and browse the results

In 1981, based on a decade of Club's [Club of Rome] research, Peccei wrote: "The future will either be the inspired product of a great cultural revival, or there will be no future" (Peccei, 1981).

The Cultural Revival Dialog - Building the Europe of the Future Together - was organized by the European Movement Croatia in cooperation with the University of Oslo Knowledge Federation Project, on occasion of the 60th anniversary of the International European Movement. The invitation letter was sent to prominent Croatian researchers, policy makers and media workers, inviting them to a free and open dialog about the prospects for contemporary cultural revival. As always, the purpose of this Key Point Dialog was to come closer to the Key Point - an inspiring vision of the cultural revival, which The Club of Rome considered to be the solution to our global issues, or to the world problematique as they called them. This time we began our dialog by reflecting about a specific theme, the Sheng Zhen Qigong. The intention behind this reflection was to become aware of the nature of our present cultural turning point, of the obstacles that hinder us from changing course, and of the opportunities that a new direction may make available.

I am pleased to announce the release of Issue II of Consilience: The Journal of Sustainable Development. Our current editorial board of 32 undergraduate and graduate students worked with this issue's 23 authors to present to you an inspiring collection of written experiences and novel ideas of individuals passionate for the advancement of sustainable development.