sensemaking

Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity.

In this century a number of events could extinguish humanity. The probability of these events may be very low, but the expected value of preventing them could be high, as it represents the value of all future human lives. We review the challenges to studying human extinction risks and, by way of example, estimate the cost effectiveness of preventing extinction-level asteroid impacts.

You'd think being seriously wounded on the battlefield would be the most painful thing a soldier could go through, but the recovery from burns can take months of agonizing physical therapy that prolongs the suffering. In some cases, healing can be more painful than the original trauma. What if you could take patients away from their immediate surroundings when cleaning their burns or stretching the skin during physical therapy? A virtual reality game created to help patients deal with pain hopes to do just that.

According to T. Boone Pickens, it is not possible for America to "drill itself" out of the energy crisis.

As the need for fresh water increases, growing populations across the globe will increasingly turn to groundwater to slake their thirst. But where will we find that water? UNESCO's World-wide Hydrogeological Mapping and Assessment Programme (WHYMAP) created this map, along with several others, to serve as a guide to the world's groundwater resources in aquifers and other groundwater environments.

ILIAS is a powerful web-based learning management system that allows you to easily manage learning resources in an integrated system.

LT4eL (Language Technology for e-Learning) develops a framework of multilingual language technology tools and semantic web techniques for improving the retrieval and the metadata annotation of learning material.

Knowledge Federation 2008 Conference. Dubrovnik, Croatia

"Cyber English is a pedagogical experiment in practical theory in developing an alternative option to tradition education and a project to answer the various voices of America for better educational practice"

This is the official website of the TAGora project, a STREP project funded by the European Commission in the framework of the FET proactive initiative "Simulating Emergent Properties in Complex Systems".

Metre-wide cracks in the ground suddenly split open, as red-hot rock and ash are thrown violently into the air amid searing temperatures. It's like a vision of how the Earth behaved in prehistoric times. Except these events have happened within the last three years in Ethiopia's Afar region. What's more, a matter of days ago there was more extreme volcanic activity there, with reports of the country's biggest eruption to date - and the largest recorded lava flow in scientific history.

Welcome to DeepDebate! We are passionate about ideas and are exploring new ways to improve online conversations. In order to do this, we've built a framework which makes it easier for a very large number of people to create a structured conversation.

The State of the Future 2008 report is out now from the World Federation of UN Associations Millennium Project, with an updated analysis of the 15 global challenges that its worldwide panel have been analysing for 12 years now.

This habitat of excellence is designed and maintained by scientists for scientists from various disciplines e.g. veterinary and human virology, bioinformatics, epidemiology, immunology and clinical analysis etc. From here on, you will find a series of services, starting with our EpiFlu Database (led by the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics) providing secure storage and the analysis of genetic, epidemiological and clinical data.

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.

AGROVOC is a multilingual, structured and controlled vocabulary designed to cover the terminology of all subject fields in agriculture, forestry, fisheries, food and related domains (e.g. environment).

ESSENCE: E-Science/Sensemaking/Climate Change is an immersive internet experiment, culminating in a face-face conference. We want to build a collective intelligence resource on the climate change debate. This is analogous to Wikipedia, but decidely not enforcing a "neutral point of view". We are going to put through their paces tools tuned for mapping the key issues, options, arguments and evidence on the different dillemmas - and reflect on how effective the current tools are.