sensemaking

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.

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.

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.

Knowledge Federation 2008 Conference. Dubrovnik, Croatia

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.

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.

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

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.

SearchMonkey reuses structured data to improve search result display with benefits to both search users, developers, and publishers of web content.

In this section you'll find some of the research data, findings, articles, and webinars that have come out of our 2008 Tribalization of Business study.

The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) will integrate regional clean energy progress into a coordinated, global effort. It will provide political recommendations and identify funding for renewable technologies. Moreover, IRENA will seek to even the playing field for countries that have had difficulty affording investment in renewable energy. To this end, the agency will fund its budget with contributions by member-countries on a sliding scale with unindustrialized countries paying less.

The technology to make biobutanol, a non-food based biofuel, cost-competitive with gasoline isn't here yet, but companies in the know say that it could be by 2010.

The Environmental Appeals Board blocked the EPA from issuing a permit to a proposed coal plant addition near Vernal, Utah, about 150 miles east of Salt Lake City. Perhaps more importantly, the quasi-independent board, composed of four highly regarded, experienced judges, ruled that the EPA needs to develop a single nationwide standard for dealing with carbon dioxide.

Making Government Information More Accessible

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.

Interdisciplinary research programs at Harvard and elsewhere naturally tend to be distributed geographically, across campuses and departments. Effective collaboration for these programs requires the ability to bridge distance, which in turn implies digital collaboration, and therefore abilities to publish and discuss on-line content such as articles, news, and perspectives; to provide semantic context to on-line content for more powerful interactions within multiple sub-disciplines and to integrate as well as distinguish the individual contributions of many scientific workers.

StemBook is a comprehensive, open-access collection of original, peer-reviewed chapters covering topics related to Stem Cell Biology

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.