Seven Revolutions

Wired Magazine devoted this issue to the future of food. There are excellent "info-graphics" and it is usefully divided by topics.

This factsheet at water.org provides an excellent overview of water issues

This quick article has some nice graphics about global water issues

Internet governance is under attack.: it may have to mend its ways to survive.

This is a link to a school at Oxford that has a trove of resources dealing with a variety of 21st century issues. There are multimedia materials and lots of publications on different topics available as free pdf downloads.

There are many good videos at this site. They cover a wide range of issues covered in our courses and average 3-5 minutes in length.

This site does as its title suggests--provides statistics in real time. It includes current data on population, food and hunger, technology, information, and other topics relevant to seven revolutions.

Interesting exchange of ideas about the value of looking ahead. This whole NYT series is excellent.

From the Middle East to Madagascar, high prices are spawning land grabs and ousting dictators. Welcome to the 21st-century food wars.

None of these are megacities, but an interesting article with graphs/data.

This site represents the land area necessary if the population of the world were as dense as various cities.

There is a lot of interesting stuff here-- old newspapers, postcars, essays, all indexed by decade and topic.

Renowned\ninventor Kurzweil (The Age of Spiritual Machines) may be technology's most credibly\nhyperbolic optimist. Elsewhere he has argued that eliminating fat intake can prevent\ncancer; here, his quarry is the future of consciousness and intelligence. Humankind, it\nruns, is at the threshold of an epoch ("the singularity," a reference to the theoretical\nlimitlessness of exponential expansion) that will see the merging of our biology with the\nstaggering achievements of "GNR" (genetics, nanotechnology and robotics) to create a\nspecies of unrecognizably high intelligence, durability, comprehension, memory and so\non. The word "unrecognizable" is not chosen lightly: wherever this is heading, it won't look like us. Kurzweil's argument is necessarily twofold: it's not enough to argue that\nthere are virtually no constraints on our capacity; he must also convince readers that\nsuch developments are desirable. In essence, he conflates the wholesale transformation\nof the species with "immortality," for which read a repeal of human limit. In less capable\nhands, this phantasmagoria of speculative extrapolation, which incorporates a\nbewildering variety of charts, quotations, playful Socratic dialogues and sidebars, would\nbe easier to dismiss. But Kurzweil is a true scientist-a large-minded one at that-and\ngives due space both to "the panoply of existential risks" as he sees them and the many\npresumed lines of attack others might bring to bear. What's arresting isn't the degree to\nwhich Kurzweil's heady and bracing vision fails to convince-given the scope of his\nprojections, that's inevitable-but the degree to which it seems downright plausible.\n(Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights\nreserved.)

What were the most intriguing books featured on The Globalist Bookshelf in 2011?

CSIS Trustee gives a 30,000 view of the move from West to East. 

The Globalist is supported, in part, by The Louis R. and Candice A. Hughes Charitable Foundation.

Interesting collection of data from 2010 concerning internet usage: number of websites, emails, tweats, etc. (Most followed on Twitter? Lady Gaga 7.7 M people)

Using the Google example, how are corporations acting with traditional nation states in today's interconnected world?

Summary: Do the tools of social media make it possible for protesters to challenge their governments? Malcolm Gladwell argues that there is no evidence that they do; Clay Shirky disagrees.