A 50-foot tall statue of Shaquille O'Neal marks the southeast entrance to Beijing's Chaoyang Park. The NBA star clutches a basketball close to his chest and gazes towards the horizon. Nearby are three outdoor basketball courts, where I've scheduled an interview with the head of Greenpeace East Asia's Sustainable Finance Program. Calvin Quek is playing a game of four-on-four when I arrive one morning this past August. Smog blocks the sunshine and makes the air feel thick. If the other players notice, they don't show it. Some smoke cigarettes during the water breaks. "It's hard to say black and white whether [the government] is for or against us," Quek says of Greenpeace, over the sound of bouncing basketballs. Earlier this week, his colleagues had published "Thirsty Coal," a grim critique of China's coal strategy. The government plans to build 16 new coal-fired power bases by 2015 in some of the country's most arid regions. "Left unchecked," reads the English report summary, "these mining projects will only cause more ecological disaster and social unrest in the foreseeable future."

David Suzuki: The economic benefits of tackling climate change Comments (2) By David Suzuki, October 2, 2012 David Suzuki. The failure of world leaders to act on the critical issue of global warming is often blamed on economic considerations. Over and over, we hear politicians say they can't spend our tax dollars on environmental protection when the economy is so fragile. Putting aside the absurdity of prioritizing a human-created and adaptable tool like the economy over caring for everything that allows us to survive and be healthy, let's take a look at the economic reality. A new scientific report concludes that climate change is already costing the world $1.2 trillion a year and is eating up 1.6 per cent of global GDP, and rising. It's also killing at least 400,000 people every year, mainly in developing countries. That's not counting the 4.5 million people a year who die from air pollution caused by burning fossil fuels.

How Big Data Became So Big By STEVE LOHR Published: August 11, 2012 This has been the crossover year for Big Data - as a concept, as a term and, yes, as a marketing tool. Big Data has sprung from the confines of technology circles into the mainstream. First, here are a few, well, data points: Big Data was a featured topic this year at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, with a report titled "Big Data, Big Impact." In March, the federal government announced $200 million in research programs for Big Data computing.

He knew what that meant: this ad wasn't being shown to every person who read that page. It was being targeted to him in particular. Tax-exempt groups like Crossroads GPS have become among the biggest players in this year's election.  They're often called "dark money" groups, because they can raise accept unlimited amounts of money and never have to disclose their donors.

Big data might very well be the tech buzz word of the year. And just how hot is it? Consider this:  Data scientist Stephen Purpura - an expert in artificial intelligence, machine learning and predictive analytics who is studying for his PhD in information sciences at Cornell University - has received no fewer than 45 job offers in recent months. And they just aren't any fly-by-night offers, with some rolling in from big-name companies touting salaries of $300,000 or more.

Have you noticed that as we dematerialize consumer goods (that is, change their atoms to bits), we're less likely to own them? Businesses like iTunes have furtive terms of service that turn out to merely license the music you think you're buying. And then there are fee-based services that forgo media ownership entirely, such as Spotify. As visionary and Wired cofounder Kevin Kelly puts it, "Access is better than owning." 29 That sentiment is the driving force behind a new economic model called collaborative consumption, where consumers use online or off-line tools to rent, share, and trade goods and services. Some people refer to it as Zipcar capitalism, from the eponymous car sharing service wherein subscribers-who apparently without irony call themselves Zipsters- rent vehicles by the hour.

Rioting and related intra-crowd dynamics are significant human processes, but we know less about the basic behavioral science and subsequent processes that drive and shape rioting than we would like to. This is due, in large part, to the difficulty in studying riots on the ground and to the sheer complexity of riot phenomena. We know even less about the geographical dynamics of rioting, even though there is a dedicated (but only general) appreciation that geography is important. Existing work has, for the most part, adopted the most straightforward path to discovery, by examining coarse (city-scale) geographies of rioting, or in the few instances where intra-crowd riot dynamics are considered they have focused on stylized abstractions of behavior. Because of the difficulties of using standard social science inquiry to study riots (surveys, ethnographic analysis, interviews), many researchers have turned to computer modeling to create synthetic riots that can be configured, sampled, and experimented with. But, building models of something as bewilderingly complex as rioting is really quite difficult and so many short-cuts are taken. In particular, models are usually cellular-based in form (where rasters represent people and their local environment) and founded on physical interactions between relatively "dumb" particle-people (where continuum mechanics, random walks, or particle-particle forces serve as a substitute for socio-spatial interaction and behavior).

It is well known that Canada is an urban nation. Most people now live in cities. But most growth is occurring in the suburbs of large metropolitan areas and in nearby towns and cities. Yet academic research has often focused on our central cities. Better understanding of suburbs as places, and suburbanization as a process, have less frequently been explicit aims of research.

Five of the nation's largest banks were required to pay states a total of $2.5 billion as part of this year's mortgage settlement. The money was intended to alleviate the foreclosure crisis, but many states aren't exactly using the funds that way. We made a map of what each state is doing with the millions of dollars it received.

If one draws links radiating outward from NATO to all of these different countries and organizations, the result is a security network that has multiple hubs and clusters - much like a map of the Internet or of planets and galaxies. This world is no longer unipolar, bipolar, or even multipolar, because the actors that matter are not single states but groups of states that are more or less densely connected. It is a multi-hub security network, in which the hubs are regional organizations of different sizes and strengths.

Fifteen years later we've made a lot of progress. Many cloud services are now switch-hitters. When a person using a browser asks them to do something, they respond with HTML for humans to read and interact with. When a computer asks - and by computer I mean a smartphone, a desktop PC, or a virtual machine running elsewhere in the cloud - they respond with data for that computer to process.