ted.com: Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz makes a passionate call for “practical wisdom” as an antidote to a society gone mad with bureaucracy. [ more ]

cnn.com: By Jon Fortt

Tech visionary Lawrence Lessig made a sobering prediction Tuesday at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference: “There’s going to be an i-9/11 event,” he said, “an event that demonstrates the instability of the Internet, and that inspires the government to a response.”

He said he believes this digital disaster – a major hacker attack or other act of cyber-terrorism in the next 10 years – will prompt the U.S. government to clamp down on Internet freedoms in an online parallel to the Patriot Act.

[ read more ]

realclearpolitics.com: By Fareed Zakaria

On June 22, 1897, about 400 million people around the world — one-fourth of humanity — got the day off. It was the 60th anniversary of Queen Victoria’s ascension to the British throne. The Diamond Jubilee stretched over five days on land and sea, but its high point was the parade and thanksgiving service on June 22. The 11 premiers of Britain’s self-governing colonies were in attendance, along with princes, dukes, ambassadors, and envoys from the rest of the world. A military procession of 50,000 soldiers included hussars from Canada, cavalrymen from New South Wales, carabineers from Naples, camel troops from Bikaner, and Gurkhas from Nepal. It was, as one historian wrote, “a Roman moment.”

In London, eight-year-old Arnold Toynbee was perched on his uncle’s shoulders, eagerly watching the parade. Toynbee, who grew up to become the most famous historian of his age, recalled that, watching the grandeur of the day, it felt as if the sun were “standing still in the midst of Heaven.” “I remember the atmosphere,” he wrote. “It was: ‘Well, here we are on top of the world, and we have arrived at this peak to stay there forever. There is, of course, a thing called history, but history is something unpleasant that happens to other people. We are comfortably outside all of that I am sure.’”[ read more ]

salon.com: Earth, that is. Our energy expert cracks open the Democratic candidates’ proposals on global warming — and is impressed.

The most important call for the next president won’t come at 3 a.m., and it won’t involve military security.

The gravest threat to the American way of life is posed by unrestricted greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Global warming threatens to put the Southwest into a permanent drought, raise sea levels by 6 or more inches a decade, generate hundreds of millions of environmental refugees at home and abroad, wipe out half the planet’s species, and increase average temperatures in the nation’s interior 10-20 degrees Fahrenheit. And these impacts would likely get steadily worse for hundreds of years or longer. [ read more ]

huffingtonpost.com: Professional circumstances have given me a monster backstage pass to see how innovation really works in many countries around the world, as well as in our own. I want to bring this knowledge home to fuel a national conversation on these important issues. And so with these words I am pleased to launch “Innovation Nation” as my offering to the blogosphere.

I begin my first HuffPost with some puzzlement. It is January 18, 2008, the presidential campaign has been in full swing for longer than most of us would like to admit, and the “innovation” issue is still conspicuously MIA from discourse and debate. [ read more ]

online.wsj.com: If your child has a life-threatening disease and you’re desperate to read the latest research, you’ll be dismayed to learn that you can’t — at least not without hugely expensive subscriptions to a bevy of specialized journals or access to a major research library.

Your dismay might turn to anger when you realize that you paid for this research. Through the National Institutes of Health alone, American taxpayers funnel more than $28 billion annually into medical research. That’s leaving aside the billions more in public spending on state universities or the tax exemptions granted for gifts to private campuses. [ read more ]

realclimate.org: To veterans of the Climate Wars, the old 1970s global cooling canard - “How can we believe climate scientists about global warming today when back in the 1970s they told us an ice age was imminent?” - must seem like a never-ending game of Whack-a-mole. One of us (WMC) has devoted years to whacking down the mole (see here, here and here, for example), while the other of us (JF) sees the mole pop up anew in his in box every time he quotes contemporary scientific views regarding climate change in his newspaper stories.

The problem is that the argument has played out in competing anecdotes, without any comprehensive and rigorous picture of what was really going on in the scientific literature at the time. But if the argument is to have any relevance beyond talking points aimed at winning a debate, such a comprehensive understanding is needed. If, indeed, climate scientists predicted a coming ice age, it is worthwhile to take the next step and understand why they thought this, and what relevance it might have to today’s science-politics-policy discussions about climate change. If, on the other hand, scientists were not really predicting a coming ice age, then the argument needs to be retired. [ read more ]

wired.com: The use of man-made nanoparticles has been banned in British products that want a sometimes-valuable “organic” label from the Soil Association. The group laid out the first organic standard in the world back in 1967 and continues to certify organic products in Great Britain.

Cosmetics from Johnson & Johnson and L’Oreal could be impacted, but in our snooping around, we didn’t find any companies that currently have an organic label that would be forced to remove it (neither could the Financial Times). One widely used product containing nanoparticles is sunscreen containing titanium dioxide, which normally is white, but at the nanoscale, becomes transparent, allowing for “clear” sunscreen. [ read more ]

edge.org: To mathematicians, 32 is an interesting number: it’s 2 raised to the fifth power, 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2. To economists, 32 is even more special, because it measures the difference in lifestyles between the first world and the developing world. The average rates at which people consume resources like oil and metals, and produce wastes like plastics and greenhouse gases, are about 32 times higher in North America, Western Europe, Japan and Australia than they are in the developing world. That factor of 32 has big consequences.

To understand them, consider our concern with world population. Today, there are more than 6.5 billion people, and that number may grow to around 9 billion within this half-century. Several decades ago, many people considered rising population to be the main challenge facing humanity. Now we realize that it matters only insofar as people consume and produce. [ read more ]

edge.org: In the modern world, science and society often interact in a perverse way. We live in a technological society, and technology causes political problems. The politicians and the public expect science to provide answers to the problems. Scientific experts are paid and encouraged to provide answers. The public does not have much use for a scientist who says, “Sorry, but we don’t know”. The public prefers to listen to scientists who give confident answers to questions and make confident predictions of what will happen as a result of human activities. So it happens that the experts who talk publicly about politically contentious questions tend to speak more clearly than they think. They make confident predictions about the future, and end up believing their own predictions. Their predictions become dogmas which they do not question. The public is led to believe that the fashionable scientific dogmas are true, and it may sometimes happen that they are wrong. That is why heretics who question the dogmas are needed. [ read more ]