Lifeboat Foundation

I have just watched this video by Global Futures 2045.

This is my list of things I disagree with:

It starts with scary words about how every crisis comes faster and faster. However this is untrue. Many countries have been running deficits for decades. The financial crisis is no surprise. The reason the US has such high energy costs goes back to government decisions made in the 1970s. And many things that used to be crises no longer happen, like the Black Plague. We have big problems, but we’ve also got many resources we’ve built up over the centuries to help. Much of the challenges we face are political and social, not technical.

We will never fall into a new Dark Ages. The biggest problem is that we aren’t advancing as fast as we could and many are still starving, sick, etc. However, it has always been this way. The 20th century was very brutal! But we are advancing and it is mostly known threats like WMDs which could cause a disaster. In the main, the world is getting safer every day as we better understand it.

Continue reading “Response to the Global Futures 2045 Video” »

Every year Médecins Sans Frontières/ Doctors Without Borders (MSF) hold a conference to present scientific research carried out by their teams from different parts of the world. This year’s conference highlighted some of the strategic challenges facing MSF, and challenged some of our conceptions of medical humanitarian aid, and international development in light of groundbreaking digital technologies. We are as Paul Conneally passionately articulated in his keynote speech – Digital Humanitarian – ‘on the cusp of a global health revolution’.

Some of the groundbreaking technologies touched upon included crisis mapping, a technology that is still in its infancy, and the era of big data. The possibilities of how healthcare and humanitarian aid will be transformed by the convergence of ideas and technologies were evident in the poster session; humanitarian technology applications showed refugee camps in Kenya being monitored using satellite imagery and a humanitarian field software kit called joekit. Of the talks demonstrating real world examples, a talk by Isabella Panunzi on teleradiology proved to be immensely inspiring.

Isabella’s talk on her experience of applying teleradiology to improve diagnosis of tuberculosis in Thyolo District Hospital, Malawi showcased humanitarian innovation at its best. X-rays are taken at the Malawi hospital and the images are then sent to radiologists in the USA to interpret the images. As a result teleradiology has reduced critical delays and missed diagnosis of TB. This example of digital humanitarianism symbolises a small fraction of what can be potentially achieved in transforming our world. It opens up new possibilities in the transfer of technology and knowledge to the developing world. It also highlights the need for a different approach to modelling the strategic challenges of medical humanitarian aid and international development, and this is where complexity thinking and science can bring together different parts of problems and solutions to construct true holistic solutions.

A talk by Jonathan Smith, lecturer in Global Health and Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases at Yale University, brought together the disciplines of the arts and sciences as he gave an inventive take on using research in the digital age. Visually documenting disease and connecting the ‘emotional component to epidemiological data’ is extremely powerful to create change in global health observed Jonathon, as he showed part of a documentary film he is directing, ‘They Go to Die’, a film about,

Continue reading “Médecins Sans Frontières Scientific Day 2012” »

The biggest challenge to the ‘ecosystem’ of world economics that keeps society ticking over is how to overcome our inability to regulate a sustainable economic model. In Europe at present we are undergoing the difficult measures in setting about rules of austerity to ensure that government borrowing never gets as out of hand as it has done on our watch. I post on this topic now as it is topical to me — back home here in my native Ireland we are voting on a referendum this week to ensure we no longer borrow from our children to fuel indulgences today — a referendum on rationality and responsibility.

The topical of austerity reminds me of an opinion I blogged on a crisis in the Obama administration last August on national debt in the light of striking comments from foreign figureheads amid the storm from the ‘Tea Party Taliban’. I share with you for to see if anyone cares to comment on an operandi of living like parasites off the global economy:

Living Like Parasites Off The Global Economy, originally written 3 Aug 2011:

With the US in turmoil over its national debt, and held to ransom by a ‘Tea Party Taliban’, last week China publicly mocked American democracy. Yesterday, the world witnessed the humbling of America after a trillion-dollar deal marked the end of an era for the US. The US now faces a shift in its relations with creditor nations, and it was not all too surprising to hear Vladimir Putin, the Russian Prime Minister, yesterday accusing Americans of living “like parasites off the global economy”. If America had defaulted on its international debt obligations, that is exactly what it would be. While America continues to service it’s debt, it is quite the opposite — for now at least- as is perpetually paying interest to its creditors.

Continue reading “Spiralling Debt & The Road to Breaking Point” »

Hawking could save us all if he spoke up.

A pope knealt before Hawking to make him re-confirm the big bang. I kneel before Hawking to make him re-confirm Hawking radiation.

Then we are all safe.

I spend most of my time thinking about software, and occasionally I come across issues that are relevant to futurists. I wrote my book about the future of software in OpenOffice, and needed many of its features. It might not be the only writing / spreadsheet / diagramming / presentation, etc. tool in your toolbox, but it is a worthy one. OpenDocument Format (ODF) is the best open standard for these sorts of scenarios and LibreOffice is currently the premier tool to handle that format. I suspect many of the readers of Lifeboat have a variant installed, but don’t know much of the details of what is going on.

The OpenOffice situation has been a mess for many years. Sun didn’t foster a community of developers around their work. In fact, they didn’t listen to the community when it told them what to do. So about 18 months ago, after Oracle purchased Sun and made the situation worse, the LibreOffice fork was created with most of the best outside developers. LibreOffice quickly became the version embraced by the Linux community as many of the outside developers were funded by the Linux distros themselves. After realizing their mess and watching LibreOffice take off within the free software community, Oracle decided to fire all their engineers (50) and hand the trademark and a copy of the code over to IBM / Apache.

Now it would be natural to imagine that this should be handed over to LibreOffice, and have all interested parties join up with this effort. But that is not what is happening. There are employees out there whose job it is to help Linux, but they are actually hurting it. You can read more details on a Linux blog article I wrote here. I also post this message as a reminder about how working together efficiently is critical to have faster progress on complicated things.

It’s been a while since anyone contributed a post on space exploration here on the Lifeboat blogs, so I thought I’d contribute a few thoughts on the subject of potential hazards to interstellar travel in the future — if indeed humanity ever attempts to explore that far in space.

It is only recently that the Voyager probes provided us with some idea of the nature of the boundary of our solar system with what is commonly referred to as the local fluff, The Local Interstellar Cloud, through which we have been travelling for the past 100,000 years or so, and which we will continue to travel through for another 10,000 or 20,000 years yet. The cloud has a temperate of about 6000°C — albeit very tenuous.

We are protected by the effects of the local fluff by the solar wind and the sun’s magnetic field, the front between the two just beyond the termination shock where the solar wind slows to subsonic velocities. Here, in the heliosheath, the solar wind becomes turbulent by its interaction with the interstellar medium, and keeping the interstellar medium at bay from the inners of the solar system, the region currently under study by the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 space probes. It has been hypothesised that there may be a hydrogen wall further out between the bow shock and the heliopause composed of ISM interacting with the edge of the heliosphere, another obstacle to consider with interstellar travel.

The short end of the stick is that what many consider ‘open space’ to traverse once we get beyond the Kuiper belt may in fact be many more mission-threatening obstacles to traverse to reach beyond our solar system. Opinions welcome. I am not an expert on this.

… theorem and still do so on CERN’s website ( http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/lhc/Safety-en.html ):

Dear colleagues, please, try and dismantle my much simpler, and hence both more powerful and more easy-to-disprove if false, “Telemach theorem” ( http://www.scribd.com/doc/82752272/Rossler-s-Telemach-paper ).

The latter again proves the likely pan-biocidal nature of the currently running LHC experiment. For it shows that black holes have radically new properties: They are stable, almost frictionless at first, undetectable by CERN’s detectors, and exponentially growing inside matter – thus forming a perfect slow bomb for planet earth. The theorem waits to be dismantled for 2 years (the former does so for 5 years).

I grant you, my esteemed 11 colleagues, 11 days to deliver – either on the CERN website of 2008, revised, or in case CERN denies you access, on this blog. If none of you manages to deliver a counter-proof to Telemach during this time, I shall accuse all of you of actively supporting the worst terrorist act of history, presently in progress. Acting in good faith – as you no doubt will pledge – offers no excuse as you were alerted in time. And please, do forgive me that I did not give you the occasion to revoke your testimony earlier.

Continue reading “I herewith Challenge my 11 CERN-supporting Colleagues who in 2008 Defamed my Gothic-R …” »

Note: This article originally appears on WealthLift.com and can be seen here.

In 2006, the underpinnings of the American financial system began to crack from a speculative bubble in the country’s housing market. Fueled by irrational exuberance in which homeowners believed their home prices would rise forever, this was made worse by Main Street and Wall Street, both of whom repackaged mortgage loans for sale to everyday investors through a process called securitization. That’s right, this was a multipronged problem, not the hell-bent desires of a few financial fat cats, as Occupy Wall Street would have you believe.

When the bubble burst and home prices began to decline, this not only hurt the original lender, but also every investor that held a piece of a mortgage-backed asset. Imagine this process like a moldy pie that no one realizes is bad. Originally, the entire pie is held by one bank. Next, pieces of this pie are sold to other banks, pension funds, hedge funds, and anyone else that has an appetite. Soon enough, however, everyone holding this pie has gotten sick. Well, this happens with all kinds of assets, including car loans, credit cards and student loans. The benefit of securitization is that it allows organizations to grant more loans to people like you and me, but the downside is that it exposes the entire economy to the financial woes of an individual market. Without securitization, what happened in the housing market would have likely stayed in the housing market.

Six years later, many people are crying that the same thing will happen to the student loan market. While disbelievers can claim that these are just ‘cynics’ whose views are skewed by the world’s ongoing economic turmoil, a basic investigation into the matter yields some worrying results.

Continue reading “Will Student Loans Cause an Economic Armageddon?” »

The reason for the current planet-wide abandonment of major progress lies in the re-acquired belief in clairvoyance – of which anonymous peer review is a symptom. Einstein would ridicule the latter as a “dogma-generating superstition.” While in the early 17th century, the innovators were burnt on the stakes, to date the censors choose instead to burn themselves along with their children and planet.

NO BIG BANG

The expansion theory got disproved in 1929 by Hubble’s friend Zwicky. A remaining gap was closed in 1943 by Chandrasekhar, but the two apparently never met. The final cornerstone is the discovery of a “second statistical mechanics” besides Thermodynamics, called Cryodynamics. It can be used to break the decades-old impasse of hot fusion and hence solve earth’s energy problems.

NO GRAVITATIONAL WAVES

Continue reading “Big Bang gone, Gravitational Waves gone, Hawking Radiation gone: The Dolphins Confront CERN” »