It’s no secret that the world is on the alert for plans toward political and economic solvency. Strategic planner Thomas Barnett has released Great Powers: America and the World After Bush to address many of our most significant global crises.

In a recent interview with Dan Hare, Barnett elaborated on the book, saying the US must admit that it no longer has control over globalization — or the global economy. Here’s a quote:

As we’re demonstrating now through the overhang we’ve created financially, I want readers to realize that we’re the one country that can truly destroy globalization. That’s why I think it’s absolutely essential — and why I wrote the book — to make Americans aware that this globalization is a many-decades-long project that began with how we started this country and ultimately with how we seek to run this complex world — with rules but not a ruler.

Also check out Barnett’s 2005 talk on rethinking the US Military.

After a whirlwind of media speculation over the weekend following a story by The Guardian, biologist Craig Venter (watch his TED2005 speech) will announce today at the annual meeting of his institute in San Diego that his team has built a synthetic chromosome, using lab chemicals. “A giant leap forward in the development of designer genomes”, writes the newspaper.
Mr Venter’s autobiography, “A Life Decoded: My Genome, My Life” is scheduled to be published in two weeks.

At TED2006 computer scientist Jeff Han demonstrated his prototype of a revolutionary multitouch screen (watch video). At TED2007 he brought along a larger, wall-size version that TEDsters could try out. The interactive media wall, built by Han’s company Perceptive Pixel, will be sold by Nieman Marcus in the US. Price tag: $100,000 USD.

A few days ago TED2005 speaker Craig Venter (watch his talk) announced that his lab has finished sequencing a single human’s genome — his own. At his old company, Celera, Venter worked on sequencing his genome and four other genomes all mixed together, creating an anonymous composite. He told Newsweek:

What we got this time was a diploid genome—a genome that includes both sets of chromosomes from both my parents. We were surprised at how much variation between individuals there was.
You mean there’s more genetic difference between one person and the next than we previously thought?
Absolutely. It’s quite comforting to me as an individualist that we’re not very close to being clones of one other. (…)
Why did you choose to decode your own genome?
It goes back to the government’s notion that genetics has to be secret and anonymous. But there’s really nothing anonymous with your genetic sequence—it’s the ultimate identifier. I thought it was showing proper leadership—to show that I don’t think there’s any risk in it. I don’t know if there’s any scientist in this field that wouldn’t want to have his own genome known.
(Read the full interview)

Nobel laureate (for co-discovering the double-helix structure of DNA), and fellow TED2005 speaker (watch his talk), James Watson couldn’t probably agree more: he also had his genome fully sequenced three months ago. “Project Jim”, as it was called, took 67 days of sequencing time and cost around USD 1 million. (More in this Newsweek story from June.)

The raw sequencing data of both Watson and Venter are publicly available in the US National Center for Biotechnology Information’s Trace Archive.

Lomborg (watch his TED2005 speech) argues that although global warming is clearly happening and is human-caused, the debate over what to do about it has been polluted by way too much bad science, non-science, inflamed rhetoric and outright fibs.

In the book, the Danish political scientist offers numerous examples of how much of the rhetoric over the effects of climate change doesn’t stand up to scrutiny (for example: the most likely effect of climate change would be to increase, not decrease, the amount of ice in Antarctica).

“It’s time to put the debate over whether human-driven climate change is happening behind us and instead focus on technologies to decarbonize the economy,” writes Anderson. But climate change is only one of three strong reasons to do this, he adds: the others are economics (rising direct and indirect costs of oil and carbon fuels) and geopolitics (oil revenues prop up bad governments around the world).

There is a fourth reason that Anderson forgets, and which has been convincingly put forth by Al Gore in his TED2006 speech: it’s a moral imperative.

"Manufactured landscapes" is based on the work of photographer — and 2005 TED Prize winner (watch his speech) — Ed Burtynsky, whose camera has captured stunning images of man-transformed landscapes around the world.

Burtynsky is not much interested in micro: his focus is on vastness, on the scale of the environmental scars and transformations brought forth by industry, energy production and transportation. The documentary (trailer) is a hybrid: it’s a meditation that makes very little use of words, leaving it to images and
situational sounds and noises to tell the story, and at the same time a
convincing illustration of the monstrosity of today’s global trade.
Although Baichwal shows images from Canada, California and Bangladesh
– and makes generous use of Burtynsky’s TEDPrize speech — the movie’s
main character is China, the "manufacture to the world": there,
Burtynsky, followed by Baichwal’s cameras, has shot factories, huge
container ports, quarries, the Three Gorges Dam, electronics
graveyards, the rapid urbanization of Shanghai. (Another great movie, recently, has shown some of this within a fictional frame: Gianni Amelio’s "The Missing Star").

Burtynsky’s work (see his books) can be unsettling. He extracts beautiful, sometimes poetic images from outrageous alterations and destructions of the environment. He calls himself an artist — not a reporter — and refrains from judging what he photographs or from politicizing it,
wanting, as he said at TED, to "make people think harder about our
planet’s future" without suggesting them a direction. As the film goes
I find myself thinking of painters: Jackson Pollock, Piet Mondrian,
Salvador Dalì because, respectively, Burtynsky’s photos of a computer
components dump, the stacks of containers in the port of Tianjin, and
the lunar shipbreaking beach of Chittagong (Bangladesh) oddly remind of
their artworks.

The photographer has a rationale for aestheticizing this devastation: that’s a way to gain access.
Most of what Burtynsky photographs is on private land: "My work is
mostly negotiation, with some photography thrown in", he said half-jokingly at the
premiere in San Francisco. There is a scene in the movie where he is
shown with his assistants and an interpreter trying to talk Chinese
officials into opening the gates to a neverending coal yard, and the
key sentence is "we will make it beautiful". Asked how he convinced
factory managers to gather all their thousands of employees on a street
for the picture that makes the poster of the movie (see image),
Burtynsky explained that what Westerners see as a robotization of
workers, the Chinese proudly consider an organizational and industrial
achievement.

This discrepancy echoes throughout the documentary. It powerfully reminds us
that "stuff" doesn’t just happen, that it comes from somewhere,
although we tend to forget or ignore it (thought of the impact of the
extraction industry lately?) And it illustrates how, as we transform
nature, we redefine who we are and our relationship to the planet.

He says,

I tend to think of the technium like a child of humanity. Our job will be to train the technium, to imbue it with certain principles because, at a certain level and at a certain age, it will basically become much more autonomous than it is now. It will leave us like a teenager who goes on to live alone: although he or she will continue to interact with us and will always be part of us, we have to let it go.

To succeed in this, though, he warns:

We need to have a deep sense of our values, what we stand for. In a deep irony, the more technology advances, the less sure we are of who we are and what we stand for as a species and as individuals.

Watch Kevin Kelly’s TEDTalk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, and join a wide-ranging discussion.

Moyers is a great interviewer. At a certain point, he asks Wilson: why should we care if the woodpecker goes? I mean, we’ve lost—how many species have we lost?

Wilson: How many species going extinct or becoming very rare do you think it takes before you see something happening? We now know from experiments and theory that the more species you take out of an ecosystem like a pond, a patch of forest, a little bit of marine shallow environments, the more you take out the less stable it becomes. If you have a tsunami or a severe drought or a fire, it is less likely that that ecosystem, that body of species in that particular environment, is going to come back all the way. So it becomes less stable with fewer species. And then we also know it becomes less productive. In other words, it’s not able to produce as many kilograms of new matter from photosynthesis and passage through the ecosystem. It’s less productive. It sure is less interesting, though, isn’t it? And more than that: we lose the services of these species.

Moyers: The services of these species.

Wilson: Yes, services of these species to us. Like pollination and water purification.

Moyers: That we get free from nature.

Wilson: Yeah. Here’s an easy way to remember it.

The New York Times may be cranky about the new trend in web comics. (They question the distinction between web comics and animation, and bemoan the “added headaches.”) But those of us who recognize that emerging media are, by definition, works in progress, find the new form fascinating. Our favorite: The Right Number by Scott McCloud (TED2005).