by Alex Evans | Oct 14, 2008 | Global system, UK
[youtube:http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=nRl3uRra_w8]
As Gideon Rachman put it yesterday,
The current financial crisis seems to have actually cheered Mr Brown up. When a mobile phone rang during a speech he was giving late last week, the prime minister made a rare spontaneous joke, speculating about whether this was news of yet another collapsing bank. This kind of joke sounds like the height of bad taste. But somehow it worked. Gallows humour becomes Mr Brown. And besides, his audience had some confidence that he had a handle on the situation.
by Richard Gowan | Oct 13, 2008 | Conflict and security, Off topic, South Asia
I have read some useless UN documents in my time. Few, if any, match “The Crocodile Threat in Timor-Leste”, prepared by the Joint Mission Analysis Cell (the UN intelligence unit) in Dili. This 1,400-word document (“not a definitive report on the subject”) was drawn up in September but is unavailable to the public. This is a pity, as while parts of it (“Legend of East Timor: Crocodile Story”) have been cut-and-paste from the Lonely Planet, it contains some – er – explosive prose…
The larger the animal grows, the greater the variety of animals it includes in its diet. Capable of explosive bursts of speed when launching an attack from the water, many species of crocodile are also capable of fast land-movement. Many crocodiles are capable of explosive charges that can carry them nearly as fast as a running human.
That’s got me, and presumably a whole lot of UN staffers, worried. What to do?
There is a sensitive flap in a crocodile’s throat, known as the glottis, which they use for breathing. As a result, as with some other predators, forcing the arm into the throat may encourage release, although this is not certain by any means and may instead lead to the arm being severed.
Any less risky options available?
The eyes of a crocodile are weak sensitive areas, with several attacks on humans being foiled by poking and gauging (sic) the eyes.
Right, I’m not convinced by that one either. The use of force basically looks like non-starter. But fear not, the UN has an answer: monitor the situation!
There is a real danger for UNMIT personnel swimming in waters around Timor-Leste of being attacked by a crocodile. Fatal attacks on humans have and continue to occur in the waters of Timor-Leste. Some areas are more risky than others, but all areas have the potential for crocodiles to be present. Crocodiles are just as likely to be present in clear water as in murky water. Due to the stealthy nature of the crocodile, visual sightings of a crocodile may not occur prior to an attack. All personnel engaging in swimming in the ocean and positioned close to the waters edge, especially at night, should be aware of the risk of crocodiles and always maintain constant vigilance.
Yep, read those last two lines over again and put them into English: you won’t see the crocodile coming, but you should watch out for it anyway! Pure, pure UN…
by Alex Evans | Oct 13, 2008 | Conflict and security, Cooperation and coherence
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44tsI4IzGcg]
…just one of five global ‘superthreats’ that sit at the core of Superstruct, billed by its creators at the Institute for the Future as the world’s first massively multiplayer forecasting game. Especially good is the system for determining your personal score, which depends on how many proficiency badges you gain (with varying scores depending on the level of challenge involved):
| High Ping Quotient |
Excellent responsiveness to other people’s requests for engagement; strong propensity and ability to reach out to others in a network |
2
|
| Longbroading |
Seeing a much bigger picture; thinking in terms of higher level systems, bigger networks, longer cycles |
4
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| Open Authorship |
Creating content for public modification; the ability to work with massively multiple contributors |
5
|
| Cooperation Radar |
The ability to sense, almost intuitively, who would make the best collaborators on a particular task or mission |
7
|
| Multi-Capitalism |
Fluency in working and trading simultaneously with different hybrid capitals, e.g., natural, intellectual, social, financial, virtual |
8
|
| Mobbability |
The ability to do real-time work in very large groups; a talent for coordinating with many people simultaneously; extreme-scale collaboration |
10
|
| Protovation |
Fearless innovation in rapid, iterative cycles; the ability to lower the costs and increase the speed of failure |
11
|
| Influency |
Knowing how to be persuasive and tell compelling stories in multiple social media spaces (each space requires a different persuasive strategy and technique) |
14
|
| Signal/Noise Management |
Filtering meaningful info, patterns, and commonalities from the massively-multiple streams of data and advice |
18
|
| Emergensight |
The ability to prepare for and handle surprising results and complexity that come with coordination, cooperation and collaboration on extreme scales |
21
|
Here’s how to play. IFTF say:
More than just about imagining what lies ahead, Superstruct is about building a better, stronger future. It’s about inventing new ways to organize the human race and augment our collective human potential.
We open up the future to the public, so that players can document their personal reactions to the scenario. Players are encouraged to “imagine out loud” how their families, their local communities, their professions, or their extended social networks might respond to the game scenarios.
They build websites from the future, keep blogs from the future, upload podcasts from the future, make videos from the future, develop research wikis from the future, and host discussion forums from the future.
In short, they persuasively record, discuss, and debate the details of how they imagine their own personal futures might play out within the game parameters. In Superstruct, we’ll show you the world as it might look in 2019—and you’ll show us what it’s like to live there.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUCi85sg68M]
by David Steven | Oct 13, 2008 | Global system
Economists are getting a bad rap for greater failings at the moment – so probably not many will notice their dismal failure to predict the winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in their field.
But for Global Dashboard readers, here’s a reminder of the standing in the Nobel Prize pool just before the aware of this year’s prize: Barro 16.2%; Hansen 12.2%; Sargent 6.8%; Fama 6.8%; Hart 5.4%; Diamond 4.1%; Feldstein 4.1%; Sims 4.1% and Thaler 4.1%.
So I think it’s fair to see that Paul Krugman’s win is a surprise – at least to his professional colleagues. Krugman’s award comes for work that “integrated the previously disparate research fields of international trade and economic geography.”
Many of these ideas are presented in approachable form in Pop Internationalism, a book that – among other things – takes a hatchet to the idea of international competitiveness and which remains worth a read.
“Let’s start telling the truth,” Krugman writes. “Competitiveness is a meaningless word when applied to national economies. And the obsession with competitiveness is both wrong and dangerous.” An emphasis on absolute economic advantage at a national level (as opposed to relative or comparative advantage) drives policy-makers towards zero-sum thinking, Krugman believes – something that can be disastrous in an interdependent world.
Writing in 1997, his warnings have great contemporary relevance:
Why do we imagine that the global market is something new? Because politics killed that first global economy. Between 1914 and 1945 wars and protectionism tore up the dense web of trade, investment and often family ties that linked old Chicago [then a boom city] to the rest of the world.
It is a little-known but startling fact that world trade as a share of world production did not return to its 1913 level until about 1970; it is even more startling that net international flows of capital (as opposed to complex financial operations that do not finance real investment) were a considerably larger share of world savings in the years preceding World War I than they have been in the ’emerging market’ boom of the last few years.
Surely everyone who things about it is aware that for all our current hysteria, international migration was far larger in an era that could actually build the Statue of Liberty to welcome immigrants than it has ever been since.
by Alex Evans | Oct 13, 2008 | Conflict and security, Global system
Nils Gilman at Small Precautions:
Six months ago (specifically: March 8, before even Bear Stearns had collapsed) I undertook a scenario planning exercise with Peter Schwartz, Steve Weber, and several other colleagues, trying to assess where this whole “sucker” (to use Bush’s choice phrase) could possibly end up. We spent a lovely, sunny afternoon on Peter’s balcony in the Berkeley Hills thinking rational but black thoughts about where it could all end up.
By the end of the exercise, as we discussed the various risks in the system, and how it might all play out, we had laid out a scenario whereby the money center banks, that is, the very core of the Western financial system (in the U.S., these are Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, and Bank of America) could end up insolvent, necessitating a wholesale nationalization of the banking sector. We then looked around the table at each other and tried to imagine what this would mean for Western capitalism and democracy, and it just seemed too crazy to even consider. Political and ideological apocalypse on a scale of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
We all sat there, feeling a little crazy, and then finally one of us (who shall remain, for now, unnamed) uttered the most taboo words in scenario planning: “That could never happen. Impossible.”
And we all agreed, and wrapped up the session.
The wholesale ideological and political collapse of Communism? There were lots of smart people as late as 1989 who said that couldn’t ever happen, either….
