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Introducing The Paper Tab:

Wed, 24 Jul 2013 10:22:24 +0100

A future competitor to the iPad that leaves usual tablet conventions in favour of a flexible “electrophoretic” display that functions like digital paper, basically, it’s a fold-up, roll-up tablet computer. The genius behind this is innovator, Roel Vertegaal, Age 41. He is also the Director of Queen’s University’s Human Media Lab in Kingston, Ont. Here’s how it works…

Iris ID:

Wed, 24 Jul 2013 10:20:49 +0100

We’ve seen the idea of this technology being used in Hollywood blockbusters, mostly science fiction flicks where someone is trying to access a highly secure government facility but now iris recognition scanners seems to be the ultimate in human identification software. Where better to test this new technology than in schools.

‘Kids lose their school IDs but they don't often lose their eyeballs.

That's one of the reasons why a growing number of American schools are replacing traditional identification cards with iris scanners. By December, several schools -- ranging from elementary schools to colleges -- will be rolling out various iris scanning security methods.

Winthrop University in South Carolina tested out the iris scanning technology during freshman orientation this summer.

"Iris scanning has a very high level of accuracy, and you don't have to touch anything, said James Hammond, head of Winthrop University's Information Technology department. "It can be hands free security."

Iris-scanning is part of a growing trend called "biometrics," a type of security that recognizes physical characteristics to identify people. As the technology becomes faster and cheaper to build, several security equipment manufacturers are looking at biometric methods like iris scanning as the ID badge of the future.

In the next year, industry insiders say the technology will be available all over-- from banks to airports. That means instead of entering your pin number, you can gain access to an ATM in a blink. Used in an airport, the system will analyze your iris as you pass through security, identifying and welcoming you by name.

One company developing that technology is Eyelock. The company's scanners are already in use in foreign airports and at high-security offices.

Eyelock's technology records video of your eyeball and uses an algorithm to find the best image of each eye. Eyelock is also entering the school market, piloting their devices in elementary school districts and nursery schools around the country.

"Imagine a world where you're no longer reliant on user names and passwords," Eyelock CMO Anthony Antolino told CNNMoney. "If we're going through a turnstile and you have authorization to go beyond that, it'll open the turnstile for you, if you embed it into a tablet or PC, it will unlock your phone or your tablet or it will log you into your email account."

Eyelock's airport security technology can process up to fifty people per minute. "You walk through without stopping, you look at the camera, it recognizes you in less than one second," Antolino said. "In the case of customs, by the time you approach the customs agent your profile would pull up and present your documents for authorization."

Though some privacy advocates worry that convenience could be coming at the expense of security. The iris scanning companies note that the data their scanners collect is encrypted -- an outsider would only see 1s and 0s if they went in search of your iris scans. And the companies themselves don't collect any of the data -- the schools, airports and businesses that use them own the data.

"It's sort of like a brave new world; the new technology is sort of scary," said Page Bowden, a parent of a student at Winthrop University's on-campus nursery school. "But when you stop to actually think about it, and think about the level of security that [it] affords you as a parent and your children, it's worth it."

Apps for the Great Beyond

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 09:24:11 +0100

The next time you stop by the cemetery, you may learn a lot more about your dearly departed than their names and a few ceremonial words. A few companies are now marketing quick response (QR) codes for gravestones, which will allow visitors to connect their smartphones to a website containing a collection of information on a deceased person, including photos, videos and testimonials from family and friends.

"It's about keeping people's memories alive in different ways," Poole, England based Chester Pearce Associates Managing Director Stephen Nimmo told Reuters.

"When you lose somebody, whether it be suddenly or ongoing, you can really struggle with things. Talking about them is very important, keeping their memory going is very important and this is just an add-on to that."

QR codes have become commonplace on advertising campaigns, allowing a smartphone owner to scan the bar code on an ad to obtain more information about the product or campaign online. U.S. customers can get their own QR code gravestones as well. Of course, adding publicly available information after a person's death raises some issues of privacy and taste. Though there are a few obvious precautions, such as adding password protection to a grave's QR code. In addition, if the product catches on, people will most likely begin stipulating in their estate planning what sort of information they'd want included.

"It's a new technology, it's something that there will be people who like it, there will be people who don't and that's the same in everything that we do," Nimmo said.

Nimmo says Chester Pearce charges customers about $500 for the QR code service, which can be placed on memorial benches or plaques in addition to the grave sites themselves. Gill Tuttiet purchased one of the QR codes for her late husband, Timothy, and says he would have appreciated the forward-thinking gesture.

"Tim was quite outward-going and game for anything. I think this is the way forward and Tim would have wanted that, and it's making a process that's hard possibly easier," Tuttiet, 53, told Reuters.

The Future of Medicine: 10 Goals for the Next Decade

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 18:30:09 +0100

We asked experts in the fields of neuroscience, biology, immunology and more to tell us their biggest goals for the next decade. Here's one we found interesting.

Mapping the Genome Opens a World of Opportunity

Scientists must also come to a better understanding of the metabolic processes that occur within each cell. The metabolic system controls all of the body’s biochemical processes, including extracting energy from the environment and using it to help build new cells. Obesity and diabetes are considered metabolic diseases, and recently researchers have even begun investigating the role of metabolism in cancer. One major goal for the coming decade is creating the “metabolome,” a complete map of the metabolic system that would let doctors observe the body’s processes on a cellular level and give them insight into the chemical differences between healthy and diseased tissues, perhaps leading to new tests or treatments. Yet another groundbreaking mapping initiative will detail the complex networks of the brain and help us determine what goes wrong in diseased brains.

Flexible Solar Cells

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 18:18:02 +0100

Swiss scientists have invented extremely energy-efficient solar cells, called flexible CIGS solar cells. With a thin polymer foil as their base, they are better suited for both portable electronics equipment and house facades than inflexible silicon solar cells. Moreover, their energy efficiency of 18.7 percent outperforms other flexible solar cells. Scientists hope that the flexible solar cells can be used to generate cheaper electricity in the future.

Online Anonymity

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 16:53:18 +0100

Whatever your reason for desiring anonymity, you’ll find it hard to make yourself truly traceless on the web. Even if you refrain from signing in to any services, your IP traffic is logged almost everywhere you go. Even if you’re not worried about Big Brother, this can be disconcerting. Worry not, there’s still one thing you can do to get invisible — put all of your network activity behind a proxy. This masks your IP address using a virtual detour that makes it appear that your connection is originating from somewhere else in the world, like Brazil or China. Here’s how to set yourself up for backdoor browsing.

In essence, proxies are public servers that route network traffic to the World Wide Web. You don’t need to know a guy who knows a guy to find one; several free proxy lists are available on Google and updated daily. With a simple search for “proxy list,” you should have no problem spotting exactly what you’re looking for on the front page, such as this site. Don’t concern yourself too much with choosing a port type or SSL configuration if you don’t know what they are; just make sure you exclude transparent proxies from your search (this type of proxy only routes information and foregoes anonymity filtering). Feel free to get creative with the list of countries; it doesn’t matter where your proxy server is, as long as it’s not in your next-door neighbor’s house.

Depending on your needs, you can put as little as a single browser behind a proxy, or your entire computer. Some might prefer to have a single browser dedicated to anonymous browsing, but if you consider yourself a particularly paranoid surfer, you don’t need to configure each browser separately.

Firefox

In Firefox, open your Preferences/Options menu and click the Advanced tab to the far right. In the Advanced settings, click Network and then the Connection button. In the Connection panel, you’ll be given the option to select a manual proxy configuration. Here, you can enter the proxy address you pulled from the list. The address will be in the format of four octets, followed by a colon and between two and four additional digits (i.e. 555.55.55.555:8080). The numbers before the colon are the actual address, and the numbers after represent the port number. Ensure that you’ve clicked the option to use the proxy for all protocols, apply the changes, and enjoy your new position as the wizard behind the curtain.

Google Chrome

Google Chrome pulls whatever proxy settings you have on your computer’s preferences and applies them to the browser, so if you want anonymous browsing in Chrome, you’ll have to go all or nothing. If you’re sure you want to put all of your network traffic through a proxy, simply follow the instructions for your operating system below.

Internet Explorer/Windows

In Internet Explorer, click through the Tools menu and select Internet Options (you can also access these options through the Windows Control Panel). Navigate into Connections and select LAN settings. Check the box to use a proxy server for your LAN and enter the address you pulled from the proxy list, with the numbers before the colon in the address bar and the numbers after the colon in the port number box. Save all changes and start roaming the web anonymously at last.

Safari/Mac OS X

In Safari, open the Preferences menu and click the Advanced tab. From there you can open your OS X proxy settings — alternatively available in your System Preferences — with which you can add your proxy address to any of the given protocols (if you’re not sure which to pick, just configure them all). The numbers before the colon in your proxy address go in the address bar, and the numbers after go in the port number box.

Ubuntu

In Ubuntu, proxy settings can be set in the Network Proxy menu under the System tab. Select the radial option for using a manual proxy configuration and input the proxy address you obtained into the designated address bars, with the numbers after the colon in the port box. For full anonymity, check the box to use the proxy settings for all protocols.

If you’ve ever seen the movie Hollow Man, then you’re certainly familiar with the idea that invisibility can corrupt a perfectly good human being. Just because your traffic is tougher to track doesn’t mean you should exploit the darker side of the web, and you may find your homemade proxy setup to be as weak as cardboard to the FBI if they’re provoked. Use anonymity for peace of mind (and the occasional world travelling prank on location services), but heed our warning: You haven’t just scored a free pass to unlimited torrents and Undernet forums. Go forth and use your newfound powers for good instead.

Electronic Voting: Are Nigerians Truly Ready

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 14:40:08 +0100

First I must dispel a popular myth against electronic voting, the assertion that Nigeria is not ready or ripe for electronic voting. This is a myth without ‘street credence’ or empirical evidence. There are two categories of proponents of this myth. The first category is made up of those who genuinely think Nigerians are so backward as to comprehend the use of what they consider super sophisticated technology. Those who belong to this group are sincere. The do not know. All they need is adequate education to make them understand what electronic voting is and how the absence of or lack of citizen sophistication is no barrier to its use. Once they realise that electronic voting is not as sophisticated as the ubiquitous Sharp calculator or the popular Nokia handsets and that we have successfully conducted online registration for WAEC examinations for over a decade as well as the reality that the staff that would attend to each electronic station would do the ‘difficult computing job’ (there is none) rather than abandoning each old person or unsophisticated voter to his or her fate on election day, you can get this category to ‘cooperate’.

To secure the support of the second category of people is however not that simple. This category is against electronic voting solely because it would undermine and impede its traditional capability and monopoly over the electoral processes – its ability to manipulate each step and outcomes. Of course nobody would admit that the reason for his protestation against electronic voting is because of a hidden agenda to preserve the status-quo.

Something must be projected as an excuse and the easiest excuse is that ‘Nigerians are not ripe for electronic voting’. There is nothing that can be done to get this second category to support electronic voting. The reform must be driven against its adherents point blank! That said, I must now go back to the earlier questions bordering on how we can ensure that we attain the gains of electronic voting rather than introducing same only for it to become a weapon in the hands of would be electoral manipulators. Yes, electronic voting can be manipulated! The very first step INEC must take is to develop a policy document and a legal framework for the protection and preservation of electronic voting system.

This framework will enumerate the dos and don’ts of the entire process, protect the identity-related or primary data of individuals that would be in the custody of the agency, itemize the procedures for data validation in instances of dispute by providing scientific and fool-proof guidelines and procedures to be followed in courts or tribunals during adjudication as well as embed an unmatched regime of transparency that would confer credibility upon the electoral processes and the resultant dispute resolution phase. Imagine the impact this could have on election litigation by reducing period of judicial review from several months (some took years) to a few hours or days and the realization by both petitioners and respondents that the processes involved in the adjudication of their electoral dispute are of unquestionable integrity. Such is the potential when the power of technology is properly harnessed.

The aforementioned are minimum critical requirements. Their absence was responsible for the directionless nature of INEC’s 2010/2011 electronic registration exercise such that INEC’s earlier promise of technology use as a major enhancer of free and fair election only ultimately played marginal role in the success of the elections whereas the public and the National Assembly’s tacit support for INEC’s N89billion budget was built around a technology enhanced fool-proof electronic register as the transformational elixir required to get identity verification right for the voting age and permanently ensure only real living people can vote and that only one legitimate vote can come from one genuine person for one particular candidate seeking one specific post. INEC would however do a better job by developing this overall policy instrument and legal framework in conjunction with stakeholders, sister organizations like the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA), the Nigerian Identity Management Agency, the Ministry of Justice and related professional institutions like the Nigerian Computer Society as well as the relevant division of the Nigerian Society of Engineers. Because of my peculiar experience as one of the pioneers (I use that word with all sense of modesty) in the application of electronic technology in managing enterprise and large public record using fingerprint identification system in Nigeria and who understands the distinctive ‘Nigerian factor’, I strongly advocate that for the policy document to accomplish its intended objective, it must expressly support an independent cross agency check and balance routine. It must also support independent people-driven regime of transparency, transparency affirmation and monitoring. In essence the system must not only grant absolute confidence to all stakeholders (citizens, political parties, law enforcement agencies, election monitors etc) that it is absolutely reliable, effective and beyond manipulation, it must been seen – and verifiably so – that it is doing just that. In theory and in practice, this is doable.

There is no doubt that electronic voting would bring a major change to the existing electoral system. Any such change must be matched by changes in the system as well as the processes involved, hence the reason for the policy stipulates and legal framework advocated above. Also, in order to eliminate the challenges occasioned by inadequate power supply and logistics, the new legal framework would benefit immensely if the voting period is altered from the current single day to a period of about 30 days to accommodate early voting. You think this would encourage electoral malpractices? No, not if the systemic checks advanced above are in place and definitely not when people’s votes are truly being matched to their fingerprint minutiae! This will also have the multiple benefits of reducing the need for too many voting stations, introducing permanent voting stations in secure locations and enabling INEC to drive political parties to utilize such voting stations for the conduct of their primaries thereby promoting real internal democracy in those parties. A leadership that does not want to profit from or implicitly or tacitly promote election manipulations would embrace this.

Research by: Tunji Ariyomo

*Tunji is a chattered engineer and the pioneer Coordinator of the Ondo State Information Technology Development Centre (SITDEC). He is currently a Policy Chair of the National Development Initiative NDi (an independent think-tank with focus on Nigeria). NDi Project can be accessed at www.nd-i.org* To respond to this column and ask question from Tunji or make contribution, send email to oariyomo@nd-i.org

Apocalypse 2012

Fri, 07 Sep 2012 14:51:49 +0100

When the sun rises on December 22, as it surely will, do not expect apologies or even a rethink. No matter how often apocalyptic predictions fail to come true, another one soon arrives. And the prophets of apocalypse always draw a following—from the 100,000 Millerites who took to the hills in 1843, awaiting the end of the world, to the thousands who believed in Harold Camping, the Christian radio broadcaster who forecast the final rapture in both 1994 and 2011.

Religious zealots hardly have a monopoly on apocalyptic thinking. Consider some of the environmental cataclysms that so many experts promised were inevitable. Best-selling economist Robert Heilbroner in 1974: “The outlook for man, I believe, is painful, difficult, perhaps desperate, and the hope that can be held out for his future prospects seem to be very slim indeed.” Or best-selling ecologist Paul Ehrlich in 1968: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s ["and 1980s" was added in a later edition] the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked on now … nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.” Or Jimmy Carter in a televised speech in 1977: “We could use up all of the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade.”

Predictions of global famine and the end of oil in the 1970s proved just as wrong as end-of-the-world forecasts from millennialist priests. Yet there is no sign that experts are becoming more cautious about apocalyptic promises. If anything, the rhetoric has ramped up in recent years. Echoing the Mayan calendar folk, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved its Doomsday Clock one minute closer to midnight at the start of 2012, commenting: “The global community may be near a point of no return in efforts to prevent catastrophe from changes in Earth’s atmosphere.”

Over the five decades since the success of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 and the four decades since the success of the Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth in 1972, prophecies of doom on a colossal scale have become routine. Indeed, we seem to crave ever-more-frightening predictions—we are now, in writer Gary Alexander’s word, apocaholic. The past half century has brought us warnings of population explosions, global famines, plagues, water wars, oil exhaustion, mineral shortages, falling sperm counts, thinning ozone, acidifying rain, nuclear winters, Y2K bugs, mad cow epidemics, killer bees, sex-change fish, cell-phone-induced brain-cancer epidemics, and climate catastrophes.

So far all of these specters have turned out to be exaggerated. True, we have encountered obstacles, public-health emergencies, and even mass tragedies. But the promised Armageddons—the thresholds that cannot be uncrossed, the tipping points that cannot be untipped, the existential threats to Life as We Know It—have consistently failed to materialize. To see the full depth of our apocaholism, and to understand why we keep getting it so wrong, we need to consult the past 50 years of history.

The classic apocalypse has four horsemen, and our modern version follows that pattern, with the four riders being chemicals (DDT, CFCs, acid rain), diseases (bird flu, swine flu, SARS, AIDS, Ebola, mad cow disease), people (population, famine), and resources (oil, metals).

The Silent Spring, published 50 years ago this year, was instrumental in the emergence of modern environmentalism. “Without this book, the environmental movement might have been long delayed or never have developed at all,” Al Gore wrote in his introduction to the 1994 edition. Carson’s main theme was that the use of synthetic pesticides—DDT in particular—was causing not only a massacre of wildlife but an epidemic of cancer in human beings. One of her chief inspirations and sources for the book was Wilhelm Hueper, the first director of the environmental arm of the National Cancer Institute. So obsessed was Hueper with his notion that pesticides and other synthetic chemicals were causing cancers (and that industry was covering this up) that he strenuously opposed the suggestion that tobacco-smoking take any blame. Hueper wrote in a 1955 paper called “Lung Cancers and Their Causes,” published in CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians, “Industrial or industry-related atmospheric pollutants are to a great part responsible for the causation of lung cancer … cigarette smoking is not a major factor in the causation of lung cancer.”

In fact, of course, the link between smoking and lung cancer was found to be ironclad. But the link between modern chemicals and cancer is sketchy at best. Even DDT, which clearly does pose health risks to those unsafely exposed, has never been definitively linked to cancer. In general, cancer incidence and death rates, when corrected for the average age of the population, have been falling now for 20 years. By the 1970s the focus of chemical concern had shifted to air pollution. Life magazine set the scene in January 1970: “Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support … the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution … by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half.” Instead, driven partly by regulation and partly by innovation, both of which dramatically cut the pollution coming from car exhaust and smokestacks, ambient air quality improved dramatically in many cities in the developed world over the following few decades. Levels of carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, lead, ozone, and volatile organic compounds fell and continue to fall.

In the 1980s it was acid rain’s turn to be the source of apocalyptic forecasts. In this case it was nature in the form of forests and lakes that would bear the brunt of human pollution. The issue caught fire in Germany, where a cover story in the news magazine Der Spiegel in November 1981 screamed: “THE FOREST DIES.” Not to be outdone, Stern magazine declared that a third of Germany’s forests were already dead or dying. Bernhard Ulrich, a soil scientist at the University of Göttingen, said it was already too late for the country’s forests: “They cannot be saved.” Forest death, or waldsterben, became a huge story across Europe. “The forests and lakes are dying. Already the damage may be irreversible,” journalist Fred Pearce wrote in New Scientist in 1982. It was much the same in North America: Half of all US lakes were said to be becoming dangerously acidified, and forests from Virginia to central Canada were thought to be suffering mass die-offs of trees.

Conventional wisdom has it that this fate was averted by prompt legislative action to reduce sulphur dioxide emissions from power plants. That account is largely false. There was no net loss of forest in the 1980s to reverse. In the US, a 10-year government-sponsored study involving some 700 scientists and costing about $500 million reported in 1990 that “there is no evidence of a general or unusual decline of forests in the United States and Canada due to acid rain” and “there is no case of forest decline in which acidic deposition is known to be a predominant cause.” In Germany, Heinrich Spiecker, director of the Institute for Forest Growth, was commissioned by a Finnish forestry organization to assess the health of European forests. He concluded that they were growing faster and healthier than ever and had been improving throughout the 1980s. “Since we began measuring the forest more than 100 years ago, there’s never been a higher volume of wood … than there is now,” Spiecker said. (Ironically, one of the chief ingredients of acid rain—nitrogen oxide—breaks down naturally to become nitrate, a fertilizer for trees.) As for lakes, it turned out that their rising acidity was likely caused more by reforestation than by acid rain; one study suggested that the correlation between acidity in rainwater and the pH in the lakes was very low. The story of acid rain is not of catastrophe averted but of a minor environmental nuisance somewhat abated.

The threat to the ozone layer came next. In the 1970s scientists discovered a decline in the concentration of ozone over Antarctica during several springs, and the Armageddon megaphone was dusted off yet again. The blame was pinned on chlorofluorocarbons, used in refrigerators and aerosol cans, reacting with sunlight. The disappearance of frogs and an alleged rise of melanoma in people were both attributed to ozone depletion. So too was a supposed rash of blindness in animals: Al Gore wrote in 1992 about blind salmon and rabbits, while The New York Times reported “an increase in Twilight Zone-type reports of sheep and rabbits with cataracts” in Patagonia. But all these accounts proved incorrect. The frogs were dying of a fungal disease spread by people; the sheep had viral pinkeye; the mortality rate from melanoma actually leveled off during the growth of the ozone hole; and as for the blind salmon and rabbits, they were never heard of again.

There was an international agreement to cease using CFCs by 1996. But the predicted recovery of the ozone layer never happened: The hole stopped growing before the ban took effect, then failed to shrink afterward. The ozone hole still grows every Antarctic spring, to roughly the same extent each year. Nobody quite knows why. Some scientists think it is simply taking longer than expected for the chemicals to disintegrate; a few believe that the cause of the hole was misdiagnosed in the first place. Either way, the ozone hole cannot yet be claimed as a looming catastrophe, let alone one averted by political action.

Repeatedly throughout the past five decades, the imminent advent of a new pandemic has been foretold. The 1976 swine flu panic was an early case. Following the death of a single recruit at Fort Dix, the Ford administration vaccinated more than 40 million Americans, but more people probably died from adverse reactions to the vaccine than died of swine flu.

A few years later, a fatal virus did begin to spread at an alarming rate, initially through the homosexual community. AIDS was soon, rightly, the focus of serious alarm. But not all the dire predictions proved correct. “Research studies now project that one in five—listen to me, hard to believe—one in five heterosexuals could be dead from AIDS at the end of the next three years. That’s by 1990. One in five,” Oprah Winfrey warned in 1987.

Bad as AIDS was, the broad-based epidemic in the Americas, Europe, and Asia never materialized as feared, though it did in Africa. In 2000 the US National Intelligence Council predicted that HIV/AIDS would worsen in the developing world for at least 10 years and was “likely to aggravate and, in some cases, may even provoke economic decay, social fragmentation and political destabilization in the hardest hit countries in the developing and former communist worlds.”

Yet the peak of the epidemic had already passed in the late 1990s, and today AIDS is in slow retreat throughout the world. New infections were 20 percent lower in 2010 than in 1997, and the lives of more than 2.5 million people have been saved since 1995 by antiretroviral treatment. “Just a few years ago, talking about ending the AIDS epidemic in the near term seemed impossible, but science, political support, and community responses are starting to deliver clear and tangible results,” UNAIDS executive director Michel Sidibé wrote last year.

The emergence of AIDS led to a theory that other viruses would spring from tropical rain forests to wreak revenge on humankind for its ecological sins. That, at least, was the implication of Laurie Garrett’s 1994 book, The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance. The most prominent candidate was Ebola, the hemorrhagic fever that starred in Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone, published the same year. Writer Stephen King called the book “one of the most horrifying things I’ve ever read.” Right on cue, Ebola appeared again in the Congo in 1995, but it soon disappeared. Far from being a harbinger, HIV was the only new tropical virus to go pandemic in 50 years.

In the 1980s British cattle began dying from mad cow disease, caused by an infectious agent in feed that was derived from the remains of other cows. When people, too, began to catch this disease, predictions of the scale of the epidemic quickly turned terrifying: Up to 136,000 would die, according to one study. A pathologist warned that the British “have to prepare for perhaps thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of cases of vCJD [new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human manifestation of mad cow] coming down the line.” Yet the total number of deaths so far in the UK has been 176, with just five occurring in 2011 and none so far in 2012.

In 2003 it was SARS, a virus from civet cats, that ineffectively but inconveniently led to quarantines in Beijing and Toronto amid predictions of global Armageddon. SARS subsided within a year, after killing just 774 people. In 2005 it was bird flu, described at the time by a United Nations official as being “like a combination of global warming and HIV/AIDS 10 times faster than it’s running at the moment.” The World Health Organization’s official forecast was 2 million to 7.4 million dead. In fact, by late 2007, when the disease petered out, the death toll was roughly 200. In 2009 it was Mexican swine flu. WHO director general Margaret Chan said: “It really is all of humanity that is under threat during a pandemic.” The outbreak proved to be a normal flu episode.

The truth is, a new global pandemic is growing less likely, not more. Mass migration to cities means the opportunity for viruses to jump from wildlife to the human species has not risen and has possibly even declined, despite media hype to the contrary. Water- and insect-borne infections—generally the most lethal—are declining as living standards slowly improve. It’s true that casual-contact infections such as colds are thriving—but only by being mild enough that their victims can soldier on with work and social engagements, thereby allowing the virus to spread. Even if a lethal virus does go global, the ability of medical science to sequence its genome and devise a vaccine or cure is getting better all the time.

Of all the cataclysmic threats to human civilization envisaged in the past 50 years, none has drawn such hyperbolic language as people themselves. “Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet,” says Agent Smith in the filmThe Matrix. Such rhetoric echoes real-life activists like Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society: “We need to radically and intelligently reduce human populations to fewer than one billion … Curing a body of cancer requires radical and invasive therapy, and therefore, curing the biosphere of the human virus will also require a radical and invasive approach.”

On a “stinking hot” evening in a taxi in Delhi in 1966, as Paul Ehrlich wrote in his best seller, The Population Bomb, “the streets seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people.” Ehrlich’s conclusion was bleak: “The train of events leading to the dissolution of India as a viable nation” was already in progress. And other experts agreed. “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” said Denis Hayes, organizer of the first Earth Day in 1970. Sending food to India was a mistake and only postponed the inevitable, William and Paul Paddock wrote in their best seller,Famine—1975!

What actually happened was quite different. The death rate fell. Famine became rarer. The population growth rate was cut in half, thanks chiefly to the fact that as babies stop dying, people stop having so many of them. Over the past 50 years, worldwide food production per capita has risen, even as the global population has doubled. Indeed, so successful have farmers been at increasing production that food prices fell to record lows in the early 2000s and large parts of western Europe and North America have been reclaimed by forest. (A policy of turning some of the world’s grain into motor fuel has reversed some of that decline and driven prices back up.)

Meanwhile, family size continues to shrink on every continent. The world population will probably never double again, whereas it quadrupled in the 20th century. With improvements in seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, transport, and irrigation still spreading across Africa, the world may well feed 9 billion inhabitants in 2050—and from fewer acres than it now uses to feed 7 billion.

In 1977 American President Jimmy Carter went on television and declared: “World oil production can probably keep going up for another six or eight years. But sometime in the 1980s, it can’t go up anymore. Demand will overtake production.” He was not alone in this view. The end of oil and gas had been predicted repeatedly throughout the 20th century. In 1922 President Warren Harding created the US Coal Commission, which undertook an 11-month survey that warned, “Already the output of [natural] gas has begun to wane. Production of oil cannot long maintain its present rate.” In 1956, M. King Hubbert, a Shell geophysicist, forecast that gas production in the US would peak at about 14 trillion cubic feet per year sometime around 1970.

All these predictions failed to come true. Oil and gas production have continued to rise during the past 50 years. Gas reserves took an enormous leap upward after 2007, as engineers learned how to exploit abundant shale gas. In 2011 the International Energy Agency estimated that global gas resources would last 250 years. Although it seems likely that cheap sources of oil may indeed start to peter out in coming decades, gigantic quantities of shale oil and oil sands will remain available, at least at a price. Once again, obstacles have materialized, but the apocalypse has not. Ever since Thomas Robert Malthus, doomsayers have tended to underestimate the power of innovation. In reality, driven by price increases, people simply developed new technologies, such as the horizontal drilling technique that has helped us extract more oil from shale.

It was not just energy but metals too that were supposed to run out. In 1970 Harrison Brown, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, forecast in Scientific American that lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would all be gone by 1990. The best-selling book The Limits to Growth was published 40 years ago by the Club of Rome, a committee of prominent environmentalists with a penchant for meeting in Italy. The book forecast that if use continued to accelerate exponentially, world reserves of several metals could run out by 1992 and help precipitate a collapse of civilization and population in the subsequent century, when people no longer had the raw materials to make machinery. These claims were soon being repeated in schoolbooks. “Some scientists estimate that the world’s known supplies of oil, tin, copper, and aluminum will be used up within your lifetime,” one read. In fact, as the results of a famous wager between Paul Ehrlich and economist Julian Simon later documented, the metals did not run out. Indeed, they grew cheaper. Ehrlich, who claimed he had been “goaded” into the bet, growled, “The one thing we’ll never run out of is imbeciles.”

Over the past half century, none of our threatened eco-pocalypses have played out as predicted. Some came partly true; some were averted by action; some were wholly chimerical. This raises a question that many find discomforting: With a track record like this, why should people accept the cataclysmic claims now being made about climate change? After all, 2012 marks the apocalyptic deadline of not just the Mayans but also a prominent figure in our own time: Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, who said in 2007 that “if there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late … This is the defining moment.”

So, should we worry or not about the warming climate? It is far too binary a question. The lesson of failed past predictions of ecological apocalypse is not that nothing was happening but that the middle-ground possibilities were too frequently excluded from consideration. In the climate debate, we hear a lot from those who think disaster is inexorable if not inevitable, and a lot from those who think it is all a hoax. We hardly ever allow the moderate “lukewarmers” a voice: those who suspect that the net positive feedbacks from water vapor in the atmosphere are low, so that we face only 1 to 2 degrees Celsius of warming this century; that the Greenland ice sheet may melt but no faster than its current rate of less than 1 percent per century; that net increases in rainfall (and carbon dioxide concentration) may improve agricultural productivity; that ecosystems have survived sudden temperature lurches before; and that adaptation to gradual change may be both cheaper and less ecologically damaging than a rapid and brutal decision to give up fossil fuels cold turkey.

We’ve already seen some evidence that humans can forestall warming-related catastrophes. A good example is malaria, which was once widely predicted to get worse as a result of climate change. Yet in the 20th century, malaria retreated from large parts of the world, including North America and Russia, even as the world warmed. Malaria-specific mortality plummeted in the first decade of the current century by an astonishing 25 percent. The weather may well have grown more hospitable to mosquitoes during that time. But any effects of warming were more than counteracted by pesticides, new antimalarial drugs, better drainage, and economic development. Experts such as Peter Gething at Oxford argue that these trends will continue, whatever the weather.

Just as policy can make the climate crisis worse—mandating biofuels has not only encouraged rain forest destruction, releasing carbon, but driven millions into poverty and hunger—technology can make it better. If plant breeders boost rice yields, then people may get richer and afford better protection against extreme weather. If nuclear engineers make fusion (or thorium fission) cost-effective, then carbon emissions may suddenly fall. If gas replaces coal because of horizontal drilling, then carbon emissions may rise more slowly. Humanity is a fast-moving target. We will combat our ecological threats in the future by innovating to meet them as they arise, not through the mass fear stoked by worst-case scenarios.

Matt Ridley (rationaloptimist.com) is a columnist for The Wall Street Journal and the author, most recently, of The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves.

Plan For Life-Long Learning

Fri, 07 Sep 2012 14:42:01 +0100

How can IT workers traverse the current skills gap and get to work on the new technologies employers say they want now? Beyond that, how should they prepare for the rapidly approaching transformation of corporate IT?

First and foremost, tech managers and employment experts say, IT professionals must never stop learning – even though some, if not all, of the training they need will be on their own time and with their own money. ‘You can’t rely on a company for your growth and training anymore,’ say executive recruiters. ‘Except for a few enlightened companies, if they’re training you at all, they’re training you for what they need, not necessarily training for what you need to develop your technical skills over the long run’.

That message resonates in many technocrats, who believe they have been successful in both corporate IT and consulting careers in part because they’re willing to invest their own time and resources in staying technologically current. ‘You need to invest in your career. I have N200,000 worth of hardware – a server, two processors, a terabyte of storage – in my house. That’s how I learned,’ says one technocrat, who also has a string of Microsoft certifications. ‘Nobody told me to get my (Microsoft Certified IT Professional credential), but that helped me get a job.’

In addition to pursuing training opportunities, IT professionals need to determine where their skills will fit best in the future. They should begin by assessing where they are in the life cycles of three types of technologies: emerging, mainstream and legacy systems.

The future of education in Africa is mobile

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 12:54:39 +0100

Education systems are under stress.

It is a problem felt in many parts of the world, but in Africa, the strain is even more acute.

In sub-Saharan Africa, 10m children drop out of primary school every year. Even those fortunate enough to complete primary school often leave with literacy and numeracy skills far below expected levels.

In addition, there is a major shortage of trained and motivated teachers. It is estimated that to ensure that every child has access to quality education by 2015, sub-Saharan Africa will need to recruit 350,000 new teachers every year. It seems increasingly unlikely that this will happen. Throw in one of the highest concentrations of illiterate adults in the world, and you begin to understand the scale of the problem.

In the last decade many African countries have, against these significant odds, made solid progress in improving their education levels. However, the challenges are often too large. The “usual” tried and tested methods of delivering education are not enough. Yet there is a potential solution.

While education struggles to cope, mobile communication has grown exponentially. Africa is today the fastest growing and second largest mobile phone market in the world. While in some countries – including Botswana, Gabon and Namibia – there are more mobile subscriptions than inhabitants, Africa still has the lowest mobile penetration of any market. There is plenty more growth to come. Over 620 million mobile subscriptions mean that for the first time in the history of the continent, its people are connected.

These connections offer an opportunity for education. Already, we are starting to see the beginnings of change. An increasing number of initiatives – some large-scale, some small – are using mobile technologies to distribute educational materials, support reading, and enable peer-to-peer learning and remote tutoring through social networking services. Mobiles are streamlining education administration and improving communication between schools, teachers and parents. The list goes on. Mobile learning, either alone or in combination with existing education approaches, is supporting and extending education in ways not possible before.

Numbers game

For millions of Africans, much of their daily reading and writing happens on mobile phones in the form of SMS and instant message (IM) chats. Mobiles are also increasingly being used to access long-form reading material – not only 160 character text bites. For example, projects such as Yoza Cellphone Stories, which offers downloads of stories and novels, has shown impressive uptake amongst young African readers who enjoy mobile novels or ‘m-novels’. On Yoza, users not only read stories but comment and vote on them. In its first 18 months, Yoza had 470,000 complete reads of its stories and poems, as well as 47,000 user comments.

Since 2010, the non-profit organization Worldreader has provided school children in a number of developing countries with access to digital books through donated Kindle e-readers. Recently, it has begun to publish the books via a mobile phone-based e-reader. The Worldreader app and its library of stories is already on 3.9 million handsets, with active readers in Nigeria, Ethiopia and Ghana, to name a few.

In many countries, mobiles are the only channel for effectively distributing reading material, given the high cost of books and their distribution, especially to rural areas. Reading on a mobile device is different to reading in print. Mobile devices offer interactivity, the ability for readers to comment on content, the ability to connect with other readers and to publicly ask questions and receive support. Mobile devices can be used to deliver appropriate and personalized content, in ways that print books cannot. Of course, print books have their strengths – such as not having batteries that need to be recharged. A complementary approach that draws on the strengths of each – print and mobile books – is ideal.

Social networking sites, accessed primarily or only via mobile devices by most Africans, are also on the rise and offer another opportunity. Already they are being used by teachers and learners to share resources and provide support in open discussions. For communities that are geographically dispersed and cannot afford to meet in person, the support from such virtual communities is invaluable.

MXit is Africa’s largest homegrown mobile social network. With over 50 million users, the South Africa-founded service not only allows its mostly young users to stay in touch by text chatting, it also facilitates live tutoring on maths homework. Dr Maths on MXit has helped 30,000 school-aged children work through maths problems by connecting them with maths tutors for live chat sessions. The service is effective for two reasons: it is cheap – the actual service is free but users pay a minimal data charge to their mobile providers – and it operates in the evenings, when learners need help with homework. For many children in South Africa, this is the most qualified tutor that they will have access to.

Of course, it is not possible to have a one size fits all approach. The mobile landscape in Africa is spread unevenly across 56 countries: in some places there is good infrastructure and access to mobile data, in others access is spotty and limited to basic services. To make a real impact mobile learning, initiatives must – and do in Africa – cater to the full range of technology contexts. An example is Nokia Life, an information service with over 70 million subscribers in India, China, Indonesia and Nigeria. Popular information channels in Nigeria deliver preparation tips for middle and high school exams, health education aimed at families and English language learning. The service uses SMS, meaning it does not need mobile data coverage that is not as widely implemented in many places.

But it is not just about the services. If mobile learning is to have a real impact, we need to also rethink what we mean by education, schooling and what skills it delivers.

Recently, a United Nations task team led by UNESCO produced a think piece on education and skills beyond 2015. The piece predicts there will be a shift away from teaching in a classroom-centred paradigm of education to an increased focus on learning, which happens informally throughout the day. A core feature of mobiles is that they support ‘anywhere, anytime’ learning. Because they are personal and always at hand, they are perfectly suited to support informal and contextual learning.

The report also predicts that there will be an increased blurring of the boundaries between learning, working and living. Mobiles already support skills development in a range of fields including agriculture and healthcare, and provide paying job opportunities for mobile-based ‘microwork’.

In addition to education basics such as literacy and numeracy, the reports says, there will be a need for digital and information literacy, as well as critical thinking and online communication skills. With the guidance of teachers, mobiles provide a medium for developing these skills for millions of Africans who go online ‘mobile first’ or even ‘mobile-only’.

On a continent where education change – what should be taught, how it should be delivered and assessed, and where learning happens – is inevitable, and mobiles are more affordably and effectively networking people to each other and information than ever before, the combined promise is bigger than the sum of the parts. Mobile learning is here to stay and will only influence and enable learning more and more.