Kuwaitigenius

Source: Tatango SMS Marketing

The social layer has settled on the web like a dusting of multicolored snowflakes, gracing every story with a little menagerie of sharing counts and buttons. Once basic standards of content publishing were established, basic standards of sharing had to be as well, the internet being as it is a medium of information transmission. First you get the content, then you move it around. We’re still working on the moving around part.

Another layering we’ve seen is the layering of the internet onto the real world. Location-based networking, maps, deals, all that. As soon as we had the ability to tell the world where we were, that information was naturally integrated into our services.

Yet another combination is emerging: the layering of reference and context onto the information you read. What this even comprises is difficult to say exactly, but MIT Media Lab grad student Daniel Schultz (@slifty) has one idea: a browser script that automatically checks what you’re reading against reliable, substantiated facts. It’s a simple idea with innumerable approaches, problems, and implications — which means we’ll probably be dealing with it for a long time.

The European Commission is cracking down on the way Facebook gathers information about European users. A new EC Directive will ban targeted advertising unless users specifically say they want it. This is great news for European Facebook users, especially after the case of 24-year-old Austrian law student Max Schrems who, in late October, started an online campaign aimed at forcing Facebook to abide by European data privacy laws.

The real question is: Why isn’t this happening in America? All 800 million Facebook users agree to let the company use their personal information.

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The World Bank published an easy to read guide to climate adaptation. The primary focus is to explain what adaptation is, and how city managers can adapt and lower risks to people, their homes, and businesses.

“Building resilience and adapting to climate change is increasingly a high priority for cities. Besides mitigation, on which efforts have largely focused in the past, cities should today play a larger role in adaptation. The World Bank and various other development institutions are working with cities to strengthen their capacity to assess vulnerability to climate change impacts and to identify corresponding plans and investments to increase their resilience.

This guide on climate change adaptation in cities is intended to offer mayors and other city officials, in developing countries, practical guidance on how to respond to the challenges of climate change adaptation in their cities. It provides a comprehensive overview of key climate adaptation issues that are relevant to cities, offers examples of good practices and successful experiences, and is a useful guide to other available resources and policy tools on the topic.

The guide focuses on disaster risk management, the urban poor and other vulnerable groups, and access to climate finance.”

World Bank: Guide to Climate Change Adaptation in Cities

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Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is one of the great symbols of America’s scientific and military prowess. For six decades, here on this tranquil campus tucked away in the hill country east of San Francisco, where scientists stroll along leafy paths and zip to meetings on bicycles, huge breakthroughs have been made, like the discovery of a half-dozen elements on the periodic table and the detection of a key component of dark matter.

Livermore’s biggest claim to fame involves designing the world’s most advanced nuclear warheads—this was the mission of the lab when it was created in 1952 by Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb. To do this, Livermore relies on powerful machines called supercomputers, which hum away inside top-secret, heavily guarded buildings. The U.S. has long dominated the industry. Which is what made the news that Bruce Goodwin, head of the lab’s weapons program, received last November all the more momentous: the Chinese had unveiled the world’s most powerful supercomputer, a machine five times more powerful than Livermore’s biggest computer.

To most of us, this might sound like no big deal, akin to Apple coming out with a faster smartphone than Microsoft. But to the scientists, industry titans, and world leaders who understand how delicate America’s position as a global superpower really is, this was a Sputnik moment. Only this time, it wasn’t Russia trouncing the U.S. in the space race, but China surging ahead in one of the most vital areas of national security. By running thousands of processors in parallel, supercomputers not only help design weapons systems, they also model climate change, crack codes, and help develop new and life-changing drugs. Cranking out 500 trillion operations per second, just one of Livermore’s supercomputers throws off so much heat that if the air-conditioning system were to fail, the computer would start to melt within minutes.

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Full post here.