Europe’s plan to simulate the entire planet

from MIT’s Technology Review:

The ‘Living Earth Simulator’ will mine economic, environmental and health data to create a model of the entire planet in real time.

Helbing’s idea is to create a kind of Manahattan project to study, understand and tackle these techno-socio-economic-environmental issues. His plan is to gather data about the planet in unheard of detail, use it to simulate the behaviour of entire economies and then to predict and prevent crises from emerging.

This model will be capable not only modelling the planet in real time but of simulating the future, rather in the manner of weather forecasters.

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The Risk of Extrapolating Linear Trends Against Non-Linear Systems

by Chris Arkenberg, URBEINGRECORDED.com

A common habit in forecasting, particularly in energy futures & economic growth, is to take roughly linear trends and extend them over the next few decades. The notion is that there is inertia in what has already happened that will make the future look markedly similar, or at least there will likely be a more-or-less linear movement along an existing path.

[…] Linear projections help us continue to get things done based on fairly reliable expectations. But avoiding the next economic catastrophe requires a deep study of the many threads & amplifiers that drive black swan events.

Outliers occupy the thin edge of statistical possibility yet almost always have tremendous consequences. They are, by nature, entropic & disruptive, shifting the territory and demanding new adaptations.

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Rob Glaser defines the 2013 Superphone

from GIGAOM:

The future of media will be information consumed on superphones while on the go, said Rob Glaser, chairman of RealNetworks, today in his first public speech since stepping down from his CEO position.

In the speech, given in Seattle at a Mobile Broadband Breakfast event, he forecast that by 2013 the installed base of smart and superphones (see chart for Glaser’s definition of each) will exceed the installed base of PCs, and those web-surfing devices will be mobile.