Food for thought

MoneyWeek on How big data will feed the global population – however big it gets and Christian Science Monitor on The next food revolution: fish farming?.

Trade magazine Biofuels Digest has a somewhat grittier take on the subject, with a new five-part series Future Farm, Future Crop: Utopia or Dystopia?. It asks a more pointed question: will fickle American politicians abandon support for farming once the rural population vanishes (because of the aging demographics, and because cheap Indians and Africans will be tele-working the farm-bots / drones / Big Data interrogation)?

I think that’s what many ordinary people miss in the unproductive robots/jobs debate. Getting fast Internet access to the billions in India and Africa will potentially enable the people there to work inside our robots and drones. The low-level functions of a bot will be automated, in much the same way as a Google self-driving car, while the higher-level functions are simultaneously provided by a data-assisted remote human operator.

The Jewish Future

I guess the future looks less optimistic if you’re Israel, staring down the parabola of an Iranian nuclear missile and surrounded by irrationally hostile forces. But there is hope, even there, as is seen in 60,000 words in Commentary magazine which has 69 Jewish leaders and intellectuals think about “The Jewish Future”. Incidentally, Commentary magazine has some exemplary Web design and a nice line in covers…

The Jewish Journal has a short digest of Commentary, for those without the time to read something that’s the same length as a novel. Thankfully…

Podhoretz concludes with the project’s good news: “No one actually envisions the Jewish people’s end in an Iranian mushroom cloud.”

i24 also has a good summary.

I guess one possibility, given the rapid emptying of southern Italy of its population, would be to quite literally expand Israel into Europe. Just give southern Italy to Israel, at some point around 2050. Such an expansion could solve a whole lot of problems at once — including Israel’s booming birthrate which appears to be totally unsustainable in a tiny desert nation.

Until then, Israel could do a whole lot worse than to radically up their game on the Web, specifically in publishing open access academic ejournals in English. The nation has so much potential there, to influence and to educate the world and to project a ‘soft power’ that is congruent with their deserved status as both a tech and a military power. But what they offer at present is very poor, both in quantity and presentation.

Shocking news

Back in fashion, it seems: electro-therapy. The Boston Globe reports “Devices spark movement to treat disease with electricity”. Sounds cranky, up until one reads that…

“the National Institutes of Health will announce this autumn the first funding from its $248 million Stimulating Peripheral Activity to Relieve Conditions, or SPARC, program, and the Pentagon’s blue-skies research arm, DARPA, will disclose recipients of its $80 million ElectRx initiative. … GlaxoSmithKline, the pharmaceutical company, is investing $50 million in bioelectronic startups and $5 million more for basic research to, among other things, map the body’s neurons and show how they might affect chronic diseases”

Blockle ’em!

Corrupt officials, could the incorruptable blockchain stop them?

“If the current projects prove successful in diverse areas like diamond fraud and land registry ledgers, the question very quickly becomes one of how to create similar solutions in other areas — whether you are a government, an NGO, an industry like finance or an individual company.”

There needs to be a shorthand word for doing that, I’d say. Blockle might do. “We need to blockle these corrupt officials…”

The Virgin Podcast: Matt Ridley on his new book

The Virgin Podcast: Sept 2015, 50 minutes with Matt Ridley (The Rational Optimist) on his new book, recorded on a Thames-side terrace of the House of Lords in London. It’s Soundcloud streaming and doesn’t offer an .mp3 download, but 9xBuddy will easily get you an audio file if you need it.