Hello all – Friday Thinking is a humble curation of my foraging in the digital environment. My purpose is to pick interesting pieces, based on my own curiosity (and the curiosity of the many interesting people I follow), about developments in some key domains (work, organization, social-economy, intelligence, domestication of DNA, energy, etc.) that suggest we are in the midst of a change in the conditions of change - a phase-transition. That tomorrow will be radically unlike yesterday.
Many thanks to those who enjoy this. ☺
In the 21st Century curiosity will SKILL the cat.
Jobs are dying - work is just beginning.
“Be careful what you ‘insta-google-tweet-face’”
Woody Harrelson - Triple 9
Content
Quotes:
Articles:
It so happens that there is a robust scientific language for understanding habit-formation in self-organising systems, centred on the term ‘attractor’. An attractor is simply a stable state in a complex (dynamic) system. So: seeds grow into trees and then stabilise to an attractor: the tree acquires a shape. Birds fly in sync with each other and form a V-shaped (or other-shaped) flock. Ecosystems go through periods of massive change (eg, speciation and species death) and then stabilise. Cities stabilise. Cultures stabilise. Even family dynamics stabilise. Family arguments inevitably repeat the same infuriating script.
Complex systems are epitomised by elements such as individuals in a society or ecosystem, or cells in an organ or organism. These elements continue to interact – they cause changes in each other, which cause further changes in each other, and so forth – until they arrive at stable states, at least for a while. (And note that we are not talking about the stability of a rusty roller skate lying in a ditch or a billiard ball that’s stopped moving. We are talking about stability in a system that continues to grow and change – as all natural complex systems must do.)
So what’s the point of a word such as ‘attractor?’ What does it offer us? Complex systems such as us and our brains reach stability in a very different way from roller skates or billiard balls. They have not lost their energy; they continue to grow and develop, to live. But for some period of time, the feedback loops that comprise them remain in sync, promoting steadiness or balance, like your body temperature after you’ve gotten used to a blast of wintry air. (Technically, this means that negative feedback rather than positive feedback now characterises system dynamics.) At that point, we can say that the system has reached its attractor. Its components now interact in a way we might call self-reinforcing….
The addiction habit
one early definition of a hacker (from the Jargon File) was “A person who enjoys learning the details of programming systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary.” In another early definition (RFC:1392), a hacker is defined as “A person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the internal workings of a system, computers and computer networks in particular.” Both of these definitions highlight something important: violating the security of a technical system isn’t necessarily the primary objective.
People began producing memes just for fun. But for a group of hacker-minded teenagers who were born a decade after I was, a new practice emerged. Rather than trying to hack the security infrastructure, they wanted to attack the emergent attention economy. They wanted to show that they could manipulate the media narrative, just to show that they could. This was happening at a moment when social media sites were skyrocketing,
By engaging in these campaigns, participants learned how to shape information within a networked ecosystem. They learned how to design information for it to spread across social media.
Running campaigns to shape what the public could see was nothing new, but social media created new pathways for people and organizations to get information out to wide audiences. Marketers discussed it as the future of marketing. Activists talked about it as the next frontier for activism. Political consultants talked about it as the future of political campaigns. And a new form of propaganda emerged.
A new form of information manipulation is unfolding in front of our eyes. It is political. It is global. And it is populist in nature. The news media is being played like a fiddle, while decentralized networks of people are leveraging the ever-evolving networked tools around them to hack the attention economy.
I only wish I knew what happens next.
Hacking the Attention Economy
In the early 1980s, a major telecom company hired a consulting firm to make a projection of global mobile phone adoption by the year 2000. After studying the devices, with their clunky handsets and short-lived batteries, the analysts returned with their estimate: 900,000.
The actual figure was around 109 million. Why were these numbers so far off?
DESIGNING FOR THE FUTURE
For the past 65 years, the focus of developmental biology has been on DNA as the carrier of biological information. Researchers have typically assumed that genetic expression patterns alone are enough to determine embryonic development.
To Levin, however, that explanation is unsatisfying. “Where does shape come from? What makes an elephant different from a snake?” he asked. DNA can make proteins inside cells, he said, but “there is nothing in the genome that directly specifies anatomy.” To develop properly, he maintains, tissues need spatial cues that must come from other sources in the embryo. At least some of that guidance, he and his team believe, is electrical.
In recent years, by working on tadpoles and other simple creatures, Levin’s laboratory has amassed evidence that the embryo is molded by bioelectrical signals, particularly ones that emanate from the young brain long before it is even a functional organ. Those results, if replicated in other organisms, may change our understanding of the roles of electrical phenomena and the nervous system in development, and perhaps more widely in biology.
Brainless Embryos Suggest Bioelectricity Guides Growth
An interesting 16 min video of various futurists discussing the evolving of foresight into Futures Literacy. Worth the View. The web page is in French but the video is in English.
Transforming the future: anticipation in the 21st century
Transforming the Future: Anticipation in the 21st Century - forthcoming UNESCO publication. In this video, leading experts from around the world are coming together to share their understanding of what it means to use the future. The video also demonstrates the importance of improving people's ability to use the future to build a more equitable and sustainable future.
This is a great article - a concise description of Web 3.0 based on blockchain technology and a number of truly excellent infographics displaying the actors currently in this domain.
Why the net giants are worried about the Web 3.0
Web 2.0 - Web 3.0 Comparison Landscape
The birth of blockchain spawned a movement which is set to disrupt the entire tech industry. Blockchain and crypto enthusiasts are calling it the Web 3.0 and it’s looking to make all traditional business models defunct. This is because, in short, the technology will facilitate the decentralization of the World Wide Web, thereby equalizing control and ownership back from the grasp of profit hungry corporations.
The Web 3.0 ecosystem already consists of over 3000 variegated crypto coins and over 900 decentralized apps or DApps (a single DApp can mean a team of up to 50 members, each dedicated to disrupting a specific industry). And even though the industry is still in its infancy, the market cap has already exceeded 800 billion.
These numbers supply damning evidence this movement is indeed a revolution in the works. And not unlike France in the 18th century, this revolution was born out of the frustration of inequality between millions of people and the few in power. And justly so, the Web 2.0 provided a fertile ground for corporations to monopolize control and profits.
This is a very interesting signal about changes in the computational paradigm as well as the rapidly evolving blockchain technologies.
IBM’s blockchain-ready CPU is smaller than a grain of salt, costs just 10 cents
IBM kicked off its Think 2018 conference today with a bombshell announcement: It has made the world’s smallest computer, and it’s designed from the ground up to work with the blockchain. The computer itself is smaller than a single grain of salt, coming in at 1 millimeter by 1 millimeter and reportedly has about the same computing power as a 1990s era CPU.
The company wants to extend digital authentication to objects in the physical world – think the next generation of barcodes used in retail. While a miniature computer isn’t strictly needed to do that, it expands what’s possible.
The device’s capabilities go well beyond simple authentication. It has the potential to perform data summarization and local data analysis tasks that often fall to IoT devices. It’s all a matter of how developers choose to use the architecture.
“It’s a general purpose machine, so it can do these things,” said Dan Friedman, an IBM researcher who contributed to the project, speaking to Digital Trends earlier today. “What kind of limits it, to some extent, is that in order to keep it physically small, the amount of memory that it has is small.” Suffice it to say that the smallest computer around isn’t exactly a powerhouse. It’s been compared to a desktop processor circa 1990.
Another strong signal for the Moore’s Law is Dead - Long Live Moore’s Law file.
“this discovery could help fill the ‘THz gap’ and create new and more powerful wireless devices that could transmit data at significantly higher speeds than currently possible. In the world of hi-tech advances, this is game-changing technology,”
Breakthrough to enable computers that are 100 times faster
Following three years of extensive research, Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HU) physicist Dr. Uriel Levy and his team have created technology that will enable our computers—and all optic communication devices—to run 100 times faster through terahertz microchips.
Until now, two major challenges stood in the way of creating the terahertz microchip: overheating and scalability.
However, in a paper published this week in Laser and Photonics Review, Dr. Levy, head of HU’s Nano-Opto Group and HU emeritus professor Joseph Shappir have shown proof of concept for an optic technology that integrates the speed of optic (light) communications with the reliability—and manufacturing scalability—of electronics.
Optic communications encompass all technologies that use light and transmit through fiber optic cables, such as the internet, email, text messages, phone calls, the cloud and data centers, among others. Optic communications are super fast but in microchips they become unreliable and difficult to replicate in large quantities.
Now, by using a Metal-Oxide-Nitride-Oxide-Silicon (MONOS) structure, Levy and his team have come up with a new integrated circuit that uses flash memory technology—the kind used in flash drives and discs-on-key—in microchips. If successful, this technology will enable standard 8-16 gigahertz computers to run 100 times faster and will bring all optic devices closer to the holy grail of communications: the terahertz chip.
Net Giants are also worried about Net Giants - here’s a signal of the emerging platform wars. Although I have to say it would be great to have a competitor to Amazon - who can make shopping as easy and secure.
'Where can I buy?' - Google makes push to turn product searches into cash
Alphabet Inc’s Google routinely fields product queries from millions of shoppers. Now it wants to take a cut of their purchases, too.
The U.S. technology company is teaming up with retailers including Target Corp, Walmart Inc, Home Depot Inc, Costco Wholesale Corp and Ulta Beauty Inc.
Under a new program, retailers can list their products on Google Search, as well as on the Google Express shopping service, and Google Assistant on mobile phones and voice devices.
In exchange for Google listings and linking to retailer loyalty programs, the retailers pay Google a piece of each purchase, which is different from payments that retailers make to place ads on Google platforms.
The listings will appear under sponsored shopping results and will not affect regular search results on Google, the company said.
We are getting ever closer to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy’s “Babel Fish”
Microsoft reaches a historic milestone, using AI to match human performance in translating news from Chinese to English
A team of Microsoft researchers said Wednesday that they believe they have created the first machine translation system that can translate sentences of news articles from Chinese to English with the same quality and accuracy as a person.
Researchers in the company’s Asia and U.S. labs said that their system achieved human parity on a commonly used test set of news stories, called newstest2017, which was developed by a group of industry and academic partners and released at a research conference called WMT17 last fall. To ensure the results were both accurate and on par with what people would have done, the team hired external bilingual human evaluators, who compared Microsoft’s results to two independently produced human reference translations.
Xuedong Huang, a technical fellow in charge of Microsoft’s speech, natural language and machine translation efforts, called it a major milestone in one of the most challenging natural language processing tasks.
Another important signal in the transformation of medicine arising from domestication of DNA.
Prof Richard Burt, lead investigator, Northwestern University Chicago, told me: "The data is stunningly in favour of transplant against the best available drugs - the neurological community has been sceptical about this treatment, but these results will change that."
Stem cell transplant 'game changer' for MS patients
Doctors say a stem cell transplant could be a "game changer" for many patients with multiple sclerosis.
Results from an international trial show that it was able to stop the disease and improve symptoms.
It involves wiping out a patient's immune system using cancer drugs and then rebooting it with a stem cell transplant.
Louise Willetts, 36, from Rotherham, is now symptom-free and told me: "It feels like a miracle."
Just over 100 patients took part in the trial, in hospitals in Chicago, Sheffield, Uppsala in Sweden and Sao Paulo in Brazil.
The patients received either haematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) or drug treatment.
After one year, only one relapse occurred among the stem cell group compared with 39 in the drug group.
After an average follow-up of three years, the transplants had failed in three out of 52 patients (6%), compared with 30 of 50 (60%) in the control group.
Those in the transplant group experienced a reduction in disability, whereas symptoms worsened in the drug group.
And in the same category of signal - this is one to track.
Macular degeneration: 'I've been given my sight back'
Doctors have taken a major step towards curing the most common form of blindness in the UK - age-related macular degeneration.
Douglas Waters, 86, could not see out of his right eye, but "I can now read the newspaper" with it, he says.
He was one of two patients given pioneering stem cell therapy at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London.
The technique, published in Nature Biotechnology, starts with embryonic stem cells. These are a special type of cell that can become any other in the human body.
They are converted into the type of cell that makes up the retinal pigment epithelium and embedded into a scaffold to hold them in place.
The living patch is only one layer of cells thick - about 40 microns - and 6mm long and 4mm wide.
It is then placed underneath the rods and cones in the back of the eye. The operation takes up to two hours.
And another signal - although this is far from prime time ready - it points not just to restoration but to enhancement.
Bionic Contacts: Goodbye Glasses. Hello Vision That’s 3x Better Than 20/20
This development comes thanks to the Ocumetics Bionic Lens. This dynamic lens essentially replaces a person’s natural eye lens. It’s placed into the eye via a saline-filled syringe, after which it unravels itself in under 10 seconds.
...the procedure is identical to cataract surgery and would take just about eight minutes. He adds that people who have the specialized lenses surgically inserted would never get cataracts and that the lenses feel natural and won’t cause headaches or eye strain.
The Bionic Lens may sound like a fairy tale (or sci-fi dream), but it’s not. It is actually the end result of years and years of research and more than a little funding — so far, the lens has taken nearly a decade to develop and has cost US$3 million.
And another signal about the acceleration of our knowledge of our ecologies and innovation with DNA.
“Previously, people had no method to study viruses well,” says Jie Ren, a computational biologist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. “But now we have tools to find them.”
Machine learning spots treasure trove of elusive viruses
Artificial intelligence could speed up metagenomic studies that look for species unknown to science.
Researchers have used artificial intelligence (AI) to discover nearly 6,000 previously unknown species of virus. The work, presented on 15 March at a meeting organized by the US Department of Energy (DOE), illustrates an emerging tool for exploring the enormous, largely unknown diversity of viruses on Earth.
Although viruses influence everything from human health to the degradation of trash, they are hard to study. Scientists cannot grow most viruses in the lab, and attempts to identify their genetic sequences are often thwarted because their genomes are tiny and evolve fast.
In recent years, researchers have hunted for unknown viruses by sequencing DNA in samples taken from various environments. To identify the microbes present, researchers search for the genetic signatures of known viruses and bacteria — just as a word processor’s ‘find’ function highlights words containing particular letters in a document. But that method often fails, because virologists cannot search for what they do not know. A form of AI called machine learning gets around this problem because it can find emergent patterns in mountains of information. Machine-learning algorithms parse data, learn from them and then classify information autonomously.
While 3D printing seems to have past the Hype curve - it’s still being massively developed - here’s something from the frontier.
"We are on the cusp of creating a new generation of devices that could vastly expand the practical applications for 3-D and 4-D printing," H. Jerry Qi, Ph.D., says. "Our prototype printer integrates many features that appear to simplify and expedite the processes used in traditional 3-D printing. As a result, we can use a variety of materials to create hard and soft components at the same time, incorporate conductive wiring directly into shape-changing structures, and ultimately set the stage for the development of a host of 4-D products that could reshape our world."
New 4-D printer could reshape the world we live in
Scientists report that they have developed a powerful new printer that could streamline the creation of self-assembling structures that can change shape after being exposed to heat and other stimuli. They say this unique technology could accelerate the use of 4-D printing in aerospace, medicine and other industries.
The machine they ultimately devised combines four different printing techniques, including aerosol, inkjet, direct ink write and fused deposition modeling. It can handle a multitude of stiff and elastic materials including hydrogels, silver nanoparticle-based conductive inks, liquid crystal elastomers and shape memory polymers, or SMPs. SMPs, which are the most common substances used in 4-D printing, can be programmed to "remember" a shape and then transform into it when heated. With this new technology, the researchers can print higher-quality SMPs capable of making more intricate shape changes than in the past, opening the door for a multitude of functional 4-D applications and designs.
This is another signal of how biotechnology provides new forms of material.
"We think we've cracked the code for interfacing natural and synthetic systems," said study author Ting Xu, a Berkeley professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and the Department of Chemistry, whose lab led the work.
Researchers create a protein 'mat' that can soak up pollution
In a breakthrough that could lead to a new class of materials with functions found only in living systems, scientists have figured out a way to keep certain proteins active outside of the cell. The researchers used this technology to create mats that can soak up and trap chemical pollution.
The study will be published in the March 16 issue of the journal Science. The research was supported by grants from the U.S. Department of Defense. Collaborators at Northwestern University were supported by the Department of Energy and the Sherman Fairchild Foundation. Collaborators at the University of Lyon and the Air Force Laboratory received support from the Fulbright program and the Miller institute.
Geoengineering is a more thoughtful enactment of human contribution to the Anthropocene - one aimed at purposeful shaping of the earth.
Geoengineer polar glaciers to slow sea-level rise
Stalling the fastest flows of ice into the oceans would buy us a few centuries to deal with climate change and protect coasts, argue John C. Moore and colleagues.
The ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica will contribute more to sea-level rise this century than any other source. By mid-century, a 2 °C increase is predicted to swell the global oceans by around 20 centimetres, on average. By 2100, most large coastal cities will face sea levels that are more than a metre higher than currently.
If nothing is done, 0.5–5% of the world’s population will be flooded each year after 21002. For example, a 0.5-metre rise in Guangzhou, China, would displace more than 1 million people; a 2-metre rise would affect more than 2 million. Without coastal protection, the global cost of damages could reach US$50 trillion a year. Sea walls and flood defences cost tens of billions of dollars a year to construct and maintain.
At this price, geoengineering is competitive. For example, building an artificial island to host Hong Kong’s international airport, which added 1% to the city’s land area, cost more than $20 billion. China’s Three Gorges Dam, which spans the Yangtze River to control floods and generate power, is thought to have cost about $33 billion.
We think that geoengineering of glaciers on a similar scale could delay much of Greenland and Antarctica’s grounded ice from reaching the sea for centuries, buying time to address global warming. In our view, this is plausible because about 90% of ice flowing to the sea from the Antarctic ice sheet, and about half of that lost from Greenland travels in narrow, fast ice streams. These streams measure tens of kilometres or less across. Fast glaciers slide on a film of water or wet sediment. Stemming the largest flows would allow the ice sheets to thicken, slowing or even reversing their contribution to sea-level rise.
Knowledge and it's cousins (know how - Techne) and information have always been the source of human survival including getting the food we need. This is a great signal for the eventual transformation of agriculture.
the $1.6 billion aid target for Somalia would be enough to finance 16,000 hectares of seawater greenhouses across the landscape, which could grow an astounding 4.8 million tonnes of fresh produce a year
The decades-long quest to end drought (and feed millions) by taking the salt out of seawater
“The world isn’t short of water, it’s just in the wrong place, and too salty," says Charlie Paton – so he's spent the past 24 years building the technology to prove it
This year alone, the United Nations is appealing for $1.6 billion in aid just for Somalia – a fact that unsettles Paton. “That $1.6 billion could probably make the place self-sufficient, not just in 2018, but forever,” he says. And he thinks his invention could help make that a reality.
Paton is the founder of Seawater Greenhouse, a company that transforms two abundant resources – sunshine and seawater – into freshwater for growing crops in arid, coastal regions such as Africa’s horn. The drought-stricken landscape that cloaks this region doesn’t exactly inspire visions of lush agriculture – but then, Paton sees things differently: “The world isn’t short of water, it’s just in the wrong place, and too salty,” he says.
His latest project in Somaliland (an autonomous but internationally unrecognised republic in Somalia) takes that bullish optimism to the extreme. On a 25-hectare plot of desert land close to the coastline, he’s building the region’s first sustainable, drought-resistant greenhouse. Using solar power to pump in seawater from the coastline and desalinate it on site, Paton is generating freshwater to irrigate plants, and water vapour to cool and humidify the greenhouse interior. In January – less than a year after its launch – this improbable desert oasis produced its first harvest of lettuce, cucumbers and tomatoes. “The idea is so simple that it’s rather insulting,” Paton says. “People say, ‘If that’s going to work then somebody would have done it before.’”
The prevalence of this attitude might explain why Paton’s invention is the first of its kind in the Horn of Africa. That – and the overwhelming challenges of investing there. “The main problem is drought. Somalia was hit by serious water shortage in 2016 and 2017,” says Amsale Shibeshi, who works with the NGO Pastoral and Environmental Network in the Horn of Africa, a partner on the greenhouse project. Though Somaliland has maintained relative peace since the 1990s, in neighbouring Somalia the drought has fuelled persistent famine, which underlies disease outbreaks and ongoing political instability – with the militant fundamentalist group al-Shabab still influential there.
Another signal of emerging water technology.
In field tests, device harvests water from desert air
MIT-developed system could provide drinking water even in extremely arid locations.
The new device, based on a concept the team first proposed last year, has now been field-tested in the very dry air of Tempe, Arizona, confirming the potential of the new method, though much work remains to scale up the process, the researchers say.
The new work is reported today in the journal Nature Communications and includes some significant improvements over the initial concept that was described last year in a paper in Science, says Evelyn Wang, the Gail E. Kendall Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, who was the senior author of both papers. MIT postdoc Sameer Rao and former graduate student Hyunho Kim SM ’14, PhD ’18 were the lead authors of the latest paper, along with four others at MIT and the University of California at Berkeley.
The system, based on relatively new high-surface-area materials called metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), can extract potable water from even the driest of desert air, the researchers say, with relative humidities as low as 10 percent. Current methods for extracting water from air require much higher levels – 100 percent humidity for fog-harvesting methods, and above 50 percent for dew-harvesting refrigeration-based systems, which also require large amounts of energy for cooling. So the new system could potentially fill an unmet need for water even in the world’s driest regions.
And more about ensuring food security.
Wheat in heat: the 'crazy idea' that could combat food insecurity
Durum wheat varieties can withstand 40C heat along the Senegal River basin, and could produce 600,000 tonnes of food
Following four years of trials, which saw thousands of wheat varieties tested in the unforgiving sub-Saharan heat, scientists have successfully turned what was first thought of as a “crazy idea” into a vital new food crop. With more than 1 million smallholders living along the Senegal River basin, which also runs through Mali and Mauritania, it was an important strategic area to trial the wheat.
The strain of wheat can withstand constant 40C temperatures, and has been developed by the International Centre for Research in the Dry Areas (Icarda). The so-called drylands cover more than 40% of the world’s land surface and despite the challenges, remain huge centres of agriculture, supporting half the world’s livestock.
The new variety of wheat is fast growing, and can be harvested in just 92 days, ensuring it doesn’t impact on the rice. It can produce six tonnes per hectare, despite requiring less water than rice, and contains five times more protein, as well as more vitamins and minerals. Straw from the fields will also provide an important feed for livestock.
The wheat has the potential to improve food security in other areas of the world at risk from rising temperatures, such as Sudan, Nigeria and countries in south Asia. The project won last year’s $50,000 Olam Prize for Innovation in Food Security. “As climate change causes temperatures to rise, the usefulness of these varieties will expand to nearly all countries,” Bassi says.
The continued transformation of energy geopolitics accelerates. This will also provide zero marginal cost energy to enable desalination plants to provide water.
Formerly a gas exporter, Egypt must now import liquefied natural gas, or LNG, at a high cost to meet its energy needs. New gasfields that have started production, including the giant offshore Zohr field operated by Eni SpA, should help the country close its supply gap, trim its import bills and maybe even resume exports. Solar and wind energy projects will help transform the country’s power mix.
Desert Sun to power Upper Egypt with $2.8b solar park
New park should help Egypt scale back its use of hydrocarbons
Egypt inaugurated the first solar power plant at a remote desert complex where the government plans to generate as much as 1.8 gigawatts from the sun, cutting the most populous Arab nation’s reliance on dirty and expensive fossil fuels.
The plant, developed by Germany-based Ib Vogt GmbH and a local company called Infinity Solar Systems, began supplying the national grid in December, Ib Vogt Chief Executive Officer Anton Milner said on Tuesday in an interview. The 64-megawatt facility is the first of 32 units that the government targets for construction at Benban Solar park in southeastern Aswan province. The project, with all the plants, is to be completed next year at a cost of $2.8 billion.
“In this plant, we have 200,000 solar panels and 780 sun trackers that allow the panels to move toward the solar position throughout the day,” Amine Al Adghiri, Ib Vogt’s project manager, said during a media tour of the facility 650km south of Cairo on the fringes of the Nubian Desert. The photovoltaic modules arrayed across 95 hectares (235 acres) can produce enough power to supply 20,000 households, Al Adghiri said.
And here’s international efforts to bring energy freedom.
India and France pledge billions of dollars on solar-energy
Cash will help lower the cost of solar technology in developing countries.
India and France have committed more than US$2 billion to fund solar-energy projects in developing countries. Renewable-energy analysts say that the money has the potential to dramatically expand solar technology in these nations, but others argue that governments should instead focus on removing barriers that slow the growth of renewable energy.
The announcement came on 11 March during the first summit of the International Solar Alliance (ISA) in New Delhi, which drew heads of government from more than 20 countries. In his opening address, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi pledged $1.4 billion to support solar-energy projects in Bangladesh and in developing countries in Africa. French President Emmanuel Macron committed €700 million (US$865 million) to the scheme.
I just had to share with our communities - how proud I am of our efforts and the incredibly generous support we have received.
We've raised $40K in two Kickstarter campaigns and we are approaching our 1rst birthday.
CBC Ottawa awarded theSpace as one of 10 'Trailblazers' (there were over 300 nominations).
Rian is the core of the effort in theSpace - catalyzing our members into finding their own voice and creative focus.
Our Mission - is "Enabling Adults on the Spectrum to Apprentice creative Self-Employment and Building Generative Community".
It is shocking in a positive sense - just how many fantastic self-driven initiatives are arising in Ottawa.
In the next month we will incorporate as a non-profit corporation.
Our website is here
And our Patreon site is here
All of these efforts and initiative should give us all hope and optimism about the capacity for people to take hold of the future with solid 'Response-Ability'
Here is a short 4 min video created by some video journalism students.
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