Nature (440:7083) has a Microsoft sponsored freely available special feature on the future of scientific computing – the articles focus on sensor networks, database management, and automated learning.

Declan Butler 2020 computing: Everything, everywhere

Data networks will have gone from being the repositories of science to its starting point. When researchers look back on the days when computers were thought of only as desktops and portables, our world may look as strange to them as their envisaged one does to us. Although we might imagine a science based so much on computing as being distanced from life’s nitty gritty, future researchers may look back on today’s world as the one that is more abstracted. To them the science practised now may, ironically, look like a sort of virtual reality, constrained by the artificialities of data selection and lab analysis: a science not yet ready to capture the essence of the real world.

Computer scientist and science fiction writer Vernon Vinge writes on the internet as The Creativity Machine

All this points to ways that science might exploit the Internet in the near future. Beyond that, we know that hardware will continue to improve. In 15 years, we are likely to have processing power that is 1,000 times greater than today, and an even larger increase in the number of network-connected devices (such as tiny sensors and effectors). Among other things, these improvements will add a layer of networking beneath what we have today, to create a world come alive with trillions of tiny devices that know what they are, where they are and how to communicate with their near neighbours, and thus, with anything in the world. Much of the planetary sensing that is part of the scientific enterprise will be implicit in this new digital Gaia. The Internet will have leaked out, to become coincident with Earth.

How can we prepare for such a future? Perhaps that is the most important research project for our creativity machine. We need to exploit the growing sensor/effector layer to make the world itself a real-time database. In the social, human layers of the Internet, we need to devise and experiment with large-scale architectures for collaboration. We need linguists and artificial-intelligence researchers to extend the capabilities of search engines and social networks to produce services that can bridge barriers created by technical jargon and forge links between unrelated specialties, bringing research groups with complementary problems and solutions together — even when those groups have not noticed the possibility of collaboration. In the end, computers plus networks plus people add up to something significantly greater than the parts. The ensemble eventually grows beyond human creativity. To become what? We can’t know until we get there.

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In the next fifty years the world’s population is expected to increase by roughly 50%. Almost of of this population growth is expected to be in cities in the developing world. Mike Davis’ Planet of Slums presents one vision of the developing world’s megacities. Below are three others.

Robert Neuwrith’s informative and novel book Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World (see review on WorldChanging) is about the one billion people who live in informal settlements in the world’s megacities. Neuwrith lived in informal settlements in Bombay (Mumbai), Rio de Janeiro, Istanbul, and Nairobi. Based on his experience he argues that rather than being zones of chaos and crime, shantytowns are innovative and adaptive responses to poverty that allow poor people to improve their lives – as long as their governments don’t evict and destroy their settlements. Neuwirth also maintains a weblog that comments on new related to his book.

Suketu Mehta‘s great book Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found presents a rich evocative picture of Bombay (Adam Hochschild review in Harpers). Mehta tells the stories of gansters, policemen, politicians, dancers, Bollywood stars, the middle class, the poor, and the rich. He tells of the failure of state justice, police assassinations of gangsters, and the intertwined stories of gangsters and movie stars – as well as Bombay’s connection with Dubai, India and the West.

Finally, a Guardian article tells the story of a day in Chongqing – the fastest-growing urban centre on the planet – just upstream from the reservoir of the Three Gorges Dam (see Edward Burtynsky photos).

China’s development is one of humanity’s worst environmental disasters. Cheap coal and a doubling of car ownership every five years has made the country the second-biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. According to the World Bank, 16 of the planet’s 20 dirtiest cities are in China, and Chongqing is one of the worst. Every year, the choking atmosphere is responsible for thousands of premature deaths and tens of thousands of cases of chronic bronchitis. Last year, the air quality failed to reach level 2, the government health standard, one day in every four. Today’s haze is so thick that I still haven’t seen the sun.

Outside at midnight, the bright lights cannot mask a seedier side of city life – the poor trawling through rubbish bins, the homeless on street corners, the touts offering drugs and sex for sale. Many of the women working as prostitutes are rural migrants. Their children are left with relatives or sent to the streets to beg, sell flowers or sing songs for money until the early hours.

Eugene Linden a journalist, who has recently published a book on climate change – The Winds of Change: Climate, Weather, and the Destruction of Civilizations, in Jan 2006 wrote an article Cloudy With a Chance of Chaos in the US business magazine Fortune. In it he discusses how ecological degredation has lead to a decline of ecological resilience.

Around the world, humanity has reduced nature’s capacity to dampen extremes to an astonishing degree: more than 59% of the world’s accessible land degraded by improper agriculture, deforestation, and development; half the world’s available fresh water now co-opted for human use at the expense of other species and ecosystems; more than half the world’s mangroves destroyed; half the world’s wetlands drained or ruined; one-fifth of the world’s coral reefs (including crucial barrier reefs) destroyed and one-half damaged–the list goes on and on.Nature does not alert us to all her tripwires. Perhaps that’s why in recent years the unprecedented has become increasingly ordinary. When pushed past a certain magnitude, the damage of natural events increases exponentially, and that threshold falls as natural buffers are eliminated. Research led by MIT climatologist Kerry Emmanuel suggests that hurricanes have doubled in intensity during the past 30 years as the oceans have warmed. Hurricane Katrina surged to its immense power when the storm passed over a deep layer of 90-degree Fahrenheit water in the Gulf of Mexico. Hurricane Rita transfixed meteorologists when it strengthened from Category 2 to 5 in less than 24 hours while moving over those same hot seas. And in October, Wilma bested that by strengthening from tropical storm to Category 5 hurricane in a single day.

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