Monday, February 20, 2012

Flattening the World: Building a Global Knowledge Society


The focus of the 2012 meeting, then, is on using the power of electronic communications and information resources to tackle the complex problems of the 21st century on a global scale through international, multidisciplinary efforts. We have a model already in the scale and scope of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But that’s just the beginning. The interconnections among, for example, climate change, agriculture, and health are as yet poorly understood; predictive modeling is in its infancy.
The ability to approach global problems through global collaborations depends on an educated populace and on substantial scientific and technological sophistication throughout the world. Thus building the global knowledge society depends on advancing education and research, the engines of the knowledge society, everywhere. This task is facilitated, but not accomplished, by the existence of electronically accessible open educational resources. There remain limitations of language and culture, of poverty and access.See: Flattening the World: Building a Global Knowledge Society(bold added by me for emphasis)


Flattening the world sounds like something that you would not like to return in thinking about the push for society to become better informed and pulled out of the dark ages? But it's not really about that. It's about leveling the playing field in terms of,  "Globalization of Knowledge."

 WIRED: What do you mean the world is flat?
Thomas Lauren Friedman

FRIEDMAN: I was in India interviewing Nandan Nilekani at Infosys. And he said to me, "Tom, the playing field is being leveled." Indians and Chinese were going to compete for work like never before, and Americans weren't ready. I kept chewing over that phrase - the playing field is being leveled - and then it hit me: Holy mackerel, the world is becoming flat. Several technological and political forces have converged, and that has produced a global, Web-enabled playing field that allows for multiple forms of collaboration without regard to geography or distance - or soon, even language. See: Why the World Is Flat

The theme above then in opening linked article is like a mission statement.  So in a sense,  I highlight with the paragraphs above to illustrate what a stubborn scientist frustrated has been like,  locked in his own perspective about climate change( it seems a formulation principle arises with the basis of that topic. Okay, the presentation is specific and he talks about Quantum Computing) That one might in his case may cast a wide sweeping statement about the aims and purposes of giving as much knowledge as possible to the masses, as being leftist.

 Right,  left?  Nothing like being stereotype, yet,  a question in my mind exists about globalization? Suffering from "the products"  from which one could have grown up,  you can understand indeed why such skepticism might be measured as a "dying voice of concern about that global village?"  This though,  is not about economics. You See?:)

The public, needs to be better informed. Remove the barriers and constraints to that knowledge you then are successful in raising the standards of communication across the world. It should lower the stress level for an  impatient scientist who is frustrated with the level of knowledge perceived from the basis of the questions asked by the public?:)

 Ask you self then.........In respect of knowledge, do those who control the medium, control the message?

 The very thing you might fight for is in fact a form of something that one might see as being repressed under a presentation of some communistic system,  when in fact,  such monopolistic controls are much the same?

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So why have I stayed out of the climate debate change? One, because I do not know enough, and two, because I knew nature was ever present while we were contributing to the environment in which we live.

So the population,  since my looking into the subject of particle research has it's basis set in understanding our connectives to the space around us? What is happening in the airs above earth that you would not take notice? Cosmic particle research? It may help one understand the logo better? Like ideas,  particles exist all around us?:)

How does this then contribute to the understanding that nature is ever a greater force then humanity could ever think itself  as to the design of our place in history.

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