As addressed in Calestous Juma's Berkman talk on September 15th, the African continent sits poised on the fulcrum of growth. Market inefficiencies exist and are held in stasis until government reforms and deregulation opens floodgates of market opportunity, diversification, and stipulated foreign capital injections that create windfalls of improved accounting standards, corporate governance, and transparency. And then there's technology.

I can remember, when I was still a kid, asking why the commercials on TV were louder than the program, and being assured that they weren't -- that FCC rules required them to be no louder than the program. Although there was some truth in that claim, my ears were telling the truth, too.

As I mentioned in a post a few days ago, sometimes I almost feel sorry for Microsoft. But fortunately, they usually do something that helps me snap right out of it.

The Data Liberation Front (dataliberation.org) is now public " a part of Google outside the google.com domain (along with google.org which seeks and funds good ideas mainly in renewable energy and health). The DLF aims to make it easy to both import and export YOUR data to and from the Google Cloud.

VRM East Coast Workshop 2009 is coming up soon " on 12-13 October, at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, MA. For those of you not familiar with VRM, the letters stand for Vendor Relationship Management, and it's about the tools that developers and friends are creating to provide individuals with tools of independence form organizations that wish to control them " and better means for engaging with those organizations. In other words, it's about blowing up silos and walled gardens, and creating a better system: one in which individuals are the collection centers for their own data, and the ones controlling what gets done with that data.

There's plenty of talk at the moment about the impact of social networking sites on friendship. Bring up the topic at a party or during a coffee break and you will certainly trigger quite a lively discussion. Some will tell you that Facebook is the end of friendship as we know it. Others will proudly report how they reconnect and interact with so many more people than they used to and how that certainly cannot be a bad thing, can it? I would offer a boring compromise.

Would you believe that it's possible to produce a fascinating feature-length documentary about a typeface? After watching "Helvetica" by Gary Hustwit at the Institute of Contemporary Arts last night, I know it can be done. This intriguing film features interviews with renowned typographers and designers, discussing the history of the type face, its cultural significance, and aesthetic appeal. By the end of it, I was truly blown away by the implications that something as inconspicuous as a font can have.

Bloomberg today quotes OMB director Peter Orszag predicting that health care legislation will complete its way through Congress within six weeks. That would be early November, 2009. What kind of health care legislation will this be? Reading the tea leaves over the past week has the law lurching rightward or leftward with each report.

Obviously, there is a great deal of discussion going on in the US at the moment around the issues involved in health care reform. It is a lamentable fact that the US spends more money per capita than any other country in the world; yet the US, on the basis of many standard public health measures (e.g., life expectancy, infant mortality), gets far from the best outcomes.

Back in July, I posted a note about a new approach to ensuring the deletion of sensitive information on the Internet. Researchers at the University of Washington had developed an experimental software package called Vanish, which first encrypted sensitive data, and then stored the encryption keys on a public peer-to-peer [P2P] filesharing network, using a trick that would result in the keys' effectively disappearing within a predictable time. Now the New York Times has a report that another group of researchers, from the University of Texas at Austin, Princeton University, and the University of Michigan, has developed a was to defeat the Vanish system, and ensure that the data can be "un-Vanished".

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