January 27, 2015

Chasing Innovation

January 27, 2015
Urbanization has been the engine of modernization in Europe. For most citizens today, every event from birth to the grave including education, marriage, work and leisure, occur in cities. Cities are mirrors of cultures and regimes. McKinsey’s report entitled “Urban World: The Shifting Global Business Landscape” predicts the changes of the major cities in the next decade. According to the report, there are 8,000 companies that account for 90% of the total world GDP and third of those companies are located in 20 major cities that generate 40% of their revenue. McKinsey’s forecast shows that by 2025, there will be 15,000 companies
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3 mins read
1.5K views

A Tantalizing Glimpse of the Social Web in the Future; When Everything is Connected

January 27, 2015
Imagine yourself chatting with your home before you leave the office. Your home control panel will immediately communicate with an oven and a cooktop to prepare dinner and activate the washing machine before you arrive home. Your vacuum will check the condition of your carpet and clean it. When you are stood up on a date, your home will respond and recommend you food. Your home appliances will gear up for a warm welcome to cheer you up. Once you walk into the house, your favorite music and TV program will already be on along with a welcoming message. This
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3 mins read
958 views

Coping with Demographic Realities: The Case of Kawane Village

January 27, 2015
Trends in urbanization are often accompanied by even more significant trends of depopulation in rural areas. Japan presents an extreme case in population changes as in addition to being an incredibly urbanized state; it has one of the lowest birthrates in the World. As a consequence, the care of the elderly who remain in rural areas is of growing concern. Efforts from the Japanese government to date have revolved around consolidating the small rural hamlets into larger administrative units. While this drastically improves the efficiency in fund allocation from a governmental standpoint, the services provided to the residents of these
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3 mins read
739 views

How to Design a Truly Smart City

January 27, 2015
For hundreds of years, people have been flocking to cities where jobs, ideas, and wealth are generated. Cities have been perceived as a symbol of opportunities for success, attracting millions of youths and ambitious individuals every year. According to the United Nations’ projections, by 2050, the urban population will rise to almost 6.5 billion, and 64.1% of the developing countries and 85.9% of the developed countries will be urbanized. In response to rising urban population, some countries, such as China and India, have been spending heaps of money to build new cities for the accommodation of mounting city dwellers. Growing
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3 mins read
858 views

Wheels Falling off the WTO: Is it high time to write an obituary for multilateralism?

January 27, 2015
Multilateralism was believed to have returned from the grave, when delegates to the World Trade Organization (WTO) bragged of the Bali deal, the first fruit to be reaped out of the long-deadlocked multilateral trade negotiations in December 2013. The resurrection of the Doha round of international trade talks was indeed quite a surprise to those who already promulgated the end of multilateralism. Doha negotiations, initiated in 2001, were suffocated owing to the conflict of interest among WTO members in intractable issues such as agricultural subsidies, intellectual property rights and trade in services. They also experienced the collapse of talks in
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3 mins read
848 views

Space Law: A New Frontier

January 27, 2015
“Space law”, contrary to how it sounds, does not entail any notions of space sheriffs hunting bandits in lunar canyons. In reality, the body of international laws and customs that govern human activities in outer space is what is properly referred to as space law. Before the first human ventures into space, such as Sputnik, there was no clear agreement or conceptualization of what rules and customs should be applied to the new frontier. The US and the USSR both had little reason to extend airspace laws further up as they both would be repeatedly violating each other’s airspace through
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2 mins read
719 views

Testing Theories of American Politics

January 27, 2015
While not an altogether new phenomenon, the nature of the US’ democratic system in terms of its responsiveness to the needs of its citizens has been given considerable attention in recent years. Coinciding with this is the emergence of new challenges to the existing system. The Occupy Wall Street movement was an example of citizens protesting the actions of the US government in handling the financial crisis. Riots, such as those in the wake of the police shooting in Ferguson, Missouri speak to the racial tension existing there, but also have the political element of expressing anger at the government’s
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3 mins read
1.4K views

Technological Advances in M-health

January 27, 2015
As smartphones and wearable gadgets cascade into every crevice of life, the prospect of technological advances in mobile health (m-health) that will usher in a transformative era of healthcare has appeared. M-health refers to the practice of medicine supported by mobile devices. Particularly in developing countries that have experienced a sharp rise in mobile penetration, a flurry of innovative experiments have been under way to revolutionize their ill-equipped healthcare systems and provide life-saving services to those who need them the most. For instance, Dr. Andrew Bastawrous and his colleagues have developed Peek, the portable eye exam kit comprised of a
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2 mins read
846 views

The New State Nobody Saw Coming

January 27, 2015
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The Islamic State (IS) has achieved many of its territorial and organizational goals during the past year. Operating both on the Syrian and on the Iraqi fronts, it has expended territorially, acquired new financial resources and grown in number its recruits. The rapid and vicious expansion of this well-organized Sunni jihadist group has taken by surprise the Iraqi government and it has de facto split the country between the IS, the Iraqi central government and the Kurds. The already precarious stability and unity of Iraq has been broken by the IS and to date, the country is trapped in a
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3 mins read
967 views

Dragon Ready to Forge Ahead: Will China overtake US?

January 27, 2015
The Chinese juggernaut is expected to overtake the American eagle by 2021 in terms of GDP, according to The Economist’s latest estimates (Aug 2014). In fact, China already outpaced the U.S. as the world’s largest manufacturing power in 2010. Since then, it has been further widening its lead, according to the 2013 UN research. Notwithstanding a small dent in its recent growth trend line, partly owing to a slowdown in export demand from key markets (e.g. U.S. and EU), China has been able to achieve its growth target of 7.5% in the second quarter of 2014. Yet a fleet of
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4 mins read
2.6K views
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