You have a blog. You compose a new post. You click Publish and lean back to admire your work. Imperceptibly and all but instantaneously, your post slips into a vast and recursive network of software agents, where it is crawled, indexed, mined, scraped, republished, and propagated throughout the Web. Within minutes, if you've written about a timely and noteworthy topic, a small army of bots will get the word out to anyone remotely interested, from fellow bloggers to corporate marketers. Let's say it's Super Bowl Sunday and you're blogging about beer. You see Budweiser's blockbuster commercial and have a reaction you'd like to share. Thanks to search engines and aggregators that compile lists of interesting posts, you can reach a lot of people — and Budweiser, its competitors, beer lovers, ad critics, and your ex-boyfriend can listen in. "You just need to know how to type," says Matthew Hurst, an artificial intelligence researcher who studies this ecosystem at Microsoft Live Labs. Here's how the whole process goes down during the big game.

The Life Cycle of a Blog Post, From Servers to Spiders to Suits -- to You

The first principle. When using a product to help you do a task, the product should only help and never distract you from the task.

The second principle: An interface should be reliable.

The third princple: An interface should be efficient and as simple as possible.

The fourth principle: The suitability of an interface can only be determined by testing.

The fifth principle: An interface should be pleasant in tone and visually attractive.

A nearly one page summary of design rules, by Jef Raskin

After more than a century of relative stagnation, the economies of India and China have been growing at remarkably high rates over the past 25 years. In 1820 the two countries contributed nearly half of the world’s income; by 1950, with the industrialized West having pulled away, their share had fallen to less than one-tenth. Today it is just less than one-fifth, and projections suggest that by 2025 it will rise to one-third. (In 2008 the World Bank is expected to issue revised numbers about cost of living in China and India, which may somewhat reduce these estimated income shares, both current and future).

The consequences of this expansion are extraordinary. The Chinese economy in particular has made the most headway against poverty in world history, with hundreds of millions of people moved out of the most extreme poverty within just a generation. (The environmental consequences are comparably remarkable, though perhaps proportionately disastrous).

What explains this strikingly rapid growth?

What Makes a Miracle: Some myths about the rise of China and India

According to futurologist theory, major cities will soon cease growth as technology improves the quality of life and space regulation is improved. This, according to University of Southern California communication professor Manuel Castells, is not only wrong, but it is also contrary to his prediction that cities will soon expand into large metropolitan regions that will connect in many different ways. Castells visited UC Irvine’s University Club on Thursday, Jan. 24 to talk about the evolution of cities and the concept of “urban” today.

Castells holds joint appointments with sociology, international relation, and policy, planning and development at University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication. He is one of the world’s most highly cited social science and communications scholars in the world. At the behest of the Department of Planning, Policy and Design, Castells gave a presentation on what he believes is the natural progression of the urban world.

According to Castells, the world is becoming a network society, where different networks of interests criss-cross the globe. Studying individual societies is pointless because of the interconnections between nations. These networks meet in giant metropolitan nodes, typically surrounding major cities. They connect the various populations of the world, but there are some who are disconnected and isolated. Those regions not advanced enough to participate or involve themselves in these networks are cut off from the global society of networks. The regions that are cut off are usually too poor or technologically behind to keep up.

“We have shifted from exploitation to something much worse: irrelevance,” Castells said. “At least exploited people can fight. The irrelevant are ignored.”

Spread Technology, Strengthen Networks

From the man who puts the Long in Long Bet:

A World Economic Forum (WEF) panel featuring such futurists as Paul Saffo of Stanford and Peter Schwartz, chairman of Global Business Network, suggested Thursday that print newspapers will disappear by 2014. But ever since the Internet became a powerhouse we’ve heard similar predictions on the end of print, so, no need to pay attention to this prediction either. Right?

I mentioned another Saffo prediction last year: Paul Saffo: USA to disappear in 50 years.

A Futurist Panel At The World Economic Forum Suggests Print Newspapers Will Cease By 2014 So Should We Start Packing Our Bags?

Must See.

There may be no scarcer commodity in modern Hollywood than a distinctive and original film score. Most soundtracks lean so heavily on a few preprocessed musical devices—those synthetic swells of strings and cymbals, urging us to swoon in tandem with the cheerleader in love—that when a composer adopts a more personal language the effect is revelatory: an entire dimension of the film experience is liberated from cliché. So it is with Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie “There Will Be Blood,” which has an unearthly, beautiful score by the young English composer Jonny Greenwood. The early scenes show, in painstaking detail, a maverick oilman assembling a network of wells at the turn of the last century. Filmgoers who find themselves falling into a claustrophobic trance during these sequences may be inclined to credit the director, who, indeed, has forged some indelible images. But, as Orson Welles once said of Bernard Herrmann’s contribution to “Citizen Kane,” the music does fifty per cent of the work.

Welling Up

From microorganisms to whales, from single cells to complex organisms, from plants to animals to fungi, from body plans to behavior, the diversity of life is amazing. Living organisms have a profound impact on our physical world of ocean, landscape, and climate; around us is a multitude of diverse ecosystems that provide a livable environment and many valuable resources. The study of life—biology—is a multifaceted endeavor that uses observation, exploration, and experiments to gather information and test hypotheses about topics ranging from climate change to stem cells. The field of biology is so diverse that it can sometimes be hard for one individual to keep its breadth in mind while contemplating a particular question.

This study was initiated at the request of, and with the sponsorship of, the National Science Foundation. It was conceived as a new approach to a question that has been asked before: What is the future of biology? In 1989 the National Research Council released a report on this topic entitled Opportunities in Biology. Over 400 pages long and four years in the making, the report provided a detailed snapshot of the state of biology at that time. Eleven different panels detailed the opportunities awaiting the rapidly diversifying field of biology. Reading the report today, the excitement of that time is palpable. Section after section describes new technologies and promises new discoveries. Each section focuses on a different subdiscipline of biology.

The Role of Theory in Advancing 21st Century Biology: Catalyzing Transformative Research

“Our economy is in serious trouble,” writes Eric Janszen in the cover story for the February Harper’s. “Both the production-consumption sector and the FIRE [finance, insurance and real estate] sector know that a debt-inflation Armageddon is nigh, and both are praying for a timely miracle, a new bubble to keep the economy from slipping into a depression.” A well-known venture capitalist, Janszen is the founder and owner of iTulip.com. His is hardly the only voice on the markets today invoking apocalyptic notes.

The Bubble Bursts

File under New Middle Ages:

A crucial Iraqi ally of the United States in its recent successes in the country is threatening to withdraw his support and allow al-Qa'ida to return if his fighters are not incorporated into the Iraqi army and police.

"If there is no change in three months there will be war again," said Abu Marouf, the commander of 13,000 fighters who formerly fought the Americans. He and his men switched sides last year to battle al-Qa'ida and defeated it in its main stronghold in and around Fallujah.

"If the Americans think they can use us to crush al-Qa'ida and then push us to one side, they are mistaken," Abu Marouf told The Independent in an interview in a scantily furnished villa beside an abandoned cemetery near the village of Khandari outside Fallujah. He said that all he and his tribal following had to do was stand aside and al-Qa'ida's fighters would automatically come back. If they did so he might have to ally himself to a resurgent al-Qa'ida in order to "protect myself and my men".

Abu Marouf said he was confident that his forces controlled a swath of territory stretching east from Fallujah into Baghdad and includes what Americans called "the triangle of death" south-west of the capital. Even so his bodyguards, armed with AK-47 assault rifles, nervously watched the abandoned canals and reed beds around his temporary headquarters. Others craned over light machine guns in newly built watch towers.

'If there is no change in three months, there will be war again'

Joseph Stiglitz:

When we look back someday at the catastrophe that was the Bush administration, we will think of many things: the tragedy of the Iraq war, the shame of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, the erosion of civil liberties. The damage done to the American economy does not make front-page headlines every day, but the repercussions will be felt beyond the lifetime of anyone reading this page.

...

Some portion of the damage done by the Bush administration could be rectified quickly. A large portion will take decades to fix—and that’s assuming the political will to do so exists both in the White House and in Congress. Think of the interest we are paying, year after year, on the almost $4 trillion of increased debt burden—even at 5 percent, that’s an annual payment of $200 billion, two Iraq wars a year forever. Think of the taxes that future governments will have to levy to repay even a fraction of the debt we have accumulated. And think of the widening divide between rich and poor in America, a phenomenon that goes beyond economics and speaks to the very future of the American Dream.

In short, there’s a momentum here that will require a generation to reverse. Decades hence we should take stock, and revisit the conventional wisdom. Will Herbert Hoover still deserve his dubious mantle? I’m guessing that George W. Bush will have earned one more grim superlative.

The Economic Consequences of Mr. Bush