Happy Holidays & thanks to friends of wordup!

wordup wishes you the very best for 2011!

And to the friends of wordup research: thanks for an amazing 2010!! Through these friends I have enjoyed a front row seat on the research and development at:
Centre for the Mind
Finrisk
Institute of Neuroinformatics
SCANCO AG
Stimmt AG
Universal Postal Union

Thanks very much, also, to the many individuals who have discussed ideas and research with me in 2010!

When I wrote in March 2009 that I was organizing interviews with "researchers and research policy opinion leaders about their response to the changed global conditions in research funding," I simply could not have imagined the way things have developed since. The response of Universities and innovative businesses to the aftermath of the global financial crisis has been dramatic. But much more diverse than I predicted back then.

I'm re-doubling my efforts to help innovators prepare themselves for the changed economic conditions. During the next few months I will distribute some interviews I have made, posted on Youtube, about how people are re-drawing their plans and keeping their eyes on the prize: being innovative, seizing opportunities.

And of course I am already planning the wordup research Asia 2011 tour! Stay tuned.

Hello from Interact @wordupresearch

I'm currently taking a holiday from this blog. That is not to say I won't make further posts.

Most of my blog attention now resides here on my new 'interact' blog:

Interact does not replace this blog. It is just a different concept for blogging and one that suits me better right now. And don't forget that my tweets get published here, on this site (top left hand side), so I would still encourage you to stop by now and then.

Thanks for reading!

Unblogged: visit to Singapore and Sydney

I know I should get out more, so next week I will begin a journey to Singapore and Sydney for some face time with the people I usually only blog about.


High on my meetings list are students, recent graduates and entrepreneurs. I'll be heading along to a youth event jointly organized by the University of Sydney and the National University of Singapore, called What Makes a Young Champion. And I will also be speaking with graduates and faculty of the Singapore Management University.

With the financial crisis starting to have a direct impact on many research institutions around the world, it is interesting to see how universities are reshaping themselves as a result. For example, Singapore Management University is expanding its Social Sciences and Humanities faculty. In the UK, the Humanities/Arts faculties face the greatest funding pressure.

More than anything else I am simply keen to learn from people who are living in these exciting Asia-Pacific centers.

Read the full announcement here. I welcome you to follow my journey here (for Facebook fans) or here (for those that aren't...).

Scientific culture and war in Britain

Is the pen mightier than the sword? Not in hand-to-hand combat, according to new research by Univ. Maastricht Professor Geert Somsen about British war propaganda in 1941.

Raining down on France that year were more than 22 million pamphlets, dropped from bomber aircraft, containing stories penned by Britain's top secret Political Warfare Executive.

The so called Forth Fighting Army of Britain, its propaganda campaign, was no less active on the Home front. Former Nature editor Sir Richard Gregory made rousing remarks about the importance of scientific culture at the Science and World Order conference held at London's Royal Institution. Diplomats, politicians, and significantly, famous scientists and science journalists heard Gregory argue that science is a "true democracy and a great democracy".

Professor Somsen noted that many of the assembled luminaries, including Gregory, had openly questioned Western democracy during the decade before. In short, they rallied for the Allied cause and sent a clear message about the democratic, democratizing effects of science and international research culture.

Thanks to the host of Professor Somsen's seminar, the ETH History of Knowledge Centre.

Risks Report narrows awareness gap about runaway risks

I've now had a chance to digest last night's stimulating panel on the WEF Global Risks Report, hosted at the Centre for Global Dialogue.

Collapsing asset prices, indebtedness and fiscal crises have featured prominently in each of the Reports since 2006. This year, editor and lead author Sheana Tambourgi points to what she calls an 'awareness gap' about the implications of underinvestment in infrastructure, rising costs of chronic disease and, more cryptically, a deficit in global governance.

Why the attention towards such apparently vague risks?

The panel discussion focused on the impact of interconnections between individual global risks. A central theme of the Global Risks Report, the complex interconnections between risks are examined graphically in the Risks Interconnection Map (RIM, pictured).

For example, the Map shows how connections between the degraded state of global infrastructure, weak climate/energy policies and China's slowing growth rate can explain why chronic disease, food price volatility and biodiversity loss could combine to produce a disproportionately large economic cost.

What can such an analysis offer? To answer this question I am reminded of a recent piece in Nature suggesting that “science should focus more on understanding the present and less on predicting the future”. A focus on the apparently vague and relatively modest hazards of the here and now may help to avoid a calamity of far greater proportions.