So the other day I referred briefly to the new idea of decoupling. It never really gained any traction with me, and to be truthful I am not really sure how it gained traction with anybody.

How would it be possible to have a global, integrated economy and trading network where effects do not propagate. One might say that if there are multiple strong economies the failure of one might be mitigated by the others. As it is, the Asian and European markets are suffering from the changing fortunes of their American partners. This should not at all be unexpected. In fact, it is a classic social contagion problem.
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Troubling news from the world financial markets(US markets are closed today in observance of Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday) as stock prices decline on fears of United States recession. The New York Times points out that:

The angst about the United States belies the popular theory that Europe and Asia are not as dependent on the American economy as they once were, in part because they trade more with each other. The theory, known as decoupling, has been used to explain why economies like China and Germany have kept growing robustly, even as the United States has slowed.

Emphasizing the fact that despite the strong growth of Asian economies in the past decade, United States can still exert a powerful economic pull on those nations. The global market seems to persist as officials from the European Central Bank have also questioned the idea that the world’s major markets have “decoupled”, making them less subject to the recent downturn in American fortunes.
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This post about regenerative agriculture reminded me of something that I learned about last year. In a discussion on the nature of precision agriculture and monocropping methods which have been introduced to areas around the world, one point that was brought up was that plants might thrive in a less homogeneous environment. Meaning that, rather than planting a garden full of one crop(likely for export) one might be better served by mixing crops together.

It’s an old idea, but one that had been ignored by modern agriculture and never fully investigated as it was often assumed to be inefficient. Anyways, its an idea that is returning perhaps to the forefront of Western thought, and researchers have been looking into the idea of gardens as social network.
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One of the hottest debates in globalization discussions is the changing nature of the nation-state. While I won’t go into all of the arguments and views here, I will just say that the perspectives are many. As time goes on I will explore more of them, but for now I want to focus on an article by Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek, “What People Will Die For”. In it, Zakaria asserts that because of globalization, subnationalist identities are asserting themselves and are coming to the forefront in global politics:

Globalization and democratization are the broad trends of the day, and both have the effect of empowering small groups within countries and weakening the nation-state. Gujarat can prosper without much reference to or help from New Delhi. The Sindhis can maintain their sense of identity far better today—with the proliferation of regional television, Web-based communities and cheap communication—than ever before.

As Zakaria points out, these are very old and very firm identities. It is not always a religious conflict within nations, but rather a clash of subnational ideologies. I would not go so far as to say that this is all leading to the collapse of the nation-state(to be replaced with smaller nation-states, perhaps), but it does bring up the issue of legitimacy.
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It is thought that one of the defining features of a functioning democratic system is the ability of people to freely form groups to represent their interests. In China, this has traditionally not been the case. Typically the Chinese government has feared the disturbances that civil society groups might cause - or the challenge that it might pose to official policy or orthodoxy. The Wall Street Journal just ran an article about Ma Chen and her efforts to start a school for autistic children, an effort that she has undertaken without state sanction:

The outcome has important implications for China. Independent centers of power, such as charities and advocacy groups, have begun popping up here in response to social problems. Beijing is gradually permitting nongovernmental organizations, but it restricts their scope. The country’s leadership worries that too much civil society could stir up conflict, challenge its grip and put at risk the stability that has underpinned 25 years of fast economic growth.

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There has been plenty of discussion on how exactly to measure globalization; whether we are talking about political, economic or cultural aspects there has been a drive to quantify things so that we may compare them with previous eras and see just where this process is going.

One of the attempts to provide a comprehensive tool for measuring globalization comes from the Swiss KOF Foundation. The KOF Index of Globalization allows you to query a database for a variety of years and countries and generate graphs or maps presenting a variety of globalization data.
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While talking to a friend recently I realized that when one says “social networks” nowadays people immediately think that you are talking about sites like Facebook, Myspace, Linkedin, etc. While these “social networking sites” can be analyzed much as any other social network, they are really just the tip of the iceberg.
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Ever since things started getting hectic in Kenya, I have been considering how the news might appear within that country. An obvious thing to do, but one that I had not really done until now was to look up a Kenyan newspaper online. In this case I found the East Africa Standard and the Daily Nation - both Kenya-based.
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During a recent trip to Guatemala I was surprised to discover how large the indigenous population of that country is - by some estimates nearly half the population is classified as “Native American”, or indigenous. What surprised me even more was the prevalence of people who spoke and used traditional Mayan languages such as Tz’utujil, K’iche and Kaqchikel in daily life. Some people I spoke to said that many of the older people spoke only a Mayan language and did not know Spanish at all. According to the CIA World Factbook, 40% of the population speaks on of 23 Mayan dialects.
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2007 ushered in a new era in warfare as armed robots were first deployed on the battlefield. The SWORDS robots are manned remotely by soldiers, and do not make tactical decisions on their own, so I wonder if this is any different than remotely controlled Predator drones, which have been used for years.

Naturally, the use of any new technology in the battlefield raises ethical issues, and in this case some people are concerned with the issue of responsibility when a remotely controlled robot takes a life. I would argue that it is the soldier controlling that robot. However, in the future we might see thornier issues as robots are given more independent control over their responses to threats. If an algorithm decides to take a fatal shot without human input, who is to blame then if the robot kills a friendly target or civilian due to programming error?

It still remains to be seen if robots are even an effective or reliable tool in ground combat.