"Speaking of “…the noble and profound application of ideas to life ” "
-Matthew Arnold

Do you believe the world is a closed system with limited volume of resources that must be shared by citizens of the world OR would you rather accept that the world is an open system with infinite resources and infinite capacities to continuously create new wealth?

If you believe in the former, then poverty and wealth can be reduced to a mere balancing problem that can be more or less summed up in the following statements:
a. Someone has to lose money, become poor or die for another to make money or become rich;
b. China’s economic ascent draws so much on the world’s resources and automatically puts the rest of the global economy in decline – down with China!
c. India’s IT outsource market automatically translates to America’s middle class opportunities being shipped off to India, inter alia.

From the most mundane economic observation, this finite resource argument lacks any kind of merit. Take global population expansion -- global human population has continuously grown for twenty to thirty thousand years, depending on who you listen to, yet resources has also continued to grow in tandem with population. If resources were finite, then global wealth should have gotten so terribly diluted that we would all have become a planet of severely malnourished paupers -- we would also have eaten up all naturally occurring resources and reverted back to cannibalism. But on the contrary, thank God, brand new millionaires and billionaires continue to sprout all around us everyday!

"Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please."
-Mark Twain

In the light of the amazingly alarming ways in which emerging computer technologies are redefining 21^st century existence – I have this one more clanger – MRI exams successfully conducted remotely over the Internet. If you recall, I had started talking about this whole remote-medical-procedure trend in this earlier blog. Marvel at the hand of ICT, I do!

I’m not done yet – just warming up to the entrée; I know some people who think a wireless mouse is way cool. Or even kick it up a notch to voice recognition software -- if you recall, "U talk it types" came bundled with some IBM PCs a few years back, you literally typed up your projects on your PC by merely dictating/talking to the machine. Ok, but when you start talking about the computer taking commands directly from your brain – your unvoiced thoughts – that’s downright spooky! But that’s exactly what Brain Computer Interface is all about. Picture a guy sitting in a room in front of a screen with wires sticking out of a headpiece on his head, and then words start popping up on the screen – the guy is composing an email on the computer -- from his mind directly to the PC! Yeah – the possibilities are infinite, the blind, deaf, dumb, and quadriplegics can all go back to work! The US military wouldn’t need to torture Al –qaeda captives in Gitmo – they can just read their gaddem minds! Anyways, I took the above BCI link from the ECE department at the University of British Columbia. You can Google up more links if you are really excited about this – alternate keywords: Direct Neural Interface or Brain Machine Interface.

The recent Wharton Finance Conference paints an ebullient picture of 3^rd world microfinance – it was totally centered on the Nobel peace prize and Muhammad Yunnus.

The highlights are as follows:

Microfinance has got the world’s attention per economist Muhammad Yunus, founder of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Oct. 12.

There is a microfinance curriculum at Wharton,  whoopie!

It’s not just another 3rd world handout or free money scheme – it can actually be profitable to the lenders.

Although reliable statistics are hard to come by, there is evidence that microfinance is growing dramatically. As of the end of 2004, according to the Microcredit Summit Campaign Report, more than 3,000 Microcredit institutions reported reaching over 92 million clients, two-thirds of whom were among the poorest when they received their first loan.

Vis a Vis the pressure of being profitable as a business lender, how do you balance the dual objectives of profitability and social responsibility?

Everybody may not be able to play the microfinance field like Developing World Markets, an investment bank involved only in socially dedicated projects. Commercial bank participation both as wholesalers and retailers may help fuel microfinance growth trend.

We the willing, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much for so long, with so little. We are now qualified to do anything with nothing.
-On a piece of paper I found somewhere.

The African survivalism phenom emerges in the face of unusually harsh living conditions, social inequities and economic inadequacies prevalent in that clime -- extremely high rates of unemployment (Sub Saharan Africa (SSA) 2nd highest in the world) and under-employment. How does the African go about meeting his/her individual economic needs? How desperate is the economic situation? Answers can be quite difficult to read, as the good and bad outcomes of "survivalism" are so closely interwoven. On the good side – sparks of creativity and ingenuity abound – necessity and invention are pretty close relatives. And of course, breeding right alongside the sparks of genius are trampled egos, dashed hopes, unrealized dreams, seething frustration, disease, superstition, weak intellectual property protection – bootlegging ad libitum...whatever.

In an English class years back, we were introduced to Jonathan Swift’s Modest proposal and satirical prose, and we were then asked to craft a satire about technology in the year 2030. I totally botched it – I just couldn’t think of worse things that technology would do beyond humans procreating with Robots -- and breeding a new Homo-digitus species.

Businessweek dispassionately informs of " Venice Project " -- the latest assault on the universally accepted order of television viewing by the same WWW brigands some of us have come to genuinely love or seriously hate. Yep – same bunch of guys who wreaked the KazaA music file sharing havoc – the freebie music download/exchange device was welcomed with wide open arms by most Netizens, until record producers started screaming blue murder. And they started hauling pre-teen KazaA patrons (as well as other free file sharing device patrons) off to court , kicking and screaming for their mommies! Yep – these are same guys who unleashed Skype on the world not too long ago (before Ebay acquired it.) Skype has of course slashed long distance phone expenses for many of us, but it’s causing some serious heartburn for some traditional telecommunication operators.