By Hernando de Soto – Over the past 20 years, Americans and Europeans have quietly gone about destroying these facts. The very systems that could have provided markets and governments with the means to understand the global financial crisis—and to prevent another one—are being eroded. In a few short decades the West undercut 150 years of legal reforms that made the global economy possible.
We are now staring at a legal and political challenge. A legal challenge because American and European governments allowed economic activity to cross the line from the rule-bound system of property rights, where facts can be established, into an anarchic legal space, where arbitrary interests can trump facts and paper swirls out of control. The rule of law is much more than a dull body of norms: It is a huge, thriving information and management system that filters and processes local data until it is transformed into facts organized in a way that allows us to infer if they hang together and make sense. more> http://twurl.nl/3n6n7o
World Bank – The World Development Indicators 2011 publication and database update are now available. The publication is the 15th edition of WDI and the database now contains updated data through 2009 or 2010 for many indicators. A number of additions and improvements have been made to the WDI database in this update.
By David Greenfield – A number of efforts are currently being employed across industries to harvest energy typically lost during production operations. A number of these projects involve energizing low-power devices, such as sensors, through capture of wasted energy from vibrations or heat dissipation. But that still leaves a massive amount of energy being released by industrial systems that remain uncaptured for greater use.
R&D Mag – Like atomic-level bricklayers, researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory are using a precise atom-by-atom layering technique to fabricate an ultrathin transistor-like field effect device to study the conditions that turn insulating materials into high-temperature superconductors.
