…we pursue holistic, sustainable solutions to end extreme poverty. Holistic because the problems of the extreme poor are so interconnected that water and sanitation can’t be separated from education, or agriculture from micro-finance. Sustainable because the poor need solutions to lift themselves out of poverty, not programs that create dependence on an outside organization for resources.

It means that we are constantly working to create appropriate, sustainable solutions in partnership with the poor. It means that we admit that we don’t have it all figured out, but we’ll learn from our mistakes and won’t repeat them. It means that we are the pioneers of the next generation of solutions in this fight, and we’re starting a revolution against extreme poverty.

From How Nuru Works

In short, America should stop pouring billions into bureaucracies to buy short-term alliances and focus its efforts on bottom-up entrepreneurship. This would increase America’s popularity, alleviate poverty, and promote real democratic change in these developing countries.

We should encourage governments to be sustained by citizens’ taxes — that is, democracies. Democracies will be enduring allies of America.

Foreign Aid and Bad Government

One afternoon I was interviewing Rafael Branco, a former foreign minister, when Corallo’s name came up. “You see the car he drives, the simple way he lives, the things he does for this country? Don’t give us aid - give us ten clones of Corallo,” said Branco.

Instead of putting a dozen scientists in a room to come up with a better model of the existing global financial system, we should put a dozen Pierre Omidyars, Elon Musks, Salar Kamangars, and Jeff Bezoses in a room (with Danny Hillis) and let them actually build one (a new financial system, not another model)

“It’s not nearly as glamorous as people think to keep working on something and to keep hitting roadblocks and to keep going,” he said.

Stubborn, delusionally optimistic, creative, fearless, flexible and focused are some of the ways psychologists and business people describe the personality of an entrepreneur. Surprisingly, another word is ignorant.

…

Research by Harvard Business School psychology professor emeritus Abraham Zaleznik has unveiled a darker side to the entrepreneur’s psyche.

Another academic researcher on the topic, professor Kelly Shaver of the College of William & Mary, told Forbes magazine in 2002 that successful entrepreneurs “really don’t care as much” about what other people think. “They’re just happy to go ahead and do what they’re doing.” 

From CNN.com: Segway Inventor Reveals Toughest Question

“We process a huge amount of information second by second. If we were aware of every single thing, our minds would be overloaded. The flood of information would choke us. The human mind uses the method of information abstraction to cope with the sensory overload of everyday life.”

- Professor Andrzej Bargiela, Director of Computer Science at The University of Nottingham, Malaysia Campus

Granular Computing: Analysing groups or sets of data (information granules)

As all who read Downtime know, technology tends to be pretty predictable (Moore’s Law still holds), but what people will do with it remains a mystery.

Take the latest modelling tool from the University of Warwick’s department of statistics and centre for complexity science (aka the chaos class). They invented this cool bit of technology called “graphical models” to unpick the complex cell interactions that lead to cancer.

No sooner had they published some results that some new kids on the block, aka sociologists, purloined it to datamine Facebook.

The boffins at Warwick looked at just 14 proteins which were implicated in the development of a form of cancer. Those 14 proteins could get together in around 8.72 followed by 10 zeros, according to Downtime’s rusty HP12C.

So, to save MIPS, they found a way using “informative priors” to interpret new information in light of what is already known. The clever bit is that the system will even recover from earlier errors in understanding.

Not only was the network model with information priors much better able to resolve complex interactions, it was much more accurate, they said.

They are now looking at how the tool could be used to mine anonymised data from social networking sites to better understand large scale interactions and relationships in society at large.