Wisdom in fragments

The proposed link-up between Microsoft and Yahoo has been approved by European regulators, paving the way for the two companies to combine their search engines and take on Google together.

It is the sinusoidal movement of economies between stage 1 and stage 2 which contributes to growth, while the participants in stage 3 very rarely contribute to any real economic growth as their entire theatre is virtual.

Fundamentally, the real way to tackle bubble-formation is through careful understanding and regulation of how financial products are created and traded, not necessarily regulating the capital structure of the markets themselves.

In December 2007, Listed credit derivatives stood at USD 548 trillion - to put that in context, The GDP of the entire world is USD 50 trillion. On top of the listed credit derivatives, there was also an OTC derivatives bubble which had a notional face value of USD 596 trillion.

Classic economic theory simply will not allow governments and regulatory bodies to deal with bubbles effectively, as they will grow to tremendous sizes immensely fast, meaning that the amount of support needed when they burst vastly exceeds the value of most economies.

Roughly 100 countries in the world have already eliminated malaria (most of them since the Second World War). Of the 100 countries in the world that still have endemic malaria, 39 are in the process of eliminating while the remaining 61 are making steady progress.

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The discovery of an effective HIV vaccine is the nirvana for all our efforts to prevent AIDS.

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We are scientifically naked in front of this threat. We do not have the diagnostics to quickly detect an MDR or XDR case. Once detected, we do not have the drugs to effectively treat the patient at reasonable cost, and we do not have a TB vaccine.

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HIV/AIDS is the greatest pandemic in human history. It is chronic pandemic, in the sense that its rise and fall is measured in decades. The known part of this pandemic is now three decades old, and it has several decades still to run.

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In times of crisis, whether through conflict or nature, it is not an option for us to assist people but an obligation.

We are no longer sovereign-islands protected by fortified walls and arbitrary map-lines- we are an interconnected global family who depend on each other in incredibly profound ways.

Even the most untrained eye can sense the degrees of discrimination seen in foreign policy responses to natural disasters and conflict. Discrimination which can only rationally be explained by morally abhorrent flaws in foreign-policy.

The twenty million people who currently need assistance in Pakistan are not terrorists, nor of strategic importance for our governments. They are much more important than that, they are people like you and me- men, women, families, children- who only want the best for their lives, and who were already struggling with immense poverty, even before nature yielded a blow.

And a country that stops its citizens having access to Facebook, say, or Google or Skype, faces real disadvantages – from inward investment to domestic discontent…

Cambridge computer scientist specializing in security engineering and cryptography

And the overall picture that's emerging is that the controls which still work operate more along corporate boundaries than along national boundaries. In order to censor YouTube, for example, countries like Turkey and Pakistan had to block access to the whole site; it's not practical just to block selected content.

Cambridge computer scientist specializing in security engineering and cryptography

[the impact of the internet on liberty and free speech has been] very positive indeed – not so much two steps forward and one step back, as ten steps forward for every step back. By breaking the oligopoly of the established press and letting everyone be a publisher, it has made information much harder for the powerful to control.

Cambridge computer scientist specializing in security engineering and cryptography