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The World in 2012: What will next year bring?
This year The World in 2012 has also invited a number of contributors to make their predictions in the space of 140 characters.
If you are not a Twitter user you can still take part by leaving your prediction (in no more than 140 characters) in the comments below. Winners will be announced near the date of publication, in mid-November. Good luck [Read more]!
Technology shift sparks a rethinking of conventional office space.
With mobile devices invading the workplace and more workers telecommuting, many companies—and the design firms that serve them—are rapidly changing their thinking about conventional office space.
Cubicles are passé; flexible spaces that allow employees to log in, collaborate, and hit the road are all the rage. The goal is to support the mobile workforce, increase the opportunities to interact, and save money by using space more efficiently [Photo Gallery: Innovations in office design].
The World Economic Forum is often described as “the world’ s largest brainstorm” — and the issues on the global agenda are increasingly interconnected and require systemic thinking [Source].
The School of Visual Arts in New York City developed a design that tackles the complexity issue by looking at which WEF councils are seeking dialogue with one another. Their wheel lets you hover over a council name — and the lines indicate the other council they want to reach. The darkness of the line indicates the strength of the relationship [Source].
For example, the “Weapons of Mass Destruction” council understandably has a strong dialogue with their “Terrorism” colleagues. They want to engage the “International Legal” team — but that connection is quite weak.
Please find the wheel here.
Thinking of entering the world of high-speed computer trading, but don’t know whether you’re best situated in New York, London, or Hong Kong? Your best bet may be Siberia instead, according to a new study from two MIT researchers.
The insight of the MIT researchers, Alexander Wissner-Gross and Cameron Freer, is that some automated traders–or at the very least, their server farms–will be best positioned in-between certain exchanges. Since some trading strategies capitalise on price fluctuations between separate exchanges in different parts of the world, the optimally located server will receive information from those exchanges at precisely the same moment, gaining that millisecond advantage over the competitor. In some cases that pefect location is the midpoint between the two exchanges, but not always–it depends on whether the exchanges’ prices move at the same speed or not [Source].
Relativistic statistical arbitrage: Recent advances in high-frequency financial trading have made light propagation delays between geographically separated exchanges relevant. Here we show that there exist optimal locations from which to coordinate the statistical arbitrage of pairs of spacelike separated securities, and calculate a representative map of such locations on Earth. Furthermore, trading local securities along chains of such intermediate locations results in a novel econophysical effect, in which the relativistic propagation of tradable information is effectively slowed or stopped by arbitrage [Source].
The CIA World Factbook is a data nerd’s dream and a crowning achievement in data gathering, highlighting every single country in the world, and presenting myriad facts ranging from GDP to important local industries. It’s also mind-numbingly boring and not terribly useful because there’s simply no way to summarize all that data.
IBM’s data-visualisation researchers leveled their resources at the problem, producing their own World Factbook, a sprawling online tool that lets you create thousands of charts on the fly.
For a similar–and even more ambitious–project, definitely check out the World Development Indicators 2010, which contains details about health, environment, and education of every country in the world.
In case you weren’t one of the 700 million-plus fans to watch the World Cup Finals yesterday, Spain beat the Netherlands 1-0 in extra time. But the España football stars weren’t the only winners–and certainly the Holland footballers were not the only losers. Companies around the world were competing to increase brand awareness and boost profits–here’s FastCompany’s list of the winners and losers.
The World Competitiveness Yearbook 2010 from Swiss business school IMD finds the U.S. and Europe losing their edge to fast-growing Asian economies.
A lot can change in 12 months. At this time last year, Western nations dominated the annual ranking of the world’s most competitive countries prepared by the IMD business school in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Now, in the most recent ranking released May 19, five of the top 10 are from the Asia-Pacific region. Emerging-power China, ranked No. 18, has gained ground, even as No. 3-ranked U.S. and No. 22-ranked Britain slipped in the global pecking order. Check out the top 10 here.
Escaping to a private island is a childhood dream fed by stories such as Treasure Island and Swallows and Amazons. Surprisingly, many real islands are on the market, starting at well under £100,000 (€114,000). Here Times Money lists 10 affordable examples from around the world now on sale at Vladi Private Islands.
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