DIMITAR DILKOFF/AFP

The World Economic Forum has released its annual Network Readiness rankings, which assesses how well a country can engage in and benefit from developments in information technology. Denmark nabs the top spot this year, followed by Sweden, Singapore, Finland, Switzerland, and the Netherlands.

The United States, which topped the list last year, fell to seventh place this time around. Authors of the report cited problems in the justice system, the low rate of mobile phone use, and the low quality of science and math education as reasons behind the slide. They also singled out the lack of government leadership as harming American dominance in tech development.

Remember a few years back, when European and Asian countries were developing their third-generation (3G) technologies for mobile phones, which were leaps and bounds ahead of the U.S.?  The United States is still playing catch-up. It seem that allowing market forces to run amok may not always result in the best technology. A more regulated environment for mobile technology in Europe and Asia allows for more unity in technological advances, whereas in the United States, competing standards can cause logjams. The same logic applies to some other aspects of IT as well, such as broadband penetration. It turns out government involvement can be a good thing, if it's efficient and well-informed.

Over the weekend, a video game system became the heart of the most powerful supercomputer on earth. As I write this, Playstation 3 game consoles all over the world are working together to power through 493 trillion calculations per second in a group effort to find cures for Alzheimer's, Huntington's Disease, Mad Cow Disease, and several forms of cancer. To put that into perspective, IBM’s Blue Gene, considered to be the fastest unclassified supercomputer, reportedly maxes out at 367 trillion calculations per second. And the Playstation 3 cluster is still growing.

The game consoles' owners have volunteered to run a special software package developed at Stanford by a group called Folding@home. Their task is to simulate protein folding, the process whereby the human body produces new proteins. Alzheimer's and other diseases appear when human proteins become malformed. Exactly how normal protein production goes bad and eventually leads to these diseases is unknown, because the processes are extremely complicated, and they happen in milliseconds. 

So scientists have begun simulating these complex processes via software—but it's no light-weight task. Most protein folding requires banks of powerful computers and days, if not months, of processing time to simulate just a few seconds of biological reaction. The "distributed computing" approach to tackling big problems isn't new. Several other projects are working to cure AIDS, study global warming, and even scan the cosmos for extraterrestrial life by dishing their software out over huge networks of computers. But Folding@home is the first to tap the power of the Playstation 3, which, it turns out, is a computational powerhouse.

Stocked with seven processors, all tuned to perform heavy number crunching, the Playstation 3 puts the average single-processor PC to shame. (All that computing power is also using quite a bit of energy, but that's another story.)

The Playstation 3's formidable numbers are surely being noticed by the other distributed computing projects, so pretty soon video game consoles could also be predicting the weather, simulating nuclear explosions, or unlocking the origins of the universe. To follow the progress of the Folding@home project, be sure to check in on the regular updates published on their website.

Watch a video of the Playstation 3 Folding@home software at work:

In a recent FP cover story, The Bomb in the Backyard, nuke experts Peter Zimmerman and Jeffrey Lewis showed that for just a few million dollars, terrorists could purchase highly enriched uranium on the black market and basic military supplies on the Internet and— voilà—have a nuclear bomb. 

To stop this nightmare scenario, U.S. border officials must be able to detect smuggled uranium at the border. That's extraordinarily difficult, explains Steve Coll in a recent piece for the New Yorker, because, "unless it is being compressed to explode, highly enriched uranium is a low-energy isotope that does not emit much radioactivity."

Undaunted, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has promised to shell out $1 billion on "next generation" monitors at port and border checkpoints in order to catch illicit uranium. But in its zeal to shell out some cash, DHS has conveniently overlooked the fact that its new detection monitors don't really work.

A stinging new GAO report shows DHS essentially lying to Congress by asserting that its new monitors were 95 percent effective in detecting smuggled uranium. (Congress had insisted on seeing increases in operational effectiveness before cutting the check for new monitors.) But in truth, the new monitors detected uranium around 70 percent of the time. And when it came to "masked" or hidden uranium, the best new monitors worked only half the time.

So why the discrepancy between the actual and the reported figures? DHS explained to the GAO that "they relied on the assumption that they will reach that [high] level of performance sometime in the future."

Because why have real results when you can make them up?

iStockphoto.com

China is moving aggressively to become a player in space. In 2003, it became the third country after Russia and the United States to put an astronaut in orbit. Then, the country shocked the world in January by testing a new anti-satellite missile. Arms control experts speculated that China's intention was to shake the United States into negotiating a ban on weapons in space.

Since then, China has laid out an ambitious space program that reveals its intention to become a peer of the United States. NASA's chief told the U.S. Congress on Thursday that China could put a man on the moon, for what it's worth, in ten years.

But it looks like some Chinese have gotten a bit too carried away with this space thing:

BEIJING (AFP) - A Chinese company has been banned from selling plots of land on the moon, state media reported on Saturday.

The company, Lunar Embassy to China, had sold a total of 49 acres (20 hectares) to 34 customers before authorities acted, Xinhua news agency said.

The case had been going on since 2005, when the company sued the state after its license was revoked. The wheels of justice do tend to turn slowly in China, but in this case the ruling may have been timed to send a pointed diplomatic message:

On Friday, the Beijing intermediate court rejected its appeal, saying no individual or country could claim ownership of the moon.

lunchoverip.com

Last week, I blogged about how the lack of robust power grids in the rural areas of developing countries spurred some cell providers to experiment with solar, wind and biofuels to independently power individual cell phone towers.

Of course, this solves the problem of power for the cellular network, but—as Passport reader Bradley Loomis asked via email—if there isn't an electrical grid to power the cell towers, how do cell phone users in these areas charge their cell phones?

The answer lies in a business model that is quickly emerging across the globe, from China to Uganda: charging the cell phone batteries of rural customers in bigger cities for a fee. Check out LunchOverIP’s report on how Chinese businessmen are transforming their charge-for-a-fee service into a potentially charge-for-free ad-supported model (kind of like Google but without the whole Internet part). Jan Chipchase also has a great piece on the subject and some good photos of charging stations in Uganda.

Bradley, thanks for the question! More good comments on Slashdot.

When Hitler rained bombs on London for more than 50 consecutive nights in the fall of 1940, Londoners responded by tacking up "Business As Usual" signs on the city's streets. Life went on, and the Blitz be damned.

Contrast that to this morning, when a light dusting of snow—less than one-eighth of an inch—fell on Washington. It was apparently too much for our federal government to handle. Business couldn't continue. On the floor of the U.S. Senate, Majority Leader Harry Reid struggled to explain why the chamber was helpless in the face of a dusting of snow. Taking a vote on a homeland security measure would have to wait. Washington, he explained, is "different from a lot of other places." Here, at the epicenter of the free world, he continued, "an inch or two" of snow probably shouldn't cause the federal government to grind to a halt, "but it does." "Those are the facts of life in the bitter winter of an inch of snow" in the most powerful city in the world, Reid concluded.

Let's hope the terrorists don't get their hands on any cloud seeding technology, in which silver iodide is sprayed into clouds by airplanes or artillery shells in an effort to encourage precipitation. Come to think of it, a pre-emptive strike against China may be necessary, as they've been making use of cloud seeding for years.

What's one of the best sections of any newspaper or magazine? The corrections section. In the case of the New Yorker, these come under the heading of the Editors' Note. And the most recent issue has quite the doozy:

The July 31, 2006, piece on Wikipedia, "Know It All," by Stacy Schiff, contained an interview with a Wikipedia site administrator and contributor called Essjay, whose responsibilities included handling disagreements about the accuracy of the site's articles and taking action against users who violate site policy. He was described in the piece as a "tenured professor of religion at a private university' with "a Ph.D. in theology and a degree in canon law." ...

Essay now says that his real name is Ryan Jordan, that he is twenty-four and holds no advance degrees, and that he has never taught.

Whoops. If only it ended there. Wikipedia, always one to get a little sensitive over questions about the credibility of its editors, initially stood by its man. But his Wikipedia user page now says he's "no longer active on Wikipedia."

In a farewell message, Essjay wrote, "it's time to make a clean break." Though he claims to have received "an astounding amount of support," the site's user forums had become awash in harsh comments for Essjay, calling him a fraud and worse. There was talk of reviewing the thousands of articles he edited to see if he used his false credentials improperly while acting as one of the site's few officially empowered moderators. At least one instance came to light right away: 

In a discussion over the editing of the article with regard to the term "imprimatur," as used in Catholicism, Essjay defended his use of the book "Catholicism for Dummies," saying, "This is a text I often require for my students, and I would hang my own Ph.D. on it's credibility."

Perhaps that errant apostrophe should have been a tip-off. 

Here in America, we have a hard time getting our rudimentary electronic voting machines to work. But over in the former Soviet republic of Estonia—which is about the size of New Hampshire and Vermont combined and boasts a per capita GDP of under $20,000—they've held the world's first online elections. Internet polling, which ended on Wednesday, drew about 30,000 voters, or 3.5 percent of the registered pool. Those votes will be added to the ballots cast this Sunday, Estonia's official election day. A handful of other countries have tested similar technology, including Britain, France, and the Netherlands. But, for the most part, the idea of online voting still scares the majority of nations, especially America. John Borland over at Wired explains:

Critics worry that voting systems using ordinary Windows PCs and the open internet could be hacked by unscrupulous outsiders, or subverted by insiders.

A high-profile United States Defense Department system called SERVE, or Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment, aimed at allowing overseas military personnel to vote was canceled after a 2004 review by computer security experts said it presented an easy target for hackers."

Between electronic voting machines that cause multi-hour delays at polling stations and hanging chads on our paper ballots, we probably ought to concentrate on making sure we can get every American's vote counted before attempting to reinvent the wheel.

iStockphoto.com

Canada's former defense minister has a novel suggestion for halting climate change: alien technology.

Paul Hellyer, who has claimed to see a UFO, told the Ottawa Citizen yesterday that governments need to fess up about what alien technology they're keeping at their respective Area 51s because they may unwittingly have the silver-bullet solution to the planet's woes:

Alien spacecrafts would have traveled vast distances to reach Earth, and so must be equipped with advanced propulsion systems or used exceptional fuels, he told the newspaper.

I knew there had to be a reason why aliens are always green.

The race for wired global geriatric supremacy is ON! Over the last few months, the media speculated that 93-year-old Don Crowdis of Ontario, Canada was the world's oldest blogger. Then it was supposedly 94-year-old Allan Lööf of Finspång, Sweden. Then came news that Spain's 95-year-old Maria Amelia was given a blog for her birthday by her "stingy" grandson. But now there's someone who's beat them all, and who's likely not to get beat herself.

Olive Riley, who lives north of Sydney, Australia and was born in 1899, just started her blog this month. The 107-year-old great-great-grandmother was born in the British Colony of New South Wales under the rule of Queen Victoria, two years before Australia became a nation. She loves to drink shandy. The latest:

Good afternoon everyone. This is Olive here. First, I want to thank all of you who visited my blob. Gerard says there’ve been 192,000 visits but that can’t be right.

Mike

It’s a blog, Ollie. Not a blob.

Olive

Oh, really?

(Hat tip: my brother Ted)

Wondering if your website is blocked in China? Plug your URL into www.greatfirewallofchina.org, and you'll know instantly if your page is reaching the Middle Kingdom's 125 million Internet users. The slick site is the work of a group of artists and journalists who want "to make the censorship system transparent and keep open the discussion on censorship." The site keeps a record of every URL tested and the result, revealing that the status of many blocked sites changes almost daily. If your site is available, you can even see a preview of how it appears to Chinese surfers. 

Here are some blocked and available sites, according to the Great Firewall:

FP is not blocked. For more on Chinese censorship, don't miss Mike Boyer's interview with Li Wufeng, China's top Internet censor.

UPDATE: Robert Mayer over at Publis Pundit points out that Chinese bannination doesn't just happen on a site-wide scale. While FP Passport's main page is available in China, some individual pages, such as our previously mentioned interview with China's top internet cop are blocked. Could China's filters be so sophisticated that they can whittle down websites to knock out individual, offending pages? Looks like it.

ATTA KENARE/AFP/Getty Images

Two years ago, former Harvard President Lawrence Summers had women fuming when he said that innate differences between the sexes might explain why there aren't many women in science and engineering careers.

As a female with a degree in chemical engineering, I've wondered a lot about the nature vs. nurture debate myself, and a recent piece in FP may have scored one point for the "nurture" camp. The piece notes that an estimated one half of all software engineers coming out of Iran's universities are women, and at least one half of computer coders in Syria are estimated to be female. (In the United States, women received only 25 percent of computer science bachelor’s degrees awarded in 2004.)

So, maybe Summers was partially right, but it's only American women who are "stupider."

Seriously though, the broader point is that social constraints influence our decisions. For women in the Middle East, computer work is ideal. It can be done from home, which is compatible with the restrictions they face when outside the home. Plus, working from home probably makes it easier to balance job and family responsibilities.

It all makes me wonder what's holding back American women.

That giant sucking sound you heard this weekend was defense contractors from all over the world heading to Abu Dhabi to ply their wares at IDEX, one of the largest shows of its kind in the world. The International Defense Exhibition is bigger than ever now that oil-producing Arab regimes are flush with cash and feeling a bit threatened by Iran.

There are usually cool new technologies and products at these hardware shows, but this one is the most interesting at IDEX: a giant wall in a box. Actually, it fits in a shipping container, but it's still pretty neat. All you need is something to fill the sandbags and a backhoe, and in no time flat you've got your very own fortification. The British are using these in Afghanistan.

Two thousand five hundred of the world's cheapest laptops—retailing for a trifling $150—will be shipped to educational authorities in countries ranging from Pakistan to Brazil this month. We've blogged about this initiative previously (on the disparate reactions of India and Libya), but here's a refresher: The computers are the brainchild of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), a project of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that aims to use the laptops to enable children in developing countries to learn like their counterparts in the developed world. "It's an education project, not a laptop project," OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte has stressed—but the technological achievement is pretty astounding. Each computer, which can be charged by cranking a handle, boasts a digital video camera, multi-lingual keyboard and wireless internet connectivity. OLPC plans to roll out 50 million of them in the next twelve months, by which time it hopes they will cost barely $100 (the original target price). 

Not everyone is applauding. After all, $150 is still a lot of cash in these countries, and there's no guarantee the scheme will work. Indeed, many feel the only result will be a thriving black market in cutting-edge laptops. For my money, both sides are missing the point. Affordable computers are undoubtedly worthwhile, but it's small businesspeople, not children, who could make best use of them. Cheap laptops will boost their firms' efficiency, and provide long-distance communication at the touch of a button. When funds are scarce, it might be best that the kids stick to pens and paper—it's worked in the past.