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When it comes to poverty reduction, what role does Information and Communications Technology (ICT) play?
There are innumerable ways in which ICT can be applied to deliver better services to poor people, whether it’s telemedicine, using ICT to bring medical care to people in remote areas, or e-schools, using ICT to enhance the delivery of curricula to remote areas. There is a wide variety of practical applications, and I’m referring to actual examples in a growing number of countries where these applications have been put into practice with great effect. The most important general contribution that the emerging information society can provide to people everywhere, however, including the poor, is access to knowledge and an empowerment mechanism by which they can themselves take hold of their own lives and seek to improve them.

In January 2004, the UNDP and Microsoft jointly put out a press release announcing a partnership. What has developed as a result?
This is something that will build over time. I think that the synergy between UNDP ICT and Microsoft results from our respective global vocations, but unlike Microsoft we look for highly differentiated solutions to problems at the country level and within countries at the local level. In other words, we eschew the idea of there being a single solution for every problem. Now, you might say that is contrary to the Microsoft idea, which is complete uniformity in their software applications. But no, we’re helping Microsoft identify areas in which their standard software applications can actually be applied in specific organizational or other contexts. I think that we’ve learned a lot from each other so far. Concretely, we are building this partnership in a few countries, such as Morocco and Mozambique, and we hope to spread this outward.
But let me also say that we have certainly not decided that all the software solutions for the developing countries are going to be based on Microsoft technology. We are very keen to encourage countries and organizations and individuals within them to make their own choice of the best software solution. In Afghanistan, for example, we identified telecenters that could be empowered with free Microsoft software, while at the same time educating people about the advantages in other contexts of open source technologies. As I say, we look at different solutions to different problems. Where we can work with Microsoft and see that their product can bring an advantage to a particular situation, then we’d be delighted to help them find an opportunity. On the other hand, we look for other solutions, many of which include the rivals to Microsoft. Chief among them is the open source non-proprietary software.

As with countries like Bulgaria and Brazil, which tend to favor free and open source software.
I was about to mention Bulgaria as a good example of a country which, for its own reasons, has decided that in much of its public sector it wants to go for an open source solution. And we’ve been ready to help them on that. We try to be non-conflictual about it. We believe in using partnerships to the advantage of our clients. And this doesn’t mean that we have a single standard solution. That doesn’t mean to say that we are going to be inviting all of our program countries around the world to use Microsoft exclusively just because we have a global arrangement with them. We will be fairly opportunistic and see where it is that countries find Microsoft to be an advantage and where they don’t. (more…)

Aerospace engineers and architects, respectively, benefit enormously from the efficiency and versatility of porous gels and flexible films. In the realm of the superlights, less is always more. A material’s lightness is important to consider when designing such things as mobile structures, portable appliances, and fuel-efficient vehicles. With handheld electronic devices and electric cars, superlight lithium batteries are used in place of heavy lead-acid batteries; lightweight materials are especially critical for electric vehicles, since the point with these is to conserve energy. Carbon-fiber materials such as nylon and Kevlar, both light and strong, are commonly used for sporting equipment associated with speed, like car racing and cycling, and in the aerospace industry, where aerogel does most of its work today. Aerogel is as much as 99% air and is typically made out of silica, but it can be made out of a wide variety of materials, including carbon and polymers. According to The Guinness Book of World Records, the latest and lightest versions of aerogel weigh just 1.9 mg/cm3 and are produced by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Although it is the lightest solid on Earth, aerogel is primarily used aboard spacecraft as a collection device for interstellar and cometary dust. Its pores and particles are smaller than the wavelength of light and it has low thermal and sound conductivity. Aerogel is the thermal insulation material of choice for the Warm Electronics Boxes (WEBs) on the 2003 Mars Exploration Rovers.

SUPERLIGHT SOLID. Aerogels were developed in the 1930s, but have only recently found practical applications in space. Particles shot into aerogel at high velocities in an experiment leave carrot-shaped track marks (7.12). The insulating properties of aerogel protect the flower from the flame (7.13). A block of aerogel weighing only 2 g can support a brick weighing 2.5 kg (7.14).

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Describe the transformation of the citizen sector that we’re witnessing today.
First, it helps to look at the historical framework. Starting around 1700, the business sector went through a transformation, one that empowered anyone with an idea to start a business. This shift was so effective that, over the past three centuries, it compounded productivity in the business half of society two to three percent a year. An equal shift in the social half of the world did not happen. As a result, societies became half-stunted and backward, and relatively unproductive, while the business sector grew dramatically. The very recent citizen sector breakthrough is a direct result of this intolerable imbalance. The social entrepreneurial movement started earlier, of course, with individuals like Florence Nightingale and Maria Montessori, who were as brilliant, in a social context, as Carnegie or Rockefeller were, in business. Despite these remarkable pioneers, however, the social sector as a whole did not make the jump to the entrepreneurial/competitive architecture that had allowed business productivity to soar. Roughly two and a half decades ago, the social sector as a whole began the process of tipping from premodern to the same entrepreneurial/competitive architecture adopted by business centuries earlier. Control by a few percent was no longer cutting it in a world of ever more pervasive and rapid change. Social entrepreneurs have led this transformation. However, two decades ago we didn’t even have the word “social entrepreneur”; when we started talking about it, people would go glassy-eyed, and the really smart ones would say it was an oxymoron.

What sort of character becomes a social entrepreneur?
The core psychology of a social entrepreneur is someone who cannot come to rest, in a very deep sense, until he or she has changed the pattern in an area of social concern all across society. Social entrepreneurs are married to a vision of, for example, a better way of helping young people grow up or of delivering global healthcare. They simply will not stop because they cannot be happy until their vision becomes the new pattern. They will persist for decades. And they are as realistic as they are visionary. As a result, they are very good listeners. They have to hear if something isn’t working; and, whenever they do, they just keep changing the idea and/or the environment until their idea works. They are intensely concerned with the how-to’s: How do I get from here to there? How do I solve this problem? How do these pieces fit together?

In the eyes of Ashoka, is the citizen group the same thing as the NGO?
We cringe whenever anyone uses the term NGO, or non-governmental organization -or non-profit, for that matter. You can’t define a sector by what it isn’t. Again, the history is interesting: the Europeans saw something new and they said, “Oh, it’s a non-government organization.” The Americans said saw something new that was not what they expected and called it a “nonprofit”. (A brothel, for example, is usually a non-governmental organization!) So we prefer to focus in on the active ingredient, the citizen individually, or in a group, who takes the initiative in an area of public concern, be it to provide a service or introduce a needed change. (more…)

Through electron and atomic force microscopes, physicists and chemists are looking to nature to build materials from the bottom up. The impact of this unprecedented development - nanotechnology - has yet to materialize on the macro scale. Nanoscience is the study of systems with nanometer dimensions and the manifestation of Richard Feynman’s big idea more than 40 years ago. According to George M. Whitesides, Mallinckrodt Professor of Chemistry at Harvard University, it is “a contender with genomics for changing the world.” Ever since IBM famously positioned 35 xenon atoms into the form of its corporate logo, it has been widely accepted that we can manipulate matter at the atomic scale. The big question remains: Now that we can move atoms, what will we do with them? Perhaps mimicking biological, not mechanical, systems will lead us to our answer.

NANOTUBES (left). In 1996, Sir Harold Kroto was jointly awarded the Nobel prize for chemistry with Richard Smalley and Robert Curl of Rice University, Texas, for the discovery of C60, which led to the development of carbon nanotubes. Image Courtesy of Kroto.

ATOMIC LOGO (right). The Scanning Tunneling Microscope made it possible for the IBM logo to be spelled out in atoms.

SYNTHETIC OPALS. As computer chips become smaller, their tiny electrical connections are likewise getting smaller, and limits will inevitably be reached. So the search is underway for an entirely new materials system to replace current technologies.

Synthetic opals are a new kind of material that may one day enable faster chips that work entirely with light instead of electricity. This innovation could hold the key to the next generation of ultra-fast computers, and may find applications no one has yet imagined. The synthetic opals shown here are composed of perfectly spherical, nanometre-sized balls of ordinary glass, precisely organized into a close-packed, 3D array. Into this base, scientists engineer “functional defects” such as waveguides that trap the light, enabling it to bend ninety degrees without loss, and creating circuits of light.