It has been one year since the disastrous nuclear accident at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in March 2011. Experts now view Fukushima as the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl in 1986. In the aftermath, the Chinese government promptly reaffirmed that nation’s nuclear energy policy. Yet China also became the only nation among all major nuclear energy states that suspended its new nuclear plant project approvals. Before it would restart approvals, China said it would: 1) Conduct safety inspections at all nuclear facilities 2) Strengthen the approval process of new nuclear plant projects 3) Enact a new national nuclear safety plan 4) Adjust the medium and long-term development plan for nuclear power Where is China on this path, and what is the future of its nuclear power industry? Progress By August 2011, China completed safety inspections of  its nuclear facilities,  including all commercial reactors under construction.

Critics of agricultural biotechnology have long maintained that the technology is unsuitable for small-scale farmers and harmful to the environment. But according to newly-released adoption rates, evidence is pointing in the opposite direction. In its latest report, Global Status of Commercialized Biotech/GM Crops: 2011, the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA) shows that biotechnology crops now cover 160 million hectares worldwide. Of the 16.7 million people who grew transgenic crops in 2011, 15 million or 90% were small resource-poor farmers in developing countries.

The history of technology is filled with people examining a genuinely new innovation and seeing it simply as an extension of something familiar.  For example, the automobile was originally termed a “horseless carriage.”  When a camera was invented capable of providing the illusion of motion, the product was termed “motion pictures”; many people used the device to film plays on stage.  The desktop computer was originally seen as a kind of digital typewriter, and new staff roles were created in organizations for “word processing” specialists who were expert typists.

[1] In my reading of history, every country which has successfully lifted its people out of poverty has done so primarily by building its basic productive capacity. Central to this process has been giving priority to improving the productivity of agriculture, and creating the energy, transport and water infrastructure for rural and urban economic growth and employment generation. In the water sector this includes what my colleague David Grey calls the infrastructure ‘‘platform for growth’’.

With Twitter’s 140 character limit there’s little focus to the discussion so far about the new filtering Twitter  just announced.  I offer  my comments to add some  substance to the discussion. First, we don't know very much about what Twitter is doing, and it's not clear that we ever will. Second, the examples Twitter cites -- laws in France and Germany that prohibit pro-Nazi speech -- are reasonable. But this same rationale can be used to prevent leaks of information governments and companies don’t want leaked.

When people took to the streets across the U.K. last summer, the Prime Minister suggested restricting access to the Internet to limit protestors’ ability to organize. The resulting debate complemented speculation on the effects of social media in the Arab Spring and the widespread critique of President Mubarak’s decision to shut off the Internet and mobile phone systems in Egypt. Decisions about when and how to regulate activities online have a profound societal impact. Debates underlying such decisions touch upon fundamental problems related to economics, free expression and privacy.

In June of 2011, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin met with Hamadoun Touré, Secretary General of the International Telecommunications Union.  According to a transcript of the first minutes of the meeting subsequently published by the Russian government, Putin said: We are thankful to you for the ideas that you have proposed for discussion. One of them is establishing international control over the Internet using the monitoring and supervisory capabilities of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).

The on-going famine in the Horn of Africa has put in sharp focus the urgency to raise the continent’s food production through improved agricultural innovation. This cannot be done without reforming the continent’s research system by creating greater synergies between research, training, extension and commercialization. Africa’s research and higher education systems are dominated by fragmented approaches where research and teaching are carried out in separate institutions often under different ministries.

“Caterpillar to Shift Some Production to U.S.” That’s good news for American workers: 1,000 jobs are coming home from Japan. Some lucky state will win the lottery for the factory and become home base for global sourcing of Caterpillar’s small bulldozers and mini-hydraulic excavators. Interestingly, Caterpillar first developed these mini-machines to fix a distinctively Japanese problem. Cramped urban construction sites cried out for compact excavators. That friction brought on innovation, invention, and manufacturing.