In the year 2000, world leaders made eight pretty incredible promises, which are known as the Millennium Development Goals. The first of these goals is to reduce by half the number of people living in extreme poverty by the year 2015. Extreme poverty is defined as living on less than $1 USD per day. More than 1.5 billion people qualify, which is roughly 1 out of every 4 people alive. Two-thirds of these people don't have access to clean water, and malnutrition is so bad that six million children die EVERY YEAR before their fifth birthday. That's a holocaust-sized catastrophe...

Lehigh Valley Storymill is our "act local" effort to make our backyard better. Tonight, after a town meeting, I wrote this: -- Finding time to make the effort. That's the key. In recent years we've seen our valley invaded by developers intent on carving up and selling our daily views and vistas as half-acre luxury homes for New York and Philly expatriates. I've seen this happen twice in my life: first, in northeast New Jersey, as the woods around my house were razed to make a commuter town instead. Next, in southwest Florida, as developers rushed in like locusts to...

I haven't written since the American election. I've talked about it. I've read and watched a great deal of conjecture. As usual, everyone's exaggerating for dramatic effect, saying the Democrats were trounced, when in the end the difference was just 140,000 votes in Ohio, which is pretty small. If the 2000 election hadn't happened, they'd be calling this one the closest ever. What worries me is why the Republicans won. I'm not sure I buy the whole "moral values" hypothesis (ie, gay marriage drove red voters to the polls), but as a student of persuasion, I'm shell-shocked by the methods...

A few nights ago, we saw two co-hosts of CNN's Crossfire, Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson, speak at my wife's college, just a few miles from here. They seemed very well-informed, respectful, and geniunely funny. I was surprised by the two men, whom I'd heard of, but never really paid attention to until the recent Jon Stewart flap. Paula and I watched the video before their talk, and were expecting some well-worn partisan bickering. Instead, the two men were truly thoughtful, delivering analysis and insight rich with surrounding context, something all but lacking on American political shows. Watching them on...

The Brookings Institution recently presented a study on how best to to revitalize my home state of Pennsylvania. In it, they make the point that Pennsylvania is especially provincial in nature. Its institutions, organizations, and people are highly disconnected from each other: "The intense localism of the state's 2,566 municipal governments—compounded by the state bureaucracy's own fragmentation—has often caused jurisdictions to work at cross-purposes rather than together on tough problems." We see this at the local level all the time. Everybody's got their own agendas, so they bicker instead of banding together. Even the well-meaning among us are less effective,...

Tonight, while much of the world celebrates Christmas Eve, that magical time when we all remember "true meaning", spontaneously helping our neighbors like Scrooge after his big conversion, I'm reminded instead about the divisions between us, the physical and conceptual neighborhoods that make it possible for us to disregard each other easily. I guess it's no one's fault. Our brains are barraged with the demands of the day. We need to find shortcuts, remembered mnemonics, to help us sift through our choices so we know how to feel about stuff. Without intending it, we slip on our "us and them"...

I started this blog in response to the many terrific conversations I had while at ISWC in Sanibel, many of which centered around the social implications of the Semantic Web. On the last day, I talked with Dieter Wolf. After some time, he half-jokingly said in surprise, "You are an American, and you care about these things?" Yes, I do, and there's a lot of us, though you wouldn't know it by watching our television. Last week was an exception, though. There was an episode of ER that blew me away. Doctor Carter, one of the main characters, was treating...

Borislov Popov wrote in response: "As all tools in the world, the Sem Web will be just a tool ... It will be employed by people, so the people are the ones to change; because the tools are just artificial limbs for us --- they fulfill our intentions ... They will help if our intention develops, as does the internet in some cases and radio'n tv in others." Well said, and history agrees with him. With each technological advance, there's always a few optimists like me shouting hope from the rooftops, who then later agree that their world-changing advance is...

Many of the talks I had in Sanibel were about our current social problems: what they are, why they persist, what can be done. I loved having so many Europeans to talk with, since I find them to be more open, more personal, more informed about world events than many Americans, particularly in professional settings. It might seem odd to have a whole lotta philosophizing going on at a technical conference, but I was thrilled by it. As technologists, we have more power to change things than often we realize. With something as pervasive and as influential as the Semantic...

I decided to do this a month ago tonight. I was getting a reckless drive home along Sanibel streets to the Sundial, just coming from a talk-filled dinner with a dozen or so DERI folk, worried I wouldn't have enough time to sleep and pack before returning to Pennsylvania the next morning, when I thought of it: Big Fractal Tangle would be the name of a blog. Earlier that day, we'd all seen the Tim Berners-Lee keynote speech at the end of the five-day ISWC 2003, during which he said the phrase as an aside while describing the Semantic Web....