ParisTech Review

Whether it comes from ethics or from theory, the impression is that the days of the contemporary speculator are numbered. For this moody character is reckless: he is one to confuse the stock market and roulette. Economic theory has a hard time understanding him. Nevertheless, a theory of the speculator is possible.

Information is more abundant than ever. Day after day, the flood of data is growing at exponential rates. Barely ten years ago, the main issue for politics and industries, was to hold a firm grip on this daunting explosion. Today, the challenge consists in being able, in real-time, to take advantage and transform into value massive swaths of data.

To understand tsunamis or locate oil slicks, scientists are running ever more complex models in ever more powerful machines. Some are now able to compute nearly ten million billion operations per second. Welcome to the world of HPC (High Performance Calculation) where technical challenge meets major industrial stakes.

The U.S. Senate just passed a bill reforming the patent system, without appeasing controversies that for the past ten years have been agitating academic circles as well as the Silicon Valley. Patents are generally considered to fuel innovation. But do they?

Intel's breakthrough "vertical" chip means that computer capacity will keep increasing, at least for 10 to 20 years. What will all that new firepower mean for technology and society? And what happens after that?

Looking for balance between science and technology in modern research, we can observe it is the latter in the ascendant. Research is being dictated by the availability of technological resources but in the past, the reverse was true. Projects began by a review of the available data from which a scientific hypothesis was constructed, and finally a search for the best technological tools would begin. Francoise Barre-Sinoussi has suggested that in the rush to embrace technology, researchers may be missing the chance to learn from what worked so well in the past.

When the French poet Louis Aragon wrote the line "the weight of the future pushes each present moment back to but a memory", its application to either the internet or management would never have entered his mind. And yet, the words of the great poet resonate for the contemporary challenge of information technology in enterprise.

Commercial space travel, breakthroughs in the fight against cancer, a new industrial revolution based on broadly distributed clean energy -even now, despite global warming and overpopulation, the future is still looking bright to some leading futurists. But before you book that trip to the moon, keep in mind that predictions are rarely spot on. When it comes to technology, making the right call is surprisingly rare -even among its inventors.

The revolution in Tunisia and the toppling of Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak resemble any number of prior upheavals, except for one thing - the role played by social media. Facebook, in particular, which once seemed just a high-tech way for teenagers to waste time, is now emerging as an important political tool. Why has social media been so useful to the protesters in North Africa? How will it be applied next? Will it really change the world?

The less heralded consequence of globalization is the emergence of crises of expanding magnitude which test our ability to coordinate and swiftly execute a response. Truly global institutions such as the World Health Organization govern only specific domains and in most areas of human activity such bodies exist little, if at all. We are stuck with the question of how to respond to the new reality and it was with these stakes in mind that HEC Paris convened a workshop last November to discuss the way forward following the paralysis of European airspace in April 2010 as a result of volcanic activity in Iceland.

Wikipedia just turned 10. The largest reference work ever produced, the Web site makes vast amounts of knowledge available to everyone that was once available to just a few scholars in major university libraries. But some thinkers say the volunteer-written encyclopedia is itself a sign of something still more important: the rise of social production.

The world is on the brink of yet another technological revolution: "the Internet of Things". Just as the networking of computers led to multiple changes in our lives, the growing networking of things - connecting cars, power grids, even toilets to the Internet - may lead to other profound adjustments. Many forecasters say these changes will make us healthier, wealthier, and safer. But as with any new technology, there are also risks.

In the age when the massive success of social network sites relies on users' willingness to freely disclose their personal data for profiling purposes, issues of user privacy and personal data protection are under the spotlight. This article addresses current developments in the field of decentralized social networking as a way of countering the trade-off between privacy and connectivity in social network services. We argue that such tools may constitute the first attempt to fully leverage the social opportunity of virtual networking tools.

More objects are becoming embedded with sensors and gaining the ability to communicate. The resulting information networks promise to create new business models, improve business processes, and reduce costs and risks.

Efforts to forecast our future fall short of a perfect dream where events can be weighed and measured with the predictability more commonly found in cookbooks the world over. If predictions could be made with the same degree of certainty that a baker employs then where would we find the creative drive to innovate ? In an increasingly uncertain world is it even possible for random acts of genius ? Can we embrace chaos and harness its power ? The paradox is that to plan for the future we must discard the limits of our present. When we accept this seeming contradiction the need for a stable hand is clear if we are to successfully identify the sea that acts as the ultimate source of attraction.

Julian Assange, the Australian founder of WikiLeaks, the controversial website that has been posting classified government documents, is now being held without bail in the U.K. (since this article has been written, Julian Assange has been released on parole in return for a 283.000 euros bail), awaiting extradition to Sweden for questioning regarding an alleged rape. But sensational news aside, his site's recent release of confidential U.S. State Department cables has implications for businesses and corporations with sensitive information to shield, according to experts at Wharton and the University of Pennsylvania.

Social media is the flavor of the day in marketing, the latest in a line of digital innovations that were supposed to "change everything". But media experts say this innovation really is becoming a revolutionary force, not just for consumers but for marketers. Social media's ability to connect people is reinforcing consumer clout, while at the same time giving businesses more data to create better products and services. Still, the power that social media unleashes can turn on a company, all too quickly.

The combined challenges of energy and environmental security pose important national security questions and risks that, with few exceptions, remain poorly formulated and understood today. This article, adapted from a keynote address given by Carol Dumaine at the 8th International Security Forum in Geneva, Switzerland, shines light on these issues and calls for a common security framework to strengthen our ability to cope with global change.

How are we to obtain the measure of the distance between basic research and the essential technologies of the modern age? Are we in the process of building the bridge that will unite the two domains or is the gulf between them growing wider by the day? Reconciling the interested parties in any definitive way remains difficult as each side can furnish multiple examples to support their perspective on the matter.

The scientific jury may still be out on the causes of global warming (though most polls suggest roughly 11 of 12 climatologists see fossil fuel consumption as the literal smoking gun), but for non-experts, the large number of record-breaking high temperatures, floods, and other extreme weather events in 2010 has shifted the debate from asking is the weather changing to what will happen next.