The MacArthur Foundation recently funded one of the first multi-year efforts to analyze and evaluate youth behavior online.  The study, conducted as part of the Digital Youth Project, was exhaustive and included hundreds of structured interviews, over 5000 hours of observation, and analysis and review of over 10,000 MySpace and Facebook pages.[2]

The world's fastest supercomputer in November 2008 is a system at Los Alamos National Laboratory called Roadrunner. Roadrunner is one of two supercomputers in the world to break the petaflop (1000 trillion floating point operations a second) barrier and posted a top performance of 1.105 petaflops, barely edging out a machine at Oak Ridge National Laboratory which achieved a peak performance of 1.059 petaflops. 
 

Taken from a blog post by Anthony Townsend, IFTF researcher. Not only do I agree that this lack of transparency and debate presents a potentially significant problem for R&D in China, but it is possible that smaller, moer highly networked scientific communites will meet or exceed the R&D output of China. Here's his post:

Harvard biology professor Peter Girguis and his team have created a low-cost power generator for families in Tanzania.

During a June 2008 workshop on the future of science in Hungary, we conducted a session on the strengths and weaknesses in Hungarian science. This signal discusses some of the results.

The X2 project conducted an expert workshop at National University of Singapore on July 24, 2008, with academics from NUS and Nanyan Technological University, and members of the Singaporean government. The workshop generated a map of the future of science, with particular attention to science in Singapore.

Understanding the Trends in LBS scenario
The growth of the location based services (LBS) market is driven by the emergence of connected navigation devices, the development of new device form factors with advanced user interfaces (iPhone), the expected pervasiveness of GPS-enabled phones, and the availability of affordable data plans with both converged and dedicated navigation and telematics solutions vying for dominance.

DuBiotech is a science park in Dubai and part of TECOM investments, a subsidiary of Dubai Holding. The importance of this signal is the desire to incorporate not merely a knowledge-based infrastructure, but a full-on manufacturing based infrastructure as well. This approach will result in demand for employment at all levels of education, not just post-graduate. Perhaps this is a signal of an U.A.E. strategy to integrate manufacturing in order to attract the local workforce as well.

Serial entrepreneur and AI expert Ben Goertzel reflects on the future of science in China, and the comparative fortunes of China and the U.S.: