This thought came to me while standing on Omaha Beach, one of the American landing beaches on D-Day. I think about the future and it is clear to me that humanity will need to find greatness to face some of the issues it faces now and in the next decade.  We need to rise up to a level of commitment, collaboration, will and innovation that seems far from universal today.  There is no question but that we can and that we will need to do so.  The question is how we rise up to this level of greatness. 

Standing on Omaha Beach, and later the same day on Utah Beach I was struck by the magnitude of D-Day.  The heroism, valor, loss of life, and incredible stories of individual and collective victory are usually what comes to mind when thinking of this invasion.  Those thoughts usually are of the soldiers, but there were larger forces at work.  Things were done that had never been done before.  Plans were created based on no prior human experience.  Let me give you just one example.
The Nazi military command built unprecedented fortifications on the …

Brasilia, the capitol of Brazil, represents an example of what humanity must do in this early part of the 21st century.  In my last column, I discussed the history of this great city and the fact that it was created in the late 1950s to be “the capitol of the third millennium” and that it was built literally in the middle of Brazil hundreds of miles from the nearest city.  In other words the eyes of the visionaries who built the city were completely focused on the future.  What should a capitol of the future look like?  How should it be laid out?  How can future governmental needs and functionality be anticipated and planned for?

It is this type of thinking on a grand scale that is needed now more than ever as humanity approaches 7 billion in number, the planet is warming, water scarcity is growing and we have entered our global stage of evolution.  Forward thinking these days seems to come primarily from innovative, fast moving, companies in the private sector.  National leaders seem increasingly to be following their citizens rather than leading them.  There seems to be a reliance on past processes as ways to confront the future.  There is a growing number of people who are now realizing that many of the ‘old ways of doing things’ have run their course and that new approaches are essential for facing the issues. This is, to be sure, one of the forces fueling the success of Barack Obama in …

Brasilia is the futuristic capitol of Brazil.  It has been so since 1960 when the federal government moved there from Rio de Janeiro.  I recently spent two days there and it is truly magnificent. It has been a place I have wanted to visit almost my entire life, but more on that later.  First it is important to briefly tell the story of its creation as it is all about vision and how vision can project humanity into the future.

The population of Brazil, since colonization by the Portuguese has always been predominately oriented to the Atlantic coast, where the majority of Brazilians still reside.  The country is the fifth largest in the world in terms of land mass.  In 1823 a statesman named Jose Bonifacio suggested that moving the capitol inland would be a stimulus to the great interior of the country and would also be safer from foreign attack.  He came up with the name Brasilia.  Nothing much came of his efforts until decades later, a priest, living in Italy prophesied that a new civilization would emerge in Brazil between the 15th and 20th parallels.  This caught the attention of Brazil and in the 1891 Constitution, land in the central plateau of Brazil was allocated for the construction of a federal district.  Several legislative directives followed in the decades that followed, but nothing was ever done until a great leader with vision became President.

Juscelino Kubitschek became President in 1955.  During the electoral campaign, he was asked if he would …

Technology has been the defining force of the Information Age.  Technology has given us an appreciation for speed, global communications, connectivity, miniaturization and of course computing power.  We embrace new generations of computers, cell phones and digital content players.  Many of these innovations, as they increase in power, generate heat. As they decrease in size there is often a proportionate increase in generated heat.

Decades ago, the large main frame computers were housed in large refrigerated rooms.  Today server farms reside in similar cooled environments.  Heat can cause computing and networking equipment to malfunction, slow down operating speed and in extreme cases to simply fry.  Any of us who have actually put our laptops on our laps when working know how fast they can heat up.  Desktop PCs have more powerful fans built in to keep them cooler and therefore operating closer to the maximum speed of the installed processor chip.  We are, however living in a world of increasing mobility where the laptop is fast replacing the desk top.  This means that often the laptops we use are not operating at peak efficiency due to generated heat.

This is not something to which I had given much thought as I had accepted this as one of the accepted limitations of mobile computing.  Laptops provide mobility but must sometimes sacrifice performance due to heat generation because of the demands for compact computing.  Last week however I was given much to think about.  As mentioned in my prior column I had traveled to …