Opposition parties need to agree on a political agenda and a tactical alliance to defeat the BJ

A string of  defeats is the common thread holding the opposition parties together against the Bharatiya Janata Party ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha election .

Ideological divides have been papered over and tactics reworked in the quest to stop the BJP from getting a second consecutive term. The post-poll alliance stitched together by the Congress with the Janata Dal (Secular), which allowed for the swearing-in of JD(S) leader H.D. Kumaraswamy as Chief Minister, provided the occasion for a show of hands in unity in Bengaluru. But more significant than winning over the JD(S) was the presence of Bahujan Samaj Party leader Mayawati on the front stage. Former Congress president Sonia Gandhi, still the most respected leader in her party, seemed to share a special moment on the dais with Ms. Mayawati. Of course, the ground for the coming together of the Congress and the BSP was set much earlier, when the BSP announced support for the Samajwadi Party in the Lok Sabha by-elections in Gorakhpur and Phulpur constituencies. If the success in the two by-elections presented a rational argument for a larger pre-poll alliance, the BSP’s loss in the Rajya Sabha election following the cross-voting engineered by the BJP gave an emotional edge to Ms. Mayawati’s determination to stop the BJP in the next election. An SP-BSP-Congress-RLD alliance will have the look of a mahajot in Uttar Pradesh, and galvanise Opposition parties elsewhere to make the most of any anti-BJP sentiment.

But the real test for a Congress-led Opposition is to generate an agreed policy programme that will have the support of all the disparate groups. Some of these parties share nothing more than an antipathy to the BJP, while others have allied with the BJP in the past. In many cases, electoral rivalry, and not ideological dissimilitude with the BJP, is the reason for fighting it. Crucially, parties such as the Trinamool Congress and the Telangana Rashtra Samithi are not yet ready to accept the leadership of the Congress in a broad coalition of anti-BJP parties. The TRS has the Congress as its main rival in Telangana, and the Trinamool could possibly be arrayed against an alliance of the Left and the Congress in the next general election. Even the newly formed alliance of the Congress and the JD(S) could run into difficulties on seat-sharing as the two parties are the principal rivals in the southern parts of Karnataka. And the Left will be fighting the Congress in Kerala even if it is amenable to seat adjustments with it in other States. Thus, building a viable alternative to the BJP is far more difficult than coming together for a swearing-in ceremony and raising hands in unison. The Congress will need to show leadership as also a willingness to step back and accommodate smaller, regional players in yoking together an alliance of this nature.

We’re looking at June 12 in Singapore. It hasn’t changed,” says the U.S. President.

U.S. President Donald Trump said on Saturday that things are moving “very nicely” towards a summit on June 12 in Singapore with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

“It’s moving along very nicely,” Mr. Trump said at the White House during a meeting with a U.S. prisoner freed by Venezuela.

“We’re looking at June 12 in Singapore. It hasn’t changed,” he said.

Trump rattled the region on Thursday by cancelling his June 12 meeting with Mr. Kim in the Southeast Asian city-state, citing “open hostility” from Pyongyang.

But within 24 hours he reversed course, saying it could still go ahead after productive talks were held with North Korean officials.

“There are meetings going on as we speak,” Mr. Trump said. “I think there’s a lot of goodwill.”

His comments came after North Korea said Mr. Kim was “fixed” on holding the summit with Mr. Trump, raising hopes the historic meeting might still take place after a turbulent few days of diplomatic brinkmanship.

The latest conciliatory declaration from Pyongyang came as the White House confirmed it was sending a team to Singapore to prepare for the talks — a further signal that both sides were moving to cool tensions following a rollercoaster few days on the Korean Peninsula.

A decade ago, Wikipedia and open-source software were treated as mere curiosities in business circles. Today, these innovations represent a core challenge to how we have thought about property and contract, organization theory and management, over the past 150 years.

For the first time since before the Industrial Revolution, the most important inputs into some of the most important economic sectors are radically distributed in the population, and the core capital resources necessary for these economic activities have become widely available in wealthy countries and among the wealthier populations of emerging economies. This technological feasibility of social production generally, and peer production — the kind of network collaboration of which Wikipedia is the most prominent example — more specifically, is interacting with the high rate of change and the escalating complexity of global innovation and production systems.

Increasingly, in the business literature and practice, we see a shift toward a range of open innovation and models that allow more fluid flows of information, talent, and projects across organization.

RELATED STORIES View other articles provided by BBVA OpenMind:

• A Revolution in Business
• Banking, Information, and Technology: Toward Knowledge Banking

Peer production, the most significant organizational innovation that has emerged from Internet-mediated social practice, is large-scale collaborative engagement by groups of individuals who come together to produce products more complex than they could have produced on their own. Organizationally, it combines three core characteristics: decentralization of conception and execution of problems and solutions; harnessing of diverse motivations; and separation of governance and management from property and contract.

These characteristics make peer production highly adept at experimentation, innovation, and adaptation in changing and complex environments. If the Web was innovation on a commons-based model — allocating access and use rights in resources without giving anyone exclusive rights to exclude anyone else — Wikipedia’s organizational innovation is in problem-solving.

Wikipedia’s user-generated content model incorporates knowledge that simply cannot be managed well, either because it is tacit knowledge (possessed by individuals but difficult to communicate to others) or because it is spread among too many people to contract for. The user-generated content model also permits organizations to explore a space of highly diverse interests and tastes that was too costly for traditional organizations to explore.

Peer production allows a diverse range of people, regardless of affiliation, to dynamically assess and reassess available resources, projects, and potential collaborators and to self-assign to projects and collaborations. By leaving these elements to self-organization dynamics, peer production overcomes the lossiness of markets and bureaucracies, and its benefits are sufficient that the practice has been widely adopted by firms and even governments.

In a networked information economy, commons-based practices and open innovation provide an evolutionary model typified by repeated experimentation and adoption of successful adaptation rather than the more traditional, engineering-style approaches to building optimized systems.

Commons-based production and peer production are edge cases of a broader range of openness strategies that trade off the freedom of these two approaches and the manageability and appropriability that many more-traditional organizations seek to preserve. Some firms are using competitions and prizes to diversify the range of people who work on their problems, without ceding contractual control over the project. Many corporations are participating in networks of firms engaging in a range of open collaborative innovation practices with a more manageable set of people, resources, and projects to work with than a fully open-to-the-world project. And the innovation clusters anchored around universities represent an entrepreneurial model at the edge of academia and business, in which academia allows for investment in highly uncertain innovation, and the firms allow for high-risk, high-reward investment models.

The Impact of the Internet on Society: A Global Perspective

The Internet is the decisive technology of the Information Age, and with the explosion of wireless communication in the early twenty-first century, we can say that humankind is now almost entirely connected, albeit with great levels of inequality in bandwidth, efficiency, and price.

People, companies, and institutions feel the depth of this technological change, but the speed and scope of the transformation has triggered all manner of utopian and dystopian perceptions that, when examined closely through methodologically rigorous empirical research, turn out not to be accurate. For instance, media often report that intense use of the Internet increases the risk of isolation, alienation, and withdrawal from society, but available evidence shows that the Internet neither isolates people nor reduces their sociability; it actually increases sociability, civic engagement, and the intensity of family and friendship relationships, in all cultures.

Our current “network society” is a product of the digital revolution and some major sociocultural changes. One of these is the rise of the “Me-centered society,” marked by an increased focus on individual growth and a decline in community understood in terms of space, work, family, and ascription in general. But individuation does not mean isolation, or the end of community. Instead, social relationships are being reconstructed on the basis of individual interests, values, and projects. Community is formed through individuals’ quests for like-minded people in a process that combines online interaction with offline interaction, cyberspace, and the local space.

Globally, time spent on social networking sites surpassed time spent on e-mail in November 2007, and the number of social networking users surpassed the number of e-mail users in July 2009. Today, social networking sites are the preferred platforms for all kinds of activities, both business and personal, and sociability has dramatically increased — but it is a different kind of sociability. Most Facebook users visit the site daily, and they connect on multiple dimensions, but only on the dimensions they choose. The virtual life is becoming more social than the physical life, but it is less a virtual reality than a real virtuality, facilitating real-life work and urban living.

Because people are increasingly at ease in the Web’s multidimensionality, marketers, government, and civil society are migrating massively to the networks people construct by themselves and for themselves. At root, social-networking entrepreneurs are really selling spaces in which people can freely and autonomously construct their lives. Sites that attempt to impede free communication are soon abandoned by many users in favor of friendlier and less restricted spaces.

Perhaps the most telling expression of this new freedom is the Internet’s transformation of sociopolitical practices. Messages no longer flow solely from the few to the many, with little interactivity. Now, messages also flow from the many to the many, multimodally and interactively. By disintermediating government and corporate control of communication, horizontal communication networks have created a new landscape of social and political change.

Networked social movements have been particularly active since 2010, notably in the Arab revolutions against dictatorships and the protests against the management of the financial crisis. Online and particularly wireless communication has helped social movements pose more of a challenge to state power.

The Internet and the Web constitute the technological infrastructure of the global network society, and the understanding of their logic is a key field of research. It is only scholarly research that will enable us to cut through the myths surrounding this digital communication technology that is already a second skin for young people, yet continues to feed the fears and the fantasies of those who are still in charge of a society that they barely understand.

Read the full article here.

Manuel Castells is the Wallis Annenberg Chair Professor of Communication Technology and Society at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. He is also Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley; director of the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute of the Open University of Catalonia (UOC); director of the Network Society Chair at the Collège d’études mondiales in Paris, and director of research in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. He is académico numerario of the Spanish Royal Academy of Economics and Finance, fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, fellow of the British Academy, and fellow of the Academia Europea. He was also a founding board member of the European Research Council and of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology of the European Commission. He received the Erasmus Medal in 2011, and the 2012 Holberg Prize. He has published 25 books, including the trilogy The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture (Blackwell, 1996–2003), The Internet Galaxy (Oxford University Press, 2001), Communication Power (Oxford University Press, 2009), and Networks of Outrage and Hope (Polity Press, 2012).

The Future of Artificial Intelligence and Cybernetics

Science fiction has, for many years, looked to a future in which robots are intelligent and cyborgs are commonplace. The Terminator, The Matrix, Blade Runner and I, Robot are all good examples of this vision.

But until the last decade, consideration of what this might actually mean in the future was unnecessary because it was all science fiction, not scientific reality. Now, however, science has not only done some catching up; it’s also introduced practicalities that the original story lines didn’t appear to include (and, in some cases, still don’t include).

What we consider here are several different experiments linking biology and technology together in a cybernetic way—essentially ultimately combining humans and machines in a relatively permanent merger.

When we typically first think of a robot, we regard it simply as a machine. We tend to think that it might be operated remotely by a human, or that it may be controlled by a simple computer program.

But what if the robot has a biological brain made up of brain cells, possibly even human neurons? Neurons grown under laboratory conditions on an array of non-invasive electrodes provide an attractive alternative with which to realize a new form of robot controller. In the near future, we will see thinking robots with brains not very dissimilar to those of humans.

That development will raise many social and ethical questions. For example, if the robot brain has roughly the same number of human neurons as a typical human brain, then could it, or should it, have rights similar to those of a person? Also, if such robots have far more human neurons than in a typical human brain—for example, a million times more neurons—would they, rather than humans, make all future decisions?

Many human brain–computer interfaces are used for therapeutic purposes to overcome medical or neurological problems, with one example being the deep brain stimulation (DBS) electrodes used to relieve the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. However, even here it’s possible to consider using such technology in ways that would give people abilities that humans don’t normally possess—in other words, human enhancement. In some cases, those who have undergone amputations or suffered spinal injuries due to accidents may be able to regain control of devices via their still-functioning neural signals.

Meanwhile, stroke patients can be given limited control of their surroundings, as indeed can those who have motor neurone disease. With those cases, the situation isn’t straightforward, as patients receive abilities that normal humans don’t have—for example, the ability to move a cursor on a computer screen using nothing but neural signals.

It’s clear that connecting a human brain with a computer network via an implant could, in the long term, open up the distinct advantages of machine intelligence, communication, and sensing abilities to the individual receiving the implant. Currently, obtaining the go-ahead for each implantation requires ethical approval from the local authority governing the hospital where the procedure is performed. But looking ahead, it’s quite possible that commercial influences, coupled with societal wishes to communicate more effectively and perceive the world in a richer form, will drive market desire.

For some, brain–computer interfaces are perhaps a step too far just now—particularly if the approach means tampering directly with the brain. As a result, the most studied brain–computer interface to date is that involving electroencephalography (EEG). While EEG experimentation is relatively cheap, portable, and easy to set up, it’s still difficult to see its widespread future use. It certainly has a role to play in externally assessing some aspects of brain functioning for medical purposes. However, the idea of people driving around while wearing skullcap of electrodes, with no need for a steering wheel, doesn’t seem realistic. Completely autonomous vehicles are much more likely.

Such experimental cases indicate how humans—and animals, for that matter—can merge with technology. That, in turn, generates a plethora of social and ethical considerations as well as technical issues. That’s why it’s vital to include a sense of reflection so that the additional experimentation we’ll now witness will be guided by the informed feedback that results.

Toy-inspired experiment on behavior of quantum systems

With its suspended metallic spheres that clack back and forth, Newton's cradle is more than a popular desktop plaything. It has taught a generation of students about conservation of momentum and energy. It is also the inspiration for an experiment Benjamin Lev, associate professor of physics and of applied physics at Stanford University, has created to study quantum systems.

Lev and his group built their own quantum version of Newton's cradle in order to answer questions about how the chaotic motion of quantum particles eventually leads to thermal equilibrium in a process called thermalization. Answering how this occurs in quantum systems could help in developing quantum computers, sensors and devices, which Lev characterizes as a "quantum engineering revolution."

"If we want to be able to create devices that are robust and useful, we need to understand how quantum systems behave out of equilibrium -- when they're kicked, like the Newton's cradle -- at a level as fundamental as we understand that for classical systems," Lev said.

With the cradle, the researchers observed for the first time how, after inducing small amounts of chaotic motion, a quantum system reaches thermal equilibrium. They published their findings May 2 in Physical Review X.

The results of these experiments, which did not fit previous predictions, have led to a theory of how this process works in quantum systems.

Extremely cold, strongly magnetic

The turbulent swirl of milk as it's added to coffee is a familiar example of chaos in the non-quantum world. Over time, the coffee mixture becomes homogenous and, therefore, reaches equilibrium. What the Lev lab wanted to know is how this evolution occurs in quantum systems after they induce just a touch of chaos. Through experiments with their cradle, the researchers were the first to observe this process as it happened.

The Lev lab's quantum Newton's cradle is different from anything you've seen in your co-worker's cubicle. The researchers shine laser beams through an airtight chamber to cool a gas of atoms down to nearly absolute zero -- one of the coldest known gases in the universe -- and then they load those atoms into an array of laser tubes that act as the structure for the Newton's cradle. Each of the 700 parallel cradles contains around 50 atoms in a row. Then, another laser kicks the atoms, starting the movement of the cradle.

Unlike a previous quantum Newton's cradle developed by David Weiss at Penn State, where weakly magnetic atoms took the place of the cradle's metal spheres, the Lev lab's cradle includes strongly magnetic atoms.

This work builds on the lab's previous achievement of making the first quantum gas of the highly magnetic element dysprosium -- tied with terbium as the most magnetic of all elements. President Obama gave Lev a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers for this milestone in 2011. It was atoms of dysprosium the researchers loaded into the airtight chamber.

The researchers can tune how these atoms affect their neighbors. They can make the cradle act as though the atoms are not magnetic so that it will produce the periodic motion typical of Newton's cradle. Or they can produce chaotic motion by turning up the magnetism -- like a Newton's cradle with magnets strapped to the spheres.

Until now, physicists haven't had a theory of how thermalization arises in subtly chaotic quantum systems. Previous research with computational simulations has resulted in varying conclusions. Now, through their experiments, the researchers directly showed that the cradles' oscillation reached equilibrium in a sequence of two exponential steps, which was an unexpected result.

They also confirmed their experimental results in an extensive computer simulation. Based on these experiments and simulations, the group developed a theory that explains their findings.

"It means we can have a very general, simple theory for how complicated quantum systems like this one thermalize," Lev said. "That's beautiful because it allows you to translate that to other systems."

Atom by atom

Already, the researchers have several experiments planned for the magnetic quantum Newton's cradle and they anticipate many more opportunities for building upon this work as the quantum revolution evolves.

"Very sophisticated laser technologies can manipulate systems atom by atom," said Yijun Tang, a recently graduated doctoral student in the Lev lab and lead author of the paper. "So, maybe what we can do will go beyond fundamental science questions. Maybe, at some point, we can turn these technologies into something more practical as well."

In experiments to come, the researchers may add disorder to the cradle's tubes, in the form of speckled laser light, to see if they can create a sort of quantum glass that evades thermalization. The experiments that contributed to this paper were all done with one version of dysprosium isotopes, called bosons, so the group also plans to repeat its work with the alternative version, fermions. They aren't sure whether the change to fermions will make a difference to thermalization, Lev said, and they would welcome another surprise.

Additional Stanford co-authors are Wil Kao, Kuan-Yu Li and Sangwon Seo. Krishnanand Mallayya and Marcos Rigol of Penn State and Sarang Gopalakrishnan of the City University of New York are also co-authors. Lev is a faculty member in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford.

This research was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

Engineers upgrade ancient, sun-powered tech to purify water with near-perfect efficiency

The idea of using energy from the sun to evaporate and purify water is ancient. The Greek philosopher Aristotle reportedly described such a process more than 2,000 years ago.

Now, researchers are bringing this technology into the modern age, using it to sanitize water at what they report to be record-breaking rates.

By draping black, carbon-dipped paper in a triangular shape and using it to both absorb and vaporize water, they have developed a method for using sunlight to generate clean water with near-perfect efficiency.

"Our technique is able to produce drinking water at a faster pace than is theoretically calculated under natural sunlight," says lead researcher Qiaoqiang Gan, PhD, associate professor of electrical engineering in the University at Buffalo School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

As Gan explains, "Usually, when solar energy is used to evaporate water, some of the energy is wasted as heat is lost to the surrounding environment. This makes the process less than 100 percent efficient. Our system has a way of drawing heat in from the surrounding environment, allowing us to achieve near-perfect efficiency."

The low-cost technology could provide drinking water in regions where resources are scarce, or where natural disasters have struck. The advancements are described in a study published on May 3 in the journal Advanced Science.

The project, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), was a collaboration between UB, Fudan University in China and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. UB electrical engineering PhD graduate Haomin Song and PhD candidate Youhai Liu were the study's first authors.

Gan, Song and other colleagues have launched a startup, Sunny Clean Water, to bring the invention to people who need it. With support from the NSF Small Business Innovation Research program, the company is integrating the new evaporation system into a prototype of a solar still, a sun-powered water purifier.

"When you talk to government officials or nonprofits working in disaster zones, they want to know: 'How much water can you generate every day?' We have a strategy to boost daily performance," Song says. "With a solar still the size of a mini fridge, we estimate that we can generate 10 to 20 liters of clean water every single day."

Modernizing an age-old technology

Solar stills have been around for a long time. These devices use the sun's heat to evaporate water, leaving salt, bacteria and dirt behind. Then, the water vapor cools and returns to a liquid state, at which point it's collected in a clean container.

The technique has many advantages. It's simple, and the power source -- the sun -- is available just about everywhere. But unfortunately, even the latest solar still models are somewhat inefficient at vaporizing water.

Gan's team addressed this challenge through a neat, counterintuitive trick: They increased the efficiency of their evaporation system by cooling it down.

A central component of their technology is a sheet of carbon-dipped paper that is folded into an upside-down "V" shape, like the roof of a birdhouse. The bottom edges of the paper hang in a pool of water, soaking up the fluid like a napkin. At the same time, the carbon coating absorbs solar energy and transforms it into heat for evaporation.

As Gan explains, the paper's sloped geometry keeps it cool by weakening the intensity of the sunlight illuminating it. (A flat surface would be hit directly by the sun's rays.) Because most of the carbon-coated paper stays under room temperature, it can draw in heat from the surrounding area, compensating for the regular loss of solar energy that occurs during the vaporization process.

Using this set-up, researchers evaporated the equivalent of 2.2 liters of water per hour for every square meter of area illuminated by the regular sun, higher than the theoretical upper limit of 1.68 liters, according to the new study. The team conducted its tests in the lab, using a solar simulator to generate light at the intensity of one regular sun.

"Most groups working on solar evaporation technologies are trying to develop advanced materials, such as metallic plasmonic and carbon-based nanomaterials," Gan says. "We focused on using extremely low-cost materials and were still able to realize record-breaking performance.

"Importantly, this is the only example I know of where the thermal efficiency of the solar evaporation process is 100 percent when you consider solar energy input. By developing a technique where the vapor is below ambient temperature, we create new research possibilities for exploring alternatives to high-temperature steam generation."