(Art design: Jean-Dominique Lavoix-Carli) How can individuals and small business leaders protect themselves against the crises and upheavals that seem to be imposed on them? Can they take advantage of tools that are generally reserved for state actors, especially security forces, and sometimes for large companies? Can such a tool, early warning, be useful for …
Continue reading “Early Warning for Individuals and Small Businesses – Overcoming Energy Insecurity”
This article, using scientific knowledge, looks at the COVID-19 dynamics of contagion to identify ideal measures that should be taken to stop contagion. These ideal measures, then, compared with real policies will allow assessing the potential for a second wave. Our aim, for this series, is to find ways to improve how we foresee if, …
Continue reading “Dynamics of contagion and the COVID-19 Second Wave”
This brief article is a first early warning about food insecurity resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. The danger is rising and deserves further and more in-depth analysis and monitoring. As the COVID-19 pandemic developed, we immediately added food insecurity on our watch list of issues to monitor (see our COVID-19 section). To date, mid-May 2020, …
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The world is now struggling to know how to face the COVID-19 pandemic. We want to know how long the pandemic will last. Actually, what we want to know is when the pandemic will end and when life will be able to resume normally. As we explained in the opening article for this series, to …
Continue reading “COVID-19 Antiviral Treatments and Scenarios”
The COVID-19 pandemic is now a global fact. It still involves many uncertainties. At present and in the near future, we need to handle the ongoing pandemic as a global catastrophic crisis with complex cascading impacts. We also need to start thinking about reconstruction. We are here concerned with reconstruction that will allow polities to …
Continue reading “The COVID-19 Pandemic, Surviving and Reconstructing”
(Rewritten and revised edition) Horizon scanning and monitoring for early warning are part of the family of activities used to foresee the future, anticipate uncertainty and manage risks. Their practice is crucial for successful strategic foresight and warning, risk management, futurism or any anticipatory activity. While monitoring is a generic and common term used for …
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On 24 June 2016 morning, the U.K. announced the results of the referendum on the Brexit: 51.9% of the population voted to leave the EU against 48.1% wanting to remain, while the turnout reached 72,2% (BBC Referendum Results). This vote triggered among the media, financial and European political elite a “shock”, consternation, and a host of predictions of impending doom, while markets plunged worldwide (BBC News, “Brexit: What the world’s papers say“, 24 June 2016). It also set off a series of events and dynamics still unfolding nowadays with far-ranging consequences, globally, for the future.We shall use this real life case to further enhance our understanding of the way businesses and the corporate world relate to and especially anticipate or rather …
Continue reading “Lessons from and for the Brexit – Geopolitics, Uncertainties, and Business (2)”
On 4 June 2015, Science magazine published “Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global surface warming hiatus,” which addressed what some see as an apparent pause in the upward trend of global surface temperatures since 1998. In the paper, Thomas R. Karl and others presented updated global surface temperature analysis, which they think reveals that global trends are higher than reported by the IPCC and does not support the notion of a “slowdown” or a pause in the increase of global surface temperature. For those who firmly believe there is a pause or even a downward trend, that paper released the Kraken. Whatts Up With That?, a website dedicated to climate change skepticism, called the new paper “laughable”. Dr …
Continue reading “Climate Change, a Pause or an Aposiopesis?”
The war in Syria has now become fully internationalized, after its expected regionalization, notably favoured by the failure to stabilize Iraq after its state was destroyed by the 2003 US-led Iraq war. The two, initially unrelated wars have morphed into a war against one of the fighting actors on the Syrian battlefield, the Islamic State, originally born from the Iraqi …
Continue reading “Monitoring the War against the Islamic State or against a Terrorist Group?”
Editorial – War and Weak Signals – While progressing through the raw mass of information of The Weekly and editing it, initially, it seemed obvious the editorial should focus on Obama’s visit to Asia, the TPP and especially on the U.S. President’s assertion in the Yomiuri Shimbun regarding the disputed Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands: “The policy of the United States is clear — the Senkaku Islands are administered by Japan and therefore fall within the scope of Article 5 of the U.S.-Japan Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security. And we oppose any unilateral attempts to undermine Japan’s administration of these islands”. The accommodating Chinese News reactions to this American statement, as a willingness to keep the U.S. outside the dispute, are also to be underlined …
Continue reading “The Red Team Analysis Weekly 149 – War and Weak Signals”
