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Cloud Computing Advantage

The Cloud

Innovation in software vital to solve every existential risk


Hayes, 14 (Correspondent-Democrat & Chronicle, 10/5, Bill Gates sees innovation solving world problems, http://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/money/business/2014/10/05/bill-gates-sees-innovation-solving-world-problems/16760969/)

ITHACA – Bill Gates delivered an optimistic message about the future to Cornell University students during a back-and-forth Wednesday evening with President David Skorton. Gates, who fielded questions from the audience, spoke to the packed auditorium at Bailey Hall with the message that innovations in science, medicine and computer technologies will continue to shape the world for the better. Progress in reducing health and income inequalities in developing countries gave him particular pride, he said. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which he co-chairs with his wife, has dispersed more than $30 billion in grants since its inception 14 years ago. The foundation has a mission to improve education in the United States and a global focus on improving people’s health in poor countries. “We saw that health was the greatest injustice,” he told Skorton about his foundation’s mission to improve people’s health. Feeding the poor is only one priority of the Gates Foundation. The philanthropic group has helped lower the number of childhood deaths from 10 million in 2000 to about 6 million today. His goal is to reduce that further to 2 million, he said. He expressed optimism that research into diseases that ravage the poorer parts of the world — malaria, cholera, tuberculosis and others — will continue to be funded. Economic development in poorer countries has helped reduce global inequality, which he said is at a lower level than it has ever been. “The world is A, much richer, and B, much richer in a far more equitable way,” he told the students. That has been the opposite of what has happened in the past three decades or so in the United States, he said. He called for tax policies to help level that inequality, with a progressive consumption tax and a high estate tax that limits the dynastic possession of wealth. While he expressed concern about the current political climate in the country, he felt that science innovations can overcome problems in Washington, D.C. “The things that count in society don’t depend on politicians being geniuses,” he said. At the dedication Gates had a similar optimistic message earlier in the day during the dedication ceremony of Gates Hall. Gates said it’s an exciting time to be involved in the computer sciences, even more than when he got involved 46 years ago. Despite the advances over the past few decades, he said, “the full dream of what is possible with computing has not yet been realized.” Problems like developing vaccines, energy sources without carbon dioxide emissions, and understanding issues as diverse as neurological disease and weather forecasting can all be tackled with emerging technologies. “With every one of these problems, the digital tools combined with really amazing software are going to be the reason that we can solve these things,” he said. He said figuring out solutions depends on software-intensive techniques, and that Cornell students will be poised to make gains in those fields.

Software developments key to address every global problem


Aznar, 12 (Columnist-Sun Star, 7/23, Software ‘can solve world’s problems,’ http://www.sunstar.com.ph/cebu/business/2012/07/23/software-can-solve-world-s-problems-233596)

WITH seven billion people in the world riddled with problems like climate change, cancer, transport deadlocks and financial crises, a computer science professor believes computer software can be developed to solve the world’s problems. Srini Devadas, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in a lecture entitled “Programming the Future,” said that if the huge amount of data available in the world is processed efficiently to discover patterns or hidden meanings, much progress can be done in many different fields, such as healthcare, finance and energy. Devadas was flown in from MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts to the Philippines to participate in the MIT Lecture Series conducted by Accenture, which is part of the company’s collaboration with the MIT Professional Education. The collaboration, called the Accenture Technology Academy, is a career development program of the company that earns for its employees four types of certifications to further the technical development of their IT workers. This month, the company is also dedicating celebrations for technology and made Devadas’ lecture available for some 200 IT professionals and students yesterday. Computing paradigms Devadas’ talk focused on three computing paradigms considered central to the progress in computers, software and hardware–programming for everyone, big data and crowds to clouds. A shortened part of his talk was presented to reporters and he showed simple applications that could be useful to everyone, such as a program that replies to a text message sender that the person is driving. Devadas said that most enterprises today generate more data than they can process and that the amount of data grows 50 percent yearly. “It’s hard to keep up with all this data. Think of it as a fire hose and try to drink water from it. It can’t be done,” he said. “The best approach to tackling big data is to combine the strengths of both human and machine,” he added.

Data driven healthcare is the critical factor in disease prevention – revolutionizes planning and treatment


Marr 15 (Bernard, contributor to Forbes, he also basically wrote the book on internet data – called Big Data – and is a keynote speaker and consultant in strategic performance, analytics, KPIs and big data, “How Big Data Is Changing Healthcare”, http://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2015/04/21/how-big-data-is-changing-healthcare/)

If you want to find out how Big Data is helping to make the world a better place, there’s no better example than the uses being found for it in healthcare. The last decade has seen huge advances in the amount of data we routinely generate and collect in pretty much everything we do, as well as our ability to use technology to analyze and understand it. The intersection of these trends is what we call “Big Data” and it is helping businesses in every industry to become more efficient and productive. Healthcare is no different. Beyond improving profits and cutting down on wasted overhead, Big Data in healthcare is being used to predict epidemics, cure disease, improve quality of life and avoid preventable deaths. With the world’s population increasing and everyone living longer, models of treatment delivery are rapidly changing, and many of the decisions behind those changes are being driven by data. The drive now is to understand as much about a patient as possible, as early in their life as possible – hopefully picking up warning signs of serious illness at an early enough stage that treatment is far more simple (and less expensive) than if it had not been spotted until later. So to take a journey through Big Data in healthcare, let’s start at the beginning – before we even get ill. Wearable blood pressure monitors send data to a smartphone app, then off to the doctor. (Photo by John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe via Getty Images) Prevention is better than cure Smart phones were just the start. With apps enabling them to be used as everything from pedometers to measure how far you walk in a day, to calorie counters to help you plan your diet, millions of us are now using mobile technology to help us try and live healthier lifestyles. More recently, a steady stream of dedicated wearable devices have emerged such as Fitbit, Jawbone and Samsung Gear Fit that allow you to track your progress and upload your data to be compiled alongside everyone else’s. In the very near future, you could also be sharing this data with your doctor who will use it as part of his or her diagnostic toolbox when you visit them with an ailment. Even if there’s nothing wrong with you, access to huge, ever growing databases of information about the state of the health of the general public will allow problems to be spotted before they occur, and remedies – either medicinal or educational – to be prepared in advance This is leading to ground breaking work, often by partnerships between medical and data professionals, with the potential to peer into the future and identify problems before they happen. One recently formed example of such a partnership is the Pittsburgh Health Data Alliance – which aims to take data from various sources (such as medical and insurance records, wearable sensors, genetic data and even social media use) to draw a comprehensive picture of the patient as an individual, in order to offer a tailored healthcare package. That person’s data won’t be treated in isolation. It will be compared and analyzed alongside thousands of others, highlighting specific threats and issues through patterns that emerge during the comparison. This enables sophisticated predictive modelling to take place – a doctor will be able to assess the likely result of whichever treatment he or she is considering prescribing, backed up by the data from other patients with the same condition, genetic factors and lifestyle. Programs such as this are the industry’s attempt to tackle one of the biggest hurdles in the quest for data-driven healthcare: The medical industry collects a huge amount of data but often it is siloed in archives controlled by different doctors’ surgeries, hospitals, clinics and administrative departments. Another partnership that has just been announced is between Apple and IBM. The two companies are collaborating on a big data health platform that will allow iPhone and Apple Watch users to share data to IBM’s Watson Health cloud healthcare analytics service. The aim is to discover new medical insights from crunching real-time activity and biometric data from millions of potential users.

An international approach is key – only cooperation solves


Donahue et al 10 (Donald A. Donahue Jr, DHEd, MBA, FACHE, Potomac Institute for Policy Studies and University of Maryland University College Stephen O. Cunnion, MD, PhD, MPH, Potomac Institute for Policy Studies Fred L. Brocker, MPH, RS, Brocker Staffing & Consulting, Inc. Richard H. Carmona, MD, MPH, FACS, 17th Surgeon General of the United States & University of Arizona, https://www.academia.edu/3651172/Soft_Power_of_Solid_Medicine ekr)

In this article, the authors argue that a broader, coordinated program of medical diplomacy would generate dual benefits: increased global engagement and stability and the creation of a worldwide disease surveillance network that could detect and deter an emerging pandemic. Framing the Issue At an April 2008 conference on preparedness hosted by the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies’ National Security Health Policy Center, Dr. C. Everett Koop observed that our national approach to communicable disease has not changed in over a century. In Foggy Bottom—at the far end of the National Mall from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)— diplomacy is similarly practiced as it was 100 years ago. This seemingly strange correlation and recent world events point to the need to augment nineteenth-century “Gunboat Diplomacy” with twenty-first-century “Hospital Ship Diplomacy.” Linking the considerable scientific and public health expertise of HHS to the diplomatic mission of the State Department would serve to bolster both the U.S. international diplomacy mission and improve global public health (Avery 2010). The positive impact of projecting quality public health and medical expertise—on a consistent basis—to the developing world is well documented (Gillert 1996). The success of General Petreaus’ approach in Iraq is attributed largely to enhancing the availability of the civic infrastructure (Patraeus 2006). Médecins San Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) and similar nongovernment organizations (NGOs) sow well documented international goodwill. Even the Taliban recognize the value of providing medical infrastructure services where the government does not. Providing these services was a significant factor in their early successes in parts of Afghanistan and the frontier provinces of Pakistan (Homas 2008). Serving the needs of vulnerable populations can be an entrée to acceptance, including providing a salve for an otherwise unwanted foreign military presence. It should be noted that when U.S. Marine and French paratrooper barracks were bombed in Beirut in 1983, Italian medical troops were left unharmed. The efficacy of medical diplomacy in underserved regions has been validated by first-hand experience. As a young Army medic serving in Phu Bai, Vietnam in 1971, one of the authors built an 80-bed hospital which was named “Tu Ai,” a Vietnamese-Buddhist term for peace. This facility provided medical treatment to all in need with no questions asked. After the fall of South Vietnam in 1975, the Tu Ai medical facility was the only one in the I Corps area of operations (and perhaps of all Vietnam) that was allowed by the new government to continue its mission unchanged. It continues to provide medical care to this very day. There is ample precedent that supporting improvements in world health produces a political payoff, as evidenced by multiple, if sometimes disjointed, efforts (Avery 2010; Public Health Systems Research Interest Group Advisory Board 2009; Macqueen KM, et al. 2001; Subcommittee on Oversight & Investigations 2008). The U.S. and other nations’ military organizations routinely conduct medical assistance missions throughout the developing world. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and a number of medical NGOs regularly provide disaster and humanitarian medical and public health assistance. Significant goodwill was engendered by deployment of U.S. Army, Navy, and Public Health Service (PHS) Commissioned Corps resources to Banda Aceh after the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami and, more recently, to Haiti. Relief missions to Pakistan have been mounted following the 2005 earthquake and again in response to recent, epic flooding. Defining an Underutilized Resource as an Available Solution. The benefit of having a robust, organized health and medical presence around the globe to help collect and disseminate medical information and coordinate public health activities, including humanitarian assistance, is less obvious. This benefit is manifested in three ways: the fostering of human security, the increase in effectiveness of global public health efforts, and an increase in political legitimacy (Nye 2004). While it is beyond the scope of this commentary to debate the components and relative merits of human security, history supports the position that a population with increased levels of disease and illness is more susceptible to destabilizing factors that can pose direct threats to state viability and create fertile fields for radicalism and insurgency (WHO 2007). This is especially true if there are very clear differences in healthcare and public health services available to ruling and elite classes compared to that available to the general population. Reflective of this, the National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI) routinely assesses medical information and reports on diseases and poor public health conditions that may contribute to politically destabilizing a county (e.g., AIDS). Despite significant, if disparate, initiatives and interest for improving international health throughout the executive branch of the U.S. government, these collective efforts lack meaningful coordination into a comprehensive approach on foreign health diplomacy, and therefore fail to realize the cumulative benefit of and the inherent political stabilization impact fostered by an organized and coordinated global health improvement effort. Even with improved political stability, the need for increased global health capabilities continues unabated. The emergence of SARS, H5N1 influenza, and the pandemic H1N1 outbreak clearly demonstrates that national borders and ocean expanses no longer protect us from far-flung illnesses. In a global economy and with the ability to travel almost anywhere in the world within 24–36 hours, a local infectious disease aberration can become an international health crisis in a matter of days. Moreover, because H1N1 influenza turned out to be not as deadly as feared, the danger of a future calamitous pandemic occurring could be enhanced because the public may not heed future health official warnings. This is not limited to individual perception. In a rare divergence of political and clinical focus regarding communicable disease, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe soundly criticized the World Health Organization (WHO) and national health authorities for “distortion of priorities of public health services across Europe, waste of large sums of public money, and also unjustified scares and fears about health risks faced by the European public at large” (Flynn 2010). 

Zoonotic diseases coming now – effective healthcare is key to check


Naish 12 (Reporter for Daily Mail, “The Armageddon virus: Why experts fear a disease that leaps from animals to humans could devastate mankind in the next five years Warning comes after man died from a Sars-like virus that had previously only been seen in bats Earlier this month a man from Glasgow died from a tick-borne disease that is widespread in domestic and wild animals in Africa and Asia” http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2217774/The-Armageddon-virus-Why-experts-fear-disease-leaps-animals-humans-devastate-mankind-years.html#ixzz3E5kqxjQI)

The symptoms appear suddenly with a headache, high fever, joint pain, stomach pain and vomiting. As the illness progresses, patients can develop large areas of bruising and uncontrolled bleeding. In at least 30  per cent of cases, Crimean-Congo Viral Hemorrhagic Fever is fatal. And so it proved this month when a 38-year-old garage owner from Glasgow, who had been to his brother’s wedding in Afghanistan, became the UK’s first confirmed victim of the tick-borne viral illness when he died at the high-security infectious disease unit at London’s Royal Free Hospital. It is a disease widespread in domestic and wild animals in Africa and Asia — and one that has jumped the species barrier to infect humans with deadly effect. But the unnamed man’s death was not the only time recently a foreign virus had struck in this country for the first time. Last month, a 49-year-old man entered London’s St Thomas’ hospital with a raging fever, severe cough and desperate difficulty in breathing. He bore all the hallmarks of the deadly Sars virus that killed nearly 1,000 people in 2003 — but blood tests quickly showed that this terrifyingly virulent infection was not Sars. Nor was it any other virus yet known to medical science. Worse still, the gasping, sweating patient was rapidly succumbing to kidney failure, a potentially lethal complication that had never before been seen in such a case. As medical staff quarantined their critically-ill patient, fearful questions began to mount. The stricken man had recently come from Qatar in the Middle East. What on earth had he picked up there? Had he already infected others with it? Using the latest high-tech gene-scanning technique, scientists at the Health Protection Agency started to piece together clues from tissue samples taken from the Qatari patient, who was now hooked up to a life-support machine. The results were extraordinary. Yes, the virus is from the same family as Sars. But its make-up is completely new. It has come not from humans, but from animals. Its closest known relatives have been found in Asiatic bats. The investigators also discovered that the virus has already killed someone. Searches of global medical databases revealed the same mysterious virus lurking in samples taken from a 60-year-old man who had died in Saudi Arabia in July. Scroll down for video Potentially deadly: The man suffered from CCHF, a disease transmitted by ticks (pictured) which is especially common in East and West Africa Potentially deadly: The man suffered from CCHF, a disease transmitted by ticks (pictured) which is especially common in East and West Africa When the Health Protection Agency warned the world of this newly- emerging virus last month, it ignited a stark fear among medical experts. Could this be the next bird flu, or even the next ‘Spanish flu’ — the world’s biggest pandemic, which claimed between 50 million and 100 million lives across the globe from 1918 to 1919? In all these outbreaks, the virus responsible came from an animal. Analysts now believe that the Spanish flu pandemic originated from a wild aquatic bird. The terrifying fact is that viruses that manage to jump to us from animals — called zoonoses — can wreak havoc because of their astonishing ability to catch us on the hop and spread rapidly through the population when we least expect it. The virus's power and fatality rates are terrifying One leading British virologist, Professor John Oxford at Queen Mary Hospital, University of London, and a world authority on epidemics, warns that we must expect an animal-originated pandemic to hit the world within the next five years, with potentially cataclysmic effects on the human race. Such a contagion, he believes, will be a new strain of super-flu, a highly infectious virus that may originate in some far-flung backwater of Asia or Africa, and be contracted by one person from a wild animal or domestic beast, such as a chicken or pig. By the time the first victim has succumbed to this unknown, unsuspected new illness, they will have spread it by coughs and sneezes to family, friends, and all those gathered anxiously around them. Thanks to our crowded, hyper-connected world, this doomsday virus will already have begun crossing the globe by air, rail, road and sea before even the best brains in medicine have begun to chisel at its genetic secrets. Before it even has a name, it will have started to cut its lethal swathe through the world’s population. The high security unit High security: The high security unit where the man was treated for the potentially fatal disease but later died If this new virus follows the pattern of the pandemic of 1918-1919, it will cruelly reap mass harvests of young and fit people. They die because of something called a ‘cytokine storm’ — a vast overreaction of their strong and efficient immune systems that is prompted by the virus. This uncontrolled response burns them with a fever and wracks their bodies with nausea and massive fatigue. The hyper-activated immune system actually kills the person, rather than killing the super-virus. Professor Oxford bases his prediction on historical patterns. The past century has certainly provided us with many disturbing precedents. For example, the 2003 global outbreak of Sars, the severe acute respiratory syndrome that killed nearly 1,000 people, was transmitted to humans from Asian civet cats in China. More... Man, 38, dies from deadly tropical disease after returning to the UK from Afghanistan Nine-year-old who turns YELLOW with anger: Brianna must spend 12 hours a day under UV lights because of rare condition In November 2002, it first spread among people working at a live animal market in the southern Guangdong province, where civets were being sold. Nowadays, the threat from such zoonoses is far greater than ever, thanks to modern technology and human population growth. Mass transport such as airliners can quickly fan outbreaks of newly- emerging zoonoses into deadly global wildfires. The Sars virus was spread when a Chinese professor of respiratory medicine treating people with the syndrome fell ill when he travelled to Hong Kong, carrying the virus with him. By February 2003, it had covered the world by hitching easy lifts with airline passengers. Between March and July 2003, some 8,400 probable cases of Sars had been reported in 32 countries. It is a similar story with H1N1 swine flu, the 2009 influenza pandemic that infected hundreds of millions throughout the world. It is now believed to have originated in herds of pigs in Mexico before infecting humans who boarded flights to myriad destinations. Once these stowaway viruses get off the plane, they don’t have to learn a new language or new local customs. Genetically, we humans are not very diverse; an epidemic that can kill people in one part of the world can kill them in any other just as easily. On top of this, our risk of catching such deadly contagions from wild animals is growing massively, thanks to humankind’s relentless encroachment into the world’s jungles and rainforests, where we increasingly come into contact for the first time with unknown viral killers that have been evolving and incubating in wild creatures for millennia. This month, an international research team announced it had identified an entirely new African virus that killed two teenagers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2009. The virus induced acute hemorrhagic fever, which causes catastrophic widespread bleeding from the eyes, ears, nose and mouth, and can kill in days. A 15-year-old boy and a 13-year-old girl who attended the same school both fell ill suddenly and succumbed rapidly. A week after the girl’s death, a nurse who cared for her developed similar symptoms. He only narrowly survived. The new microbe is named Bas-Congo virus (BASV), after the province where its three victims lived. It belongs to a family of viruses known as rhabdoviruses, which includes rabies. A report in the journal PLoS Pathogens says the virus probably originated in local wildlife and was passed to humans through insect bites or some other as-yet unidentified means. There are plenty of other new viral candidates waiting in the wings, guts, breath and blood of animals around us. You can, for example, catch leprosy from armadillos, which carry the virus in their shells and are responsible for a third of leprosy cases in the U.S. Horses can transmit the Hendra virus, which can cause lethal respiratory and neurological disease in people. In a new book that should give us all pause for thought, award-winning U.S. natural history writer David Quammen points to a host of animal-derived infections that now claim lives with unprecedented regularity. The trend can only get worse, he warns. Quammen highlights the Ebola fever virus, which first struck in Zaire in 1976. The virus’s power is terrifying, with fatality rates as high as 90 per cent. The latest mass outbreak of the virus, in the Congo last month, is reported to have killed 36 people out of 81 suspected cases. According to Quammen, Ebola probably originated in bats. The bats then infected African apes, quite probably through the apes coming into contact with bat droppings. The virus then infected local hunters who had eaten the apes as bushmeat. Quammen believes a similar pattern occurred with the HIV virus, which probably originated in a single chimpanzee in Cameroon. 'It is inevitable we will have a global outbreak' Studies of the virus’s genes suggest it may have first evolved as early as 1908. It was not until the Sixties that it appeared in humans, in big African cities. By the Eighties, it was spreading by airlines to America. Since then, Aids has killed around 30 million people and infected another 33 million. There is one mercy with Ebola and HIV. They cannot be transmitted by coughs and sneezes. ‘Ebola is transmissible from human to human through direct contact with bodily fluids. It can be stopped by preventing such contact,’ Quammen explains. ‘If HIV could be transmitted by air, you and I might already be dead. If the rabies virus — another zoonosis — could be transmitted by air, it would be the most horrific pathogen on the planet.’ Viruses such as Ebola have another limitation, on top of their method of transmission. They kill and incapacitate people too quickly. In order to spread into pandemics, zoonoses need their human hosts to be both infectious and alive for as long as possible, so that the virus can keep casting its deadly tentacles across the world’s population. But there is one zoonosis that can do all the right (or wrong) things. It is our old adversary, flu. It is easily transmitted through the air, via sneezes and coughs. Sars can do this, too. But flu has a further advantage. As Quammen points out: ‘With Sars, symptoms tend to appear in a person before, rather than after, that person becomes highly infectious. Isolation: Unlike Sars the symptoms of this new disease may not be apparent before the spread of infection Isolation: Unlike Sars the symptoms of this new disease may not be apparent before the spread of infection ‘That allowed many Sars cases to be recognised, hospitalised and placed in isolation before they hit their peak of infectivity. But with influenza and many other diseases, the order is reversed.’ Someone who has an infectious case of a new and potentially lethal strain of flu can be walking about innocently spluttering it over everyone around them for days before they become incapacitated. Such reasons lead Professor Oxford, a world authority on epidemics, to warn that a new global pandemic of animal-derived flu is inevitable. And, he says, the clock is ticking fast. Professor Oxford’s warning is as stark as it is certain: ‘I think it is inevitable that we will have another big global outbreak of flu,’ he says. ‘We should plan for one emerging in 2017-2018.’ But are we adequately prepared to cope? Professor Oxford warns that vigilant surveillance is the only real answer that we have. ‘New flu strains are a day-to-day problem and we have to be very careful to keep on top of them,’ he says. ‘We now have scientific processes enabling us to quickly identify the genome of the virus behind a new illness, so that we know what we are dealing with. The best we can do after that is to develop and stockpile vaccines and antiviral drugs that can fight new strains that we see emerging.’ But the Professor is worried our politicians are not taking this certainty of mass death seriously enough. Such laxity could come at a human cost so unprecedentedly high that it would amount to criminal negligence. The race against newly-emerging animal-derived diseases is one that we have to win every time. A pandemic virus needs to win only once and it could be the end of humankind.

Zoonotic diseases specifically cause extinction


Casadevall 12 (Arturo, M.D., Ph.D. in Biochemistry from New York University, Leo and Julia Forchheimer Professor and Chair of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, former editor of the ASM journal Infection and Immunity, “The future of biological warfare,” Microbial Biotechnology Volume 5, Issue 5, pages 584–587, September 2012, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1751-7915.2012.00340.x/full)

In considering the importance of biological warfare as a subject for concern it is worthwhile to review the known existential threats. At this time this writer can identify at three major existential threats to humanity: (i) large-scale thermonuclear war followed by a nuclear winter, (ii) a planet killing asteroid impact and (iii) infectious disease. To this trio might be added climate change making the planet uninhabitable. Of the three existential threats the first is deduced from the inferred cataclysmic effects of nuclear war. For the second there is geological evidence for the association of asteroid impacts with massive extinction (Alvarez, 1987). As to an existential threat from microbes recent decades have provided unequivocal evidence for the ability of certain pathogens to cause the extinction of entire species. Although infectious disease has traditionally not been associated with extinction this view has changed by the finding that a single chytrid fungus was responsible for the extinction of numerous amphibian species (Daszak et al., 1999; Mendelson et al., 2006). Previously, the view that infectious diseases were not a cause of extinction was predicated on the notion that many pathogens required their hosts and that some proportion of the host population was naturally resistant. However, that calculation does not apply to microbes that are acquired directly from the environment and have no need for a host, such as the majority of fungal pathogens. For those types of host–microbe interactions it is possible for the pathogen to kill off every last member of a species without harm to itself, since it would return to its natural habitat upon killing its last host. Hence, from the viewpoint of existential threats environmental microbes could potentially pose a much greater threat to humanity than the known pathogenic microbes, which number somewhere near 1500 species (Cleaveland et al., 2001; Taylor et al., 2001), especially if some of these species acquired the capacity for pathogenicity as a consequence of natural evolution or bioengineering.

to the particular communication in question, a simple framework emerges that allows courts to apply the SCA to modern technologies and addresses the concerns that prompted Congress to adopt the SCA. Only then can courts be sure that Congress’s intent is properly carried out.


Global Data Key

A globalized internet is the key internal link to big data and cloud computing success


Bauer et al 14 (Matthias Bauer is Senior Economist at ECIPE. His areas of research include international trade as well as European fiscal and capital market policy. Matthias studied business administration at the University of Hull and economics at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena. He received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Jena after joining the Bundesbank graduate programme on the “Foundations of Global Financial Markets and Financial Stability“. Hosuk Lee-Makiyama is the director of European Centre for International Political Economy (ECIPE) and a leading author on trade diplomacy, EU-Far East relations and the digital economy. He is regularly consulted by governments and international organisations on a range of issues, from trade negotiations to economic reforms. He appears regularly in European, Chinese and US media, and is noted for his involvement in WTO and major free trade agreements. Erik van der Marel is a Senior Economist at ECIPE. His areas of expertise are in services trade and political economy of services trade policy, Russia’s trading patterns, plus total factor productivity (TFP) and regulation including trade policy in developing countries. Bert Verschelde has a MSc in European Political Economy and graduated with a Master's in Comparative and International Politics, “THE COSTS OF DATA LOCALISATION: FRIENDLY FIRE ON ECONOMIC RECOVERY” http://www.ecipe.org/app/uploads/2014/12/OCC32014__1.pdf, ekr)

Industry and internet advocates have warned against an Internet which is fragmented along national borderlines. Some of them are going as far as calling balkanisation the greatest threat to the Internet today, even greater than censorship.9 One comprehensive study by Chander and Lê (2014) from the California International Law Centre established that data localisation “threatens the major new advances in information technology – not only cloud computing, but also the promise of big data and the Internet of things”.10 It is not unlikely that future trade agreements will include disciplines against data localisation requirements, as there are often less trade-restrictive measures available to address privacy and security. However, the more immediate effect of data localisation measures – the impact on economic recovery and growth – is even more dangerous. As this study has shown, this impact is a direct consequence of the complex relations between cross-border data flows, supply chain fragmentation and domestic prices. These are complexities that are generally not understood by policymakers, who are often in the field of security and privacy law, rather than international trade. The findings regarding the effects on GDP, investments and welfare from data localisation requirements and discriminatory privacy and security laws are too considerable to be ignored in policy design. It is also reasonable to assume that SMEs and new firms are the first to be displaced from the market, as they lack resources to adapt to the regulatory changes. In the current security policy context, many regulators and privacy advocates stress the importance of discretion to tackle problems at a national level (e.g. NetMundial 2014 draft conclusions)11. The economic evidence however proves that unilateral trade restrictions are counterproductive in the context of today’s interdependent globalized economy. The selfincurred losses make data localisation a policy that unilaterally puts the country at a relative loss to others while the possibilities for offsetting the negative impact through trade agreements or economic stimulus are relatively limited over the long term.


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