Major World Events 2025

The following are major events that will shape 2025, worldwide, with social, political, and economic implications.

Geopolitical Shifts:

• G7 Summit
• NATO Summit
• Potential for Increased Global Tensions
• Shifting Alliances
• Reforms to International Organizations

Economic Developments:

• Global Economic Slowdown
• Energy Transition
• Technological Advancements and Breakthroughs
• Metaverse and Web3

Social Trends:

• Climate Change Impacts
• Social and Political Polarization
• Demographic Changes

Major Elections:

• Several Key Elections

Global Events:

• Expo 2025
• WEF 2025

Resource Scarcity and Geopolitics:

• Water Stress
• Food Security
• Critical Materials

Technological Disruptions:

• AI Development and Regulation
• Cybersecurity Threats
• Space Race

Global Health:

• Pandemic Preparedness
• Antimicrobial Resistance
• Global Health Security

Social and Cultural Shifts:

• Migration and Displacement
• Growing Inequality and Unrest
• Evolving Social Norms

Unforeseen Events:

• Natural Disasters
• Political Upheaval
• Alien Encounters (?)

Dahiya Doctrine and Hannibal Directive

Hannibal Directive:

• Focus: To prevent capture of Israeli soldiers by enemy forces
• Application: Authorizes use of force, including lethal force against captured soldiers to avoid abduction
• Goal: Prevent capture of soldiers
• Targets: Captured soldiers
• Legality: International law violation
• Issue: In most cases, it violates international humanitarian law and principle of proportionality

Dahiya Doctrine:

• Focus: Deterrence of enemy attacks through deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure to inflict maximum civilian casualties
• Application: Disproportionate force against civilian areas and infrastructure
• Goal: Deter attacks and inflict collective punishment
• Targets: Civilians and infrastructure
• Legality: Essentially, a war crime
• Issue: In most cases, this is considered a war crime by human rights organizations and international law

Syrian Situation

• Fall of Assad Regime: Overthrow of Assad regime by coalition of rebel groups, led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham
• HTS in control: HTS controlling cities like Damascus and Aleppo
• Internal Displacement: 1M+ people displaced
• Refugee Crisis: Situation leads to refugees fleeing Syria
• Regional Implications: Shifts in balance of power and increasing regional instability
• International Response: Rising concern for the control of HTS in Syria
• Humanitarian Crisis: Millions of people in need of aid
• Political Future: Uncertain future with no clear path to progress
• Security: Volatile situation with ongoing clashes

Ethical Consumer

Ethical Consumer

Pessimist Archive

Pessimist Archive

How To Identify A Racist Company

• They will reject your CV even if you are appropriate for the job
• They will keep talking about skills shortage even though they keep rejecting good candidate CVs for the job
• They seem to want to give you an interview invite if the name is not disclosed but not when the name is disclosed
• They don't want to shake your hand after an interview
• They isolate you from communications so it prevents you from doing your job
• They block your bonus or pay increments
• You have to work harder than everyone else to prove your worth
• They incessantly talk about your background like you don't belong
• They try to talk to you like you have entered civilization for the first time
• They avoid going to lunch with you
• They look at you differently
• You get stared at work
• When you raise issues of racism with the company HR they deflect the topic or brush it aside
• They block you from contributing to any technical project work
• They try to put you on the spot as a scapegoat for all their politics
• They will try to blame you for all their wrongs and mistakes
• You will likely be the first person they will consider to make redundant
• They will racially profile you in the workplace
• They will talk to you like you don't understand their language
• They will talk to you like you are beneath them
• They will even talk about how they feel about 'your kind' in the workplace and you may have to put up with it as the HR don't want to do anything about it
• They will try to harass and bully you in the workplace so you end up leaving the organization
• They may expect you to put up with their verbal abuse and hostile intimidations
• They may even overly criticise you for your lack of abilities
• You might have to put up with microaggressions
• You might have to put up with your complaints being dismissed
• You might see it in the hiring and interview process
• You might see it in the lack of diversity in both the management as well as in the general workplace
• You might hear the term 'cultural fit' being used a lot by people that are mostly similar to each other
• Your ideas for change and opinions will get dismissed without much thought
• They may even try to take credit for your work
• They will avoid having a desk next to you
• They will constantly complain about you behind your back and keep tabs of your work
• You will be expected to work harder for the same level of work and put in more hours
• They will treat you like someone that doesn't have a voice in the organization
• They will avoid giving you access to things to be able to do your job
• They will overlook you from attending organizational events
• They will not be willing to pay you the same level of compensation but expect to pay you less
• They will put you in the hiring process for diversity but will not consider you for the interview or have any intention of hiring you
• They will go out of their way to keep tabs of your whereabouts and have a heightened sense of distrust for you than is normal - what time you go to lunch, what time you leave office, how much time you spend at the desk, how long you spend time in the restroom, what you are doing on the computer, what time you get into work, checks and balances for everything that you produce
• They will scrutinize your background alot more than is typical for their candidates in an interview process and likely will give you more tests to do
• They will likely consider you an outsider and not part of the team
• During the breakout periods in an organizational induction you will typically see the first signs of racist employees where they openly talk about how they hate a particular group of people, religion, etc
• Their organizational culture, marketing, and advertising campaigns are not considerate towards the protected characteristics
• The managers, co-workers, and colleagues are generally rude, unapproachable, and hostile towards you
• Many times the security will block you from entering the building and likely also do more random searches on you
• The receptionists will generally have a rude and hostile demeanor with which they greet you and how they interact with you 
• They will excessively question and scrutinize your right to work in the country even though you might have been born there, are a citizen of that country, or have already shown proof of id
• The contract will at times display signs of it in the wording and particular sections
• They make bigoted and inappropriate jokes and comments about race, color, nationality, ethnicity and other cultures
• They show favorable preference for people of a specific nationality, race, color, ethnicity, or culture
• They refuse to do business with companies that are run by minorities 
• They play down acts like slavery, human rights, affirmative action, and equality
• They use offensive terms to describe people of certain race, color, nationality, ethnicity, or culture 

Ex-Googlers

It seems googlers are taught to practice arrogance as if their entire life goal was to be part of Google. In fact, working for such a large company does have its disadvantages. And, when they turn ex-googlers they become even more arrogant. So, why did they leave? Is this because they are insecure that they left the company or because they want to impress on the fact that they once were there as well? But, one thing both ex-googlers and googlers share is the fact that they find any one that did not work at Google as beneath them. This sort of sordid culture of arrogance and conceit is unlikely to be found in other companies like Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, or even at Netflix. Perhaps, this is the way Google's internal culture brews and transforms the mentality of their employees into spoilt individuals. Either way, it projects a toxic culture. One can already see glimmers of toxicity in the way the organization forces other clients to use their cloud infrastructure which compared to AWS has a significantly long road ahead in playing catchup. Is it any wonder that ex-googlers struggle to find much success outside of Google as if to permanently lose their sense of what it means to be human. One can only anticipate that such a large company over time can only get bigger, and this perpetuated sense of complacency within Google is only bound to get worse, can only eventually lead to a corporate demise like a climactic fall of bricks.

Newspapers

Newspapers

Online Fact-Checking

The coverage of ukraine-russia conflict has shown that online fact-checking is not only farcical, in variably filled with biases, and often manipulated by regional governments. To evaluate for credibility for trust one has to start with an objective view in analyzing a balanced set of sources of input in order to garner a full picture of claims and biases before processing for a set of filters in disinformation and misinformation. This implies looking at both sides of the argument. However, as pro-russian media outlets are blocked and only pro-ukrainian western mainstream media is allowed coverage, a one-sided narrative is provided to the masses. As a result, the credibility process becomes flawed which undermines the process of fact-checking. The web has become a pre-filtered echo chamber where blocking freedoms of speech are ruthlessly defended through geographic jurisdictions. The western notion of freedom of speech emerges as a facade. In a court of law, there tend to be two-sides, a defense and a prosecution. On the web and social media, the defense is blocked and only a biased prosecution is made available. If a government jurisdiction can intervene to suppress freedoms of speech then it leaves little in process of credibility evaluation, especially when the concluding evidential claims is found not to fit or support the narrative. What if the mainstream coverage is an inaccurate projection of events happening on the ground, that would surely result in a cascade of fake news being treated as credible and supported by regional government narratives. In order to accurately evaluate and deliver on credibility one has to go beyond the fold.

Proppian Functions

Proppian Functions

Propp
Fairy-Tale Generator

Story Grammars

Plot Generator

Plot Generators

Narratology Handbook

TalkToTransformer

GPT2

GPT3
HuggingFace

Moogsoft

Moogsoft

Computer Science Conferences

Computer Science Conferences

MemeTrackers

Memetracker
Techmeme
Memeorandum
knowyourmeme
memeburn
memebuster
nifty

Sports Ontologies

-Events
-Locations
-Programmes
-Sports
-Stories
-Players
-Teams

IPTC
DBPedia - Sports
DBPedia - Sports Event
W3C Sports Schema Community Group
Schema.org - Sports Team
Schema.org - Sports Organization
Schema.org - Sports Activity Location
ConceptNet - Sports
BBC Sports Ontology
GeoNames - Geographical Database
Visual Sentiment Ontology - Sports
SenticNet - Sentiment Knowledge Base

Text-Driven Forecasting

Text-Driven Forecasting is about building systems that are able to predict on the future by analyzing collection of a body of natural language documents. Often they predict numeric quantities about a certain event based on various textual sources/feeds (e.g. news, twitter, facebook, polling data, opinion blogs, financial reports, amazon reviews, economics data, etc) as input and gather information gain from aspects of sentiment analysis and subjectivity. Machine Learning algorithms that can be applied to such a domain can range from regression, deep learning, decision trees, and others. 

Examples:
Predicting movie reviews using social media
Predicting opinion polls using social media
Predicting stock volatility using financial data
Predicting government elections and referendums
Predicting product sales using social media
Predicting property prices in the future
Predicting risk of a potential course of action or decision

smith whitepaper

Related Courses & Resources:
Priberam Labs
Social Media Analysis & Computational Social Science
Natural Language Processing & Social Interaction
Computational Social Science
Social & Information Network Analysis
Text as Data
NLP for Social Science
Computational Social Science
Computational Linguistics / Computational Social Science
Predicting Economic Indicators from Web Text Using Sentiment Composition
Making Predictions with Textual Contents

Microservices Monitoring

Breaking down a system into more granular services guided by the single responsibility principle does have multiple benefits of bounded context. However, it can also add a degree of complexity that requires more extensive monitoring. With multiple services interaction in a distributed systems context implies multiple log files and a need to aggregate them as well as multiple places for network latency issues to arise. One simple approach is to monitor everything in the entire workflow of the services as well as the system as whole but at same time try to get the bigger picture through an aggregation process. Also, add structure to the logs by utilizing correlation IDs which can then provide a guided trail. The need to be responsive can also be important so real time alerting may also be needed in order to avoid cascaded issues. One can abstract away the service from the system for a monitoring strategy.  The current trend towards monitoring is in a holistic way to get the full picture of the entire system including all its sub-systems as well as all the services interaction within it. A break down of the types of things that can be monitored and examples of tools is given below.

Service-Level Tracking:

• check inbound response times, error rates, and application metrics
• check downstream response health, response times of calls, error rates (Hystrix)
• standardize metrics collection process and pipelines
• standardize on logging formats so aggregation is easier
• check system processes for the OS in order to plan for capacity

System-Level Tracking:

• check host metrics like CPU
• check system logs and aggregate them so it is possible to filter on individual hosts
• standardize on single query option for searching through logs
• standardize on correlation IDs
• standardize on an action plan and alert levels
• unify aggregation (Riemann or Suro)

Logstash and Graphite/Collectd/Statsd are also often used in conjunction for the collection and aggregation of logs. One can also apply the ELK stack. The Java Metrics Library can also be utilized to get insights of code during production. There are other tool options available like Skyline and Oculus for anomaly detection and correlation. 

Hypocritical Western Holidays

Western societies are seeped in hypocritical social conundrums often brought about through capitalist commercial ideals. During Halloween we find ourselves celebrating empty pumpkins and dressing up in wickedly evil costumes. On other occasions like Thanksgiving we find ourselves being thankful only on that particular day. Why must we only be thankful to mothers on a Mother's Day and fathers on Father's Day. On Easter we celebrate all things made in shape of eggs. And, during Christmas we find the value of gift giving and lighting up trees. Turkey is also the most in demand during Thanksgiving and Christmas, even by some vegetarians. Soon after Christmas all the trees are left to die next to the rubbish bins. Unless, it is an artificial tree. When people only seem to care during the season not after the season is over. Wonder what happens to all the tree activists during Christmas time. Then as New Year period approaches it is time when an entire society is at bedrock of party and sex. Most likely also the time when major commercial vendors of condoms and alcohol are in huge demand. Holidays bring much joy for businesses. But, they also command confusion and a lot of hypocrisy for communities. Furthermore, even religious holidays are added on annually. One cannot imagine the confusion that kids would go through as they grow up to realize that such holidays really have no meaning other than to provide more reason to be with family, to breathe, relax, eat in copious amounts, and to shop without remorse. 

Netherlands vs Argentina

One very intense game with no goals scored on either end even with overtime. Both sides were relentless and working as a team. However, by the second half one could witness that the pressure and frustration was catching up with the Netherlands team as they were falling and pushing all over the place. Netherlands team does seem to have tendency of falling over very easily to grab a free kick or a penalty. Other times, they were literally pulling and tugging the Argentinian players. One could tell they were losing steam and getting desperate. However, going into penalties is a dangerous endeavor for any World Cup team, if it means going against Argentina, who have one of the best forward players. Ultimately, it was the penalties that provided a clear break for Argentina right from the first shoot out. Overall Argentina proved to be a far better team to qualify into the finals. Germany vs Argentina will be the pinnacle of World Cup 2014 in a very intense match. On one side we have the well oiled machine of Germany and on other hand we have the artful attacking plays by Argentina. Both, solid in their team spirit and working together to clinch the goals.

Glastonbury

This year the lineup is quite fresh and varied with significantly new performers on stage. There is also a varied group of people at Glastonbury this year. Certainly there is an air of expectation and excitement. Perhaps, even the odd bit of muddy escapism has struck at the minds of many over the unpredictable weather. However, the weather does not appear to be effecting the mood of either the performers or the people. Many new performers will be looking to showcase their talents during the festival. There will also be many young individuals looking to strike up love interests at such events while many camp the nights in their tents. Glastonbury festivals have always drawn a very hippy sort of crowd. But, this year it was slightly more open and mixed. Perhaps, this is a reflection of the multiculturalism and globalization in effect that brings so many to such festivals in shared music interests. However, the commencement of the festival around the same time as the World Cup has not given it much sway as many will still be watching the games from their available screens. There are also Arcadia monsters on display performing for a live audience. These are fire breathing, recycled scraps of monsters, like the Spider, that provide for a massive infusion of flaming explosion, sculpture, architecture, and an ephemeral adrenaline with the music. There is even a Mechanical Playground with Hand-of-Man, Paka, Spitfire Forge, Itchy Gorilla, and Bug Stage. With a huge line-up of performers and a welcome mix of monster scrap, there was/is much party to be had over the few days, on the grounds, for an experience to remember. The event lasts between June 25-29 and is therefore coming to an eventual close.

Glastonbury
BBC Glastonbury 2014
BBC Glastonbury Storm Stoppage
BBC Glastonbury Continuation
Arcadia Spectacular

England vs Costa Rica

Not sure what positives one can take away from that game other than the fact that England were terrible and Costa Rica were relentless. In all fairness, it could be very well predicted that England would lose as they had a very slim chance of even scoring a goal, let alone drawing. Furthermore, it is even worse to state that by losing they were taking back a learning experience. How many learning experiences in losing do they need to finally be able to win games or at least score? England not only struggled to win games, they struggled to even score, let alone play as a team. We find the same patterns develop in every game, time and time again. Moreover, England seem to be the only team that somehow find solice in losing by clapping at themselves as if the fans were in some way pleased at their performance or just plain disgusted to having flown so many miles to watch such an awful team play at an international level. Most people have literally given up on the odds to England games because everyone knows what the outcome will be, there is no real odds to apply. One can also wonder if, they are all that serious about the games and performing when they go out representing the flag as well as their country at an international level. Also, why does the manager always have to be fired? Over the years, there have been so many managers fired for representing England at World Cup that it seems quite apparent that it surely is not the managers fault, but that of the players as well as the team dynamics. How badly did the players want to win? Did the players have a constructive strategy? Did they even have a fighting spirit? What about all that climate conditioning? Not all teams have so much excessive care for their players as countries like England. This does beggar belief that even when England players get all the support they could possibly need they still come out losers.