This is the next blog in the continuing series of interviews with top-echelon and renowned professionals. In this blog, I interview this Year's ACM Turing Award Recipient, from Microsoft Research, Charles Thacker. The award was announced this month--March 2010. Chuck is the legendary computing pioneer, world-renowned distinguished researcher, inventor, and engineer whose innovations influence every part of our lives. Take a moment to carefully read Chuck's profile below. Many of the foundational computing elements we use today (WYSIWYG PCs, Ethernet, Laser printing, High speed and peer networks, Multi-processor computing, Tablet computers, Parallel/multi-core/multi-threading, ..) can be directly traced to original innovations from Chuck. Chuck is also key to the founding of the most famous research labs including: XEROX PARC, DEC SRC (Systems Research Center), and Microsoft Research Cambridge UK.

The ACM Turing Award is widely considered the Nobel Prize of Computing carrying a $250,000 cash prize. Chuck is the second hardware engineer to receive the Turing Award; the last one given out in the 1960s'. Chuck will receive the award in June. I will have the good fortune to talk with him again at the ceremonies.

Enjoy,
Stephen Ibaraki

Chuck Thacker was fortunate to enter computing at a time when the fundamental electronic technologies had matured to the point that many of the predictions of the field's pioneers could finally be achieved. Educated in Physics at the University of California at Berkeley, he joined the university's project Genie in 1968. This project had constructed one of the most successful early timesharing computers, the SDS 940, and was planning a follow-on system when he joined the project.

The project became the Berkeley Computer Corporation, which developed the BCC 500 timesharing system. Here, he led the group designing the system's central memory and microprocessor. Although not a commercial success, BCC supplied the core group of technologists for the newly-formed Computer Science Laboratory at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), which he joined in 1970/1.

During his thirteen years at PARC, Chuck led the hardware development of most of the innovative systems that were developed at CSL. He was the project leader of the MAXC timesharing system, a PDP-10-equivalent that was one of the first systems to make use of semiconductor memory. He was the chief designer of the Alto, the first personal computer to use a bit-mapped display and mouse to provide a windowed user interface. He is a co-inventor of the Ethernet local area network, and contributed to many other projects, including the first laser printer and the Dorado, a high-performance ECL-technology personal workstation. He also designed and implemented the SIL CAD system, which was used by most PARC hardware designers throughout the '70s. In the early '80s, he was architect of the Dragon, a multiprocessor system that employed the first "snooping" cache.

In 1983, Chuck was a founder of the Digital Equipment Corporation's Systems Research Center. Here he led the hardware development of the Firefly, the first multiprocessor workstation, and the Alpha Demonstration Unit, the first Alpha-architecture multiprocessor.

Chuck has also worked extensively in computer networking. He led the development of AN1, a local area network that used active switches and 100 Megabit-per-second point-to-point links to provide high aggregate performance. The follow-on project, AN2, also developed by his team, became the DEC Gigaswitch/ATM product.

He joined Microsoft in 1997 to help establish the company's Cambridge, England laboratory. After returning to the U.S. in 1999, he joined the newly-formed Tablet PC group and managed the design of the first prototypes of this new device. He then worked on a project to make computing more pervasive and effective in K-12 education. He is currently setting up a group at Microsoft Research in Silicon Valley to do computer architecture research.

Chuck has published extensively, and holds a number of U.S. patents in computer systems and networking. In 1984, he was awarded (with B. Lampson and R. Taylor) the ACM's Software Systems Award for the development of the Alto. He is a Distinguished Alumnus of the Computer Science Department of the University of California, and holds an Honorary Doctorate from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH). He is a member of the IEEE, a fellow of the ACM, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering, which awarded him (with Butler Lampson, Alan Kay, and Robert Taylor) the 2004 Charles Stark Draper prize for the development of the first networked personal computers. In 2007 he was awarded the John Von Neumann medal by the IEEE. In March 2010, Chuck was awarded the Turing Award by the ACM.

For more information on Chuck, see: Detailed Profile

ACM A.M. Turing Award: Learn more, also view the ACM Press Release or visit the ACM A.M. Turing Award site.

To listen to the interview, click on this MP3 file link

DISCUSSION:

Interview Time Index (MM:SS) and Topic

:00:50:
Chuck shares when he heard about this extraordinary honour as recipient of the 2009 ACM Turing Award, widely considered the Nobel Prize in computing, how he felt at the time and the reaction from his colleagues and his family.

:02:28:
What specific qualities make you excel at innovating new technologies?
"....I try to read as much as possible and be aware of what technologies are becoming plausible as things that can be used in the construction of other new things. I've always been privileged to have excellent colleagues...."

:03:33:
You had an early start and an opportunity to work in a kind of inventor's workshop. Can you describe that process?
"....I was working with a fellow with whom I had worked before and he had started an inventorship in Berkeley and I made him a deal. I told him if he would teach me to operate his machine tools, I would design electronics for him. It worked out well and it actually led to my taking the job at the Genie Project at the University of California which led to everything else...."

:04:23:
Describe the types of technologies being created or updated that will drive the user computing experience in ten years? In what ways in the next 5 years does this intersect and extend your work with the ground-breaking tablet-PC?
"....The types of technologies are information access technologies....Things like the tablet PC work very well and the GUI that we use today that grew out of the Alto, but there is also still a place for having a more natural interaction with the computer...."

:06:34:
You are one of the initial members of the team that founded Xerox PARC. Bob Taylor was there and he laid out a vision for computing. Can you describe that vision and how that inspired you?
"....There were two components of that. He (Bob) was more interested in the human uses of computers and in particular using the computer as a communication device. The other component was man-computer symbiosis. A lot of people worked on the latter. The former got pretty much solved, people communicate pretty much all the time. As far as symbiosis between humans and computers - THAT we don't know how to do...."

:09:32:
How would you describe your three top innovative achievements in terms of what specifically inspired these innovations, what were the factors that made the innovations possible, the problems you were trying to solve, your solutions, and the impact it has today and into the longer term future?
"....The most important was probably the Alto itself and a lot of the technology that surrounded it. The interesting thing about the Alto was not only that it was the first machine but that it was part of a distributed system....I'm particularly proud of some of the networking that we did at the DEC system research centre in the mid-80's and early 90's. Many of the techniques that were developed in those products are now coming into much wider use today as networks proliferate....Another is the B3, which is the FPGA platform for enabling new kinds of computer science architecture research...."

:12:42:
All of our concepts of computing were developed 20 to 30 years ago and now everything has changed, the technology has changed, the economics have changed and we have to look a little bit more broadly. Your work with the field programmable gate arrays tie into that. Please comment.
"....Technology has changed so much in the last 40 to 50 years that it behooves us to look back at some of the ideas that we looked at in the early days which were either dismissed or went down other paths, to see if they didn't have more merit than we thought. The converse of that is that we should look at some things that we did adopt to see if they are still good ideas in light of the way that technology has moved on. I think that it is important to continuously innovate new things but sometimes it's a good idea to look to the past...."

:13:45:
Does that speak to not only decreasing complexity but also driving toward simplicity as well?
"....In computing, complexity is the enemy. Everything should be done as possible to minimize the complexity of the systems that we build, because in complexity lurks error. We are now so dependent as a society on computing that errors are getting less and less acceptable. The only way I know to minimize the error rate is to minimize complexity...."

:16:33:
What were your specific drivers and goals for each of the labs you have started? What are the notable outcomes or contributions from these labs?
"....Xerox PARC was the first and possibly the most influential but possibly the least commercially successful (at least for the organization that sponsored the labs which was Xerox). There we were interested in the paperless office, although what we ended up doing was actually quite different. One of the nice things about PARC was that we were able to build systems that we could actually use ourselves....At DEC SRC we were much more aware of the need to make computers more accessible and more commercially oriented....The primary mission of Microsoft Research is to advance the field...."

:20:02:
What are the major goals for your current research, what are the challenges, what are the opportunities and implications?
"....What's going to happen over the next few years is that we are not going to faster computers that can run a program or a single threaded program quickly, we are going to see more cores. Right now we are hard pressed to program those things and some of that is just programming and some of that is the way the computers are organized. That's the area in which I am working right now. That was the purpose of the B3. My most recent project is the Beehive environment for exploring the many core architecture through field programmable gate arrays...."

:21:31:
What are the stages in the future evolution of field programmable gate arrays, the Berkeley Emulation Engine, Beehive, transactional memory, and Barrelfish?
"....Those things are all different. The B3 is a platform for doing research and it's actually fairly expensive. Look to much simpler hardware platforms for the Beehive so that it is more accessible to a larger number of people. Since we are not a hardware company we can share these kinds of designs very freely for research purposes with the world and we do in fact do that....Barrelfish is actually a operating system that was developed as a joint effort between the people at our Cambridge lab and ETH Zurich (the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology)....We are using Barrelfish to try to figure out if that is a better way to organize many core computers more along the lines of a distributed system, rather than a lot of computers sharing a common memory...."

:24:04:
For the audience who aren't familiar with the Berkeley emulation engine, can you give us an overview?
"....It's a large printed circuit board that has on it four fairly large field programmable gate arrays and a large amount of input/output....You can think of it exactly what it's called - programmable in the field, change what it does dynamically and it essentially supplies a large number of logic gates that you can use to implement anything that you describe as a verilog program...."

:25:22:
As an extension to the previous question, can you talk about Beehive?
"....Beehive is a specific example of a design that was done to map it into a field programmable gate array...."

:26:44:
Chuck comments on machine learning, collaborative filtering, the semantic web and quantum computing.

:28:30:
Past, present, and future --- name three people who inspire you and why is this so?
"....I've been constantly inspired by my colleagues and collaborators. Externally (as an example), I would say Doug Engelbart. Within computing, Ivan Sutherland....Wesley Clark...."

:30:03:
You continue to make significant historical contributions. How will your growing status contribute to your vision for the world, society, industry, academia, and technology?
"....You have to realize that people like me, who are fundamentally researchers, are working below the radar to improve the world, I think....By and large we work in our laboratories doing what we do best and a lot of the benefits become part of civilization but people don't really understand where they came from...."

:31:07:
Chuck, you laid many of the pillars for modern-day computing as one of the top groundbreaking visionary innovators. Distilling from your experiences, what are the greater burning challenges and research problems for today's youth to solve to inspire them to go into computing?
"....When I was going to school we had Sputnik and that was a tremendous motivator for people to enter engineering and the sciences even though those subjects are quite difficult. We don't really have that today and I suspect that is a large part of the reason that more kids don't do it. What motivates kids? Well, kids like to build things so one of the things that I'm quite positive about is robotics....When I was young they had Heathkits (electronic kits that you could buy from the company and assemble them and do nice things. I was a ham radio operator and I built my radio station from a Heathkit.) Robotics in my view is the 21st century Heathkit and I think it offers a lot of opportunities...."

:34:30:
You choose the topic area. What do you see as the three top challenges facing us today and how do you propose they be solved?
"....We have to begin doing a better job at taking care of the planet and I think technology has a lot to say and do about that and computing will be a large part of that....Within computing we tend to look at the great things we have done but we should also be looking at the great things we haven't done....Getting computers to really help people to carry out their daily tasks...."

:36:16:
Over your long and distinguished career, what are your top 3 lessons you want to share with the broad audience?
"....Choose your colleagues carefully to the extent that they help you and you will be more successful and the extent that you can help them and they will be more successful....Value simplicity and elegance....Pick your problems carefully..."

:37:35:
What are the two most significant challenges you could not overcome at the time and what would you do differently now?
"....The biggest challenge that we had at the Alto system and the stuff we developed at PARC was that the management didn't understand the work....The other challenge is how to educate kids better...."

PWN2OWN: iPhone 3Gs Hacked Minutes After The Event Started

Post from: FSMdotCOM

Security researchers Vincenzo Iozzo from Zynamics GmbH and Ralf-Philipp Weinmann from the University of Luxembourg today won the “iPhone” section of the renowned PWN2OWN contest in Vancouver, Canada. The demonstrated attack code steals the SMS database from the phone, albeit other attack payloads are easily possible.

MuscleNerd congratulates the two researchers and says that their work potentially re-opens userland jailbreaks that haven’t been around since 1.x days. The attack occurs when an iPhone user is visiting the jailbreakme.com site , and although they demonstrated it on an iPhone 3Gs, MuscleNerd says that it affects all iDevices. Apple should patch this bugs asap, BUT if you are on a jailbroken device, you should avoid updating it.

Besides all iDevices, the attack affects Firefox and IE7 ( really IE?… still?!!? ) users on Windows and Safari users on Mac. The interesting thing, it took them only a few minutes after the event started to announced that the iPhone 3Gs is pwned, and they already tweeted “all you sms are belong to us”…

Official press release:

Vancouver, Canada

Security researchers Vincenzo Iozzo from Zynamics GmbH and Ralf-Philipp Weinmann from the University of Luxembourg today won the “iPhone”
section of the renowned PWN2OWN contest in Vancouver, Canada. The contest pits the world’s leading security researchers against the latest versions of common operating systems and platforms.

In 2009, researchers failed to compromise the iPhone, confounding general expectations. This year, Iozzo and Weinmann had to put in extra effort to bypass the ”code signing” and data execution prevention (DEP) technologies that prevent arbitrary code from running on the phone as well as defeat straightforward exploitation of buffer and heap overflow bugs. In order to achieve this result, they chained existing code bits in a technique commonly known as “return-into-libc” or “return-oriented-programming”.

It is the first time that this technique has been publicly demonstrated on a real-world telephone. The attack allowed them to execute code on the iPhone when a user visits a malicious website. The demonstrated attack code steals the SMS database from the phone, albeit other attack payloads are easily possible.

The organizers of the contest will communicate the details of the attack to the vendors and will not make the details of the attack public untill the vendors can properly patch it.

Vincenzo Iozzo’s research was supported by zynamics GmbH (www.zynamics.com), the leader in advanced reverse engineering and malware classification tools.

Ralf-Philipp Weinmann’s research was done in the framework of the Embedded Systems Security (ESS) project, supported by the Laboratory of Algorithmics, Cryptology and Security (LACS) at the University of Luxembourg (lacs.uni.lu).

We do our very best here at SlashGear to bring you the latest intelligence from the huge, and still growing world of the tech industry. But, as it stands, we’re only human, and sometimes we’re just not able to bring you every single piece of information we get our hands on. It’s unfortunate, but we also don’t want to give you any kind of sensory overload throughout the day. We realized that there were still a lot of great stories out there, so we wanted to bring them to your attention, in a nice, orderly fashion. That’s why we have the Daily Slash, where we’ll bring you a daily wrap-up of all the cool, interesting, or just plain shiny stuff we find.

Verizon Wirelss Adds HomeCel and Motion’s Rugged Tablet to the Network: Hopefully you stuck around throughout the day as we covered the crazy launch announcements from CTIA 2010. Did you see the EVO 4G? It’s okay, our jaws hit the ground, too. But, pick them back up real quick, and let’s talk about Verizon here for a moment. They’ve gone ahead and added two platforms to their already substantial base of products running on their wireless network. First up, we’ve got the Waxess USA HomeCel, which is a cordless, cellular solution for your home office, or other landline need you may have. They want you to add the HomeCel to your existing plan, so hopefully you get to save some money, rather than pay them for your wireless bill, and some other company for your home-based phone. That would just be silly, right? And then we’ve got the Motion J3400 Rugged Tablet, which we’ve seen before around these parts. Nothing different about the set-up, except that it’s running with Verizon Wireless 3G network sewn up inside. Same 12.1-inch WXGA touchscreen and everything. Oh, and it’s rugged. Just look at the back of this thing.

HTC Launches Online Store, Start Buying Phones and Accessories: Are you one of the five people out there that thinks there needs to be another online retail store out there? Well, good, because that means this story was hand-picked for you. HTC have gone ahead and launched a new online retail store, where you can go ahead and pick out your latest HTC manufactured handset, or any accessories you might need. Oh, and if you’re wanting to sign a new, two-year contract with one of the four (major) wireless carriers here in the States, you can do that from the site as well. Pretty fantastic news if, you know, you’re not a fan of actually touching the phone you’re buying. [via PR Newswire]

Motorola Milestone Gets Updated to 2.1, Way Before the DROID: Sure, the DROID may have launched on the Verizon Wireless network before the Milestone  launched in the European regions (by a matter of days), but that’s not stopping Motorola from going ahead and launching the prodigal 2.1 update for that other device. It’s not like Motorola isn’t trying though, right? It’s looking like the only regions able to get the update at this moment are Hong Kong and Macau, but that’s sure to change very, very soon. The Milestone is officially getting Live Wallpapers (yay!), and it looks like Motorola has made something called . . . Motorola Car Home, which activates a special interface for when you’re using the device in a car. Oh, and there’s some speed improvements in there somewhere, too. Word is that by the end of March, all Milestone units should be up and running with the 2.1 update. So . . . How about the DROID, Verizon… [via Engadget]

Meet the Lund Variable Velocity Weapons System, or LVVWS: Ever felt like there needed to be more guns on the market that, based on how you were feeling at a particular moment, could be lethan or “less-lethal?” Apparently, the military agrees with those sentiments, as they’ve been searching for a weapon that can do this exact thing. While other weapons, or ammunition for that matter like rubber bullets, are still lethal at close range, Lund Technologies has created a weapon that can actually become less-lethal, depending on the velocity settings. The rifle itself weighs just six pounds, it fires two types of rounds (lethal and less-lethal), and it’s pump-action. Oh, and it looks awesome. We agree that the military and law enforcement agencies need less-lethal options, because it really does depend on the situation. So, kudos to Lund Technologies, and we hope that their LVVWS gets picked up soon. Oh, and we hope it gets a better name. LVVWS is a pain to say. [via Wired]

Tanks Get Force Fields (yeah, force fields): Man, we love this stuff! Can you believe you even read that title? And no, it’s not the title of our next science fiction novel. This is the real deal. Or, at least, that’s what scientists are planning. It seems that researchers at the Defense Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) have found a way to put material known as supercapacitors into armor, which basically turns the entire thing into a giant battery. Once a threat is determined, which means once a projectile is fired at a tank, then the supercapacitors release the stored energy into the metal plating of the vehicle, which in turn creates an incredibly strong electromagnetic field. Bam. Force field. And just like that, we blur the line between science and science fiction, ladies and gentlemen. [via Telegraph]

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Internet giant's move likely to put spotlight on methods Beijing uses to block content that is hosted overseas

Google's announcement in January that it was no longer willing to remove sensitive material from search results highlighted the issue of China's domestic internet controls.

But its decision last night to shift its Chinese-language service to servers in Hong Kong looks likely to put the spotlight on the methods Beijing uses to block content that is hosted overseas.

The censorship system works because it is twofold: it consists of controls on the content posted inside the country, and the "great firewall", which prevents mainland users from reading material hosted overseas.

While Google may have stopped censoring its results thanks to its move to Hong Kong, the Chinese government has not.

That is why, using google.com.hk from the mainland last night, searches for "Tiananmen student movement" in Chinese and "89 student movement" in English brought no results – just a message that is all too familiar to internet users in China: "The connection was reset."

In the last year, censors in Beijing have shut down thousands of domestic sites and blocked more of those hosted abroad. Social media appear to have been a particular target – YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and various blog platforms have fallen foul of the censors.

The great firewall is implemented by internet police in three ways. The first two are common tactics: blacklisting domain names and IP addresses, for example those belonging to groups such as Amnesty International. These methods are used by many countries around the world.

But Dr Steven Murdoch, a researcher at the computer laboratory of Cambridge University, said Chinese authorities have been using such methods with increasing zeal.

Murdoch is a member of the Tor project, which helps internet users surf the web anonymously, and says that the IP addresses it uses are blocked as quickly as the authorities can find them.

The third technique used by China is "close to unique," added Murdoch. This is the keyword blocking system. Essentially, the government's system mirrors and searches each packet of data as it passes in and out of the country, looking in URLs and webpages for keywords such as "falun", in reference to the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement. Should it find them, it breaks the connection.

The result is that China is beginning to look like the world's biggest intranet, joke users. When Google announced it would not self-censor, the well-known blogger Hecaitou described it as "not an issue of Google abandoning China but one of China abandoning the world".

In the last year, mainland internet users have complained of finding it increasingly hard to get around the firewall. They can still access a greater range of information from outside China than they can within – as long as they know where to find it.

In general, unless the issue is a particularly sensitive one, the authorities are not so bothered by information posted in English. They seem to be most concerned by three kinds of sites: those which allow users to network and share information; those which carry Chinese-language material; and those which have videos.

China's censors could make it even harder for users to access sensitive information if they wanted to. Instead, they make it difficult enough that most people do not know how to get around it or just cannot be bothered.

Rocky relationship

January 2006 Google sets up Google.cn, a Chinese version of its search site.

February 2006 Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Cisco criticised at a US Congressional hearing for giving in to Chinese government pressure.

November 2006 Great Firewall of China blocks sites deemed illegal.

January 2007 Google claims just 20% of market after a year, second to Baidu.

March 2009 Access to YouTube, owned by Google, blocked by China for four days after video of Chinese police officers beating Tibetan protestors appears.

June 2009 China introduces filtering software to disable some search functions on Google.cn.

January 2010 Google claims it is victim of a "highly sophisticated" cyber attack originating in China.

March 2010 Google shifts operations from mainland China to Hong-Kong.

(As part of his research for a book he's writing on microfinance, Bob Harris took a trip through the Peruvian Andes, including Cusco, Lake Titicaca, Machu Picchu, where he studied the architecture, refused to try corn-and-human-saliva beer, imbibed in coca tea ("maybe the best damn thing I ever drank"), and visited with people who live on floating islands made out of reeds. His photos and comments are fascinating. -- Mark)

We begin in transit, killing time in the Lima airport. I hope you'll enjoy the titanic clashes of cultures...

The culture shock of being faced with difficult, obscure translations...

... later on, inscrutable symbols beyond an outsider's comprehension...

... and the occasional midnight bathroom scorpion:

Our arachnid friend was in the town of Ollantaytambo. In the loo of a sweet little guest house. Right by the toilet, middle of the night, exactly like in my nightmares when I was little. The joys of travel.

I probably should have asked for a non-scorpion room.

Anyway, let's get some standard tourism out of the way. Here's a sight famiiar to anyone who has ever visited the travel section of a bookstore:

This young lady is one of many who eke out a living in tourist areas by posing for pictures for one nuevo sol (about 35 cents USD). You're surely seen guidebooks with a similar image on the cover.

I wonder how many guidebooks and magazines actually pay their subjects more than $0.35 for the profitable use of their image? (Come to think of it, what should I have paid for this free online use? I honestly have no idea. My bargaining skills in Quechua being non-existent, I gave her considerably more than her usual rate. I hope it was enough. But I also hope I didn't accidentally incentivize a job that doesn't develop other skills that would help her improve her life. I mention this because seeking a solution to such questions is what my next book is largely about.)

Speaking of Quechua -- in which "Rimaykullayki" means "hello" -- it's the living language of the Incas, still spoken (with major regional variations) by about 7 million people throughout formerly Inca lands from southern Colombia to northern Argentina. In Peru, it has official status, so some Andean street signs are multilingual -- here's "Avenue of the Sun" in Spanish and Quechua:

Of course, it's not just the languages -- you see Spanish sitting physically on top of Inca pretty much everywhere you look.

Historians currently peg the beginning of Inca civilization's greatest expansion roughly around 1493 -- just months after a Spanish sailor named Roderigo de Triana first sighted the New World from a ship called La Pinta.

(As a side note, Roderigo dutifully shouted the news to his captain, Christopher Columbus, who promptly claimed that he didn't see anything. This may have been because the expedition's financiers had promised a huge reward to the first person to see land. Sure enough, a little while later, Columbus announced that he himself finally saw land, and he was given the reward. Roderigo soon converted to Islam, moved to Africa, and disappeared from our elementary school history books. Columbus went on to become substantially less nice to the people he was about to meet.)

After Columbus came firearms, armor, smallpox, and eventually Francisco Pizarro, who executed the last Inca emperor in 1533. When the conquistadors reached Cusco, the grand Inca capital, they made a point of de-Inca-fying everything, plopping their Spanish stuff right on top.

The results are abundantly visible all over the place:

The Spanish building at top center was for many years the local Archbishop's palace -- constructed directly atop the walls of the palace of the Inca emperor.

Down the street, here's what was once the site of the Temple of the Sun, one of the holiest spots in the Inca Empire -- until the Spanish razed the original edifice and built the Church of Santo Domingo atop its foundations:

The surviving Inca stonework here has to be seen to be believed. For example, major earthquakes in 1650 and 1950 severely damaged the Spanish structure, but the Inca bits remained almost perfectly intact. These windows, for example, still line up perfectly, even after the whole building around them fell twice:

Back at the old archbishop's place, here's the famous 12-sided stone, only the most rococo of thousands of massive, ludicrously shaped rocks that jigsaw together so well that you generally can't even slip an index card between them:

The Incas moved and shaped these stones, most of which are bigger than you are, and then built hundreds of such walls -- all of course with no power tools, no known use of the wheel, no draft animal bigger than a llama, and no written language beyond intricately knotted cords.

How huge did Inca stonework get? Here's Sacsayhuaman, a fortification in which some stones are up to 20 feet high and may weigh nearly 200 tons:

Sacsayhuaman was intended to protect Cusco. Right up until the Spanish cornered the defenders inside, slaughtered them, and then began quarrying the non-huge rocks for imperial construction projects.

After executing the Inca leaders, selling the survivors on Christianity involved a different form of building on existing foundations. Take a look this small slice of the main cathedral in Cusco:

In Inca mythology, the most powerful earth deity, Pachamama, was frequently represented by a triangular shape symbolizing the mountains. Coincidentally enough, on the local Catholic god guy... a big triangle for a halo. (Pachamama, being an earth mother, also led to representations of Mary wearing garb so voluminous as to become triangular herself.) Mary and Joseph, meanwhile, have big spiky sunburst halos -- which just coincidentally resemble Inti, the Inca sun god.

There's tons of this sort of syncretism all over the place. Here's the Last Supper as portrayed inside the cathedral (cribbed from the web, since photographs are forbidden):

In Cusco, the Last Supper seems to have included potatoes (unknown outside the New World before Columbus), a homebrew corn-based beer called chicha to drink (see below) and local chinchilla instead of lamb as the main dish.

Let's take a minute to digress on local beverages. Chicha is a local corn-based homebrew beer as ubiquitous as it is kinda gross -- the fermentation is accelerated by enzymes in the maker's saliva:

That colorful plastic on a stick is the local signal that the occupants inside -- puh-tooey! -- have just brewed up a fresh batch of corn-and-spit beer. Mmm-mm.

Nasty as it sounds, it's also cheap as... well, corn and spit. So for poor folks with no better way to enlarge their livers, its a cheap buzz, and for the homeowners, it's an easy profit.

In some neighborhoods around quitting time, there can be almost as many chicha flags as there are buildings:

Since I'm not doing one of those Man Eats World-style cable shows, I didn't try chicha myself. Sorry to disappoint. Just, well, eww.

Besides, I was too busy getting buzzed on the coca tea:

Just take loose coca leaves, add boiling water, let steep, add sugar, and drink. Maybe the best damn thing I ever drank.

It tastes sort of like sweet spinach, but with the stimulant kick of good coffee and an analgesic effect I'd place somewhere between naproxen and vicodin. (I have a bad back, so I feel confident in my ability to scale analgesics.) One pot, and pretty soon my head felt better, my feet felt better... hell, my childhood felt better.

Seriously, it's fantastic medicine for that altitude and climate. Too bad putting a handful of those leaves in my pocket could get me arrested back home, thanks to the War On Some Drugs.

Anyway, back to the cathedral. Let's step back into the square for a wider look. Check out the flags:

On the right, the national flag of Peru. On the left... a rainbow flag, remarkably like pride flag used by the North American gay community since the 1970s.

Here, it's not a gay thing. It's simply the Cusco city flag, said to be inspired by banners flown by Incas fighting the Spanish. There's spotty evidence for the claim, and Cusco only adopted the flag in 1978 -- the very same year Gilbert Barker designed the gay pride flag in San Francisco. Still, in Cusco, rainbow = Inca, flag-wise.

Does this lead to confusion? Oh dear god yes. In moments of broad comedy that sound more like an episode of Family Guy than real life, I've been told that American tourists are sometimes shocked on arrival to discover that the entire city of Cusco is so totally Out. Others pose happily in front of the flag, demonstrating solidarity with a culture they are misunderstanding completely.

The city of Cusco periodically discusses just changing the whole thing.

Moving on...

It's all well to criticize the Spanish destruction of the Inca empire, but let's also disabuse ourselves of any assumption that the Incas were morally superior. After all, they probably didn't get to be the most powerful empire in the hemisphere by asking nicely.

Let's move a few hundred miles south, to Lake Titicaca near the Bolivian border, and meet the Uros people, who were at one time oppressed and even enslaved by the Incas.

Lake Titicaca is at about 12,500 feet -- about 2.4 miles up in the air. By comparison, Denver is at 5280 feet, altitude sickness starts affecting sensitive people at just 8000 feet, and the MacBook I'm using is only rated by Apple to function up to 10,000 feet. (Above that, the thin air can supposedly cause a dynamic imbalance in the spinning hard drive.) Lake Titicaca is, in a word, somewhat high.

As a result, it's one of the most vividly colorful places on earth. You're missing almost two and a half miles of air that normally stand between you and the sun god, plus you're near the equator, so Inti is bashing you pretty straight on. So the blue is BLUE. The green is GREEN. My camera couldn't possibly do it justice. The colors are so bright they almost vibrate:

And on this beautiful lake -- several kilometers out, just, like, floating out there -- live several hundred members of the Uros, a people whose culture predates the Incas.

Roughly half a millennium ago, the Uros were under such frequent and violent assault that many finally fled onto the lake itself, building floating pontoon islands out of the lake's abundant totora reeds.

Centuries later, many of the Uros are still there. Floating on their reed islands.

They're still raising their kids in reed huts, paddling reed boats, and constantly weaving and re-weaving the whole kaboodle, since water and weather are constantly eroding most of their world.

There are anywhere from about 45 to 60 of these islands at any time, generally housing from 2-5 families each, depending on population and who is getting along with whom. (A bad family spat, for example, may lead to the construction of a new island.) The island in the above picture was abandoned shortly before I arrived; the elderly couple who had previously lived in the house on the right had recently passed away.

The islands are squishy to walk on, something like trying to stride across a mattress. If you stomped, you could put your foot right through the matting. So you walk carefully.

Say hello to Olympia. She and her husband were born on one of these pontoons, are raising their children out here, and will probably live much of the rest of their lives in the same small hut:

Olympia invited me into her home and showed me around. (She surely does this with travelers almost every day.) The whole hut is probably about the size of your living room.

Here's where they cook, just outside:

These are their three daughters:

It may not be clear in the photos, but everyone looks kinda sunburned. A scientific survey completed in 2006 determined that this general region receives the highest jolt of UV radiation of any continuously inhabited place on earth. And nobody here can afford frequent sunscreen.

I brought (as any traveler should) pencils and paper as gifts for the kids, since school supplies are way expensive for these folks; their only income is from selling crafts and trading fresh fish, handicrafts, and other goods with non-lake-dwellers. Speaking of crafts, that handwoven mat that Olympia is sitting with, above -- that's currently sitting on my couch here in L.A., awaiting a frame. It's gorgeous, it tells the story of the Uros, and it was the biggest thing she had for sale. I will treasure it.

The fishing is done primarily with what the Uros call "plastic boats," since they're not made of reeds:

But they still make traditional reed boats like the one below, which took five men two months of labor to build, and lasts only two years before the lake water eventually reclaims it:

These boats are more for making a few bucks by taking visitors like me out for a lap. Fair enough. Cesar here manned the oar and was kind enough to share a few more details of life here:

He's 25 and commutes by boat to the lakeshore city of Puno for school, medical care, and other things most first worlders take for granted. He's also not actually a full-blooded descendent of the Uros -- nobody here is. Over the centuries, the Uros eventually intermarried with neighboring Aymara-speaking peoples, and the Uros's language disappeared long ago. Uros traditions continue, although it's all getting harder to maintain as the living standard on the shore continues to lure people away.

The government is now heavily subsidizing the Uros, partly for humane reasons, and partly because they're increasingly a tourist attraction. As my own presence here confirms. This is strange to contemplate. Another generation or two (if not already or very soon), and people may only live here to attract visitors, reducing an entire centuries-old culture to little more than a publicity stunt.

I'm trying to imagine what it would be like to have all of your traditions and culture, handed down for hundreds of years, collapse into a tourist trap that rapidly -- to grow up while that's going on, and then wonder who your children will even be. I'm trying, and failing, to imagine that.

I hope that buying the beautiful weaving from Olympia will help her family and support her work, and not encourage her to continue an unnecessarily hard way of life they will someday maintain only for show.

Moving on.

Further into the lake (and with a beautiful view of the Bolivian Andes), is the island of Taquile:

Thanks to physical isolation, Taquile has yet another distinct culture. Possessions are generally collectivized -- even the sheep feeding on the Inca-era terraces:

Family lineage is identified by color-coded clothing:

Conflicts on the island are resolved every Sunday in lengthy group discussions in the main square:

Too bad Copenhagen couldn't be organized this smoothly. I can think of some people who could seriously learn from Taquile.

Heading back to dry land, however, things got less inspiring for a while.

The nearest airport is in Juliaca, a city just slightly larger than Akron, Ohio. Not the most enticing place I've been. To give you an idea, this Peru tourism website, whose whole point is to make things sound as appealing as possible, has this to say about Juliaca:

very unattractive... [it] competes with Chimbote on the northern coast for the title of the most unpleasant city in Peru. Most of the buildings in the city are very ugly... the bitter cold winds make being out at night almost unbearable..."

As a bonus, cars, 3-wheel cabs, motorcycles, pedicabs, bicycles, and pedestrians compete in a downtown oddly bereft of traffic lights, so everyone just sort of shoves their noses in and pushes. I've been in third world traffic from Cairo to Bali to Kuala Lumpur, and this was as hostile as anything I've ever seen. Before becoming congealed in traffic, my taxi driver almost ran over a dog, a teenage school girl, and an elderly woman, all within a two minute period -- accelerating, honking, daring them not to dive out of the street. This seemed to be the etiquette; other drivers did the same. When I asked him to please slow down and not risk hitting people, the driver pulled the car over and began yelling abusively.

Hokay.

According to the locals I spoke with, much of the economy is built around contraband of many varieties -- Peru and Bolivia maintain no border controls on Lake Titicaca, creating an enormous smuggling route for anyone trying to get stolen or illegal goods from the rest of South America into Peru for sale or export. And Juliaca is the hub.

For what it's worth, the lone cop I saw looked like a total prop:

Yes, the cop stayed in a little box on the sidewalk, blowing a whistle and waving at traffic that barely paid the slightest mind. Yes, the box was provided by Inca Kola. And yes, a man is about to urinate on the wall.

It's not really a law-and-order place, I guess.

On Christmas Eve of last year, someone threw a tear gas grenade into a nightclub here, where 1200 people were dancing in a room built for half that many. In the confined space, five people were asphyxiated and 10 were severely injured in the rush to flee. The police never found out who did it, but it's believed to have been a prank by some teenagers. For fun.

Outside, neighbors who lived near the nightclub took advantage of the situation and tried to set fire to the building, the better to rob the panicked, fleeing survivors.

Afterward, seven people were arrested for trying to steal valuables from the dead bodies.

Tough town, this Juliaca.

A couple of years ago, a poor man was discovered stealing cooking fuel here. A mob tied him to a lamppost with wire and burned him alive.

A couple of months before that, the mayor of an outlying village was accused of corruption, and the entire town beat him to death.

That said, they do have a giant slide:

So there's that.

Let's get back on the road, shall we?

Here's the Altiplano, Peru's answer to the South African highveldt -- a high plain often seemingly as flat as a putting green for as far as the eye can see:

Occasionally you hit a speed bump at a toll station. These are accompanied by the following warning:

The sign is meant to communicate that the large bump may destroy your suspension if you don't slow down. My crappy Spanish, however, always interpreted the sign more literally -- as Spring Break.

Cool! Turns out it's Spring Break in Peru every 50 miles or so.

Moving on.

This is the central wall of the Temple of Wiracocha, a pre-Inca ruin 80 feet high and 100 yards long. Prior to the Spaniards doing to the Incas roughly what Juliaca does to propane thieves, this central wall supported a church the size of an entire football field, surely one of the largest structures on the continent when the Spanish arrived:

The sheep is a comparatively recent addition.

Further north, we pass Cusco and enter the Sacred Valley, a vast fertile swath along the Urubamba river that was to the Incas what California's Central Valley is to modern supermarkets.

It's gorgeous. Depending on your altitude, the Sacred Valley can look like anything from the most fertile bits of Appalachia...

... to a drive through the back roads of Utah:

Next stop, Moray, site of what may have been a massive Inca crop laboratory, 14 stories deep and 150 yards across:

The theory goes that all those concentric circles create different microclimates, with the center several degrees warmer than the outermost rings. Many scientists now believe that in addition to using the center for various religious rites and sacrifices, the Incas also used the entire area as a microcosm for the terraced hillsides throughout the valley -- and a laboratory for determining which grains would grow best at which altitude and direction of exposure to the sun.

I would not have thought that an Inca crop lab would be so cool. But then, I'd have also said the same about this Peruvian salt mine:

Normally, somebody says "Peruvian salt mine," I'm not thinking, wow, cool. But this was:

About 600 years ago, the Incas discovered a natural spring that provided a constant trickle of extremely salty water. With some careful terracing, they created this massive field of 3000 evaporation pools. The trace mineral content varies from pool to pool, with distinct applications in agriculture, animal husbandry, and human consumption.

If you own one of the plots, you get to the actual salt by just walking out onto the terraces and harvesting it. This feels a lot like walking on snow when it's 80 degrees outside:

The only similar experience I'd had was crunching around the Gilmore Girls set during a Christmas episode being shot in Burbank in October. But if I'd lost my footing there, I wouldn't have gone careening down the side of a mountain.

Moving on.

Nearby, here's Ollyantaytambo, site of an Inca fortress the Spanish never conquered:

At its feet, the town of Ollyantaytambo is among the best-preserved Inca villages in Peru:

Many of the residents of Ollyantaytambo speak Quechua, retain some elements of traditional dress and custom, and live in Inca-built dwellings along Inca-built streets, eating potatoes and corn grown from hybrids and techniques pioneered by the Incas. It's pretty damn Inca here.

If you're planning a visit, the Casa Del Scorpion guest house is just out of camera range here to the left.

Watching the train to Machu Picchu chug past these half-millennium-old terraces was oddly jarring -- like watching two widely-spaced centuries overlap right before your eyes:

Speaking of Machu Picchu... let's go.

(Warning: my words are going to completely fail. So will my camera. Most of these pictures will look just like every other picture of Machu Picchu. Some things -- Iguazu Falls, the pyramids of Giza or Teotihuacan, the Grand Canyon, etc. -- are just they're too big and wonderful to encapsulate in a snapshot.)

8000 feet in the air, in the saddle between two bullet-shaped mountains far enough into the Peruvian jungle that neither cars nor planes can take you to the spot...

... there's a 550-year-old ruin larger than Times Square. Constructed entirely of rocks that seem to have no earthly business being there.

Archaeologists aren't even sure what it was for. Possibly a retreat for the emperor Pachacutec. Whatever it was, the Spanish never plundered it -- heck, they never even found it -- so the whole thing is unusually pristine.

The place is often overrun by tourists, but if you look closely, you'll see that I lucked out and almost had the whole deal to myself. It was a random Thursday at the beginning of the wet season. Must be a good time to visit.

The view above is taken from a small building theorized to be a sort of observation post, now known as the Caretaker's Hut. Here's a look back up from what would be street level, were the town still active:

To give you a sense of scale, each one of those terraces is about 5 feet high. So climbing up to the hut from here is like taking the stairs on a 20-story building.

Here's the most sacred spot in the place, a stone called Intihuatana ("hitching post of the sun"):

Despite its simple appearance, it's oriented to point directly at the sun on the winter solstice, with the travel of its shadows subsequently providing an excellent guide to the seasons. This stone and the temple around it may have been the center of all Inca social and political planning.

And here are what seem to be the primary caretakers, keeping the grass neat with their grazing:

They also line up single file to use the stairs, which was more civilized than any human act I saw in the entire city of Juliaca.

A lot of tourists don't want to visit during the wet season, but if you like dramatic shifts in mood, it's the way to go:

And when the mist clears, rainbows appear in the valley below:

500 feet over the rainbow would be a good place to end this entry... except there's one thing even more beautiful that I want to show you.

It's the real reason I went, the main thing I was visiting in Cusco, and the actual subject of this chapter of my book on microfinance. (The rest is just window dressing, really.)

Here's the loveliest place I visited in Peru:

Arariwa may not look gorgeous, but it's a microfinance institution that brings financial resources to the working poor throughout the region -- craftspeople not unlike Olympia, say. Plus farmers and tradespeople and small businesspeople of every kind.

Microfinance is changing millions of lives -- so much so that its biggest pioneer, Muhammad Yunus, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. Unfortunately, it's not yet very well known in America. So for my next book, I'm taking all the money I made swanking around doing luxury travel reviews last year and putting it to good use -- funneling every dime into backing a bunch of loans* (1036 as of today; eventually I hope to do many thousands) in more than 40 developing countries. I'm using Kiva.org as my primary investment platform so far, but I'll be checking out include Babyloan.org, MYC4.com, and MicroPlace.com, among others. (They're all a little different, but generally in the same ballpark.)

And I'll be spending much of 2010 following the results in a half-dozen interesting places, then writing about what I see, learn, and occasionally fall off of or getting bitten by on the way.

That's the next book. Peru was just my first stop.

About 35 of my Kiva loans are to borrowers hooked up via Arariwa ("guardian of the harvest" in Quechua), and while I was in Cusco, I met some of the good folks at Arariwa who get the money to the people who need it, teach them how to handle it, offer health and reproductive information, and devote their lives to equipping the poor to, basically, not be poor anymore.

Want to know what was really gorgeous in Peru? People like Clotilde here, the head of education (and caretaker of a gazillion other things) for Arariwa, and one of the sweetest people I've ever met:

Clotilde here kindly opened her office, offered her time and support, arranged for me to visit with a few borrowers, and put up with my crappy Spanish. You just can't ask for more than that.

(Also, a grateful shout-out to Kiva Fellow Sheethal Shobowale for introducing me to Clotilde, shepherding me around more than once, and frequently making my Spanish comprehensible to others. This was all above and beyond. It was a privilege.)

I'd just like anyone reading this to get the feel for how real and cool and normal and important this stuff is. And in a way, how totally ordinary. Clotilde is an exceptional person -- but I also think everyone reading this is in their own way, too. (Yes, I get how sappy and contradictory that sounds. Deal with it.)

And that's it from Peru. Next stop will probably be India and Bangladesh in a few months. Will send more from there.

Thanks for reading! May your chicha be fresh, your island well-thatched, and your loo scorpions slow-moving.

*Sticklers may want me to clarify that a "Kiva loan" is typically the refinancing of an existing loan already made by the local lending institution. To which I say, whoopty. It's still helping to get food on the table where it's needed.

The Union Ministry of Environment & Forests (MoEF) today announced five initiatives aimed at strengthening the scientific base underlying its activities, including the establishment of a Global Advisory Network Group on Environmental Sciences (GANGES).

The other initiatives are a National Environmental Sciences Fellows Programme, an Expert Committee to Enhance the Scientific Capacity of MoEF, an Action Plan to Enhance Forestry Science and an Indian Network for Climate Change Assessment (INCCA), which was announced in October, 2009.

"When this Ministry was conceived in the early 1980s by (then Prime Minister) Indira Gandhi, it was conceived as a scientific ministry. It was recognized that in order to conserve our environment and forests, we need rigorous science-based policy making and enforcement," Environment & Forests Minister Jairam Ramesh told journalists here.

"Over the years, this science-focus has got somewhat diluted. With these initiatives, we aim to ensure that science is brought back into the mainstream of our work and decision-making," he said.

GANGES is a new forum, comprising some of the world's leading environmental scientists of Indian origian. It has been set up to advise the Government on the country's environmental sciences agenda.

The forum will address questions such as the areas of focus, how the Government should engage on this agenda, institutional collaborations and private-public sector engagement, innovation and fast-tracking of development, among other things.

The following scientists are part of the group:

1. Subra Suresh, School of Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA

2. Jagadish Shukla, Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Earth Sciences, George Mason University, USA

3. Purnendu Dasgupta, Department of Analytical and Environmental Chemistry, University of Texas, Arlington, USA

4. Veerabhadran Ramanathan, University of California, San Diego, USA

5. Asit Biswas, Third World Centre for Water Management, Queens University, Canada

6. Ashok Gadgil, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA

7. Pratim Biswas, Washington University in St. Louis, USA

8. Kamal Bawa, University of Massachusetts, Boston

9. Tam Sridhar, Faculty of Engineering, Monash University, Australia

10. Shankar Sastry, Dean of Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, USA

11. Venkatachalam Ramaswamy, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, University of Colorado, Boulder Institute, USA

12. Venky Narayanamurti, Science, Technology and Public Policy Programme, Harvard Kennedy School, USA

The National Environmental Sciences Fellows Programme will provide promising young scientists who wish to work in the area of environmental sciences, engineering and technology the opportunity to do cutting-edge research on critical environmental issues in collaboration with leading institutes and scientists in India and the world.

It will provide 10 young scientists under the age of 35 ,where age limit is extendable to 40 in exceptional cases, with a generous fellowship and institutional support to undertake this research. Each fellow would be attached to an institution which will sign a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Ministry. The selection of the fellows and thrust areas for research will be done by a Management Committee of eminent scientists.

An official press release explained that this programme would allow young Indian scientists to enhance their areas of expertise under the mentorship of the leading scientists in the world today, and will help create a cadre of top class Indian environmental scientists for the future. The knowledge emerging from the research work under this programme will help inform the country's environmental policy agenda, ensuring that it is based on rigorous science.

The Expert Committee to Enhance the Scientific Capacity of MoEF will address the various issues and constraints that have arisen over the years with regard to the scientific resources and expertise of the Ministry.

Scientific personnel have historically made up a large portion of the human resources of the MoEF, as it was conceived as a science-based Ministry.

The Government is of the view that the constraints and issues that have arisen over the years needs to be urgently addressed.

The Ministry has proposed that the Committee will consist of the following members:

1. Dr. K Kasturirangan, Member Planning Commission, Chairman

2. Dr. Chandra Venkataraman, Professor, Department of Chemical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Mumbai,

3. Dr. Kalpana Balakrishnan, Professor, Environmental Health Engineering, Sri Ramachandra University Chennai,

4. Mr Vishwanathan Anand, Retired Secretary, MoEF,

5. Dr. Deepak Pental, Vice Chancellor, Delhi University,

6. Ms. Swati A Piramal, Director, Piramal Healthcare Limited,

7. Mr M.F. Farooqui, Additional Secretary, MoEF, Convenor

Mr Ramesh had held a special meeting with more than 100 Indian Forest Service officers with Ph.D. degres in forestry science, when a number of decisions relating to upgrading the scientific capabilities of the forestry establishment were taken.

These include a Forestry Fellowship Programme to recognise outstanding contributions to forestry sciences and a Naitonal Forestry Knowledge Forum as a platform where expert knowledge in various issues in forestry will be shared.

There will be a National Forestry Information Network that will use remote sensing, GIS and MIS and map and monitor all land-based forestry interventions on a time scale and put it in the public domain.

There will also be a programme to use satellite data for early transmission of fire signals to the mobile phones and PDAs of field officers. The University of Maryland in the US has agreed to share all active fire data obtained from TERRA and AQUA satellites of NASA every six hours for this. This will not only help in quick fire detection and reducing the response time, but also in identifying fire sensitive areas. This was originally conceived by the Madhya Pradesh Forest Department, for which it had won a national e-governance award.

The Ministry will also set up a National Bureau for Forest Germplasm, along the lines of the Plant Genetics Resources Bureau. The objective would be to identify, characterise, preserve the valuable germplasm of a wide number of forestry species in the country. This will protect valuable genetic resource against extinction and exploitation, the release said.

In the Union Budget for 2009-10, the government has already made a special grant of Rs. 100 crore to the Indian Council for Forestry Research and Education (ICFRE) for modernisation of forestry research. This grant is being used to support some of these initiatives, among other things, it said.

The INCCA was established by the MoEF in October last year as a network-based programme to make science, particularly the "3 Ms" – Measuring, Modelling and Monitoring – the essence of policy-making in the climate change space. It brings together over 120 institutions and over 220 scientists from across the country.

The first Report of the INCCA – an updated emissions inventory of greenhouses gases of anthropogenic origin of India for 2007 – will be released on May 11. A comprehensive "4x4" assessment of key sectors in India – agriculture, water, natural ecosystems & biodiversity and health – and key geographic "hotspots" – the North-East, the Indian Himalayan Region, the Western Ghats, and the Coastal Areas – will be released in November 2010.

A group has also been constituted under INCCA comprising scientists from the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and MoEF to run specific regional models for the Indian subcontinent for the monsoon in order to enable better assessment of impacts and reduction of uncertainties in monsoon projections over the South Asian region.

The "4x4" and the regional assessment will be provided to the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as part of the input to the IPCC’s 5th Assessment Report (AR5). This will be the first time that India will be providing institutional inputs to the IPCC.

These initiatives will help fill an important scientific knowledge gap in the IPCC assessment, by providing robust information at the sub-regional level, the release added.

NNN

Ten years after the publication of No Logo, Naomi Klein switches her attention from the mall to Barack Obama and discovers that corporate culture has taken over the US government

In May 2009, Absolut Vodka launched a limited edition line called "Absolut No ­Label". The company's global public relations manager, Kristina Hagbard, explained that "For the first time we dare to face the world completely naked. We launch a bottle with no label and no logo, to manifest the idea that no matter what's on the outside, it's the inside that really matters."

A few months later, Starbucks opened its first unbranded coffee shop in Seattle, called 15th Avenue E Coffee and Tea. This "stealth Starbucks" (as the anomalous outlet immediately became known) was decorated with "one-of-a-kind" fixtures and customers were invited to bring in their own music for the stereo system as well as their own pet social causes – all to help develop what the company called "a community personality." Customers had to look hard to find the small print on the menus: "inspired by Starbucks". Tim Pfeiffer, a Starbucks senior vice-president, explained that unlike the ordinary Starbucks outlet that used to occupy the same piece of retail space, "This one is definitely a little neighbourhood coffee shop." After spending two decades blasting its logo on to 16,000 stores worldwide, Starbucks was now trying to escape its own brand.

Clearly the techniques of branding have both thrived and adapted since I published No Logo. But in the past 10 years I have written very little about developments like these. I realised why while reading William Gibson's 2003 novel Pattern Recognition. The book's protagonist, Cayce Pollard, is allergic to brands, particularly Tommy Hilfiger and the Michelin man. So strong is this "morbid and sometimes violent reactivity to the semiotics of the marketplace" that she has the buttons on her Levi's jeans ground smooth so that there are no corporate markings. When I read those words, I immediately realised that I had a similar affliction. As a child and teenager I was almost obsessively drawn to brands. But writing No Logo required four years of total immersion in ad culture – four years of watching and rewatching Super Bowl ads, scouring Advertising Age for the latest innovations in corporate synergy, reading soul-destroying business books on how to get in touch with your personal brand values, making excursions to Niketowns, to monster malls, to branded towns.

Some of it was fun. But by the end, it was as if I had passed some kind of threshold and, like Cayce, I developed something close to a brand allergy. Brands lost most of their charm for me, which was handy because once No Logo was a bestseller, even drinking a Diet Coke in public could land me in the gossip column of my hometown newspaper.

The aversion extended even to the brand that I had accidentally created: No Logo. From studying Nike and Starbucks, I was well acquainted with the basic tenet of brand management: find your message, trademark and protect it and repeat yourself ad nauseam through as many synergised platforms as possible. I set out to break these rules whenever the opportunity arose. The offers for No Logo spin-off projects (feature film, TV series, clothing line . . .) were rejected. So were the ones from the megabrands and cutting-edge advertising agencies that wanted me to give them seminars on why they were so hated (there was a career to be made, I was learning, in being a kind of anti-corporate dominatrix, making overpaid executives feel good by telling them what bad, bad brands they were). And against all sensible advice, I stuck by the decision not to trademark the title (that means no royalties from a line of Italian No Logo food products, though they did send me some lovely olive oil).

Most important to my marketing detox program, I changed the subject. Less than a year after No Logo came out I put a personal ban on all talk of corporate branding. In interviews and public appearances I would steer discussion away from the latest innovation in viral marketing and Prada's new superstore and towards the growing resistance movement against corporate rule, the one that had captured world attention with the militant protests against the World Trade Organisation in Seattle. "But aren't you your own brand?" clever interviewers would ask me endlessly. "Probably," I would respond. "But I try to be a really crap one."

Changing the subject from branding to politics was no great sacrifice because politics was what brought me to marketing in the first place. The first articles I published as a journalist were about the limited job options available to me and my peers – the rise of short-term contracts and McJobs, as well as the ubiquitous use of sweatshop labour to produce the branded gear sold to us. As a token "youth columnist", I also covered how an increasingly voracious marketing culture was encroaching on previously protected non-corporate spaces – schools, museums, parks – while ideas that my friends and I had considered radical were absorbed almost instantly into the latest marketing campaigns for Nike, Benetton and Apple.

I decided to write No Logo when I realised these seemingly disparate trends were connected by a single idea – that corporations should produce brands, not products. This was the era when corporate epiphanies were striking CEOs like lightning bolts from the heavens: Nike isn't a running shoe company, it is about the idea of transcendence through sports, Starbucks isn't a coffee shop chain, it's about the idea of community. Down on earth these epiphanies meant that many companies that had manufactured their products in their own factories, and had maintained large, stable workforces, embraced the now ubiquitous Nike model: close your factories, produce your products through an intricate web of contractors and subcontractors and pour your resources into the design and marketing required to project your big idea. Or they went for the Microsoft model: maintain a tight control centre of shareholder/employees who perform the company's "core competency" and outsource everything else to temps, from running the mailroom to writing code. Some called these restructured companies "hollow corporations" because their goal seemed to be to transcend the corporeal world of things so they could be an utterly unencumbered brand. As corporate guru Tom Peters put it: "You're a damn fool if you own it!"

For me, the appeal of X-raying brands such as Nike or Starbucks was that pretty soon you were talking about everything except marketing – from how products are made in the deregulated global supply chain to industrial agriculture and commodity prices. Next thing you knew you were also talking about the nexus of politics and money that locked in these wild-west rules through free-trade deals and at the WTO, and made following them the precondition of receiving much-needed loans from the International Monetary Fund. In short, you were talking about how the world works.

By the time No Logo came out, the movement was already at the gates of the powerful institutions that were spreading corporatism around the world. Tens and then hundreds of thousands of demonstrators were making their case outside trade summits and G8 meetings from Seattle to New Delhi, in several cases stopping new agreements in their tracks. What the corporate media insisted on calling the "anti-globalisation movement" was nothing of the sort. At the reformist end it was anti-corporate; at the radical end it was anti-capitalist. But what made it unique was its insistent internationalism. All of these developments meant that when I was on a book tour, there were many more interesting things to talk about than logos – such as where this movement came from, what it wanted and whether there were viable alternatives to the ruthless strain of corporatism that went under the innocuous pseudonym of "globalisation".

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In recent years, however, I have found myself doing something I swore I had finished with: rereading the branding gurus quoted in the book. This time, however, it wasn't to try to understand what was happening at the mall but rather at the White House – first under the presidency of George W Bush and now under Barack Obama, the first US president who is also a ­superbrand.

There are many acts of destruction for which the Bush years are rightly reviled – the illegal invasions, the defiant defences of torture, the tanking of the global economy. But the administration's most lasting legacy may well be the way it systematically did to the US government what branding-mad CEOs did to their companies a decade earlier: it hollowed it out, handing over to the private sector many of the most essential functions of government, from protecting borders to responding to disasters to collecting intelligence. This hollowing out was not a side project of the Bush years, it was a central mission, reaching into every field of governance. And though the Bush clan was often ridiculed for its incompetence, the process of auctioning off the state, leaving behind only a shell – or a brand – was approached with tremendous focus and precision.

One company that took over many services was Lockheed Martin, the world's largest defence contractor. "Lockheed Martin doesn't run the United Slates," observed a 2004 New York Times exposé. "But it does help run a breathtakingly big part of it . . . It sorts your mail and totals your taxes. It cuts Social Security cheques and counts the United States census. It runs space flights and monitors air traffic. To make all that happen, Lockheed writes more computer code than Microsoft."

No one approached the task of auctioning off the state with more zeal than Bush's much-maligned defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. Having spent 20-odd years in the private sector, Rumsfeld was steeped in the corporate culture of branding and outsourcing. His department's brand identity was clear: global dominance. The core competency was combat. For everything else, he said (sounding very much like Bill Gates), "We should seek suppliers who can provide these non-core activities efficiently and ­effectively."

The laboratory for this radical vision was Iraq under US occupation. From the start Rumsfeld planned the troop deployment like a Wal-Mart vice-president looking to shave a few more hours from the payroll. The generals wanted 500,000 troops, he would give them 200,000, with contractors and reservists filling the gaps as needed – a just-in-time invasion. In practice, this strategy meant that as Iraq spiralled out of US control, an ever-more elaborate privatised war industry took shape to prop up the bare-bones army. Blackwater, whose original contract was to provide bodyguards for US envoy Paul Bremer, soon took on other functions, including engaging in combat in a battle with the Mahdi army in 2004. The sprawling Green Zone, meanwhile, was run as a corporate city-state, with everything from food to entertainment to pest control handled by Halliburton. Just as companies such as Nike and Microsoft had pioneered the hollow corporation, this was, in many ways, a hollow war. And when one of the contractors screwed up – Blackwater operatives opening fire in Baghdad's Nisour Square in 2007, for instance, leaving 17 people dead, or Halliburton allegedly supplying contaminated water to soldiers – the Bush administration was free to deny responsibility. Blackwater, which had prided itself on being the Disney of mercenary companies, complete with a line of branded clothing and Blackwater teddy bears, responded to the scandals by – what else? – rebranding. Its new name is Xe Services.

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The Bush administration's determination to mimic the hollow corporations it admired extended to its handling of the anger its actions inspired around the world. Rather than actually changing or even adjusting its policies, it launched a series of ill-fated campaigns to "rebrand America" for an increasingly hostile world. Watching these cringeful attempts, I was convinced that Price Floyd, former director of media relations at the State Department, had it right. After resigning in frustration, he said that the United States was facing mounting anger not because of the failure of its messaging but because of the failure of its policies. "I'd be in meetings with other public-affairs officials at State and the White House," Floyd told Slate magazine. "They'd say: 'We need to get our people out there on more media.' I'd say: 'It's not so much the packaging, it's the substance that's giving us trouble.'" A powerful, imperialist country is not like a hamburger or a running shoe. America didn't have a branding problem; it had a product problem.

I used to think that, but I may have been wrong. When Obama was sworn in as president, the American brand could scarcely have been more battered – Bush was to his country what New Coke was to Coca-Cola, what cyanide in the bottles had been to Tylenol. Yet Obama, in what was perhaps the most successful rebranding campaign of all time, managed to turn things around. Kevin Roberts, global CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi, set out to depict visually what the new president represented. In a full-page graphic commissioned by the stylish Paper Magazine, he showed the Statue of Liberty with her legs spread, giving birth to Barack Obama. America, reborn.

So, it seemed that the United States government could solve its reputation problems with branding – it's just that it needed a branding campaign and product spokesperson sufficiently hip, young and exciting to compete in today's tough market. The nation found that in Obama, a man who clearly has a natural feel for branding and who has surrounded himself with a team of top-flight marketers. His social networking guru, for instance, is Chris Hughes, one of the young founders of Facebook. His social secretary is Desirée Rogers, a glamorous Harvard MBA and former marketing executive. And David Axelrod, Obama's top adviser, was formerly a partner in ASK Public Strategies, a PR firm which, according to Business Week, "has quarterbacked campaigns" for everyone from Cable­vision to AT&T.; Together, the team has marshalled every tool in the modem marketing arsenal to create and sustain the Obama brand: the perfectly calibrated logo (sunrise over stars and stripes); expert viral marketing (Obama ringtones); product placement (Obama ads in sports video games); a 30-minute infomercial (which could have been cheesy but was universally heralded as "authentic"); and the choice of strategic brand alliances (Oprah for maximum reach, the Kennedy family for gravitas, and no end of hip-hop stars for street cred).

The first time I saw the "Yes We Can" video, the one produced by Black Eyed Peas front man will.i.am, featuring celebrities speaking and singing over a Martin Luther Kingesque Obama speech, I thought: finally, a politician with ads as cool as Nike. The ad industry agreed. A few weeks before he won the presidential elections, Obama beat Nike, Apple, Coors and Zappos to win the Association of National Advertisers' top annual award – Marketer of the Year. It was certainly a shift. In the 1990s, brands upstaged politics completely. Now corporate brands were rushing to piggyback on Obama's caché (Pepsi's "Choose Change" campaign, Ikea's "Embrace Change '09" and Southwest Airlines' offer of "Yes You Can" tickets).

Indeed everything Obama and his family touches turns to branding gold. J Crew saw its stock price increase 200% in the first six months of Obama's presidency, thanks in part to Michelle's well known fondness for the brand. Obama's much-discussed attachment to his BlackBerry has been similarly good news for Research In Motion. The surest way to sell magazines and newspapers in these difficult times is to have an Obama on the cover, and you only need to call three ounces of vodka and some fruit juice an Obamapolitan or a Barackatini and you can get $15 for it, easy. In February 2009, Portfolio magazine put the size of "the Obama economy" – the tourism he generates and the swag he inspires - at $2.5bn. Not at all bad in an economic crisis. Rogers got into trouble with some of her colleagues when she spoke too frankly with The Wall Street Journal. "We have the best brand on earth: the Obama brand," she said. "Our possibilities are endless."

The exploration of those possibilities did not end, or even slow, with the election victory. Bush had used his ranch in Crawford, Texas, as a backdrop to perform his best impersonation of the Marlboro man, forever clearing brush, having cookouts and wearing cowboy boots. Obama has gone much further, turning the White House into a kind of never-ending reality show starring the lovable Obama clan. This too can be traced to the mid-90s branding craze, when marketers grew tired of the limitations of traditional advertising and began creating three-dimensional "experiences" – branded temples where shoppers could crawl inside the personality of their favourite brands. The problem is not that Obama is using the same tricks and tools as the superbrands; anyone wanting to move the culture these days pretty much has to do that. The problem is that, as with so many other lifestyle brands before him, his actions do not come close to living up to the hopes he has raised.

Though it's too soon to issue a verdict on the Obama presidency, we do know this: he favours the grand symbolic gesture over deep structural change every time. So he will make a dramatic announcement about closing the notorious Guantánamo Bay prison – while going ahead with an expansion of the lower profile but frighteningly lawless Bagram prison in Afghanistan, and opposing accountability for Bush officials who authorised torture. He will boldly appoint the first Latina to the Supreme Court, while intensifying Bush-era enforcement measures in a new immigration crackdown. He will make investments in green energy, while championing the fantasy of "clean coal" and refusing to tax emissions, the only sure way to substantially reduce the burning of fossil fuels. Most importantly, he will claim to be ending the war in Iraq, and will retire the ugly "war on terror" phrase – even as the conflicts guided by that fatal logic escalate in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

This preference for symbols over substance, and this unwillingness to stick to a morally clear if unpopular course, is where Obama decisively parts ways with the transformative political movements from which he has borrowed so much (the pop-art posters from Che, his cadence from King, his "Yes We Can!" slogan from the migrant farmworkers – si se puede). These movements made unequivocal demands of existing power structures: for land distribution, higher wages, ambitious social programmes. Because of those high-cost demands, these movements had not only committed followers but serious enemies. Obama, in sharp contrast not just to social movements but to transformative presidents such as FDR, follows the logic of marketing: create an appealing canvas on which all are invited to project their deepest desires but stay vague enough not to lose anyone but the committed wing nuts (which, granted, constitute a not inconsequential demographic in the United States). Advertising Age had it right when it gushed that the Obama brand is "big enough to be anything to anyone yet had an intimate enough feel to inspire advocacy". And then their highest compliment: "Mr Obama somehow managed to be both Coke and Honest Tea, both the megabrand with the global awareness and distribution network and the dark-horse, upstart niche player."

Another way of putting it is that Obama played the anti-war, anti-Wall Street party crasher to his grassroots base, which imagined itself leading an insurgency against the two-party ­monopoly through dogged organisation and donations gathered from lemonade stands and loose change found in the crevices of the couch. Meanwhile, he took more money from Wall Street than any other presidential candidate, swallowed the Democratic party establishment in one gulp after defeating Hillary Clinton, then pursued "bipartisanship" with crazed Republicans once in the White House.

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Does Obama's failure to live up to his lofty brand cost him? It didn't at first. An international study by Pew's Global Attitudes Project, conducted five months after he took office, asked people whether they were confident Obama would "do the right thing in world affairs". Even though there was already plenty of evidence that Obama was continuing many of Bush's core international policies (albeit with a far less arrogant style), the vast majority said they approved of Obama – in Jordan and Egypt, a fourfold increase from the Bush era. In Europe the change in attitude could give you whiplash: Obama had the confidence of 91% of French respondents and 86% of Britons - compared with 13% and 16% respectively under Bush. The poll was proof that "Obama's presidency essentially erased the battering the US's image took during eight years of the Bush administration," according to USA Today. Axelrod put it like this: "What has happened is that anti-­Americanism isn't cool anymore."

That was certainly true, and had very real consequences. Obama's election and the world's corresponding love affair with his rebranded America came at a crucial time. In the two months before the election, the financial crisis rocking world markets was being rightly blamed not just on the contagion of Wall Street's bad bets but on the entire economic model of deregulation and privatisation that had been preached from US-dominated institutions such as the IMF and the WTO. If the United States were led by someone who didn't happen to be a global superstar, US prestige would have continued to plummet and the rage at the economic model at the heart of the global meltdown would likely have turned into sustained demands for new rules to rein in (and seriously tax) speculative finance.

Those rules were supposed to have been on the agenda when G20 leaders met at the height of the economic crisis in London in April 2009. Instead, the press focused on excited sightings of the fashionable Obama couple, while world leaders agreed to revive the ailing IMF – a chief culprit in this mess – with up to a trillion dollars in new financing. In short, Obama didn't just rebrand America, he resuscitated the neoliberal economic project when it was at death's door. No one but Obama, wrongly perceived as a new FDR, could have pulled it off.

Yet rereading No Logo after 10 years provides many reminders that success in branding can be fleeting, and that nothing is more fleeting than the quality of being cool. Many of the superbrands and branded celebrities that looked untouchable not so long ago have either faded or are in deep crisis today. The Obama brand could well suffer a similar fate. Of course many people supported Obama for straightforward strategic reasons: they rightly wanted the Republicans out and he was the best candidate. But what will happen when the throngs of Obama faithful realise that they gave their hearts not to a movement that shared their deepest values but to a devoutly corporatist political party, one that puts the profits of drug companies before the need for affordable health care, and Wall Street's addiction to financial bubbles before the needs of millions of people whose homes and jobs could have been saved with a better bailout?

The risk – and it is real – is that the response will be waves of bitter cynicism, particularly among the young people for whom the Obama campaign was their first taste of politics. Most won't switch parties, they'll just do what young people used to do during elections: stay home, tune out. Another, more hopeful possibility is that Obamamania will end up being what the US president's advisers like to call "a teachable moment". Obama is a gifted politician with a deep intelligence and a greater inclination towards social justice than any leader of his party in recent memory. If he cannot change the system in order to keep his election promises, it's because the system itself is utterly broken.

It was a conversation about changing the system that many of us were having in the brief period between the anti-WTO protests in Seattle in November 1999 and the beginning of the so-called war on terror. For the movement the media insisted on calling "anti-globalisation," it mattered little which political party happened to be in power in our respective countries. We were focused squarely on the rules of the game, and how they had been distorted to serve the narrow interests of corporations at every level of ­governance – from international free-trade agreements to local water privatisation deals.

Looking back, what I liked most was the unapologetic wonkery of it all. In the two years after No Logo came out, I went to dozens of teach-ins and conferences, some of them attended by thousands of people, that were exclusively devoted to popular education about the inner workings of global finance and trade. It was as if people understood, all at once, that gathering this knowledge was crucial to the survival not just of democracy but of the planet. Yes, this was complicated, but we embraced that complexity because we were finally looking at systems, not just symbols.

In some parts of the world, particularly Latin America, that wave of resistance spread and strengthened. In some countries, social movements grew strong enough to join with political parties, winning national elections and beginning to forge a new regional fair-trade regime. But elsewhere, September 11 pretty much blasted the movement out of existence. What we knew about the sophistication of global corporatism – that all the world's injustice could not be blamed on one rightwing political party, or on one ­nation, no matter how powerful – seemed to disappear.

If there was ever a time to remember the lessons we learned at the turn of the millennium, it is now. One benefit of the international failure to regulate the financial sector, even after its catastrophic collapse, is that the economic model that dominates around the world has revealed itself not as "free market" but "crony capitalist" – politicians handing over public wealth to private players in exchange for political support. What used to be politely hidden is all out in the open now. Correspondingly, public rage at corporate greed is at its highest point not just in my lifetime but in my parents' lifetime as well. Many of the points supposedly marginal activists were making in the streets 10 years ago are now the accepted wisdom of cable news talk shows and mainstream op-ed pages.

And yet missing from this populist moment is what was beginning to emerge a decade ago: a movement that did not just respond to individual outrages but had a set of proactive demands for a more just and sustainable economic model. In the United States and many parts of Europe, it is far-right parties and even neofascism that are giving the loudest voice to anti-­corporatist rage.

Personally, none of this makes me feel betrayed by Barack Obama. Rather I have a familiar ambivalence, the way I used to feel when brands like Nike and Apple started using revolutionary imagery in their transcendental branding campaigns. All of their high-priced market research had found a longing in people for something more than shopping – for social change, for public space, for greater equality and diversity. Of course the brands tried to exploit that longing to sell lattes and laptops. Yet it seemed to me that we on the left owed the marketers a debt of gratitude for all this: our ideas weren't as passé as we had been told. And since the brands couldn't fulfill the deep desires they were awakening, social movements had a new impetus to try.

Perhaps Obama should be viewed in much the same way. Once again, the market research has been done for us. What the election and the global embrace of Obama's brand proved decisively is that there is a tremendous appetite for progressive change – that many, many people do not want markets opened at gunpoint, are repelled by torture, believe passionately in civil liberties, want corporations out of politics, see global warming as the fight of our time, and very much want to be part of a political project larger than themselves.

Those kinds of transformative goals are only ever achieved when independent social movements build the ­numbers and the organisational power to make muscular demands of their elites. Obama won office by ­capitalising on our profound nostalgia for those kinds of social movements. But it was only an echo, a memory. The task ahead is to build movements that are – to borrow an old Coke slogan – the real thing. As Studs Terkel, the great oral historian, used to say: "Hope has never trickled down. It has always sprung up."

• Extracted from a 10th anniversary edition of No Logo to be published by Fourth Estate on 21 January.