News

Update: March 2013

Jakkie Cilliers in residence as visiting scholar at the Pardee Center in Denver

We are pleased to welcome Jakkie Cilliers, executive director of the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria, South Africa, who will join us at the Frederick S. Pardee Center in Denver for the months of March and April as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar. Jakkie has long been a valuable partner of ours, especially through his leadership of the African Futures Project.

Data team expands capabilities with Import XLS Batch

Mohammod Irfan has installed Import XLS Batch in the International Futures system, significantly speeding up the process by which researchers can add large data sets to the IFs historical database. This process will allow major data sets to be uploaded from Excel to IFs as a batch, rather than sheet-by-sheet, as our research assistants had done in the past. So far, Mohammod has implemented the process for the World Bank’s World Development Indicators, as well as for data from the Food and Agriculture Organization and the UNESCO Institute for Statistics. In the future, the IFs data team also plans to incorporate International Energy Agency data into the system using the same Import XLS Batch process. Research assistants, Kate McGrath and Ara Go, have played the important role of vetting the Import XLS Batch code, and the most recent updates should be included in the forthcoming version of International Futures, Version 6.69.

Pardee Center presents first deliverable to the SENS Foundation

The Pardee Center has completed Stage 1 of its two-year forecasting project for the SENS Foundation, a nonprofit organization that researches regenerative medicine solutions for the diseases and disabilities of aging. The project is exploring possible future trends in a world where regenerative medicine could extend, and possibly double, human lifespans. For this stage of the project, the team enhanced the International Futures demographics model to support life expectancies of up to 200 years of age. This required adding support for age-cohorts above 100+, new parameters and controls, and also changes in how IFs calculates mortality rates. In addition, the team has created a series of scenarios looking at different levels and rates of life-extension, along with changes in fertility patterns. All of these changes have been included in a new packaged version of IFs, created specifically for the SENS Foundation.

Upcoming: AFP Brief on Western Cape and release of UNDP Human Development Report 2013

Be on the lookout for our latest African Futures Project brief, coming later this month, analyzing human development in South Africa’s Western Cape. The report will use UN’s Human Development Index as a measure of future development in the province. Also, on March 14, the UN Development Programme will launch the Human Development Report 2013, titled “The Rise of the South: Human Progress in a Diverse World.” Barry Hughes and the IFs team contributed to the report’s analyses of alternative development policies.

Barry Hughes to speak at Sandia National Laboratories

On March 18 and 19, Barry Hughes will travel to New Mexico to deliver a pair of lectures, titled “Alternative Futures for Energy Production and Consumption in the US and the World.” His presentations—the first at the University of New Mexico, and the second at Sandia National Laboratories—will focus on the results of simulations on alternative energy futures, a collaboration between the Frederick S. Pardee Center and the Sandia National Labs Sustainability Innovation Foundry. These simulations assess the environmental and economic consequences of future extraction and combustion of projected fossil fuel reserves, as well as the impact renewables might have on altering those consequences.

Dale Rothman to visit Oxfam in Peru

As part of the center’s work with Oxfam International on their Future of Agriculture project, Dale S. Rothman will travel to Lima and Cuzco, Peru from March 17 to 24 to participate in scenario workshops. Oxfam and the Institute for Alternative Futures will organize the workshops, which will include participants from a range of other public and private organizations. Pending funding, these workshops should lead to more detailed, quantitative modeling of the agriculture system in Peru using IFs.

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