The good news for South Asia is that Sri Lanka has moved up from 29 to 16 and Pakistan from 30 to 20. India, of course, sits at the top, no change from 2007. The advances of Sri Lanka and Pakistan have been at the expense of the Northern European countries (e.g., Lithuania and Latvia), Singapore and the UAE. Other than Singapore, the rest of SE Asia, including Vietnam are ahead of Sri Lanka and Pakistan. Ghana, Jordan, Egypt are still ahead.

Among the many casualties of Sri Lanka's bloody civil war is a Silicon Valley-built dream: an innovative technical college, built through Bay Area donations, but damaged in combat, then dismantled and moved, and finally abandoned.

The surviving faculty, staff and students of the Vanni Institute of Technology are believed to be held, against their will, in Tamil refugee camps, where the United Nations says they are in desperate need of food, water and medical care.

Intel yesterday previewed the next big, bad Xeon chip based on the latest 45nm high-k metal gate technology process, codenamed Nahelem-EX. The Nehalem-EX chip features up to eight cores inside a single chip, and thanks to HyperThreading will support 16 threads. I’ll also pack an impressive 24 MB of cache.

Maps are everywhere these days - from Ushahidi's crowdsourcing crises maps, to the 3D views offered by Google Earth. Though the aid world has yet to fully embrace new mapping technologies, there are many exciting opportunities for humanitarian organisations to use maps to showcase their work, advocate around areas of need and plan during emergency responses.

On June 4 in London, AlertNet is hosting a workshop looking at how the aid world can use maps to communicate, advocate and plan for disasters.