Blogs

Most Americans still associate childhood with long days outside making up games in the backyard or exploring a playground or park. But for today’s young children, that’s not the reality anymore.

In the late 1980s I was still working at IBM, but had taken on a number of side projects to expand my horizons. One of those projects was working with the City of Denver on the redevelopment of Stapleton Airport. At the time Stapleton was still in operation, and the new airport, DIA, was little more than a politician’s dream with a bunch of drawings and reports being pitched to the media.

Songwriter Gotye has released a YouTube re-mix of his ubiquitous hit "Somebody That I Used to Know" generated from YouTube clips of his fans doing their own covers of that hit. It is a mildly edifying clip, but seems to me far more interesting than the simple tribute we are being told it is, whether a tribute to Gotye's fans, a tribute to the YouTube utility that mediated and indispensably facilitated his fame, or a tribute to Kutiman's fabulous Thru-YOU project.

How will businesses react if patents are granted in 3 months instead of what currently takes over 3 years? And what will it look like if patents are as easy to license as music and photographs? Here are four key trends that will drive the world of intellectual property over the coming years.

What working people often need is some way to learn exactly what they need to learn, when they need to learn it. It’s time to change the old paradigm of “degree factories” and welcome the prototype of “innovation centers” at our colleges and universities.

If you had a choice of flying from Boston to San Diego in a plane piloted by a single machine or the combined intelligence of 3,000 people, which would you choose? Perhaps you would want more information before making that decision. If the machine piloting the aircraft was a well-designed piece of equipment that had been used as an autopilot for thousands of successful flights, and the 3,000 people were of average intelligence living in the Midwest, which would you choose?

In the late 18th century, a series of stunning events – including the American and French Revolutions and the onset of the Industrial Age – cracked the existing world order wide open. One consequence was an onrush of panic, epitomized by the work of the Reverend Thomas Malthus. To say that these cataclysmic events made Malthus pessimistic is probably a bit of an understatement.

There is a major wave right now of backlash against the shallow analysis of science and technology as a route to understanding the future.

Pundits have long been predicting that the presidential election will be much closer and much meaner in 2012 than it was in 2008. Closer it now is. According to the RCP Poll Average, the race is now a virtual tie: Incumbent Obama now leads by a mere 1.8 percent over Romney, whereas challenger Obama led McCain by 7.6 percent exactly four years ago. It will certainly revolve around a very different array of issues—much less argument about the war on terror and GOP performance, and a lot more about the stagnating economy and Democratic performance.

Students have been learning the basics of logic through the re-iteration of this syllogism for centuries.