Blogs

In 1954, Brook Stevens, a well-known industrial designer gave a keynote speech at an advertising conference titled “Planned Obsolescence.”

By his definition, planned obsolescence was “instilling in the buyer the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than necessary.” Over time, planned obsolescence has become a commonly used term for products designed to break easily, and our cars have become the product that most consumers associate with this business practice...But the idea of replacement cycles will soon change as we enter the driverless car era, as automobile companies make the transition from selling cars to selling transportation.

Markets celebrated the new plan for recapitalizing Itanian and Spanish banks. Mark Blyth, professor of political science, isn’t so sure celebration is the correct response. Is this really a turning point in the crisis or just another kicking of the can down the road?

A remote village in Kenya may be hundreds of miles from the nearest hospital, so what can its villagers do when one of their own comes down with a serious medical condition? That’s where point-of-care tests (POCTs)—portable devices that can diagnose patients on-site for HIV, tuberculosis, malaria, heart disease, and many other illnesses—come in.

The recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling upholding the Obama Administration’s signature health care law left many asking what is the future of health care now? THE FUTURIST magazine presents these recent articles to shed light on this complex issue.

In 1997 Reed Hasting returned his copy of “Apollo 13” to the video store and was hit with a late fee so big that he was embarrassed to tell his wife about it. Out of this moment of humiliation the idea for Netflix was born, a business that would eventually take down the entire video rental industry, and its excessive fee-charging practices in the process.

Print, apparently, is not only still alive but even more animated than we thought. A group of researchers have demonstrated a "specular microgeometic" paper that makes printed images respond to light source changes as though they were 3-D objects. The effect is very magic mirror.

Josh Brown, the Reformed Broker, has a brief and insightful post about the tension between two of the most important factions in finance, the macros versus the traders.

There's an interesting piece in this year's Nebula Awards Showcase, a lively short story about an alternative future premised on Aztec culture, "The Jaguar House, in Shadow," by Aliette de Bodard.

Name one material that has the following qualities:  superstrength, superconductivity, self-cooling, anti-bacterial, anti-corrosive, photovoltaic.   Carbon is one of the most abundant elements on the planet, yet in the form of graphene it has unique qualities. Graphene is a sheet of carbon that is just one-molecule thick. Rows upon rows of interconnected six-sided carbon molecules are linked together in a way that is unusually strong, yet flexible.

In futures thinking as in life, often it’s important to look back in order to look ahead. This week marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Alan Turing, offering the perfect opportunity to do both.