Blogs

Everyday brings new technological breakthroughs – and one of the most fascinating is the development of sensors that enable the tongue to actually see. This ability is rudimentary now, like seeing a series of pointillist patterns, perhaps a little like the earliest video games.

Failures attract attention. Much like a car accident causing a gawker’s block along the highway, failure attracts onlookers, some with offers to help, others moving quickly to avoid being painted with the same failure brush. So what causes failure? Turns out that failure is just one relentless driver being perpetuated by a series of other relentless drivers. As we lift up the hood on this eight cylinder engine, here is what’s really going on.

Another interesting week of technology and science announcements has led me to pick the following five stories:

• World's Biggest Companies Tackling Climate Change;
• Idaho Potato Gets Better by Mixing Genes from Five Spud Varieties;
• Google Timelapse Shows Decades of Planetary Change in Seconds;

My wife and I have been downsizing and ridding ourselves of over 40 years of furniture collecting as we prepare to move to our new apartment in downtown Toronto. IKEA, the assemble-it-yourself furniture store, has figured largely in our lives in the last few months as we replace the old with some new things that are a better fit for our smaller space.

It’s the stuff of sci-fi movies – mind control, where you just direct your mind to make something happen and it does, such as using your thoughts to mentally control a space ship. But more and more your brain waves have the power to actually manipulate and move objects.

At the moment I write this, a creeping group think has saturated both higher education (The Chronicle of Higher Education), and popular media (New York Times, Huffington Post, etc.). It's that moment when public debate constricts to a terrifying one-dimensionality--when all manner of unwarranted assumptions attain hegemony and become the scaffolding for etiolated prognostications.

Recent developments suggest that wearable computing may finally be gaining traction. Intel evangelist Manny Vara believes that comfortable and convenient wearable computers may be just two to five years away.

originally posted to the Trends & Foresight blog

It occurred to me today as I was reading about researchers being able to reliably predict snowstorms on Mars, that what we humans are doing here on Earth could be perfect for terraforming our red neighbour.

Back in the 1970s "experts" unequivocally stated that the world would run out of oil early in the 21st century. Of course they were looking at recoverable oil from traditional exploratory technology at the time. Today, however, it seems we are awash with the stuff. This is both a good and a bad thing.

The future is all about connectedness. Dave Gray made that point clearly in his recent book "The connected company". Online and offline social networks are getting engrained more deeply into society. People are starting to grasp new opportunities of connectedness.