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Recently, overhearing a conversation about baby names between two friends who were expecting a child, I suggested they move beyond the traditional family names that might please a grandparent, or upscale "status" names that might get their kid some respect from peers, or inantimate object names like Willow or Apple that may destine them to paparazzi-dodging, or popular names that might help their

In this essay, I outline Five futures for Pakistan: (1) the Pendulum continues forever, (2) Collapse, (3) Joining Chindia, (4) the Great Game, and (5) a South Asian Confederation. The most familiar and likely are based on the pendulum of rule by the military and rule by landlord/politicians. However, what is needed is to move from the more likely and less desirable futures to a process of anticipatory democracy where the citizens of Pakistan consider, create and commit to building their preferred future.

The good folks at io9 ask: Could SpaceX Land the First Humans On Mars? I would like the short answer to be: "Don't Bet On It." But chances are that all of us taxpayers will indeed be strong-armed into precisely that bet by the same neoliberal incumbent elites who have ruinously looted

In December 2006, Britain made its final payment of $84 million on a $4.34 billion loan from the U.S. that was made all the way back in 1945. Germany wasn’t the only country to go bankrupt after WWII. This money allowed Britain to stave off its total collapse after devoting almost all its resources to the war for over half a decade....To put this in perspective, $4.34 billion in 1945 is roughly equivalent to $140 billion today, an amount that was double the size of Britain’s economy at the time.

An enjoyable experience of scanning more than 70 trends related to work and entrepreneurship made me conclude that there are five driving forces shaping the future of work: technological developments, globalization, demographic shifts, social trends, and paradigmatic changes.

As the summer heat comes blasting across the country, it’s a perfect time to relax in a beach chair by the pool and read a book. Luckily, the World Future Society has a Summer Reading List to help you pick the perfect read. As a bonus, you can come to the WorldFuture 2012 conference in Toronto this July and meet these authors!

“I think envisioning the future is very much at the root of what we do as science-fiction writers,” said Steve Wilson, author of the SF science-fiction audio series The Arbiter Chronicles. “We look at the world today and pick our own piece of it—say, technology—and what it will do Earth, or to society, or to us as humans.”

Can e-health transform the nature of the Bangladeshi health system? If so, how? And who can deliver this vision? To answer this question, the Bangladesh Ministry of Health, and Bangladesh Enterprise Institute in collaboration with the Rockefeller Foundation promoted a three-day foresight workshop on the futures of digital or e-health. This continues Bangladesh’s leadership in the ehealth area. Participants came from a number of areas – e-health start-ups, hospital directors, leading physicians, professors of public health, e-health practitioners, international e-health experts, Ministry of Health directors and digital information/business providers.

Eric and I got haircuts yesterday afternoon, and while I was waiting I flipped through magazines.

Unless you've been hiding under a rock, you've probably noticed the increase in reporting this week about a possible Greek exit from the euro zone. The chart below (created with Google Trends) shows how searches and news stories about this scenario have spiked recently.

originally posted at The Trends & Foresight blog