Blogs

What can Google's search data reveal about our hunger to know today what will happen tomorrow?

Using Google Trends and Google’s Keyword Tool, I examined the top 350 future-oriented keywords. Combined, they represent 152,620,240 searches a month. Here are four of the major trends uncovered.

When is the last time you heard a statement that caused you to stop dead in your tracks? I wanted to focus on eight shocking statements made in 2012, and discuss briefly how they will invariably shift our outlook on the future. Here are the eight statements we’ve judged to be trend-setters for 2013 and beyond.

This week's five stories look at:

• Tripling the Efficiency of Organic Solar Cells;
• New Technology to Fight Coastal Flooding Using Irregular Concrete Blocks;
• Long Duration Human Space Flight Being Tested on the ISS;
• Pacific Island Entrepreneurs Receive Award for Green Initiatives;
• Delivering Wind and Solar Power Over Long Distances Possible with New HVDC Circuit Breaker.

 

Hold a mobile phone and you hold a piece of the biggest technological and learning platform in history—and incidentally, it’s a platform that’s revolutionizing life in general around the world.

You are probably wondering what the heck I am talking about....a carbon bubble? What's that?In the 1970s we were "conditioned" to believe that the world would run out of fossil fuel resources early in the 21st century. Remember the term "peak oil?" Much policy and financial forecasting by government and business was predicated on the peak oil forecasts. Turned out the forecast was wrong.

Futurists deny making "predictions," noting that that is not a central purpose of futurism. Still, real futurists make forecasts that look a lot like predictions all the time -- and the accuracy of these forecasts can illuminate the quality of their foresight.

The age of the textbook as I remember it is truly coming to an end. Educational publishers can feel the heat if they are not already out of business. That's because educational publishers have never adapted to the way learning has changed because knowledge delivered is no longer the way young people learn.

We would be in a Golden Age for innovation, were it not for beggar-thy-neighbor national policies in the global innovation race. Encouraging the theft of intellectual property, discriminating against foreign tech firms, and manipulating currency are among the practices referred to as innovation mercantilism.

In previous postings on this blog site I have described the changing face of our world cities both in the Developed and Developing World. Much of human population growth is in urban centres. In the Developing World, A mass migration from rural to urban settings is creating a housing and infrastructure crisis that desparatelyneeds solutions. So when I read about Synergy Thrislington, and InstaBuild, a ultra-fast building technology, I was intrigued.

A United Nations summit has adopted confidential recommendations proposed by China that will help network providers target BitTorrent uploaders, detect trading of copyrighted MP3 files, and, critics say, accelerate Internet censorship in repressive nations. Approval by the U.N.’s International Telecommunications Union came despite objections from Germany, which warned the organization must “not standardize any technical means that would increase the exercise of control over telecommunications content, could be used to empower any censorship of content, or could impede the free flow of information and ideas.”