Blogs

By Jay Gary

After a three-year absence, and with the encouragement of WFS President Tim Mack, I hosted a Religious Futurists gathering in Toronto that drew 39 conference participants. I opened the program with a 10-minute overview of the future of religion, from Toronto 1980 onward, and various milestones in publishing and meetings.

EEG headsets (Electroencephalography) work by collecting electrical activity from the scalp. They measure voltage fluctuations resulting from ionic current flows within the brain and use this electrical activity to communicate with your computer, apps and other devices.

On Election Day, the citizens of both Colorado and Washington made the bold decision to legalize marijuana and manage it with controls similar to alcohol, prompting speculation about Amsterdam-style “drug tourism” and a new round of jokes about Colorado’s official song, Rocky Mountain High. It may sound silly to walk into a bar and order up a beer with a weed chaser or to open a late night box of cereal called “Weedies” to help you sleep, but that is exactly the era we’re moving into.

Obama may have won the presidency on election night, but pundit Nate Silver won the internet by correctly predicting presidential race outcomes in every state plus the District of Columbia — a perfect 51/51 score.

Everyone has a favourite iconic Japanese consumer product – the Sony Walkman, a Panasonic DVD recorder, Blu-ray disc player, a Canon, Nikon, Minolta or Pentax camera or even a Toyota Prius. But this century will witness the long, slow sunset of Japan’s power. That’s because the country’s ageing and depopulating society will drag the economy down with it, as it has already started to do.

By Jay Herson

The city of Fayetteville, Arkansas, is expected to double its population over the next 20 years. Like many cities its size, Fayetteville has been growing by sprawl, which places strain on the land available to grow food for the local population.

In the 1980s, as a young human factors engineer at IBM, I spent much of my time working with anthropometric tables, a compilation of statistical data about the human body used for designing a product’s ergonomic interface. At the time, much of the data for these tables was compiled by the U.S. Military through a series of 40 separate anthropometric surveys of military personnel between 1945 and 1988. The research involved 240 distinct measurements of the body such as weight, height, arm length, distance between eyes, circumference of fingers and toes, and much more.

The World Future 2013 Conference course and session proposal deadline has been extended to Monday, Nov. 5th, 11:59 pm due to Hurricane Sandy. Wherever you may be, we hope that you are staying safe during the storm these next few days! Due to predicted power outages and severe weather conditions on the East Coast, we are extending the course and session proposal submission deadline to Monday, Nov 5th, as opposed to the previously scheduled deadline on Wednesday, Oct 31st.

In 2008, I was asked to speak at the Leaders in Dubai Conference along with several world famous speakers like former NYC Mayor Rudy Giulliani, Tom Peters, and former World Bank President James Wolfensohn. Attending the conference were 1,200 world leaders and influencers from 40 different counties. At the time, Dubai was a shining new star on the global stage, attracting the world’s best architects, building remarkable structures, tackling ingenious new projects, and raising the bar for creativity around the world.

Almost a year ago, I collaborated with Future Crimes visionary Marc Goodman and bestselling author and writer Steven Kotler to speculate how the advances in personalized medicine could be co-opted for less than altruistic purposes. We submitted the article to the Atlantic Magazine. The article appears in November 2012 issue, on your newsstand now. (Here’s the online version.)