The World Is My School: Welcome to the Era of Personalized Learning

By Maria H. Andersen

Future learning will become both more social and more personal, says an educational technology expert.

Humans have always been learning, but how we learn has changed over time. The earliest means of education were highly personal: Oral histories passed from adults to children, informal or formal apprenticeships, and one-on-one tutoring have all been used in the early history of most cultures. It’s only been in the last two centuries that we’ve used formalized systems of mass public education (aka industrialized education).

Certainly, personalized learning is the more effective method. In 1984, educational researcher Benjamin Bloom found that average students who were tutored one-on-one outperformed 98% of students who were learning via conventional methods (this is referred to as Bloom’s two-sigma problem). However, personal learning is not cost-effective, and so we currently educate students in batches of 20, 30, or even 200 students at a time. This is likely to get worse before it gets better, with prominent philanthropists like Bill Gates declaring that “the best lectures in the world” will be online within the next five years. Certainly we can use technology to deliver those lectures to thousands, or even millions, of students at a time, but a lecture does not automatically produce learning any more than attending a class does.

Mass education is adequate, as long as students are highly motivated to learn and get ahead of their peers. In developing countries, a student who is successful in education will be able to climb the ladder of personal economic prosperity faster than those who are not successful. But in industrialized countries, where prosperity is the norm, an education does not necessarily translate into a significantly higher standard of living. In these countries, there is no longer a large economic incentive to learn, so the motivation to learn must become intrinsic. As we redesign en masse education, we must address learners’ intrinsic motivations, which means that education must circle back to being personal again.

The vision of a modern education built around personalized learning is not new, but it is definitely tantalizing. Neal Stephenson’s novel The Diamond Age (Spectra, 1995) shares a vision of personalized learning in the future via an interactive book that possesses a conversational interface (CI) and “pseudo-intelligence,” a kind of artificial intelligence (AI) that is inferior to human intelligence. It’s likely that we’ll see decent conversational interfaces within the next decade, and certainly applications like Google Voice are moving us much closer to this reality. AI that is capable of directing the learning needs of a human will take much longer, developing in the next 20–50 years, but we can’t wait that long for the technology to catch up with education. The need for personalized learning exists in the here and now. So how does one bridge this vision of the future with the realities of the present?

Learning Technologies Today

Let’s start by taking stock of the personalized technologies for information that we already have. We have software that stores the content we like (e.g., Evernote, Posterous) and software that merely stores the location of that content (e.g., Diigo or Delicious). Even traditional media, like books, now have parallel digital systems that allow for note taking, highlighting, and bookmarking (e.g., Kindle, Nook, or iPad). While it’s useful to store and search information, I would venture that we rarely go back to look at the information we mark for storage.

This is a problem; for deep learning to occur, we need to have repeated exposure to the information, along with some time in between for reflection. We need to give our brains a repeated opportunity to process the information we take in so that it becomes knowledge, understanding, and wisdom. This means we’re going to have to find time in our busy lives to reflect on the information that flows past us on a daily basis, and we’re going to need some kind of technology that keeps us on track with our learning goals.

While it seems outrageous that we could find any more time in our busy lives, consider some of the disruptive changes we’ve seen quite recently that affect how we spend our free time. Facebook, now with 500 million users, has disrupted normal social interactions in a little over six years. Micro-blogging exploded when a Web site simply invited us to answer the question: What’s on your mind? Twitter users now send more than 50 million tweets per day, and big news stories break first on Twitter—in real time and with eyewitness accounts. As big as Twitter is, there were more people playing Farmville (a social media game on Facebook) at its peak than there were active Twitter users—a fact that has not gone unnoticed by game designers and educators. These Farmville players are choosing to spend their free time for collaborative activities (their “cognitive surplus,” as media scholar Clay Shirky puts it) plowing virtual soil and planting virtual crops.

These innovative social disruptions have happened quickly, but not from within the existing organizational structures. For example, Facebook did not disrupt phone communication by changing the nature of phone calls or phones. Facebook built an entirely new system that eventually circled back around to phones by the way of phone apps. In the same way, the trick to developing a personal learning system is to abandon thinking about how to build it from within the existing educational system and to begin pondering how such a system could be developed outside of education. Educational institutions form a vast interconnected network, and while small changes can occur within the system, individual parts only have the ability to flex within their existing boundaries. For a personalized learning system to take hold inside education, it will have to be built on the outside.

A Simple Idea: Learn This

Let me propose a realistic scenario of what a true personalized learning system might look like and how it would function. We first have to create (1) a new layer of learning media in the background of the existing Internet and (2) an ecosystem of software to easily manage the learning media we engage with. In the same way we’ve integrated buttons like Twitter’s “Tweet this” and Facebook’s “Like” at the end of videos, articles, and other media, imagine we now add a button for “Learn This.” Clicking this button (anywhere you find it) would bring you into an interface to help you learn the content.

We don’t need a humanlike artificial intelligence to begin this journey. The technology for such a journey already exists and is simple enough to use with traditional learning methods. In the first version, learning should simply be by way of Socratic questioning, where questions are used to analyze concepts, to prod at the depth of knowledge, and to focus on principles, issues, or problems. Socratic questions are elegant because, unlike with other formats (e.g., multiple choice), learners must self-generate the answers rather than rely heavily on the ability to recognize a correct answer when they see it. The personal learning system would use a spaced repetition algorithm (SRA) to reintroduce the Socratic questions over time so that biological memory is more likely to grasp onto the ideas and information. For now, let’s call this system SOCRAIT (a play on “Socratic” that includes SOC for social, AI for artificial intelligence, and IT for information technology within its name).

For example, suppose I read an article about digital copyright in educational settings, and I decide that it’s important for me to remember some of the details of this article. At the end of this article, I choose “Learn This” to add a question to my SOCRAIT question bank. Two options would appear: (1) write your own question or (2) choose from a list of questions written by others. If I choose the first option, I might write a simple question and answer for myself: “What are the allowable uses for copyrighted video in an educational setting?” Following this, I’d write a short summary or clip a few sentences of content from the article to summarize the answer to the question. Along with the question and answer, SOCRAIT would save the source URL (link to the content), and I could tag the question with metadata tags I indicate (e.g., copyright, digital copyright, and education).

Later in the day or the week, when I have some down time, I could reengage with SOCRAIT. Here’s how it would work: I read or listen to a question, answer it in my head or out loud, view or listen to the answer, rate my understanding, and go to the next question. Since the learning is tailored to intrinsic motivations, learners could rate their own ability to answer a question (e.g., 1 = I have no clue, 2 = I knew some of it, and 3 = I nailed it!), and SOCRAIT could make decisions based on these ratings. If your rating of understanding is low or spotty, the system would offer to send you back to the source for another look. Notice that there is no need to develop software to verify the answers to questions—if you aren’t good at rating your own understanding (we call this metacognition), this will come out later in the process, and you’ll have to learn to get better at it.

With a rudimentary computer interface, like the one implemented in Google Voice, there’s no reason why SOCRAIT couldn’t be voice-based and available anywhere we interact with computers (e.g., cell phones, tablets, auto navigation systems). This would allow us to improve our learning while performing other tasks: commuting to work, making dinner, or walking the dogs.

Initially, the so-called “Pareto’s Vital Few” (the 20% of people who get 80% of the work done) would be the ones who would be most interested in creating and engaging with questions. But as the connectedness of the system matures, the need to write your own Socratic questions would lessen. Authors and media creators would write their own questions, targeting comprehension of important ideas and facts. Media consumers would be able to choose from a list of questions, perhaps seeing a sorted list based on their indicated learning priorities. Two readers of the same article would see different questions at the top of their “suggested questions” based on tags of the content. In some cases, the user might choose to pay for curated or reputable content so that their learning can later be certified by an employer, educational body, or organization.

Personal Learning’s Implications For Education

Now let’s take a step back and look at the big picture. Any content that exists on the Internet (or is connected to the Internet) would be tagged with Socratic learning questions and metadata for subjects. Learners would have their own bank of questions, personalized to their own learning interests. As a result, instead of learning that is designed around a physical place (e.g., schools), an educational space (e.g., learning management systems), or a person of authority (e.g., instructor), this system is designed around the learner.

It goes without saying that the implications for education are huge. In the space of a few years, we could develop a completely separate content learning system that’s incredibly flexible and personalized to the interests of the learner. The architecture needs to develop organically around Web-based content and grow tendrils into everything we produce in the future. It will take some time to go back and create a learning layer to integrate with all the content that we already have, but as we’ve seen from projects like Wikipedia, there are people willing to contribute their time and energy to these kinds of tasks. Wikipedia became the largest encyclopedia ever assembled within a mere six years after its creation, and was built using less than 1% of the time that Americans spend watching TV every year (as calculated by Clay Shirky).

A system like SOCRAIT has the potential to benefit other industries outside of education. For example, modern journalism has been struggling with a problem of income stream. While revenue has shifted to online advertising, it is not enough to shore up the industry. At present, the vast majority of Internet content is free and, as Chris Anderson argues in his book Free (Hyperion, 2009), it’s not likely to change. How do you get readers (or viewers) to pay for something that they already get for free? The answer: Add something to the content that’s not already there. If readers or viewers had the ability to quickly add reputable questions to their learning bank, this would be a value-added service. Cleverly, the media content would remain free, but access to the question bank would require a one-time payment or ongoing subscription by the consumer. This would certainly help modern journalism (or the textbook industry) to shore up their revenue stream.

A New Learning Ecosystem

Books like Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows (W.W. Norton, 2010) cause us to question whether we might be trapped on the information superhighway—stuck on the line between data lanes and unable to scoot forward or backward. Twitter users regularly use the phrase “drink from the fire hose” when referring to their experience of dipping into the live data stream. Information, whether it be from radio, television, print, Web media, or social networks, is coming at us too quickly; all that most of us can do is surface-skim, rarely pausing to reflect or think deeply. To learn, to analyze, to innovate, and to think creatively, we must internalize some of the information we process.

An entirely new ecosystem could grow up around this Socratic learning system. Certainly a ratings system for questions could be built using the technology developed by companies like Netflix. For example, “Your friends John and Iveta chose this question. Would you like to see other questions/media they chose for this topic?” If you choose to do so, the questions you see when you add content to your question bank could be filtered by your existing social networks. Rather than showing all the possible questions in existence for that media (which could become a fairly lengthy list), you could choose to see only the ones people in your social network have also used.

So far, I’ve discussed how the system would work if you engaged in reading and watching media as you do today. However, such a system could also shift how and when we seek out content. After all, a lot of time is wasted in modern education by re-teaching content that some of the learners already know. There is no incentive for students to get ahead when the reward is sitting through a lecture on something they’ve already learned.

Imagine: When you need to learn something new, you could subscribe to a curated collection of questions on that topic. For example, “Digital Copyright 101” might be a collection of questions developed by somebody who teaches digital copyright policy to beginners. The truly fascinating shift is that you wouldn’t necessarily start by consuming the media that goes with the questions. Instead, you would simply start answering the questions in your bank. As you encounter learning questions that you can’t answer, you could dive into the content at those points in time—this is the exact point between boredom (with things you already know) and frustration (with things you don’t know), the point to engage in learning.

Testing Knowledge Acquisition

Almost immediately after the personalized learning architecture is in place, we will need a new educational industry tasked with certifying knowledge and understanding. For lack of a better name, let’s call these folks “Socratic scholars.” Their job will be to rate how well you know what you claim to have learned. For example, let’s say I’ve engaged with and theoretically learned 500 tagged questions on biochemistry to prepare for teaching a new class. In order for this to count toward my professional development hours, my college asks me to certify the learning. I pay for a Socratic scholar who specializes in chemistry to rate my knowledge. We meet either in person or via the Web (more likely) and have a discussion about the questions in my learning bank on biochemistry.

The scholar has access to the 500 questions I say I’ve mastered and asks me to answer a random selection. Of course, this is where it would be valuable to have reputable questions in my learning bank (from authors, researchers, scientists, and leaders in the field). Since the scholar can see both my questions and the answers (linked back to original content), it should not be difficult to ascertain whether I have, in fact, mastered the knowledge and concepts as I have claimed. Because the certification is human-to-human, and not human-to-machine, the nuances of human language would be understood. So if the language of the verbal answer and the language of the written answer don’t match up exactly, that wouldn’t be a problem. At the end of the session, the scholar would “grade” my understanding of the 500 questions on biochemistry, and I could provide this certification to the human resources department.

In many respects, this is a much better system than what we have today. For most certification of learning, we simply look at a transcript. If the class is listed, we assume the learner has that knowledge. Of course, knowledge ages—sometimes it evolves into understanding or wisdom, and sometimes it fades out of existence. The fact that I earned a chemistry degree in 1996 does not mean you would want to hire me as a chemist today. Ideally, you’d want me to recertify before I entered the “chemist” job pool. Biological memory is not reflected in the metrics of transcripts or grade point averages.

I am not saying that this “certified” content knowledge equals the ability to function as a practitioner in the discipline. Even a diploma only indicates that the educational system has walked you through some series of appropriate paces for the discipline. Skills like critical thinking and creativity are often lost in education (especially in science and technology) because there is such an incredible amount of content to cover. However, if the content knowledge moved outside the educational system, then educators could focus on the learning that surrounds technical knowledge instead (e.g., problem solving, analysis, creativity, applications).

Let’s imagine what would happen if a robust Socratic learning system was at the heart of the educational system. A learning coach (a more appropriate term for the teacher or instructor in this learner-centered environment) will designate some core material that he or she wants you to learn. For example, in calculus, I might use a set of 500 curated concept-oriented questions from a well-known calculus textbook author, with each question linking to supporting media. Every student would be working on those questions, and so, as a learning community, we’d all work on that together. I would hope that this doesn’t sound like too radical a departure from normal.

This is where it changes: Because every student has different interests and career ambitions, I would also require that each student find an additional 100 questions tagged with both calculus and tags that are of interest to that student. For a student studying to be a doctor, questions tagged with medicine or epidemiology might be appropriate. For a student going into business, questions tagged with marketing or management might be more appropriate.

As the learning coach, my job is no longer to “deliver content” to the students. SOCRAIT does that. Now I can use my time to help students search for good questions, help them to understand the content they are learning, provide activities to help them work with the concepts or connect the material in an applied way, and foster discussion with other students on these topics.

When it comes time to certify the learning for each student, it is done by an oral interview in which I have access to the common questions and the personalized questions for each student. Even if I’m not an expert on all the personalized questions, the answers are provided and the content is related to a subject of my expertise. Again, I only have to ask about a random selection of questions to be able to assess understanding. At the end of the semester, all students have learned their own personal versions of calculus, while still learning a core of common material.

Such a system has implications for lifelong learning “on the job,” too. Instead of holding mandatory training, a human resources department could push out a bank of Socratic questions to all their employees about safety, new initiatives, mission statements, etc. For example, to train employees on Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) compliance, the employees would be invited to add a curated list of 40 questions about OSHA policies. Each question would lead back to a source that provides the necessary content to answer the question. After two weeks, someone in HR can act as the Socratic scholar and spend five minutes with each employee to test his or her knowledge of the policies, using a random selection of questions.

A Game Layer for Learning

Futurist John Smart writes about a coming “valuecosm” within 10 to 20 years, when we’ll be able to program our apps or avatars to make decisions for us based on what we say is our set of values. The real question is whether learning can become one of our new values, especially in the United States. In 2009, The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that the average American adult spent more than five hours per day on leisure activities (close to three of those leisure hours watching television) and about 30 minutes per day on educational activities. Given the 10:1 ratio of leisure to educational activities, is American culture likely to embrace learning as a choice? Initially my answer was no, but then I began to think about video-game design.

Entrepreneur Seth Priebatsch spoke at TEDxBoston (2010) about building a “game layer on top of the world.” What if one of the game layers we create surrounds learning? The same game dynamics used to build successful video games (e.g., appointment dynamics, influence and status dynamics, and progression dynamics) could be deployed to make learning the game itself. While this might still be a hard sell for the average adult, there will be subpopulations, such as early technology adapters, who will see the immediate value in cultivating and learning from their own question banks. Children who grow up learning with a Socratic question system might gain learning values naturally and carry these to their adult lives.

A successful Spaced Repetition Socratic Learning System (SRSLS) would have to entice you to keep to specific goals, like answering 50 questions per week or answering 100 questions with a certain tag in the next month. Any of these goals could be incentivized with points (1 question answered correctly = 1 point), incentive rewards for meeting certain goals (“you’ve earned your Silver Calculus badge for 100 questions learned”), and social status levels (“Maria has just become a Calculus Master—can you do it too?”).

Those engaged in formal education would participate with a far greater intensity of daily questions than those who are in the workforce. However, the wise worker would continue to learn, albeit at a slower pace. Résumés would boast levels of knowledge on particular topics and stats on the intensity at which you participate in learning.

Let’s Build It

A diploma has become a social signal to stop learning. In today’s world, where technical knowledge doubles every two years, this is absolutely the wrong thing to do. Careers shift overnight, and industries collapse rapidly. We have to learn, and learn faster than we ever have before, in order to stay ahead of the problems we are now creating.

The content for a system like SOCRAIT already exists; it is the architecture and interface we are missing. This new learning medium needs to be an interconnected network of user-generated, or author-generated, Socratic questions with a seamless question-management interface. The architecture needs to remain open so that anyone can create questions on any content, and any developer can build applications for the computing device of his or her choice.

A system for personalized learning will not grow from inside formal education. Education is like a field that’s been overplanted with only small patches of fertile soil. Too many stakeholders (parents, unions, administration, faculty, etc.) compete to promote various ideas about how to change, acting like weeds or plagues that choke off plant growth. The fresh and fertile soil of the open Web can foster the quick growth of a personalized learning system. Then, like a good fertilizer, it can be used to replenish the soil of formal education and help us to reach that “Holy Grail” of education: personalized learning for all.

About the Author

Maria H. Andersen is the Learning Futurist for The LIFT Institute at Muskegon Community College, Muskegon, Michigan. She has degrees in mathematics, chemistry, biology, business, and (ABD) Higher Education Leadership. She is considered an expert in educational technology and has been studying, researching, speaking, and writing about the future of education and learning for several years, including at the World Future Society’s 2010 meeting. E-mail busynessgirl@gmail.com or search @busynessgirl on Twitter.

Tomorrow in Brief (January-February 2011)

Can Handedness Be  Altered?


“Choosing” which hand you use to reach for a cup or doorknob isn’t something you give a lot of thought to, but in fact the brain undergoes a complex decision-making process, pitting left versus right sides. Understanding this process may help researchers develop treatments for stroke patients and others with motor disorders.


Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, found that they could increase the use of the left hand among right-handed individuals by applying magnetic stimulation to the left side of the parietal cortex (which governs the processing of spatial relationships and planning).


Beyond the clinical applications for helping patients with brain injuries, the researchers believe that magnetic stimulation could potentially be used to influence other decision-making processes.


Source: University of California, Berkeley, www.berkeley.edu.

El Niño Events Gain  Strength


The El Niños occurring in the central Pacific Ocean have nearly doubled in intensity since 1982, according to researchers from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Intensity is measured by how much the sea surface temperature deviates from the average.


While climate change may be behind the shift of these more-intense El Niños from the eastern to the central Pacific region, it is their impacts on weather patterns that have the researchers concerned.


“El Niño’s impact on global weather patterns is different if ocean warming occurs primarily in the central Pacific instead of the eastern Pacific,” according to NOAA’s Michael ­McPhaden. “If the trend we observe continues, it could throw a monkey wrench into long-range weather forecasting, which is largely based on our understanding of El Niños from the latter half of the twentieth century.”


Source: National Oceanic and 
Atmospheric Administration, www.noaa.gov.




Stress and Cancer


Cancer may have found a partner in resisting radiation and chemotherapy: stress.


If a patient exercises intensely or experiences emotional stress within two days prior to therapy, a cell-repairing protein (Hsp27) is activated that protects the cancer cells, according to Ohio State University researchers.


The observation gives doctors hope of finding ways to counter Hsp27’s role in interfering with cancer-cell death. In the meantime, cancer patients may be able to improve their own treatment by avoiding stress, according to lead researcher Govindasamy Ilangovan, an associate professor of internal medicine.


Source: Ohio State University, www.osu.edu.


Clean-Energy Innovations


Patenting rates for clean-energy technologies have increased by approximately 20% per year since 1997, and nearly 80% of innovations originated in just six countries: Japan, the United States, Germany, South Korea, France, and the U.K., according to a new study, “Patents and Clean Energy: Bridging the Gap between Evidence and Policy.”


The surge in patent activity following the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol suggests that political decisions can help drive international competition, even in countries that did not sign the treaty, such as the United States, the study’s authors conclude.


Source: “Patents and Clean Energy,” published by the European Patent Office, is available from www.epo.org/clean-energy.


Artificial Leaf Mimics Solar Cells


A leaf-like solar device made from a water-based gel and ­infused with light-sensitive ­molecules could offer a less expensive and more environmentally friendly alternative to silicon-based solar cells.


Researchers at North Carolina State University used plant chlorophyll coupled with electrodes coated by carbon materials. The devices are stimulated by the sun’s rays to produce electricity in the same way that plants are stimulated to synthesize sugars.


Though the device is currently low-efficiency, the researchers hope to improve the biologically inspired “soft” photovoltaic arrays, perhaps one day covering roofs with sheets of artificial-leaf solar cells.


Source: North Carolina State University, www.ncsu.edu.

Human Civilization Migrates Northward

By Rick Docksai

A geologist notes world-changing population and economic shifts.

The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization’s Northern Future by Laurence C. Smith. Dutton. 2010. 322 pages. $26.95.

Brazil, China, or Iceland—which country’s population will grow the fastest between now and 2050?

The answer is Iceland, according to Laurence C. Smith in The World in 2050. The UCLA geologist envisions a “New North”—comprising Canada, the United States, Russia, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Iceland, Denmark, and Greenland—of intense activity, expansion, and economic growth. The populations of Canada, Iceland, and Norway will all grow by 20% or more.

Smith identifies four forces of change behind this great shift—demography, increasing strain on the earth’s resources, globalization, and climate change—and the specific ways that each force may shape human civilization in the next four decades.

“Big changes often just sort of ease their way in,” he says. “And quietly change the world.”

Four Forces Shaping the Future

• Demography. In 2008, for the first time in history, more humans were living in cities than in rural areas. Urbanization will continue and will necessitate expert growth management.

Industrialized countries will also need to worry about their rapidly growing elderly populations. By 2050, the nursing homes of Brazil, Russia, India, and China may be full to the brim, and none of the four countries may have enough employees to staff them.

The highest fertility rates will be in developing nations. But before their young people can take up needed jobs in industrialized nations, their societies will need to boost education, security, and governance so that they will have opportunities to gain education and job training.

• Growing strain on the earth’s resources. The world is projected to consume 106 million barrels of oil a day by 2030. Pressure will mount to tap any existing reserves. Russia in particular will aggressively develop its vast oil fields and compete with its neighbors to drill the pristine ice fields of the Arctic Circle.

The world’s population will grow 50% by 2050, and all that growth will require enormous increases in crop production to feed it. Worldwide freshwater sources are already running low due to pollution and massive irrigation.

• Globalization. Canada, Russia, the United States, and other northern nations all depend heavily on migrant workers to fill needed labor jobs. These countries’ need for migrants will rise considerably to sustain growing industries despite population aging. All nations will have to ease their immigration restrictions and discourage any surges of xenophobia, according to Smith.

The now-sparsely settled Arctic will see major influxes of settlers. Smith expects that it could host growing urban centers and larger aboriginal communities.

• Climate change. Shifts in the earth’s climate are bound to unfold erratically over time, though the long-term result will be significantly higher temperatures. The Arctic could be seasonally ice-free by 2050, and human infrastructures throughout the far north will be severely challenged.

Some amount of warming is inevitable no matter what actions the world takes now, but decisive reductions in carbon emissions during this century could keep the warming to a moderate 2.5°C increase instead of a rise of 5°C or higher.

Smith writes that he took great care to make his forecasts realistic and based on trends already under way. That meant steering clear of discussing wild-card shocks, apocalyptic doomsday scenarios, or other radical changes in the status quo.

“The described outcomes favor the likely over the unlikely. I honestly expect, should I live long enough, that I will see them within my lifetime,” Smith writes.

The World in 2050 is a plausible vision of what the world may look like four decades from today. Smith convincingly states not only what he expects to see, but also why he expects to see it.

About the Reviewer

Rick Docksai is a staff editor of THE FUTURIST and World Future Review.

Books in Brief (January-February 2011)

Edited by Rick Docksai

Message in Our Bottles

Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water by Peter H. Gleick. 2010. 211 pages. AMACOM. $26.96.

Consumption of bottled water has skyrocketed over the last few decades, says globally recognized water expert Peter Gleick. However, he thinks that the tide may be turning. In Bottled and Sold, he describes a “war on bottled water” now under way in offices, recreation centers, restaurants, and private homes across the globe.

Consumers and businesses are increasingly forgoing bottled water and getting their water exclusively from the tap, Gleick notes. Cities are banning municipal purchases of it, and some restaurants are eliminating it from their menus. Environmental concerns are a prime motivator: Every plastic bottle requires water and electricity to produce it and to move it onto a store shelf. Other critics worry about the human costs; they believe that bottled water imposes undue burdens on low-income persons. And some just hold a philosophical grudge against corporate ownership of water.

Whatever their reasons, says Gleick, the boycotters are sufficiently numerous to put the most prominent bottled-water industry associations on “crisis footing.” Bottled and Sold is a book that environmentalists, water experts, and all who follow consumer trends will want to read.

Building for a Hotter Planet

Climatopolis: How Our Cities Will Thrive in the Hotter Future by Matthew Kahn. Basic. 2010. 260 pages. Paperback. $26.95.

Construction and housing in cities around the world will be forced to adapt to global climate change, forecasts environmentalist Matthew Kahn. In Climatopolis, he describes how increased flooding, higher temperatures, and erratic weather patterns in general will force planners to redesign urban housing units worldwide in the next few decades.

Climate change will affect different cities differently, he argues. Coastal cities will face unique health and economic difficulties, while inland cities may be confronted with mass migrations of “climate refugees.” In addition, architects and home buyers in many places will have to plan ahead for increased risks of floods, droughts, or wildfires.

Kahn expresses hope that, through innovation and careful planning, cities might ensure a desirable quality of life for their residents in the face of long-term climate change. He includes a “top five” list of U.S. cities that are currently best-protected against climate change’s effects: Detroit, Michigan; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Buffalo, New York; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and Salt Lake City, Utah.

Climate researchers, engineers, and urban planners will all find Climatopolis educational.

Robotic Imitation of Life

How to Catch a Robot Rat: When Biology Inspires Innovation by Agnès Guillot and Jean-Arcady Meyer. 2010. 226 pages. MIT Press. $29.95.

Human engineers draw some of their best inspirations from nature, according to technology researchers Agnès Guillot and Jean-Arcady Meyer in How to Catch a Robot Rat. The authors introduce readers to “the new bionics,” a field that integrates biology and engineering.

Guillot and Meyer share examples of recent innovations in new bionics. For example, observations of the iridescence of butterfly wings gave rise to new high-resolution video screens. And studying the powerful auditory systems of owls, which can track even the most muffled sound in a nighttime forest, clued a German company in on how to build an acoustic camera whose hyper-sensitive microphones can locate and capture sounds inaudible to humans.

Many more breakthroughs are soon to come. Some aquariums have debuted robotic fish that look and swim almost exactly like real fish. Prototype walking robots move faster than present-day ones because their designs are based on the bodies of cockroaches. And new drone airplanes have wings that flap like birds and insects.

Guillot and Meyer are hopeful that, over time, new bionics will create robots that behave like animals, too: They will learn, think, and adapt to changes in their environments. How to Catch a Robot Rat is an engaging introduction to revolutionary new fields in robotics that is appropriate for experts and general audiences alike.

Forecasting for Economic Peaks and Valleys

Outrageous Fortunes: The Twelve Surprising Trends That Will Reshape the Global Economy by Daniel Altman. 2011. 244 pages. Holt. $25.

China’s seemingly invincible economy won’t flourish forever, says economist Daniel Altman. In Outrageous Fortunes, he forecasts that the Chinese economy’s structural weaknesses will overtake it later this century and cause the nation to grow poorer even after so many decades of growing richer.

Many nations around the world will experience financial turbulence as they strive for the highest possible living standards but are hampered by market instability and shortages of human and material resources. National economic policies will shift back and forth, and waves of immigration will challenge both developing and industrialized economies.

Keeping track of the global marketplace’s daily rising and falling indexes while still maintaining sight of the long term could seem difficult, says Altman, but he assures readers that it’s actually fairly understandable. If we grasp the deep-rooted economic factors that sway a country’s economic path, we can make fairly accurate guesses as to where the path will lead.

He identifies a series of factors that he expects will markedly shake up the markets of China and Europe, demolish the World Trade Organization, and generate unexpected new job opportunities in the United States. He spots some impending risks, as well, such as worldwide expansion of “black market” activity. Outrageous Fortunes is an economic treatise that is incisive and approachable enough for economists and general audiences alike.

Reality Check for Space Travel

Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void by Mary Roach. 2010. 334 pages. W.W. Norton. $25.95.

Travel to Mars is feasible, but the astronauts who attempt it will have to contend with tremendous psychological and physical pressures—cramped confinements, sterile surroundings, and isolation more profound than any humans before them have ever experienced—says science writer Mary Roach in Packing for Mars. She visits space-travel research stations to witness the isolation chambers, antigravity rooms, and other experimental units that astronauts today are using to prepare for future voyages into deep space.

As she describes each exercise the flight crews undertake, she shares the unique forms of vertigo, disorientation, visual illusions, and other sensations that the low-gravity environs of space will impose on human space travelers. Roach adds the even more grueling experiments into how weeks or months of immobility would impact astronauts’ bodies—a key concern, since missions to other planets might require keeping the human crew in hibernation states for the duration of the voyages.

Roach’s Packing for Mars is a reality check into the challenges of deep space and how humans can gear up now to meet them. It’s worthwhile reading for aspiring astronauts, space enthusiasts, and all who take great interest in humanity’s potential future in space.

Averting Risky Business

Rethinking Risk: How Companies Sabotage Themselves and What They Must Do Differently by Joseph W. Koletar. 2011. 242 pages. AMACOM. $29.95.

Most business executives are vigilant about identifying strong competitors and important technological developments, but they often fail to watch for the broader array of real-life risks, argues Joseph Koletar in Rethinking Risk. The consequences, he concludes, fill newspaper headlines: BP’s oil rig breaks and wreaks havoc on the Gulf of Mexico, Toyota must recall hundreds of thousands of cars due to faulty brakes, and 9 million Mattel toys made in China are found to be laced with lead paint.

Koletar, who directed the fraud investigations of Ernst & Young and Deloitte & Touche, argues that the mistake that BP, Toyota, and other leaders in these and similar incidents made was not greed or carelessness, but rather a failure to plan ahead and avert the approaching danger. Most disasters are preventable, he says, but the leadership has to be aware and pay attention to the information at the ground level.

Koletar presents action strategies for business and organization leaders who want to raise their own foresight and keep their operations safe over the long term. Through examples of businesses that did not watch for risks, he teaches lessons on risk analysis, employee training, accountability, organizational intelligence, and the risk mechanisms that a business can put in place to stay aware and secure. Rethinking Risk is a guide that leaders in any industry or sector may want to consult.

Forward to the Steam Age?

Geothermal plants could have a seismic impact on energy demand—literally.

As the gradual shift from fossil fuels to renewables gets further under way, a number of researchers are beginning to look more closely at the promise of geothermal energy. While the geothermal process is not completely emission-free, the amount of greenhouse gases released is far less than that from conventional fossil fuels. Like wind and solar, heat from the earth is safer and cleaner than fossil fuels and provides an inexhaustible source of energy.

Currently, most geothermal energy comes from around 200 meters deep, at temperatures of less than 10°C—which is actually not very hot when compared with the temperatures just a little further down.

It is estimated that 99% of the earth has a temperature of more than 1,000°C. According to researchers at the Norwegian-based organization SINTEF, harnessing just a tiny fraction of this heat could theoretically provide enough energy for the entire world population.

Several Norwegian companies and organizations— including SINTEF, which has experience with petroleum exploration—are planning an ambitious pilot project that would harness the geothermal energy from 5,500 meters deep in the earth—about the same depth as some of the more recent onshore oil wells. According to researchers, the energy is there—all that is needed is a truly safe, effective means to tap into it.

Current wisdom favors binary cycle geothermal power plants. This type of plant features two deep, interconnected wells that operate in a cyclical fashion. Cold water is pumped down an injection well and heated by the underground rock (to around 95°C at that depth), then pumped back up via a production well, giving off steam, driving turbines, and generating electricity.

After around three decades, this process will have cooled the bedrock to the point where it is no longer hot enough to be productive, not unlike a tapped oil field run dry. The wells would be sealed off and the power plant shut down.

Then, three decades later, the temperature will have risen again, and it will be time to unseal the wells and begin the process anew, after upgrading the plant. This “ace in the hole” helps make geothermal power plants more cost-effective than oil rigs, researchers argue.

The Norwegian coalition is planning to go two or even three times deeper if the pilot plant is successful. That would require new technologies, however, and greatly increases the likelihood of incurring very serious risks. Most severely, fracturing or eroding the crust’s bedrock in order to recover its heat could trigger earthquakes in the region. This notably occurred in Basel, Switzerland, in 2006, when Geothermal Explorers Limited’s field operations set off a series of quakes.

At such high temperatures in the earth’s crust, the rock is liquefied, so anything else there runs the risk of being liquefied or broken. Electronic equipment shorts out very quickly at temperatures over 200°C. New technologies are needed in order to meet those challenges.

ExxonMobil and other oil companies are beginning to drill exploration wells at 10,000 meters, depths once believed to be too risky. Geothermal researchers now hope to adapt these oil drilling technologies, perhaps working in tandem with oil companies, and make them safer and more affordable for clean, renewable energy.

“Geothermal energy is a unique opportunity for the oil industry to develop in a new way,” says Are Lund, senior researcher at SINTEF Materials and Chemistry. “They will come to realize this, it’s just a matter of time.”—Aaron M. Cohen

Source: SINTEF, www.sintef.no.

Robots as Athletes

Soccer-playing robots may help advance artificial intelligence.

Imagine robots that can play soccer (football) at the level of the World Cup championships. For researchers in artificial intelligence, such an event would be tantamount to—and possibly even surpass—that moment in 1997 when IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer defeated then-world champion Garry Kasparov in chess.

The challenges are daunting. Autonomous, athletically capable humanoids that act together as a unit would require not just highly advanced software (the intellectual component) but also highly advanced hardware (the physical component). By sharing knowledge and codes, and developing and testing technologies together, AI designers hope to realize this vision.

Launched in 1993, the RoboCup international robot soccer competition (also known as the Robot World Cup Initiative) provides a platform for AI and robotics researchers to test their developments, work together, spur each other on, and create research breakthroughs. It is a competition in the best sense of the word—the kind that facilitates cooperation.

In his essay “Robot Soccer,” University of New South Wales computer science and engineering professor Claude Sammut describes the different levels of play, pointing out that the robotic soccer fields are smaller (and virtual in some low-level competitions), and the rules much simpler than in soccer played by humans. Currently, there are only three robots per team, as compared to eleven in human play. Sammut writes: “As the robots and their programming have become more sophisticated, the rules of the game, including field size and number of players, have been made tougher to encourage progress.”

French company Aldebaran Robotics’ humanoid Nao is the model of robot currently in use in the RoboCup. While still relatively basic, these humanoid robots use color cameras as their primary sensors (not unlike HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey), operate autonomously (as opposed to being remote-controlled), and can communicate with each other wirelessly.

Sammut stresses that soccer is only a means to an end—not an end in itself. “In addition to soccer playing, the competition also includes leagues for urban search and rescue and for robotic helpers at home,” he writes. He emphasizes that soccer is good for developing the fundamentals that will be necessary for these and many other tasks. The basics include “perceiving” their surroundings, interpreting constantly changing situations, making quick decisions based on those situations, and then acting on them, adjusting tactics as necessary. The AI units must also be able to transmit information back and forth.

Whereas soccer fields always conform to the same basic grid layout and boast the same landmarks (goal posts, for example), less-structured environments present greater challenges. For example, a house or apartment and the possessions it contains (which can act as landmarks) may not change much over time, but it is more complex to move about in. It is harder still for an AI program to map a completely unfamiliar urban environment without any immediately identifiable landmarks. In search and rescue situations, “the robot has to simultaneously map its environment while reacting to and interacting with the surroundings,” Sammut writes. And off the soccer field, AI units must interact with actual people—not just other AI units.

Despite the challenges, little by little, progress is being made each year. And if the participants and organizers meet their stated goals, then expect a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots to show no mercy against their opponents in the actual World Cup in 2050.—Aaron M. Cohen

Sources: Claude Sammut, “Robot Soccer,” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, Volume 1, Issue 6, http://wires.wiley.com/WileyCDA.

RoboCup, www.robocup.org.

You Know You're a Futurist If ...

Recently on Twitter, a few of us were reflecting on what makes futurists special.

@WorldFutureSoc You know you’re a futurist if you start accidentally putting NEXT year’s year in the date line. *smacks forehead*

@jbmahaffie It’d be great to collect “you know you’re a futurist if...” jokes, with a nod to Jeff Foxworthy, got any more?

@WorldFutureSoc If I’d had foresight, I would have hashtagged.

@WorldFutureSoc #YKYAF You know you’re a futurist if you look both ways before crossing a one-way street (watch out for wild cards)

@latta if you live in a large metro area, you *need* to look both ways on a one way.

@lisadonchak In the UK, I look the wrong way first before crossing the street. Priming!

@WorldFutureSoc #YKYAF You know you’re a futurist if you think AI stands for artificial intelligence, not “American Idol.”

@lisadonchak #YKYAF You know you’re a futurist if you type AGI—artificial general intelligence—instead of AIG.

@WorldFutureSoc #YKYAF You know you’re a futurist if you would use your time machine to travel forward (and come back to change the present, not the past).

@ISOLABELLA You know you’re a futurist when you use a worm hole to commute.

@lisadonchak Is this possible yet?! I’d sign up instantly! ;)

@ISOLABELLA Wld I b here?

@WorldFutureSoc #YKYAF You know you’re a futurist if you ask “What’s next?” instead of “What’s new?”

@lisadonchak #YKYAF if you think increased prevalence of “Internet addiction” is really just a sign of the impending tech #singularity.

@lisadonchak #YKYAF when you try to click nonexistent hotlinks in your physical newspaper, book, or magazine.

@WorldFutureSoc Or fast-forward a live lecture.

@lisadonchak Or rewind a live radio program!

@ryonck #YKYAF You know you’re a futurist if someone mentions weak signals & you don’t assume they’re talking about their cell phone plan.

@busynessgirl #YKYAF You know you’re a futurist if you’re already getting annoyed with software features that don’t actually exist yet.

@OscarMopperkon #YKYAF when you ask yourself so many “what if …” questions that it drives you crazy.

@nanofoo #YKYAF if you believe we’ll have exa-scale computing by year 2019.

@lisadonchak #YKYAF when you’re up at 6am tweeting about how #ykyaf.

@WorldFutureSoc Clearly we know we’re #futurists this morning! Thx for the company.

Source: The World Future Society Twitter page, http://twitter.com/World FutureSoc.