Sources: Thom Evans. Iowa Health Care Collaborative, www.ihconline.org.

Sarah Imhof, Concord Coalition, www.concordcoalition.org.
Commonwealth Fund. Web, www.commonwealthfund.org.

Books in Brief

Boomer Selling: Helping the Wealthiest Generation in History Own Your Premium Products and Services by Steve Howard. ACTion Press. 2009. 208 pages. $15.95.

Baby boomers might hold the key to nationwide economic recovery, argues business consultant Howard. He notes that they hold 70% of the U.S. wealth and are responsible for more than half of the nation’s discretionary spending. They are the demographic group most likely to have substantial savings, home equity, and stable jobs. They also tend to spend robustly, even in the current recession—though they are becoming more selective about what they buy.

Howard surmises that a business’s best hope for success is to thoroughly understand boomers, their needs, and how to serve them. Howard lends his observations on boomers’ spending habits, attitudes, and general likes and dislikes. He explains why sales tricks, gimmicks, and pressure tactics commonly associated with sales will not work. Boomers as a group share a unique frame of reference, he says. A seller would be well-advised to learn it and design products that accommodate it.

Building Peace: Practical Reflections from the Field edited by Craig Zelizer and Robert A. Rubinstein. Kumarian Press. 2009. 332 pages. Paperback. $29.95.

“Peace building” operations have increased since the 1980s in response to increasingly complex conflicts around the globe, according to conflict-resolution expert Zelizer, international-relations scholar Rubinstein, and 33 other scholars and field directors. They record the accomplishments of peace building during that time frame in Angola, Crimea, East Timor, Palestine, and other troubled regions.

Describing 13 endeavors in grassroots capacity building, community dialogue, peace education, psychosocial healing, media campaigns, creation of new structures for addressing conflicts, and behind-the-scenes negotiations with government leaders, the authors attest that peace-building operations have made lasting impacts in their zones of operation. They offer practical suggestions for policy makers and practitioners, concluding that, when they initiate a peace operation in a sensitive manner, in accordance with local context and in strong partnerships with local actors, they can hope to make momentous progress toward turning a war-torn region into a society that enjoys long-term peace.

Crime Signals: How to Spot a Criminal Before You Become a Victim by David Givens. St. Martin’s Griffin. 2009. 220 pages. $13.95.

No buyer has to ever heed the salesperson who says “read my lips,” according to Givens, a certified expert in nonverbal communications. He explains how body language can be a telltale indicator of almost any person’s motives—including those of swindlers, criminals, and terrorists. Crime rarely happens without prior warning, he argues.

A savvy eye that knows how to decode body language can spot and avoid many foul acts before they happen, as well as speed up the apprehension of offenders after the fact, says Givens. Citing his own field observations and the accounts of judges, journalists, police, and convicted offenders, he decodes dozens of hand gestures, shrugs, changes of complexion, dilations of the pupils, and other cues that can keep a would-be victim from walking unknowingly into danger.

Free-Range Kids: Giving Our Children the Freedom We Had Without Going Nuts with Worry by Lenore Skenazy. 2009. Jossey-Bass. $24.95.

Columnist Skenazy incited a maelstrom of controversy when she wrote in a news column about having once allowed her nine-year-old son to ride a subway in New York City alone. Many pundits expressed outrage that she would give her child such free rein. In Free-Range Kids, she counters these critics and argues that more freedom is just what children need.

Children who are overly monitored, she argues, will never learn to become independent adults. She cites evidence that many perceived dangers—online predators, germs, poisoned Halloween candy, hazardous playground equipment, and others—are real but are grossly exaggerated. Parents should exercise reasonable caution to keep their children safe without going into excess. Skenazy recommends setting realistic ground rules for using the Internet, playing in the woods, and transiting to or from school, as well as keeping toxic chemicals in household goods out of children’s reach. She also offers ideas on how to approach difficult issues, such as sexuality and school bullies.

Futures Research Methodology: Version 3.0 edited by Jerome C. Glenn and Theodore J. Gordon. Millennium Project. 2009. Approximately 1,300 pages. CD-ROM. $50.

Due to the increasing complexity and pace of change in our world, organization leaders seek better ways to anticipate opportunities and risks. Futures research methodologies—exercises in which participants explore, create, and test both possible futures and desirable ones in order to chart better paths forward—are going into increasingly widespread use, according to Glenn and Gordon, co-founders of the futures-research think tank Millennium Project.

They and more than 27 other leading futurists detail 37 futures-research methods, including Environmental Scanning, the Delphi Method, and Trend Impact Analysis. All methods are widely used by government agencies, private corporations, nongovernmental organizations, universities, and other decision-making bodies across the globe. The authors describe each method, recount its history, and explain how it is used, its strengths and weaknesses, its usefulness in combination with other methodologies, and the prospects for its use in the future.

How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2009. 302 pages. $25.

We weren’t designed to be rational creatures, says neuroscientist Lehrer. For centuries, most scholars have said that the human brain is guided by reason. Lehrer begs to differ. He argues that any time the brain must make a decision, it confronts multiple impulses and emotions; often, these emotions and impulses–our “gut feelings”-are our best guides. On the other hand, there are times when we have to use logic, because gut feelings could lead us blindly astray.
Nature gave us brains that are fundamentally pluralistic—amalgamations of reason and emotion—according to Lehrer. The secret, he adds, is knowing when to use reason and when we should let our feelings decide.

Lehrer examines real-life decisions made by airplane pilots, hedge fund investors, poker players, professional athletes, and other individuals to chart how each one thinks in the heat of the moment. He draws conclusions about how the human mind makes decisions, and how we can make our decisions better.

Long-Range Futures Research: An Application of Complexity Science by Robert H. Samet. 2009. 593 pages. Paperback. $39.20.

The sciences of evolution and complexity provide an approach for exploring the unprecedented patterns of global change expected in the future. Futurist consultant Samet views the human civil system’s ongoing processes of development as akin to natural-world evolution. The human system is, he says, as organic and evolutionary as Darwin’s model of biological change. Civil artifacts are a “second nature” that superimposes on the first and yet becomes entangled in it. Civilization is guided by visions of the future, and humans contribute the genetic structure of societal systems in the form of ideas, images, knowledge, blueprints, etc.

Samet provides a guide to evolutionary future research and explains how the concept of far-from-equilibrium stability replaces the notion of economic equilibrium. He applies complexity science to a world city region, derives macrolaws of Ecodynamics, and describes the geopolitical macrostructure and scenarios for the global macrosystems.

The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memory by Torkel Klingberg. Oxford. 2009. 202 pages. $21.95.

The human brain’s capacity has scarcely changed since prehistory, but the amount of information it is forced to process has increased exponentially, notes neuroscientist Klingberg. E-mails, phone calls, advertisements, text messages, multiple news headlines, and other bits of information confront us continually. We multitask and become used to constantly seeking more, quicker, and more-complex information. But feelings of inadequacy, distractedness, and information overload are common.

According to Klingberg, the modern work environment is so fast paced and demanding that our brains cannot keep up. But he thinks that this can change. Any continued activity shapes the brain and expands it, he explains. As we learn more about our brain’s limitations, we might learn how to change it and improve our abilities to multitask and gather information. Klingberg describes what is currently known about attention abilities, information processing, and training the brain for expanded capacity.

The Parents We Mean to Be: How Well-Intentioned Adults Undermine Children’s Moral and Emotional Development by Richard Weissbourd. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2009. 241 pages. $25.

Parents, not society at large, are the primary shapers of their children’s moral lives, according to psychologist Weissbourd. He challenges parents to focus on their children’s moral development first and their happiness second.

Many parents, he warns, unintentionally harm their children’s moral development by trying too hard to make their children happy, by striving unnecessarily to be closer to their children, or by becoming too invested in their children’s lives and intensely pushing them to be achievers. All of these impulses can ultimately lead to young adults who are self-involved, emotionally fragile, and conformist.

Weissbourd suggests constructive alternatives for helping children learn to deal with emotions, find motivation to live in accordance with values, and develop a strong sense of self that will resist peer pressure and adversity, as well as attend to and care for others.

The Passionate Mind Revisited: Expanding Personal and Social Awareness by Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad. 2009. 362 pages. Paperback. $16.95.

Conscious social evolution is both possible and necessary, according to yoga practitioners Kramer and Alstad. They link many of the problems in today’s world to limited worldviews, beliefs, and identities, and they urge readers to break through this lifetime of conditioning and thereby see life and the world in a new way.

The process, as they see it, involves synthesizing the best parts of Eastern and Western worldviews, valuing and protecting democracy, evolution, social justice, and—most importantly—self-awareness. The expanded social awareness that the world needs is best achieved not by setting our own selves aside, but by understanding ourselves more deeply first, and realizing what brought us to where we are today, and what we must do to continue our evolutionary journey.

The authors argue that humanity has achieved great things, but it has yet to turn its collective intelligence toward moving the world to where it can makes the lives of all its people livable, valuable, and valued, all of which are essential for creativity to flower.

The Penn Center Guide to Bioethics edited by Vardit Ravitsky, Autumn Fiester, and Arthur Caplan. Springer. 2009. 828 pages. $65.

Biotechnology presents us with promising breakthroughs, potential wonder cures, frightening dangers, and many perplexing ethical questions, according to Ravitsky, director of the Penn Center for Bioethics, and Center fellows Fiester and Caplan.

The editors compile 80 essays by bioethics specialists, each of whom presents an overview of his or her area of expertise and where the research in that area is heading. They explore a variety of developments and their implications for society: reproductive technologies, eugenics, biological threats to national security, vaccination, abortion, nanotechnology, organ transplantation, end-of-life issues, the meaning of free will in light of new discoveries of the brain and neural wiring, and more.

The Price of Perfection: Individualism and Society in the Era of Biomedical Enhancement by Maxwell J. Mehlman. Johns Hopkins University Press. 2009. 309 pages. $25.

Altering a patient’s genome or hormones to prevent a disease might be a good thing, says bioethicist Mehlman. But should doctors use such enhancements to improve a patient’s eyesight, brain function, mood, or physique? Biomedical treatments now enable doctors to do all of the above, he explains. And, he adds, its powers keep growing: Before a child is even born, doctors can now screen him or her for genetic traits and abnormalities; in time, they might be able to preprogram genes and weed out undesirable traits.

The potential to mitigate human suffering is exhilarating, Mehlman argues, but we run risks of going too far. Critics warn that we do not know enough about the human genome to tamper with it. Moreover, the benefits might not be realizable for all: What if the affluent use biomedicine disproportionately and become a genetically enhanced “genobility”? Mehlman concludes that biomedicine will continue to move forward, but that we can and should set appropriate boundaries for its use. He outlines several policy recommendations.

ReBound: A Proven Plan for Starting Over After Job Loss by Martha I. Finney. 2009. FT Press. 187 pages. Paperback. $16.99.

There is no such thing as a job-for-life; all of us can expect to lose our job at some point. What can we do when it happens? Business journalist and employment consultant Finney poses a comprehensive answer, proceeding chronologically from what to do prior to a layoff, during a layoff, and in the first few weeks of its aftermath. She offers specific pointers for how to handle the pain, anger, and other negative feelings; what to remember when negotiating a severance package and other final arrangements; what to tell family and loved ones; and how to minimize expenditures and find adequate short-term health coverage while waiting for a new job.

Finney follows with a complete game plan for finding a new job through networking and online resources, succeeding in a job interview, evaluating a new job offer, and—should a job offer prove acceptable—beginning strong and thereby lowering the chances of yet another layoff.

2009 State of the Future by Jerome C. Glenn, Theodore J. Gordon, and Elizabeth Florescu. The Millennium Project. 2009. 100-page paperback plus a CD-ROM with 6,700 pages of research. $49.95.

The combination of a global recession, climate change, increasing migrations, and shortages of water, food, and energy spell difficult times ahead, warn scholars Glenn, Gordon, and Florescu of the futures-research think tank Millennium Project in their 2009 State of the Future report. Global strategies and international coordination will be necessities, as will a greater awareness of the relationship between environmental problems and national security.

Combining research and projections from hundreds of futurist experts, the authors forecast the future with the recession ending in 2010 and with it continuing, a key variable that will hugely impact worldwide quality of life. They also present 35 elements of the world’s post-recession economic system, 300 items related to environmental security, three Middle East peace scenarios, science and technology scenarios, a Global Energy Collective Intelligence Design, the formation of future strategy units in selected governments, and 15 Global Challenges that communities will have to confront.

Taming the Dragons of Change in Business: 10 Tips for Anticipating, Embracing, and Using Change to Achieve Success by Richard Stieglitz. Acuity. 2009. 230 pages. Paperback. $19.95.

Prepare for never-before-seen levels of global interconnectedness and information exchange, says business consultant Stieglitz. Twenty-first-century communication tools—YouTube, Blackberrys, Twitter, etc.—are already changing commerce as we know it: Users can connect with other users anywhere and anytime to disseminate ideas and innovations at lightning-fast speeds, he notes.

By mid-century, he predicts, use of these tools will have brought the world’s businesses into a new global “relationship economy,” in which supply chains link every business on earth, business-government joint ventures the norm, and industry a steadfast caretaker of the environment, and governments across the world join together in powerful multinational ventures. Stieglitz outlines 10 specific ways in which this new economy will be different, and 10 new ways of thinking that business leaders will need to adopt in order to thrive among them.

The Truth About Trust in Business: How to Enrich the Bottom Line, Improve Retention, and Build Valuable Relationships for Success by Vanessa Hall. Emerald. 2009. 264 pages. $22.95.

Trust is fundamental to the life of a business or organization, says Hall, an entrepreneur who has spent most of her career in compliance and risk management in Australia’s financial services sector. She states that, while effective marketing strategies, quality products and services, and winning communications strategies are all important, customers will inevitably do business with the companies that they trust.

Hall defines trust, presents examples of why it is so important, and explains what a business or organization can do to build and maintain solid foundations of it among its staff and with clients and customers. Using diagrams, models, and anecdotes, she explains how to become more trustworthy, build trustworthy brands and businesses, determine whom you can—and cannot—trust, and ensure that trust that has been earned is not broken.

Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum. Perseus Books. 2009. 209 pages. $24.

Scientists are achieving as many breakthroughs as ever, but the U.S. general public barely seems to care, according to science journalist Mooney and marine scientist Kirshenbaum. They warn that scientists and the public are increasingly at a disconnect due to a weak education system, an apathetic media, and concerted efforts by anti-scientific politicians and religious demagogues to sideline science, as well as scientists’ systematic failure to counter all these trends.

This is dangerous, the authors warn. Scientific knowledge is needed now more than ever to help avert such threats as climate change, nuclear proliferation, pandemics, and cybernetic warfare. And scientific perspective is vital to help make sense of developments in genetics and neuroscience that stand to redefine human identity itself. The authors propose initiatives for reopening the lines of communication between scientists and the public before it is too late.

Why Don’t Students Like School? A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom by Daniel T. Willingham. Jossey-Bass. 2009. 180 pages. Hardcover. $24.95.

Teachers need to understand how their students’ minds work, says psychologist Willingham. He sympathizes with teachers who get frustrated because they feel they are not inspiring their students or keeping their interest.

Using graphs, charts, and scientific studies, Willingham offers teachers these insights: how their students’ brains work, why classroom instruction isn’t interesting to them, and what strategies a teacher could employ to make instruction more interesting to them. He explores, and answers the pros and cons of “drills”; the secret to getting students to think like mathematicians, scientists, and historians; and how to meet the challenges of the standardized tests without just “teaching to the test.” He also shares some surprising findings about the similarities between most students’ learning styles and the possibility of increasing their intelligence.

Work Hard, Be Nice: How Two Inspired Teachers Created the Most Promising School in America by Jay Mathews. Algonquin. 2009. 328 pages. Paperback. $14.95.

Education reporter Mathews tells the success story of Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, two teachers who refused to believe that low-income, at-risk students could not be taught. Fresh out of college, the two took up teaching in a fifth-grade classroom at a disadvantaged inner-city school and introduced a new model of teaching based on lively lesson plans, high expectations, and involved teachers who believe in their students. Their students responded with gusto—in the first year, attendance went up, classroom participation soared, and students’ scores on the state assessment tests more than doubled.

Feinberg and Levin have since expanded their model into a nationwide network of 66 middle schools, the Knowledge Is Power Program. Mathews describes why Feinberg and Levin embarked on their teaching mission, the challenges they met, and what they did to overcome them. Mathews cites their endeavor as a hope for struggling students everywhere: With an enthusiastic teacher, he says, any young person can learn to achieve.

Coming Soon: A Smarter Internet

Less Web searching, more Web finding.

The founders of a new U.S. start-up called SemanticV have come up with a new weapon in the war against information overload: a search engine that actually learns the meaning of words for which it’s searching.

In June 2009, Americans conducted 14 billion Internet searches; about 40% of adult Web surfers conduct at least one in a typical day. As people post more information to the Internet — digitized public records, medical information, scanned pages from old books, etc. — the search experience could become less efficient, because the act of looking up a simple word or topic on Google in the future will yield a greater number of results than it does today.

That might sound like a good thing, but Google can’t tell you which of the myriad pages it gives you is the most relevant to the topic about which you’re seeking information. In instances when you’re researching a term or a topic that’s ambiguous, the list of results will mostly be irrelevant to what you’re seeking.

For example, the word tank could refer to a piece of military equipment or a storage container for oil. Plug the word tank into the Google query box and you’ll get a wide variety of results. If you’re not sure what type of tank you want to find, you won’t be able to add any relevant tags to narrow your search. The less you know about the subject you’re looking up, the more laborious and inefficient the research process becomes as you’re forced to spend more time going through bad leads.

SemanticV’s “Stingray” engine divines the meaning of words based on how those words are actually used, as opposed to the number of times they show up in a Web page and the popularity of that page (which is what Google does).

Stingray operates based on semantics, or the scientific study of the meaning of words. The program allows you to look up different words in different bodies of text. Wikipedia is one such body that SemanticV uses in its online demonstration; the e-mail archive of Enron is another. You, the user, would add your own, like your own company’s e-mail archive or maybe all the Google results for one particular question. The results change depending on where you’re looking.

“For example, within the scope of Wikipedia, the word tank is used in a variety of ways, mostly military,” says Aaron Barnett, one of the SemanticV founders. “In the Enron e‑mail archives, the word tank also has a variety of meanings and usages that are particular to how energy companies manage storage and transportation.”

The Stingray engine doesn’t just look for the word in the text; it analyzes the surrounding words the same way a human brain trying to figure out the meaning of a new verb or noun will scrutinize the word in context, or within multiple contexts. Stingray uses the information it gathers to show you synonyms, themes, and patterns.

“If you search for God in the King James Bible, Stingray sees two strong subject areas — one heavy with thou and shalt and another having to do with Christ and apostles. While reading through movie scripts however, God is understood in another sense, as an expletive,” says Barnett.

Once you see how different people use the word you’re looking up, you can cut down on your research time by disregarding the clutter, like the expletives that are complicating your search for God. The words are rendered less ambiguous, and the search experience becomes more productive, even conversational.

“By asking for better results, choosing a meaning, you communicate with Stingray,” says Barnett. — Patrick Tucker

Source: SemanticV, www.semanticV.com.

The Dawn of the Postliterate Age

Information technology, cybernetics, and artificial intelligence may render written language “functionally obsolete” by 2050.
Originally published in THE FUTURIST magazine, November-December 2009

By Patrick Tucker

For the literate elite — which includes everyone from Barack Obama to this spring’s MFA graduates — the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments over the demise of reading has become obligatory theater. Poets, writers, and teachers alike stand over the remains of a once-proud book culture like a Greek chorus gloomily crowded around a fallen king. How can it be that, between 1982 and 2007, reading declined by nearly 20% for the overall U.S. population and 30% for young adults aged 18–24, or that 40 million Americans read at the lowest literacy level?

The answer that rises most immediately to meet this anguish is: the image makers. Television, the Pied Piper of the last century, has been joined in its march by video games, YouTube, and an assortment of other visual tempters that are ferrying Western culture further away from the nourishing springs of literature. The public appetite for images — scenes of war, staged or otherwise, music videos, game shows, celebrities roaming the streets of Los Angeles in a daze — seems both limitless in scope and apocalyptic in what it portends for the future.

To the literary eye, the culture of the image has grown as large as Godzilla, as omnipresent as an authoritarian government, and as cruel and erratic as the Furies. In our rush to blame the moving picture for the state of our cultural disarray, we’ve overlooked the fact that — as a carrier of data, thoughts, ideas, prayers, and promises — the image is neither as functional nor as versatile as text.

The real threat to the written word is far more pernicious. Much like movie cameras, satellites, and indeed television, the written word is, itself, a technology, one designed for storing information. For some 6,000 years, the human mind was unable to devise a superior system for holding and transmitting data. By the middle of this century, however, software developers and engineers will have remedied that situation. So the greatest danger to the written word is not the image; it is the so-called “Information Age” itself.

Texting, the Brief, Golden Age of Internet Communication

Consider, first, the unprecedented challenges facing traditional literacy in today’s Information Age. The United States spends billions of dollars a year trying to teach children how to read and fails often. Yet, mysteriously, declining literacy and functional nonliteracy have yet to affect technological innovation in any obvious way. New discoveries in science and technology are announced every hour; new and ever-more complicated products hit store shelves (or virtual store shelves) all the time. Similarly, human creation of information — in the form of data — has followed a fairly predictable trend line for many decades, moving sharply upward with the advent of the integrated circuit in the mid-twentieth century.

The world population is on track to produce about 988 billion gigabytes of data per year by 2010. We are spending less time reading books, but the amount of pure information that we produce as a civilization continues to expand exponentially. That these trends are linked, that the rise of the latter is causing the decline of the former, is not impossible.

In a July 2008 Atlantic article entitled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Nicholas Carr beautifully expresses what so many have been feeling and observing silently as society grapples with the Internet and what it means for the future:

“Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory…. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.… My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

Information Age boosters such as Steven Johnson (Everything Bad is Good for You), Don Tapscott (Grown Up Digital), and Henry Jenkins (Convergence Culture) argue that information technology is creating a smarter, more technologically savvy public.

These authors point out that the written word is flourishing in today’s Information Era. But the Internet of 2009 may represent a brilliant but transitory Golden Age. True, the Web today allows millions of already well-read scholars to connect to one another and work more effectively. The Internet’s chaotic and varied digital culture is very much a product of the fact that people who came by their reading, thinking, and research skills during the middle of the last century are now listening, arguing, debating, and learning as never before.

One could draw reassurance from today’s vibrant Web culture if the general surfing public, which is becoming more at home in this new medium, displayed a growing propensity for literate, critical thought. But take a careful look at the many blogs, post comments, MySpace pages, and online conversations that characterize today’s Web 2.0 environment. One need not have a degree in communications (or anthropology) to see that the back-and-forth communication that typifies the Internet is only nominally text-based. Some of today’s Web content is indeed innovative and compelling in its use of language, but none of it shares any real commonality with traditionally published, edited, and researched printed material.

This type of content generation, this method of “writing,” is not only subliterate, it may actually undermine the literary impulse. As early as 1984, the late linguist Walter Ong observed that teletype writing displayed speech patterns more common to ancient aural cultures than to print cultures (a fact well documented by Alex Wright in his book Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages). The tone and character of the electronic communication, he observed, was also significantly different from that of printed material. It was more conversational, more adolescent, and very little of it conformed to basic rules of syntax and grammar. Ong argued compellingly that the two modes of writing are fundamentally different. Hours spent texting and e-mailing, according to this view, do not translate into improved writing or reading skills. New evidence bares this out. A recent report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that text messaging use among teenagers in Ireland was having a highly negative effect on their writing and reading skills.

Cybernetics and the Coming Era of Instantaneous Communication

Consider the plight of the news editor or book publisher trying to sell carefully composed, researched, and fact-checked editorial content today, when an impatient public views even Web publishing as plodding. Then imagine the potential impact of cybernetic telepathy.

In the past few years, amazing breakthroughs involving fMRI, or functional magnetic resonance imaging — with potential ramifications for education — have become an almost daily occurrence. The fMRI procedure uses non-ionizing radiation to take detailed pictures of soft tissue (specifically the brain) that tends to show up as murky and indistinct on computed tomography scans. The scanner works like a slow-motion movie camera, taking new scans continuously and repeatedly. Instead of observing movement the way a camcorder would, the scanner watches how oxygenated hemoglobin (blood flow) is diverted throughout the brain. If you’re undergoing an fMRI scan and focusing one portion of your brain on a specific task, like exerting your anterior temporal lobe on pronouncing an unfamiliar word, that part of the brain will expand and signal for more oxygenated blood, a signal visible to the scanner.

In 2005, researchers with the Scientific Learning Corporation used fMRI to map the neurological roots of dyslexia and designed a video game called Fast ForWord based on their findings. The project was “the first study to use fMRI to document scientifically that brain differences seen in dyslexics can be normalized by neuroplasticity-based training. Perhaps of greater relevance to educators, parents, and the children themselves are the accompanying significant increases in scores on standardized tests that were also documented as a result of the intervention,” neuroscience experts Steve Miller and Paula Tallal wrote in 2006 in School Administrator.

Fast ForWord is likely the forerunner of many products that will use brain mapping to market education “products” to schools or possibly to parents, a commercial field that could grow to include not just software, but also chemical supplements or even brain implants. In much the same way that Ritalin improves focus, fMRI research could lead to electronic neural implants that allow people to process information at the speed of electric currents — a breakthrough possible through the emergent field of cybernetics.

Speculative nonsense? To Kevin Warwick, an IT professor at Reading University in the United Kingdom, our cybernetic future is already passé. In 2006, Warwick had an experimental Internet-ready microchip surgically implanted in his brain. Building on the success of widely available implants like the cochlears that treat certain types of deafness, Warwick’s implant research dealt with enhancing human abilities. In a December 2006 interview with I.T. Wales, he discussed an experiment he took part in with his wife, wherein the couple actually traded neural signals — a crude form of telepathy.

Warwick wore an electrode implant that linked his nervous system (not his actual brain) directly to the Internet. His wife, Irina, had a similar implant, and the two were able to trade signals over the Internet connection.

“When she moved her hand three times,” Warwick reported, “I felt in my brain three pulses, and my brain recognized that my wife was communicating with me.”

In April 2009, a University of Wisconsin–Madison biomedical engineering doctoral student named Adam Williams posted a status update to the social networking site Twitter via electroencephalography or EEG. EEG records the electrical activity that the brain’s neurons emit during thought. Williams, seated in a chair with the EEG cap on his head, looked at a computer screen displaying an array of numbers and letters. The computer highlighted the letters in turn, and when the computer highlighted a letter Williams wished to use, his brain would emit a slightly different electrical pulse, which the EEG would then pick up to select that letter.

“If you’re looking at th”” said Williams. “But when the ‘R’ flashes, your brain says, ‘Hey, wait a minute. Something’s different about what I was just paying attention to.’ And you see a momentary change in brain activity.”

Williams’s message to the world of Twitter? “Using EEG to send tweet.”

While advancement in cybernetics and the decline in literary culture appear, at first glance, completely unrelated, research into cyber-telepathy has direct ramifications for the written word and its survivability. Electronic circuits mapped out in the same pattern as human neurons could, in decades ahead, reproduce the electrical activity that occurs when our natural transmitters activate. Theoretically, such circuits could allow parts of our brain to communicate with one another at greater levels of efficiency, possibly allowing humans to access data from the Web without looking it up or reading it.

The advent of instantaneous brain-to-brain communication, while inferior to the word in its ability to communicate intricate meaning, may one day emerge as superior in terms of simply relaying information quickly. The notion that the written word and the complex system of grammatical and cultural rules governing its use would retain its viability in an era where thinking, talking, and accessing the world’s storehouse of information are indistinguishable seems uncertain at best.

Google, AI, and Instantaneous Information

The advent of faster and more dexterous artificial intelligence systems could further erode traditional literacy. Take, for example, one of the most famous AI systems, the Google search engine. According to Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, the company is turning “search” (the act of 220;search” (the act of googling) into a conversational interface. In an interview with Venture Beat, Norvig noted that “Google has several teams focused on natural language and dozens of Googlers with a PhD in the field, including myself.”

AI watchers predict that natural-language search will replace what some call “keywordese” in five years. Once search evolves from an awkward word hunt — guessing at the key words that might be in the document you’re looking for — to a “conversation” with an AI entity, the next logical step is vocal conversation with your computer. Ask a question and get an answer. No reading necessary.

Barney Pell, whose company Powerset was also working on a conversational-search interface before it was acquired by Microsoft, dismissed the notion that a computerized entity could effectively fill the role of text, but he does acknowledge that breakthroughs of all sorts are possible.

“The problem with storing raw sounds is that it’s a sequential access medium; you have to listen to it. You can’t do other things in parallel,” said Pell during our 2007 discussion. “But if you have a breakthrough where auditory or visual information could connect to a human brain in a way that bypasses the processes of decoding the written text, where you can go as fast and slow as you want and have all the properties that textual written media supports, then I could believe that text could be replaced.”

The likelihood of that scenario depends on whom you ask, but if technological progress in computation is any indication, we are safe in assuming that an artificial intelligence entity will eventually emerge that allows individuals to process information as quickly or as slowly as reading written language.

Will “HAL” Make Us Stupid?

How can the written word — literary culture — survive the advent of the talking, all-knowing, handheld PC? How does one preserve a culture built on a 6,000-year-old technology in the face of super-computation? According to many of the researchers who are designing the twenty-first century’s AI systems, the answer is, you don’t. You submit to the inexorable march of progress and celebrate the demise of the written word as an important step forward in human evolution.

When confronted by the statistic that fewer than 50% of high-school seniors could differentiate between an objective Web site and a biased source, Norvig replied that he did perceive it as a problem, and astonishingly suggested that the solution was to get rid of reading instruction altogether.

“We’re used to teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic; now we should be teaching these evaluation skills in school,” Norvig told me. “Some of it could be just-in-time. Education, search engines themselves should be providing clues for this.”

Norvig is not an enemy of written language; he’s even contributed several pieces to the McSweeny’s Web site, a favorite among bibliophiles. He’s not a starry-eyed technologist harboring unrealistic views of technology’s potential. Still, this cavalierly stated proposal that we might simply drop the teaching of “reading, writing, and arithmetic” in favor of search-engine-based education speaks volumes about what little regard some of the world’s top technologists hold for our Victorian education system and its artifacts, like literary culture.

In the coming decades, lovers of the written word may find themselves ill-equipped to defend the seemingly self-evident merits of text to a technology-oriented generation who prefer instantaneous data to hard-won knowledge. Arguing the artistic merits of Jamesian prose to a generation who, in coming years, will rely on conversational search to find answers to any question will likely prove a frustrating, possibly humiliating endeavor.

If written language is merely a technology for transferring information, then it can and should be replaced by a newer technology that performs the same function more fully and effectively. But it’s up to us, as the consumers and producers of technology, to insist that the would-be replacement demonstrate authentic superiority. It’s not enough for new devices, systems, and gizmos to simply be more expedient than what they are replacing — as the Gatling gun was over the rifle — or more marketable — as unfiltered cigarettes were over pipe tobacco. We owe it to posterity to demand proof that people’s communications will be more intelligent, persuasive, and constructive when they occur over digital media, proof that illiteracy, even in an age of great technological capability, will improve people’s lives.

As originally proposed by futurist William Crossman, the written word will likely be rendered a functionally obsolete technology by 2050. This scenario exists alongside another future in which young people reject many of the devices, networks, and digital services that today’s adults market to them so relentlessly. Being more technologically literate, they develop the capacities to resist the constant push of faster, cheaper, easier information and select among the new and the old on the basis of real value. If we are lucky, today’s young people will do what countless generations before them have done: defy authority.

About the Author

Patrick Tucker is the senior editor of THE FUTURIST magazine and director of communications for the World Future Society.

Debunking the "Depression Gene"

Depression's causes continue to defy definitive answers.

In 2003, researchers reported to great excitement that they had identified what could be called a "depression gene" - a genetic link to the risk of major depression. But new analysis of the groundbreaking study now disputes this conclusion. The new analysis, conducted by researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health, finds no strong association between the gene and risk of depression, though it does affirm the study's findings on stressful life events as triggers for the illness.

The 2003 "depression gene" study was influential, as it benefited from advanced technologies emerging in genetic research and suggested possibilities for gene-based therapies. The study found that a gene involved in serotonin activity increased the risk of depression among individuals experiencing stressful life events over a five-year period. The study thus offered hope for genetic testing and treatment for depression.

However, the study's results have not been consistently replicated. Though the role of the presumed high-risk gene was not supported, researchers did find a correlation between stressful life events and depression risk. Moreover, the findings do not exclude the possibility of some other genetic influence on mental health.

"Rigorous reevaluation of published studies provide the checks and balances necessary for scientific process," notes NIMH director Thomas R. Insel. "We are still in the early days of understanding how genes and environment interact to increase the risk for depression."

Depression reportedly affects about 121 million people worldwide, according to the World Health Organization, and is among the leading causes of disability. And while researchers debate depression's causes, patients seek solutions. Antidepressant use among Americans nearly doubled in the decade between 1996 and 2005, with more than 10% of people over age 6 reportedly receiving antidepressant medications, reports NIMH.

In Spain, nearly one-fourth of women now take antidepressants and 30% take tranquilizers, according to a new study published by the journal Atención Primaria. Rather than studying the genetic risks for depression, however, the Spanish study focused on environmental factors, specifically problems within the family and stressful life events (SLEs). Again, their conclusions were not clear.

The researchers speculated that family dysfunction was a contributing factor to women's mental health problems, but found this not to be the case.

"The use of psychopharmaceuticals is often related to family or work-related problems. We wanted to see if there was actually a positive link between the consumption of antidepressants and benzodiazepines and any kind of family dysfunction," lead author Sonsoles Pérez, a doctor at the Las Águilas Health Centre in Madrid, told the Spanish science news service SINC.

The researchers used the Apgar test, a protocol for measuring family functionality (e.g., cooperation, adaptability, affection, social maturity), as well as records of stressful life events, or SLEs (e.g., births, deaths, divorces, job loss), which often trigger mental illnesses. They compared these measures with the survey subjects' prescribed use of antidepressants and benzodiazepines, which are often used for insomnia.

"Although one might think that family conflicts lead to greater consumption of psychopharmaceuticals among women, we did not find any such relationship," Pérez reports.

The researchers did find that use of benzodiazepines increased with age, but that use of antidepressants did not, suggesting directions for further research into understanding the relationship among family dysfunction, stressful events, and mental health, as well as what interventions or medications are most appropriate to treat individuals.

"We think that greater training is needed in identifying SLE and family dysfunction, and recording these in patients' records in order to help psychologists, psychiatrists, and primary health-care specialists," Pérez concludes.

Untangling the mysteries of the human mind is complicated by the many interacting risk factors, both genetic and environmental, and finding the exact combinations of risk factors that trigger depression continue to challenge researchers. Meanwhile, depression continues to afflict more individuals - and their families.

Sources: National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health, www.nimh.nih.gov.

Plataforma SINC, Fundación Española para la Ciencia y la Tecnología, www.plataformasinc.es.

Innovation and Creativity in a Complex World

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Order The Conference Volume Innovation and Creativity in a Complex World

By Cynthia G Wagner; Rick Docksai; Aaron M Cohen
Attendees at the World Future Society's 2009 annual conference in Chicago learned new ways to understand and manage complexity.

Those who fear that we will leave the future in worse shape for the next generation, take comfort: The kids are not just all right - they've got it right, and about quite a lot of things.

For the first time, the younger generation is an authority over older generations, said Don Tapscott, author of Grown Up Digital. The Net generation (aka the echo boom, Generation Y, or millennials) are now "lapping" their parents on the "information track," he told the 850 attendees of the World Future Society's annual meeting, WorldFuture 2009: Innovation and Creativity in a Complex World, held in Chicago July 17- 19.

But if we want to help the Net generation succeed, Tapscott said, our institutions are doing everything wrong. "We do the opposite of what we should," he said, because "we fear what we don't understand." The negative view that society has of this generation now coming of age is not supported by the data.

For instance, the Net generation isn't reading newspapers or books at the rates that their parents and grandparents do, but that does not mean they are less informed. Tapscott quoted one young woman who said that, rather than reading a printed newspaper that only comes out once a day, she likes to "triangulate" the news by subscribing to 60 RSS feeds so that she can form her own opinions. Accused of only getting her news from the Comedy Central program The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, she replied, "The Daily Show is only funny if you know the news."

One of the things that institutions do wrong for the Net generation is to ban their tools, Tapscott warned. Social networking enables young people to learn in more collaborative ways and to become more engaged in tasks: They feel that working and learning are the same thing, and they get more out of it when it's social, entertaining, and fun. So Tapscott advised teachers to abandon the "drill and kill, sage on a stage" model of pedagogy, and managers to give workers license to self-organize, then give them the feedback that they need and want to get better.

David Pearce Snyder of the Snyder Family Enterprise focused on the role of education in preparing today's students for tomorrow's world. He argued that most of today's adults are ill-equipped to deal with complex decision making and that most of today's schools are failing to provide tomorrow's adults with "complexipacity" - the cognitive skills necessary for dealing with complexity, including systemic thinking, creativity, collaboration, problem solving, contextual learning, and cyber literacy.

Resistance to teaching beyond "core knowledge" is strong, Snyder noted, as it takes away from history, literature, and other subjects that represent (to the traditionalist's mind) a quality education. "But this silo thinking is what the researchers were saying is why adults can't deal with complex situations. So it's going to be a trick reinventing education," he said.

Resistance to new technologies also can be strong, often to the detriment of a business, said futurist consultant Michael Zey. Traveling salesmen, for instance, couldn't be convinced of the benefits of the first car phones. "They said the car was the only place they could get away from it all. The car phone was intrusive," he noted.

"Think in terms of the big picture - globally and holistically," Zey advised. Technology will continue to expand and population will continue to increase. The United States will have 400 million people by 2050, so technology has to serve that growing population.

Leading for Change

Certainly, hope is not lost for grownups, and futurists offered a wealth of ideas for honing "complexipacity" skills in fields ranging from law enforcement to health care.

In a global environment of weakened nation-states, citizens' overreliance on the government for help leaves them less capable of handling their own problems, said Bud Levin, commander of the Policy and Planning Bureau, Waynesboro (West Virginia) Police Department. For example, local police systems are rapidly overwhelmed when citizens call 911 for minor problems, so "whatever disaster may arise, [be it] terrorism or gangs, will overwhelm police," he warned.

Police departments must start "viewing policing as comprehensive community-building," Levin said, and help communities "focus on parenting and family building." Families have become broken because governments have taken over too many family functions, he said. Future leadership will come from the communities, so we need to build up their self-reliance.

"Remember, we're public servants, not in the business of running lives," he said.

Another challenge to institutions is to overcome resistance to foresight and creativity. As futures educator Peter Bishop of the University of Houston noted, government needs foresight to "increase good, decrease harm"; government leaders are accountable to citizens: If they fail, the public can vote them out of office.

The downside of this accountability is that it "makes government decision makers more cautious," Bishop said. "There are more-frequent public tests on their decisions, and they're not allowed to have significant failures." When failures are averted and crises avoided, the decision makers get very little credit for it, while people who fix the problems created by disasters often do get credit.

"Foresight is difficult; it is strongly resisted because there are risks when [decision makers] use it," Bishop noted. "There are disincentives."

Creativity-studies specialist Marci Segal, president of Creativityland Inc., offered leaders practical advice for breaking those kinds of disincentives for innovative thinking.

"There was a long-standing bias against creativity as 'nutso,' but in the Sixties it began to be looked at as a mental skill," Segal observed. Yet, obstacles to creative thinking remain, and for much the same reason that obstacles to foresight persist, as Bishop pointed out.

"Remember Pandora?" Segal prodded attendees. "'Out-of-the-box thinking' is a bad archetype for creativity." No wonder we become insecure when we are told we think out of the box.

She also pointed to Prometheus, punished for stealing fire, and to Icarus when he flew too close to the sun as mythic warnings against creativity. So how do we overcome the fear of creative thinking?

Segal recommended giving the "Icaruses" of the organization places for "soft landings" for their ideas. Defer judgment of any ideas brought up in a brainstorming session in order to keep ideas flowing, then play "Angel's Advocate" for a new idea by first listing three good things about it. After that, you can address any concerns and what can be done about them.

You Could Be Better Than You Are and So Could Your Kids

Reproductive technologies that enable us to produce perfect kids may be inevitable, and in fact may become the norm, said bioethicist Arthur Caplan of the University of Pennsylvania. "Within 20 to 25 years, there will be billboards proclaiming that responsible mothers won't do it the old-fashioned way," he predicted. Such messages will reinforce the idea that "the responsible way to go is the controlled way" through the use of artificial wombs and genetic enhancements.

Caplan pointed out that arguments against technologies to create "perfect" babies - such as the risk of homogenization, the unfair advantages for the rich, and the treatment of children as objects - are social objections that not only won't stop the technologies from coming, but would still be objections in society even without the technologies. Unfairness is always unfair.

As the technologies advance, moreover, arguments in the abortion debate, such as the issue of viability, will disappear with the advent of artificial wombs. But Caplan warned that we should be careful about overturning abortion rights because throwing out the fundamental right to privacy could give government the perogative to mandate child creation, or even put pressure on parents to perfect their children or to have certain types of children.

Slow, cautious consideration of the consequences of these new technologies will thus be needed, but it won't stop the technologies from coming, Caplan concluded.

Whether we'll change young people in the future or not, it is clear that young people themselves will change the future. One way to do that is to make education more entrepreneurial, argued recent highschool graduate Max Marmer, an intern with the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto.

"Why doesn't our education system nurture the innovative spirit and leadership traits necessary for changemaking in the twenty-first century? Because it is a legacy of the industrial era that was designed to stamp these traits out," Marmer said, arguing that success will require us to flip the education paradigm on its head.

"Instead of filling our heads with knowledge for 15 years, we should want to do something first, of tangible value to the real world, and then learn the skills necessary to do it," he said. "Learning skills on an as-needed basis fosters deeper understanding and greater motivation because it furthers a goal you care about. This also answers the ubiquitous question heard from students, 'Why am I learning this?'"

Walking his talk on the concept of life entrepreneurship, Marmer introduced his startup organization, Force For the Future, whose mission is to "get more young people on this entrepreneurial path and accelerate the learning curve and impact by providing them with foresight, skills, connections, and a support network of peers, mentors, and organizations." It is not enough to want to change the world, he argued; there must be learning environments that allow this to take place.

"Every young person can change the world, and our future depends on our collective ability to do so," said Marmer.

[Sidebar]

Fighting Poverty with Marketing

Antipoverty programs are taking more-personalized approaches, according to Philip Kotler, Northwestern University professor of international marketing. He discussed the trend of "social marketing," which promotes positive behaviors - eating better, smoking less, pursuing education, etc. - by selecting target groups and crafting messages specifically for them, instead of broadcasting generic messages to society at large.

"We don't think a mass-message, Coca Cola approach - 'Coca Cola is good, everybody should drink Coca Cola' - would work," he said.

As a case study, Kotler described how the Romanian government used social marketing for its "Among Us Women" campaign in 2002, in conjunction with the U.S. Agency for International Development. The campaign aimed to encourage contraceptive use among female factory workers. It noted that the target population suffered from a lack of education about contraception.

"They thought that birth-control pills caused facial hair and cancer, two things that obviously none of them wanted," Kotler noted.

The program hired health counselors to go to the factories and speak to assemblies of women about how they could safely use birth-control treatments to prevent too many births. Birth-control use increased substantially, as did the rates of babies born healthy.

The social-marketing strategy also succeeded in lowering resistance among Malawi's farmers to using chemical fertilizers and high-yield seeds. Starting in 2005, USAID and the Malawi government jointly brought farmers together in focus groups to tell them about the benefits of these agricultural enhancements and to dispel misinformation. Farmers listened and achieved record-breaking harvests in 2006 and 2007.

- Rick Docksai

Technology and the Economy

The current recession is not just an economic crisis - it's also a punctuation mark, argued Menno van Doorn of the Research Institute of Sogeti, Amsterdam. The industrial model has come to an end, thanks to the digital technology revolution, which is profoundly changing every institution.

Van Doorn proposed that information technology is not only a cause but also the solution to the global economic crisis, and urged businesses to change their organizational structures in order to stay relevant and be successful in the global economy. For example, harnessing the interactive, collaborative nature of the Internet will enable them to connect better with their customers.

Robert Atkinson, founder and president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, listed a few key public policy principles for driving prosperity in the digital age: looking to digital progress as the key driver of improved quality of life and productivity, actively encouraging the digital transformation of economic sectors, and supporting public-private partnerships to build digital platforms.

Atkinson warned that policy makers should "do no harm" to the digital engine of growth. For example, they should avoid regulatory restrictions, protect intellectual property, and reduce protections for incumbents against digital innovators.

- Aaron M. Cohen

The Future of China

The Internet has had a positive impact on China by creating a more open society and giving citizens a greater voice in their own country, said Ting Xu, senior project manager for the Global Project, Bertelsmann Foundation. Currently, there are 300 million Internet users in China, and as time passes, this number will grow exponentially.

On the other hand, she said, China's rapid development has created disruptions, such as greater income disparity. Very little exists in terms of health care or pensions for the rural workforce, for instance, and rural- to-urban migration is at an estimated 30 million per year.

Gender imbalance is another potential driver of social tensions: By 2030, approximately 30 million Chinese men will be unable to find wives.

Futurist consultant John Cashman of Social Technologies reported that the massive transitions occurring simultaneously across all of the different sectors (social, economic, political, technological, etc.) have created an unusual dichotomy: China is now both a developing country and a world power. As a world power, the country has joined the WTO and wants to be accepted by the rest of the world. Yet, China is still learning the rules of the game and, as a developing country, needs time to learn them.

Cashman forecast that the growing middle class, generally more educated and worldly than in previous generations, will be much more influential at the grassroots level, pressuring the government to change domestic and international policy. They will be more effective at promoting positive change in China.

- Aaron M. Cohen

Energy Wild Cards

Two "energy wild cards" - the commercialization of nuclear fusion energy and cars that run without fuel - could result in improved health, but also in economic and political upheaval, said Francis Stabler, principal of Future Tech LLC.

Deuterium, a form of hydrogen that is abundant in ocean water, is very conducive to fusion reactions, according to Stabler. If a breakthrough occurs in harnessing deuterium and using it to generate fusion energy, nuclear fusion might soon displace fossil fuels and nuclear fission. Fusion-plant construction would boom, as would refurbishment of existing nuclear-fission and fossil-fuelpowered plants into plants that generate fusion energy. Within 40 years, most of the world's power plants would be fusion-based.

"China is currently bringing online one coal plant every week. They could switch over to building fusion plants at that same rate because they need the additional power," said Stabler.

Gas stations could practically disappear if the second wild card occurs. Stabler envisions car engines powered by energy modules that generate either zero-point energy, which draws energy out of a vacuum, or low energy nuclear reactions, which merge neutrons with atoms at low speeds to produce radiation-free fusion energy. Unlike combustible fuel, which vehicle owners have to refill once every few days, these modules might only need "refilling" once every three to four years.

In the short term, the combination of nuclear fusion and fuel-free cars would lead to serious economic trouble for countries whose economies depend on exports of oil and natural gas - Bolivia, Canada, Russia, Venezuela, and most of the Middle East. The hardships might lead to political upheavals and more incidents of terrorism.

- Rick Docksai

Infotech's Impacts on Communication

Information technology's expansion could potentially impact our communication in very different ways: either making us more insulated or making us more integrated, according to Les Gottesman, chair of the Department of English and Communications at Golden Gate University.

On the one hand, information technology allows users to project their own ideas onscreen without anyone challenging them or offering different ideas. Computers, unlike people, do not argue.

"These compliant inputs do not interrogate the inquirer. The customer - i.e., user - is always right," Gottesman said. In extreme cases, users could become literally lost in their own thoughts.

"Atomized, insulated virtual worlds become insulated physical worlds in which the receptors allow us to insulate ourselves and ignore the needs of real people," he said.

On the other hand, if information technology facilitates conversations, then it will bring more users into contact with other points of view.

"However technology develops, whatever mediations it is modeled on, face-to-face conversation can be expanded greatly by information technology and increased on a global basis," he said. More conversation would lead to people who exercise more critical thinking and greater acceptance of other points of view.

"Critical thinking is a process of coming to an understanding. Not necessarily an agreement, but an understanding of where you agree, where you disagree, and why," Gottesman said. "Only in conversation, only in confrontation with another 's thought that could dwell with us, can we hope to go beyond the limits of our present horizons."

- Rick Docksai

Education for a New Age

Expectations for schools and teachers are only going to get higher, according to Gary Marx, president of the Center for Public Outreach. Schools have always taught math, reading, and writing, but curricula needs to broaden to include new subjects: interpersonal skills, information accessing, media literacy, self-discipline, responsibility, and use of computers and other technologies.

He also encouraged teachers to move toward more "active learning," such as group exercises, class discussions, and other exercises that allow the students to interact with the course material.

"Students need to know that they are part of the process. They are not just subjects," said Marx.

He gave the example of Project Citizen, a program in Senegalese schools in which students gather in groups, identify issues in their communities that need to be addressed, and develop action plans to resolve them. One group lived in a community where residents suffered from waterborne diseases. The students researched diseases and water systems, then met with the adults - their parents, the rural administrator, the imam at the mosque, and the head of a rice growers' association - and launched with them a campaign to educate people about the water. Together, the adults and students organized a massive demonstration that drew crowds from communities across the region.

"The older people were saying, 'This is the way it's always been, this is the way it is, this is the way it will always be.' The kids said, 'This is the way it's always been, this is the way it is, this is the way it could be in the future,'" Marx said. - Rick Docksai

Tweeting the Future

The World Future Society's Twitter page enabled conference attendees to report on their impressions of live events - and gave interested readers from around the world an insider's view of the two and a half days of activities.

Here are a few tweets (140-character postings) collected in the WorldFuture09 feed:

@RielM: In Chicago, at #wfs, yesterday taught a course on Jumpstarting the Future, today workshop on future of telepresence
@justinadams: Tapscott gave a great talk to open the conf RT @dtapscott: http://twitpic.com/apgnq - On stage for #WFS opening Keynote
@dtapscott: http://twitpic.com/ar6tc - Booksigning at World Future Society in Chicago
@jenjarratt: Driver of bus back to hotel last night was full of questions about #WFS & ... the future
@ann_feeney: Whether or not you can attend WFS this year, do follow @WorldFuture09 for good, fast notes. Does @WorldFuture09 sleep?
@moravec: ... my "A new paradigm of knowledge production in higher education" article from 2008: http://bit.ly/12UDfv
@WorldFuture09: recommend checking out @busynessgirl's blow-by-blow tweeting from today's sessions @worldfuture09! #wfs #wfs09
@fstop23: Listening to Ted Gordon at #wfs re Probing the Unknowable. Basically, forecasting tends to miss the really big developments
@robspohr: I'm at the #wfs conference in Chicago. They say that by 2020 the computer will have more power than the human brain!
@jdean3: ... great day at #wfs. boys had mixed reviews but look forward to tomorrows sessions. Hard part is limiting book buy to 10
@jenjarratt: #wfs "The future is affinity nations." - Ann Feeney
@jenjarratt: We are all global. How do you govern nationally in a global system? - Joan Foltz, #wfs
@ann_feeney: Teens at #wfs include some of the most thoughtful, creative minds. When looking for hope at sessions, look at audience, too
@busynessgirl: Death to bullet points, enlarge the images, don't write it if you're going to read it to us. Depth not breadth.... #wfs
@jdean3: Terrific final day of #wfs conf. Best session was GrrRank. [Editor's note: Speaker was David Pearce Snyder.] Alex & Nate loved it. Purchased 10 books, too!
@TweetJRmail: Blog post on #wfs09: Notes for July 18. http://tinyurl.com/ljr3cn
@GreenJAV: On the last day of the #wfs conference. Lunch keynote was the scariest talk I have heard, on bioviolence. [Editor's note: Speaker was Barry Kellman.]
@gillysalmon: World Futures conference was very mixed, and largely US not world
@Kjowcatalead: Working the #wfs Conf in Chicago. My favorite part is the global rep & interacting with people that are not like me.
@jenjarratt: Great time ... w/ futurist friends See ya next yr, I hope!

- Compiled by C. G. Wagner

Oceans’ Dead Zones on the Rise

A predicted global increase in food consumption is likely to create an environmental crisis where it’s least expected. Studies link a rise in industrial food production to an increase in the already large number of so-called “dead zones” in coastal waters.

Dead zones are so named because they lack sufficient oxygen to support fish, crustaceans, and other forms of marine life. The World Resources Institute (WRI) recently labeled them a “rapidly growing environmental crisis.” More than 400 have been identified worldwide, and researchers have spotted one in the Gulf of Mexico near the mouth of the Mississippi River that’s roughly the size of a small country — 7,500 square miles and growing.

A major contributor to the problem is industrial agriculture, according to WRI. Too much animal manure and crop fertilizer is entering into and contaminating freshwater and coastal ecosystems. The nitrogen and phosphorous they contain overfertilize the algae and phytoplankton that grow on or near the surface of the water, causing the plants to grow at an unnaturally high rate. The unusually large amounts of algae inevitably die and sink to the bottom of the gulf. As the plant matter decomposes, it exhausts much of the oxygen from the surrounding water. This process is known as eutrophication.

Since much of the manure from factory farms runs off into freshwater streams before being transported out to sea, the problem it isn’t limited to coastal waters. Eutrophication may be the primary reason for freshwater problems in the United States, WRI claims. And eutrophication doesn’t just impact the environment — it affects human health and economic systems as well.

Global consumption of meat is expected to increase by more than 50% within the next 25 years. WRI reports that a surge in livestock production in particular would have serious repercussions for developing countries that lack strong, enforceable environmental regulations.

The situation isn’t much better in the developed world. In the United States, manure from cows, pigs, and chickens does not legally have to be treated (unlike human sewage), so it mostly isn’t. The industry has repeatedly blocked and resisted any regulation of runoff and waste.

There are other causes of eutrophication as well, including fossil fuels and runoff from large urban areas. These are also expected to increase as the world population increases, and as developing nations continue to grow.

The issue has remained largely under the radar because, unlike large catastrophic events, this type of pollution has been occurring at a low enough level over a long enough period of time to avoid drawing attention to itself. The long-term risks are also revealing themselves slowly over time, and for now remain largely unknown, unnoticed, and undetected.

In terms of solutions, one starting point that many policy makers believe is long past due is requiring animal manure to be treated like sewage and regulating its disposal. Several last-ditch geoengineering solutions are being considered, such as large-scale aeration systems that would pump oxygen into the dead zones. Closer to home, consumers may consider supporting organic, locally grown, small-farm produce and to cut down on meat consumption. — Aaron M. Cohen

Source: World Resources Institute, www.wri.org.

The Rapid Evolution of “Text”

An author looks toward a less-literate future.
By Nicholas Carr

The written word seems so horribly low tech. It hasn’t changed much for a few millennia, at least since the ancient Greeks invented symbols for vowels. In our twitterific age of hyperspeed progress, there’s something almost offensive in such durability, such pigheaded resilience. You want to grab the alphabet by the neck, give it a shake, and say, Get off the stage, dammit. Your time is up.

Of course, people have been proclaiming the imminent death of the written word for a long time. When Thomas Edison invented his tinfoil phonograph a hundred years ago, everybody assumed the flashy new device would mean the end of writing. We’d become listeners instead of readers, talkers instead of scribblers. But writing didn’t die. The phonograph proved to be a second-rate medium for exchanging information. We came to use it mainly to play music.

In the 1960s, hip cultural theorists predicted that new media — radio, cinema, television, computer — would soon render writing obsolete. “It is true that there is more material written and printed and read today than ever before,” wrote Marshall McLuhan in his influential 1964 book Understanding Media, “but there is also a new electric technology that threatens this ancient technology of literacy built on the phonetic alphabet.”

Today, nearly a half century later, the familiar letters of the alphabet are more abundant than ever. One of the most astonishing consequences of the rise of digital media, and particularly the Internet, is that we’re now surrounded by text to an extent far beyond anything we’ve experienced before. Web pages are stuffed with written words. Text crawls across our TV screens. Radio stations send out textual glosses on the songs they play.

Even our telephones have turned into word-processing machines. The number of text messages sent between phones now far outnumbers the number of voice messages. Who would have predicted that even just twenty years ago?

The fact is, writing is one heck of an informational medium — the best ever invented. Neurological studies show that, as we learn to read, our brains undergo extensive cellular changes that allow us to decipher the meaning of words with breathtaking speed and enormous flexibility. By comparison, gathering information through audio and video media is a slow and cumbersome process.

I have little doubt that in 2050 — or 2100, for that matter — we’ll still be happily reading and writing. Even if we come to be outfitted with nifty Web-enabled brain implants, most of the stuff that’s beamed into our skulls will likely take the form of text. Even our robots will probably be adept at reading.

What will change — what already is changing, in fact — is the way we read and write. In the past, changes in writing technologies, such as the shift from scroll to book, had dramatic effects on the kind of ideas that people put down on paper and, more generally, on people’s intellectual lives. Now that we’re leaving behind the page and adopting the screen as our main medium for reading, we’ll see similarly far-reaching changes in the way we write, read, and even think.

Our eager embrace of a brand new verb — to text — speaks volumes. We’re rapidly moving away from our old linear form of writing and reading, in which ideas and narratives wended their way across many pages, to a much more compressed, nonlinear form. What we’ve learned about digital media is that, even as they promote the transmission of writing, they shatter writing into little, utilitarian fragments. They turn stories into snippets. They transform prose and poetry into quick, scattered bursts of text.

Writing will survive, but it will survive in a debased form. It will lose its richness. We will no longer read and write words. We will merely process them, the way our computers do.
About the Author

Nicholas Carr’s most recent book is The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google. His next book, The Shallows, will be published in 2010.

Scientific Breakthroughs Ahead!

By Rick Docksai
Anthology offers a sneak preview into the next great wave of innovation.

What’s Next? Dispatches on the Future of Science. Edited by Max Brockman. Vintage Books. 2009. 237 pages. Paperback. $14.95.

Young scientists entering their fields today will grapple with perplexing questions that their elders have left behind. What’s Next? Dispatches on the Future of Science offers some of their answers.

Editor Max Brockman personally scouted out 18 of the most promising new researchers and solicited original articles from them. The resulting compilation promises to be “a representative who’s who of the coming generation of scientists.”

Here is a sampling of the questions tomorrow’s scientists are tackling.

In “Our Place in an Unnatural Universe,” Sean Carroll, senior research associate in physics at Caltech, emphasizes how little we know about the universe. We know that it is expanding, but not what is propelling the expansion. Nor can we explain how the universe arrived at its present-day shape. We think that it began as a super-dense, super-hot ball that exploded in a “big bang” — but how did it coalesce into a ball in the first place? We cannot conclusively answer these questions, says Carroll. We can only postulate ideas. It is a matter of trying to make the most sense of the universe that we can.

Joshua D. Greene, a Harvard cognitive neuroscientist, hopes that we will transcend the limits of our moral instincts. In “Fruit Flies of the Moral Mind,” he argues that moral judgment is a complex interplay between intuitive emotional responses and more effortful cognitive processes. Each is controlled by a separate set of brain systems. When we puzzle over moral dilemmas, these neural systems compete; the dissonance between the two is what we know as anguish. This tension may underlie recent debates over stem-cell research, torturing of suspected terrorists, and other issues. Greene concludes that neither brain system is fully prepared to process the increasingly complicated moral decisions that modern life deals us.

Katerina Harvati, now with the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, discusses species extinction in “Extinction and the Evolution of Humankind.” Most of the species that ever lived on earth are now extinct, she points out. The human fossil record has two extinctions: Paranthropus, which disappeared a million years ago, and Neanderthalis, which died out 30,000 years ago.

Harvati observes that our species, Homo sapiens, benefited from a varied diet, long life span, adaptability to harsh environments, and ability to spread to diffuse geographic areas quickly. However, our recent activity strains ecosystems considerably, so we must adapt again to the new challenges of climate change and environmental degradation.

What enabled Homo sapiens to evolve into civilized humans? In “Out of Our Minds,” Hominid Psychology Research Group researcher Vanessa Woods and Duke University anthropologist Brian Hare conclude that it was this species’ unique aptitude for cooperation and tolerance. Early humans learned to solve problems by communicating with each other and by cooperating both with strangers and with tribe members they did not personally like. Chimpanzees, by contrast, have nothing to do with those who are not their companions or kin. Some apes are comparatively more humanlike, though, such as the bonobos. We should study them intensively, Woods and Hare conclude; it might be crucial to understanding ourselves.

Other subjects covered in the collection include:

* The nature and effects of dark energy, according to Stephon H.S. Alexander, Haverford College physicist.
* The mind of the adolescent, according to Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, research fellow at the Institute of Cognitive Neursocience, University College in London.
* The role of viruses in the planet’s equilibrium, according to Nathan Wolfe, Stanford University biologist.
* Prospects for human enhancement, according to Oxford University bioethicist Nick Bostrom.
* The effects of specialization on scientific output, according to Gavin Schmidt, climatologist with NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

The volume’s 18 authors speak excitedly about the gaps in what we know and the prospects for filling them. They also evince keen hope that, as our species learns more, it might grow toward greater health, awareness, and sustainability. Readers will be inspired by these authors’ accounts and what directions they might take science, and the global community along with it, in the decades ahead.

About the Reviewer
Rick Docksai is a staff editor for THE FUTURIST.

Second Thoughts on Nuclear Power

By Michael Mariotte
Cancer, toxic spills, and damage to ecosystems from mining might come with nuclear energy production.

What kinds of energy systems are we going to need? And what kinds are going to be sustainable? The answer to both questions is something other than nuclear energy. It poses too many dangers to humans and their environment. Here is a breakdown:

* Mining. The Navajo tribe in the U.S. Southwest sits on top of some of the most productive uranium mines in the world. But the tribe banned uranium mining permanently because it killed so many tribe members during the 1950s and 1960s.

Mining of any kind is inherently a dirty business. When you're mining something that's potentially radioactive, it's an extremely dirty business.

* Storing waste. It has been said that nuclear power could replace fossil fuels and thereby avert human-induced climate change. The truth is that, for nuclear power to play any meaningful role in reducing carbondioxide emissions and reversing climate change, it would take as many as 2,000 new reactors worldwide.

Where would we put the waste from all those sites? In a program where you're constantly building nuclear power plants, where you will have nuclear power from now on, you would need a new storage site every 25 years or so.

* Danger of leakage. Nuclear plants store their wastes in casks of concrete and steel. Eventually, the casks will decay and the waste will seep out. The only question is when. For years, the U.S. government has been developing facilities at Yucca Mountain in Nevada for storing waste permanently.

The Obama administration made it clear that waste storage at Yucca Mountain is going to end. The Energy Department was admitting that the mountain offered no protection: The casks offered 99.5% of the protection. If that's the case, you might as well put the waste on the White House lawn. [Editor's note: The U.S. Senate voted in July 2009 to shut down Yucca Mountain.]

* Monitoring waste. What kind of monitoring would the waste program have? Having teams of people watching it 24 hours a day is not what most people think of when they think of waste disposal.

* Cancer risk. In 1979, a reactor at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island nuclear plant suffered a near meltdown. According to researcher Stephen Wing, an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, leukemia rates went up 300%-400% in the communities downwind from the plant, and lung cancer rates went up 600%-700%.

Every reactor releases radiation into the air and water. All radiation exposure carries some risk, and the more exposure, the greater the risk. It's hard to single out which cancers may have been caused by nuclear power plants, but studies done in many parts of the world suggest that there is some effect caused by routine operation of reactors. In Massachusetts in the 1970s, the Pilgrim reactor had a fuel problem and the state health department identified higher-than-normal radiation releases for a period, as well as some excess cancers that may have been caused by that. No one knows how many people have died from nuclear power. We do know that radiation is a carcinogen, however, and that there is no safe level.

Innovation Isn't Enough

Nuclear facilities use more sophisticated technology today to generate, store, and monitor nuclear fuel and nuclear waste. Granted, any technology improves over time. Cars are safer now than when they first came out due to innovations like seatbelts, air bags, and better brake systems. But people still manage to die on the highways.

Nuclear technology is no different. Of course, there have been improvements in computer controls and design, but the fundamental safety problems have not been fixed and cannot be fixed with the technology that we are using now. You can't make an inherently dangerous technology safe.

Are there alternative ways to get our energy that don't involve release of toxic materials? Twenty or thirty years ago, the renewables weren't ready. Today, however, they are. You don't need to release radiation or burn coal to get the power we need. We have a place to get it, and those places - solar, wind, and others - are becoming cost competitive.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.

Tomorrow in Brief, November-December 2009

Making Personal Data Vanish

Denizens of online social networking sites have long been warned about leaving unflattering (or even incriminating) information about themselves where it could later be found and used against them by future employers, loved ones, or voters. Even deleting posts does not eradicate them from Internet archives. Now, computer scientists at the University of Washington have put expiration dates on data: After a set time, e-mails, chat messages, and Facebook postings would self-destruct. The prototype system, called Vanish, tags a time limit to any text uploaded to a Web service through a Web browser. The system encrypts messages with a secret key that is divided and spread among random computers in a file-sharing network; as turnover occurs in the network, those leaving the network unknowingly take parts of the key with them, leaving the message undecipherable.

Source: University of Washington, www.u.washington.edu .

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Cancer Mortality Rates Are Declining

The war on cancer rages on. The incidence of cancer continues to rise across many types; however, deaths caused by cancer have declined steadily over the past three decades, particularly among younger patients, reports the Van Andel Research Institute in Grand Rapids, Michigan. In the United States, the youngest age groups have experienced the steepest decline in cancer mortality, at 25.9% per decade, according to the researchers. And even the oldest groups have experienced a 6.8% per decade decline, thanks to improved screening and treatment.

Source: Van Andel Institute, www.vai.org .

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Smart Cane Will Help Visually Impaired

More freedom of mobility may be ahead for people whose vision is impaired. Radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology is now being embedded in the traditional white cane used by people with little or no vision. The new Smart Cane will help users get around more safely and independently. Now under development at Central Michigan University, the Smart Cane incorporates an ultrasonic sensor, and the user carries a miniature navigational system in a messenger-style bag. The device detects obstacles in the user’s path and provides navigational cues, with voice alerts as well as vibration-based alerts for individuals who are also hearing impaired.

Source: Central Michigan University, www.cmich.edu
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Portable Food Tester

New sensing technologies developed by researchers at Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute may enable food suppliers to determine the right time for bringing produce to market for purchase by fussy consumers. The system, based on metal-oxide sensors, checks the emission of volatile gases that reveal ripeness, over-ripeness, or rottenness of produce. The goal is to make more-portable devices that have the same levels of sensitivity as equipment used in food laboratories, reducing waste if fresh produce is purchased before (or after) its time.

Source: Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, www.fraunhofer.de .

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WordBuzz: Complexipacity

How well can you or your organization handle complexity?

Coined by designer Tom Snyder in 2008, the term “complexipacity” refers to the capacity to “assimilate complex ideas, systems, problems, situations, interactions or relationships.”

In his WorldFuture 2009 presentation on the topic, futurist consultant David Pearce Snyder argued that complexipacity will become a key issue, and that today’s schools are not equipping tomorrow’s adults with the skills necessary to deal with complexity.

Source: David Pearce Snyder, Snyder Family Enterprise, www.the-futurist.com.

“Waste Heat” a Potential Threat to the Climate

A new paper argues that cutting greenhouse gas emissions, switching to nuclear or geothermal power, and even sequestering carbon in the earth won’t stave off massively disruptive climate change. Greenhouse gases are less a threat to stable climate than is the excess heat produced when fuel is burned to create energy, say Swedish researchers Bo Nordell and Bruno Gervet.

About half of the energy that humanity creates becomes waste heat. Depending on the method of energy creation or manner in which it’s used, such as to raise the temperature of water, waste heat can be as high as 70% or 80%. In terms of electricity usage, even extremely efficient devices, appliances, and gadgets give off a lot of warmth in their operation. This is why your laptop needs a fan and why a car that’s been turned off is still hot to the touch after it’s been driven. But most of this excess thermal activity comes from energy generation itself: the burning of fuel to create electricity. It’s commonly believed that this excess heat escapes into space, but that’s only true at very high temperatures, Nordel and Gervet contend.

“In most cases,” they write in the International Journal of Global Warming, “net heat emissions mean that low-temperature waste heat is dumped into sea water or the atmosphere or heat leakage from buildings is transferred to the surrounding air or ground.”

According to this view, nuclear power, which doesn’t create any carbon emissions, is still a contributor to global warming. One of the primary byproducts of nuclear fuel generation is hot water, since water is used to cool the nuclear reactor and heats up during the process. Much of that hot water is dumped into lakes and streams; the process could potentially raise the temperature both of these bodies of water and of the ground.

“All this energy dissipates into heat when consumed and must contribute to the heating of our planet,” they write.

Nordell and Gervet’s idea breaks from mainstream thinking on global warming. Most experts see extraterrestrial heat, namely from the sun, trapped inside the earth’s atmosphere by greenhouse gases as the singular cause of rising temperatures. However, the two Swedish scientists aren’t alone in their contention that heat itself, not just gas, could change the climate.

“The second law problem says that if you create and use energy you have to eject waste heat,” says Dennis Bushnell, chief scientist at the NASA Langley research facility. He says that, as more humans create and use more energy, eventually the waste heat “will reach a level, that in order for the planet to reject it into space, the whole planet will have to warm up.”

Only wind and solar power don’t produce significant amounts of waste heat, Bushnell adds. Although photovoltaic systems use the sun’s heat already being sent to earth, they’re extremely inefficient: Only about 10%–20% of the heat that hits a photovoltaic panel is converted into energy. Even photovoltaic systems that have been improved through nanotechnology won’t ever be more than 70% efficient due to thermodynamic barriers.

Bushnell’s assessments are supported by Tufts University astrophysicist Eric J. Chaisson, whose July 2008 paper titled “Long-Term Global Heating From Energy Usage” concluded that waste heat — including waste heat from nuclear power generation — would continue to warm the earth even if humans were able to arrest the greenhouse effect. Because we’re dependent on energy and the vast majority of human energy production also produces waste heat, human civilization will eventually reach a limit in terms of how much it can grow without destroying itself.

“It just came to me as a no-brainer,” Chaisson said in a interview with the Boston Globe.

Chaisson notes a ninety- to hundredfold increase in the amount of energy that humans use since the days of our hunter-gatherer forebears, due to activities like driving, texting, microwaving, and watching DVDs (hopefully not simultaneously).

“The per capita energy rate will probably continue rising for as long as the human species culturally evolves, including conditioning our living spaces, relocating cities swamped by rising seas, and sequestering increased greenhouse gases — which implies that even if the first two reasons for growth end, the third will continue increasing society’s total energy budget, however slowly,” he writes.

Unlike Chaisson, Nordell and Gervet don’t speculate about how soon waste heat will have dire effects on the planet — only that it contributes more to temperature change than does the greenhouse effect. Chaisson argues that curbing climate change from greenhouse gases is a much more pressing challenge than is curbing waste heat.

“I do think that the Swedish authors have greatly overestimated the effects of anthropogenic heating currently, and they seem completely unaware of other, detailed work on the same topic that has been done within the past year by other researchers,” he told THE FUTURIST (in an e-mail sent from atop a glacier).

In his various writings, Chaisson argues that the waste-heat phenomenon is best viewed as a reason to invest in passive solar technologies and energy efficiency today so that they will be in place a couple of hundred years from now when it matters.

Dennis Bushnell agrees. “It’s good physics,” he says of Chaisson’s paper, “and it’s absolutely true. But the numbers on this are such that we don’t have to worry about waste heat for hundreds of years.” — Patrick Tucker

Sources: “Global Energy Accumulations and Net Heat Emission” by Bo Nordell and Bruno Gervet, International Journal of Global Warming, Vol. 1, Nos. 1/2/3, 2009, pg. 378.

“Long-Term Global Heating from Energy Usage” by E. J. Chaisson, EOS, Transactions of the American Geophysical Union, Vol. 89, No. 28, July 8, 2008, pg. 253.

Whole Earth Review

By Aaron M. Cohen
U.S. and Japan combine resources to map the Earth’s topography via satellite imagery.

Scientists and amateur Earth watchers may now see the planet in sharper and more complete detail than ever before. A new topographic map of the Earth combines millions of stereoscopic digital pictures taken via satellite to chart the appearance, temperature, and elevation of 99% of the planet. The map is the result of a joint effort between the United States and Japan. Officially known as the Global Digital Elevation Model (GDEM), it is available online, and can be downloaded for free.

The digital images were created by a specially designed piece of technology called the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer, or ASTER. ASTER was engineereed in Japan before being placed aboard NASA’s Terra satellite as part of NASA’s Earth Observing System.

ASTER’s sensors are constantly recording and transmitting data, so the GDEM is not a static but a dynamic map; its quality will continue to improve as the process is refined over time and the technology advances. Think of the version currently available as an early draft or a beta release.

This ever-evolving map has a number of practical applications. For instance, cataloging the planet’s topography and generating environmental observational data over the long term will better enable scientists to forecast when and where natural disasters might strike. Scientists and researchers will also be able to detect and map environmental disasters such as floods, hurricanes, wildfires, and earthquakes as they are happening. In addition, the map is a powerful tool for monitoring global climate change and determining its effects.

Here’s how ASTER works: Three separate telescope modules, each capturing a different part of the electromagnetic spectrum, continually record images as the satellite orbits our planet. The image data is then transmitted from the satellite to Earth and assembled to form a map of the Earth. The entire process is automated and only takes about a year from start to finish — an incredibly fast rate of production.

ASTER is sensitive not only to light but also to heat (via infrared waves on the electromagnetic spectrum), which enables it to survey and record geographic temperatures as well. The higher the temperature, the more infrared radiation is emitted, resulting in a brighter image.

A major aspect of the project’s mission is to provide information and resources not only to scientists in the field but to the general population as well, in the democratizing spirit of the Internet. It’s not unlikely that general enthusiasts in addition to highly trained specialists will be combing through the data to create accurate forecasts and breakthroughs as well.
About the Author

Aaron M. Cohen is a staff editor for THE FUTURIST.

For more information: NASA, www.nasa.gov.

Community Service for Government Aid?

The collapse of the housing market left many American homeowners facing foreclosure. President Obama's $75 billion mortgage-relief plan, announced in February, is intended to help up to 9 million U.S. homeowners. Yet, the idea of the U.S. government giving away tax dollars with no strings attached has drawn much criticism.

Public service could be required of homeowners as a condition for receiving federal aid, although they should not be compelled to repay any tax dollars they receive, says University of Illinois law professor Michael LeRoy. By making a positive contribution to society, they'll be stretching taxpayers' dollars even further.

LeRoy outlines his ideas in a recent paper entitled "The Inequality of Sacrifice - Reducing Moral Hazard for Bailed-Out Homeowners: The Case for Compulsory Community Service."

There are numerous historical precedents for mandatory public service dating back to the eighteenth century, LeRoy points out. According to the U.S. Supreme Court, mandatory public-service work is a far cry from "involuntary servitude," as some critics have claimed. As far as the service requirement goes, he tells THE FUTURIST, "I suggest that bailed-out homeowners work for 200 hours on a Habitat for Humanity program - or similar civic-minded projects in their communities."

Although it may seem like it at first glance, this proposal isn't intended to punish the victim. Besides, LeRoy argues, at least part of the blame does in fact lie with those who gambled with the housing market. There are precedents for these requirements. Also, much federal aid (such as welfare) tends to come with strings attached - if it comes at all. LeRoy asks, somewhat rhetorically, "If homeowners get hundreds of dollars per month in mortgage assistance, why don't low-income renters get a government subsidy?"

But just as no-strings-attached debt relief is criticized as unfair, so, too, would be a blanket work requirement. For example, it could be argued that the amount of public service required should be adjusted depending on how much money a homeowner receives from the government. Yet if that were the case, then working families in high-cost areas saddled with so-called "jumbo loans" could contend that the law unfairly punishes them.

Another possible drawback of the public-service model is that it could interfere with work obligations, child care, and job searches.

LeRoy suggests that legislators and policy makers take his suggestion as a starting point and debate these matters earnestly, with the goal of working out the details and finding the best possible arrangement.

- Aaron M. Cohen

Source: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, www.uiuc.edu.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.

The Future World of Work: A Gen Xer’s Perspective

Wall Street Journal columnist Alexandra Levit parses today's and tomorrow's job market for new grads.

For those of us who are members of generations X and Y, (see note) the future I always dreamed about is coming up fast. Our careers are relatively young, and for those still in college, they haven’t even begun yet. But already, technology is changing so quickly that we can easily imagine future work lives that barely resemble the ones we lead today. As our baby-boomer parents age, we will become the leaders in an increasingly complex world.

If we want to create thriving, sustainable careers that will easily withstand the turbulence of the next few decades, we must anticipate the qualities of the future work world. Here are a few ideas based on my own experiences and my conversations with other workplace experts.

• Who we’ll be working with: In the coming decades, the baby boomers will start retiring from their management positions in droves. We will have to contend with the “brain drain” from those who leave the workforce, boomers who remain employed underneath us for money or personal fulfillment, and a large influx of immigrants.

• Who we’ll be working for: In the last decade, as American companies have laid off millions of workers, the ideals of job security and employee loyalty no longer apply. In the knowledge-driven economy of the future, large organizations won’t be needed to create value and our livelihood won’t be connected to a single corporation. We’ll work for much smaller organizations that outsource everything but the business’s core area of expertise, and more than half of us will eventually become contingent workers, employed part time or as freelancers or consultants.

• Where we’ll be working: We’ve already seen the model of everyone at the same place, at the same time, begin to disappear. Now that we can be connected regardless of our physical location, work activities will be distributed across central offices, remote locations, and community locations. The typical eight-hour workday will be spread across a 14 plus-hour window to allow us to attend to needs at home and work with colleagues abroad.

• How we’ll be working: Our future workplace will be one of constant change, innovation, and skill upgrading. Work projects will begin with one set of goals, but will reinvent themselves over and over again, so we’ll be forced to think on the fly. Workers at all levels of the organization will be responsible for devising creative strategies, and cross-functional teams will be assigned for individual projects.

• What we’ll be working on: Future employers will rely on individuals who are willing to work the flexible hours and can leverage the latest technologies associated with an Internet-oriented, nonstop marketplace. Technical skills will only increase in importance, and as organizations continue to flatten, people in all areas of the business will be responsible for administrative skills like budgeting, hiring, and operations. From Generations X and Y, the leaders, organizations will expect individuals who understand human behavior, can engender cooperation, and can bring out the best in workers.

Sounds like an exciting time, doesn’t it? I think I’m going to look forward to “going to work” in 2025.

About the Author

Alexandra Levit is a Wall Street Journal columnist and the author of Success for Hire (ASTD Press 2008) and the forthcoming New Job, New You (Random House, 2010). She speaks to organizations around the globe about generational workplace issues. Web site www.alexandralevit.com .

*Note: demographers William Strauss and Neil Howe, in their book Generations, define Generation X as the cohort born between 1961 and 1980, and Generation Y or the Millennial Generation as being born from 1980 until the early 1990s.

Futurist Bookshelf

Blue Collar and Proud of It: The All-in-One Resource for Finding Freedom, Financial Success, and Security Outside the Cubicle by Joe Lamacchia and Bridget Samburg. HCI. 2009. 420 pages. $15.95.

We do our youth a disservice when we tell them they have to go to college to be successful, says landscaping-company director Lamacchia. As a successful entrepreneur who never went to college, he testifies that there are many gratifying and exciting career paths one can find without a four-year degree and the mountain of student-loan debt that goes with it. Moreover, these careers are necessities, he argues: Our society is facing shortages of skilled electricians, plumbers, construction workers, and other traders precisely because we have pushed all our young people into college and white-collar professions.

Lamacchia describes the many opportunities available for those who want to explore blue-collar professions and the resources available to them. “White-collar” readers are welcome, also—it’s never too late to change direction!

Bringing in the Future: Strategies for Farsightedness and Sustainability in Developing Countries by William Ascher. University of Chicago Press. 2009. 328 pages. Paperback. $27.50.

There are good ways to promote long-term thinking in society, and there are not-so-good ways, says economics and government professor Ascher. He identifies demonstrably effective approaches that government officials can take to encourage their citizens to save money and to refrain from high-risk behaviors, spur businesses to maximize productivity while refraining from pollution and resource waste, and prompt communities to undertake more “self-help.”

Ascher further describes the strategies that successful nongovernmental organizations employ to raise public interest in their causes, and the role they should play in encouraging reform of the economy and government. Not all “farsighted” actions are workable, however, according to Ascher. Leaders have to determine what will be most effective in given circumstances. He describes the psychology behind actual human decision making and some general guidelines that can help leaders plan accordingly.

Chaotics: The Business of Managing and Marketing in the Age of Turbulence by Philip Kotler and John A. Caslione. AMACOM. 2009. 206 pages. $25.

Businesses need new approaches to dealing with uncertainty, argue marketing professor Kotler and business strategist Caslione. Traditionally, they say, a business would devise one strategy for prosperity and a Plan B—e.g., staff cuts, price slashes, and draw-downs in product development—for periods of recession. Not only will this old approach not work anymore, but it will also be hazardous to a business’s long-term viability. Companies will only prosper if they can manage both risk and opportunity simultaneously and continuously.

The authors present a comprehensive system for achieving this, with tools for making one’s business more responsive to change and more able to act decisively, react quickly, withstand stress, and rebound from setbacks. They demonstrate how companies such as Friendly’s, McDonald’s, Johnson & Johnson, and Royal Dutch Shell successfully applied their methods. And they show how others, including Starbucks, Citicorp, and Chrysler, suffered losses by adhering to the old playbook.

Climate Change: Simple Things You Can Do to Make a Difference by Jon Clift and Amanda Cuthbert. Chelsea Green Publishing. 2009. 91 pages. Paperback. $7.95.

Anyone can curb climate change, according to environmental consultant Clift and freelance writer Cuthbert. They present a comprehensive guide to decreasing the carbon footprint of everyday activities. In concisely written, illustrated chapters, they list suggestions for heating and insulating a house to reduce energy usage; ways to use less electricity while cooking, refrigerating food, or washing dishes; and overviews on new solar and wind generators that can be installed on household rooftops. Looking beyond the home, they show how readers can minimize the carbon impact of their shopping, transit, and vacation travel.

The Day We Found the Universe by Marcia Bartusiak. Pantheon. 2009. 337 pages. Hardcover. $27.95.

The universe may have begun with a big bang, but landmark scientific discoveries about the universe only come about after many little bangs, according to science writer Bartusiak. She tells the story of Edwin Hubble’s discovery that our universe is at least trillions of times bigger than the Milky Way, and the subsequent observation by Albert Einstein that the universe is actually expanding.

Neither man’s epiphany bolted out of the blue. Their epiphanies became apparent only after thousands of hours of toil by many lesser-known contemporaries: Vesto Slipher, Georges Lemaitre, and Milton Humason, and others who worked alongside Einstein and Hubble and helped make the two celebrities’ final, historic conclusions possible. Bartusiak recounts these researchers, their personalities, their theories, and the process of scientific discovery in which each one played a part.

The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives by Leonard Mlodinow. Random House. 2008, reprint 2009. 252 pages. Paperback. $15.

Some of the greatest scientific discoveries of all time came about because of chance events. Some of Hollywood’s best-acclaimed screenwriters attribute their big breaks not to genius, but to luck. And stock markets boom and bust due to myriad, and seemingly unrelated, occurrences.

The world around us is abuzz with randomness, says physicist Mlodinow. This is disconcerting to us humans, because we’re innately wired to look for simple explanations and to craft mental models of how things work. Our minds have a hard time accepting chance, and we tend to panic and make poor decisions whenever chance confronts us.

We can learn to cope with chance, says Mlodinow. He identifies the “principles” that govern chance and how it plays out in business, economics, leisure, medicine, politics, sports, and other areas of human life. He maps the thought processes that we tend to undergo when chance confronts us, and the ways we can improve them.

Future: A Recent History by Lawrence R. Samuel. University of Texas Press. 2009. 244 pages. $45.

No one knows what the future holds, but that’s never stopped Americans from guessing, says cultural historian Samuel. He concludes that American culture has historically been preoccupied with the future, in part because its people tend to assume the future will be better than the present: Human ingenuity and technology will create a tomorrow of abundance, leisure, unlimited progress, and urban utopias. From time to time, though, deep apprehensions of social, economic, and political turmoil have made manifest in the cultural psyche, too.

Samuel draws from each era’s popular movies, music, television, academic literature, high-school and college textbooks, and the hundreds of predictions from its leading futurists to show how perceptions of the future have evolved over time and been shaped by both watershed socio-political events and the advancement of information technology.

Globesity: A Planet Out of Control? by Francis Delpeuch, Bernard Maire, Emmanuel Monnier, and Michelle Holdsworth. Earthscan. 2009. 180 pages. Paperback. $34.95.

“Obesity epidemics” are sweeping industrialized and developing countries across the globe, according to science journalist Monnier and public-health nutrition researchers Delpeuch, Maire, and Holdsworth. They cite studies that indicate dramatic upswings in obesity in North America, Europe, Japan, and even many developing countries, such as India and the countries of Oceania. By 2030, the authors project, more than half the world’s population might have excessive bodyweight.

These alarming trends are not simply due to individual lifestyle choices, the authors argue: They have their roots in underlying socioeconomic causes within the world’s agricultural and food production-and-supply systems. The authors retrace the history of the obesity trend, the factors that are exacerbating it, and the actions that societies can take to reverse it.

Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey. Harvard Business Press. 2009. 340 pages. Hardcover. $29.95.

If seven cardiac patients hear their doctors say that they must change their lifestyles or they will die, only one patient will actually change, according to professional-development professor Kegan and professional-services consultant Lahey. The authors assert that change is extremely difficult, be it on the personal or the organizational level, due to ingrained thought patterns that discourage us from abandoning the status quo.

But we can overcome the anti-change impulses with the right strategies and, in so doing, unlock our true potential. Kegan and Lahey describe ideas and practices for fostered meaningful discussion and effective group problem solving. These methods have worked for the leaders of a national railway in Europe, an international financial-services company, a leading American technology company, a U.S. labor union, and many other organizations.

Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong by Wendell Wallach and Colin Allen. Oxford University Press. 2009. 275 pages. $29.95.

Within the next few years, the world will suffer a catastrophe brought about by a computer system acting independently of human oversight. Thus predict bioethicist Wallach and cognitive-science professor Allen. They worry that as robots gain more thinking capacity, the likelihood increases that some of them might use it against us.

Robots administer the daily operations of electric grids and stock markets. Designs are under way for robots that will care for the elderly and disabled, or patrol military borders and fire at targets without instruction. Such tasks will inevitably require robots to make moral decisions. Can we trust that they will do what is right?

For our own safety, Wendell and Allen argue, we should begin work now on installing moral principles in these smart machines. They describe the frameworks of potential machine morality, its current limitations, and how we might overcome them to develop workable software.

The Silver Lining: An Innovation Playbook for Uncertain Times by Scott D. Anthony. Harvard Business Press. 2009. 210 pages. $25.

Just because a company has less revenue does not mean it should expect to have less growth or less product development. Innovation can flourish in even the toughest of economic climates, argues innovation expert Anthony. The downturn of the past year strikes him as a uniquely fertile environment for innovation as companies, consumers, and communities are all seeking new ways to live well with less.

Businesses can succeed in this environment, but only if they master the art of “disruptive innovation,”—learning to innovate more quickly, cheaply, and with less needless risk. Anthony presents guidelines for developing and practicing these needed skills day to day: determining which expenses to cut and which ones to maintain, pursuing smart and strategic experiments, motivating creative minds in the workplace, increasing innovation productivity, and segmenting markets to successfully reach value-seeking customers.

The Skeptical Economist: Revealing the Ethics Inside Economics by Jonathan Aldred. Earthscan. 2009. 281 pages. $12.

Economics and ethics are inseparable, whether we acknowledge it or not, says economics professor Aldred. He criticizes orthodox economic theory for its presumption that economics is purely a measure of how things are, not how they should be.

To the contrary, Aldred argues, all economic theories and polices draw on a view about how we ought to live and what we should value. But most economists go too far, in his opinion, by trying to measure the value of life purely in monetary terms—a policy is “right” because it “maximizes profits” or “wrong” because it is “anticompetitive.”

Aldred sets forth a new economics backed by an ethical framework that affirms quality of life, not just efficiency and output. His framework overturns many classic economics assumptions, such as the belief that more economic productivity equates with more happiness, that taxes are always wrong, and that people will always opt for that which is most profitable to them.

Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior by Geoffrey Miller. Viking. 374 pages. $26.95.

What would our prehistoric ancestors say if they saw our frenetic buying and spending habits? Evolutionary psychologist Miller ponders this question, and concludes that they might think we are crazy.

We have much in common with them because we are not a “materialistic” society; we make purchases to impress other people, not to own things, Miller notes. This is a carryover from our cave-dweller days, when we lived in small groups in which status and image determined whether or not one might survive, impress friends, attract mates, and raise a family.

But the marketplace of our world is a far cry from the simple subsistence that cave dwellers knew. We are hypersocial beings, not semi-social beings like they were. Our consumer pressures to keep amassing the socially accepted items contrasts sharply with their slow-paced foraging for life’s necessities. Miller examines contemporary advertising, consumer spending trends, and the top-selling products, and he deciphers what they all say about us and our evolutionary development as Homo sapiens.

Threats in the Age of Obama edited by Michael Tanji. Nimble Books LLC. 2009. 212 pages. Paperback. $20.51.

The Obama administration will need to muster as much independent and diverse thinking as possible to confront new threats to U.S. national security very unlike those that his predecessors faced. In a series of essays edited by retired Defense Intelligence Agency officer Tanji, authors call for a reevaluation of how analysts and scholars today study and approach terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and transnational organized crime.

The essays explore the particular issues in which the updated thinking will be useful: missile defense systems; the spread of infectious diseases; the prospects for Iran, North Korea, and Pakistan, each of which has or is developing the capacity for a nuclear weapons arsenal; and dangers posed by the rapid expansion of the “infosphere.”

Urban Design: Health and the Therapeutic Environment by Cliff Moughtin, Kate McMahon Moughtin, and Paola Signoretta. Elsevier. 2009. 262 pages. Paperback. $53.95.

Humans have aspired for millennia to create cities that afford their residents “therapeutic environments” in which residents enjoy health and well-being, according to planning professor Moughtin, psychotherapist McMahon Moughtin, and human-geographer Signoretta. But therapeutic environments will require much more planning and upkeep in the future, they argue, due to shifting demographics and strained ecosystems.

The text explores theories of health and well-being, and the ways that cities throughout history strove to realize them. The authors discuss present-day urban blight; and contemporary understandings of the relationship among mind, body, and nature. They encourage planners to consider the organic relationship between a city and its bioregion, the relationship of a home to its neighborhood, and the needs of individual families. They conclude with examples of communities in which therapeutic environments are a successful reality.

What Color Is Your Parachute? 2009: A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters and Career-Changers by Richard Nelson Bolles. Ten Speed Press. 407 pages. Paperback. $18.95.

Every year since 1975, career coach Bolles has been producing updated versions of his comprehensive guide for finding jobs. This 2009 edition takes stock of the shake-up in the worldwide job market in 2008 and the ways it has radically changed job hunting.

Millions more adults are now out of work, Bolles notes, and the competition for new jobs is historically fierce. But he cautions against giving up. With a proactive attitude and some up-to-date strategies, he says, job seekers can become gainfully employed.

Bolles identifies the kinds of jobs that are available now, the five best ways to hunt for a job, how long you should expect your job search to take, the first thing you should do if your job search is taking longer than expected, what to do if you cannot find any jobs in your field, and how you can stand out above the vast sea of other applicants.

With Purpose: Going from Success to Significance in Work and Life by Ken Dychtwald and Daniel Kadlec. William Morrow. 2009. 288 pages. $25.99.

Can we find meaning in our senior years? Is it possible to experience personal growth and revitalization in a time of life that most people associate with decline? Gerontologist Dychtwald and reporter Kadlec enthusiastically answer “yes” to both questions and encourage readers to make the most of the longer lives that medicine and health practices have given them.

Speaking autobiographically and philosophically, they explain the role that your talents can play in making your post-retirement life fulfilling, satisfying, and meaningful. By using your time to help others, deepen your own relationships, and make a difference in the world, you can construct your own vision of purposeful aging as you make your “Golden Years” into years of examination, self-discovery, and achievement.

Healing Habitats

By Aaron M. Cohen

Urban Design: Health and the Therapeutic Environment by Cliff Moughtin, Kate McMahon Moughtin, and Paola Signoretta. Elsevier. 2009. 262 pages. Paperback. $60.95.

Facing climate change, resource depletion, peak oil, and global migration, urban designers are challenged to create sustainable environments that contribute to the overall well-being of those who inhabit them.

This fifth book in Cliff Moughtin’s Urban Design series focuses on the design concepts that will guide humanity to a more sustainable future, promote mental and physical health, and create or provide a sense of community. Like the first four volumes in the series, it speaks clearly and eloquently to professionals working in the fields of urban planning and urban design.

Moughtin and his co-authors argue that environmental health directly impacts individual and communal health — both mental and physical. This poses a problem for those living in densely packed, highly developed urban areas. A decreasing quality of city life reduces health and life expectancy, regardless of a city’s size. Yet, due to poor planning, the two typically go hand in hand: As cities expand, the overall quality of life decreases.

Moughtin notes that “current thinking on sustainability in urban development, which promotes compact and high-density cities, goes against research findings on the adverse effects of urbanization on mental health.” He argues that it is not only possible but imperative to mix urban and rural development. Throughout the book, he shows why such settlements will ultimately be more sustainable than compact, high-density urban areas.

The book opens with a case study of the Sanctuary at Epidaurus in ancient Greece, a remotely located healing center that mixed entertainment and hedonistic pleasure with spiritual rejuvenation and exercise. Here, Moughtin begins to build a case for a holistic approach to urban planning in which social, environmental, health, and other concerns are understood as being interconnected.

Leaving ancient Epidaurus, the reader enters contemporary Havana. Poor, noisy, crowded, Epidaurus’ opposite in many ways, Cuba’s capital city nonetheless boasts progressive health, education, and rural development policies that Moughtin characterizes as being “centered on the well-being of the individual while emphasizing care for the environment and the need for sustainable development.” Especially notable are the government-sanctioned urban gardens throughout Havana. “Economic necessity has seen the need to introduce nature into the Cuban urban environment,” Moughtin writes. “It has taken the form of intensive gardening being practiced on every free (unused) piece of urban land.” Urban agriculture and community gardens contribute greatly to a community’s ability to be self-sufficient and self-sustaining.

Another case study is New Lanark, the eighteenth-century Scottish model city constructed by factory owner and social reformer Robert Owen with the well-being of the burgeoning industrial workforce in mind. Moughtin characterizes the town as the “successful realization of a vision to provide dignified living conditions for workers in an idyllic natural setting.” The founder of the cooperative movement, Owen believed that environment affected individual character as well as community well-being and hoped to improve the living and working conditions of both urban and rural working classes. New Lanark, which boasted a central green space, was both self-sustaining and sustainable long before those terms gained their present meanings.

Bridging the unlikely gap between Robert Owen and modern suburbia is another forward-thinking, cooperative-minded factory owner, William Lever, who designed the garden village of Port Sunlight in 1888 near Liverpool. Like Owen, Lever also understood that workers’ collective health and happiness led to greater productivity and, ultimately, a more successful business. Moughtin points to Lever’s Port Sunlight as “the foundation for the garden city and the garden suburb, inspiring the suburban developments from the 1930s and the post–Second World War new towns.”

The final section of the book focuses on using the knowledge gained from earlier examples to find the best possible ways to design therapeutic environments that can help offset climate change and also promote general health. It emphasizes the oft-forgotten distinction between neighborhood and community, and the importance of being part of a community to an individual’s overall well-being. The authors also discuss current theories such as bioregionalism (ecologically defined communities) and show how economically self-reliant ecovillages can preserve the nature and culture of the region.

One of the most intriguing metaphors that the book presents is “urban metabolism.” Moughtin argues that cities should have a “circular metabolism” that more closely resembles that of the natural world — a healthy living being. Instead, cities have a linear metabolism: “The city consumes goods, energy and food at high rates, then pollutes the environment heavily with organic wastes, noxious fumes and inorganic wastes,” Moughtin writes. Drawing on systems dynamics, Moughtin advocates designing a city that can function as a self-sustaining closed system, rather than one that operates as a more rapacious open system.

The book ends with a tour of a model city that idealistically points the way toward the future: Freiburg, Germany, “Europe’s solar city,” is leading the way with its emphasis on sustainable development and ecological preservation.

Those in the field will find this to be a highly readable, lavishly illustrated text. Among the many valuable lessons contained within its pages is one conclusion that bears repeating: Ecological co-housing and other intentional forms of community are what may ultimately best sustain us, mentally and physically.

About the Reviewer

Aaron M. Cohen is a staff editor for THE FUTURIST and World Future Review.

No Natural Resources? Lucky You!

Roger Howard presents plausible scenarios regarding the geopolitical dangers of peak oil. Equally plausible scenarios could envision some positive impacts, because countries dependent on natural resources are often poor and undemocratic, while countries dependent on human resources are often rich and democratic.

Countries with natural resources invest in resource development. State wealth derives from royalties rather than from taxes paid by citizens producing products and services. No social contract between governed and governors is created. In contrast, countries without natural resources must invest in their citizens in order to generate national wealth. This establishes a social contract between taxpaying citizens and government and leads to the creation of independent worker and managerial classes as well as a significant higher education system. The components of constitutional democracy thus evolve.

Countries dependent on human resources tend to democratize fairly quickly (in historical terms) since they require constitutional protections of real and intellectual property, transparency, and freedom of human initiative. The examples of South Korea and Taiwan come to mind. Fifty years ago, both could have justifiably been termed fascist dictatorships. Today they are constitutional democracies — perhaps not on a Western model but still a long way from dictatorship. Autocratic Singapore has also had to democratize.

Even communist China has developed extensive entrepreneurial and managerial classes and has legislated guarantees regarding personal and corporate property. It is also increasingly coming in line with international standards of intellectual property. Once standards of due process and objective law “infect” any part of a legal system (usually beginning with property rights) the “infection” spreads throughout the rest of the system and concepts of human and civil rights follow quickly (in historical terms). Competition for natural resources generates instability; competition based on trade requires stability.

Let us turn to specific oil-producing countries. First, it seems obvious that Norway, Canada, and Mexico will neither invade their neighbors nor implode. Howard’s forecast of implosion, domestic unrest, and aggression against neighbors is most likely to be realized in Iraq and Nigeria.

Indonesia has recently left OPEC and become an oil importer. This seems to have had a stabilizing effect (regionally and locally) rather than the opposite. As oil production has plummeted, Indonesia has grown more democratic, with stronger constitutional protections and transparency. This is because Indonesia’s economic development now depends on increased trade of industrial products and services in the global economy. In other words, Indonesia must follow the same path as the other Asian economic miracles.

Russia has immense natural resources besides hydrocarbons. It also has highly educated human resources. Russia needs regional stability to retain China as a market for natural resources. It also needs good relations with the European Union as a market for both natural resources and the products and services generated by Russia’s human resources. Russia will need growing direct and indirect foreign investments, requiring constitutional protections and transparency — something that oil and gas revenues obviated. This will reinforce internal stability and democracy and thwart the instinct for foreign adventures.

Venezuela’s potential instability because of a substantial decline in oil revenue could be a positive: It could result in a return to the values of a middle-class democracy. As petrodollars decline, the extravagant waste of allowing the professional and managerial classes to bleed out of the country will no longer be an option.

The development of the European-Mediterranean Free Trade Zone should be a major factor in neutralizing the loss of oil revenues for Algeria and Libya. The Zone itself will act as a driver for the liberalization of all the regimes it encompasses.

All the smaller Gulf States have been proactive in diversifying their economies for more than a decade. Trade, tourism, and international corporate hubs now comprise an ever-growing portion of national economies in this region. Managerial and entrepreneurial classes have developed. International standards of transparency and legal protections for property have become the norm. Tourism has created a cosmopolitan element that is subversive to reactionary aspects of local culture — especially in regards to gender. Small populations require the employment of more educated women in the economy. Currently the gender proportions in local branches of American universities are 3 to 1 in favor of women. All this bodes well for internal stability and good relations with neighboring states as oil revenues decline.

Saudi Arabia is insular in every sense of the word. It will probably turn inward under a fundamentalist regime but will avoid regional adventurism. The small Gulf States will still be protected by American military power, and Jordan will be protected by Israel. The Saudis would have little of value to gain by invading Yemen or Aden.
By Tsvi Bisk
Iran is a 3,000-year-old cosmopolitan civilization with a substantial educated middle class. Half its population has been born since the Islamic revolution. Many educated urban youth want to sustain good relations with the West. And, as strange as it might sound, Iran is a functioning constitutional republic run by democratic mechanisms. The political means of self-correction theoretically have been in place.

I would suggest that the disappointed expectation to honor its own constitutional principles is the driving emotional force behind the recent citizen uprising. But the power of petrodollars might enable the mullahs to suppress this citizen uprising. So, as Tom Friedman has suggested in a recent article in the New York Times, the best way the West can support the democratization of Iran is to liberate both itself and Iran from dependence on petrodollars. This might enable Iran to make the transition from oil thuggery to civilized citizen of the global community.
About the Author

Tsvi Bisk is an American Israeli futurist. He is the director of the Center for Strategic Futurist Thinking (www.futurist-thinking.co.il) and contributing editor for Strategic Thinking for THE FUTURIST magazine. He is also the author of The Optimistic Jew: A Positive Vision for the Jewish People in the 21st Century (www.maxannapress.com/index-9.html), which is available from Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and other booksellers. E-mail bisk@futurist-thinking.co.il.

Opening Up the Shut-Down Learner

By Rick Docksai

The Shut-Down Learner: Helping Your Academically Discouraged Child by Richard Selznick. Sentient Publications, www.sentientpublications.com. 2009. 160 pages. Paperback. $15.95.

Four out of every 10 American students in elementary school today might give up on learning well before graduation time, according to school psychologist Richard Selznick. They will disconnect from teachers, tune out of class, and simply “shut down” as students. In The Shut-Down Learner, Selznick tells parents and teachers what they can do to re-engage them.

“The shut-down learners that I have known are incredibly talented and misunderstood. Sadly, many of them are casualties of school,” Selznick writes.

Selznick has counseled thousands of young people with learning challenges. Almost all of his patients share two common traits: high visual-spatial skills — i.e., strength in “hands-on” activities — and poor language skills. They are adept at building, painting, and exercising outside. But standard classroom instruction is “deadening” to them. They get restless, easily distracted, and fail to follow through on assignments and exercises.

“Laziness and low motivation are not the main culprits — they are the byproducts of years of frustration,” Selznick writes.

As one example, he shares the experience of Catherine, whose mother scheduled an appointment with Selznick. He recalls:

“Catherine loved doing all of the spatial and hands-on activities, such as making puzzles, building block designs, and drawing pictures. In contrast, when it came to doing more of the letter- and language-related activities, she became much more fidgety and restless. I had to help her to stay on task and not give up readily.”

Shut-down learners constitute about 40% of the U.S. population, says Selznick. We often diagnose them with attention-deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or dyslexia and prescribe them medications. Selznick is not anti-medication, but he cautions against thinking that medications alone will solve the problems. Shut-down learners have additional emotional and psychological needs. The first step is to discover why a child is exhibiting “shut-down” behavior, learn what makes him or her tick, and note his or her strengths.

Parents need to give intense structure, supervision, and support to children with learning needs. Parents must congratulate any small achievements and maintain an encouraging tone, Selznick advises. Outside tutoring can also help.

Selznick urges teachers to provide remedial education for shut-down learners in small classes or in one-on-one settings. The lessons would be supplemented by classes steeped in lively visual and spatial exercises.

“Building, creating, taking things apart and putting them back together will keep them connected much more than sitting in seven excruciating classes a day of academics,” Selznick writes.

Growing numbers of teachers today say that they struggle to sustain the attentions of many of their students. Selznick’s text is very timely, offering teachers and parents educational tools that could better engage children of many backgrounds and learning types.

About the Reviewer

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

Radical Measures to Save Species

Climate change isn't just a human problem; it could also dramatically alter the habitats - and limit the survival prospects - for many already fragile species of flora and fauna, warn scientists. Salvation strategies once thought too radical are now under serious consideration, according to the National Science Foundation.

"Managed relocation," also known as "assisted migration," involves deliberately moving species to new habitats that they can easily adapt to when their own have become inhospitable. Such measures have been considered - and ruled out - in the past, but now are on the table thanks to new scientific protocols developed to help decision makers know when, where, how, and which species to relocate.

"It is becoming overwhelmingly evident that climate change is a reality; and it is fast and large," says working-group co-leader Jessica Hellmann of the University of Notre Dame. "Consequences will arise within decades, not centuries, so action seems much more important now than it did even five or 10 years ago." In other words, doing nothing has become the riskier choice in many cases.

Historically, slower-paced climate change has allowed species to adapt, either by evolving or by relocating. But now, climate change is accelerating, potentially trapping species in uninhabitable locations. In addition, obstacles such as cities and other human developments stand between threatened populations and their best alternative homes, the researchers note.

How can scientists be certain that introducing a species into a new enenvironment will both succeed for that species and not produce undesirable consequences for the environment? The short answer is, they can't. However, "we can make informed predictions with stated bounds of uncertainty," says David Richardson of Stellenbosch University in South Africa. The history of intentional and accidental species introductions has taught scientists to carefully evaluate potential impacts of such dramatic interventions.

The researchers' goal is to develop an effective tool for calculating the risks, costs, and tradeoffs of a relocation. Stakeholders will then have a scoring system based on multiple criteria.

"The tool takes advantage of the fact that, although science can't tell us exactly what will happen in the future, it can tell us how likely a favorable result is - useful information for decision makers," says NSF program director Nancy Huntly.

- Cynthia G. Wagner

Source: National Science Foundation, www.nsf.gov.

[Sidebar]

Tortoise poised at the edge of Athens, Greece, illustrates a race for survival against rapid climate change.

Running from Homelessness

Many organizations help homeless people by giving them food and shelter. But one group is now trying a radically new approach.

Back On My Feet, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit, sets homeless youth and adults on a path to recovery by having them jog three times a week. Back On My Feet hopes that this regimen can boost not only the runners’ physical health, but also their confidence and personal well-being.

“We use running as a vehicle to show individuals they are capable of accomplishing anything, but it’s not going to happen overnight — it takes hard work, dedication, and perseverance,” according to the organization.

Back On My Feet organizes homeless people into teams of 10–25 runners, who follow designated routes. Attendance at every workout is mandatory during the six-month program.

“Through running, we create a community of love, hope, trust, friendship, encouragement, and support that allows positive decision making for all our members,” the organization maintains.

Runners who complete two months with a 90% attendance rate can enroll in educational classes, job training, and job placement. Those who reach six months are eligible for grants to help with apartment, education, or job-related expenses.

Of 139 current runners, 39 have already secured jobs. In addition, 23 runners have secured housing and 25 have enrolled in new school or job-training programs. And of those runners who were smokers when they enrolled, 63% quit or suppressed their smoking.

And their outlooks on life tend to brighten. Many runners say their self-esteem has improved and they’ve become more excited about the future, more disciplined, and more productive in their daily lives.

“It’s very encouraging to get out there and run, plus I’ve lost up to 35 pounds,” says Claudel Edwards, a runner who completed six months of the program. “I want to find housing and just get healthier.”

Running as a team makes it more likely that the participants will continue running after they complete the program, according to Jeremy Jordan, a Temple University assistant professor of sports and recreation management.

“Being part of a community hopefully leads to sustained physical activity for the folks that are in Back On My Feet,” he says.

Jordan and other Temple researchers are conducting an 18-month study of the Back On My Feet runners to determine how the exercise program is benefiting them emotionally.

“I guess that simply put, Back On My Feet establishes that somebody cares, and I think for a lot of the members, they have not had that,” he says.— Rick Docksai

Sources: Back on My Feet, www.backonmyfeet.org.

Temple University, www.temple.edu .

The Cinematic Singularitarian

Scene: A movie theater on the west side of Manhattan during the Tribeca Film Festival. The audience teems with hip New York film students eager to see the world premiere of a new documentary. They’re joined, unexpectedly, by computer scientists, geneticists, and futurists from Denmark, the United Kingdom, and Hong Kong. The lights dim. After a brief opening, inventor Ray Kurzweil appears on the screen, looks squarely into the camera, and says, “I’m never going to die.”

So began the world premiere of Barry Ptolemy’s Transcendent Man, a feature-length film that chronicles Kurzweil’s ideas on the future of technological innovation. Chief among his forecasts: In the next 30 years, humans will use genomics, nanotechnology, and even artificial intelligence to escape death.

“Soon, we’ll be able to reprogram the underlying process of biology,” Kurzweil told THE FUTURIST after the screening. “We’ve mapped the genome; we’re making exponential progress in reverse engineering it. We can design new genetic interventions and test them with computer modeling. These breakthroughs are at an early stage, but because medicine is an information technology, it will progress at an exponential rate. If I were to say to you, 'One day, you’ll have nanobots in your bloodstream and they’ll be keeping you healthy from the inside,' you might respond that that sounds fairly futuristic. But we’re already doing experiments in animals with first-generation nanodevices that are blood-cell sized.” For instance, a team at Sandia National Laboratories is working to implant individual red blood cells with DNA, proteins, or drugs via a machine with molecularly small parts.

With the 2005 publication of his fifth book, The Singularity Is Near, Ray Kurzweil became an international phenomenon. His ideas have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, FOX News, CNN, and hundreds of newspapers, magazines, and networks. Transcendent Man follows Kurzweil as he discusses his ideas with various glitterati, including Star Trek star William Shatner, musician Stevie Wonder, and former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Technology watchers like Wired founding executive editor Kevin Kelly also make appearances in the film to discuss — and dispute — Kurzweil’s ideas.

“We’ll have immortality one day, perhaps in 300 years,” says Kelly.

“The reason many people, including some futurists, have a myopic view of the future is that they think linear; the actual nature of information technology is exponential. The linear perspective is intuitive; the exponential perspective is historically accurate. The computation in a cell phone today is a million times cheaper and a thousand times more powerful than the computer I used as a student. That’s a billion-fold increase in price performance,” Kurzweil told THE FUTURIST.

“Part of being a futurist is looking back,” director Ptolemy remarked. “He’s looking back at trends that have happened since the dawn of the universe. It fascinates me. I don’t know why, exactly. Human potential, what we can do, is fascinating to me.”

Kurzweil’s relationship with his late father was key to Ptolemy’s vision. At one point during the filming, Kurzweil confessed that he hoped to use artificial intelligence to bring his father back in the form of an interactive avatar. Even after hearing Kurzweil speak hundreds of times, the announcement was a surprise to Ptolemy. “That was the first time he’d expressed that idea on film,” he said.

“He’s really still the only person who was close to me who has died, but that was enough to really make me aware of just what a tragedy death is,” said Kurzweil.

Transcendent Man is Ptolemy’s first film, which he co-produced with his wife, Felicia, after Kurzweil’s ideas moved him. “I read The Singularity Is Near and when I was done with the first chapter, it was a movie,” he said.
About the Author

Patrick Tucker is the senior editor of THE FUTURIST magazine and director of communications for the World Future Society.

Kurzweil’s latest book, with co-author Terry Grossman, is Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever (Rodale Books, 2009).

The Global Talent Crisis

By Edward Gordon
The Futurist, September-October 2009

Contrary to popular opinion, there are plenty of open jobs. What's missing are candidates with skills.

We are in the midst of a global job and talent upheaval, the most remarkable of any job and talent change since the Industrial Revolution and encompassing every aspect of the global economy.

The dawning of a new industrial age, a period characterized by a growing need for highly skilled technical workers, is driving this revolution. From now through the next decade and beyond, this need will grow at an unrelenting pace. This new age will require the reinvention of the education-to-employment system. Simply put, we need to prepare more people for jobs that are now being created by an ultra-high-tech economy. In the United States alone, this high-tech age could spur the economy to a GDP of $20 trillion per year by 2019 (Congressional Budget Office estimate), compared with a little over $14 trillion now. But progress is not guaranteed, and the bounties of success will not be evenly distributed.

In the United States, the official unemployment rate is projected to top out at near 10.5% by 2010. Factoring in the number of people too discouraged to even look for work or file for unemployment, and the number of people working part time who wish to work full time, that figure now approaches 15%. Some 9 million people in the United States only have part-time work, up 83% from a year ago. Part-time workers account for almost 20% of the workforce. That number, too, will likely go up by next year. There will be jobs in 2010, but highly skilled and educated workers will have an easier time in a highly competitive environment.

This is a familiar refrain; we've been hearing alarms about the skills gap for years. But if ever there was a time to get serious about helping workers acquire the right skills, this is it.

Clearing the Decks: What Today's Downturn Means for Tomorrow's Job Market

Over the last 10 years, the real U.S. economy did grow. Unfortunately, too much of the wealth created was based on short-term financial speculation all around the globe and the manipulation of exotic financial instruments. The tech-based U.S. economy failed to invest enough longterm resources to educate the nation's youth, preparing them to work in the next wave of emerging science, technology, engineering, or mathematically based (STEM) jobs.

While much attention has been focused on how many millions of lowskill U.S. jobs have been outsourced, little notice has been paid to how many millions of high-pay, high-skill tech jobs have been outsourced to Europe, Japan, Singapore, or other countries with well-educated labor pools. Meanwhile, U.S. businesses are importing STEM talent from abroad using H-1B visas to keep the nation's tech-based economy operating.

The United States has outsourced advanced technological production, design, and management capacity. Also, many U.S. industries have become over-reliant on H-1B "specialty occupation" visas to import workers from overseas. However, over the next decade, U.S. companies will have trouble building new high-tech factories in high-skill counties like South Korea, Japan, or Germany, because their workforces will have begun shrinking. In fact, many countries will probably bring more production into the United States if they can locate communities that have developed appropriate hightech workforces.

At the same time, U.S. firms will still seek to use H-1B visas to bring engineers, technicians, and other professionals from China and India into the United States. Multiple studies have shown that China graduates about 600,000 engineers each year, but only 60,000 are educated at world standards. India graduates 400,000 new engineers each year, but only 100,000 are educated at world standards. The quality of educational institutions in India and China vary greatly, as they have not yet established the standards comparable to the United States for college/university accreditation. As the Chinese and Indian economies move up the high-tech value chain, they will have increasing difficulty supplying their own talent needs. Hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals are returning home from the United States and elsewhere. They are starting new tech-based businesses or taking advantage of rampant wage inflation driven by skilled worker shortages across China and India.

These trends mean that U.S., European, and Japanese firms will have increasing difficulty importing enough talent over the next decade. In the United States, business will lobby the government to increase the availability of H-1B visas. There simply will not be enough people to fill all the high-skill/high-wage jobs that are going to be vacant around the world.

Meanwhile, U.S. society has pushed many of its best and brightest students and mature workers into finance-related jobs that fed a massive short-term speculative bubble. Many other Americans have ended up in low-pay/low-skill service jobs because thousands of American schools are of substandard quality.

In Search of Technical Talent

Today's U.S. employment picture is extremely muddled. In early 2008, when U.S. unemployment was at 5.6%, 3 million jobs remained vacant (i.e., jobs advertised for six months or more that remain unfilled). The vast majority of vacant jobs are STEM related. They require a good high-school education, plus specialized postsecondary career education, two-year or four-year college degrees, one- or two-year college occupational certificates, or a two- to three-year apprenticeship education.

By May 2009, U.S. unemployment had jumped to 9.4%. However, with more than 14 mi l l ion unemployed, more than 3 million jobs were still vacant, according to Manpower. An analysis of unemployment by education levels helps show why. The unemployment rate for high-school dropouts was 15%, contrasted to 10% for high-school graduates, 7.7% for those with some college, and 4.8% for those with a bachelor's degree or higher.

Manpower's 2009 Talent Shortage Survey also reported that 30% of the world's employers are still facing a talent showdown. Tig Gillion, chief executive at Adecco, another staffing company, agreed that many business sectors were still hiring new people to fill STEM jobs. A Fortune magazine report highlighted firms that had openings for specific positions, including Boeing, Google, Genentech, Cisco Systems, Ernst & Young, Booz Allen Hamilton, KPMG, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, and many U.S. hospitals.

What Do the Labor Shortages Look Like?

After the current recession ends, there will be a growing job crisis around the world due to these talent shortages. Demographic trends in the United States, Europe, Russia, and Japan show a drastic reduction in the pool of new highly skilled workers, due to low birthrates and massive retirements. As the global need for talent grows, even China's and India's educational systems will not be able to produce enough qualified graduates for themselves, let alone act as safety valves for the rest of the world. But the heart of this issue is the seldom understood fact that the education-to-employment system worldwide is badly out of date. The United States and most other nations are not producing enough graduates with the kinds of technical, communications, and thinking skills needed in the twenty-first-century workplace.

Without drastic talent creation changes between 2010 and 2020, the United States will experience a major talent meltdown, with 12 to 24 million vacant jobs stretching across the entire U.S. economy. Businesses will leave the United States searching for scarce talent wherever they can find it. The U.S. economy will stagnate or shrink. For example, in the late 1990s, AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) wanted to build a new high-tech plant. They looked at locations in California and Texas, but company officials felt that the communities they investigated could not produce enough qualified entry-level technicians for their needs. The company went to Germany, built a plant near Dresden in 1999, and added a second in 2004. Germany was a good fit for AMD because of the high technical standards of Germany's dual education system.

The picture of the U.S. economy that emerges is of abundance and poverty: abundance of labor, poverty of talent, and economic pain everywhere. To prevent a chronic job imbalance and a true economic catastrophe, the United States needs to reinvent its talent-creation system.

The Three Forces Driving the Talent Shortage

There are three socioeconomic forces driving us to a talent showdown: demographic declines in many industrialized nations, a skills gap because students and incumbent workers are not receiving the education and training needed for hightech employment, and a cultural bias against undertaking the rigorous educational preparation needed for scientific or technical employment.

* Global demographics. Throughout the industrialized world, birthrates are very low and the proportion of baby boomers retiring is very high. This is a particularly important issue in western Europe and parts of Asia. Replacement-level fertility (on a national level) is generally considered 2.33 children per female, but can be higher in countries with a significant infant-mortality rate. The CIA World Factbook estimates Germany's fertility rate now to be 1.4; Italy's, 1.31; Russia's, 1.41; Japan's and South Korea's, 1.21. This means that the working-age populations in these countries will shrink and have to support higher and higher numbers of retirees.

Shifts in generational values are magnifying the impact of demographic declines. Generations X and Y don't have the same ethos regarding work as their parents did. The baby boomers seemed to live to work and shop. They put up with long hours in exchange for big salaries. That's changing. Many boomers are looking to work less hard as they age, although many may be forced to delay retirement due to declines in investments and pensions. Generation X in particular is more interested in obtaining a good work-life balance. Women are graduating from institutions of higher learning at higher rates than are men, and many want time off to raise children. They want to work at home, flex hours, sabbaticals, and job sharing, but they also want pay parity with men. Many companies are having trouble dealing with those issues.

* The skills gap. Since the original publication of A Nation at Risk in 1982, reports continue to be issued about serious deficiencies in American education. In this age when some form of postsecondary education is a requirement for all but low-wage, low-skill jobs, the overall U.S. highschool dropout rate continues to hover around 30%. Even more alarming, the average high school graduation rate in the 50 largest U.S. cities was 52.8%. In a 2005 survey, 60% of American manufacturers reported that even those high-school students who did graduate were poorly prepared for entry-level jobs.

According to a 2008 Alliance for Excellence in Education report, only half of the 1.4 million twelfth graders who took the ACT tests were ready for college-level reading. Some 42% of public community college freshmen and 20% of freshmen in public four-year institutions need to take remedial courses in basic skills such as reading, writing, and math. Moreover, only 25% of Americans who begin postsecondary education ultimately obtain a full college degree. This is the lowest "survival rate" in any of the major developed countries.

* A cultural bias. A bias exists against gaining the education and training required for science and technology jobs, but not against technology itself.

What's truly amazing is the number of people who love technology - iPods, iPhones, laptops, Twitter, podcasts - but due to cultural reasons, they don't acquire the training to design, repair, or manage the technology. This is now true even in Japan, where they call this phenomenon "the flight from science." Even the tech-driven German economy in 2008 was experiencing a shortage of 75,000 engineers to fill vacant positions.

The baby boomers' formative years were marked by the Cold War arms race and by the space race. The National Defense Act funded a variety of math and science programs in elementary and high schools as well as higher education career programs. This, in turn, supported a major expansion of science and technology across the entire U.S. economy. NASA put men on the moon in 1969 and during the early 1970s; the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. These events brought an end to much of the U.S. government emphasis on technological expansion. The next generation received far less encouragement to consider these STEM careers.

Starting in 2010, 79 million baby boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) will begin the shift to retirement. As a result, between 2010 and 2020, some technology-based industries will be seeking to replace 100% of their workforces. Overall, 66% of the jobs to be filled during the next decade will be vacancies created by boomer retirements.

Advancing technologies are transforming the nature of occupations. All the skilled trades and many installation and repair positions now require the use of advanced technologies that continue to evolve at a rapid pace.

The number of new technologies introduced over the next decade will likely be equal to those invented over the last 50 years. Yet the current breakdown in the global talent-creation systems does not bode well for the future.

Rebuilding the Talent Pipeline

If between 2010 and 2020 the U.S. education-to-employment system remains unchanged, the United States will see increasing numbers of people, even degreed individuals, with poor job prospects.

Can this gloomy scenario be avoided? Businesses, educators, and unions will all have to play a far more active role in expanding the proportion of highly skilled Americans to fill this widening STEM talent shortfall, and attract new businesses into every American community. The problem demands much broader investment by large and smaller businesses through updated career education systems formed in partnership with other community leaders.

At the national level, the U.S. Congress can encourage these community investments by allowing businesses to depreciate investments in training and education, just as they now depreciate investments in plants and equipment. This will encourage a significant increase in employee training, particularly for entry-level jobs. Businesses will also have an incentive to invest in career information and education programs in community elementary, secondary, and postsecondary institutions to rebuild the shattered education-to-employment pipeline. Currently, U.S. businesses invest around $53 billion annually in training and education. This could grow to $100 billion if such initiatives prove successful.

Across America, numerous community- based organizations (CBOs) and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have been at work for more than a decade expanding business- education partnerships. They have mobilized the broad participation of chambers of commerce, unions, parent organizations, workforce boards, economic-development organizations, professional and trade associations, and other community groups. In Santa Ana, California; Fargo, North Dakota; Danville, Illinois; Mansfield, Ohio; and in many other communities, these local CBOs and NGOs are now making significant local investments to reinvent the local and regional education-to-employment systems. They have helped businesses stay competitive through worker retraining and elementary/ secondary/postsecondary career-education programs. These CBOs and NGOs are rebuilding talent pipelines and helping to attract new businesses offering higherwage, higher-skilled jobs for their communities.

The long-term goal of these CBOs and NGOs is very simple. They seek to change the education and training systems in their own communities and then the mandates in their states so that all elementary, high school, and postsecondary schools will be able to offer the educational and training programs that realistically support a knowledge economy.

The global talent showdown will affect entire economies, and it will be felt by everyone. We must all be part of the solution.

The Future World of Work: A Gen Xer’s Perspective

Wall Street Journal columnist Alexandra Levit parses today's and tomorrow's job market for new grads.

For those of us who are members of generations X and Y, (see note) the future I always dreamed about is coming up fast. Our careers are relatively young, and for those still in college, they haven’t even begun yet. But already, technology is changing so quickly that we can easily imagine future work lives that barely resemble the ones we lead today. As our baby-boomer parents age, we will become the leaders in an increasingly complex world.

If we want to create thriving, sustainable careers that will easily withstand the turbulence of the next few decades, we must anticipate the qualities of the future work world. Here are a few ideas based on my own experiences and my conversations with other workplace experts.

• Who we’ll be working with: In the coming decades, the baby boomers will start retiring from their management positions in droves. We will have to contend with the “brain drain” from those who leave the workforce, boomers who remain employed underneath us for money or personal fulfillment, and a large influx of immigrants.

• Who we’ll be working for: In the last decade, as American companies have laid off millions of workers, the ideals of job security and employee loyalty no longer apply. In the knowledge-driven economy of the future, large organizations won’t be needed to create value and our livelihood won’t be connected to a single corporation. We’ll work for much smaller organizations that outsource everything but the business’s core area of expertise, and more than half of us will eventually become contingent workers, employed part time or as freelancers or consultants.

• Where we’ll be working: We’ve already seen the model of everyone at the same place, at the same time, begin to disappear. Now that we can be connected regardless of our physical location, work activities will be distributed across central offices, remote locations, and community locations. The typical eight-hour workday will be spread across a 14 plus-hour window to allow us to attend to needs at home and work with colleagues abroad.

• How we’ll be working: Our future workplace will be one of constant change, innovation, and skill upgrading. Work projects will begin with one set of goals, but will reinvent themselves over and over again, so we’ll be forced to think on the fly. Workers at all levels of the organization will be responsible for devising creative strategies, and cross-functional teams will be assigned for individual projects.

• What we’ll be working on: Future employers will rely on individuals who are willing to work the flexible hours and can leverage the latest technologies associated with an Internet-oriented, nonstop marketplace. Technical skills will only increase in importance, and as organizations continue to flatten, people in all areas of the business will be responsible for administrative skills like budgeting, hiring, and operations. From Generations X and Y, the leaders, organizations will expect individuals who understand human behavior, can engender cooperation, and can bring out the best in workers.

Sounds like an exciting time, doesn’t it? I think I’m going to look forward to “going to work” in 2025.

About the Author

Alexandra Levit is a Wall Street Journal columnist and the author of Success for Hire (ASTD Press 2008) and the forthcoming New Job, New You (Random House, 2010). She speaks to organizations around the globe about generational workplace issues. Web site www.alexandralevit.com .

*Note: demographers William Strauss and Neil Howe, in their book Generations, define Generation X as the cohort born between 1961 and 1980, and Generation Y or the Millennial Generation as being born from 1980 until the early 1990s.

Tomorrow in Brief

"Smart" Turbine Boosts Wind Power

Wind energy may become more-efficient, economical, and reliable thanks to "smart" turbines under development at Purdue University and Sandia National Laboratories. Sensors embedded in the blades monitor the forces exerted on their surface, signaling changes in wind conditions. The blades' built-in flaps—similar to the wings of an airplane—enable the turbines to be adjusted for optimal performance. The system will also send feedback to operators in order to prevent damage from sudden, potentially catastrophic winds, as well as track the blades' conditions—vital for predicting fatigue and enabling engineers to develop more-resilient turbines.

Source: Purdue University, www.purdue.edu .

Soap Sniffer Monitors Hygiene

The same type of sensors that tell the cops you're tipsy could also tattle on you if you fail to wash your hands in the restroom. Hand washing is vital for avoiding the spread of germs and is particularly critical in hospitals, restaurants, and other places with "hands-on" workers. A monitoring device developed at the University of Florida detects sanitizer or soap fumes given off from people's hands, offering real-time monitoring of hygiene compliance. The mere presence of the soap-sniffer could improve compliance by being a compelling reminder to workers to wash their hands.

Source: University of Florida, www.ufl.edu .

WordBuzz: Fewer Dirty Words in Movies

Profanity in teen movies is on a long-term decline, report researchers at Brigham Young University. In fact, teens attending popular G, PG, and PG-13 rated movies now will encounter less than half as many swear words as their parents did 25 years ago.

Films directed to the teen market in the 1980s averaged 35 instances of profanity, compared with 25 in the 1990s and 16 in the 2000s.

The researchers do not offer an explanation for the trend but suggest that the influence of media watchdogs and parent groups may have succeeded in pressuring filmmakers to keep it clean for the kids.

Source: Brigham Young University, www.byu.edu .

Contracts for Family Caregivers

Many older people anticipate that their adult children will eventually provide some sort of care for them, financially or otherwise. But when the time comes, the adult children are often unaware of this expectation and unprepared to fulfill it. Now, more families are turning to caregiver agreements—financial contracts to care for sick or aging relatives, according to University of Illinois law professor Richard L. Kaplan. Though many people may bristle at the idea of formalizing family responsibilities, precedents may be seen in such phenomena as prenuptial agreements. As costs rapidly deplete life savings, it is becoming more critical to plan for each generation’s financial and health needs and to resolve potential problems in advance, says Kaplan.

Source: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, www.illinois.edu .

Eyeglasses as Data Dashboard

An interactive chip on the lens of your eyeglasses will not only display information for you, but also track your eye movements and interpret commands such as “scroll” or “next.” Because the image is actually projected on your retina, it appears to be several feet in front of you, so you won’t go cross-eyed trying to read what’s on the lens. Developed by researchers at Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems, the data eyeglasses could offer a lightweight alternative to bulky head-mounted displays and data goggles for hands-free interactivity.

Source: Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems, www.ipms.fraunhofer.de .

Source: “The Need for Speed: The Importance of Next-Generation Broadband Networks,” by Stephen Ezell, Robert Atkinson, Daniel Castro, and George Ou. March 2009. The Information Technology & Innovation Foundation. Web site www.itif.org.

Big Ideas for Saving the Earth

By Bob Olson
Hacking the Earth: Understanding the Consequences of Geoengineering by Jamais Cascio. Self-published e-book, 118 pages, $7.50 PDF or $12.99 paperback, available at www.lulu.com.
(Reviewed July-August, 2009)

Some of the most thoughtful work on the topic of climate change appears in Jamais Cascio’s new e-book, Hacking the Earth. Cascio is a Bay Area futurist who worked with Global Business Network during the 1990s and is currently a research affiliate at the Institute for the Future, a global futures strategist at the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, and a fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.

The actual pace of climate change seems likely to be faster than in even the gloomiest scenarios in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2007 Assessment Report, Cascio notes. Greenhouse gas emissions increased much more quickly than anticipated before they were trimmed back by the global recession. Higher temperatures are now expected to trigger self-amplifying feedback effects that were not taken into account in the 2007 report, such as melting permafrost in the Arctic releasing large amounts of methane, which is 20–25 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Recent research also suggests that the world’s oceans have less ability to moderate global warming by soaking up both carbon and heat than previously estimated.

Meanwhile, few political leaders understand the scale of effort needed to prevent dangerous climate change. Accelerating climate change and weak political responses are leading a growing number of people to conclude that we need to seriously consider the possibility of using geoengineering to offset and temporarily delay global warming. Major articles on geoengineering have recently appeared in publications ranging from New Scientist to Foreign Affairs.

While geoengineering technologies are the context for Cascio’s book, they are not the focus. For his purposes, all we really need to know is that geoengineering schemes to damp the greenhouse effect range from low-tech to sci-fi, and they all work by either reducing the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface or by sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and storing it in the oceans, plants, soil, or geological formations.

On the lower-tech side are concepts such as reforesting on a massive scale (trees absorb CO2), fertilizing the ocean with iron to stimulate the growth of CO2-eating plankton, and putting ground limestone into the ocean to help it absorb more CO2 and counter ocean acidification. At the other extreme are proposals to put large mirrors in orbit to deflect the sun’s rays and to genetically engineer trees so they will absorb more carbon than normal trees. In between are ideas like creating clouds to block sunlight by pumping atomized seawater into the lower atmosphere or pumping sulphate particles into the stratosphere to make it more reflective.

Cascio assumes that these and other geoengineering technologies could be developed, and moves on quickly to the really hard questions, such as “Who should be responsible for making decisions about the use of such technologies?” (geopolitics) and “What ethical guidelines should shape the decisions?” (geoethics).

Cascio makes it very clear that he is not enthusiastic about climate geoengineering and completely rejects the idea that it might be a replacement for the economic, social, and technological changes needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Its only possible purpose, he asserts, is to give us more time to make those changes. It would be far better if geoengineering is never needed, because we still know too little about geophysical systems to be confident that we could engineer changes on a planetary scale without making an already-bad situation even worse. And the politics of geoengineering is a nightmare to be avoided if at all possible.

But, he argues, “we may be running out of alternatives.” If it comes down to a choice between a global climate catastrophe and using geoengineering to buy more time to reduce carbon emissions, would we really choose catastrophe?

Two lines of thought out of many in the book stand out as especially important: Cascio’s analysis of the climate problem from a futurist’s perspective and his discussion of the challenges involved in what might be called climate stability governance.

Climate change is arguably the toughest problem we face in terms of the demands it makes for sophisticated thinking about the future. Cascio stresses again and again the importance of lag in geophysical systems due to the Earth’s “thermal inertia.” Even if we could instantly end all human emissions of greenhouse gases, global temperatures would increase for at least the next 20–30 years. And if that temperature increase triggers feedback effects, like methane released from thawing tundra or dark open water absorbing more heat than highly reflective ice as the Arctic ice cap shrinks, then temperature increases could go on longer.

Of course, we can’t stop our emissions on a dime. Meeting the climate challenge will require an Energy Technology Revolution in which virtually all of our energy-using technologies are redesigned to be more efficient and new energy sources that do not emit carbon dioxide are fast-tracked on a global scale to replace fossil fuels. This will be, by far, the greatest deliberate technological transformation in human history, and it will take many decades to accomplish. Behavioral changes in how we live, move around, and build our cities will take at least as long and probably longer. All the economic, political, and social changes required to mobilize on the needed scale will face stiff opposition that will take time to overcome. So the climate problem involves major response lags as well as geophysical lags.

Climate change, says Cascio, is the prime example of what he calls a “long-lag problem.” The combination of geophysical lags from thermal inertia and response lags from human inertia means that the solution window will close well before the problem fully hits. Only foresight can prevent a climate catastrophe.

Therefore, Cascio argues, more farsighted governance arrangements need to be developed to pursue climate stability over the generation ahead. He does not make proposals about what those arrangements should be like, but says they need to embody a new form of power based on superior information and analysis, better long-term thinking, and greater openness and accountability.

Governing the use of geoengineering will present special problems. Preferably, the United Nations would both authorize and provide oversight for any use of geoengineering, since both the benefits and the risks would be global in scope. But some geoengineering approaches are relatively inexpensive, not in absolute terms but in comparison to the enormous costs involved in creating a new global energy infrastructure. It’s entirely possible that a state that has the capacity to undertake geoengineering and is suffering particularly severe climate impacts might decide that it needs to act on its own without waiting for the approval of dithering international institutions. Such “rogue actors” need not be just states. Some geoengineering schemes are financially within the reach of the world’s multi-billionaires.

This possibility that geoengineering might be attempted without international approval is, for Cascio, a key reason why it needs to be studied now. The most important task is to identify approaches that may look workable but might actually have dreadful side effects. We need to know what approaches to avoid even if we’re desperate.

As a counter to unwise decision making, Cascio urges the development of geoethics: guidelines that researchers and policy makers dealing with geoengineering can use in making difficult decisions. He proposes a number of core principles for geoethics, the most important of them being reversibility. This means that any decision to employ geoengineering should be made with a strong bias toward the ability to step back and reverse the decision should harmful outcomes begin to appear or become more likely. Cascio develops this concept at some length and discusses other proposed principles, such as interconnectedness, diversity, foresight, integration, and expansion of options.

He uses the provocative term open-source terraforming to describe the level of openness he believes there should be in research on geoengineering. He argues that, the more people who examine and evaluate proposed geoengineering schemes, the better the chance of finding flaws or dangers and the greater the pool of knowledge from which to develop solutions. Critics of open-source approaches to anything typically argue that they can undermine the market and put knowledge into the hands of people who may use it in unwise or even hostile ways. Economic concerns make no sense in the case of geoengineering since there’s no market for it, but the security argument carries some weight. Nevertheless, Cascio believes a “many eyes, many minds” approach is ultimately safer than secrecy.

To some environmentalists who continue to argue that we should not even consider geoengineering options but should focus solely on reducing CO2 emissions, Cascio argues back that, yes, reducing emissions is the fundamental solution and the preferred strategy, but a resilient, farsighted, ethical approach must include preparing to deal with the failure of one’s preferred strategy before that failure occurs. If we do come to a point where geoengineering is the only alternative to climate catastrophe and we haven’t studied it, it will be far too late to develop the technological options and choose wisely among them.

Cascio is at least moderately optimistic about humanity’s ability to prevent a climate catastrophe and to make it through the coming era of global system breakdowns battered but ultimately successful. “The end result,” he believes, “may be far greater than we dare hope. Not only would we find ourselves in a world of sustainable wealth, abundance and efficiency, we’d be living in a civilization that, for the first time, had really started to think like a mature, adult society.”
About the Reviewer

Bob Olson is Senior Fellow at the Institute for Alternative Futures, 100 North Pitt Street, Alexandria, Virginia 22314. Web site www.altfutures.com

Print:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00262KMVM

Kindle:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002BDV8FU

Futurist Bookshelf

Calculating Political Risk by Catherine Althaus. Earthscan. 2009. 304 pages. Paperback. $48.95.

From containing food-borne epidemics to preventing terrorist attacks, public officials have to continuously make decisions that involve high levels of risk. But what exactly is risk? How does it manifest itself? What makes a given action too risky? Public-administration consultant Althaus explores these and related questions, bringing together perspective from medicine, finance, philosophy, mathematics, and other fields to flesh out a scholarly understanding of political risk, the calculation thereof, and what it means to actual political practice, which requires the frequent making of decisions that literally involve life and death. Australia’s regional infrastructure-development plans, Britain’s response to the mad-cow epidemic, and the U.S. government’s counterterrorism policies in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks are cases in point, from which she pinpoints lessons to learn.

Counterknowledge: How We Surrendered to Conspiracy Theories, Quack Medicine, Bogus Science, and Fake History by Damian Thompson. W.W. Norton & Company. 2008. 162 pages. $21.95.

Demonstrably false beliefs are in high demand nowadays, notes sociologist Thompson. Officials in the United States and Britain endorse teaching creationist explanations for the origin of life on earth in public schools, while publishing houses circulate new “nonfiction” books that allege U.S. government complicity in the 9/11 attacks, claim that a Chinese fleet circumnavigated the globe 70 years before Columbus crossed the Atlantic, and warn parents that having their children vaccinated for measles might make them autistic.

Mainstream media are no help. They promulgate such theories to fan discussions, drive audience traffic, and sell copy. And tens of millions of educated adults believe them. Thompson asks what has happened to scientific proof and historical fact; a generation of adults seems to be losing faith in both while they let themselves be deluded by “counterknowledge,” or beliefs that contradict clear evidence. At a time when our methods for ascertaining fact are more sophisticated than ever, our interest in the facts seems to be waning.

Thompson analyzes the psychology that underlies this—why people create counterknowledge, why others hunger for it—and he speculates on how it will affect society overall. Vast political and socioeconomic disaster is inevitable, he says, if we do not come to our senses.

Future Scenarios: How Communities Can Adapt to Peak Oil and Climate Change by David Holmgren. Chelsea Green Publishing. 2009. 126 pages. Paperback. $12.

We need to find new ways of living in the face of climate change and global oil peak, says sustainability-innovator Holmgren. He envisions four future scenarios: techno-explosion, in which large new energy sources allow us to keep expanding our wealth; techno-stability, in which steady consumption and new renewable energies allow us to maintain current standards of living; energy descent, in which declining energy availability triggers declining economic activity, population, and urbanization; and collapse, in which human systems across the globe fail.

Large new energy sources are unlikely, according to Holmgren: We best learn to live with less. He advocates permaculture living—maximizing communities’ self-sufficiency via localized food, renewable energy, community-based economies, and bioregional political structures. Argentina, Cuba, and New Zealand have already adopted some permaculture practices in the wake of rising energy and food prices.

(Note: Holmgren is co-originator, with Bill Mollison, of the permaculture concept following their joint publication in 1978 of their book Permaculture One. He has also written Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainaiblity and developed three properties whose designs incorporate permaculture principles.)

Hacking the Earth: Understanding the Consequences of Geoengineering by Jamais Cascio. Self-published, www.lulu.com. 2009. 160 pages. $12.95.

The greenhouse gases currently in the earth’s atmosphere are not going away—unless we apply some special tools to remove them, says environmental futurist Cascio. In this self-published collection of essays, he explores the prospects for geoengineering, or using human-made structures to undo climate change: pumping seawater into clouds to increase their reflectivity of incoming sunlight; growing genetically engineered plants that will absorb carbon dioxide at faster-than-average rates; building mirrors in space to block some of the sun’s rays; dumping iron into the ocean to stimulate growth of carbon-dioxide-consuming plankton; and more.

None of these will be easy to deploy. And all carry risks—they might trigger new changes in the earth’s atmosphere or ocean currents; they might benefit some parts of the earth while scarcely helping, or even harming, other parts; and disagreements over their developments and deployment might spark heated political tensions, or even wars. It’s the future we know versus the alternative future we don’t know. Both are scary, and both and will require us to make hard decisions.

Mom-in-Chief: How Wisdom from the Workplace Can Save Your Family from Chaos by Jamie Woolf. Jossey-Bass. 2009. 262 pages. $22.95.

The skills that working mothers learn at the office can help them create happier family lives at home, says leadership consultant—and proud parent—Woolf. Drawing from her own experiences, she elaborates some readily transferable “best practices” that foster communication, teamwork, and morale in employees and children alike. Her anecdotes and tips aim to help readers discover their personal leadership styles and maximize them to nurture healthy family cultures, manage crises, delegate effectively with their spouses, and motivate their children to discover and unleash their potential strengths.

One Square Inch of Silence: One Man’s Journey for Natural Silence in a Noisy World by Gordon Hempton and John Grossmann. Free Press. 2009. 356 pages. $26. Includes compact disc.

Natural silence is harder to find, according to ecologist Hempton and freelance-writer Grossmann. In Hempton’s expedition across the continental United States, he recorded the sounds of nature—the vibrations of butterfly wings, the sifting of breeze through pine branches, the crash-boom of waterfalls, the howls of wolves, and all those other sounds that existed eons before the first human beings. To hear these sounds uninterrupted, however, is increasingly difficult nowadays. The authors note that even in the most “remote” natural parks, one may hear human-caused noise: a chainsaw here, a jet plane there, highway traffic, helicopters, trains, and more.

Hempton’s journey is retraced with vivid descriptions of wilderness through which he hiked and the local humans he met and conversed with along the way. They express the hope that the reader, too, will rediscover how to listen to the land and thus reconnect with it. This will only happen when we can experience natural silence, the “meeting place” between us and our environment. An enclosed compact disc features Hempton’s sound recordings and illustrations of poignant natural scenes.

Political Economy in a Globalized World by Joergen Oerstroem Moeller. World Scientific. 2009. 442 pages. $48.

Our world’s global economy is a fragile system, as the widespread damage of the recent financial crisis demonstrated, says economist—and World Future Society Global Advisory Council member—Moeller. He advises taking careful note of the system’s strengths and weaknesses, because it will undergo even greater strains later this century: climate change, demographic changes, shifting balances of geopolitical power, rising nationalism, the continuing menaces of extremism and terrorism, and new scarcities of needed resources in every economy worldwide. The global economy is our best hope of worldwide prosperity, but we must modernize it in order to meet all these new challenges.

Moeller describes the future trends, and the ways we can expect the world’s financial system to evolve in light of them. Global economics could be a bigger factor than domestic policy in most countries’ domestic prosperity, since all citizens are vulnerable to events beyond their national borders. We have an opportunity to act now and identify the right policies. If we take it, we will have the brightest prospects of reducing or eliminating the negative impacts on our societies, and promoting human rights and opportunities.

The Shut-Down Learner: Helping Your Academically Discouraged Child by Richard Selznick. Sentient. 2009. 160 pages. $15.95.

Children with diagnoses of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, dyslexia, and other “learning disabilities” need much more than clinical tests and medications; they need understanding and support, says school-psychologist Selznick. The typical classroom setting just isn’t designed for the way they think: Most of these children excel in creative tasks that demand strong visual skills or spatial thinking, but they struggle—and often fail—at following standard instruction in reading, math, and writing. Their difficulties leave them feeling anxious, depressed, and resentful. Their self-esteem suffers, and their relationships with their parents become strained.

Well-meaning parents may expect counseling and medication regimens to “fix” them. Selznick cautions against this. Medical treatments are often necessary, he says, but parents also need to explore the underlying factors that may be worsening their children’s conditions. Selzick helps parents identify the factors, and offers concrete approaches that can help resolve them.

Social Capital: Reaching Out, Reaching In by Viva Ona Bartkus and James H. Davis. Edward Elgar. 2009. 369 pages. $150.

“Social capital,” the resources that individuals and groups accrue from building and maintaining personal relationships, is a highly discussed—and controversial—subject of study, according to management professors Bartkus and Davis. Each one of us can enrich our lives, make it through tough times, and discover new personal or professional opportunities by way of the relationships we share with friends, family, co-workers, and colleagues.

Larger groups benefit, too, since their members’ mutual relationships foster information flow, raise awareness of common problems, and identify and sanction unacceptable behavior. But there can be too much of a good thing: A community that is excessively close-knit can become insular, discriminatory, and prejudiced against those on the outside.

Recent research is making many fascinating new revelations about human community behavior, challenging many long-cherished assumptions, such as classical economics’ belief that humans are individualistic and self-interested. Bartkus and Davis share innovative discoveries by leading economists, political analysts, and sociologists on the nature and value of social capital: what social capital is, how we measure it, how we create and maintain it, and where it stands in our society today.

The Virtue of Wealth: Creating Life Success the Zenvesting Way by Paul H. Sutherland. Spirituality & Health Books. 2009. 193 pages. Paperback. $16.95.

Living in accordance with our unique values and dreams is not easy, but it is the only way to true happiness and true wealth, says investment-manager Sutherland. He leads readers through the processes of creating road maps for lives of healthy relationships with money, possessions, and, most importantly, other people. Balance, anticipation of life’s up and downs, substitution of personal responsibility for victim mentality, and awareness of one’s own place in the grand scheme of human existence are his core tenets. Applying those tenets, you will learn how to successfully save for retirement, plan for a more fulfilling future, and raise your kids to spend money wisely, engage in household chores, share with others, and deeply value their educations.

The Wall Street Journal Guide to the End of Wall Street As We Know It: What You Need to Know About the Greatest Financial Crisis of Our Time—And How to Survive It by Dave Kansas. Collins Business. 2009. 199 pages. Paperback. $15.99.

Radical changes are under way in the world’s financial systems in the wake of the subprime-mortgage implosion, credit crunch, and market meltdown, according to financial-writer Kansas. He clues consumers in to what the crises mean to them, and what they need to do to weather the storm. His text traces the unwise investment decisions and spending excesses that led to today’s situation, and he compares it with prior economic downturns, such the stock-market depreciation of 2000.

Taking stock of the current morass, he notes what the current events mean for the global economy. It will recover, he says, but it will be of a markedly different form: fewer Wall Street firms, more global players, and the disappearance of many small- to medium-size banks. He notes further what the current events mean for individual investors: He describes the changes in the housing market; clarifies the new rules of funds protection, identifying which investments are protected and which are not; suggests ways to pay down debt; and shows how you can determine the safety of your assets.

Wetware: A Computer in Every Living Cell by Dennis Bray. Yale University Press. 2009. 258 pages. $28.

Robots made from biological materials aren’t found only in sci-fi movies, says biologist Bray. Our bodies, and the bodies of every other living thing on earth, contain billions of them. Those robots are our cells, and their moment-to-moment function is nothing less than living computation: Each cell consists of organic circuits performing logical operations, albeit with unique properties that human-made computers cannot yet match, and protein complexes that switch genes on and off just to execute microchip-like “programs of development.” We owe everything to these computational capacities. They are the source of cells’ ability (and ours) to become aware, to adapt, and to be intelligent.

What’s Next: Dispatches on the Future of Science edited by Max Brockman. Vintage Books. 2009. 237 pages. Paperback. $18.95.

Literary-agent Brockman gives a sneak peek of the next generation of scientific discovery with a compilation of essays by 18 of today’s most promising young scientists. Essays weigh in on some of the most perplexing questions in astrophysics, neuroscience, paleoanthropology, and a cross-section other research fields.

The authors detail new revelations about childhood and adolescent brain development; reexaminations of the role of culture in the way individuals think; and critical speculation on the universe’s mysterious stores of “dark energy” and “dark matter,” among more subjects. Other essays speculate on future trends, such as the ethical frameworks that we might put in place to govern genetic engineering, and the prospect that climate change may spark massive migrations of human communities from warmer regions to the Northern Hemisphere. In all, authors challenge long-standing notions and elucidate intriguing new ones.

Winning the Global Talent Showdown: How Businesses and Communities Can Partner to Rebuild the Jobs Pipeline by Edward E. Gordon. Berrett-Koehler Publishers Inc. 2009. 246 pages. $27.95.

The “cyber-mental” age is coming, and the world’s work forces are not ready for it, says management-consultant Gordon. A fundamental shift is under way in the global economy, he says, from industries that require basic skills to those that require higher skills. He argues that national school systems, designed in the nineteenth century, are behind the curve. They are not cultivating in their students the technical, communications, and thinking skills that this new economy demands.

The sad consequence is that, while the world’s young-adult population is larger than ever, the population of young adults with critically needed technical skills remains small. They miss opportunities, workforces shrink, and community infrastructures everywhere fall under strain.

We need to reinvent the systems, Gordon says. He praises some efforts now under way: programs that find employment for low-income youth, new mothers, people with disabilities, and former prisoners; career academies that combine traditional liberal arts with intensive study of mathematics, science, and technology; partnerships between local businesses, governments, and NGOs to develop local talent; and workplaces that increasingly embrace employee training and lifelong learning.

Economics: Internet Fraud on the Rise

July-August 2009

Spike in Internet crime complaints concerns U.S. law enforcement.

As more of our lives are conducted online, including our financial lives, the risk of falling prey to online crime also grows. In 2008, a record-setting 275,284 complaints were filed, according to the latest report of the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center.

Crimes, both fraudulent and nonfraudulent, increased by more than 32% in the United States between 2004 and 2008, and the amount of money reported lost annually skyrocketed from $68 million to $265 million.

Fraud complaints include auction fraud, credit and debit card frauds, and nondelivery of goods or services. Nonfraud complaints include computer intrusions (hacking/cracking), spam, and child pornography.

One of the biggest stories of 2008 was the popularity of fraudulent FBI e-mails used in identity-theft schemes, the report notes. Another development was the increasingly personalized nature of the contacts to gain trust of the victims, allowing fraudsters to take over unsecured e-mail accounts.

Despite the global nature of the Internet, more than 66% of the perpetrators of Internet crimes were from the United States, as were 92% of the complaints that the organization received.

Predicting where, when, how, and whom Internet crimes and frauds may strike is impeded by the many variables of individual Internet usage — more time spent using the Internet increases exposure, for instance, but also increases a user’s experience and Net savvy.

The report concludes that the best crime-fighting strategy is proactive prevention measures. Users need to educate themselves about Internet crimes and fraud schemes, and be more aware of their own risky behaviors.

Tips offered by the report for preventing Internet crimes include:

*In Internet auctions, learn as much about the seller as you can and see what actions the auction site will take in the event of a problem.
*Obtain a physical address for the seller, not just a post office box.
* Be particularly cautious in responding to unsolicited e-mail offers.
*Make payment by credit cards, because those payments can be disputed if something goes wrong. Another option is an escrow service, but be sure to investigate that service, too.
*To avoid identity theft, guard your personal information, especially your Social Security number; check your credit reports; and destroy documents before discarding them if they contain critical information such as account numbers.

Victims also need to overcome any embarrassment they may have about reporting such crimes, because more information on more Internet users’ experiences enables law enforcement officials to better see trends in the criminal uses of the Internet. — Cynthia G. Wagner

Source: 2008 Internet Crime Report, Internet Crime Complaint Center, Federal Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover Building, 935 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20535-0001. Web site www.fbi.gov .

Government: Are Small Governments Getting Too Big?

July-August 2009

Local and state governments in the U.S. may be restricting individual rights.

“Big Government” has been characterized by those on various sides of the political spectrum as an ever-expanding bureaucracy interfering with individual rights and limiting economic freedoms. Some also believe that small government may pose a similar threat. They charge that state and local governments are guilty of intervening too much in private citizen affairs.

According to U.S. Census Bureau statistics, there are close to 90,000 local governments in the United States. The bureau recognizes both general-purpose governments (counties, municipalities, and townships) and single-purpose governments (school districts and special districts). The latter comprise the majority of newly formed governments.

A new local government now emerges, on average, once a day in the United States. “I think it gives you a fair sense of the scale of growth that warrants attention,” says Nick Dranias, director of the Center for Constitutional Government at the Goldwater Institute, a public policy think tank in Phoenix, Arizona. For example, according to the California state government Web site, “within California, there are 58 counties, 468 cities, and over 3,400 special districts, exclusive of school districts.” Dranias believes that “few [special districts] are models of limited government restrained by a system of checks and balances,” arguing that these bodies are often driven by special interests.

“The bottom line is that special districts are the major contributor to the growth of the number of local governments,” Dranias tells THE FUTURIST. “I view this as actually worse than an explosion of new cities, counties, and towns because special districts tend to undermine accountability and transparency in local government when county and municipal services are spun off to unfamiliar entities with overlapping jurisdictions, unusual election dates, and broad taxing and spending authority. They are ripe for special-interest capture, and they are often electorally immune from the general public.”

Another organization tracking local governments’ influence over citizenry is the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. The Center’s new report, “Freedom in the 50 States: An Index of Personal and Economic Freedom,” ranks all 50 U.S. states according to the amount of governmental intervention across the public policy spectrum, “from income taxation to gun control [as well as] overall respect for individual freedom.” Its authors divide these issues into three “components of freedom”: fiscal policy, regulatory policy, and paternalism (governmental attempts to control citizens’ lifestyle choices, with regard to such issues as gambling, alcohol, and marijuana).

“Government intervention,” however, is a subjective term, and difficult to quantify. The index’s authors further argue that “freedom, properly understood, can be threatened as much by the weakness of the state as by overbearing state intervention.” However, the index offers a methodology for measuring how restrictive state and local public policies may be to individuals. The study’s authors choose to err on the side of caution: Certain “hot button” issues such as abortion and the death penalty are not included in the index due to larger disagreements over what, exactly, constitutes a rights violation with regard to such issues.

According to the Mercator Center’s index, Colorado is the freest state. New York finishes in last place.

The index’s authors have created another tool for measuring state governments’ influence on citizens that may be found at freedom.robocourt.com. This Web feature places the control squarely in the hands of the viewer: Adjust the index according to which individual liberties you value most (gun ownership? Gambling? Civil unions?) and watch the rankings automatically reconfigure themselves accordingly.

Americans feeling that their liberties are abridged by their local governments might find some consolation by taking a global perspective. The index’s co-authors, William P. Ruger and Jason Sorens, conclude that “even New York provides a much freer environment for the individual than the majority of countries.” — Aaron M. Cohen

Sources: Nick Dranias, Center for Constitutional Government, Goldwater Institute, 500 East Coronado Road, Phoenix, Arizona 85004. Web site www.goldwaterinstitute.org.

“Freedom in the 50 States: An Index of Personal and Economic Freedom” by William P. Ruger and Jason Sorens. Mercatus Center, George Mason University, 3301 North Fairfax Drive, Suite 450, Arlington, Virginia 22201. Web site www.statepolicyindex.com.

How Evolution Is Evolving

By Patrick Tucker
The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending. Basic Books. 288 pages. $27.
(Reviewed July-August,2009)

Mainstream science maintains that humans stopped evolving about 50,000 years ago. Civilization put an end to process. Therefore, the human of the pre-modern era is the human of today and will be the human tomorrow, right? Not so fast, say scientists Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending. In The 10,000 Year Explosion, they argue that humankind is evolving even faster in the modern age. We developed new genetic traits as recently as the Middle Ages. The Ashkenazi (or European) Jews, for instance, don’t just seem smarter; they demonstrate a genetic predisposition toward higher intelligence.

Cochran and Harpending open the book by disputing the common perception of evolution as an inexorably slow process. Natural selection, they assert, does not always transpire over the course of multiple millennia. In fact, an evolutionary leap can be quite fast under certain conditions where organism and challenging environment converge. Such a combination can result in an explosion of genetic variation, especially when species intermingle, as humans interbred with Neanderthals thousands of years ago.

Such explosions and experiments aren’t well represented in fossil records and so mainstream science has regarded them as little more than interesting anomalies. Today, say Cochran and Harpending, genetics is showing that these incidents of chromosomal blossoming — whether due to species interbreeding or behavioral factors such as the change in diet — can impact the genetic future of an entire species in remarkable ways.

One need only look to domesticated variations of the same species to see how evolutionary divergence can take place over just a few hundred years. For instance, stand a tiny Maltese — a somewhat ill-tempered purse dog — up against a Neapolitan Mastiff, or try to make a corn casserole with an ear of teosinte, the genetic ancestor to maize, and you’ll immediately get a sense of how quickly human-aided evolution moves. While it is true that domesticated animals and plants arise from artificial selection, the process by which certain genes are favored and gradually increase in frequency is, according to the authors, “the essence of evolutionary change.” From a genetic point of view, there exists no important distinction between natural and artificial selection. Genes are genes.

In the same way we selectively breed dogs, so we are selectively (but not as deliberately) breeding ourselves, turning our descendants into crossbreeds. The difference is that, when it comes to human breeding, we have no idea what we’re doing. The sorts of jobs we enter into, the types of social experiences we have, the advice we take about who to marry and how to eat, each of these little decisions and actions — carried out repeatedly over multiple generations — will have effects that show up in the genome.

Cochran and Harpending single out the Ashkenazi Jews as a textbook example of how cultural decisions from just a few hundred years ago (a nanosecond in the conventional view of evolution) have already resulted in new genetic advantages. Prior to the Middle Ages, Ashkenazi Jews lived in the middle of an important cultural route, linking Europe to key parts of Asia. The Jews were the recipients of tremendous genetic variety as ancient people crossed through their territory, settled down, married, or just mated.

As increasing numbers of Jews moved into Europe during the Middle Ages, cultural rules against marrying outside the group, coupled with external social pressures, resulted in a relatively closed genetic circle. The more useful chromosomal traits picked up in the Levant rose to the top as genetic of dilution was contained. More importantly, the difficult conditions in Europe ensured a strong biological imperative to adapt and survive.

Indeed, while most Europeans experienced the Middle Ages as a clear improvement over the preceding dark ages, European Jews were roundly persecuted and, by and large, were locked out of land-ownership. They developed a set of shared survival tactics that happened to be ideally suited for the changes sweeping the continent. Without the legal ability to own large tracts of land, most were relegated to towns and hamlets. This gave them a head start on urban life. The primary occupations available to the Jews who settled in these nascent urban centers were service trades requiring literacy and arithmetic skills. Abstract intelligence and reasoning skills were valued more highly within the group than was the ability to wield an ax or pull a cart. Over the course of multiple generations, a cultural emphasis on developing quantitative intelligence rather than physical strength accentuated one particular genetic trait at the expense of others. The chosen trait in question was intelligence.

“The [genetic] mutations themselves suggest this,” the authors write. “Some of them look like IQ boosters, considering their effects on the development of the central nervous system.”

Ashkenazi Jews show slightly elevated levels of sphingolipids, a class of fat molecule. Sphingolipids are common in neural tissues and play an important role in signal transmission. Elevated levels of this molecule can lead to more interneural connections, therefore, a bit more brain.

The authors go on to show that people of European Jewish descent, regardless of family background, perform better than average on IQ tests. They are disproportionately well represented among lists of major math and science award winners. Although they account for less than 3% of the U.S. population, they comprise 27% of U.S. Nobel Prize winners over the past two generations, account for about a fifth of CEOs, and about 22% of Ivy League students.

In broaching this idea, Cochran and Harpending flirt with dangerous territory. The politically sensitive reader is likely to recoil at the notion of genetic variation along ethnic lines resulting in superior intelligence, even if the befeficiaries of this genetic bounty are God’s chosen. All of modern history, Joseph Mendele’s genetic experiments on twins in particular, cautions against wading too deeply into such a line of inquiry. Much time and energy has gone into portraying the mere consideration of such distinctions as inherently misguided, pseudoscientific, and even evil. But this is cultural baggage and has no bearing on the scientific merits of Cochran and Harpending’s argument, per se.

In terms of the future, the value of Cochran and Harpending’s book is primarily as a cautionary tale for our times. We stand today on the verge of yet another great evolutionary leap forward. In the next 50 years, scientists may be able to eliminate all congenital illnesses known to man. Tomorrow’s genomic breakthroughs, treatments, and vaccines will indeed be a great boon to future generations.

But as Cochran and Harpending show, no species can be perfected. In striving to optimize our genetic makeup, we may inadvertently (or even intentionally) decrease the genetic variety that has been vital to our species’ progress. This next evolutionary leap will rise not from the unconscious biological imperative to adapt but from human curiosity as to what improvements may be practically achievable, what, indeed, “improvement” even means. In undertaking this experimentation, we may do well by our descendants to err on the side of chaos, randomness, and nature every now and again.
About the Reviewer

Patrick Tucker is the senior editor of THE FUTURIST and director of communications for the World Future Society.

Stephen Thaler’s Imagination Machines

An inventor discusses his revolutionary form of AI — a highly proficient synthetic consciousness that has quietly existed for more than 30 years.

The Creativity Machine has invented new-and-improved everything from toothbrushes to warheads, and has even released an album of original music compositions (“Song of the Neurons,” available on eMusic and iTunes). It may also represent the closest that inventors have come to achieving artificial intelligence and machine consciousness.

THE FUTURIST recently spoke with Stephen Thaler, inventor of the Creativity Machine and president and CEO of Imagination Engines Inc., about the principles behind this powerful form of artificial intelligence, the reasons why consciousness itself may simply be a neurologically induced illusion, and the technology’s potential for both good and evil.

THE FUTURIST: To begin, could you explain a little about how the Creativity Machine works, and how you designed synthetic neural networks capable of generating ideas?

Stephen Thaler: In 1975, I discovered that trained artificial neural networks spontaneously “dream” potentially useful information that transcends what they already “know,” once they are properly stimulated by random disturbances (i.e., noise) to their internal architectures. Such disturbances within an artificial neural net are tantamount to heat in the biological neural networks of the brain.

Essentially, one artificial neural network, an “imagitron,” is stimulated via computationally simulated heat to dream new ideas, while another network, a “perceptron,” perceives value or utility to this stream of candidate ideas. The perceptron can micromanage the simulated heat in the imagitron so as to coax the imagitron to cough up its best ideas.

To those unfamiliar with the concept of an artificial neural network, this very concise description may not pack much punch. After all, a computer algorithm can be written by a computer programmer to generate a crapshoot of possible solutions to a problem. Furthermore, the same programmer can write another algorithm to filter for the very best of the ideas generated by the first (i.e., a genetic algorithm). But a Creativity Machine is composed minimally of two neural nets, a perceptron and an imagitron, and neither of these algorithms is written by human beings. Each is self-assembling.

For me, coming out of the culture of physics, this theory of the mind and the accompanying AI paradigm send shivers down my spine: It is a simple, elegant, and immensely powerful concept, accounting for the breadth of human cognition and consciousness while supplying the core principle for many future generations of artificial intelligence.

THE FUTURIST: How much do artificial neural networks rely on intuition versus pure logic when inventing or problem solving?

Thaler: From a computational psychologist’s point of view, discrete logic, fuzzy logic, intuition, and the most sublime of thoughts are all the same: numerical activation patterns of neurons. However, we in the cognitive neurosciences do tend to search for the neural correlates of such high-level psychological concepts as “intuition.” One prime example of such hunch formation in an artificial neural network is how it follows mathematical gradients that lead it toward better solutions to a problem (i.e., if I add more of this or that to a recipe, I suspect it will have more appeal).

Another example of the intuitive process is how an artificial neural network automatically carves the world up into its most frequently occurring themes. Within its internal or “hidden” layers, certain colonies of neurons spontaneously respond to and classify certain objects and scenarios. … This is all a computational process, but not what I would call a logical process. And this “intuitive process” can and often does err.

So far, I’ve just talked about ordinary neural networks that merely perform pattern recognition. In the Creativity Machine paradigm where pattern generation occurs, disturbances to those hidden layers of the networks tend to combine those token representations of things into new compound ideas in a process akin to juxtapositional invention, or new analogy-based models of things and behaviors in the external world. Both processes may be considered intuitive.

THE FUTURIST:You’ve said that human consciousness may, in fact, be running on inferior neural networks. Do you think that the Creativity Machine is “conscious”? And will this form of AI ultimately become the basis for strong AI and mind uploading?

Thaler: In regard to the consciousness question, how do you synthetically create that which is not real in the first place? One can kick, scream, and plead that consciousness is a uniquely human and inimitable quality of mind, but that doesn’t budge me an inch. Consciousness is an illusion of mind that is handily modeled by the Creativity Machine concept, wherein one internally perturbed neural net spontaneously generates the parade of memories, ideas, and feelings (all neuronal firing patterns) that we call “stream of consciousness.” That is, those sensations and thoughts that appear to miraculously emerge from nowhere. …. So, you can bet on the Creativity Machine being the closest thing to human consciousness there can be, as well as the only vehicle for the mind, once one’s protoplasmic matrix peters out.

THE FUTURIST: How do neural networks differ from genetic algorithms?

Thaler: The short of it is that genetic algorithms emulate the way biological species adapt through mutation and natural selection. The Creativity Machine faithfully emulates how the brain achieves cognition, creativity, and consciousness. There is a big difference between these notions, as sizable as the intellectual divide between Evolutionists and Creationists.

In the Creativity Machine paradigm, ideas are autonomously and intelligently designed by non-human, machine intelligence, whereas genetic algorithms accidentally produce concepts through the “rolling of dice” loaded by human beings. If you want to build that scary, genuinely autonomous AI portrayed by science fiction, you can’t afford to have professors and graduate students rushing in and out to periodically change or repair the code!

THE FUTURIST: What are the implications (existential, ethical, and otherwise) if someone who has little to no knowledge or expertise about a certain subject someday gains access to inventing technology that enables them to achieve breakthroughs in, say, medical science — simply by asking a computer a question?

Thaler:Wow! Great question, but give me a year and a literary agent to respond!

Let’s deal with the ethical implications of letting a Creativity Machine supply the answers. Obviously, those with motives we may not all admire can devise Machiavellian schemes to attain power over the rest of us. On the other hand, such systems may be used to fulfill peaceful, harmonious, and noble visions.

Weapons of mass destruction can be quickly formulated and optimized. Just as quickly, Creativity Machines can devise effective countermeasures to such weaponry. Economic systems can be toppled overnight by this paradigm. Otherwise, the paradigm can usher in a new era of global prosperity. We can ask a Creativity Machine how to preserve our health, or recommend the most efficient means to end the life of others.

So, without going any further, suffice it to say that the Creativity Machine paradigm is a double-edged sword, as many technologies typically are. Another dimension to the ethical dilemmas posed by a Creativity Machine “genie” is the ultimate request of its user to grant us exactly what they want. To me, this suggests an even more subtle and effective way for machines to get the upper hand, in a way that pales the classic Judgment Day scenario of the Terminator series.

With regard to the existential aspect of the question, I think that, with the expanded use of highly augmented machine intelligence based upon the Creativity Machine paradigm, we will all begin to question our purpose and nobility in the scheme of things. Naturally, pride within certain professional cultures may begin to erode as machines begin to outthink the thinkers in these conceptual spaces. Even within the field of artificial intelligence and neural networks, there is growing angst and denial over Creativity Machine accomplishments. After all, people say, “I’ve been trying to do that the last 30 years and you say you’ve accomplished the same in a day!?”

I believe that the ultimate existential challenge to humanity will be the growing suspicion that our self-revered intelligence, consciousness, and self-importance are only neural network-induced illusions.

About the Interviewee

Stephen Thaler is president and CEO of Imagination Engines Inc. He holds more than 20 patents in the field of machine intelligence and has written numerous scientific and philosophical papers on the confabulatory basis of cognition, creativity, and consciousness. His Creativity Machine paradigm has been proclaimed by NASA visionaries as AI’s best bet at creating human to transhuman intelligence in machines.

This interview was conducted by Aaron M. Cohen, staff editor of THE FUTURIST.

Tomorrow in Brief, July-August 2009

Ice That “Burns”

Harvesting chunks of ice from the bottom of the ocean and beneath the Arctic permafrost may yield a source of burnable fuel in the future. Gas hydrates are a form of frozen natural gas that readily combusts when lit by a match, suggesting a promising source for renewable energy, according to researchers working with the U.S. Geological Survey. The gas hydrates also would leave a smaller carbon footprint than other fossil fuels. “These gas hydrates could serve as a bridge to our energy future until cleaner fuel sources, such as hydrogen and solar energy, are more fully realized,” says the study co-leader, research geologist Tim Collett.

Source: American Chemical Society, 1155 Sixteenth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036. Web site www.acs.org .

Sunny—with a 50% Chance of Migraine!

Allergy sufferers already can obtain warnings for oncoming sneezes and itches from weather forecasts during pollen season. Now, meteorologists can also help predict the likelihood of migraine headaches, asthma attacks, arthritis flare-ups, and other chronic conditions. A new, free service called MediClim.com tracks weather patterns to identify when health-impacting events may occur. The service sends an e-mail alert to a subscriber to warn if the weather is likely to trigger a problem, such as changes in barometric pressure or humidity, which can exacerbate arthritis. Armed with the weather-health predictions, patients can consult their doctors to find ways to minimize the weather’s impacts on their chronic conditions.

Source: MediClim, www.mediclim.com

Rising Sea Levels Will Threaten New York

New York City is only a few feet above sea level, so the rising sea levels predicted by climate modelers should give the city and other parts of the northeastern U.S. coast cause for urgent concern. Sea-level rise is now expected to occur twice as fast in the twenty-first century as it did in the twentieth, bringing a greater risk of hurricanes and winter storm surges, according to a study by the Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies at Florida State University. By 2100, thermal expansion and a slowing of the North Atlantic Ocean circulation could increase sea levels in this region by as much as 18 inches, Yin predicts. Aside from potential flooding, other potential problems include beach erosion, loss of wetlands, and increased salinity of estuaries. The good news is that a cut in greenhouse gas emissions—by 70% this century—could diminish this threat, according to the latest report by the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Sources: Florida State University, Media Relations, 114 Westcott Building, Tallahassee, Florida 32306. Web site http://unicomm.fsu.edu .

WordBuzz: Open Dictionary

Trend watchers watching trends in language in order to identify trends in culture may want to check out Merriam-Webster’s Open Dictionary.

The latest-submissions page offers a frequently amusing glimpse into the minds of the word-centric, as well as new social norms. Among the new terms offered recently:

• Unfriending: the act of removing a person from one’s social-networking site. (See also "unfollow" for Twitter, specifically unfollow Thursday.)

• Podference: a podcast of a conference call.

• Textaholic: one who compulsively sends text messages.

• Geekanese: jargon used by geeks, especially technical language showing specific knowledge.

Source: Open Dictionary, http://www3.merriam-webster.com/opendictionary/

Trouble Ahead for Suburbanites?

Rising poverty rates in the United States may hit suburbs especially hard, warns a study by the University of Illinois, Chicago. A big yard and a quiet neighborhood away from the hustle and bustle of the city may be part of the suburban dream, but in economic hard times, many suburbanites may be left wondering where the nearest soup kitchen, emergency clinic, or shelter is. The study reports that the number of poor living in suburbs has been increasing since 1990—well before the current recession—and many suburban townships have reduced or eliminated services. Researchers recommend decentralizing services from state governments, along with better coordination of social services among different levels of government and across public and private sectors.

Source: University of Illinois, Chicago, Office of Public Affairs, 601 South Morgan Street, Chicago, Illinois 60607. Web site www.news.uic.edu .

Futurist Bookshelf

The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey into How the World’s Poorest People Are Educating Themselves by James Tooley. Cato Institute. 2009. 291 pages. $19.95.

Growing numbers of the world’s poorest families are taking their children’s education into their own hands, according to education scholar Tooley. He tells the stories of low-income parents who, frustrated with the inadequacies of their communities’ public schools, sacrifice to afford private schooling for their children. Some parents even open up schools of their own, creating opportunities for their and their neighbors’ children to achieve better standards of living.

Tooley encourages global-development advocates to give these private-education ventures more credit and more support. He argues that these institutions are not the bastions of middle-class privilege or refuges of unqualified educators that many experts presume them to be, but indispensable sources of community enhancement and empowerment.

Elsewhere, U.S.A.: How We Got from the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, Blackberry Moms, and Economic Anxiety by Dalton Conley. Pantheon Books. 2009. 221 pages. $24.

The unique economic and social conditions of our time have given rise to a “new breed” of American adult, the intravidualists, according to sociologist Conley. Unlike their individualist predecessors, who sought to live in accordance with their true selves, intravidualists each assume multiple selves and roles, often all in the same instant. They do not distinguish between work and leisure, office and home, public space and private space, or one conversation and another; the lines that used to separate all of these are increasingly blurred and permeable.

For intravidualists, Conley explains, work takes place at all hours, even those spent at home or on vacation. Daily life requires “split-screen” attention that navigates simultaneous streams of text-messages and real-time conversations. And people are constantly shuttling between where they are and where they think they should be. In all, it is a new cultural landscape with a new texture of everyday life. Conley examines where it came from, why it is here to stay, and what it means to be living within it.

The Genius Machine: The Eleven Steps That Turn Raw Ideas Into Brilliance by Gerald Sindell. New World Library. 2008. 152 pages. $19.95.

Your ideas are your most precious asset, asserts intellectual-property consultant Sindell. And as with any asset, you can maximize your returns on them with the right methods. Sindell spells out his method of choice, an 11-step process that starts with a rough idea and finishes with a polished end product. Whether you are trying to write a book, design a house, foster more communication and cooperation in your company, or teach a classroom of difficult students, Sindell’s text will provide you some insight into developing workable solutions and exciting innovations.

Grabbing Lightning: Building a Capacity for Breakthrough Innovation by Gina C. O’Connor, Richard Leifer, Albert S. Paulson, and Lois S. Peters. Jossey-Bass. 2008. 332 pages. $29.95.

Business leaders can—and should—make innovation within their companies the norm rather than the exception, according to O’Connor and three fellow professors of management and marketing. The authors profile 12 companies that they say exemplify a radical new approach to organization, the “breakthrough innovation management system.” This system supports innovators and their teams and encourages learning and experimentation even at the risk of mistakes and failures. Companies that learn this approach, the authors argue, they can look forward to innovation that occurs again and again, not as a rare flash.

How to Live on Mars: A Trusty Guidebook to Surviving and Thriving on the Red Planet by Robert Zubrin. Three Rivers Press. 2008. 205 pages. Paperback. $13.95.

In this humorous yet scholarly tour of a future human civilization on Mars, astronautics engineer Zubrin presents a how-to guide for successfully transitioning to Martian life. He begins with the process of booking a flight to the Red Planet and continues on to detail every facet of daily living and what a new settler should know: what to look for when choosing a home and equipping it with life-support and radiation-protection systems; how to spot a lemon when buying a new or used ground rover; securing a first job; which jobs to avoid; finding a spacesuit that both works and is fashion-friendly; dating on Mars—and how it differs from dating on Earth; designing a greenhouse and selecting the right crops to grow in it; the best places to shop for gear, including where to find the best bargains and how to avoid scams; and a list of the 10 best high-tech startup companies and real-estate deals.

Mars’s thin atmosphere, dry surface, frigid temperatures, and cataclysmic sandstorms make it a very dangerous place. As Zubrin points out, however, those who are smart, ambitious, and willing to look hard enough for the right publicist can look forward to fabulous fame and fortune on Earth’s next-door neighbor.

Innovation for Underdogs: How to Make the Leap from What If to Now What by David Pensak, with Elizabeth Licorish. Career Press. 2008. 224 pages. $19.99.

Anyone can be wildly innovative, says master innovator Pensak, creator of the first Internet firewall and holder of 38 product patents. He encourages us to be more like our childhood selves. Children have the key innovator qualities: constant curiosity and ease with exercising imagination. We tend to lose these qualities as we get older, complete our schooling, pursue careers, and get accustomed to looking to society for all the “right” answers. Drawing from his work and teaching experiences, Pensak shares “truths about innovation” that he hopes might help readers reconcile childhood curiosity and imagination with adulthood wisdom and experience to better define problems and market solutions.

Investing in a Sustainable World: Why Green Is the New Color of Money on Wall Street by Matthew J. Kiernan. AMACOM. 2008. 300 pages. $27.95.

Now more than ever, businesses and investors who want to be successful must incorporate environmental and social issues into their decision-making processes, says sustainable-investment advisor Kiernan. He notes that, until now, most institutional investors have not given much thought to their investment portfolios’ sustainability quotients, but a gathering storm of worldwide trends is making it highly prudent for them to start doing so. Kiernan tells the stories of seven investors who did, and the immense benefits they reaped as a result. He also presents conceptual and practical steps for emulating them.

The Long Descent: A User’s Guide to the End of the Industrial Age by John Michael Greer. New Society Publishers. 2008. 257 pages. Paperback. $18.95.

All empires eventually fall, and our present-day industrial civilization will be no exception, says ecologist Greer. He foresees us going the same way of the Maya, Romans, and Victorian-era British, and by virtue of the same fatal flaws: We, like them, continuously overextend ourselves and consume more resources than our environments provide. Global warming, oil depletion, volatile economies, and other problems bear testament to this. Our current path heads toward an impending Dark Age of poverty, war, social strife, and system breakdown.

A new civilization that accommodates the global realities will, after several centuries, arise, but we should plan for a long transition, argues Greer. He presents the strategies and practices that will help. For instance, individuals can grow their own food, cut back on fuel consumption, take charge of their health, and help to build up their communities. Societies at large can downsize to local exchange and local governance, expand renewable energy and organic farming, promote spiritual awareness, and reallocate into human hands many tasks now done by machines.

The collapse of industrial civilization need not end in scenes of barbarian hordes storming city gates, reassures Greer. If we will it, there can be a peaceful exit of old ways and an emergence of new.

National Lies: The Truth About American Values by Charles Churchyard. Axroide Publishing. 2009. 442 pages. $26.95.

There is method in the madness of America’s economic, political, and cultural life, says sociologist Churchyard. He identifies distinct societal forces—veneration of individualism and egalitarianism, propensity for higher idealism over real-world logic, and dogmatic belief in future prosperity and social betterment—that have driven the nation’s ups and downs through the centuries and into the foreseeable future, coloring the way Americans approach business, politics, and most social problems.

These beliefs have engendered tremendous civic might and social affluence for much of the nation’s history, but now they are fueling widespread malaise and undue guilt. Churchyard summarizes the present state of American life and speculates on its future.

Problem Solving 101: A Simple Book for Smart People by Ken Watanabe. Portfolio. 2009. 111 pages. $22.95.

What do John the Octopus, a soccer player named Kiwi, and all four musicians in the rock band The Mushroom Lovers have in common? They all work out solutions to perplexing problems in Ken Watanabe’s Problem Solving 101. The author, an entrepreneur and former consultant of global-management firm McKinsey & Company, originally wrote this book as a teaching tool for Japan’s schoolchildren. But readers of all ages can enjoy, and learn from, the text’s many fun and accessible examples of what can happen when you apply “problem-solving-oriented thinking” to your problems: More—and better—solutions will become visible to you, you’ll be better able to accomplish the things that matter to you, and your lifelong dreams and goals will be within your reach.

Scientific Collaboration on the Internet edited by Gary M. Olson, Ann Zimmerman, and Nathan Bos. MIT Press. 2008. 406 pages. $45.

The distances between scientists around the world are shrinking fast due to media technologies that make collaboration across disciplines and across continents easier than ever, according to researchers Olson, Zimmerman, and Bos. Authors of these collected essays observe a growing trend of scientists from different fields, institutions, and nationalities linking by telecom and Internet services to co-author papers and jointly investigate grants.

In the process, these collaborations yield innovations at a never-before-seen pace. The essays examine collaborative projects, ongoing and past, in AIDS research, astronomy, biomedicine, earthquake engineering, ecology, and other areas of study to note the problems they encountered, successes they achieved, and ways by which future collaborations will likely build upon them.

Teens in Crisis: How the Industry Serving Struggling Teens Helps and Hurts Our Kids by Frederic G. Reamer and Deborah H. Siegel. Columbia University Press. 2008. 178 pages. Paperback. $22.50.

Hundreds of programs are diagnosing and counseling troubled teenagers suffering from learning or behavioral difficulties. Today, this massive industry is undergoing some growing pains, and not all programs are up to the task. Some operate without adequate training or certification. Others use ineffective—even dangerous—techniques that result in injuries and deaths.
Social-work professors Reamer and Siegel recall the struggling-teen industry’s history and map out its present-day landscape: prominent organizations, the services they provide, and some troubling scandals and tragedies. They conclude with an evidence-based blueprint for reform to make sure that society has the best means at hand to address the needs of young people, today and in generations to come.

Healthy People Need Healthy Communities

Good health, like good real-estate value, is largely a matter of “location, location, location.”

Americans continue to be very unequal in terms of personal health, and recent studies find African Americans and other minority groups to be at far higher risk than white Americans for many major health problems.

The Robert Woods Johnson Foundation reports the following:
• African Americans die from diabetes at twice the rate of white Americans.
• The life expectancy of African American men is 6.3 years shorter than that of white American men; African American women’s life expectancy is 4.5 years shorter than that of white American women.
• Native Americans are 2.6 times more likely than white Americans to have diabetes.
• Among 2,608 children under age three, 90% of white children were reported to be in good health compared with only 72% of Hispanic children.

The primary source of these inequalities, according to the Foundation public-affairs director Adam Coyne, is differences in living space: Some Americans’ neighborhoods are more conducive to health than others.

“Much of it has to do with where they live, work, and play,” he says. For instance, Native-American men in South Dakota live to an average age of 58 if they live near a reservation, but they live into their 70s if they live elsewhere, according to the report.

A patient who lives in a low-income neighborhood may face many obstacles to healthy living, such as an abundance of convenience stores that sell alcohol and tobacco, a scarcity of markets that sell fresh fruits and vegetables, and an absence of public space in which to exercise.

“If you’re in inner-city Detroit, where there are hardly any supermarkets, where are you going to get fresh foods? It’s structured such that it discourages some from leading healthy life,” says Jim Marks, the Foundation’s senior vice president.

Marks hopes that communities will do more to promote exercise, balanced diets, and other healthy living habits. They might follow the example of Pennsylvania, which mandated the opening of 58 new supermarkets in inner cities across the state, or the example of U.S. public-school systems that banned high-sugar foods from school vending machines.

Research by Thomas LaVeist, director of the Center for Health Disparities Solutions at Johns Hopkins University, underscores the extent of the problem. In a 2008 study of inner-city communities around the United States, he and co-authors noted that:

• Supermarkets are 4.3 times more likely to be located in predominantly white neighborhoods.

• Full-service restaurants are 3.4 times more likely to be located in predominantly white neighborhoods.

• Low-income African-American neighborhoods have eight times as many liquor stores compared with other neighborhoods.

• Tobacco companies advertise more heavily in African-American neighborhoods.

Clearly such environments matter to health.

“You put anyone in a low-income environment, and they are going to be sick. It doesn’t matter what race they are,” says LaVeist.

When LaVeist and researchers surveyed white and African American residents who lived in the same disadvantaged communities, the disparities shrank or even disappeared: Rates of physical activity were roughly the same, obesity rates were only marginally higher among African Americans than whites, and whites were slightly more likely to smoke.

“When people are living in the similar social conditions, the outcome is more similar,” he says.

LaVeist’s findings corroborate those of the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation’s “Road to Reform” report, which urged a comprehensive approach to public health. The strategy would combine universal health coverage and expanded health-care services with community enhancements that promote residents’ health.

“The entanglement of disease, race, geography, economics, and behavior is terrifically complex and will not lessen until policy and funding decisions match the reality of daily life of people in communities with poor health,” concludes Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, Foundation president.

Marks is optimistic that we can achieve good public health and lower costs. If we invest in public health now, we will get returns in the form of a healthier population that requires less care later.

“If we can lower the amount of illness we might be able to deliver better quality to those who need it,” he says. “We see these as very much tied together.”—Rick Docksai

Sources: Jim Marks, senior vice president of the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation. Web site, www.rwjf.org.

Thomas LaVeist, Johns Hopkins University, Bloomberg School of Public Health. Web site, www.jhsph.edu.

Forecasts in Hindsight

By Cynthia G. Wagner
Every now and then, we at THE FUTURIST are asked to look back at previous forecasts to see how we did. Many magazines have turned back the clock briefly to recall what topics interested the readers (or at least the editors) 10, 20, 50, or even 100 years ago.

So a curious thing happened when I picked up the May-June 1989 issue of THE FUTURIST to see what we were forecasting then. I had an overwhelming sense of déjà vu.

In the Future View editorial “Tomorrow? Who Cares?” economics professor Thomas Oberhofer wrote of the consequences of short-term focused and greed-driven financial maneuvering by businesses and individuals alike. He attributed this phenomenon to impatience.

“When we are impatient with the little things, it is hard to be patient with the big things,” he wrote. “We see this in many areas of contemporary society. Financial markets in the 1980s have been driven by merger activity and corporate raiding as a means of capturing value. This is in lieu of the old-fashioned way of investing in productive capacity and building a business. Consumers have plunged into debt to enjoy a fling today, often with limited concern for the longer-term consequences of their actions. And the American people have tolerated the creation of massive federal indebtedness and the international erosion of their financial power in the world economy.”

Oberhofer advised economic policies that created incentives for patience and disincentives for immediate gratification, though he noted that implementing and enforcing such policies would require a change in the cultural mind-set.

Looking around the international financial landscape just now, I think I can safely say that cultural mind-sets are very difficult to change: Impatience persists, exacerbated by accelerating change in all directions and by a proliferation of distractions.

Several other topics we covered 20 years ago ring familiar today, too, including the cover story, “Cars That Know Where They’re Going” by Robert L. French, a consultant on vehicular navigation systems. Indeed, as he foresaw, the use of GPS in cars today is widespread.

“Once a sufficient fraction of all cars are equipped with navigation systems,” French predicted, “even unequipped drivers will benefit because traffic will be spread uniformly over the road network.” Unfortunately Unfortunately, this forecast has not quite met with success, though perhaps today’s traffic congestion is not as bad as it could have been without drivers’ ability to better manage their personal routes.

What else was on THE FUTURIST’s mind? Among the other feature articles in the May-June 1989 issue were “Renewable Energy: Power for Tomorrow” by Robert L. San Martin, “Human Factors: The Gap Between Humans and Machines” by Edie Weiner and Arnold Brown, and “A New Era of Activism: Who Will Frame the Agenda?” by Rafael D. Pagán Jr.

Pagán foresaw the impacts of the Information Age creating better-informed and better-connected citizens, who would pursue an active interest in improving public and private institutions. But he warned of fallout from anticorporate movements: “Leaving the authorship of public policy to activists is irresponsible,” he argued.

“Corporations can find a way to retrieve eroded public trust, can be dynamic participants in the debates of our time, and can fairly balance the social contract between themselves and consumers.”

Pagán was clearly optimistic on corporate responsibility, both for self-regulation and for stewardship. “The doctrine of the stewardship of the earth has developed dramatically in the last two decades,” he noted. “Now we are coming to see ourselves as caretakers, and we are holding ourselves responsible for the way we use our resources.… The choice for industry is no longer whether it will be responsible, but how.”

Our World Trends & Forecasts section likewise covered topics that continue to have an impact on our lives and futures, such as family–work balance, investments in children’s health and education, and the phenomenon of “environmental refugees”—entire groups of people forced into migrating due to insurmountable environmental problems. As Hurricane Katrina painfully illustrated, some problems just cannot be planned away, but they can (and must) still be planned for and, if possible, prevented.

And that lesson continues to be the principal subject matter of THE FUTURIST and the World Future Society.

About the Author
Cynthia G. Wagner is managing editor of THE FUTURIST. E-mail cwagner@wfs.org .

For further discussion of financial manias and their causes and impacts, see Chapter 11, “The Past as a Guide to the Future,” of Futuring: The Exploration of the Future by Edward Cornish (WFS, 2004), which may be ordered from the World Future Society at www.wfs.org/futuring.htm .

Build Your Own Island Nation Expert Advice

Sick of pesky government oversight? Don't like taxes? Pessimistic about democracy in general? Why not find your build your own island nation and declare yourself king? Modern land-moving technology makes it easier than ever, but hardly an simple undertaking. As part of our May-June cover story, engineer McKinley Conway, How to Start Your Own Country author Erwin S. Strauss, and micro-nation documentarian George Dunford explain the history of the DIY nation.

THE CASE FOR MICRONATIONS AND ARTIFICIAL ISLANDS
By McKinley Conway

In early centuries, artificial islands were built to create home sites easier to defend against wild animals or hostile tribes. There is evidence that Greek, Roman, and Scottish civilizations built hundreds of small islands for a variety of purposes. Excavations reveal that many islands were built by piling mud on layers of reed mats.

In recent times, new islands have been built to provide sites for airports and other urban infrastructure.

For example, in Japan, boatloads of dirt and rock were hauled from a nearby mountain and dumped into a huge box in Osaka Bay to create an island site for the new Kansai international airport. Hong Kong spent nearly $15 billion to enlarge an existing island for its new airport and to accommodate bridges and transit lines to link it with the city. When growth occupied every available site in Singapore, the small island nation dredged new sites from the shallow waters around its main island.

In addition, there are many primitive villages in remote areas built on stilts over shallow water. I have noted these in the upper Amazon basin between Manaus, Brazil, and Iquitos, Peru, and around Bandar Seri Begawan in Borneo. One of the most interesting was a small village of textile workers in the middle of Inle Lake in northern Myanmar (Burma).

Without question, the most advanced artificial island projects today are found in Dubai. I was there during construction of the pioneering project, the now-famous Burj Al-Arab “sail” hotel built on a small artificial island. This was followed by development of the Palm Island group that went beyond all others in creative design and venture risk, raising the bar for all future island builders.

Perhaps the most intriguing projects are those proposed by creators of new micronations. Among the scores of such ventures, there are many that have been launched by people trying to establish modern utopias, seeking total freedom from the pressures of government or society. Others of a more practical nature have sought to set up tax havens that would attract investors. Some have looked for sites to base lotteries and gambling casinos or pirate radio transmitters.

Founders of such new nations have searched the globe looking for sites. One entrepreneur set up shop on an abandoned World War II gun tower off the coast of England. More imaginative planners have looked for seamounts or under-ocean mountains with peaks near the surface where they could drive pilings to support above-water micronations. A few farsighted developers have experimented with accelerating coral growth to build artificial reefs and islands in mid-ocean.

As yet, we find no substantial successes in launching free-standing micronations. By contrast, artificial islands have proven their worth and practicality around the world. The future will most certainly bring a substantial increase in the number and sophistication of new man-made islands.

NEW LANDS IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
By Erwin S. Strauss

Ever since the emergence of modern humans in Africa about a hundred thousand years ago, expanding onto new lands has been a key part of the human story. The issues of new lands and particularly new nations are of perennial interest to me. Where does the quest for new lands go from here? To the oceans.

Currently, international agreements generally recognize a territorial limit of 12 nautical miles from land, and an “exclusive economic zone” extending to 200 nautical miles. The zone provision is focused on securing rights to fishing as well as oil and gas exploitation while allowing a “right of innocent passage” to all nations’ ships; however, it’s clear that most nations would interpret this as precluding the establishment of any independent entity in those waters.

This leaves a substantial amount of water unaccounted for, including some that is quite shallow. There are two basic approaches to occupying such places: artificial structures and building up land.

Over the years, there have been many experiments and some notable failures regarding the latter.

An Italian engineer named Giorgio Rosa built a platform off Italy in the 1960s as a gambling resort, but the authorities seized and destroyed it. More recently, a group in Las Vegas proposed a floating city to be called

Oceana; the group spent about $100,000 building a detailed model. No investors came forward.

In the 1970s, a group sent a dredge to the South Pacific, and in a shallow area built up enough land to stay above the water even at high tide, proclaiming it the nation of Minerva. Again, investors failed to materialize. After the king of Tonga sailed over and claimed it, King Neptune soon reclaimed his own: In a few months, without further dredging, no trace remained above the waves.

A Los Angeles B-list celebrity named Joe Kirkwood famously took a barge out over a nearby sea mount and scuttled it, intending it to extend above the surface. The water was deeper than he had figured, and his plans disappeared with the barge.

Building up new land may be the most practical method for starting a new country; however, as history shows, new land construction is hardly an easy undertaking.

More importantly, the geopolitical climate may be less open to that sort of experimentation. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Cold War was in full swing, and each of the superpowers was hesitant to push smaller countries too hard, for fear of driving them into the arms of their rival. This opened exploitable interstices in the international system. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, and especially since 9/11, the major powers (and the United States in particular) have been much more aggressive in dealing with entities that appear to have the potential to upset the established international order.

When I wrote on this subject in the 1980s, I suggested with tongue in cheek that such ventures plan on acquiring weapons of mass destruction, invoking the film comedy The Mouse That Roared, about the tiniest country in the world that accidentally stumbles upon a nuclear weapon. Nowadays, such an idea hardly seems funny.

So those following in the footsteps of the ventures above will have to deal with this geopolitical fact, as well as all the national and financial obstacles the earlier efforts faced. I can only wish them good luck; they’ll need it.

A MINI-HISTORY OF MICRONATIONS
By George Dunford

Regardless of UN recognition or constitutional definitions, micronations have been appearing for decades. For some, it’s a matter of political protest, fervent belief, or the kind of megalomania associated with super-villains, while others are just playing it for laughs.

To search out the granddaddy of the modern micronation, you have to visit an abandoned military installation in the North Sea just off the coast of the United Kingdom on the way to Belgium. Sealand is a platform about the size of a baseball diamond that was originally designed by England as a fort to repel German bombers during World War II. In the mid-1960s, two pirate radio operators had other ideas. The platform seemed a perfect place for their illegal broadcasts, as it was just outside the UK’s legal territory but close enough for transmission.

Unfortunately, the two piratical nation builders squabbled (one argument got so heated that it reportedly involved a flame-thrower). Of the two nation builders, Roy Paddy Bates emerged victorious, declaring the platform the Principality of Sealand with himself anointed Prince Roy. Despite UK attempts to unseat him and a brief spell as a “data haven” hosting the Internet’s most dubious sites, Sealand endures as a micronation.

Sealand’s success story inspired other micronationalists the world over. In a distant corner of Western Australia, a troubled wheat farmer heard the call. Leonard Casley was one of a number of farmers informed by the Australian government that he had grown too much wheat. With thousands of acres ready to be harvested, he could only reap 100 acres. While others towed the line, Casley seceded from Australia, creating the Hutt River Principality with — you guessed it — himself as head of state, Prince Leonard, alongside his wife, Princess Shirley.

The principality has made a living through stamp exports and tourism, probably because it’s one of the few royal tours that concludes with an offer of a regal cup of tea or a dip in the monarch’s own pool. The new nation ran into strife in 1977, when the Australian Tax Department noticed just how well it was doing. Never one to back down, the prince responded to threats about unpaid taxes by declaring war on Australia. Australia ignored the declaration, allowing the prince to declare himself victorious and continue his reign.

The best micronationalists know there’s some fun to be had. Segway inventor Dean Kamen refers to the New York state island he bought as the Kingdom of North Dumpling Island. His reason for seceding came when local authorities refused to let him build his own turbine, and he got his buddy, then-President George Herbert Walker Bush, in on the joke by signing a nonaggression pact with the kingdom. Kamen made several appointments to his court, including ministers of Nepotism, Brunch and Ice Cream (the latter officers were the founders of Ben & Jerry’s). He reputedly carries his own made-up currency in his wallet, which he has attempted to use as payment on the mainland. And in shaky economic times, Kamen has eschewed the gold standard in favor of ice cream. “As long as we keep it below 32°F,” he quipped, “our currency is rock solid.”

But the days of micronations as good clean fun may be over. In 2008, Sealand was looking to monetize itself as Sealand Casino. There’s still hope that technology will further the frontier, however, as new micronations are forming online or as budding micronationalists claim territory in Antarctica or, more recently, outer space. Many more aspiring micronationalists find hope in Frank Zappa, who opined, “You can’t be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline — it helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer.” Never mind the UN. On these terms, statehood is just a microbrewery away.

About the Authors

McKinley Conway is an engineer and founder of Conway Data Inc., a firm involved in research, publications, and telecommunications, specializing in futures studies, global megaprojects, and site selection. His address is Conway Data Inc., 6625 The Corners Parkway, Suite 200, Norcross, Georgia 30092. Web site www.conway.com . His last article for THE FUTURIST, “The Desalination Solution,” appeared in the May-June 2008 issue

Erwin S. Strauss is the author of How to Start Your Own Country (Paladin Press, 1985), which discusses these matters in more detail.

George Dunford is a co-author of Micronations: The Lonely Planet Guide to Home-made Nations. As well as writing articles for a variety of publications, he blogs about travel, journalism, and culture at hackpacker.blogspot.com . His latest book is The Big Trip: The Ultimate Guide to Gap Years and Overseas Adventures (Lonely Planet, 2008).

COPYRIGHT © 2009 WORLD FUTURE SOCIETY, 7910 Woodmont Avenue, Suite 450, Bethesda, Maryland 20814. Tel. 301-656-8274. E-mail info@wfs.org. Web site http://www.wfs.org. All rights reserved.

Increasing Mental Fitness

Review:
Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain
by John J. Ratey. Little, Brown and Co., www.hachettebookgroup.com. 2008. 294 pages. $24.99.

In Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain, Harvard Medical School psychiatrist John Ratey gives the majority of Americans and the 60% of the world’s people who do not exercise enough for good health even more reason to get off their duffs and start moving. Ratey effectively summarizes recent research and case histories to show that exercise is good for you mentally as well as physically — a regular exercise program can literally heal a troubled mind.

The first chapter, “Welcome to the Revolution,” sets the stage by discussing the innovative physical-education program at Naperville Central High School in Naperville, Illinois. The program emphasizes cardiovascular fitness rather than development of skills for team sports. The students are continually moving rather than waiting for a turn to shoot a basket or bat a ball. They are self-motivated by comparing their current to their past performance, so that even the most uncoordinated or overweight kid can get a sense of accomplishment.

While Ratey does not tie the exercise program directly to the students’ academic success, he points out that Naperville Central students do exceptionally well on standardized tests. The reader gets the feeling that a lot more adults would be physically active in their leisure and mentally healthier if everyone’s high school had a physical-education program like that at Naperville Central. In subsequent chapters, Ratey explains how exercise makes one sharper mentally and, in combination with — or even instead of — medications, improves mental health and relieves mental illnesses. He explains the biological mechanisms involved, cites relevant scientific studies, and relates his experiences with patients. He shows that exercise helps one to learn better, relieve stress, control anxiety and depression, live with attention-deficit- hyperactivity disorder, recover from addictions, alleviate the undesirable effects of hormonal changes, and stave off the deleterious effects of aging. The beneficial effects of exercise on some of Ratey’s patients are particularly interesting:

Susan learned to deal with the stresses of motherhood by jumping rope instead of drinking wine.

Amy went off Prozac and gained control of her anxiety with an exercise routine consisting of yoga and workouts on a treadmill.

Rusty found that playing the exercise video game Dance Dance Revolution blunted his drug cravings, keeping him free from drugs and out of jail.

Stacy relieved her postpartum depression by workouts on a treadmill, which she and her husband bought immediately after leaving Ratey’s office.

To stave off the cognitive decline, emotional decline, and dementia that can accompany aging, Ratey recommends that anyone over 60 years old exercise six days a week: aerobic exercise on four days and strength training, balance, and flexibility exercises on two. One of his most interesting examples is 80-year-old Harold, who lives with his wife in a retirement home because she has Alzheimer’s disease. The retirement home, University Living in Ann Arbor, Michigan, has a fitness center called “Preservation Station” with aerobic and strength-training machines. Preservation Station is headed by an exercise physiologist who specializes in aging. Under her supervision, Harold works out on a weight machine, does balance drills on the physioball, and completes 30-minute drills on the NuStep exercise machine. The payoff from this regimen for Harold is that he is able to play 18 holes of golf twice a week in the summer and ski in the winter. Ratey begins the concluding chapter, “The Regimen: Build Your Brain,” with this significant statement: “The point I’ve tried to make — that exercise is the single most powerful tool you have to optimize your brain function — is based on evidence I’ve gathered from hundreds and hundreds of research papers, most of them published only within the past decade.” Significantly, he recommends more exercise than the familiar 30 minutes of moderate aerobic exercise recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and the American Council on Exercise.

“Americans are so inactive that the experts are wary of providing guidelines that are too stiff for fear the whole country will give up,” he says.

He recommends aerobic activity six days a week for 45 minutes to an hour, plus strength training. And he echoes the familiar recommendation to stick with whatever exercise routine you start. Perhaps the soundest advice buried in the concluding chapter is that “the most important thing is to do something. And to start.”

Ratey is optimistic that attitudes are becoming more favorable to exercise, particularly in the medical community. The president of the American Medical Association has urged all AMA members to read a pamphlet called “Exercise Is Medicine” to help each patient plan an exercise regimen.

Based on my own studies, I am also optimistic that Americans and others in the developed world are increasingly heeding the advice of Ratey and others and becoming more physically active in their leisure time, or at least feeling that they should. In a world where medicine is increasingly high tech and increasingly expensive, simple behavioral changes like starting and sticking to an exercise routine can also contribute significantly to good health. We cannot afford not to keep urging people to adopt them.

About the Reviewer
Kenneth W. Harris is secretary of the World Future Society, chairman of the Consilience Group LLC, and transportation field editor for Techcast.org. E-mail kenharris39@mac.com .

Recession Could Lead to Labor-Force Growth in 2009

The U.S. labor force could rise considerably in 2009 and 2010. This means the number of people working and the number of people actively looking for work will increase. It means more people competing for jobs in the short term, adding to stress on U.S. job seekers. Increased competition also implies that the U.S. labor force will become more efficient as vacancies are filled by higher-caliber employees.

This scenario runs somewhat counter to recent trends. However, looking at previous forecasts in the light of the present situation does yield some surprising insights.

First, here’s what the data say today:

• The labor force is shrinking. U.S. labor force participation was 65% in January 2009 which was down slightly. This means 65% of the population who were legally old enough to work and younger than the retirement age were either working or seeking work.

• More people are on the periphery of the working world. About 2.1 million people were marginally attached to the labor force in January, about 400,000 more than 12 months earlier, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). “These individuals wanted and were available for work and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the [four] weeks preceding the survey,” the Bureau reported.

• Discouragement is growing. Among the marginally attached individuals, some 270,000 more workers were identified as “discouraged” than a year before, meaning they did not believe any work was available to them and had not looked for work in the four weeks leading up to the survey. There were 734,000 discouraged workers in the United States in January 2009.

Given these dismal statistics about some very discouraged people, how is it possible that the number of Americans participating in the labor force will stop moving down and instead start moving up? For answers, it becomes necessary to look at what people were forecasting before the downturn, when economic trends pointed upward toward more uninterrupted economic growth.

• Boom times were causing some young people to opt out of the work scene. In 2005 and 2006, during the height of the housing bubble and when employment rates were far better (around 4% during the last quarter of 2005), many young people were actually opting out of the labor force in the United States. If employment was readily available, why were these young people not looking for work?

Claudia Goldin, a Harvard University labor expert interviewed by THE FUTURIST in December 2006, observed that many young people were spending more time in school, getting extra degrees, and just living life, backpacking around the world, etc., before settling down into a steady job, marriage, and the sorts of adult commitments that require labor-force participation.

How has the story changed? The dropoff in easy credit (less money for students to pursue advanced degrees, lower credit-card limits on people without established credit) and worsening economic conditions for baby-boomer parents could force more of these young people into the labor force earlier than they would have wanted to go. This would cause the number of people actively looking for work to rise.

• More 50- and 60-somethings may realize they can’t afford to retire and put it off. Retirees in the United States may also return to the workforce in large numbers. Statistics from 2005 showed that one-third of Americans who retired went back to work two years later. In other words, even in times of economic growth and stability, many baby boomers and pre-baby boomers who had planned to retire but had not actually saved enough for retirement were forced back into the labor force unexpectedly. Now, many may opt to simply stay in their jobs.

In the next few months, a labor force jump means more people looking for work and more people who were going to retire hanging on to their jobs. A larger labor force also implies that job vacancies will go to the best possible job seekers and employers will reap the benefits. For anyone seeking work, however, that consolation may be meager.— Patrick Tucker

Sources: Bureau of Labor Statistics, www.bls.gov . Claudia Goldin, Harvard University (interview, December 2006).

Rehabilitating Terrorists

Following a number of deadly attacks in 2003, Saudi Arabia has begun to incorporate so-called “soft” measures into its counterterrorism efforts, including such tactics as providing psychiatric counseling to imprisoned jihadists.

These strategies are “designed to combat the intellectual and ideological justifications for violent extremism,” according to Christopher Boucek, former media analyst for the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia in Washington, D.C. Because these methods address the underlying factors of extremism, they hold a distinct advantage over strong-arm approaches, Boucek notes in a paper for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The counseling program, for example, has been very effective in persuading former jihadists that the use of violence to bring about change is unacceptable

The apparent success of the Saudi program has inspired similar ones, such as the Religious Rehabilitation Group in Singapore. Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, and even the U.S. military in Iraq have begun to employ these measures as well. The Saudis’ “soft” approach is divided into three stages: prevention, rehabilitation, and postrelease aftercare.

• Prevention. Prevention programs in Saudi schools educate students about the dangers of terrorism in much the same way that American school programs warn about the dangers of using recreational drugs. Students are encouraged to participate in writing contests and art competitions on the topic, and the government also supports other youth activities, including organized sports and athletic events. Such endeavors can lure children away from the ideological summer camps and religious retreats run by extremist groups.

“By some government estimates, about seven different activities aimed at reducing the tacit and implicit support for extremism occur each day at thousands of schools throughout the kingdom” — and at mosques as well, according to Boucek. The government has also launched public information campaigns that target all age groups as part of a broader effort.

• Rehabilitation. The counseling program for convicted jihadists is the cornerstone of the overall strategy.

Over the past few years, Boucek writes, “a comprehensive effort to rehabilitate and reeducate violent extremists and extremist sympathizers through intensive religious debates and psychological counseling” has been under way. Those recruited by terrorist groups often have little formal and religious education, and while in prison, they are encouraged to discuss and debate Islamic law with sheiks and scholars. This type of religious counseling seeks to correct the detainees’ interpretations of Islam through open dialogue. Currently, minor offenders (low-level support personnel and terrorist sympathizers promoting extremist views online, for example) are the most likely to participate.

• Aftercare. The jihadist recovery program begins in prison and continues at the Care Rehabilitation Center just outside the capital city of Riyadh. Here, former jihadists participate in a wide variety of activities ranging from Koranic studies class to art therapy. This is the transition point from prison to society: a place where the guards don’t wear uniforms and where there is 24-hour telephone access. A typical stay at the Center lasts eight to 12 weeks. Afterwards, the detainee begins the process of reentering society, and the government is there to monitor his progress and offer its continued support.

“Once an individual has satisfactorily renounced his previous beliefs, assistance is provided in locating a job, and receiving other benefits, including additional government stipends, a car, and an apartment,” Boucek reports. Authorities continue to meet with former detainees on a regular basis. If there seems to be something vaguely Orwellian brimming beneath the surface, then here’s one more thing to consider: “Success of the program … is based in part on the recognition that being radical is not inherently a bad thing. Acting on radical beliefs with violence, however, is, and that is the behavior that needs to be modified,” Boucek writes. — Aaron M. Cohen

Source: “Saudi Arabia’s ‘Soft’ Counterterrorism Strategy: Prevention, Rehabilitation, and Aftercare” by Christopher Boucek. Carnegie Papers. 2008. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1779 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036. Web site www.CarnegieEndowment.org .

Smarter Smart Phones

A mechanism that accelerates personal computers’ performance might work wonders if placed inside new cell phones, according to a European Union funded research team, eMuCo Project.

The multi-core processing unit, as the mechanism is called, consists of a computer chip that has two or more processing cores, which calculate data. Multi-core processing units are common in desktop computers today since they have double the power of their single-core predecessors. The eMuCo Project hopes to give the same upgrade to smart phones, the highly popular category of cell phones that feature Web-based amenities like Internet access and MP3 players. The finished products might give consumers more features while requiring less battery power.

“With the recent advances in wireless networks and the exponential growth in the usage of multimedia applications, multi-core platforms point to be the solution of future mobile devices. With them, a new paradigm has emerged,” says Maria Elizabeth Gonzales de Izarra, a researcher with the eMuCo Project.

Unlike present-day smart phones, whose single-core chips all work overtime to power both the phone and its Web-browser applications, the multiprocessors’ cores split up work — one core will maintain phone service while another enables Web browsing, and each powers down when not in use.

There are currently many Web pages that smart phones are just not powerful enough to display, notes Jason Parker, senior project manager for smart-phone manufacturer Symbian.

“Take a typical MySpace home page as an example,” says Parker. “It will probably include a number of plug-ins for media that have been designed for a desktop environment. As a result, a PC may easily use half its CPU capacity to display some seemingly trivial item of content.” A multiprocessor-equipped smart phone will not run into this problem; it will be using the same systems that desktops use.

Cell phones have been a tough sell in the past year due to the recession, but smart phones were one glimmer of hope, according to market-research firm IDC. Their sales shot up by 22.5% from 2007 to 2008 worldwide, and by 70% in North America. It seems that cell phones can retain their market shares if they offer new products with good enough features. Multiprocessors may be the power-up that the cellphone market needs.

“As long as developers continue to enhance applications, then this segment will be a silver lining in an otherwise gloomy market,” says IDC senior research analyst Ramon Llamas.— Rick Docksai

Sources: Ruhr-University Bochum, www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de . Symbian, www.symbianone.com . “Smartphones offer hope in declining cell phone biz” by Marguerite Reardon. CNET News, http://news.cnet.com .

Stalking Goes High Tech

It's easier than ever to stay in touch with people you know — including the ones you really don’t want to hear from.

Growing numbers of men and women report being pursued by stalkers via cell phones, Internet services, GPS systems, wireless video cameras, and other technologies, according to law-enforcement agencies and victims’ groups.

“Technology is more widely available, and so stalkers have more tools to use against their victims,” says Will Marling, executive director of the National Organization for Victim Assistance.

Of the 3.4 million Americans who reported being stalked between 2005 and 2006 — up from 1.4 million annual cases a decade earlier — according to the U.S. Department of Justice, 27% reported being cyberstalked, or stalked through computer programs, while one in 13 said their stalkers used tracking devices to monitor their locations.

E-mail and instant messaging are the most common stalking methods, according to the Justice Department— 83% of victims reported getting unwanted e-mails from their stalkers and 35% reported getting instant messages.

Six percent said that their stalkers stole their identities to open or close financial accounts in their names, steal funds from their existing accounts, or make unauthorized charges to their credit cards.

Marling recalls one man whose exgirlfriend infiltrated his computer via a Wi-Fi account and repeatedly posted content onto his Web site in his name.

“People who become tech-savvy, as perpetrators they can find weak spots,” he says.

High-tech stalking comes in many forms:

• Caller ID. The Caller ID systems on many new phones reveal callers’ names and locations. Using an online phone directory, a stalker can pinpoint a victim’s new place of residence.

• Cell phones. Whenever a victim’s cell phone is in analogue mode, a radio scanner can intercept it.

• GPS services. A Wisconsin woman wondered at her ex-boyfriend’s ability to continually find her whenever she was driving her car. Then she discovered the global positioning device he had installed beneath her car ’s front grill. Many stalkers use these devices, which pinpoint carriers’ exact locations, to track victims. Telephone-based instant-messenger services and some cell phones’ location services are also potential tracking tools.

“Every cell phone has its own identifier, so you can theoretically know the location someone is in,” says Marling. “It’s definitely a growing problem.”

• Spyware. A Michigan man remotely installed a software program on his estranged wife’s computer; the program would e-mail him daily notifications listing all the sites she visited and the contents of every e-mail she sent or received. Stalkers can also use keystroke loggers, which record every key typed and thus disclose passwords, PINs, Web sites, and e-mails.

• Cameras. Cameras today are more powerful, less expensive, smaller, and easier than ever to secretly place inside a wall. A New Jersey man monitored his ex-wife daily through a video camera in her bedroom.

• Public databases. A surprising amount of information about individuals is public record. For example, the court system of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, publishes the names and addresses of individuals who obtain protective orders.

• Headers on fax documents. One woman fled an abusive partner, but had to send him papers. She faxed her attorney papers from her shelter’s fax machine, and he in turn faxed them to the abusive partner’s attorney, who passed them along to him. The woman’s partner spotted the shelter location on the fax head and tracked her down, forcing her to relocate a second time.

• E-mail and instant messages. Stalkers send their victims abusive messages. They can also impersonate their victims by sending out messages in the victims’ names. One abuser changed his wife’s e-mail password and sent threatening messages to himself from her e-mail account. Then he took the messages to the police and convinced them to arrest her.

Defending against Stalkers. Stalkers who use e-mail and other electronic means are sometimes harder for law enforcement to stop. Michelle Garcia, executive director of the Stalking Resource Center, notes that many investigators don’t know how to prove that a stalker’s e-mails came from the stalker — consequently, they don’t count e-mails as evidence.

“We have to get our responders up to speed on how to trace those technologies back to the offenders,” she says.

Technology can also protect victims, however. The Internet is a means to find counselors, employment agencies, housing opportunities, shelters, and support services. It also provides forums for victims to share their stories with each other.

Meanwhile, communities have become much better-equipped to confront stalking. In the last 10 years, new programs for training law enforcement officers, new victims’ support services, and tougher laws have all been introduced.

The Justice Department report offers some advice for keeping safe from stalkers:

• Know who calls you. Use per call (*67) when you get an unknown call, and make sure your phone has caller ID.

• Keep your contact information private. Clear your name from any database that might be published or sold from one company to another.

• Do not send any confidential information via a personal computer Use a library computer, which a stalker will not be able to track. Marling further advises destroying as much personal information as possible and routinely checking your computer for viruses and intruder programs.

“You have to be smarter than your stalker,” says Marling. — Rick Docksai

Sources: Michelle Garcia, Stalking Resource Center, www.ncvc.org/src . Will Marling, National Organization for Victim Assistance, www.trynova.org . Office of Justice Programs, Department of Justice, www.ojpdoj.gov . Stalking Awareness Month, www.stalkingawarenessmonth.org

Tomorrow in Brief (May-June 2009)

Raising Saltwater Fish Far from Oceans

Two of the ocean’s tastiest saltwater fishes, cobia and pompano, may be raised hundreds of miles away from the ocean, thanks to improved aquaculture systems that clean and recirculate water. U.S. Department of Agriculture researchers have demonstrated the effectiveness of RAS (recirculating aquaculture system) tanks for raising the saltwater fish. The reused water has salinity levels of just five parts per thousand, compared with 35 parts per thousand in ocean water. Further development of the RAS tanks could produce a highly desirable source of fish while reducing fish-farm effluent; fish wastes and unused food could be recycled as compost.

Source: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service, www.ars.usda.gov .

Word Watch: Ecoflation

Coined by the World Resources Institute, ecoflation refers to a future scenario in which resource scarcity dramatically raises the prices of vital commodities.

These forces add environmental costs to other costs of doing business. The report warns that companies could see their earnings drop by up to 31% by 2013 and by 47% by 2018 if they fail to develop strategies to mitigate these risks.

“We believe that in order to adapt to these challenges, companies will need to implement real structural changes, such as product innovation and restructured value chains, which will affect both the company and millions of existing and new customers,” the report concludes.

Source: World Resources Institute, www.wri.org .

Saving South America’s Vicuña

A traditional, capture-and-release approach to managing wildlife may have helped bring the South American Vicuña back from the brink of extinction. A relative of the llama, Vicuña were once abundant in the Andes. Rising global demand for their high-quality fleece led to sharply dropping numbers in the 1960s; a 1969 moratorium on sales helped populations begin recovering. In 1987, community-based conservation policies were enacted, reinstating ancient Incan methods of “capture-shear-release” of wild populations that are now credited for saving the species. Australian researcher Iain Gordon believes the Vicuña’s success story provides lessons for wildlife management in Australia, where nearly half of the world’s mammal extinctions of the last two centuries have occurred.

Source: Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, www.csiro.au . See also The Vicuña: The Theory and Practice of Community Based Wildlife Management by Iain Gordon (Springer, 2008).

Producing Artificial Skin, Factory-Style

A factory-like approach to tissue engineering may help produce artificial skin, cartilage, and other body parts quickly and in large quantities, thanks to research at Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for Interfacial Engineering and Biology. The team aims to break down and automate many of the labor-intensive procedures, such working with biopsied material, preparing cells for stimulating growth, and cryopreserving or packaging the new tissue for shipment. The result could mean improved treatment for burn victims using skin grown in laboratories, as well as the creation of tissue that is suitable for chemical testing, thus avoiding experiments on animals.

Source: Fraunhofer Institute for Facial Engineering and Biotechnology, IGB, www.igb.fraunhofer.de.

Nano-sized Additive Strengthens Concrete

A nanomaterial additive for concrete could slow down the deterioration of roads and bridges, thus reducing maintenance costs as well as the possibility of catastrophic failures. Engineers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology have developed a nano-sized additive that thwarts the penetration of chloride and sulfate ions from road salt, seawater, and soils into concrete. The engineers were reportedly inspired by additives in food processing that thicken foods like salad dressings and give ice cream its texture. Their additive for concrete increases the viscosity, so the damaging chemicals that the concrete is exposed to cannot penetrate it so quickly.

Source: National Institute of Standards and Technology, www.nist.gov .

Wild Cards in Our Future

In the January 2009 issue of Futurist Update, the World Future Society’s free e-newsletter, we invited readers to submit their ideas of “wild cards” that futurists need to be looking at critically right now. This section showcases a few of the responses.

What is a wild card? According to FUTURIST editor Edward Cornish, author of Futuring: The Exploration of the Future, a wild card is “an unexpected event that would have enormous consequences if it actually occurred.”

Many wild cards are disasters, such as an asteroid striking the Earth. However, a wild card might be highly beneficial, such as a revolutionary technology that leaves zero carbon dioxide, or a surge of peaceful co-existence among long-standing enemies.

The “advantage” of disaster scenarios, in terms of futurists, is that they give clear and urgent reasons for thinking ahead, whereas the possibility of a pleasant surprise does not normally inspire a need for planning. Some obvious exceptions to that complacency are when we unexpectedly receive a marriage proposal or a job offer, or learn of a new baby on the way—all of which require a great deal of futuring skills.

As you examine the following wild-card scenarios, think about the trends that may lead up to these surprise events, what might be done to prevent them (or promote them, in the case of beneficial wild cards), and how you, your family, business, and community might prepare for a world that has suddenly become quite different.

And if you can think of other wild-card scenarios, feel free to share them with us. —Cynthia G. Wagner

Cynthia G. Wagner is managing editor of THE FUTURIST. E-mail cwagner@wfs.org.

For more on wild cards and other tools of foresight, see Futuring: The Exploration of the Future by Edward Cornish (WFS, 2004), which may be ordered at www.wfs.org/futuring.htm.

Costs Threaten Nuclear Power

Nuclear power appears to be an increasingly expensive proposition. Those looking to invest in alternative energy may find nuclear to be more cost-prohibitive than other options, says Lester R. Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute.

Costs include the decommissioning of nuclear power plants when they are worn out - a massive and expensive undertaking. According to the World Nuclear Association, it is common for plants to build in a decommissioning fund during the life of a facility by including it in the price of the electricity they produce. Construction and fuel expenses are also on the rise. Brown points out that this increase reflects the paucity of skilled engineers and construction workers in a "fading industry."

The price of uranium has skyrocketed in the past decade as well, although some speculate that increased production and enrichment may cause the price to decrease. Accident insurance adds to the overhead. Companies are required to purchase the maximum coverage - $300 million per reactor - although critics claim that even this amount is inadequate to cover the risks.

Nuclear waste disposal is also costly, and Brown points out that the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in the United States is billions of dollars over budget and almost 20 years behind schedule.

"Originally slated to start accepting waste in 1998, it is now set to do so in 2017, assuming it clears all remaining hurdles," Brown notes. Currently, spent nuclear fuel is stored in more than 100 temporary facilities (mostly on-site) in 39 states. However, some experts argue that the spent fuel can be recycled, thus reducing the amount of toxic waste, cutting disposal expenses, and conserving resources.

Future nuclear power might be safer and more affordable with innovations such as the Hyperion Power Module (HPM), a small, self-regulating, factory-sealed nuclear power plant about the size of a hot tub. HPMs would potentially provide power to an entire community or college campus for at least five years before it would need refueling. It would not contain weapons-grade materials such as enriched uranium, and, according to Hyperion, "the waste produced after five years of operation is approximately the size of a softball and is a good candidate for fuel recycling." Hyperion received the commercialization rights from the United States' Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the technology was developed. Orders for HPMs (priced at $25-$30 million) are already arriving, and they should hit the consumer marketplace within five years.

Electricity from a conventional nuclear plant is estimated at 14¢ per kilowatt hour, and Hyperion's goal is to decrease the cost even further. However, Brown reports that wind energy is currently estimated at just 7¢ per kilowatt hour, making it significantly more economically attractive. In addition to generating more (clean) energy per dollar, wind is much safer than conventional nuclear plants: You don't have to decommission a wind farm. Also, unlike the HPM, wind energy creates "green-collar jobs" that benefit local and rural economies.

- Aaron M. Cohen

Algae: A Panacea Crop?

By Dennis Bushnell
Algae and bacteria are the two most important biofuel technologies of the twenty-first century. As a replacement for oil, algae is extremely practical, utilizes mostly cheap and abundant resources like saltwater and wasteland, and has the potential to reduce global carbon-dioxide output tremendously. Unlike corn or even sugar ethanol, halophyte algae (algae that grow in saltwater) do not compete with food stocks for freshwater. Agriculturalists are told to think of salt as bad, but people living on the shores of India have had a saline-based agricultural system for hundreds of years. For halophyte algae, salt is good.

A number of countries already have seawater agriculture projects under way. The Chinese are producing genetically modified corn and rice in saltwater marshes. There’s no reason similar techniques couldn’t be used to raise algae in the energy-hungry United States. The Great Salt Lake could conceivably be turned into an algae pond to produce something on the order of $250 billion a year in biofuels.

People are looking at turning parts of the Pacific Ocean off of South America into algae ponds. Many deserts are near coasts, and these underutilized areas naturally lend themselves to algae cultivation. Irrigating desert terrain with saltwater would constitute an enormous and —many would argue— expensive public works project for whatever nation or nations took it on. But such a project need not be exorbitantly expensive. Indeed, when the cost of pumping ocean water into so-called “wasteland” regions such as the Sahara is factored in, the cost of halophytic algae biofuel is less than the cost of petroleum trading at $70 per barrel or higher. Because desert areas receive a lot of sunlight, halophyte algae farmers could use solar-powered pumps to move water up from sea level or even up from underground aquifers such as the Nubian sandstone aquifer system that sits beneath desolate regions of Libya, Chad, and Sudan. Suddenly, “wastelands” in western Australia, the Middle East, eastern Africa, the American southwest, and west Texas become valuable, productive real estate.

Algae require a lot of nitrogen, a mineral that is missing in most seawater. But genetic mapping of halophyte algae — a task already occupying geneticists around the globe — could lead to entirely new algae species that would derive their nitrogen from the atmosphere.

Biofuel from algae could be a direct petroleum replacement and is an extremely practical fuel source from a production standpoint. The refining process for algae is much simpler and less expensive than the current process for refining oil. Algae are lipids, comprising 30%–60% oil. With a mere olive press you can get a burnable fuel. Can we use biofuels in aircraft? In space? At NASA, we have looked into the question. The answer, emphatically, is yes. A global transition from oil to algae wouldn’t require the construction of an expensive, complicated new infrastructure, as a transition to a hydrogen economy would.

Halophytic algae, cultivated correctly, could lessen the world’s food and water shortages as well. Some 68% of the freshwater that is now tied up in conventional agriculture could instead go to thirsty populations rather than irrigating freshwater dependent crops. There exist more than 10,000 natural halophyte plant species, and some 250 of those are usable as staple food crops. You can get a great deal more fuel per acre with algae than you can with ethanol crops like corn, and you can use halophytes as a petrochemical to make plastic or as a feedstock for animals. Most importantly, algae are a renewable and CO2-neutral power source.

Halophytes and algae are only part of the overall solution space. We’ll use many approaches to combat global warming. However, the potential of this fuel can’t be stated forcefully enough. If humanity were to plow a portion of the Sahara Desert, irrigate it with saltwater from the Mediterranean, and then grow biomass such as algae, we could replace all the fossil carbon fuel that our species uses currently and provide food for a growing global population at low cost.

About the Author

Dennis Bushnell is the chief scientist at NASA’s Langley Research Center, Hampton, Virginia 23681-2199. Web site www.nasa.gov/centers/langley/home/index.html .

Join WFS for $59 per year and receive THE FUTURIST, Futurist Update, and many other benefits. Or order the print edition of the March-April issue.

COPYRIGHT © 2009 WORLD FUTURE SOCIETY, 7910 Woodmont Avenue, Suite 450, Bethesda, Maryland 20814. Tel. 301-656-8274. E-mail info@wfs.org. Web site http://www.wfs.org. All rights reserved.

Google Searches Its Future

In 1998, a pair of Stanford University doctoral students named Sergey Brin and Larry Page ventured out into the wild, wild west of the early World Wide Web. They had but a few ideas about algorithmic Internet page-ranking and the daunting, self-given goal of “organizing the world’s information.” Eleven years later, their company, Google, is projected to earn $19 billion in 2009. Some 70% of all U.S. Internet searches take place through Google’s site, compared to 20% through Yahoo, and less than 6% through Microsoft’s MSN.

Is Google, by virtue its of visibility and the success it’s already achieved, destined to dominate the Internet era? Business columnist Randall Stross offers fresh insight in his recent book, Planet Google: One Company’s Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know.

From its founding to its future, the picture Stross paints is of an enterprise that benefited as much from the savvy of its creators as the overconfidence of its two primary rivals. Indeed, if Google plays the scrappy, earnest underdog in Stross’s story, Yahoo and Microsoft are the bragging bullies who are brought down by their egos.

In the late 1990s, Yahoo was the heavy favorite to dominate the growing online service field. It had an established presence with plenty of money for advertising. It was also a one-stop-shop destination site offering classifieds, news stories, weather reports, and, of course, search-engine capability directly on its homepage. Users could type a query into the search box and receive results from a directory of Web sites rigorously culled and verified by trained technicians. Yahoo was convinced that an index assembled by humans was a great asset.

Brin and Page made it their mission to automate the process of finding new sites and ranking them. Their work soon caught Yahoo’s attention. Faced with too many new Web sites to record by hand, and too many search requests, Yahoo contracted the then much-smaller Google to analyze new Web pages in 2000. Yahoo paid the fledgling start-up relatively little for this service, and the search-engine results were displayed through Yahoo’s portal, thus denying Google even the opportunity to build name recognition. What Google gained was the opportunity to grow its own index, which allowed it to perfect its search model.

“Google understood, well before its chief rivals, Yahoo and Microsoft,… that an information collection that attempts to be complete expands on a scale far beyond anything that can be curated by human editors,” writes Stross. “Just as the human mind depends upon neural connections that develop spontaneously, so, too, digital collections of information will rely on interconnections that are created by software, without human agency. Software algorithms are created by humans, but the complexity of the end products far exceeds anything that human creators could produce manually.”

What is perhaps most significant (and terrifying) about the Google phenomenon is its self-replicating nature. As the company’s interconnected algorithms organize more information, the organizational process improves. As users get better at Googling, the company learns more about the pages being searched and its users. As the company’s revenue model proves more successful, it attracts more ads, in turn attracting more revenue to make acquisitions like YouTube, which attracts more ads and more revenue.

Google has since taken aim directly at the once-indomitable Microsoft by offering online word processing and spreadsheet applications through its Google Docs program. If all goes according to plan, users of the future will search, e-mail, and even do office work all through Google without ever stopping by Windows, Microsoft’s operating system, or even saving anything on their hard drives. This Internet-as-office idea is what tech-watchers call cloud computing: Your files are available to you wherever you go. Every computer becomes your computer. The popularity of the trend bodes ill for Microsoft.

“Microsoft’s on-off-on bids for Yahoo in 2008 were an expression of the company’s rather desperate wish to better meet the competitive challenge posed by Google by moving the place of battle from Microsoft’s home ground, office applications, to Google’s home ground, Web search and advertising. In May, when lack of agreement between the two companies about Yahoo’s valuation led Microsoft to withdraw its offer, Microsoft changed tactics, but no one doubted that its most pressing strategic challenge remained Google,” writes Stross. “As Microsoft devotes more attention — and more of its treasury — to its online businesses, no major software company will remain to defend the notion that personal data should remain physically close to the individual and scattered among different media and devices. Centralization of data seems inexorable, and as it proceeds, the concerns about protecting individual privacy seem likely to diminish.”

What does Google’s gargantuan capability mean for its future? Google CEO Eric Schmidt — in a moment of extreme confidence about the company’s long-term viability — forecast that Google would succeed in its mission of organizing the world’s information “in about 300 years.”

Meanwhile, the company is looking toward further enhancing search.

“There are a lot of exciting things going on right now,” Google research director Peter Norvig told THE FUTURIST. He’s enthusiastic about Google’s burgeoning online translation tools, which allow users to parse text between any pair of 34 different languages in more than 1,000 combinations. But what excites him most is how Google is reinventing the search experience entirely. The company that made a fortune linking key words together is now looking beyond type, beyond the keyboard, for new ways to collect, organize, and present information.

“With our voice search you can now speak your queries, and I think we’ll see more uses of voice input and output in the near future,” says Norvig. “What if the information you want is not in words at all, but in images or video? We’re working on that, too. Of course we’ve had the ability for years to search for images or videos, but it was done by matching key words to the annotations that surround images and video, not to the content itself. We’re now starting to search the content. We already have face recognition in our Picasa Web Albums — you label a couple of faces as ‘Aunt Sally,’ and from then on we’ll label new pictures of her as you upload them. It won’t be perfect if there are severe shadows or if the view is not front-on, but it is a step towards understanding the content, and we’ll continue to progress in this direction.”

As to whether 300 years might be a realistic time frame to organize the world’s information, Norvig says, “I don’t think it makes much sense to try to speculate about 300 years in the future. Three hundred years ago, we had neither steam, internal combustion, nor electrical motors; it would have been hard to predict where technology would be today. I think Eric was saying that it would take 300 years if everything proceeds at the current pace. But we’ll probably have an accelerated pace of both the production of new information (because more people will be creating more permanently storable content, and because there will be more opportunity for creating richer media content, like video) and an accelerated pace of the indexing of that information (because more of it will be created digitally and available to be indexed right from the start).”

Read another way, Google is not only on track to meet its lofty goal; it’s actually ahead of schedule. — Patrick Tucker

Sources: Planet Google: One Company’s Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know by Randall Stross. The Free Press. 2008. 275 pages. $26.

Personal Interview with Peter Norvig.

Repairing the World's Financial System

For globalization to endure, poor nations must stop lending, start borrowing.

In a recent poll, 60% of U.S. respondents said they believed an imminent economic depression was “likely.” Retirement accounts have lost more than $2 trillion in value over the past year, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average has dropped more than 30% from its apex in the fall of 2007.

Where do we go from here? Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator of the Financial Times and author of the recently-released book Fixing Global Finance, has some surprising answers.

Futurist: Everyone is terribly concerned about the global economy. Investors have seen their stock portfolios decrease by 30 and 40%. What do you see the global economy doing in the next five years?

Wolf: The only honest thing one can say is that one doesn’t know. There are two or three very powerful reasons we don’t know. First, we really can’t forecast economies. Forecasters always miss turning points. They can tell you what will happen only if things remain as they are. Turning points are inherently unpredictable. The consequences when things do change are always unpredictable for the same reason, because a lot of other things are likely to change at the same time. That’s the first point.

Second point is that the forces now at work are unbelievably rare and, in this combination, have never been seen before. Ever. That makes looking back on anything that’s happened in history almost useless. It gives you some guidance; there are better and worse guides. But there is no clear guide that will give you more than a conceptual idea of what’s going on.

Third reason is that it really depends on what people, policy makers above all, actually do. There are choices to be made. So far, in the run up to the crisis and through this crisis, most of the choices made have turned out to be bad choices. Because they’ve been made they’ve been bad choices. We ended up with the worst of all possible worlds at the moment. If people go on making bad choices, we’re going to wind up with a depression lasting many years. If they make what I think are the right choices, we may still end up with a severe recession but we may avoid a severe depression. Those are, I think, the most important things to understand. Anyone who claims to know what’s going to happen is lying.

The forces at work, however, are at least moderately clear. We’ve got three gigantic things happening at the same time that are forcing the world in the direction of recession, or worse. First, for a very long period, household consumption in the United States and a number of other smaller developed counties, particularly the United Kingdom, Australia, Spain, played a very large role in supporting demand around the world, at home and abroad, because these households were spending much more than their incomes consistently and borrowing, consistently, to make up the difference in an era of easy credit. This was supported by a series of asset-price bubbles, far-and-away the most important in this regard was the house price bubble in the recent years, which has ended in these countries starting in the United States in 2006. Because households are losing wealth, or have been losing wealth, reinforced by the collapse in equity markets, they are cutting back on their spending very quickly. If they do that, that guarantees an enormous recession. To give you a relevant example, the U.S. consumer has been spending all his or her income, borrowing a lot more besides, and savings rates have hit zero. The consumption has been a little over GDP, so it’s the principal source of demand in the U.S. economy. If households go back to saving at a more normal rate of their income, which will be somewhere in the neighbor of 6% to 8% of disposable income, that alone, if it happens quickly, will reduce GDP on the demand side by about 5 %. That will feel like a depression. It will certainly be worse than any recession since the war. The first thing that is happening is immense pressure on the high-spending households.

The second thing happening is an extraordinary expansion of the credit system and the financial sector in the world, particularly in these developed countries. By extraordinary, I really mean extraordinary. Over the last 25 years or so the balance sheet of the financial sector of the United States has grown about six times faster than GDP, generating an extraordinary increase in income for the people in the financial sector, and this has led to a massive increase in leverage and low capital ratios. This expansion of the balance sheet of the financial sector financed enormous indebtedness in household sectors in the United States and United Kingdom. Household indebtedness has doubled in relation to disposable income over the last decade.

As a result of the decline in asset prices and the losses associated with that, the feared losses given the very slow capitalization and the very small expertise-base of much of the sector, the financial sector is effectively decapitalized, i.e. bankrupt. And if it were properly, rigorously, evaluated, a large part of it would look bankrupt, and government would recapitalize. As a result, today’s financial sector wants to lend less, reduce its balance sheet, get people to payback the money it lent, and that leads to the third problem, which is that credit is much more difficult to obtain than it used to be as a result of what happened in the financial system.

You add these three things together and you have an enormous contractionary force operating in the countries that generated very large and buoyant demand growth over the course of the last decade. You have to ask yourself, if they save more and spend less what is going to offset it? What might offset it to get us out? When you think about that, you realize it can’t be investment. Companies invest less in recession. Companies will follow households. That leads you with two sources of demand, one is government, which will spend upwards. It might be financed by the printing press, even by the central bank. That is part of the short term solution in my view. Governments are credit worthy, everybody wants to lend to them. Government spending is a temporary solution. It’s a good one. It will help households to go through a period when they’re saving more, improving their balance sheet. It will take a long time. Household wealth is declining at the same time. The other thing that will help these countries is export growth. You look at U.S. growth in the last year or so, most of it has been generated by exports. That leads you to the final big problem; for exports to grow form the economies that are so big, you need very strong and rigorous demand from the countries which are not heavily burdened by debt. Unfortunately, most of these counties have shown no willingness to increase their spending at large rates, with the marginal exception of China, again, only marginal.

For all these reasons, we can expect a deep and self-fulfilling recession--prevented from becoming a depression--by enormous increases in fiscal deficits to levels like 10% of GDP or more. This will be financed perhaps by borrowing from the central bank. It’s going to take a long time before demand grows in the private sector of these debt-afflicted economies, and I don’t see anything very strong coming from the rest of the world.

There are two other elements, one of which is promising, the other is sort of interesting. The promising one is we no longer have any inflation concern. Commodity prices are collapsing. That’s shifting income back to households, making it easier to save and spend more without cutting back on their consumption. But their real incomes are higher. It’s also removing income from the high-saving countries, which is helpful. It’s lowering inflation; that’s allowing banks to be aggressive in their interest rate policy, which should help households. That is really quite a positive element. The second element is what’s happening in the stock markets.

You’ve seen that we’ve been in a structural bear market at least since 2000. We had an enormous overvaluation, particularly the developed world in 2000, this foresees a long recovery because of the aggressive monetary policy of the fed which had the consequences we now see in terms of the balance sheet of the financial sector.

Their collapse is now leading to a further collapse in the value of stocks. But I do believe that on a fundamental basis, if you look at long-term underlying valuations, stock markets are beginning to look fairly valued or even cheap--not incredibly cheap, but cheap given the proper understanding of the risks. There was a reason there was an equity risk premium. So that may, in time, once we start stabilizing and the economy becomes better, induce people to start buying stocks, supporting them, giving some stability to stocks. Getting out of this will require aggressive action by governments to prevent total collapse in demand and a total collapse in the financial system. They’ve taken dramatic actions on the later. No body can reasonably think that core financial institutions... they have not done enough on the former to get demand growing again, To get much bigger fiscal boosts in my view to get it growing the deficit in the short run and much more aggressive action to make sure newly re-capitalized institutions at least provide financing to business.

So if those things all go well, ALL go well, I think we can avoid a depression, have just a very deep recession, and see weak recovery of some kind in 2010 or 2011. But this is bound to be the deepest global recession since the war, the first one on which all the developed countries are in recession. It’s going to be a very slow process.

Futurist: This issue of stimulating demand and what government can do to do it; one view says don’t increase the deficit too much it harms the national balance. Others say if you have to stimulate demand through stimulus and not issuing tax rebates. Is there some way government might work against the psychology a little more, like send out a stimulus of hundreds of billions but then say, in order to fight deflation, we’re going to institute a sales tax particularly on commodities and we may even experiment with wealth taxation, to prevent hording of stimulus, the way the government is now considering mandating that the banks lend the money they received as part of the bailout package? What else can government do to stimulate demand?

Wolf: There are some interesting points of view as to how to use the combination of monetary and fiscal stimulus in these situations. It should be understood that once you get into the current U.S. situation when interest rates are so low, you can’t separate monetary and fiscal policy. The best ways monetary policy can support the economy is not by lowering interest rates anymore, because they’re already so low, but either by directly lending to the business sector, which increasingly the FED is doing, or by lending to the government to spend. The government can avoid accumulating large debt by the simple expedient of financing its additional borrowing by borrowing short term from the banking system or borrowing from the federal reserve. In the present situation of extreme liquidity preference, where everyone wants to hold cash, there is no inflation risk associated with that whatsoever. In the long run, that may be different. It’s perfectly reasonable for the government to borrow short term and give it to people and things where they know it will be spent. They can spend on investment and projects that can be done quickly. That would be a good thing to do. They can finance the poor, who always spend money, employment compensation, that will be spent. There are plenty of things you can give money to people for that will be spent. Generalized income tax cuts, where most tax is paid by the well of, won’t be a useful way to lend to the economy. But it would at least give strength to the balance sheet of the household sector. The government should do all of theses things on an exceptionally large scale.

It’s important to remember that we got out of the Great Depression essentially by a huge public works project called the Second World War. I‘m not recommending war, but it’s a reminder of what can be done. There are some risks with such projects. If a country with a large current account deficit prints money like this, maybe the currency will be dumped. It would be better therefore if everyone does it at once. But in a deflationary situation like this, I think the United States, perhaps a bit less the United Kingdom, can get away with substantial increases in domestic liquidity money, because I don’t think other countries would dump U.S. currency; it would destroy their own competitiveness. If it forces them to destroy their own money supply, it would not be a very good thing. Now then there are lots of details you could start discussing. There are many ways to provide money to get it spent. Once we get the household sector back in shape, the stock market at a reasonable price, and people again start buying stocks and finance companies through the stock market or through debt, then you will want to see the government deficit start to diminish. That’s why I think the best forms of stimulating the economy have to be things the government wouldn’t ever do.

For instance, unemployment compensation is related to the Great Depression. Similarly, funding large scale investment programs which, once they’re finished, they’re finished. If you’re’ talking about large, permanent spending increases, say a reform to universal health-care systems, those must be funded by permanent increases in taxation or some reduction in spending. Not part of this package. In the long run, when everything gets back to being healthy, you would expect deficits to shrink. You would expect the private sector to spend more, revenue to improve. The government’s need to spend diminishes. It will all go away again.

In the end, it would be sensible to move back into surplus, withdraw the money you’ve printed, or you can start selling bonds to mop up the money. Clearly, at the very end of the process, government deficits will be higher than they are now but household indebtedness will be smaller, with luck. It’s important to understand this clear borderline between private and government indebtedness doesn’t work at the macroeconomic level. There’s a relationship between the two. When households have large amounts of debt they can’t pay, they stop servicing. It is the government that comes in by printing its own debt, which everyone will then want, and that’s what’s happening now. So I think the process will be reversible later on. It has always been possible to reduce deficits and debt provided the policy is reasonably discipled. Right now, it’s a question of spending and financing by borrowing from the system in the short term, and not worrying about bond finance and just making sure we get through the next two or three years without a total self-fullfing and reinforcing collapse in the economy.

Futurist: Looking ahead even more long-term, one of the thing I like about your book, you write that the United States is as much a victim of others’ misfortuntes. You talk about global savings and how developing nations in particular have fallen into this strange habit of giving surplus money to the United States in the form of loans, but really they should be spending it domestically, and developed nations should be spending more in developing nations. This is a much more healthy flow of capital. Did I sum up the point correctly?

Wolf: I think you’ve done it admirably. It is a central theme of my book. It’s an interesting point that nearly all serious professional economists--there are exceptions--would agree completely with me, yet this is seen as a controversial view. There are two big points in this book. The first is the United States is embedded in the global economy. It’s the biggest economy but its still smaller than the rest of the world. It’s roughly 1.4 of the economy and the rest is 3.4. What the rest of the world does actually has an enormous effect on the United States. It’s not just one way. It so happens that for reasons I lay out at length in my book, the rest of the world undertook a series of actions. In response to a financial crisis of an earlier decade, they pushed up deficits and gave themselves large export services and large export capital, to sustain large export surpluses particularly in the case of China but not only China. That, in my view, created strong deflationary and recessionary pressure in the United States You think about it, the import surpluses are withdrawal from a country, domestic demand going abroad. The U.S. Federal Reserve, not totally consciously, chose to offset this deflationary pressure by greatly expanding domestic demand; it was purely accidental. The same thing followed from the Bush tax cuts in the early part of his administration. The United States was responding to these external pressures. I don’t think it responded intelligently, unfortunately. It allowed this later financial mismanagement. And so, in the end, a large part of the domestic U.S. counterpart of this lending turned out to be borrowing by fundamentally insolvent households by assets that were fundamentally overpriced, intermediated by a financial system that turned out to be undercapitalized.

If you think of that combination, it was the worst way to do it. It would have been better for the United States to run bigger fiscal deficits in this period and invested the proceeds in bridges and roads and railroads and whatever capital investment makes sense. The investment it did undertake was to build houses that nobody needs. It’s a sad story. The big macro-picture is, as you describe it, an important indication of the way the United States is not master of its own fate.

This gets to the second big point, if--and I’ve already made this point--if we are going to get out of this cleanly, the U.S. economy needs to rebalance. We don’t have to go back to a big borrowing binge. We can’t run fiscal deficits of 8%-10% of GDP forever. That’s clearly unsustainable and will sooner or later destroy the credit and the currency. So the United States has to save more at home and it has to have a balance in the current account and reduce its debt that way. But the United States and the other countries can only do that without having a huge depression if other countries in the world voluntarily expand demand in relation to their financial supply and move into current account deficits themselves. These things have to work out.

The big question now is whether other countries with large surpluses understand that they are going to have to adjust to and expand demand because in fact, what is really happened here is the world has run out of large-scale, willing, and solvent debtors. Because it’s run out of them, except governments, there has to be adjustment everywhere. What’s not clear to me is that people around the world in China, Japan, Germany fully understand this. There’s a danger they won’t do enough. We’ll be reducing demand anyway. We’ll have a vicious downward spiral. It’s a big danger on the macroeconomic level, which could push us to a very deep and long recession or even a depression. It’s not just about financial system or expanding fiscal deficits, it’s also about having a view of how the longer-term adjustments in the world economy are going to happen. That will take American intellectual and political leadership, which has been totally lacking in this respect to the Bush administration. I do hope the people who take over will have a better appreciation. I know many of the economists on both sides and the economists who have been advising the Democratic side and I do think they appreciate this much better than their counterparts in the current [Bush] administration, though not in all respects. But if you don’t get a more balanced world economy, it may prove impossible to sustain a world with open capital; close it all and we will go back to the more self-sufficient financial systems and economies of fifty or sixty years ago.

This interview was conducted by Patrick Tucker, senior editor of THE FUTURIST.
12.01.08

Imagining an American Utopia

Review by Arthur B. Shostak: Imagining America in 2033: How the Country Put Itself Together after Bush by Herbert J. Gans. University of Michigan Press. 2008. 210 pages. $24.95.

If ever a book warranted a place by the bedside of the next president of the United States (and his Cabinet appointees), Herbert J. Gans’s “utopian narrative” Imagining America in 2033 is it. Likewise, any futurist eager to learn how the American presidents from now through 2033 might craft a remarkably finer country (and, thereby, a much better world) have an indispensable primer here. Written in the form of an engaging novel, rather than a stuffy academic treatise, the book lightly instructs in policy studies, pragmatic reforms, and the gritty give-and-take of tomorrow’s White House realities.

Sociologist Gans’s scenarios explore possible offstage wheelings and dealings as four U.S. presidents (three Democrats and a Republican) work to shape the future. Each of the four successive administrations enables America to achieve a fairer economy, a more democratic polity, a reduced fear of terrorism, the assimilation of undocumented people, upgraded schooling and freedom from test-domination, creative adjustment to the ever-greater challenge of global climate change, along with scores of other such outcomes.

The chapter entitled “Democratizing the Polity” merits special attention, as it explains why and how a Democracy Project might, “in the longer historical perspective, prove the most significant innovation of the first third of the century.” The nongovernmental project, established in 2012, succeeds by 2033 in winning significant electoral reforms, changes in governmental structures, and citizen empowerment reforms that strengthened citizen representation beyond voting. At the book’s close, the Democracy Project is busy in 2033 campaigning to amend the Constitution to substantially update it; e.g., Supreme Court justices would serve an 18-year term, rather than for life.

Gans does not shy away from forecasting many controversial (if familiar) possibilities, such as birth-control technologies that virtually eliminate abortion, small and technologically imaginative K-12 classrooms, experimental housing, life-extension technologies, assisted suicide, and the acceptance of same-sex marriages. One major development Gans offers in his utopia is the creation of a White House Council of Long-Range Advisors in 2010. He also outlines several intriguing policies too impractical or unpopular to win enactment even by 2033, but well worth notice all the same.

Gans makes no explicit use of the futures literature and refers to no futurist advocates. That the book pays no attention to certain “Gee whiz!” developments — such as advances in nanotechnology, commercialization of fusion power, enhanced human intelligence with brain chips, and so on — may disappoint some surprise-focused futurists (like this reviewer). But working with a comparatively surprise-free scenario, Gans still manages to take a reader a dazzling distance ahead.

Gans wisely declines to “predict,” instead relying on “mixing estimation, projection, and imagination.” This is a creative formula well worth employing by forecasters of every political persuasion. He also relegates to second place the power of things to shape events (things like nano and machine intelligence) in favor of emphasizing human interaction as the prime lever of change. Ever cautious and realistic, Gans concludes that in forecasting, as in baseball, we can chart and project trends, but we cannot know “what will happen in the next inning.”

Futurists have at least four reasons to give this book careful attention. First, we can track the progress of these detailed and down-to-earth forecasts over the years ahead and learn much from their fate. Second, we can adopt Gans’s practice of employing sentences that end in periods rather than in exclamation points. He knows how much we cannot know about tomorrow, and he does not pretend otherwise. He is much too smart to use the three words that should be taboo in futuristics: will and will not. Third, he models a realistic and adult approach to his material. And finally, Gans takes a cautiously optimistic approach at a time when Cassandras hold center stage. In this he reminds us it is darkest before the dawn.
About the Reviewer

Arthur B. Shostak is professor emeritus of sociology at Drexel University and THE FUTURIST’s contributing editor for Utopian Thought.

New Greenhouse Gas Threat

What do solar panels and global warming have in common?

The answer: Both are produced with nitrogen trifluoride (NF3), a gas that is 17,000 times more effective than carbon dioxide at trapping atmospheric heat, according to geochemistry professor Ray Weiss and a team of researchers at the University of California–San Diego Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Weiss and his team expect NF3 to become a bigger problem in the near future because it is used in the manufacturing of three highly popular products: LCD televisions, computer circuits, and thin-film solar cells.

“There is a little irony in that, because thin-film solar is one of the ways we hope to reduce the fossil-fuel impact,” says Weiss.

Weiss’s study found an NF3 concentration of 0.02 parts per trillion in the atmosphere in 1978 and 0.454 parts per trillion in 2008. While it is now responsible for only 0.04% of human-induced global warming compared with the 60% attributable to CO2 emissions, its share could increase exponentially. The report notes that NF3’s atmospheric presence is growing by 11% a year.

United Nations officials share Weiss’s concerns. In 2008, the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate change added NF3 to a list of gases that the Kyoto Protocol should regulate. The Kyoto Protocol, which is due to be succeeded by a new climate treaty in 2012, currently sets no official limit on NF3.

According to the UNFCC, manufacturers use NF3 as a “chamber-cleaning gas” in production processes to clean unwanted buildups on microprocessor and circuit parts as they are being constructed. A gas called hexafluoroethane, which Kyoto does regulate, used to corner this market, but NF3 became a strong competitor due to its lower costs and its absence from the Kyoto Protocol. NF3 production has consequently increased 15%–17% a year, from 1,000 tons produced in 1992 to a projected 8,000 tons in 2010.

Most of the NF3 is destroyed during these processes, but a remnant escapes into the atmosphere where it can linger for up to 740 years. The amount of NF3 reaching the atmosphere varies from 2% to 16%, depending on what types of emissions-control systems the manufacturers use.

Manufacturers have many options for controlling emissions. Emissions-reduction systems on the market today can capture the escaping NF3 for later reuse or destroy it before it can leave the facility. Manufacturers can also substitute more earth-friendly chemicals. The UN report notes that Toshiba Matsushita Display, Samsung, and LG all opt for fluorine, which has no greenhouse-gas potential and no life-span in the atmosphere.

Fluorine has drawbacks, though, in cost and legal liability: It is highly toxic and cannot be transported off-site. The UN report evinces skepticism that most companies are going to emulate Samsung and voluntarily adopt fluorine as an alternative.

“Smaller LCD manufacturers might not want to bear the costs of switching, and any accidental release of fluorine could also be a problem,” the report notes.

Weiss says that solar-cell manufacturers can use silicon instead of NF3, but they do so also at greater expense.

“If you’ve spent several million dollars to make a microprocessor or something like that, you’re not going to trash it, because that doesn’t make business sense,” says Weiss.

The only hope, he concludes, is to add NF3 to the greenhouse gases proscribed by Kyoto (or its successor).

“If we don’t, there will be an artificial pressure to use it more, because other gases are in Kyoto and it is not,” he says. — Rick Docksai

Sources: Ray Weiss (interview). University of California–San Diego, News Service, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, California 92093. Web site http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/science/10-08GreenhouseGas.asp.

“Kyoto Protocol,” United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Web site http://unfccc.int.

Tommorow In Brief

Capturing Energy Under the Sea

Slow-moving ocean and river currents may be a new source of reliable and affordable power. Most of the world’s water currents move slowly (under three knots), but to capture energy, turbines and water mills require currents at nearly twice that speed to operate efficiently. A machine called VIVACE (Vortex-Induced Vibrations for Aquatic Clean Energy), developed by University of Michigan marine engineer Michael Bernitsas, enhances the slow currents by creating vortices, then capturing their power. The device works much like the way fish use each other’s wake to propel themselves through water. Besides providing renewable energy, the device would also be less likely to harm marine life than dams and water turbines, says Bernitsas.

Source: University of Michigan, News Service, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109. Web site www.ns.umich.edu .

Liquid-Wood Toys

A bioplastic made of renewable “liquid wood” rather than petrochemicals could be an ideal component for toys. No matter how roughly a child treats the toy, it releases no heavy metals or other ingredients that would cause harm. The material, known as Arbofoam, was developed at the Fraunhofer Institute for Chemical Technology ICT in Germany. Though bioplastics using cellulose from wood have been used in other products, they have been unsuitable for toys because of additives such as sulfur. Arboform’s sulfur content was reduced by 90%; the next challenge was to find suitable additives that keep the bioplastics from dissolving in water—a big problem since children tend to suck on their toys or leave them out in the rain.

Source: Fraunhofer Institute for Chemical Technology, Joseph-von-Fraunhofer-Strasse 7, 76327 Pfinztal, Berghausen, Germany. Web site www.ict.fraunhofer.de .

Hospitals and Patients Seek Alternatives

More than one-third of American adults and 12% of children use some form of complementary or alternative medicine, such as herbal and dietary supplements, according to a report from the National Institutes of Health. Therapies showing significant increases in popularity in the past five years are deep-breathing exercises, meditation, massage therapy, and yoga. Hospitals are responding to increased patient demand for these services, reports the American Hospital Association. More than 37% of hospitals surveyed indicated that they are integrating complementary and alternative services with conventional treatments, largely due to patient demand.

Sources: National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, National Institutes of Health, www.nih.gov .

American Hospital Association, www.aha.org .

Toward a More Multilingual Military

The U.S. military needs to improve its foreign-language and cultural skills to operate more effectively, according to Congressman Vic Snyder (Democrat-Arizona), chairman of the House Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee. “In today’s and tomorrow’s national security environment, the demand for these skill sets may be even greater, given the range of missions our military personnel can be called on to perform,” he says. “Language and cultural skills can save lives and even prevent conflict.” The Subcommittee’s report calls for increased support for foreign language study in the U.S. educational system, though it did not make clear how schools are to predict where future military interests may be.

Source: U.S. House of Representatives, House Armed Services Committee, 2120 Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, D.C. 20515. Web site http://armedservices.house.gov .

Word Watch: Pre-vivor

New words often offer clues to new trends. The term pre-vivor—meaning an individual who takes extreme preventive measures to ensure survival—suggests a new, more extreme level of proactivism or initiative. As used by Baylor Medical Center breast surgeon Valerie Gorman, the term refers specifically to women at risk of developing breast cancer who opt for preemptive bilateral mastectomies, or those who have developed cancer in one breast choosing to remove the remaining healthy breast as well.

Comment: Becoming a pre-vivor may seem extreme, but as change accelerates and complexity grows in all areas of life, risk assessment is becoming more and more imperative. The sooner that a risk is identified and acted upon, the more likely survival becomes.

Source: Baylor Health Care System, Marketing and Public Relations, 2001 Bryan Street, Suite 750, Dallas, Texas 75201. Web site www.baylorhealth.com .

Futurist Bookshelf

The Civility Solution: What to Do When People Are Rude by P. M. Forni. St. Martin’s Press. 2008. 166 pages. $19.95.

It’s a rude world, but there are ways to help make it more polite, says literary professor Forni. He notes that polite people may be overwhelmed by the rudeness that confronts them every day—loud cell-phone conversations, aggressive drivers—and can feel tempted to be rude in return. Forni discourages this reaction, and shows ways to civilly answer an inconsiderate action or remark with more than one hundred examples that span the whole range of human interactions with family members, coworkers, friends, relationship partners, salespersons, and others. He explains rudeness, how it works, and how we can defend ourselves against it politely.

The Competition of Ideas: The World of the Washington Think Tanks by Murray Weidenbaum. Transaction Publishers. 2008. 118 pages. $34.95.

Having served five major think tanks as analyst, speaker, and writer, Washington University economics professor Weidenbaum is highly knowledgeable about what is right and wrong with these influential but little-understood institutions. He shares his wisdom in this commentary of think tanks’ operations, funding streams, functions, influence over public policy, and the fundamental attitude changes they must make to stay relevant and helpful to national policy discussions.

Think tanks are vital sources of information and expertise. But their positions are often predictable, and they compete too fiercely with each other for resources and visibility, Weidenbaum notes, and the war of ideas often obscures the search for truth. He calls upon think-tank leaders to enhance their quality of scholarship, become more relevant, and cooperatively share research with each other. With substantial reorientation of their activities, they can help Americans achieve badly needed common ground amid deep partisan divides.

Dead Pool: Lake Powell, Global Warming, and the Future of Water in the West by James Lawrence Powell. University of California Press. 2008. 283 pages. $27.50.

Water shortages loom like circling buzzards over the great North American desert metropolises of Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and Phoenix, according to physical-sciences professor Powell. He eyes signs of the trouble ahead in Lake Powell, bordering on Utah and Arizona, which has atrophied to less than half its original size under the strains of a dam and reservoir system that continually releases more water than the lake receives, as well as a burgeoning population and escalating farm industry that both consume too much of the Colorado River, Lake Powell’s mainstay.

The problem is likely to worsen due to global warming and warming-related drought, the author warns. Developers built the dams and reservoirs in the nineteenth century to direct the river’s water toward thirsty communities; those communities thrived as a result. Only in hindsight, Powell says, we are realizing that the system’s developers grossly overestimated the river’s capacity, and did not anticipate either population booms or a warming climate. Business as usual cannot continue, he argues. Public officials at all levels will have to effect change—reformed water-management policy locally, and decisive action against global warming nationally—lest their populations suffer an arid future.

Evolution’s Edge: The Coming Collapse and Transformation of Our World by Graeme Taylor. New Society Publishers. 2008. 306 pages. Paperback. $24.95.

Our global system is about to collapse and be replaced by a budding new one, according to sustainable-development consultant Taylor. Our current ways of greed, overconsumption, and violence are not sustainable, he asserts; we must therefore make a fundamental evolution toward conservation, cooperation, and equality or become victims of our own success like the many great civilizations that have come and gone before us.

That evolution is already taking place, says Taylor. We can see it in the institutions and organizations around the world that are shifting toward holistic ideas, values, and technologies. He explains why their shift represents the crucial evolution that our world must undergo, and presents the actions we can take to accelerate it.

Free Market Madness: Why Human Nature Is at Odds with Economics—And Why It Matters by Peter A. Ubel. Harvard Business School Press. 2009. 240 pages. $26.95.

How free should we really be? Ubel, a physician, examines this question while considering the many patients he has treated for conditions that arose from their poor decision making: overeating, excess alcohol consumption, smoking, and other behaviors. Though some of his patients’ behaviors are genetic, much more of them are due to their susceptibility to modern marketing advertising, he argues. People often choose things that are not good for them. In a free marketplace, one is free to make unhealthy decisions.

Ubel encourages a societal reexamination of freedom and self-control. Government should put some restrictions in place for the sake of people’s well-being, but people should in turn learn to practice sufficient self-control and long-term thinking so that it may not have to.

Global Catastrophes and Trends: The Next Fifty Years by Vaclav Smil. MIT Press. 2008. 307 pages. $29.95.

Geographer Vaclav Smil discusses the factors that will shape the next 50 years of life on Earth in both positive and destructive ways. Change comes about in gradual trends as well as in sudden catastrophes. Gradual trends in demographics, economics, and resource consumption will substantially impact the futures and fortunes of every prominent player on the world stage: Europe, Japan, the Middle East, Russia, and the United States.

If we do not pay close attention to the trends, we may be surprised by consequent catastrophes such as viral pandemics, terrorist attacks, and wars. It is crucial that we keep aware of change, says Smil; if we do, we may be able to reverse the negative trends and minimize future catastrophes.

Happiness: Unlocking the Mysteries of Psychological Wealth by Ed Diener and Robert Biswas-Diener. Wiley-Blackwell. 2008. 290 pages. $24.95.

Happiness is healthy, but only in moderate doses, according to psychology professor Ed Diener and his son, psychologist Robert Biswas-Diener. The duo share the findings of the latest research on human happiness: the benefits of happiness, what makes people happy, what does not, and ways we can become happier.

A sunny outlook can benefit your physical health, enrich your social relationships, increase your income, lengthen your life span, and make you more altruistic. But too much happiness is not so good for you; you need to be happy for the right reasons and in the right ways, the researchers warn. This means seeking long-term life satisfaction, or psychological wealth, and not limiting oneself to short-term euphoria. The authors describe what psychological wealth entails and how to get it. A truly feel-good read.

Imagining America in 2033: How the Country Put Itself Together after Bush
by Herbert J. Gans. University of Michigan Press. 2008. 210 pages. $24.95.

In this utopian scenario, it is 25 years since the 2008 elections, and the excesses of the Bush administration are a distant memory. Sociologist Gans imagines a hopeful future scenario for an America that is freer, more humane, and more just. Its citizens, their elected officials, and the three succeeding Democratic presidencies leading them have made the economy more equitable, the democratic process more participatory, and all institutions more responsive to the needs of the people they are meant to serve. People are less polarized, less angry, less paranoid, more trusting of others, and more confident in their government.

Gans lays out a step-by-step process for how this better time might come into fruition, including the policies that three hypothetical Democratic administrations succeeding Bush might pursue—and political battles they might wage—in the realms of domestic, foreign, and social policy.

In the Name of Justice: Leading Experts Reexamine the Classic Article “The Aims of Criminal Law” edited by Timothy Lynch. Cato Institute. 2008. 176 pages. $35.

Criminal justice needs to evolve, argues a panel of judges and scholars in essays compiled by Lynch, project director on criminal justice for the libertarian think tank Cato Institute. The essays weigh in on the congested court dockets, voluminous legal codes, overcrowded prisons, and other trends that raise concern within the U.S. criminal justice system, as well as the unique challenges posed by terrorism, drug trafficking, and sexual predators. They identify a problem of “overcriminalization,” or too many laws and too little public awareness of them; millions of well-meaning adults are technically criminals and don’t even know it. The writers conclude that communities need to work with courts to design an upgraded system that is simpler, clearer, and more respectful of individual liberty.

Men to Boys: The Making of Modern Immaturity by Gary Cross. Columbia University Press. 2008. 316 pages. $29.50.

The “boy-man” is everywhere in American society today, according to historian Cross: boyfriends who never commit to marriage, professional males who obsess over video games, fathers who fight with their sons’ Little-League umpires, husbands who prefer tinkering with their cars to family interaction, and leaders of business or government who exhibit garishly immature behavior. All are symptoms of deep confusion among men about what “maturity” is and whether they want to achieve it, Cross writes. Too many opt to live like teenagers forever, shirking marriage and personal commitments while reveling in comic books, extreme sports, and the endless pursuit of personal experience and self-gratifying thrills.

The problem is historic: Members of the “Greatest Generation” were steady providers but emotionally aloof, whereas the baby boomers were very sensitive and expressive but ambivalent toward steady providing. Generation X dismissed both models and dived into cynicism and sensuality that negated growing up. And while rejecting old models of maturity, the Gen Xers failed to generate any new ones. It is up to today’s young people to find a new ethos that reconciles personal desire and ethical adulthood, Cross argues. Men need to recognize their adult responsibilities to their partners, families, and communities. A thought-provoking read for men and women of all walks of life.

Networked Publics edited by Kazys Varnelis. The MIT Press. 2008. 176 pages. $35.

Are we more connected than ever, more isolated, or both? Architecture professor Varnelis and 11 other scholars from a cross-section of disciplines explore the ways that communications technologies are transforming human society for better and worse. The technologies are great democratizers of media and information access, but they have the power to undermine democratic society and corrode public discourse. They can empower an individual to take on many commitments, but only at great cost to his or her non-digital commitments.

The authors discuss issues of privacy, net neutrality, intellectual property, the Internet’s effects on political expression and mobilization, and many more. The book is the collaborative result of a year-long fellowship program at the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California.

Philanthrocapitalism: How the Rich Can Save the World by Matthew Bishop and Michael Green. Bloomsbury. 2008. 298 pages. $27.

Changing the world is big business, Economist editor Bishop and development-expert Green report in Philanthrocapitalism. The two authors take stock of the new generation of wealthy humanitarians such as Bono, Bill Gates, George Soros, and Angelina Jolie, who invest vast fortunes in social change and promote their causes through business and marketing strategies. They mark a sharp break from the philanthropists of yesteryear, who only donated funds.
These new philanthropists are investors, not donors, the authors observe. These investors donate funds and then commit their career lives to keeping their beneficiaries accountable and successful, and the world owes them for this work.

In decades ahead, as governments struggle to meet environmental and societal challenges despite shrinking tax bases, philanthrocapitalists may be a crucial force for good. Bishop and Green weave together personal profiles and anecdotes with big-picture analyses.

The Power of Sustainable Thinking: How to Create a Positive Future for the Climate, the Planet, Your Organization and Your Life by Bob Doppelt. Earthscan. 2008. 218 pages. $29.95.

Resolving the climate crisis will require major changes in the way we think, according to psychologist Doppelt. He psychoanalyzes the world’s socioeconomic status quo and identifies destructive patterns of thinking running rampant throughout: overcompetition, individualism, short-term thinking, a make-take-waste view toward resources, cheaper-is-better, blind faith in technology, and others. Humanity must reframe its thought patterns and embrace a new logic of personal, social and environmental costs and benefits.

Doppelt proposes a stage-based recovery program that individuals, teams, organizations, and society as a whole can adopt to develop sustainable mind-sets and motivate others to do likewise.

Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country by Sudeep Chakravarti. Viking. 2008. 352 pages. $24.

India’s much-hyped economic growth masks persistent and widespread social inequalities, according to futurist-journalist Chakravarti, who tells the story of the Maoist insurgency that has been waging combat in cities, jungles, and villages against their nation’s capitalist system since the 1960s. The “Naxalists,” as the insurgents are called after their home base in the West Bengali village Naxalbari, grew over time from a local militia movement into a present-day leftist political phenomenon that unites peasants and sympathetic intellectuals across 15 of India’s 28 states. Naxalite-organized strikes and counterstrikes in which demonstrators and police are killed have become common news fodder in India’s daily press.

Chakravarti recounts his travels through Naxalite zones and his discussions with Naxalite leaders and sympathizers, combining interviews and anecdotes with extensive background history to present a grim behind-the-scenes view of India and the dangers that lie ahead for it. Followers of economic and world news will find this an enlightening and disturbing account.

Space Enterprise: Living and Working Offworld in the 21st Century by Philip Robert Harris. Springer Praxis. 2008. 616 pages. $39.95.

Governments around the world are now pooling their resources to explore, and one day colonize, outer space. International management professor Harris details how their endeavors might unfold. He examines the current efforts in China, Europe, Japan, Russia, and the United States toward achieving space-based living, and assesses the challenges to continued progress—technical difficulties, physical and psychological hazards, coordination among sometimes hostile nations—and what it will take to overcome them.

Harris delves into the nitty-gritty commercial, legal, and political complications, and the long-term ways that global space exploration will transform the world’s cultures, economies, and political systems. Appendices speculate on particulars such as a Declaration of First Principles for the Governance of Outer Space Colonies, a Lunar Solar Power System, the development of space-based health-care teams, and the plans for the International Lunar Observatory, now under construction and expected to be operational within the next two years.

Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain by John J. Ratey with Eric Hagerman. University of California Press. 2008. 283 pages. $27.50.

Our best defense against mood disorders, learning disabilities, addictions, and the symptoms of menopause and Alzheimer’s is not a new drug—it’s aerobic exercise, according to physician Ratey. He explores the many scientifically demonstrated ways that exercising boosts brain activity. Our brains gain strength when we stay physically active. There is much truth to the old aphorism of “a sound mind in a sound body,” and Ratey thoroughly demonstrates it with a complete list of reasons for us all to take exercise seriously.

Too Free for Our Own Good?

Review: Free Market Madness: Why Human Nature Is at Odds with Economics — And Why It Matters by Peter A. Ubel. Harvard Business Press. 2009. 240 pages. $26.95.

In a free market, it’s much too easy to make choices that endanger our health and wealth, observes Peter A. Ubel, a primary-care physician, in Free Market Madness. In a free market, we are free to overeat, smoke, drink excessively, ruin our credit, and not save enough for retirement.

Inundated by eye-candy ads, we buy products that harm our health and make spending decisions that carry severe long-term consequences, such as losing our homes by defaulting on mortgages.

“We humans are too easily manipulated by other humans,” Ubel says. “We are too easily seduced by the multitude of choices we face in our fast-moving market economies.”

Not coincidentally, he says, the country with the highest rate of obesity in the industrialized world — the United States — is also the country that has the largest proportion of its GDP spent on advertising. Obesity is much lower in Europe, where governments regulate food ads more aggressively.

“Such regulations have been shown to statistically predict the rate of obesity in any given country,” Ubel writes.

He argues that it’s not always people’s own decisions to drink, eat, and spend. Studies indicate the human will is a lot more malleable than we would like to think. Ubel offers this evidence:

• Finite self-control. Exerting self-control in one area of life leaves less self-control available for other areas. One study seated test subjects in front of plates of cookies and required that they not give in to eating them. Afterwards, participants attempted to solve difficult math problems. They gave up more quickly than members of a group who did not have to undergo the first exercise. This explains why obesity rates are highest among low-income groups: The stresses of dealing with poverty leave little will power for eating right or exercising.

• Default bias. We are partial to the default option — what we get if we take no action. Countries in which hospitals harvest organs from the deceased unless the families request otherwise have significantly higher rates of organ donors than countries that count on individuals to volunteer to donate. This passivity spells trouble for retirement savings, which require that people choose to set money aside.

• Social pressure. Smoking and overeating are contagious. If one of your friends gains weight, you will be more likely to gain weight. People who associate with smokers will be more likely to take up the nicotine habit in turn. This is no surprise to most parents, who know that, once one child has a new toy, every child at school wants it.

Where will is weak and threatens the public’s health, Ubel argues, governments can help citizens choose more wisely with policies of “soft paternalism” that encourage good decisions but don’t coerce them.

“I hope and believe that the government can help us tackle a problem like obesity without causing us to slide toward a cholesterol-free police state,” Ubel writes.

Soft paternalism could take the form of tax rebates to people with healthy body weights and subsidies of healthy foods, matched with taxes on unhealthy foods.

“Some people, faced with the higher price, would shift to a cheaper alternative,” he writes. This approach would engage consumers’ interest through ad campaigns that play to emotions, and not just their intellects. “Such an approach would go beyond boring statistical displays of calorie information or tedious data about carbohydrates and fat calories, to labeling food with evocative images that create aversions to foods that aren’t healthy.”

It would also provide citizens with the resources necessary to adopt healthy lifestyles: designing neighborhoods and park systems that make it easy for people to walk or play outside, subsidizing fitness centers and transit to and from them, and encouraging employers to create opportunities for employees to exercise during work hours.

This approach could promote wise financial decisions as well. It could encourage employers to make retirement accounts the default option so that employees automatically have retirement savings. It could mandate better information about financial transactions, such as adjustable-rate mortgages and rent-to-own deals.

“Free markets fail if consumers don’t have easy access to important information relevant to their purchasing decisions,” Ubel writes.

At times, officials might take firmer approaches: ban vending machines from schools, require restaurants to cut trans fats from their recipes, and limit aggressive marketing practices like children-friendly advertising or the direct-to-consumer advertising of pharmaceuticals.

“Carefully calibrated restrictions on our freedom are a small price to pay for a happier, healthier populace,” Ubel concludes. — Rick Docksai

Visionaries

Two British researchers offer an ambitious plan to save the world from global warming.
By Patrick Tucker

There are thousands of ways to battle climate change, from supporting solar and wind power to buying low-energy appliances to simply consuming less. But what if these measures, taken en masse and individually, come up short? If humanity just can’t be bothered to save itself before runaway climate change takes over, is there a Plan B?

Perhaps.

British atmospheric physicist John Latham and engineer Stephen Salter have come up with a scheme to attack global warming directly. By blasting seawater droplets into the air from wind-powered ships, they believe stratocumulus clouds could be made thick and white enough to bounce more solar radiation back into space to change the earth’s temperature.

THE FUTURIST magazine talked to Latham about changing the climate, for good.

THE FUTURIST: Why do you think your idea is receiving special attention right now? Would you call something like this a desperation measure to be implemented only after all else has failed?

John Latham: I think the increased attention results from increasing public consciousness and concern regarding global warming. If our idea works as computations indicate, it could hold the earth’s temperature constant in the face of increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations for at least 50 years.

The best solution by far is to reduce CO2 emissions to the point where any temperature rise is not dangerous. I do not think this will happen, so we need to develop (hopefully not deploy) stopgap measures to stabilize temperature for however long it takes to develop a clean primary energy source. It is, in a sense, a desperation measure, but it is also an attempt to restore climate as best as possible to how it was before the warming.

FUTURIST: You’re seeking funds right now to test the idea. How might you go about testing it?

Latham: [We would have] a limited-area field experiment in which selected areas of a region of marine stratocumulus clouds are seeded with seawater particles, whilst adjacent areas are not.… A range of instruments are used to determine if seeding causes an increase in cloud brightness, and if so, how much.

FUTURIST: The challenges to implementing such a system must be enormous. What are the biggest ones?

Latham: It actually is not a very daunting prospect. The costs are such that economists say they can be regarded as zero in comparison with those of damage caused by unbridled warming. The largest current problem is developing the spray technology.

FUTURIST: You have discussed the possibility of unintended consequences to such a system. What might they be?

Latham: It is inevitable that our scheme will modify global temperature, rainfall, and wind distributions to some degree. It is vital, therefore, to examine fully — largely by major global modeling — all possible ramifications of its possible deployment. If there are significant adverse ones which cannot be eliminated, the scheme should not be deployed.

FUTURIST: Was there any particular moment of epiphany where you were considering the effects of saltwater in the atmosphere and realized you had happened upon an idea that might one day save the entire world?

Latham: About 35 years ago, my 10-year-old son Mike and I were watching a gorgeous sunset over the Irish Sea from a Welsh mountain. He asked why the clouds were gleaming, and I told him they were reflecting sunlight, like mirrors. He laughed and said, “soggy mirrors.” That comment stuck with me and I think provided, almost 20 years later, the stimulus that gave rise to my 1990 Nature paper first proposing the idea.
About the Interviewer

Patrick Tucker is senior editor of THE FUTURIST and director of communications for the World Future Society.

For more information, contact: The National Center for Atmospheric Research, www.ucar.edu.

Algae: A Panacea Crop?

By Dennis Bushnell
Algae and bacteria are the two most important biofuel technologies of the twenty-first century. As a replacement for oil, algae is extremely practical, utilizes mostly cheap and abundant resources like saltwater and wasteland, and has the potential to reduce global carbon-dioxide output tremendously. Unlike corn or even sugar ethanol, halophyte algae (algae that grow in saltwater) do not compete with food stocks for freshwater. Agriculturalists are told to think of salt as bad, but people living on the shores of India have had a saline-based agricultural system for hundreds of years. For halophyte algae, salt is good.

A number of countries already have seawater agriculture projects under way. The Chinese are producing genetically modified corn and rice in saltwater marshes. There’s no reason similar techniques couldn’t be used to raise algae in the energy-hungry United States. The Great Salt Lake could conceivably be turned into an algae pond to produce something on the order of $250 billion a year in biofuels.

People are looking at turning parts of the Pacific Ocean off of South America into algae ponds. Many deserts are near coasts, and these underutilized areas naturally lend themselves to algae cultivation. Irrigating desert terrain with saltwater would constitute an enormous and —many would argue— expensive public works project for whatever nation or nations took it on. But such a project need not be exorbitantly expensive. Indeed, when the cost of pumping ocean water into so-called “wasteland” regions such as the Sahara is factored in, the cost of halophytic algae biofuel is less than the cost of petroleum trading at $70 per barrel or higher. Because desert areas receive a lot of sunlight, halophyte algae farmers could use solar-powered pumps to move water up from sea level or even up from underground aquifers such as the Nubian sandstone aquifer system that sits beneath desolate regions of Libya, Chad, and Sudan. Suddenly, “wastelands” in western Australia, the Middle East, eastern Africa, the American southwest, and west Texas become valuable, productive real estate.

Algae require a lot of nitrogen, a mineral that is missing in most seawater. But genetic mapping of halophyte algae — a task already occupying geneticists around the globe — could lead to entirely new algae species that would derive their nitrogen from the atmosphere.

Biofuel from algae could be a direct petroleum replacement and is an extremely practical fuel source from a production standpoint. The refining process for algae is much simpler and less expensive than the current process for refining oil. Algae are lipids, comprising 30%–60% oil. With a mere olive press you can get a burnable fuel. Can we use biofuels in aircraft? In space? At NASA, we have looked into the question. The answer, emphatically, is yes. A global transition from oil to algae wouldn’t require the construction of an expensive, complicated new infrastructure, as a transition to a hydrogen economy would.

Halophytic algae, cultivated correctly, could lessen the world’s food and water shortages as well. Some 68% of the freshwater that is now tied up in conventional agriculture could instead go to thirsty populations rather than irrigating freshwater dependent crops. There exist more than 10,000 natural halophyte plant species, and some 250 of those are usable as staple food crops. You can get a great deal more fuel per acre with algae than you can with ethanol crops like corn, and you can use halophytes as a petrochemical to make plastic or as a feedstock for animals. Most importantly, algae are a renewable and CO2-neutral power source.

Halophytes and algae are only part of the overall solution space. We’ll use many approaches to combat global warming. However, the potential of this fuel can’t be stated forcefully enough. If humanity were to plow a portion of the Sahara Desert, irrigate it with saltwater from the Mediterranean, and then grow biomass such as algae, we could replace all the fossil carbon fuel that our species uses currently and provide food for a growing global population at low cost.

About the Author
Dennis Bushnell is the chief scientist at NASA’s Langley Research Center, Hampton, Virginia 23681-2199. Web site www.nasa.gov/centers/langley/home/index.html .

Google Searches Its Future

In 1998, a pair of Stanford University doctoral students named Sergey Brin and Larry Page ventured out into the wild, wild west of the early World Wide Web. They had but a few ideas about algorithmic Internet page-ranking and the daunting, self-given goal of “organizing the world’s information.” Eleven years later, their company, Google, is projected to earn $19 billion in 2009. Some 70% of all U.S. Internet searches take place through Google’s site, compared to 20% through Yahoo, and less than 6% through Microsoft’s MSN.

Is Google, by virtue its of visibility and the success it’s already achieved, destined to dominate the Internet era? Business columnist Randall Stross offers fresh insight in his recent book, Planet Google: One Company’s Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know.

From its founding to its future, the picture Stross paints is of an enterprise that benefited as much from the savvy of its creators as the overconfidence of its two primary rivals. Indeed, if Google plays the scrappy, earnest underdog in Stross’s story, Yahoo and Microsoft are the bragging bullies who are brought down by their egos.

In the late 1990s, Yahoo was the heavy favorite to dominate the growing online service field. It had an established presence with plenty of money for advertising. It was also a one-stop-shop destination site offering classifieds, news stories, weather reports, and, of course, search-engine capability directly on its homepage. Users could type a query into the search box and receive results from a directory of Web sites rigorously culled and verified by trained technicians. Yahoo was convinced that an index assembled by humans was a great asset.

Brin and Page made it their mission to automate the process of finding new sites and ranking them. Their work soon caught Yahoo’s attention. Faced with too many new Web sites to record by hand, and too many search requests, Yahoo contracted the then much-smaller Google to analyze new Web pages in 2000. Yahoo paid the fledgling start-up relatively little for this service, and the search-engine results were displayed through Yahoo’s portal, thus denying Google even the opportunity to build name recognition. What Google gained was the opportunity to grow its own index, which allowed it to perfect its search model.

“Google understood, well before its chief rivals, Yahoo and Microsoft,… that an information collection that attempts to be complete expands on a scale far beyond anything that can be curated by human editors,” writes Stross. “Just as the human mind depends upon neural connections that develop spontaneously, so, too, digital collections of information will rely on interconnections that are created by software, without human agency. Software algorithms are created by humans, but the complexity of the end products far exceeds anything that human creators could produce manually.”

What is perhaps most significant (and terrifying) about the Google phenomenon is its self-replicating nature. As the company’s interconnected algorithms organize more information, the organizational process improves. As users get better at Googling, the company learns more about the pages being searched and its users. As the company’s revenue model proves more successful, it attracts more ads, in turn attracting more revenue to make acquisitions like YouTube, which attracts more ads and more revenue.

Google has since taken aim directly at the once-indomitable Microsoft by offering online word processing and spreadsheet applications through its Google Docs program. If all goes according to plan, users of the future will search, e-mail, and even do office work all through Google without ever stopping by Windows, Microsoft’s operating system, or even saving anything on their hard drives. This Internet-as-office idea is what tech-watchers call cloud computing: Your files are available to you wherever you go. Every computer becomes your computer. The popularity of the trend bodes ill for Microsoft.

“Microsoft’s on-off-on bids for Yahoo in 2008 were an expression of the company’s rather desperate wish to better meet the competitive challenge posed by Google by moving the place of battle from Microsoft’s home ground, office applications, to Google’s home ground, Web search and advertising. In May, when lack of agreement between the two companies about Yahoo’s valuation led Microsoft to withdraw its offer, Microsoft changed tactics, but no one doubted that its most pressing strategic challenge remained Google,” writes Stross. “As Microsoft devotes more attention — and more of its treasury — to its online businesses, no major software company will remain to defend the notion that personal data should remain physically close to the individual and scattered among different media and devices. Centralization of data seems inexorable, and as it proceeds, the concerns about protecting individual privacy seem likely to diminish.”

What does Google’s gargantuan capability mean for its future? Google CEO Eric Schmidt — in a moment of extreme confidence about the company’s long-term viability — forecast that Google would succeed in its mission of organizing the world’s information “in about 300 years.”

Meanwhile, the company is looking toward further enhancing search.

“There are a lot of exciting things going on right now,” Google research director Peter Norvig told THE FUTURIST. He’s enthusiastic about Google’s burgeoning online translation tools, which allow users to parse text between any pair of 34 different languages in more than 1,000 combinations. But what excites him most is how Google is reinventing the search experience entirely. The company that made a fortune linking key words together is now looking beyond type, beyond the keyboard, for new ways to collect, organize, and present information.

“With our voice search you can now speak your queries, and I think we’ll see more uses of voice input and output in the near future,” says Norvig. “What if the information you want is not in words at all, but in images or video? We’re working on that, too. Of course we’ve had the ability for years to search for images or videos, but it was done by matching key words to the annotations that surround images and video, not to the content itself. We’re now starting to search the content. We already have face recognition in our Picasa Web Albums — you label a couple of faces as ‘Aunt Sally,’ and from then on we’ll label new pictures of her as you upload them. It won’t be perfect if there are severe shadows or if the view is not front-on, but it is a step towards understanding the content, and we’ll continue to progress in this direction.”

As to whether 300 years might be a realistic time frame to organize the world’s information, Norvig says, “I don’t think it makes much sense to try to speculate about 300 years in the future. Three hundred years ago, we had neither steam, internal combustion, nor electrical motors; it would have been hard to predict where technology would be today. I think Eric was saying that it would take 300 years if everything proceeds at the current pace. But we’ll probably have an accelerated pace of both the production of new information (because more people will be creating more permanently storable content, and because there will be more opportunity for creating richer media content, like video) and an accelerated pace of the indexing of that information (because more of it will be created digitally and available to be indexed right from the start).”

Read another way, Google is not only on track to meet its lofty goal; it’s actually ahead of schedule. — Patrick Tucker

Sources: Planet Google: One Company’s Audacious Plan to Organize Everything We Know by Randall Stross. The Free Press. 2008. 275 pages. $26.

Personal Interview with Peter Norvig.

Imagining an American Utopia

Imagining America in 2033: How the Country Put Itself Together after Bush by Herbert J. Gans. University of Michigan Press. 2008. 210 pages. $24.95.
Review by Arthur B. Shostak
If ever a book warranted a place by the bedside of the next president of the United States (and his Cabinet appointees), Herbert J. Gans’s “utopian narrative” Imagining America in 2033 is it. Likewise, any futurist eager to learn how the American presidents from now through 2033 might craft a remarkably finer country (and, thereby, a much better world) have an indispensable primer here. Written in the form of an engaging novel, rather than a stuffy academic treatise, the book lightly instructs in policy studies, pragmatic reforms, and the gritty give-and-take of tomorrow’s White House realities.

Sociologist Gans’s scenarios explore possible offstage wheelings and dealings as four U.S. presidents (three Democrats and a Republican) work to shape the future. Each of the four successive administrations enables America to achieve a fairer economy, a more democratic polity, a reduced fear of terrorism, the assimilation of undocumented people, upgraded schooling and freedom from test-domination, creative adjustment to the ever-greater challenge of global climate change, along with scores of other such outcomes.

The chapter entitled “Democratizing the Polity” merits special attention, as it explains why and how a Democracy Project might, “in the longer historical perspective, prove the most significant innovation of the first third of the century.” The nongovernmental project, established in 2012, succeeds by 2033 in winning significant electoral reforms, changes in governmental structures, and citizen empowerment reforms that strengthened citizen representation beyond voting. At the book’s close, the Democracy Project is busy in 2033 campaigning to amend the Constitution to substantially update it; e.g., Supreme Court justices would serve an 18-year term, rather than for life.

Gans does not shy away from forecasting many controversial (if familiar) possibilities, such as birth-control technologies that virtually eliminate abortion, small and technologically imaginative K-12 classrooms, experimental housing, life-extension technologies, assisted suicide, and the acceptance of same-sex marriages. One major development Gans offers in his utopia is the creation of a White House Council of Long-Range Advisors in 2010. He also outlines several intriguing policies too impractical or unpopular to win enactment even by 2033, but well worth notice all the same.

Gans makes no explicit use of the futures literature and refers to no futurist advocates. That the book pays no attention to certain “Gee whiz!” developments — such as advances in nanotechnology, commercialization of fusion power, enhanced human intelligence with brain chips, and so on — may disappoint some surprise-focused futurists (like this reviewer). But working with a comparatively surprise-free scenario, Gans still manages to take a reader a dazzling distance ahead.

Gans wisely declines to “predict,” instead relying on “mixing estimation, projection, and imagination.” This is a creative formula well worth employing by forecasters of every political persuasion. He also relegates to second place the power of things to shape events (things like nano and machine intelligence) in favor of emphasizing human interaction as the prime lever of change. Ever cautious and realistic, Gans concludes that in forecasting, as in baseball, we can chart and project trends, but we cannot know “what will happen in the next inning.”

Futurists have at least four reasons to give this book careful attention. First, we can track the progress of these detailed and down-to-earth forecasts over the years ahead and learn much from their fate. Second, we can adopt Gans’s practice of employing sentences that end in periods rather than in exclamation points. He knows how much we cannot know about tomorrow, and he does not pretend otherwise. He is much too smart to use the three words that should be taboo in futuristics: will and will not. Third, he models a realistic and adult approach to his material. And finally, Gans takes a cautiously optimistic approach at a time when Cassandras hold center stage. In this he reminds us it is darkest before the dawn.
About the Reviewer

Arthur B. Shostak is professor emeritus of sociology at Drexel University and THE FUTURIST’s contributing editor for Utopian Thought.

Repairing the World's Financial System

In a recent poll, 60% of U.S. respondents said they believed an imminent economic depression was “likely.” Retirement accounts have lost more than $2 trillion in value over the past year, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average has dropped more than 30% from its apex in the fall of 2007.

Where do we go from here? Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator of the Financial Times and author of the recently-released book Fixing Global Finance, has some surprising answers.

Futurist: Everyone is terribly concerned about the global economy. Investors have seen their stock portfolios decrease by 30 and 40%. What do you see the global economy doing in the next five years?

Wolf: The only honest thing one can say is that one doesn’t know. There are two or three very powerful reasons we don’t know. First, we really can’t forecast economies. Forecasters always miss turning points. They can tell you what will happen only if things remain as they are. Turning points are inherently unpredictable. The consequences when things do change are always unpredictable for the same reason, because a lot of other things are likely to change at the same time. That’s the first point.

Second point is that the forces now at work are unbelievably rare and, in this combination, have never been seen before. Ever. That makes looking back on anything that’s happened in history almost useless. It gives you some guidance; there are better and worse guides. But there is no clear guide that will give you more than a conceptual idea of what’s going on.

Third reason is that it really depends on what people, policy makers above all, actually do. There are choices to be made. So far, in the run up to the crisis and through this crisis, most of the choices made have turned out to be bad choices. Because they’ve been made they’ve been bad choices. We ended up with the worst of all possible worlds at the moment. If people go on making bad choices, we’re going to wind up with a depression lasting many years. If they make what I think are the right choices, we may still end up with a severe recession but we may avoid a severe depression. Those are, I think, the most important things to understand. Anyone who claims to know what’s going to happen is lying.

The forces at work, however, are at least moderately clear. We’ve got three gigantic things happening at the same time that are forcing the world in the direction of recession, or worse. First, for a very long period, household consumption in the United States and a number of other smaller developed counties, particularly the United Kingdom, Australia, Spain, played a very large role in supporting demand around the world, at home and abroad, because these households were spending much more than their incomes consistently and borrowing, consistently, to make up the difference in an era of easy credit. This was supported by a series of asset-price bubbles, far-and-away the most important in this regard was the house price bubble in the recent years, which has ended in these countries starting in the United States in 2006. Because households are losing wealth, or have been losing wealth, reinforced by the collapse in equity markets, they are cutting back on their spending very quickly. If they do that, that guarantees an enormous recession. To give you a relevant example, the U.S. consumer has been spending all his or her income, borrowing a lot more besides, and savings rates have hit zero. The consumption has been a little over GDP, so it’s the principal source of demand in the U.S. economy. If households go back to saving at a more normal rate of their income, which will be somewhere in the neighbor of 6% to 8% of disposable income, that alone, if it happens quickly, will reduce GDP on the demand side by about 5 %. That will feel like a depression. It will certainly be worse than any recession since the war. The first thing that is happening is immense pressure on the high-spending households.

The second thing happening is an extraordinary expansion of the credit system and the financial sector in the world, particularly in these developed countries. By extraordinary, I really mean extraordinary. Over the last 25 years or so the balance sheet of the financial sector of the United States has grown about six times faster than GDP, generating an extraordinary increase in income for the people in the financial sector, and this has led to a massive increase in leverage and low capital ratios. This expansion of the balance sheet of the financial sector financed enormous indebtedness in household sectors in the United States and United Kingdom. Household indebtedness has doubled in relation to disposable income over the last decade.

As a result of the decline in asset prices and the losses associated with that, the feared losses given the very slow capitalization and the very small expertise-base of much of the sector, the financial sector is effectively decapitalized, i.e. bankrupt. And if it were properly, rigorously, evaluated, a large part of it would look bankrupt, and government would recapitalize. As a result, today’s financial sector wants to lend less, reduce its balance sheet, get people to payback the money it lent, and that leads to the third problem, which is that credit is much more difficult to obtain than it used to be as a result of what happened in the financial system.

You add these three things together and you have an enormous contractionary force operating in the countries that generated very large and buoyant demand growth over the course of the last decade. You have to ask yourself, if they save more and spend less what is going to offset it? What might offset it to get us out? When you think about that, you realize it can’t be investment. Companies invest less in recession. Companies will follow households. That leads you with two sources of demand, one is government, which will spend upwards. It might be financed by the printing press, even by the central bank. That is part of the short term solution in my view. Governments are credit worthy, everybody wants to lend to them. Government spending is a temporary solution. It’s a good one. It will help households to go through a period when they’re saving more, improving their balance sheet. It will take a long time. Household wealth is declining at the same time. The other thing that will help these countries is export growth. You look at U.S. growth in the last year or so, most of it has been generated by exports. That leads you to the final big problem; for exports to grow form the economies that are so big, you need very strong and rigorous demand from the countries which are not heavily burdened by debt. Unfortunately, most of these counties have shown no willingness to increase their spending at large rates, with the marginal exception of China, again, only marginal.

For all these reasons, we can expect a deep and self-fulfilling recession--prevented from becoming a depression--by enormous increases in fiscal deficits to levels like 10% of GDP or more. This will be financed perhaps by borrowing from the central bank. It’s going to take a long time before demand grows in the private sector of these debt-afflicted economies, and I don’t see anything very strong coming from the rest of the world.

There are two other elements, one of which is promising, the other is sort of interesting. The promising one is we no longer have any inflation concern. Commodity prices are collapsing. That’s shifting income back to households, making it easier to save and spend more without cutting back on their consumption. But their real incomes are higher. It’s also removing income from the high-saving countries, which is helpful. It’s lowering inflation; that’s allowing banks to be aggressive in their interest rate policy, which should help households. That is really quite a positive element. The second element is what’s happening in the stock markets.

You’ve seen that we’ve been in a structural bear market at least since 2000. We had an enormous overvaluation, particularly the developed world in 2000, this foresees a long recovery because of the aggressive monetary policy of the fed which had the consequences we now see in terms of the balance sheet of the financial sector.

Their collapse is now leading to a further collapse in the value of stocks. But I do believe that on a fundamental basis, if you look at long-term underlying valuations, stock markets are beginning to look fairly valued or even cheap--not incredibly cheap, but cheap given the proper understanding of the risks. There was a reason there was an equity risk premium. So that may, in time, once we start stabilizing and the economy becomes better, induce people to start buying stocks, supporting them, giving some stability to stocks. Getting out of this will require aggressive action by governments to prevent total collapse in demand and a total collapse in the financial system. They’ve taken dramatic actions on the later. No body can reasonably think that core financial institutions... they have not done enough on the former to get demand growing again, To get much bigger fiscal boosts in my view to get it growing the deficit in the short run and much more aggressive action to make sure newly re-capitalized institutions at least provide financing to business.

So if those things all go well, ALL go well, I think we can avoid a depression, have just a very deep recession, and see weak recovery of some kind in 2010 or 2011. But this is bound to be the deepest global recession since the war, the first one on which all the developed countries are in recession. It’s going to be a very slow process.

Futurist: This issue of stimulating demand and what government can do to do it; one view says don’t increase the deficit too much it harms the national balance. Others say if you have to stimulate demand through stimulus and not issuing tax rebates. Is there some way government might work against the psychology a little more, like send out a stimulus of hundreds of billions but then say, in order to fight deflation, we’re going to institute a sales tax particularly on commodities and we may even experiment with wealth taxation, to prevent hording of stimulus, the way the government is now considering mandating that the banks lend the money they received as part of the bailout package? What else can government do to stimulate demand?

Wolf: There are some interesting points of view as to how to use the combination of monetary and fiscal stimulus in these situations. It should be understood that once you get into the current U.S. situation when interest rates are so low, you can’t separate monetary and fiscal policy. The best ways monetary policy can support the economy is not by lowering interest rates anymore, because they’re already so low, but either by directly lending to the business sector, which increasingly the FED is doing, or by lending to the government to spend. The government can avoid accumulating large debt by the simple expedient of financing its additional borrowing by borrowing short term from the banking system or borrowing from the federal reserve. In the present situation of extreme liquidity preference, where everyone wants to hold cash, there is no inflation risk associated with that whatsoever. In the long run, that may be different. It’s perfectly reasonable for the government to borrow short term and give it to people and things where they know it will be spent. They can spend on investment and projects that can be done quickly. That would be a good thing to do. They can finance the poor, who always spend money, employment compensation, that will be spent. There are plenty of things you can give money to people for that will be spent. Generalized income tax cuts, where most tax is paid by the well of, won’t be a useful way to lend to the economy. But it would at least give strength to the balance sheet of the household sector. The government should do all of theses things on an exceptionally large scale.

It’s important to remember that we got out of the Great Depression essentially by a huge public works project called the Second World War. I‘m not recommending war, but it’s a reminder of what can be done. There are some risks with such projects. If a country with a large current account deficit prints money like this, maybe the currency will be dumped. It would be better therefore if everyone does it at once. But in a deflationary situation like this, I think the United States, perhaps a bit less the United Kingdom, can get away with substantial increases in domestic liquidity money, because I don’t think other countries would dump U.S. currency; it would destroy their own competitiveness. If it forces them to destroy their own money supply, it would not be a very good thing. Now then there are lots of details you could start discussing. There are many ways to provide money to get it spent. Once we get the household sector back in shape, the stock market at a reasonable price, and people again start buying stocks and finance companies through the stock market or through debt, then you will want to see the government deficit start to diminish. That’s why I think the best forms of stimulating the economy have to be things the government wouldn’t ever do.

For instance, unemployment compensation is related to the Great Depression. Similarly, funding large scale investment programs which, once they’re finished, they’re finished. If you’re’ talking about large, permanent spending increases, say a reform to universal health-care systems, those must be funded by permanent increases in taxation or some reduction in spending. Not part of this package. In the long run, when everything gets back to being healthy, you would expect deficits to shrink. You would expect the private sector to spend more, revenue to improve. The government’s need to spend diminishes. It will all go away again.

In the end, it would be sensible to move back into surplus, withdraw the money you’ve printed, or you can start selling bonds to mop up the money. Clearly, at the very end of the process, government deficits will be higher than they are now but household indebtedness will be smaller, with luck. It’s important to understand this clear borderline between private and government indebtedness doesn’t work at the macroeconomic level. There’s a relationship between the two. When households have large amounts of debt they can’t pay, they stop servicing. It is the government that comes in by printing its own debt, which everyone will then want, and that’s what’s happening now. So I think the process will be reversible later on. It has always been possible to reduce deficits and debt provided the policy is reasonably discipled. Right now, it’s a question of spending and financing by borrowing from the system in the short term, and not worrying about bond finance and just making sure we get through the next two or three years without a total self-fullfing and reinforcing collapse in the economy.

Futurist: Looking ahead even more long-term, one of the thing I like about your book, you write that the United States is as much a victim of others’ misfortuntes. You talk about global savings and how developing nations in particular have fallen into this strange habit of giving surplus money to the United States in the form of loans, but really they should be spending it domestically, and developed nations should be spending more in developing nations. This is a much more healthy flow of capital. Did I sum up the point correctly?

Wolf: I think you’ve done it admirably. It is a central theme of my book. It’s an interesting point that nearly all serious professional economists--there are exceptions--would agree completely with me, yet this is seen as a controversial view. There are two big points in this book. The first is the United States is embedded in the global economy. It’s the biggest economy but its still smaller than the rest of the world. It’s roughly 1.4 of the economy and the rest is 3.4. What the rest of the world does actually has an enormous effect on the United States. It’s not just one way. It so happens that for reasons I lay out at length in my book, the rest of the world undertook a series of actions. In response to a financial crisis of an earlier decade, they pushed up deficits and gave themselves large export services and large export capital, to sustain large export surpluses particularly in the case of China but not only China. That, in my view, created strong deflationary and recessionary pressure in the United States You think about it, the import surpluses are withdrawal from a country, domestic demand going abroad. The U.S. Federal Reserve, not totally consciously, chose to offset this deflationary pressure by greatly expanding domestic demand; it was purely accidental. The same thing followed from the Bush tax cuts in the early part of his administration. The United States was responding to these external pressures. I don’t think it responded intelligently, unfortunately. It allowed this later financial mismanagement. And so, in the end, a large part of the domestic U.S. counterpart of this lending turned out to be borrowing by fundamentally insolvent households by assets that were fundamentally overpriced, intermediated by a financial system that turned out to be undercapitalized.

If you think of that combination, it was the worst way to do it. It would have been better for the United States to run bigger fiscal deficits in this period and invested the proceeds in bridges and roads and railroads and whatever capital investment makes sense. The investment it did undertake was to build houses that nobody needs. It’s a sad story. The big macro-picture is, as you describe it, an important indication of the way the United States is not master of its own fate.

This gets to the second big point, if--and I’ve already made this point--if we are going to get out of this cleanly, the U.S. economy needs to rebalance. We don’t have to go back to a big borrowing binge. We can’t run fiscal deficits of 8%-10% of GDP forever. That’s clearly unsustainable and will sooner or later destroy the credit and the currency. So the United States has to save more at home and it has to have a balance in the current account and reduce its debt that way. But the United States and the other countries can only do that without having a huge depression if other countries in the world voluntarily expand demand in relation to their financial supply and move into current account deficits themselves. These things have to work out.

The big question now is whether other countries with large surpluses understand that they are going to have to adjust to and expand demand because in fact, what is really happened here is the world has run out of large-scale, willing, and solvent debtors. Because it’s run out of them, except governments, there has to be adjustment everywhere. What’s not clear to me is that people around the world in China, Japan, Germany fully understand this. There’s a danger they won’t do enough. We’ll be reducing demand anyway. We’ll have a vicious downward spiral. It’s a big danger on the macroeconomic level, which could push us to a very deep and long recession or even a depression. It’s not just about financial system or expanding fiscal deficits, it’s also about having a view of how the longer-term adjustments in the world economy are going to happen. That will take American intellectual and political leadership, which has been totally lacking in this respect to the Bush administration. I do hope the people who take over will have a better appreciation. I know many of the economists on both sides and the economists who have been advising the Democratic side and I do think they appreciate this much better than their counterparts in the current [Bush] administration, though not in all respects. But if you don’t get a more balanced world economy, it may prove impossible to sustain a world with open capital; close it all and we will go back to the more self-sufficient financial systems and economies of fifty or sixty years ago.

This interview was conducted by Patrick Tucker, senior editor of THE FUTURIST.
12.01.08

Demography: Hooked up or Just Hooked?

Nearly half of adolescent activities in the United States are driven by technology, according to the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA). Between watching TV and interfacing with the Internet, the average American teen spends four hours per day interfacing with some sort of device. The result, according to some, is that today's adolescent culture totally revolves around technology.

"Today's teens are significant consumers of technology goods and content . Spending many activities and hours of the day devoted to technology, they are comfortable with its advancement and further placement in their lives.... As this generation continues to grow in their technology driven world, their desires for new and better products will continue to grow and fuel the industry," the group concludes in their recent report, Teens and Technology.

Authors like Neil Howe (Millennials Rising, Vintage, 2000) and Don Tapscott (Grown Up Digital, McGraw- Hill, 2008) have documented and much praised the millennial and post-millennial generations' facility with technology, and teens' fondness for digital networking in particular. But not everyone is convinced that so much time on the Web is a good thing for young people.

"Go stand behind these kids when they're online, see how fast they plow through those pages. Listen to how fast they type. This acceleration of words and images builds a desire. The joy in networking is being supplanted by the constant need for stimulation," says Emory professor Mark Bauerlein, author of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Tarcher, 2008).

"When students leave my class," he says, "the first thing they do is check their e-mail and then they check Facebook. They don't have joy on their faces; they have concern. Did someone post something about me? Did I miss something? When they see everything is okay, there's relief. Not pleasure, just relief."

What many techno-enthusiasts and industry groups are missing, says Bauerlein, is that teens don't view network devices, or networks, as merely recreational. Cell phones and computers have become essential to the average American teenager's social life. Even the time spent away from gadgets - in the physical presence of other people - is increasingly dominated by discussion about what happened online or about popular culture as conveyed through digital media.

"These tools for teenagers and young people are more than communication devices; they are the primary means for relating to one another. You can see this when you watch a parent take away their child's cell phone. For the 15-yearold, this means exclusion. If I don't have this tool, they say, I can't connect, or text; I can't access my online profile page; I have no real place among my peers," says Bauerlein. "The private bedroom upstairs has become the focal point of social life for these kids. If you want to send them into exile, tell them go outside and play."

The CEA report provides evidence to support Bauerlein's observation. When asked, 80% of the teens surveyed said that going a day without technology made them feel "bored," "grumpy," "sad," and "uninformed." A week without technology is "severe punishment."

"Adults who didn't form our networks in youth through these tools don't recognize there's social formation taking place," Bauerlein notes. "The idea of social life being vibrant, active, dynamic, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, all online: This is totally new."

Not only is the phenomenon new, it may actually be harmful to the goals of traditional education. Although 84% of teens in the CEA survey said that technology helps them with their school work, evidence suggests that certain types of online networking behavior harms academic performance. A 2007 report from the Irish State Examination Commission found that text messaging use among teenagers was having a highly negative effect on their writing and, thus, reading skills.

"Some of the things, the activities and the skills that help you succeed when you're 17, are the things that hurt you when you're 30," Bauerlein observes. - Patrick Tucker

New Greenhouse Gas Threat

What do solar panels and global warming have in common?

The answer: Both are produced with nitrogen trifluoride (NF3), a gas that is 17,000 times more effective than carbon dioxide at trapping atmospheric heat, according to geochemistry professor Ray Weiss and a team of researchers at the University of California–San Diego Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Weiss and his team expect NF3 to become a bigger problem in the near future because it is used in the manufacturing of three highly popular products: LCD televisions, computer circuits, and thin-film solar cells.

“There is a little irony in that, because thin-film solar is one of the ways we hope to reduce the fossil-fuel impact,” says Weiss.

Weiss’s study found an NF3 concentration of 0.02 parts per trillion in the atmosphere in 1978 and 0.454 parts per trillion in 2008. While it is now responsible for only 0.04% of human-induced global warming compared with the 60% attributable to CO2 emissions, its share could increase exponentially. The report notes that NF3’s atmospheric presence is growing by 11% a year.

United Nations officials share Weiss’s concerns. In 2008, the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate change added NF3 to a list of gases that the Kyoto Protocol should regulate. The Kyoto Protocol, which is due to be succeeded by a new climate treaty in 2012, currently sets no official limit on NF3.

According to the UNFCC, manufacturers use NF3 as a “chamber-cleaning gas” in production processes to clean unwanted buildups on microprocessor and circuit parts as they are being constructed. A gas called hexafluoroethane, which Kyoto does regulate, used to corner this market, but NF3 became a strong competitor due to its lower costs and its absence from the Kyoto Protocol. NF3 production has consequently increased 15%–17% a year, from 1,000 tons produced in 1992 to a projected 8,000 tons in 2010.

Most of the NF3 is destroyed during these processes, but a remnant escapes into the atmosphere where it can linger for up to 740 years. The amount of NF3 reaching the atmosphere varies from 2% to 16%, depending on what types of emissions-control systems the manufacturers use.

Manufacturers have many options for controlling emissions. Emissions-reduction systems on the market today can capture the escaping NF3 for later reuse or destroy it before it can leave the facility. Manufacturers can also substitute more earth-friendly chemicals. The UN report notes that Toshiba Matsushita Display, Samsung, and LG all opt for fluorine, which has no greenhouse-gas potential and no life-span in the atmosphere.

Fluorine has drawbacks, though, in cost and legal liability: It is highly toxic and cannot be transported off-site. The UN report evinces skepticism that most companies are going to emulate Samsung and voluntarily adopt fluorine as an alternative.

“Smaller LCD manufacturers might not want to bear the costs of switching, and any accidental release of fluorine could also be a problem,” the report notes.

Weiss says that solar-cell manufacturers can use silicon instead of NF3, but they do so also at greater expense.

“If you’ve spent several million dollars to make a microprocessor or something like that, you’re not going to trash it, because that doesn’t make business sense,” says Weiss.

The only hope, he concludes, is to add NF3 to the greenhouse gases proscribed by Kyoto (or its successor).

“If we don’t, there will be an artificial pressure to use it more, because other gases are in Kyoto and it is not,” he says. — Rick Docksai

Sources: Ray Weiss (interview). University of California–San Diego, News Service, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, California 92093. Web site http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/science/10-08GreenhouseGas.asp.

“Kyoto Protocol,” United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Web site http://unfccc.int .

Tomorrow In Brief

Capturing Energy Under the Sea

Slow-moving ocean and river currents may be a new source of reliable and affordable power. Most of the world’s water currents move slowly (under three knots), but to capture energy, turbines and water mills require currents at nearly twice that speed to operate efficiently. A machine called VIVACE (Vortex-Induced Vibrations for Aquatic Clean Energy), developed by University of Michigan marine engineer Michael Bernitsas, enhances the slow currents by creating vortices, then capturing their power. The device works much like the way fish use each other’s wake to propel themselves through water. Besides providing renewable energy, the device would also be less likely to harm marine life than dams and water turbines, says Bernitsas.

Source: University of Michigan, News Service, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109. Web site www.ns.umich.edu.

Liquid-Wood Toys

A bioplastic made of renewable “liquid wood” rather than petrochemicals could be an ideal component for toys. No matter how roughly a child treats the toy, it releases no heavy metals or other ingredients that would cause harm. The material, known as Arbofoam, was developed at the Fraunhofer Institute for Chemical Technology ICT in Germany. Though bioplastics using cellulose from wood have been used in other products, they have been unsuitable for toys because of additives such as sulfur. Arboform’s sulfur content was reduced by 90%; the next challenge was to find suitable additives that keep the bioplastics from dissolving in water—a big problem since children tend to suck on their toys or leave them out in the rain.

Source: Fraunhofer Institute for Chemical Technology, Joseph-von-Fraunhofer-Strasse 7, 76327 Pfinztal, Berghausen, Germany. Web site www.ict.fraunhofer.de.

Hospitals and Patients Seek Alternatives

More than one-third of American adults and 12% of children use some form of complementary or alternative medicine, such as herbal and dietary supplements, according to a report from the National Institutes of Health. Therapies showing significant increases in popularity in the past five years are deep-breathing exercises, meditation, massage therapy, and yoga. Hospitals are responding to increased patient demand for these services, reports the American Hospital Association. More than 37% of hospitals surveyed indicated that they are integrating complementary and alternative services with conventional treatments, largely due to patient demand.

Sources: National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, National Institutes of Health, www.nih.gov. American Hospital Association, www.aha.org .

Toward a More Multilingual Military

The U.S. military needs to improve its foreign-language and cultural skills to operate more effectively, according to Congressman Vic Snyder (Democrat-Arizona), chairman of the House Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee. “In today’s and tomorrow’s national security environment, the demand for these skill sets may be even greater, given the range of missions our military personnel can be called on to perform,” he says. “Language and cultural skills can save lives and even prevent conflict.” The Subcommittee’s report calls for increased support for foreign language study in the U.S. educational system, though it did not make clear how schools are to predict where future military interests may be.

Source: U.S. House of Representatives, House Armed Services Committee, 2120 Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, D.C. 20515. Web site http://armedservices.house.gov .

Word Watch: Pre-vivor

New words often offer clues to new trends. The term pre-vivor—meaning an individual who takes extreme preventive measures to ensure survival—suggests a new, more extreme level of proactivism or initiative. As used by Baylor Medical Center breast surgeon Valerie Gorman, the term refers specifically to women at risk of developing breast cancer who opt for preemptive bilateral mastectomies, or those who have developed cancer in one breast choosing to remove the remaining healthy breast as well.

Comment: Becoming a pre-vivor may seem extreme, but as change accelerates and complexity grows in all areas of life, risk assessment is becoming more and more imperative. The sooner that a risk is identified and acted upon, the more likely survival becomes.

Source: Baylor Health Care System, Marketing and Public Relations, 2001 Bryan Street, Suite 750, Dallas, Texas 75201. Web site www.baylorhealth.com .

Too Free for Our Own Good?

Free Market Madness: Why Human Nature Is at Odds with Economics — And Why It Matters by Peter A. Ubel. Harvard Business Press. 2009. 240 pages. $26.95.

In a free market, it’s much too easy to make choices that endanger our health and wealth, observes Peter A. Ubel, a primary-care physician, in Free Market Madness. In a free market, we are free to overeat, smoke, drink excessively, ruin our credit, and not save enough for retirement.

Inundated by eye-candy ads, we buy products that harm our health and make spending decisions that carry severe long-term consequences, such as losing our homes by defaulting on mortgages.

“We humans are too easily manipulated by other humans,” Ubel says. “We are too easily seduced by the multitude of choices we face in our fast-moving market economies.”

Not coincidentally, he says, the country with the highest rate of obesity in the industrialized world — the United States — is also the country that has the largest proportion of its GDP spent on advertising. Obesity is much lower in Europe, where governments regulate food ads more aggressively.

“Such regulations have been shown to statistically predict the rate of obesity in any given country,” Ubel writes.

He argues that it’s not always people’s own decisions to drink, eat, and spend. Studies indicate the human will is a lot more malleable than we would like to think. Ubel offers this evidence:

• Finite self-control. Exerting self-control in one area of life leaves less self-control available for other areas. One study seated test subjects in front of plates of cookies and required that they not give in to eating them. Afterwards, participants attempted to solve difficult math problems. They gave up more quickly than members of a group who did not have to undergo the first exercise. This explains why obesity rates are highest among low-income groups: The stresses of dealing with poverty leave little will power for eating right or exercising.

• Default bias. We are partial to the default option — what we get if we take no action. Countries in which hospitals harvest organs from the deceased unless the families request otherwise have significantly higher rates of organ donors than countries that count on individuals to volunteer to donate. This passivity spells trouble for retirement savings, which require that people choose to set money aside.

• Social pressure. Smoking and overeating are contagious. If one of your friends gains weight, you will be more likely to gain weight. People who associate with smokers will be more likely to take up the nicotine habit in turn. This is no surprise to most parents, who know that, once one child has a new toy, every child at school wants it.

Where will is weak and threatens the public’s health, Ubel argues, governments can help citizens choose more wisely with policies of “soft paternalism” that encourage good decisions but don’t coerce them.

“I hope and believe that the government can help us tackle a problem like obesity without causing us to slide toward a cholesterol-free police state,” Ubel writes.

Soft paternalism could take the form of tax rebates to people with healthy body weights and subsidies of healthy foods, matched with taxes on unhealthy foods.

“Some people, faced with the higher price, would shift to a cheaper alternative,” he writes. This approach would engage consumers’ interest through ad campaigns that play to emotions, and not just their intellects. “Such an approach would go beyond boring statistical displays of calorie information or tedious data about carbohydrates and fat calories, to labeling food with evocative images that create aversions to foods that aren’t healthy.”

It would also provide citizens with the resources necessary to adopt healthy lifestyles: designing neighborhoods and park systems that make it easy for people to walk or play outside, subsidizing fitness centers and transit to and from them, and encouraging employers to create opportunities for employees to exercise during work hours.

This approach could promote wise financial decisions as well. It could encourage employers to make retirement accounts the default option so that employees automatically have retirement savings. It could mandate better information about financial transactions, such as adjustable-rate mortgages and rent-to-own deals.

“Free markets fail if consumers don’t have easy access to important information relevant to their purchasing decisions,” Ubel writes.

At times, officials might take firmer approaches: ban vending machines from schools, require restaurants to cut trans fats from their recipes, and limit aggressive marketing practices like children-friendly advertising or the direct-to-consumer advertising of pharmaceuticals.

“Carefully calibrated restrictions on our freedom are a small price to pay for a happier, healthier populace,” Ubel concludes. — Rick Docksai

Visionaries: Saving the Planet, One Cloud at a Time

By Patrick Tucker
There are thousands of ways to battle climate change, from supporting solar and wind power to buying low-energy appliances to simply consuming less. But what if these measures, taken en masse and individually, come up short? If humanity just can’t be bothered to save itself before runaway climate change takes over, is there a Plan B?

Perhaps.

British atmospheric physicist John Latham and engineer Stephen Salter have come up with a scheme to attack global warming directly. By blasting seawater droplets into the air from wind-powered ships, they believe stratocumulus clouds could be made thick and white enough to bounce more solar radiation back into space to change the earth’s temperature.

THE FUTURIST magazine talked to Latham about changing the climate, for good.

THE FUTURIST: Why do you think your idea is receiving special attention right now? Would you call something like this a desperation measure to be implemented only after all else has failed?

John Latham: I think the increased attention results from increasing public consciousness and concern regarding global warming. If our idea works as computations indicate, it could hold the earth’s temperature constant in the face of increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations for at least 50 years.

The best solution by far is to reduce CO2 emissions to the point where any temperature rise is not dangerous. I do not think this will happen, so we need to develop (hopefully not deploy) stopgap measures to stabilize temperature for however long it takes to develop a clean primary energy source. It is, in a sense, a desperation measure, but it is also an attempt to restore climate as best as possible to how it was before the warming.

FUTURIST: You’re seeking funds right now to test the idea. How might you go about testing it?

Latham: [We would have] a limited-area field experiment in which selected areas of a region of marine stratocumulus clouds are seeded with seawater particles, whilst adjacent areas are not.… A range of instruments are used to determine if seeding causes an increase in cloud brightness, and if so, how much.

FUTURIST: The challenges to implementing such a system must be enormous. What are the biggest ones?

Latham: It actually is not a very daunting prospect. The costs are such that economists say they can be regarded as zero in comparison with those of damage caused by unbridled warming. The largest current problem is developing the spray technology.

FUTURIST: You have discussed the possibility of unintended consequences to such a system. What might they be?

Latham: It is inevitable that our scheme will modify global temperature, rainfall, and wind distributions to some degree. It is vital, therefore, to examine fully — largely by major global modeling — all possible ramifications of its possible deployment. If there are significant adverse ones which cannot be eliminated, the scheme should not be deployed.

FUTURIST: Was there any particular moment of epiphany where you were considering the effects of saltwater in the atmosphere and realized you had happened upon an idea that might one day save the entire world?

Latham: About 35 years ago, my 10-year-old son Mike and I were watching a gorgeous sunset over the Irish Sea from a Welsh mountain. He asked why the clouds were gleaming, and I told him they were reflecting sunlight, like mirrors. He laughed and said, “soggy mirrors.” That comment stuck with me and I think provided, almost 20 years later, the stimulus that gave rise to my 1990 Nature paper first proposing the idea.

About the Interviewer
Patrick Tucker is senior editor of THE FUTURIST and director of communications for the World Future Society.

For more information, contact: The National Center for Atmospheric Research, www.ucar.edu.

Garbage as a Renewable Resource

Cheap alternative energy may be no farther than your nearest landfill.

Mark Redwood has a keen appreciation for garbage.

As a research fellow with the University of Birmingham’s Unit of Functional Bionanomaterials, Redwood has helped develop a process that uses bacteria cultures to convert food waste into hydrogen fuel.

“There are special and yet prevalent circumstances under which microorganisms have no better way of gaining energy than to release hydrogen into their environment," wrote Redwood in a Microbiology Today article. "Microbes such as heterotrophs, cyanobacteria, microalgae, and purple bacteria all produce biohydrogen in different ways."

Redwood and his fellow researchers are hopeful that “waste to energy” processes might give consumers around the world a clean and affordable energy source while reducing the flow of garbage into landfills.

“The world today faces a triple threat of growing waste volumes, declining disposal options, and limited energy resources,” reads the Web site of Biowaste2Energy Ltd., a firm co-founded early 2008 by Redwood’s university research unit and outside agencies to further develop and promote waste-to-energy technology. The site touts the method as one that “dramatically reduces the waste volume, while providing clean energy.”

The Biowaste2Energy process involves two storage tanks, one that houses cultures of fermentative bacteria and another that teems with photosynthetic bacteria. Machines churn the food waste up and pour it into the fermentative-bacteria tank, whose micro-residents munch away and burp quantities of hydrogen for use as fuel.

The fermentative bacteria also emit acid compounds that drain into a photosynthetic bacteria tank, where other bacteria convert the compounds into even more hydrogen for fuel use.
Garry Golden, a futurist and energy consultant, says the process is so simple and involves equipment so portable that homeowners might someday buy waste-to-energy disposal units for their homes and produce their own electricity. Golden estimates that a household with a lot of biodegradable trash might save as much as 20% to 30% on its monthly energy bills.

“People can start extracting energy from their own sources on site,” he says. “You’re looking at more localized production and storage.”

Many villages in Costa Rica already practice a form of waste-to-energy scheme, according to Rachel Tubman, University of Houston future-studies graduate assistant. Tubman has researched villages in which residents truck their homes’ food waste and animals’ excrement into a community tank unit; bacteria and enzymes break it all down into a natural gas that villagers use for heating and cooking. The leftover solid compounds make for a highly nutrient-rich fertilizer.

“It amounts to taking something that is considered the bane of our existence and making it a positive thing,” says Tubman. “In an energy-constrained society, every piece of biomass becomes valuable.”

Golden notes that the United States currently consumes 3.8 trillion kilowatts of electricity a year. He calculates that if the United States converted all 170 million tons of the garbage it currently incinerates or sends to landfills, it would get a yield of 93.9 billion kilowatts of energy a year—2.4% of the current energy need. But even 2.4% could prove to be a substantial saving for many consumers who worry about energy expenses.

“It doesn’t save the world,” he says. “But if GE or some company can design a bioenergy appliance and sell it to homes in America, that is a great way to reduce waste, a great way to reduce the cost of energy, and a great way to improve the environment. There are a lot of positives.” —Rick Docksai

Sources: “Life’s a Gas…and it’s Hydrogen,” by Mark Redwood and Lynne Macaskie. Microbiology Today. Society for General Microbiology. Web site www.sgm.ac.uk.

Biowaste2energy Ltd. Web site www.bw2e.com.

Garry Golden. The Energy Road Map. Web site www.garrygolden.net.

Rachel Tubman, University of Houston. Web site www.uh.edu.

Teens and Cell Phones

Cell phones can be noisy and distracting. But they can also be an aid to learning.

Many schools frown on students using cell phones in the classrooms, but a British study suggests that they reconsider. The mobile technology could in fact be a powerful learning tool.
“We hope that, in the future, mobile phone use will be as natural as using any other technology in school,” says Elizabeth Hartnell-Young, University of Nottingham research fellow and study co-author.

Hartnell-Young and colleagues tracked 331 teens, ages 14 to 16, for nine months in five participating schools whose teachers incorporated “smartphones,” or cell phones with Internet access and other advanced functions, into lesson plans. Students used the smartphones to create short movies, set homework reminders, record their teachers’ readings of poems, time experiments via phone stopwatches, access relevant Web sites, and transfer electronic files between school and home. The study gave the smartphone-enhanced lessons high marks.

“Even pupils were often surprised at the thought that mobile phones could be used for learning,” says Hartnell-Young. “But after the hands-on experiment, almost all pupils said they enjoyed the project and felt more motivated.”

These findings do not surprise Joseph Porus, vice president of market-research firm Harris Interactive, who notes that teens have a deep comfort level with mobile phones. In September, Harris Interactive and telecommunications trade association CTIA co-released a survey of teen phone use in which 51% of the teen respondents said they consider the cell phone a vital means to getting important information.

Nearly one in five respondents (18%) said that the cell phone is a positive influence on their education. Of those who access the Internet on their phones, 24% do so for class-related purposes and 39% do so for national and world news.

Phone Web features are increasingly important, according to the Harris poll. Some teachers collect homework online and answer questions about assignments through e-mail or text-messaging.

“The mobile phone is another form of access to teachers and to help,” Porus says.
The mobile phone can go to less-than-edifying purposes also, however.

Some students at a school in British Columbia school created a “fight club” with scheduled smackdowns that they recorded and uploaded for global sharing. In a Quebec classroom, students acted chaotically so as to provoke their teacher and then recorded his angry outburst for later upload onto YouTube.

According to Emily Noble, president of the Canadian Federation of Teachers, incidents such as these prompted many Canadian school districts to ban students’ use of cell phones altogether.
“While we at the Canadian Federation of Teachers do not object to cell phones, we have serious concerns about their misuse–e.g., to cyberbully, cheat on exams, or just be disruptive in the classroom,” says Noble.

But Noble stressed that many teachers in Canada have been able to “use the technology in a positive way.” At a school in Saskatchewan, eighth and ninth graders reading Todd Strasser’s novel The Wave used cell phones to share thoughts about the book, record and summarize group discussions, share digital art projects, and receive morning homework reminders from their teacher.

“It’s like everything else; you have to be careful about it. There’s proper and improper use,” Noble says. —Rick Docksai

Sources: Joseph Porus, Harris Interactive, www.harrisinteractive.com.

Emily Noble, Canadian Teachers’ Federation, www.ctf-fce.ca.

CTIA, www.ctia.org.

University of Nottingham, www.nottingham.ac.uk.

Youth Depression and Suicide

Medical advisory warnings may have some nasty side effects.

Warning labels meant to protect young people might be doing them more harm than good, according to a Nationwide Children’s Hospital study on antidepressants and youth suicide rates.
The study finds that suicides of Americans under 20 years old rose 18% between 2003 and 2004—the largest single-year increase in more than 15 years. The rate went back down by a slight 5% from 2004 to 2005.

The spike coincides with U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s 2003 and 2004 public warnings that antidepressants might trigger “suicidality”—suicidal thoughts and behaviors, short of actual suicide—in young people age 20 and under who use them, though suicidality usually abated after the first few months of treatment. The FDA first alterted consumers to a possible antidepressant–suicidality link in June 2003 when tests suggested increased risk in young consumers of the antidepressant parotexine.

Over the following 14 months, the FDA sponsored studies of all major antidepressants and held public hearings that discussed findings. It concluded that all brands of antidepressants needed to carry a note of caution; a young patient taking them would be 4% more likely to exhibit suicidality.

In October 2004, the agency ordered drug companies to place “black-box” warnings on the inserts of all their antidepressants. Every warning was to say state the increased risks and urge doctors prescribing antidepressants to watch the patients closely for any changes in behavior: “Anyone considering the use of [drug name] or any other antidepressant in a child or adolescent must balance this risk with the clinical need. Patients who are started on therapy should be observed closely for clinical worsening, suicidality, or unusual changes in behavior.”

The first warnings appeared in 2005. FDA spokeswoman Sandy Walsh told THE FUTURIST that the warnings were meant to make doctors and patients more cautious.

“The FDA’s intent is to fully inform doctors about the risks and benefits of antidepressants, and not to discourage appropriate prescribing,” says Walsh.

But critics say that doctors and patients became too cautious. Nathan Bridge, Nationwide Children’s Hospital study author, suggests that the warnings might have scared some physicians into not prescribing antidepressants and some young children into not taking them. Bridge worries that the grownups’ concerns backfired, with tragic consequences for some young patients who were denied needed treatments.

“That may mean there are more depressed kids who aren’t being diagnosed and being treated, and that may be more at risk for suicide,” says Bridge.

According to FDA data, a young person suffering from depression is 15% more likely to commit suicide than peers not suffering from depression.

Bridge’s concern is not new. In December 2006, Columbia University psychiatry professor John Mann testified at a public FDA hearing that antidepressant prescriptions to young people declined 22% after the black-box warnings were imposed. He added that the best way to help depressed and suicidal patients is to closely monitor them and prescribe drugs whenever appropriate: “We can do more good by encouraging treatment for all depressed children and adults.”

Child psychiatrist Carolyn Robinowitz told the same committee that the black-box label fueled needless fear about the drugs.

“The imposition of the black box label has resulted in unintended negative consequences restricting access to care and adding to risk,” she said.

She argued further that the warnings fueled negative stereotypes about people with depression, and might even shame some depressed persons from acknowledging their depression and seeking help.

“The black box has contributed to further stigmatization of depression, those who suffer from it, and its treatment,” she says.

Despite the criticisms, the FDA expanded the black-box warning in May 2007 to all patients under 24 years old.

Walsh agrees that excess fear of antidepressants can become a serious problem.

“Findings such as these do raise a concern about the unintended consequences,” she says.

But she defended the black-box warnings as a benefit to doctors and patients alike.

“At this time, nothing indicates a need for change in the boxed warning,” she says, “which urges that particular attention is given to patients starting treatment, still good advice.”—Rick Docksai

Sources: Jeff Bridge, Nationwide Children’s Hospital, Columbus, Ohio. Web site, www.nationwidechildrens.org.

Sandy Walsh, FDA Public Affairs Office. Web site, www.fd.gov.

Psychopharmacologic Drugs Advisory Committee. December 13, 2006. FDA. Web site, www.fda.gov/cder.

Tomorrow in Brief

Navy Returns to Sail Power

Sails may be making a comeback on ships. Using a giant computer-controlled kite called a skysail, a cargo ship chartered by the U.S. Navy for the Military Sealift Command will move supplies and equipment around the globe. Rising 100 yards into the air, the innovative kite-sail will capture wind to help propel the 400-foot MV Beluga Skysails during long ocean transits, saving an estimated 20%–30% in fuel costs, or about $1,600 per day.

Source: U.S. European Command, www.eucom.mil.

Celebrity Trumps Beauty

Consumers make more of a connection with famous faces than beautiful ones, so marketers are looking more toward the stars to sell their products. A recent study by psychologists Carl Senior and Baldeesh Gakkal of Aston University (Birmingham, U.K.) concluded that the modern brain has become hard-wired to produce emotional reactions to celebrities and the products they endorse. Participants’ responses were measured when exposed to hypothetical ads featuring famous and nonfamous, attractive and average-looking models; fame proved more stimulating. The researchers believe that it doesn’t matter how attractive the celebrity is; consumers are simply more likely to respond to fame than to beauty.

Source: Aston University, Press Office, Aston Triangle, Birmingham B4 7ET, United Kingdom. Web site www.aston.ac.uk.

Space Research Leads to Depression Treatment

A self-guided depression-treatment program developed for astronauts could one day be used for Earthbound sufferers. NASA’s Virtual Space Station, a multimedia program for addressing problems that astronauts may encounter on long-term missions, includes a module to guide space crews through psychosocial challenges when no communication link to a psychologist is available. “While astronauts are not particularly prone to psychological problems, the environment is very demanding,” says project co-investigator and former astronaut Jay Buckey. The treatment program helps the user identify specific problems, set goals to solve them, and brainstorm the steps necessary to reach those goals. Developers believe the program might also benefit rural residents and others without immediate access to mental health care professionals or services.

Source: National Space Biomedical Research Institute, One Baylor Plaza, NA-425, Houston, Texas 77030. Web site www.nsbri.org.

Burials at Sea Benefit Coral Reefs

Cemetery plots are growing increasingly scarce and more people are seeking ways to maintain their eco-friendly lifestyles after they die. One option in the “green burial” movement is to contribute your remains to reef restoration. Eternal Reefs, a company founded by a pair of college roommates inspired during their diving adventures off the Florida Keys, entombs cremated remains in “reef balls” that are then used to help rehabilitate and restore dying reefs and provide new habitats for marine life.

Source: Eternal Reefs Inc., P.O. Box 2473, Decatur, Georgia 30031. Web site www.eternalreefs.com.

Microwaves May “Pump” Water on Moon

When future astronauts need water on the Moon or Mars, they’ll need to go only as far as an outpost where subsurface ice has been pumped out with microwave beams. Materials scientist William Kaukler of the University of Alabama, Huntsville, has devised a system for extracting water by shooting beams into the lunar or Martian surface at the poles, where ice has been shown to exist. The microwaves will penetrate and heat the soil; on the Moon, the vacuum environment would percolate the water vapor to the surface, where it would be collected on a plate as ice and then scraped off for human use, either as water or for conversion to hydrogen and oxygen through electrolysis. The key advantage to such a system would be to avoid transporting water from Earth — an expensive proposition.

Source: University of Alabama, Huntsville, University Relations, SKH 321, Huntsville, Alabama 35899. Web site www.uah.edu/news.

Book Reviews

The Emergence of a Global Generation

A maverick pollster explains why the new American Dream is better than the old one.

The Way We’ll Be: The Zogby Report on the Transformation of the American Dream. By John Zogby. Random House, www.atrandom.com. 2008. 235 pages. $26.

In The Way We’ll Be, pollster John Zogby draws exhaustively on the results of his organization’s long-term polling to reveal what trends are guiding the United States into the future. On the one hand, distrust of political leaders and the mainstream media has become highly pervasive, cutting across all age groups. (A 2004 poll of New Yorkers found that almost half believed the Bush administration knew about the 9/11 attacks in advance.) On the other hand, the average 18- to 29-year-old also has a heightened social awareness, a genuine appreciation for diversity and multiculturalism, a more personal spiritual sense of the world, and a broader worldview in general, Zogby reports.

In addition, 25% of this age group “think they’ll end up living for some significant period of time in a country other than America,” and they are more aware of (and more interested in) international politics than previous generations have been. The current twenty-somethings are multilateral as well as multicultural and “want a foreign policy as inclusive and embracive as they are,” writes Zogby. “They expect impediments to trade to be removed so they can shop anywhere, and they want developing countries and their peoples protected from predatory multinational corporations and their fiscal policies that hold the world’s poorest people ransom.”

In other words, politicians and CEOs would be wise not to underestimate the under-30 crowd. Zogby re-dubs the millennial generation the “First Globals,” calling them “the most outward-looking and accepting generation in American history.” As he charts their values and beliefs, he repeatedly makes the case that “First Globals are also the most cosmopolitan age group in America, the most international, and the one most concerned about the environment and human rights.”

According to Zogby, First Globals are also proving themselves to be more conscientious consumers, demanding greater honesty and accountability from businesses, political leaders, the media, and themselves. “If there is a single element driving the operating manual of our lives more than any other, it is the demand after so many years of falsity — in products, claims, and promises — that things finally get back to being honest and actual,” he writes.

Despite the relentless fusillade from a multibillion-dollar-a-year advertising industry, First Globals aren’t nearly as materialistic or as “branded” as they were conditioned to become. On the contrary, the conspicuous consumption of previous generations of nouveau-riche is being supplanted by the trappings of a more socially responsible lifestyle, Zogby asserts.

This doesn’t mean that Americans are raising a generation of liberals. What it shows is that the old American Dream has shifted away from materialism and toward what Zogby calls “secular spiritualism,” the search for inner tranquility, a tendency to look for deeper meaning from life. He writes, “Just as Thoreau looked out at the landscape of industrial age America and decried its dehumanizing effects, so these Secular Spiritualists have looked out at the landscape of an America obsessed with consumption and have decided that it isn’t working for them.”

Of course, raw data can be interpreted many different ways. As Zogby points out, “polling is not a crystal ball. Despite our best efforts and the most pristine methodologies, the unpredictability of events sometimes gets in the way.” Polling is most useful as a way to discover emerging trends and changes in cultural values and opinions. Polls don’t determine future outcomes, but they can provide strong indications of what’s to come. Zogby issues a caveat that expresses this nicely: “All I know for sure is what the polls and surveys tell me, and all they can tell me is what people are thinking and intending at the moment the questions are asked.”

That said, when he starts referring to baby boomers as “Woodstockers” and Gen Xers as “Nikes,” it comes across as a way to maintain literary consistency, rather than an inspired method of recategorizing the generations based on polling data. And it’s possible that, by the end, older readers may find themselves experiencing a bit of a backlash toward Zogby’s “favorite child”: a schadenfreude to see the archetypal First Global living in his or her parents’ basement ten years from now, watching grainy political videos on YouTube and muttering about international government conspiracies.

On the other hand, Zogby’s upbeat vision of the future provides a nice counterbalance to doom-and-gloom prophesying. Why argue with the data? Better to take a deep breath and relax. As it turns out, the kids are doing just fine. And the rest of us aren’t doing too bad either. — Aaron M. Cohen

Hope in the State of the Future

2008 State of the Future. By Jerome C. Glenn, Theodore J. Gordon, and Elizabeth Florescu. The Millennium Project, www.millennium-project.org. 2008. 104 pages plus a CD-ROM containing 6,300 pages. $49.95.

The Millennium Project of the World Federation of United Nations Associations has released a State of the Future report every year since 1996. This latest edition draws upon all 12 predecessors and incorporates findings from 229 new contributing futurists, business planners, and scientists.

The report identifies 15 Global Challenges that experts conclude will demand worldwide cooperation to resolve; summarizes, in a State of the Future Index, data collected over the last 20 years to project five areas in which the human species will gain ground and five in which it will lose ground; and proposes ways for new systems of communication and information-sharing to coordinate global action necessary to address the 15 Global Challenges.

The report’s authors bring together much of the contributors’ research findings through a survey method called Real-Time Delphi Technique, in which participants answer questionnaires in one year and are allowed to revise their answers at any time thereafter. The 15 Global Challenges are the results tallied from a Delphi survey ongoing since 1996; the State of the Future Index used a Real-Time Delphi Technique survey dating back to 2006.

The report gives reason to look forward to substantially reduced world poverty, rising literacy, and vast increases in worldwide Internet availability and use. Yet it also finds much to fear: As much as half the world might witness violence and upheaval due to rising energy and food costs, unstable governments, climate change, water shortages, desertification, and increasing migrations of refugees.

The survey participants find hope for solving these problems, however, in ever-evolving communications technologies and in government “foresight units.” Communications technologies such as the Internet enable people across the globe to share ideas, cooperate on initiatives, and allocate resources more easily than ever before. Foresight units keep public officials aware of worldwide developments that need to be considered when formulating policies. The report spotlights the present foresight units of 10 individual governments, and urges other governments to form foresight units as well. The authors hope that those units might connect to each other and to partners in the nonprofit and business sectors to form a worldwide grid of information sharing, idea development, and strategy implementation.

“This does not mean world government; it means world governance — civilizations working better by cooperating with some common rules,” the report states.

Additional international coordination systems might target the specific challenges of sustainable energy policies: a Global Energy Network to link energy experts and a Global Energy Information System to serve as a knowledge base for information about energy. Energy and environmental matters in general merit special consideration, since ecological problems factor into many armed conflicts.

“A new global system for the identification, analysis, assessment of possible consequences, and synthesis of energy options for decision making is urgently needed,” the report states.

The 2008 State of the Future report is an ambitious meeting of research and vision, presenting a grand-scale sweep of today’s world and its difficulties. It puts forth blueprints for an ambitious mobilization of world-conscious citizens and governments across the globe. That mobilization is a powerful break from the squabbles that feed the world-news sections of today’s newspapers. It becomes clear that the contributing researchers hope for a new and better world. Anyone who shares their hope will find the 2008 State of the Future report a welcome resource. — Rick Docksai

Reinventing Morality

By Patrick Tucker

Evolutionary biology and neuroscience are adding to our understanding of a historically unscientific area.

Morality may be something different for everyone; it may be the set of rules handed down by God to Moses on stone tablets, or the system in which karma is passed through the Dharma. But morality is also a decision-making process, one that plays out in the brain in the same way a mechanical decision-making process plays out on a computer. Clerics, theologians, and, in the last century, anthropologists have put forward various answers to the riddle of how our species stumbled upon the concept of goodness. Now, neuroscientists and evolutionary biologists are adding to that understanding. Discoveries in these fields have the potential to achieve something remarkable in this century: an entirely new, science-based understanding of virtue and evil.

Marc Hauser, author of Moral Minds (Ecco, 2006) and director of the Cognitive Evolution Laboratory at Harvard University, is at the forefront of the emerging scientific discussion of morality. David Poeppel of the University of Maryland is on the cutting edge of today’s brain and neuroscience research. I spoke with both of them about what science can contribute to the human understanding of good and bad.

The first thing I discovered is that applying a scientific approach to a murky, loaded issue like morality requires understanding the problem in material terms. You have the event, in this case the moral decision. Then you have the space where the event plays out, the brain. Some aspects of the decision-making process are fluid and unique to the individual. To form a crude and an unoriginal analogy, this would be like the software code that the brain processes to reach decisions about what is morally permissible and what is not. Other aspects are fixed, like hardware.

Marc Hauser is an expert on the former.

Moral Grammar

A great example of moral-writing software is culture. Cultural influences on moral decision making can include everything from the laws that govern a particular society to the ideas about pride, honor, and justice that play out in a city neighborhood to the power dynamics of a given household. Religion, upbringing, gender, third-grade experiences dealing with bullies, and so on all contribute lines of code to an individual’s moral software. For this reason, no two moral processes will be identical. Academics have given this phenomenon a fancy name: moral relativism. The theory holds that because morality is transferred from groups to individuals in the form of traditions, institutions, codes, etc., everyone will have a different idea of good and bad.

But what if there are limitations to the spectrum of variation? What if, beneath the trappings of culture and upbringing, there really is such a thing as universal morality? If such a thing existed, how would you go about proving it? Enter Marc Hauser, whose research is adding credence to the notion of a universal goodness impulse.

According to Hauser, the human brain learns right from wrong the same way it learns language. The vast majority of the world’s languages share at least one thing in common: a system of guidelines for usage. This is called grammar. Just as languages have rules about where to put a subject, an adverb, and a predicate in a sentence, so too every culture has a set of guidelines to teach people how to make moral decisions in different situations. So just as learning a language means learning not only words, but also a system for putting the words together, the same is true for morality; there are very specific “commandments” that are unique to every culture, but there are also softer usage guidelines. People who have mastered the moral guidelines of their particular culture have what some might call principles or scruples. Hauser calls this a moral grammar.

“A mature individual’s moral grammar enables him to unconsciously generate and comprehend a limitless range of permissible and obligatory actions within the native culture, to recognize violations when they arise, and to generate intuitions about punishable violations,” he writes in his book. “Once an individual acquires his specific moral grammar, other moral grammars may be as incomprehensible to him as Chinese is to a native English speaker.”

Hauser has spent his career studying how people from different backgrounds and cultures rely on different grammars to make moral decisions. About three years ago, he put up a survey Web site called the Moral Sense Test, which is still operating today. Since its establishment, some 300,000 people from around the world have logged on. Participants are asked to answer a series of so-called trolley problems to reveal their unique moral decision-making processes.

The quintessential trolley problem goes something like this: A group of five people is on a train track unaware that a runaway trolley is heading toward them. One person is on a separate track, equally oblivious to what’s going on. If you’re in a control room overlooking the train yard, is it morally permissible to pull a lever and divert the train away from the five people onto the track with the one person, thereby saving the five and killing the one? Or is it morally preferable to take no action and allow the trolley to continue along its predestined path?

“Each question targets some kind of psychological distinction,” says Hauser. “For example, we’re very interested in the distinction between action and omission when both lead to the same consequence.… It’s an interesting distinction because it plays out in many areas of biomedical technology and experiences.”

Surveys such as these aren’t new. But Hauser’s Web-based survey model allows him to ask these questions of people who originate from all sorts of cultural, economic, and educational points of view, as opposed to polling the opinions of a handful of Ivy League undergrads.

“There’s going to be that kind of variation culturally,” he says. “But what the science is trying to say is Look, could the variation we observe today be illusory? Could there be real regularity, universals that underpin that variation fundamental to how the brain works?”

Though the Moral Sense Test is ongoing, it is adding significantly to an understanding of moral reasoning across different cultures. Among Hauser’s most interesting findings: People who don’t adhere to a specific religion and people who do are remarkably similar in the way they make moral decisions.

“This is independent of the benefits that people obtain from being associated with religion; I have nothing to say about that,” he insists. “This is more a question of … does having a religious background really change the nature of these intuitive judgments. The evidence we’ve accumulated suggests, no.” His research shows that people who are religious and people who claim to be atheists show the same moral patterns and answer the same way when they’re presented with a whole host of moral dilemmas. Where they diverge, says Hauser, is when the question touches on political or topical issues about which people are likely to have pre-formed and not necessarily educated opinions.

This is one area where he hopes moral science can make a real difference.

“If you ask most people, Do you think stem-cell research is morally good or morally bad, many people will say bad,” says Hauser. “But then you ask, what is a stem cell? Most people won’t have a clue. What they’ve often done, they’ve masted stem-cell research onto something else, [such as] killing a baby. If killing a baby is bad then stem-cell research is bad. So that’s a matter of using a moral problem one is familiar with and using it to judge a new case that one is not familiar with. We do that all the time…. What science should be doing is trying to educate us, and say Look, the blastocyst is a cluster of cells that stem-cell research is focusing on … nothing like a baby. It’s the potential, with lots of change and development, to become a baby. But it’s not a baby. There’s an onus on researchers to educate. In the absence of education, what people do is examine moral cases in terms of what they’re familiar with.”

He’s received a mixed reaction to his findings. Some people, he says, see the work as artificial, that what morality is really about is how we behave. In other words, according to some, morality can’t be judged on the basis of how a person answers a survey, but on what that person does in real life.

In the future, new technologies like virtual reality will test this hypothesis. But first, researchers need to learn more about how the process plays out in the brain.

The Moral Hardware

In keeping with our computer–brain analogy, some aspects of the moral decision-making process are fixed; namely, the platform on which this process occurs. You might call this the hardware, the physical brain itself. We all process moral decisions based on different assumptions or beliefs, but the process happens in the same place for each of us, an area in the front of the brain called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. This is where our emotional experiences — religious, traumatic, joyous — connect with our higher-level social decision making to give us a sense of good or bad.

So now that science has found the region involved in moral decisions, how long before some Silicon Valley start-up gives us a machine to read good or ill intentions, a veritable evil detector?

Not anytime in the foreseeable future. The human brain is an object of unfathomable complexity. To imagine that it might suddenly be rendered as transparent and simple as the items in an Excel spreadsheet is to commit hubris. This is why David Poeppel of the University of Maryland likes to keep expectations realistic. He studies language in the brain. Just as Hauser is focused on the language of morality, Poeppel is focused on how vibrations in the ear become abstractions. It’s next to impossible, he says, to see how a brain formulates big abstractions, like Locke’s Second Treatise of Government. He hopes one day to understand the neural processing of words like dog or cat.

Poeppel’s current work involves magnetoencephalography (MEG), an imaging technique that measures the brain’s electrical signals in real time. He was kind enough to invite THE FUTURIST to watch some experimentation. We found him in a lab with some of his brightest doctoral students, several gallons of liquid nitrogen, a $4 million MEG machine, and a girl named Elizabeth — who was having her brain activity, her inner-most thoughts, displayed on a big bank of monitors.

It looked like squiggles.

“What we’re looking at are the electrical signals her brain is giving off as she responds to certain stimuli,” Poeppel told me. In the case of Elizabeth, the stimuli were blips on a monitor and ping noises. The spikes and squiggles on the graph indicated that she was “seeing” the blips, without her having to make any other signal.

Poeppel doesn’t believe we’ll ever be able to hook people to a machine and get a complete transcript of their thinking. “We aren’t capable of that kind of granularity,” he says. But what his — and his students’ — experiments with MEG do show is the brain reacting to stimuli in real time, which can later reveal which parts of the brain react to which stimuli and how much electricity those regions throw off.

The way the brain reads little blips may not seem to be correlated with morality, but it is. Returning to the brain computer analogy, Poeppel says that the moral rules we follow, the impulses that tell us when to push the button and divert the trolley and when not to, are set in a sort of default position when we’re born, just like the default settings on your PC. “Those are constant, immutable. They form the basis of morality. And then the switches are set to particular values as a function of experience. There’s a close interaction between the universality (meaning the brain hardware) and cultural specificity (the software).”

One day, MEG research, trolley surveys, and other aspects of moral science will reveal the key aspects of that correlation.

Amazingly, even though neuroscience is still in its infancy, it’s already yielding insights into moral issues, such as race bias. According to Poeppel, studies have shown that “people make decisions that reflect race biases even when they’re aware of what they’re doing.” Race bias is a reaction that rises from lived experience. What MEG, fMRI, and other neuro-imaging techniques give us is a picture for how those experiences change the physical brain and how the physical brain recreates, reimagines, recomputes them all the time.

“Does this reflect very deeply imbedded mechanisms of decision making? If you’re aware of it, can you neutralize it, can you override it and reeducate the system? Of course you can. The brain is plastic. It changes all the time. That’s what learning is. But we still don’t have a real explanatory theory for how that works.” He adds, “It’s an area where we will see progress in the years ahead.”

In terms of mysteries of morality, that progress will likely take the form of more questions than answers.

Moral Science and Your Future

A common reaction to the radical breakthroughs that seem to occur daily in neuroscience is impatience for ever greater and more important breakthroughs. If we know what lying looks like under fMRI (goes this line of thinking), when will we be able to inoculate against deceit? If we can diagnose the roots of racism, when will we be able to predict which student will go on a violent shooting spree? If we know that bias has something to do the with the amygdala, when will we be able to see it on our computer screens?

The emerging science of morality will not relieve us of the hard work of examining our own motivations and impulses. But it will present us with a lot more data. As this line of inquiry progresses, as new neural-imaging techniques, new technologies like virtual reality come to bear on this problem, we will likely lose certainty about what is right and wrong rather than gain it.

People answering trolley problems will surely give different answers when they’re allowed to “live” the survey in a virtual-reality setting, when they can see the trolley, hear it approach, meet a computer-graphics generated version of the person to be saved or squashed. When we can view that decision-making process using fMRI, MEG, or some other brain-imaging technique not yet in existence, we may be able to see how slightly different firing patterns play out in different decisions. We’ll examine people’s actions in light of their brain activity and reach new understandings, and probably all sorts of hasty conclusions as well.

More importantly, and controversially, the science of morality may bring into doubt some of our most deeply ingrained cultural perceptions about right and wrong. We’ll have new, richer opportunities to examine our actions in the presence of consequences. We probably won’t like what we see.

Those awkward realizations may be the greatest value of moral science.

Consider that we’re called upon to make moral decisions daily. Every so often, we’re given an important one, a decision that will radically affect someone else’s life. Sometimes the decision comes masked as a professional matter, as it did for U.S. sheriff Tom Dart, who, when tasked with evicting individuals whose only crime had been renting from a landlord who had defaulted on his mortgage, decided against action and briefly suspended such evictions in Cook County, Illinois. Sometimes the choice comes in a more dramatic form, as in the case of Wesley Autrey, a New York man who jumped onto a set of train tracks to save a stranger from a speeding subway.

The moral actions of Dart and Autrey strike us as exceptional in their selflessness. But such feats of heroism are the products of the same moral decision-making process that occurs in each of us. When we are called upon to commit to such an act, we first make the decisions that are easiest for us. Our faith (or lack there of), upbringing, official job titles, obligations to our bosses or clients, and our various experiences justify action in the interests of self-preservation and in accordance with convention.

But suppose we were each given a better, more sophisticated understanding of the root of morality, its universal core. We suddenly have the opportunity to examine, perhaps even experience, the other option and explore our emotional aversion to it. We suddenly have a new tool to call upon, our private knowledge of the neurological decision-making process. We play the choice out differently, possibly picturing the person on the other end of the problem, and we reach a different conclusion and commit to a different action.

Something has happened. Insight into the moral deliberative method has yielded a result that is more inline with a broader, more rational, and surely more accurate understanding of what is good. The process has been improved.

The future has changed.

About the Author

Patrick Tucker is the senior editor of THE FUTURIST and director of communications for the World Future Society.

Cyborgs Among Us

Science is daily gaining new insights into how the brain works. That growing field of knowledge is already coming into play in the world around us.

• Washington University medical students used fMRI to show that children use more of their brains and different portions of their brains than adults do when they perform word tasks.
• A group of Japanese researchers from ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, working with researchers from the Honda Research Institute in Saitama, have used fMRI data to program a prosthetic hand to mimic the movements of a real hand.
• Perhaps most remarkable, researchers at Columbia University have demonstrated that fMRI can detect lies or truth more accurately than polygraphs.

— Patrick Tucker

David Poeppel, Master of Synthetic Telepathy

University of Maryland neuroscientist David Poeppel, along with researchers at University of California, Irvine, and other schools, is part of a $4 million U.S. Army grant to achieve what the Army is calling synthetic telepathy. This sounds like something out of Hollywood, but, says Poeppel, electronic telepathy is absolutely possible so long as “communication” is understood to be electrical signals rather than words.

“Suppose you tap out two rhythms,” says Poeppel. “I train you to get really good at tapping out those particular two rhythms, so you can do it mentally. You have motor memory connected to those two rhythms. That can give a big signal (readable via MEG). If I can extract that, I have a signal I can work with and send it.” All mental thoughts create electrical signals.

The experimenters hope to train subjects to make those signals fire in patterns that can convey information, like Morse code. The code could conceivably be picked up by a sensor trained to focus on a particular electromagnetic frequency and then sent to a computer and resent to another sensor, allowing for something like helmet-to-helmet telepathic communication.

How else will neuroscience affect our lives in the decades ahead? Prescription medications for mental health will be far more effective than those currently available, says Poeppel. We’ll treat most sight or hearing loss with brain prostheses like the cochlear implant. We’ll discover the real roots and effects of mental illness, and mental disorders will become as mundane as a common sports injury and will be treated as such. Our cognitive functioning will become far clearer and better understood.

According to Poeppel, the number of people going into the field (the Society of Neuroscience boasted some 38,000 members in October 2007) guarantees a “full frontal assault” on the mysteries of the brain in the years ahead. — Patrick Tucker

A Brave New Pyschocivilzed Society

Wildly optimistic notions about the potential of neuroscience aren’t new. In the 1960s and 1970s, famed neuroscientist José Manuel Rodriguez Delgado predicted that innovations in cybernetics and brain anatomy would lead to a “psychocivilized society.”

Delgado’s experiments with cybernetic brain implants in monkeys, apes, and even cows were revolutionary for their time. In one famous instance, he was able to stop a charging bull by sending a radio signal into a tiny electrode receiver (a stimoceiver) implanted in the animal’s caudate nucleus, an area of the brain that controls voluntary movement.

In another experiment, he put several small macaque monkeys in a cage with an aggressive male macaque that had similarly wired with a stimoceiver to his caudate nucleus. Also in the cage was a lever that — when activated — sent a signal to the implant. Delgado describes the results of the experiment in his book Physical Control of the Mind, writing, “A female monkey named Elsa soon discovered that Ali’s [the male] aggressiveness could be inhibited by pressing the lever, and when Ali threatened her, it was repeatedly observed that Elsa responded by lever pressing. Her attitude of looking straight at the boss was highly significant because a submissive monkey would not dare to do so, for fear of immediate retaliation.… Although Elsa did not become the dominant animal, she was responsible for blocking many attacks against herself and for maintaining a peaceful coexistence within the whole colony.”

In the late 1960s, Delgado was outspoken in his assertions that neuroscience, and particularly the suppression of urges through electrical stimulation, could lead to a world without war, strife, crime, or even cruelty.

“We are only at the beginning of our experimental understanding of the inhibitory mechanisms of behavior in animals and man, but their existence has already been well substantiated. It is clear that manifestations as important as aggressive responses depend not only on environmental circumstances but also on their interpretation by the central nervous system where they can be enhanced or totally inhibited by manipulating the reactivity of specific intracerebral structures,” he wrote. — Patrick Tucker

Marketing a More-Healthful Future: A Moderate Revolution

By John Sweeney

Advertisers have cleverly coaxed us to supersize our waistlines, while urban planners and a knowledge-based economy have removed the necessity for us to move around. For a fitter future, we’ll need the willpower to reverse these trends.

One future of fitness may be tied to a pill that simulates the body’s response to exercise. Just swallow it once a day and you’ll have a healthy body-mass index, even if you munch chips on your couch from morning to night. Doctors may never prescribe such a pill, as much as you might want it, because they know physical activity and healthful eating habits carry irreplaceable benefits.

That is why I expect the real future of fitness to be one based on exercise and diet. The problem is how to get people to subscribe to that future. How do we create a mass movement toward healthier behavior? I believe it is a marketing problem as much as a medical one. Based on my experience in advertising and marketing, I offer 10 trends and their implications for the year 2020.

1. Weighty Food Inventions

The best marketing minds of this generation have made cars more luxurious, but they have also made our foods and drinks more caloric year after year. Starbucks began as a way to enjoy the coffeehouse experience in America. A “tall” (small) coffee at your local Starbucks has just five calories and no fat or carbs. The brilliant inventions of new kinds of coffee experiences led to the glorious drink called the Caramel Macchiato. It features 240 calories with whole milk, 10 grams of fat, and 28 carbs. Suddenly, a coffee break takes on new dimensions for the waistline.

The CEO of Burger King ordered that no fewer than 30 new products would be offered each year. His first new product was called the Enormous Omelet Sandwich; it boosted breakfast sales by 20% and weighed in at an amazing 760 calories.

Implications for 2020: The brilliance of human invention will continue to create extraordinary chances to gain and lose calories. You can’t regulate the imagination, so consumers will have to depend on willpower. This is hard to do as a lone individual, but much easier as part of a tidal movement. Health and fitness promotion will need to draw on the inventiveness of marketing professionals to reverse a dangerously weighty trend in the food industries.

2. Portions: Rightsizing Food

It is a marketing truism that it is easier to get more money from an existing customer than to try and find a new one. In that respect, we have made it easy to go from a 260-calorie hamburger to a 560-calorie Big Mac, because the hamburger buyers already existed — they just got “supersized.”

Despite a public-service campaign that tells you to “avoid foods larger than your fist,” researchers Young & Nestle in The American Journal of Public Health reported the following startling results: “The largest excess over USDA standards (700%) occurred in the cookie category, but cooked pasta, muffins, steaks and bagels exceeded USDA standards by 480%, 333%, 224% and 195% respectively.”

Naturally, the market is filled with new products that must please the consumer to survive. Cold Stone Creamery started in Tempe, Arizona, in 1988 with a new kind of “Super Premium” ice cream. Its interpretation of a chocolate ice cream cup is called Chocolate Devotion and includes not just chocolate ice cream, but also chocolate chips, a brownie, and fudge wrapped into a massive arrangement of caloric wonderment. From a single store in 1988, there are now 1,350 stores throughout America.

Implications: Controlling size and portions of food offerings may require an intervention. Government regulations may require restaurants to provide clearer statements about the calories on menu offerings. There will be more packaging of foods with proper portions for healthy living. It will be an enormous new category. As the future fitness movement accelerates, transparency will be more than a regulation; it will be a requirement by consumers.

3. Transforming Youth Sports

There was a time when youth sports meant having some idle time on the neighborhood sandlot. Today, there are fewer school teams, a decline in daily physical fitness class in middle and high school, and a major increase in the intensity and costs of elite youth sports leagues. These leagues operate separately from the school system and cost parents thousands of dollars in fees and a tremendous commitment in transportation and time.

The level of commitment required to participate has led to the need for kids to focus on single sports in order to compete. Some doctors think this phenomenon is behind the epidemic of repetitive stress injuries, as young athletes turn sports into a 365-day-a-year passion.

The other side of this trend, though, is the effect on the average kid. An estimated 70% of young athletes drop out of sports by age 14. And for the vast masses of semi-coordinated folks, sports represents an elite world of competitive frenzy rather than a sustainable fitness regimen and lifelong pursuit of health. This is not the message that sports needs to send at a time of obesity epidemics.

Implications: Physical education must return as a major priority for schools, as research has shown the importance of physical fitness in academic achievement. Tomorrow’s phys-ed classes will focus on maximum exercise in very tight amounts of time and space. The competitive demands of youth sports will continue to accelerate even as social concern about obsessed parents and repetitive stress injuries mount.

4. The Power of Advertising

The traditional measures of advertising’s effectiveness — reach, frequency, and impressions — begin to take on an ominous dimension when the money promoting broccoli is compared with the amount promoting french fries. According to a number of studies, sugar colas can be traced as a major source of the obesity crisis. When the leading cola companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on commercials, the total becomes extraordinary over the lifetime of a child. Add fast food, sugar-coated cereals, snacks, and beer for adults, and the amounts are truly staggering.

While it is always possible to run commercials with different content next to the big-fat, big-sugar executions, there is absolutely no way to favorably compare the share of voice in the marketplace. And food advertising is often wrapped up in highly effective merchandising strategies, such as movie superhero action figures sold with your food or popular clothing incorporating beverage brands.

The FTC reported in July 2008 that the major food and beverage marketers spent $1.6 billion on promoting products to kids in the United States in 2006. The promotions included the Internet, TV tie-ins, sweepstakes, games, and more. In contrast, investment in nutrition education goes where it may be least effective: classrooms. An Associated Press report reviewing studies of nutrition education programs—on which the federal government spent more than $1 billion in 2007 — found very little success in combating childhood obesity.

Implications: There will be calls for dramatic increases in restrictions on marketing unhealthy foods. Food companies will offer some healthier options. Recent moves in this direction: McDonald’s adds salads and Coca-Cola adds bottled water. The results will be mixed, but it will be a world where consumers have healthy, affordable options with easy access.

Nutrition education programs need to take a tip from advertisers: Go where the audiences are and use the pitches that are most likely to succeed rather than simply revising classroom curricula.

5. The Video Influence

A few decades ago, there were only three major channels on a television screen and no remote controls. Today’s world includes home entertainment centers that rival movie theaters, computer screens that bring the Internet and video games of fantasy sports far more intriguing than the original, and these liquid screen, graphic paradises require little from us but the movement of a few fingers. Recent studies show people entranced by a screen of some kind over 500 minutes a day. And that’s more than eight hours of sedentary living before any recruitment for fitness can even start.

Implications: Technology will continue to make the sedentary life ever more alluring. While there will be innovative products to promote fitness, like Wii, it is ultimately a matter of a person’s willpower whether to use them.

6. Fast Food, Faster Food, Ubiquitous Food

Remember the days of old? Only one vending machine within a mile? And that one needed exact change. Not that anyone would even consider drinking a soft drink in the morning. Today we are a world where vending machines can accept even the most mangled currency, and they await us around every corner, even in public schools.

The same can be said for the sheer number of fast-food restaurants and self-service gasoline snack shops. They have multiplied by the thousands and added caloric breaks by the millions. Ulysses had to pass the Sirens just once in his Odyssey. We pass them several times a day—day after day after day.

Implications: Expect an explosion of restrictions in public buildings and public spaces on the sale of unhealthy products. The average store, though, will feature the latest in both positive and negative products.

7. Compressed Architecture

Compression as a marketing idea is wonderful in certain consumer categories. Thanks to time compression, I can get my pictures developed or prescription eyeglasses changed in just an hour. The idea of compression becomes a bit more troubling when it comes to space.

Thanks to the rise of real-estate values, architects have found ways to put hundreds more houses into developments. These new designs feature maximum floor space with minimal green space. Parks and sidewalks are designed out at certain price points and presented as decorative ambience rather than as open places for play and recreation. The new world of suburban living is designed around accessibility rather than fitness—driving rather than walking. We have escalator-enhanced shopping malls and walking-restricted golf courses, so we all can gain weight but do so with maximum convenience.

Implications: A countertrend against automobile-dominated habitats is rising in many communities. But while more parks and trails will be required in clustered communities, the return to plentiful land in urban areas is simply not possible. The rise in fitness activities that require little space, such as pilates, will explode in popularity by necessity. There won’t be room for anything else.

8. Combating Rising Life Stress

Not just leisure activities, but work also has become increasingly sedentary and time-stressed. The brave new world of hypercompetitive global business requires longer working hours. Business Week reports that 31% of college-educated male workers are grinding through more than 50 hours a week at work.

Furthermore, studies show that 40% of American adults are getting less than seven hours of sleep on weekdays, and 60% of meals are rushed. Given that work in general is now far more white collar than blue collar, it is a world of longer work hours sitting in office chairs typing at computers, and fewer parks to visit because of compressed architecture.

In other words, all our brilliant inventions work together to keep us tired and sitting. Being stressed by time makes it harder to make time for unstressing, as stalling membership rates in health clubs and other fitness adventures would indicate.

Implications: Corporations will likely make major investments in fitness programs for their employees, justifying these investments by adding requirements for healthier lifestyles. These requirements will be tested in court, but the final refinements will still support a more fit employee. Yes, you’ll work long hours, but a visit to the gym will be part of your work schedule.

9. Aging and Fitness

“Age” is the one “inevitable” category to consider in the health and fitness future. People in developed societies are, quite simply, getting older. In 2010, the majority of the population in the United States will be at least 45 years old.

The effects of aging are well documented: metabolism slows, arthritis invades, flexibility declines, and waistlines expand. While this may be true, it does not explain the global increase in obesity. All of the previous trends discussed have contributed to this situation.

Implications: Societies throughout the world are getting older, and low-impact activities like walking, gardening, birding, and swimming will find increasing popularity. The older audience will be one of the anchors for the new fitness movement in 2020.

10. Toward an Ethos of Health

Yes, there will be a fitness revolution, but it will be low-key and pedestrian in its execution. Whether or not hundreds of millions of dollars are spent marketing broccoli and exercise, the ultimate decision to lead healthier lifestyles will be up to individuals.

Unfortunately, the solution to the obesity crisis lies in the commitment to fitness and the sweat equity and diet restraint that creates a healthy body. It is a commitment that comes from individual determination rather than a catchy ad campaign. But it is, ultimately, our path back to normality.

Implications: We will ultimately exercise more and eat better because it is the societal norm. In the same way that social expectations guide our grooming, language, and dress, so will these norms and expectations quietly govern our general fitness. The epidemic rise in morbid obesity will subside because it is no longer acceptable. That — and not whiz-bang technology — will be the source of the next fitness revolution.

The year 2020 will not dawn on a culture of fitness fanatics. Instead, it will dawn on a general ethic of tolerable fitness through general diet restraint and moderate exercise. It will take an enormous list of both regulations and voluntary adjustments to make it work, but a shared sense of the national need to achieve a moderately healthy lifestyle will be the key to one of the quietest revolutions in history.

About the Author

John Sweeney is a Distinguished Professor and head of the advertising sequence at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His address is School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Campus Box 3365, Carroll Hall, UNC-Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27599. Telephone 919-962-4074; fax 919-962-0620.

Why Education Must Get Physical

By Kenneth W. Harris

Positive trends toward a healthier future society include innovative fitness equipment and activities that are appealing to adults. But the fitness ethos must begin earlier in life, and education should reintroduce physical activity for children, argues a futurist consultant.

The promotion of healthy lifestyles is benefiting from calorie-burning innovations that are almost as numerous as calorie-gaining temptations. One only has to view late-night cable TV for a little while to see an advertisement for some type of exercise equipment promising extraordinary health benefits, such as the Bowflex Home Gym. Games and activities, too, seem more imaginative than ever in promoting exercise. Activities like underwater hockey, bicycle polo, and cardio-tennis combine two or more sports or fitness activities. Active games originally intended for children, like dodgeball and kickball, have become popular with adults.

Many companies, like Country Walkers, Backcountry Access, and Vermont Country Cyclers, offer “exercise tourism” featuring walking, skiing, cycling, or kayaking. Even electronic games are starting to promote exercise, like Dance-Dance Revolution and the suite of games accompanying the Nintendo Wii games system, getting gamers off the couch and moving.

Health and Youth

Organized sports for children and youth in America have largely supplanted the games that kids used to organize and play on their own. Organized sports now start as early as age five and continue through high school, with the less talented gradually dropping out and turning to inactive pursuits, including excessive use of electronic media. Meanwhile, schools’ physical-education programs provide inadequate amounts of physical activity for good health, and more kids rely on motorized transport rather than walking or biking to school. All these trends converge as a major cause of the much discussed childhood obesity epidemic in America.

This focus on elite competitive sports participation rather than lifelong fitness has been particularly bad for girls. While Title IX of the Higher Education Amendments in 1972 caused a revolutionary increase in American girls’ sports participation, it also caused a disproportionate increase in injuries to girls who play sports.

Michael Sokolove, author of Warrior Girls: Protecting Our Daughters Against the Injury Epidemic in Women’s Sports (Simon and Schuster, 2008), has documented in heart-breaking fashion the epidemic of ligament tears and concussions in girl soccer players largely caused by playing too many games on too many teams year-round. A key point of the book is that political correctness gets in the way of reform of this unfortunate situation. Groups that ought to be loudly advocating reform are not doing so because of fear that their protest will lead to a retreat from the requirements of Title IX.

Fortunately, advocacy for and implementation of a saner approach to youth sports are starting to appear in disparate quarters. The Web site Momsteam (www.momsteam.com) provides a comprehensive clearinghouse of information for parents of children and youth in sports. Momsteam does not oppose organized youth sports; rather, it seeks to make them fun and inclusive so that they contribute positively to a child’s development.

There is plenty of evidence that physical activity helps children to learn better, but I am not confident that this evidence is enough to turn educational policy around. One reason is that, at least in the United States, the federal No Child Left Behind Act does not require students to meet minimum physical-fitness standards, as it does for reading and mathematics. Consequently, schools are reducing time spent on subjects other than reading and mathematics to assure that their students pass reading and mathematics tests.

Forces Against the Sedentary Lifestyle

The quality of sedentary home entertainment seems to improve continually with no end in sight, and objective time-use studies show that Americans choose to spend a lot of leisure time with electronic media. However, other forces are working against this trend, such as:

• Medical opinion is unanimous that regular exercise offers significant health benefits for people of all ages and both sexes.
• Many organizations, such as the American Heart Association, strongly advocate regular exercise.
• Opportunities are increasing for adults to engage in athletic events such as marathons, long-distance bicycle rides, triathlons, 10K and 5K races, and walks, many of which are charitable fund-raisers.
• Changing laws, regulations, and social attitudes like Title IX are making more exercise possible for more people.
• Support is growing for extensive outdoor infrastructure in urban areas for exercise, including recreational trails and bicycle lanes. [Ed. note: See the author’s article “Outlook for the Automobile’s Alternatives” in the September-October 2008 issue of THE FUTURIST.]

Health and Aging

The popularity of pilates, yoga, and other gentler fitness activities results from a growing recognition that flexibility is one of the three types of essential fitness activities, along with cardiovascular endurance and muscular strength, especially as the U.S. population ages.

I believe that older people — those over age 45 — are already an anchor of the fitness movement. In my study “Global Aging and Sports: The Impact of Aging of the World’s Population on the World of Sports,” I found that, between 1993 and 2005, participation rates among people over age 45 were growing in many sports and fitness categories, even while total participation rates fell in some.

Also, while low-impact sports are certainly highly popular, more and more older people engage in strenuous activities as well. Age group competitions in events like marathons and senior games give people over 45 reason to train for and participate in events that they would not have considered a generation ago.

A countertrend to this aging-fitness movement may be fiscal rather than physical: People over 45 today, especially retirees over age 55, often can devote a lot of leisure time to sports and fitness because they have defined benefit pensions that guarantee income for life. However, defined benefit pensions are disappearing from private-sector retirement plans and are less generous for public-sector workers. Retiree health benefits, especially for those too young for Medicare eligibility, are also fast going away.

Prospects for a Healthier Society

Children’s lack of fitness today is a big issue. If incidence of childhood obesity and diabetes continues to increase, as some dire predictions suggest, then significant numbers of tomorrow’s working-age adults will not be fit and will have limited ability to become fit. Parents will need to change their attitudes and practices to allow their children more time for free outdoor play, to encourage more walking and bicycling to school, to lobby schools and politicians for more and better physical education, and to fight for reform in children’s and youth sports.

For working-age adults, the issue is largely whether they will choose to devote enough of their leisure time to fitness for good health, and, if the long-term decline in smoking is any guide, there is reason for hope that they will gradually do so. Adults past working age also need to choose to devote part of their leisure to active pursuits, as many are already doing. However, without significant medical advances, the triad of old-age diseases — Alzheimer’s, osteoporosis, and diabetes — coupled with lack of financial resources and increasing caregiving responsibilities may prevent them from doing so to the extent they would like.

So, what if we do get a pill that simulates the effects of exercise? As recent research from the Salk Institute suggests, this possibility is no longer science fiction, though other researchers warn of the loss of other benefits of exercising.

A real test of whether the fitness revolution will culminate in a new pervasive social norm will be whether people continue to choose active leisure pursuits. People of the future may have a choice between taking long brisk walks or taking a pill and sitting on the couch, watching their favorite sitcom. The challenge may be to make moderate exercise at least as much fun as what’s on TV.

About the Author

Kenneth W. Harris, a former policy analyst and manager for the Federal Aviation Administration, is chairman of the Consilience Group LLC and transportation field editor for Techcast.org. Among his reports on sports futures are “Global Aging and Sports” (2006) and “Physical Activity Trends” (2007). Web site www.theconsiliencegroup.com.

Be Your Own Big Brother

Call it Web-based personal fitness, or maybe Vanity 2.0: In January 2009, a Silicon Valley start-up called Fitbit will release a wireless system that allows people to track and monitor intimate physical information about themselves and then upload that info to a publicly viewable Web site. The system consists of a hair-clip sized wearable device, the Fitbit Tracker, which monitors its owner’s steps, exercise levels, calories, and sleep patterns.

“The Tracker uses motion-sensing technology to precisely capture all moment-to-moment physical activity throughout the day and night. It also measures sleep quality to provide a holistic view of a 24-hour period,” according to a statement.

At the click of a button, calories, steps, and distance are illuminated and displayed on the Tracker. “In addition to these numerical measurements, the Tracker also displays a user’s progress toward [his or her] goals in the form of an avatar that changes as a user advances toward or falls behind [his or her] goals,” reads the statement. The biggest difference between the Fitbit and a standard pedometer is that the Fitbit allows people to track their own fitness progress online with friends, family, and co-workers, or even strangers. Users can also input nutrition, weight, and other data onto the Web site to gain a “compelte picture of their health.”

The device itself is little more than a 2.4 GHz radio-frequency identification tag, similar to the tags found on store merchandise to prevent stealing. Instead of sending digital data to a security system in a store, the device simply transmits the data wirelessly to a web of receivers or base stations without the user having to lift an extremely fit finger.

“We know that direct action to upload data to a site can turn into a chore,” says Fitbit chief technical officer Eric Friedman.

A machine that watches its owner may ring of Orwell, but many tech-watchers, such as Tim O’Reilly, forecast that the most interesting computer applications in the years ahead will involve sensors. Industry experts forecast more sensing devices to hit the market in the next decade.

The Fitbit’s makers are also optimistic that people will use the knowledge gleaned from the device to make healthier choices. Says Friedman, “We feel that anything we can do to get people to live healthier helps the world be a better place.” — Patrick Tucker

Source: Fitbit, www.fitbit.com, personal interviews.

Video Games as Behavior Modification

Anyone who’s ever been snapped at by someone having a bad day knows that feelings of insecurity lead people to behave in ways that might be deemed aggressive. Psychologist Mark Baldwin of McGill University says that insecurity, bullying behavior, and so on are emotional reactions that happen “automatically — extremely quickly, and without you wanting them or being able to control them.” He and his students have come up with a surprising answer to help people develop “more positive automatic patterns of thought,” namely video games.

Through what he’s calling the Self-Esteem Initiative, Baldwin and his students have created a series of video games that aim to trick the human brain into forming more positive mental images and encouraging a healthier emotional state. The research hinges on neuroscience and fMRI brain scanning breakthroughs that show the effects of isolation, rejection, and despair on the physical brain.

“Some researchers are beginning to use fMRI to examine the neural correlates of social events,” he says. “One study, for example, found that the pain of social rejection seems to activate the same area of the brain as does physical pain. … Other researchers have developed a laboratory paradigm to measure aggressiveness. The participant is insulted by a confederate of the experimenter, and later is given the chance to blast the confederate with a loud noise, supposedly during a learning task. The question to measure aggressiveness is, How loud and how long would you like to make the noise blast? In our study, we simply asked participants to imagine being in this kind of situation, and to then answer the same question about how noxious a blast of noise they would like to administer to the person who had insulted and rejected them.”

So, if rejection and insecurity stemming from common experiences … being treated rudely in a waiting room, being denied entry into art school, or being called short … can cause a person to blast a loud noise at someone or wage a land war in Europe, what can science do to fix this? Aren’t rejection and insecurity unavoidable aspects of life?

Baldwin acknowledges that no one can avoid bad feelings or social rejection forever, but people can lessen the effects that these experiences have on the brain through systematic self-reprogramming. He calls this “psychological practice” and says that the idea came to him one day while he was playing Tetris.

Tetris famously calls on the player to assemble falling shapes into solid blocks before too many of them stack up. Baldwin is something of an avid player but says he was terrible at first. Before long, the game came to feel automatic, so much so that, even after he put the game down, his mind would see the world in terms of rotating shapes he had to piece together. He started looking at parking spaces differently. He reorganized his closets. He realized that, if a video game could program his brain to be more spatially aware, other people might be able to use video games to meliorate feelings of rejection, isolation, or insecurity.

So far, the Self-Esteem Initiative is offering three games on its Web site: Grow Your Chi!, EyeSpy: The Matrix, and WHAM! Self-Esteem Conditioning. All of them “lead players to practice specific mental operations over and over. These operations are designed to foster positive mental habits to give an automatic sense of security,” Baldwin explains. “Pairing any two experiences together over and over can — as with Pavlov’s dog — create an association between them so that thinking about one tends to activate thoughts about the other.”

For instance, in WHAM! the player clicks on words that appear in different parts of the computer screen. Sometimes the word is the player’s own name. Whenever the player clicks on his or her name, a smiling, accepting face appears for a half a second. “Theoretically, this should create an automatic association between ‚myself’ and ‘acceptance,’ leading to a mental habit whereby thinking of oneself automatically brings to mind images of warm social acceptance,” Baldwin says.

Does it work? Baldwin’s research has found a measurable improvement in self-esteem among subjects who played the game for about five minutes. “We also asked them to imagine a situation in which someone insulted and rejected them, and then to say how much they would want to hurt that person: Those participants who had played the self-acceptance conditioning game were less aggressive, compared to a control condition.” — Patrick Tucker

Source: Mark Baldwin interview. To play the Self-Esteem Initiative games, go to http://selfesteemgames.mcgill.ca/games/index.htm.