Tomorrow’s Interactive Television

By John M. Smart

The iPad and its successors could revolutionize television. But only if and when we choose this future.

The elephant in America’s living room right now is that there is not nearly enough quality choice, specialization, and personalization on television. According to many social critics, 70 years of lowest-common-denominator, mass-produced, big-business-driven TV content and news has hobbled Americans’ education and narrowed their worldview. It has stunted their social participation and increasingly distracted them with entertainments, as in decadent Roman times.

Those who want sustained, in-depth television coverage of any particular issue; who want more transparency, accountability, foresight, and the ability to measure progress (in their own or their party’s terms) on an issue; who strive to see the United States in global context; and who desire collective action to fix a problem are today unable to use society’s primary electronic medium. They can’t use it to interact with their fellow citizens or to produce programming worthy of their communities.

As the Internet advances, however, this is beginning to change.

In recent decades, many European and Asian developed countries have become more equitably regulated in media ownership and transparency, and they are much further along in wired and wireless access to the Internet than the United States. Not coincidentally, these countries also have superior educational performance, much stronger social safety nets, more-extensive personal rights, and greater citizen participation in governance. Many, including Germany, the Scandinavian countries, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore, are centers for world-leading manufacturing run by high-paid workers.

The same can no longer be said for the United States, as demonstrated by the nation’s persistent trade deficits and the 60-year collapse of steel, auto, and manufactured goods industries. Only 4% of all American firms and 15% of manufacturers do any exporting at all, according to Matthew Slaughter of Dartmouth College. The export economy has so little diversity that just 1% of U.S. firms account for 80% of exports.

But perhaps the deepest problem that the United States faces, as documented by the Gini coefficient, is that the rich–poor divide has grown so much in the last 40 years that it now rivals emerging nations, countries like Venezuela, Argentina, China, and Mauritania. Meanwhile, the developed countries mentioned earlier have all become more income equal over the same time period. Data-backed books like Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s The Spirit Level (Bloomsbury Press, 2009) document that income inequality leads to greater crime, educational failure, illiteracy, unemployment, poorer health, teen pregnancy, obesity, mental illness, homelessness, class warfare, and political deadlock.

Ingenuity and the right incentives can fix these problems, but the United States will first need new groups of citizens that recognize them as problems. U.S. leaders don’t have the ability to change the system on their own. Furthermore, as the income gap data suggests, these leaders are increasingly among the ultra rich, so they may not be motivated to change the system.

To change this state of affairs, access to true Internet television, not the walled gardens that cable companies offer American consumers, will be a critical piece of social equity.

I argue that access to the Internet’s media universe in our living rooms, with appropriate content controls for youth, should be the right of every citizen in a developed society. It’s also something that the major telecommunications companies like Verizon and cable companies like Comcast want to slow down, according to testimony from public-interest groups like Public Knowledge, the Center for Public Integrity, and even industry groups like the Competitive Telecommunications Association.

How Television Could Rise From the Wasteland

Robert Putnam’s perceptive book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Simon and Schuster, 2001), chronicles the loss of social identity and interpersonal relationship complexity that occurred in U.S. towns and communities from the nation’s 1950s zenith to today’s nadir. Putnam names a number of culprits for this, but principally blames television.

Network television steals our eyeballs out of complex, two-way, social interactions in human space. It focuses us instead on one-way electronic messages. In The Assault on Reason (Penguin, 2007), former U.S. Vice President Gore says that average American consumers have seen a steady loss of complexity in the political conversation in the last 50 years, and the quality of American media is directly to blame. Network television is, on average, a “vast wasteland,” and has been so for decades, as then-newly appointed FCC chairman Newton N. Minow said in his famous speech in 1961.

TV production quality now rivals the movie studios, and programming choice has slowly expanded over the years (as noted in The Economist’s May 2010 report on the future of television, Changing the Channel). But compared with video on the Web, which includes user-created channels like YouTube’s Disco project and peer-to-peer offerings, television is less competitive than it was. Cable television gave U.S. viewers first 50, then 90, then 150 channels of slightly more interesting wasteland.

I argue that access to tens of thousands of specialty channels, a variety of content-aggregation options, and collaborative filtering by peer and trusted expert rankings would better serve U.S. social needs. Such a system will enable all those who wish to do so to eliminate unpersonalized advertising. What we need is two-way communication: person-to-person and many-to-many, not one-to-many. What we need is an electronic re-creation of the interactivity of the 1950s communities that Putnam chronicles, but in digital space, with the modern world’s collective intelligence and diversity. Social networks are a start, but not nearly enough. Web 3.0, comprising TV-quality peer-to-peer video delivered on the Web, will be the next major step in this progression.

Film and television remain among the least competitive and democratic of all media. They have historically high development costs (your average Hollywood movie costs more than $106 million). We’ve seen small cracks in the film distribution monopoly in the last decade, with all the new documentaries produced by “filmanthropists”—folks who mortgage their house and self-finance low-budget films with $100,000 of capital or less. Many of these filmmakers can now make their money back, plus a small profit, just by using the personalized Netflix content distribution and rating system (“you told me you liked this film, so you may also like this new film”), which surfaces such niche films for users to consider. Most of these films would never get on cable TV or the retail floor in any Blockbuster or Hollywood Video store. More recently we also have Netflix’s Watch Instantly (streaming video), iTunes movies, and a few other Internet outlets for independently produced specialty content.

Imagine how much more important, entertaining, and educational video we will see once most of us have Internet televisions at home, managing our access to thousands of online video aggregation environments. Want to see a three- to five-minute public domain film summarizing a Wikipedia page? You’ll be able to pay 25 cents for it through the iTV of tomorrow, and eventually someone will make that film for you (and all of us), and make a profit. The media marketplace will be forever splintered. The old media corporations, and their big federated ad clients, will have given up trying to keep the lid on our choice. The new video universe will finally have arrived for everyone.

The Future of the iPad: How the Television Will Be Revolutionized

Today, 17 years after the Apple “Newton” MessagePad debuted in 1993, tablet PCs like the iPad are poised to live up to the hype that first surrounded them and realize their promise. More than 3 million iPad units sold in its first three months. More-open and diverse Android tablets from more than 20 manufacturers, running software from Apple’s rival Google, are also on the horizon. Uncomplicated and easy to use for brief tasks, tablets seduce us into even more online social interaction, eReading, eLearning, gaming, and other activities, and bring us another step closer to wearable computing.

The iPad’s blockbuster software application is also now evident. The tablet PC is an ideal platform to manage all of the video viewing we will be doing on the Internet televisions that are beginning to arrive in living rooms around the world. This “killer app” seems likely to sell tens of millions of tablets annually as media center computers and iTV roll out across the world in the 2010s. Consider the following facts:

• In 2009, 211 million TVs were sold worldwide. In 2010, 228 million are projected to sell, with 79% being digital-ready LCD TVs. There are now 2.3 billion TVs in the world, and 6.7 billion people.
• Fully 25% of U.S. TVs sold in January 2010 were connected by consumers to the Internet. About 10% of TVs sold came “Internet ready.” The rest, and all our older TVs, are being Internet-connected via set-top boxes, media centers, DVRs, game consoles, and DVD players.
• Today there are 20,000+ streamable Internet TV channels, waiting to be connected to Internet-enabled TVs. With the accelerating popularity of YouTube, Metacafe, Vimeo, Viddler, etc., we can expect, and hope for, more than 100,000 specialized channels by 2015.
• A few companies, like Boxee, have had easy-to-use, open-source Internet media center software since 2008, and are now developing set-top boxes. The best of these include social networking, peer viewing, and chat-while-viewing features and deliver a far more rewarding and personalized viewing experience than cable or satellite TV.
• All media center devices currently use “dumb” remotes with unusable small keyboards, and display their viewing options in large characters, with low resolution, on a distant TV screen. Only one remote can be used at a time, so individual viewers can’t search for or signal what they want to watch next, or multitask on the Internet with their remotes. None of these use the advanced voice command and search software we find on our phones. In short, the television is waiting to be revolutionized by next-generation media centers and tablet remotes.

With the right software, a tablet can rapidly organize the most relevant of 20,000 (or a million) potential channels for the viewer. It can deliver a highly personalized viewing and learning experience while we are in the same room with others who have their own tablets. It can allow social viewing options so rich that we haven’t even fully visualized them yet.

Imagine a tablet that displays what’s on your “top 50” favorite channels on the home screen, and with the next 50 channels or titles just a tap away. With key words, user rating, and community rating as filtering options, all of these video items would be fighting to get higher in your stack depending on your viewing habits, feedback, and interests. Imagine an extensive set of social viewing features (real-time chat, social network integration, video and audio conferencing, peer-to-peer video, etc.) allowing you to watch TV and videos with others, and see what your friends are watching right now. Imagine being able to use your tablet to check the Internet for more on any subject while watching the large screen, just as those with Wi-Fi enabled laptops do today.

In an Internet-enabled, transparent society, advanced content control could create many new communities of specialization. As Adam Smith said in The Wealth of Nations, specialization and hard work are the tried-and-true roads to understanding and mastery of our environment.

Youth today often multitask on the Web when they watch television, and audience share for network television has been falling for more than a decade as consumers’ video options (DVD, DVR, Netflix, the Web) have grown. Nevertheless, according to the American Time Use Survey, in 2008 the average U.S. household still spent roughly 2.9 hours for men and 2.6 hours for women watching television each day. Television viewing remains the single largest discretionary activity that U.S. residents engage in daily, accounting for fully half of daily leisure time.

It is an easy thesis, therefore, that improving television’s quality, diversity, and relevance is a uniquely important target for social progress. Opening up the idiot box and making it competitive is where we need to go next, if we truly care about American free enterprise, social diversity, and democracy. When a society’s openness and diversity grow, the country gets less stable at first, and then much more stable and productive than it was before openness began, as Ian Bremmer notes in The J-Curve (Scribner, 2006).

Paying for the iTV Play

To maximize revenue for the hundreds of thousands of new iTV content creators (individuals, organizations, communities) who are currently shut out of the American living room, there will need to be a mix of payment options, including direct micropayments, personalized commercials, and click-through ads.

Micropayments can be used to purchase video content from a marketplace (like iTunes), or, more commonly, to purchase a subscription from a specialty channel producer, like today’s magazines and newspapers, almost all of which may need iTV channels by the 2020s to survive. Programming on some channels will be monetized by more viewer-friendly versions of today’s commercial breaks, commercials that we can automatically play captioned or at a much lower volume than the regular program, giving us back our conversation space, and a system that allows us to “like,” “dislike,” and permanently block commercials of any type.

Another form of payment, perhaps occurring in a hideable window adjacent to the video, will be context-based per-click revenue and advertising (like Google’s AdSense), a revenue model that is already greatly broadening the availability of text-based content on the Web.

Prospects for iTV

Yochai Benkler’s FCC-commissioned Berkman Center 2009 report, “Next Generation Connectivity,” addresses America’s lagging wired and wireless connectivity and affordability. Other leading developed economies, such as Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and parts of Europe, have many times more broadband (data transfer ability and speed) than the United States has today. The report urges a public–private partnership to make affordable, always-on broadband (1,000 Mbps or more, via fiber optic cable) into a public right. Such “gigabit broadband” is what will allow iTV to emerge in the United States, and the incumbent carriers will provide it as slowly as they can.

Another critical need is net neutrality—that is, the principle that all providers use the information superhighway at the same rates, without discrimination by content type. Some of the above countries, like Japan, have already passed net neutrality laws, while the United States has yet to even consider them in the courts.

I believe that it is the U.S. government’s, not corporations’, role to provide leadership to close the “fiber gap” that currently exists between the United States and leading Asian and European countries, to ensure that the poor have affordable access, and to develop the incentives for bringing broadband (via Wi-Max, LTE, satellite, and other routes) to rural areas. If the U.S. government mandated eminent domain of fiber access routes, and allowed any authorized firms to have access to fiber trunk cabinets, competitive delivery of fiber-to-the-premises (home or office) could be quickly achieved today in all U.S. cities and, a few years later, everywhere.

Americans have had a similar learning experience with the national highways in the early twentieth century, which were once networks of private roads. Road development is ideal to start privately, but once the cost of construction has been recovered plus a reasonable return on investment, private ownership is very inefficient to continue, with all those turnpikes and the constant need to “turn” a profit. U.S. leaders figured this out and nationalized the highway system. Today, the build-operate-transfer model—starting with private construction, a limited operating lease, and then transfer to public ownership—is the fastest-growing and most productive way to create new roads in any country.

I believe the same situation holds for wired and wireless communications channels, our information superhighways. These digital “roads” are great to build out privately, but once the corporations have made a reasonable profit, it’s time to turn those data pipes into a publicly owned utility. Competitive private bidding would keep the public information superhighway maintained and free to all, and many new services and businesses would emerge, with far greater total market value than is possible in today’s limited-connectivity world.

The big telecommunications and cable companies could then be freed to develop even faster and better communications technology, or, failing that, to become content providers. The government could grant them all one last five-year monopoly license before they started this in any state, to give them time to prepare for the rigors of the marketplace. In that setting, Comcast’s recent purchase of NBC would be something we could champion (a move from carrier to content provider).

U.S. leaders may not act to fix the nation’s growing connectivity gap anytime soon, as pundits and lobbyists will do their best to portray this as “inefficient governmental intervention.” Yet, it is exactly such smart intervention that has allowed Asian countries like Japan and South Korea to leapfrog the United States in critical digital-infrastructure development and to develop profitable new businesses and exports around the high-bandwidth Internet, including several early versions of iTV.

Many Americans don’t understand just how anticompetitive the nation’s communications technology laws and regulatory agencies have become, and how much this diminishes the diversity and value of its digital economy. In an iTV world, we can imagine a lot of easily available quality media that would make this case. In the meantime, we do what we can.

About the Author

John M. Smart is a futurist, president of the Acceleration Studies Foundation, and associate professor and Program Champion of the Master of Science in Emerging Technologies at the University of Advancing Technology in Tempe, Arizona. E-mail johnsmart@accelerating.org.

Download the PDF of this article.

Tomorrow in Brief (November-December 2010)

Mosquitoes Beware!

Reducing future mosquito populations may be as simple as simulating the scent of an enemy.

When a pregnant mosquito looks for a safe place to lay her eggs, the scent of a predator will steer her away. If she doesn’t die first, she’ll be forced to lay her eggs in a more densely populated area, where the larvae will have a tougher time competing for survival.

A multidisciplinary team of researchers at the University of Haifa in Israel believe they have identified key compounds released by mosquitoes’ predators. Synthesizing these natural chemicals and releasing them in breeding areas could offer an inexpensive, nontoxic alternative to pesticides.

Source: University of Haifa, www.haifa.ac.il.

The Bus Stops Here: Make Way for AutoTram

A public-transportation vehicle that is as long as a streetcar, agile as a bus, and a whole lot cleaner and more efficient than either is the goal of the AutoTram’s developers.

The trick to making such an electric-powered vehicle work is speeding up the time it takes to recharge the batteries. Since public-transit vehicles are in constant motion (unlike cars parked for many hours at a time), engineers at the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany were challenged to create fast-changing docking stations that would be positioned at stops along the AutoTram’s routes. The batteries must be made large enough to store the energy, and the materials with which the batteries are made must be capable of withstanding these high-speed charges.

In addition, the system needs to be safe, durable, and efficient, thus requiring more challenges for the multidisciplinary research team to conquer before the AutoTram makes its way to tomorrow’s city streets.

Source: Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, www.fraunhofer.de.

Robots to Learn Emotions from Humans

Human emotions are hard enough for people to understand, so robots are especially challenged to interpret, respond to, or simulate the range of human feelings. Robots’ success so far has depended on how well they have been programmed.

In the future, robots may be able to learn human emotions by interacting with people; they’ll form attachments and convey meaning through body language, suggests researcher Lola Cañamero of the University of Hertfordshire, England.

In research funded by the European Commission, Cañamero and colleagues applied a model of children’s early attachment behavior to the programming of robots. The more interaction with (and feedback from) a human caregiver that the robot has, the stronger the bond becomes and the more emotional expression it learns. The goal is to give robots enough emotional intelligence that they could become the caregivers for children in hospitals.

Source: University of Hertfordshire, www.herts.ac.uk.

Smarter Metals for Cooling Systems

A new “thermally elastic” metal alloy has been developed that could improve the efficiency of refrigeration and air-conditioning systems, saving energy and lowering costs.

The smart metal, developed by researchers at the University of Maryland Energy Research Center, is a two-state alloy that alternatively absorbs and creates heat; used in cooling systems, it would take the place of fluid coolants used in compressors and would use far less energy.

“The approach is expected to increase cooling efficiency 175%, reduce U.S. carbon-dioxide emissions by 250 million metric tons per year, and replace liquid refrigerants that can cause environmental degradation in their own right,” according to Center director Eric Wachsman.

Source: University of Maryland, www.umd.edu.

Virtual Autopsies

Advances in medical imaging could reduce the need for invasive autopsies.

A project under way at the University of Leicester in England aims to develop cardiac angiography for use in virtual autopsies. The technology will enable pathologists to diagnose coronary heart disease from CT scans.

“The outcome of this research has the potential to affect every family in the future, and is a significant contribution to the developing practice of using CT scans instead of autopsies,” says project leader Guy Rutty.

Source: University of Leicester, www.le.ac.uk.

Future Scope (November-December 2010)

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

Downside of Demand for “Natural” Food

Food manufacturers have reduced the amount of preservatives they use, conceding to consumers’ demand for “natural” foods. But in so doing, they may have increased the risks of food poisoning, warns researcher Nina Wallin Carlquist of Lund University in Sweden.

One of the most common food preservatives is acetic acid, which prevents bacterial growth in sauces, dressings, pickles, and other processed foods. However, when the amount of acetic acid used is too small, it actually “stresses” the existing bacteria into increasing production of toxins.

Carlquist recommends focusing more effort on reducing bacterial contamination of food in the first place, which means better hygiene at all stages of food production and distribution.

“If we know more about what it is in the food that enables the bacteria to thrive, we can then adapt the composition of the food product and thereby improve food safety,” she says. “This is a new way to approach food safety.”

Source: Lund University, www.lu.se.

HEALTH CARE

Fewer Restraints in Nursing Homes

Restraints to protect nursing-home patients may be on the way out in the United States. The use of belts, vests, wrist ties, special chairs, bedside rails, and similar restraints has been cut in half in the past eight years, reports the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), an agency of the federal government.

The trend away from using protective restraints may reflect a growing recognition that they do more harm than good, as they reduce healthful physical activity and increase bedsores, chronic constipation and incontinence, and emotional and other problems, according to AHRQ.

Source: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, www.ahrq.gov.

CHILD DEVELOPMENT

Payoffs of Good Kindergartens

Doing well in kindergarten can give kids an edge in income as adults, according to new research funded by the (U.S.) National Science Foundation.

As children learn more in their earliest education experience—indicated by moving from average scores on the Stanford Achievement Test up to the 60th percentile or better—their earnings at age 27 are $1,000 more than their counterparts whose scores remain average. And those who benefited from smaller class sizes and more-experienced teachers earned $2,000 more.

Other advantages that a good kindergarten experience bestows include improved likelihood of attending college and of beginning earlier to save for retirement.

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

TRANSPORTATION

Public Transit Helps Fight Obesity

Urban planning that forces people to walk to a light-rail stop rather than driving their own cars could yield a slimmer, healthier populace, suggests new research from the University of Pennsylvania, Drexel University, and the RAND Corporation.

The study found that construction of a light-rail system increased physical activity and subsequent weight loss by people served by that system. The results suggest that improving neighborhood environments and encouraging the use of light rail could benefit the health of potentially millions of people.

“The built environment can constrain or facilitate physical activity,” says lead investigator John M. MacDonald of the University of Pennsylvania. “Understanding ways to encourage greater use of local environments for physical activity offers some hope for reducing the growth in the prevalence of obesity.”

Source: “The Effect of Light Rail Transit on Body Mass Index and Physical Activity” by John M. MacDonald et al., American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Volume 39, Issue 2 (August 2010), published by Elsevier, www.elsevier.com.

INDICATORS

WordBuzz: Mappiness

The London School of Economics wants to know how happy you are (if you own an iPhone, that is).

Download a free application, and the Mappiness program will beep you a couple of times a day to find out how happy you are, and where you are when you are feeling blissful (or not). The goal is to learn the effects of different environmental conditions (traffic noise, air pollution, pleasant scenery) on relative happiness.

In addition to achieving a little self-awareness on what makes you happy, the site promises participants “the warm glow of helping increase the sum of human knowledge.”

Source: London School of Economics and Political Science, Department of Geography and Environment, www.mappiness.org.uk.

Tweet Patrol

Deploying social networks to solve public safety issues.

A group of researchers in the United Kingdom are using the power of social networks and location broadcasting to make cities safer. The program, Voice Your View, allows pedestrians to record their opinions about their surroundings into a database via their mobile phones or strategically situated kiosks. The data is then shared with both city planners and the public via Web sites and at the public spaces themselves.

Voice Your View bears a slight resemblance to the popular location-based marketing service Foursquare, which rewards users with points and coupons for “checking in” with their phones at various venues and commercial establishments around the city. But the Voice Your View program solicits real-time data from residents and visitors about areas that need improvement.

“A key focus area of the project is people’s perceptions about crime,” says chief investigator Jon Whittle of Lancaster University. He reports that Voice Your View has analysis and artificial intelligence components not available in other commercial services like Twitter and Foursquare. The program surpasses the capabilities of many other social networks. It analyzes the body of data collected at any given point and organizes comments by theme, sentiment, and how easily the problem being reported can be solved. Voice Your View actually connects users to one another and to planners.

“We match up users based on what they are talking about, and we are experimenting with matching users with opposing views so as to break down barriers and start a conversation,” says Whittle.

The research team has conducted public trials in Lancaster, England, with 600 users, and a semi-public trial in the town of Derry. They also have an upcoming trial in Coventry.

Location-based Internet services like this will change city life in the next few decades in a number of ways, according to researchers exploring geographic information system (GIS) solutions. Key barriers remain, such as building out fiber-optic infrastructure to allow for greater system capability, getting citizens who are vulnerable but not technically inclined—like the elderly—to use the systems, and getting policy makers to give importance to the data.

In the near future, systems like Voice Your View could play a central role in larger government management, says Whittle.

“Communities are going to be asked to do more and run their own services,” he says. “Voice Your View and other systems could significantly help facilitate this process. I like what Clay Shirky says when he talks about social networking systems now being so much a part of everyday life that they are taken for granted. It is because they have reached this level of maturity that we are seeing an increasing number of … community initiatives.” — Patrick Tucker

Sources: Voice Your View, www.voiceyourview.com. E-mail interview with Jon Whittle.

In Forecasting, Mini Is Big

A Book Review by David Pearce Snyder

Technology forecaster John Vanston explains why trends that are less than “mega” are very much worth watching.

Minitrends: How Innovators & Entrepreneurs Discover & Profit from Business & Technology Trends by John Vanston, with Carrie Vanston. Technology Futures Inc. 2010. 189 pages. Paperback. $19.95.

Minitrends would have merited an enthusiastic review solely for having introduced a useful new term-of-art for the futurist’s toolbox. But the book offers much more than that. In Minitrends, Technology Futures Inc. chairman John Vanston (writing with TFI’s media and marketing director, Carrie Vanston) has distilled insights and techniques developed over a highly successful 40-year career in technology forecasting into a 189-page do-it-yourself guide to the early identification of those emerging developments that eventually become the “next big things.”

Vanston explicitly offers this guidance for three different levels of users: (1) individuals and group practices, (2) small and medium-sized enterprises, and (3) large firms. This “tracking” of content continues throughout the book, and is, in my experience, a unique (and highly desirable) feature in a book on futures methodology.

The author defines “minitrend” as any trend—technical, social, economic, demographic, legal, etc.—that is just beginning to emerge and that, although not yet acknowledged by the media or the marketplace, has the potential to become nationally significant within two to five years. Eliciting such potentially valuable foresight out of today’s information maelstrom requires considerable self-discipline and commitment, but is an intellectual pursuit well worth the effort.

The book is roughly divided into thirds. The first third describes how minitrends fit into the perceptual frameworks by which futurists view the world and presents a detailed guide to public sources where evidence of minitrends may be gleaned, gauged, and validated.

Vanston’s next three chapters spell out how different types of practitioners can make use of minitrends. Examples of current market-changing developments are offered for each scale of enterprise. Finally, the last four chapters deal with practical steps to take marketplace advantage of minitrends.

While this book is specifically about a futures research methodology, it is also an unabashed business book. The authors’ expressed purpose in writing Minitrends was to enable entrepreneurs at every level of the workplace to take advantage of the foresight that they, themselves, can gather from the “infosphere.”

Throughout the book, Vanston enlivens his narrative with dozens of vignettes from his decades of practice as a tech forecaster. A valuable side benefit of reading Minitrends is discovering the diversity of clientele and assignments that characterizes contemporary applied futuring.

The author reminds us (several times) that the “Minitrend Adventure” is not just a step-wise process; it’s a mind-set that must be maintained at all times, especially now that we are passing through a period of accelerating technical, economic, and demographic change. One minitrend can be trumped by another—or redoubled! The commercial marketplace is complex, volatile, and difficult to anticipate. For this reason, much of the final four chapters of the book deal with selecting specific minitrends for marketplace action, developing an “exploitation scheme,” and putting the scheme into action.

While corporate readers will no doubt be interested in the author’s lucid depiction of the process by which futurists help institutions come to terms with the need for innovation and change, it is the first four chapters that offer the most exciting potential for the future. In those chapters, Minitrends portrays the learnable mind-set of futures research, not on the basis of visionary principles or rigid rules, but in attitudes, in habits of thinking about the world, and in the collective events of daily life that make up the forecastable continuities of human enterprise.

The patterns of thought that Vanston describes, the modalities by which emerging trends manifest themselves, and where to find corroborative information are discussed in such straightforward, jargon-free language that anyone with a college degree could use the first four chapters of Minitrends as a primer for teaching himself or herself to become a competent trend spotter: i.e., applied futurist.

Because the early identification of emergent long-term trends poses such enormous marketplace value, it seems not improbable that traffic in minitrends will become a significant online phenomenon during the next two to five years. I am also prepared to believe that much of that traffic will be generated by freelance futurists who learned their trade by reading this book.

About the Reviewer

David Pearce Snyder is principal of The Snyder Family Enterprise, 8628 Garfield Street, Bethesda, Maryland 20817. Web site www.the-futurist.com. He is also THE FUTURIST magazine’s contributing editor for lifestyles.

Reviewer’s disclosure: I have known John Vanston since 1973, and during the first 15 years of our respective careers, we collaborated on projects for a number of clients. He asked me to assess a pre-publication copy of Minitrends and to provide an “endorsement” to put on the flyleaf of the book. While critiquing the work of a friend and colleague is fraught with awkward possibilities, my review rests entirely on the merits of the book. —DPS

Foresight Across National Borders

A Book Review by Rick Docksai

Experts seek global answers for global problems.

2010 State of the Future by Jerome C. Glenn, Theodore J. Gordon, and Elizabeth Florescu. The Millennium Project. 2010. 88 pages, paperback, with 7,000 pages on CD‑ROM. $49.95.

Human society could grow vastly healthier, more peaceful, and more prosperous later this century, or it could be devastated by ecological damage and domestic strife, according to the 2010 State of the Future, by Jerome Glenn, Theodore Gordon, and Elizabeth Florescu, scholars of the futures-studies think tank Millennium Project. The report calls for decision makers to become more collaborative and responsive to change.

“The world has the resources to address its challenges. What is not clear is whether the world will make good decisions on the scale necessary to really address the global challenges,” says the report.

Like the other annual State of the Future reports that preceded it, this year’s edition combines input from experts across the globe to measure the world’s progress on benchmarks of human health, political freedom, safety, conflict resolution, education, and environmental welfare.

On the plus side, the 2010 report notes clear signs of recovery in most economies from the 2008 recession. In addition, the explosive growth of the Internet and mobile-phone-based Web technology is a boon for intercontinental communication and cultural exchange.

Many other quality-of-life factors are trending positive: Poverty rates are falling in most parts of the world; wars are fewer in number; and literacy rates, women’s representation in government legislatures, and life expectancies are all on the rise.

The report cites other trends that are cause for alarm, however. For example, climate change is occurring more rapidly and more dramatically than anticipated. Also, as the information economy grows, so do the volumes of electronic waste discarded into the environment. Moreover, communities on every continent suffer unacceptably high rates of organized crime activity, violent crime, and violence against women.

Fostering the positive trends while minimizing or reversing the harmful ones will require “trans-institutional decision-making” processes that bring together as much expert opinion as possible in minimal time, according to the report. Global, national, and local systems must work together to anticipate disruption and navigate challenges.

“There are many answers to many problems, but we are flooded with so much extraneous information every day that it is difficult to identify and concentrate on what is truly relevant,” says the report.

Technology may be a valuable bridge. The report describes South Korea’s Climate Change Situation Room, which receives insights and research data from climatologists worldwide into a central information system. Situation Room staff researchers analyze the entered data, tag it, annotate it, and link it. The end result is a synthesis of expert advice on best responses to the changing climate.

The Early Warning System with SOFI Capability, in use by the prime minister of Kuwait, is another promising system. It uses the Millennium Project’s own Real-Time Delphi software to continuously survey experts inside Kuwait and across the globe on the variables that they deem most critical to ensuring a better future for Kuwait.

The Real-Time Delphi program even combines all the factors to calculate an overall score for Kuwait’s future prospects. This score allows the prime minister to gauge how making changes to one variable might affect other variables and sway the overall score.

“These are systems that facilitate the interaction and feedback among human judgments, information, and software so that each can change in real time,” says the report in reference to the South Korean and Kuwaiti systems.

The report further details the Millennium Project’s own compilations of global research in a survey of the futures-research activities of the Millennium Project’s nodes. It also has several new studies not seen in the 2009 edition. These include a series of developments likely to significantly impact Latin America before 2030. Also, the report contains an international review of the concept of creating a Partnership for Sustainable Development.

The 2010 State of the Future presents descriptions of both formidable challenges and exciting new technology-enhanced foresight systems that could help world leaders meet them. The report makes a compelling case for international cooperation and then displays fascinating, successful test cases in how such cooperation can work. World leaders, policy makers, and private citizens of all walks of life would find the report both impressive and enlightening.

Books in Brief (November-December 2010)

A Field Guide to Outer Space

The Farthest Shore: A 21st Century Guide to Space edited by Joseph N. Pelton and Angelia P. Bukley. Apogee Books. 2010. 416 pages. Paperback. $27.95.

The Farthest Shore optimistically considers the opportunities and advantages that outer space may hold for us in the future.

Taking their cue from the International Space University’s “3-I” approach (interdisciplinary, intercultural, and international), the editors have compiled essays by a number of experts in different fields from around the world, covering everything from space tourism to astrobiology to existing and emerging satellite technologies, and much in between. The volume also includes an overview of representations of space travel in art, literature, and cinema and an examination of the ways that outer space can potentially help fight climate change.

Written with a general audience in mind, The Farthest Shore is straightforward, informative, in-depth, and accessible.

How Open Collaboration Is Creating a “World Brain”

Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia by Joseph Michael Reagle Jr. The MIT Press. 2010. 256 pages. $27.95.

In Good Faith Collaboration, media scholar Joseph Reagle takes an ethnographic approach to understanding the collaborative “open content” community behind Wikipedia.

Wikipedia’s pseudonymous and anonymous contributions are fundamentally assumed to be made in good faith, and the site is governed largely via pro-social norms, consensus building, and—most significantly—three core content policies: neutral point of view, no original research, and verifiability. The author examines these elements in depth while looking at the ways that leadership functions in this community and how anything other than consensus decision making could potentially compromise Wikipedia’s openness.

Reagle also considers the online encyclopedia’s origins (which date back to H. G. Wells’s concept of a “world brain” and, more recently, to the free and open-source software movements) and its future potential in this compelling look at Wikipedia and wiki culture.

Why the Recession Is a Great Opportunity

The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity by Richard Florida. HarperCollins. 2010. 225 pages. Paperback. $26.99.

The economic recession is really an economic “reset,” argues economist Richard Florida. We are seeing the demise of obsolete means of production and consumption and their replacement with new alternatives.

Florida notes that several economic crashes took place in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and each one was followed by a period of sweeping innovation. In the same vein, the current global crisis could be resolved as individuals and societies transition away from outmoded and obsolete methods of commerce and consumption.

Florida analyzes the trends under way and projects a new way of life that is emerging from them. He expects the industrial economy to transition to an economy driven by ideas, creativity, and knowledge, and the financial sector to lose prominence as more investment goes toward education, health care, technology, and human capital.

The Great Reset retraces history while also projecting a hopeful course for the world’s future. Economists, historians, and futurists may all find it interesting reading.

Local TV in a Globalized World

New Flows in Global TV by Albert Moran. The University of Chicago Press. 2009. 192 pages. Paperback. $40.

This critical examination of the global television industry focuses on the ways that television programs are distributed internationally—and the ways that business and culture intersect in the international marketplace of TV programs.

Viewers’ tastes and preferences tend to be specific to their localities. Traditionally, syndicated “canned” programs have been translated and re-dubbed for broadcast in other languages and cultures, but an alternative approach—program formats—allows for more successful linguistic and cultural integration into other markets. Program formats are licensed as a set of instructions and services that enable a customized version of the program to be produced elsewhere. An example is Britain’s Pop Idol franchise, which has been replicated around the world.

Author Albert Moran, a senior lecturer in media at Australia’s Griffith University, examines how and why everything from children’s programs such as Romper Room to reality and game shows are being reformatted for diverse global audiences.

Future View: Cultural Stickiness in Technological Forecasting

By Samuel Gerald Collins

Why forecasters relying on linear projections sometimes get “stuck.”

Technology-oriented futurists have been fairly successful in their predictions of technological change and development; cultural trend watchers have likewise succeeded in anticipating many social changes. But the impacts of technology on culture—and of culture on technology—have been less predictable. One reason is the relative “stickiness” of cultures. The adage that “the more things change, the more they stay the same” bears remembering.

Case in point: It’s 1950, and Levitt and Sons are adding new models to their New York suburb. What makes these new ranchers different from the first homes in Levittown is the television: an Admiral set built directly in the wall of the living room. But why built in? Didn’t the designers realize that someone would make improvements to the television? What if the new sets were larger?

The 1950 design implied several other predictions. First, the built-in set assumes that television would be a group activity. The whole family would automatically want their television in the living room, and the TV would be heir to the parlor-room entertainments of the Victorian era. Second, the 1950 design assumes that the television would work to bring everyone together in a nucleated way—Mom in the kitchen, Dad on the easy chair, children sitting beneath him on the carpet.

Of course, in this age of individuated media consumption, the television in the living room seems like a curious artifact of the past. But could Levitt and Sons have foreseen the family all retiring to their bedrooms to watch movies by themselves—or even taking their entertainment out of the house with them on their own mobile devices? Couldn’t they have foreseen patterns of television viewing based on more solitary pursuits, such as reading and letter writing?

Every new technology brings with it cultural surprises, including unexpected uses that were never predicted. But that’s not a bad thing. On the contrary, it’s the surprises that provide the creative impulse for new ideas, and one area worth examining is exactly that shadowy zone where cultural ideas and practices come together to form new technocultures.

But where would we look for some emerging technoculture?

Writing in the last half of the nineteenth century, anthropologist E. B. Tylor felt he had a duty to identify what he considered to be superannuated elements of culture and mark them for extinction. Examples of his “theory of survivals” included both the relatively innocuous (e.g., sewn cuffs as a survival of times when shirt sleeves were actually folded back), and the profound (Tylor held particular contempt for the occult, which he believed had no place in science). In his mind, cultural survivals introduced two areas of intolerable confusion into the society of the nineteenth century. First, cultural traits that should be “extinct” still existed. And second, cultural survivals had “shifted,” moved from their original contexts into new ones.

It’s been 150 years, but we still think a lot like E. B. Tylor. The future is presumed to result from a linear course of development: e.g., the Web gives way to Web 2.0 (and so on). That the reality is a good deal messier may be a source of consternation to latter-day Tylors. But what if we looked at cultural survivals not as a problem to be cleaned up, but as a potential for change?

From this perspective, we could say that culture is inherently “sticky,” and by that I mean both its meaning in economics (when, for instance, some consumer prices refuse to follow other indices) and in Web design, where “sticky” pages keep people coming back and staying longer. Culture can be “sticky” in all those ways—as something that may inexplicably adhere, and also as something that we connect back to even as we engage with new cultural experiences.

The problem for Levitt and Sons was that the television they envisioned projected a linear progression of technologies of the parlor and public—from cinemas to radios to the built-in TV. Their progression from public to private stopped at the family unit, and did not extend to the individual. The source of stickiness that remains is the cultural desire for a connection to the outside world—instant news and entertainment—that the television offered.

What kinds of “built-in televisions” are we installing today? That is, what assumptions are we making about the way that we will live with the things we invent? If we conflate the development of these technologies with current lifestyles, we are likely to be surprised when novel practices emerge, bubbling out of the past to confound our best predictions.

The futurist’s role in the study of culture should be to look for these potential areas of alternative “stickiness”—the ways in which our cultural life mixes technologies, beliefs, and practices together, in a process that produces not just “survivals” ripe for the chopping block, but resources for richer cultural experiences.

Thinking about our technocultural futures may not lead to accurate predictions, but the exercise itself may bring to light surprising connections from the past, present, and future in such a way that invigorates our imagining of what might be by unsettling some of our linear assumptions of what has to be.

About the Author

Samuel Gerald Collins is a cultural anthropologist at Towson University, who has researched, published, and taught on cultural futures for the last 16 years. His most recent book is Library of Walls: Contradictions of Information Society at the Library of Congress (2009). E-mail scollins@towson.edu.

Download the PDF of this article.

Books in Brief: September-October 2010

Edited by Rick Docksai

Ending the MADness?
Apocalypse Never: Forging the Path to a Nuclear Weapon-Free World by Tad Daley. Rutgers. 2010. 296 pages. $24.95.

Ridding the world of nuclear weapons is both feasible and necessary for survival, argues science journalist Tad Daley. As long as nations keep them, it is only a matter of time before they fire them at each other, he warns.

Daley examines the alternative futures that can unfold from the status quo of globally distributed nuclear arsenals. He concludes that, despite nations’ belief that they need nuclear weapons to ensure their own security, the only true security would be to not have them at all.

Daley outlines the steps that governments and social movements could take to abolish nuclear weapons by 2020 and rebuts some of the most common arguments against disarmament, such as the theory that a noncompliant nation would hold onto its nuclear stockpile and proceed to rule the world.

Skeptics may consider the goal of no nuclear weapons to be utopian, but Daley’s Apocalypse Never makes a bold and convincing case for policy makers to both believe in a nuclear-free world and to strive wholeheartedly toward it.

Grassroots World-Changing

Change the World, Change Your Life: Discover Your Life Purpose Through Service by Angela Perkey. Conari Press. 2010. 218 pages. Paperback. $15.95.

Despite the best efforts by government and nonprofit groups, many of the world’s problems seem to be getting worse. That’s why it’s up to individuals to contribute to community betterment, according to Angela Perkey, founder of the nonprofit group Students Serve. She shows examples of what regular citizens can do, such as participating in service organizations, building Web sites, or even starting service organizations of their own.

The best part, says Perkey, is that anyone can emulate these initiatives. It doesn’t matter what your education level, annual income, or background might be. If you commit your talents to an issue or cause that inspires you, you can make a difference in the world and be a much happier, more fulfilled person in the process.
Change the World, Change Your Life is a guide that philanthropists and activists across the globe may find inspirational.

Averting Planetary Meltdown

The Flooded Earth: Our Future in a World Without Ice Caps by Peter Ward. Basic. 2010. 252 pages. Paperback. $25.95.

When global temperatures 125,000 years ago were just 4°F higher than they are now, Florida was submerged, according to biologist Peter Ward. A similar increase — or even more by 2100 — could happen with present-day carbon-dioxide levels, he warns. Should this warming take place, the ice sheets of Greenland, the Arctic, and Antarctica would mostly melt. The property losses, crop damage, famines, and displacements worldwide would be catastrophic.

Ward combines research on the earth’s ancient fossil record and present-day climate patterns to paint a vivid and alarming picture of how climate change would disrupt life over the long term.

Identifying Our Cultural Tribes
The Lifestyle Puzzle: Who We Are in the 21st Century by Henrik Vejlgaard. 2010. 235 pages. Prometheus. Paperback. $19.

Americans are more diverse and individualistic than ever before, observes social scientist Henrik Vejlgaard in The Lifestyle Puzzle. He cites the increasing fluidity of U.S. society: Few Americans today grow up in “traditional” two-parent households; fewer still keep the same jobs or remain in the same towns; and religious and political affiliations have grown highly interchangeable. Even age means less than it once did — senior citizens frequently adopt the clothing styles and hobbies of younger adults.

Yet certain patterns are discernible, he adds. Nonverbal symbols that carry universal meanings are ubiquitous: sports jerseys, corporate logos, national flags, etc. And the landscape teems with modern-day tribes whose members share clothing styles, recreational pursuits, and language: cowboys, hip-hoppers, and Goths, to name a few.

Tribes and cultural symbols are present in societies throughout the world. Many observers fear that globalization homogenizes cultures, but Vejlgaard concludes that the diversity of America’s cultural tribes suggests that people still find ways to be culturally unique and individually expressive.

The Lifestyle Puzzle is an analysis of contemporary culture and the forces likely to drive its evolution. Anthropologists and cultural critics will find it an especially valuable resource.

Better Brains, Better World?
The Neuro Revolution: How Brain Science Is Changing Our World by Zack Lynch, with Byron Laursen. St. Martin’s Press. 2009. 245 pages. $25.99.

Although neurotechnology researchers’ primary goal is development of better-targeted medical treatments, neurotechnology applications are likely to transform many areas of human life during this century, including legal systems, health care, academia, culture, politics, and business, predicts Jack Lynch, founder of the Neurotechnology Industry Organization.

He and co-author Byron Laursen describe the explosive growth and activity that this field of research is undergoing, noting that universities invest millions of dollars in it. Private venture capital in neurotechnology start-ups has tripled in the last 10 years.

Besides describing major trends under way in neuroscience, the authors note the potential for great benefits as well as for misuses.

The Neuro Revolution is an overview of a major scientific field and its relevance to everyday life now and in the future. General audiences of all kinds will find it informative and approachable.

Alternatives to Consumption
Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet by Tim Jackson. Earthscan. 2009. 264 pages. $22.50.

Many nations experienced momentous economic growth across the globe over the last few decades, yet people’s reported levels of happiness stayed the same, according to environmental economist Tim Jackson. He adds that this is not surprising: Just because a nation’s economy is growing does not mean that its people are better off. In fact, sometimes economic growth can be detrimental to national well-being.
Jackson points out the roles that uncontrolled speculation and scarcities in land and resources played in hastening the 2008 economic crash and hampering economic recovery. Nonstop economic growth is the aim of most modern economies, but it is ecologically and socially impossible.

The great challenge of our time will be learning how to flourish within our ecological and social limits, Jackson concludes. This will require a new kind of “ecological macronomics” that will require structural reforms and societal values shifts to come into being.

Prosperity Without Growth is a futurist’s approach to global economics, its potential trajectories, and the desirable future to which the author believes societies can and should aspire. It is well-suited for economists and for general reading audiences.

Innovation to Avert Catastrophe
The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley. HarperCollins. 2010. 422 pages. Paperback. $26.99.

Throughout the last two centuries, experts have repeatedly warned that civilization was headed for an imminent collapse and that society would shortly descend into anarchy, epidemics, famines, or other such catastrophes — yet the future kept turning out better than they had expected, says conservationist Matt Ridley.
The disasters never materialized, and instead living standards everywhere continuously improved. People in the twenty-first century are living longer, eating healthier, earning more, and enjoying vastly more and better amenities than they have at any time in human history.

“Apoca-holic” experts, Ridley argues, accurately described existing problems but failed to consider that future technological innovations might mitigate them. No one in the early 1800s foresaw the rise of fast transit by steam-engine trains, for example, and even the most savvy computer-industry experts in the 1960s had no idea that microchips would shrink computers to sizes that would fit inside users’ home offices.

Ridley advises having some hope in the capacity of future generations to solve problems that may seem insurmountable today. The key, he says, is making sure that our institutions and laws promote innovation rather than stifle it.

Combating Inequality
The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. Bloomsbury. 2010. 331 pages. $28.

Societies won’t make major cuts in their carbon emissions until they first reduce their socioeconomic inequalities, argue health professors Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. Wide gaps between the more-affluent and less-affluent members of a society are powerful drivers of consumerism — people buy and consume far more than they need in order to appear to hold higher social statuses.

Inequality has risen in most developed countries over the last few decades, according to Pickett and Wilkinson; as inequalities rise, so do unhealthy consumer buying habits and a wide range of associated ills: debt, minimal personal savings, obesity, crime, scarce charitable giving, and mood disorders such as anxiety and depression.

The authors favor a “steady-state economy” that would ration the extraction of the earth’s resources and keep their use well below present-day levels. Technology may ameliorate the situation by reducing the environmental and production costs of most goods, thus making them more affordable to more consumers. But true social equality will take a fundamental transformation of societal values.

The Spirit Level is a philosophical and political evaluation of national economies and how they might have to adapt to be viable in the future.

Cultural Transformation for Sustainability
State of the World 2010: Transforming Cultures by the Worldwatch Institute. W.W. Norton. 2010. 244 pages. $19.95.

A worldwide binge of material consumerism has been draining the planet’s resources for the last few decades, but a new mass movement toward sustainability seems to be under way at last, according to the Worldwatch Institute’s State of the World 2010.
The Institute report identifies such trends as religious leaders increasingly urging their congregations to embrace environmental conservation. Carbon fasts and “green” weddings are becoming common rites. Organic farmers, anti-consumerist social movements, and eco-villages promote the principle of living contentedly with less. Governments are passing legislation meant to encourage their citizens to live more sustainably. And businesses are increasingly assuming roles of social responsibility.

The report praises these initiatives as societal pioneering that could lead the way to a healthier and more equitable future — but only if their values become truly accepted by society at large. State of the World 2010 is a detailed road map for sustainable societal organization that readers of all professions may find insightful.

Designing Buildings for Climate Change

Scientists at the University of Exeter have created an online database called Prometheus to show how increasing temperatures will affect future weather patterns in the United Kingdom. The creators hope that their projections will help architects design structures that are better suited to the hotter climate of the 2050s and 2080s.

“Buildings are modeled using historic weather. As the climate warms, this means estimates of overheating and energy use will be wrong. As peak temperatures are predicted to change by much more than means, this error will be substantial,” Exeter physicist David Coley told THE FUTURIST in an e-mail. “We use the output of the probabilistic models to create a series of example weather files (which can be found on our Web site). These cover all common weather variables and are on a one hour time step [change]. The reason we use probabilistic data is that the climate science is not perfect. Hence the predictions cover a range.”

The United Kingdom’s Met Office Hadley Centre (cited by the researchers) reports that the 40°C (104°F) temperatures at the height of the 2003 European heat wave will be common for Europe during the summer by the year 2040. The 2003 European heat wave saw tens of thousands of deaths from heat stroke. Heat mortalities were particularly high among vulnerable communities.

“Think about the 14,000 elderly people who died in Paris in 2003. They died because of a failure of buildings to moderate the external climate. The temperatures in the heat wave are soon to become common. Is it acceptable that we are designing buildings around the world that will kill people?” asked Coley.

Among the Prometheus project’s findings is that the mean temperature in London in 2080 would be higher than that of Washington, D.C., today.

“People want to compare a typical year in 2010 with a typical year in 2050, say, to see the difference. This is the first time this has been done,” the group wrote in a press statement.

The various files are available for free on the Prometheus site and are compatible with common building-simulation software. Used correctly, they show how any given design will respond to weather variables within a wide range of scenarios. Not all building projects will be affected by climate change the same way, Coley noted. “Some companies need to be precautionary, some conservative. For example, if you were thinking of expanding your ice cream factory, you might take the 10th percentile; if [you were] designing a flood defense you might take the 90th.”

Many construction strategies actually amplify the effects of climate change. A 2°C rise in mean summertime temperature outside a house could translate to a 3°C rise in mean summertime temperature inside the house, depending on the method of construction.

The findings contradicted accepted thinking on the subject, which assumed that any relationship between external structural temperature and internal structural temperature would be difficult to obtain given the complexity of the movement of heat indoors. In one of the papers available on the site, the researchers call this link between internal and external temperature “climate change amplification co-efficiencies,” a somewhat esoteric term that may show up more frequently in tomorrow’s construction proposals. The ability to quantify these co-efficiencies could have a major influence on building design in the future.

Coley reports that the Prometheus project is already helping architects reconsider how to build in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. — Patrick Tucker

Source: David Coley (e-mail interview), University of Exeter Prometheus Program. Web site http://centres.exeter.ac.uk/cee/prometheus/.

Driving Toward a New Destination

By Patrick Tucker
Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink. Riverhead. 2009. 242 pages. $26.95

Most of us believe that the best way to motivate ourselves and others is with external rewards. Without a clear incentive, like more money, complemented by a disincentive, like poverty, people wouldn’t contribute to society. They might hunt and gather, but they wouldn’t build skyscrapers, invent new computer languages, or teach high-school algebra.

That carrot-and-stick approach worked well in the twentieth century, but as Wired magazine contributing editor Dan Pink shows in his new book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, it’s the wrong way to inspire people to tackle the challenges of today. A growing body of scientific evidence — starting with the work of physiologists Harry Harlow in the 1940s and Edward Deci in the late 1960s — shows us that people are motivated by the “intrinsic value” of a good job well done far more than many managers assume. “If the science is to be believed, a new approach to encouraging people is in order,” says Pink.

He outlines three essential elements to that approach.

• Autonomy. In the words of Harlow and Deci, “autonomous motivation means acting with a full sense of validation and choice.” The autonomous performance environment, whether an office or a classroom, is one where results matter above adherence to arbitrary control rules like dress code and punctuality. Researchers at Cornell University studied 320 small businesses to see whether top-down micromanagement motivated workers better than did freedom or autonomy. Pink reports that the control-oriented firms grew at one-fourth the rate of the firms that allowed more worker freedom. The control firms also experienced three times the job turnover among employees.

• Mastery. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has shown that people tend to perform best on those jobs where perfection was just beyond the person’s present capabilities. “That perfect balance between person and a goal that sits just barely out of reach produced a degree of focus and satisfaction that surpassed other, more quotidian experiences,” says Pink.

• Purpose. Purpose is the personally affirming, possibly spiritual, connection between the individual and the task. Pink says that, without purpose, even autonomous employees striving for mastery will perform below their potential. Field research at the Mayo Clinic found that doctors who spent one day a week on community service projects, or talking with patients, or involved in other activities to which the doctors felt a strong personal connection brought more energy to the rest of their work. These physicians had half the resignation rate of those who did not have this connection.

This new way of organizing what we do, which Pink calls Motivation 3.0, doesn’t destroy the value of extrinsic rewards. People who participate in open-source software development still want to turn a profit in their own endeavors. Wikipedia’s many thousands of volunteer contributors still eat out at restaurants, buy gas, and lust after the same commercial goods as anyone else does. But, says Pink, we now have real evidence to show what many of us always suspected: Success in any endeavor comes from a personal connection to the task at hand.

“We are designed to be active and engaged,” he concludes. “We know that the richest experiences in our lives aren’t the moments when we’re clamoring for validation from others, but when we’re listening to our own voice — doing something that matters, doing it well, and doing it in the service of a cause larger than ourselves.”

FutureScope

HEALTH

Mental-Health Benefits of Parks

Mother Nature may be an efficient therapist: Five minutes of exercise in a park, on a trail, or even in a backyard garden has measurable benefits to mental health, especially for young people and individuals with mental illnesses, according to a study in the American Chemical Society’s journal Environmental Science & Technology.
The benefits both of physical activity and of communing with nature are well known, but the new research defines the amount of “green exercise” that may boost short-term mental health and long-term physical health.

The largest positive effects for mood and self-esteem came from a five-minute “dose,” report authors Jules Pretty and Jo Barton, and even urban parks can provide the boost.
Source: American Chemical Society, www.acs.org.

SOCIOECONOMICS

The Well-Being Gap in America

The disparities in well-being and socioeconomic development across the United States have become so wide that it would take some groups a century to catch up.

Asian Americans and whites score highest on the latest update of the Human Development Index created by the American Human Development Project. The Index measures life expectancy, income, educational attainment, and other factors to provide a more complete picture of well-being than is shown by GDP.

The latest Index shows that Asian Americans living in New Jersey are 50 years ahead of the national average in terms of development, and Native Americans living in South Dakota are 50 years behind.

“If current trends continue, it will take Native Americans in South Dakota an entire century to catch up with where New Jersey Asian Americans are now in terms of life expectancy, educational enrollment and attainment, and median earnings,” according to the report.

Source: “A Century Apart,” American Human Development Project, www.measureofamerica.org/acenturyapart.

GENDER

Rise of Rwandan Women

If there can be any “good” news from the horrors of genocide in Rwanda, it may be that it allowed women to rise to positions of leadership. Rwanda now has the most gender-equal government in the world, with women making up 56% of parliament.
This elevation of women’s political status may not be the result of improved education or other advances, as typically occurs in developed countries such as Sweden. Simply put, the 1994 genocide created a shortage of men and thus an opening for women in politics, according to researcher Christopher Kayumba, a doctoral candidate at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.

Though Rwanda’s elite have attempted to defuse conflicts between the Hutus and Tutsis, focusing on the “Rwandan-ness” of all regardless of ethnicity and gender, a sustainable democracy is still a challenge, Kayumba warns.

Source: University of Gothenburg, www.gu.se. The abstract for Christopher Kayumba’s thesis may be viewed at http://hdl.handle.net/2077/22216.

FORECASTING

WORDBUZZ: Econophysics

If economists can’t predict economic crises and prevent their ensuing disruptions, maybe physicists can. In 2005, Didier Sornette—a physicist, earthquake scientist, and financial expert at the Swiss Technical Institute in Zurich—accurately predicted the bursting of the U.S. real estate bubble three years later.

The emerging field of econophysics relies on the study of complex systems, which looks at feedback loops and cascading effects. Forecasts do not rely on averages, as mainstream economists do, and take into account irrational decision making, herding behavior, and other destabilizing influences.

Econophysicists argue that markets are not stable, efficient, or self-regulating, so models that succeed in predicting upheavals will be those that understand the rich dynamics of market interactions.

The multidisciplinary approach to economic forecasting has spawned a European research initiative called FuturIcT, and is also getting support from billionaire George Soros, who has established the Institute of New Economic Thinking.
Sources: ETH Zurich, www.ethz.ch. FuturIcT, www.futurict.eu.

Learning from Informal Cities, Building for Communities

By Pavlina Ilieva and Kuo Pao Lian

What if there were a better way of living? A way that was more environmentally sound, more economical, more conducive to the building of community, and didn’t require huge monetary investments? What if this new method of existence was already visible, and people were already participating in it, in places we had never thought to look?

Today, in the world’s most underdeveloped countries, locations where the impact of formal rule or government and capital is scarce, people are creating this other way of life. You might know these places by their other names: slums, favelas, and ghettos. We believe that these settlements offer lessons on natural development patterns, on more efficient resource and commodity use, and on sustainability. There’s this book we have, Informal City: Caracas Case,* which depicts quite vividly the “informal city” phenomenon.

Environmental futurist Stewart Brand and San Diego architect Teddy Cruz have spent years trying to learn and communicate the lessons of these places. Here’s the truth about so-called slums that you probably never considered: They’re high-density and walkable, two goals most urban designers consider of utmost importance when planning multibillion-dollar neighborhoods for hip, wealthy Americans. Commerce and housing in these informal cities mingle freely to the betterment of both residents and shopkeepers. In the West, we hear a lot about the need to recycle. Slum residents have always made use of post-recycled material more effectively than anyone else, including the stuff no one else will take.

In a March 2009 Boston Globe article, writer Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow points out that some countries have begun to “mitigate the problems with slums rather than eliminate the slums themselves.”

As Cruz remarks in the article, these inhabitants hold to “sophisticated, participatory practices.” They have “a light way of occupying the land. Because people are trying to survive, creativity flourishes.”

These areas are the most vulnerable to floods and natural disasters, as recent events in Haiti make clear. The total absence of planning is not a goal for urban planners to strive for. But people in these areas have been surviving and developing with very little capital or government involvement, and they’re becoming increasingly good at it. If we can learn what these places have to teach us, we can find better ways to live in our own local habitats.

We call our interpretation of this idea the self-generative community, or SGC.

The Self-Generative Community

Modern life is frustrating and disappointing; we work too hard to spend too much for things we hardly want. The most obvious alternative to our feelings of technological discontent and disconnect is leaving the world behind, quitting the high-stress job, abandoning society with its regulations and failing institutions, moving somewhere temperate, and looking out for oneself. This is popularly referred to as “going off the grid,” meaning the electrical grid, but really referring to any and all sense of society or obligation.

We propose living on the grid of a new urban fabric that distributes self-generated resources—food, learning, skills, human talent, and labor—and creates natural connections among inhabitants and nature. This way of living draws from the lessons that the world’s poorest inhabitants have to give us without romanticizing the difficult and unfortunate aspects of impoverishment. The SGC is a portrait of humanity not at its poorest, but at its most resourceful, responsible, and aware of its surroundings. The objective of the SGC is to realize homegrown socioeconomic sustainability by investing in the proper handling of the natural environment and technology.

How do you create an SGC? We see three steps, which involve uncovering the natural resources of the area, tapping into the appropriate use of both natural and social capital (such as building partnerships, cooperative business enterprises, etc.) in order to further the economic development, and finally integrating a sophisticated mix of programs into a high-density model.

Step One: Restore. Reconnect the Earth and the Sky

Restore, in this context, refers to bioremediation or restoration of the natural cycles as needed. Nations in the developed world have altered the urban landscape to a point where water hardly reaches soil for filtration and drainage, and rooftops squander solar energy that nature had used productively. There are better ways to treat both those resources.

If you’re talking about building an SGC at one particular urban area, fulfilling step one can be as simple as ripping out urban pavement that isn’t actively supporting a structure and allowing rainwater to be absorbed into the ground. Communities around the world function effectively with a lot less pavement around than do people in the industrialized world. Again, the point is not to create a situation without adequate land grading, or where un-zoned structures impede the flow of rainwater, possibly causing flooding. This is an unfortunate fact of life in many of the world’s poorest communities. We propose simply the removal of unnecessary pavement in an intelligent, considered way.

Does your city not want you to rip up the sidewalk? Some local governments are giving ideas like this serious attention. Starting in June 2010, the state of Maryland will be enforcing a new law stipulating that, if you’re developing a site of a particular size, you’ll need to meet the highest water-management requirements. But for a picture of what truly effective water management looks like, go to a forest.

Step Two: Plant and Energize the Seeds

This refers to the building of new social, economic, and environmental infrastructure based on cooperative capacity, or the amount of time and talent the neighborhood is willing to invest to make their area economically self-sustainable.

Harvesting renewable energy sources locally to generate immediate revenue and help sustain development is one key to realizing step two. This could mean passive solar energy co-ops, where neighborhoods build their own photovoltaic systems on rooftops. It could mean inner-city biofuel-crop growing, perhaps in basement hydroponic gardens. It could be all of the above. The idea is to start harvesting available renewable energy and use it to power local businesses, or sell it back into the grid. Power generation becomes a community business. In this way, it’s integrated seamlessly into the area’s future development.

This is directly connected to the informal city way of life. We in the developed world commonly misperceive slums as economic dead zones, as basket cases, when in fact they’re hotbeds of self-sustaining commerce. That’s as it should be.

Informal cities are also mixed use in their layout. That means commercial, residential, and light industrial/agricultural activities take place side by side. The key here is to capitalize on cooperative relationships, seek potential partners within the community, and develop strategies for integration. Meanwhile, the SGC must also be adaptable and versatile. Communities change constantly; SGCs reflect and support that change.

Step Three: Nourish, Breathe, and Grow

The third step is to introduce a series of connected programs between local government and the community. In terms of proposing programs to fit community needs, there is no one-size-fits-all strategy. We presented a plan to the city of Baltimore a few years ago called Hidden Walls. The plan involved rehabbing blocks of abandoned row houses. This was a high-unemployment inner-city neighborhood. The community in that situation needed a means to build equity and value into their area. They also needed to shelter their kids from the notorious Baltimore drug-dealing scene. Our final proposal was a modern iteration of the Middle Ages manor village, but with high-speed Internet and without a feudal lord. The programs we proposed were geared mostly toward community education and neighborhood economic development.

We suggested different program solutions at another location in Dallas, where the community was trying to make use of abundant sunshine and open space. The key is to add new programs and transform the relationships of the actors as more people move to the location and change it. There is no formalist approach to building a self-generating community. It’s more systematic; complexity grows itself naturally in keeping with how community actually develops.

In the context of every city and in the life of every neighborhood, there is a synergy that brings up the potential to develop something unique, to rebuild the urban environment to reach its fullest potential. There is no MAKE GOOD button for creating a more equitable environment, just like there is no GO AWAY for unwanted elements and no PUT THERE for discarded resources.

To regenerate our cities and communities and restore our feeling of place, we must stop perceiving ourselves as mere consumers. If we can become inhabitants, constituents, and producers, we can achieve a different sort of habitat, one that is environmentally, sociologically, and culturally self-sustaining precisely because it honors all of these vital areas of life, equally.

About the Authors
Pavlina Ilieva and Kuo Pao Lian are the founders of the PI.KL design group. They have won numerous awards for their work on sustainable solutions in urban design, disaster relief projects post-Katrina, and ecological strategic planning. Their works have been featured in THE FUTURIST, Architectural Record, Dwell, Metropolis, and Urbanite.

* The authors are not claiming to have written the book Informal City: Caracas Case, only to have read it. Alfred Brillembourg was the editor of the anthology.

Life Dollars: Finding Currency in Community

By Douglas Rushkoff

The recent financial meltdown may not be punishment for our sins, but it is at least in part the result of our widespread obsession with financial value over values of any other sort.

As corporations gain ever more control over our economy, government, and culture, it is only natural for us to blame them for the helplessness we now feel over the direction of our personal and collective destinies. But it is both too easy and utterly futile to point the finger of blame at corporations or the robber barons at their helms—not even those handcuffed CEOs gracing the cover of the business section. Not even mortgage brokers, credit-card executives, or the Federal Reserve.

This state of affairs isn’t being entirely orchestrated from the top of a glass building by an élite group of bankers and businessmen, however much everyone would like to think so—themselves included. And while the growth of corporations and a preponderance of corporate activity have allowed them to permeate almost every aspect of our awareness, these entities are not solely responsible for the predicament in which we have found ourselves.

Rather, it is corporatism itself: a logic we have internalized into our very being, a lens through which we view the world around us, and an ethos with which we justify our behaviors. Making matters worse, we accept its dominance over us as preexisting—as a given circumstance of the human condition. It just is.

But it isn’t.

We need to figure out what—if anything—we are to do about it. Here are some ideas.

Like thousands of other people across the United States, I’m a member of a community-supported agriculture group, or CSA. People make a commitment to buy a season’s worth of crops from a local farm and then either pay up front or by subscription over the course of a year. Some farms require their members to work a few hours during the growing season; others let members work in lieu of payment. In 1990, there were just 50 CSAs in the United States. By 2008, there were more than a thousand.

The farmer running my CSA wanted to provide his members with an easy way to sign up for shifts and make special requests for their weekly food shares. An unemployed Web designer I knew from the neighborhood built a site for the farmer that offered all this and more. In return, he earned a year of crops.

These activities are revolutionary for the way that they cut out the middleman. People create value for one another directly, rather than paying corporations. No one is extracting value from our engagements, separating us from our competencies, or distancing us from one another.

The one exception, of course, is the money we are still using to pay one another. When we aren’t coding Web sites in return for kale, we are cutting the Federal Reserve and its network of banks in on every transaction we make. This extractive force is a drag on the system, particularly at times when speculation or banking-industry incompetence has made money too expensive to get hold of or too unstable to use as a means of exchange.

A tiny organic café in my town called Comfort decided to expand to a second, larger location. John, the chef and owner, had been renovating the new space for a year, but—thanks to the credit crisis—was unable to raise the cash required to finish and finally open. With currency unavailable from traditional, centralized money-lending banks, he turned instead to his community, to us, for support. Granted, this is a small town. Pretty much everybody goes to Comfort—the only restaurant of its kind on the small strip—and we all have a stake in its success. Any extension of Comfort would bring more activity, vitality, and commerce to a tiny downtown that was commercially devastated in the 1970s by the chain stores and malls on the auto-friendly main strip.

John’s idea was to sell VIP cards, or what I helped him rename Comfort Dollars. For every dollar spent on a card, the customer receives the equivalent of $1.20 worth of credit at either of John’s restaurants. If I buy a $1,000 card, I get $1,200 worth of food: a 20% rate of return on the investment of dollars. John gets the money he needs a lot cheaper than if he were borrowing it from the bank—he’s paying for it in food and labor that he has in ample supply. Meanwhile, customers get more food for less money.

But wait, there’s more: The entire scheme reinvests a community’s energy and cash locally. Because our money goes further at our own restaurant than at a restaurant somewhere else, we are biased toward eating locally. Since we have a stake in the success of the restaurant in whose food we have invested, we’ll also be more likely to promote it to our friends. By using its own currency, a local business can even undercut the corporate competition. It’s not complex or even communist. It’s just local business, late Middle Ages style.

Local currencies are now used by several hundred communities across the United States and Europe, giving people the chance to buy and sell goods and services from one another no matter what the greater economy might be doing. Instead of favoring large, centralized corporations, local currencies favor businesses and the community members who own them.

There are two main types of local currency employed today. The simplest, like Comfort Dollars or the BerkShares created for the entire Berkshire Hills region in Massachusetts, have exchange rates for regular dollars. The BerkShares themselves can be spent only at local businesses that accept them, which keeps the currency circulating close to home. Local currencies such as these encourage local buying, put large corporations with no real community involvement at a big disadvantage, and circulate much more widely and rapidly through a community than conventional dollars. Further, the nonprofit bank issuing BerkShares is not an extractive force; no one needs to get rich or pay anyone back. Businesses that refuse to accept the local currency do worse than just brand themselves as apathetic to local development; they cut themselves off from a potential source of revenue.

Townspeople with their own money systems still need conventional currency. The three automobile repair shops in Great Barrington that accept BerkShares must still buy auto parts from Mopar or BMW with U.S. dollars. But they are willing to break down their bills into two separate categories, selling parts at cost in U.S. dollars and markups and labor in the local currency. The object is not to replace centralized currency altogether, but to break the monopoly of centralized currency and the corporations it supports over transactions that keep money circulating locally. This is why many advocates now call local currency “complementary” currency—because it complements rather than replaces centralized money.

Larger businesses have begun to embrace alternative currency systems as well. In October 2008, as the credit crisis paralyzed business lending, companies started signing onto barter networks in droves. Utilizing more than 250 exchange services now available through the Internet, companies can barter directly with one another, or earn U.S.-dollar-equivalent credits for the merchandise they supply to others. According to BarterNews.com, business-to-business bartering already accounts for $3 billion of exchanges annually in the United States.

Life Dollars

An even more promising variety of complementary currency, like the grain receipts of ancient times, is quite literally earned into existence. “Life Dollars,” such as those used by the Fourth Corner Exchange in the Pacific Northwest, are not exchanged for traditional currency. Instead, members of the Exchange earn credits by performing services or providing goods to one another. There’s always enough money, because money is a result of work exchanged, not an existing store of coin. There can’t be too much money either, since every service provided is a service someone else was willing to be debited for.

These local or complementary currencies, and many others, are as easy to begin as visiting the Web sites for community exchange systems (CES), local economic transfer systems (LETS), or Time Dollars. According to the most recent data available from the community exchange system (communityexchange.org), more than 180 community exchanges have sprung up around the world, including 55 in Australia, 26 in South Africa, and 33 in the United States. A local currency system can be as informal as a babysitting club, where parents earn credits for babysitting one another’s children, or robust enough to serve as the primary currency for an entire region or sector.

In 1995, as recession rocked Japan, unemployment rose and currency became scarce. This made it particularly difficult for people to continue to take care of their elderly relatives, who often lived in distant areas. Everyone had time, but no one had money. The Sawayaka Welfare Foundation developed a complementary currency by which a young person could earn credits for taking care of an elderly person. Different tasks earned different established credit awards—bathing someone earned more than shopping, and so on. Accumulated credits—Fureai Kippu, or “elderly care units”—could then be applied to the care of one’s own relative in a distant town, saved for later, or traded to someone else. Independently of the centralized economy—which, thanks to bad speculation and mismanaged banking, was no longer supporting them—people were able to create value for themselves and one another.

Although that particular financial crisis has passed, the Fureai Kippu system has only grown in popularity. At last count, the alternative currency was accepted at 372 centers throughout Japan, and patients surveyed said they like the care they get through the Fureai Kippu system better than what they get from professional service agencies. As I originally wrote for my book Life Inc., close to a thousand alternative currencies are now in use in Japan, thanks to the success of the Fureai Kippu and other pioneering models.

Complementary currencies make it easier to record and administer value exchange in an increasingly decentralized marketplace. They initiate the process through which local regions or specific sectors learn to create value for themselves instead of having it drained unnecessarily by an artificially chartered monopoly entity. They remind us that some of the things we have in abundance are still valuable, even though markets have not yet been created for them. And they give us a way to transact business during a recession or depression, when central banks and treasuries are more concerned with their own solvency and that of the speculative economy than they are with our ability to conduct the basic transactions through which we take care of one another.

Bartering in the Big City

The most recent recession saw the closure of big Wall Street firms like Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns affecting the entire New York City economy. Not surprisingly, a lot of New Yorkers turned to the popular classifieds on Craigslist to find cheap goods or to sell them. But the site also saw an increase in the number of New Yorkers willing to barter services to one another. These ranged from the exchange of IT work for dental repair to free professional portrait photographs to tanning sessions, according to a Daily News story.

Bartering systems and local currencies are just one possible step in the slow subordination of market activity to social activity, and corporate behavior to human behavior. After all, we don’t spend time volunteering in our public school because we want to earn local credits; we do it to make the place better for our kids. The psychological hurdle to cross is the inability to accept that $10,000 worth of one’s time spent making a local school better will create more value than $30,000 of one’s money spent on a private school. The money guarantees a great education for our own kid; the time improves the school for everyone’s kids. Still plagued by internalized competition and self-interest, most of us are not quite ready to choose the better path or to convince our neighbors to join us in the effort. Luckily, a desperate lack of funds and employment opportunities can help nudge us toward the more socially beneficial choice.

But the more social we get, the more one voluntary act will encourage another one, and so on. We learn that it’s more fun and less time-consuming to provide real help to our local elementary school than to take on an extra corporate job to pay for a private school. We reverse the equation through which we calculate how much money we’ll need to insulate ourselves from the pitfalls of modern life, like diminishing real-estate values, stock-market collapses, and layoffs.

Instead, we could calculate how much we can get from and give to that world with no money at all. Reciprocity is not a market phenomenon; it’s a social one. And when the market is no longer functioning properly, reciprocity is a necessary life skill.

This is where the Internet might be of some help. Networks can connect those looking to reinforce their sense of hope and connection to others. We can share new models that work, collaborate with like-minded members of other communities, and build decentralized constituencies to fight our common battles. Beneath all its flashy, advertising-based social networks, the Internet is still a communications medium. We can use it to find the people and ideas deemed unready for corporate media’s precious prime time.

Perhaps more important, by restoring our connections to real people, places, and values, we’ll be less likely to depend on the symbols and brands that have come to substitute for human relationships. As more of our daily life becomes dictated by the rules of a social ecology instead of those of a market economy, we will find it less necessary to resort to the behavior of corporations whenever things get rough. We might be more likely to know the names of our neighbors, and value them for more than the effect of their landscaping on our block’s real-estate prices.

I’ve offered a few suggestions here, but the ones you’ll find will be particular to your life, your neighborhood, and your situation. That’s the whole point. Although corporatism offers itself up as a universal answer to our needs, it really just reduces the myriad complexity of human need down to individual selfishness.

This monolithic approach to society and its recovery is antisocial in intent, dehumanizing in effect, and, dare I say it, fascist in spirit. It’s also entirely temporary. We will either arrest corporatism, or it will arrest us. The alternative—local, day-to-day, mundane pleasure—is what makes us human in the first place.

About the Author
Douglas Rushkoff is the author of such best-selling books as Media Virus and Innovation from the Inside Out. This piece adapts material from his most recent book, Life Inc: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back (Random House, 2009). Web site www.rushkoff.com.

Prospects for Brain–Computer Interfacing

A group of undergraduates at Northeastern University demonstrated in June that they could steer a robot via thought. The subject in the experiment watched a computer screen and selected commands using his retina, causing electrical activity in the brain’s visual cortex ranging from 4 to 100 hertz. The signals were then translated to a small robot, similar to the Roomba vacuum cleaner.

Electrical engineering professor Deniz Erdogmus, who oversaw the project at Northeastern, says that because the connection between the user and the robot is Internet-based (you can track the robot over Skype) an operator could control it from a considerable distance away.

“We could take the robot to Tahiti and the operator can take a webcam tour,” says Erdogmus. “We are looking for volunteers to take the robot to Bora Bora.”
The demonstration was the latest in a string of breakthroughs over the last decade, showing the growing viability of brain–computer interface, or BCI, technologies. Cybernetic research will advance far more rapidly in the next few years, experts contend.

The Present and Future of Brain–Computer Interface Technology

Neural interface technology goes back half a century (and the larger field of cybernetics dates back to World War II), but advancement proceeded unevenly. The primary obstacle was, and remains, system compatibility; the delicate and complicated web of nervous tissue that is the brain doesn’t communicate well with wires and electronics.

“If you put an array of sensors into a brain, there’s a tissue reaction, namely scarring. The nervous tissue can no longer send a signal when there’s scar tissue,” says Klaus-Robert Müller, director of the machine learning group at Technische Universität in Berlin.

Previous studies have shown that linking mammalian brain matter with electric circuitry has a burning or melting effect on the brain. However, in the last two decades, advances in computation have enabled researchers to bypass this problem, somewhat, and rely more on devices that don’t have to be surgically implanted to collect brain signals.

Electroencephalography (EEG), which the Northeastern University team used, is among the favored of these techniques. EEG uses a sensor array afixed to a subject’s head externally, like a swimming cap. Because the signal from an EEG is weaker than the signal from a surgically implanted sensor, more guesswork is required to deduce what the brain is trying to communicate; that guesswork is aided through algorithmic math. Noninvasive BCI relies much more on algorithms and mathematic problem solving.

Erdogmus says that more funding agencies are seeing the potential of BCI, and this is having a positive effect across the field. “Technological and algorithmic advances allowed more groups to work on this problem for [less] equipment-wise.”

Müller agrees that shifting more of the burden to number crunchers (helped by the increase in computing power in recent years) has made a big difference. “We have put all the learning on the machine side. The computer learns to interpret your brain waves,” he says. A few years ago, subjects would need to train for 300 hours to control their brain signals before those waves could be usable in BCI. Now, says Müller, you can achieve the same effect after about five minutes of training.

Brain-based control of conventional keyboards, allowing individuals to type without physically touching the keys, has been demonstrated at the universities of Wisconsin and Michigan. In the near future, brain e-mailing and tweeting will become far more common, say experts (though these interfaces remain extremely slow). BCI will also show up in some surprising places.

Other Applications for Brain–Computer Interfaces

Also in the near term, video-game makers could use BCI to develop gaming systems capable of reading and responding to a player’s emotional state. Similar research could lead to new therapies for various neurotic disorders, enabling sufferers to see and potentially moderate their own brain patterns to reduce stress. Müller reports that a company called Pico has designed an iPhone application that allows users to see their own thought patterns on the iPhone. (He says the app is not yet commercially available, as it requires a surgical implant to operate.) Automobile manufacturers might use BCI to improve navigation systems.

“Say you’re a carmaker; you are designing a new driver-assistance system,” says Müller. “Normally if you were testing this system, you would have people come in, try the car, and you would survey them on their experience. But what if you wanted a highly accurate qualitative measure to see if cognitive workload was lower using one gadget over another? Or you wanted to see how people reacted emotionally to different designs? These things can be measured non-intrusively and quantitatively.”

Erdogmus sees brain-controlled prosthesis and robots going mainstream within a few decades. There have been a number of startling demonstrations on this front in addition to the work at Northeastern. In 2008, a University of Pittsburgh team led by Andrew Schwartz taught a monkey to feed itself using a robot arm that the monkey controlled via implant.

(A link to the video is available here.)

Researchers caution that they need much more information about the brain, particularly its feedback mechanisms and how it transitions between different states, before science can fulfill the more ambitious cybernetic visions of science fiction. Acquiring this information will be the most important application of BCI in the years ahead. — Patrick Tucker

Sources: Personal Interviews, Deniz Erdogmus (e-mail) Northeastern University, www.northeastern.edu. Klaus-Robert Müller, Technische Universität. Suggested further reading: Toward Brain Computer Interfacing edited by Guido Dornhege et al. MIT Press, 2007.

September-October 2010, Tomorrow in Brief

3-D Posters

Coming soon to billboards near you: posters you can see in 3-D without special glasses.

Based on the same principle as the old grooved “3-D” postcards of years past, the new displays consist of 250,000 individual lenses with a diameter of 2 millimeters each, aligned on sheets with computer precision to eliminate distortion.
The resulting 3-D images can be up to five meters in size. The technology was achieved by researchers from Fraunhofer Institute for Physical Measurement Techniques, RealEyes Company, and the University of Kiel.
Source: Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, www.fraunhofer.de.

Musical Clothing

Fabrics with sensors could give musicians a simple way to carry their instruments with them: in their clothes.

An outfit that produces sounds when the user touches it has been created by Swedish School of Textiles fashion student Jeannine Han and technician Dan Riley.

The prototype garments yield a harp-like sound. The goal is to improve the use of technology to produce future clothing, and also to create clothing with a larger and easily controlled musical palette. Han and Riley plan to form a band that will wear the outfits and “play themselves.”

Source: University of Borås, Expertanswer, www.expertsvar.se/english.

Bridging the Mentor Age Gap

If you’re choosing a mentor, it may be better to choose one who is still relatively early in his or her career. Doing so increases the likelihood that you, too, will become a productive mentor in the future.

In a study of mathematicians, Northwestern University researcher R. Dean Malmgren and colleagues found that older, late-career mentors were too far removed from the experiences of young protégés to train them effectively, and those protégés subsequently mentored fewer protégés of their own.

“It’s a phenomenon in our culture that as you gain more importance and success you are expected to oversee more and more people, which means that face time with your protégés goes down,” says Malmgren. “This tradeoff has negative consequences.”
Source: Northwestern University, www.northwestern.edu.

Crowd-Sourcing the Crowd

A new social-search engine promises to identify popular places in the same way that Twitter identifies popular, or “trending,” topics.

With a program developed by the Sency search-engine company in Santa Monica, California, users can find where the action is by simply selecting a city name; the search results show the locations of the most-active chatter, along with addresses and street maps.

Among the searchable places now available are London, New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C.

Be warned, however: Party goers may have to do some extra trending-topic searching, lest they inadvertently join a protest movement or street riot.
Source: Sency, www.sency.com.

Arctic Warming, Mid-Latitude Freezing

Loss of sea ice in the Arctic region is likely to yield colder and snowier winters in other parts of the world, according to new research presented by James Overland of the NOAA/Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory.

Arctic warming, which is occurring twice as fast as in the rest of the planet, is due to a combination of factors, including loss of sea ice reflectivity, ocean heat storage, changing wind patterns, and natural variability.

“The exceptional cold and snowy winter of 2009–2010 in Europe, eastern Asia, and eastern North America is connected to unique physical processes in the Arctic,” Overland reported to the recent International Polar Year Oslo Science Conference.
Source: International Polar Year Oslo Science Conference, Research Council of Norway, www.ipy-osc.no.

The Postemployment Economy

By Patrick Tucker
The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future by Martin Ford. Acculant Publishing. 2009. 253 pages. $15.95. Paperback.

In The Lights in the Tunnel, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Martin Ford argues that technologies such as software automation algorithms, artificial intelligence (AI), and robotics will result in dramatically increasing unemployment, stagnant or falling consumer demand, and a financial crisis surpassing the Great Depression.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics foresees automation and AI-assisted outsourcing restraining job growth, particularly in the field of office and administrative support. But the Bureau still anticipates growth in this sector of roughly 7.3 million job openings from 2008 to 2018, as well as growth in most others.

These forecasts are woefully optimistic, in Ford’s view. He says that mainstream economists do not consider the possibility of radical breakthroughs of automation technology when making their projections. In a worst-case scenario, every job that can conceivably be automated will be turned over to the robots. The unemployment rate under such a scenario defies easy calculation, but the current rate of 9% would look idyllic in retrospect.

Other potential effects of superautomation according to Ford include:
The high-profit, small-staff business model will rule. An example is the Web-based movie-rental company Netflix, which has effectively driven rival Blockbuster to bankruptcy. Consumer demand for goods will plummet as unemployment rises. Defaults on mortgages and consumer debt will reach unprecedented levels, and plunging values for housing and other assets will result in cascading financial crises. College enrollment will fall as potential students shy away from “knowledge worker” jobs that are susceptible to automation and off-shoring. Young people will instead compete for trade jobs in the occupations that can’t be automated. (Hypothetical examples here might include nursing or even specific types of high-tech machine repair.) Governments will face rising pressure to restrict technological progress. Organized labor may realize a last-ditch resurgence. High unemployment in developed countries will dramatically reduce demand for foreign-manufactured goods. The result may be social unrest and political instability in places like China as export trade crumbles. The U.S. government’s already dire projections for pensions and government entitlements will become even more dismal as wide unemployment among young people decimates payroll tax revenues. Sovereign debt crises—of the type playing out in Greece at the time of this writing — will spread as demand for government services outstrips revenue. Political battles will become even more heated, partisan, and irrational.

Ford’s solution to this calamity is at once obvious and politically unspeakable: Governments must devise a system to pay their unemployed populations to consume. Only in this way can the demand for goods stay bouyant and depression be avoided. Human labor may be largely superfluous in the automated economy of the twenty-first century, but broad-based consumption will remain essential.

The idea of consumption without labor is truly radical. In the developed world — and in the United States especially — work is tied directly to our individual sense of self worth and identity. Almost half of the unemployed people in the United States suffer from depression or anxiety; unemployed Americans are four times more likely than those with jobs to report symptoms of major depression, according to the American Psychological Association. Absent career ambition, how will capable, intelligent people discover and create meaning in their lives?

The answer, says Ford, is to distribute income on the basis of performance. Civic involvement, educational, research, or humanitarian accomplishments should be better compensated than indolence, allowing for competition. Effort and intelligence, well intended and skillfully applied, would still meet with reward. But the actions of these workers would not “necessarily result in ‘work’ in the traditional sense.”

From a reader’s perspective Lights in the Tunnel is an interesting referendum on King Camp Gillette’s 1894 socialist utopian treatise, The Human Drift. Gillette, inventor of the disposable razorblade of the same name, saw the Industrial Revolution leading inexorably to a future where a single robotic corporation created and distributed goods with perfect efficiency, a tomorrow of evermore capable machines freeing people from the chores and burdens of work in order that they might pursue intellectual passions.

Ford sees a similar future but calls “freedom” by another name: mass unemployment. The results of humankind’s liberation from labor would be unrest, high crime, loss of prosperity, and eventual societal collapse. This darker modern iteration of the Utopian ideal illustrates how easily the hopes of the past can become the horrors of tomorrow.

About the Reviewer
Patrick Tucker is the senior editor of THE FUTURIST magazine.

Tomorrow In Brief

3-D Posters

Coming soon to billboards near you: posters you can see in 3-D without special glasses.

Based on the same principle as the old grooved “3-D” postcards of years past, the new displays consist of 250,000 individual lenses with a diameter of 2 millimeters each, aligned on sheets with computer precision to eliminate distortion.

The resulting 3-D images can be up to five meters in size. The technology was achieved by researchers from Fraunhofer Institute for Physical Measurement Techniques, RealEyes Company, and the University of Kiel.

Source: Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, www.fraunhofer.de.

Musical Clothing

Fabrics with sensors could give musicians a simple way to carry their instruments with them: in their clothes.

An outfit that produces sounds when the user touches it has been created by Swedish School of Textiles fashion student Jeannine Han and technician Dan Riley.

The prototype garments yield a harp-like sound. The goal is to improve the use of technology to produce future clothing, and also to create clothing with a larger and easily controlled musical palette. Han and Riley plan to form a band that will wear the outfits and “play themselves.”

Source: University of Borås, Expertanswer, www.expertsvar.se/english.

Bridging the Mentor Age Gap

If you’re choosing a mentor, it may be better to choose one who is still relatively early in his or her career. Doing so increases the likelihood that you, too, will become a productive mentor in the future.

In a study of mathematicians, Northwestern University researcher R. Dean Malmgren and colleagues found that older, late-career mentors were too far removed from the experiences of young protégés to train them effectively, and those protégés subsequently mentored fewer protégés of their own.

“It’s a phenomenon in our culture that as you gain more importance and success you are expected to oversee more and more people, which means that face time with your protégés goes down,” says Malmgren. “This tradeoff has negative consequences.”

Source: Northwestern University, www.northwestern.edu.

Crowd-Sourcing the Crowd

A new social-search engine promises to identify popular places in the same way that Twitter identifies popular, or “trending,” topics.

With a program developed by the Sency search-engine company in Santa Monica, California, users can find where the action is by simply selecting a city name; the search results show the locations of the most-active chatter, along with addresses and street maps.

Among the searchable places now available are London, New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C.

Be warned, however: Party goers may have to do some extra trending-topic searching, lest they inadvertently join a protest movement or street riot.

Source: Sency, www.sency.com.

Arctic Warming, Mid-Latitude Freezing

Loss of sea ice in the Arctic region is likely to yield colder and snowier winters in other parts of the world, according to new research presented by James Overland of the NOAA/Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory.

Arctic warming, which is occurring twice as fast as in the rest of the planet, is due to a combination of factors, including loss of sea ice reflectivity, ocean heat storage, changing wind patterns, and natural variability.

“The exceptional cold and snowy winter of 2009–2010 in Europe, eastern Asia, and eastern North America is connected to unique physical processes in the Arctic,” Overland reported to the recent International Polar Year Oslo Science Conference.

Source: International Polar Year Oslo Science Conference, Research Council of Norway, www.ipy-osc.no.

A New Generation of Business Leaders

Students are increasingly blending social awareness and social entrepreneurship.

Business schools may attract more students if they offer more courses on corporate responsibility and environmentally friendly business practices.

More than 80% of undergraduate students surveyed jointly by nonprofits Net Impact and the Aspen Institute said that they want more sustainability and corporate responsibility material in their curricula. Only 23% said they were satisfied with the quantity of material that their schools currently offer.

“Students in college today are pretty aware of environmental issues in a way that my generation was not,” says Amanda Nicholson, an assistant professor of retail management at Syracuse University’s Whitman School of Management. “They grew up with recycling bins outside their dorm rooms. They’re already believers.”

Nicholson led a group of students in a Converting Organic Waste project. The students built a septic system that breaks down food waste from the dining hall into biogas and fertilizer; the biogas powers the tank system, and the fertilizer can be bagged and sold commercially.

Not only does the project benefit the environment, according to Nicholson, but it also makes great business sense in that it cuts costs while also making marketable products.

The Whitman School offers a Certificate of Advanced Studies in Sustainable Enterprise, which students earn by completing five courses in the challenges facing businesses that strive to practice social and environmental responsibility.

The school also partners with the State University of New York to teach a course called “Managing Sustainability,” which explores sustainable enterprise. Syracuse and SUNY faculty jointly teach it, and students from schools in both universities enroll in it.

“Ethics and environmental sustainability — those two things seem to come up in every class now across the board,” Nicholson says.

Whitman law and public policy professor Eletta Callahan sees the trend echoing in college campus administrations. Colleges are measuring their own carbon footprints, for example, and reducing their buildings’ emissions.

“Attention to sustainability has become an expectation in colleges,” says Callahan.

However, college curricula have been slower to adopt the sustainability ethos, as course material is much harder to change than campus administrative policies. But if student populations have their way, course content, too, may change over time, Callahan concludes. — Rick Docksai

Sources: Amanda Nicholson and Eletta Callahan, Syracuse University, www.syr.edu.

Net Impact, www.netimpact.org.

Latinos Online

In an increasingly wired United States, only slightly more than half of Latinos were using online media until the last few years. Many of those offline were recent arrivals in the country, lacking the resources — including education, language skills, and income — needed to join the digital community.

However, in a very short amount of time, Internet use among Latinos in the United States has rapidly grown. The Pew Hispanic Center reports that, between 2006 and 2008, the number of Latino adults going online increased from 54% to 64%. Latinos are now slightly more wired than African Americans, according to the Pew Center study.

What’s more, the study shows evidence that the increase in overall Internet usage among Latinos is largely due to those with less education, less income, and less English language proficiency. These groups grew a great deal percentage-wise, due in no small part to the fact that they had the most room for improvement. College-educated Latinos, for example, are already going online in droves, so there’s not as much margin for growth.

U.S. born, English-speaking Latinos are accessing the Internet much more than foreign-born Latinos in the United States, indicating that language continues to be a barrier preventing individuals from taking advantage of new technology. And those with higher incomes and higher levels of education were the most likely to have broadband connections at home. Notably, the digital divide continues to separate young and old: More than three quarters of adults under 35 are wired, as opposed to about one quarter of the over-65 set.

The surveys were conducted via telephone by the Pew Hispanic Center and the Pew Internet & American Life Project in 2006 and 2008. Only those with landlines were contacted — no cell phone numbers were dialed — which, the study’s authors point out, allows for a certain margin for error.

More and more individuals in the United States are relying exclusively on cell phone use, and the study’s authors note those who only use cell phones are likely to be a little more tech-savvy than those who can still be contacted over landlines. Their research shows that the percentage of cell phone-only Latino households was 25% in 2008, up from 15% in 2006. Therefore, it’s likely that the study’s results may slightly underestimate the total percentage of online Latinos. — Aaron M. Cohen

Source: Pew Hispanic Center, www.pewhispanic.org.

A Software Business Model That Turns Users into Partners

A new start-up has built “economic self-empowerment” for its users into the core of its mission.
By Jason P. Clark

I believe it’s safe to say that the next 10 years will give rise to some of the greatest advances in technology we have ever seen. We have witnessed a steady climb to a new level of collective consciousness and distributive intelligence through increasing Internet use. Today, social media sites such as Facebook, Reddit, and many others each possesses its own unique hive mind, wherein knowledge and life experiences are shared across the planet at the speed of light.

Yet, there is a major drawback to this fantastic future. As we progress, we simultaneously create a great divide that leaves behind those who do not have the means to participate in the global hive. These individuals are separated by economic challenges and thus are limited to this collective information. There is a chasm between those who have access to the Internet and those who do not.

Most of us take for granted our privileged exposure to technology and do not think about how this exposure creates opportunities for us later in life. Over the next 10 years, some aspects of this problem will be resolved by cheaper access to computing and the Internet. Case in point: The Federal Communications Commission has submitted its National Broadband Plan for the next decade and proposes that every American should have affordable access to “robust broadband services.” That means at least 100 million U.S. homes should have affordable access to speeds of at least 100 megabits per second (Mbps) for downloading and 50 Mbps for uploading.

By 2020, access to the Internet will no longer be an issue for most who desire it. Computers will be handed out as readily as textbooks in schools and communities. Yet, simply having access to these tools does not instantly solve the problem of a knowledge divide. So long as a paradigm exists by which corporations profit by directly charging the end user for their services, there will be so-called “haves” and “have-nots” of the Internet.

Turning Have-Nots into Partners

One way in which we at Syntiant, the company at which I serve as chief technical officer, are working to actively shift this paradigm is by incorporating philanthropy — or, more specifically, “economic self-empowerment” — into the core of our business model. Empowering people to help themselves through knowledge and a marketplace for knowledge fosters loyalty, spurs creativity, and creates a potential revenue stream in the process. This approach weds individuals’ ideals with their financial interests and shatters the attitude that an organization can’t be philanthropic and make money at the same time.

One of Syntiant’s goals is to facilitate education and social interaction, while providing the requisite equipment and connectivity to those who need it most. Syntiant’s goal is to introduce a new profit paradigm for a global social media company. Here’s how it works: Instead of charging users for the use of our basic services, we will offer free access in exchange for a small computational contribution. In essence, Syntiant will request four to five hours per day of an end-user’s unused computing time, a tit-for-tat trade in which everyone benefits.

Syntiant will use the millions of combined hours of excess computing power to create a Global Exaflop Supercomputing Cloud (GESC), the fastest and most distributed system of its kind. Instead of feeding from our users’ pockets, we receive their donations of unused clock cycles, thus turning users into contributors. By utilizing a distributed computing network already in existence, we eliminate the need for the costly overhead associated with deploying and managing our own computing infrastructure. Syntiant will also offer an app-store model for user-based transactions within our operating environments.

We are working on a wholly new way of delivering social networks — evaluating them as a microcosm of the Internet itself and using already proven models of browsing and searching to improve content and advertising delivery in a way that is tailored to each and every individual user.

The year 2020 should see many variations of this distributed, consumer powered — but not consumer-based — revenue model. The companies of tomorrow that embrace this philosophy will stand a much better chance at prosperity long after organizations adhering to the traditional model have run aground.

It is difficult to visualize and prepare for a coming phase change before the event, when it seems as if chaos and entropy are increasing boundlessly. Consequently, when we originally shared our comprehensive vision with potential investors and other stakeholders, we were told that our ideas are scattered, unfocused, and without direction. Yet it is precisely this model of scattered, distributed components working together as a global information system that creates value in the Syntiant network.

We are committed to overcoming the challenge of limited information access and striving to bridge the gap by creating a global, user-built community. We believe the tipping point is soon upon us for a more consumer-driven, user-focused world in social networks.

About the Author

Jason P. Clark is a serial entrepreneur in the field of network infrastructures, multimedia, and virtual-reality content. He’s the creator of three international patents for uni-directional audio navigation, which were later purchased by Hewlett-Packard. At age 32, he’s developed and acquired funding for more than five start-up companies. He’s currently chief technical officer for Syntiant, www.syntiant.com/.

The author acknowledges Brad Thompson, CEO of Altruent, and Elliot Kulakow, partner/VP Technology R&D at Syntiant, as contributors to this article. Without their distributive intelligence and vision, this article would not have been possible.

Books in Brief: July-August 2010

Edited by Rick Docksai
The Economics of Integrity: From Dairy Farmers to Toyota, How Wealth Is Built on Trust and What That Means for Our Future by Anna Bernasek. Harper. 2010. 193 pages. $19.99.

The businessman who says he created his wealth all by himself is mistaken, states financial reporter Anna Bernasek in The Economics of Integrity. She points out that any successful enterprise is the result of a number of people lending their cooperation and their time. For all these people to cooperate effectively, they must first be able to trust each other.

Bernasek affirms the fundamental role that relationships of trust play in national and global commerce. There is actually far more integrity in the world of finance than some people might assume, she says. Integrity is what makes the economy go. Without it, a future of economic prosperity will not be possible.

Bernasek cites the successes that some major businesses attained by being trustworthy, and the comparatively greater wealth that some nations attain by enforcing transparency and integrity among their national businesses. Then she describes the benefits a new business can enjoy if it counts integrity and trustworthiness among its paramount values.

The Economics of Integrity makes a sound case for moral behavior and a clear link between doing the right thing today and achieving a better future tomorrow. Entrepreneurs and students who might one day be entrepreneurs will both find it to be inspirational reading.

Global Sources of Local Pollution: An Assessment of Long-Range Transport of Key Air Pollutants to and from the United States by the National Research Council. National Academies Press. 2010. 234 pages. Paperback. $35.

The pollution that a factory emits on one continent today will impact the health of a neighborhood on another continent next week, warns the National Research Council in Global Sources of Local Pollution.

Global wind and water currents have the potential to carry smog, soot, pesticide residues, and other toxins from region to region. Within one week, they can cross an ocean. A year is all the time needed for them to completely circumnavigate the globe. Consequently, any one locale’s ecological problems are likely to become the world’s ecological problems.

The authors identify four main types of pollutants — ozone, particulate matter, mercury, and organic pollutants — the long-term health risks each one presents, and specific actions that the global community can take now to mitigate them.

With thorough research and analysis, Global Sources of Local Pollution affirms the interconnectedness of our world and the ties that bind every community within it, and points out scientifically sound ways forward toward a healthy future for all.

Streetlights and Shadows: Searching for the Keys to Adaptive Decision Making by Gary Klein. MIT Press. 2009. 337 pages. $27.95.

Decision makers sometimes put their faith in logic and data when intuitive thinking would really be the better guide, says scientist Gary Klein in Streetlights and Shadows.

He notes that most adults assume that the way to plan for the future is to gather copious information about the matter at hand and carefully consider the available options. This may be true only in situations that are well-ordered and predictable. But real life is often complex, random, and prone to dramatic changes in short spans of time.

We often are pressed to make decisions without having all the information at hand, or where change is taking place rapidly and unpredictably. Trying to analyze the environment and predict what will happen next could be futile, and maybe even counterproductive.

Klein urges decision makers to alter their planning methods when they are faced with unexpected events. This means revising a lot of deeply ingrained beliefs: accepting that biases aren’t always bad, logic does not always help, gathering more information can confuse instead of clarify, and generating multiple options might do more harm than good. There are times to conduct analysis, Klein says, and there are times to let experience and intuition pinpoint the answers.

Streetlights and Shadows is a sharp assessment of planning methods and their relative strengths and weaknesses. Consultants and organization leaders may find it an insightful read.

Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. Broadway. 2010. 305 pages. $26.

How, exactly, do you motivate people to change their behaviors? According to Chip Heath and Dan Heath in Switch, it boils down to a three-part process: reaching people’s rational minds, appealing to their emotions, and then shaping the environment to make it more conducive to change.

The authors lay out their own insights about the change process and how successful change comes about. They demonstrate their findings by presenting case-by-case examples from real life. Among the many anecdotes that they share:

• Steve Booth-Butterfield and Bill Reger, two West Virginia University health researchers, persuaded the residents of two West Virginia towns to drink more low-fat milk and less whole milk via promotional ads that contrasted unsightly images of blobs of saturated fat (which an individual ingests when he or she drinks whole milk) with appealing images of glasses of low-fat milk. After six months, sales of low-fat milk nearly doubled.

• Donald Berwick, a doctor and president of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, spearheaded life-saving procedural changes within Institute-affiliated hospitals. The hospital administrators were reluctant to adopt many of them, but he won them over by setting forth specific goals and the interventions that could help achieve them. He then launched a campaign of procedural change that hospitals would join if they wanted to participate. For added effect, he brought the mother of a girl who had been killed by medical error on stage to deliver a keynote speech. Joining the campaign was easy, and every hospital that did would receive a team of researchers that would help guide it through the changes. Within the first two months, more than a thousand hospitals joined.

• Jerry Sternin, a Save the Children administrator, received an invitation from the Vietnamese government to come to the country and reduce rural malnutrition. He traveled to a rural village and sought out “bright spot” households in which children were healthier and better-nourished than their peers. Then he interviewed the bright-spot parents to find out what they were doing differently. He brought them together with other parents in cooking groups that would meet regularly to prepare well-balanced meals. Six months later, 65% of the children in the village were eating better.

Switch offers many insights about human behavior and psychology that marketing professionals, communications experts, and public-policy makers might all appreciate.

Toward Human Emergence: A Human Resource Philosophy for the Future by Philip Harris. HRD Press. 2010. 452 pages. $59.95.

The human species is transitioning toward a new, higher state of being, asserts management and space psychologist Philip Harris. The exponential acceleration of knowledge is transforming civilization itself. As the twenty-first century progresses, humans will have a series of opportunities to develop their potential.

The challenge will be for all people to widen their perspectives and be mindful of humanity’s long-term evolution. People can move beyond self-destructive and exploitative behaviors, and embrace cooperation and compassion for those less fortunate. But it will take a concerted effort. We must all personally strive to be “world shapers” rather than “earth squatters.” Harris lays out specific courses of action for both policy makers and private citizens to take.

Harris’s Toward Human Emergence is an introspective and inspirational discussion of human life. Philosophers, public officials, and the general public will all find it to be a worthy read.

2048: Humanity’s Agreement to Live Together by J. Kirk Boyd. Berrett-Koehler. 2010. 221 pages. Paperback. $15.95.

Since World War II, world leaders have initiated serious discussions about how to turn from a past of worldwide warfare and poverty to a future of global peace and prosperity for all, notes Kirk Boyd, executive director of the nonprofit 2048 Project. He argues that the goal is achievable, though it will require a written agreement for peaceable coexistence that is ratified by all countries and enforceable in all of the world’s courts.

He explains how the agreement might come to fruition by 2048: It will build off the successes of the European Convention on Human Rights and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and it will follow two prior steps: education of all the world’s citizens on human rights, and then bringing the world’s leaders together to draft an international accord.

Many skeptics believe that war and poverty are inevitable and will always be realities of human life, Boyd notes. But he challenges that supposition throughout 2048 with hope for a better future and an action plan to bring it about. His book offers a lofty, but inspiring, set of goals.

The Warcraft Civilization: Social Science in a Virtual World by William Sims Bainbridge. MIT Press. 2009. 248 pages. $27.95.

Imagine a video game bursting out of the screen and merging with the real world around you. You may experience precisely that if a prototype augmented-reality game system called LARP (live-action role-playing games) becomes fully developed, according to William Sims Bainbridge in The Warcraft Civilization.

A LARP’s playing field, Bainbridge says, would be an open-air city or park. Your view would be altered by game-generated holographs of heroes, villains, and action sequences. Gamers who now play World of Warcraft on computer screens might gather in a theme park and face off against each other in real time, disguised as warlocks, elves, orcs, and other characters.

Education might get enhancements, too. Tourists who visit Washington, D.C., and listen to a guide discuss the capital’s role in World War II might relive the era by pretending to be OSS agents or Nazi spies.

Even without LARP, however, World of Warcraft is very much present in the real world and may become more so, Bainbridge adds. In May 2008, scientists held an academic convention as avatars in the World of Warcraft domain. Also, many sociologists are experimenting with the game because of its parallels with real life. Tribes of beings interact with each other and sometimes clash. And there are functioning economic systems, complete with “black-market” transactions.

In The Warcraft Civilization, Bainbridge explores the social trend of role-playing games and their significance for contemporary culture in the years ahead. Gamers and sociologists will both find his observations informative.

Your Flying Car Awaits: Robot Butlers, Lunar Vacations, and Other Dead-Wrong Predictions of the Twentieth Century by Paul Milo. Harper. 2010. 288 pages. Paperback. $14.99.

Renowned twentieth-century experts made many educated guesses about what life in the early twenty-first century would be like, and many of those guesses turned out to be spectacularly wrong, notes freelance journalist Paul Milo in Your Flying Car Awaits. We’re now 10 years into the new century and have as of yet no bases on the moon, computers that think, flying cars, or any of the other marvels that scholars only three decades ago expected that we would have.

Milo reviews the leading forecasts across the twentieth century and infers what they say about their respective times — optimistic eras bred optimistic forecasts, while recession eras bore gloomy forecasts, for example. He also identifies lessons that forecasters today stand to learn from these erroneous forecasts. Forecasting is always a risky endeavor, he says. But if we determine how scholars in the past erred, we can alter our approaches to forecasting accordingly and guess the future with greater accuracy.

Your Flying Car Awaits is a light and conversational overview of forecasting through the decades, as well as a sharp evaluation of the limits to our abilities as humans to guess the future. Students of cultural history will appreciate it, as will any readers who want an approachable yet informative discussion about the discipline of making forecasts.

Future Scope: July-August 2010

MEDICINE

Rx: New Medical Specialties

Tomorrow’s doctors will practice more-personalized medicine, not because they’ll be friendlier, but because they’ll have access to more-detailed genetic information about their patients. Such changes will affect how medicine is taught.

“A curriculum in genetics is so important to the future of medicine,” says Aaron Michelfelder, associate professor of family medicine at Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine. Loyola’s genetics course used to be completed in the first year of medical school, but now it has been expanded and incorporated into the entire four-year curriculum.

Another major change Michelfelder foresees is more specialties and sub-specialties to handle new and emerging medical technologies and innovations.

Source: Loyola Medicine, www.loyolamedicine.org.

HABITATS

Design Out Unwanted Noise

Architects may soon be able to design more conversation-friendly rooms by mapping “hot spots” for potential noise.

Sound-mapping software developed by engineers at Cardiff University in Wales shows where conversations would be unintelligible if a room were busy. The architect could then alter room shapes and materials to cancel out noise that would make conversation difficult.

Acoustic engineering is already well developed for theaters and concert halls, but more attention is needed for acoustic design of indoor meeting spaces, notes research project leader John Culling, a professor at Cardiff’s School of Psychology. The new software could be used where large numbers of people gather to interact, such as open-plan offices, cafés, and reception halls.

Source: Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, www.epsrc.ac.uk.

HEALTH

Gluten Intolerance on the Rise

Population aging may be behind a recent upsurge in gluten intolerance in Finland, report nutrition researchers at the Academy of Finland. Sufferers of the digestive disorder have increased from 1% of adult Finns in the early 1980s to 2% by the 2000s. Among the elderly, the rate is 2.7%.

Intolerance to gluten — a blend of proteins found mainly in wheat — is difficult to catch early, as patients may be symptom-free until later stages, when the condition can be identified from tissue samples. The principal symptom may be anemia due to iron deficiency or folic acid deficiency.

Researchers are seeking new and better markers for gluten intolerance that will allow easier diagnosis without need for endoscopy. Patients also hope for an “anti-gluten” pill with enzymes that break down gluten — a treatment that may prove feasible in the future, the researchers believe.

Source: Academy of Finland, www.aka.fi.

LIFESTYLES

Cheaper Fashions Change Faster

Fashions are changing faster than ever because clothing is becoming relatively cheaper. In fact, twenty-first-century clothes are 70% cheaper than the mod outfits of the Sixties, reports University of Kent sociologist Julia Twigg.

One outcome of this trend is that fashion is, well, fashionable for a wider age group, as new markets extend to the very old and very young. Women over age 75 are shopping for clothes more frequently now than they did as youths in the Sixties — and far more than their elders did at the time..

Despite a reputation for nonconformity, aging baby boomers are adopting the latest mainstream fashion trends, Twigg notes. Boomer women are neither accepting the “frumpy” look of previous generations of middle-agers nor making their own fashion statements, as they have throughout their lives.

“Although the baby boomers are indeed increasingly engaged with fashion in the twenty-first century, it’s a myth that they are different,” says Twigg. “It is just that they are responding to the mood of the times — like everyone else.”;

Source: University of Kent, www.kent.ac.uk.

WORDBUZZ

Unconsumption

More people are becoming conscious consumers or even unconsumers, reports social entrepreneur Halle Tecco in the Stanford Social Innovation Review blog (April 7). She credits the convergence of recession-driven frugality and the green movement for the rise of this trend.

“Unconsumption describes the now savvy and respectable trend of reducing, reusing, and recycling,” writes Tecco.

Source: Stanford Social Innovation Review, www.ssireview.org.

Life Among the Clones

How to Defeat Your Own Clone: And Other Tips for Surviving the Biotech Revolution by Kyle Kurpinski and Terry Johnson. Bantam. 2010. 180 pages. Paperback. $14.

Genetic manipulation and human cloning are possible, write bioengineers Kyle Kurpinski and Terry Johnson in How to Defeat Your Own Clone. They point out that medicine is gaining the abilities to alter genes, delete them, or copy them in their entirety, and speculate on where the innovations might lead.

Mass production of clones might lead to a nightmare world of viral warfare, clone rebellions, and super-intelligent clones that take over the workforce and drive non-clones into unemployment. Scenario: A government-funded battalion of Chuck Norris clones imposes a rough Norris Law everywhere and forces all television stations to play reruns of Walker, Texas Ranger around the clock. An army of Bruce Lee clones rises up to resist them, and the biggest kung fu battle in world history ensues, at the end of which society lies in ruins.

Alternatively, genetic manipulations might lead to a better world in which doctors undo any physical injury or ailment via on-demand generation of any human body part. Children everywhere are born immune to HIV and diabetes, and they are smarter and stronger than ever before. Medicine treats every major disease and anticipates every newly emerging one.

The authors detail what clones are, what they are not, and how we might expect clones to behave. They also delve into the potential family and social dynamics you would likely encounter after cloning yourself. Your clone could be your best friend — or a dangerous enemy. The authors argue that you should think now about what you might do if you do get cloned.

Kurpinski and Johnson lay out in precise detail what it would take to clone a human being and why present technology cannot yet achieve it. They also explore the role that stem cells might play in finally making cloning a reality. Since stem cells can transform into any cell in the body, researchers might use one to generate a complete human being. All they’d be doing is replicating the process of human reproduction.

“Complex organisms don’t exist as a single cell, but they all start as one — a very special one — and this phenomenon is what will allow us to replicate the development of a specific individual,” write Kurpinski and Johnson.

Real clones will be very different from the clones in science-fiction movies and television shows. Your clone will not necessarily have your personality, likes, and dislikes, for example. An individual’s thoughts and memories come from life experience and do not get carried over in genetic codes.

“Popular culture has been misrepresenting clones since the term was applied to Homo sapiens,” write Kurpinski and Johnson. “If you want to make the most of the biotech revolution, you’re going to have to unlearn the most egregious of culture’s misapprehensions.”

Among the things that biotechnology can do is genetically engineer lab mice to run faster and farther than average mice, and to not accrue body fat at the same rates.

These same enhancements might enable humans to change their genomes to be stronger and less prone to obesity. Extended life spans, faster recovery times from injuries, and immunity to diseases and addictions will all be feasible. Individuals might change their appearance, raise their intelligence to unnaturally high levels, or program themselves to thrive on three or four hours of sleep a night.

“Whether you want to be smarter, prettier, or genetically battle-ready, your body will be yours to enhance — and so will your clone’s,” write Kurpinski and Johnson.

But are all of these enhancements things that we would want to see? The authors stay relatively mum on this question.

Having new powers to change the human body carries deep ethical dilemmas. Individuals who use medical treatments to boost their strength and intelligence might become a new ruling elite, for example. And a society of people who only sleep four hours a night sounds like a society of workaholics. Kurpinski and Johnson thoroughly relate the mechanics of what we could develop, but they say little on whether we should develop it.

Nevertheless, How to Defeat Your Own Clone is a lighthearted, erudite look at the many directions that biomedicine could lead society.

About the Reviewer

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

Sustainable Urban Mobility in 2020

To make the car of the future, we need to make the city of the future, says MIT designer Ryan Chin.

How can you design a city by designing a car? Today’s automobiles are driven by an increasing number of users who live in cities. The United Nations reported in 2007 that migration patterns and population growth have created an equal split between inhabitants of cities and rural areas for the first time in human history. This general trend will continue for the next several decades and will produce a very urbanized world.

In 1950, New York City was the only megacity on the planet, with 10 million occupants. Today, there are 25 megacities that are mostly in developing countries. To verify this trend, we need only to look at the rapid urbanization in China to see the mass migration of the rural poor to urban areas for economic opportunity. Population experts project that most of the urban growth will occur in Asia and Africa for the next several decades. Simultaneously, humanity’s thirst for personal mobility will continue to grow. History shows that, as countries develop economically, so does their use of four-wheeled motorized transportation.

The world’s automobile fleet is currently estimated at 800 million cars that serve the 7.8 billion people living on Planet Earth. In the developed world, roughly seven out of 10 people own a car, whereas in the developing world, it’s two out of 10. The continued economic development of Brazil, Russia, India, and China will fuel the growth of this fleet to more than 1 billion cars by 2020. The continued use of this personal transportation model is simply unsustainable given the combination of energy inefficiency, environmental consequences of fossil-fuel usage, potential disruptions to fuel supplies, urban sprawl created by automobile reliance, and congestion caused by inadequate alternative modes of transport. What we need is to radically rethink the problem by examining not only the automobile itself, but also how it is used in cities (where most of us are currently living).

Size and Weight

2010: Today’s automobiles weigh an average of nearly 4,000 lb, approximately 20 times the weight of the driver. Today’s automobiles also have a footprint of approximately 100 square feet, which is nearly 15 times the amount of space required for a comfortable office chair. But the size requirements don’t stop at the footprint of the vehicle, if we consider the space that cars occupy on the road, in parking at home, work, and other destinations; add to that the space for maintenance and repair and it quickly grows to approximately 1,200 sq. ft. per vehicle. In midtown Manhattan, a 1,200 sq. ft. condominium would cost you upwards of $2 million to own.

2020: Tomorrow’s automobiles will be more lightweight and smaller. Size, weight, and energy efficiency are three factors that intimately interconnect in the design and engineering of automobiles. The lighter the vehicle, the more energy efficient it will be to move the mass of the car. The smaller the vehicle, the less mass you have. This set of relations forms a set of positive and negative feedback loops that ultimately affect the design of the vehicle. It will be imperative to incorporate technological improvements in lightweight materials, and composites will certainly help to make vehicles leaner, but this is not enough. Vehicles must also become more compact. These changes will not only improve energy efficiency, but also the vehicles’ overall footprint.

Range and Speed

2010: Today’s automobiles have a fuel range of about 300 miles (meaning they can travel 300 miles or so on one tank) can go from 0 to 60 mph in less than 10 seconds, and top out at more than 110 mph. This is great for intercity travel, but most Americans don’t travel that far. More than 80% of daily commutes in America are less than 40 miles (round trip). With more than 81% of Americans living in metropolitan areas, you simply don’t need to go 100 miles an hour down a city street. If you travel to Shanghai today, the average speed in the city is 9 mph. Bangalore, India, has achieved 24-hour congestion. Today’s vehicle is simply over-engineered for most practical purposes in cities.

2020: Tomorrow’s automobiles will not need that much refueling autonomy. BMW recently finished a series of user experiments to examine “range anxiety” — the fear of running out of electricity in electric cars — and discovered that their new electric mini (with 100 miles of range) has two to three times the range required for practically all trips. Users don’t need to have five to six times the range, and they quickly learned to adapt to the constraints (and benefits) of this new vehicle type. The introduction of electric charging infrastructure in the upcoming decade will virtually eliminate range issues in urban areas. Cities like San Francisco, Portland, Paris, Madrid, and Barcelona all have initiatives to bring a network of charging stations in their respective metropolitan areas. Car makers are introducing plug-in options for many models that enable the electrical charging from a common 110V household outlet.

Gasoline versus Electric

2010: Today’s vehicles are predominantly powered by petroleum-based fuels. An internal combustion engine is terribly inefficient (approximately 15%) in converting chemical energy into mechanical work to drive the wheels of your car. Hybrid vehicles are better at conserving energy at the cost of a more complex powertrain, but projections for the next five years call for less than 12% of the total new car market. The remaining alternative fuels, like compressed natural gas, hydrogen, compressed air, and biofuels, have varying levels of efficiency, but are utilized in even fewer numbers than hybrids. Battery electric vehicles utilize electric motors that are more than 90% energy efficient, but these have not taken over mainstream markets because of limitations of battery technology.

2020: Tomorrow’s automobiles will be increasingly electrified. The emergence of new battery chemistries such as lithium ion nanophosphate have allowed battery manufacturers to produce cells that have higher energy density and lower internal resistance, thus allowing rapid charging in less than 30 minutes. In fact, my colleagues at the MIT Electric Vehicle Team have been able to rapid-charge these new cells in less than 7 minutes with just a 10% degradation in capacity after 1,500 cycles. For comparison, lithium ion cells in your laptop today have roughly 1,000 cycles of usable life. The ability to rapid-charge will enable users to top-off their batteries in about the time it will take to order and drink an espresso, thus opening up new opportunities to create a ubiquitous charging network distributed throughout cities. No longer do we need to charge only at home or the workplace where our cars sit waiting for six to 10 hours.

Driver-Controlled versus Autonomous Driving

2010: Today’s cars are driven by human operators. Drivers have a number of telematic devices that aid in driving, such as antilock brakes for safe stopping, adaptive cruise control for the highway, parking sensors to help avoid scratches to the bumpers, and GPS for navigating unfamiliar places. However, we still have more than 50,000 deaths a year in the United States under the current driving paradigm. Today’s drivers sit in traffic for more than 50 hours a year and endure the stop-and-go driving experience.

2020: Tomorrow’s cars will be increasingly autonomous. The annual DARPA Urban Challenge has consistently proven to be a tremendously useful catalyst for innovations in autonomous driving. The most recent challenge shows that autonomously driven vehicles can navigate in busy city streets without incident. The potential of autonomous vehicles to self-drive and coordinate with other autonomous vehicles is to smooth traffic flows. In urban environments, top speed is not necessary; it is the orchestrated movement of vehicles within a speed regime that will improve congestion. The introduction of semi-autonomous systems such as self-parking and automated highway systems has provided useful lessons in the benefits and challenges of autonomous driving. Continued federally funded research in this area, combined with improvements in computational power, will enable the miniaturization of autonomous technologies, thus making autonomous driving commercially viable for mass markets in the coming decade.

Private versus Shared Ownership

2010: Today’s automobiles are designed for private ownership. The burden of ownership includes the cost of the vehicle, depreciation, tires, licensure, taxes, registration, insurance, maintenance, fuel, and parking. These individual direct costs are compounded by what economists call “negative externalities,” which include congestion and pollution leading to global warming — that is, costs to society not immediately felt by the individual user. Privately owned commuter vehicles that may drive two hours a day (round trip) will sit doing nothing useful for 92% of the day. During this state, the car takes up valuable real estate and doesn’t move people around. Single passenger occupancy also doesn’t help in this situation; if I stand on Memorial Drive in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I could wait up to 20 minutes before seeing a vehicle with two occupants. In that same city, approximately one-third of the land area is devoted to the servicing of automobiles (this includes roads and parking for cars) that are principally used by private individuals. This is not an atypical land-use percentage devoted to the automobile throughout the United States.

2020: Tomorrow’s automobiles will be increasingly utilized in cooperative or shared-use models. The emergence of car-sharing and bike-sharing schemes in urban areas in both the United States and Europe have established alternative models and markets for fractional or on-demand mobility. Zipcar, the world’s largest car-share program, has grown from just a handful of cars to a fleet of 6,000 cars and 275,000 drivers in 49 cities in just under 10 years. It’s very difficult to own one-quarter or one-tenth of a car with traditional ownership, and let’s not even talk about fractional insurance. Shared ownership provides users fractional ownership that allows them access to any vehicle in the fleet whenever they please and for as long as they need, just like video on demand or print on demand.

Radical Rethinking Required

Since 2003, the Smart Cities group at the MIT Media Lab has developed solutions to directly tackle these problems. We have designed an electric two-passenger vehicle called the CityCar, which utilizes in-wheel electric motors called Wheel Robots that have incorporated drive, suspension, and braking directly inside the wheel. Each wheel is independently controlled with by-wire controls (no mechanical linkages) and is capable of 120 degrees of steering, which provides very high maneuverability. The CityCar can turn on its own axis (zero turn radius) and can make sideways turns by turning the wheels perpendicular to the primary driving axis.

The Wheel Robots eliminate the need for traditional components like drivelines, transmissions, and gearboxes. We have taken advantage of this freedom by rethinking the architecture of the vehicle. Since there is no driveline, we can make the vehicle very compact by folding the chassis. The CityCar can fold up to half its length to just under the width of a traditional parking space. The CityCar, when folded, is less than 60 inches in length and 100 inches when unfolded (comparable to the Smart Car). Three CityCars when parked can fit into one traditional parking space. It weighs just 1,000 lb, thus making it very lightweight and energy efficient, and the new architecture allows us to rethink entry and exit. We have designed a front ingress solution that easily allows the driver and passenger to safely exit the vehicle onto the curb rather than the street. The folding mechanism complements this feature by articulating the seats so that the user can ergonomically and elegantly exit at an elevated position. CityCars are designed to park nose-in to the curb, which allows the users to use the sidewalk rather than the street. Finally, the in-wheel motors will provide plenty of low-end torque, thus making the CityCar fun to drive in urban areas.

Simply redesigning the vehicle is only one part of the solution. We have also created a new use model, called “Mobility on Demand”(MoD), which utilizes a fleet of lightweight electric vehicles (LEVs) that are distributed at electric charging stations throughout a metropolitan area. The LEVs are designed for shared use, which enable high utilization rates for the vehicles and the parking spaces they occupy. The use model mimics the bike sharing systems made popular in Europe, whereby users simply walk up to the closest charging station, swipe a credit card, pick up a vehicle, drive to the station closest to their destination, and drop off the vehicle.

Our group has designed our CityCar to fit into these MoD systems, thus creating a complementary network that can solve what transportation planners call the “First Mile Last Mile” problem of public transit — that is, how to bridge the distance between your real origin (i.e., your home) to the transit station and from the transit station to your real final destination (i.e., your workplace). Often these distances are too long to walk, thus encouraging private automobile use.

The expansion of MoD into a sustainable urban ecosystem can be achieved by introducing additional shared-use vehicle types like electric bicycles and scooters. (Smart Cities has also designed an electric folding scooter called the “RoboScooter” and an electric bike called the “GreenWheel.”) This will offer flexibility and convenience while allowing for asymmetric trips. For example, a user can drive a GreenWheel to the supermarket, then go home with a CityCar that can carry groceries.

We believe that MoD systems will work better than private automobiles in cities because you never have to worry about storing the vehicle. In many cases, a MoD charging station will be closer to your final destination than if you had to park in a private lot. A typical urban trip is short, however; much of the time spent is not actually driving, but rather walking to the vehicle and finding parking once you get there. A recent study by the Imperial College in London showed that, during congested hours, more than 40% of total gasoline use is by cars looking for a parking space!

In 2020, I expect the shift from private gasoline powered use to shared electric vehicles will be on its way. There are three primary factors that will accelerate this trend:

1. Economic and environmental pressure to transition away from petroleum fuels.

2. Technological innovations.

3. Political leadership to promote new regulations and policies for this type of innovation.

In 2010, China has become the world’s number-one automobile market, surpassing the United States. in the total number of cars purchased. The increased consumption of fossil fuels and the emissions of CO2 will be part and parcel of this economic development. This will all but guarantee increased demand for petroleum and set the stage for political responsiveness.

Luckily, most of the technologies required to make the CityCar real already exist today, such as highly efficient electric motors, computational horsepower, new battery technologies, wireless network communications, lightweight composite materials, advanced sensing, and GPS. The only thing that limits us is the inherent difficulty of breaking away from our preconceived notions and embracing this radical rethinking.

About the Author

Ryan Chin is PhD student at the MIT Media Lab in the Smart Cities research group. He has led and managed the design development of lightweight electric vehicles (LEVs), including the CityCar, RoboScooter, and GreenWheel electric bicycle. In 2007, Chin co-founded the MIT Smart Customization group, which is focused on improving the ability of companies to efficiently customize products and services across a diverse set of industries and customer groups. Web site: http://cities.media.mit.edu.

The author would like to acknowledge the collective effort of the Smart Cities team that developed the CityCar, RoboScooter, GreenWheel, and the Mobility-on-Demand System. He is particularly grateful for the guidance of Professor William J. Mitchell and team leaders William Lark Jr., Raul-David “Retro” Poblano, Michael Chia-Liang Lin, Andres Sevtsuk, Dimitris Papanikolaou, and Chih-Chao Chuang.

The Future Then and Now: Electronic Newspapers

When futurists were first outlining scenarios for electronic news delivery, they didn’t foresee the overwhelming demand for interactivity, nor the consequences of multitudes of competing information sources.

The Internet has so transformed our lives that we may forget how recently it came about. Interestingly, one of the industries it’s transformed most radically—journalism—was in the process of changing anyway.

“Futurists have long speculated that newspapers would someday be delivered electronically to people’s homes. In Britain, electronic newspapers are already a reality,” THE FUTURIST reported in “The Electronic Newspaper,” April 1978.

In that article, Kenneth Edwards, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Alabama, took FUTURIST readers on a tour of Britain’s Viewdata system, a scheme whereby information could be transmitted by teletext from a BBC editor’s office directly to viewers’ televisions at home.

While the technologies were being developed to provide online access to news, information, and other communication, another unexpected phenomenon was beginning to occur: a call from media consumers to participate in the process.

Nearly a decade after Edwards’s article, Mike Greenly wrote about his experience as one of the world’s first interactive electronic journalists (“Interactive Journalism and Computer Networking: Exploring a New Medium,” March-April 1987). In addition to covering the World Future Society’s 1986 conference electronically, Greenly also used computer conferencing to cover the Comdex computer trade show in Las Vegas and the Democratic and Republican National Conventions in 1984 (for which Greenly struggled to obtain press credentials).

As he hauled his portable computer to interview such luminaries as New York City Mayor Ed Koch for research on his book Chronicle: The Human Side of AIDS, Greenly sent reports back to a computer bulletin board on The Source (a predecessor of AOL). When he checked back in after a day’s reporting, he would find responses and queries from readers.

“I had a following to whom I offered my reports,” Greenly wrote. “Not just my own attempts at journalism, but interactive journalism, since people could write back to me and electronically converse with each other.”

We caught up with Greenly recently to get his thoughts on today’s—and tomorrow’s—media environment.

“Back when we—myself and scattered online buddies around the world—were exploring or inventing what ‘electronic journalism’ could be, the corporations who were hosting us didn’t seem to have a clue,” he recalls. “They kept pushing stock quotes, news feeds, and weather, but the pull we users felt to spend more time online came primarily from each other and from what we each had to share.”

Welcome to the first glimpse of Web 2.0!

“Today’s online world has surpassed, already, our expectations for it,” Greenly continues. “We knew that people-to-people sharing would only grow and flourish, and we demonstrated for ourselves the power of an on-the-spot ‘reporter’ being able to respond, live, to the queries of distant readers. But we didn’t envision, for example, the impact of broadband to enable the global sharing of YouTube videos of dancing cats or government oppression.

“As for tomorrow,” he adds, “I would personally strongly favor stricter regulation of publicly crediting content. If blog X lifts content from blog Y, for example, I think it must always be clear who generated the original content. That kind of accountability is clearly in the public interest, so that we always know the source of reports or ‘news’ we can trust versus lies disguised as fact.

“As usual, technology is outpacing regulation,” Greenly observes. “But the fast-growing critical mass of online readers and reporters (and the blur between them, since people can play both roles) will—I believe and I hope—lead to clearer legal guidelines that protect content providers, encourage them to keep providing, and enable all of us to use or avoid them, depending on what matters to us.”

Coincidentally, Greenly’s 1987 article appeared in the same issue in which THE FUTURIST described a technology enabling researchers to better communicate with each other—“ScholarNet: The Beginning of a World Academic Community” by Richard W. Slatta of North Carolina State University. We would later know this technology better as the Internet.

About the Author

Cynthia G. Wagner is managing editor of THE FUTURIST and editor of the World Future Society’s e-newsletter, Futurist Update. E-mail cwagner@wfs.org.

For more information, visit Mike Greenly at www.mikegreenly.com.

Tomorrow in Brief: July-August 2010

Solar Power at the Micro Scale

Tiny, sunlight-capturing cells could one day provide a nearly ubiquitous source of mobile power. Glitter-sized photovoltaic cells, developed at Sandia National Laboratories, would also lower the costs of solar arrays, as they could be mass-produced using common microelectronic and microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) techniques.

Glitter power could be applied on items with unusual shape, such as clothing or other textiles used for hiking, hunting, and military operations.

Source: Sandia National Laboratories, www.sandia.gov.

“Skinput”: Human Skin as Touchpad

Instead of scribbling someone’s phone number in your palm, you may soon be able to tap the number on your arm or some other part of your body.

A technology called “Skinput,” developed by Carnegie Mellon PhD candidate Chris Harrison and team, uses bio-acoustic sensors that can pick up the signature sounds of a finger tapping on specific locations on the skin. An armband device projects the keypad image on the user’s palm or forearm and picks up the acoustic signature of the finger taps.

Simple devices such as MP3 players could be used without the projected keypads, as users learn where to tap without looking — a true touch system.

Sources: Carnegie Mellon University, www.cmu.edu. Skinput, www.chrisharrison.net/projects/skinput.

Biodegradable Packaging

An eco-friendly alternative to petroleum-based food packaging could come from dairy farms.

Most foods are wrapped in multilayer films made of synthetic polymers, which has some consumers worried about the use of petroleum in manufacturing the film and disposing of the waste after it’s used.

Agricultural researchers believe dairy proteins such as casein and whey offer a viable alternative to petroleum.

Future research will address the ability of dairy-based packaging to provide adequate barriers to moisture.

Source: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service, www.ars.usda.gov.

Tattletale Pills

Doctors, caregivers, and clinical researchers may soon have an easy way to make sure patients are taking their medicines: The pills will tell on them.

Engineers at University of Florida have developed a digestible microchip and antenna that can be integrated into a standard medicine capsule; when it’s swallowed, it automatically sends an alert to the doctor or caregiver.

Improving compliance is important not just for patients using prescription drugs, but also for clinical drug research, since a participant’s failure to take the experimental drug will skew the test results.

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

Conquering Phobias Pharmaceutically

It may one day be possible to vaccinate yourself against irrational fears.

Researchers at the University of Hiroshima used classical conditioning to “teach” goldfish to become frightened by a flash of light; however, fish that first received injections of the anesthetic lidocaine into their cerebellums maintained steady heart rates, suggesting that they did not learn to fear the flash.

The effects of the lidocaine were temporary, but the researchers hope their work could one day help people overcome phobias. (And perhaps an alternative to injections could help those with a fear of needles.)

Source: “Effects of Local Anesthesia of the Cerebellum on Classical Fear Conditioning in Goldfish,” Masayuki Yoshida and Ruriko Hirano, Behavioral and Brain Functions, BioMed Central, www.behavioralandbrainfunctions.com.

What Quantum Computing Means for National Security

If cyberwarfare is the Cold War of the new millennium, quantum computation may be the hydrogen bomb.

Researchers with Google, D-Wave (a Canadian computer hardware company), and the U.S. government are looking to quantum physics to make vastly more-capable computers. They may also find the key to making certain networks, pages, or computers nearly invincible to cyberattacks, or render certain Internet security systems completely defenseless.

Quantum computation harnesses the unique behavior of subatomic particles — behaviors that don’t occur anywhere else in nature above this incredibly small scale. Scientists view quantum physics as distinct from regular physics for this reason. It’s also why subatomic particles can be made to compute information differently than their bulkier macro-scale counterparts.

Regular computers function through the use of transistors. An electric current running through the transistor activates a switch, turning the switch either on or off, thus giving it a value of either one or zero. Lots of activated switches create the binary computer codes of ones and zeros that compose all computer functioning. But quantum bits of information (qubits) can convey a value of one, zero, or both at once because certain subatomic particles can exist in more than one state (known as a superposition). If scientists can direct the powers of these in-between numbers, they can use them to solve mathematical problems, called quantum algorithms, which have long eluded solutions.

A quantum computing breakthrough could, in turn, enable governments to break otherwise impervious encryption codes such as the “public key” cryptographic systems that protect your e-mail and bank account. Cracking the public key could render such security measures worthless. The same trick could be reversed to create essentially unbreakable encryption codes.

One potentially vulnerable code is the public key system based on a supremely difficult math problem called Shor’s algorithm. Cryptography may sound like some obscure security concept of little relevance to civilians, but millions of people interact with public key codes every day.

For instance, thousands of U.S. banks rely on a type of public key system called RSA (named for Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman, its inventors) to provide users with private online account access. Web sites around the world use a public key system called the Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA) when they integrate Google code into their sites’ functioning, in order to keep areas of their site visible only to secure, approved users. Home WiFi networks employ various “public keys” to keep their networks closed to hackers (or neighbors who refuse to buy their own routers). As more sensitive data — possibly involving medical records or the electric grid — is brought online, the use of simple encryptions like RSA and DSA will likely increase, potentially spreading vulnerabilities across the system

“There is a national security interest in not being the second country to build a large quantum computer,” says Dave Bacon, a computer scientist at Washington University.

Recently, scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) unveiled what they called “the world’s most efficient single photon detector,” which is purportedly able to count individual particles of light traveling through fiberoptic cables with roughly 99% efficiency. The announcement could have ramifications for quantum computing efforts and for secure networking. A detector that could recognize if a photon forming part of a transmission were missing would be a substantial defense against information theft, say researchers.

According to the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), several research groups have built functioning multiple qubit processing systems in which two qubits were able to interact in a stable way.

Canadian company D-Wave is the industry pioneer in the building of these processors, having invested $44 million over the last five years. The biggest chips the company has feature 128 total qubits, according to D-Wave chief technical officer Geordie Rose. (Not all of qubits interact — or form an “entanglement gate” — on the chip, however.) Last December, the Google image recognition team led by Hartmut Neven demonstrated a search algorithm that could differentiate objects in thousands of still photographs. The demonstration was run on the D-Wave chip developed by Rose.

A number of technological hurdles remain before these chips can show their superiority to regular processors. Researchers will have to maintain and improve control over the chips’ quantum operations in more complex environments. Additional challenges will arise from trying to increase the density of the qubits used in the devices.

Rose says the net knowledge gain from quantum computing R&D is probably wider than we can imagine. “A universal quantum computer is the most powerful computer possible in our universe,” he told THE FUTURIST. “Anything better would quite literally violate the laws of physics.” — Patrick Tucker

Sources: Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity. www.iarpa.gov.

D-Wave, personal interviews with Dave Bacon, Geordie Rose. A detailed paper on the D-Wave processor may be obtained at: http://arxiv.org/abs/1004.1628.

Further reading: “Recent Progress in Quantum Algorithms” by Dave Bacom and Wim van Dam, Communications of the ACM.

What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

By Patrick Tucker

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr. Norton 2010. 264 pages. $26.95.

Nicholas Carr achieved notoriety after a July 2008 article in The Atlantic, in which he asked, “Is Google Making us Stoopid?” For all its wonders, all the convenience it creates for consumers and the money it makes for companies across the world, the Internet may actually be a diseducating force, gradually and invisibly rendering the surfing public incapable of reflective thought or sustained attention, argued Carr.

In posing this polemic, he set fire to a debate that still smolders. Web proponent Clay Shirky called Carr’s essay a “caricature of Luddism.” Best-selling author Steven Johnson, writing in the Chicago Tribune, derided it as “perfect fodder for a ‘don’t-be-ridiculous’ blog post.”

In his newest book, The Shallows, Carr responds to these criticisms and shows that neurological and cultural effects of heavy Internet use are becoming more observable and measurable. As our reliance on ever brighter and faster Internet content increases, a new force is taking hold across the culture of the Web-connected world, leading to changes in reading habits and even in human brains. The Internet trends of today foreshadow the surfing, the teaching, learning, and thinking of tomorrow. The picture of our intellectual future, rendered thoroughly, convincingly, and often beautifully in Carr’s text, is bleak enough to give any serious mind some serious pause. Studies show that constant exposure to high-speed Internet is making us quicker in our ability to make connections and more adept at finding what we’re looking for online using search engines. But we’re losing something of great value in the trade: the literary mind-set.

The Internet has many virtues and is perhaps as great an aid to research and conversation as Gutenberg’s printing press or the library of Alexandria; however, the effect that the Web has on the brain is rather distinct from that of books and more traditional literary activity. If sitting and reading a piece of static text for long periods of time feels “less natural” or “less intuitive” than zipping through the various pages, applications, and comments of a Web page, that’s because it is. The patience and focus required for sustained engagement with static text must be cultivated, a primary benefit of reading. Our most significant achievements as a species — the discovery of the scientific method, the recognition of universal human rights, and the exploration of space — would have been impossible without the rigorous, stubborn, disciplined, and unnatural literary mind-set; brains, in other words, capable of understanding and analyzing extremely complex narrative and dialogic arguments.

The traits of the informed intellect are essential to the furtherance of scholarship, particularly in difficult and abstract domains like science or philosophy, but the educated mind-set isn’t characteristic of the brain’s natural state. Like those of most of our cousins in the animal kingdom, the human neural and sensory network is biologically predisposed to quick attention shifts and unstructured rapid-fire responses to stimuli. In our wildest state, we’re wide-eyed, constantly searching our environment for threats to be avoided or opportunities to be exploited. We emerged upon the world naked, dirty, and easily distracted.

Book culture offered humanity some reprieve from this condition. But the Internet, in the speed and randomness with which it presents new information to the user, encourages a return to the feral mode of information gathering. Although the Web overflows with text, the bounty of links available in any article or post, the advertisements, the widgets, the blog displays increasingly crowding out the pages of even ostensible information sources, have the effect of pushing the brain away from the words on the screen as forcefully as they pull the user toward the most up-to-the-moment celebrity tweet.

“The need to evaluate links and make related navigational choices, while also processing a multiplicity of rapid sensory stimuli, requires mental coordination and decision making, distracting the brain from the work of interpreting text or other information,” says Carr. “The influx of competing messages that we receive whenever we go online not only overloads our working memory; it makes it much harder for our frontal lobes to concentrate our attention on any one thing. The process of memory consolidation can’t even get started. The more we use the Web, the more we train our brain to be distracted, to process information very quickly and very efficiently but without sustained attention.”

Herein lies an explanation for why so many of us feel challenged to concentrate even when we’re away from our computers. Use of the Web makes it harder for us to lock information into our biological memory. The type of reading that the Internet engenders does not inspire or support the cultivation of the literary mind-set. Indeed the effect of the Internet, Carr argues, is to unravel that mind-set where it exists, and prevent its formation where it is absent. It was, after all, unnatural to begin with. The effect of this trend can be clearly perceived: Every day, every hour that we submit to the furtherance of Internet culture, we are creating a new type of civilization. Its schools and offices shall be populated with individuals who lack the mental circuitry required to read beyond a few sentences. These are the students, teachers, entrepreneurs, and leaders of the future.

The postliterate being whom Carr conjures up is a subtle sort of monster. He grows more menacing the longer you stare at him. This creature processes visual signals and forms memories differently from his more book-reliant ancestors. He is incapable of reflection or contemplation and doesn’t care to remember much. He is limited in terms of his capacity for original thought, having spent his entire life tailoring his communications to meet the expectations of an ever-vigilant network of so-called peers. He communicates constantly but only in sparse bursts. He can think with great speed but cannot know anything with certainty. He cannot conceive of hard-won knowledge yet is isolated in his hastily reached convictions. He is quick in every decision. What is perhaps most frightening about the phantom of The Shallows, this ghost of our collective future self, is how much, and how quickly, we have come to resemble him already.

About the Reviewer

Patrick Tucker is the senior editor of THE FUTURIST magazine.

Books in Brief, May-June 2010

Edited by Rick Docksai

Life After Fossil Fuels

Blackout: Coal, Climate and the Last Energy Crisis by Richard Heinberg. New Society. 2009. 200 pages. Paperback. $18.95.

Momentum is growing to combat climate change, but the use of fossil fuels continues to rise, reports Post Carbon Institute scholar Richard A. Heinberg.

He warns that, in the next few decades, supplies of coal, oil, and natural gas will run low. Societies will have to expend more resources on extracting the remaining supplies, and quality of life will deteriorate. Over time, economic catastrophe and political anarchy may befall much of the industrialized world.

Only with proactive effort now to reduce energy consumption and limit further growth of cities and mass industry can we avert this future. More fundamentally, governments must measure economic growth in terms of human welfare and environmental stability rather than GDP.

These efforts require near-term sacrifices, while their payoff will not bear fruit until later in the future. Implementation thus defies conventional political thinking, which fixates on imminent risks and opportunities. As actual oil shortages and coal price increases become manifest, however, policy makers might rethink strategies they would not consider now.

Designing Isn’t Just For Designers

Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation by Tim Brown. HarperCollins. 2009. 260 pages. Paperback. $27.99.

Design executive Tim Brown attributes many of the boldest innovations in business today to “design thinking,” a radical product-development strategy that “pulls design out of the studio” and channels the creativity of everyone in a company or organization, from the CEO down to the entry-level employee.

Brown describes the design-thinking process and the principles that underlie it: shifting thinking from “problem” to “project”; working in small teams, rather than large groups; supplementing incremental innovation with evolutionary innovation that extends beyond a company’s traditional base and takes it in new directions; people from different disciplines joining forces; creating stories to share ideas; and empathizing with real people, so as to create products and services that will improve their lives.

The Palm Pilot, the Wii, and Netflix all were born of design thinking, according to Brown. It’s catching on in hospitals, universities, NGOs, and businesses of every industry. He is hopeful that, as design thinking continues to spread, it will help industries and organizations of all kinds to resolve a much wider range of problems than they had ever thought possible.

Change By Design offers inspirational reading for entrepreneurs and designers in many fields of industry.

The Nature of the Cosmos

Cosmic Conversations: Dialogues on the Nature of the Universe and the Search for Reality by Stephan Martin. New Page Books. 2010. 287 pages. Paperback. $16.99.

We humans have been trying to understand the cosmos since prehistory and will keep inquiring well into the future, according to astronomer Stephan Martin. He presents interviews with 20 thinkers, each of whom speaks about the cosmos, but from a spiritual rather than a scientific or materialistic standpoint.

• Brian Swimme, California Institute of Integral Studies cosmologist, finds deep truths about the cosmos within the languages of the Hopi, Navajo, and other indigenous peoples. English, he says, is embedded with Newtonian perceptions of reality. Researchers now know that the universe does not conform to Newton. English does not have the words to describe it, but many indigenous peoples’ languages do.

• Futurist Barbara Marx Hubbard, president of the Foundation for Conscious Evolution, notes that the universe has been evolving since its inception. She adds that the evolution may be accelerating, and that we are active participants: We can either self-destruct or ascend and become a universal species.

• Media activist Duane Elgin speculates that the universe is regenerating and recreating itself anew at astonishingly rapid speeds. Our purpose, he says, is to keep evolving with it by growing progressively in self-knowledge.

Other interviewees include astronaut Edgar Mitchell; Peter Russell, author of The Global Brain; and the Rev. Michael Dowd, author of Thank God for Evolution: How the Marriage of Science and Religion Will Transform Your Life and Our World.

In Cosmic Conversations, scholars of any field might find material relevant to their concerns.

Trading Freedom for Economic Security

The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations? by Ian Bremmer. Portfolio. 2010. 221 pages. $26.95.

The free-market economic system of Europe and North America could be undone by a new rival, called state capitalism, warns political consultant Ian Bremmer.

State capitalism is the economic system of China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and many other politically authoritarian countries. In each, the government owns various companies and uses the markets to create wealth that it can direct as it deems best-suited for maximizing the state’s power and the leadership’s chances of survival.

Bremmer tracks the rise of state capitalism out of the ruins of the Soviet command economy and its present-day potential to unseat free markets and take control of the global financial system. The 2008 recession has emboldened state capitalism’s proponents, since they can claim a degree of stability that the U.S. economy lacks. Free markets might withstand the challenge, but only if they successfully reform themselves to guard against future meltdowns and crises.

Readers will find in The End of the Free Market a thought-provoking critique of the existing economic system and its future.

Low-Cost, Low-Risk Space Flight

Lightcraft Flight Handbook LTI-20 by Leik Myrabo and John S. Lewis. Apogee. 2009. 284 pages. Paperback. $29.95.

Jet airplanes and rocket-propelled spacecraft are profligate fossil-fuel burners and carbon-dioxide emitters, according to aerospace engineer Leik Myrabo and planetary-sciences professor John S. Lewis. They look forward to the debut — possibly by 2025 — of carbon-free “lightcraft.”

These up-and-comers, the authors explain, wouldn’t use rocket boosters or combustion engines. Instead, they would run on electromagnetic waves beamed to them from remote satellite power stations.

The lightcraft will not only be cleaner, but also immensely cheaper. Average consumers might finally be able to afford to travel to space. National and international space programs could ferry personnel and supplies continuously to bases on the Moon or to space stations in near-Earth orbit.

Non-space flight will be easier, too, the authors explain. These lightcraft will be fast enough to fly passengers from one hemisphere to another in under an hour.

Myrabo and Lewis describe the state of lightcraft technology and detail how, with further development, it could evolve into the components of lightcraft spaceplanes.

Engineers and astronomers will enjoy this book, as will many nonscientist readers — provided that they are so excited by the prospect of cheap space flight that they are not daunted by many pages of technical jargon.

Charting the Pathways of Disaster

Mega Disasters: The Science of Predicting the Next Catastrophe by Florin Diacu. Princeton University Press. 2010. 195 pages. $24.95.

It is possible to mathematically predict the directions in which stars, planets, and other objects in space will travel, but can we also predict how things will unfold on Earth? Yes, in many cases, argues mathematician Florin Diacu.

Real-life systems are often unpredictable and hard to calculate, he notes. We can, however, recognize many dangers before they happen and avert them if we watch for the common warning signs. He cites examples of tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes, stock market crashes, and other particularly consequential phenomena.

Mega Disasters offers a highly readable cross-disciplinary perspective on tsunamis, pandemics, climate change, and financial collapses.

Connecting Wildlife, Habitats, and People

Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution by Caroline Fraser. Metropolitan. 2009. 400 pages. $28.50.

In just one century, we could undo hundreds of millions of years of natural evolutionary processes, according to ecologist Caroline Fraser. She warns that the loss of ecosystems to growing human populations and rampant development could wipe out half the world’s animal and plant species by 2100.

Rewilding might stop this massive extinction before it happens, she argues. Rewilding consists of preserving and expanding key habitat areas; linking them with “corridors,” or intersecting patches of land; then mobilizing local people to participate in caring for these ecosystems.

Conservationists now agree that rescuing isolated patches of earth is not enough. It is also necessary to save the greater system of which individual lands are just parcels.

Fraser shares examples of successful rewilding in North America, South America, Europe, and Africa. She sees a bright future ahead for it. The establishment and maintenance of corridors and reserves is an engine of job creation. Plus, these projects might mitigate climate change by stabilizing forests and sequestering carbon dioxide.

A Renewable-Energy Vision

Turning Oil into Salt: Energy Independence Through Fuel Choice by Gal Luft and Anne Korin. Booksurge. 2009. 138 pages. Paperback. $14.99.

Current oil-consumption rates will require four new Saudi Arabias before the century is finished, according to the co-directors of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security in Potomac, Maryland.

Gal Luft and Anne Korin, in their new book Turning Oil into Salt, rate the odds of finding such bonanzas as virtually nonexistent. Instead, they hope that societies will embrace electric-powered transportation.

Supply issues aside, the switch to electric would advance global democracy, according to the authors. Oil dependence forced the United States to forge alliances with brutal dictatorships and support them while they oppressed their peoples. An oil-free United States could press these dictatorships to reform.

But energy independence will not happen, the authors conclude, until car designers develop electric cars with wide ranges and affordable batteries. The authors offer reasons for hope, such as promising outcomes from tests of several new batteries, potential for methanol and algae-based biofuels to provide cheap power, and the possibility of a scaled transition via plug-in hybrid electric vehicles.

Turning Oil into Salt provides a balanced overview of where electric car technology stands now and where it might head. This is a worthwhile book for car enthusiasts, environmentalists, policy makers, and anyone who looks forward to a post-fossil-fuel world.

Are Humans Headed for Extinction?

The Vanishing of a Species? A Look at Modern Man’s Predicament by a Geologist by Peter Gretener. Qualitas. 2010. 280 pages. $19.95.

In the 1970s, geologist Peter Gretener believed strongly that the human race would go extinct if it did not dramatically readjust its ways of living. He wrote a manuscript explaining why, but he died before he could publish it.

In 2009, his son, Nick Gretener, discovered the manuscript and found that “much of what had been put down some 30 years ago rings as true today as when it was written, perhaps even more so given the current economic turmoil.”

Nick Gretener had the text published as The Vanishing of a Species. His father’s words — untouched except for obligatory proofreading corrections and occasional editorial notes — implore the human race to reassess its actual needs and scale back its expectations accordingly. The author cautions that permanent economic growth is impossible, that pursuit of happiness via material gain guarantees disappointment, and that the planet will not support our continued trajectory of population expansion. True prosperity necessitates that we flourish within our planet’s ecological limits.

The Vanishing of a Species is a valuable look both backwards and forwards — the challenges the world faced in the twentieth century, and the challenges it still faces today. Historians and futurists both may find much to like.

Connecting the Dots

ReThink: A Twenty-First Century Approach to Preventing Social Catastrophes by Donald Louria. LouWat. 2010. 200 pages. $24.95.

The world’s problems will be much more manageable if we look at them all at once, says health scholar Donald Louria. In systems thinking, every issue and challenge in the world is viewed as part of an integrated whole. Only by observing the whole, he argues, can we adequately judge the individual parts.

Louria’s own brand of systems thinking diagrams a system’s parts and their relationships. He applies this diagram to a range of contemporary problems. Among them are:

• The case for and against public-health recommendations to consumers to eat more omega-3 rich fish.

• The potential for the United States and other countries to deploy military hardware in space.

• The pros and cons of universal screening for health conditions.

Many approaches for systems thinking and complexity science exist, he says, but they tend to require years of study. Louria touts his method as one that anyone can use: With a semester of instruction, high-school students could become regular systems thinkers.

Louria is a scholar who is writing about futurist theory. But like the method itself, ReThink is approachable for a well-educated reader.

China First

By Patrick Tucker

China's Megatrends: The 8 Pillars of a New Society by John and Doris Naisbitt. Harper Business. 242 pages. $27.

Oh, to be China in 2010, object of the world’s envy, admiration, and fear. Since the economic reforms of the late premier Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s, the country has gone from a relatively isolated authoritarian state into a shining triumph of socialist-market economics. At present rates of growth, it will be the world’s largest economy by the middle of this century, overtaking the United States and achieving a GDP above $14 trillion per year — a significant first.

The question of how China became so successful, and what its leadership might do next, is a source of speculation and consternation, particularly in Washington, D.C. In China’s Megatrends: The 8 Pillars of a New Society, John and Doris Naisbitt dissect China’s achievement and provide what they call a “balance” to the “heavily weighted negative commentary” about China in the U.S. media.

Why has China grown so much so quickly? The Naisbitts present an exhaustive list of success stories, but their most novel insight comes from the retelling of a third-century Chinese legend. General Zhuge Liang sat on the banks of the Yangtze River facing the enemy army of Cao Cao on the other side. Rather than attack directly, Zhuge sent over various boats packed with straw. Cao Cao’s archers, perceiving an attack, sent a hail of arrows down onto the boats, whereupon Zhuge retrieved the vessels — and stole his enemy’s ammunition.

Deng employed the same “borrowing arrows” strategy when he invited foreign capital and industry into the country, starting with Volkswagen in 1978. Other large Western firms followed, including Boeing and IBM. The arrangement provided abundant cheap labor for U.S. companies. China secured capital and, more importantly, technological expertise — arrows that the West valued cheaply, it turns out. In 2005 Lenovo, which did subcontracting work for IBM under a different name, became the world’s third-largest computer manufacturer when it acquired IBM’s PC division. The Naisbitts forecast that China will eventually become the world’s largest supplier of electric cars, thanks in part to lessons learned building automobile parts for foreign companies.

In the century ahead, China will be first to reach a number of milestones as it seeks to leverage its growing technological sophistication to meet the needs of its one-billion-plus population. Faced with the challenge of educating an impoverished rural workforce, but free from the influence of teachers’ unions, China may be the first country to succeed in educating most of its population through the Internet. From 2003 to 2007, China spent about $1 billion to implement distance-learning projects in the rural countryside.

China’s leaders have invested heavily in the nation’s technological infrastructure through the establishment of various research and development centers such as the Zhangjiang High-Tech Park or the ZHTP (the park’s researchers received 2,205 patents in 2007 alone). It’s no wonder AI researcher Hugo de Garis, who has lived in China for years, has expressed certainty that China will be the first country to create an artificial general intelligence. The children of the researchers who work at ZHTP can elect to take SAT prep classes at the expense of the government (to secure placement in U.S. universities) or they can go along the Chinese track to continue their education in China. It’s a great education by American standards. It’s hardly typical of what most children in China experience.

How does China reconcile an explosion in private wealth with the tenets of communism? Easily, say the Naisbitts. Prosperity for all remains the Chinese government’s goal. But, in the words of Deng himself, China has “allowed some people and some regions to become prosperous first.” Trickle-down economics is apparently just another arrow to be employed expeditiously. The Chinese people don’t find the apparent contradiction nearly as troubling as do China’s critics.

Western concerns about the state of human rights behind the Great Wall aren’t shared by the Chinese people, according to the Naisbitts, and the authors are dismissive of Tibetan or Taiwanese sympathizers. From the 1970s to today, the human rights condition in China has been steadily, even remarkably, improving, the authors point out. Minority rights, worker rights, distribution of wealth, open elections, freedom of capital, freedom of speech, and rule of law: China is making “progress” in every one of these areas. But the Chinese people are happy to allow the government to determine the pace of that progress, rather than suffer the lectures of the West, they assert.

Too many in the West hold to a single, self-flattering image of China as an oppressed people in need of rescue, say the Naisbitts. This picture, born of that iconic moment in Tiananmen Square where an unarmed protester confronted a tank, isn’t representative of how the Chinese view themselves or their government today. China’s continued growth depends on access to U.S. consumer markets and technological expertise, for now. But the Chinese people do not see themselves as needing liberation by Washington. They perceive their future as bright. According to a China Daily poll that the authors cite, 76% of Chinese believe the world will be better in five years. Is China Daily a credible source? Don’t worry, journalistic independence is “improving,” too.

Unfortunately, in their pursuit of balance, the Naisbitts did not, it seems, include any personal interviews with any Chinese dissidents. If they sought any such interactions but were blocked by Chinese censors, they don’t remark on it. China’s Megatrends will likely strike American readers as adulatory in the tone it takes to the country’s leadership. For all of its merits, the book too often reads like a marketing pitch from the office of the Communist Party of China, intended to extol the country’s success and show the government’s sensitivity to the concerns of the people (note: the level of sensitivity is also improving).

China’s ascent is butting up against major obstacles. But the Naisbitts devote barely a sentence to the lack of transparency in Chinese financial institutions; to wit: “China’s banking system is more or less a monopoly. State-owned banks give loans to large [state-owned enterprises] that are operating at a loss; thus large amounts of nonperforming loans have accumulated.” You may recall, it was large, nonperforming loans sitting on bank balance sheets that nearly plunged the world into a second global depression just two years ago. The Naisbitts don’t explore the size of the Chinese finance bubble and don’t speculate when, if ever, it will pop.

The deteriorating freshwater situation is the larger problem, and the Naisbitts do pay more attention here. China hosts 20% of the world’s population, but the country holds only 7% of its resources. As covered in this magazine, the most water-intensive and highly polluting industries — paper, textiles, processed food production, and agriculture — have migrated to China’s relatively arid north, from which the more economically significant southern portion imports most of its food. The authors forecast that “water shortages in Beijing will become a crisis when its population, as expected, reaches 20 million in 2010, 3 million more than its current resources can support.” The Naisbitts offer examples of China attempting to deal proactively with the water situation. But it remains a daunting problem and an example of the most important first China is likely to achieve: limits to growth.

The obstacles are significant, but China seems poised to handle them dexterously. The country has made a habit of defying expectations. It’s done so for centuries. In 607 CE, the insolent Japanese prince Shotoku referred to the aging empire to Japan’s west as the “land of the setting sun.” China recently eclipsed Germany’s status as the third largest country in terms of GDP and will likely surpass Japan by the end of 2010. It seems the sun also rises.

About the Reviewer

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

Film’s Immortals: Forever Young and in 3-D

By Cynthia G. Wagner
The technical achievements of filmmakers like James Cameron, director of Avatar, suggest that futurists’ predictions are close to coming true.

More than 20 years ago, THE FUTURIST wrote of the possibility of bringing Humphrey Bogart (and other movie stars) back to cinematic life.

The item, “Bogey’s High-Tech Comeback” (Tomorrow in Brief, March-April 1987), focused on combining computer animation with accelerated image processing. Theoretically, every move that Bogart ever made in the movies, and every syllable he uttered, could be stored and reprocessed into new moves and new dialogue in future movies.

That future is very nearly now.

In a recent Entertainment Weekly story about the technical achievements in Avatar, James Cameron’s blockbuster 3-D movie, columnist Benjamin Svetkey commented that the photorealistic CGI (computer-generated imaging) technology “could easily be used for other, even more mind-blowing purposes — like, say, bringing Humphrey Bogart back to life.”

So why is that future not now, but only “nearly” now? Ethics, according to Cameron. While the motion-capture and CGI technology that enabled Cameron to transform live actors like Sigourney Weaver into characters far younger (and weirder), his technology would still require a live actor to recreate Bogart’s movements. And since Bogart apparently did not leave permission for the use of his likeness in this way, Cameron suggests that it would be unethical to bring the dead back to life.

The future that Cameron has given us with Avatar is that of the virtual actor (vactor), described in the May-June 1993 FUTURIST in a story about the VActor Animation Creation System developed by SimGraphics Engineering.

And of course there’s that other future we’ve been waiting for — a really awesome 3-D movie. Now that high-definition television networks like ESPN and Discovery are launching dedicated 3-D channels, we can say that the 3-D TV “future,” too, is finally “now.”

About the Author

Cynthia G. Wagner has been an editor for THE FUTURIST since 1981.

Future Scope, May-June 2010

TECHNOLOGY

Electric Cars That Charge Themselves

Materials scientists may have come up with the ultimate solution for keeping cars running: automobile body parts that store and discharge electrical energy.

The prototype material designed by researchers with Imperial College London, Volvo, and other partners is a lightweight composite of carbon fibers and a polymer resin, which could be used to replace metal flooring. Ultimately, the material could make hybrid gasoline/electric vehicles lighter and more energy efficient, allowing motorists to travel longer distances between recharges.

The material could also be used in a number of other applications, such as casings for cell phones and other electronic gadgets used on the go.

Source: Imperial College London, www.imperial.ac.uk.

HEALTH

Children with HIV Are Living Longer

Fewer children are dying of AIDS, thanks to the intensive antiretroviral treatments that have been prescribed since the 1990s, according to the National Institutes of Health. The death rate of children with HIV has been reduced ninefold, although mortality among children with HIV is still 30 times higher than among their noninfected peers.

The “cocktails” of multiple drugs used for highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) help ward off the opportunistic infections and other complications in HIV-infected patients. The death rate among HIV patients under age 21 has fallen from 7.2 per 100 in 1994 to a now-stabilized 0.8 in 2000, and the mean age at death has more than doubled, from 8.9 to 18.2 years old.

Source: National Institutes of Health, www.nih.gov.

ENVIRONMENT

Second-Hand Pollution

Recycling old equipment in developed countries for reuse in the developing world could be bad for the environment in the receiving countries, warns a research team from the University of Luxembourg and the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris.

Access to affordable tools and equipment has helped stimulate economic growth in the Third World, but these older technologies tend to be more polluting than newer, more-efficient manufacturing equipment. Thus, the short-term choice of purchasing equipment that is cheaper but dirtier may have long-term costs in increased pollution.

“Pressures put on developing countries in order to reduce their barriers to imports of used goods should thus be balanced against the costs of supplementary pollution that the use of older technology will induce,” the researchers conclude.

Source: “Polluting Technologies and Economic Development” by Luisito Bertinelli et al., International Journal of Global Environmental Issues 2010 (Volume 10, Number 1/2), Inderscience, www.inderscience.com.

GOVERNMENT

Alternatives to Prison

The United States could save $9.7 billion by exploring alternatives to imprisonment for low-level offenses, claims the National Council on Crime and Delinquency.

In 2008, about 414,000 Americans were serving time for nonviolent, nonsexual crimes that do not involve significant property loss. Most would be eligible for alternative sanctions that would be less costly than incarceration, such as electronic monitoring or enrollment in drug treatment or work-release programs.

Such programs have proven effective in states where they have been implemented, according to the Council. The United States currently spends about $12.9 billion to incarcerate individuals convicted of these less-dangerous crimes.

Source: National Council on Crime and Delinquency, http://nccd-crc.org.

RESOURCES

Making Food Plants Climate-Proof

Agricultural scientists believe they have isolated the “thermometer” gene in plants that allows them to sense and adapt to temperature changes. The work could one day lead to crops that are impervious to climate change.

Researchers Vinod Kumar and Phil Wigge of the John Innes Centre in Norwich, U.K., discovered a mutant plant that seemed to grow as though it were in hot conditions, despite the temperature being turned down.

The defective gene gives the scientists a clue in plant growth switching mechanisms, which may permit them to create crops that could grow in any climate condition. Such a possibility would be a boon to places like Africa, where food production is predicted to decline dramatically over the next decade.

Source: John Innes Centre, www.jic.ac.uk.

Homosexuality and Family Formation

For the first time in its history, the U.S. Census Bureau will count gay marriages in its 2010 surveys. By collecting and releasing data on same-sex partners, both married and unmarried, and on the numbers of children being raised in these households, the new census will enable researchers and policy makers to do more than extrapolate from existing data.

In previous rounds of census taking, the Bureau has classified married households as only consisting of opposite-sex couples, while unmarried households could consist of either opposite-sex or same-sex couples. Gay or lesbian partners, on the other hand, were either classified as unmarried, even if they declared themselves to be spouses, or erroneously recorded as opposite-sex spouses.

The Bureau has attempted to hypothetically correct its existing data using models such as those that reassigned respondents’ gender based on their first names. The results increased the number of same-sex unmarried partners in the United States in 2000 from 0.6 million to an estimate ranging from 1.1 million to 1.6 million. This model does not correct the data on marital status of same-sex partners, however.

Without official, longitudinal data, it is difficult to track trends in gay/lesbian family formation or to quantify the impacts on children of these household types and of the policies affecting them. As states and voters increasingly weigh the pros and cons of gay marriage and other issues, these data will provide vital (and presumably politically neutral) information.

Heterosexual and homosexual-headed families stand to learn more of both their differences and their similarities in terms of life experiences and challenges in raising children.

Parenting by Homosexuals

Parenting may be as strong an urge in homosexual individuals as it is among heterosexuals, despite what may be counterintuitive from an evolutionary point of view. In a recent study of Samoa’s fa’afafine (a unique gender classification for gay men), Canadian evolutionary psychologists Paul Vasey and Doug VanderLaan found a strong willingness for caretaking and teaching of nieces and nephews, offering the uncles a boost for their family lineage and a way to “earn their evolutionary keep.”

The Western world has not been as supportive of gay males as nurturers as has the more-isolated and communitarian Samoa, but the urge to raise children appears to be especially strong among gay men in the United States. According to a 2007 study of adoption trends by the UCLA School of Law and the Urban Institute, more than 50% of gay men said they desired to be a parent, compared with 41% of lesbians surveyed. Yet, more than a third of lesbians had given birth, while just one in six gay men had fathered or adopted a child.

The study further noted that there may be significant social and economic costs of banning adoption or foster care by lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT) parents. Same-sex couples and homosexual singles applying for adoption tend to be older, better educated, and have more economic resources than their heterosexual counterparts. The national cost of excluding this group of motivated and resourceful parents from foster care in the United States was estimated at $87 to $130 million.

Gay men who do become fathers may require more social services, suggests a recent study of fatherhood in the Netherlands. Though same-sex marriage has been approved since 2001 in the Netherlands (the first country to allow it), parenting by LGBT people is less widely accepted. Gay fathers must often share custody with biological mothers, so they typically spend far less time with their children — and have fewer of them — than heterosexual fathers. They also report experiencing more pressure to justify their choice to become fathers, though they are more likely to state that happiness was their motivation than are heterosexual dads.

“Many people can understand a lesbian’s desire to have a baby because they appreciate the idea of maternal instinct,” says University of Iowa anthropologist Ellen Lewin, author of Gay Fatherhood (University of Chicago Press, 2010). “They’re much more suspicious about why gay men would want to be dads, and therefore gay men have to jump through a lot more hoops to be parents.”

As with the Dutch dads, gay fathers in the United States indicate that the desire to have children is part of finding happiness or satisfaction in life, particularly as they mature, Lewin notes. Another motive is to pass on their own values and traditions, just as heterosexual parents do.

“I interviewed several guys who adopted kids with disabilities or other challenges and basically gave their lives up for their children,” says Lewin. “But most weren’t out to be heroes or do something revolutionary by becoming gay fathers. Most were ordinary people who live in suburbs, go to Disney World for their vacations, and just want to have children like anyone else.”

A side effect of parenthood may be the repair or strengthening of relationships with LGBT parents’ own parents, according to Lewin: “I heard stories about gay men who were estranged from their families, but once they had a kid, the grandparents came over all the time. Their relatives may not have understood or supported them in the past, but having kids was something their family got and related to.”

In the United States, gay dads may face another source of criticism — members of the gay community who view parenthood as conformity, according to Lewin. But LGBT parents’ activism may simply have evolved along with their family-oriented lifestyles, as witnessed by such groups as the Family Equality Council and Our Families Count, a campaign partnering with the Census Bureau to ensure that LGBT families are aware of the new Bureau policies and of the importance of being counted.

— Cynthia G. Wagner

Sources: United States Census 2010 Activities Update (December 2009); “Editing Unmarried Couples in Census Bureau Data,” Housing and Household Economic Statistics Division Working Paper (July 2007), Bureau of the Census, www.census.gov.

“An Adaptive Cognitive Dissociation Between Willingness to Help Kin and Nonkin in Samoan Fa’afafine,” Paul Vasey and Doug VanderLaan, Psychological Science (February 4, 2010), www.psychologicalscience.org.

LGBTQ Families, Research Article Summaries, Family Equality Council, www.familyequality.org.

Gay Fatherhood by Ellen Lewin (University of Chicago Press); University of Iowa News Service, www.uiowa.edu.

Nanowires Will Make Computers Smarter

How much more powerful can computers get? Much more than we thought, argue American and British engineers. They cite the recent development of nanowire transistors and transistor-simulation tools.

“As a society, we have come to expect the continuation of Moore’s law,” says Eric Stach, associate professor of materials engineering at Purdue University. Moore’s law is the 1965 assertion by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that the number of transistors that could fit on one integrated circuit would double every two years, and so computers would continue to expand their processing capacity while the price of computer processing would decrease.

Most engineers today doubt that the law can hold true forever, since the silicon-based semiconductors that constitute transistors can only get so small. Stach expects that transistors will reach their limits in the next five to 10 years.

But something else will also take place in five to 10 years, he adds: commercial use of nanowire tranistors.

Stach and other Purdue researchers are working with engineers from IBM and UCLA to develop these new transistors, which are made with silicon and germanium nanowires. The silicon nanowires stand vertically, not horizontally like traditional transistor components, so many more nanowire transistors can fit on one circuit.

The new transistors are also more powerful. The elements that compose them sharply delineate at the atomic level — one solid layer of germanium atop one solid layer of silicon. This is more conducive to effective transistor performance than conventional transistors, whose layers gradually transition from one element to the next. These special features enable them to bypass traditional transistors’ size limitations, Stach explains.

“These structures are being investigated to continue Moore’s law,” he says. Where it might lead is anybody’s guess.

“What will people do with enhanced computation power? Lots!” says Stach.

Existing transistors are already pretty small. Some are no more than a few molecules in size, according to Asen Asenov, University of Glasgow professor of device modeling.

Even smaller ones are possible, he explains, but certain technical problems need to be overcome. One major obstacle to making smaller transistors is that, the smaller they get, the more affected they are by atomic-scale imperfections and variations within the transistor, and thus the more likely the entire microchip will fail to perform as well as it could. To keep shrinking the transistors and improving performance, it is necessary to account for the variability.

Asenov and his Glasgow colleagues have found a way to do so. Working with scientists at Edinburgh, Manchester, Southampton, and York universities, they have devised “simulation tools” that predict how billions of microscopically different transistors will perform if placed together on a computer chip.

These simulation tools will help researchers place nanotransistors in the most optimal arrangements possible. Smaller transistors and more powerful microchips can result.

Moore’s law will reach its end point somewhere, according to Asenov, because no transistor — not even a nanowire one — can be smaller than an atom.

“Because we are hitting the atomic limits, Moore’s law cannot continue forever,” says Asenov. Nevertheless, vast improvements in microchip design and function are still possible. “The end of scaling is not the end of the microchip improvements,” he says.

— Rick Docksai

Sources: Eric Stach, Purdue University, www.purdue.edu.

Asen Asenov, University of Glasgow, www.gla.ac.uk.

Prospects for Truth and Freedom

What would life be like if globalization were to reach its full potential? What about if it fell short or suddenly reversed course?

In his new book, The Future of Truth and Freedom in the Global Village (Praeger, 2010), North Central College religious studies professor Thomas McFaul envisions three different paths that the future might take.

Scenario 1: Fragmentation and Fundamentalism

In the worst-case scenario, globalizing technology produces too much change too quickly, and the frightened masses retreat to the perceived safety, social stability, and unity of their own separate enclaves. People from different religious, ethnic, national, and tribal affiliations voluntarily segregate themselves from each other.

Their cultural traditions, religious worldviews, values, and boundaries bring them respite from encroaching foreign mind-sets. However, the respite is short-lived, due to growing hostility and intolerance between groups with different belief systems. Multiculturalist viewpoints take a backseat to xenophobia. Fundamentalist ideas gain prominence and lead to a rise in terrorist attacks. The first half of the twenty-first century would be characterized by less separation between church and state — and less religious freedom in many countries. If this were to happen, then the democratic growth trend would reverse itself, giving rise to new authoritarian regimes.

Economically, the opposite sides of the spectrum would pose the biggest problems, in McFaul’s view: Greater market deregulation would widen the gap between haves and have-nots and inflict serious structural damage on the middle class (“the foundation for social stability”). On the other hand, excessive regulation, taxation, and nationalization of industry would cause entire economies to stagnate.

All of the above would negatively affect the rate of technological progress.

Outcome for freedom and democracy: “By 2050, the two-centuries-old trend towards democracy also started backing up, as the number of authoritarian and semi-authoritarian regimes expanded around the planet.”

Scenario 2: Diversity and Harmony

Just because different cultures don’t interact doesn’t mean that they can’t all get along. In McFaul’s second scenario, social integration slows to a crawl at every level, from local to global. As different groups work to preserve their unique cultural identities, they nonetheless peacefully coexist, at least for the most part.

In this scenario, terrorism still poses a strong threat, despite a concerted global effort to eradicate it. Worldwide, democratization slowly grinds to a halt.

Centralized governments (such as China) prove as economically successful as decentralized democracies (such as India).

Under this set of circumstances, technological breakthroughs in fields from transportation to health care would continue to be made.

Outcome for freedom and democracy: By mid-century, democratization has stagnated, providing reassurance to those who feared secularization and the loss of their sacred beliefs — and frustration to those who did not.

Scenario 3: Global Cultural Integration

In the best of all possible worlds, terrorism has been almost completely eliminated — along with most worldview differences. A world “melting pot” culture has emerged, so-called universal values have been embraced, and democracy has spread to many countries, notably China.

Economically, nations everywhere have managed to achieve governments that provide “for the social well-being of all citizens without undermining the entrepreneurial motivations necessary to sustain a modern marketplace economy.” Advances in science and technology continue, and breakthroughs in the biosciences eradicate many diseases.

As for global finance, McFaul writes, “While there is no guarantee, the most probable and preferred economic trend of the future to the year 2050 will involve the spread of the regulated marketplace under the direction of democratically derived governments.”

Outcome for freedom and democracy: “Nations with diverse governments that ranged from multiparty to single-party systems found the balance they needed in order to achieve both political stability and economic growth. … The promises of the Modern world were slowly being realized throughout the global village — even if some communities were marching forward faster than others.”

So, what will the future bring? Of these scenarios, McFaul believes that the first — and most dystopian — scenario is the least likely, since it would necessitate a sudden and complete reversal of key long-term trends. The third — and most utopian — scenario is the most likely, given the long-term indicators.

— Aaron M. Cohen

Source: The Future of Truth and Freedom in the Global Village by Thomas R. McFaul. Praeger, www.abc-clio.com. 2010. 190 pages. $44.95.

Teaching Social Skills

Strengthening Kids’ Social and Emotional Skills, an interview with Clark McKown

THE FUTURIST: You recently identified three key factors in a child’s behavior that could cause him or her to suffer social rejection: inability to pick up on nonverbal cues and social cues in social interaction; inability to recognize cues’ meanings and respond appropriately; and inability to reason about social problems. The first two are pretty self-explanatory. But what, exactly, is the third?

Clark McKown: When we talk about reasoning we're talking about problem solving, real world social dilemmas. For example, if two kids want to play with the same toy, they can’t both play with the same toy. That’s a problem. They’ve got to recognize what the problem is that they want to solve, they’ve got to figure out what they want to get out of the situation, and they have to figure out what they’re going to do to resolve the issue, and then. Then they have to do it. It's really a series of problem-solving steps.

The Futurist: How would a greater awareness of these three factors change the discussion on socially rejected youth and how to help them?

Clark McKown: Identifying these factors would help develop screening tests and treatment plans for social-emotional learning difficulties.

The Futurist: Of the three factors identified, two of them—inability to pick up on nonverbal cues and inability to recognize cues’ meanings—are commonly recognized symptoms of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. To what extent does recognizing these three cues early help educators also identify learning disabilities early on?

Clark McGowen: I'm glad you asked that because of two things. One, I'm not sure that kids with ADHD do have deficits in the ability to read nonverbal cues and meanings. We’ve been doing tests of kids with ADHD and autism. The evidence is that a lot of kids with ADHD actually read people pretty well and know what they should do. But they act before they think things through, and so they are they're not able to take advantage of the social smarts that they have. They don’t need to be taught social thinking. They need to be taught to slow down. There's another piece that’s important for social success. That’s social regulation, the ability to refrain from impulsive behavior. Kids who are able to regulate their behavior--slow down, not speak up--end up being at a social advantage.

The Futurist: Many schools currently have staff counselors who work with children who exhibit behavioral problems. Roughly how many of these school counselors know about, and look for, the three factors that you identified?

Clark McGowen: Not too many. I think that many clinicians who work with children who have behavioral issues are looking at whether children are reading people well and so on. But I don’t think it’s pretty uniform. The counselors and mental-health staff at the schools would do well to do these assessments and use them to target treatments. It’s within our reach to do universal screening for social functioning, and to both identify kids who struggle socially and to implement prevention-oriented programming in the schools that gives children the emotional tools they need to succeed. In Illinois and a handful of other states there's legislation that requires school districts to have a plan to address kids with social and emotional needs. We go out to meet school personnel all the time who are aware that they need to be focused on social and emotional issues. I give a lot of credit to school administrators for reaching out and trying to learn these new requirements.

The Futurist: Where are these laws in place, or at least under consideration?

Clark McGowen: They exist in Illinois, New York, California, and the city of Anchorage, Alaska. And there are a handful of other states that are in serious discussion about implementing or passing laws that would increase the focus of school personnel on social learning, teaching social skills in the classrooms. A lot of people are skeptical about that because they think it’s not really the schools’ job, that it’s taking time away from academic pursuits. But it turns out the CASEL Group looked at hundreds of studies and found that when the school implements it well, their social skills improve, and also their tests and grades improve. It’s social learning and academics; it's not either/or. They're both intimately tied together.

The Futurist: In the last 15 years, there have been a number of school shootings committed by students who had been socially isolated and not adequately helped. It wouldn’t surprise me if this had raised momentum for a lot of these new initiatives.

Clark McGowen: I do think that is a big motivator behind some of the legislative efforts.

The Futurist: How early would trained counselors be able to spot these three factors? How early do these signs show compared with other signs of antisocial behavior?

Clark McGowen: What I would recommend for schools is that they look not at the three factors to begin with. The thing to do is figure out who in the school is rejected by peers, actively disliked by peers, excluded from activities, bullied, or is a bully. When you figure that out, those are the kids that you want to do some assessments to figure out if they have skills deficits.

The Futurist: To what extent is concern for children who suffer social rejection a growing phenomenon?

Clark McKown: I think there are a number of groups trying to grapple with this issue of screening identification everyone seems to have a different point of view on it. My view is that there's an inexpensive way of identifying kids having problems socially, and that is to ask kids. Take each kid aside, give the kid a photo of the kids in the class, and have the kid indicate whom he or she likes in the class and whom he or she doesn’t like.. That’s called “sociometrics,” the measurement of peer acceptance. From those two simple questions, you can quickly calculate a score for each child, and you can identify kids who are rejected. It wouldn’t take much for schools to learn how to do it, identify the kids on the fringes, and work on how to integrate them more successfully. Some teachers might be uncomfortable with asking kids to single out other kids who they don’t like. But the questions themselves are not harmful. Kids talk about these things anyway. We’d just make sure that each discussion with each kid is private and stays anonymous. There are other ways, too. Teachers can nominate kids they are concerned about socially, for instance, though they actually don’t get you the quality of information you get when you ask the kids themselves. If you really want to know who is rejected by peers, you ask kids.

The Futurist: What’s a good resource for readers to get more information on these topics?

Clark McKown: I think very highly of the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning. You can find it online at CASEL.org. It’s a repository of information about programs that can be implemented in school to prevent social problems and help kids who have social problems. If you’re in a school and you want to promote kids behavioral and learning schools, CASEL is where to go.

For more information, see: Rush Neurobehavioral Center, www.rnbc.org . Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, www.casel.org .

Tomorrow in Brief, May-June 2010

The “Greening” of Antarctica

A new wind farm on Antarctica’s Ross Island will supply nearly 1,000 kilowatts of power and save about 240,000 gallons of fuel a year, according to the National Science Foundation. The three new turbines offer a “green” source of power for the polar research work conducted at McMurdo Station (U.S.) and Scott Base (New Zealand).

Once powered by a nuclear plant (closed about 40 years ago), Antarctica’s research stations currently rely on diesel generators and boilers for electricity and heat. The wind farm will meet up to 15% of McMurdo’s and nearly all of Scott Base’s electricity demand.

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

WordBuzz: Transvaluation

The dictionary defines transvaluing as reevaluating something in a way that repudiates accepted standards. In the case of anthropologists studying ways to save the western lowland gorillas of the Central African Republic, transvaluation refers to combining ethnographic and ecological studies to improve understanding of the role of local human cultures in species preservation.

“Conservation isn’t just about protecting wildlife,” says Purdue University anthropology professor Melissa Remis. “You also need to consider the human dimension such as how local hunting technologies or even migration can change how land is used.”

For instance, diminished populations of a local species of antelope, called duikers, has led many hunters to turn to the gorillas for food; the researchers thus suggest that permitting selective logging would result in new vegetation growth that would help sustain the duiker populations and make the gorillas less tempting.

Source: Purdue University, www.purdue.edu.

Hollywood Goes Bilingual

It’s sounding more and more like America on American TV and movie screens. English–Spanish bilingualism is increasing in Hollywood scripts, according to linguistics researcher Nieves Jiménez Carra of Pablo de Olavide University in Seville, Spain.

With the U.S. population comprising a growing proportion of Latinos, who often alternate between Spanish and English, script writers and producers are also incorporating both languages into scripts, rather than simply adding Spanish subtitles or dubbing English-language programs into Spanish.

The advantage over dubbing or subtitling is that the characters sound more authentic, using natural Mexican, Puerto Rican, or Cuban Spanish, for instance, rather than a more formal version of Spanish translated for audiences in Spain.

Source: Plataforma SINC, www.plataformasinc.es.

Second-Hand Effects of Bullying

Witnesses of bullying may be at greater risk for later psychological distress than the victims themselves, suggests a study of public schools in England.

These “second-hand victims” may be experiencing stress from two fronts: fear of becoming targets of the bullies themselves and guilt from not interceding on the victim’s behalf. The researchers encourage school psychologists to pay more attention to witnesses in bullying incidents and to teach them ways that they can intercede rather than remain passive bystanders.

Source: “Observing Bullying at School: The Mental Health Implications of Witness Status” by Ian Rivers et al., School Psychology Quarterly (Volume 24, Number 4), American Psychological Association, www.apa.org.

Electromagnetic Waves May Protect the Brain

Long-term use of cell phones may improve memory and help protect users from Alzheimer’s disease, or even reverse its effects, report researchers at the Florida Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center.

The study of old mice with Alzheimer’s showed that exposure to electromagnetic waves generated by cell phones reversed memory impairment. The waves removed brain deposits of the protein beta--amyloid, the harmful, sticky plaque that is the hallmark of Alzheimer’s.

While the mice weren’t wearing earpieces or holding phones to their heads as humans typically do, the effect of exposure to electromagnetic fields offers a potential avenue for drug-free treatment of Alzheimer’s patients, the researchers believe.

Sources: “Electromagnetic Field Treatment Protects Against and Reverses Cognitive Impairment in Alzheimer’s Disease Mice” by Gary W. Arendash et al., Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease (January 2010). Florida Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, www.floridaadrc.org.

Tourism Booms as Arctic Melts

Gas, oil, and shipping boost economy but add to environmental concerns.

Researchers anticipate large increases of Arctic industry and tourism in this century.

The Arctic Marine Shipping Assessment, a report compiled by the Arctic Council, an intergovernmental forum, says that the number of cruise ships visiting Greenland alone rose from 14 in 2003 to 39 in 2008.

"All the vistas, all the sights, all the marine animals, polar bears, polar glaciers - people want to go see that stuff," says Lawson Brigham, chair of the assessment. "They want to go to the North Pole and say they stood there."

The Arctic is a promising site for business as well as pleasure. A 2008 study by the U.S. Geological Survey estimated that it contains 30% of the world's undiscovered natural gas and 13% of its undiscovered oil. Energy companies in Canada, Norway, Russia, and other nations now vie for access.

As tourism and industries increase, so might the emissions from ship smokestacks: ozone, carbon dioxide, sulfur oxides, and black carbon, among others. The emissions poison animal life, deplete the ozone layer, and taint the snow and ice, reducing their ability to mitigate global warming by reflecting sunlight away from the earth.

Arctic animals face additional hazards from human activity, according to Brigham: Fish flee ships' noise, and marine mammals are wounded by collisions with boat hulls or entanglements in fishing gear. Those animal populations have been a staple food source for the region's indigenous peoples for millennia. When animals die off, humans will go hungry.

Industry can benefit indigenous peoples, however, with bigger supplies of food, more amenities, and new jobs.

"The issue is how the indigenous people will share in the wealth of the Arctic," says Brigham. "There are opportunities, but also challenges."

Visiting tourists and developers face the risks of boating accidents, according to Walt Meier, researcher for the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

"If someone gets into trouble, there aren't any bases there to operate rescue missions from," he says. "And any kind of oil spill that may need to be cleaned up - there's no infrastructure there to support that."

The Arctic in general is now threatened by global warming, according to Meier.

"If you have a two-degree temperature change, you've completely changed the environment from ice to water," he says.

The ice is already melting rapidly: The Arctic had 13.5 million square kilometers of ice in December 1979, but only 12.5 million square kilometers of it in December 2009. By 2050, or even sooner, according to Snow and Ice Center researchers, the Arctic might be ice-free for part of every summer.

"The ice is now a lot younger and a lot thinner than it used to be," says Meier.

Brigham concurs and hopes that new treaties and laws in the future will enforce responsible use of the region and its resources. - Rick Docksai

Biotechnology’s Promise—and Risks

Chips, Clones, and Living Beyond 100: How Far Will the Biosciences Take Us? by Paul J. H. Schoemaker and Joyce A. Schoemaker. Financial Times Press. 2009. 201 pages. $24.99.

“Between now and 2025, the biosciences will likely become one of the most important topics in our personal lives, at work, and in society,” assert Paul J. H. Schoemaker and Joyce A. Schoemaker, a husband-and-wife team with experience in the industry. Yet, their new book, Chips, Clones, and Living Beyond 100, is not so much about the biosciences as it is about the outside social, economic, and political factors that will likely impact the industry and determine its commercial potential. The real question, as far as the authors are concerned, is not how far the biosciences will take us, but rather what will drive biotechnology forward.

To answer this, the authors analyze long-term trends and build scenarios, giving special consideration to possible wild cards. They also examine biotechnology’s potential impact on related industries such as pharmaceuticals and health care. The end result is practically a textbook example of how to apply futures techniques in a nonfiction book aimed at the average reader, and this may be its most exciting contribution.

After a quick rundown of significant medical breakthrough over the past 200 years, the authors discuss some of the pivotal breakthroughs that effectively created and defined the biosciences (such as synthesizing the human insulin gene and the Human Genome Project). From there, they look to potential future innovations, such as affordable genome-sequencing microchips, individualized prescription drugs, stem-cell treatments, and gene therapy (replacing or shutting off a defective gene).

Next, they examine what must happen fiscally in order to make such innovations a reality. Entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are needed to help fund biotech innovations and commercialize the technology. Yet, up to this point, commercializing the technology has not exactly been a walk in the park. Given overall disappointing financial results thus far, the industry nonetheless survives and continues to grow in large part because of Big Pharma.

“Established pharmaceutical companies have created extensive alliance and ownership arrangements with many biotechnology companies,” the Schoemakers write. Pharmaceutical companies are drawn to the emerging field in part because of their own struggling financial situation. They see it as a response to growing challenges that are threatening their profit margins, now that they can no longer depend on so-called blockbuster drugs. To them, biotech drugs represent an opportunity to move toward a more sustainable long-term business model. Conversely, how successfully biotech manages to cross business boundaries will be one of the major keys to its success and growth, the authors argue.

The industry’s success also depends on how well we meet global health-care challenges, including those in the developed world.

“How can we expand these new technologies to poorer nations when the richest countries in the world, where they are first developed and deployed, have difficulties themselves controlling healthcare costs?” the authors ask. Health care has to be reformed if it is to be sustained, they argue. The rapidly growing need for greater preventive care and chronic disease management, thanks to increased longevity, will only add to the already large tab.

Where biotech is ultimately headed also has to do with those potential game changers known as wild cards. The authors group them into three sectors: society and politics, science and technology, and business and economics. While the events they list are certainly high impact, the big surprise is that not many truly qualify as low probability. For instance, as the Schoemakers point out, there is ample reason to believe that mass public acceptance — or rejection — of the biosciences could occur. (The debate over genetically modified foods in Europe sets a strong precedent for the rejection scenario.) Even the notion of rogue states harboring bioterrorists doesn’t seem too far-fetched.

Building on these forecasts, the authors divide their scenario framework into two main categories: technological success and societal acceptance. (Funding is a third variable, but it’s at least partially dependent on the other two.) They then use scenario-building exercises to answer the nagging questions: (1) What if biotech doesn’t live up to expectations? and (2) What if it does?

The authors identify a number of different tensions between projected technological breakthroughs and sociopolitical and economic forces. These include potential class inequities that could arise and ethical arguments regarding life extension, not to mention other thornier matters.

“We stand at the threshold of an unprecedented era in which humans can change their own genes, and hence redefine what it means to be human,” the Schoemakers assert. “Unfortunately, we presently lack the regulatory oversight and moral compass to wisely navigate the technological terrain.”

Thoroughly researched and highly accessible, Chips, Clones, and Living Beyond 100 is designed with a wide audience in mind. To that end, it’s not weighted down by technical jargon and the work appeals to the reader’s interest and imagination. The book’s geographic orientation is almost exclusively toward the United States, but the authors justify this focus by arguing that biotech innovation depends mainly on the United States, both economically and politically.

If the book has a not-so-hidden agenda, it’s to advocate for the advancement of the biosciences. But if there’s a second, less-intended aftereffect, it may well be the expansion of futuring.

About the Reviewer

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

Books in Brief

By Rick Docksai

Surprising Facts About the Brain

Brain Sense: The Science of the Senses and How We Process the World Around Us by Faith Hickman Brynie. AMACOM. 2009. 274 pages. $24.

The brain is much more dynamic than scientists used to think, according to science and health writer Faith Hickman Brynie in Brain Sense. She takes readers on a tour of how the brain and the senses interact, sharing discoveries that she says have dramatic implications for brain research and medical practice. Examples:

Monkeys using their own brain waves to control robotic arms.

Patients blinded by strokes regain some of their vision by retraining their eyes with computer-assisted visual exercises.

New physical-therapy regimens that relieve amputees of “phantom-limb” pain (pains in the empty spaces where those parts used to be).

Brynie points to newly discovered ways that the brain constantly reshapes its own structure and replacing circuits — or even memories — that had been lost or damaged. She also describes recent observations about how the brain perceives reality: “Our brains have minds of their own,” she says. In other words, no two people will taste, smell, or feel in the same way.

Brynie’s Brain Sense is a fascinating look at what it means to be human and conscious. It is also an exciting preview of treatments that doctors might one day achieve.

Change Design: Conversations about Architecture as the Ultimate Business Tool by NBBJ and Bruce Mau. Greenway. 2009. 250 pages. $59.95.

A well-designed building encourages creativity and cooperation within, according to architectural firm NBBJ and design company Bruce Mau. Their jointly authored and richly illustrated book Change Design showcases new buildings that offer new ways of working. Change Design presents real-life stories of 14 organizations that enhanced productivity, employee satisfaction, energy efficiency, or all three by changing the layout of their office buildings.

Case studies include the Banner Health hospital complex, designed to accommodate systematic growth over the next 20 years; Boeing, which brought manufacturers and designers — two groups that had always worked separately — together into one facility, thereby resolving problems more quickly and cutting production time in half; and developer City Developments Limited, which custom-builds high-rises with ventilation, shading, and rainwater-sequestration features to maximize sustainability and comfort.

Accompanying these stories are essays on the nature of design, the future of workplaces, the relationship between building design and personal values, and hope for resolving tensions between executives and designers. The volume also includes descriptions of change-design activities that you can organize in your own workplace.

Change Design is a delightful show-and-tell of architectural improvements and their tangible benefits. Artists, business leaders, and professionals of all kinds may find it informative and inspirational.

Fight for the Bay: Why a Dark Green Environmental Awakening is Needed to Save the Chesapeake Bay by Howard R. Ernst. Rowman & Littlefield. 2009. 144 pages. Paperback. $19.95.

Pollution has reduced more than 400 water ecosystems around the world to “dead zones,” notes U.S. Naval Academy political-science professor Howard Ernst in Fight for the Bay. For conservationists trying to save these ecosystems, the eastern United States’ Chesapeake Bay serves as a cautionary tale.

Since the early 1980s, Ernst explains, a publicly funded Chesapeake Bay Program has coordinated bay-restoration efforts with the governments of neighboring states Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. The program, however, lacks any lawmaking power. It only organizes public education campaigns, distributes grants to citizen cleanup projects, and sets nonbinding guidelines for state officials. This “voluntary” approach — “light-green conservation,” as Ernst calls it —failed miserably. Fauna and animal life across the bay remain in jeopardy, and its fishing industries have collapsed.

There is no substitute for political action and litigation, Ernst concludes. However, he sees the Chesapeake Bay Program’s light-green approach being repeated in estuaries around North America and beyond. He hopes that conservationists will change course and accept confrontation as necessary for reform.

Ernst’s Fight for the Bay is an incisive look at an important ecosystem and what communities everywhere can learn from it. Researchers, environmentalists, and political activists of all kinds may find it an enlightening read.

How to Survive the End of the World As We Know It: Tactics, Techniques, and Technologies for Uncertain Times by James Wesley Rawles. Plume. 2009. 153 pages. Paperback. $17.

Civilization is still standing now, but that does not mean it always will, cautions survival expert James Wesley Rawles in How to Survive the End of the World As We Know It.

We’d better know what to do in the event of a deadly viral pandemic, major asteroid strike, unprecedented hyperinflationary (or deflationary) economic depression, third World War, or any other global disaster, Rawles argues.

He spells out all the hazards that we might face in a post-disaster society: looting, armed violence, food shortages, etc. Then he lays out steps we can take now, such as taking survival-training courses, designing shelters, and stocking them with necessary supplies. He even offers a chapter on disaster-proof financial security: savvy investments to make now, earning income in the midst of a major recession, and bartering in the wake of a true disaster.

If all of these musings sound alarmist, he explains, consider that the world today is increasingly dangerous and fraught with uncertainty — worldwide terrorist movements since the early 1990s and the 2008 meltdown of markets across the globe are proof.

Making the Invisible Visible: Essays by the Fellows of the International Leadership Forum edited by Richard Farson. Western Sciences Behavioral Institute. 2009. 153 pages. $29.

We cannot reliably forecast the future unless we understand the present, says Richard Farson, president of the Western Sciences Behavioral Institute, a nonprofit foundation that explores ways to improve human life. In Making the Invisible Visible, he brings together essays from 29 Institute fellows, who share their perspectives on current challenges. Among the contributing authors are:

Ralph Keyes, freelance writer, describes a trend of increasing groupthink throughout society.

Lawrence Solomon, management consultant, wonders at the human mind’s capacity to simultaneously comprehend reality and distort it.

Michael Crichton, the late physician and author, states his concern that our society is losing its tolerance and respect for opposing ideas.

Jane Poynter, aerospace engineer, debunks the common belief that we must choose between the environment and human welfare.

Carlos Cardozo Campbell, urban planner, notes the toll that mass urbanization takes on human and environmental health.

James Cramer, co-founder of the journal DesignIntelligence and co-chairman of the Design Futures Council, considers the pros and cons of society’s fixation on speediness.

The authors eloquently address deep ideas to general audiences, in thought-provoking essays that are good for reflection, discussion, and community action.

The Smart Growth Manual by Andres Duany and Jeff Speck with Mike Lydon. McGraw-Hill. 2009. 240 pages. $24.95.

Urban growth is inevitable, so let us plan ahead for it to make sure that it takes place in the most orderly ways possible, argue design consultants Andres Duany and Jeff Speck in The Smart Growth Manual.

“No-growth” campaigns rarely if ever succeed, they note, and often serve to undercut needed planning — so when growth does resume, it is even more haphazard and wasteful.

If given the chance, local discussion sessions among city officials and residents can minimize growth’s worst side effects and help keep neighborhood enlargement from degenerating into urban sprawl. If successful, they will design mixed-use neighborhoods that treat all residents with equity. They will also harmonize urban and rural areas, and live in accordance with their regions’ natural resource and water supplies.

The authors outline fundamental principles of smart growth, instructions for formulating a growth blueprint, and making optimum arrangements for convenient mass transit. They also cover affordable housing, vibrant neighborhood life, and conservation of energy, land, and water.

The Smart Growth Manual is an attractive, well-illustrated guidebook for building cities that will offer high quality living in the present and the future.

Upstarts: How GenY Entrepreneurs Are Rocking the World of Business and 8 Ways You Can Profit from Their Success by Donna Fenn. McGraw-Hill. 2009. 258 pages. $29.95.

A new business landscape is in the making, and the 13- to 25-year-old youth demographic is creating it, according to Upstarts by business writer Donna Fenn. A trend is rising of teens and young adults starting their own businesses, offering the world’s best hope for a flourishing post-recession global economy, Fenn argues.

She explains that these Generation Y “upstarts” are the first generation to grow up digital; they know the Internet, mobile devices, and social media and how these applications can facilitate starting and running a business. In addition, they are more frugal and independent than preceding youth cohorts. Most were raised by working parents, and all were faced with the turmoil of the twenty-first-century economy, in which any large corporation or institution can fail. The upstarts have learned to count on themselves.

Older executives who want to know where their industries are headed, younger professionals who are considering launching out on their own, and anyone else who wants to better understand Generation Y will benefit from reading Upstarts.

The Viking in the Wheat Field: A Scientist’s Struggle to Preserve the World’s Harvest by Susan Dworkin. Walker & Company. 2009. 239 pages. $26.

The global food outlook is grim, says magazine writer and author Susan Dworkin in The Viking in the Wheat Field. She points out that, according to the United Nations, there will be 9 billion people on earth by 2050, and they will require a 75% increase in food supply. Meeting such an elevated feeding demand is a major challenge, since farmers have already cultivated most of the planet’s arable land. Worse still, much of the land that is available has lost its fertility due to overuse. What options remain besides destroying more forests?

One hope rests on making more-efficient use of existing crop land. Dworkin describes the lifetime work of Bent Skovmand, the late Norwegian horticultualist who spent his career developing biotechnology procedures for cross-breeding wheat plants to enhance their disease resistance, accelerate their growth, and exponentially increase their grain output. Dworkin’s account relates Skovmand’s many experiments in seed banks and their successful outcomes in Mexico, Turkey, and other locales.

In light of the much-publicized rises in food costs and shortages of water for farming, the story that Dworkin tells in The Viking in the Wheat Field is very compelling and very timely.

Why We Cooperate by Michael Tomasello et al. MIT Press. 2009. 204 pages. $14.95.

In the next decade, research into human infants’ thought patterns might help answer ancient questions about human nature, speculate anthropologist Michael Tomasello and co-authors in Why We Cooperate.

Tomasello reviews studies that compared human children with apes and found the humans to be uniquely cooperative: Only human children convey information to one another, exhibit teamwork, share their belongings, or object when others are not being “fair.”

But where did humans’ unique cooperativeness emerge, wonders psychologist Carol Dweck. She argues that it is not entirely from nature; children’s altruistic behaviors are heavily influenced by other people.

Philosopher Brian Skyrms encourages researchers to study the cooperation that exists across the animal kingdom: Bacteria, mole rats, meerkats, and many insects are very cooperative with each other.

Psychologist Elizabeth Spelke posits that humans’ cooperation started after they developed language. She notes that at around age two, humans begin to display unique abilities that are possible only with language: analyzing information, understanding math, discerning other people’s intentions, communicating ideas through gestures, and helping others to achieve goals.

Why We Cooperate is an impressive convergence of philosophy and hard science that nonspecialists will find very approachable and engaging.

Digital Bandage Monitors Vital Signs

Wireless technology for early detection.

A wireless digital “bandage” that would continuously monitor patients’ vital signs and transmit the data in real time to health-care professionals is currently being tested in the United Kingdom.

The Sensium disposable adhesive bandage is non-intrusive and affixes easily and painlessly to a patient’s chest. Doctors and nurses would be notified instantly of any changes in a patient’s body temperature, heart rate, and respiration on any digital device, from desktop computers to cell phones. This would enable them to respond faster to any changes or complications. The patient’s medical records would also be automatically updated with the data.

The bandage, developed by Toumaz Technology, is part of a growing medical trend toward integrating wireless technology in patient care.

Compared to large, fixed monitoring machines, the Sensium digital plaster boasts several distinct advantages. It could enable patients to leave their beds and move about with greater independence, shorten hospital stays, and improve the quality of outpatient care.

Just like a regular Band-Aid or gauze wrap, the digital bandage would need to be replaced with a fresh one every couple of days.

Chris Toumazou, CEO and co-founder of Toumaz Technology and the director of the Institute of Biomedical Engineering at Imperial College in London, says, “We’re hoping that the plaster will improve the health and well-being of a vast range of patients — from patients on a general hospital ward to people with chronic diseases like diabetes and cardiovascular disease who want to have their health monitored without having to keep visiting the hospital.” — Aaron M. Cohen

Source: Toumaz Technology, www.toumaz.com.

Is Industrial Civilization Doomed?

The Ecotechnic Future: Envisioning a Post-Peak World by John Michael Greer. New Society Publishers. 2009. 153 pages. Paperback. $18.95.

It is the middle of the twenty-first century, and the only countries that can still afford to use fossil fuels are those that are producing them. Half those countries’ populations — and 90% of the populations of the non-fossil-fuel-producing countries — labor at subsistence agriculture. Most of the rest eke out livings in factories converting salvaged materials with hand tools. Public health has collapsed, literacy rates are in steady freefall, and poverty and hunger are everywhere. Dozens of nations are mired in civil war, and populations are migrating in hordes, some to flee rising sea levels and encroaching droughts.

This is the future that ecologist John Michael Greer anticipates in The Ecotechnic Future. He argues that our industrial civilization is headed for its final fall. It doomed itself by exhausting its natural resources and mistakenly assuming that technology freed human communities from their natural environments’ constraints.

The population boom of the last few centuries, Greer explains, was made possible by massive advances in living standards, economic growth, surpluses of food, and vastly improved public health. All of this, however, was sustained by fossil fuels. Once fossil-fuel reserves peak —as they are expected to do between 2020 and 2030 — production, growth, and the amenities of modern life will gradually halt. Contemporary industrial society will downgrade into a “scarcity society” that manages on minimal energy, after which it will become a “salvage society” that scrapes survival from the refuse of the defunct urban buildings, information networks, and industrial centers. Populations everywhere will shrink. Civic unrest will simmer, and epic migrations will sweep continents. Power will shift from multinational corporations to national governments, which in turn will lose power to local communities. Cultures will disintegrate, the Internet will collapse, and cultural exchanges across nations and continents will be few.

Greer sees hope, however: The industrial age’s end might lead to the rise, centuries from now, of a new “ecotechnic” society that supports complex technology and sustainable relations with the rest of the biosphere.

No one knows for sure what this ecotechnic society will look like, he explains. Through diversity and experimentation with many piecemeal solutions — not grandiose, radical agendas — we will gradually construct it. It will help if we embrace sustainability and wise lifestyle changes now, not later; then the decline will be less drastic, and the ecotechnic world’s arrival much sooner.

Every aspect of our daily lives must manage on much less energy, Greer says. We will need to implement massive changes in eating habits, land use, food distribution, and waste management. Homes will have to transition to compactness, energy efficiency, and production of their own electricity and food. Economies will have to rely more on human labor and domestic production. In all, we will need to recognize our role as one species among many, subject to the same natural laws and ecological patterns.

This book is as realistic a portrayal of the end of civilization as one is likely to find. It is a worthwhile read for all who think about the far future.

About the Reviewer

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

Pop Music as an Economic Indicator

Changing tastes may reflect market mood.

That long hemlines accompany a bad economy is an old saying in the fashion industry. Today, most experts regard hemline theory as fanciful, but a number of social theorists agree that trends in fashion, movies, or music do reflect public sentiment, which can influence stock market direction. Theoretically at least, new fads could point to shifting economic conditions. But finding the exact correlation between changing music tastes and economic performance is anything but easy.

William Higham, author of The Next Big Thing: Spotting and Forecasting Consumer Trends for Profit (Kogan Page, 2009), argues that the down economy and grumpy public sentiment forecasts an angry music wave in the coming year. However, economics is not the sole cause, says Higham. The next music fad will take more than one form, he believes.

“Consumers’ current mood, which blends confused, afraid, angry, and determined, is due to a mix of financial hardship, anger at being let down by politicians and big business, continuing fear of world events, the speed of technological/social change, and a reassessment of work/life priorities,” Higham told THE FUTURIST.

Jon P. Avlon, author of Independent Nation (Three Rivers Press, 2005), agrees that the public mood is bad and getting worse, and mainstream media will only exacerbate the grumpiness. The angry rhetoric rocking the airwaves and cable channels across the United States, the protestor clashes outside the Copenhagen Summit on Climate Change, and the Tea Party rallies that have lately sprung up in Washington, D.C., are a “reflection of a larger trend, the fragmentation of modern media, which has had an ironic effect on the way we get our information,” he wrote to THE FUTURIST. “The best ratings are achieved by [TV and radio] hosts who cultivate narrow but intense niche audiences. This has helped pump up the hate and hyper-partisanship we see today.”

Higham argues that previous eras of socioeconomic flux had two distinct and separate effects on pop culture. Mainstream music (which appeals more to baby boomers) became more quiet, subdued, and quaint, whereas “alternative” music, marketed primarily to younger people, became louder and more primal.

“Socioeconomic problems drove rock in the 1960s, heavy rock and punk in the 1970s, gangsta rap in the late 1980s, and grunge in the 1990s. So the new consumer mood will, I believe, drive a rise in both more aggressively patriotic mainstream roots music (the soundtrack to Tea Party anger) and more angry, dissonant Alternative music (the soundtrack to environmental protest),” he said.

Visible changes in fashion, television, movies, and particularly pop music can not only reflect a nation’s economic circumstances, but predict them as well, according to scholars with the Socionomics Institute.

In the October 2009 issue of The Socionomist, authors Matt Lampert and Euan Wilson claim that the commercial success of particular types of popular culture items — the music, movies, and TV shows that big-name clothiers and studios market to the public — can indicate stock market changes. When the public’s “social mood” and popular culture are both good, then upbeat or even vapid entertainment fare becomes the rage and the economy is likely in or about to enter a bullish cycle. Teen or tween pop acts such as the Jonas Brothers, Miley Cyrus, and High School Musical epitomized the bull market for stocks following the 2002 recession, say Lampert and Wilson. Supporting their theory, they point to the commercial success of 1980s bubblegum pop musicians such as Michael Jackson and Cyndi Lauper during a period of economic growth.

When both popular culture and social mood are down, movies, television, and music will trend toward the dark, gritty, dissatisfied, and potentially innovative; in a word, bearish. Lampert and Wilson attribute the rise of Seattle grunge aesthetic during the early 1990s to the recession that began in 1987, and the rise of punk rock in the mid-1970s to falling affluence and economic stagnation of that decade, particularly the 1970 to 1973 period.

A diminished stock market, high unemployment, and unprecedented government intervention that characterized the 2008 and 2009 economic environment portends terribly for social mood going forward. Recent poll numbers indicate as much. Some 55% of Americans think the country is on the wrong track, and 66% say that they aren’t confident that their children’s lives will be better than their own (as opposed to 27% who are confident), according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll from December. Yet, popular music in the United States remained “planted in bull territory” during this time. The disconnect suggests a pop culture lag. Forecast: Expect further stock market losses and a downbeat music wave.

“The continued reign of light popular music is an indicator that stocks are high, not low,” write Lampert and Wilson. “Coincident socioeconomic indicators convey compatible messages, and we can use one to validate the other.... At minimum, when social mood turns negative, lyrical themes will become dark and melody will diminish. Many performers who play discordant, experimental styles will find an audience. A genre even more aggressive than punk will ultimately emerge.”

Whether music is becoming angrier, lighter, more primal, or more quaint is no easy determination in an environment where cultural trends can be measured using an ever-wider array of metrics. And music fads will remain an imprecise (at best) indicator of stock market performance into the foreseeable future, according to other sociologists.

“I think there might be a correlation,” says Higham, “but it would be a brave man to bet [his] portfolio on a number one hit album.” — Patrick Tucker

Sources: The Socionomist (October 2009), www.socionomics.net.

The Next Big Thing: Spotting and Forecasting Consumer Trends for Profit by William Highham. Kogan Page, 2009. 261 pages. $29.95.

Reviving the Aral Sea

Aralsk, Kazakhstan, is surrounded by barren desert, but the city could become a thriving port if the Aral Sea makes its anticipated comeback.

“A billboard outside Aralsk proclaims ‘Good News — the Sea is Coming Back.’ There is a lot of optimism among the people,” reports Joop Stoutjesdik, task team leader of the World Bank’s Syr Darya and Northern Aral Sea Project.

The Aral Sea, situated in Central Asia between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, was the world’s fourth-largest inland body of water in 1960, according to the European Space Agency. But the Aral lost more than 70% of its water due to drainage for irrigating parched farmland.

By 1990, the Aral had shriveled into a remnant northern sea within Kazakhstan and a southern one on the Kazakh-Uzbek border. Each sea was more than 20 meters lower than the original.

The drainage lay bare more than 40,000 square kilometers of its sea bed, whose exposed salts and sands fueled sandstorms that caused fatal illnesses and erratic weather.

The remaining water became so unnaturally saline that most of the fish and fauna died. Drinking-water supplies became scarce, and tens of thousands of fishing, agriculture, and service-sector jobs vanished.

Better times may be ahead, however. Between 2005 and 2007, Kazakhstan and the World Bank funded extensive restoration projects for the northern sea: a 13-kilometer Kok-Aral dike to block flow of its water into the southern sea; hydraulic facilities along the Aral tributary Syr Darya river to increase its capacity and channel more water into the sea basin; and a dam and canal from the Syr Darya to restore fishing lakes, which would serve as hatcheries for new fish populations.

The northern sea has since risen four meters and increased its surface area by 13%. Its salinity has been reduced by more than two-thirds. New water-supply systems bring better-quality drinking water to seaside villages. Seven species of fish have returned, according to the World Bank. The sea’s recovery is also improving the climate.

“During the last years there were rains in April, May, and June, while before, the last rains would fall in March,” Stoutjesdik adds. “There is more grass for livestock. Dust storms are fewer. Swans, ducks, and geese are returning.”

The southern sea is still shrinking, however. The European Space Agency expects it to dry out completely by 2020.

Amanda Wooden, Bucknell University environmental science professor, says that the best-case scenario is that the southern sea stabilizes around its present levels.

“This is a significant loss for the region and the world,” she says.

She notes that this is troubling for the human communities around the sea basin.

“A decline in health conditions and the agricultural sector could have ramifications for Uzbekistan’s stability,” she says. “The broader region will be impacted by climatic changes.”

The southern sea’s western side, at least, could be salvaged if engineers dammed it. Reforming the region’s irrigation systems would also help, but Wooden does not see either approach happening.

“These steps have not been taken and do not seem likely to be followed soon enough,” says Wooden. But even a partial recovery is better than none, she concludes. — Rick Docksai

Sources: Joop Stoutjesdijk, World Bank, www.worldbank.org.

Amanda Wooden, Bucknell University, www.bucknell.edu.

European Space Agency, www.esa.int.

Smart People, Dumb Decisions

By Michael J Mauboussin

Chances are you're unaware of the limits to your abilities, unappreciative of the challenges that lie ahead, and uninformed of all that can go wrong. Don't worry - you're not alone.

If you ask people to offer adjectives that they associate with good decision makers, words like "intelligent" and "smart" are generally at the top of the list. Yet, history contains plenty of examples of smart people who made poor decisions as the result of cognitive mistakes. These mistakes can have horrific consequences, from the space shuttle Columbia disaster to the scores of bank failures across the United States since the start of the 2007 recession. But faulty decision making is also avoidable. Every day, research is offering new insights into the decision- making process. A science of choice is emerging, and the good news is that everyone, from students to stockbrokers, can learn how to make better decisions.

Smart people make poor decisions because the mental software that we humans inherited from our ancestors isn't designed to cope with the complexity of modern day problems and systems. In short, smart people, like everyone else, face two major obstacles to making good decisions. The first obstacle is the brain, which evolved over millions of years to make decisions unlike what we face in modern life. The second obstacle is the growing complexity of the world in which we live.

Overconfidence: The Biggest Factor in Poor Decisions

Our natural decision-making process makes us vulnerable to certain mental mistakes. One example is what psychologists call the "inside view," which explains that we consider problems by focusing on a specific task, use information that is close at hand, and make predictions based on that narrow and unique set of inputs. This approach is common for all forms of planning and almost always paints too optimistic a picture.

Overconfidence, in one form or another, is central to the inside view, and can lead to three illusions that can derail decisions: the illusion of superiority, the illusion of optimism, and the illusion of control.

To introduce the first illusion, take a moment to answer (honestly!) the following questions either Yes or No:

* I am an above-average driver.
* I have an above-average ability to judge humor.
* My professional performance places me in the top half of my organization.

If you are like most people, you said "yes" to all three questions. This shows the illusion of superiority, which suggests that people have an unrealistically positive view of themselves. Of course, not everyone can be above average. In a classic 1976 survey, the College Board asked high school test takers to rate themselves on a host of criteria. Eighty-five percent considered themselves above the median in getting along with others, 70% above the median in ability to lead others, and 60% above the median in sports. One survey showed that more than 80% of people believed that they were more skillful than half of all drivers.

Remarkably, the least-capable people often have the largest gaps between what they think they can do and what they actually achieve. In one study, researchers asked subjects to rate their perceived ability and likely success on a grammar test. The bottom-quartile performers dramatically overstated their ability, thinking that they would be in the nextto- highest quartile. Furthermore, even when individuals do acknowledge that they are below average, they tend to dismiss their shortcoming as inconsequential.

The second is the illusion of optimism. Most people see their future as brighter than that of others. For example, researchers asked college students to estimate their chances of having various good and bad experiences during their lives. The students judged themselves far more likely to have good experiences than their peers and far less likely to have bad experiences.

Finally, there is the illusion of control. People behave as if chance events are subject to their influence. In one study, researchers asked two groups of office workers to participate in a lottery, with a $1 cost and a $50 prize. One group was allowed to choose their lottery cards, while the other group had no choice. Luck determined the probability of winning, of course, but that's not how the workers behaved.

Before the drawing, one of the researchers asked the participants at what price they would be willing to sell their cards. The mean offer for the group that was allowed to choose cards was close to $9, while the offer from the group that had not chosen was less than $2. People who believe that they have some control have the perception that their odds of success are better than they actually are. People who don't have a sense of control don't experience the same bias.

I must concede that my occupation - active money management - may be one of the best examples of the illusion of control in the professional world. Researchers have shown that, in aggregate, money managers who actively build portfolios deliver returns that are lower than the market indices over time, a finding that every investment firm acknowledges. The reason is pretty straightforward: Markets are highly competitive, and money managers charge fees that diminish returns. The same is true for individuals. Even though doing a lot of research into what to buy and sell may give you confidence, over time the costs you incur make it likely that your portfolio returns will fail to keep up with someone who parked money in a garden-variety index fund and forgot about it.

Markets also have a good dose of randomness, assuring that all investors see good and poor results from time to time. Despite this evidence, active money managers behave as if they can defy the odds and deliver market-beating returns. These investment firms rely on the inside view to justify their strategies and fees.

A vast range of professionals commonly lean on the inside view to make important decisions, with predictably poor results. This is not to say that these decision makers are negligent, naïve, or malicious. Encouraged by illusions, most believe they are making the right decision and have faith that the outcomes will be satisfactory.

On Time and within Budget - Maybe Next Time

Just as our faulty brains are naturally inclined toward overly optimistic perception of our abilities, we also have a funny, and faulty, view of time. You will be familiar with this example if you have ever been part of a project, whether it involved renovating a house, introducing a new product, or meeting a work deadline. People find it hard to estimate how long a job will take and how much it will cost. And when they are wrong, they usually underestimate the time and expense. Psychologists call this the planning fallacy. Here, again, the inside view takes over as the majority of people imagine how they will complete the task. Only about onequarter of the population incorporates the base-rate data either from their own experience, or from that of others, while laying out planning timetables.

Years ago, Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist who won the Nobel Prize in Economics, assembled a group to write a curriculum to teach judgment and decision making to high-school students. Kahneman's group included a mix of experienced and inexperienced teachers as well as the dean of the School of Education. After about a year, they had written a couple of chapters for the textbook and had developed some sample lessons.

During one of their Friday afternoon sessions, the educators discussed how to elicit information from groups and how to think about the future. They knew that the best way to do this was for each person to express his or her view independently and to combine the views into a consensus. Kahneman decided to make the exercise tangible by asking each member to estimate the date the group would deliver a draft of the textbook to the Ministry of Education.

Kahneman found that the estimates clustered around two years and that everyone, including the dean, was between 18 and 30 months. It then occurred to Kahneman that the dean had been involved in similar projects. When asked, the dean said he knew of a number of similar groups, including ones that had worked on the biology and mathematics curriculum. So Kahneman asked him the obvious question: "How long did it take them to finish?"

The dean blushed, then answered that 40% of the groups who had started similar programs had never finished, and that none of the groups completed it in less than seven years. Seeing only one way to reconcile the dean's optimistic answer about this group with his knowledge of the shortcomings of the other groups, Kahneman asked how good this group was compared with the others. After a pause, the dean responded, "Below average, but not by much."

While people are notoriously poor at guessing when they'll complete their own projects, they're pretty good at guessing when other people will finish. In fact, the planning fallacy embodies a broader principle. When people are forced to look at similar situations and see the frequency of success, they tend to predict more accurately. If you want to know how something is going to turn out for you, look at how it turned out for others in the same situation.

Daniel Gilbert, a psychologist at Harvard University, has pondered why people don't rely on the outside view more often: "Given the impressive power of this simple technique, we should expect people to go out of their way to use it. But they don't." The reason is that most people think of themselves as different, and better, than those around them.

Even people who should know better forget to consult the outside view. Now that you are aware of how the inside-outside view influences the way people make decisions, you'll see it everywhere. In the business world, it will show up as unwarranted optimism for how long it takes to develop a new product, the chance that a merger deal succeeds, and the likelihood a portfolio of stocks will do better than the market. In your personal life, you'll see it in the parents who believe their seven-year-old is destined for a college sports scholarship, debates about what impact video games have on kids, and the time and cost it will take to remodel a kitchen.

How to Incorporate the Outside View into Your Decisions

Unlike the inside view, the outside view asks if there are similar situations that can provide a statistical basis for making a decision. Rather than seeing a problem as unique, the outside view wants to know if others have faced comparable problems and, if so, what happened. The outside view is an unnatural way to think precisely because it forces people to set aside all of the cherished information they have gathered. Regardless, it can create a very valuable reality check for decision makers.

Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, a psychologist who had a long collaboration with Kahneman, published a multistep process to help you use the outside view. I have distilled their five steps into four and have added some thoughts. Here are the four steps:

1. Select a reference class. Find a group of situations, or a reference class, that is broad enough to be statistically significant but narrow enough to be useful in analyzing the decision that you face. The task is generally as much an art as it is a science, and it is certainly trickier for problems that few people have faced before. But for decisions that are common - even if they are not common for you - identifying a reference class is straightforward.

2. Assess the distribution of outcomes. Once you have a reference class, take a close look at the rate of success and failure. Study the distribution, including the average outcome, the most common outcome, and check for extreme successes or failures.

In his book Full House, Stephen Jay Gould, who was a paleontologist at Harvard University, showed the importance of knowing the distribution of outcomes after his doctor diagnosed him with mesothelioma. His doctor explained that half of the people diagnosed with the rare cancer lived only eight months (more technically, the median mortality was eight months), a seeming death sentence. But Gould soon realized that, while half the patients died within eight months, the other half went on to live much longer. Because of his relatively young age at diagnosis, there was a good chance that he would be one of the fortunate ones.

Gould wrote, "I had asked the right question and found the answers. I had obtained, in all probability, the most precious of all possible gifts in the circumstances - substantial time." He lived another 20 years.

3. Make a prediction. With the data from your reference class in hand, including an awareness of the distribution of outcomes, you are in a position to make a forecast. The idea is to estimate your chances of success and failure. For all of the reasons that I've discussed, the chances are good that your prediction will be too optimistic.

Sometimes when you find the right reference class, you see the success rate is not very high. So to improve your chance of success, you have to do something different from what everyone else did. One example is the play calling of National Football League coaches in critical game situations like fourth downs, kickoffs, and two-point-conversion attempts. Conventional ways to decide about these situations are handed down from one generation of coaches to the next, but this stale decision-making process means scoring fewer points and winning fewer games.

Chuck Bower, an astrophysicist at Indiana University, and Frank Frigo, a former world backgammon champion, created a computer program called Zeus to assess the play-calling decisions of pro football coaches. Zeus uses the same modeling techniques that have succeeded in backgammon and chess programs, and the creators loaded it with statistics and the behavioral traits of coaches. Bower and Frigo found that only four teams in the 32-team league made crucial decisions that agreed with Zeus over one-half of the time, and that nine teams made decisions that concurred less than one-quarter of the time. Zeus estimates that these poor decisions can cost a team more than one victory per year, a large toll in a 16-game season.

Most coaches stick to the conventional wisdom because that is what they have learned and they are averse to the perceived negative consequences of breaking from past practice. But Zeus shows that the outside view can lead to more wins for the coach willing to break with tradition. This is an opportunity for coaches who are willing to think twice.

4. Assess the reliability of your prediction and fine-tune it. How good we are at making decisions depends a great deal on what we are trying to predict. Weather forecasters, for instance, do a pretty good job of predicting what the temperature will be tomorrow. Book publishers, on the other hand, are poor at picking winners, with the exception of those books from a handful of bestselling authors. The worse the record of successful prediction is, the more you should adjust your prediction toward the mean (or other relevant statistical measure). When cause and effect is clear, you can have more confidence in your forecast.

Black Swans and Bad Predictions

We've discussed how the brain naturally clings to certain illusions, such as overconfidence, control, and misplaced assumptions about how difficult challenges will be. When our unreliable brains meet up with complex systems, the chances for poor decision making increase exponentially.

The term "black swan" reflects philosopher Karl Popper's criticism of induction. Popper noted that seeing lots of white swans doesn't prove that all swans are white, but seeing one black swan proves they aren't. Popper's point is that, to understand a phenomenon, we're better off focusing on falsification than on verification.

Repeated good outcomes provide us with confirming evidence that our strategy is good and everything is fine. This illusion lulls us into an unwarranted sense of confidence and sets us up for a surprise (usually negative).

A brief understanding of phase transitions, an aspect of the behavior of complex systems, is useful here. Phase transitions are where small incremental changes in causes lead to large-scale effects. Physicist Philip Ball calls it the "grand ah-whoom." Put a tray of water into your freezer and the temperature drops to the threshold of freezing. The water remains a liquid until - ah-whoom - it becomes ice. Just a small incremental change in temperature leads to a change from liquid to solid.

The grand ah-whoom occurs in many complex systems where collective behavior emerges from the interaction of its constituent parts. You can find lots of these systems both in the physical world and the social world. Examples include everything from the behavior of stock exchanges to the popularity of hit songs.

The presence of phase transitions invites a few common decision-making mistakes. The first is the problem of induction, or how you should logically go from specific observations to general conclusions. Although philosophers from Sextus Empiricus to David Hume have for centuries warned against extrapolating from what we see, refraining from doing so is very difficult. To state the obvious, induction fails - sometimes spectacularly so - in systems with phase transitions.

To illustrate the problem, former derivatives trader and best-selling author of The Black Swan (Random House, 2007) Nassim Taleb retells Bertrand Russell's story of a turkey that is fed 1,000 days in a row. (Russell actually spoke of a chicken. Taleb changed it to a turkey for the American audience.) The feedings reinforce the turkey's sense of security and well-being, until one day before Thanksgiving an unexpected event occurs. All of the turkey's experience and feedback is positive until fortune takes a turn for the worse.

The equivalent of the turkey's plight - a period of prosperity (being fed) followed by sharp losses (one's head) - has occurred repeatedly in business. For example, Merrill Lynch (which was acquired by Bank of America) suffered losses over a two-year period in 2007-2008 that were in excess of one-third of the profits the company had earned cumulatively in its 36 years as a public company. Dealing with a system governed by a power law is like the farmer feeding us while he holds the axe behind his back. If you stick around long enough, the axe will fall.

Getting out of a situation before the phase transition - whether it's cashing out of a game of poker before the inevitable bad hand or exiting a particular stock position before the bursting of an equity bubble - is one of the key motivators for people to seek, and often pay for, information about the future. Humans have a large appetite for forecasts and predictions across a broad spectrum of domains, but they must recognize that the accuracy of forecasts in systems with phase transitions is dismal, even by so-called experts.

Duncan Watts, a research scientist at Yahoo who has done seminal work on network theory, says, "We think there is something we can call quality ... and the results we see in the world reflect this quality." But, he adds, "I am comfortable with the idea that the outcomes we get are often largely arbitrary." The best course is to recognize the nature of the distribution and to prepare for all contingencies. But how do you do that? If you've been fed by the farmer for the last 90 days, how do you anticipate the tipping point?

People must deal with systems that are marked by abrupt, unforeseeable change and rare but extreme outcomes. We are all particularly mistake-prone with these systems because we intuitively want to treat the system as being simpler than it is and to extrapolate the past into the future. Flag these systems when you see them and slow down your decision- making procedures.

Thanks to Nassim Taleb's prodding, many people now associate extreme events with black swans. But Taleb makes a careful, if overlooked, distinction: If we understand what the broader distribution looks like - what the best, worst, and most-likely scenarios are - even the extreme outcomes are correctly labeled as gray swans, not black swans. He calls them "modelable extreme events." In fact, scientists have done a lot of work classifying the distributions of various systems, including the stock market, terrorist acts, and power-grid failures. So if you have the background and tools to understand these systems, you can get a general view of how the system behaves even if you have no reliable way to predict any specific event. The key is to properly prepare for whatever the system metes out, extreme or not. For the most part, people are scorched not by black swans - the unknown unknowns - but rather by their failure to prepare for gray swans.

Know What You Can't Predict

In most day-to-day decisions, cause and effect are pretty clear. If you do X, then Y will happen. But in decisions that involve systems with many interacting parts, causal links are frequently unclear. For example, what will happen with climate change? Where will terrorists strike next? When will a new technology emerge? Remember what Warren Buffett said: "Virtually all surprises are unpleasant." So considering the worst-case scenarios is vital and generally overlooked in prosperous times.

Also resist the temptation to treat a complex system as if it's simpler than it is. One of the greatest challenges in finance is to create models that are useful to practitioners but that also capture the market's large moves. Models consistently fail to capture the richness of outcomes inherent in a complex system like the stock market.

There's a funny paradox with decision making. Almost everyone realizes how important it is, yet very few people practice in order to improve. Why don't we drill young students on decision making? Why are so few professional executives, doctors, lawyers, and government officials versed in these big ideas?

There are common and identifiable mistakes that you can understand, see in your daily affairs, and manage effectively. In those cases, the correct approach to deciding well often conflicts with what your mind does naturally. But now that you know when to think twice, better decisions will follow. So prepare your mind, recognize the context, apply the right technique - and practice.
- Michael J. Mauboussin

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The Brain, Stress, and Faulty Extrapolation

One common mistake in decision making is a tendency to inappropriately extrapolate from past results. Scott Huettel, a psychologist and neuroscientist at Duke University, and his colleagues confirmed this finding when they placed subjects in a brain-reading functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine and showed them random patterns of circles and squares. After one symbol, people did not know what to expect next. But after two in a row, they automatically expected a third, even though they knew the series was random. Two may not be a trend, but our brains sure think so.

This mistake is tough because our minds have a deep-seated desire to make out patterns, and our prediction process is very rapid (the researchers call it "automatic and obligatory"). This pattern-recognition ability evolved through the millennia and was profoundly useful for most of human existence.

"In a natural environment, almost all patterns are predictive," says Huettel. "For example, when you hear a crash behind you, it's not something artificial; it means that a branch is falling, and you need to get out of the way. So, we evolved to look for those patterns. But these causal relationships don't necessarily hold in the technological world that can produce irregularities, and in which we look for patterns where none exist."

Extrapolation puts a finer point on a number of other mistakes, as well. We can restate the problem of induction as inappropriately projecting into the future based on a limited number of observations. Failure to reflect reversion to the mean is the result of extrapolating earlier performance into the future without giving proper weight to the role of chance. And models that are based on past results indicate, falsely, that the future will be characteristically similar to history. In each case, our minds - or the models our minds construct - anticipate without giving suitable consideration to other possibilities.

Robert Sapolsky, a neurobiologist at Stanford University and an expert on stress, notes that an important feature of the stress response is that it turns off longer-term oriented bodily systems. You shouldn't worry about your digestion, growth, disease prevention, or reproduction if you are about to be a lion's lunch.

Because stress increases focus on the here and now, stressed people have a hard time thinking about the long term. The manager about to lose her job tomorrow has little interest in making a decision that will make her better off in three years. Psychological stress creates a sense of immediacy that inhibits consideration of options with distant payoffs. The stress response - so effective for dealing with hereand- now risks - co-opts the decision-making apparatus and compels poor decisions.
The functional map is overlaid on a high-resolution anatomical image.

- Michael J. Mauboussin

The Brain versus The Web

By Patrick Tucker

Wired for Thought by Jeffrey M. Stibel. Harvard University Press. 2009. 202 pages. $29.95.

In his new book, Wired for Thought, entrepreneur Jeffrey M. Stibel takes the shop-worn notion that the brain functions like a computer and reorders it into a more useful new idea. The computer is not a brain, Stibel asserts, but the Internet could be.

The differences between the brain and a computer are numerous and inescapable. Among the key distinctions: Our millennia-old three-pound thinking machines perform massive parallel processing. Even the best computers do this terribly in comparison. Electronic logic gates are faster than chemical synapses, but also much simpler. The brain evolved in response to natural circumstances as a tool for survival, but computers (and the vast majority of the programs that operate on them) are designed by people, not by the experience of life, and therefore will never truly be analogous to brains despite the best efforts of many of the world’s top AI researchers.

According to Stibel, computers are much better understood as elements within a larger intelligent system. They act less like brains and more like neurotransmitters. Web sites function as the neuronal synapses in this analogy. Like every synapse, sites hold information and then present that information when accessed. More importantly, Web sites deal in the stuff of the real world. From Wikipedia to the latest trend on Twitter, they serve not simply as files of coded instructions but as repositories of information about life on earth.

Every Web page faces the evolutionary imperative to be both unique and relevant; a Web site that is neither will pass to the digital dustbin, unviewed and unmaintained. Similarly, when the brain is forced to categorize some new sensory impression, it forms a synapse link, a memory. Memories are subject to the same competitive forces that their host organisms must contend with. Those sites that are of little consequence, or that don’t prove particularly useful to the survival of the larger organism, fade with time.

Both the brain and the Internet employ memes or “units of culture” in the parlance of Richard Dawkins, originator of the term. The human neocortex is made of six layers; the topmost of these occupies itself with executing decisions after the lower orders have processed and refined the data to make that decision. Similarly, the makeup of the Web is hierarchical. Internet trends always start small, on individual computers, but quickly pick up momentum. The most-trafficked sites and applications like YouTube and Facebook are popular precisely because they make that process as fast as possible and involve the largest number of people.

Much like the brain, the Internet experienced a period of rapid expansion. But the brain actually grew too large for our Neanderthal predecessors and fell back in size, ultimately settling on 100 billion neurons and roughly 100 trillion interneuron connections. The Web will do the same thing, says Stibel: It will fall back in size and achieve a new equilibrium. This forecast puts Stibel in direct conflict with Internet optimists who contend that the Web can only grow continuously and even exponentially. Surely the Internet shows no sign of curbing its growth anytime soon.

Stibel’s theory is rather comforting, even flattering in the way it reduces the future of the Internet to the evolutionary history of the human thinking organ. According to this view, in the coming decades, the Internet will adapt to the world much as the brain did. It will seek to identify patterns in order to better predict what may happen next. Signs of this future are already evident. In September, Netflix awarded $1 million to a software team who figured out a way for the company to better “predict” what movies its customers might most want to watch. The Web is getting smarter about the real world all the time, accumulating information about the way the world sounds, smells, and tastes through real-time sensing technology. Many trend watchers, such as Tim O’Reilly, consider sensor technology to be the next great trend to move the Internet forward (Web 3.0, if you will). We will merge our brains with the Web, not simply through implants, but through our behavior. This will quickly change the way we experience the Web — and the way the Web experiences us.

No longer will you “surf” the Web, traveling to different sites seeking out information. The Web will search itself and customize itself for you as you encounter it. Stibel points to a company called Kosmix.com that dynamically builds entirely new Web pages based on a particular search. “The Web will one day be able to generate a Web page specific to your request, just as the brain fires off new symphonies of excitation when it encounters a novel subject,” he writes.

Missing from this engaging and persuasive book is any doubt or hesitation that a future smarter, more brainlike Internet is a good thing. A cautious pause may be in order. The basics of biology suggest that intelligent creatures prioritize their own survival above the well-being of others. We evolved our smarts to better survive in a competitive, difficult environment. If the Internet is a brain, the question becomes, what does it think of us?

About the Reviewer

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

Vertical Farming

An Idea Whose Time Has Come Back

By Cynthia G. Wagner
Like all our precious resources, good ideas should be reclaimed and recycled. Urban agriculture is one such good idea now made new again.

The April 1985 issue of THE FUTURIST featured an inspiring new book by New Alchemy Institute founders John and Nancy Jack Todd, Bioshelters, Ocean Arks, City Farming: Ecology as the Basis of Design (Sierra Club Books, 1984). The visionary seeds they planted then are now coming into season.

Among the Todds’ more intriguing proposals were multi-tiered city farms occupying once-abandoned warehouses: Mushrooms in the basement; chickens, eggs, trout, and catfish on the first floor; hydroponic veggies on the second floor; third-floor lettuce; and rooftop wind turbines and solar-energy panels.

Even more intriguing were the Todds’ micro-agriculture visions, such as park fountains used for irrigation, fish raised in bus-stop aquariums, and sidewalks converted to aquaculture ponds.

Now, these visions are being reclaimed, recycled, and renewed in towers that are half workspaces and half gardens, eco-laboratories and pyramid farms, and “living” skyscrapers with decks dedicated to food, fuel, or families. These and other inventive agro-architectural solutions take the ideas of city and indoor farming into a new, increasingly urbanized future.

The Vertical Farm Project, launched in 2001 by Columbia University environmental health science professor Dickson Despommier, collects ideas that promise to reduce agriculture’s ecological footprint — not only by bringing food growers and consumers closer together, but also by extending “farmland” into a third dimension: skyward.

The advantages of raising food crops and animals indoors and in closer proximity to consumers include year-round production, more-efficient use and reuse of water and other resources, and protection from threats ranging from epidemics to terrorists.

The recent resurgence of urban agriculture in popular futurist and science literature (including articles in Scientific American, Time, Popular Science, and the New York Times) illustrates that good ideas may need to be cycled and recycled before their time truly comes.

Like the Todds’ New Alchemy Institute, the Vertical Farm Project envisions the transformation of urban architecture along ecological principles. A 30-story skyscraper on one city block could potentially feed 50,000 Manhattanites, using technologies available now, according to Despommier. And with technologies available in the future, intensive-farming techniques could enable us to settle on the Moon, Mars, or beyond.

About the Author

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

For more information, visit The Vertical Farm Project, www.verticalfarm.com.

John and Nancy Jack Todd co-founded (1981) Ocean Arks International, www.oceanarks.org; since 1999, John has been a research professor and distinguished lecturer at the University of Vermont’s Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources.

A Search Engine that Listens Breakthrough in computer speech-recognition.

The Internet may not be making us smarter, but it may be getting smarter about us. Recent breakthroughs in speech-recognition technology point toward a future where Web crawlers recognize more of the words we speak.
Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis have developed a type of search engine that works for spoken words in television broadcasts. Other similar speech-recognition programs attempt to match what the system hears to words stored in a digital database. The Fraunhofer program recognizes syllables and pieces together spoken words based on their small parts, allowing for almost 99% accuracy, the researchers claim.

“Our system is based on a syllable thesaurus instead of a word thesaurus,” according to researcher Daniel Schneider. “Conventional speech recognizers can only discern a limited number of words, while the total number of words in existence is too vast to handle. The number of existing syllables, on the other hand, is manageable. With about 10,000 stored syllables, we can make up any word.”

The program is also able to differentiate between speakers and scan thousands of hours of broadcasts in just a few milliseconds, the researchers assert. Users can look for bits of spoken dialogue based on when comments were made, what was said, where, or by whom.

Students, detectives, or snoops could also use the program to analyze surveillance footage (provided people's words are clear enough to be heard on the recording). As more people spend more time under the lenses of cameras, and as more footage from those cameras and devices goes online, some interesting if not troubling implications for privacy emerge. A spoken-word search engine could one day theoretically allow someone with little more than a smart phone to look up any recorded conversation between any two people that's occurred virtually anywhere a microphone was present.—Patrick Tucker

Source: Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, www.fraunhoher.de .

Arctic Species at the Cliff’s Edge

Climate change will affect species in the Arctic in surprising ways. Olivier Gilg, Benoît Sittler and Ilkka Hanski, writing in the journal Global Change Biology, warn that rapid arctic heating, already pushing species like polar bears closer to extinction, will also interfere with the breeding habits of the collard lemming. The seemingly small change could have disastrous consequences for a number of species that feed on the lemmings, such as snowy owls, Arctic foxes, the long-tailed skua (a seagull-like bird) and the stoat (also known as the short-tailed weasel), all of which could have further ripple effects on other animals across the globe later this century.

“Small changes for lemmings can indeed induce huge changes at the community level, because lemmings are almost the only prey for the predators in the high Arctic. So if lemmings decline and stop cycling, their predators will either disappear or focus on alternate prey (if any), and in turn the latest will also decline,” Gilg told THE FUTURIST.

In their report Gilg, Sittler, and Hanski present a number of scenarios showing how temperature and snowfall changes will affect lemming behavior. Among the most important factors in their study are the growing likelihood of longer arctic summers and a poor quality snow layer during winter. Lemmings typically dig deep snow tunnels and breed in the snow during the winter so that their offspring can emerge in the spring with several months to feed on freshly thawed vegetation. The sudden arrival of lots of lemmings in the spring (sometimes referred to as “lemming peaks”) provides food for the Arctic foxes, owls, and skua. Only the wily weasel (stoat) can burrow into the lemmings’ dens to hunt them during the region’s colder months.

A longer summer would seem to be good for the lemmings, as this would increase the time available for the younger members of the species to forage and grow before the onset of harsher conditions. But the shorter winter season means less time for breeding. The result is far fewer lemmings in the spring for the predator species to feed on. The change in lemming breeding habits will likely change the predators’ habits as well, the researchers conclude. All of these disruptions will add to pressure the animals already face from encroaching populations of other alien species attracted to the north’s rapidly rising temperatures, like the red fox and seagulls.

The researchers’ scenarios show that the change in the lemming population is likely to reduce skuas’ breeding at both of the two Greenland areas the researchers modeld for, (two completely uninhabited areas of one million square kilometers in size.) In one scenario, the snowy owl disappeared from at least one of the areas and experienced much lower breeding in the second. The breeding success of the Arctic fox was reduced by a factor of two, and the stoat population decreased significantly in one location and went extinct in another.
“Our results underscore the fragility of the dynamic interactions between the lemmings and their predators, because the life-time reproductive success of the predators is much dependent on the years of high lemming density. Even a moderate advance in snow melt has a potentially great impact on the community, and it may ultimately cause the local extinction of some of the predator species,” the authors write. “The lemmings themselves do not commit suicide as foreseen for centuries, but their spectacular high-amplitude cyclic dynamics might as well be ‘thrown off the cliff’ by climate change.”

Many researchers argue that the rapid climatic and biota changes playing out in the Arctic provide a window to how temperatures and animal behaviors will shift as a result of climate change. The Arctic is warming about twice as fast as the rest of the planet. By the end of this century, the globe is forecast to warm anywhere from 4 to 7 degrees Celsius; the Arctic is forecast to heat up 6 to 9 degrees. As previously reported in THE FUTURIST, oceanographers have forecast that the Arctic Ocean could experience iceless summers by 2040, and one model holds that the arctic could be ice-free during the summer months in just 11 years.

The Arctic also provides a relatively ideal setting of the analysis of weather patterns on animals, as it hosts the earth’s simplest vertebrate community. There are few species that can survive in the harsh terrain, and their interactions tend to be more direct and more observable. Importantly, the change in the breeding and survival patterns of arctic species will have less-predictable effects for other animals as well.

“The dynamics of this community influence the dynamics of other terrestrial vertebrates through indirect effects and across several trophic levels, hence the dynamics of this community have important consequences for the structure and functioning of the Arctic biota,” the researchers note.

“Changes are now occurring so rapidly and impact the ecosystems so strongly that species and even communities will not be able to cope and to adjust,” said Gilg. “Many arctic species will likely disappear within just years or decades, and what happens in the Arctic should be regarded as a summary of what will happen next in countries with more temperate climates.”—Patrick Tucker
Source: “Climate Change and Cyclic Predator-Prey Population Dynamics in the High Arctic” by Olivier Gilg, Benoît Sittler and Ilkka Hanski, Global Change Biology (2009). Personal interview.

Books in Brief

Can Antarctica Survive?

Antarctica 2041: My Quest to Save the Earth’s Last Wilderness by Robert Swan with Gil Reavill. Broadway. 2009. 290 pages. $24.99.

Antarctica’s long-term survival is in question, warns Robert Swan, a researcher who has led expeditions to both the North and South poles. In 2041, he explains, the international treaty protecting Antarctica from human development is up for review. He fears that human development might win, due to the continent’s vast oil, natural gas, and mineral resources, and the likelihood that—if current consumption trends continue—existing oil wells will be mostly drained and no longer sufficient to sustain industrialized civilization.

Swan tells of his ventures on the tundra and his observations about its already-troubled health: disintegrating ice, accumulating trash, and the permanent discoloration of his own eyes from the solar radiation that penetrated the depleted ozone layer above. He expresses his hope that human civilization will find the will to protect this last wilderness.

Space-Based Energy Solutions

Energy Crisis: Solution from Space by Ralph Nansen. Apogee. 2009. 203 pages. $24.95.

An energy source that is nondepletable, available to everyone, environmentally clean, and in a form we can easily use—we have yet to find it on Earth, but it is there for the taking in space, argues space engineer Ralph Nansen. He presents a bold and far-reaching plan to deploy satellites that will capture solar radiation from the sun and beam it to earth for use in generating immense new quantities of electricity.

Plans for such satellites have been under way since the 1970s, he explains, relating the historical background of America’s space program and technical details of the structures that a hypothetical solar-satellite system would include. It would be a very long-term solution, he cautions: Government agencies and businesses would have to commit many years of development and huge initial investments. But if human beings muster the foresight to go through with it, the reward will be a new era of low-cost energy that the entire world can enjoy.

Futurism, Kid-Style

2030: A Day in the Life of Tomorrow’s Kids by Amy Zuckerman and James Daly Dutton. 2009. 32 pages. $16.99.

Kids in 2030 will still have to eat their vegetables, but genetic engineering will make those greens taste far yummier. School will still be in session, but most kids will be excited to go. What child wouldn’t look forward to teacher-led holograph tours of the pyramids of Egypt; multimedia centers where talking computers help students create dynamic video presentations; and gym classes replete with virtual-reality baseball and “smart” trampolines?

In 32 richly illustrated pages, business writer Amy Zuckerman and education writer James Daly give young readers a snapshot of daily life as it might look when they grow up. Dogs “speak” to people via voice simulators, kitchen appliances interact with users, and humanoid search agents converse with you and help you find whatever information you need.

Other, less far-fetched amenities include energy grids powered mainly by wind and solar generators, recycling of nearly all garbage, and suburban “eco-villages” whose buildings are specially insulated to keep out excess heat.

Many of these marvels will be familiar concepts to career futurists, but they will come alive for the first time to young readers—and maybe inspire them to engage in their own futures thinking.

Career—and Life—Hunting

What Color Is Your Parachute? 2010: A Practical Manual for Job Hunters and Career Changers by Richard N. Bolles. Ten Speed Press. 2010. 311 pages. $18.99.

The job search as career coach is not a matter of looking for available positions; it is one of self-discovery and personal futuring.

In this “hard times” edition of the job-search guide that Richard Bolles has published annually since 1970, he explains that job seekers will have the most success if they undertake a “life-changing job hunt”: taking a thorough personal inventory of what one enjoys, brainstorming of job environments where one will use these skills and interests, and planning to contact individuals who can help find jobs that offer opportunities to use these skills and interests.
With anecdotes, step-by-step instructions, and engaging charts and graphs, Bolles shows how to undertake this introspective job hunt. He maps out the multitude of available aids one can find along the way, such as Web sites, unemployment agencies, networking groups, and many others.

On a Lifetime of Community Building

Odyssey of a Practical Visionary by Belden Paulson. Thistlefield Books. 2009. 757 pages. $24.95.

In the mid-twentieth century, while communists and anticommunists across the world were locked in ideological warfare, futurist and community organizer Belden Paulson went about his own peaceful quest to change the world. Now he tells his story, with all the people who shared in it and the history he witnessed.

Paulson relates his post-college journey to Sardinia in 1950 as a work-camp humanitarian helping towns rebuild from the lingering damage of World War II. He then decided to stay and co-found Italy’s first settlement center and resettlement camp to help Sardinia’s war refugees join the neighboring towns as self-sufficient working citizens.

Paulson continued his community-building in Wisconsin, where he helped establish High Wind, a community powered by renewable energy and designed for maximum cooperation and closeness to nature among its residents. While at High Wind, he established the Plymouth Institute, a futurist think tank.

Paulson’s activism as a futurist led him to participate in the World Future Society’s 1980 globla conference in Toronto, an account of which is included in this memoir.

Through his lifelong “adventure,” as he calls it, Paulson has held fast to the conviction that anything is possible, and that all of us are bound by the ties of global interdependence. He challenges readers to rethink how they see the world and realize the opportunity that each of us has to commit to building a more perfect world.

New Leadership Skills

Leaders Make the Future: Ten New Leadership Skills for an Uncertain World by Bob Johansen. Berrett-Koehler Publishers. 2009. 191 pages. $26.95.

Self-serving leadership is about to become obsolete, according to Institute for the Future scholar and board member Bob Johansen. He expects the next 10 years to be a “threshold decade” of greater volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. Leaders who wish to steer their organizations through all the turmoil will need to be able to look beyond their own personal interests and collaborate with the broader system of which they are parts.

Johansen identifies 10 fundamental skills that every leader will need to possess to be effective, and he explains how he or she can implement them into everyday practice. These skills include the “maker instinct,” clarity, dilemma flipping (turning problems into opportunities), and quiet transparency (being open and authentic without advertising).

Making Education More Effective

The Money Myth: School Resources, Outcomes, and Equity by W. Norton Grubb. Russell Sage Foundation. 2009. 400 pages. $35.

Increased funding does not guarantee improved school performance, according to Berkeley education professor W. Norton Grubb. Despite lavish funding, he says, many U.S. school districts lag far behind others in the quality of education they offer their students. Those students will consequently be at a steep disadvantage throughout their adult lives.

Grubb cites evidence that schools often waste or misallocate the resources they have, in part because they operate by outmoded top-down management styles in which leadership does not work in tandem with teachers and the communities. With more collective decision making, schools might function more effectively.

Grubb describes new approaches to reorganize schools and school districts to make them more collegial, democratic, and equipped for meeting the challenges of the twenty-first century.

Bringing Garbage Cans into the 21st Century

Imagine a trash can that actually sorts your recyclables for you—and then tells you how much money your garbage is worth. Currently being developed at Georgia Tech, Smart Trash receptacles are being touted as an ecologically sound method of waste disposal that’s easy and rewarding to use.

Trash receptacles equipped with scanners that read bar codes and other product tags would record much of what is thrown away, along with the items’ potential resale value. They would then relay that information to recycling centers via WiFi. Recycling centers would set aside anything hazardous or toxic for treatment, storage, and safe disposal. Anything of value would be auctioned off, with proceeds going to the consumer, who would have the option of receiving cash back or applying the earnings to next month’s sanitation bill.

The cash incentive and user-friendliness of Smart Trash technology is intended to encourage more consumers to recycle and also enable them to easily recycle many more items than the current system allows, such as consumer electronics, for example. Developers are betting that the benefits for consumers (not to mention the environment) will outweigh any embarrassment of leaving yet one more digital trail behind.

Source: Georgia Institute of Technology, www.gatech.edu.

Collecting Wisdom About the Future

2009 State of the Future by Jerome C. Glenn, Theodore J. Gordon, and Elizabeth Florescu. Millennium Project. 2009. 100-page paperback plus a CD-ROM with 6,700 pages of research. $49.95. Order from World Future Society, www.wfs.org/wfsbooks.htm.

In October 2008, major U.S. financial institutions crashed, and economies around the world went into recession. In March 2009, an asteroid passed within 77,000 kilometers of Earth; had it made impact, it would have obliterated all life within an 800-square-kilometer area. What do these two events have in common? According to Millennium Project scholars Jerome C. Glenn, Theodore J. Gordon, and Elizabeth Florescu in the 2009 State of the Future, both were near-total surprises.

“No one knew it [the meteor] was coming,” the authors write. “The time between its discovery and close approach was very short. Few people knew the global financial crisis was coming; fewer still forecast its breadth and depth.”

As a commission that advises the United Nations’ global efforts to raise living standards, lower disease rates, and relieve hunger, the Millennium Project anticipates—and seeks to avert—disasters of all kinds. It continually surveys more than 2,700 researchers for which trends they expect will shape world events over the coming years, and releases their combined observations in its annual State of the Future reports.

Like preceding reports, the 2009 edition identifies 15 Global Challenges that only worldwide action will be able to solve. The 2009 also present an overall outlook for life on earth over the next decade in its State of the Future Index, and synthesizes researchers’ analyses about conditions in the world at large via real-time Delphi studies and other forecasting exercises.
On the plus side, according to the researchers, the world now has fewer conflicts, global development assistance is growing, poverty reduction continues, women are gaining a greater voice in governments and organizations internationally, and scientific and technological progress keeps accelerating. On the minus side, fewer countries are governed by democratic governments; population growth trends portend more people lacking food and water; climate change is altering animal and insect patterns; new infectious diseases, including 20 drug-resistant “superbugs,” have emerged over the last 40 years; and worldwide energy demand could double by 2030.

The global recession and its long-term impacts have given the researchers much to discuss in this report. So has the growing concern worldwide over climate change. The authors hope that new national and international systems might effectively respond to both.

“The global financial crisis and climate change planning may be helping humanity to move from its often selfish, self-centered adolescence to a more globally responsible adulthood,” they write.
This year’s State of the Future Index projects global development over the next 10 years post-recession, alongside a “baseline” projection scenario in which the recession never took place. The comparison is a concrete tracker of the recession’s impacts: The first projection shows greater scarcity of food and potable water, higher poverty rates, stifled research and development, and hampered economic growth.

Yet we have an opportunity to build a new, better global economy, the authors argue. In a chapter unique to this edition, 217 international questionnaire participants offer ideas on the elements that this new economy might include: a higher priority on ethics at all levels; new definitions of GNP and GDP; global commons supported by international agreements; “collective intelligence,” by which leaders are able to draw from universal banks of information to guide their decisions; and updated educational systems.

At least one reason for hope is cited: Instantaneous- communication technologies provide the means for people across the world to know the world’s problems and to act collaboratively to solve them.

“Mobile phones, the Internet, international trade, language translation, and jet planes are giving birth to an interdependent humanity that can create and implement global strategies to improve the prospects for humanity,” the authors write.

Ethical decision making also seems to be making progress. More than 5,000 businesses signed on to the UN’s Global Compact, pledging to use global ethics. The International Criminal Court, international treaties, and new International Organization for Standardization guidelines are setting norms for national governance. Social media, ethics commissions, and NGOs all are keeping public officials accountable. Corporate social responsibility, ethical marketing, and social investing are increasing.

If one seeks evidence of new collective intelligence, this report itself surely provides it. With more than 2,700 participants from around the world since 1996 contributing to these assessments, the annual reports are as well-researched and all-encompassing as any. Readers will find a grand overview of the trends—both positive and negative—likely to shape world events in this century and beyond.

About the Reviewer
Rick Docksai is a staff editor for THE FUTURIST and World Future Review. E-mail rdocksai@wfs.org.

Deciding Our Futures

Futurists offer a toolbox for improving decision making.

As the world becomes more complex, the likelihood of making poor decisions about our future increases, as does the cost of bad outcomes.

Psychologists refer to two types of decision-making strategies: intuition and reason. Intuition is faster and often emotional, while reason is slower and logical. As the pace of our world accelerates, intuition may increasingly trump reason; "going with the gut" can be an efficient way to decide, but it can also lead to more errors.

It is becoming harder to make good decisions because it has become risky to simply rely on expert advice: Expertise has become fractured into smaller and smaller areas, leaving a gap in areas in which we may be unknowledgeable. Experience leaves us ill-prepared for judgments about wild-card events. And intuition is often based on biases that may lead us in the wrong direction.

This special section offers insights from futurists on ways that we can come to grips with the flaws in our decision-making processes and improve our strategies for making critical decisions about the future.

- Editors

The Dymaxion Dream Reincarnate

By Cynthia G. Wagner
Volkswagen showcases the “purposeful aesthetics” of earth-friendly design.

One could not help but smile when Volkswagen introduced its trim little concept car, the L1, at the 2009 auto show in Frankfurt. Smile, with nostalgia for futures past … and for visionary inventor R. Buckminster Fuller.

The future is, and has been for some time, streamlined.

In a description strongly reminiscent of that for the Dymaxion car, which Fuller designed and built in the 1930s, VW outlines its philosophy for the latest car of the future in a press package:

In developing both prototype generations of the L1, (pictured right) Volkswagen simply questioned everything that typically characterised an automobile. The key starting point was body construction, and a core question was raised here: How would a car have to look and be built to consume as little energy as possible? The logical answer: extremely aerodynamic and lightweight.

Thus, aerodynamically designed and built with lightweight materials, the 838-pound, one-liter vehicle (with a fuel economy of 240 mpg) may be on the market by 2013 — realizing a vision for efficient transportation that’s more than 75 years old.

Is this the reincarnation of Fuller’s Dymaxion Car we see before us? The new vehicle is at least a worthy descendent, bearing traces of its ancestor’s noble silhouette.

VW’s L1 is far smaller than Fuller’s Dymaxion car, with room for just two passengers (one sitting behind the other), while Fuller’s vision accommodated a larger American family of up to 10 passengers.

Fuller’s Dymaxion concept extended beyond vehicle design to housing and even global mapping. As the Buckminster Fuller Institute defines it, Dymaxion (dynamic maximum tension) was an engineering concept built on “the idea that rational action in a rational world demands the most efficient overall performance per unit of input. [Fuller’s] Dymaxion structures, then are those that yield the greatest possible efficiency in terms of available technology.”

The principles of energy efficiency are the legacy that VW has inherited from Bucky Fuller, affectionately known as Earth’s friendly genius. But Walter de Silva, head of design for the Volkswagen Group, emphasizes the L1’s more modern appeal — its “purposeful aesthetics” — as a feature no less significant to the car-buying public and, hence, to the future of personal transportation.

About the Author

Cynthia G. Wagner is managing editor of THE FUTURIST.

For more information about Volkswagen AG, visit www.volkswagenag.com. For a review of the L1, see “VW’s One-Liter Car Is Finally On Its Way” by Jens Meiners, Car and Driver (September 2009).

For more about R. Buckminster Fuller, visit Buckminster Fuller Institute, www.bfi.org.

IN THE PRINT VERSION OF THIS ARTICLE, THE PHOTOS RUN WERE PUBLISHED IN “CRITICAL PATH TO AN ALL-WIN WORLD: BUCKY FULLER DESIGNS THE NEW AGE” BY BARBARA MARX HUBBARD, THE FUTURIST, JUNE 1981.

The photos above are from Car addicts.com, and Tommytoy, respectively.

The Fate of the Galaxy

The Milky Way has a bright future ahead of it—literally—predicts Ohio State University astronomer Stelios Kazantzidis.

Using computer models, he concludes that, in the far future, the host of smaller satellite galaxies that orbit the Milky Way will merge with it. When they do, the gravitational forces will puff up the Milky Way’s stars and other matter to create luminous stellar rings or flares.

Many scientists expect this merger. They speculate, however, that it would tear the Milky Way apart—one tough break for whatever life forms inhabit the galaxy at the time.

Kazantzidis’s computer models are based on the real-life movements of other galaxies similar to the Milky Way, and project a much more hopeful future.

“The satellite galaxy impacts don't destroy spiral galaxies. They actually drive their evolution,” he says.
It is an evolution that has already been going on for billions of years, he adds. The continous pull from the satellite galaxies might explain why the Milky Way has its namesake nebulous haze.

“Every spiral galaxy has a complex formation and evolutionary history,” says Kazantzidis. “We would hope to understand exactly how the Milky Way formed and how it will evolve. We may never succeed in knowing its exact history, but we can try to learn as much as we can about it.”—Rick Docksai

Source: Stelios Kazantzidis, www.ohio-state.edu.

Foresight Conquers Fear of the Future

By Edward Cornish
Today’s youth are growing up in the midst of radical social and economic transformations. Now is the time to develop the most critical skill for effectively managing their careers and personal lives: Foresight.

“I’m scared,” the young man confessed. “I’m starting my eighteenth year in a world that makes no sense to me. All I know is that this world I’m living in is a shambles and I don’t know how to put it together.”

The young man bared his soul to an invisible audience during a radio call-in show. Other callers agreed with his dismal assessment of the state of the world. Nobody offered an answer for his fears.

Bill Moyers, the TV interviewer, happened to be listening that night and was profoundly affected by what he heard.

“Such lamentations,” Moyers commented later, “are deep currents running throughout the liberal West today. Our secular and scientific societies are besieged by violence, moral anarchy, and purposelessness that have displaced any mobilizing vision of the future except hedonism and consumerism.”

Moyers put his finger on what may be a key challenge faced by many young people today: their inability to think realistically, creatively, and hopefully about the future. Instead, these young people suffer from what can be described as “futurephobia.”

Some futurephobes have an acute version of this malady, like the young man described by Moyers, but most futurephobes simply focus on their immediate circumstances and drift into the future without thinking much about it at all. Either way, they may drift into financial or other kinds of trouble.

The connection between poor foresight and serious problems is widely recognized by psychologists and sociologists. Yale sociologist Wendell Bell asserts that some authorities “go so far as to claim that all forms of deviant, criminal, and reckless behavior have the same fundamental cause: the tendency to pursue immediate benefits without concern for long-term costs, a disregard for inevitable and undesirable future consequences.”

Successful self-management, says Bell, requires understanding and giving appropriate value to the likely consequences of your actions. If you have little or no foresight, you cannot think realistically and creatively about your future, so you cannot steer your career and personal life toward long-term success.

Poor foresight can threaten not just the careers of emerging adults, but even their lives. Young people lacking foresight are prone to act recklessly — drive too fast, use drugs, play with guns, commit crimes, and even kill themselves (or others).

On the other hand, when young people do manage to develop good foresight, they can think realistically, creatively, and hopefully about the future. So empowered, they can aim their careers toward achievable goals and cheerfully accept the burdens of responsibility and self-discipline required for success. Barack Obama is a recent example of foresight-empowered success.

The New Urgency of Foresight

Older people are prone to dismiss the problems of youth as just a normal part of growing up, but the fact is that today’s youth are coming of age in a world undergoing an unprecedented transformation powered by multiple technological revolutions. These technological advances, all occurring simultaneously, are overturning the world’s economies and undermining long-established institutions, careers, and lifestyles.

Amid such turbulence, making a good decision concerning one’s career or private life can be highly problematic, and the demographic group most acutely affected are young people moving into adulthood. These emerging adults have entered a time of life when parents and teachers have diminished power to guide them, so young people must make critical decisions by themselves at a time when their experience of the world is limited and their brains are still immature. (Foresight, scientists say, is largely a function of the brain’s prefrontal cortex, which does not reach maturity until about age 25.)

Adding to the challenge of making appropriate decisions in today’s world is the fact that knowledgeable and trustworthy advisors are now less available to emerging adults. In bygone days, most young people lived in villages or small towns where people got to know each other well, enabling the elders to offer wise counsel for a young person trying to find a suitable job or marriage partner.

In today’s highly mobile mass society, young people roam the world and can choose among thousands of potential careers and mates in countless different locations. In principle, the abundance of choice offers wonderful opportunities, but it can pose a baffling conundrum for an emerging adult with little experience of the world.

Making matters worse for many young people, technological advances have eliminated most of the jobs that could be learned quickly and paid enough for an 18-year-old to live on and maybe support a family. Now, getting a decent job is likely to require years of training at a college or university during which time the student earns little or no money and may go heavily into debt.
Improving Youth Foresight

Ironically, it was fear of the future that led to some of our most useful foresight tools.

Relatively little was done to create a science of foresight until after World War II, which had led to the development of rockets and atomic bombs. Frightened that the Soviet Union might use the new superweapons, the U.S. Air Force established the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California, as a “think factory.” The main task of RAND’s scientists and scholars was to think about future wars — how to fight and win them.

To fulfill their mission, the RAND scientists had to think seriously about the future, and in the process they developed a variety of methods for thinking more scientifically about the future than had ever been done before. Mathematician Olaf Helmer and his RAND colleague Norman Dalkey developed the Delphi technique, a way to refine and synthesize scientists’ forecasts of future technological developments. In addition, Herman Kahn developed his scenario technique for exploring the implications of possible future events. The scenario method is now widely used in government and business.

Meanwhile, Arnold Brown, Edie Weiner, and others refined ways for identifying and analyzing social trends. Today trend analysis is widely recognized as one of the most useful ways for identifying significant developments in technology and society and anticipating outcomes.

Many of the methods developed since World War II can now be used in simplified forms by young people and by teachers or others trying to help young people gain a practical understanding of what is happening in the world now, where things are going, and the opportunities that young people have to make valuable contributions to human welfare as well as succeed in their chosen careers and personal lives.

The task now is to make foresight into a recognized life skill that can empower young people to think more clearly, constructively, and hopefully about the future. The World Future Society has already initiated several projects for improving youth foresight, and more are under development.

Young people interested in participating in a Society conference now can attend at a reduced rate of $125 ($150 on site) and many members have been donating funds to cover one or more full scholarships for young people.

In addition, the Society recently sponsored a High School Essay Contest, and the first group of winners was announced in July. Other programs will be instituted as funding becomes available.

If we can equip today’s young people with good foresight, we can all be much more optimistic about their future and ours.
About the Author

Edward Cornish, founder of the World Future Society, is editor of THE FUTURIST and a member of the Society’s Board. His book Futuring: The Exploration of the Future provides a readable description of the futures field, including many of the methods now in use. It may be ordered from the World Future Society for $19.95 (member’s price $17.95). Go to www.wfs.org/futuring.htm

Reinventing the Music Business

The music industry continues to search for a sustainable long-term model for the digital age. Recently, industry leaders, musicians, and policy makers gathered to search for innovative solutions at the Future of Music Coalition Policy Summit in Washington, D.C.

“It’s chaos, the music industry right now,” said Greg Kot, music critic for the Chicago Tribune, during a panel discussion. “But chaos is not necessarily a bad thing.”

Nowadays, musicians have the option of signing to a label (large or small), relying on outside investment, or finding the time, energy, and money to manage everything themselves—the do-it-yourself approach. Convincing fans to microfinance their efforts is a fourth possibility, and a bit riskier. Each choice comes with its own set of advantages and disadvantages. Speaking at the conference, Emily White of Whitesmith Entertainment emphasized that what’s best for an artist depends on a number of factors, including where artists are in terms of their careers and where they ultimately want to be.

In other words, just because independent musicians now have the power to tap into the global marketplace from their laptops doesn’t mean that the “middle man” is obsolete. On the contrary, White pointed out that having to constantly promote and market one’s own music takes a great deal of effort and leaves less time to focus on actually making music. It is probably a task better left to others.

Nevertheless, even with an army of publicists behind them, bands need to take advantage of social networking sites to connect with fans, spread the word about their music, and gain support. As a number of speakers and panelists pointed out, social networking is a huge component of a successful promotional strategy that also includes giving away MP3s for free.

Ariel Hyatt of Cyber PR insisted that musicians should view MP3s first and foremost as a method of self-promotion that can lead to other financial opportunities. Music sales form only a small fraction (possibly even the smallest fraction) of a band's revenue. There is greater financial opportunity in licensing recordings (for use in movies, television shows, games like Rock Band, and commercials, for example).

Legendary band manager and artist advocate Peter Jenner predicted that music sales will never recover now that anyone can effortlessly copy an MP3 file, arguing that music producers need to move beyond outdated industrial models of mass production. The Internet is a communications medium, and actually functions more like a radio station than a large store, he said. In other words, music is a service rather than a product.

The popular European Web site Spotify is one of a small handful of recent start-ups intent on offering music as a service under a blanket licensing system. As co-founder Daniel Ek explained, Spotify offers subscribers the ability to stream millions of recordings for a monthly fee. There is also a more limited, ad-supported free version.

Such online music services, which enable users to access virtually any music at any time without having to download it, could render peer-to-peer file sharing—the industry’s white whale—a thing of the past. Spotify users can share and collaborate on playlists, there are applications for Facebook and other social media, and the basic interface is simple to use. One music critic has said that it’s like having the entire iTunes library on your laptop or phone. So far, Spotify has been enthusiastically received in France, Spain, and the U.K.

There are no gatekeepers, so independent artists’ creative output is just as easily accessed as that of those on major labels. Ek pointed out that independent music makes up approximately 25% of what users are listening to. A more even playing field for musicians is one of the great advantages of digital media, but it faces a potentially large challenge.

Net Neutrality

Internet service providers, in the interest of increasing profits, could put bumps in that level playing field, warned Michael Bracy, co-founder and policy director of the Future of Music Coalition and co-owner of Austin, Texas-based independent record label Misra. Bracy noted that ISPs can make exclusive arrangements that direct consumers to certain large, corporate marketplace sites and slow down or even block access to competitors’ sites. Some ISPs might offer different tiers of service, where consumers would pay a premium in return for increased options.

The result might be a few large corporations controlling the digital music sphere in much the same way that they have American commercial radio, where independent and local artists face insurmountable obstacles in order to get airplay. Summit speaker Senator Al Franken pointed out that, without regulation, ISPs would have the power to transform a free, open, democratic system into a corporate pay-to-play system where those that can’t compete financially simply aren’t allowed in. Currently, “a garage band can stream songs just as easily as a multiplatinum superband,” he said, “but recently, business executives from top ISPs have declared their interest in offering prioritized Internet service to companies that can pay for it.”

This wouldn’t just affect the music industry. Determining what content moves at what speed across servers threatens innovation across the board, Franken warned. And restricting innovation would adversely affect the economy as a whole. In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission is currently working on regulations to keep the Internet neutral.

—Aaron M. Cohen

For further information: The Future of Music Coalition, futureofmusic.org.

Saving a Tribal Language

Cultural knowledge may disappear with dwindling native populations.
When languages disappear, so do oral histories and cultural knowledge. As minority indigenous cultures face rapidly dwindling populations, the future of their heritage grows dark.

In America’s northern Plains, the Assiniboine tribe has shrunk to just 50 living members in Montana who are fluent in its language, Nakota. The Assiniboine separated from the Sioux some 400 years ago, developing their own linguistic and cultural forms, according to Raymond DeMallie, an Indiana University anthropology professor.
DeMallie is leading a project to preserve the oral history of the tribe, with plans to publish a dictionary of the language and two volumes transcribing oral histories that were recorded nearly 25 years ago.

The Assiniboine tribe had long been neglected by linguists and anthropologists because they were believed to have been closely related to the Sioux; they were also incorrectly identified with the Stoneys of Canada, according to DeMallie. This mistaken identity led to neglect by scholars pursuing the larger and better known indigenous cultures.

Armed with new digital audio technologies that can visually represent sounds for precise analysis, DeMallie and his team will be able to replay difficult passages of the recorded material, consult with other experts, and render more accurate translations.

The Assiniboine traveled farther north than did the Sioux, and the culture was greatly influenced through intermarriage with the Cree tribe and with French and Canadian fur traders, DeMallie explains. The oral culture is rich with stories incorporating European folktales.

But of particular importance to cultural anthropologists is the effect of one of the tribe’s key distinctions: It survived as hunters without benefit of horses. Unlike other Plains tribes, the Assiniboine relied on pre-horse hunting techniques, such as communal buffalo drives. Knowledge about their unique survival strategies could thus be preserved in the oral histories and stories collected.
Source: Indiana University, www.indiana.edu.

Stewart Brand’s Environmental Heresies

By Aaron M. Cohen
A maverick environmentalist advocates saving the planet via nuclear power, mass urbanization, genetically engineered food, and geoengineering.

Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto by Stewart Brand. Viking. 2009. 316 pages. $25.95.

Futurist and ecologist Stewart Brand believes that the Green movement must move swiftly and decisively to embrace technological solutions to climate change — several of which many leading environmentalists have spent their careers campaigning against — including nuclear energy, genetic modification, mass urbanization, and geoengineering.

Brand, founder of The Whole Earth Catalog, and co-founder of The Long Now Foundation and The WELL, has never had any trepidation about seeking out controversial solutions or endorsing emerging technologies. As he sees it, climate change is the single largest threat looming over humanity. It comes down to a simple choice, he writes: “We finesse climate, or climate finesses us.”

The first item on the agenda is a carbon-free future. Brand argues that this is well within reach and that the technological know-how is already in place — all we need to do is get over our nuclear fears.

A 2002 tour of the notorious Yucca Mountain project led Brand to rethink his long-held opinions on nuclear energy. He began to balance potential benefits against potential drawbacks. In the process, he learned that the risk of cancer is much higher from fossil-fuel production and usage; that oil, natural gas, and hydrogen are much more explosive; that trace radiation technically isn’t bad for you; and that nuclear energy is historically associated with deproliferation efforts — not nuclear weapons programs.

Brand makes nuclear energy the leading component of his green energy plan and presents a strong case that it is economical and safe. (The arguments he presents against greater investment in wind and solar technology are far less persuasive, however). He also endorses the proposition, quickly gaining acceptance, that booming megacities are facilitating an increasingly beneficial arrangement between humans and the environment. “Urban density allows half of humanity to live on 2.8 percent of the land,” he writes. “Soon that will be 80 percent of humanity on 3 percent of the land. Consider just the infrastructure efficiencies.”

Brand goes on to declare urban slums, home to more than half of city dwellers, to be the new sustainable communities. Intentionally or not, “squatter cities are Green,” he says. For example, urban farming and rooftop agriculture have their roots in squatter cities, where such practices were born of necessity if not ideology. He argues that squatter cities must be improved and incorporated within larger urban structures.

With the energy crisis and overpopulation under control and everyone comfortably ensconced in megacities, the next question is how to feed everyone. Brand advocates what he sees as the next logical step in what has been an ongoing process ever since humans began domesticating crops thousands of years ago.

Like nuclear power, genetically modified crops have long been the bane of environmentalists, but Brand believes it’s time to rethink the issue. The benefits of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are myriad, he argues. Crops modified to grow without being tilled prevent carbon in the soil from being released in the atmosphere. So called Bt crops (engineered with a gene from the Bacillus thuringiensis bacterium) reduce pesticide use. Other technologies reduce the amount of water or fertilizer needed to grow crops. Still others may help reduce methane emitted from the animals that consume them (including humans).

The main hindrance comes from the private sector in the form of corporate licensing practices and intellectual property law, which can prevent farmers in the developing world from taking full advantage of agricultural aid. Taking his cue from the open-source software movement that he’s been a strong advocate for over the years, Brand pushes for what he calls “open-source biotech,” which he believes is very much a possibility. If environmental scientists develop non-patent-protected seeds with ecology and international aid in mind, they may be able to contain food and water shortages, keeping them at more manageable, localized levels.

Saving what is arguably his most controversial proposition for last, Brand writes that large-scale geoengineering efforts are now imperative. Relying on systems dynamics, he shows that it’s too late to completely prevent or mitigate climate change even if humanity somehow miraculously reverses course at the last minute. More drastic measures must be considered. Finding ways to engineer the planet with a light touch is a tricky proposition, to say the least, and implementing such solutions even trickier, but Brand is cautiously optimistic that it can be done.

The moral of the story is that, in the face of imminent climate change, we must search for innovative high-tech solutions and embrace what Brand calls “the freedom to try things.” This thoroughly researched and highly readable book presents a compelling if controversial argument for how best to confront the challenges ahead.

About the Reviewer

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

Tomorrow in Brief

Sustainable Sources of Biofuels

Native prairie plants may provide an alternative source of fuel that does not cut into food supplies. As societies increasingly demand crop-based biofuels to reduce dependence on petroleum, the rapid diversion of corn from food to fuel has many people worried about feeding tomorrow’s hungry. Now, environmental science researchers led by Michigan Technological University’s David Flaspohler advocate the use of diverse native prairie plants for bioenergy instead of relying on agricultural crops such as corn. Native crops are also better for preserving the habitats of birds and other species, and maintaining biodiversity is good for the long-term health of the ecosystem, according to the researchers.

Source: Michigan Technological University, www.mtu.edu .

Pollution without Borders

Most of the world’s air-quality problems are local, but non-domestic sources of pollution are an increasing concern around the world, according to the U.S. National Research Council. As developing countries become more industrialized, they are emitting more ozone, particulates such as soot and dust, mercury, and organic pollutants such as DDT. All of these pollutants can travel across continents; for instance, satellite observations have attributed plumes in central Oregon to polluted air masses that took eight days to travel from East Asia, where man-made emissions are expected to rise in coming decades.

Source: “Global Sources of Local Pollution,” National Research Council, Committee on the Significance of International Transport of Air Pollutants. National Academies Press, www.nap.edu .

Long-Term Impacts of Bad Shoes

Whether it’s a sexy stiletto or a stylish sandal, cute but high-risk shoes could cost you long-term foot pain, warn researchers from Boston University School of Public Health. Women are more prone to make poor footwear choices than men are, and thus put themselves more at risk of sprains, muscle strains, fractures, and a variety of foot pains from toenail to heel. The researchers recommend choosing low-risk shoes, such as athletic and casual sneakers, and avoiding high-risk shoes—high heels, sandals, and slippers. Performing stretching exercises can also help reduce the effects of bad shoes.

Source: “Foot Pain: Is Current or Past Shoewear a Factor?” by Alyssa B. Dufour et al. Arthritis Care & Research (Wiley-Blackwell, October 2009).

Plagiarists Beware: Musical Detection Software

Popular music has frequently borrowed from classical composers such as Mozart and Rachmaninoff, but now when songwriters borrow even a sequence of chord changes from one of their contemporaries, cries of plagiarism can be expected. Melody detectives will soon have new software to help predict whether a specific plagiarism charge would hold up in court, thanks to tune algorithms developed by computer scientists at Goldsmiths, University of London. The program models court decisions for cases of alleged tune theft; when tested on U.S. court cases, the model predicted 90% of the decisions correctly. The benefit for songwriters and their publishers would be that they could test their tunes against any similar preexisting melodies, assuring themselves and their fans of the new songs’ originality.

Source: Goldsmiths, University of London, www.goldsmiths.ac.uk.

Can Happiness Be Acquired?

Are some people just born happy while others are doomed to despair? Psychiatrists have plied patients with psychotropic drugs and long-term therapy sessions without altering their happiness, says Robert Cloninger, professor of psychiatry at Washington University in St. Louis. However, by redirecting clinical treatment toward enhancing patients’ character development, their overall life satisfaction and well-being can be improved. To achieve happiness, Cloninger prescribes a psychoeducational program for improving self-directedness (by becoming more calm, accepting one’s limitations, and letting go of fear and conflict), cooperativeness (by working in the service of others), and self-transcendence (awareness of the roots of negative emotions), all traits that are essential for well-being.

Source: Robert Cloninger, Department of Psychiatry, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri 63110; http://psychobiology.wustl.edu/cloninger.html .

Heartbeat Monitored by Phone
A new application for your smart phone will let you send your heart rate directly to your doctor’s office. The iStethoscope, developed by University College London computer scientist Peter Bentley, comprises an audio amplifier that filters sounds from the built-in microphone to transmit clear signals of your heartbeat to the cardiologist. Bentley foresees such devices becoming more powerful and cheaper than traditional medical equipment, eventually putting an array of monitoring and diagnostic instruments in everyone’s pockets.
Sources: University College London, www.ucl.ac.uk. Peter Bentley, iStethoscope Pro, www.peterjbentley.com.

Tech Support for Homeless
Homeless people may be placed in permanent housing more quickly, thanks to portable technologies that reduce the cumbersome paper-based inspection and matching processes of housing services.
New York City’s Department of Homeless Services (DHS) is teaming with IBM and global Bay Mobile Technologies to deploy handheld devices for field inspectors to file reports, photos, and other documentation on available apartments, providing DHS case workers real-time information on what repairs are needed before placing clients in their new homes.The devices have already increased the number of inspections that DHS performs every month by 57%, and in turn the number of leases signed increased by 25% in one year.

Sources: New York City Department of Homeless Services, www.nyc.gov/dhs. IBM, www.ibm.com/services. Global Bay Mobile, www.globalbay.com/public-sector.html.

Retirement Crisis among Hispanic Americans
The future hardships that many Americans are already bracing themselves for as they approach retirement will hit Hispanic Americans even harder, according to a new study by Americans for Secure Retirement and the Hispanic Institute. Reasons: Hispanic Americans have saved less for their futures, are less likely to be covered by employer-sponsored retirement plans, and have inadequate financial literacy. The retirement crisis that many foresee is due to increased longevity and inadequate financial planning. Some 60% of middle-class Americans will outlive their money, according to the study. These trends will become especially critical to the rapidly growing Hispanic American population, who are largely employed in service-related fields that do not provide retirement plans or enough income for workers to save on their own. The study recommends educational programs for the Hispanic American community emphasizing alternative retirement savings options, such as lifetime annuities, which can help build retirement savings and guarantee secure future incomes.

Source: Americans for Secure Retirement, www.paycheckforlife.org .

Kids Need More Places to Play
Two-thirds of American children now fall short of the recommended 60 minutes of daily physical activity, and one reason is that they lack a safe place to play within walking distance.
Building more safe places to play could reduce childhood obesity and improve juvenile health and well-being overall. U.S. child obesity rates have nearly tripled since 1980.
The nonprofit organization KaBOOM has launched a Playful City USA campaign to honor imaginative ways that local groups have promoted play. Among the programs showcased in KaBOOM’s “Play Matters” report:
• Boston, Massachusetts’s Schoolyard Initiative has transformed 70 schoolyards into colorful and engaging outdoor classrooms and places to play.
• Boulder, Colorado’s Freiker Program (for “frequent bikers”) uses incentives to increase the number of children biking or walking to school. Kids can use solar-powered “Freikometers” that count their bike trips, earning points for prizes.
• Cedar Rapids, Iowa’s Switch Program encourages kids to switch what they do (from nonphysical to physical activities), switch what they view (reducing television viewing time), and switch what they chew (to increase fruit and vegetable consumption).
Source: KaBOOM, http://kaboom.org.

Developing “Middle Skills”
The recession may have severely suppressed employment growth, but economic recovery will depend on a workforce that is prepared for the jobs that will open. And the recovery may be led by the middle, according to a study by the Workforce Alliance and the Skills2Compete campaign.
Middle-skill workers ranging from carpenters to radiology technicians will be needed in the key industries that are benefiting from federal funding, such as construction, health care, manufacturing, and transportation. In Rhode Island, more than 42% of job openings between 2006 and 2016 are projected to be middle-skill jobs, compared with 26% for low-skill and 32% for high-skill jobs.
To overcome the middle-skills gap, the study recommends that employers invest more in training of lower-skilled employees, that jurisdictions invest more in vocational and two-year college programs, and that individuals invest more in their own skills through post-secondary schooling, vocational training, or apprenticeships.
Source: The Workforce Alliance, www.workforcealliance.org.
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Wild Plants as Protein Source
Wild lupins growing in the mountains of Andalusia in Spain could come to be a useful source of protein and fiber, according to researchers at the Fat Institute (CSIS) and the University of Seville.
Lupins are legumes, a principal source of vegetable protein in the human diet, and they are rich in fiber and polyphenols. The researchers studied six wild species of lupins, focusing on their amino acids, digestibility, and other nutritional factors. Whether the plants are cultivated as food or not, their seeds offer rich nutritional properties, the researchers conclude.

Sources: Javier Vioque Peña, Fat Institute (CSIC), www.ig.csic.es. Platforma SINC, www.plataformasinc.es .