Futurist Update 2012 Issues

December 2012, Vol. 13, No. 12

In this issue

How Quickly Does Aging Occur? The "Methylome" Offers a Model

Aging is an unevenly distributed process, affecting individuals differently and accelerating with disease and other stress factors. Even an individual’s organs may age at different rates, making it hard to predict when aging occurs.

Now, medical researchers believe they have found "a very robust way of predicting aging, " reports Kang Zhang, MD, of the University of California, San Diego, Institute for Genomic Medicine. In a new paper published in the journal Molecular Cell, Zhang and colleagues focus on how gene activity and expression are promoted or suppressed in the lifelong process of DNA methylation (where a methyl group is added or removed from the cytosine molecule in DNA).

The researchers measured methylation markers in blood samples of 656 persons ranging in age from 19 to 101, validating their model with hundreds of samples from another cohort. They concluded that mapping the entire "methylome" of these markers and changes across the genome offers a reliable way of predicting change over time. In other words, they can determine an individual’s actual biological age from a blood sample and predict rates of decay at the molecular level.

Such information could not only assist in forensics, but also improve therapies, according to Zhang. "For example," he notes, "you could serially profile patients to compare therapies, to see if a treatment is making people healthier and younger. You could screen compounds to see if they retard the aging process at the tissue or cellular level."

Source: University of California, San Diego Health Sciences

The research is published in the November 21, 2012, online edition of Molecular Cell. Read abstract.

Predicting Ice Formation in the Arctic

MIT researchers have created a model to predict where and how much Arctic sea ice will form in winter--critical considerations for navigators, hydrologists, and climatologists.

The model considers large, difficult-to-plot factors, such as how global ocean currents cause small ice sheets to merge into massive ice floes, sometimes hundreds of miles in diameter. The model also looks at interactions on a much smaller scale, such as how ice melting and forming affects the molecular composition of the water itself.

When sea ice melts in the spring it creates pockets of freshwater, which refreeze more easily in winter than does regular salt water. Understanding where these freshwater pockets will form in the spring is key to modeling the amount of ice that will reemerge when the temperature drops.

Over the last thirty years, the amount of sea ice over the Arctic in winter has shrunk tremendously, leading to conflicting forecasts for an ice-less Arctic during the summer months (the predictions for this milestone have ranged from 2050 to 2015).

Arctic ice, which reflects sunlight back into space, plays a critical role in global temperature. The researchers hope their model (really a synthesis of various models) will help climatologists better understand how climate change, ocean currents, and Arctic ice interact.

Source: MIT

Training New Thinkers for a More Complex World

Solving the world’s problems will demand thinkers who are schooled in "complexity science," assert the founders of the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) in New Mexico. For that reason, SFI is expanding its Omidyar Fellows program in 2013 to take in more students and offer them more opportunities to research and learn.

Omidyar Fellows complete three to five years of residence at SFI, during which they work alongside the institute’s scholars to advance the science of complex systems—how myriad sub-systems interrelate and cause changes within the larger systems that make up our economies, societies, and the natural world. Starting in 2013, the program will increase each class size by a third, to total 11-13 fellows per class; introduce new training and professional-development courses; and boost support for fellows’ travel and scientific collaboration.

"Through the SFI Omidyar Fellowship, we want to identify the most promising young postdoctoral scholars working on important problems, and provide them the skills, opportunities, and freedoms to become tomorrow’s Albert Einsteins, tomorrow’s Margaret Meads, tomorrow’s Murray Gell-Manns," said SFI president Jerry Sabloff.

SFI is also bringing complexity science to the general public with a free, online Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on introductory complexity-science theory. As SFI communications director John German notes, MOOCs are gaining popularity in higher education and "could very well topple the university system itself unless academic institutions get on board."

Source: Santa Fe Institute

What’s New @WFS

Business Summit in Mexico Focuses on Education and Futuring

At the annual Mexico Business Summit, held November 11-13, World Future Society President Timothy Mack discussed how best to tackle education reform as a way to stimulate and support economic growth in Mexico. The summit focused on "Energies for Developing Mexico" as it transitions under the leadership of incoming President Enrique Peña Nieto, who also spoke at summit.

Peña Nieto appears to be bringing serious futures work to the forefront of Mexican policy planning; he himself spoke at the World Future Society’s annual conference in 2008. And the recently ended Business Summit featured well-known futurist Paul Saffo as the opening plenary session speaker.

Mack also participated in a press conference during his visit, and was interviewed on the popular morning edition of the radio program, Enfoque Noticias, during which he predicted that Mexico’s growing economic strength will also change the nature of Mexico-U.S. relations.

Details: 2012 Mexican Business Summit program (PDF)

Mack’s interview with Leonardo Curzio on Enfoque Noticias Podcast

Four New Directors Offer Vision and Expertise to WFS Board

Receiving unanimous approval from the World Future Society’s directors, four outstanding thought leaders have accepted the Society’s invitation to join the Board.

  • Nancy Donovan, senior analyst at the U.S. Government Accountability Office, Center for Evaluation Methods, has worked with WFS conference organizers to develop programs offering increased value to officials in the public sector.
  • Joyce Gioia, president and CEO of The Herman Group and editor of its weekly newsletter, The Herman Alert, also serves as THE FUTURIST magazine’s contributing editor on Workforce/Workplace issues.
  • Carol D. Rieg, corporate foundation officer of Bentley Systems Inc., has volunteered for the Society in numerous capacities, including serving as the chair of the WorldFuture 2010 conference in Boston.
  • Les Wallace, president of Signature Resources Inc., is a specialist in tracking business environment and workplace trends, analyzing and anticipating their impacts on business and government.

Also joining the WFS team, as deputy conference director, is Dawn Tullis, who brings event-planning and relationship-marketing experience, plus organizational and networking savvy.

Advertisement

Announcing: WorldFuture 2013 Video Contest

The World Future Society is pleased to announce a video contest on the theme of Exploring the Next Horizon, in conjunction with the annual conference to be held July 19-21, 2013, in Chicago, Illinois. The grand prize will include a cash award and public showing of the winning video during the conference.

The conference theme was inspired by THE FUTURIST magazine’s special report, The 22nd Century at First Light: Envisioning Life in the Year 2100 (September-October 2012). We therefore encourage entrants to explore these essays—forecasts, scenarios, timelines, tools, and questions—to inspire their own video presentations.

So come up with your most creative way to report on trends or tell a story about life in the year 2100. Possible approaches include an interview with an expert, a dramatization of a scenario, or a journalistic report on trends and forecasts. Animations welcome, too!

This contest is open to any group or individual age 16 or older (or submitted by a parent or legal guardian). Entrants may submit up to three videos, submitted separately. Deadline for all submissions is March 18, 2013.

For more information, see here.

What’s Hot in THE FUTURIST Magazine?

Outlook 2013

Human actions could become more accurately predictable, thanks to neuroscience. Nano-sized robots will deliver cancer-fighting drugs directly to their targets. And though many recently lost jobs may never come back, people will find plenty to do (and get paid for) in the future. These are just a few of the forecasts you’ll find in this latest edition of Outlook. Read more.

Whatever Happened to Western Civilization? The Cultural Crisis, 20 Years Later

By Richard Eckersley

In 1993, THE FUTURIST published author Richard Eckersley’s provocative essay, The West’s Deepening Cultural Crisis. Here, he looks back at what has happened since, and forward to what the next 20 years might hold. Read more.

In Search of the Better Angels of Our Future

By Kenneth B. Taylor

The ideologies that once guided us through political and economic conflicts— such as communism versus capitalism—have little relevance to cultures that face new, technologically driven conflicts over the very meaning of humanity. As we relentlessly pursue paradigm-altering technologies, we will need a new set of guidelines for understanding who we are and where we are heading. Read more.

Who Will Be Free? The Battles for Human Rights to 2050

By Josh Calder

As geopolitical power around the world shifts, so will the global consensus on human rights. There are challenges ahead, but the expansion of affluence, education, and digital technology may lead to a freer and more humane world in the long run. Read more.

The Global Talent Chase: China, India, and U.S. Vie for Skilled Workers

By Edward E. Gordon

Too many tech jobs and not enough tech professionals to fill them—China, India, and the United States all face this dilemma. Here is what each economic powerhouse is—and should be—doing to ease its workforce gap, and a look at a successful strategy known as Regional Talent Innovation Networks, or RETAINS. Read more.

Dream, Design, Develop, Deliver: From Great Ideas to Better Outcomes

By Rick Docksai

A better future doesn’t happen on its own. We create it with our ideas, plans, and actions. In July, hundreds of futurists from around the world took the opportunity to dream, design, develop, and deliver  the future together at WorldFuture 2012. Read more.

Tomorrow in Brief

  • Threats to Biodiversity in Protected Forests
  • Sapphire Optics
  • Acoustic Tweezers
  • Amish Boom
  • WordBuzz: Connectome

And MANY more stories.

Join today!

November 2012, Vol. 13, No. 11

Trending on Twitter, Five Hours from Now

MIT Researchers Devavrat Shah and Stanislav Nikolov have created a machine learning algorithm that can predict what topics will trend on Twitter as many as five hours in advance, with 95% accuracy.

"This is a very simplistic model. Now, based on the data, you try to train for when the jump happens, and how much of a jump happens," says Shah.

The algorithm determines the probability of a topic becoming a trending topic based on how closely the topic in question resembles the growth pattern of previous topics that went trending. As the amount of training data grows—that is, the number of raw tweets from Twitter that reveal patterns--the algorithm will improve, says Shah.

Speeding up the identification of breaking news and hot topics could benefit news organizations, users, and advertisers, the researchers believe.

Source: MIT

Devavrat Shah will speak about this research at the MIT Museum on Friday, Nov. 9, from 12:10 to 12:50 p.m. Learn more here.

In Need of a New Systems Approach to Save the World’s Fish

Fisheries management as we know it is failing the world’s fish, says Ellen K. Pikitch, executive director of the Institute for Ocean Conservation Science and professor at Stony Brook University. She warns that fisheries will have to become much more precautionary, or else many of the world’s fish species will die out.

In an article for the October 26 edition of the journal Science, Pikitch and co-authors point out that fish populations worldwide are all below the levels that standard fisheries management recommends. Even worse, many species are exhibiting a continuing trajectory of decline.

Traditional fisheries management makes the mistake, the study contends, of focusing on only one given species at a time and not looking at the whole ecosystem or at the other fish species and wildlife whose numbers may be declining, as well.

Pikitch serves on the Lenfest Forage Fish Task Force, which proposes replacing this "single-species" approach with an " ecosystem-based" approach. This would limit fishing strictly to the places and quantities that are safe and that pose minimal risk of damaging the underwater ecosystems, based on what the data of the ecosystems and fisheries indicates.

Source: Stony Brook University

Social Media Provide Early Alerts for Manufacturing Defects

If something goes wrong with your car, you’ll probably text your family first, Facebook your friends, Instagram a snapshot of your disaster, and tweet a general complaint to the rest of the world. Then you’ll get the car fixed. Probably the last thing you would do is go to the manufacturer’s Web site and fill out a feedback form.

Social media represent a largely untapped source of information that could be extremely valuable to manufacturers that need to stay on top of safety and reliability problems. The challenge is to sift useful data out of the mountains of unrelated information that consumers share on message boards, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and the like.

At Virginia Tech, business information scholars Alan Abrams and Weiguo Fan are developing a sort of linguistic smoke detector to identify potentially useful information about specific automobiles that may be contained in vast amounts of " dynamic and unstructured" social media content.

Beginning with online discussion forums for owners of Honda, Toyota, and Chevrolet vehicles, the researchers employed car experts to manually sort and tag posts that contained information about defects. The "automotive smoke words" enabled the researchers to devise decision support systems (such as automated Web crawlers) to help manufacturers discover defects.

The researchers plan to expand their analysis to Twitter and Facebook postings. Says Abrams, "With the volume of social media posts expanding rapidly, we expect that the need for automated business intelligence tools for the exploration of this vast and valuable data set will continue to grow."

Source: Virginia Tech

WorldFuture 2013: Exploring the Next Horizon

The Annual Conference of the World Future Society: July 19-21, 2013 at the Hilton Chicago Hotel, Chicago, Illinois.


Register Today and Save $250!

The World Future Society's annual conference, WorldFuture 2013: Exploring the Next Horizon, will give you the opportunity to learn from others in many different fields, and to explore actions affecting our futures in as yet unimagined ways.

The conference will feature nearly 100 leading futurists offering more than 60 sessions, workshops, and special events over the course of two and a half days. And for those who want to take a deeper dive, into key studies of interest, the preconference Master Classes allow for an in-depth look in a small group setting.

New for 2013: 22nd Century Lecture Series

Special hour-long sessions each day will focus on one of the six major themes of the conference, offering expert insights on issues, trends, forecasts, scenarios, and wild cards in Earth, Humanity, Commerce, Governance, Sci/Tech, and Futuring.

Video Highlights from WorldFuture 2012

Age Isn't a Number (Video)

Adriane Berg, author of How Not to Go Broke at 102, explains why insurers don’t care how old you are – and neither should you. Excerpt from WorldFuture 2012; video by Hunter Molnar Stanton for the World Future Society. Watch the video here.

What Is A Futurist? Interview Nine of Them in Nine Minutes

By Patrick Tucker

What is a futurist? Every self-described futurist you ask will likely give you a different answer. A more interesting question is what do these people say about the future? Brian Bethune from Maclean's magazine recently put that query to a grab bag of inventors, technologists, geneticists, business consultants, and writers he encountered at WorldFuture 2012, the Society's recently concluded conference in Toronto, Canada. Read more.

October 2012, Vol. 13. No. 10

Climate Change and Forests: Good for Canada, Bad for Europe?

Canada’s far northern territory of Nunavut has been a treeless tundra for millennia, but it could be home to flourishing forests by century’s end, due to global warming, according to Alexandre Guertin-Pasquier, University of Montreal geographer. Guertin-Pasquier, who presented his findings September 21 at the Canadian Paleontology Conference in Toronto, explained that tree fossils found in Nunavut indicate that forests of oak, spruce, and hickory did cover much of the territory about 2.6 million years ago, when the Earth was warmer, and that if current projections of warming bear out, those forests will return in full.

Meanwhile, global warming will shrink forests throughout Europe, according to a study led by Marc Hanewinkel from the Swiss Federal Research Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research. The study findings, which were published in the online journal Nature Climate Change, warn that much of the continent’s forest cover is composed of Norway spruce and other tree species that are accustomed to cooler climates. Sudden warming, combined with lengthier and more frequent droughts, would significantly harm them.

Other tree species that favor warmer temperatures, such as cork oak and Holm oak, might expand their ranges. These species, however, deliver lower economic returns for the timber industry, and they sequester less carbon dioxide. The study projects that climate-change-related damage will reduce the economic value of the continent’s forest land by 14% to 50%—an economic loss of 60 billion to 680 billion euros—unless the European community enacts swift and effective countermeasures to curb CO2.

Source: University of Montreal

Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research.

Using Brain Scans to Predict Future Test Performance

Will a brain scan reveal how well you’ve studied for a big test? Researchers at Sandia National Laboratory have demonstrated that the brain’s electrical activity, detectable via electroencephalogram (EEG), predicts how well studied material has been incorporated into memory, and, thus, how well subjects performed on memory tests.

The researchers asked 23 people to attempt to memorize a list of words while undergoing brain scanning. The average subject recalled 45% of the words on the list. The EEG data correctly predicted which five of the 23 subjects would beat the competition, remembering 72% of the words on average.

"If you had someone learning new material and you were recording the EEG, you might be able to tell them, ‘You’re going to forget this, you should study this again,’ or tell them, ‘OK, you got it and go on to the next thing,’ " chief researcher Laura Matzen said in a statement.

Matzen presented her findings at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society conference in Chicago. This second phase of research will determine the effectiveness of various types of research and training methods.

Source: Sandia National Laboratories

Cities Will Support 5 Billion Humans by 2030, but Fewer Other Species

Urban areas around the world are expanding at twice the rate of their populations, reversing historic trends toward increased density within city limits. The result will be more loss of habitat and biodiversity, warns a team of researchers in a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

More than 1 million square kilometers of land—largely in biodiversity “hotspots”—have a high probability of being converted to urban use by 2030, with nearly half of the expansion occurring in Asia (primarily China and India), according to the authors. However, the fastest land-to-urban conversion will occur in Africa, which will see urban land cover grow 590% above the 2000 level.

This urban expansion will encroach on or destroy habitats for 139 endangered amphibian species, 41 mammalian species, and 25 bird species, the researchers predict.

"Given the long life and near irreversibility of infrastructure investments, it will be critical for current urbanization-related policies to consider their lasting impacts," says lead author Karen Seto, associate professor in the urban environment at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. "The world will experience an unprecedented era of urban expansion and city-building over the next few decades. The associated environmental and social challenges will be enormous, but so are the opportunities"

Source: "Global forecasts of urban expansion to 2030 and direct impacts on biodiversity and carbon pools" by Karen C. Seto, Burak Güneralp, and Lucy R. Hutyra. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, published ahead of print September 17, 2012, doi:10.1073/pnas.1211658109.

Event Alerts: The Singularity Summit Returns to San Francisco, GLOBAL +5 Takes Place in Geneva, and Robert Moran hits D.C.

The sixth annual Singularity Summit will take place in San Francisco, California, at the Nob Hill Masonic Center, October 13-14, 2012.

Speakers at this year’s summit include inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, neuroscientist Steven Pinker, Google researcher Peter Norvig, and science fiction author Vernor Vinge, among others.

The Singularity Summit 2012 is produced by the Singularity Institute, a nonprofit organization that endeavors to "raise awareness about the promise and peril of advanced artificial intelligence and to develop a mathematical theory of safe artificial intelligence, "according to the organization’s Web site. The Institute’s mission is to "ensure that the creation of smarter-than-human intelligence benefits society. "

Learn more and register: http://singularitysummit.com

The GLOBAL +5 conference, a competition of future-focused projects from around the world, will take place at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Geneva, Switzerland, October 9-10. The projects approach mobility, democracy, global governance, sustainable competitiveness, energy security, and innovation in a new way. The jury will meet on October 9. Results will be declared and awards will be presented on October 10.

Learn more and register http://global5.theglobaljournal.com/

The Futures of Marketing

Robert, Moran, marketing expert and partner at the Brunswick Group, believes marketing is headed for a significant transformation. While the industry will still exist, he thinks it will reposition, rebrand, and rename itself with a more forward-thinking term such as, consumer insights, business insights, or
business intelligence industry.

Moran will present his insights to the U.S. National Capital Region Chapter
on October 18 at the Hilton Garden Inn, 7301 Waverly Street, Bethesda, MD. Kick-off time is 6:00 PM. Learn more here.

WorldFuture 2013: Exploring the Next Horizon

The Annual Conference of the World Future Society: July 19-21, 2013 at the Hilton Chicago Hotel, Chicago, Illinois.

Register Today and Save $300!

The World Future Society's annual conference, WorldFuture 2013: Exploring the Next Horizon, will give you the opportunity to learn from others in many different fields, and to explore actions affecting our futures in as yet unimagined ways.

The conference will feature nearly 100 leading futurists offering more than 60 sessions, workshops, and special events over the course of two and a half days. And for those who want to take a deeper dive, into key studies of interest, the preconference Master Classes allow for an in-depth look in a small group setting.

New for 2013: 22nd Century Lecture Series

Special hour-long sessions each day will focus on one of the six major themes of the conference, offering expert insights on issues, trends, forecasts, scenarios, and wild cards in Earth, Humanity, Commerce, Governance, Sci/Tech, and Futuring.

Register today.

The deadline for session proposals and course proposals is October 31. Submit here.

September 2012, Vol. 13. No. 9

Wright's Law: A Better Predictor of Technological Progress than Moore's Law

Moore's law, which says that number of transistors you can fit onto an integrated circuit doubles every 18 months, has been the benchmark measurement for technical progress in electronics for decades. The doubling of transistors on a chip translates to a doubling of computing power and so--it was believed-- Moore's law was the reason why people in 2007 could carry a computer in their pocket, the Apple iPhone, that was four hundred times more powerful than the first Apple computer that debuted in 1976 (as measured by Hertz).

But because Moore's law applies only to electronics, it can't be used to forecast technological progress in other areas, or even in areas of computing that don't involve transistors, such as in quantum computing.

Researchers from the Santa Fe Institute now argue that a theory proposed by Theodore Wright in 1936, called Wright's law, is actually a better reflection of technological progress than is Moore's law. In their working paper, "Statistical Basis for Predicting Technological Progress," they detail how they looked at technological progress rates from 62 different technologies including chemical compound manufacture, mechanical engineering, etc., and found key similarities.

"Moore's law says that costs come down no matter what at an exponential rate. Wright's law says that costs come down as a function of cumulative production. It could be production is going up because cost is going down," Santa Fe Institute lecturer Doyne Farmer told Futurist Update.

More importantly, Wright's law can be applied to a much wider variety of engineering areas, not just transistors. That will give technological forecasters a new way to measure and predict progress and cost for everything from airplane manufacturing (its original use) to the costs of building better photovoltaic panels.

"It means that if investors or the government are willing to stimulate production, then we can bring the cost down faster. In the case of global warming, for instance, I think that a massive stimulus program has the potential to really bring the arrival date for having solar energy beat coal a lot sooner," said Farmer.

He and his colleagues are expanding their working paper into more expansive study that further details the relationship between costs and the rate of progress. "We're trying to make nice, probabilistic forecasts for where solar will be with and without stimulus, what's the distribution of times that will happen with business as usual or a scenario," says Farmer. They plan to submit their final work to Nature next month.

Source: Doyne Farmer (interview), The Santa Fe Institute. "Statistical Basis for Predicting Technological Progress" (PDF) is available from the Santa Fe Institute.

Thanks to David Wood (@dw2) for the tip!

Too Many Choices for the Future? Consumers Want Fewer "Flavors"

A choice of 33 flavors of ice cream tonight may be highly desirable, but most people don’t want to sort through 33 types of annuity options for their retirement decades from now. Psychological distance from a decision outcome tends to determine the number of options that consumers wish to deal with, according to Joseph K. Goodman and Selin A. Malkoc, both assistant professors of marketing at Washington University in St. Louis.

"The lure of assortment may not be as universal as previously thought. Consumers’ preferences for large assortments can decrease due to a key psychological factor—psychological distance," the authors write in a paper to be published in the Journal of Consumer Research.

In retirement planning, for instance, we typically prefer to focus on the end goal—target dates and income, choice of residence, or whether to volunteer part time. Consumers needing to make a decision about an annuity plan may actually prefer fewer choices, the researchers found. This preference could help inform retailers’ strategies.

"In product categories where psychological distance is automatically evoked, it might not be necessary for retailers to offer a large and overwhelming number of options," the authors conclude. "Consumers may even be attracted to those sellers offering a smaller and simpler assortment of options."

Goodman and Malkoc's work echoes a famous 2001 study by Sheena Iyengar and Mark Leeper of Columbia University titled "When Choice is Demotivating: Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Thing?" Iyengar and Leeper set up table outside of California grocery store and offered some passersby six flavors of jam; others they offered 24 flavors. When there were 24 options, only 3% of the customers purchased anything. When the number of options was a more manageable six, the purchase rate was 30%. Moral? if you're making your customers select from too many options they aren't going to select as well.

Sources: Washington University in St. Louis

The study "Choosing for the Here and Now vs. There and Later: The Moderating Role of Psychological Distance on Assortment Size Preference," is available online and scheduled to appear in the December 2012 print issue of the Journal of Consumer Research.

Download the Iyengar and Leeper paper: "When Choice is Demotivating: Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Thing?" here.

Counterterrorism Efforts "Target" Boston’s Subways

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has chosen the Boston subway system as a real-life testing ground to evaluate several experimental models of biological agent-detection sensors. Scientists from the Science and Technology Directorate will spray subway tunnels during the off hours with quantities of dead Bacillus subtilis, a bacterial strain that is common in soil and plants and is not hazardous to humans. The researchers will then deploy the sensors to see if they can detect the bacteria’s presence.

This Detect-to-Protect (D2P) Bio Detection project will run from September 2012 until February 2013, with oversight from the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, as well as state and local public-health officials. Flir Inc., Northrop Grumman, Menon and Associates, and Qinetiq North America are the systems’ manufacturers. If the systems work as their designers intend, then they will be able to detect a microbial strain within minutes, allowing DHS authorities to mobilize fast public responses in the event of a biological attack.

Source: U.S. Department of Homeland Security

News from World Future Society

Partnership with SAGE: Beginning in 2013, World Future Review, the journal of the Society’s Professional Membership program, will join an esteemed roster of science journals published by SAGE Publications Inc.

WFR’s editorial content will continue to be managed solely by the Society, which has lined up an international board of peer reviewers. SAGE will contribute its vast publishing and marketing experience and resources, greatly facilitating the review and editing process, enhancing the reader experience, and improving research tools.

The Society is working on additional benefits for the Professional Membership program and is pleased to announce that the current dues structure is unaffected.

School Leaders Look to THE FUTURIST: More than a thousand school superintendants across the United States will regularly receive THE FUTURIST magazine, thanks to an agreement with National School Development Council. NSDC Secretary/Treasurer Jack Sullivan recently informed WFS of the Council’s plan to add THE FUTURIST magazine to the resources it makes available to its regional members. NSDC serves the leadership of school study and development councils across the United States. These regional, state, and county councils work with local school systems to improve educators’ skills and knowledge and to provide professional development assistance and resources. Learn more about NSDC.

Plans for WorldFuture 2013 Gear Up: Yes, we know the 2012 conference just ended, but we’re futurists! And we’re already drawing from the energy and ideas in Toronto to plan an even better conference experience for Chicago next July. Among the ideas in development for WorldFuture 2013: Exploring the Next Horizon are:

  • Poster Session, including a cash-bar reception with the poster presenters.
  • 22nd Century Lecture Series by leading futurists, focusing on the six major conference tracks.
  • Video Competition for students to explore the forecasts and scenarios in THE FUTURIST’s special report, "The 22nd Century at First Light: Envisioning Life in the Year 2100."

Stay tuned for details! If you have an idea for a special event or activity for WorldFuture 2013 and would like to volunteer your time to help develop it, please contact conference administrator Sarah Warner at Society headquarters. Learn more about WorldFuture 2013

Speakers at last year's conference received coverage from i09, The Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, the Epoch Times, CBC, and CTV Canada.

Download the final WorldFuture 2012 program

Order a copy of the special conference edition (Summer 2012) of World Future Review

Browse audio highlights: IntelliQuest Media

Register at the early-bird rate for WorldFuture 2013, to be held in Chicago, July 19-21, 2013

August 2012, Vol. 13, No. 8

In this issue:

Global Warming Causes Heat Waves, Says NASA Scientist

Heat wave events, once rare, are becoming more frequent due to global warming, says NASA scientist James Hansen. Such summertime heat events covered only 1% of Earth’s surface for most of the time since humanity has been studying the climate. Now, when they occur, they cover closer to 10% of the global land area.

"We conclude that extreme heat waves, such as that in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 and Moscow in 2010, were ‘caused’ by global warming, because their likelihood was negligible prior to the recent rapid global warming," Hansen writes in a new paper, "Perceptions of Climate Change: The New Climate Dice," to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

This summer saw another major and anomalous climate related event; over the course four days, from July 8 to July 12, the amount of melting occurring over the surface of Greenland went from a seasonally normal 40% to an abnormal 97%, according to NASA scientists working with satellite data.

Massive melting was even observed at the Summit Central station located at the highest and coldest point of the Greenland ice sheet, nearly two miles above the sea level. Though extremely unusual, the melting phenomenon is not without precedent. A corollary event occurred in 1889, and ice-core samples suggest that Greenland melting seems to occur every 150 years.

However, scientists say that this year’s event was likely caused by extremely unusual high pressure systems, or heat ridges, which have been moving over Greenland since May. "Each successive ridge has been stronger than the previous one," says University of Georgia climatologist Thomas Mote. This latest heat ridge made its way over the central part of Greenland on July 8 and stayed there until about July 16. Scientists believe that the ice will regrow, but the new ice, at least at first, will not be as thick as the ice that melted.

Scientists believe that the Arctic is heating twice to four times as fast as the rest of the globe. The bigger heat ridges in the Arctic may be linked to changes in the jet stream, as a result of manmade global warming.

Sources: NASA; an early draft of the paper by James Hansen et al. is available from Columbia University, Download PDF

NOTE: Futurist Magazine Update editor Patrick Tucker will be speaking on these and other issues related to climate and the future with Michio Kaku on Science Fantastic, airing Saturday, August 11. Check your local listings here.

New Organ Prize Aims to Put an End to Organ Shortages

As supplies of donor organs continue to trail the numbers of patients who need them, the Methuselah Foundation is pursuing the prospect of building new organs right in the lab. This nonprofit organization, which sponsors and advocates for research into arresting and reversing the human body’s aging processes, recently announced that it will dispense a New Organ Prize to go to any researcher who successfully constructs an entire new organ from a patient’s own cells. The competition specifies a few required benchmarks. For example, the organ must have maintained viability in its lab for two years or more.

"Our New Organ Prize is designed to connect the vast community of those needing replacement organs with those who can do something about it in an accelerating time frame that prizes have proven to produce," says David Gobel, CEO of the Methuselah Foundation.

A prize could be just the catalyst that organ generation may need, as past prizes have brought about solutions to other global problems, Gobel adds. For instance, a Food Preservation Prize in the early nineteenth century spurred the development of refrigeration, which effectively ended famine in the developed world.

"It took a prize to get someone to fix it—and fix it they did," he says.

The Methuselah Foundation is counting on donors to provide the funding for the prize, whose exact dollar amount will be greater or smaller depending on contributions. Donors can deposit funds directly via the Web site.

Sources: The Methuselah Foundation, NewOrgan.org

Innovators Go on Display at Futurists: BetaLaunch 2012

Innovative leaps in marketing, gaming, personal health care, and even national defense—visitors saw all of these and more at the World Future Society’s Futurists: BetaLaunch 2012, an expo of 11 future-thinking start-ups. The event took place July 28 in Toronto, in conjunction with WorldFuture 2012.

"Best in show" went to The Mission Business, a Toronto design collective out of OCAD University that produces connected live-action and online entertainment experience. Their project, ZED.TO, an "interactive, twenty-first-century marketing campaign," entertained and informed with a dramatized debut of BioLogyc, a fictional pharmaceutical company that uses volunteer and crowd-sourced research and development to produce gene-based drug therapies. There actually is no such company, but the business model is a real concept.

"ZED.TO is a transmedia project that allows audiences to join the ranks of ByoLogyc, a fictional biotech corporation from the near future. By exploring the world of ByoLogyc through live-action events and online media, audiences challenge their assumptions about the future, helping us understand the future of entertainment, the evolution of technologies like synthetic biology, and how corporations and organizations can anticipate the future needs and values of customers," says Trevor Haldenby, co-founder of The Mission Business.

Meanwhile, exhibitor CyberHero League presented its real-life approach to engaging young people in social causes via video games. The company’s computer games teach players about conservation, world hunger, and other issues. As the kids play the games and rack up points, actual donors contribute donations toward efforts relevant to those causes in the real world.

A third exhibitor, Lifetech, debuted an ion proton genome sequencer that could sequence a person’s entire genome within one day. The first sequencer may be released at the end of the year.

Then there was B-Temia, designer of a "dermoskeleton," a skintight brace-like device that soldiers in combat could wear to protect against acute injury and repetitive strains. The company’s spokesman said that U.S. military leaders are very interested: Increasingly lengthy deployments have been making repetitive-strain injuries a serious problem.

Source: Futurists: BetaLaunch 2012

Andrew Hessel (left), the real father of synthetic biology, meets Chet Getram (center), the fictional father of synthetic biology and CEO of the faux company ByoLogyc, and ByoLogic player Olive Swift (right) at WorldFuture 2012

The Future’s Narrative: A Report from WorldFuture 2012

The World Future Society’s 2012 conference, held in Toronto July 27-29, got off to an inspiring start thanks to Lee Rainie (director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project) and Brian David Johnson (director of Future Casting and Experience Research for Intel Corp.).

Rainie’s survey work involves offering experts two alternative scenarios of change ("tension pairs") and asking them to pick which will be more likely to happen. While the resulting data provides an overview of the experts’ general mind-set (optimistic or pessimistic), the open-ended narrative responses to the scenarios are more useful, Rainie said.

Johnson used science-fiction references to make his point that "futurecasting is not about predicting the future; it’s about developing an actionable vision that we can build." And building that future will mean understanding the language of computing, or algorithms. "Algorithms are written by people, and it’s a story, a narrative," he said. Referencing Mary Shelley’s parable about Frankenstein’s monster—that if you build something, it will come to life and kill you—we need to change the narrative about the things we make.

As an example of a "real mad scientist" who is changing that narrative, Johnson introduced surprise guest speaker Andrew Hessel, whose Pink Army Cooperative is working on curing cancer—for free. Hessel’s work with synthetic biology changes the narrative of what viruses are. "Viruses are apps," he said. Viruses are used to load "software" (cancer-fighting compounds) into cells.

Naveen Jain, founder of Moon Express, promoted an entrepreneurial approach to solving problems: "Don’t be afraid of doing well, but if you can do well by doing good, you’re a great entrepreneur." In other words, don’t just do the "feel-good" stuff; solve billion-dollar problems, and think about the scalability of solutions.

In his Saturday luncheon speech, Geordie Rose, creator of the World's First Quantum Computer, said that quantum computation is advancing faster than Moore's Law. And on Sunday, speaker Edie Weiner looked at the future of 3-D printing, pharmaceuticals, cutting-edge trends in neuroscience, and the widening frontier of the possible.

These are just a few highlights of the more than 50 presentations, workshops, and roundtables taking place during WorldFuture 2012: Dream. Design. Develop. Deliver. Further coverage of the event will appear in the November-December 2012 issue of THE FUTURIST magazine.

WorldFuture 2012 speakers received coverage from i09, The Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, the Epoch Times, CBC, and CTV Canada.

Download the final WorldFuture 2012 program

Order a copy of the special conference edition (Summer 2012) of World Future Review

Browse audio highlights: IntelliQuest Media

Register at the early-bird rate for WorldFuture 2013, to be held in Chicago, July 19-21, 2013

July 2012, Vol. 13, No. 7

Genetic Analysis of Children Detects Abnormalities in Parents

Previously undetected abnormalities may be revealed in the parents of children born with congenital anomalies, thanks to testing known as genome-wide array analysis.

The knowledge of a possible genetic source of their children’s abnormalities could help parents make more-informed decisions regarding their own health, as well as whether or not to have more children, according to researchers developing the testing technique.

The team of genetic researchers, led by Nicole de Leeuw of the Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre in Nijmegen, Netherlands, focused on "mosaic abnormalities," where both genetically normal and abnormal cells may be found in an individual.

The analysis uses samples taken from different cells—from blood and a mouth swab, for instance—to detect aberrations in the DNA of patients with intellectual disabilities or other abnormalities not traditionally thought to be genetically based. The same test is then used on their parents.

"These abnormalities occurred more frequently than we had expected," de Leeuw reports. "Armed with this knowledge, we can try to understand not only why, but also how genetic disease arises in individuals, and this can help us to provide better genetic counseling."

The researchers presented their findings June 24 at the annual conference of the European Society of Human Genetics.

Source: European Society of Human Genetics

Getting the Climate Models to Agree

Hundreds of climate models forecast global climate warming this century, but they contradict each other on exactly how much warming will take place—and where. Now, Ohio State University statisticians may have found a way to form a climate model consensus.

The researchers—Noel Cressie, statistics professor and director of Ohio State’s Program in Spatial Statistics and Environmental Statistics, and former graduate student Emily Kang, now at the University of Cincinnati—used a combination of spatial statistics that Cressie pioneered to reconcile two projections of temperature increases across North America for the years 2041 to 2070.

Their analysis found commonalities between the models, determined how much weight to give to each, and crunched these values into a single forecast of average temperature increase for the continent as a whole and for each region in any season of any year.

North America’s land temperatures will rise by an average of 2.5°C (4.5°F) by 2070, according to their analysis. Winters in the Hudson Bay will see the most disruption, with temperatures rising an estimated 6°C (10.7°F), while the Rocky Mountains region is in for a summertime increase of 3.5°C (6.3°F).

Cressie and Kang hope to incorporate a larger number of models for other parts of the world to build public awareness of the widespread scientific agreement on climate change and the case for action. They presented their results in the International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation.

Source: Ohio State University

Foreign Investment in Agriculture—or Land Grab?

The world’s economic powerhouses are dealing with domestic resource shortages by buying land elsewhere. Rather than exporting food to their wealthier neighbors, countries in resource-rich regions are leasing or selling their agricultural land itself to foreign investors, reports the Worldwatch Institute.

Critics call the phenomenon a "land grab" by places like China, India, and Brazil, involving more than 70 million hectares around the world, according to data compiled by the Land Matrix Project. The biggest target for these investments by far is Africa, where 34.3 million hectares have been sold or leased since 2000.

While some of this foreign investment is a result of increased regional cooperation among emerging-economy neighbors, we are also seeing "wealthy (or increasingly wealthy) countries, many with little arable land, buying up land in low-income nations--especially those that have been particularly vulnerable to the financial and food crises of recent years," says Worldwatch researcher Cameron Scherer.

The trend may increase the displacement of local farmers, as well as replace small-farm practices with industrial agricultural practices that may have negative, long-term ecological consequences, Scherer warns.

Source: Worldwatch Institute

Will We Have Smart Homes by 2020? Internet Experts are Divided

More than 1,000 Internet stakeholders, trend-watchers, observers, and futurists weighed on the future of the Internet. A report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project and Elon University found Internet experts optimistic about future improvements in smart devices and the experts see greater adoption of them among consumers. But respondents were split on the idea that many people will be living in the long promised "smart home" of the future, a home with replete with built-in sensors to detect and respond to its occupant's every wish and desire, by 2020.

More than half (51%) of the respondents agreed with the statement:

By 2020, the connected household has become a model of efficiency, as people are able to manage consumption of resources (electricity, water, food, even bandwidth) in ways that place less of a burden on the environment while saving households money. Thanks to what is known as "smart systems," the Home of the Future that has often been foretold is coming closer and closer to becoming a reality.

But 46% agreed with the contrasting scenario:

By 2020, most initiatives to embed IP-enabled devices in the home have failed due to difficulties in gaining consumer trust and because of the complexities in using new services. As a result, the home of 2020 looks about the same as the home of 2011 in terms of resource consumption and management. Once again, the Home of the Future does not come to resemble the future projected in the recent past.

"The experts pointed out the high level of complexity involved in smart systems," report co-author Lee Rainie, director of Pew Internet, said in a press release. "They said the large hurdles to overcome include getting the various players to agree to standardize communication across sectors of consumer products and making the right moves in regard to oversight of regulation and the provision of incentives to encourage positive change."

The results were part of a survey conducted in the fall of 2011, which covered aspects of the future of the Internet ranging from smart devices to big data. The report on smart homes was released on Friday. You can read the report at http://www.imaginingtheInternet.org.

You can meet Rainie at WorldFuture 2012, the annual conference of the World Future Society taking place in Toronto at the end of this month.

Source: Pew Internet and American Life Project

Bonus: Also check out Chris Carbone and Kristin Nauth coverage on the future of smart homes in the July-August issue of THE FUTURIST magazine

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We’re eagerly counting down the days till we all meet up in Toronto for WorldFuture 2012: Dream. Design. Develop. Deliver!

An Invaluable Learning Opportunity!

The adventure begins with the preconference Master Courses on July 26 and 27. These intensive all-day workshops are not only a great way to prepare your mind for the general sessions to come, but also an indispensible set of futuring skills to add to your professional portfolio. Learn more about Master Courses here.

Books Are Back!

We are pleased to announce the return of the on-site Futurist Bookstore, a highly popular meeting and browsing spot at previous conferences. And it will be better than ever! In addition to the latest in important futurist literature, the Futurist Bookstore will also carry many of the titles that WorldFuture 2012 presenters will be referencing during their sessions.

The Futurist Bookstore will also host our popular Meet-the-Author sessions, where you will be able to exchange ideas with many of the published authors participating at WorldFuture 2012.

With our partner, Training Systems Inc., the Futurist Bookstore will provide you the best possible resource for filling your own "futures syllabus"!

Attention Leaders: What Your Team Will Get from WorldFuture 2012

World Future Society conferences are not just an average training session. Rather than mastering a suite of specialized software tools or even a new marketing strategy, successful organizations require a more advanced and nuanced set of skills from their key personnel.

WorldFuture 2012 will empower your staff to identify weak signals, assess new ideas in the context of macrotrends, filter through the noise to better judge what truly matters to your organization, and make valuable and diverse contacts with individuals and institutions in a uniquely forward-thinking setting. It’s like sending your team to Visionary School.

Please contact Society headquarters if you would like to register a group of individuals at the special Members’ rate. Call 1-800-989-8274.

Download the latest preliminary program. [PDF-updated]

Save even more off the conference registration by becoming a member of the World Future Society, which entitles you to discounts on WFS events, a one-year subscription to THE FUTURIST magazine, and six free special reports.

Learn about the trends changing the future and make a better tomorrow, today!

What’s in THE FUTURIST magazine?

A selection of articles, special reports, and other future-focused material on our Web site that you might have missed. Join now at www.wfs.org/renew.

The Abundance Builders

By Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler

Progress occurs when inventive people solve problems and create opportunities. Here, Peter Diamandis (left) and best-selling science writer Steven Kotler present just a few of the breakthroughs that offer the brightest prospects for a future that leaves austerity and deprivation behind. Read more.

The Secret Life of Data In the Year 2020

By Brian David Johnson

Author Brian David Johnson, a futurist for Intel, shows how geotags, sensor outputs, and big data are changing the future. He argues that we need a better understanding of our relationship with the data we produce in order to build the future we want. Read more.

The Individual in a Networked World: Two Scenarios

By Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman

Collaborative agent bots? A walled world under constant surveillance? Two information technology experts parse the future of human–network interaction. Read more.

Plus...

From Smart House to Networked Home

By Chris Carbone and Kristin Nauth

Two foresight specialists describe how tomorrow’s integrated, networked, and aware home systems may change your family life. Read more.

Building and Connecting Communities for the Future

By Center for Communities of the Future

The economic-development profession can be a positive force for change in communities as we transition from a materialistic economy to a transformational society. Read more.

Integrated and Innovative: The Future of Regions

By John M. Eger

Challenges facing city and regional governments today may spur a movement toward improving the creative resources of tomorrow’s citizens. Investing in the arts may help communities capitalize on shifting paradigms. Read more.

Revolutionary Health: Local Solutions for Global Health Problems

By Rick Docksai

Better health care doesn’t have to be costlier, as a number of innovative health practitioners are showing. In India, Venezuela, and elsewhere, the strategic use of technology, community involvement, and resource reallocations are enabling health-care providers to treat more patients more effectively, all while spending less money. Read more.

Visions: Preview of Future Inventions

By Kenneth J. Moore

Futurists: BetaLaunch, the World Future Society’s second annual innovation competition, will allow WorldFuture 2012 attendees to preview a few of the life-changing and society-altering artifacts of the future. Read more.

And MANY more stories.

June 2012, Vol. 13, No. 6

Predicting Your Future Location Years in Advance

University of Rochester computer scientist Adam Sadilek has developed a system that can, under certain conditions, predict the location of an individual years in advance. The breakthrough is possible, in part, because of the wide and growing adoption of GPS-enabled smartphones. Almost 50% of the U.S. population now carries a GPS device of some sort, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

Sadilek evaluated a large dataset consisting of 703 subjects (carrying GPS devices) over a variety of different time periods and collected more than 30,000 daily samples.

"While your location in the distant future is in general highly independent of your recent location, as we will see, it is likely to be a good predictor of your location exactly one week from now. Therefore, we view long-term prediction as a process that identifies strong motifs and regularities in subjects’ historical data, models their evolution over time, and estimates future locations by projecting the patterns into the future," Sadilek writes.

The system, called Far Out, could be used to map future traffic congestion, disease spread, and electricity demand. Sadilek will present his paper at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence 2012 conference in July.

Source: "Far Out: Predicting Long-Term Human Mobility" by Adam Sadilek and Jon Krumm, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, 2012. PDF

What Does Climate Change Have to Do with the Price of Corn in Iowa?

Check off another box on the list of climate change’s impacts: commodity crop price volatility. "Even one or two degrees of global warming is likely to substantially increase heat waves that lead to low-yield years and more price volatility," says Noah Diffenbaugh, a researcher at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and one of the authors of a recent Nature Climate Change paper on how climate change will impact commodity markets.

Government will also affect price volatility through such policies as promoting the use of corn as a renewable fuel source. The corn market will be less resilient if bound by the biofuels mandate, so any yield fluctuations will drive up prices even more.

Nudging the U.S. corn belt northward to a little below the Canadian border could help avoid excessive heat that would devastate corn crops and impact of market prices. Alternatively, the corn could stay in place—as long as new varieties are bred with increased heat tolerance of at least 6 degrees Fahrenheit.

The government’s attempts to curb the causes of climate change might have costly unintended effects, although less costly than the impact of climate change itself. In a recent survey by Jon Krosnick at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, most responders favor federal tax breaks for companies producing alternative energies (wind, water, and solar). But with the politically charged topic on the table during the presidential race, only 62% of Americans say they support government action to address climate change—a drop from 72% in the survey’s 2010 iteration.

This reversal in public sentiment is out of step with growing consensus on global climate change among scientists. According to a recent Yale survey, more than 90% of climate scientists now agree on the existence of man-made global warming.

Sources: Stanford University and Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media

Machines That Can Read Between the Lines

In the military, lives depend on human leaders getting messages and understanding them in full. Unfortunately, defense operators and analysts receive huge volumes of data from many sources, and written texts’ meanings are not always obvious. Important information may not be explicitly stated, key details may be unclear, and there may only be indirect references to important activities and objects.

Under deadline pressure, the readers may miss important points. Now, a new “natural-language processing” computer program could help human leaders to cut through the haze.

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is creating a Deep Exploration and Filtering of Text (DEFT) program that will read documents and understand inferred meaning from them far more quickly than a human reader could.

Defense analysts who use this program will be able to investigate and process far more documents in less time; they’ll also be able to discover important but implicitly expressed information in the documents. The system will identify connections among documents, filter redundancies, and infer implicit information, all of which will ease planning and decision making.

Source: DARPA

U.S. Census Improves in Accuracy

In its post-enumeration surveys, the U.S. Census Bureau reports that it achieved near-zero overcounting of the nation’s population in the 2010 Census. The net overcount of 0.01% (representing 36,000 people) improves upon the 2000 Census overcount of 0.49% and the 1990 Census undercount of 1.61%.

The survey sampled the 300.7 million Americans living in housing units (excluding nursing homes, college dorms, and other group quarters) and matched responses to the Census in order to estimate errors. These errors may include omissions, duplications, imputable demographic characteristics, and fictitious responses.

Post-enumeration surveys are part of the Census Bureau’s strategy to improve its data collection. Other efforts involve evaluating Census operations and data-collection processes and comparing other methods for estimating population size. The goal is to improve Census processes (and the resulting data) for the 2020 Census.

"On this one evaluation—the net undercount of the total population—this was an outstanding census," says Census Bureau Director Robert Groves. "When this fact is added to prior positive evaluations, the American public can be proud of the 2010 Census their participation made possible."

A remaining challenge to Census accuracy is reaching the nation’s harder-to-count renters and minority populations, says Groves.

Source: U.S. Bureau of the Census

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Why Should You Book Your Registration for WorldFuture 2012 Today?

Don’t miss your chance to meet visionaries and thought leaders shaping our understanding of the future, such as Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project; Brian David Johnson, Intel Futurist; Geordie Rose, creator of the D-Wave One, the world’s first commercial quantum computer, and named Canadian Innovator of the Year for 2011 by the National Post; Edie Weiner, president of Weiner, Edrich, Brown, Inc., and co-author of Future Think; Naveen Jain, founder of Moon Express; Josh Schonwald, journalist and author of the forthcoming book The Taste of Tomorrow: Dispatches from the Future of Food; and John Smart, head of the Accelerating Studies Foundation and the Brain Preservation Foundation.

View invitation from WFS board member Mylena Pierremont:

Download the latest preliminary program. [PDF-updated]

Register by June 29 and save $50 dollars!

Save even more off the conference registration by becoming a member of the World Future Society, which entitles you to discounts on WFS events, a one-year subscription to THE FUTURIST magazine, and six free special reports.

Learn about the trends changing the future and make a better tomorrow, today!

What’s in THE FUTURIST magazine? (Members Only)

A selection of articles, special reports, and other future-focused material on our Web site that you might have missed. Members may sign in to read and comment. Not a member? Join now at www.wfs.org/renew.

A Thousand Years Young

By Aubrey de Grey

An "anti-aging activist" identifies the medical and biochemical advances that could eventually eliminate all the wear and tear that our bodies and minds suffer as we grow old. Those who undergo continuous repair treatments could live for millennia, remain healthy throughout, and never fear dying of old age. Read more.

Engineering the Future of Food

By Josh Schonwald

Tomorrow’s genetically modified food and farmed fish will be more sustainable and far healthier than much of what we eat today—if we can overcome our fears and embrace it. Here’s how one foodie learned to stop worrying and love "Frankenfood." Read more.

The Future of the Commercial Sex Industry

By Emily Empel

As new technologies impact the products and services of the sex industry, other businesses will find new opportunities in the world’s oldest professions. Read more.

Anticipating an "Anything Goes" World of Online Porn

By Roger Howard

Increased exposure to more-intensive pornographic imagery and content online will make future generations less sensitive to its effects. Read more.

What’s in THE FUTURIST magazine? (Public)

VISIONS: Futurists Review the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show

By Patrick Tucker and Thomas Frey

Two Futurist editors rate the gadgets that may soon make a big difference in our lives. Read more.

To Predict or to Build the Future? Reflections on the Field and Differences between Foresight and La Prospective

By Michel Godet

A pioneer from the French school of la prospective discusses the development of futures-studies methodologies and the imperative of making methods accessible to all. Read more.

May 2012, Vol. 13, No. 5

Why Lean and Hungry Entrepreneurs Succeed

The adage that "success breeds success" may not hold true for new start-up companies. Entrepreneurs starting with less personal liquidity may in fact be more resourceful, cautious, and successful, according to a study of Norwegian entrepreneurs.

Finance professors Jarle Møen (Norwegian School of Economics) and Hans K. Hvide (University of Aberdeen) found that entrepreneurs in the top quartile of personal wealth fared worse in terms of profit than those with fewer assets. They theorize that, because financial freedom offers a buffer against poor performance, the wealthier entrepreneurs are often more experimental and less intimidated by the need for large profits.

Less-wealthy entrepreneurs, on the other hand, work with less room for error. They may also be more receptive to financial advice from investors and from the lenders looking over their shoulders, the researchers suggest.

"Normally, banks and co-investors will serve as a corrective, and the more risk you take, the more critical they will be," says Møen. "If you finance the whole thing yourself, you can simply start up--and are often a bit too optimistic. … It has been normal to see a lack of capital as an obstacle to entrepreneurship and innovation. Our findings nuance this picture. If new businesses are not disciplined by a certain scarcity of capital, both the entrepreneur and investors should be very much on the alert."

Source: Norwegian School of Economics

Seeing Coastal Erosion Before It Happens

British researchers expect climate change to alter Great Britain's coastal areas, but they don't know for sure what the change will look like or how severe it will be. A four-year collaborative model endeavor, the iCoast Project, may provide definitive answers.

The project brings together researchers from across Great Britain to build models that will simulate what Great Britain's coastlines will look like up to 100 years into the future.

Britain's coastal areas are more prone to flooding and erosion than are the shorelines of inland rivers and lakes, according to the researchers, who anticipate even greater wear and tear upon the coasts this century due to climate change and sediment starvation. Science has greatly improved its abilities to analyze and forecast such coastal landscape changes in the last few years, they add.

The iCoast simulations will develop new models that could accurately portray key variables such as the directions of tidal waves, patterns of storm weather, and the overall sensitivity of the shorelines. Researchers will use this knowledge to more effectively manage risks of flooding and erosion.

The project will take an estimated four years to complete and will cost £2.9 million, with funding provided by Britain's Natural Environment Research Council. Britain's Environment Agency (EA) is also partnering on the project.

Source: University of Southampton

The Future of Predictive Analytics Is Bright

Predictive Analytics World kicked off its inaugural Toronto conference April 25 and 26, bringing together data scientists from around the world. "We are in the midst of a paradigm shift from behavior prediction to influence prediction," said conference chair and founder Eric Siegel.

Predictive analytics uses customer monitoring and data collection to improve marketing efforts and profitability. The field has grown steadily as a result of the ease of online tracking, but commercial use of predictive analytics dates back to 1903, when statistician Robert Fisher invented the credit score.

Takeaway findings from Predictive Analytics World Toronto:

  • A Norwegian telecom named Telenor used predictive analytics to predict which customers would drop their telecom contract if they were contacted for marketing purposes. The company reduced churn (customer unsubscribes) by 36% as a result, and the campaign return on investment increased by a factor of 11. (Using predictive analytics, researchers also discovered that a cell phone customer is 700% more likely to cancel if someone in his or her social network does.)
  • MTV learned to predict which words in tweets and Facebook posts would produce the biggest viral reaction. When it implemented the new strategy around the launch of the Video Music Awards, MTV.com saw a 40% increase in hourly unique visits, a 55% increase in hourly page views, and a 36% gain in video views; it also set a new Twitter tweets per second record on a given subject: 8,868. "Lady Gaga" tweets drove 40% of incremental MTV.com traffic.
  • The salary for statisticians will go up two to three times in the next few years, largely as a result in the growth of unstructured data from social media channels, according to IBM.

Source: Predictive Analytics World

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Why Should You Book Your Registration for WorldFuture 2012 Today?

Don't miss your chance to meet visionaries and thought leaders shaping our understanding of the future, such as Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project; Brian David Johnson, Intel Futurist; Geordie Rose, creator of the D-Wave One, the world's first commercial quantum computer, named Canadian Innovator of the Year for 2011 by the National Post; Edie Weiner, president of Weiner, Edrich, Brown, Inc., and co-author of Future Think; Naveen Jain, founder of Moon Express; Josh Schonwald, journalist and author of the forthcoming book The Taste of Tomorrow: Dispatches from the Future of Food; and John Smart, head of the Accelerating Studies Foundation and the Brain Preservation Foundation.

Get up close and personal with inventions and inventors who are defining innovation for the new decade, such as the makers of the Life Technologies Ion Proton™ Sequencer (pictured), which can read your genome (all 3 billion base pairs) in one day for $1,000.

Learn more or register today!

A Futurist's Summer Reading List

Prepare for WorldFuture 2012 by catching up on the latest futurist books on such topics as education, social networking, resource management, and food technology. Many of the authors of these books will be attending or speaking at the World Future Society's annual meeting in Toronto. Read more about their sessions in the preliminary program, and make sure you're registered for the conference to meet the authors this summer!

Networked: The New Social Operating System
Lee Rainie (Opening Plenary Session: Future of the Internet) and Barry Wellman
Networked takes a look at how social networks enable learning, problem solving, decision making, and personal interaction, as well as at the challenges the networks pose.

Screen Future
Brian David Johnson (Opening Plenary Session: Waking Up the Algorithm)
Screen Future explores how the personal devices we will have in the future are being shaped by people, technology, and economics.

Flash Forward! Rethinking Learning
Karen Grose (Education Summit)
Flash Forward presents educational practices that address the challenges of today's education system.

Reinventing Life: A Guide to Our Evolutionary Future
Jeffrey Scott Coker (Session: Reinventing Life: A Guide to Our Evolutionary Future)
Reinventing Life discusses how society is rapidly—and radically—changing the biology of life and our responsibility as evolutionary stewards.

The Biggest Wake Up Call in History
Richard Slaughter (Session: Global MegaCrisis: How Bad Will It Get? What Strategies?)
The imbalance between our way of life and the Earth's natural limits cannot keep up forever, Slaughter warns in this provocative book.

How Asia Can Shape the World—From the Era of Plenty to the Era of Scarcities
Joergen Oerstroem Moeller (Session: Asian Economies over the Next Decade)
How Asia Can Shape the World details the economic and social impacts of Asia's growth in the coming decades.

Granddad's Farmhouse Porch Stories
Don C. Davis (Session: The Future We Ask For)
Granddad's Farmhouse Porch Stories is a collection of classic faith stories retold with a focus on the technology and global family of tomorrow.

The Taste of Tomorrow: Dispatches from the Future of Food
Josh Schonwald (Session: Cobia or Barramundi? And Other Choices on Tomorrow's Menu)
The Taste of Tomorrow takes a look at the people, trends, and technologies that will create the food we eat in the future.

What’s in THE FUTURIST magazine? (Members Only)

A selection of articles, special reports, and other future-focused material on our Web site that you might have missed. Members may sign in to read and comment. Not a member? Join now at /renew.

A Thousand Years Young

By Aubrey de Grey

An "anti-aging activist" identifies the medical and biochemical advances that could eventually eliminate all the wear and tear that our bodies and minds suffer as we grow old. Those who undergo continuous repair treatments could live for millennia, remain healthy throughout, and never fear dying of old age. Read more.

Engineering the Future of Food

By Josh Schonwald

Tomorrow's genetically modified food and farmed fish will be more sustainable and far healthier than much of what we eat today—if we can overcome our fears and embrace it. Here's how one foodie learned to stop worrying and love "Frankenfood." Read more.

The Future of the Commercial Sex Industry

By Emily Empel

As new technologies impact the products and services of the sex industry, other businesses will find new opportunities in the world's oldest professions. Read more.

Anticipating an "Anything Goes" World of Online Porn

By Roger Howard

Increased exposure to more-intensive pornographic imagery and content online will make future generations less sensitive to its effects. Read more.

What’s in THE FUTURIST magazine? (Public)

VISIONS: Futurists Review the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show

By Patrick Tucker and Thomas Frey

Two Futurist editors rate the gadgets that may soon make a big difference in our lives. Read more.

To Predict or to Build the Future? Reflections on the Field and Differences between Foresight and La Prospective

By Michel Godet

A pioneer from the French school of la prospective discusses the development of futures-studies methodologies and the imperative of making methods accessible to all. Read more.

April 2012, Vol. 13., No. 4

  • Should We Get Rid of Middle School?
  • New Wireless Sensor Could Enhance Post-Surgery Treatment Follow-Up
  • Envisioning a Blind-Friendly Internet
  • White House Announces $200 Million For Big Data Research
  • What’s in THE FUTURIST magazine

Should We Get Rid of Middle School?

Students who move to new schools for grades six or seven exhibit disproportionately lower math and reading scores and form an unusually large percentage of the students who drop out of high school (compared with kids who attended kindergarten through eighth grade schools prior to high school). These achievement drop-offs equate to losing between three and a half and seven months of expected learning, according to a survey of all Florida public schools conducted by Harvard researchers Martin West and Guido Schwerdt. The effects are more pronounced among students who switch in seventh grade, and are severest in urban districts and among African American students.

Nor do the students ever fully recover. Compared with students who never changed schools, they still averaged lower math and reading scores by the end of their eighth-grade year. Furthermore, their probability of dropping out of high school by grade 10 was 18% higher. West and Schwerdt say that their findings vindicate K-8 schools, which instruct students continuously from kindergarten to eighth grade.

Source: Harvard

New Wireless Sensor Could Enhance Post-Surgery Treatment Follow-Up

A prototype micro-scale wireless sensor could give surgeons better and timelier imaging of a patient’s physical condition after an operation than even the best X-rays and MRIs. Developed by engineers at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute engineers, the sensor—which measures just 4 millimeters in length and 500 microns in width—would be implanted into the surgical site by being fitted atop any one of the commonly used orthopedic musculoskeletal implants that patients might receive, such as plates, prostheses, or rods. Once in place, the sensor would transmit data wirelessly, with no radiation, battery power, or electricity inside the body required, to an external receptor device. Compared to the existing imaging equipment, this sensor bodes to be less invasive and, thanks to its compactness and few parts, less costly.

Additionally, it would be much more reliable and accurate. Surgeons who use it would gain streams of accurate measurements of the healing site’s strain, pressure, temperature, and other indicators. This information would enable them to gauge more precisely whether a patient is healing properly and when he or she is able to resume work and daily activities. Eric Ledet, the Rennsselaer assistant professor of biomedical engineering who is leading the project, has spent five years developing it and is optimistic about its progress. He is currently obtaining a patent and is looking for ways to mass-produce it.

Source: Rensselaer

Envisioning a Blind-Friendly Internet

For all the multimedia wonders of the Internet, the vast store of information, knowledge, and connections it contains is largely based on graphics and text—visual input that is inaccessible to the visually impaired. Now, an information-studies scholar who is blind aims to make the Internet more universally available.

Blind and sighted users organize their online tasks and process information differently. Thus, text-based search tools such as tags are not particularly useful to the visually impaired, says Rakesh Babu, an assistant professor in the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee’s School of Information Studies. (Babu himself lost his vision to a degenerative eye disease.)

Screen readers provide digitized voice translations of text, but they produce a linear online experience that cannot keep pace with a nonlinear visual experience comprising color cues, animations, and text that can be quickly scanned.

Babu’s research is focusing on understanding the differences in how blind users conceptualize online tasks compared with sighted users; this includes not just information gathering, but also communicating and engaging in activities that are already available to sighted users—and are vital to career prospects and to independent living.

“Web accessibility is not a legal issue; it’s an equal opportunity issue,” says Babu. “When you sit down to design a Web site, you have to think, how would a screen reader read my Web site? You need to be user-centered from the beginning.”

Source: University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Watch a demo by Rakesh Babu on YouTube

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Don't miss your chance to meet visionaries and thought leaders shaping our understanding of the future such as Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project; Brian David Johnson, Intel Futurist; Geordie Rose, creator of the D-Wave One, the world's first commercial quantum computer, named Canadian Innovator of the Year for 2011 by the National Post; Edie Weiner, president of Weiner, Edrich, Brown, Inc., and co-author of Future Think; Naveen Jain, founder of Moon Express; Josh Schonwald, journalist and author of the forthcoming book The Taste of Tomorrow: Dispatches from the Future of Food; and John Smart, head of the Accelerating Studies Foundation and the Brain Preservation Foundation.

Get up close and personal with inventions and inventors who are defining innovation for the new decade, such as the makers of the Life Technologies Ion Proton™ Sequencer (pictured), which can read your genome (all 3 billion base pairs) in one day for $1,000.

Learn more or register today!

White House Announces $200 Million For Big Data Research

The Obama administration will allocate $200 million to new and ongoing science initiatives to collect and interpret extremely large, structured and unstructured data sets. The recipients of the funds include NASA, for a wide range of activities including using satellite data to predict the impact of forest fires; the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), among others.

The amount of potentially useful data, particularly in terms of health, has grown exponentially over the past several decades, said NIH director Francis Collins, and the costs associated with collecting such data continue to decrease. In terms of human genome sequencing, in particular, “the average cost has fallen from $400 million in 2003 to less than $8000, today,” said Collins in a press conference on Friday, (March 30.) “So this is a real challenge.”

Collins announced that NIH will publish 200 terebytes of genomic data, a storehouse roughly equivalent to 16 million file cabinets, to the cloud through Amazon Web Services as part of the 1000 Genomes Project.

The largest recipient of funds will be the U.S. Department of Defense. “The data being brought to bear on Department of Defense operations, the data collected is often imperfect, incomplete, and heterogeneous…the share volume of info is creating background clutter, making it hard to identify the data we need to see,” said Kaigham “Ken” Gabriel, acting head of the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA).

Source: The White House Blog, The White House fact sheet on big data in government, PDF

What’s in THE FUTURIST magazine? (Members Only)

A selection of articles, special reports, and other future-focused material on our Web site that you might have missed. Members may sign in to read and comment. Not a member? Join now at http://www.wfs.org/renew.

Thriving in the Automated Economy

By Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee

Two management experts show why labor’s race against automation will only be won if we partner with our machines. They advise government regulators not to stand in the way of human–machine innovation. Read more.

A World Wide Mind: The Coming Collective Telempathy

By Michael Chorost

The Internet plus humanity equals hyperorganism, a merger of man and machine that may result in global mindfulness. Read more.

Nuclear Power’s Unsettled Future

By Ozzie Zehner

A year after the Fukushima Daiichi disaster in Japan, prospects for the nuclear power industry worldwide are far from certain. An energy policy scholar assesses the key economic, environmental, political, and psychological hinges on which nuclear power’s future now swings. Read more

A Future of Fewer Words?: Five Trends Shaping the Future of Language

By Lawrence Baines

Natural selection is as much a phenomenon in human language as it is in natural ecosystems. An ongoing “survival of the fittest” may lead to continuing expansion of image-based communications and the extinction of more than half the world’s languages by this century’s end. Read more.

Visions: Toward Better Space-Weather Forecasts

By Cynthia G. Wagner

Scientists hope to help avert devastating impacts of solar outbursts. Read more.

March 2012, Vol. 13., No. 3

  • Robot Ants Invade Factories to Boost Efficiency
  • Dispatch from the Big Data Frontier
  • Generation “Always On“
  • WorldFuturist.net Seeks Input from Young Futurists
  • What’s in THE FUTURIST magazine

Robot Ants Invade Factories to Boost Efficiency

Robotic vehicles at the Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics IML, in Dortmund, Germany, can mimic the thinking of ants, almost. Multishuttle Moves®, as the machines are known, use processors modeled after ants’ brains and body systems to independently navigate a warehouse, identify items to pick up, and coordinate with each other to carry each item to its designated picking station.

Each vehicle knows what to carry and where to carry it, based on installed software that crunches “ant algorithms,“ which emulate the actual behavior of ants searching for food. The vehicles’ software programs notify them when an order comes in, and then each vehicle interacts with the others through W-LAN to determine which vehicle will take on which task and where. The fleet increases or decreases its activity as the demands fluctuate throughout the workday.

Their on-board navigation systems also enable each vehicle to move freely without crashing into any objects or, for that matter, other vehicles. And via their scanners for location, acceleration, and distance, the vehicles independently calculate the shortest routes to any destination.

Fraunhofer’s researchers, who built a fleet of 50 of these robots in partnership with robotics firm Dematic, said that this suite of capabilities makes them far more efficient and economical than traditional, human-driven vehicles. Following further testing and development, the researchers said, autonomous vehicles like them could be clearing inventory in warehouses throughout Germany and beyond.

Source: Fraunhofer

Dispatch from the Big Data Frontier

More than 2,500 data scientists, business executives, and number crunchers gathered in Santa Clara, California, last week for the O’Reilly Strata conference. Speakers included Jonathan Bruner of Forbes, Ed Kohlwey of Booz Allen Hamilton, Coco Krumme of the MIT Media Lab, and Hal Varian, chief economist of Google, among many others. A full brief is available on THE FUTURIST magazine blog. Some key highlights and insights include:

Query volume on the term “Sign up for unemployment“ can predict future unemployment claims with a high degree of accuracy one week before official numbers are released from the U.S. government, according to Google’s Hal Varian.

David Vogel and his “Market Makers” team won the second milestone competition (as well as the first funding round last fall) in Dr. Richard Merkin’s Heritage Health Prize. The competition “challenges participants to train algorithms to predict the likelihood of a patient being hospitalized in the next year, based on that patient’s medical records.“

Coupon and rebate search queries are an excellent predictor of weak economic times ahead, a Google study found.

Jonathan Gosier’s MetaLayer site (in private beta) won the start-up showcase. MetaLayer aims to help people with little training create interesting visualizations (charts and graphs) from large public data sets such as Twitter trends.

“The exabyte age will bring with it the twin challenges of information overload and overconsumption, both of which will require organizations of all sizes to use the emerging toolboxes for filtering, analysis and action. To create public good from public goods — the public sector data that governments collect, the private sector data that is being collected and the social data that we generate ourselves — we will need to collectively forge new compacts that honor existing laws and visionary agreements that enable the new data science to put the data to work,” said O’Reilly’s Alex Howard in a white paper, “Data for the Public Good,” timed to go out with the conference.

Sources: Learn more about the conference and watch videos here.

Download the free white paper, Data for the Public Good here

Read THE FUTURIST magazine brief: “The Three Things You Need to Know About Big Data, Right Now” here

Generation “Always On”

The Internet may be a mixed blessing for younger generations, whose brains are being irrevocably altered by their relationship with the medium, warn more than half of the respondents to a new survey from the Pew Research Center.

While fleetly multitasking and instantly gratifying every info-whim simultaneously posting Facebook updates, texting their sweethearts, researching history assignments, streaming live concerts, and Skyping friends—today’s average teenagers may be turning themselves into shallow thinkers and impatient adults, warn some of the experts surveyed.

On the other hand, “quick-twitch” thinking may become a key survival skill for this hyperconnected, “always on ” generation, others believe.

“The essential skills [of 2020] will be those of rapidly searching, browsing, assessing quality, and synthesizing the vast quantities of information,” said Microsoft researcher Jonathan Grudin. “In contrast, the ability to read one thing and think hard about it for hours will not be of no consequence, but it will be of far less consequence for most people.”

These responses came from the fifth “Future of the Internet“ survey of more than 1,000 Internet experts and other users, fielded by Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center and the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project.

Source: “Millennials Will Benefit and Suffer Due to Their Hyperconnected Lives“ by Janna Anderson and Lee Rainie, Pew Internet.

WorldFuturist.net Seeks Input from Young Futurists

WorldFuturist.net, a Web site for future-focused kids aged 8-18, is seeking submissions in the following categories: future predictions, future scenarios, utopian visions, alternative lifestyles, science fiction, science fiction book reviews, science fiction video game reviews, science fiction movie reviews, science and technology news reports, scifi drawings, and futuristic videos according to the site's creator, FUTURIST magazine blogger and IEET managing director Hank Pellissier.

WorldFuturist.net is also looking for regular contributors aged 13-18 who want to be columnists, critics, and news reporters on topics ranging from Neanderthal studies to black holes.

All material published by WorldFuturist.net will include the author's name, photo, and biography. WorldFuturist.net is sponsored by the California registered non-profit, The Kids' Co-op, Inc. Official launch is April 15, 2012. Directors include Gabriel Rothblatt, Nikki Olson, and Hank Pellissier. To submit material or make inquiries, contact hankpellissier(at)yahoo.com

Source: IEET on Facebook

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Why Should You Book Your Registration for WorldFuture 2012 Today?

Don't miss your chance to meet visionaries and thought leaders shaping our understanding of the future such as Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project; Brian David Johnson, Intel Futurist; Geordie Rose, creator of the D-Wave One, the world’s first commercial quantum computer, named Canadian Innovator of the Year for 2011 by the National Post; Edie Weiner, president of Weiner, Edrich, Brown, Inc., and co-author of Future Think; Naveen Jain, founder of Moon Express; Josh Schonwald, journalist and author of the forthcoming book The Taste of Tomorrow: Dispatches from the Future of Food; and John Smart, head of the Accelerating Studies Foundation and the Brain Preservation Foundation.

Get up close and personal with inventions and inventors who are defining innovation for the new decade, such as the makers of the Life Technologies Ion Proton™ Sequencer (pictured), which can read your genome (all 3 billion base pairs) in one day for $1,000.

Learn more or register today!

What’s in THE FUTURIST magazine? (Members Only)

A selection of articles, special reports, and other future-focused material on our Web site that you might have missed. Members may sign in to read and comment. Not a member? Join now at http://www.wfs.org/renew.

Thriving in the Automated Economy

By Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee

Two management experts show why labor’s race against automation will only be won if we partner with our machines. They advise government regulators not to stand in the way of human–machine innovation. Read more.

A World Wide Mind: The Coming Collective Telempathy

By Michael Chorost

The Internet plus humanity equals hyperorganism, a merger of man and machine that may result in global mindfulness. Read more.

Nuclear Power’s Unsettled Future

By Ozzie Zehner

A year after the Fukushima Daiichi disaster in Japan, prospects for the nuclear power industry worldwide are far from certain. An energy policy scholar assesses the key economic, environmental, political, and psychological hinges on which nuclear power’s future now swings. Read more

A Future of Fewer Words?: Five Trends Shaping the Future of Language

By Lawrence Baines

Natural selection is as much a phenomenon in human language as it is in natural ecosystems. An ongoing “survival of the fittest” may lead to continuing expansion of image-based communications and the extinction of more than half the world’s languages by this century’s end. Read more.

February 2012, Vol. 13, No. 2

  • Too Much Passenger Screening Is Making Airports Less Secure
  • Reducing Inequality in Europe Could Boost Growth
  • Tornadoes of the Past Offer Clues of Tornadoes to Come
  • Visionaries And Inventors to Gather in Toronto
  • IBM Gets Atoms to Remember Data
  • What’s in THE FUTURIST magazine

Too Much Passenger Screening Is Making Airports Less Secure

Ever stricter security measures in place in U.S. airports is making air travel less safe and airports more vulnerable, according to University of Illinois mathematics professor Sheldon H. Jacobson. The reason is too many resources are spent screening passengers who pose little risk, which steals time and money away from identifying real threats.

“A natural tendency, when limited information is available about from where the next threat will come, is to overestimate the overall risk in the system,” says Jacobson in a press release. “This actually makes the system less secure by over-allocating security resources to those in the system that are low on the risk scale relative to others in the system.”

Jacobson recommends airports work to distinguish high-risk from lower-risk passengers before subjecting every flier (and all that baggage) to zealous screening. More programs like the TSA’s Pre-Check, which expedites screening for eligible passengers by rating their risk against that of entire flying population, would help airports perceive security threats more accurately. His recently published paper also explores scenarios to expose security gaps.

Sources: University of Illinois.

Addressing Passenger Risk Uncertainty for Aviation Security Screening by Adrian J. Lee and Sheldon H. Jacobson, Transportation Science (December 2011)

Reducing Inequality in Europe Could Boost Growth

Rising socioeconomic inequality is one of the major risk factors portending an insecure future, warn researchers for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). In a new report, OECD economists outline several policy proposals for reducing Europe’s wealth and income gap while simultaneously boosting economic growth.

First, the report recommends that governments adjust tax and benefits systems to promote “growth in the middle” i.e., reform tax codes that favor the wealthy, thus enabling tax burdens on struggling middle-income taxpayers to be reduced.

The 25% wage gap between temporary and permanent workers could also be reduced by offering more protections for temporary workers. Women’s labor-force participation could be increased with the provision of more affordable child care. And improving educational opportunities and outcomes for immigrants and disadvantaged groups will have long-term benefits to the economy, such as enhancing the quality of the labor force, according to the report.

“The main challenge facing governments today is implementing reforms that get growth back on track, put people to work and reduce the widening income gap,” concludes OECD chief economist Pier Carlo Padoan.

Source: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development

Tornadoes of the Past Offer Clues of Tornadoes to Come

People in the path of a tornado don’t typically know it’s coming until minutes before it arrives. But a new tornado prediction model could give them as much as a month or more of prior notice.

The model’s debut is particularly timely, as climate experts expect climate warming to intensify tornado activity. U.S. deaths due to tornado activity last year exceeded all tornado-related deaths for the prior 10 years combined. It is not conclusive that global warming is to blame, but the index’s authors hope that their model could help researchers find out for sure.

Meanwhile, NOAA tornado expert Harold Brooks is optimistic that the index will minimize future injuries and deaths. With advance warning, communities and relief agencies will have time to gather needed supplies, he says.

Source: Columbia University.

Why Should You Book Your Registration for WorldFuture 2012, Today?

Don’t miss your chance to meet visionaries and thought leaders shaping our understanding of the future such as Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project; Brian David Johnson, Intel Futurist; Geordie Rose, creator of the D-Wave One, the world’s first commercial quantum computer, named Canadian Innovator of the Year for 2011 by the National Post; Edie Weiner, president of Weiner, Edrich, Brown, Inc., and co-author of Future Think; Naveen Jain, founder of Moon Express; Josh Schonwald, journalist and author of the forth-coming book The Taste of Tomorrow: Dispatches from the Future of Food; and John Smart, head of the Accelerating Studies Foundation and the Brain Preservation Foundation.

Get up close and personal with inventions and inventors who are defining innovation for the new decade, such as the makers of the Life Technologies Ion Proton™ Sequencer, which can read your genome (all 3 million base pairs) in one day for $1,000.

Register today!

IBM Gets Atoms to Remember Data

Researchers at IBM have succeeded in encoding data in just 12 magnetic atoms, an enormous improvement over conventional disk drives that use as many as 100 atoms to store a single bit of Information. The accomplishment could lead to future breakthroughs in nanocomputation and computer efficiency.

To make it happen, the IBM team had to look beyond the traditional silicon transistor and get specially magnetized atoms to “hold” information by spinning in one of two directions, to represent either ”1” or “0.”

“The chip industry will continue its pursuit of incremental scaling in semiconductor technology but, as components continue to shrink, the march continues to the inevitable end point: the atom. We’re taking the opposite approach and starting with the smallest unit — single atoms — to build computing devices one atom at a time, ” said project leader Andreas Heinrich in a press release.

Source: IBM

Call for Papers: Conference Essay Collection

The World Future Society will publish a collection of essays in conjunction with WorldFuture 2012: Dream. Design. Develop. Deliver, to be held July 27-29, 2012, in Toronto.

This collection will be published in a special edition of World Future Review, the journal of the Society’s Professional Membership program, and will be made available to all conference registrants.

Deadline for completed papers is February 20, 2012.

Guidelines

What’s in THE FUTURIST magazine? (Members Only)

A selection of articles, special reports, and other future-focused material on our Web site that you might have missed. Members may sign in to read and comment. Not a member? Join now at http://www.wfs.org/renew.

Thriving in the Automated Economy

By Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee

Two management experts show why labor’s race against automation will only be won if we partner with our machines. They advise government regulators not to stand in the way of human–machine innovation. Read more.

Hard at Work in the Jobless Future

By James Lee

Jobs are disappearing, but there’s still a future for work. An investment manager looks at how automation and information technology are changing the economic landscape and forcing workers to forge new career paths beyond outdated ideas about permanent employment. Read More

What’s in THE FUTURIST magazine? (Public)

Rethinking “Return on Investment:” What We Really Need to Invest In

By Timothy Mack

Innovation means more than inventing new products for the world’s growing populations to consume. Innovation also means solving the problems created by consumption. By investing in sustainable innovation and creativity now, we will enhance our future returns. Read more.

January 2012, Vol. 13, No. 1

In this issue:

  • CES: The Future is Now-ish
  • MIT Scientists Discover Memory Gene
  • January 2012 Prediction List Roundup
  • Disease Hunters Follow the Night Lights
  • Better Nanotubes for Better Electronics
  • Inventors Wanted
  • What’s in THE FUTURIST magazine

CES: The Future Is Now-ish

The annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) storms Las Vegas this week. THE FUTURIST magazine and other members of the media received a special preview access to the more than 20,000 new products expected to launch at the event this year.

Previous CES shows saw the launch of the VCR and DVD players. According to Shawn Dubravac of the Consumer Electronics Association, more than 90% of U.S. households own a product that debuted at the world’s biggest tech show. Dubravac called 2012 the year of the interface and stressed that some of the inventions and prototypes on display won’t be commercially viable “for years.” Read more of THE FUTURIST magazine’s on-site coverage at wfs.org.

Also download a copy of Dubravac's presentation here.

MIT Scientists Discover Memory Gene

Our memories give birth to our expectations of the future; but what gives birth to memory? A group of MIT scientists led by Yingxi Lin claim to have discovered a master gene for memory encoding. The Npas4 gene is responsible for activating the genes that make memories stronger and more permanent (both synapse strength and connections between neurons). “This is a gene that can connect from experience to the eventual changing of the circuit,” says Lin.

The team found that Npas4 is heavily present in the CA3 region of the hippocampus in mice when they wandered to a part of a maze where they received a mild electric shock. The gene helped them remember to avoid that area. When the researchers removed the gene from that area of the hippocampus, the mice forgot which part of the maze was dangerous.

The ability to produce Npas4 in sufficient volume may have an effect on the study of learning and education in the future.

Source: MIT

January 2012 Prediction List Roundup

The beginning of 2012 saw the usual burst of predictions from media, industry, tech watchers, and futurists.

Declan McCullagh of the popular blog CNET forecast that “If 2011 was the Year of the hackers, 2012 may be the Year the Hackers Upset the Political Establishment.” Read more.

Daryl Lang of the Web site Breaking Copy published a self-deprecatingly titled list of “Ten Foolishly Specific Predictions for 2012,” among them: “An angry online mob forces the CEO of a Fortune 500 company to resign.” Read more.

John Brandon of Inc. magazine predicted that, by 2025, augmented reality and instantaneous language translation will be common.“ Read more.

Lance Ulanoff of Mashable announced “6 Crazy Tech Predictions for 2012,” among them: “Scientists will partner with Hollywood studios to unveil a new technology known as ‘Fresh Ends.’ Using CGI, Hollywood script writers, voice and context recognition and logic algorithms, Fresh Ends technology will generate new endings for some of the world’s most popular films. These slightly rewritten movies will be re-released to theaters—just like the 3D rereleases—and are expected to add 15- to 20% additional box office returns to each film. For now, Fresh Ends only works with movies shot digitally.“ Read more.

IBM published five predictions based on current IBM projects; they included telepathetic control of computers, the end of the digital divide, multifactor biometrics, and predictive analytics ending the days of junk mail. Read more.

Finally, social networking guru Brian Solis joined with Awareness Networks and other futurists in the release of the 2012 Social Marketing and New Media Report, packed with predictions about the future of social networks. The bottom line: “Engage or Die.” Read more (PDF).

Disease Hunters Follow the Night Lights

Public-health officials may have a new tool for fighting epidemics in developing countries, thanks to satellite images of nighttime light patterns in cities.

Researchers led by Nita Bharti of Princeton University have correlated the onset of communicable diseases such as measles with the population growth that occurs seasonally as people move from rural areas into cities. Comparing NASA night-light data with health records from Niger between 2000 and 2004, the researchers found that measles cases were more prevalent in cities’ brightest spots.

Monitoring changes in nighttime lighting will help identify hotspots for epidemics and enable public-health workers to inoculate the most vulnerable populations, the researchers believe. The night-light pattern tracking could also be used to monitor population movements during wars and natural disasters.

Source: Princeton University. The research was published in the December 9, 2011, edition of the journal Science.

Better Nanotubes for Better Electronics

A range of electronic products and solar cell technologies could become more affordable, thanks to a new manufacturing technique that expedites the production of carbon nanotubes.

These molecule-sized tube structures, which are now added to many structural materials, come in two varieties: semiconducting nanotubes, the active material in transistors and solar cells, and conducting nanotubes, used in batteries.

The current carbon nanotube manufacturing process creates conducting and semiconducting nanotubes in the same batch. They have to be separated, and this has presented a longtime “production bottleneck,” according to Stanford University chemical-engineering associate professor Zhenan Bao.

Bao has co-developed, with colleagues at the University of California–Davis and the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, the use of a polymer that latches onto semiconducting nanotubes but not the conducting ones.

The final polymer-fused semiconducting nanotubes are themselves useful for making lower-cost solar cells; “bendable display screens,” now increasingly featured in portable electronic devices; “stretchable electronics,” which feature in some components for advanced robots; and “circuits printed on plastics,” applications of which include transistors for flexible/foldable displays, transistors for flexible sensors and electronic skin, and circuits for printed price tags or RFIDs.

“Our simple process allows us to build useful devices very easily,” says Bao.

Source: Stanford University

Inventors Wanted

Do you have an invention or start-up that will change the world? The World Future Society has issued a call for inventions and innovations from breakthrough start-ups, who will compete in the second annual Futurists:BetaLaunch expo in Toronto next July.

Futurists:BetaLaunch (F:BL) serves as a technology expo where engineers, designers, and others can present their inventions to the 1,000 futurists expected to gather for the Society’s annual conference. Also in attendance will be venture capitalists such as Moon Express founder Naveen Jain, Netopia founder Reese Jones, and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

All inventors selected to present their inventions at F:BL will receive a complimentary registration to the WorldFuture 2012 conference ($750 value). The deadline for entry is March 15, 2012.

What’s in THE FUTURIST magazine? (Members Only)

A selection of articles, special reports, and other future-focused material on our Web site that you might have missed. Members may sign in to read and comment. Not a member? Join now at http://www.wfs.org/renew.

Crossing the Species Boundary: Genetic Engineering as Conscious Evolution

By Jeffrey Scott Coker

Genetic engineering is actually as natural as any process on Earth, and mastering it would enable us to do what microbes do trillions of times every day, but purposefully and with better results. Read more.

Outlook 2012

Environmental threats and energy source opportunities; in vivo organ and tissue printing and buildings that self-adapt to weather fluctuations. These forecasts and more appear in THE FUTURIST’s annual roundup of thought-provoking ideas. Read more.

Purchase a PDF download. Members: Login for free access. Check out Cynthia G. Wagner’s video of our the Top 10 Forecasts.

What’s in THE FUTURIST magazine? (Public)

The Best Predictions of 2011

Drawing from a variety of sources throughout the past year, the editors of THE FUTURIST take a look at some of the best predictions for the world’s future. Read more.

Innovating the Future: From Ideas to Adoption

By Peter J. Denning

Futurists and innovators can teach each other lessons to help their ideas succeed.

Visualizing Human Intention

Neuroscientists may predict what you will do before you do it. Read more.

Tomorrow in Brief

  • iGrammar: Mobile Language Lessons
  • Robotic Aides for Children with Autism
  • Glass as Waste Cleaner
  • Building Stronger Skyscrapers, Faster
  • Remote-Controlled Telescopes for Citizen Astronomers