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

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

Books in Brief

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coming Soon: A Smarter Internet

Less Web searching, more Web finding.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: SemanticV, www.semanticV.com.

The Dawn of the Postliterate Age

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

By Patrick Tucker

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

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

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

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

Texting, the Brief, Golden Age of Internet Communication

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cybernetics and the Coming Era of Instantaneous Communication

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Google, AI, and Instantaneous Information

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

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

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

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

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

Will “HAL” Make Us Stupid?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About the Author

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

Debunking the "Depression Gene"

Depression's causes continue to defy definitive answers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Innovation and Creativity in a Complex World

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Order The Conference Volume Innovation and Creativity in a Complex World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leading for Change

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Sidebar]

Fighting Poverty with Marketing

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Rick Docksai

Technology and the Economy

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

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

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

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

- Aaron M. Cohen

The Future of China

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

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

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

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

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

- Aaron M. Cohen

Energy Wild Cards

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

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

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

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

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

- Rick Docksai

Infotech's Impacts on Communication

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Rick Docksai

Education for a New Age

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

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

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

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

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

Tweeting the Future

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

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

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

- Compiled by C. G. Wagner

Oceans’ Dead Zones on the Rise

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Rapid Evolution of “Text”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scientific Breakthroughs Ahead!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other subjects covered in the collection include:

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

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

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

Second Thoughts on Nuclear Power

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Innovation Isn't Enough

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

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

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

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

Tomorrow in Brief, November-December 2009

Making Personal Data Vanish

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

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

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Cancer Mortality Rates Are Declining

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

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

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Smart Cane Will Help Visually Impaired

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

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

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

Source: Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, www.fraunhofer.de .

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WordBuzz: Complexipacity

How well can you or your organization handle complexity?

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

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

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

“Waste Heat” a Potential Threat to the Climate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whole Earth Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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