Humanity

Big cuts by the UK government and a tripling of university tuition fees pushed British students to protest. Passing tuition fees rise by the British parliament may have implications that will affect the future of higher education in the UK and elsewhere.

Change can be made at different levels: individual, organizational and societal. On the one side, people resist change (“we have always done things this way, why shall we change it?”) but on the other side they embrace it (“I have moved into a new apartment”, “I got a new job”). How come?

Here are some recent future-related titles from the Center for Strategic International Studies, Yale, Georgetown Press and some other organizations that produce exceptional material for the futurist who insists on the best possible material. Happy reading.

Trying to understand how futures thinking works cannot be separated from trying to understand how a futurist applies his/her knowledge in futures works.

A large, diverse audience packed Washington, D.C.’s Sidney Harman Hall this past Friday for the independently organized TED event TEDx MidAtlantic. “TED” stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, and over the decades, that focus has broadened to include pretty much every imaginable field.

Neurobiology is revealing the mechanisms that show who we are created: how we make decisions and control our emotions, how our genes shape our desires and how our personal futures are being shaped by a reward system that adapts in response to satisfying experiences.

I just returned from the annual American Magazine Conference, or AMC, this year in Chicago, where I got a front row view of the future of my industry. In one presentation after the next, the heads of such giants as Hearst, Condé Nast, and Time (along with Oprah Winfrey) reassured one another that the future was increasingly bright.

Researchers have recently looked at how time travel is represented psychologically in the sensorimotor systems that regulate human movement. Technically we may not have a means for moving through time (yet), but when we think of the past or the future, our brains engage in a sort of mental time travel. It turns out our perceptions of space and time are tightly coupled.

Many of the exact generational boundaries describing the 30-and-under population have been poorly defined, and terms are oftentimes used interchangeably. For example, terms like “Millennial” sometimes are used to describe portions of what is considered “Generation Y”. For the purpose of this blog, I am focusing solely on the under-18 population.