June 2011, Vol. 12, No. 6

In this issue:

Researchers Warn of Greenhouse Oceans
DARPA Launches 100-Year Starship Study
New Model Predicts Pace of Design Innovation
The Virtual Economy Valued at $3 Billion
What’s Hot @WFS.ORG (Public)

Escaping the Filter Bubble
Future Prospects for the Smart Era
News and Events for the Futurist Community

What’s Hot @WFS.ORG (Members Only)

WorldFuture 2011 Conference Forums
World Trends & Forecasts from the May-June issue of THE FUTURIST

Researchers Warn of Greenhouse Oceans

The world’s oceans may be more vulnerable to climate change than previously thought. As more dead zones (patches of ocean severely deprived of oxygen) are being discovered, scientists exploring prehistoric mass marine extinctions now believe another round of extinctions is likely.

“What’s alarming to us as scientists is that there were only very slight natural changes [in the Late Cretaceous period] that resulted in the onset of hypoxia in the deep ocean,” says Martin Kennedy of the University of Adelaide’s School of Earth and Environmental Sciences. This suggests a vulnerability to the more-rapid increase of CO₂ that is predicted over the next 50 years. It’s like “hitting our ecosystem with a sledgehammer,” he says.

Nature may have its own cure for “greenhouse oceans,” however. Kennedy and fellow researcher Thomas Wagner of Newcastle University observe that certain minerals in soils help in collecting and burying organic matter dissolved in seawater. And burying the excess carbon helps to restore marine oxygen concentrations and to cool the planet-oceans and all.

Source: University of Adelaide http://www.adelaide.edu.au/news/news45241.html

“Clay mineral continental amplifier for marine carbon sequestration in a greenhouse ocean” by Martin Kennedy and Thomas Wagner (posted May 16, 2011) is available from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/05/12/1018670108.full.pdf+html?sid=31daf44c-6579-4b6a-b08d-7606a300a4ca

DARPA Requests Information for 100 Year Starship Study

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is requesting ideas and information to help get the recently launched 100 Year Starship Study a little further off the ground. Specifically, DARPA is interested in business model proposals for sustaining private investment in long-distance interstellar travel over the next hundred years or longer. (The project will be free of government funding and oversight.)

The 100 Year Starship Study, a collaborative effort between DARPA and NASA, is an initiative to develop what the organizations are calling “the next era of space exploration” — an endeavor that is projected to extend over the next few generations.

Sources: 100 Year Starship Study, 100yearstarshipstudy.com. DARPA, http://www.darpa.mil.

New Model Predicts Pace of Design Innovation

A new mathematical model for predicting how quickly given technologies will improve could enable policy makers and venture capitalists to pick tech winners from losers a lot more easily. The model measures a design’s cost and complexity to forecast how easily it might be upgraded, or innovated compared with other designs.

“It gives you a way to think about how the structure of the technology affects the rate of improvement,” says Jessika Trancik, assistant professor of engineering systems at MIT, one of the authors of a recent paper published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers found that, the more complex a technology, the more time, effort, and money will go into improving it and the slower it will get better.

How might the model be used? Pretend for a moment that you’re a venture capitalist and you have to pick between two companies that make solar cells. Each company is marketing its own patented design; one converts more of the sun’s energy into electricity, but the other is easier to build. The model can tell you which of one of the two to invest in on the basis of whether the benefits of one (efficiency) are justified by the costs (complexity). The price of material and other factors may also be entered in to refine the calculation and provide a better prediction.

The researchers hope the model will also help designers improve their products and manufacturing processes.

Sources: MIT http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/accelerated-discovery-0517.html.
Read the paper, courtesy of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/05/12/1017298108.full.pdf+html

The Virtual Economy Valued at $3 Billion

The Virtual Economy — roughly defined as exchanges of virtual goods, links, and digital labor such as tweeting — is valued at $3 billion, according to an April report commissioned by the World Bank. The report also lays out future growth areas and growing service sectors for the Virtual Economy. Among them:

Third-party online gaming services. An example would be outsourcing to other players the boring parts of a video game to earn more points, a practice also known as “gold farming.”
Microwork, defined as work in micro-sized units, like image tagging or brief transcription. Microwork works “similarly to how Taylorism and scientific management transformed manufacturing work in the late 19th century. The resulting microtasks and tools can then be optimized for maximum productivity, as well as distributed to new and innovative labor sources, crowdsourcing platforms being one,” say the report’s authors.
“Cherry blossoming” refers to small marketing-related digital tasks, such as “liking” a brand’s Facebook page against a small pay.

“Entrepreneurs should focus on digital micro-work that benefits society. Examples include transcribing books, translating documents, and improving search-engine results,” said Vili Lehdonvirta, a researcher at Helsinki Institute for Information Technology and the study’s main author.

Sources: World Bank http://www.infodev.org/en/Document.1056.pdf, Vili Lehdonvirta (personal site) http://virtual-economy.org/blog/world_bank_virtual_economy_rep.

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What’s Hot @WFS.ORG (Public)

A selection of articles, special reports, and other future-focused material on our Web site that you might have missed.

Escaping the Filter Bubble

By Eli Pariser

The former executive director of MoveOn.org warns that more-personalized Internet searching may have hidden side effects. Read more

Future Prospects for the Smart Era

By Timothy Mack

The President of the World Future Society lays out how smart technology will change the way we live and work. Read more

News and Events for the Futurist Community

Edited by Aaron M. Cohen

Earth Policy Institute Celebrates 10th Anniversary
Students Will Address Global Issues at Upcoming Design Science Lab
Calling All Professional Futurists: A Research Study Seeks Input
Play a Game to Find the Future at the New York Public Library
Tech Cocktail Teams Up With Futurists:BetaLaunch
Humanity+ and Parsons Co-Host Upcoming Conference

The Futurist Interviews the authors of The Techno-Human Condition

Arizona State University engineer Braden Allenby and Arizona State science and society professor Dan Sarewitz, authors of The Techno-Human Condition, talk to FUTURIST magazine assistant editor Rick Docksai about humanity’s capacities to keep up with innovation. Read more