The population crash | Fred Pearce | World news. Innovation: The relentless rise of the digital worker - tech - 1. Innovation is our regular column that highlights emerging technological ideas and where they may lead When Unilever wanted ideas for a new TV advertising campaign to sell its Peperami snack food, it decided to try something unusual. It dropped its ad agency of 15 years and turned instead to a little known internet site called IdeaBounty.com, an online marketplace trading in creative ideas. Companies or individuals post topics and then sit back and wait for surfers to send in their best shots. After the closing date, the client selects the best idea and pays the winner. The challenge generated over 1000 replies and in November last year, Unilever paid out $15,000 for the two ideas it liked best.
The new Peperami adverts are due to appear on British TV later this year. Welcome to the world of "cloud labour" where a virtual workforce will undertake any task in the cloudlike world of cyberspace for the best possible price. Wage cheats The reality appears to be somewhat different. Space food. Looking Beyond 2050 - Some Interesting and Disturbing Trends : R. [social_buttons] Fertility rates are declining around the world and most of what is written about this trend casts it in a positive light. The cover story of last November’s Economist magazine carried the headline: “Falling Fertility – How the Population Problem is Solving Itself.” It claimed that countries like China are enjoying a “demographic dividend” over the coming decades. As positive as an end to human population increase might be for the planet, the question that is not getting much attention is, “what next?” After population reaches an inflection point and begins to decline, what will society be like?
I won’t live to see this, but my grand daughter who was born last month certainly will. My good friend John sent me a link to the IIASA website (International Institute for Applied System Analysis) where it is possible to download data from their models of global demographic trends (I’ve made some graphs of that data).
Fewer and Fewer Children More and More Old People. Mouse skin cells turned directly into neurons, skipping IPS stag. Scientists at the Stanford University School of Medicine have succeeded in transforming mouse skin cells in a laboratory dish directly into functional nerve cells with the application of just three genes. The cells make the change without first becoming a pluripotent type of stem cell -- a step long thought to be required for cells to acquire new identities. The finding could revolutionize the future of human stem cell therapy and recast our understanding of how cells choose and maintain their specialties in the body.
"We actively and directly induced one cell type to become a completely different cell type," said Marius Wernig, MD, assistant professor of pathology and a member of Stanford's Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine. "These are fully functional neurons. They can do all the principal things that neurons in the brain do. " Wernig is the senior author of the research, which is published online in Nature. Are You An Internet Optimist or Pessimist? The Great Debate over. [I’ve been working on an outline for a book I hope to write surveying technological skepticism throughout history. I first started thinking about this topic two years when I noticed that a great number of recent books about Internet policy could generally be grouped into one of two camps: Internet optimists vs. Internet pessimists. I subsequently penned an essay on the subject that generated a fair bit of attention.
So, I figured I must be on to something, and the more Net policy books I read, the more I realized that the divisions between these two camps were growing wider and increasingly heated. Thus, I thought I would share this very rough draft (much of it still in outline form) of the opening chapter of that book I want to write about this great intellectual war over the impact of technology on society. I invite reader input. Update Jan. 2011: I finally published a full-length essay on this topic.
The cycle goes something like this. Nicholas Negroponte begged to differ. Growing Pentagon Focus on Energy and Climate - Dot Earth Blog - Children of the Law of Accelerating Returns | h+ Magazine. Surfdaddy Orca February 3, 2010 The New York Times reports that the “ever-accelerating pace of technological change may be minting a series of mini-generation gaps, with each group of children uniquely influenced by the tech tools available in their formative stages of development.” Will this gap narrow even more as the pace of technological innovations quickens – as we approach "The Singularity?
" Whether or not you agree with Ray Kurzweil’s vision of the Singularity, the evidence that the pace of technological innovation continues to accelerate is hard to deny. “An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense ‘intuitive linear’ view,” Kurzweil famously asserts. “So we won't experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century -- it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today's rate). Dr. The ability to multitask may indeed require the cognitive flexibility of a 2-year-old to keep pace with such change.
Environment 360: Pentagon Says Warming May Affect Global Securit. Global Push for High-Speed Rail | WBUR and NPR - On Point with T. February 2, 2010 at 10:00 AM Global Push for High-Speed Rail In this photo distributed by the Xinhua news agency, a high-speed train is seen at the Wuhan Railway Station in Wuhan, central China, on Saturday Dec. 26, 2009. The Wuhan-Guangzhou line is China's longest high-speed railway and one of the world's fastest with an average speed around 217 mile per hour (350kph). (AP/Xinhua) Post your comments below It’s a train buff’s dream. Last week President Obama gave high-speed rail prime billing in his State of the Union address, and the next day he was in Florida announcing a Tampa-Orlando line.
San Diego, San Francisco, Kansas City, St. This hour, On Point: High-speed rail, around the planet. Guests: More links: Take a look at the Department of Transportation’s overview of new plans for high speed rail in the United States. In “Superfast Bullet Trains Are Finally Coming to the U.S.,” Wired’s James Glave and Rachel Swaby offer a broad look at what’s on the table around the country.
Prototype: Luxury Eco-Zeppelins Will Fly Future Passengers Aroun. View Photo Gallery Phileas Fogg may have hopped aboard hot air balloons, trains, and elephants in his race around the world in 80 days, but future airship passengers need only step aboard the Aircruise for a far shorter and more luxurious travel experience. The 2015 concept for a sky hotel comes courtesy of London designers Seymourpowell, and a commission from Samsung Construction and Trading to make the vision come to life before our eyes in a series of stunning visuals.
Passengers would enjoy living and dining above the clouds for journeys lasting up to 90 hours from Los Angeles to Shanghai, or perhaps less for other destinations. The hydrogen and solar-powered airship could perhaps only top itself in our minds by flying us to Cloud City on Bespin -- not that we're expecting Leia or Lando as fellow travelers. Ready for your imaginary future ride? The world in 2020. If you judge the progress of humanity by Homer Simpson, Paris Hilton, and Girls Gone Wild videos, you might conclude that our evolution has stalled—or even shifted into reverse. Not so, scientists say. Humans are evolving faster than ever before, picking up new genetic traits and talents that may help us survive a turbulent future. Much remodeling has gone on since the dawn of agriculture about 10 millenniums ago.
"People who lived 10,000 years ago were much more like Neanderthals than we are like those people," says John Hawks, a professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin. "We've changed. " Hawks is among a growing number of scientists who are using whole-genome sequencing and other modern technologies to zero in on just how we've changed. New mutations. At the same time, the human genome has been scrambling to adapt to a rapidly changing world—11,000 years ago, nobody farmed, nobody milked domesticated animals, and nobody lived in a city. Meet the Sims … and Shoot Them: The Rise of Militainment - By P. View a slide show about video games and war The country of Ghanzia is embroiled in a civil war. As a soldier in America's Army, your job is to do everything from protect U.S. military convoys against AK-47-wielding attackers to sneak up on a mountain observatory where arms dealers are hiding out. It is a tough and dangerous tour of duty that requires dedication, focus, and a bit of luck.
Fortunately, if you get hit by a bullet and bleed to death, you can reboot your computer and sign on under a new name. America's Army is a video game -- a "tactical multiplayer first-person shooter" in gaming lingo -- that was originally developed by the U.S. military to aid in its recruiting and training, but is now available for anyone to play. The link between games and war goes all the way back to "boards" scratched onto the back of statues by Assyrian guards almost 3,000 years ago. The stakes are high. And this is no mere American trend. Be (Online) All That You Can Be Virtual Vets Avatar Fatigue.
The World Future Council: A Renewable World. Herbert Girardet, Director of Programmes Prof. Herbert Girardet is an author, consultant and filmmaker. He is chairman of the Schumacher Society UK, an honorary fellow of Royal Institute for British Architects (RIBA), a patron of the Soil Association, and a recipient of a UN Global 500 Award 'for outstanding environmental achievements'. His eight books include 'Earthrise' (1992), 'The Gaia Atlas of Cities' (1992), 'Creating Sustainable Cities' (1999) and 'Cities, People, Planet' (2004). He has produced 50 TV documentaries on sustainable development for broadcasters around the world. In 2003 he was 'Thinker in Residence' in Adelaide, developing sustainability strategies for South Australia. He is visiting professor at the University of Northumbria, Middlesex University, and the University of West of England. Miguel Mendonça Miguel Mendonça was the World Future Council’s Research Manager from 2006 to 2010.
2010: Living In the Future | the book. Biblical scholar's date for rapture: May 21, 2011. Harold Camping lets out a hearty chuckle when he considers the people who believe the world will end in 2012. "That date has not one stitch of biblical authority," Camping says from the Oakland office where he runs Family Radio, an evangelical station that reaches listeners around the world.
"It's like a fairy tale. " The real date for the end of times, he says, is in 2011. The Mayans and the recent Hollywood movie "2012" have put the apocalypse in the popular mind this year, but Camping has been at this business for a long time. And while Armageddon is pop science or big-screen entertainment to many, Camping has followers from the Bay Area to China. Camping, 88, has scrutinized the Bible for almost 70 years and says he has developed a mathematical system to interpret prophecies hidden within the Good Book.
This is not the first time Camping has made a bold prediction about Judgment Day. But the world did not end. 'I'm looking forward to it' Code-breaking phenomenon Meaning in numbers. Glimpse the Wireless Future of Transportation | Autopia | Wired. The coming convergence of how we communicate and how we travel is spawning technologies that will change how we get around — and make transportation safer and more efficient, at the same time. The promise of vehicles communicating with each other and with the road, coupled with advancements in transportation infrastructure, has planners, technocrats and futurists creating an Intelligent Transportation System. Unlike the future once envisioned in Disney’s Magic Highway, which predicted a world of fog-eliminating machines and nuclear robots building highways, the ITS will work within a proven technological infrastructure that already exists.
This future of transportation will be based around smart phones, mobile navigation systems and other common gadgets and will drastically change how we navigate and interact with cities. The idea of ITS, at its most basic, is to connect every vehicle in a network of transportation users that instantly tracks and shares information. ISAAA Status Genetically Modified Crops Second Wave From Develop. The predicted second wave of biotech growth and development begins as developing countries recognize biotechnology as a key to food self-sufficiency [preventing starvation] and prosperity [fixing poverty]. from International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA) Countries that have plenty of food and less poverty will also have more money for clean water projects and more medical care. Food security is the basic foundation for a virtuous circle of growth and prosperity. Economist Magazine - Yet in Europe, opposition to GM food appears as strong as ever, despite increasingly strident scientific dissent.
The European arm of Greenpeace, a green pressure group, still denounces the technology and gloats about a decline of over a tenth in cultivation of GM crops in Europe last year. Sir David King, a former scientific adviser to the British government, argues that the unjustified vilification of GM is leading to needless deaths. Executive summary Economic Impact. Africa to meet MDGs (updated) | Africa | Global Dashboard. Tomorrow's Wars by Victor Davis Hanson, City Journal Winter 2010. Enormous, massively destructive engagements may again be on the horizon.
Bridgeman Art Library The Battle of Issus in 333 BC pitted Persian king Darius III against Alexander the Great. Have we not seen, then, in our lifetime the end of the Western way of war?” Two decades ago, I concluded The Western Way of War with that question. Since Western warfare had become so lethal and included the specter of nuclear escalation, I thought it doubtful that two Western states could any longer wage large head-to-head conventional battles.
A decade earlier, John Keegan, in his classic The Face of Battle, had similarly suggested that it would be hard for modern European states to engage in infantry slugfests like the Battle of the Somme. Events of the last half-century seem to have confirmed the notion that decisive battles between two large, highly trained, sophisticated Westernized armies, whether on land or on sea, have become increasingly rare. Weaponry is not static. FourCast Podcast - About Us. Mail - from my twitter feed... - Coalescent :: A conversation about Life. Gwyneth Jone's novel Life, published by Aqueduct Press, was this year's winner of the Philip K Dick Award, as well as being shortlisted for the James Tiptree Jr. Award. It's a major novel, a barely-sf, barely-near-future speculation about the interactions between society, biology and gender.
It's also a study of science, and of one scientist in particular--Anna Senoz--from her days as a student to the point at which her discoveries are on the brink of causing a social, as well as a scientific revolution. Reviews:-- A.M. Other links: -- A brief interview with Gwyneth Jones-- A longer summary of a panel at Wiscon about the book. Here, despotliz and I discuss the book. NH: a lot of reviews have found Anna to be a somewhat unsympathetic character. LB: Yes, I would. NH: In what ways? LB: Yes--I was bothered by the way she stands around and lets everything go on around her.
NH: I think her passivity is deliberate on Jones' part. NH: Exactly. NH: That's true. NH: Largely, yes, I think. NH: Why not? The limits to environmentalism – Part 2 « Political Climate. PeePoo Bags Sterlize and Compost Human Waste Where Toilets Are a. The Incredible Secret Future Of Videogames | Rock, Paper, Shotgu. Convenient Solutions for an Inconvenient Truth: Ecosystem-based. Oil.