links for 2008-04-30
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good folks on water, energy, urbanization, and dance
About the Institute for the Future
- The Institute for the Future is an independent nonprofit research group. We work with organizations of all kinds to help them make better, more informed decisions about the future. We provide the foresight to create insights that lead to action. We take an explicitly global approach to strategic planning, linking macro trends to local issues in such areas as technology and society, health and health care, and global business trends.
About Future Now
IFTF's Future Now draws on research and forecasting at the Institute for the Future, a Palo Alto, CA think tank specializing in the future of technology, health, and organizational change. It began in September 2003.
Who is Future Now?
IFTF's Future Now is a group weblog, founded by Institute research director Alex Soojung-Kim Pang in September 2003. Its contributors include IFTF researchers interested in emerging technologies, the future of Asia, and the social and economic impacts on new technologies; IFTF corporate affiliates; academic partners; and members of the Innovation Lab, a Danish futures group with offices in Aarhus and Copenhagen. A complete list of contributors is available here.
The Future of Cities - A conversation about global urbanization in the 21st century
Virtual China
« March 2008 | Main | May 2008 »
24 posts from April 2008
April 30, 2008
April 28, 2008
links for 2008-04-28
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on the growing power of Chinese netizens
April 27, 2008
links for 2008-04-27
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also tells why widgets are important
April 26, 2008
links for 2008-04-26
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european data
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Paul Camuti, CEO of Siemens Corporate Research, talks about how virtual factories can save corporations time and money, for instance by predicting design flaws.
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Takuma Takahashi is Professor at the Graduate School of Accounting and Finance, Chuo University in Tokyo. He is also Special Senior Fellow at Sino-Japan Economic Research Center, Chinese Academy of Social Science in Beijing.
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New doctoral program in mobility studies sponsored by a consortium of Swiss universities.
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Earthquake researchers in California hope to take advantage of the motion sensors in laptops to create an earthquake-sensing network.
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Aim to create the legal, technical and business infrastructure necessary to enable formation and operation of companies by groups of individuals who want to share time and attention rather than investing capital.
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Rising populations. Skyrocketing commodity prices. Strains on natural resources. Is this our Malthusian moment?
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Living Tomorrow embodies a totally new approach for dealing with innovation: Tomorrow's world materialized within a futuristic building.
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n eco-industrial park (EIP) is an industrial park in which businesses cooperate with each other and with the local community in an attempt to reduce waste and pollution, efficiently share resources.
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A 'future vision' of banking, including 'magical' gadgets with all the fantastical bells and whistles one might desire, from Microsoft's Industry Innovation Group
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"While it may appear that graduate training has become less costly with increases in assistantships and tuition reimbursements, the value of PhD level training must be evaluated as a form of investment."
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Boston Dynamics is an engineering company that specializes in robotics and human simulation. Our customers have applications that range from military robotics to simulation-based training to physics-based virtual prototyping.
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Ireland has to produce 16% of its electricity from renewables by 2020 under European mandates, but has an even more-ambitious self-imposed target of 33% by the same date.
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How the Chinese plan to modify the weather in Beijing during the Olympics, using supercomputers, airplanes, and artillery.
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Communications technologies will make Boulder, (Colorado)'s grid more efficient and environmentally friendly
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As more companies examine the issue of environmentally friendly products, it is not surprising that the concept of green computing would grow in importance
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The nation's four Internet provider organizations have agreed to forcibly cut the Internet connection of users found to repeatedly use Winny and other file-sharing programs to illegally copy gaming software and music, it was learned Friday.
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Vapor is a survey of new art, architecture and design that takes our declining air quality as the subject matter, medium and metaphor for creative work
April 25, 2008
links for 2008-04-25
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“he pessimistic scenario is that there is a sharp drop in investment as 2008 develops as firms and banks become aware that future profits in exports and industry more generally are not so promising. Banks discover that some of the loans they have made
April 24, 2008
April 22, 2008
The X2 project
For the last 6 months or so, I've been working on a big new project at the Institute. I haven't written that much about it, as we've been... quiet. Now, though, we're starting to take the project public.
The project is called X2, and its aim is to forecast the future of science, technology and innovation. The name may sound like science fiction, but it's actually an historical allusion. In my previous life as an academic historian, I studied the X Club, a group of Victorian scientists who were very interested in the future of British science. The Club formed when its members were still young, ambitious outsiders, fighting to establish their reputations in a world in which social connections and privilege mattered more than scientific achievement; by the time they retired, its nine members were among the leaders of British science.
Not only did they do well for themselves; they changed how we think about science. The X Club helped establish the idea that science was an essential ingredient for modern industry, a resource for national security, and a tool to improve public health and well-being. Now, the idea that science is important in modern society seems so self-evident, it's hard to imagine a time when people didn't believe it; but that was exactly the world the X Club confronted in its early years. As much as any single group of people, they created our modern view of science.
Finally, the group was interested in just about everything, and was incredibly hard-working. They lectured on a wide variety of subjects, published popular works, did ground-breaking research, and advised government-- and like many of their Victorian brethren, still took month-long vacations to the Lake Country or Europe.
As of today, the main site for the project is public. There's a FAQ that explains what we're doing in greater detail, but you should just go wander about and see for yourself what's going on.
April 19, 2008
Future Now is moving!
Future Now is moving to a new location. We'll keep posting to this location for a while, but we're moving the archive, and new posts, to our new, unified IFTF site. The URL for the new site is http://www.iftf.org/futurenow; RSS feed is available here.
In the course of this transition, Future Now will turn from being a project involving a subset of IFTF researchers, into a more general site that will feature content from across the Institute. It'll give a fuller view of the Institute's work-- and a better view of the future.
Post-scientific society
[Cross-posted from the new Future Now.]
I've been in Malaysia and Singapore this week, conducting workshops on the future of science and innovation. It's been a very interesting week, talking to scientists in Penang and Kuala Lumpur about the future of science, and what role they see Malaysia playing in that future. The people I've been talking to are pretty convinced that Malaysia, which has a respectable but not world-class scientific community, can evolve into a global player in science in the next couple decades. They don't want to emulate American and European institutions: you won't see multi-billion dollar particle accelerators here any time soon. But they're pretty aware that cloud computing, cheap genomics, and other inexpensive research tools will lower the economic bars to develop world-class competence in some important fields.
So I was especially struck by Gregg Zachary's latest column in the New York Times, which asks, "might cheap science from low-wage countries help keep American innovators humming?" At least a few policy analysts and scholars studying global trends in science think that the United States can profit from the growth of scientific excellence in the developing world.
Americans have long profited from low-cost manufactured goods, especially from Asia. The cost of those material “inputs” is now rising. But because of growing numbers of scientists in China, India and other lower-wage countries, “the cost of producing a new scientific discovery is dropping around the world,” says Christopher T. Hill, a professor of public policy and technology at George Mason University.
American innovators — with their world-class strengths in product design, marketing and finance — may have a historic opportunity to convert the scientific know-how from abroad into market gains and profits. Mr. Hill views the transition to “the postscientific society” as an unrecognized bonus for American creators of new products and services.
Mr. Hill’s insight, which he first described in a National Academy of Sciences journal article last fall, runs counter to the notion that the United States fails to educate enough of its own scientists and that “shortages” of them hamper American competitiveness.
The opposite may actually be true. By tapping relatively low-cost scientists around the world, American innovators may actually strengthen their market positions....
Precisely because the gap between basic science and commercial innovations is large, Mr. Hill’s postscientific society makes sense to innovators on the front lines. One implication for the future is that the United States “won’t have to import so many scientists,” says Stephen D. Nelson, associate director of policy programs at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The association, which for decades has generally favored policies to expand the ranks of American scientists, is devoting a portion of its annual policy seminar next month to talk about the “postscience” situation.
Industry, meanwhile, is adapting to a world where scientific goods can come from anywhere — and fewer scientists work on abstract problems unrelated to the market. “It is no accident that many corporate labs have fallen apart,” Sean M. Maloney, executive vice president of Intel, says. “They were science farms looking for problems.”
What is this post-scientific society that Hill writes about? As he explains it,
A post-scientific society will have several key characteristics, the most important of which is that innovation leading to wealth generation and productivity growth will be based principally not on world leadership in fundamental research in the natural sciences and engineering, but on world-leading mastery of the creative powers of, and the basic sciences of, individual human beings, their societies, and their cultures.
Just as the post-industrial society continues to require the products of agriculture and manufacturing for its effective functioning, so too will the post-scientific society continue to require the results of advanced scientific and engineering research. Nevertheless, the leading edge of innovation in the post-scientific society, whether for business, industrial, consumer, or public purposes, will move from the workshop, the laboratory, and the office to the studio, the think tank, the atelier, and cyberspace.
There are growing indications that new innovation-based wealth in the United States is arising from something other than organized research in science and engineering. Companies based on radical innovations, exemplified by network firms such as Google, YouTube, eBay, and Yahoo, create billions in new wealth with only modest contributions from industrial research as it has traditionally been understood. Huge and successful firms like Wal-Mart, FedEx, Dell, Amazon.com, and Cisco have grown to be among the largest in the world, not as much by mastering the intricacies of physics, chemistry, or molecular biology as by structuring human work and organizational practices in radical new ways. The new ideas and concepts that support these post-scientific society companies are every bit as subtle and important as the fundamental natural science and engineering research findings that supported the growth of firms such as General Motors, DuPont, and General Electric in the past half century. But innovation in these two generations of firms is fundamentally different.
The piece is well worth reading, as it has a number of provocative implications for science policy, innovation policy, and education. Essentially, Hill is arguing that a decline in America's monopoly on science-- even if that does happen-- is not to be lamented any more than the shrinking of the agricultural workforce: it doesn't reflect a weakness, but a more fundamental shift to a different kind of economy, in which the sources of value aren't facts, but what you do with them.
April 18, 2008
links for 2008-04-18
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Future China research website
April 17, 2008
links for 2008-04-17
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has some good data on adult education and new businesses to meet the need
April 10, 2008
links for 2008-04-10
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Report by RTI International
April 09, 2008
2008 Ten Year Forecast conference
Opening address on resilience, ecology, food webs, and complex systems.
Ten Year Forecast conference
The Institute's 2008 Ten Year Forecast conference is going on today at the Mission Bay conference center. The center is part of the new UCSF Mission Bay campus, which is a pretty extraordinary piece of city redevelopment. It's also a very fitting place for this year's conference, as we're talking about innovations in biology and ecology, sources of new economic value, and the development of "amplified humans"-- all things that are happening here.
Technorati Tags: conference, IFTF, Ten Year Forecast
links for 2008-04-09
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The Information Website of Development Research Center of the State Council (or "DRCnet")
April 08, 2008
links for 2008-04-08
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"[T]he workshop aims at identifying future trends in the social sciences, and problems that will have to be addressed."
Shifting platforms in the near future
The first of many notes on this, no doubt. The Institute recently updated its Web site, and as part of this effort we're going to be moving our blogging activities to a new site.
This version of Future Now will remain up for some time, but you should visit the new location (http://www.iftf.org/futurenow) or redirect your RSS readers to the new feed.
April 07, 2008
links for 2008-04-07
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"Huge investment in Olympic projects and a total lack of transparency have facilitated serious corruption and widespread bribery. Taxpayers are not allowed to supervise the use of investment amounting to more than $40 billion. Liu Zhihua, formerly in char
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the Beijing Olympics is driving domestic digital cable take-up which is set to grow from 18 per cent at the end of 2007 to 24 per cent by the end of Olympics year.
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with data on patents and R&D spending
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website of the State Intellectual Property Office of the PRC
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has table with countries' rates of growth in PCT patent filings
April 04, 2008
links for 2008-04-04
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"Infomania is the mental state of continuous stress and distraction caused by the combination of queued messaging overload and incessant interruptions."
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peter hessler on nat geo
April 03, 2008
Bonding with robots
New Scientist reports on a project by Georgia Tech researchers Ja-Young Sung and Rebecca Grinter that examines how people interact with Roomba:
"Dressing up Roomba happens in many ways," Sung says. People also often gave their robots a name and gender, according to the survey (see Diagram) which Sung presented at the Human-Robot Interaction conference earlier this month in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Kathy Morgan, an engineer based in Atlanta, said that her robot wore a sticker saying "Our Baby", indicating that she viewed it almost as part of the family. "We just love it. It frees up our lives from so much cleaning drudgery," she says.
Sung believes that the notion of humans relating to their robots almost as if they were family members or friends is more than just a curiosity. "People want their Roomba to look unique because it has evolved into something that's much more than a gadget," she says. Understanding these responses could be the key to figuring out the sort of relationships people are willing to have with robots.
Until now, robots have been designed for what the robotics industry dubs "dull, dirty and dangerous" jobs, like welding cars, defusing bombs or mowing lawns. Even the name robot comes from robota, the Czech word for drudgery. But Sung's observations suggest that we have moved on. "I have not seen a single family who treats Roomba like a machine if they clothe it," she says. "With skins or costumes on, people tend to treat Roomba with more respect."
So as they move from environments that we don't like into places that are more familiar, and from doing work we hate to work we just dislike, two things happen to our perception of robots: their social status goes up, and they become more familiar. But this doesn't just happen with robots who are doing "dull, dirty and dangerous" jobs: humans who are doing those jobs can develop bonds with those robots, too.
US soldiers serving in Iraq and interviewed last year by The Washington Post developed strong emotional attachments to Packbots and Talon robots, which dispose of bombs and locate landmines, and admitted feeling deep sadness when their robots were destroyed in explosions. Some ensured the robots were reconstructed from spare parts when they were damaged and even took them fishing, using the robot arm's gripper to hold their rod.
Figuring out just how far humans are willing to go in shifting the boundaries towards accepting robots as partners rather than mere machines will help designers decide what tasks and functions are appropriate for robots. Meanwhile, working out whether it's the robot or the person who determines the boundary shift might mean designers can deliberately create robots that elicit more feeling from humans. "Engineers will need to identify the positive robot design factors that yield good emotions and not bad ones - and try to design robots that promote them," says Sung.
links for 2008-04-03
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"Intel plans to proclaim Wednesday in Shanghai that the next big thing in consumer gadgets will be the 'Internet in your pocket.' ” Welcome to the obvious.
Climate change knowledge and action: Less connection than we would expect?
Political scientists at Texas A&M recently published an article arguing that public campaigns to educate the public about the dangers of global warming may make people less, not more, worried about climate change.*
People generally believe that when you have more information about a risk, you act to avoid or control that risk, and that there's some positive correlation between how much information you have, and how hard you try to fix a problem. This is the knowledge-deficit model.
As people are exposed to more information about what scientists know about how human activities like CO2 emissions are related to increasing global temperatures, then one should expect two things. First, one should expect to see higher amounts of information to be related to higher degrees of personal efficacy and responsibility for global warming and climate change. Second, one should expect to see higher amounts of information to be related to heightened perceptions about the risks of global warming and climate change. Together, these hypotheses are straightforward applications of the knowledge-deficit model to the issue of global warming.
That's not the case. In fact, they report two slightly counterintuitive, but disturbing, patterns. First,
more informed respondents both feel less personally responsible for global warming, and also show less concern for global warming. We also find that confidence in scientists has unexpected effects: respondents with high confidence in scientists feel less responsible for global warming, and also show less concern for global warming.... [C]ertainly contrary to the assumptions underlying the knowledge-deficit model, as well as the marketing of movies like Ice Age and An Inconvenient Truth, the effects of information on both concern for global warming and responsibility for it are exactly the opposite of what were expected. Directly, the more information a person has about global warming, the less responsible he or she feel for it; and indirectly, the more information a person has about global warming, the less concerned he or she is for it.
The authors themselves add the caveat that "The effects here are statistically significant, but they are modest in magnitude." Further, several people have argued that since the study is based on a survey taken in 2004, just before the release of An Inconvenient Truth, it doesn't capture how the terms of public debate around climate change, or the ways people respond to information about climate, changed after the movie.
* Paul M. Kellstedt, Sammy Zahran, Arnold Vedlitz (2008) "Personal Efficacy, the Information Environment, and Attitudes Toward Global Warming and Climate Change in the United States," Risk Analysis 28 (1), 113–126.
Technorati Tags: climate, decision-making, risk
April 02, 2008
links for 2008-04-02
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NYT story on HourTown, infrastruture for small business scheduling.
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"This paper is an attempt to question one of the most fundamental assumptions in management theory: thought as an activity separate from ongoing action in the world."
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"In a world and an epoch where screens pervade a great many aspects of human experience, we submit that [Heideggerian] phenomenology... can provide an interesting and novel basis for our understanding of screens."
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In discussions of the globalization of professional service firms there is an increasing recognition that understanding the "social construction" of organizational architectures is essential."
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"The need for information technology-mediated cooperation seems obvious. However, what is not obvious is what this means and what social demands such cooperation may imply."
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McKinsey article that says that corporate earnings will decline, with some nice figures
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