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Tobias Seidl

Global Futures Studies & Research by the MILLENNIUM PROJECT - 0 views

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    The Millennium Project is a global participatory futures research think tank of futurists, scholars, business planners, and policy makers who work for international organizations, governments, corporations, NGOs, and universities. The Millennium Project manages a coherent and cumulative process that collects and assesses judgements from its several hundred participants to produce the annual "State of the Future", "Futures Research Methodology" series, and special studies such as the State of the Future Index, Future Scenarios for Africa, Lessons of History, Environmental Security, Applications of Futures Research to Policy, and a 700+ annotated scenarios bibliography.
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    very nice page - we should use some of its resources!!
Luís F. Simões

Why Is It So Hard to Predict the Future? - The Atlantic - 1 views

  • The Peculiar Blindness of Experts Credentialed authorities are comically bad at predicting the future. But reliable forecasting is possible.
  • The result: The experts were, by and large, horrific forecasters. Their areas of specialty, years of experience, and (for some) access to classified information made no difference. They were bad at short-term forecasting and bad at long-term forecasting. They were bad at forecasting in every domain. When experts declared that future events were impossible or nearly impossible, 15 percent of them occurred nonetheless. When they declared events to be a sure thing, more than one-quarter of them failed to transpire. As the Danish proverb warns, “It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.”
  • Tetlock and Mellers found that not only were the best forecasters foxy as individuals, but they tended to have qualities that made them particularly effective collaborators. They were “curious about, well, really everything,” as one of the top forecasters told me. They crossed disciplines, and viewed their teammates as sources for learning, rather than peers to be convinced. When those foxes were later grouped into much smaller teams—12 members each—they became even more accurate. They outperformed—by a lot—a group of experienced intelligence analysts with access to classified data.
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  • This article is adapted from David Epstein’s book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World.
ESA ACT

Future - alltop.com - 0 views

shared by ESA ACT on 24 Apr 09 - Cached
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    A bunch of blogs on the future, seems to be based more on research than sci-fi, though mostly seems to cover AI and NAN
johannessimon81

Mathematicians Predict the Future With Data From the Past - 6 views

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    Asimov's Foundation meets ACT's Tipping Point Prediction?
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    Good luck to them!!
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    "Mathematicians Predict the Future With Data From the Past". GREAT! And physicists probably predict the past with data from the future?!? "scientists and mathematicians analyze history in the hopes of finding patterns they can then use to predict the future". Big deal! That's what any scientist does anyway... "cliodynamics"!? Give me a break!
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    still, some interesting thoughts in there ... "Then you have the 50-year cycles of violence. Turchin describes these as the building up and then the release of pressure. Each time, social inequality creeps up over the decades, then reaches a breaking point. Reforms are made, but over time, those reforms are reversed, leading back to a state of increasing social inequality. The graph above shows how regular these spikes are - though there's one missing in the early 19th century, which Turchin attributes to the relative prosperity that characterized the time. He also notes that the severity of the spikes can vary depending on how governments respond to the problem. Turchin says that the United States was in a pre-revolutionary state in the 1910s, but there was a steep drop-off in violence after the 1920s because of the progressive era. The governing class made decisions to reign in corporations and allowed workers to air grievances. These policies reduced the pressure, he says, and prevented revolution. The United Kingdom was also able to avoid revolution through reforms in the 19th century, according to Turchin. But the most common way for these things to resolve themselves is through violence. Turchin takes pains to emphasize that the cycles are not the result of iron-clad rules of history, but of feedback loops - just like in ecology. "In a predator-prey cycle, such as mice and weasels or hares and lynx, the reason why populations go through periodic booms and busts has nothing to do with any external clocks," he writes. "As mice become abundant, weasels breed like crazy and multiply. Then they eat down most of the mice and starve to death themselves, at which point the few surviving mice begin breeding like crazy and the cycle repeats." There are competing theories as well. A group of researchers at the New England Complex Systems Institute - who practice a discipline called econophysics - have built their own model of political violence and
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    It's not the scientific activity described in the article that is uninteresting, on the contrary! But the way it is described is just a bad joke. Once again the results itself are seemingly not sexy enough and thus something is sold as the big revolution, though it's just the application of the oldest scientific principles in a slightly different way than used before.
LeopoldS

The future is bright for humanity - opinion - 05 March 2012 - New Scientist - 1 views

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    This is almost word for word the title Andrés gave to the first presentation of the team to DG ten years ago ...
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    There's a whole series of futuristic articles, may be worth having a look: http://www.newscientist.com/special/deep-future
Luzi Bergamin

You know you have been in Finland too long, when... - 4 views

shared by Luzi Bergamin on 23 Jun 10 - Cached
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    How you know you have been to long in xy. The Finnish version. My favorite is 33. You accept that 80°C in a sauna is chilly, but 20°C outside is freaking hot. Quite a lot of them are outdated, esp. about opening hours of shops, and one is definitely missing. Your normal mealtime has shifted to 11am for lunch and 5pm for dinner. But don't worry, it's a really comfy place here, isnt' it Jose??
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    well somethings you get used to in a year (like salmiakki or koskenkorva) others don't (seriously, lunch at 11?!?!)
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    But what stage are you in already, Luzi?
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    I would say a 50% Finn. I do have lunch at 11am, every working day, an 80 degrees sauna indeed is just a warm room. But I will never get used to salmiakki (which is just literally eating a cleaning agent!!) and you can imagine that "silence is fun" is not really MY motto...
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    True?? 22. You understand why the Finnish language has no future tense. No, I don't think I ever will understand that one... Finns are quite future-oriented at two particular times of the year. On the day after Midsummer (see above), they say "Well, it's all downhill from now on" and prepare feverishly for winter, and similarly after December 21st they perk up and start thinking about Midsummer - ignoring the fact that they still have to get through January, February and March before the place becomes inhabitable again...
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    ... Finnish language has no future tense. That's true
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    everything expressed with "tomorrow I go to " or "in one year" etc? what about the distinction between to future events, one conditional on the other?
Luís F. Simões

This Will Change Everything: Ideas That Will Shape the Future (The Edge Annual Question... - 3 views

  • WHAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING? "What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?"
  • That's the question John Brockman, editor of the Web site edge.org, posed to about 160 cutting-edge minds in his 11th annual Edge Question. As in years past, they responded with bold, often thrilling, sometimes chilling, answers.
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    And here's the same thing, but in dead-trees format: http://www.amazon.com/This-Will-Change-Everything-Future/dp/0061899674 Anyone else thinks that the ACT should buy us all a copy as a Christmas present? :)
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    you are the ACT!!!
LeopoldS

Recorded Future - 0 views

shared by LeopoldS on 10 May 10 - Cached
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    you can sign up for this - and they send you an email about the future :-)
ESA ACT

Climate Futures: responses to climate change in 2030 | Forum For The Future - 0 views

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    Some predictions on our climate - something which might help for the YGT description...
ESA ACT

Web of Fate | Share your future - 0 views

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    A social experiment that harnesses the collective intelligence of the web to visualize and uncover hidden relationships among future events.
evo ata

Future Human Evolution - 1 views

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    Scientific and speculative articles about the future of human evolution regarding to artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, transhumanism, nanotechnology, space colonization, time travel, life extension and human enhancement
Carlos Sánchez

AI and The Future Of Civilization - 1 views

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    What makes us different is the particulars of our history, which gives us our notions of purpose and goals. That's a long way of saying when we have the box on the desk that thinks as well as any brain does, the thing it doesn't have, intrinsically, is the goals and purposes that we have. Those are defined by our particulars-our particular biology, our particular psychology, our particular cultural history. The thing we have to think about as we think about the future of these things is the goals. That's what humans contribute, that's what our civilization contributes-execution of those goals; that's what we can increasingly automate.
LeopoldS

http://envisioningtech.com/envisioningtech.pdf - 3 views

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    and what is your take?
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    As William Gibson famously said "The future is already here - it's just not very evenly distributed." Many of the listed technologies are already here, in one way or another, the authors are just putting dates on when they think they'll achieve greater consumer impact. I have issues with many of those dates. I think there are a lot of under- and overestimations. Also, what a bleak future for AI it that's all it'll give the world in the next 30 years!
Dario Izzo

Past Future Predictions - 3 views

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    "Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons." Underoptimistic ... Excellent source of inspiration and quotation for all our reports
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    put them on the wiki ....
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    "Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons." Technically, this is a correct prediction :P
LeopoldS

House Approves Flat 2011 Budget for Most Science Agencies - ScienceInsider - 0 views

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    "Some segments of the research community would get their preferences under the House spending bill. For example, it matches the president's request for a 1.5% increase for NASA, to $19 billion, including a 12% increase, to $5 billion, for the space science program. Legislators had already worked out a deal with the White House on the future of the manned space program, and they included funding for an additional shuttle flight in 2011. They even added $35 million to the $20 million increase that the president requested for NASA's education programs, boosting them by a whopping 30% to $180 million. "
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    Some segments of the research community would get their preferences under the House spending bill. For example, it matches the president's request for a 1.5% increase for NASA, to $19 billion, including a 12% increase, to $5 billion, for the space science program. Legislators had already worked out a deal with the White House on the future of the manned space program, and they included funding for an additional shuttle flight in 2011. They even added $35 million to the $20 million increase that the president requested for NASA's education programs, boosting them by a whopping 30% to $180 million.
ESA ACT

Horizons : Web focus : Nature - 0 views

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    maybe everyone else than me knows them already: nature has a series on the future of science.
ESA ACT

Bruce McCall's faux nostalgia | Video on TED.com - 0 views

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    interesting presentation on past ideas of the future ...
ESA ACT

CNN.com Specials - Vision - 0 views

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    visions of the future collected by CNN
Dario Izzo

Paleo-Future - 2 views

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    A look into the future that never was
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    And, for par condicio (see post below), an old link with a list of overoptimistic predictions
LeopoldS

Sea Level Rise and the Future of the Netherlands - 2 views

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    Sea Level Rise and the Future of the Netherlands ....no comment
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