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anonymous

What Futurists Actually Do - 0 views

  • This is a shame, because during the second half of the 20th century and continuing through the past decade, professional thinking about the future has grown from a niche field dominated by military strategists and predictioneers into a diverse global practice.
  • The Institute for the Future’s work is heavily influenced by disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, and philosophy. By looking at the convergence of social and technological forces that shape our communities, we help individuals and organizations make better, more informed decisions about the future. 
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    "...during the second half of the 20th century and continuing through the past decade, professional thinking about the future has grown from a niche field dominated by military strategists and predictioneers into a diverse global practice." By Mathias Crawford at GOOD Blog on July 13, 2010.
anonymous

If the Earth Stood Still - What Would Happen if the Earth Stopped Spinning? - 0 views

shared by anonymous on 25 Sep 12 - Cached
  • Typically, we do not pay much attention to the delineation of the sea because it seems so obvious and constant that we do not realize it is a foundation of geography and the basis for our perception of the physical world.
  • Why is the sea level where we currently observe it? What controls the sea level? How stable are the forces that determine the sea level? This article does not refer to the climate change and the potential increase of the water level in the global ocean but rather to the geometry of the globe and the powerful geophysical energies that determine where oceans lie.
  • Sea level is—and has always been—in equilibrium with the planet's gravity, which pulls the water toward the earth's center of mass, and the outward centrifugal force, which results from the earth's rotation. After a few billion years of spinning, the earth has taken on the shape of an ellipsoid (which can be thought of as a flattened sphere). Consequently, the distance to the earth's center of mass is the longest around the equator and shortest beyond the polar circles.
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  • What would happen if the earth's rotation slowed down and finally stopped spinning over a period of a few decades? ArcGIS lets us model the effects of this scenario, performing calculations and estimations and creating a series of maps showing the effects the absence of centrifugal force would have on sea level.
  • The lack of the centrifugal effect would result in the gravity of the earth being the only significant force controlling the extent of the oceans. Prominent celestial bodies such as the moon and sun would also play a role, but because of their distance from the earth, their impact on the extent of global oceans would be negligible.
  • If the earth's gravity alone was responsible for creating a new geography, the huge bulge of oceanic water—which is now about 8 km high at the equator—would migrate to where a stationary earth's gravity would be the strongest.
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    "The following is not a futuristic scenario. It is not science fiction. It is a demonstration of the capabilities of GIS to model the results of an extremely unlikely, yet intellectually fascinating query: What would happen if the earth stopped spinning? ArcGIS was used to perform complex raster analysis and volumetric computations and generate maps that visualize these results."
anonymous

Kurzweil still doesn't understand the brain - 0 views

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    "Ray Kurzweil has responded to my criticisim of futurist fortune-telling. It really just compounds the problems, though, and gullible people who love Ray will think he's answered me, while skeptical people who see through his hocus-pocus will be unimpressed. It's kind of pointless to reply again, but here goes." (By PZ Meyers at Pharyngula on August 21, 2010)
anonymous

Paleo-Future - Paleo-Future Blog - Driverless Car of the Future (1957) - 0 views

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    "TVs that hang on walls? Automatic lights? Food cooked in seconds? American power companies sure had the future figured out! Except for one little thing... we're still waiting on those driverless cars. The futuristic family from this ad bares a striking resemblance to the family of Disneyland TV's 1958 episode, "Magic Highway, USA." ELECTRICITY MAY BE THE DRIVER. One day your car may speed along an electric super-highway, its speed and steering automatically controlled by electronic devices embedded in the road. Highways will be made safe -- by electricity! No traffic jam.. no collisions... no driver fatigue."
anonymous

In Gurgaon, India, Dynamism Meets Dysfunction - 5 views

  • Gurgaon, located about 15 miles south of the national capital, New Delhi, would seem to have everything, except consider what it does not have: a functioning citywide sewer or drainage system; reliable electricity or water; and public sidewalks, adequate parking, decent roads or any citywide system of public transportation. Garbage is still regularly tossed in empty lots by the side of the road.
  • how can a new city become an international economic engine without basic public services? How can a huge country flirt with double-digit growth despite widespread corruption, inefficiency and governmental dysfunction?
  • India and China are often considered to be the world’s rising economic powers, yet if China’s growth has been led by the state, India’s growth is often impeded by the state.
    • anonymous
       
      Libertarians like to picture the state in a very fixed, binary position in relation to the economy. Further peeking, though, and you see that governments can be broadly pro-business, or anti-business, or both, or directed specificially in one or another sector. The Libertarian persistence that Government = Bad Things is hardly descriptive or useful.
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  • GURGAON, India
    • anonymous
       
      This would appear to be a wet-dream scenario for Libertarian/Anarchists. Let's see how this author portrays the many facets there most certainly are...
    • Erik Hanson
       
      Only certain types of anarchism allow for large, organized corporations. Recall that the workers' rights movement was largely spurred on by anarchists.
  • In Gurgaon, economic growth is often the product of a private sector improvising to overcome the inadequacies of the government. To compensate for electricity blackouts, Gurgaon’s companies and real estate developers operate massive diesel generators capable of powering small towns. No water? Drill private borewells. No public transportation? Companies employ hundreds of private buses and taxis. Worried about crime? Gurgaon has almost four times as many private security guards as police officers.
  • “You are on your own.”
  • It is experiencing a Gilded Age of nouveau billionaires while it is cleaved by inequality and plagued in some states by poverty and malnutrition levels rivaling sub-Saharan Africa.
  • Gurgaon was widely regarded as an economic wasteland. In 1979, the state of Haryana created Gurgaon by dividing a longstanding political district on the outskirts of New Delhi. One half would revolve around the city of Faridabad, which had an active municipal government, direct rail access to the capital, fertile farmland and a strong industrial base. The other half, Gurgaon, had rocky soil, no local government, no railway link and almost no industrial base. As an economic competition, it seemed an unfair fight. And it has been: Gurgaon has won, easily. Faridabad has struggled to catch India’s modernization wave, while Gurgaon’s disadvantages turned out to be advantages, none more important, initially, than the absence of a districtwide government, which meant less red tape capable of choking development. By 1979, Mr. Singh had taken control of his father-in-law’s real estate company, now known as DLF, at a moment when urban development in India was largely overseen by government agencies. In most states, private developers had little space to operate, but Haryana was an exception. Slowly, Mr. Singh began accumulating 3,500 acres in Gurgaon that he divided into plots and began selling to people unable to afford prices in New Delhi.
    • anonymous
       
      This smells a bit like the rise of Hong Kong. Filling out one piece of paper to start a business. This is Libertarian stuff that still resonates with me. That's very good. And then, the inevitable: BUT...
  • Mr. Singh had become the company’s India representative after befriending Jack Welch, then the G.E. chairman. When Mr. Welch decided to outsource some business operations to India, he eventually opened a G.E. office inside a corporate park in Gurgaon in 1997. “When G.E. came in,” Mr. Singh said, “others followed.”
  • Ordinarily, such a wild building boom would have had to hew to a local government master plan. But Gurgaon did not yet have such a plan, nor did it yet have a districtwide municipal government. Instead, Gurgaon was mostly under state control. Developers built the infrastructure inside their projects, while a state agency, the Haryana Urban Development Authority, or HUDA, was supposed to build the infrastructure binding together the city.
  • And that is where the problems arose. HUDA and other state agencies could not keep up with the pace of construction. The absence of a local government had helped Gurgaon become a leader of India’s growth boom. But that absence had also created a dysfunctional city. No one was planning at a macro level; every developer pursued his own agenda as more islands sprouted and state agencies struggled to keep pace with growth.
  • From computerized control rooms, Genpact employees manage 350 private drivers, who travel roughly 60,000 miles every day transporting 10,000 employees.
    • anonymous
       
      As an MR reader notes, in the absence of street laws, drivers are incentivized to speed and behave recklessly. This is one hell of a *feature* of little-to-no government? Cool.
  • The city’s residential compounds, especially the luxury developments along golf courses, exist as similarly self-contained entities.
  • “We pretty much carry the entire weight of what you would expect many states to do,” said Pramod Bhasin, who this spring stepped down as Genpact’s chief executive. “The problem — a very big problem — is our public services are always lagging a few years behind, but sometimes a decade behind. Our planning processes sometimes exist only on paper.”
  • Not all of the city’s islands are affluent, either. Gurgaon has an estimated 200,000 migrant workers, the so-called floating population, who work on construction sites or as domestic help.
  • Sheikh Hafizuddin, 38, lives in a slum with a few hundred other migrants less than two miles from Cyber City. No more than half the children in the slum attend school, with the rest spending their days playing on the hard-packed dirt of the settlement, where pigs wallow in an open pit of sewage and garbage. Mr. Hafizuddin pays $30 a month for a tiny room. His landlord runs a power line into the slum for electricity and draws water from a borehole on the property. “Sometimes it works,” Mr. Hafizuddin said. “Sometimes it doesn’t work.”
    • Erik Hanson
       
      This is one of the issues I take with anarcho-capitalism. It works great, so long as you only look at those on top.
  • Meanwhile, with Gurgaon’s understaffed police force outmatched by such a rapidly growing population, some law-and-order responsibilities have been delegated to the private sector. Nearly 12,000 private security guards work in Gurgaon, and many are pressed into directing traffic on major streets.
    • anonymous
       
      And where the private world of Gurgaon and everywherelse intersect, who's problem is it?
  • Sudhir Rajpal, the wiry, mustachioed commissioner of the new Municipal Corporation of Gurgaon, has a long to-do list: fix the roads, the sewers, the electrical grid, the drainage, the lack of public buses, the lack of water and the lack of planning. The Municipal Corporation was formed in 2008, and Mr. Rajpal, having assumed the city’s top administrative position a few months ago, has been conducting a listening tour to convince people that government can solve their problems. It is not an easy sell.
  • “The drains are broken and accidents are happening,” shouted one man. “Yet no one is answerable! There are problems and problems. Whatever water we get is dirty, but we have nowhere to complain.”
  • “Every day some agitation is taking place,” he said, shouting above the din of traffic. “People are not satisfied.” If people should be satisfied anywhere in India, Gurgaon should be the place. Average incomes rank among the highest in the country. Property values have jumped sharply since the 1990s. Gurgaon’s malls offer many of the country’s best shops and restaurants, while the city’s most exclusive housing enclaves are among the finest in India. Yet the economic power that growth has delivered to Gurgaon has not been matched by political power. The celebrated middle class created by India’s boom has far less clout at the ballot box than the hundreds of millions of rural peasants struggling to live on $2 a day, given the far larger rural vote, and thus are courted far less by Indian politicians.
    • anonymous
       
      Years ago, when I moved to Seattle, I worked with a mess of Indian programmers who complained that, coming from middle to middle-upper class households, their families had a difficult time doing the U.S.-style entrepreneur thing precisely because of (you put it:) byzantine laws and payoffs. I also take the nod that deriving broad trends from this isn't exactly wise. But it was worth noting because I have vague, youthful memories of the classic Capitalist-vs-Marxist quandry: Both can claim that there has never been a *true* example of one or the other. Reality is messy like that; it never provides perfect samples. By the way, thanks so much for joining in with my little bookmark-experiment, Erik. I love the idea of marking up a discussion document in order to probe an issue. I really shoulda gone to college. :)
    • Erik Hanson
       
      Hey, thanks for chunking out longer articles so that I can get through them (once I have time to open the Diigo emails in my inbox). I'm always a little upset about the juicy stuff I may be missing by skipping Buzz for a week or two.
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    The anarcho-libertarian's wet dream: a city without a government. "In this city that barely existed two decades ago, there are 26 shopping malls, seven golf courses and luxury shops selling Chanel and Louis Vuitton. Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs shimmer in automobile showrooms. Apartment towers are sprouting like concrete weeds, and a futuristic commercial hub called Cyber City houses many of the world's most respected corporations. "
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    India's government is especially byzantine and a truly active inhibitor of commerce and growth. I can understand how, especially to outside companies who don't know the system, there's a real appeal in being able to avoid the sort of daily struggles of someone claiming to be an official coming to your reception and demanding a fine for a law you're not sure even exists. But even if this city weren't rotting out from the inside, I don't think it would necessarily be a lesson applicable to all other governments. Not every piece of rope is a Gordian Knot, as not every government is India's.
anonymous

1940's whiskey ads predicted the future - 1 views

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    "Seagram's advertised its VO Canadian whiskey back in the mid-1940's with a series of extremely manly magazine ads about "Men Who Plan Beyond Tomorrow". They were unspecified futuristic thinkers who liked the fact that Seagram's was patient enough to age VO for six years. Each of the ads depicted a different miracle that would transform postwar America and they were glorious." Thanks to Theron Jacobs.
anonymous

We've Entered The Volatile Postnormal Stage Of History - 0 views

  • Mark Twain once wisecracked, "History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes."
  • Perhaps that metaphorical understanding of the self-similarity of human events is part of the work--or tools--that futurists find useful.
  • we have slipped inexorably out of the late industrial, postmodern era that started soon after the end of World War II.
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  • I refer to this period as the postnormal. I did so partly to avoid the unwieldy "post-postmodern," but also to indicate the nature of the break: the old rules don’t apply any more, but there may still be some rhymes we can use to pierce the postnormal fog.
  • "facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent," that normal scientific methods of inquiry won’t work.
  • So, I turned the adjective into a noun to characterize our new era: a time when volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (known together by the acronym VUCA) are at an all-time high, and where established approaches to analysis and planning are increasingly ineffective.
  • In a nutshell, the world economy has become massively unstable and complex, far too interconnected to understand in any real sense.
  • the world’s most successful investors are unable to find low-risk investment
  • some points that echo:
  • what happened in the developing world following the end of World War II. The colonial empires through which European governments had dominated much of the world’s land, trade, resources, and people, rapidly disintegrated.
  • over 700 million souls were under the control of the British Empire outside the UK in 1945, falling to 5 million by 1965, 3 million of whom were in Hong Kong.
  • The echo of colonialism in the postnormal is subtle.
  • We don’t have colonialism any longer, but the neoliberal capitalist economic system is global, and largely grew out of the same countries that were colonial powers.
  • We’ve created a global financial and manufacturing system that has come to control and concentrate the world wealth and power into the hands of a small elite.
  • The only difference it that it is no longer the crowned heads of Europe setting policy, but the technocrat managers of large corporations, financial institutions, and the political class.
  • The rising concerns about inequity--shown in Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, and the rewriting of the constitution in Iceland--are an echo of the early rise of anticolonial insurgents.
    • anonymous
       
      Also the Tea Party, at least a shade of it. :)
  • If the past is prologue, we might see the fall of the European Union, the defection of regions like Catalonia and Scotland from their nation states, and the rising of trade barriers as a means to protect local workers and industries.
  • We can imagine the explosion of a new generation of manufacturing, one that doesn’t rely on either armies of semi-skilled laborers or industrial regions dominated by computer-controlled factories and their supply chains and logistics networks.
  • a new caste of millions of artisanal product designers will be building small runs of 3-D printed products, sharing designs and selling through a social web, using low-cost machinery, and sidestepping the control of large corporations. Such an advance has the opportunity to destabilize the world’s patterns as much as the rise of industrialism did.
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    "By looking at the past, we can judge what this new era might bring: a lot of chaos, populist movements fighting off the old economic order, and a 3-D printing fueled return to a more local economy."
anonymous

2010 Isn't What Many Futurists Of The Past Imagined - 0 views

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    "The late visionary Arthur C. Clarke was a master of predictive fiction. In Clarke's 1968 film, 2001: A Space Odyssey - which he co-wrote with director Stanley Kubrick - we get a taste of the vast influence that computers will have in our lives over the coming decades. The 1984 movie sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey, was about - among other things - humans making contact with alien life. The year he chose for this breakthrough: 2010. Well, here we are. It's 2010 and no word from a Jovian moon yet. But it's only October." By Linton Weeks at NPR on October 18, 2010.
anonymous

A radical pessimist's guide to the next 10 years - The Globe and Mail - 0 views

  • 2) The future isn't going to feel futuristic It's simply going to feel weird and out-of-control-ish, the way it does now, because too many things are changing too quickly. The reason the future feels odd is because of its unpredictability. If the future didn't feel weirdly unexpected, then something would be wrong.
  • 16) “You” will be turning into a cloud of data that circles the planet like a thin gauze While it's already hard enough to tell how others perceive us physically, your global, phantom, information-self will prove equally vexing to you: your shopping trends, blog residues, CCTV appearances – it all works in tandem to create a virtual being that you may neither like nor recognize.
  • North America can easily fragment quickly as did the Eastern Bloc in 1989 Quebec will decide to quietly and quite pleasantly leave Canada. California contemplates splitting into two states, fiscal and non-fiscal. Cuba becomes a Club Med with weapons. The Hate States will form a coalition.
    • anonymous
       
      No it can't. I'm going to trust geography in this instance.
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    "The iconic writer reveals the shape of things to come, with 45 tips for survival and a matching glossary of the new words you'll need to talk about your messed-up future." By Douglas Coupland at The Globe and Mail on October 8, 2010.
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