Group items tagged

"It all started with Steven Ing's counseling practice. He was working with all sorts of people who were dissatisfied with their lives in one way or another. A man and wife who couldn't talk to each other about their problems, a woman who felt depressed but didn't know why, an older man who seemed to hate the world. And then there were the people who had committed sex crimes who were court ordered to go through therapy with Ing. As Ing went on with his practice, it became apparent to him that his "regular" clients and his "sex-offender" clients all had similar problems that stemmed from the same place. The problems all came back to their individual sexualities and inability to cope with them. Ing then went further and realized that these problems were societal, no one seemed to be able to have an open and honest conversation about sex. But it was not just because in his own backyard that struggled with this aspect of their lives, it was people and cultures all over the world as well. So Ing decided to start a community called "sexual futurist." He wasn't trying to solve everyone's problems or tell them what to think, he just wanted to encourage people to start having intelligent and logical conversations about sex to ultimately lead to change for the better. If we are able to have these intelligent conversations about sex using reason and logic, perhaps one day we'll start being more comfortable with the topic and therefore able to respect sex as an important aspect of our lives. Perhaps we will be able to encourage the United Nations to help people all over the world by enacting our "Sexual Bill of Rights.""

"ZGF Architects and PoSI teamed up to provide a concept submission for the International Living Future Institute's 2011 Living City Design Competition which has been recently awarded a People's Choice Award voted by the attendees of the Living Future 2011 conference. Their submission entitled Symbiotic Districts: Towards a Balanced City explores the symbiosis between five EcoDistricts in Portland, Oregon as well as regional systems and examines how strategies in a single district contribute to the city's overall performance. "

Australia's peak ICT research body, National ICT Australia (NICTA), has launched a "Digital Productivity Showcase" facility that displays new applications for digital communications.

5000+ is asking for ideas to help redesign and renew inner Adelaide as a more cosmopolitan centre - a place where all kinds of people of will want to work, play, visit and live prosperous lives

"How to Liberate America from Wall Street Rule is a report of the New Economy Working Group produced in collaboration with the New Economy Network; it is an outcome of a series of conversations focused on building a policy agenda for transforming our money system. David Korten is the lead author; participating organizations include Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, Capital Institute, Democracy Collaborative, Green America, Institute for Policy Studies, Living Economies Forum, New Economy Network, New Rules Project, Institute for Local Self-Reliance, Public Banking Institute, RSF Social Finance, and YES! Magazine."

"The European Journal of Futures Research is a peer-reviewed open access jounral published under the brand SpringerOpen: It publishes original research papers on all aspects of foresight and futures studies; Welcomes (inter-)disciplinary articles on society, politics, economy and science and technology, in particular from European and/or comparative perspectives; Encourages empirical, theoretical and/or methodological contributions; Strengthens networking and community building among scholars engaged in European futures studies. This journal provides an international platform for leading and upcoming scholarly work on possible, probable and desirable European and global futures. We invite submissions of articles focusing on both interdisciplinary and disciplinary studies on future developments in society, politics, economy and science and technology. The journal publishes empirically oriented articles as well as contributions of a more methodological, epistemological or theoretical nature.  Envisioning a common future, the journal welcomes lively debates on European affairs - viewed against the backdrop of a shared, yet diverse and complicated history. The journal seeks to foster comprehensive analyses of key European policies, such as those for research and education - among others. A central objective of the journal is to strengthen European dimensions of futures studies. All research articles are subject to double-blind peer review."

Welcome to the September 2012 issue of the Technology Innovation Management Review. The editorial theme of this issue is Living Labs. We invite your comments on the articles in this issue as well as suggestions for future article topics and issue themes. PDF: Download this issue

"When asked by his interviewer about the "modest title" of his new book, The Future - Six Drivers of Global Change, former Vice President Al Gore replied, "Random House came up with that title." It's not an auspicious beginning to a talk about the perils of the Global Megacrisis, when you more or less say your title was chosen because the marketing team liked it best. Nevertheless, when Al Gore speaks, people listen. And hundreds of people lined up last week for his live South By Southwest (SXSW) interview with Wall Street Journal and All Things D tech reporter Walt Mossberg. It was to a sympathetic crowd that Gore laid out the tenets of his newest book, which was born in 2005 as an off-the-cuff but "adequate" answer during a post-appearance Q&A session. "

"The Human Race to the Future: What Could Happen - and What to Do, by Dr. Daniel Berleant (388 pages), the first book published by the Lifeboat Foundation, is available free (Kindle version) to KurzweilAI readers on July 8 as a one-day promo. A non-fiction book verging on science fiction, its imaginative future scenarios include colonizing the planet Mercury (it has water at the poles), GPS-enabled clocks replace daylight savings time, mind-reading replaces keyboards, cheap genomes, smart pills, the Asteroid Apocalypse, global warming vs. Big Ice, and live anywhere, work anywhere - an hour's work yields a week's (radically genetically engineered) food. "Mandatory reading for anyone trying to grasp where civilization is heading" - Zoltan Istvan, author, The Transhumanist Wager."

Absent significant changes on the spending and/or revenue sides of the federal budget, long term deficits will encumber a growing share of federal resources and test the capacity of current and future generations to afford both today's and tomorrow's commitments. Continuing on this unsustainable path will gradually erode, if not suddenly damage, our economy, our standard of living and ultimately our national security. Incremental approaches to budgeting will need to give way to more fundamental and periodic reexaminations of the base of government, ultimately covering discretionary and mandatory programs as well as the revenue side of the budget. Having identified the major fiscal challenge facing the nation, and given our role in supporting the Congress, we believe that GAO also has an obligation to provide policymakers with support in identifying issues and options that could help to address these fiscal pressures. In this report, we draw on our past and pending work-about 90 percent of which is either requested by the Congress or required by law-- to provide policy makers with examples of the kinds of hard choices stemming from these challenges in the form of questions for elected officials and other policy makers to consider.

ONE of humanity's ultimate dreams, to peer into the future, may be moving a step closer with a controversial €1 billion ($1.3bn) EU plan to recreate the entire world in a computer system. The Living Earth Simulator project would take the vast streams of data pouring into the internet, ranging from Facebook and Twitter to dry-as-dust government statistics, and try to spot the economic and social trends that will shape the future.

In the first years of the 21st century, our capacities for imagining new realities have proved inadequate. From Madrid to London, Bali to Mumbai, from Katrina-ravaged New Orleans to the tsunami's devastation all around the Indian Ocean, to the most recent financial crisis, the alarms went unheeded until after disaster had struck. Now, as the first decade of the century has drawn to a close, its many shocks make plain that we are living in a world with greater potential for surprise, uncertainty, and threats to resilience. In a time of poorly understood interacting causes and consequences, we require new habits of thinking, new approaches to assessment, and new ways of engaging with the world. Emerging is a world filled with just as much opportunity as risk, but seeing both of those forces and appreciating their interrelatedness requires new lenses and an unflagging awareness of diverse perspectives. It means investing all of our energies to profoundly challenge the status quo.

About the ProjectThe Future We Want (FWW) is a global initiative to envision what we want our lives and communities to be like 20 years from now. Gathering Promising IdeasUsing everything from modern technologies like the web and social media to traditional grassroots communication we intend to reach people on a worldwide scale. We will ask everyone, at every level of society, to submit their visions for a positive future. From solutions addressing poverty and injustice to strategies for creating sustainable and environmentally responsible communities, we will gather ideas internationally. But we won't stop here.

Psychologists and other social scientists (most economists excepted) have learned a lot in the last few decades about what makes us happy. They have taught us that, in affluent societies, money doesn't buy as much happiness as people think. Indeed, for people living above subsistence, it may buy very little. They have also taught us what affects well-being more than money: close relations with family, friends, and community; meaningful work; security (financial, job, and health); and democracy.

"We are Academically Qualified Futurists who provide innovative, dynamic leadership and qualified expertise in transformation practice from a futurist perspective. The purpose of our practice is to create powerful, measurable and practical results for individuals and organisations by providing the expertise and proven methodology to guide them to shape their best possible future, the future they aspire to live. We work one on one with individuals from Australia and around the world to assist them to identify, strategically plan and create significant, conscious and purposeful improvement in their life. We work with organisations in Australia to assist leaders in the strategic development and implementation of significant, cultural and business transformation."

Selection review

Kevin Kelly on Richard Florida's new book about why where you live is important.

" Verbalizing visceral feelings about technology, whether attraction or repulsion, Kelly explores the "technium," his term for the globalized, interconnected stage of technological development. Arguing that the processes creating the technium are akin to those of biological evolution, Kelly devotes the opening sections of his exposition to that analogy, maintaining that the technium exhibits a similar tendency toward self-organizing complexity. Having defined the technium, Kelly addresses its discontents, as expressed by the Unabomber (although Kelly admits to trepidation in taking seriously the antitechnology screeds of a murderer) and then as lived by the allegedly technophobic Amish. From his observations and discussions with some Amish people, Kelly extracts some precepts of their attitudes toward gadgets, suggesting folk in the secular world can benefit from the Amish approach of treating tools as servants of self and society rather than as out-of-control masters. Exploring ramifications of technology on human welfare and achievement, Kelly arrives at an optimistic outlook that will interest many, coming, as it does, from the former editor of Wired magazine. --Gilbert Taylor "

Places of living revisited...ideology vs utopia and other stories (articles) from Portugal