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"We say price falls are both imminent and unstoppable. Philip Soos explains why," Collyer concluded. "This is essential reading for every citizen thinking of buying.

"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. "

Brilliant article on the insides of the struggle for control of the internet....  "For more than a year, the intelligence services of various authoritarian regimes have shown an intense desire to know more about what goes on in an office building on L Street in Washington DC, six blocks away from the White House."

"Score one for highbrow tastes: If you've ever downloaded a popular movie, TV show or music album from a site like Pirate Bay, there's a strong chance your IP address is sitting on a database somewhere. But anyone who's used torrent sites to obtain some obscure French art-house from the 1970s is likely flying under the radar."

FORGET using passwords to log on to your computer, needing touch screens to navigate on your smartphone or paying expensive energy bills; in the future your daily activities will create all the energy you need to power your house, biometrics will unlock your devices, and your mind will be capable of controlling them.

**Let's intentcast to bootstrap Creative Economy 3.0** What is intentcasting? I came across this concept on Seb Paquet's blog, Emergent Cities. He describes it as follows Interest brings groups together, but intent is what brings teams together to actually get things done. Intentcasting is deceptively simple to describe. It consists in broadcasting your intent to make something happen. That something could be anything: "I want to have a party at my house!" "We want to raise $1,000 for Japan!" "I want this piece of software to exist!" "We want this work of art to exist!" In order for intent to catch on, it has to meet a few conditions: It must describe a promise - a future state of affairs that could conceivably happen, explained in a way that people understand. It must open participation in one or more well-defined ways. It must be expressed in a way that enables it to travel and spread over the communications infrastructure. There must be other people or groups out there who resonate with the intent and can get excited enough to connect.

One way to ensure you're right at least some of the time is to make the same prediction year after year -- after all, a stopped clock is right twice a day. "Dr. Doom" himself -- New York University economist Nouriel Roubini -- has been expecting a U.S. financial catastrophe for years. As Anirvan Banerji of the Economic Cycle Research Institute told the New York Times Magazine last year, Roubini's explanations -- increasing trade deficits, soaring current account deficits, Hurricane Katrina, skyrocketing oil prices -- have tended to evolve over time. But as we now know, he hit the jackpot by calling the housing bubble in 2006. Smart or lucky? Wait to see where his next predictions land.

"From time to time, someone under 30 will ask me, "When did this all begin, America's downward slide?" They say they've heard of a time when working people could raise a family and send the kids to college on just one parent's income (and that college in states like California and New York was almost free). That anyone who wanted a decent paying job could get one. That people only worked five days a week, eight hours a day, got the whole weekend off and had a paid vacation every summer. That many jobs were union jobs, from baggers at the grocery store to the guy painting your house, and this meant that no matter how "lowly" your job was you had guarantees of a pension, occasional raises, health insurance and someone to stick up for you if you were unfairly treated."

Over the next few decades, the global food system will come under renewed pressure from the combined effects of seven fundamental factors: population growth, the nutrition transition, energy, land, water, labour and climate change. The combined effects will create constraints on food supply and if action is not taken, there is a real potential for demand growth to outstrip increases in global food production. Effects on developing countries would be devastating. Developed countries will be affected too. Expectations of abundant and ever cheaper food could come under strain. The UK can no longer afford to take its food supply for granted.