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Why the drop? Most prominently, the United States lost nearly 6 million users, falling from 155.2 million at the start of May to 149.4 million at the end of it. This is the first time the country has lost users in the past year. Canada also fell significantly, by 1.52 million down to 16.6 million, although it has been fluctuating around that number for the past year. Meanwhile, the United Kingdom, Norway and Russia all posted losses of more than 100,000. If these countries - most of whom had adopted Facebook many years ago - had not lost users, and instead posted even small gains, Facebook would have had a much more typical month

ABOUT FIND THE FUTURE Find The Future at NYPL brings visitors to the Library together with players around the world to tap into the creative power of the Library's collections. It is the first game in the world in which winning the game means writing a book together - a collection of 100 ways to make history and change the future, inspired by 100 of the most intriguing works of the past. Starting May 21, 2011, visitors to the Stephen A. Schwarzman branch of the NYPL can play the game with their personal smartphones or on Library computers. Global players will join the game with any computer that has access to the Internet. The game is free to play. The game is designed to empower players to find inspiration for their own extraordinary futures by bringing them face-to-face with the writings and personal objects of people who made an extraordinary difference in the past. The game starts with a special, invitation-only event on May 20, 2011. As part of the Centennial celebration weekend, hundreds of gamers will earn the chance to join a special once-in-a-lifetime event: an "overnight lock-in" at NYPL's Stephen A. Schwarzman building. This "write all night" lock in will serve as the official kick-off for the Find The Future game. All visitors to the Library or the website nypl.org/game will continue to be able to play Find The Future through the end of 2011.

Past, present and future examples of augmented reality

"The image below this post comes from the latest IMF working paper (May 2012) looking at the "The Future of Oil: Geology versus Technology" (opens pdf) which attempts to take both the models of oil availability - that proposed by geologists and that by technologists and work out what the likely price implications are going to be to 2020. An internal working paper that "does not presume that there is a constraint on how much oil can be taken out of the ground. It prefers to believe that extraction rates will depend on the price that will be able to be charged for the final product", it makes the wonderfully understated point that "the future may not be easy". I continue to be amazed at the number of people I meet, sitting in leadership positions, who are unaware of this issue. I have heard from colleagues of engagements in the past couple of years with groups of senior decision-makers who have refused to discuss the issue as they believe it to be a fringe problem."

The image below this post comes from the latest IMF working paper (May 2012) looking at the "The Future of Oil: Geology versus Technology" (opens pdf) which attempts to take both the models of oil availability - that proposed by geologists and that by technologists and work out what the likely price implications are going to be to 2020. An internal working paper that "does not presume that there is a constraint on how much oil can be taken out of the ground. It prefers to believe that extraction rates will depend on the price that will be able to be charged for the final product", it makes the wonderfully understated point that "the future may not be easy". I continue to be amazed at the number of people I meet, sitting in leadership positions, who are unaware of this issue. I have heard from colleagues of engagements in the past couple of years with groups of senior decision-makers who have refused to discuss the issue as they believe it to be a fringe problem.

"Memory allows for a kind of mental time travel, a way for us to picture not just the past but also a version of the future, according to a growing body of research. The studies suggest that the purpose of memory is far more extensive than simply helping us store and recall information about what has already happened. Researchers from University College London and Harvard University have made strides charting how memory helps us draw a mental sketch of someone's personality and imagine how that person might behave in a future social situation. They detailed their latest findings in work published in the journal Cerebral Cortex last week."

"Car owners invest huge amounts of time and money into an asset they barely use. Cars are driven only 8% of the time, while potential drivers walk past block after block of underutilized cars. We are here to connect the dots... to help people get around. Getaround is a social car sharing service. We enable car owners to safely rent out their underutilized cars to a community of trusted drivers. People in need of a car can rent one by the hour using the Getaround website or iPhone app. Imagine a world with fewer cars, without traffic jams, and with less pollution. We are a team of successful entrepreneurs, hackers, and business people passionate about using mobile technology to create sustainable transportation solutions. We want to empower people to travel more efficiently and cause a shift from personal to shared transport. "

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.

Will Asia lead the world in green technologies and in the political-economic transition to sustainability? Can Asia bury past conflicts and create stronger regional institutions including perhaps, step by step, an Asian Union? In what ways could Asia's traditional cultures - Islamic, Tantric, Taoist, Confucian, Buddhist and Vedic - be resources in inventing an alternative more hybrid cultures?

Society 5 plans to explore the past, present and potential futures of our society, initially as a blog at society5.net, and then as a book and beyond.

The baby bust, the big tilt, whatever you want to call this bold new demographic world, it is like nothing we have experienced before. It works silently, eating away at the consumer and the tax base just as it worked for the consumer and the tax base over the past 60 years: more babies and more young migrants pumped up the worker base. But at some point it all comes crashing down. And that point is upon us or at least will be upon us in the coming decade. And it's not just Australia where the demography tilts in favour of the retirement age group. The working-age population in Japan has contracted from 87 million in 1994 to 81 million in 2010; over the previous 16 years the working-age population had expanded by nine million. Which period delivered greatest prosperity to the Japanese people?

"HONOLULU, Hawaii, U.S., May 26, 2011 (IPS) - For the past quarter century, the United States' relations with Pacific island nations were framed by the South Pacific Tuna Treaty, which combines foreign aid, subsidies to the U.S. fleet of purse-seine fishing vessels and their largely unfettered access to the islands' waters, which contain the world's last major stocks of tuna."

"Resonant City is an interdisciplinary writing and research collaborative exploring the intersections of art, architecture, technology, the immediate past, enduring present, and possible futures. In the course of our explorations we hope to illuminate a subtle yet critical discourse underlying the construction of nature, landscape, the city, and cultural modes of production. We write anonymously because it is not a single author that is important, but rather ideas."

Global production of phosphorus fertilizer could peak and decline later this century, causing shortages and price spikes that jeopardize world food production, five major scientific societies warned today. The crisis will come at a time when Earth's population may surge past 9 billion.

The Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies was formed to study and debate vital questions such as: Which technologies, especially new ones, are likely to have the greatest impact on human beings and human societies in the 21st century? What ethical issues do those technologies and their applications raise for humans, our civilization, and our world? How much can we extrapolate from the past and how much accelerating change should we anticipate? What sort of policy positions can be recommended to promote the best possible outcomes for individuals and societies?

David Ronfeldt Published on 23 May 2012 This video offers an overview about the TIMN framework: its focus on social evolution (past, present, future), its construction around four cardinal forms of organization (tribes, institutions, markets, networks), its system dynamics, and its future implications.

"This illustrates the lesson that access to information doesn't necessarily encourage proactive action."