Popular Mechanics reviews the predictions of Sci-Fi movies

"Because of the grand nature of this expedition, not only the launch and landing will draw large audiences. In 2013, Mars One will start the selection of the first crews that will train to be able to go to Mars. Unlike the astronaut selection processes at the space agencies, Mars One will open up this procedure for everyone to see. And not only to watch: after Mars One experts have eliminated unsuitable candidates, the audience will have a say in who will be the first humans on Mars. Mars One will make the selection of the first ambassadors to another planet a democratic process!"

"THOUSANDS of wannabe Martians from Australia have put their hand up for the biggest relocation of a lifetime - from Earth to the Red Planet. More than 2500 Australians have applied for the one-way trip to Mars, which will double as a reality TV show. The Mars One project, which aims to create the first human settlement on the Solar System's second-smallest planet, has received 165,000 applications from astronaut hopefuls from 140 different countries. "We now have a large group of applicants from where we can start our search," Mars One chief medical officer Dr Norbert Kraft said. "Finding the best crews of qualified and compatible individuals is crucial to the success of our mission." Successful applicants will have to say goodbye to Earth forever, with the first crew of four people expected to launch into space for their seven months journey to Mars in 2022."

You gotta love anything that mentions Scientology, UFOs, occultism and Willis Harmon - all in the same post. Check out the highlighted passage

"With the deflation of the Social Media bubble, people have been asking us where the next bubble is going to be. One that is starting to froth is the "Makers" movement - ever since Chris Anderson's latest book, Makers*, the area has been rocketing up our Bubblewatch, overtaking Internet of Things and Quantified Self. The claims for this area are becoming truly hyperbolic"

Conducttr has been around for a while as a tool for automating the telling of a narrative over several platforms - online, text messages and so on. This seems like the very logical next step, to take it out from the laptop or tablet and into the world of mobile. A three-part ecosystem, where the audience takes part of a mobile app which lets them take part of different "Worlds", each belonging to a separate story or story world, the designers of the narrative get a "cloud-based network intelligence" and the developers get an API to play around with.

"Together, they highlight five "technologies that matter" for cities in 2020: mobile broadband; smart personal devices, whether they're dirt-cheap phones or tablets; government-sponsored cloud computing (modeled on the U.K.'s national "G-cloud" initiative); open-source public databases to promote grassroots innovation, and "public interfaces." Instead of Internet cafés, imagine an outdoor LED screen and hacked Kinect box allowing literally anyone to access the Net using only gestures."

Over the next decade, cities will continue to grow larger and more rapidly. At the same time, new technologies will unlock massive streams of data about cities and their residents. As these forces collide, they will turn every city into a unique civic laboratory-a place where technology is adapted in novel ways to meet local needs. This ten-year forecast map, The Future of Cities, Information, and Inclusion (PDF), charts the important intersections between urbanization and digitalization that will shape this global urban experiment, and the key tensions that will arise. 

This is a book about undermining the industrial system. You can read this book online, here, right now. This is also a blog about the book, the act of writing it and getting it into the wider consciousness. The two parts of this website can be found at the top, by going to either The Blog or The Book.

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.

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.