The occupation of Wall Street began in the deserts of Western Sahara and this weekend it will spread to our Australian cities.

"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.

UnCollege is a social movement designed to help you hack your education.  This manifesto will show you how to gain the passion, hustle, and contrarianism requisite for success - all without setting foot inside a classroom.

There is a crisis of meaning in the world of business, especially for millenials.  They're asking the question, "Why am I doing this?"  And I think businesses are not providing great answers to those questions, and I think that's why you're getting more and more talented millenials picking a career that is non-business or quasi-business in part for foundation or some NGO.  And I think it's partially tied into this whole shareholder value maximization theory.

This progress is quietly driven by improvements in computer hardware. Many of us find it unremarkable that a $600 iPad can outperform the Cray 2, which not so long ago was the fastest computer on Earth. Unfortunately the source of these endless performance improvements is drying up, and the free ride so long enjoyed by software developers is in jeopardy. Worse, this is occurring at a time when software has become more important than ever.

When I first heard of Bhutan's goal of maximizing its people's happiness, I wondered if it really meant anything in practice, or was just another political slogan. Last month, when I was in the capital, Thimphu, to speak at a conference on "Economic Development and Happiness," organized by Prime Minister Jigme Y. Thinley and co-hosted by Jeffrey Sachs, Director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University and Special Adviser to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, I learned that it is much more than a slogan.

Are you ready for designer biohazards, an end to Middle Eastern dominance of the oil business, and a United Nations with a lot more countries sitting at the grown-ups' table? What about a robot chauffeur, Iranian smart bombs, or a United States desperate to encourage immigrants from south of the border, not keep them out? Welcome to Foreign Policy's first-ever predictions issue. We asked some of the world's most bleeding-edge thinkers to look at the planet in the year 2025-and those are just a few of their remarkable, and at times startling, projections. Most of all, what they told us is that The Future Is Now; the big trends and inescapable developments dictating our next few decades have already been set in motion, and though of course we can't begin to predict the unknowable, we actually already know an awful lot about how the world will look in the coming years.

Ajay Kapur, global strategist at Citigroup, and his research team came up with the term "Plutonomy" in 2005 to describe a country that is defined by massive income and wealth inequality. According to their definition, the U.S. is a Plutonomy, along with the U.K., Canada and >>>Australia<<<. [my emphasis - TM]

Projections of the size of the personal robot market in 2015 and 2020.

Out there on the internet is a place where you can buy and sell anything anonymously using untraceable money. What is mostly being bought and sold in this stealth market right now are recreational drugs -- pot and acid, etc. There has always been black markets in every city of the world, but as underground and out of sight as they might be, you still needed to show up in person to trade. And there has long been outlaw areas of the internet where black markets thrive and you don't need to reveal yourself, but paying without any trace has been a problem. This new online stealthy anonymart, called Silk Road, solves these problems with two existing technologies. Silk Road uses established anonymizing Tor network to trade anonymously, and it employs the new Bitcoin peer-to-peer encrypted payment system to provide untraceable payments, which can in theory be converted to dollars or other national currencies.

myForesight, Malaysia's first national level initiative dedicated to the study and application of Foresight in prospecting technology for business. It provides a common platform to share experiences, insights and expertise on futures studies - both at the local and global levels. At this initial stage, myForesight focuses on awareness of the Malaysian stakeholders on Foresight and programmes currently being undertaken. It has also embarked on the effort to make myForesight as a joint initiative by parties interested on the future of Malaysia.

A super-fast summary of James Moody's "The Sixth Wave".

"What is this? The Forecasting ACE project explores new methods to combine predictions from a wide range of volunteer contributors to provide more accurate forecasts of global events."

The original BAA for the ACES program.

"A new model for crowdsourcing predictions called Aggregative Contingent Estimation System (ACES) is transforming the way future events are forecast - combining the collective knowledge of many individual opinions in a unique way that improves accuracy beyond what any one person or small group of experts could provide."

This seems to connect to that hyper-connected citizens trend José identified in the eGov report

Otlet first developed the idea of a global knowledge "network" in 1934. At a time when radio and television were still in their infancy, he tried to develop multimedia concepts to improve opportunities for cooperation among researchers. Otlet wrestled with the question of how to make knowledge accessible across great distances. He used a combination of index cards, telephones and other equipment to approximate what is possible today with any computer.