Services 2020

"It is much easier to engage with the World System Model through experience and interaction. The IFF World Game provides a way in which the players can engage with the complexity of the global problematique in a fun, non-threatening, interactive and highly creative way. The players may be groups in a business context, community groups, students or individuals seeking to broaden their capacities."

"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.""

"* Report: A Synthetic Overview of the Collaborative Economy. By Michel Bauwens, Nicolas Mendoza and Franco Iacomella, et al. Orange Labs and P2P Foundation, 2012. "

"Former senior intelligence officials have created a detailed surveillance system more accurate than modern facial recognition technology - and have installed it across the US under the radar of most Americans, according to emails hacked by Anonymous."

"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. 

How's this for mixing the virtual and physical?

The professor of archaeology at the University of Alabama is a space archaeologist who uses satellite imagery to map and locate previously unknown archaeological sites in the Middle East, Europe, and across the Mediterranean.  

How presidential elections are impacted by a 100 million year old coastline

Book hacking - cyber crime meets implanted healthcare devices

Micro Drones and 3d printing!

 A murmuration of drones !

We continually scan tens of thousands of high-quality, online news publications, blogs, public niche sources, trade publications, government web sites, financial databases and more.

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.

"Australia's Federal Government announced the National Broadband Network (NBN) in 2009. NBN's current roll-out is scheduled for completion in 2021, with market forecasts estimating optical fibre overtaking DSL broadband connections in about 2015. This paper provides a timely contribution to more critical and expansive analysis of potential Australian internet futures. First, 'schools of thought' and current technological frames (Web 2.0, 'the cloud') for the internet and its possible futures are outlined, which provide perspectives on the emergence of the NBN. We then outline five generic images of the future which, as predetermined images, enable quick 'incasting' of alternative futures for a technology topic or related object of research: promised future, social/speculative bubble(s), unfolding disruption/chaos, unintended consequences, and co-existence/'cooption'. High-level application of the 'schools' and generic images to the NBN and Australia's potential internet futures, suggests policymakers and strategists currently consider too few perspectives."