Services 2020

This look like a fantastic emerging internet TV channel on environmental issues. Definitely worth checking out.

" Welcome to the Sigma Scan - a searchable repository for horizon scanning papers, designed for government users. To create it, the Horizon Scanning Centre has collected 'evidence of the future' from more than 6000 document sources and interviews with 300 leading thinkers, and condensed this into 250 short papers to challenge assumptions and spark ideas. "

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.

" What are young adults thinking about money and value? How can we create new systems of wealth generation and abundance? What does the future hold for banks and other financial institutions in the wake of massive peer to peer exchange?"

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]

200 examples and research detail and definitions of collective intelligence

"The Asia-Pacific Conferences on Conceptual Modelling provide an annual forum for disseminating the results of innovative research in information modelling and related areas. The amount, complexity and diversity of information held in computer systems are constantly on the increase, and so are the requirements and challenges to be met for useful access and manipulation of this information. Conceptual modelling is fundamental to the development of up-to-date information and knowledge-based systems. The conference series aims on bringing together experts from all areas of computer science and information systems with a common interest in the subject. "

"When Texas Gov. Rick Perry decided to stage a Texas-size prayer event - dubbed "The Response" - on Aug. 6, it no doubt seemed like the right thing to do at the time. It received little critical scrutiny when he announced it back in early June, except on websites that track these sorts of things. But after Rachel Maddow, drawing on these sites, did a segment highlighting some of the more bizarre statements made by Perry's high-profile religious endorsers, things cooled considerably - even though the real story is still not remotely well-understood."

I've heard thin threads of this before, but this does seem like one of these massive, subterranean movements that no-one's going to notice until it pops up "out of nowhere".

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

""Water-whether we treat it as a public good or as a commodity that can be bought and sold-will in large part determine whether our future is peaceful or perilous," wrote the scholar Maude Barlow."

" (Reuters) - Apple Inc's increasingly effective patent war against rivals like Samsung Electronics may mask its real target: arch-foe Google Inc."

"David Cameron, the U.K. prime minister, said the government is considering whether it should block social-networking websites and messaging services during violent unrest after the country's worst riots since the 1980s. "

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."

"Renewable energy showed itself to be a stalwart player on the troubled world economic scene in 2010, supplying an increasing proportion of global power consumption despite facing the headwinds of financial crisis, sagging incentives and low natural gas prices, Worldwatch Institute said."