Services 2020

"You have to hand it to Standard and Poor's. Forget their two-trillion dollar math error. The whole idea that these clowns are evaluating the creditworthiness of the United States is just loony. For starters, these are the same people who brought us the crisis, by blessing junk sub-prime loans as AAA securities. And they did so because they were paid as consultants by the same financial scoundrels who created the securities."

Facebook users who want an interesting (and perhaps creepy) visualization of their activity on the world's largest social network can get it with the help of Intel's new Museum of Me application. Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20068257-17/intels-facebook-museum-of-me-is-a-must-try/#ixzz1UOjMmAlE

"From time to time, someone under 30 will ask me, "When did this all begin, America's downward slide?" They say they've heard of a time when working people could raise a family and send the kids to college on just one parent's income (and that college in states like California and New York was almost free). That anyone who wanted a decent paying job could get one. That people only worked five days a week, eight hours a day, got the whole weekend off and had a paid vacation every summer. That many jobs were union jobs, from baggers at the grocery store to the guy painting your house, and this meant that no matter how "lowly" your job was you had guarantees of a pension, occasional raises, health insurance and someone to stick up for you if you were unfairly treated."

"The Foresight for Development initiative is being piloted in Africa by the South Africa Node of the Millennium Project, with support from the Rockefeller Foundation. Foresight for Development is accountable to the directors of the South Africa Node of the Millennium Project. We support the effective use of foresight for Africa's future by aggregating, enhancing and promoting futures thinking and practice in Africa."

"Many people - politicians and pundits alike - prattle on that China and, to a lesser extent Japan, own most of America's $14.3 trillion in government debt. But there's one little problem with that conventional wisdom: it's just not true. While the Chinese, Japanese and plenty of other foreigners own substantial amounts, it's really Americans who hold most of America's debt"

"To address this and similar challenges, we're developing Open Foresight - a social response to accelerating change. It's a new process that crowdsources the future of given topics, as demonstrated by the Future of Facebook pilot project. It's different because it structures data around established futures categories and methods, then synthesizes that information into easily digestible video format."

"This is a forum where participants from different disciplines and organisations can meet and challenge each other to develop the field of participatory innovation. It will be held in Melbourne Australia from 12-14 January 2012. The conference presents an exciting programme of five tracks: "

Scenario Thinking for Small Business Survival with Professor George Cairns, RMIT University.Thursday, September 01, 2011 from 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM (GMT+1000)Melbourne, Australia

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

Great article on participatory budgeting and gov 2.0 from my good friend Darren Sharp.... "The Gov 2.0 network Gov Loop and Personal Democracy Forum recently launched a special series on 'Designing Digital Cities' that explores ideas for how to meet the demands of 21st century citizens in an era where doing more with less has become a priority. GovLoop founder Steve Ressler kicked things off in a blog post asking what ingredients go into a true digital city in 2011 in the context of emerging tools, technology, processes and assets."

" The internet is a copy machine. At its most foundational level, it copies every action, every character, every thought we make while we ride upon it. In order to send a message from one corner of the internet to another, the protocols of communication demand that the whole message be copied along the way several times. IT companies make a lot of money selling equipment that facilitates this ceaseless copying. Every bit of data ever produced on any computer is copied somewhere. The digital economy is thus run on a river of copies. Unlike the mass-produced reproductions of the machine age, these copies are not just cheap, they are free. "

TIMN talk by Ronfeldt and others

Future Government conference  Australia, September 12-18

CSIRO Megatrends - Our Future World Video of CSIRO..and their 5 mega trends

Isn't this the guy from the talk we went to? http://www.csiro.au/people/James.Moody.html More at..http://www.abc.net.au/tv/bigideas/stories/2010/07/27/2964355.htm

"When the number of committed opinion holders is below 10 percent, there is no visible progress in the spread of ideas. It would literally take the amount of time comparable to the age of the universe for this size group to reach the majority," said SCNARC Director Boleslaw Szymanski, the Claire and Roland Schmitt Distinguished Professor at Rensselaer. "Once that number grows above 10 percent, the idea spreads like flame."

I think all of these ideas, power of pull, TIMN are similar... also there's constructal theory which may provide an overarching framework.. i think ,some what vaguely... http://www.constructal.org/

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.

Places of living revisited...ideology vs utopia and other stories (articles) from Portugal

Conference listing

" The man accused of the killing spree in Norway was deeply influenced by a small group of American bloggers and writers who have warned for years about the threat from Islam, lacing his 1,500-page manifesto with quotations from them, as well as copying multiple passages from the tract of the Unabomber. "

SAP - augmented reality for business