Future Now

McKinsey's Pitch for a More Compact Urban China

Anthony Townsend — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 08:44:47 -0700

The McKinsey Global Institute has just published a major report outlining four potential scenarios for urbanization in China.

Ten-Year Forecast

Open Bioscience: Where Will the Distributed Scientists Go to Work?

Anthony Townsend — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 12:21:29 -0700

IFTF researcher David Pescovitz shared an article from Nature News today that covers the proliferation of crowdsourced biodata sharing. Recent months have seen a flurry of launches of open, loosely structured repositories of complex biochemical pathways like WikiPathways, Protein Data Bank Wiki and WikiGene.

Science In Place

Me as a Word Graph

Anthony Townsend — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 04:35:32 -0700

Wordle is sweeping it's way across the web, and while I've been a reluctant aficionado of tag clouds, this Java applet can turn any arbitrary set of text, web page, or del.icio.us feed and turn it into an -attractive- tag cloud. Yes, attractive is the operative word.

Here's the tag cloud of my del.icio.us feed, and I'm shocked at what an accurate fingerprint it is of my research interests over the last year.

Technology Horizons

Bioenergy Hubs for the 21st Century: The Latin Axis, From Sao Paulo to Havana

Anthony Townsend — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 07:27:27 -0700

Joe Conason's recent piece in Salon makes a fairly compelling argument that normalizing relations with Cuba has become an immediate strategic priority, not because of Fidel's succession, but because it makes sense to secure a good supply of sugar cane for our ethanol needs before China makes an offer Raul can't refuse.

Science In Place

Chinese universities now top the NSF list of institutions sending students to American graduate schools

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 14:03:08 -0700

For decades, American graduate schools have attracted students from all over the world. Over time, of course, the origins of international graduate students has shifted. For years, the NSF Survey of Earned Doctorates has been following where Ph.D. recipients received their undergraduate degrees, and each year it publishes a list showing what universities and colleges graduate the largest number of students going on to get Ph.D.s in the U.S.

The latest survey shows that in 2006, two Chinese universities contributed more Ph.D. students to American graduate programs. This is notable because until now, American universities have dominated (but not monopolized) the top five slots.

X2 Project

Welcome to Digital Mobs

Marina Gorbis — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 16:31:40 -0700

A husband writes an impassioned letter on one of the popular Internet bulletin boards denouncing a college student he suspects of having an affair with his wife. Immediately, throngs of people join in the attack, and within days the numbers grow to tens of thousands, with “teams of strangers hunting down the student, hounding him out of his university, and causing the family to barricade themselves inside the home." http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/03/.

Technology Horizons

Melting Icecaps and Global Oceans

Jamais Cascio — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 17:24:07 -0700

If the Greenland icecap sees an even-more-significant melt, how soon do you need to pack your bags and head for the high country?

Ten-Year Forecast

Seeing the future in stock photoraphy

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 14:50:00 -0700

An article in today's Slate looks at how stock photography houses commission photographers to shoot scenes that advertisers are going to want in the future. Essentially, "suppliers of the world's commercial imagery are making bets on what life will look and feel like in the near future."

Getty gave me lists of the most popular search terms on their database for 2006, 2007, and the first half of 2008. Only three entries showed up in the top 10 on all three lists: business, people, and woman. (Woman climbed from eighth to fifth to first, which Waggoner attributes to the increasing global presence of women in the workplace and thus the increasing global demand for photos and video depicting women in the workplace.)

Other terms fade in and out. Soccer makes a single top-10 appearance in 2006—a World Cup year. (Getty will refresh its soccer content as the 2010 World Cup approaches in the expectation that soccer will be ascendant.) In a development that may be of no surprise to you, Christmas has been showing up earlier and earlier. "It hit the top 10 in June last year," says Waggoner. "We usually don't plan for it until August."...

Beyond the numbers, sometimes the composition of images can tell a story. "We saw a big shift after 9/11," says Waggoner. "Family entered the top 10 in search keywords and in revenue-generating subject matter for us, but there was also a change in how families were shown. Whereas before it had generally been everybody in a row, now a child was often moved to the foreground of the photo with the parents' attention focused on him. And there was a lot more black and white being used, suggesting a sense of nostalgia." In the last couple of years, the trend has shifted back toward photos of lone people looking into the camera. Waggoner surmises that this is "testimonial" imagery, playing on the appeal of real people as authentic-seeming message-bearers.

One can't make too much of this-- stock photography is as subject to the whims of fashion as any field-- but as an indicator of popular mood, it's interesting.

X2 Project

Superstruct! Play the game, invent the future.

Jane McGonigal — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 15:10:01 -0700

This fall, the Institute for the Future invites you to play Superstruct, the world’s first massively multiplayer forecasting game. It’s not just about envisioning the future—it’s about inventing the future. Everyone is welcome to join the game. Watch for the opening volley of threats and survival stories, September 2008.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SEPTEMBER 22, 2019

Humans have 23 years to go

SuperStruct Signals

read more

New report on the U.S. innovation system

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 10:47:57 -0700

The Institute does quite a bit of work these days on the future of innovation and innovation systems. So I was interested to see a report by the Information Technology and Innovation Forum (ITIF) on the U.S. innovation system. (It also caught my eye because long ago I took a sociology of work class with one of the report's authors.) From the press release:

IFTF Signals Pool

Exinction Risks Underestimated -- NATURE

Jamais Cascio — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 15:46:26 -0700

A new article in Nature argues that current models for estimating extinction risks underestimate the impact of forces beyond birth-death ratio and environment. As a result, biologists may be missing potentially significant extinction threats.

From the Nature summary:

Ten-Year Forecast

Creation Care: Evangelicals Embrace Environmentalism

Anthony Townsend — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 11:49:02 -0700

The Sundance Channel aired an interesting new documentary last night called "The Great Warming". What's interesting about it is that it examines how people are coping with forecasts and realities of global warming around the world - in London, in Bangladesh, etc. It's not about polar bears dying off or the Earth in pain... it's about real people suffering and being scared out of their wits. Powerful stuff.

Ten-Year Forecast

Suburbia During the Crash

Anthony Townsend — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 08:20:40 -0700

Maybe it's the rain in New York today, but I'm gloomy. So while China collapses, it looks like the mobility-land use solution embodied in many of America's newer suburbs seems to be unravelling due to high oil prices.

The IHT reports:

Ten-Year Forecast

The China Slowdown

Anthony Townsend — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 06:15:06 -0700

The World Bank's East Asia and Pacific blog has a good update on the most recent China quarterly forecast. The Bank's official forecast for 2008 China GDP growth is now 9.8 percent, a full 2 points below 2007 growth. Elsewhere, we've been hearing about high fuel prices and the cheap dollar putting the squeeze on Chinese manufacturing export platforms.

Ten-Year Forecast

Cease-and-desist letter sent to California-based personalized genetics startups

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 12:51:09 -0700

California likes to think of itself as a high-tech friendly place, and generally it is. However, Alexis Madrigal reports that the state government has decided to go after personal genetics companies:

Last Monday, the state's laboratory field services group issued 13 cease-and-desist letters to genetic testing companies. Wired.com obtained a copy of the letters (pdf.) from two recipients. And the tough talk in a recent teleconference among regulatory officials confirms the seriousness of the department's intent.

"We [are] no longer tolerating direct-to-consumer genetic testing in California," Karen Nickles, Chief of Laboratory Field Services at the health department, told members of the Clinical Laboratories Advisory Committee on June 13.

Targeted companies include personal genomics startups 23andMe and Navigenics. These services are seen as the leading edge of a new type of health care in which consumers can use their genetic profile to tailor their medical and lifestyle choices. The established medical community, however, is wary of the technology arguing that the medical utility of some tests is unproven. Doctors also complain that direct-to-consumer services bypass them as the gatekeepers and analysts of medical information, which they worry could confuse consumers, not to mention cost them a billing event.

The health department's actions are a direct challenge to the viability of the infant DNA-testing industry, for which physician involvement is shaping up to be a major battleground. As far back as a September 2006 meeting, health department officials were voicing concerns over "nutrigenetic tests that analyze a limited number of genes to give personalized nutritional and lifestyle recommendations."

(via Virginia Postrel's Dynamist Blog)

Health Horizons