October 2011
58 posts
WatchBBC News - How to predict the future
However, there is an entire profession that takes a different view. For futurologists, or futurists as they often like to abbreviate themselves, there are patterns, rhythms, signs and pointers to the future that can be discerned and measured in the here and now.
“I think there is a false dichotomy between the idea that we can predict the future and the...
Daniel Kahneman: How cognitive illusions blind us... →
Why do investors, both amateur and professional, stubbornly believe that they can do better than the market, contrary to an economic theory that most of them accept, and contrary to what they could learn from a dispassionate evaluation of their personal experience? The most potent psychological cause of the illusion is certainly that the people who pick stocks are exercising high-level skills....
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Forrester to your IT dept: Let them use Macs →
Employees are not only asking IT departments for Macs at work, they’re bringing their own into the office. The Forrester report finds that 22 percent of enterprise businesses foresee the use of Macs owned by employees “increasing significantly.” But at the same time 41 percent of those same companies don’t allow those employees to access e-mail or the company network on those machines, either at...
Quantum Leap →
tetw:
by Peter Schwarz (via afflictor.com)
Brain prosthetics. Telepathy. Punctual flights. A futurist’s vision of where quantum computers will take us.
“Books don’t go viral. And that’s largely because the thing that makes books...”
– Books are like the news — it’s better when they are social — Tech News and Analysis (via infoneer-pulse)
An important insight on the differences between digital and analog media…
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What if population grows faster than the experts... →
climateadaptation:
Growth seems to be a theme today. We commonly read and hear that population will top out at 9 billion mid-century. Oddly, we somehow find comfort in this. But, what if this number is wrong? What if the Earth hits 12 billion people?
What if population continues to soar, as it has in recent decades, and the world becomes home to 12 billion or even 16 billion people by 2100,...
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More Data Was Transmitted Over the Internet in... →
infoneer-pulse:
There was more data transmitted over the Internet in 2010 than the entire history of the Internet through 2009.
Now the transfer of data over the Internet is growing faster than ever, said Vice President of Intel’s Architecture Group Kirk Skaugen during the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. He also explained how infrastructure is scaling with the increasing transfer of data.
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Five Reasons Companies Fail at Business Model... →
Interesting summary of reasons for why companies is not changing on a deeper level.
These 5 reasons are mentioned in the article:
CEOs don’t really want a new business model
Product is king. Nothing else matters
Cannibalization is off the table
ROI hurdles are too aggressive for fledgling models
Rogues and renegades get no respect
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Watch10 Top Innovation Trends by 100 Innovators
View more presentations from The Fifth Conference
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textually.org: More Than a Quarter of US Adults... →
Just over a quarter (26%) of U.S. adults have used their mobile phones for health information or tools in the past 12 months, according to a survey by Manhattan Research. The mobile health population has more than doubled since 2010, when 12 percent of consumers conducted health activities on their mobile phones.
This is yet another signal that personal communication devices will play an...
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“In Dubai, traffic accidents fell 20 per cent from average rates on the days...”
– Traffic accidents in Abu Dhabi decreased significantly during the BlackBerry outage.
BlackBerry cuts made roads safer, police say - The National
(via heyitsnoah)
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Columbus Blamed For Little Ice Age - Science News →
MINNEAPOLIS — By sailing to the New World, Christopher Columbus and the other explorers who followed may have set off a chain of events that cooled Europe’s climate for centuries.
The European conquest of the Americas decimated the people living there, leaving large areas of cleared land untended. Trees that filled in this territory pulled billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere,...
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Watch Origo’s 3D Printer Could Be The Last Toy Your Ten Year Old Will Ever Need | Singularity Hub
Origo may be the last toy you ever have to buy for your child. The prototype 3D printer under development by Artur Tchoukanov and Joris Peels allows children aged ten and up to design figurines and shapes on a computer, and then print them out to play with. Instead of buying your children more toys, let...
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Friedman in NYTimes: There’s Something Happening... →
When you see spontaneous social protests erupting from Tunisia to Tel Aviv to Wall Street, it’s clear that something is happening globally that needs defining. There are two unified theories out there that intrigue me. One says this is the start of “The Great Disruption.” The other says that this is all part of “The Big Shift.” You decide.
Yes, there is really something fundamental happening...
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Amazon Publishing Launches New Science... →
Now Amazon is stepping forward with it’s publishing strategy - this time with SF, Fantasy and Horror Imprint. And it is maybe symbolic because this will most likely turn into real horror story for traditional publisher.
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“What’s going on here? The answer, surely, is that Wall Street’s Masters of the...”
– Paul Krugman, Panic of the Plutocrats (via stoweboyd)
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What just happened? Why some of us seem totally... →
A new study of the brain by University of Cambridge scientists explains why some people can’t tell the difference between what they saw and what they imagined or were told about — such as whether they or another person said something, or whether an event was imagined or actually occurred.
[…]
This brain variation is present in roughly half of the normal population. It’s one of the last...
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Porn Is No Longer A Leading Indicator of Web... →
infoneer-pulse:
Adult entertainment studio Pink Visual announced the release of an API yesterday so Web and mobile developers can take advantage of the company’s content to create dynamic games, websites and native applications. There was once a time when this would have been significant news. It is not. The porn industry was once the leading pusher of technological adoption. If porn adopted a...
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New Scientist TV: Born to be Viral: Watch a... →
Today chip manufacturing can no longer be performed by human beings, soon surgery might be there as well. We simply wouldn’t trust a human surgeon to carve inside us anymore since the machines can do things individuals cannot and with much less errors.
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Personal technology at work: IT’s Arab spring |... →
The arrival en masse of personal technology in the workplace is causing waves. “Historically many IT departments have treated people as tech automatons who should do what they are told,” says Bob Tinker, the boss of MobileIron, which helps firms manage mobile devices.
[…]
Now, however, IT teams are facing a challenge to their authority. Much of what workers are demanding, including the...
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