Somewhat surprisingly, current workers said that having an impact job was more important than having children, a prestigious career, wealth, and community leadership. The top two most important things to have for happiness: financial security and marriage. Financial security still matters more than making a difference, but wealth isn’t important for people if they can do some good.
Source: fastcoexist.com
On "Growth in Low Growth Economy" by Eamonn Kelly & Steven Weber
A Monitor/GBN report on the current state of the economy.
There will inevitably be new and important risks ahead—but stepping around them is likely to prove the riskiest approach of all, as others less burdened with legacy assets and assumptions attack the new opportunity spaces. “Wait and see” is absolutely not the mindset and behavior pattern that has enabled the enterprise sector to drive the last 30 years of remarkable growth, spreading prosperity, increased opportunity, and transformation of human lives around the planet. It is time again for Western enterprises to embrace fully this dynamic moment, and to learn, experiment, invest, and commit—precisely the behaviors that have, for so long, served us and the world so well.
Libraries are changing, despite their facades. And they’re changing to high-tech service companies with embedded librarians, according to some library professionals. Of course, that assumes they aren’t defunded out of existence.
Future U: Library 3.0 has more resources, greater challenges | Ars Technica
This is the important point I strive to make in discussions with libraries: Libraries are not in control of their funding in the same way a company is, and must therefore be perceived by their governing bodies as a valuable resource in competition with all other services and resources that are competing about the available money… And when they are not, it doesn’t matter how much they have changed.
Source: Ars Technica
Kinect imaging lets surgeons keep their focus - tech - 17 May 2012 - New Scientist
On Tuesday last week, a surgeon at Guy’s and St Thomas’ hospital in London began trials of a new device that uses an Xbox Kinect camera to sense body position. Just by waving his arms the surgeon can consult and sift through medical images, such as CT scans or real-time X-rays, while in the middle of an operation.
Maintaining a sterile environment in the operating room is paramount, but scrubbing in and out to scroll through scan images mid-operation can be time-consuming and break a surgeon’s concentration or sense of flow. Depending on the type of surgery, a surgeon will stop and consult medical images anywhere from once an hour to every few minutes. To avoid leaving the table, many surgeons rely on assistants to manipulate the computer for them, a distracting and sometimes frustrating process.
Source: newscientist.com
The Future of Gamification | Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project
Tech stakeholders and analysts generally believe the use of game mechanics, feedback loops, and rewards will become more embedded in daily life by 2020, but they are split about how widely the trend will extend. Some say the move to implement more game elements in networked communications will be mostly positive, aiding education, health, business, and training. Some warn it can take the form of invisible, insidious behavioral manipulation.
The Internet, and all it has come to include, is the most powerful interruption technology ever invented. It slices and dices our focus, fractures and distracts it, gives us less and less of more and more. It prompts us to skim, scan, and skip rather than immerse ourselves in any one thing.
As the Nobel Prize winning economist Herbert Simon put it so presciently, back in 1970, even before there was an Internet: “What information consumes is rather obvious. It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
Joi Ito’s Near-Perfect Explanation of the Next 100 Years
“One hundred years from now, the role of science and technology will be about becoming part of nature rather than trying to control it.”
Full Story: Technology Review
We can see the trends already and it is really an important shift that will have profound implications - the problem is that it is probably deeper transformation than any traditional scientific paradigm shift and might therefore take much longer than humanity can wait.
Source: emergentfutures
The Big Shift: Challenge and Opportunity for Women
Posted by John Hagel on December 14, 2010, typepad.com
How are women affected by the longer-term changes that are transforming our business environment? This issue is rarely explored. Since I am on the edge anyway, I thought I would venture into this potentially sensitive topic.
L…
An interesting post by John Hagel about the masculine and feminine archetypes and their possible success in the future. Well worth thinking about!
The Campus Tsunami - NYTimes.com
This week, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology committed $60 million to offer free online courses from both universities. Two Stanford professors, Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, have formed a company, Coursera, which offers interactive courses in the humanities, social sciences, mathematics and engineering. Their partners include Stanford, Michigan, Penn and Princeton. Many other elite universities, including Yale and Carnegie Mellon, are moving aggressively online. President John Hennessy of Stanford summed up the emerging view in an article by Ken Auletta in The New Yorker, “There’s a tsunami coming.”
What happened to the newspaper and magazine business is about to happen to higher education: a rescrambling around the Web.
(via @mgorbis)
