This year, as the mainstream media
focused on the scandals of the day, THE FUTURIST looked at potential “fixes”
to big problems awaiting today’s and tomorrow’s young people. Generous
members of the World Future Society make that happen.

There are certain classic responses you will hear from people when they resist strategic ideas about the future. Let's say that you recognize a threat to your current business and suggest a course of action. One of my all-time favorite reactions you are likely to hear is:

"We tried that once in 1980s...it didn't work! So, you know, it can't work now, either."

We take this business of telling people what’s coming pretty seriously. Competitive Futures works with leaders of large, medium and small businesses to help them interpret weak signals in trends and forecasts to help them make wiser, more profitable decisions. There are no guarantees for outcome, only a rigorous methodology that can produce insights.

Special thanks to Alex Lightman for catching this.

What happens if global efforts to set and abide by strong carbon emissions cuts fail?

The standard answer to a question like this is that "we all suffer." While that's probably true, it misses the point -- we may all suffer, but we don't all suffer equally. Some nations will be hit harder by storms or droughts than others; some nations will have the resources and technologies to adapt better than others. And therein lies the potential for what may end up as a nasty tool of international competition.

Tom Friedman has an excellent column today comparing the
application of Dick Cheney's "One Percent" Doctrine on terrorism to
climate change.  As Friedman explains, the question is what to do
about potential events that are unlikely to happen, but if they do the
fallout would be catastrophic.

With that in mind, he counters about the downside if we're wrong on climate change:

There was a gem of a quote in today's NY Times coverage of the Obama's state dinner hosting India.  The First Lady, talking to some schoolchildren, said:

The Money Myth: School Resources, Outcomes, and Equity by W. Norton Grubb. Russell Sage Foundation. 2009. 400 pages. $35.

Increased funding does not guarantee improved school performance, according to Berkeley education professor W. Norton Grubb in The Money Myth. Despite lavish funding, he says, many U.S. school districts lag far behind others in the quality of education they offer their students. Those students will consequently be at a steep disadvantage throughout their adult lives.

(What?  You don't know what the heck "Eschatological" means either?  Let's ask our friends at Wikipedia: 

I’ll skip the poetry and just try and convey what went
through my mind through the launch. 

Given some stereotypes of social media users (I just told
a reporter from the German Press Agency that the Star Trek ones are
true :) ) this group is not a bunch of people who prefer to stare at their
iPhones instead of making eye contact.  In fact, their most defining
characteristic is the ability to have a great conversation.  They're
interesting and interested.  Their hyper sharing online translates into
hyper helpfulness offline.  And given the friendly nature of the
technical social channels, there's much more of a "we're all in this

Miles O'Brien was a featured speaker at today's NASA Tweetup for STS-129.  After a terrific speech (watch it here via UStream)about how the internet has changed journalism, he was kind enough to share his thoughts with me on how the quality of information delivered via social channels can be superior to that found in traditional media.  Listen carefully because I think Miles coined a new term that should resonate in social circles...the "editorial commons." 

Astronaut Mike Massimino on the stage now...he's the first person to Tweet from space.  "That's one 140 character message for man, one giant leap for social kind."  Sorry.  Way to cheesy.  But how can you not revert to being 10 years old at something like this?  Check out the famous video of Mike fixing the Hubble, and then later on Craig Ferguson.

 "On this day, before the eyes of an enormous gathering two men rose into the air...Two hundred thousand men, lifting their hands in wonder, admiring, glad, astonished; some in tears for fear the intrepid physicists should come to harm, some on their knees overcome with emotion, but all following the aeronauts in spirit...What with the novelty, the dignity of the experiment, the unclouded sky, welcoming as it were the travelers to his own element, the attitude of the two men sailing into the b

Off to a good start with Jon Cowart, the Arez I-X deputy mission manager on the ecology of Cape Canaveral.

On a related note...Right around 1960, Jay Barbree of NBC, the only reporter
to cover every spaceflight from Sputnik onward, found the Cape Canaveral of 1960 a place
where "bear-shared the natural habitat with alligator and deer, and
Indians buried their dead on sacred mounds."

Hey tweeps - How did YOU get ready for #nasatweetup?  This is was NASA was working on...

Driving down FL-528 tonight, I was looking down the long and creepy highway when I noticed some lights ahead.  It took an embarassingly long length of time to realize that they were stars.  You see, around New York City, you rarely see stars. And when you do, it's just one or two; not a field across the sky. 

The talk I gave at the New York Future Salon is now available!

The 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall has a lot of people thinking existentially, and their insights illuminate some interesting aspects of how we think about the past and future.

There are at least 4 stages of intelligence levels that AI will have to get through to get to the take-over-the-world level. In Beyond AI I refered to them as hypohuman, diahuman, epihuman, and hyperhuman; but just for fun let’s use fake species names:

* Robo insectis: rote, mechanical gadgets (or thinkers) with hand-coded skills, such as Roomba or industrial robots or automated call-center systems or dictation programs.
* Robo habilis: Rosie the housemaid robot level intelligence, able to handle service level jobs in the real world but not a rocket scientist.

BEST SECTORS FOR HOLIDAY HIRING

Retail: Only a portion of the retail jobs available are at the cash register or on the sales floor. There are a wide array of opportunities in back-office positions, including shipping, receiving, warehousing, accounting, information technology and security. There are also countless job opportunities in areas related to the support of retail, such as transportation, marketing, consumer product manufacturing, etc.

A new paper argues that cutting greenhouse gas emissions, switching to nuclear or geothermal power, and even sequestering carbon in the earth won’t stave off massively disruptive climate change. Greenhouse gases are less a threat to stable climate than is the excess heat produced when fuel is burned to create energy, say Swedish researchers Bo Nordell and Bruno Gervet.