Meat vs. Miles

Carnegie Mellon University's Christopher Weber and H. Scott Matthews argue in a new report in Environmental Science and Technology that, when it comes to the environmental (especially carbon) impact of food webs, the presence of meat in the diet matters more than the distance the food has traveled.

IFTF in the news

The Institute's new future of making map got a mention in the New York Times.

As important as tinkering has been to the nation’s past, it could become a much bigger deal before long, said David Pescovitz, a research director at the Institute for the Future, a consultancy in Silicon Valley. A new report from the institute argues that the makers could force enormous changes in the ways that goods and services are designed and manufactured. The renewed urge to tinker, along with flexible manufacturing technologies, could shift production from big companies and stores to communities of makers and consumers, Mr. Pescovitz said.

"It’s about having a deeper connection with the stuff around you, and through that with the people around you," he said. That is why his research group took the slogan from the pins given out at the Futurama pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair — "I have seen the future" — and edited it for the report to "I am making the future."

"If you want something done right, do it yourself. That’s really what it’s about," Mr. Pescovitz said.

Maoists on the Streets of Mumbai? Coming Soon

BusinessWeek Asia is reporting some genuine news for me - about the growing threat of India's home grown Maoist insurgency, the Naxalite movement, that is starting to bubble over after decades of simmering in the remote countryside. Now that Maoists have overthrown the Nepalese government:

Workbook in Resilience Assessment -- the Wiki

The Resilience Alliance, an organization promoting the study and support of social and environmental resilience, has converted its Resilience Assessment Workbooks into wiki format. According to the alliance's Allyson Quinlan, 

Watch Your Carbon Footprint As You Go

Participatory web service Dopplr, which allows individuals to coordinate travel and inform colleagues about where they'll be, has now introduced a tool for calculating the carbon footprint of your journeys.

Dopplr co-founder Matt Jones describes its purpose this way:

Green Games

Jon Lebkowsky has a piece in the Austin Chronicle entitled "The Serious Play in Saving the World," building on the South-by-Southwest panel he ran in March. It's a strong piece on the state of green gaming, and both its potential and challenges.

The Bionic Athlete

The cover story of the current ESPN Magazine, "Let 'Em Play," explores the bigger issues surrounding the augmentation of our biological bodies with prosthetic technologies. The story's author, Eric Adelson, looks at a cross-section of prosthetic enhancements, some allowable, some not, and notes that this wouldn't be the first

Maker Faire: It's About Rethinking Assumptions

Maker Faire opened today with a Maker Day—a time for Makers to meet each other and showcase some of their cool projects. As I was listening to Umberto Crenca, one of the founders of AS220, a non-profit arts center in Providence, RI, that provides spaces for different types of media artists and performers, it occurred to me that the Faire is not just about seeing great DIY projects, it is about much more; it is about breaking established modes of thinking, established approaches to living, working, organizing.

The X2 project

For the last 6 months or so, I've been working on a big new project at the Institute. I haven't written that much about it, as we've been... quiet. Now, though, we're starting to take the project public.

On Morning Edition

Cyrus Farivar quotes me at the end of his latest NPR Morning Edition piece, "High-Tech Pen Makes Note-Taking Easier." In my sound bite, I reveal that I like my Moleskine notebook because it's harder for me to break paper than the screen on my Nokia N95.

Post-scientific society

I've been in Malaysia and Singapore this week, conducting workshops on the future of science and innovation. It's been a very interesting week, talking to scientists in Penang and Kuala Lumpur about the future of science, and what role they see Malaysia playing in that future. The people I've been talking to are pretty convinced that Malaysia, which has a respectable but not world-class scientific community, can evolve into a global player in science in the next couple decades. They don't want to emulate American and European institutions: you won't see multi-billion dollar particle accelerators here any time soon. But they're pretty aware that cloud computing, cheap genomics, and other inexpensive research tools will lower the economic bars to develop world-class competence in some important fields. So I was especially struck by Gregg Zachary's latest column in the New York Times, which asks, "might cheap science from low-wage countries help keep American innovators humming?"

Biocitizens and Advertizing

A recent piece in the NYT BITS blog has some interesting ramifications for our forecasts on biosocial identities and affinities. It discusses a set of “compromises” reached by the Network Advertising Initiative, an advertising trade association.

The lists of restrictions and red-flag categories represented here is about as culturally loaded as you can get, but what drew my attention was the way that biological identities, biological affinities, online collective organization were called out as particularly tricky areas of “behavioral correlation.”

Food vs. Fuel Heats Up

The food vs. fuel debate has really flared up in the last few weeks, with food riots in places like Haiti threatening major political disruption. This has been building up rapidly for the last year.

The New York Times reports today:

Read more >

Time-lapse Video from TYF Conference

As promised, Jerry Michalski's time-lapse video from the Ten-Year Forecast Conference on Thursday, April 10, 2008.

Thanks to all who joined us at the conference!

2008 Ten Year Forecast conference

The Institute's 2008 Ten Year Forecast conference is going on today at the Mission Bay conference center. The center is part of the new UCSF Mission Bay campus, which is a pretty extraordinary piece of city redevelopment. It's also a very fitting place for this year's conference, as we're talking about innovations in biology and ecology, sources of new economic value, and the development of "amplified humans"-- all things that are happening here.