Saudi King Abdullah
Thirty women were appointed to the previously all-male consultative Shura Council by Saudi King Abdullah in decrees published on Friday, marking a historic first as he pushes reforms in the ultra-conservative kingdom.
Continue reading… “Saudi King appoints 30 women to advisory council in historic first”
The enchanted era of geographic gaffes is coming to an end.
Tens of millions of iPhone users last week found that they could suddenly leave their homes again without getting either lost or cross. Google was finally able to release an app containing its own mapping system. Google Maps had been sorely missed for several months, ever since Apple booted it in favor of the company’s own inadequate alternative—a cartographic dud blamed for everything from deleting Shakespeare’s birthplace to stranding Australian travelers in a desolate national park 43 miles away from their actual destination. As one Twitter wag declared: “I wouldn’t trade my Apple Maps for all the tea in Cuba.”
Continue reading… “The end of the paper map”
Friday, Dec. 21 is the date some say the Mayans prophesized would be the end of the world.
More than 500 people from a fringe Christian group for spreading rumors about the world’s impending end have been detained by Chinese police, China’s state media reported Tuesday.
Continue reading… “More than 500 people detained in China for spreading doomsday rumors”
Futurist Thomas Frey: When is the last time you heard a statement that caused you to stop dead in your tracks?
It doesn’t happen very often, but for each of us, there are a few unusual sound bites that will permeate our senses and sway our thinking.
Continue reading… “Eight Shocking Quotes from 2012 that will Redefine Our Future”
Raymond Alvarez: Can you imagine the world if Mozart was unable to record his music? How tragic that would be to lose something that belongs to all generations.
Fortunately, his music survived to our day and has been masterfully reprised and recorded in different formats. I wonder, though, if we are not aware of or have forgotten the lesson of preserving Mozart’s music and the great trove of art and knowledge of civilization. A few have not.
Continue reading… “Our Rosetta Stone”
Futurist Thomas Frey: How many extra shavers, bars of soap, or cans of soup do you currently have on your shelves at home? How much money do you currently have tied up in “inventory” of typical household items? What if you could get by without any?
Continue reading… “Moving from Just-in-Case to Just-in-Time Living”
According to Taleb the future will not be cool.
What will your future surroundings look like in five, 10 or 25 years. Your imagination will probably see new things in it, things we call innovation, improvements, and killer technologies. These common concepts concerning innovation, we will see, are not just offensive aesthetically, but they are nonsense both empirically and philosophically.
Continue reading… “Nassim Nicholas Taleb tells us why futurists get it wrong”
Futurist Thomas Frey: When you buy a stock, you place a bet on how that stock will perform in the future. In a perfect world, where market insiders and manipulators are removed from the equation, the market is a terrific tool for determining the true value of companies being invested in.
Continue reading… “Will Big Data Destroy the Stock Market?”
Much of what we believe to be factual has an expiration date.
In primary school you learned that there were nine planets in the solar system. There weren’t any that were known to exist outside of it. Since then, astronomers have spotted over 800 planets around other stars (and thousands more “candidates”) and demoted Pluto to a mere “dwarf planet”. Even a cursory glance at other fields reveals similar patterns.
Continue reading… “Samuel Arbesman explains ‘The Half-life of Facts’”
Futurist Thomas Frey: For most of us, the language we speak is like the air we breathe. But what happens when we wake up and find that our air is going extinct?
Continue reading… “Creating a Global Language Archive”
Futurist Thomas Frey: It may sound silly to walk into a bar and order up a beer with a weed chaser or to open a late night box of cereal called “Weedies” to help you sleep, but that is exactly the era we’re entering.
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/52954702[/vimeo]
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In an introductory article on Ruby, creator Yukihiro Matsumoto said, “For me the purpose of life is partly to have joy. Programmers often feel joy when they can concentrate on the creative side of programming, So Ruby is designed to make programmers happy.”
Happy computer programmers?
In this interview, world renowned futurist Thomas Frey talks to Yukihiro Matsumoto, or “Matz,” as he is known online, about how and why he created the Ruby programming language, what interested him in creating a programming language rather than creating video games, plus what it means to bring the languages newest version, Ruby 2.0, to the programming community.
By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.
Learn More about this exciting program.