The Scream sets a new record!
If he were alive, Edvard Munch would’ve screamed. You see, his iconic painting The Scream (the pastel version – one of four that Edvard has drawn) has just sold for a record $120 million at auction to an anonymous buyer.
The other three versions of The Scream are all owned by Norwegian museums, but Sotheby’s say the version they sold is the most colourful…
Continue reading… “‘The Scream’ sold for a record $120 million”
A new first for a private spaceship.
You are looking at the first private spaceship that will dock with the International Space Station: a SpaceX Dragon on top of a Falcon 9 rocket. It’s the beginning of the future of manned space travel, people…
Continue reading… “The first private spaceship that will dock with the International Space Station”
Doc Searls says our current ‘attention economy’ should be switched to an ‘intention economy’.
Every day companies are spending gobs of money to earn and keep your attention. Advertisers are collecting heaps of information about you in the hopes of presenting you with more targeted advertisements: advertisements on which you’ll want to click. Yet despite all of this information, advertising still pretty much sucks. It doesn’t have to be this way…
Continue reading… “The Intention Economy”
How does power get from there to here?
Electricity is generated at power plants. You know that already. But to really understand how it gets to your house—and why you can count on it getting there reliably—you have to understand that our electric system is more complicated than it looks. The electric grid isn’t just about you and your connection to a power plant. There are lots of thing that have to happen behind the scenes to make sure your refrigerator stays cold and your lights turn on…
Continue reading… “Where electricity comes from”
Function words – those unassuming “filler” words like the, this, though, I, an, there, and, that – are mightier than you think. For one, they’re a very good predictor of sex and love.
Yes, sex and love. Now that I’ve got your attention, on to the story of how analyzing the patterns of the use of these words in speech between two strangers in a speed dating scenario can be a very good predictor of who will get the date…
Continue reading… “Word usage predicts dating success”
One billion dollars neatly stacked.
With all the chatter about Billion dollar valuations — like Instagram, Evernote, Splunk — combined with recent S1 filings and IPOs, the topic of tech company valuation is coming to the forefront of people’s minds. Specifically related to the software industry, the growing number of SaaS IPO candidates of late is signaling an important shift in the way that enterprise software is built and sold. It also indicates that the subscription business model is here to stay. What does this shift towards a subscription economy means for startups, investors and the IPO landscape?
First of all – get Instagram out of your mind. The price it sold for is not relevant to us mere mortals who are building B2B software businesses. For all good, non-bubble reasons, SaaS companies need tens of millions in revenue, high growth, and solid business fundamentals. What you may notice though, is that revenue may be lower than what we’ve become accustomed to during the last few years of IPO drought…
Continue reading… “How much revenue does it take to be a $1B public company?”
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/41038445[/vimeo]
The Higgs Boson is kind of a big deal. If it does exist, it could provide a key to unifying the standard and quantum models of physics. But what is a Higgs Boson, what does it do, and how does it work? With the help of this animated short, UCI physics professor Daniel Whiteson breaks down the basics of this mysterious particle (or is it a field?) in a way even your parents can understand.
[Vimeo via Open Culture]
The languages you know affect how you think.
Back in 2002, psychologist Daniel Kahneman won the economics Nobel Prize for showing that human beings don’t have a really good intuitive grasp of risk. Basically, the decisions we make when faced with a risky proposition depend more on how the question is framed than on what the actual outcome might be.
The classic example is to tell a subject that there’s going to be a disaster. Out of 600 people, she has a chance of saving 200 if she takes x risk. If she doesn’t take the risk, everybody dies. Most people will take the risk in that scenario, but if you present the same situation and frame it differently—”If you take this risk, 400 people will die”—the decisions suddenly flip in the other direction. Nothing has changed about the outcome. But everything has changed in terms of how people feel about the decision they have to make. This is the kind of thing that matters a lot to economics because it helps to explain why economic behavior in the real world isn’t always as rational and self-interested as it is in theory…
Continue reading… “Thinking in a different language affects how you make decisions”
Futurist Thomas Frey: Every couple years, as the November election draws near, my wife Deb and I receive our ballots in the mail. Both of us spend considerable time studying the issues and candidates before making our final decisions. As with most couples, we don’t always agree.
Continue reading… “Pre-Testing Your Right to Vote”
Sucks for American clean tech. Never mind that the industry is pretty universally regarded as one of tomorrow’s most important drivers of job growth and innovation—the already too-meager, maddeningly scattershot government support for clean energy is about to dry up altogether. So, goodbye ARPA-E?
David Roberts points us to this graph from a newish report from the Breakthrough Institute, the World Resources Institute, and the Brookings Institution, and, as you can see, it’s not pretty. And that sad-looking $11 billion stump too will disappear unless there’s a shift in policy.
Here’s Roberts…
Continue reading… “U.S. on track to stop funding clean tech”
How much time do you have to read the privacy policies you encounter?
In The Cost of Reading Privacy Policies, by Aleecia M. McDonald and Lorrie Faith Cranor, the authors calculate that the average Internet user would have to spend one full working month per year in order to skim all the Internet privacy policies she encounters in a year. Mike Masnick reports on Techdirt…
Continue reading… “Reading all the privacy policies you “agree” to would take a month per year”
From left: physicists Luis Delgado-Aparicio and David Gates.
Physicists have discovered a possible solution to a mystery that has long baffled researchers working to harness fusion. If confirmed by experiment, the finding could help scientists eliminate a major impediment to the development of fusion as a clean and abundant source of energy for producing electric power…
Continue reading… “Scientists see solution to critical barrier to fusion”
By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.
Learn More about this exciting program.