The bathroom of the future is going to make your electric toothbrush look decidedly low-tech. A futurologist has predicted that in less than 25 years smart mirrors could perform health checks, while robots will be able to do a person’s make-up and even paint their nails.
You probably do some form of recycling if you live in the U.S. You probably separate paper from plastic and glass and metal. You rinse the bottles and cans, and you might put food scraps in a container destined for a composting facility. As you sort everything into the right bins, you probably assume that recycling is helping your community and protecting the environment. But is it? Are you in fact wasting your time?
The Fair Pay Act is a strict gender-equality law recently enacted in California. The law puts the burden of proof on a company to show that it has not shortchanged an employee’s salary based on gender. It’s a powerful tool to address a wrong that has already happened. But can discrimination be prevented in the first place? Even managers who don’t think they are biased may be—and just their word choices can send a signal. A new wave of artificial intelligence companies aims to spot nuanced biases in workplace language and behavior in order to root them out.
People in Berlin, Germany have created a store with eco-conscious customers in mind – the Original Unverpackt (Original Unpackaged). You won’t find any paper or plastic bags here—or any kind of bags for that matter. This new grocery store creates zero waste by allowing customers to purchase exactly how much they need, reducing waste in their homes.
The DaVinci Institute’s senior futurist and executive director, Thomas Frey, shares a glimpse at how current workplace trends – from freelancing to coworking – are shaping the future of recruitment.
Japanese car maker Toyota announced this month that it has planned to have self-driving cars commercially available by 2020 — the same year Nissan, General Motors and Google plan to have autonomous vehicles on the road.
By 2025, half of all adults under 32 won’t pay for traditional cable subscriptions, according to a new Forrester study. An online survey of 32,000 U.S. adults found that 76 percent subscribe to cable. Of the 24 percent who don’t pay for cable, 18 percent are cord-nevers—people who have never paid for a cable subscription—while 6 percent are cord cutters, meaning they have canceled their cable subscriptions. The report notes that this year, digital cord-nevers have surpassed cord cutters and represent “the next stage of evolution in TV viewing.”
Would you define your workplace as fun, friendly, inspiring, collaborative, and productive? If not, you may have to ditch your own desk and take a seat at a coworking space near you. Even if you aren’t an entrepreneur or freelancer, the benefits of coworking, according to Deskmag’s annual Global Coworking Survey, are pretty hard to ignore: 71 percent of participants reported a boost in creativity since joining a coworking space, while 62 percent said their standard of work had improved.
Bite-sized learning or micro learning is an e-learning paradigm that has taken the corporate training world by storm. In a recent survey conducted by Rapid Learning Institute, nearly nine out ten L&D professionals stated that bite-sized online learning modules are their priority. The huge increase in the use of short online learning modules has resulted in major changes in world of e-learning design and development. Let us now see what they are.
Futurist Thomas Frey: A few weeks ago I was asked to appear on CCTV, the Chinese-American television channel for an interview about the topic of border walls.
With the crisis in Syria deepening, affecting bordering countries and virtually all of the European Union, the show’s moderator asked me a series of tough questions about immigration trends and whether border walls, like the one proposed in Hungary, would become a growing trend.
In retrospect, the thoughts I conveyed on-air to this complex situation were not as crystallized as they could have been, forcing me to rethink my responses.
There seems to be no end to the benefits of electronic brain stimulation. Focused thinking, better memory, deeper sleep, relief from depression, reduced stress are among some of the benefits you read about on the internet. In particular, a technique called transcranial direct current stimulation is getting loads of attention from early adopters who rave about its potential and scientists who are trying to unravel what it can and cannot do.