Flexibility is critical for young people because ‘whole careers are vanishing overnight’

2012 College of Medicine Graduation

Recent college grads

As the digital sector grows, jobs that rely on older technologies are rapidly becoming obsolete.

According to the census, between 2006 and 2011 there were some occupations where the number of people employed across the country dropped by up to two-thirds in just five years – corporate services managers, for example, fell from 21,804 in 2006 to 7365 in 2011.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 1966, 46% of workers in Australia were employed in production industries. 30 years later, that proportion has diminished to 28%.

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How solar powered drones are about to transform your life

 George Bye at the DaVinci Institute’s “Night with a Futurist” talking about the future of solar powered UAVs

George Bye is the founder of Bye Aerospace, a Colorado company involved in the design of a unique solar-electric powered aircraft that use solar electric energy, stored in batteries, to drive a propeller to both fly and stay aloft for long periods of time. A special combination of technologies and design will enable the current small UAVs to maintain station, with flight endurance of 8 to 12 hours at a time – several multiples of typical aviation gasoline fuel engine UAVs. A more extreme version of this capability will be engineered into Bye’s future aircraft (both civil and defense).

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Iowa is Creating the Digital Drivers License for Smart Phones

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Iowa residents may become the first in the U.S. to use a smartphone mobile app as their driver’s license.

The Iowa Department of Transportation wants to let drivers keep an electronic version of a license on an app, in addition (or in lieu of) the traditional plastic one you’d keep in a wallet.

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FAA Drags Feet on Drone Rulings

Many new drones are now making their debut – Image by media.salon.com

In August, the Federal Aviation Administration missed a key deadline for developing rules for small commercial drones. That failure has infuriated businesses that want to test and use drones for delivering goods, monitoring crops and doing other awesome things. Some have even threatened to move their drone research overseas if they can’t get permission to operate in the United States.
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Why Left-handed People Make Less Money

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There’s a stereotype that left-handed people are clumsier, but that might have something to do with the fact that they live in a world of objects optimized for the right-handed: scissors, the computer mouse, surgical tools, and guns, to name a few. The discrimination against the 12 percent of the population who are lefties has disarming historical roots. In the Middle Ages, left-handed writers were said to be the devil’s voice boxes, and the Jewish scholar Maimonides included sinistrality in his list of 100 imperfections that should preclude someone from priesthood.

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Turn Your Skin into a Touch Screen

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A paris-based design company is looking to take the wearable devices trend to the next level with the visualization of ‘cicret‘, a bracelet that projects the screen of your smartphone directly onto your wrist. currently in the prototype phase, the wristband remotely hooks up to a mobile device and emits the interface onto the wearer’s arm, allowing them to read emails, play games, answer calls and check the weather on the surface of the skin.

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Facebook is the most Complained about Brand

Facebook Study

We complain 879 million times/year (and Facebook is our top target)

We complain about brands an astonishing 879 million times a year on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media networks. A full 10 percent of us find something to be angry about publicly every single day.

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Which Smart Home Device will be Under your Tree this Year?

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Apple’s splash into home automation with addition of HomeKit to iOS 8 is expected to have a huge impact on sales of smart home devices in 2015 according to a Park Associates report that found 37% of U.S. Households plan to purchase one or more devices next year.

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Sneak Peek: George Lucas’ Future Museum

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Isolated, the words all sound so cliché. Organic. Flowing. Curvy. But set to the backdrop of Chicago’s blocky skyline, they assemble a brash thesis on the city’s future: The new George Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is a low-slung knoll inside a landscape of towering Lego, an Egyptian pyramid reimagined for the year 2020.

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What changes should we expect when robots replace workers?

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How long will it be before we see the first worker fired by a robot manager?

It is rather significant that economists are shifting their belief. Up until now, economists have believed that new jobs will replace lost jobs. Now the numbers suggest that is changing for the first time in history, and the trend is accelerating.

It’s also interesting to note the term, second economy. Defined as transactions between computers. That is measurable. It can be compared to the first economy. When the second passes the first, people matter less, in real numbers.

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Spray-On Solar

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Toronto’s Illan Kramer, Inventor of Spray-on Solar

Illan Kramer, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, and IBM Canada’s Research and Development Center has invented a new way to spray solar cells onto flexible surfaces using minuscule light-sensitive materials known as colloidal quantum dots (CQDs)—a major step toward making spray-on solar cells easy and cheap to manufacture. 

“My dream is that one day you’ll have two technicians with Ghostbusters backpacks come to your house and spray your roof,” says Kramer.

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Discover the Hidden Patterns of Tomorrow with Futurist Thomas Frey
Unlock Your Potential, Ignite Your Success.

By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.

Learn More about this exciting program.