The mentor-protégé relationship isn’t nearly as common as it used to be.
It used to in the past that mentors and coaches were assigned to employees. Workers were given a very clear road map to follow, and the definitions of success were clear (even if some of them were crazy).
Continue reading… “The future of mentorship”
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”
What about the combination of humans and machines predicting the future?
We would all like to know what the future is going to be like. We are talking about creating more accurate forecasts about what is likely to happen in the future. Supposedly, this is what pundits and analysts do. They’re supposed to be good at commenting on whether Greece will leave the Eurozone by 2014 or whether North Korea will fire missiles during the year or whether Barack Obama will win reelection.
Continue reading… “How to better predict the future”
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”
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It’s almost the end of 2012. Instead of looking back at the significant tech trends of 2012 we are going to look ahead to the near future, 2013. Being in the near future, these technologies are highly feasible. You will be hearing a lot more about these trends within the next 10 months and could possibly be experiencing them in some for or another.
Here’s the second annual list of Tech Trend predictions for the coming year.
Continue reading… “Top 20 tech trends for 2013”
Black swan
Self-confessed sceptic Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s bestseller The Black Swan ridicules the idea of predicting the future. Instead, he argues that the world is dominated by the impact of rare, unforeseen, random, highly improbable and yet influential events. These Black Swans, he says, happen abruptly, coming from outside the range of our vision.
Continue reading… “Testing the black swan theory”
Salman Khan, founder of Khan Academy
Salman Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, believes college should look very different from the typical four-year institution. The Khan Academy is a popular site that offers free online video lectures about a variety of subjects, lays out his thoughts on the future of education in his book, The One World School House: Education Reimagined, released last month. Though most of the work describes Mr. Khan’s experiences with Khan Academy and his suggestions for changing elementary- and secondary-school systems, he does devote a few chapters to higher education.
Continue reading… “New type of college proposed by Khan Academy founder”
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?”
A manifesto on the future of news published by Columbia University’s center for digital journalism argues that the news industry as we know it no longer exists.
Over the past few years there has been a lot written about the future of the news industry. They have written about how the rise of the web and social media have disrupted it, and how traditional players and others can recover from this disruption and repair their business models by using things like paywalls. But the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University says that trying to figure out how to repair or rebuild the news industry is a waste of time: the paper’s authors argue that there is no such thing as the “news industry” any more, in any realistic sense, and the sooner both new and existing players get used to that idea the better off everyone will be.
Continue reading… “How can post-industrial journalism adapt to the new realities of news?”
Google’s driverless car
California, Florida, and Nevada have made Google’s driverless cars street-legal and some day similar devices may not just be possible but mandatory. Some day automated vehicles will be able to drive better, and more safely than you can; no drinking, no distraction, better reflexes, and better awareness (via networking) of other vehicles. Within twenty to thirty years the difference between automated driving and human driving will be so great you may not be legally allowed to drive your own car, and even if you are allowed, it would be immoral of you to drive, because the risk of you hurting yourself or another person will be far greater than if you allowed a machine to do the work.
Lettuce vending machine
After a nuclear holocaust has blocked out the sun or rampaging zombies have taken over our farmland there is finally a device that will guarantee we can still grow vegetables in the dark. This Japanese lettuce-growing vending machinet doesn’t require sunlight (it uses fluorescent bulbs) and it can churn out a surprising yield of lettuce: 60 heads a day, or over 20,000 a year.
By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.
Learn More about this exciting program.