Five Interesting Things: Today’s Scan Hits
Here are five indicators, observations or articles that caught the eye of FA futurists today.
- A slew of new “Big Mother” apps and devices are coming online to nudge people into better behavior. These include cameras that watch posture, forks that alert a user if she is eating too quickly, and fitness devices that remind consumers to get out of their chairs/off their couches.
- In The Anatomy of Violence, Adrian Raine makes the case that there is strong evidence that biological and neurological traits are the foundation for criminal behavior. According to Raine, even a simple indicator like a low resting heart rate has a higher correlation to criminality than smoking has for lung cancer.
- Michael Lind argues that, despite recent events, decreasing political violence of all kinds is a long-term global trend.
- Airspace and drones constitute the “next great platform for innovation,” with outcomes and benefits as revolutionary as those of the Internet itself, argues Eli Dourado in this thoughtful piece for Wired.
- Continuing the momentum of mobile devices, Swipe launches into beta as a Web app to create and share presentations to anyone on any device.