Here are five indicators, observations or articles that caught the eye of FA futurists today. Wired’s Clive Thompson calls for supplementing the Maker movement with a Fixer movement that would promote the skills needed to fix “broken” goods and pressure manufacturers to improve the repairability of their products. Bank analysts are warning that China may be reaching a “Minsky…
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Here are five indicators, observations or articles that caught the eye of FA futurists today. Using “big data” to evaluate the productivity of individual scientists may have unintended consequences. A recent editorial in Science argues that any automated scoring of an individual’s publication output discourages “risky and potentially groundbreaking work” and tends to steer scientists towards highly populated fields…
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Here are five indicators, observations or articles that caught the eye of FA futurists today. US researchers have developed an automated vaccine production facility that uses hydroponic irrigation to grow genetically modified tobacco plants for producing targeted biochemicals. This approach to biochemical production can cut the lead time for culturing new vaccines to approximately 6 weeks, increasing…
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Here are five indicators, observations or articles that caught the eye of FA futurists today. Smartphones now have a majority of marketshare in the US. A new survey from Pew Center for Internet and American Life found that 56% of adult mobile users in the US own mobile devices running iOS, Android or Windows 8 operating systems,…
DetailsHere are five indicators, observations or articles that caught the eye of FA futurists today. Association of Professional Futurists member Andrew Curry pointed out a 2011 paper from Microsoft and the University of New South Wales, “Six Provocations for Big Data,” that offers “critical questions about what all this data means, who gets access to it,…
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Here are five indicators, observations or articles that caught the eye of FA futurists today. Social media sites are continuing to pursue advertising as a way of increasing revenue. But what are social media’s obligations to the advertisers they attract? As companies and organizations continue to advertise both in general and to targeted audiences, the…
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Here are five indicators, observations or articles that caught the eye of FA futurists today. An opinion piece for MIT Technology Review notes that while “big data” has the potential to enable economic and social progress, we must be careful not to become so enamored of data that we “fail to appreciate its inherent ability to mislead,” e.g., by drawing…
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