My family took a trip to the beach this weekend over a particularly long Memorial Day break (thanks for the extra day off, school!). While at the hotel, my 9-y/o and her friends delighted and entertained themselves with a bit of the hotel’s legacy technology—the landline phones. We have been going to this same hotel…
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Five years ago I wrote that the spread of drones could inspire a curious revival. For some time to come, the best countermeasure against small UAVs might be a living creature. Specifically, a bird of prey such as a falcon, which could be trained to detect and destroy such devices. I doubt that the US…
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Here are five indicators, observations or articles that caught the eye of FA futurists today. Steve Waldman hypothesizes that the moribund economies of World 1 have fallen prey to a technology-driven resource curse. Elite access to finance capital and technology is becoming increasingly monopolized, impeding the re-distribution of economic resources to non-elites. According to Packaging World, waste-to-energy…
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Here are five indicators, observations or articles that caught the eye of FA futurists today. Richard Fernandez assesses the potential for a rapid proliferation of nuclear weapons in East Asia, and makes the observation that one consequence of declining US hegemony could be a global race to build or acquire nuclear weapons. Jane McAdam at the…
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For the past six years my colleague Terry Grim and I have taught the opening course in the Administrators Masters Program of the International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans. The class is a two-day plunge into management basics: leadership skills, management skills, fundamentals of project management, communication skills, customer service, and effective strategy—plus a practical…
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My 2.5 year-old daughter has developed an interesting new behavior: The beeping of the coffee pot, the chirp of the microwave, the bloop-bloop of the TiVo causes her to ask, “What does that noise mean?” Rather than focus on the source of the sound (“What was that noise?”) she is trying to understand and parse…
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The raid that killed Osama bin Laden yesterday has to have been one of the most secret operations in the world — and yet it was live-blogged by an inadvertent witness. Sohaib Athar, an IT consultant trying to get away from it all in the small Pakistani city of Abbottabad , was so irritated by…
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