Five Interesting Things: Today’s Scan Hits
Here are five indicators, observations or articles that caught the eye of FA futurists today.
- Fifty-nine percent of Americans are afraid of falling out of their current economic class, a poll finds.
- In this video interview, Dr. Susan Katz, a retired pediatrician and biochemist, discusses new research on “obesogens”–chemicals that may promote weight gain in humans and possibly other mammals.
- In a recent, detailed blog post, Stephen Wolfram describes the results of an extensive analysis of the age, geography, status, number of friends, structure of friendship network, and topics of posts of a large group of Facebook users. Data (for users of Wolfram|Alpha Personal Analytics for Facebook) range from median number of friends (342) to age distribution of friends (much broader for older users) to number of friends by geography (Iceland is a hot spot) to relocation of users between states and nations (highest flows to the US are from Canada, India, and China).
- Warren Meyers describes the trojan horse politics that are ideologically mirrored by the gun debate and the abortion debate. In both cases, the fear that “common sense reforms” are a mere step towards an eventual outright ban impedes political compromise.
- David Rieff warns of varieties of techno-utopianism in an article in Foreign Policy.