Futurist
There are 396 posts filed in Futurist (this is page 30 of 40).
Is Traffic Making Us Lonely?
One nation, on the road, indivisible.
This month’s Atlantic cover story, “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?,” has contributed to an ongoing national debate over whether Americans are more socially isolated than ever before, and whether our dependence on electronic communications is keeping us from forming meaningful social ties.
But a generation ago — long before the invention of social media — a man named Donald Appleyard was investigating how automotive traffic isolates us from one another and diminishes our human connections.
via Is Traffic Making Us Lonely? – Commute – The Atlantic Cities.
Cheap Thoughts: automating appointments
After years of constant sessions spent updating our respective calendars, Kelly and I recently began to share our calendar details directly. It’s been much easier to know who’s supposed to be where, and it all happens automatically.
Why is it that coordinating appointments is still difficult if not impossible? I subscribe to a lot of mailing lists for charities and the like, and each one has important dates that they share with me. Yet, I have to manually add the information to my electronic calendar, risking typos and errors in the process.
Why hasn’t this been automated by now? An appointment has a set number of common fields, like date, time, description, participants, etc. It should be easy to standardize, yet everyone still does things the hard way. Why?
The iCalendar format was invented to solve this problem and most mail clients now support it. Still, it’s rare that I get an iCalendar invitation in my email: usually an event is described only in plain text. Why is this?
Facebook’s events are convenient for announcing events but this is only available to Facebook users. If someone came up with a easy-to-use calendaring server that put event details into an iCalendar format reached through a shortcut link, I think it would be heavily popular.
RTP seeks to be more inviting for smaller companies
RTP seemed like a great idea 60 years ago but the tide has turned against the idea of putting job centers in the boonies. The younger workers (you know, the ones graduating from the schools that put the triangle in “Research Triangle Park”) don’t want to own cars. They want to work where they live. They want to work in a dynamic environment, not one with “large amounts of green space.” Collaboration with others spurs new ideas, not navel-gazing in green pastures (or former pastures, as is the case with RTP).
Skyrocketing gas prices and different priorities among today’s younger workforce are what dooms RTP. Yes, RTP could survive if it can become a place where one can not just work but also live and play, but it’s an uphill battle that RTP cannot win. Durham and Raleigh are light years ahead of RTP in this regard and that’s where the job growth will go.
Two years ago, concerned about competition from other research parks within the state and around the globe, RTP hired a New York urban design firm to update its master plan for the first time since the park was formed in 1959.
Since then, the urgency has also heightened as new competitors – Durham’s American Tobacco Campus and N.C. State University’s Centennial Campus, to name two – have attracted numerous start-ups.
The park, meanwhile, has been hurt by appearing to be content to be a suburban, isolated campus environment, said Joel Marcus, CEO of Alexandria Real Estate Equities, a California company that has been in the park since 1998 and today owns nearly a million square feet of lab space in RTP.
“That’s really not today’s world,” he said.
via RTP seeks to be more inviting for smaller companies, quick innovation – Economy – NewsObserver.com.
Discovery’s final flight
Nasa HQ
I found out only this morning that the space shuttle Discovery would be making its final “flight” today, strapped to the back of its 747 Shuttle Carrier Aircraft for delivery to the Smithsonian’s Udvar-Hazy Center at Dulles Airport. I quickly tuned in the NASA channels on my FTA satellite and soon I saw the shuttle appear on the horizon.
Then something unexpected happened. Watching the shuttle and its carrier pass low over Dulles gave me chills. I did not expect to be so moved by this aging spaceship taking its victory lap, but I was. Suddenly I was a 12 year old kid again, cheering as the very first shuttle, Columbia, made its maiden flight. The thought occurred to me, am I watching the end of manned spaceflight?
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High-Tech Border Checks Will Blow Spies’ Cover
Wired has an absolutely fascinating story about how the U.S.’s border security paranoia has unwittingly made it very difficult for spies to use false identities. With biometric checking in effect, the days of a spy entering a country on a false passport are quickly coming to an end.
The increasing deployment of iris scanners and biometric passports at worldwide airports, hotels and business headquarters, designed to catch terrorists and criminals, are playing havoc with operations that require CIA spies to travel under false identities.
Busy spy crossroads such as Dubai, Jordan, India and many E.U. points of entry are employing iris scanners to link eyeballs irrevocably to a particular name. Likewise, the increasing use of biometric passports, which are embedded with microchips containing a person’s face, sex, fingerprints, date and place of birth, and other personal data, are increasingly replacing the old paper ones. For a clandestine field operative, flying under a false name could be a one-way ticket to a headquarters desk, since they’re irrevocably chained to whatever name and passport they used.
“If you go to one of those countries under an alias, you can’t go again under another name,” explains a career spook, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he remains an agency consultant. ”So it’s a one-time thing — one and done. The biometric data on your passport, and maybe your iris, too, has been linked forever to whatever name was on your passport the first time. You can’t show up again under a different name with the same data.”
via CIA’s Secret Fear: High-Tech Border Checks Will Blow Spies’ Cover | Danger Room | Wired.com.
The costs of jury service
I found out yesterday that the jury duty I almost had to perform was for the Kathy Taft murder case. While I was willing to serve, I am feeling very fortunate today not to have been tapped for this case. I work as a contractor and get paid by the hour and the contracting firm that employs me would’ve only paid for the first 40 hours of jury service. The Taft case will likely drag out for months, putting us in a significant financial bind. The $50 a day with which the court would’ve compensated me would not have come remotely close to bridging the gap. This all aside from the emotionally traumatic impact the case will have on all its jurors.
If these factors often weed out good juror candidates, what does that leave for our justice system? What can be done to allow people like me to serve without the risk of putting us in the poor house? Should trials be shortened solely to minimize the disruption on jurors, or would that be denying the defendant his or her due process rights?
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Young Americans not driving? Why would they?
I was mulling over the last post about young Americans not feeling the need for cars and I think I have one idea why.
It used to be that if you were a kid curious about the world we live in, you’d have go out and explore it. This usually required a car of some sort. Things are radically different now. Through the magic of the Internet (and 500+ channel cable/satellite TV), the world now comes to the kids! Kids nowadays can find out far more information on places and people than I ever could as a kid growing up. Outdated, dead-tree encyclopedias and magazines only take one so far.
While there’s still no substitute for actually being there, technology today can get one pretty close. With so much exploring available at their fingertips, kids can take their time deciding where they want to go.
Young Americans not buying cars
Wow. Transformational. The world is truly going to look a lot different very soon.
Kids these days. They don’t get married. They don’t buy homes. And, much to the dismay of the world’s auto makers, they apparently don’t feel a deep and abiding urge to own a car.
This week, the New York Times pulled back the curtain on General Motors’ recent, slightly bewildered efforts to connect with the Millennials — that giant generational cohort born in the 1980s and 1990s whose growing consumer power is reshaping the way corporate America markets its wares. Unfortunately for car companies, today’s teens and twenty-somethings don’t seem all that interested in buying a set of wheels. They’re not even particularly keen on driving.
The Times notes that less than half of potential drivers age 19 or younger had a license in 2008, down from nearly two-thirds in 1998. The fraction of 20-to-24-year-olds with a license has also dropped. And according to CNW research, adults between the ages of 21 and 34 buy just 27 percent of all new vehicles sold in America, a far cry from the peak of 38 percent in 1985.
via Why Don’t Young Americans Buy Cars? – Jordan Weissmann – Business – The Atlantic.
Cheap Thoughts: focused magnetic fields
Magnetic lines of force
I’ve been thinking that there must be a way to focus magnetic fields to very precise shapes. As I drove to work this week, I imagined my car driving through such a field in a way that my car’s speakers vibrated from the field’s effects, creating sound as the car moved through it. I think it would be a neat trick to get sound from a car’s speakers independent of whether or not they’re connected to anything!
For a while I’ve been thinking that perhaps magnetic fields could be used as antennas. Rather than have a big, metal dish to collect signals toward a focal point, a magnetic field could be generated that would invisibly reflect radio signals toward a focal point. By strengthening or weakening the field, the virtual dish could be expanded or contracted as needed, raising or lowering the gain.
Magnetic fields are circular in nature and the challenge would be how to create a parabolic shape with a field. I also have no idea if a magnetic field can even be made to reflect radio signals. It’s an interesting idea, nonetheless.
Update 25 March: I am reminded that a device exists that can beam sound to a remote location, only for this one the receiver isn’t just a speaker, it’s a human brain! Behold MEDUSA, which makes use of the microwave auditory effect.