Forecasting the News

Software Predicts Tomorrow’s News by Analyzing Today’s and Yesterday’s Technology Review (02/01/13) Tom Simonite Researchers at Microsoft and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have developed software that predicts when and where disease outbreaks might occur, based on 22 years of New York Times articles and other online data. Microsoft’s Eric [...]

instructable futures

A future scenario. Examines and amplifies existing technological and social changes. Thanks to persistant documentation, filtering, and tagging of everyone’s experiences, success, and failures, we live in a learning world. We engage with micro, ad hoc lessons on a daily basis. When we need it most, just-in-time guides and tutorials [...]

Disease Markets Crash

When technology allowed the financial sector to make transactions that exceeded the speed of the underlying business, the sector popped, detached, and began operating in the abstract. In this vacuum, the rules changed. Meanwhile, manufacturing, housing, and other real-world business were still tied to finance and dependent on its rhythm and [...]

Better Design does not Disappear

On Design in the Twenty-first Century Like most owners of a new restaurant, I buy glasses by the dozen, the cheaper the better. I do not own a restaurant but I live with a girlfriend who accidentally shatters one or two every week. “I’m just clumsy,” she explains. She graduated [...]