In his new novel Existence, David Brin writes about an unusual contact with aliens. Photo: Cheryl Brigham

Best-selling author and futurist David Brin doesnt mince words when it comes to his disdain for Yoda, the diminutive sage of the Star Wars saga.

[dewplayer:http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/underwire/geeksguide66.mp3"]

I consider Yoda to be just about the most evil character that Ive ever seen in the history of literature, says Brin in this weeks episode of the Geeks Guide to the Galaxy podcast.

Brin is just as unsparing when it comes to Star Wars creator George Lucas, whom he accuses of peddling romantic claptrap about how demigods and mystic warriors are better than democracy.

For Brin, narratives that glorify the prerogative of an elite caste are no trivial matter. His 1998 book The Transparent Society argues that current notions of privacy allow the rich to operate in secret as they dismantle democracy. Unless we have radical transparency in human civilization, says Brin, this attempted putsch by a new aristocracy is going to succeed.

Read our complete interview with David Brin below, in which he explains why SETI is doing it wrong, muses about whether self-righteous indignation is a form of addiction, and talks about his epic new first-contact novel, Existence. Or listen to the interview in Episode 66 of Geeks Guide to the Galaxy (above), which also features a discussion between hosts John Joseph Adams and David Barr Kirtley and guest geek Rob Bland about Batman in film, comics and television.

Wired: Tell us about your new novel, Existence. Whats it about?

David Brin: Existence is about the world of roughly 2050, and terrible things have happened, but guess what? People have reacted to the terrible things by coping, as they always have. Theyre dealing with it. Theyre dealing with living in a world of augmented reality, where youd step outside and you can scroll through all the overlays of augmented reality that are laid upon the surface world. Google Glass is just heading us down in that direction, but I take it 40 years into the future.

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Why David Brin Hates Yoda, Loves Radical Transparency

How can understanding the trends and technologies of tomorrow transform your business today? Best-selling author and global futurist Jack Uldrich invites readers to explore how key developments are creating and redefining what it takes to compete and win in the future in his new book Foresight 20/20.New York, NY (PRWEB) August 08, 2012 The rapid advancement of technology has already redefined ...

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Futurist and Forecaster Jack Uldrich Releases New Book

Thousands from the computer graphics community might live a little longer if they attended Monday's keynote at annual computer graphics confab Siggraph, taking place this week at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

Game developer and futurist Jane McGonigal -- director of game research and development at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, Calif., and author of Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make us Better and How they Can Change the World (2011) -- believes that games can make us more optimistic, more resilient.

STORY: Jane McGonigal: How Video Games Can Change Your Life

She did extensive research, and she explained that scientific studies suggest playing games can and have helped those with autism, ADHD, PTSD and even cancer.

We are in the business of the art of shaping peoples destinies, McGonigal told the crowd of content creators, technology researchers and educators. We need skills and abilities to get the future we want physical, mental, social and emotional resilience. When I think about games, Im very interested in what abilities they create and also the destinies they lead us toward.

McGonigal explains that games bring out positive emotions, including curiously, excitement, contentment, creativity, wonder, joy, relief, love, purpose and pride.

STORY: Siggraph: Biz Braces for Higher Frame Rates in Wake of 'The Hobbit'

Demonstrating her belief, McGonigal has created a game, SuperBetter (available at the App Store), which helps players built their resilience through various tasks. During her keynote, McGonigal led an estimated 3,000 Siggraph attendees through a sampling of the game. Tasks included raising their fists in the air for five seconds -- worth plus-one physical resilience every single second that you are not sitting still, you are actively improving the heath of your heart, and your lungs and brain.

McGonigal concluded that those who participated earned an extra 7.5 minutes of life.

In the end, she had one last task for the crowd -- decide how to spend those bonus minutes.

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Siggraph 2012: Keynoter Jane McGonigal Says Playing Games Can Improve Health, Extend Lives

Great innovations are often launched on modest budgets, writes Tim Longhurst, a trend spotter and futurist, and founder of strategy consultancy, Key Message. For small business owners setting up in business with the expectation...

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Get The Answers: Short-term strategy essential for new ventures

When President Obama called on the U.S. military to shift its focus to Asia earlier this year, Andrew Marshall, a 91-year-old futurist, had a vision of what to do.

Marshalls small office in the Pentagon has spent the past two decades planning for a war against an angry, aggressive and heavily armed China.

No one had any idea how the war would start. But the American response, laid out in a concept that one of Marshalls longtime proteges dubbed Air-Sea Battle, was clear.

Stealthy American bombers and submarines would knock out Chinas long-range surveillance radar and precision missile systems located deep inside the country. The initial blinding campaign would be followed by a larger air and naval assault.

The concept, the details of which are classified, has angered the Chinese military and has been pilloried by some Army and Marine Corps officers as excessively expensive. Some Asia analysts worry that conventional strikes aimed at China could spark a nuclear war.

Air-Sea Battle drew little attention when U.S. troops were fighting and dying in large numbers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now the militarys decade of battling insurgencies is ending, defense budgets are being cut, and top military officials, ordered to pivot toward Asia, are looking to Marshalls office for ideas.

In recent months, the Air Force and Navy have come up with more than 200 initiatives they say they need to realize Air-Sea Battle. The list emerged, in part, from war games conducted by Marshalls office and includes new weaponry and proposals to deepen cooperation between the Navy and the Air Force.

A former nuclear strategist, Marshall has spent the past 40 years running the Pentagons Office of Net Assessment, searching for potential threats to American dominance. In the process, he has built a network of allies in Congress, in the defense industry, at think tanks and at the Pentagon that amounts to a permanent Washington bureaucracy.

While Marshalls backers praise his office as a place where officials take the long view, ignoring passing Pentagon fads, critics see a dangerous tendency toward alarmism that is exaggerating the China threat to drive up defense spending.

The old joke about the Office of Net Assessment is that it should be called the Office of Threat Inflation, said Barry Posen, director of the MIT Security Studies Program. They go well beyond exploring the worst cases. ... They convince others to act as if the worst cases are inevitable.

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U.S. model for a future war fans tensions with China and inside Pentagon

Futurist website nowandnext.com put together this awesome infographic predicting all of the technologies, behaviors, and ideas that will probably be distant memories by 2050.

Among their predictions: no more retirement four years from now, no more secretaries six years from now, and no more free parking or sit-down breakfasts by 2019.

The European Union is seen as surviving the current crisis before extinct in 2039.

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Everything That Will Go Extinct In The Next 40 Years [Infographic]

Martinsville Bulletin, Inc. P. O. Box 3711 204 Broad Street Martinsville, Virginia 24115 276-638-8801 Toll Free: 800-234-6575

Wednesday, August 1, 2012

By PAUL COLLINS - Bulletin Staff Writer

Futurist David Houle said the educational system in the U.S. is outdated and needs to be transformed.

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Speaker: Education needs to be transformed

"Filmmaker, futurist, epiphany addict" Jason Silva has produced a series of videos that combine natural imagery with philosophy.

Silva contacted us after reading our article on a studyby Melanie Rudd of Stanford Graduate School of Businesson the positive effects on awe.He said his videos were meant to "capture and disseminate AWE itself." We agreed and published his video on patternsto as a demonstration of the theory.

Still the video was only indirectly related to awe. Now Silva has done one better by devoting an entire video to awe. He writes:

As amazing as that study is, it still leaves us with the question, If AWE is good for us, how exactly can we define it? Well this is exactly what my video WILL BE: a visceral representation and explainer of what the study really means....

Check it out:

The Biological Advantage of Being Awestruck - by @Jason_Silva from Jason Silva on Vimeo.

Continue reading here:

Jason Silva's Latest 'Awe' Video Is Designed To Blow Your Mind

With Google Glasses and other potential competing products coming into the limelight, the technological consciousness is going to slowly merge with the expectations set for us by science fiction books and futurist designs. To understand how one element of augmented realitythe ability to overlay UIs and instructions on visioncan affect our social interaction and our skills we need look no further than current video games and the concept of gamification.

Gamification is the process of giving game-like attributes to everyday goals, its used by websites to attract and retain visitors with numbers and fill-up-bars, its used by school teachers to gain compliance from students, and its even used by some corporations to help train and refresh the skills of workers. With a project like Google Glass it wouldnt be too difficult to project game-like interfaces onto everyday tasks and train a person to do something they otherwise would need a hands-on instructor to do.

A recent epic videoSIGHT by Eran May-raz and Daniel Lazoon Vimeo brings to mind the varied ways augmented reality could totally reconstruct our lives using augmented reality, futuristic sensor technology, and gamification (plus, no end of creepy cyberpunk dystopia to close off the social commentary.)

Watch the video below and think about how this will shape the consumer experience.

Apps become reality; physicality is more than just what we see but what we know

Right now, we have the nascent designs in our grasp for people to download apps to smartphones that enable them with instant information retrieval, extremely accurate GPS, and even search systems that look at peer groups to help decide what might be good to eat. Ive even looked into numerous advantageous technologies that could be combined into Google Glass to make a wearers life not just easier, but more interesting.

With an augmented reality system, hands-free manipulation of data would be only an eye-flick away as would a great deal of information otherwise locked away in a book, computer, or smart phone. Forget fingertips, being able to more quickly bring information into a heads-up-display or access it via the visual field could greatly speed up a persons capability to respond to an adapting information scenario (dating is a good one; although a rather antisocial science fiction social commentary here.)

I imagine that people would use things like Google Glass to convey information about interesting subjects, foment conversations about the news and lifestyle based on opinion and Wikipedia and grease our ability to better understand one anotherrather than just manipulate one another. The possibility of using emotion-recognition or other deep-sensor technology with Pick-Up-Artist tactics, of course, will likely become vogue enough to generate some wariness but we dont need technology to ruin the dating scene for us we do that by ourselves well enough already.

SIGHT does an excellent job of introducing multiple app-driven technologies that suggest a framework for how augmented reality might surpass our current experience. Replace television sets, instruct on how to chop a cucumber, provide directions to restaurants, and even drive communication across great distances.

Technologies like Google Glass are still in their infant stages from this sort of future; but what we do with it is being decided right now.

Read more:

Where We Can Go With Augmented Reality: The Spartan Gamified World Revisited in SIGHT

So you die in 2050. Then, a few decades later, your ancestors pick up your brain at the local cranium depot, upload it to a computer and read your memories. Maybe they reanimate you with an artificial body.

This scenario, brought to you by chemical brain preservation, is a hypothetical procedure where doctors preserve a dying persons brain complete with memories and knowledge for a possible revival later.

This is just another way of having another morning, says John Smart, sounding a bit like fictional ad man Don Draper reciting a slogan. Its just a very unusual strange way, now my morning is 50 years later, I wake up again.

Smart is a futurist and this weekend, futurists from around the world will converge at Torontos Sheraton Centre for their yearly conference about intriguing technologies and ideas. Smart, who is the co-founder of the Brain Preservation Foundation, will talk about how to live forever.

The idea is that if the synapses and connections of the brain are preserved at death, the contents of the brain your broken arm from soccer, that time you vomited on the bus downtown, the birth of your child may be understood later, when neuroscience is more advanced.

Someone will eventually crack the long-term memory code, to show which chemicals need to be preserved, Smart said.

But first, the preservation of the entire brain must be perfected like a very high end, rigorous embalming. Neuroscientists can already preserve small volumes of brain tissue after death, but The Brain Preservation Foundation is holding a contest with a $25,000 prize to the first team to perfectly preserve all the connections inside a mouses brain, and a $75,000 purse for the preservation of the large mammalian brain, using either cryogenics or plastination.

You have to have a preservation technique that will very quickly go in after the animal dies, before any cell damage starts occurring, and lock down all those protein molecules, to keep them from being able to decay and interact with each other, he said.

So far, two teams are competing, with judges from Harvard and MIT. Things seem reasonable so far.

We might come across something that makes it unreasonable at any one of these steps, he said. The biggest weirdness is this whole process, the idea that people can be preserved.

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Futurists converge on Toronto to discuss brain preservation, technology, and how we might live...

Futurist author Neal Stephenson regaled a bleary-eyed but enthusiastic Black Hat crowd with behind-the-scenes tales of baking science into his fiction and the struggles in creating a first-person video game sword-fighting system.

Neal Stephenson, right, discusses his fiction writing and his sword-fighting Kickstarter project with journalist Brian Krebs at Black Hat 2012.

LAS VEGAS -- It's been a double-whammy of stardom for the attendees of the 15th annual Black Hat USA conference. Many people here suffered a line more commonly associated with Comic-Con or CES to get into an exclusive performance by electronica and trance legend Paul Oakenfeld at Club PURE last night.

And then this morning, they rubbed the hangover from their eyes and the ringing from their ears to listen to an on-stage conversation with noted science fiction author Neal Stephenson in the Caesar's Palace convention center.

Stephenson spoke for almost an hour with Brian Krebs, the investigative journalist who writes about security. While they ranged from his childhood influences to his books to his non-writing projects, Stephenson's face lit up as they discussed his recent Kickstarter project, "Clang."

"The level of technical detail in [first-person] shooters is out of control," he said. "I can still remember the first shooter I played when the game actually kept track of how many rounds I had left in my magazine. I was a bit offended by that," he said, as the crowd erupted in laughter. "I didn't want to think about that! I just wanted to hold the trigger down forever."

Clang is a project that aims to take what Stephenson describes as a growing interest in historical Western martial arts, specifically different forms of sword-fighting, and gameify them. Clang beat its goal of raising more than $500,000.

When Krebs said that he was originally surprised to learn that many DefCon regulars were also gun aficionados, Stephenson said that while he likes guns, they don't hold the appeal of finely honed steel. "I don't geek out on firearms the way I do on swords. Using [guns] seems like an inordinately inefficient way to make holes in pieces of paper," he smirked to more laughter from the crowd -- some of whom were definitely the kind of DefCon regular that surprised Krebs.

Stephenson's writing also figured large into the conversation, especially his research process when preparing to write a book. "I'm almost a little ashamed to call it research," he admitted, "since it's not what real researchers do. It's this sleazy process of skimming through a book and cherry-picking things -- [then] I change all the details."

One example he gave of this was how he applied the case of the infamous I Love You virus to a modern massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) in his most recent novel, "Reamde." Other times, he said, he envisions scenarios that we all dream of, such as the character Ivanov in "Reamde" who has enough money to seek revenge on the virus writers who hurt his business.

See the article here:

Pen and sword equally mighty for science fiction's Stephenson

English: Roadside billboard of Deng Xiaoping at the entrance of the Lychee Park in Shenzhen (Photo credit: Wikipedia) By Alex Zhu, Futurist, Technology Innovation, SAP It was a rainy Friday afternoon. After a four-hour train trip from Shanghai, I finally arrived at Linhai, a coastal city located in the south of Zhejiang [...]

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From World Factory To Learning Society - The Education Landscape In China And The Future Plan

Posted in Fashion / Clothing & Accessories / Fashion blog / Fashionable accessories

The modernist mosaic of laser-cut vectors that makes up each Baguera clutch could have you drawing associations with any number of things. Origami folds, Art Deco geometries, pieces of a futurist puzzle Call me a 12 year old boy, but I cant help but see the Transformers logo sleeping within their fragmented shapes.

Like those transforming giants of cartoon Mecha, the Baguera clutches have movement and flexibility of form. They may not transform completely, but their shape will morph and change with the contents within, the soft faux-leather underneath their armour fragments allowing them the freedom of flexibility.

Article continues. To read it in full visit 'Multi-faceted, modernist clutches: Baguera' at Fashionising.com

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Multi-faceted, modernist clutches: Baguera

Acclaimed global futurist and iconoclastic “chief unlearning officer” Jack Uldrich has been selected to deliver a seminar on future trends in higher education to senior leaders of the Cuyahoga Community College, Ohio's largest community college. Uldrich will review major educational industry trends, including advances in open-source education, mobile web communication, interactive and ...

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Educational Futurist Jack Uldrich to Discuss the Future of Higher Education

The fertile minds of the futurist-designers at Nieuwe Heren (they of " Beauty and the Geek " keyboard-pants infamy) have been in touch to tell us about their latest design: a jacket named the Aegis Parka that both senses and offers protection from airborne pollutants common to inner cities. The worse the air quality, the more integrated LEDs on the jacket's front light up. .. Continue Reading ...

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Nieuwe Heren's Aegis Parka lights up in bad air

What is a futurist? Not a fortune teller, oracle or prophet. Futurists are simply people who take foresight seriously, applying past and emerging trends to envision how our lifestyles and industries will develop in the years ahead.

But the future isnt what it used to be: What was once a field dominated by experts such as Future Shock author Alvin Toffler or artificial-intelligence guru Ray Kurzweil is now becoming one that involves more amateurs, as large-scale information and the processing power to analyze it become more accessible. And thats a welcome development to most of the pros.

Really, anybody who has a prefrontal cortex is a futurist, says Patrick Tucker, communications director of the World Future Society. We spend the vast majority of our time thinking about the future. This is where we plan, where we create actions we are going to commit ourselves to.

Next weekend, Toronto will host the World Future Conference, bringing together people from disparate fields to discuss how the world is changing and how it ought to.

Next in food: Mass-produced fish and sub-Saharan flavours

Taking saltwater fish and raising them in a warehouse 500 kilometres away from the sea may not sound appetizing at first.

But putting [fish] indoors in higher-density areas, as unromantic as it sounds, has a lot of benefits, says Josh Schonwald, journalist and author of The Taste of Tomorrow. It eliminates a lot of the problems that have been associated with traditional aquaculture fish escaping and breeding with native populations, as well as unsightly coastlines and a general negative impact on marine ecosystems.

That may be how well get our protein, but what about the flavours of the future what global cuisine will be the next Thai? Mr. Schonwald says our hunger for ethnic exploration will lead us to the one area that has been off the radar for most North Americans: the foods of sub-Saharan Africa, such as chicken yassa, egusi soup, shrimp piri piri, jollof rice and baobab juice.

African fusion [is] already happening in the UK there's a small company called Bim's Kitchen that is introducing African-influenced condiments, like African ketchup spiced with distinctively African peppers, a curried egusi sauce and smoky baobab barbecue sauce.

Exposure to new cuisines can also alter our attractions or aversions to certain tastes, Mr. Schonwald says such as bitterness. In his book, he profiles a man who is trying to introduce radicchio, a bitter salad green enjoyed in Italy, to Americans.

Go here to read the rest:

Four ways futurists see the world changing, from food to technology

SAN FRANCISCO, July 19, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Next week, Black Hat, producer of the world's premier information security events, will celebrate its 15th anniversary in Las Vegas with more than 6,500 high-level security experts, bringing together a community of public and private sector security professionals, academics and researchers. Experts from around the globe will be revealing the newest cyber security research, from breaking vulnerabilities to important findings that impact everything from global cyber espionage to personal computing. Black Hat is commemorating its storied history by bringing back five of the original 1998 speakers: Jeff Moss, Bruce Schneier, Marcus Ranum, Adam Shostack and Jennifer Granick, who will share their vision of security for the next 15 years with their panel, "Smashing the Future for Fun and Profit" on Wednesday, July 25th. For more information and to register before the online registration deadline of July 20th, please visit http://www.blackhat.com.

Over the past 15 years, a unique and neutral forum has been created at Black Hat, where the security community can come together public, private and independent practitioners to exchange research, theories and experiences with the common goal of managing the ever-evolving threat landscape. The first Black Hat "futurist panel", being held on July 25th at 10:15am, brings together these industry veterans to discuss today's cutting edge research and emergent technologies, while reflecting back on where the security community has come from.

"No matter which incidents you examineor which ones your enterprise must respond toone thing is clear: security is not getting easier. The industry relies upon the Black Hat community to bring them timely security research and education," explained Black Hat General Manager, Trey Ford. "Bringing back these renowned experts is our way to celebrate the security community's past, present and future."

Online registration for Black Hat USA 2012 ends Friday, July 20th. Register now to save $400 on this year's show, featuring nine tracks and forty-nine live, onstage demonstrations presented by more than one hundred of the community's most respected security researchers.

Sponsors of this year's Black Hat include Diamond Sponsors: Qualys, Microsoft and Lookingglass Cyber Solutions; Platinum Sponsors: Accuvant LABS, Blue Coat Systems, Core Security, Cisco, IBM, Lieberman Software, LogRhythm, Mykonos Software, RSA, Symantec, Trustwave and Verizon.

To request media credentials to the event please see http://bit.ly/BHUSAmedia.

Follow Black Hat on Facebook; Black Hat on LinkedIn; #BlackHatEvents on Twitter; Black Hat Events on Flickr.

About Black Hat Black Hat provides briefings and training to leading corporations and government agencies around the world. Black Hat differentiates itself by working at many levels within the corporate, government, and underground communities. This unmatched informational reach enables Black Hat attendees to be continuously aware of the newest vulnerabilities, defense mechanisms, and industry trends. Black Hat Briefings and Trainings are held annually in Europe and Las Vegas. Black Hat is produced by UBM TechWeb. More information is available at http://www.blackhat.com.

About UBM TechWeb UBM TechWeb, the global leader in technology media and professional information, enables people and organizations to harness the transformative power of technology. Through its three core businesses media solutions, marketing services and paid content UBM TechWeb produces the most respected and consumed brands and media applications in the technology market. More than 14.5 million business and technology professionals (CIOs and IT managers, Web & Digital professionals, Software Developers, Government decision makers, and Telecom providers) actively engage in UBM TechWeb's communities and information resources monthly. UBM TechWeb brands include: global face-to-face events such as Interop, Black Hat and Enterprise Connect; award-winning online resources such as InformationWeek, Dark Reading, and Network Computing; and market-leading magazines InformationWeek, Wall Street & Technology, and Advanced Trading. UBM TechWeb is a UBM plc. company, a global provider of news distribution and specialist information services with a market capitalization of more than $2.5 billion.

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Black Hat Marks 15th Anniversary By Bringing Back Experts Who Presented 15 Years Ago

When Oprah Winfrey, then the brightest star on daytime TV, began her book club in 1996, inexpensive e-books and e-readers seemed more futurist rumour than everyday reality. Social media could have meant friendly reporters.

Now, as Winfrey, co-owner of a struggling cable network, launches Oprahs Book Club 2.0, shes seeking a literary home on a digital landscape. Comparing todays fragmented do-it-yourself media with the world of 1996 is like comparing Winfreys 42-acre estate near Santa Barbara, Calif., with her birthplace amid the rural poverty of Kosciusko, Miss.

Publishers and booksellers cheer her clubs revival, despite questions whether the new Winfrey, with a much smaller TV audience, carries the influence of the old Winfrey, who turned 70 books into bestsellers.

On Sunday, Winfreys interview with memoirist Cheryl Strayed, the first author chosen for the new book club, airs on OWNs Super Soul Sunday (11 a.m. ET/PT) and simultaneously streams on Oprah Radio and on OWNS Facebook page. (OWN is short for Oprah Winfrey Network.)

Ratings show that the audience for Winfreys weekly show Super Soul averaged only 114,000 viewers in the past month a sliver of her more than five million to six million viewers when her daily syndicated show ended its 25-year run last year. At its peak, The Oprah Winfrey Show averaged 12 million viewers.

What hasnt changed is how Winfrey, Americas favourite reader, reacts when she loves a book.

This spring, she read Strayeds inspirational memoir, Wild, about the authors solo 1,100-mile hike on the Pacific Crest Trail after the death of her mother, the destruction of her marriage and experimentation with heroin.

Winfrey, who says she read Wild in part in hardcover and on her Kindle and iPad, writes in the July issue of O, the Oprah Magazine: I love this book. I want to shout it from the mountaintop. I want to shout it from the Web I knew I had to reinvent my book club.

On June 1, Winfrey announced an interactive and multi-platform book club that uses Twitter, Facebook, Storify and GroupMe. Readers can post questions that Winfrey and Strayed answer in videos. Print editions of Wild carry a new version of the familiar O book club logo. The special e-book includes Winfreys notes on her favourite passages.

Sales of Wild, which was well-reviewed upon its March release, spiked. Within two weeks of Winfreys announcement, Wild went from No. 165 on USA TODAYs Best-Selling Books list to No. 14. Its now No. 35.

Read the original post:

Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 goes digital

What is a futurist? Not a fortune teller, oracle or prophet. Futurists are simply people who take foresight seriously, applying past and emerging trends to envision how our lifestyles and industries will develop in the years ahead.

But the future isnt what it used to be: What was once a field dominated by experts such as Future Shock author Alvin Toffler or artificial-intelligence guru Ray Kurzweil is now becoming one that involves more amateurs, as large-scale information and the processing power to analyze it become more accessible. And thats a welcome development to most of the pros.

Really, anybody who has a prefrontal cortex is a futurist, says Patrick Tucker, communications director of the World Future Society. We spend the vast majority of our time thinking about the future. This is where we plan, where we create actions we are going to commit ourselves to.

Next weekend, Toronto will host the World Future Conference, bringing together people from disparate fields to discuss how the world is changing and how it ought to.

Next in food: Mass-produced fish and sub-Saharan flavours

Taking saltwater fish and raising them in a warehouse 500 kilometres away from the sea may not sound appetizing at first.

But putting [fish] indoors in higher-density areas, as unromantic as it sounds, has a lot of benefits, says Josh Schonwald, journalist and author of The Taste of Tomorrow. It eliminates a lot of the problems that have been associated with traditional aquaculture fish escaping and breeding with native populations, as well as unsightly coastlines and a general negative impact on marine ecosystems.

That may be how well get our protein, but what about the flavours of the future what global cuisine will be the next Thai? Mr. Schonwald says our hunger for ethnic exploration will lead us to the one area that has been off the radar for most North Americans: the foods of sub-Saharan Africa, such as chicken yassa, egusi soup, shrimp piri piri, jollof rice and baobab juice.

African fusion [is] already happening in the UK there's a small company called Bim's Kitchen that is introducing African-influenced condiments, like African ketchup spiced with distinctively African peppers, a curried egusi sauce and smoky baobab barbecue sauce.

Exposure to new cuisines can also alter our attractions or aversions to certain tastes, Mr. Schonwald says such as bitterness. In his book, he profiles a man who is trying to introduce radicchio, a bitter salad green enjoyed in Italy, to Americans.

More here:

How the world is changing, from food trends to high tech

When Oprah Winfrey, then the brightest star on daytime TV, began her book club in 1996, inexpensive e-books and e-readers seemed more futurist rumor than everyday reality. Social media could have meant friendly reporters.

Now, as Winfrey, co-owner of a struggling cable network, launches Oprah's Book Club 2.0, she's seeking a literary home on a digital landscape. Comparing today's fragmented do-it-yourself media with the world of 1996 is like comparing Winfrey's 42-acre estate near Santa Barbara, Calif., with her birthplace amid the rural poverty of Kosciusko, Miss.

Publishers and booksellers cheer her club's revival, despite questions whether the new Winfrey, with a much smaller TV audience, carries the influence of the old Winfrey, who turned 70 books into best sellers.

On Sunday, Winfrey's interview with memoirist Cheryl Strayed, the first author chosen for the new book club, airs on OWN's Super Soul Sunday (11 a.m. ET/PT) and simultaneously stream on Oprah Radio and on OWN'S Facebook page. (OWN is short for Oprah Winfrey Network.)

Ratings show that the audience for Winfrey's weekly show Super Soul averaged only 114,000 viewers in the past month -- a sliver of her more than 5 million to 6 million viewers when her daily syndicated show ended its 25-year run last year. At its peak, The Oprah Winfrey Show averaged 12 million viewers.

What hasn't changed is how Winfrey, America's favorite reader, reacts when she loves a book.

This spring, she read Strayed's inspirational memoir, Wild, about the author's solo 1,100-mile hike on the Pacific Crest Trail after the death of her mother, the destruction of her marriage and experimentation with heroin.

Winfrey, who says she read Wild in part in hardcover and on her Kindle and iPad, writes in the July issue of O, the Oprah Magazine: "I love this book. I want to shout it from the mountaintop. I want to shout it from the Web I knew I had to reinvent my book club."

She still moves product

On June 1, Winfrey announced an interactive and multi-platform book club that uses Twitter, Facebook, Storify and GroupMe. Readers can post questions that Winfrey and Strayed answer in videos. The print editions of Wild carry a new version of the familiar "O" book club logo. The special e-book includes Winfrey's notes on her favorite passages.

Read the rest here:

Oprah's Book Club Dives Into Social Media