Category Archives: Transhuman News

Glen Hiemstra - Founder of Futurist.com, Author and Speaker on the Future
Glen Hiemstra is the Founder of Futurist.com. He attended his first WFS annual meeting in 1982. An internationally acclaimed expert on long range trends and ...

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Glen Hiemstra - Founder of Futurist.com, Author and Speaker on the Future - Video

The interior of Scarborough's Futurist Theatre.

The Theatres Trust has warned that Scarboroughs Futurist Theatre will face demolition after the proposed bidder for the site was named as theme park Flamingo Land.

Details of the bid made by Flamingo Land a theme park in North Yorkshire were released in September under Bidder B. However, Scarborough Borough Council has subsequently named the company in response to public concern.

If successful, Flamingo Land Coast will include a glass-roofed botanical garden, a rollercoaster, and bar, restaurant and function spaces.

Mark Price, theatres at risk adviser for the Theatres Trust, said the trust had had the Futurist on its theatre buildings at risk register since 2006, adding that the venue currently provided the only indoor venue in Scarborough capable of hosting large scale touring theatre and musical productions needing a flytower.

The 2,150-seat venue was built in 1921 and was used as a theatre and cinema up until its closure in early 2014, which followed years of uncertainty.

The theatre is owned by the council, which decided to close it after negotiations over a new contract with the venues operator broke down.

A report on the future of the theatre also found it to be no longer sustainable.

Price added: We regret the loss of the Futurist which has provided Scarborough with a fully equipped lyric theatre and cinema for over 93 years. It could have been restored to its former splendour and been a real asset for the town.

Bids for the site closed in August and Flamingo Land is working on the project with Leeds-based property and construction company, GMI Estates.

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News: Theatres Trust fears Futurist demolition after theme park bidder is revealed

"I wanted buzzwords," William Gibson says of his early writing ambitions. "I wanted buzz-neologisms, really." He scored with "cyberspace," the term he coined in a short story and popularized in his 1984 novel "Neuromancer," to describe, well never mind, you know what cyberspace is.

But we didn't then. In an era when "Dynasty" and "Dallas" dominated the airwaves and people marveled at the first Apple Macintosh computer, the idea that personal computers might connect to a notional space for business and communications that could be broken into, hacked that was the stuff of fiction.

"It's fairly common for other people to say that lots of things in 'Neuromancer' subsequently came to pass, but I don't myself say that," Gibson says with a laugh. He's talking by phone from his home in Toronto, short, frequent bursts of laughter underscoring an element of absurdity, amusement.

The burden of his prophetic debut novel is that he's frequently thought of as a futurist, although he dodges when asked about the label. His fiction resists it: In his new novel, "The Peripheral" (Putnam, 496 pp., $28.95), two story lines in different futures intersect via an unexplained, quasi-quantum technology. The science is more fairy tale than futurist, "very hand-wavy and vague," Gibson says. "That's a deliberate and I think comic violation of what some people would suppose my job description to be."

"The Peripheral" is a fast-paced mystery that takes place in two futures, one several decades hence and the other 75 years beyond that. The latter is a much-transformed but recognizable London; the former, a rural American town with little going on but an illegal drug trade, a megastore called Hefty Mart and an indie 3-D print shop. With these worlds mysteriously intersecting, the book's heroine, Flynn, witnesses a murder, inadvertently putting her small town in danger.

"It became colored with my childhood sense of what a small American town is like, which is a very Southern sense of what a small American town is like," Gibson says. Raised in South Carolina and Virginia, Gibson's voice has a soft Southern lilt, interrupted by "agayn" for "again," "bean" rather than "been." Gibson drifted to Canada during the Vietnam War and stayed; he's married and raised his family there.

Gibson is a countercountercultural baby boomer: He went to Woodstock and thought it was a bust, never got Bruce Springsteen's "Born to Run" but was transfixed by "Nebraska." "That was a really powerful influence on my work," he says of the stripped-down, bleak record. "When I heard that I began to think what it would be like to apply that aesthetic to science fiction."

The outsider looking in: Gibson savvily applies that to his own relationship with technology. He was late to give up his flip-phone because not having an iPhone allowed him to observe "dispassionately, anthropologically" how other people interacted with theirs.

It's an interesting approach, needing to be close to technologies that promise the future but not too close. He tells a pre-Internet days story of being at the bar at a science fiction convention and hearing two women former Pentagon key-punch operators talking about computer viruses, then obscure and mysterious. "I just went home completely full of it. I didn't really know anything about it I was decoding it poetically," he says. "I operate from the vernacular poetry of technology and from watching how people interact with technology."

Twelve books in, Gibson knows his process. "What I have to do is write a first sentence that's capable of sucking me through the white wall of the blank first page," he says. "Once I'm really working, I'm never not working, which is kind of a drag. The process sort of constitutes an altered state, and it can take days to do it, get the altered state up and running. I've learned to put everything on hold and just stay there."

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William Gibson coaxes the future out of the present

New York, NY (PRWEB) October 30, 2014

Acclaimed global futurist, speaker, and best-selling author Jack Uldrich is frequently asked, What will the future look like? His response is, Predictably unpredictable. Uldrich travels the world speaking about this very paradox. He says, "Learning to unlearn, thinking about the unthinkable, recognizing failure as a key component of success, and understanding that an awareness of ones ignorance is a key component of true wisdom."

Following on the heels of a tremendously busy October, speaking to over 10 clients including ABB/Thomas and Betts, the American Sportfishing Association, the PMA and TRUNO, Uldrich will gear up to speak throughout the month of November to the following clients:

NOV 04, 2014 - Grant Thornton Grant Thornton Houston, TX

NOV 05, 2014 - Farm Credit Services Leaders Conference Farm Credit Services of America Omaha, NE

NOV 06, 2014 - CLEAResult Annual Energy Summit CLEAResult Austin, TX

NOV 10, 2014 - CAS Centennial Celebration CAS Centennial News New York City, NY

NOV 23, 2014 - AASHTO Annual Meeting American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials Charlotte, NC

Uldrich focuses on giving upbeat, practical and actionable insights on future trends, emerging technologies, innovation, change management and leadership, especially in the areas of health care, agriculture, education, energy, finance, retail and manufacturing. He provides provocative new perspectives on competitive advantage, change management and transformational leadership and brings to light the advantages of being creative and using the powers of individual imagination.

In addition to speaking on future trends, one of Uldrich's key specialties is unlearning. He says,"Erroneous ideas can prevent us from being receptive to new knowledge. But before we can fully assimilate new information, we often have to unlearn old beliefs." Unlearning is defined as, "the act of releasing old knowledge." And, according to Uldrich, it is a critical skill, "especially in todays world of rapid and accelerating technical knowledge. If you think of knowledge as an iceberg, the portion of the iceberg that lies above the water can be thought of as representing existing knowledge. The portion that resides below the water is the equivalent of future knowledge. People often overlook obvious trends that will have an impact on their businesses. Unless that is, they are open to unlearning." In other words, Uldrich guides his audiences to look at what resides below the water line, teaches them how to swim with the current and prepare for tsunamis.

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Futurist Jack Uldrich to Headline 5 Events in November