Fixing the Future

I suppose it’s elitist and maybe even nationalistic of me but I was surprised to hear the phrase “resource curse,” which I associate with the developing world, used recently in a webinar in the conte…

In the world of prosthetics, we’re still at the stage where a person has to instruct the prosthetic to first do one thing, then another, then another. As University of Waterloo Ph.D. researcher Broko…

If there’s one thing we can all agree on, it’s that the world is not only changing quickly, it’s changing at a faster rate than ever. Or does it just seem that way? 

Surely we can all agree that the …

At a conference of chief technology officers in 2016, General Michael Hayden, former head of, at different times, both the NSA and the CIA, told the audience, “Cyberwar isn’t exactly war, but it’s no…

In the 2020 elections for the North Carolina State House, Democrats received 49 percent of the votes but won only 42.5 percent of the seats. In three-quarters of the state-level elections, the winnin…

Let’s face it. The United States, and, really, the entire world, has squandered much of the time that has elapsed since climate change first became a concern more than forty years ago.

Increasingly, s…

Many things have changed in 2020, and it’s an open question which are altered permanently and which are transitory. Work-from-home may be here to stay; as might the shift from movie theatres and cabl…

Batteries have come a long way. What used to power flashlights and toys, Timex watches and Sony Walkmans, are now found in everything from phones and laptops to cars and planes. 

Batteries all work th…

The saddest fact about the coronavirus pandemic is certainly the deaths it has already caused and the many more deaths to come before the world gets the virus under at least as much control as, say, …

The Federal Communications Commission's very first cellular spectrum allocation was a messy affair. The U.S. was divided up into 120 cellular markets, with two licenses each, and in some cases, hundr…

In 1936, after polling its readers, the Literary Digest famously predicted a landslide victory for Alf Landon. On 2 November 1948, based on widespread polling that all pointed in one direction, the C…

If any cars are mobile phones with wheels, it’s electric cars. And just as the switch from landline phones to mobile phones was quick, and from computers to smartphones was even quicker, the shift fr…

A modern hospital operating room often has someone you never see on television: a medical device company representative. The device might be a special saw or probe or other tool for the surgeon to us…

In 2014, two Google engineers, writing in the pages of IEEE Spectrum, noted that “if all power plants and industrial facilities switch over to zero-carbon energy sources right now, we’ll still be lef…

In 2011, the former executive director of MoveOn gave a widely-viewed TED talk, “Beware Online Filter Bubbles“ that became a 2012 book and a startup. In all the talk of fake news these days, many of …