From: Raymond Bouchard [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Monday, September 02, 2002 2:53 PM
To: Cordell, Arthur: ECOM
Subject: Meme 025
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The |
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Applied Futures Research and Strategic Planning |
September 1, 2002
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From: |
Raymond Bouchard |
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To: |
Arthur Cordell |
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Subject: |
Meme 025 |
Dear Arthur
Here's the latest edition of the Meme Pool, the newsletter
of web articles that 'deserve' to be repeated, re-used and re-cycled. Articles
of interest to futurists and strategic planners are presented once a week. They
highlight the appearance and disappearance of trends, technologies and
paradigms.
TECHNICAL NOTE
A
few readers have had difficulty viewing The MEME Pool over the last two issues.
This is due to the fact that I have switched to a higher version of MS Word
which does a "better" job of converting Word documents into HTML. It does this
by introducing various tags that can be viewed by HTML browsers, but can cause a
problem with e-mail programs. I am gradually resolving these problems, but if
your copy is garbled, let me know so I can send you something you can
read.
DEMOGRAPHY
Census
Shock
Population is one of the most important drivers for so
many trends. It should be easy to forecast. After all each country should know
how many citizens it has, and the dynamics of human reproduction are reasonably
well understood. That's probably why the U.S. census in 2000 contained a shock.
The population turned out to be rising faster than anyone had expected when the
1990 census was taken. US population should have been 275m in 2000. At least,
that is what the central projection of the 1990 census predicted. The 2000
census showed it was actually 281m, higher even than the "high series"
projection from 1990. Some of this may have been caused by things other than
population change: improvements in counting, for instance. But not all. The new
census showed that immigration was higher than expected, and that the birth rate
of native-born Americans was up too.
A report in The Economist
raises a significant issue. The US and Europe appear to have different
demographic dynamics. A gap is beginning to open with Europe. America's
fertility rate is rising. Europe's is falling. America's immigration outstrips
Europe's and its immigrant population is reproducing faster than native-born
Americans. America's population will soon be getting younger. Europe's is
ageing.
[The
Economist]
The immigration dimension may well be the most important
aspect of this new growth. The US has long considered that it is a melting pot
in which many people and their cultures blend to become "American". In 1998,
The Washington Post published a series of six articles showing how the
melting pot, if it ever existed, is now a myth. Immigrant communities retain
their individual diversity longer than had been previously assumed. Moreover,
this is not your grandfather's Diaspora. Low telephone rates and easy money
transfers means that immigrants often retain very strong links to their former
homes. Indeed, an article in Foreign Policy notes that worker remittances
account for 24 percent of Nicaragua's gross domestic product, 19.6 percent of
India's, and 6.5 percent of Morocco's. In Mexico, remittances are the third
largest source of foreign exchange after oil exports and tourism.
[Washington
Post] [Foreign
Policy]
FUTURES RESEARCH
The Futures
Forecast Book
The Long Bets Foundation exists as a bookie for
futures forecasters. Anyone can post a prediction, bet money on its happening by
a certain date, then wait for someone to take the other side of the bet. For
example, Ray Kurzweil, noted AI guru (among other things) has bet $10,000 that a
computer - or "machine intelligence" - will pass the Turing Test by 2029.
Mitchell Kapor (founder Lotus) has taken his bet. They have each provided a
rationale for their positions.
[Long
Bets]
This unique approach to forecasting comes to us from The Long
Now Foundation. They have also developed the Rosetta Project, which will create
a contemporary version of the Rosetta Stone. It will create a permanent archive
of 1,000 languages.
[Long Now
Foundation] [Rosetta
Project]
BIOLOGY-GENETIC-ECOLOGY
Life's
Gordian Knot
A recent article in The Atlantic describes
the efforts of Australian scientists to develop ways of controlling the mouse
plagues that attack their country. In the course of their efforts, they
discovered the means to potentially create viruses that kill people too. On the
surface, the article pursues the notion that such research could lead to weapons
of bio-terror. This, presumably, will help sell copies of the magazine, given
our current sensitivity to terrorism. Below the surface, the author (Jon Cohen)
has done a masterful job of describing the issues associated with bio-genetic
technology. Some points of note:
(1) Unlike nuclear technology, whose
materials are difficult to find and difficult to work with, bio-genetic
materials are in many cases easy to obtain and can be much easier to manipulate
(once you know how).
(2) The potential for these technologies to be
beneficial is high, both in terms of impact and variety of applications. This
implies that many people can be expected to be experimenting in the
field.
(3) While it may be relatively easy to produce something, it may
not be clear that what you are creating is what you want. Unintended effects are
likely.
(4) Public interest and public anxiety about this technology is
high. Political action and public policy could well be formed in the absence of
informed scientific opinion.
It is also well worth remembering that the
greatest biological disaster in recent times, the Spanish Flu, occurred without
any help from science. It killed 20 to 40 million people world-wide in the space
of 2 years. Indeed, its spread was helped by public policy. It was introduced to
Europe by US troops in the late stages of World War I, but due to the need for
military censorship its existence was kept quite and it spread among the troops.
Eventually it surfaced in Spain, a neutral country without press censorship,
where its existence became widely known. By then it was too late. The disease
spread out as the war ended and troops returned to their homes.
[Atlantic]
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