FUTURES

National Horizon Scanning Centre
"The National Horizon Scanning Centre (NHSC) aims to provide advance notice to the Department of Health in England and Wales of selected key new and emerging health technologies (including changing applications and uses of existing technologies) that might require urgent evaluation, consideration of clinical and cost impact or modification of clinical guidance. The scope of the horizon scanning activity includes health technologies in the broadest sense and includes pharmaceuticals, devices, diagnostic tests and procedures, surgical and other interventions, rehabilitation, and therapy, public health and health promotion activities.
"Briefing papers that have been produced since January 2000 are available to view on this site."

UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Centre: "Planning for the FutureUNEP-WCMC: Planning for the Future The importance of biodiversity is increasingly recognized in international efforts to meet global development goals, in the need to better manage global biodiversity resources and in meeting the 2010 target of significantly reducing the rate of loss of biodiversity (agreed to at the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development held in Johannesburg). The World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC) in Cambridge, UK, is a world leader in biodiversity assessment, monitoring and policy analysis. Since 2000, WCMC has been an Executive Agency of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and a key component of UNEP’s overall biodiversity strategy. Biodiversity activities within UNEP relate to all UNEP divisions, including Early Warning and Assessment (DEWA); Environmental Conventions (DEC); and Environmental Policy Implementation (DEPI). In view of the above, UNEP is now working with key stakeholders to expand UNEP-WCMC’s biodiversity activities.

In addition, the agreements that define the relationship between UNEP and WCMC 2000 are now scheduled for review. Given the need to develop a new strategy for biodiversity activities, UNEP has begun, in close cooperation with the UK Government, WCMC 2000 and other organizations, a series of actions that will strengthen both UNEP and UNEP-WCMC. These actions include:

* The establishment of a team to review and strengthen the agreements between UNEP and WCMC 2000, and the overall UNEP-WCMC strategy;
* The development of a stronger partnership among the UK Government, WCMC 2000 and UNEP to guide the Centre’s programme of work and ensure its financial viability;
* The transfer of the present UNEP-WCMC Director, Mark Collins, to UNEP Headquarters in Nairobi to play a leading role in developing UNEP’s overall biodiversity strategy. His extensive experience in biodiversity assessment activities will help UNEP to expand its biodiversity network, build its relationship with key stakeholders, and better identify the role it will play vis-à-vis the multilateral environmental agreements; and
* The international recruitment of a new Director of UNEP-WCMC to carry on its excellent work. Until a new Director is appointed, Mr. Kaveh Zahedi, an experienced UNEP staff member, will be the UNEP Officer in Charge and interim director at the Centre, reporting to the Director, UNEP Division of Early Warning and Assessment, Nairobi, and working collaboratively with the Centre’s staff and Management Team.

It is expected that a new biodiversity strategy for UNEP and UNEP-WCMC will be published in early 2005...."

JDCC Strategic Trends Home Page
Prepared for defence and security needs in the UK, this analyses drivers, and has a good account of wild cards.
"Strategic Trends is an ambitious attempt to develop a coherent view of how the world might develop over the next thirty years in ways that could alter the UK’s security. It is the culmination of eighteen months of work by the Joint Doctrine and Concept Centre (JDCC), an integral part of the UK Ministry of Defence. "

Keyworks
A BEGINNER'S GUIDE TO THE FUTURES LITERATURE

"This is a presentation of 60 selected works -arlier versions of the beginner’s guide have been published in Slaughter's guidebooks. The books and articles presented deal with possible, probable, desirable and undesirable futures. Brief information is provided on the background of each author. Some of them may not use labels like "futures studies" or "futures research" (not to mention "futurology"), about what they have written. But they have all developed or converted knowledge in order to contribute to long-term planning, the formulation of visions, or social change. The literature has been categorised into seven groups:
Classic Introductions
Looking back - and ahead
Trends
Scenarios
Utopias
The world problematique
Change "

Challenge Network index page Scenario studies here - OPliver Sparrow is director of the Forum.

Preparing for Emergencies - Homepage how rapidly an official document can be parodied - according to a radio interview, Thomas only took a couple of hourse to get this done. Goevrnment was on his case even faster!

The Impossible Scenarios Group
Now, this is really a role-playing group, but take a look at their millennium's end London at:
http://the-isg.co.uk/sandbox/melsb3.pdf

Plausible Futures Newsletter: "The Plausible Futures NewsletterThe Plausible Futures Newsletter is a news service for the future studies community edited by independent researcher Ole Peter Galaasen based in OSLO"

Particulalrly useful is the list of scenario studies at: http://plausible.custompublish.com/index.php?cat=6691a

Powering future vehicles strategy
from foresight and low carbon veicles to prospective technologies and fuels...

Highways Agency - Research Compendium - Project: Highways Agency Vision 2030
THE VISION 2030 PROJECT: ROADS TO THE FUTURE
By John C Miles, Ankerbold International,
Mike D’Alton WSP Group
for Richard Eastman and David E Cowell of the Highways Agency "At the start of the 21st Century, forward thinking is regarded as an essential part of long term planning whether for transport or other activities. The purpose of forward planning is to develop visions of the future by looking at possible future needs, opportunities and threats and deciding what should be done now to ensure that we are ready for these challenges.

The Vision 2030 project provides an opportunity for the Highways Agency to network with other organisations. Key stakeholders include certain government departments (especially Department of Transport, Local Government and the Regions, DTLR), local authorities, the automotive and telecommunications industries, the freight and road haulage industry, the police, motoring organisations and the public. The remit for the Highways Agency is the future of the strategic road network in England. However the HA needs to work in strategic partnership with other organisations in order to achieve its particular aims.
The aim of Vision 2030 is to develop visions for the mobility needs of people and goods in thirty years’ time...."

The Observer | Focus | Face of the future?
Just another story about the coming robotics - but makes a good point on Asimov's humanoid robots. Quote:

"The science fiction writer assumed that brains would be the costly, difficult part of an android's construction. Their bodies, and arms and legs would be relatively easy. So intelligent androids would be built to multi-task and make the most of those costly brains. It was a reasonable assumption in the 1960s, but it has not stood the test of time.

"Electronic brains, ie microprocessors, can now be manufactured for a few pounds, while progress in developing the science of artificial limbs and robot movement has been painfully slow. As a result, robotics has developed by simply taking electronic brains and fitting them to existing domestic devices. Thus we now have washing machines with chips attached, clever toasters and intelligent fridges that will tell you when you are about to run out of milk. No need for android maids or butlers with that kind of technology around.

'In fact, we are at least a couple of miracles short of the full goal of robotics: to recreate a human being in all its glory - in other words to make an android that is indistinguishable from a human, ... . For example, we will have to find a way of making artificial muscle tissue that is thousands of times stronger, lighter and more flexible than anything we have now.'

But see the current WIRED for interesting pieces on robots too, including artificial faces.

: email : Webview
This is the IAF newsletter - firast piece is on using technology to reduce health inequalities. Summary of IAF/IOIR study of EU FP scenarios and social science, too. Links to both reports.

index of the Futurework websitel
Here's one of today's postings clipped from my email - thanks to Keith Hudson:
Date sent: Sun, 11 Jul 2004 21:34:15 +0100
To: futurework@fes.uwaterloo.ca
From: Keith Hudson
Subject: [Futurework] Let's reconstruct our institutions

[ Double-click this line for list subscription options ]

507. Let's reconstruct our institutions

The strong inherent tendency to rank order within most social mammalian
species and particularly acute in relatively small groups of primates and
early homo sapiens has malign effects as well as the relatively benign one
(or perhaps neutral) these days of motivating individuals to buy consumer
goods which enhance their status in the community around them -- the
essence of my evolutionary-economics hypothesis.

One of our list members, Salvador R. Sánchez Gutiérrez, has sent me an
interesting article concerning the efforts of Robert W. Fuller to mobilise
public opinion against what he calls "rankism" in politics, business,
medicine and goodness knows what else.

Fuller is quite right to suggest that rank order is responsible for a
great many evils in the modern world. In our original hunter-gatherer
past, any sort of oppressive leadership was always visible, accessible and
relatively easily changed. Today, most governments are so centralised and
protected that they are far removed from any sort of accessibility by
ordinary people for purposes of replacement. You have to be a rich person
in order even to have a few words with the prime minister unless he,
perchance, invites you. In totalitarian regimes such as those of the
former Soviet Union under Lenin, and then Stalin, and the sort of China
that emerged after the 1949 Communist Revolution under Mao Zedong,
dictatorships are almost impossible to change. They lasted for decades at
great cost to the lives of scores of millions of people. Mao Zedong's
Great Leap Forward is said to have cost over 30 million lives. On a lesser
scale, this ineptitude of dictators has been repeated, and is still being
repeated, many times in several countries.

Strict rank order in many other institutions are also harmful because they
resist new ideas and hold back any ability to deal with new circumstances.
It is particularly dramatic in a business firm, of course, because none of
them are more than a few years away at the most from bankruptcy unless
constant changes in policy are made. Governments last a little longer -- a
few decades perhaps -- before the accumulative effects of bad decisions,
perhaps accompanied by the overwhelming costs of huge bureaucracies, bring
them low.

Outside governments, too, most institutions ossify over time, because
their hierarchies become too unadaptive. Organised religions are
particularly prone to this. Islam, Christianity, Hinduism and Judaism are
becoming dysfunctional to a great or lesser extent and only have the
chance of survival unless their hierarchies admit modern learning rather
than relying on ancient scriptures. Also, in many professions --
particularly in the older ones such as the law and medicine -- their
instituonal hierarchies become protective practices in order to prevent
younger people gaining influence, and it's touch and go in some cases
whether they will retain their supremacy or give way to more specialised
newer professions.

However, Fuller also accepts the idea of hierarchy in principle. So I
suppose his crusade is to draw attention to those many cases where a line
needs to be drawn. I agree wholeheartedly that what used to be a necessary
genetic propensity when we lived in small groups has now become at least a
hindrance and at most an ever-present danger in many of our overlarge
hierarchical institutions. But -- as he himself confesses -- it would be
impossible to start prying into every nook and cranny where undue rank
order is harmful and trying to legislate.

The one common feature to all rank-ordered closed institutions is secrecy.
Their power lies in keeping whatever skills and information they may have
to themselves as mmuch as possible. Thankfully, we have to thank one of
the more recent institutions of modern society -- the press and the media
generally. Investigative journalism of the sort that, for example,
investigated the terrible secrets of the meat industry in America just
over a century ago and, more recently, brought President Nixon down is
still fairly adolescent as institutions go.

So we can hope that investigative journalism will continue to do a good
job before it, too, becomes prey to rigid rank order. Perhaps what will
take over after that is a more informed understanding of rank order, as
being currently initiated by anthropology and the evolutionary sciences --
in age still kindergarten children. Perhaps it will be second nature in
the coming to know our human nature with some accuracy. We might then have
the wisdom to know that we're not going to change our genetic
predispositions anytime soon -- not for many thousands of years anyway. If
we can't get rid of rank order, let's bring it out into the open at least.
Perhaps then we could start constructing our institutions as modern
analogues of the sort of small groups in which we evolved for millions of
years.

Keith Hudson

<<<<
TILTING AT WINDBAGS -- A CRUSADE AGAINST RANK

Julie Salamon

Western society has denounced racism, sexism and anti-Semitism, mobilized
against ageism and genderism, anguished over postcolonialism and nihilism,
taken arms against Marxism, totalitarianism and absolutism, and trashed,
at various conferences and cocktail parties, liberalism and conservatism.

Is it possible there is yet another "ism" to mobilize against?

Robert W. Fuller, a boyishly earnest 67-year-old who has spent most of his
life in academia, thinks so, and he calls it "rankism," the bullying
behavior of people who think they are superior. The manifesto? Nobodies of
the world unite! -- against mean bosses, disdainful doctors, power-hungry
politicians, belittling soccer coaches and arrogant professors.

"I wanted a nasty word for the crime, an unpleasant word, a stinky word,"
he said, referring to his choice of the word rankism. "Language is
incredibly important in making political change. I always go back to that
word sexism and how it became the catalyst for a movement."

Mr. Fuller wants nothing less than moral as well as behavioral
accountability from the people in charge, whether of governments,
companies, patients, employees or students. And he pitches his quixotic
notion in a book, a Web site (breakingranks .net), in radio interviews and
in lectures at universities and business gatherings that could be
considered breeding farms for somebodies.

"The theory has the potential to explain many things we just ignore as a
given," said Camilo Azcarate, Princeton University's ombudsman, who
recently attended one of Mr. Fuller's lectures and bought several copies
of his book to give to friends. Democracy and education should concentrate
on creating virtuous citizens. This is exactly the kind of discussion we
need to have."

Mr. Fuller began postulating these theories on the Internet several years
ago, and then brought them together last year in a book called Somebodies
and Nobodies (New Society Publishers), published recently in paperback. He
can't answer how, exactly, his lofty ideas might translate into political
or legal action. "I don't see the form the movement will take," he
confessed in an interview at his home in Berkeley. "But I don't feel too
bad about it because Betty Friedan told me she didn't have any idea there
would be a women's movement when she wrote The Feminine Mystique. You need
five years of consciousness-raising before you find the handle."

Ms. Friedan provided a blurb for his book. Other supporting blurbers
include Bill Moyers, the political scientist Frances Fukuyama and the
author Studs Terkel. So far the book has sold 33,000 copies (including
bulk sales); and his Web site totals 2,000 to 3,000 visitors a week, his
Web master, Melanie Hart, said.

Mr. Fuller's appeal nonetheless eludes some critics. In one of the few
reviews of "Somebodies and Nobodies," Clay Evans, books editor of The
Daily Camera newspaper in Boulder, Colo., was dismissive. Mr. Fuller's
concepts, he wrote, "were old when Jesus was making fishers of men."

But with others, he has struck a chord. Among the 2,000 people who had
downloaded a working manuscript of his were Mary Lou and Ann Richardson,
two sisters living in Roanoke, Va. They were so inspired by that early
version that they eventually met with Mr. Fuller after the book was
published. The women, Ann Richardson said, had been taking care of an
aging mother with Parkinson's disease and were distressed by how people's
treatment of her changed after she lost her ability to speak. They were
not happy with the way their siblings responded either.

"I couldn't believe that people who loved me could harm me because of the
perceived rank they had in the family," said Ann Richardson, 46, who used
to work as a customer services manager for a graphic arts company in
Washington, and is now studying film and photography at Hollins University
in Roanoke.

The sisters began their own Dignitarian Foundation, described on its Web
site (dignitarians.org) as "an organization dedicated to promoting and
protecting the intrinsic right to human dignity." Ann Richardson said her
motive was simple "If I can help some people start believing in
themselves, it would make the world a much better, more peaceful place."

This was not the role Mr. Fuller seemed destined to fulfill. Designated a
math and science whiz kid, he entered Oberlin College at age 15, expecting
to follow the path of his father, Calvin S. Fuller, a physicist at Bell
Laboratories in New Jersey who was co-inventor of the solar cell. After
Oberlin, Mr. Fuller accumulated credentials with breathtaking speed. By 18
he was enrolled in graduate school at Princeton. At 33 he was named
president of Oberlin.

In between he learned about politics at the École Normale Supérieure in
Paris and economics at the University of Chicago, helped write a
significant physics text, Mathematics of Classical and Quantum Physics
(Addison Wesley Publishing Company), taught at Columbia University, did a
fellowship at Wesleyan University and was dean of faculty at Trinity
College in Hartford.

His peripatetic intellectual ambitions coincided with an era of social
upheaval. Mr. Fuller left for Oberlin as an undergraduate in 1952,
thinking Dwight D. Eisenhower was the perfect next president. By the time
he returned to Oberlin as its president in 1970, he was ready to lead the
college through the revolutions of the period -- making changes in
admissions policies for African-American students, abolishing course
requirements, ending parietal hours.

Then, after 22 years on the academic fast track, he quit -- at age 37. He
left Oberlin and his first wife, with whom he had had two children, and
traveled around the world for three months. Then he settled in Berkeley
where, he said, "I sat still for two years, read 200 books and completely
re-educated myself." Among other things, he began to realize his role
model may have been his mother, Willmine Works Fuller. "She wasn't very
concerned about social justice, but if someone tried to step on her toes,
watch out," Mr. Fuller said, recalling a protest his mother organized
against putting an airport near his hometown of Chatham, N.J. "She could
not stand to be pushed around by those in authority or bullies." Nor was
she particularly touchy-feely -- she once kept her son confined to his
room for 48 hours because he refused to eat his spinach.

He became obsessed with the nuclear arms race between the United States
and the Soviet Union. "The bomb makes nobodies of all of us, that's how I
put it now," he said. With a new wife, and eventually two more children in
tow (a third wife would come still later) he began traveling through the
Soviet Union, paying for the expeditions by giving speeches and raising
money from philanthropists. Calling himself a citizen diplomat, he helped
arrange televised discussions between Soviet and American scientists via
satellite links.

"He believes it's possible to work through the cracks of the monolith,"
said Kim Spencer, formerly a producer for ABC News and now president of
Link TV, a satellite network that features documentaries from around the
world. Mr. Spencer worked with Mr. Fuller on the Soviet programs and
remains a friend. "When I was putting together a TV network I had to go
out for a walk with Bob to see the bigger thing," he added.

In 1987, Mr. Fuller found a crucial advocate for his expensive
self-discovery -- Robert Cabot, a novelist and diplomat, but also heir to
a family fortune. They traveled together to the Soviet Union, Afghanistan
and China and together wrote a few articles. Mr. Cabot put money into some
of Mr. Fuller's citizen-diplomacy projects, which always struggled for
financing.

One day Mr. Cabot decided to become Mr. Fuller's patron. For 15 years he
paid him to think -- and to travel, expenses paid. No rankism there. Mr.
Cabot included pension payments, which kicked in two years ago when Mr.
Fuller turned 65.

How does Mr. Cabot feel about the way his money has been spent? "I am
immensely gratified," he said. "I think we are witnessing an extreme abuse
of rankism in Washington, D.C., right now. Our policy in the Middle East
is rankism."

Mr. Fuller acknowledges that rankism is harder to pin down than other more
apparent forms of discrimination -- sex, race and disability. "We try to
sniff how much power each of us has by asking `What do you do? Where did
you go to school? Who's your husband?' " said Mr. Fuller. "It's like
trying to find out if someone's gay or not, if they're a threat to us or
if we can get away with abusing or exploiting them."

Mr. Fuller isn't calling for an end to hierarchy, but neither is he simply
asking for mere politeness. Yes, national leaders should refrain from
cursing at one another in public places; executives should treat
subordinates with respect. But more controversially, he would get rid of
faculty tenure at universities, which he calls "an outdated sacrosanct
privilege of a few somebodies held at the expense of many nobodies."

He urges people to remember that rank is mutable you can be a nobody at
work and a somebody at home, or vice versa. And, he points out, almost
everyone eventually "gets nobodied."

The tall and lanky Mr. Fuller, whose presentation can be stiff and formal,
doesn't rouse his audiences with smooth patter and startling revelations
of abuse he's suffered. But his reflective, old-fashioned professorial
approach to his sometimes glib, populist theories has been taken in some
quarters as a refreshing whiff of sincerity in a skeptical age.

When he spoke at Mount Holyoke College last September, Andrea Ayvazian,
dean of religious life, was surprised to see how mixed the audience was
students, faculty members, administrators, staff members and campus
workers. "Bob's analysis freed people who considered themselves low in the
hierarchy to tell their stories," said Dr. Ayvazian, who was a student of
Mr. Fuller's 30 years earlier. "I saw this had struck a chord in
unpredictable circles."

New York Times -- 11 July 2004
>>>>

Keith Hudson, Bath, England,

# posted by Ian Miles : 9:16 AM

Phil Gyford's http://www.overmorgen.com/ has comments on futures issues - including a piece about the closure of Futures courses at Houston 9and briefly, Leeds).

Seminar Downloads from The Long Now Foundation at http://seminars.longnow.org/ some have text, all have various audio modes.


Brian Eno
The Long Now

Peter Schwartz
The Art Of The Really Long View

George Dyson
There's Plenty of Room at the Top: Long-term Thinking About Large-scale Computing

James Dewar
Long-term Policy Analysis

Rusty Schweickart
The Asteroid Threat Over the Next 100,000 Years

Daniel Janzen
It's ALL Gardening

David Rumsey
Mapping Time

Bruce Sterling
The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole