Paris imagines a world without cars
“The city banned cars from major roadways yesterday as part of an environmental campaign, but some say it didn’t go far enough.”
Humans
US Presidential Candidate in Transhumanist party gets RFID implant
…Zoltan Istvan, has implanted an RFID/NFC chip into his hand.
The Transhumanist Party, which was created in October of 2014 by Istvan, California resident (where else?), is a US political organisation that focuses on using science and technology to improve lives.
Why Futurism has a Cultural Blindspot
We predicted cell phones, but not women in the workplace.
Mastercard purchase data + Transportation data = Urbanomics
By combining MasterCard’s transactions data (they process 43 billion per year) with Cubic’s transportation data, analytics and visualization technology, the platform — dubbed the Urbanomics Mobility Project — will yield insight into the way transit and economic activity are linked in cities.
The hope is that everyone from urban planners to commercial real estate developers will find the tool useful, and that city and regional governments will sign up as clients. With transit-oriented development increasingly on the mind in the public and private sectors, the release is timely.
Atomic Bomb time markers
It turns out that virtually every tree that was alive starting in 1954 has a “spike” — an atomic bomb souvenir. Everywhere botanists have looked, “you can find studies in Thailand, studies in Mexico, studies in Brazil where when you measure for carbon-14, you see it there,” Nadkarni says. All trees carry this “marker” — northern trees, tropical trees, rainforest trees — it is a world-wide phenomenon.”
The real people behind the voice of Siri
All of the original Siri voices worldwide came from a bank of digital voices that were recorded in 2005. I recorded four hours a day, five days a week for a month. The process is called concatenation, and the reason the original Siri was so iconic is because she was the first concatenated voice to actually sound human.
That time when Toronto TV was fit for aerobics
Most famous and still fondly recalled three decades later was The 20 Minute Workout, a cheap as chips studio production from animation upstarts Nelvana, which aired on the still burgeoning Citytv and featured a bevy of spandex adorned beauties grooving with a pulsating electro soundtrack (later released on vinyl).
Why narrating the future may be better than trying to predict it
That gap between the authors’ intentions and the book’s reception tells us something critical about flaws in the way we think about the long-term future. Just as important, it points to new and different ways to think about the future at this strange moment in human history, when that future is so uncertain.
Netflix knows the exact episode of a TV show that gets you hooked
It hasn’t come to any conclusions about precisely what gets us addicted, but it’s found that there tends to be an early episode in each series that, once viewers watch it, leads to a strong chance of people coming back to finish the season. That can be as early as episode two in the case of Breaking Bad or as late as episode eight in the case of How I Met Your Mother.