Lifeboat Foundation

My mission is to prepare kids in Africa with future skills. I am open to ideas.

A US firm claims the service it offers saves more than a tonne of carbon, after a pilot study.

Researchers at Haifa’s Technion–Israel Institute of Technology say they have developed a standalone system capable of producing water from air, including in desert regions.

Described as the “first technology of its kind in the world,” the energy-efficient system aims to assist small and isolated communities far from freshwater and saltwater sources.

The newly released volume, After Shock, features 50 of the world’s most renowned futurists reflecting on the 50-year legacy of Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock, and looking ahead to the next 50 years. In this episode recorded just a few days after the book’s release, two of the contributing essayists, Jerome Glenn and Andrew Curry, discuss with me their views on the legacy of Toffler and Future Shock. Below are links to the audio podcast as well as to the unedited YouTube video of the original webinar.

The day I read Future Shock, just a couple of years after it came out, was the day that started me on the course to becoming a futurist. Here’s what I wrote on this blog when Toffler died in July of 2016.

The U.S. Department of Education announced Wednesday that it is launching an investigation into Harvard and Yale after they failed to disclose about $375 million in gifts and contracts from China and Saudi Arabia in the past four years.

Harvard and Yale are the latest in the Education Department’s continuing efforts to crack down on foreign influence, particularly from China. According to the Wall Street Journal, U.S. universities have failed to report they brought in $6.5 billion from foreign nations since 1990.

A major aspect of the alleged foreign influence on universities is through gifts and grants, which can come with strings attached and might compromise their academic independence.

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But people’s “digital afterlives” extend far beyond Facebook. When a 21st century citizen dies, they often leave behind a trove of posts, private messages, and personal information on everything from Twitter to online bank records. Who owns this data, and whose responsibility is it to protect the privacy of the deceased? Faheem Hussain, a social scientist at Arizona State University in Tempe, has spent the past few years peering into the murky waters of how people, platforms, and governments manage the digital lives we leave behind.

Hussain gave a presentation on our digital legacies today at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which publishes Science. We caught up with Hussain to talk about why online platforms should encourage people to plan ahead for their imminent deaths, whether you have a right to privacy after you die, and the strange new culture of digital mourning.

Welcome your new family member.

For the next installment of the informal TechCrunch book club, we are reading the fourth story in Ted Chiang’s Exhalation. The goal of this book club is to expand our minds to new worlds, ideas, and vistas, and The Lifecycle of Software Objects doesn’t disappoint. Centered in a future world where virtual worlds and generalized AI have become commonplace, it’s a fantastic example of speculative fiction that forces us to confront all kinds of fundamental questions.

If you’ve missed the earlier parts in this book club series, be sure to check out: