Help NASA Find Asteroids

Everyday we face an existential threat to our planet from outer space! Asteroids can hit the planet at any moment and ruin our days. To help us prepare for such an event NASA (and other space agencies) are searching for and tracking asteroids. By knowing where they are we can potentially deflect an asteroid to not hit the Earth. Now you can help in this process using your computer at home.

The computer program was created through NASA’s Asteroid Data Hunter challenge, itself a part of the space administration’s larger Asteroid Grand Challenge, and was done in partnership with the Redmond, Washington-based Planetary Resources Inc. The contest, explains a NASA release, was launched at last year’s South By Southwest conference, to develop more sophisticated means of detecting and identifying asteroids by way of land-based telescopes.

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Cuba Gets New Art Installation: WiFi

Cuba has really poor internet connectivity and it costs a lot of money to connect to the web. The thawing relationship between the USA and Cuba is bound to make it easier to develop the country’s telecommunications infrastructure (cheaper to run a cable from Florida than elsewhere). This is one of many benefits from the beginning of the end of the bizarre American embargo of the island nation.

For now, the artist Kcho is launching an art installation to prepare people for the coming rise of the internet in Cuba.

Cuba’s state telecom agency Etecsa has granted approval to the artist Kcho to open the country’s first public wireless hub at his cultural centre.

Kcho, who has close ties to the Cuban government, is operating the hub using his own, government-approved internet connection, and paying approximately $900 (£600) per month to run it.
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Kcho told the Associated Press he decided to offer free internet at the centre, which opened in western Havana in January, in order to encourage Cubans to familiarise themselves with the internet.

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Bike Lanes Improve Cities Aesthetically and Economically

There is a strong and powerful myth in North America that car drivers spend more and will always require parking. That is a myth. It turns out that nearly every study done on bike lanes as proven that cyclists are the transportation class cities should cater to because drivers don’t need all those useless parking spaces and drivers aren’t richer than others. (They have to waste all their money on gas and repairs anyway.)

Transportation Alternatives

A neighborhood survey of 420 people on First and Second avenues in Manhattan’s East Village, home to protected bike lanes, found that aggregate spending by non-drivers accounted for 95 percent of all retail spending in the area. That’s not too surprising in New York, given the great transit infrastructure, but the figures remain impressive. Cyclists spent about $163 per week on average, compared to $143 among drivers.

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An Art Gallery for Destroyed and Stolen Art

The Museum of Stolen Art is an online museum that showcases artwork that has been destroyed or stolen in conflict. The new museum couldn’t exist at a better time as ISIS destroys sites of great importance to humanity, and before them the Taliban in Afghanistan destroyed a lot of ancient sites. War always brings destruction and the invasion of Iraq over a decade ago also saw many works of art destroyed or go missing.

By showcasing the missing works we can still enjoy them digitally and hopefully it sends one more message about how evil war is.

The third exhibit to launch the museum “celebrates” some of art history’s most infamous stolen paintings, including Rembrandt’s The Storm on the Sea of Galilee, Vermeer’s The Concert, and many of the works lifted during a 1990 spree at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. While taking a digital stroll through the museum, patrons can access an audio guide to learn more about the history of the pieces. As Schneider’s website states “The goals of the museum are to give visibility to art that is otherwise impossible to see on a museum wall, and also to familiarize the public with stolen items in order to assist in the their recovery.” Schneider hopes that this tool will eventually be used as a supplementary database for organizations like the FBI and Interpol in fighting art crime. The images on her site are often culled from their vast web archives, and, as the digital docent at the Museum says on the site, “If you see any of these works in real life, please report it to the International Police.”

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WorldFuture Conference 2015

If you’re in San Francisco this July you’re going to want to check out the conference of the future: the WorldFuture Conference. They’ll be looking at future-critical issues (many of this issues are what this very site looks at) and be discussing how to prepare for what the future holds.

If we’re not thinking about how our current actions will impact the world in the future we are not giving enough thought to our actions. Think and act about the future people you’ll never meet.

WorldFuture 2015: Making the Future is expected to gather hundreds of foresight-minded professionals of diverse backgrounds. It will provide participants a unique opportunity to network with industry and government peers from around the world, collect actionable insight on future-critical issues and emerging technologies, and build alliances across World Future 2015’s three conference tracks: the Business of Foresight, Global Issues, and Technology & Innovation.

In keeping with our action-oriented theme, we are pleased to announce that Steve Jurvetson, a partner at Draper Fisher Jurvetson will be the WorldFuture 2015 keynote speaker. Known as venture capitalist making the future, Steve was the founding VC investor in Hotmail, Interwoven and Kana, and he serves on the Boards of Tesla and SpaceX. Steve was chosen by the SF Chronicle and SF Examiner as one of “the ten people expected to have the greatest impact on the Bay Area in the early part of the 21st Century.”

In addition to two high energy days of interactive sessions, WorldFuture 2015 will also offer two days of pre-conference master courses, a Millennials’ morning of activities for student futurists, special networking events, and offsite trips to relevant area attractions.

Check out WorldFuture 2015.