Gerd Leonhard is a greatly valued friend and colleague in our shared calling as media futurists, and work together in The Futures Agency. As part of our intent of working more together in both public forums and with leading media organizations we are announcing a free webinar: The Future of Media: Mobile, Social, Cloud… and Paid? 8am US EDT. MORE >>

Going to an outdoor event during the steamy months of summer generally involves packing a miniature fan and slathering yourself in sunscreen, as most venues do little to shade attendees in the cheap seats. This is something Wolfgang Kessling, of the German climate engineering firm Transsolar , would like to change. Plaza, The City of the Future. MORE >>

Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared  via Twitter  this past week. JamieNotter – “ Key lesson: for people to give energy to these new things, they need to stop doing other things.” ” @AnnaFMackenzie – “ I agree. Writing is writing – it takes practice and discipline to write well. MORE >>

Humanity is generating a huge explosion of data, information that can be used for or against us. How can we democratise access to it? “This is, to our knowledge, the first crowd-mapped network structure of a complex problem. ’ Data from the Tru North MAPPR were plugged into Quid’s visualization software to create this image.” MORE >>

People underestimate their ability at stereotypically difficult tasks like playing chess, telling jokes, juggling or computer programming. Recently I covered the Dunning-Kruger effect which explains why the incompetent don't know they're incompetent. This is the worse-than-average effect. 2003). How can we explain all this? Kruger, 1999). MORE >>