What's Emerging December 2022
A newsletter on interesting stuff that is emerging around the world so you can think about strategy
Welcome to our last newsletter for the year.
Things are usually pretty quiet for us in terms of client work during the summer holiday period so we will be taking a little bit of time off and our next newsletter will come out at the end of January.
We will still be keeping an eye on emails and phone call so please Contact Us if you want to talk about foresight approaches for your organisation or industry in 2023 or want a presentation for your organisation or conference.
We hope that you all have a great Christmas and New Year. Stay safe.
The Emergent Futures Team
In case you missed it. The most popular link from the last edition:
Copper’s biggest mystery is finally cracking
In what could prove a game changer for global supply, a US startup says it’s solved a puzzle that has frustrated the mining world for decades. If successful, the discovery by Jetti Resources could unlock millions of tons of new copper to feed power grids, building sites and car fleets around the globe, narrowing and possibly even closing the deficit..... Read More
What are we Writing About?
Paul presented again to the CEO Institute in December. This was the same presentation as in the last newsletter which you can access by going to our Home Page and looking under our latest work
What’s Emerging
The Ford F-150 Lightning Is the 2023 MotorTrend Truck of the Year
With pickup trucks being the bestselling vehicles in America by a wide margin, converting them to EVs has the potential to make an outsized impact on everything from air quality to gas prices to global warming—but only if truck buyers want them. The 2022 Ford F-150 Lightning is the first EV pickup to appeal directly to the existing truck market. ….. Read More
New Zealand bans young people from buying cigarettes for life
The suite of new laws, which are among the strictest in the world, include bans on selling tobacco to anyone born on or after January 1, 2009, punishable by fines up to NZ$150,000 ($141,744)...... Read More
Ukrainian ingenuity is ushering in a new form of warfare at sea
Are uncrewed attack vessels the wave of the future?.......……. Read more
US FCC clears SpaceX to launch 7,500 Gen2 Starlink broadband satellites
However, the FCC only 'partially' granted SpaceX the right to launch its constellation of Gen2 non-geostationary orbit (NGSO) satellites: SpaceX had applied to launch 29,988 Gen2 satellites. According to the FCC, SpaceX had launched more than 3,500 Gen1 Starlink satellites as of October 2022....……read more
Amazon used AWS on a satellite in orbit to speed up data analysis in ‘first-of-its kind’ experiment
The success of the AWS demo has implications across the space industry, as spacecraft – meaning anything from space stations to satellites – face a bottleneck in both data storage and communications while in orbit...…..Read more
Australian Organic Farmer of the Year unleashes bug vacuum to tackle Queensland fruit flies
Farmer Brendon Hoyle has found a way to smash destructive bugs and keep his delicious strawberries organic — and he's glad it sucks. The Australian Organic 2022 Farmer of the Year uses an industrial sized bug vacuum, towed behind a tractor, to control Queensland fruit flies without spraying pesticides on his crop.......…..Read more
Did physicists make a wormhole in the lab?
Scientists made headlines last week for supposedly generating a wormhole. The research, reported in Nature, involves the use of a quantum computer to simulate a wormhole in a simplified model of physics. Soon after the news broke, physicists and experts in quantum computing expressed scepticism that a wormhole had in fact been created.\...........….. Read more
It's official: France bans short haul domestic flights in favour of train travel
The European Commission has approved the move which will abolish flights between cities that are linked by a train journey of less than 2.5 hours.....…. Read more
Disney’s new neural network can change an actor’s age with ease
"Production ready" neural net makes actors younger or older for film or TV........…..Read more
Researchers Managed to Transfer Twice the Global Internet Traffic in a Single Second
To put that in perspective, if you’re lucky enough to have a fiber connection to your home delivering 1-gigabit or even 10-gigabit internet speeds, this record is the equivalent of having a 1,840,000-gigabit connection to your home. You’ll probably want to make sure your ISP doesn’t charge you for overage fees.............….. Read more
A bot that watched 70,000 hours of Minecraft could unlock AI’s next big thing
OpenAI has built the best Minecraft-playing bot yet by making it watch 70,000 hours of video of people playing the popular computer game. It showcases a powerful new technique that could be used to train machines to carry out a wide range of tasks by binging on sites like YouTube, a vast and untapped source of training data......….….Read more
Predicting sex from retinal fundus photographs using automated deep learning
Paul: a great example of AI finding stuff we did not know was there......…… Read More
Teal voters at Australian 2022 federal election were largely 'tactical', not disaffected Liberals, says a new Australian National University study
The seven "teal" independents elected to federal parliament in May were swept in largely with the support of "tactical" Labor and Greens supporters, according to a new election study. Paul: I believe that politics is in a state of flux here in Australia and that there is a plausible scenario that the current Labor government is the last ever majority Federal government in Australia. This will have lots of implications so understanding the changes is important.............…. Read more
Business Tips
Run a Conference or Event Using Airtable With Colleen Brady
Paul: This is fairly specialised but shows the value of automation when running large scale events.
Hotel booking sites actually make it hard to get cheap deals, but there’s a way around it
Spoiler alert - ring the hotel and ask. .……Read more
52 things I learned in 2022 by Tom Whitwell
A treasure trove of interesting and useful facts....…. Read more
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