As more nations worldwide go cashless, and the range of new cryptocurrency offerings widens, the participation among the general public to purchase digital currencies and investors to invest in them increases. But the speed at which digital currency investment is increasing worldwide is prompting governments to intervene, seeking to regulate, control or cease the growth of cryptocurrencies. For example, the...
A primer on blockchaining: The technology behind digital currency
Blockchaining. The technology is complex, but here’s a simple outline. A “block” is a record of a transaction between two people that’s permanently stored in a database. The database is encrypted so the record of transactions can never be hacked or altered. A “chain” is a series of blocks stored in time sequence. (Think of a chain as the register...
Trendpost
Will we get our brains and minds back into better balance in time? This will depend in large part on whether we allow ourselves to continue being trapped behind the psychological wall of anger, ego gratification, fear and dismissiveness — or choose to reflect on a “bigger picture” of who we are and how we can better adapt to the...
Self-driving cars: Good bet or a money pit?
Everyone from the Big Three automakers to insurance companies and chip designers is accelerating efforts to create self-driving cars – and accelerating the hype, too. But while the auto industry is gobbling up technology companies in multi-billion-dollar deals to accelerate their progress toward autonomous vehicles and telling shareholders, investors and consumers that a driverless world is just around the corner,...
Trendpost
Autonomous vehicles will spend decades in refinement before the Tesla dream of fully automated vehicles is realized. And even after the technology has been developed, it will spend more years “penned” in clearly defined locations, such as airports, corporate campuses, construction/mining sites, industrial parks and warehouses. Eventually, driverless commercial and public transportation vehicles will be used along routes that are...
Make up your own mind?
“Divided States of America,” the front-page headline of the Spring Trends Journal, reflects an even deeper “Great Divide.” It’s beyond politics and economics. In this article, using insights from modern neuroscience, psychology and philosophy, we’ll look at an inherent “divide” within the human brain and how we can work with it more effectively. When we turn on cable news, we...
The next big… BIG thing
Imagine intelligence agents running around the World Wide Web. They’re performing deep research based on our fields of interest. They’re helping us make intuitive leaps toward new ways of understanding the world. This, in fact, already is happening. And it quickly will increase as we become more familiar with a new level of technology that enhances collaboration between human and...
Trendpost
The key philosophical shift emerging here is from a reliance on documents with pre-determined perspectives, orientations and world views to a reliance on raw, free data that can be re-connected according to one’s own curiosities, intuitions and creative insights. By teaching computers how to meaningfully link data according to our personal choices, The Semantic Web has the potential to break...
Trend Forecast
General economic optimism persists on a global level. Europe’s economic growth, while tepid, continues to gain strength. Brazil is emerging from its worst recession in over 100 years. While India’s economy, especially small business, was hit by its demonetization-driven cash crunch and the rollout of the Goods and Services Tax that slowed production and hit manufacturing growth, it still posted...
Crash? Correction?
I’ve been in the trend-forecasting business nearly 40 years. When you review who accurately forecast market crashes, beginning with the 1987 stock market crash to the Panic of ’08, I, and a handful of others, called them first. Now, a loud chorus of financial experts and economic headlines warn of grave stock-market dangers ahead: • “ ‘Potential bubbles’ in financial markets...