With this edition of the Trends Journal, we are debuting a number of features and a fresh new look designed to connect your lives — your passions, interests and needs — to the trends evolving all around you. It is an exciting time for the Trends Research Institute. The improvements we are debuting with this...
Category: Uncategorized
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Inside San Diego’s fab lab
Engineer Dylan Drotman loves robots. He’s been building them for years — and he wants to share that love. His vision: a build-your-own robot kit for kids that would cost less than $500. Kids would assemble the parts, wire the robot, program it, and, in the process, learn about servos, LEDs, computer code and other...
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Fabricating our future
The sign should read: Caution — revolutionaries at work. But the people who come to this reclaimed art studio on the campus of the University of Illinois in Champagne aren’t making gasoline bombs or arguing political theory. On a typical Tuesday evening, one might be testing a prototype of a new design for a wind...
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Looking for garbage? Turn on CNN.
• VIDEO: Objects spotted in missing plane search• VIDEO: MH370: China rules out 11 locations• VIDEO: Malaysia: Flight 370 went down in ocean• VIDEO: Searching for plane… and answers• VIDEO: Iranian MH370 passenger ‘wanted freedom’• VIDEO: Looking to past for Flight 370 answers• VIDEO: Still no results in MH370 search• VIDEO: Communication issues hurt plane...
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The search for flight MH 370
The hunt for missing flight MH 370 proved quite the media-frenzy fodder for CNN. What a marathon that network put on, despite the scarcity of any real news. That didn’t stop CNN from tagging every insignificant nuisance “breaking news” or from reaching out to drag every retired aviation “expert” back into the talking-heads fray, and asking them the...
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Angry. Desperate. Outraged.
The demonstrations are invariably reported as a reaction to government austerity initiatives, as if the absence of those measures would leave demonstrators with no reason to protest. But look at these photos. Look at the faces. From the young, who have virtually nothing to lose — no jobs, no savings, no future — to pensioners,...
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Venezuela
This South American country of 29 million, which the American public knows little about but learned to dislike during the 14-year rule of the late Hugo Chávez, is in the midst of economic calamity, political violence and social unrest. Inflation is galloping along at nearly 60 percent. There are widespread shortages of basic foods and...
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Thailand
As with so many nations of the world, Thailand is the sum of many parts, cobbled together over time by foreign conquerors or invading neighbors. Protesters who have been “occupying Bangkok” for the past five months are, in part, rekindling regional and ethnic divisions that have been simmering for decades. Yet, beneath the ethnic strife,...
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Ukraine
Victor Yanukovich was the democratically elected president of this nation who turned his back on the European Union in favor of closer ties with bordering Russia. The western, Europe-leaning portions of the country, long struggling with a depressed economy, exploded — quite literally — with anger after Yanukovych chose Russia over the EU as the...
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Nigeria
More of the same story, just a different location, different creeds and color, Nigeria, is both a creation and victim of late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century British colonization. The amalgamation of two neighboring so-called “British protectorates” in western Africa, Nigeria, which gained independence in 1960, like so many other artificially-created former colonies, has an ongoing...