March 06 2008 / by Marisa Vitols
Category: Other Year: 2008 Rating: 1
The Future Scanner Daily Top 5 serves to highlight 5 of the
best scans submitted to the Future Scanner during the last 24
hours. 
Our last community
poll results are in! The question we asked, “If you consider
the first person who will reach the age of 200, in approximately
what year was he or she born?” received a total of 165 votes (as of
today, March 5). Receiving 41.21% of the votes, the
number one answer was “1950-1979”. Make sure to check out the
interesting comment thread
that followed!
Today’s new poll is about planetary exploration. The question
is: How many planets will a child born in the year 2000
visit in his or her lifetime?
We encourage everyone to explain their decision in the comment
thread below!
GUIDELINES:
1) The person doesn’t literally have to step on the planet – as we
know, planets can sometimes be very hot or very cold. They just
have to somehow “land” on the planet for it to count.
2) The child is born and remains in the middle-class: your average
Joe.
3) For the purposes of this poll we’ll be using the classical
definition of planets (9 total) and not including moons or
exoplanets.
March 05 2008 / by Marisa Vitols
Category: Other Year: 2008 Rating: 1
The Future Scanner Daily Top 5 serves to highlight 5 of the
best scans submitted to the Future Scanner during the last 24
hours.
Hedge fund manager and self-described ‘natural optimist’,
Melanie
Swan is basically a super-human. 
When she isn’t frequenting future salons, lecturing about
financial trends and emerging technologies or advising one tech
start-up or another, Swan somehow squeezes in enough time to manage
her
hedge-fund and blog on topics ranging from
tranhumanism, to
market trends to virtual worlds.
Melanie’s rock-solid financial foundation, which includes
degrees from Georgetown and the prestigious Wharton School, has
translated into success at the start-up level (she was founder of
GroupPurchase) and a subsequent rise through the ranks of iPass in
Silicon Valley, JP Morgan in New York, Fidelity in Boston and
Arthur Andersen in LA. Presently, she is the principal of MS
Futures Group in Silicon Valley, holding the titles of hedge fund
manager and futurist.
An active member of the Silicon Valley futurist community,
Melanie is also a Lifeboat Foundation board member,
sits on the Acceleration Studies Foundation
Advisory Board and is a co-moderator of the Philadelphia and
Boulder Future
Salons.
Melanie was kind enough to share many of her tried and tested
insights with us yesterday in this MemeBox
interview. What follows is a condensed version of Melanie’s
thoughts about the intersection between futurism and the corporate
world, as well as her investment and life philosophy.
MV: What do you do and how is that related to the
future?
MS: My goal is to stimulate the widest possible development and
deployment of innovative technology. Historically, technology has
been the one phenomenon that has demonstrated continuous positive
impact on humanity, ever since the first flint. The benefits of
technology are continuing to accelerate as the world becomes more
democratized, expressed at higher levels of Maslow’s
Hierarchy and networked globally for peak collaboration.
I also participate in creating and sponsoring innovative
technology development and tools and mechanisms to facilitate its
generation and adoption. Some of my current projects are Virtual
Worlds Data Visualization,
Open Access Futures Journals, and the Future of
Technology: What might be the next internet?.
MV: How does your background as a futurist come into
play when managing a hedge fund and running your own
consultancy?
MS: Being a futurist means…
Continue Reading
March 04 2008 / by Marisa Vitols
Category: Other Year: 2008 Rating: 2
This is the first of a nightly series, bringing you five of the
best scans from the MemeBox Future Scanner.
The Sim that Saves People: Preventing Disaster in an
Unruly World
scanned by Austra
Zubkovs –
Direct Link
Smart Coating Delivers Drugs
scanned by Bora – Direct
Link
Off-Roading on the Moon
scanned by mariposa –
Direct Link
Nanomagnets ‘could target cancer’
scanned by Fishka –
Direct Link
Coming Soon to Japan: Remote Control with a
Wink
scanned by Venessa
Posavec – Direct Link
Hope you enjoy these links!
March 03 2008 / by Marisa Vitols
Category: Other Year: 2008 Rating: 1
In addition to our weekly awards, every Sunday MemeBox will also
release our official Top 10 List of the most interesting and useful
Future Scans posted the during the preceding week. This list is a
great way to get acquainted with what the Future Scanner has to
offer and to quickly digest some great information.
The Top 10 Future Scans for the week of February 25 – March 2
(in no particular order) are:
Computers See Diseases Written All Over Your
Face
submitted by Austra
Zubkovs (Scan –
Direct Link)
10 Reasons We Will Live to 1000
submitted by juldrich
(Scan –
Direct Link)
Killer Robots … Friend or Foe?
submitted by il pinolo
(Scan –
Direct Link)
The Future of Universal Water
submitted by Zora
Styrian (Scan -
Direct
Link)
Daylight Savings Time Wastes Energy
submitted by mzalite
(Scan –
Direct
Link)
Non-Magnetic Metals Made Magnetic by Reducing to
Nanometer Sizes
submitted by Rahein
(Scan –
Direct Link)
Clothes To Monitor Heart Beat, Other Vital Signs,
Automatically?
submitted by butterscotch
(Scan –
Direct
Link)
Virtuality and Reality ‘to Merge’
submitted by Field of
Memes (Scan –
Direct
Link)
Nano Self-Assembly Boosting Moore’s Law
submitted by FutureFly
(registration required) (Scan –
Direct Link)
Robot Interprets (& Performs) Your
Dreams
submitted by mariposa
(Scan –
Direct
Link)
*BONUS – This one just gets supreme coolness
points: Amazing Pictures from Space
submitted by futuretalk
(Scan –
Direct
Link)
To get in on the action you too can submit your own scans or
write-up your reactions and enter them as blog posts. Every voice
is valued here at MemeBox and we’d love to read what you’ve got to
say!
March 02 2008 / by Marisa Vitols
Category: Other Year: 2008 Rating: 7
Here at MemeBox, Sunday is the day we look back at all of the
Future Blogger posts and Future Scanner submissions in an effort to
distill and condense the 
best of what you, the community, have contributed to the site and
the broader world throughout the previous 7 days.
My favorite part of this process is the doling out of our weekly
contributor awards. So, without further ado, the community kudos go
to:
Future Scanner of the Week: juldrich –
for scans including 57 Years is Now
Just 41 Days, Solar’s Long-Term
Forecast is Sunny, and The Future of the
Airline Industry.
Future Blogger of the Week: futuretalk
– for posts including Robot
Consciousness, Regenerative
Medicine, and Molecular Nanotech
promises increased wealth and longer life.
For more from these MemeBox award winners, check out
juldrich’s blog Jump the Curve
and futuretalk’s blog Positive Futurist for more
awesome content!
Future Scan of the Week: Computers See
Diseases Written All Over Your Face by Austra
Zubkovs
Future Blogger Post of the Week: What
is an iPlant? by iPlant
Congratulations and thank you for contributing!
Of course, a big thank you is also in order for everyone who
helped make Week #1 a great success. We’ve been delighted by the
response and the terrific quality of the information that you’ve
shared. On behalf of everyone at MemeBox Central: Danke Schön!
Stay tuned as we continue to develop the site, fix bugs and add
more and more dynamic content. Be sure to shoot me any suggestions
that you may have so that we may more effectively build a resource
that best suits your needs.
Marisa is the MemeBox Community Manager. She can be
contacted at marisa[at]memebox.com
“If you consider the first person who will reach the age
of 200, in approximately what year was he or she
born?”
The above question was posed by Daryl on the comment
thread of our recent Aubrey de Grey
article on life extension. Please vote and if you do be sure to
explain your reasoning in the comments section!
And for the sake of argument, let’s not include cryonics. So the
rules are that the person can not have already been dead. :)
