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Reuven Cohen,

It’s that time of the year again. You know, that time of year when technologists, pundits and bloggers get into the festive spirit and share technology predictions for the coming year. Being partially curious and possibly not wanting to be left out of the fun, I thought I’d throw my hat into the ring with my own set of prognoses. In terms of timeframe, whether it’s 2014 or 2050 is another story. Alas, this is a story about intersecting trends, asking the simple yet infinitely complex question of where is technology taking us?

The famous computer scientist Alan Kay can best sum up my opinion on technology predictions in his famous 1971 quote; “Don’t worry about what anybody else is going to do… The best way to predict the future is to invent it. Really smart people with reasonable funding can do just about anything that doesn’t violate too many of Newton’s Laws!”

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The yellow arrow points to retinal ganglion cell, responsible for transmitting signals from the eye to the brain.

Using an inkjet printer, researchers have succeeded in printing adult eye cells for the first time. The demonstration is a step toward producing tissue implants that could cure some types of blindness.

Scientists have previously printed embryonic stem cells and other immature cells. But scientists had thought adult cells might be too fragile to print. Now, researchers have printed cells from the optic nerves of rats, finding the cells not only survived, but also retained the ability to grow and develop.

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While the rest of us are messing around with our PayPals and Amazon Payments, some folks in Argentina have created the first crowdfunding platform in America to take Bitcoin.

The platform, called Idea.me focuses primarily on artistic, musical, and retail projects although, as evidenced by the project photos, many campaigns have a philanthropic bent. The platform was “born in Argentina” wrote Pia Giudice and is now in seven countries in Latin America. It is the area’s only regional crowdfunding platform. The platform has seen $750,000 in funding and should be raising $2.4 million in March 2014 in a Series A.

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image via Voxman

Every once in a while an electric vehicle comes along which just wows my socks off. Usually they are also the ones I’ll never be able to pay for on a writer’s salary. The latest of these is the recently unveiled Wattman super electric motorcycle from Franch brand Voxan.

The Wattman, according to Voxan, is the most powerful electric motorcycle in the world. It is also one of the most badass looking ones to date. Sporting 200 hp and a torque of 200 Nm up to 10,500 RPM, the motorcycle can accelerate from 0 to 160 km/h (nearly 100 miles per hour) in a flat 5.9 seconds thanks to its belt drive motor.

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Ernst & Young LLP is predicting a rise in demand for certain types of insurance, such as cyber and nanotechnology.

The consulting firm announced Tuesday the release of the EY 2014 US Property-Casualty Insurance Outlook, which recommends that P&C carriers “invest in innovation of product development processes and delivery to meet rising demand for protection.”

For example, according to the report, a lack of “any meaningful history” with nanotechnology indicates that potential risks are not easy to assess.

“The emerging applications of nanotechnology in the manufacture or use of medicine, cosmetics, drug delivery, robotics, materials science and other products and systems create potential liability exposures,” EY noted. “Examples include bodily injury (analogous to asbestos exposure) and environmental damage from nanoparticles escaping uncontrolled into the air or water supply.”

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By The Sentinel

STUDENTS and sci-fi enthusiasts got the chance to meet a ‘real-life human cyborg’ as part of a special demonstration.

Kevin Warwick is Professor of Cybernetics at the University of Reading where he carries out research in artificial intelligence, robotics and cyborgs.

He became known as the world’s first cyborg when he had a silicon chip implanted in the nervous system of his arm, in order to link his brain directly with a computer. He then became the first person in the world to communicate electronically between his own and his wife’s nervous system.

by Jeremiah Budin

Bitcoin is a somewhat mysterious, fairly confusing type of digital currency that, until recently, you could use to buy large amount of drugs on the internet. But now you can use Bitcoin for something (arguably) even better than drugs: New York City real estate. A tipster recently sent along a listing for a $2,580/month one-bedroom sublet in 99 John Deco Lofts, accepting Bitcoin, which hit the market last month. And today, online apartment search marketplace RentHop announced in a press release that it will be accepting Bitcoin from people advertising NYC apartments on its site.

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By Robert McMillan

One of the top software engineers behind the Bitcoin digital currency wants to launch it into space.

Last month, Jeff Garzik floated the idea of Bitcoin in space on an internet discussion forum, pitching it as a way to always keep the system up and running — even if it’s attacked by malicious hackers.

The plan is to send up a Bitcoin computer on a tiny inexpensive satellite and have this machine communicate with terrestrial Bitcoin computers via radio. Garzik — who works at Bitcoin payment processor Bitpay and helps shape the open source software that drives the digital currency on thousands of machines across the internet — says that the satellite node could help the Bitcoin network fight back something known as a Sibyl attack. This is where malicious computers flood a node on the peer-to-peer network with bad data. It could give criminals a way of spending their bitcoins more than once, and it’s also part of the so-called selfish miner scenario that Cornell University researchers described last month, saying it could bring down the entire system.

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By Sandra I. Erwin

A laser beam the size of a quarter fired from the back of a truck successfully shot down football-size mortar rounds and took small drones out of the sky.

In the world of directed-energy weapons, this was a milestone achievement, government and industry officials said. It happened between Nov. 18 and Dec. 10 during tests of the Army “high energy laser mobile demonstrator” at White Sands Missile Range, N.M.

Laser beams that can replace bullets and missiles have been a tantalizing prospect for decades, but the Pentagon has been less than enthusiastic. Directed-energy is what experts consider a “disruptive” technology that upsets the status quo. The notion that military forces would ditch proven kinetic weapons and take chances with light beams has made lasers a tough sell so far.

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Transleadership! By Mr. Andres Agostini

TRANSLEADERSHIP
This is an excerpt from the conclusion section of, “…Transleadership!…” that discusses some management, leadership and futurism theories and practices and strategies.

To read the entire piece, just click the link at the end of article:

EXCERPT. Ensuing:

(…SUMMATION OF WHAT A TRANSLEADERSHIP LEADER DOES AND IS …)

# 1 – Is An Actionable Statesman.

# 2 – Thoroughly moral and ethical in deed and spontaneously projected example.

# 3 – Happily located and navigating through Century 21.

# 4 – By far, focused on solid and increasing education and perpetual mind expansion, chiefly those acquired by solving truly complex problems systematically.

# 5 – Self-Pedagogue forever. Teaches to self-tech to his / her crew for Life.

# 6 – Leads, Co-Leads, Follows, Co-Follows, Executes, Co-Executes, Builds, Co-Builds, Envisions, Co-Envisions, Paves and Co-Paves Never-Thought-Of Pathways.

# 7 – Intuitive, Counterintuitive, and seamlessly blends both of the above.

# 8 – Takes all – encompassing curiosity as it is operated in real time – beyond known and unknown extremes.

# 9 – Makes every mistake – own or that of the competitor – into his / her won victory.

# 10 – Doesn’t care how fluid and amorphous the limits, contexts and the dynamics of his / her blurred theater of operations are.

# 11 – Can strategize and prevail through many operational frameworks at once without getting bewildered.

# 12 – Challenges every assumption, doctrine and dogma ruthlessly and relentlessly, beginning with his / her own ones.

# 13 – Learns something practical, meaningful, and decisively productive every day.

# 14 – Heightens crew’s sense of urgency and of focus.

# 15 – Re-adapts and re-invents resiliently and effortlessly regardless of whatever constraints and increasing pressures stemming from the frame of reference.

# 16 – Operates multidimensionally and cross-functionally.

# 17 – Constantly and boldly sets pre-conditions to maximize the likelihood of his / her triumphs.

# 18 – Always selects and develops his / her leadership constituency.

# 19 – Creates and applies his / her own – along with that of the team – body of knowledge.

# 20 – Does never ever institute “best practices,” but UNIQUE, premium-graded approaches.

# 21 – Carries on much swifter that “life cycles” intrinsic to products, services, challenges, and complex problem solving.

# 22 – Does not get concerned about his / her adversaries since the uniqueness and ever-upgrading quality of tactics, strategies and stratagems as applied.

# 23 – Harmonizes issues immediately.

# 24 – His / her leadership is always (and robustly so) linked to concrete and unambiguous objective and goals.

# 25 – Always updates his methods, approaches, techniques, tactics, strategies, especially using those that are extraneous to so-called and already disrupted “history.” (Which one, that wrote by winners or that stated by losers or that always failing to have sufficient objectivity?)

# 26 – Continuously learns lessons – and improves those – both from incurred mistakes and from captured successes.

# 27 – Extracts information and knowledge – to be shared and brainstormed with the crew – out of everything done, thought, as well as to be executed regardless of the incumbent.

# 28 – Wins only based on merit, principle, legitimacy and lawfulness.

# 29 – Strategizes the granularity of detail of everything. There is no such a thing as a leader that is not a strategist and visionary.

# 30 – Embraces leading-edge (even weird) science and its stemming technological derivatives immediately.

# 31 – Enjoys phenomena and prevails as he / she navigates through said phenomena.

# 32 – Is never commonsensical and always challenging long-held assumptions as he / she institutes the most unorthodox and exuberant novel practices (lavishly so).

# 33 – De-tools, tools, re-tools the amplification of the individual and collective intelligence within his / her crew.

# 34 – Instills how to operate autonomously and jointly – in pursuit of the same goals and objectives – to his / her followers and co-leaders.

# 35 – Learns from his / her mistakes, but empathizes to learn also from the mistakes of others.

# 36 – Fluidly shares experience and practical knowledge across every incumbent in the crew.

# 37 – Only thinks and performs a la unthinkable thinking.

# 38 – Disrupt the boundaries of unthinkable thinking, always going beyond such boundaries.

# 39 – Transforms new problems and old problems into actionable breakthrough opportunities.

# 40 – In his / her case and exercising this type of leadership, strongly and coherently insists on and applies three aspects: CIVILITY, CIVILITY, CIVILITY!

# 41 – Before chaos, he / she instills more and more chaos – of greater magnitude, scale and speed – to level off and outsmart the frame of reference targeted.

# 42 – Drives OPS with directness and / or indirectness, as well as with the loose/control hybridization mode.

# 43 – Shares of defined values

# 44 – Elicits conceptions of practiced futures to deal with and countermeasure way in advance.

# 45 – Fuses technology innovation with business strategy as a tool for competitive advantage.

# 46 – Conceives early and distinguishes it and exploits it strategic surprises attributable to competitors.

# 47 – Ascertains that there is not a single stone left unturned.

END OF EXCERPT.

Please see the entire presentation at http://lnkd.in/dP2PmCP