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Gaming the Future: The Book!

Category: Nanodot

Last chance to have your 2000 donation doubled

from the and-now-a-word-from-our-sponsor dept.
Sunday, December 31, is the last day to have your tax-year-2000 donation to Foresight doubled by our $35,000 Challenge Grant. To get your year 2000 U.S. federal tax deduction: donate online, fax, or write your check by tomorrow. (Donations to Foresight are tax-deductible in the U.S. to the full extent allowed by law.) Save more by donating stock. Read more for the various options, from $5K and up, down to $45 or even $0.

National Medal of Technology to Doug Engelbart

from the he's-our-hero dept.
Credit goes to Brian Berg for spotting this San Jose Mercury News article on Foresight advisor Doug Engelbart's new honor. Excerpts: "On one hand we have instant gratification — the shiny, happy kids at bigfatjackpot.com who went from zero to seven figures of net worth in a matter of months before things cooled off. On the other hand we have delayed gratification — in the noble personage of one Douglas Engelbart. Friday at a black-tie dinner in Washington, D.C., Engelbart will be one of two individuals to receive the National Medal of Technology, to be bestowed by President Clinton. The award, the nation's highest honor for technology, comes more than 30 years after he developed many of the basic tools that define today's digital world…Engelbart is more than just a great technologist. He's a humanist who sees computer-assisted communications as just a means to achieving far loftier goals. What he envisioned more than 30 years ago was comprehensive systems that would augment human decision-making. The big picture, which he continued to flesh out over the years, boiled down to this: Better tools led to better collaboration processes, which in turn led to more innovation, better decisions and better organizations. And to better chances of managing nanotechnology well, which is why Doug is an advisor to Foresight. Congrats to him!

Ethical systems: Guardian, Commercial, Idealist

from the keeping-track-of-our-biases dept.
Senior Associate PatGratton writes "On a sociological/ethical note… Around the time of the Fall Foresight Gathering, I was reading Jane Jacobs' Systems of Survival and came up with some interesting applications of her ideas to people interested in transformational technologies….When I tried to apply Jacobs' categories to the attendees of the Foresight Gathering, I quickly reached two conclusions: 1) there are virtually no Guardians present within the Foresight membership, and 2) Jacobs missed a syndrome….I contend that the Foresight community is split between Idealists and Traders, and that this leads to a certain amount of unavoidable conflict….Because Guardians are underrepresented within Foresight, Foresight discussions are likely to strongly biased towards Commercial and Idealist views and solutions. More importantly, we're likely to fail to address or to take seriously concerns that would come naturally to a Guardian. This in turn implies that we're likely be underprepared when we take our ideas/solutions to the general public…" Read More for Pat's full post.

Time to start writing

from the gigahands-make-nanowork dept.
ChrisPhoenix writes "(This was written as a letter to Foresight leadership; Chris Peterson asked us to get Nanodot feedback.)

In a spontaneous group that formed Sunday night after the recent Foresight Senior Associates Gathering, four of us discovered that we all felt similarly: that the time has come to build on the suggestions and issues produced by previous Foresight work and gatherings. Having attended several Gatherings and heard several issues from multiple perspectives, we are ready to start filling in the details. Although large and random groups are great for brainstorming, they are perhaps not the best structure for producing detailed, focused, mature work on specific issues. Small working groups or think tanks would be useful at this point, to begin processing the excellent suggestions that have flowed from the Gatherings." (Click Read More… for the rest.)

Deadline for Foresight Gathering: TODAY, Sept 1

from the be-there-or-be-confused dept.
Save $100 by registering for the Sept 8-10 Foresight Senior Associate Gathering by TODAY, Friday, Sept 1. See the speaker list and program. Topics include nanotech, encrypted money, machine intelligence, healing the environment, the "art of honesty", and reforming our bizarre intellectual property system. If you miss this one, it could be spring 2001 before you get another chance. Please join us.

Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology finalists

from the wish-he-were-here-to-see dept.
The top five individuals or teams in two categories, Experimental and Theoretical, have been selected as finalists for this year's Feynman Prizes in Nanotechnology. Winners will be feted at the Feynman Prize Banquet on November 4, 2000, at the 8th Foresight Conference on Molecular Nanotechnology in Bethesda, Maryland, USA. Congratulations to these world-class nanotechnology researchers, and thanks to all who made nominations this year.

Proposed model for group-authored Foresight book

from the many-hands-make-lots-of-work dept.
Senior Associate TomMcKendree writes "I understand the intent of "Engines of Creation 2000" project is to produce an up-to-date version of Engines of Creation by integrating the work of many contributors. An excellent model for such an integration is the Fifth Discipline Fieldbook (Senge, Kleiner, Roberts, Ross, Smith (eds), 1994). It combines the work of 63 contributors, many providing just a single section of a few pages. The book is organized into chapters by topic, with individual sections identified by type (solo exercise, team exercise, guiding idea, resource, etc). It is intended to be highly browsable–readable in any direction." In addition, the book has its own website under construction.

Foresight Gathering Sept 8-10, Palo Alto

from the brain-overload-party dept.
Register by August 1 to save $100 on this fall's Foresight Senior Associate Gathering. Speakers and participants at previous events in this series include: Bruce Ames, David Brin, Eric Drexler, Esther Dyson, Doug Engelbart, David Friedman, John Gilmore, Robert Hambrecht, Bill Joy, Steve Jurvetson, Brewster Kahle, Ray Kurzweil, Marvin Minsky, Virginia Postrel, Eric Raymond, Paul Saffo, Eric Schmidt, Vernor Vinge & Roy Walford. See comments from participants.

Remote conference attendance by web-proxy

from the entrepreneurial-opportunity dept.
WillWare can't make it to all the Foresight conferences, and has an idea on how to address this problem: It would be cool to remotely hire somebody (local to the conference) to strap on a wearable computer with a camera, microphone, loudspeaker, and wireless internet connection. I could remotely observe conference goings-on on my home computer, and I could talk to people at the conference. For the amount of time that I was hiring this person, he or she would wear a hat or t-shirt with my name and picture. It might take a T1 line or a cable modem to get acceptable bandwidth, but after a very few conferences it becomes a lot cheaper than airfare, a hotel room, and a rental car. Read More for the full proposal.

*You* can nominate the Feynman Prize winner

from the rewards-for-good-workers dept.
The deadline for Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology submissions is July 31, 2000, but now is the time to get your nomination in.

If you suspect your nominees may be too busy — or modest — to complete the process, you can do the whole thing for them; it's pretty easy.

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