Research Roundup
February 8, 2010

Tools for the future
The near future
Social trends, etc.
Other articles, essays, and recent items of interest
Refresh and reflect

Tools for the future:
  1. One key to thinking clearly about the future is thinking about risk. Many museums understand this, at least when it comes to facilities management and disaster preparedness. But "risk" is a tricky concept, especially for amateur futurists. In this video, a professional offers us some help: David Spiegelhalter, Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at Cambridge University. (From the FlowingData blog: Understanding risk—play it safe or eat a bacon sandwich?) 
  2. A New York City panel has recommended 100 Ways Buildings Can Be Greener. According to the report in the New York Times: "A panel of experts convened by the mayor and City Council issued more than 100 recommendations [last] Monday on how to make New York City's building codes more environmentally sound by imposing energy-saving requirements on construction and renovation work." The guidelines are available at http://www.urbangreencouncil.org/greencodes/.
  3. Sustainability is also the focus for the Matter Network, which describes itself as "the world's largest online distributor of sustainability news and information." Browsable topics include "Building" and a lot more, with a search function that taps into a network of sustainability websites.
  4. Popular Science says Here's What the Future of America's Infrastructure Might Look Like —25 new technologies from trackless elevated trains to microbe-powered batteries that turn sewage into electricity.
  5. There's been a lot of ink and pixels devoted to the Apple iPad in recent days (including a worried query, Will the iPad break your Museum website?). One of the most interesting reactions came from Josh Kim, an education technology expert at Dartmouth. He asked whether the iPad will eventually become a sustaining innovation, defined as something that "increases the quality of a service or product but also drives up the cost"—and whether educators (or museums, we might add) can afford to embrace sustaining innovations. Read his post at Blog U .
  6. Two quick looks at the National Center for Research in Advanced Information and Digital Technologies, a "DARPA-esque center for advanced digital technology in education" (including museums) that's been a decade in the making: http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-01/congress-finally-funds-center-advanced-digital-tech-education and http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/25/technology/25center.html .    

The near future:
  1. In the latest forecast from pioneering futurist Faith Popcorn, she predicts that 2010 will be marked by a wave of Local Cocooning ("focusing on our neighborhoods and communities, supporting those who support us ... tightening up, pulling in, reducing our radius") plus a public in search of "cultural touchstones we can trust."
  2. On March 24-26, 2010, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London will host From the Margins to the Core?, "an international conference exploring the shifting roles and increasing significance of diversity and equality in contemporary museum and heritage practice and policy." For more details: http://www.le.ac.uk/ms/profdev/marginstocore-prog.pdf. To register: www.vam.ac.uk/conferences.
  3. From the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the latest projection of national employment, covering the period from 2008 to 2018. Here are some of the highlights:
    • Total employment in the United States is projected to increase by 15.3 million (10.1 percent).
    • The labor force will become older and more racially and ethnically diverse.
    • Hispanics will join the labor force in greater numbers than non-Hispanics.
    • More than half of the new jobs will be in professional and service occupations.
    • One-third of the job openings will require a post-secondary degree or credential.

Social trends, etc.:
  1. A new study sponsored by Wells Fargo attempts to debunk the idea that youth and digital savvy necessarily go together. According to the survey of online banking customers, "the most 'adult group,' digitally speaking, is not twenty-somethings but thirty-somethings. While twenty-somethings led in the use of advanced online tools for entertainment, with such activities as watching television online and social networking, thirty-somethings are more likely to use advanced online photo and video technologies, career networking services, and financial management services."
  2. Education Futures presents a timeline of "modern education" that stretches back to 1657 and ahead to 2045: http://www.educationfutures.com/resources/timeline/.

Other articles, essays, and recent items of interest:
  1. The latest issue of Library Quarterly (volume 80, number 1, dated Jan. 2010) is devoted to digital convergence (i.e., the overlapping ways that libraries, archives and museums create, preserve and interpret digital artifacts). This is the final piece in a tripartite set of special issues on covergence that also included recent editions of Archival Science and Museum Management and Curatorship. Günter Waibel of OCLC Research has posted the tables of contents (plus links to some preprints) on the HangingTogether blog. Readers who are interested in convergence may also want to learn more about the Joint National Committee on Archives, Libraries and Museums  (CALM).    
  2. The Natural Resources Defense Council has issued a report on the relationship between walkable neighborhoods and lower foreclosure rates. This speaks (if somewhat indirectly) to the role of museums in consolidating urban residential centers rather than encouraging suburban sprawl. 
  3. From the National Endowment for the Arts Office of Research & Analysis, a new report on Artist Unemployment Rates for 2008 and 2009. The facts are not pretty: "As the recession deepened,
    unemployment among artists soared."
  4. A rousing call for more school trips to museums by AAM board chair Carl Nold, who argues that field trips are more necessary than ever now that "school budgets are dwindling and teachers are pressed for time as they try to prepare students for standardized testing." 
  5. Computer-science guru Jaron Lanier, one of the pioneers of virtual reality, has launched a manifesto against the hi-tech industry, You Are Not a Gadget. Two of his complaints: a) "The technology industry ... treats people like machines to be processed for profit" (a paraphrase) and b) The virtues of "digital collectivism"—including many kinds of open-source software and crowdsourced digital content—are vastly overstated:
    "I don't want our young people aggregated, even by a benevolent social-networking site. I want them to develop as fierce individuals, and to earn their living doing exactly that. When they work together, I hope they'll do so in competitive, genuinely distinct teams so that they can get honest feedback and create big-time innovations that earn royalties, instead of spending all their time on crowd-pleasing gambits to seek kudos." (His own words, this time.)

Refresh and reflect:
  1. A sexy statue made of typewriter parts. Which shows that some technologies never truly die . 
  2. The Impossible Hamster Club is a parable about the limits of economic growth.
  3. The first movie ever created entirely by chimpanzees.

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