Why should your website be like a Swiss Army knife, combining every possible function in one tool? And is that how it should operate in the future? Or, as the scholarly kitchen blog poses the question:

With the emergence of Facebook, Twitter, RSS, and blogs; the development of the iPhone, iTunes, the Kindle, and the pending iPad; and the continued utility of email, which has only been enhanced by smartphones—well, there's a question haunting the status quo of Web development for publishers [and museums, too!]: Do you really need all that Web site?

NTEN, the Nonprofit Technology Network, explains (nearly) everything you need to know about cloud computing in Getting Your Head (and Org) into the Clouds. Also see NTEN's earlier primer, Cloud Computing 101: What You Need to Know and this discussion from one of Microsoft's experts: Constructive Disruption: Advancing Social Change Through the Cloud.

14 Guaranteed Ways to Kill Innovation, summarized in a short, fun film by Youngme Moon, professor of business administration at Harvard Business School.

Top 5 Sites With Future Predictions About The World from MakeUseOf.

Big Think—a "global forum connecting people and ideas," featuring interviews with notable thinkers from a wide variety of fields—tackles The Future in Motion (a nine-part series about transportation in the 21st century). 

Foundation funding will continue to lag in 2010, according to a survey by Graystone Consulting and the Association of Small Foundations. "Roughly half of the small and mid-sized foundations in the country intend to make changes to their spending and grantmaking policies in 2010, with many saying they plan to cut their grantmaking budgets." A summary is available from the Foundation Center.

Some economists predict that retiring baby boomers will lead to a shortage of American workers by 2018. "It comes down to demographics, argue Barry Bluestone  and Mark Melnik of Northeastern University  in  a study sponsored by the MetLife Foundation and think tank Civic Ventures, with retiring Baby Boomers [leaving] a huge number job vacancies in their wake. The two project that by 2018 there will be 14.6 million new nonfarm payroll jobs, plus some additional jobs in farming, family businesses and so on. Meantime, with no change in immigration policy or labor force participation rates, there will only be about 9.6 million workers available to fill those positions, leaving a gap of more than 5 million jobs that are vacant." As reported in the The Wall Street Journal, which also offers an alternative scenario based on the work of demographer Joel Kotkin: "As Europe and Asia become 'veritable old-age homes,' the U.S. will enjoy the benefits of a growing population."

Are Schools Pushing Girls Away from Science?  A new survey commissioned by pharmaceutical giant Bayer says yes: "Women and underrepresented minorities who have successfully pursued STEM careers were discouraged along the way, according to [the report]. What's more, those who experienced discouragement in their lives most often cited their educational institutions as the offenders. But they also cited 'inspiring and dedicated teachers' as positive influences in their career decisions." Museums were also praised as a positive influence: 63% of respondents (women and underrepresented minorities in the chemistry/chemical engineering fields) said that science museum visits were "an important factor in stimulating/sustaining their interest in science" and 79% said that extracurricular activities (including visits to science museums) are "important for today's female and minority students wishing to pursue STEM careers."  

Hispanics graduate from college at a lower rate than non-Hispanics, shows new research from the Gates Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute. Overall, "51 percent of Hispanic students who start college complete a bachelor's degree in six years, compared to 59 percent of white students—a disparity that holds true regardless of student ability or school competitiveness." What will this mean for the diversity of museum audiences in the future, given the strong correlation between a college education and museum-going? Read a summary of the report here or download the full text at http://www.aei.org/docLib/Rising-to-the-Challenge.pdf. For a really big picture of global education trends, see Projection of populations by level of educational attainment, age, and sex for 120 countries for 2005-2050.

Americans are always on the move, and as a result, they put down fewer roots than they used toright? Not so fast, says social historian Claude S. Fischer. "In fact, American residential mobility has been declining. It’s been declining since as far back as we can get good evidence about mobility [c. 1948]." This is clear from the following chart, based on Census Bureau data from 1948-2008. Read more at The Myth that Never Moves.

  

Ann Markusen and Anne Gadwa, "Arts and Culture in Urban or Regional Planning: A Review and Research Agenda," Journal of Planning Education and Research 29:2 (2010): 379-391. Free download at http://jpe.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/29/3/379

Abstract: Amid the buzz on the creative city and cultural economy, knowledge about what works at various urban and regional scales is sorely lacking. This article reviews the state of knowledge about arts and culture as an urban or regional development tool, exploring norms, reviewing evidence for causal relationships, and analyzing stakeholders, bureaucratic fragmentation, and citizen participation in cultural planning. Two strategies—designated cultural districts and tourist-targeted cultural investments—illustrate how better research would inform implementation. In guiding urban cultural development, researchers should examine and clarify the impacts, risks, and opportunity costs of various strategies and the investments and revenue and expenditure patterns associated with each, so that communities and governments avoid squandering "creative city" opportunities.

Looking for a guide to the smartest websites? Mensa, the high-IQ organization, just issued a list of its top 50 Web sites for 2010. (One entry on the list is the Museum of Bad Art, so we can't really vouch for the other 49 selections.)

Lack of abbatoirs strains local-food movement. This article from the The Rural Blog is a fascinating reminder of how infrastructure constraints (in this case, a lack of slaughterhouses) can stand in the way of sustainability.

Gemini concept robots from Hiroshi Kasai, a designer at Tsukuba University in Japan. "The whole idea [is] to listen to what the robots are talking about in a museum." Spotted at übergizmo.

11 (Extra) Special Collections in University Libraries from mental_floss. Everything from glass eyeballs to G-strings (and we thought museums had a monopoly on weird collections).

Introducing The Mundaneum, the Internet's "first predecessor," now sitting in a Belgian museum. Nobel Peace Prize Winner Henri LaFontaine dreamed "of a place where all the world’s knowledge would be stored and [his] dream came true in 1910, when the Mundaneum opened in Belgium. ... At its peak, the Mundaneum featured 12 million 3 x 5 inch index cards available to the public."

The First Abstract American Art: The Parfleche (according to folk art blogger Jim Linderman).