Vol. 2, No. 1 | November
3, 2015 | AAI Foresight
Inside Foresight Signals
> Obesity and the Knowledge Worker
> Combining 3D Printing and Clean Energy
> Hot Topic: Travel, Tourism, and Technology
> News from AAI Foresight: New Website ... We Are One!
> Mack Report: Coal’s Future Impacts
Obesity and the Knowledge Worker
You’re a highly skilled knowledge worker of the Information Age,
with decision-making authority over your equally skilled employees. Feeling
good about yourself? Hang on.
Research has shown that having a high level of control over
your job can mitigate the stresses involved that contribute to obesity. But a
team of Australian researchers now observes that different types of job control—skill
discretion and decision authority—have different effects: Skilled workers with freedom
to use those skills had lower body mass index and smaller waist size, while workers
required to make a lot of decisions had bigger waist size.
With a global population of overweight people approaching 2
billion, researchers are pursuing a wide range of factors behind the growing
epidemic. “When looking at the wide system of factors that cause and maintain
obesity, work stress is just a small part of a very large and tangled network
of interactive factors,” said lead author Christopher
Bean, a health psychology PhD candidate from the University of Adelaide, in
a press statement.
Reference: Christopher G. Bean, Helen R. Winefield, Charli
Sargent, and Amanda D. Hutchinson, “Differential
associations of job control components with both waist circumference and body
mass index,” Social Science &
Medicine, Volume 143 (October 2015), published by Elsevier. DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2015.08.034.
Signals: health,
information age, knowledge workers, obesity, stress, work
Combining 3D Printing and Clean Energy
Additive manufacturing processes (aka 3D printing) have come
a long way from rapid prototyping. A project at Oak Ridge National Laboratory
merges building and vehicle construction with clean energy systems to create a
possible solution to the challenges of the modern electric grid, such as
intermittent outages and the impacts of extreme weather.
For its Additive
Manufacturing Integrated Energy (AMIE) demonstration, ORNL and
partners printed both a natural-gas-powered hybrid electric vehicle and a
solar-powered building, connecting them to create an integrated energy system.
The intermittent power from the building’s 3.2-kilowatt solar array is balanced
with supplemental power from the vehicle via the system’s central control.
“Working together, we designed a building that innovates
construction and building practices and a vehicle with a long enough range to
serve as a primary power source,” said ORNL’s Roderick Jackson, who led the AMIE demonstration project. “Our
integrated system allows you to get multiple uses out of your vehicle.”
Details: Oak
Ridge National Laboratory. Image: Carlos
Jones, courtesy of ORNL.
Signals: construction,
energy, 3D printing
Hot Topic: Travel, Tourism, Traffic, and Technology
Advances in transportation technology over the past 50 years
have enabled people to travel farther than ever, and to spend less time doing
so. While investment in transportation has expanded employment and leisure opportunities,
the total number of trips that people take has remained stable since 1965,
according to Britain's latest National
Transportation Survey, reported in the journal Significance.
Many current advances in transportation technologies go largely
unseen, as in Fraunhofer
IAO’s UR:BAN research initiative to
create safer and more efficient streets in tomorrow’s cities. The project
combines cognitive assistance technologies, networked traffic systems, and
human factors research that will help predict what drivers, pedestrians, and
others will do, preventing accidents and optimizing travel.
Other technologies affecting travel trends include
smartphones, wearable devices, and social networking that have converged to
create the booming sharing economy as exemplified by Airbnb, Couchsurfing,
Nightswapping, and others, writes Singapore futurist Harish
Shah.
“As these Sharing Economy models gradually converge with
other developments also driven by technological evolution, they will very much
impact the way the conventional hospitality industry players will have to do
business,” Shah writes. Up next: telepresence robotics and 4D virtual reality
that eliminate the need to travel altogether.
But technology is not the only force driving change in
travel trends. As TechCast
Global observes in its case study of Las Vegas, stresses in both the
climate and the economy could lead desert-bound cities in the dust.
“Ten years from now, [Las Vegas] may have been evacuated and
overrun by desert,” TechCast reports. “This gaudy entertainment capital faces
serious challenges in the coming decades. They could be even worse in the years
beyond 2035.”
__________
News from AAI Foresight: New Website … We Are One!
This fall, AAI Foresight introduced an all-new website
designed by Lisa Mathias. The site
is designed to improve user navigation and integration with AAI’s publications
and projects. As is the future itself, the site is a work-in-progress, so please
browse and send us your feedback.
Plus, Foresight
Signals celebrates its first birthday with this edition! Highlights of the
past year include:
- 10 Consumer Trends in Latin America
- Peak Youth: Preparing Now for an Aging Planet
- Has the First Cybermurder Already Happened?
- Living in a (Smart) Glass House
- The Challenges of a Rising China
- Hot Topic: World Population in 2100
Also beginning with this edition (Volume 2, Number 1), Foresight Signals will be published
monthly. It will still be free, and it will still cover a variety of stories
for and about the foresight community. Share your stories, news, feedback, and
signals with us and your fellow foresight professionals. Log in to comment here
or write to consulting editor Cindy Wagner at CynthiaGWagner@gmail.com.
__________
Mack Report: Coal’s Future Impacts
As coal-based energy declines, it will take other enterprises
down with it, writes AAI Foresight Managing Principal Timothy C. Mack in his latest blog, “Coal
and the Cascading Consequences of Change.”
Clean coal was long considered the wave of the future, but the
U.S. government’s cancellation of the FutureGen project, which would have used oxy-combustion
(considered the least-cost approach to clean coal), means more coal companies
will fold.
One of the businesses affected by this decline is coal
transportation, which often relies on waterways, Mack observes: “While water
transport reductions largely impact inland waterway regions, systemic change is
seldom confined, but cascades outwards, often producing unexpected negative
impacts at the same time that industries such as renewable power grow.”
Signals: coal,
energy, transportation
__________
Send us your signals!
News about your work and other tips are welcome, as is feedback on Foresight Signals. Contact Cynthia G. Wagner, consulting
editor.
Want more signals from AAI Foresight? Check out the blog! Log in to add comments.
Feel free to share Foresight Signals with your networks and
to submit any stories, tips, or “signals” of trends emerging on the horizon
that we can share with other stakeholders and the foresight community.
__________
© 2015 AAI Foresight
Foresight Signals is a publication of AAI
Foresight
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