Emerging Trends Quotes

My mind then wandered. I thought of this: I thought of how every day each of us experiences a few little moments that have just a bit more resonance than other moments—we hear a word that sticks in our mind—or maybe we have a small experience that pulls us out of ourselves, if only briefly—we share a hotel elevator with a bride in her veils, say, or a stranger gives us a piece of bread to feed to the mallard ducks in the lagoon; a small child starts a conversation with us in a Dairy Queen—or we have an episode like the one I had with the M&M cars back at the Husky station. And if we were to collect these small moments in a notebook and save them over a period of months we would see certain trends emerge from our collection—certain voices would emerge that have been trying to speak through us. We would realize that we have been having another life altogether; one we didn’t even know was going on inside us. And maybe this other life is more important than the one we think of as being real—this clunky day-to-day world of furniture and noise and metal. So just maybe it is these small silent moments which are the true story-making events of our lives.

These examples and many others demonstrate an alarming trend whereby the privacy and dignity of our citizens is being whittled away by sometimes imperceptible steps. Taken individually, each step may be of little consequence. But when viewed as a whole, there begins to emerge a society quite unlike any we have seen -- a society in which government may intrude into the secret regions of man's life at will." [Osborn v. United States, 385 U.S. 323, 343 (1966) (dissenting)]

There are three avenues of opportunity: events, trends, and conditions. When opportunities occur through events but you are unable to respond, you are not smart. When opportunities become active through a trend and yet you cannot make plans, you are not wise. When opportunities emerge through conditions but you cannot act on them, you are not bold.

It should now be abundantly clear that the comparison between the climate crisis and Covid-19 rests on a category mistake. It's a bit like comparing a war with a bullet. Covid-19 is one manifestation of a secular trend running parallel to the climate crises, a global sickening to match the global heating.

At the heart of the American paradigm is the perception that law and its agents . . . police officers, correctional officers, attorneys and judges . . . are color-blind and thus justice is impartial, objective and seeks la verdad (the truth). But, la realidad (reality) differs.

I was doing an interview with someone who had done very interesting profiles on some of America's greatest authors, and I noticed a trend emerge. So many of America's greatest writers, J.D. Salinger or Thomas Pynchon, for example, were eccentric, reclusive types. I thought a story that showed how someone helped a great writer break through the barrier of isolation and re-enter the world would make a terrific story. It struck me that it would be even more interesting if the person who brings the writer out is someone young--a teenager, for example--who is also in some way gifted.

The New Groupthink did not arise at one precise moment. Cooperative learning, corporate teamwork, and open office plans emerged at different times and for different reasons. But the mighty force that pulled these trends together was the rise of the World Wide Web, which lent both cool and gravitas to the idea of collaboration.

The scientific revolution was part of a wider intellectual revolution, the Enlightenment, which also brought progress in other fields, especially moral and political philosophy, and in the institutions of society. Unfortunately, the term ‘the Enlightenment’ is used by historians and philosophers to denote a variety of different trends, some of them violently opposed to each other. What I mean by it will emerge here as we go along. It is one of several aspects of ‘the beginning of infinity’, and is a theme of this book. But one thing that all conceptions of the Enlightenment agree on is that it was a rebellion, and specifically a rebellion against authority in regard to knowledge.

much of anything. But put a series together and patterns emerged. Some were obvious: haircuts, weight gained or lost, fashion trends. Others required

Elizabeth set an example to the monarchs of her day and of subsequent epochs, in that she never arrogated to herself the position of ruler of England, but assumed the more modest role of administrator, of carrier-out of the folk-will, of servitor to the national mission; she understood the trends of the epoch that was emerging from an autocratic regime into a constitutional regime.

Were we dealing with a spectrum-based system that described male and female sexuality with equal accuracy, data taken from gay males would look similar to data taken from straight females—and yet this is not what we see in practice. Instead, the data associated with gay male sexuality presents a mirror image of data associated with straight males: Most gay men are as likely to find the female form aversive as straight men are likely to find the male form aversive. In gay females we observe a similar phenomenon, in which they mirror straight females instead of appearing in the same position on the spectrum as straight men—in other words, gay women are just as unlikely to find the male form aversive as straight females are to find the female form aversive. Some of the research highlighting these trends has been conducted with technology like laser doppler imaging (LDI), which measures genital blood flow when individuals are presented with pornographic images. The findings can, therefore, not be written off as a product of men lying to hide middling positions on the Kinsey scale due to a higher social stigma against what is thought of in the vernacular as male bisexuality/pansexuality. We should, however, note that laser Doppler imaging systems are hardly perfect, especially when measuring arousal in females. It is difficult to attribute these patterns to socialization, as they are observed across cultures and even within the earliest of gay communities that emerged in America, which had to overcome a huge amount of systemic oppression to exist. It’s a little crazy to argue that the socially oppressed sexuality of the early American gay community was largely a product of socialization given how much they had overcome just to come out. If, however, one works off the assumptions of our model, this pattern makes perfect sense. There must be a stage in male brain development that determines which set of gendered stimuli is dominant, then applies a negative modifier to stimuli associated with other genders. This stage does not apparently take place during female sexual development. 

Social democracy as we now know it underwent its moment of speciation when Eduard Bernstein began to question the orthodoxy of revolution. His essential postulate was the absence of crises. The Steven Pinker of socialism, he pointed to the empirical fact that no serious crisis had rocked the capitalist economy for the past two or three decades, which invalidated the Marxian prophecy of a system trending towards collapse. Since it was not prone to malfunctioning, the idea of seizing power, smashing decrepit capitalism and installing a completely different order had become redundant; instead social democracy could continue to grow in strength, extract piecemeal reforms and gradually lift the working class out of the mire. Rosa Luxemburg very famously objected that the crisis tendencies had merely been postponed. In the near future, they would burst forth with even more dreadful violence. Ignoring her prognosis, the social democrats in the making went ahead and presently gave their first demonstration of how they dealt with catastrophe: by expediting it through consent.

The stark and sobering reality is that, for reasons largely unrelated to actual crime trends, the American penal system has emerged as a system of social control unparalleled in world history. And while the size of the system alone might suggest that it would touch the lives of most Americans, the primary targets of its control can be defined largely by race.

From 1990, the trend flipped; a century’s worth of rich nations’ rise has been reversed in just two decades. Their share is now back to where it was in 1914. This trend, which might be called the “Great Convergence,” is surely the dominant economic fact of the last two or three decades. It is the origin of much of the anti-globalization sentiment in rich nations, and much of the new assertiveness of “emerging markets.

What disturbs and compels about pornography is not the sex, which is always a snooze, but that the medium addresses every social issue in the absolute wrong way. Not long after any social event or trend, a pornographic response emerges. It will be incredibly creepy and wrong headed, an underbelly view of public life via the worst excesses of capitalism in which the answer to every social problem is the commodification of desire.

But what lies ahead for those who are young now? I can say with confidence that their future will depend more on science and technology than any previous generation’s has done. They need to know about science more than any before them because it is part of their daily lives in an unprecedented way. Without speculating too wildly, there are trends we can see and emerging problems that we know must be dealt with, now and into the future. Among the problems I count global warming, finding space and resources for the massive increase in the Earth’s human population, rapid extinction of other species, the need to develop renewable energy sources, the degradation of the oceans, deforestation and epidemic diseases—just to name a few. There are also the great inventions of the future, which will revolutionise the ways we live, work, eat, communicate and travel. There is such enormous scope for innovation in every area of life. This is exciting. We could be mining rare metals on the Moon, establishing a human outpost on Mars and finding cures and treatments for conditions which currently offer no hope. The huge questions of existence still remain unanswered—how did life begin on Earth? What is consciousness? Is there anyone out there or are we alone in the universe? These are questions for the next generation to work on.

But the general trends of the products and services in 30 years are currently visible. Their basic forms are rooted in directions generated by emerging technologies now on their way to ubiquity. This wide, fast-moving system of technology bends the culture subtly, but steadily, so it amplifies the following forces: Becoming, Cognifying, Flowing, Screening, Accessing, Sharing, Filtering, Remixing, Interacting, Tracking, Questioning, and then Beginning.

The basic reason for Germany’s lack of competitiveness, however, was not political in this crude sense. The basic problem was the uncompetitive exchange rate of the Reichsmark. As we have seen, this fundamental misalignment had first emerged in the autumn of 1931 after the devaluation of sterling. The second shock had come in April 1933 with the devaluation of the dollar. By 1933 only 20 per cent of world trade was still conducted between countries with currencies fixed in terms of gold. Germany’s failure to follow this trend meant that the prices of its exports, translated at the official exchange rate of the Reichsmark, were grossly uncompetitive. This was not a matter of particular industries or sectors. It was not a matter of high wages, or excessive taxes and social levies. At prevailing exchange rates, the entire system of prices and wages in Germany was out of line with that prevailing in most of the rest of the world economy.

This trend, to be easily offended, is now exploding into public consciousness with the unraveling madness that has taken over so many American universities, and is now emerging on British campuses. Spiked's Free Speech University Rankings 2016 show that 90 percent of universities and students' unions censor speech. Rising from 80 percent in 2015, the vast majority of these censorious policies are carried out by students' unions. Barely a week goes by without reports of something 'offensive' being banned from campus.

Political gerrymandering fortified these trends, as both parties, with the help of voter profiles and computer technology, drew congressional districts with the explicit aim of entrenching incumbency and minimizing the number of competitive districts in any given election. Meanwhile, the splintering of the media and the emergence of conservative outlets meant voters were no longer reliant on Walter Cronkite to tell them what was true; instead, they could hew to sources that reinforced, rather than challenged, their political preferences.

[A]s we know, the sexual development in childhood determines what direction this new start at puberty will take. Not only will the early aggressive impulses be re-awakened; but a greater or lesser proportion of the new libidinal impulses—in bad cases the whole of them—will have to follow the course prescribed for them by regression and will emerge as aggressive and destructive tendencies. In consequence of the erotic trends being disguised in this way and owing to the powerful reaction-formations in the ego, the struggle against sexuality will henceforward be carried on under the banner of ethical principles.

The mere exposure effect explains many facets of our lives, such as why it’s so hard to find someone who can prepare our childhood favorites like Mom did, and it also holds when we see the latest fashion trends prominently featured in stores, catalogs, and finally on people we know. In addition, when a trend emerges, it sends the message that it’s becoming increasingly accepted. When we see the supplies of multiple independent retailers simultaneously shift in one way, we assume the demand has shifted as well. Of course, the change may actually be driven by the prediction of a future shift in demand, which may or may not materialize, but it still affects people’s choices.

You may have noticed a trend in this chapter: the more we ponder the connection between reason and feeling, the dimmer the prospects seem for keeping our behavior under truly rational control. First we learned that Hume seems to have been right: our “reasoning faculty” isn’t ever really in charge; its agenda—what it reasons about—is set by feelings, and it can influence our behavior only by in turn influencing our feelings. Then we learned that, actually, even the term reasoning faculty suggests more in the way of orderly deliberation than is typical of the human mind. The view emerging here is that we don’t so much have a reasoning faculty as reasoning faculties; modules seem to have the ability to recruit reasons on behalf of their goals.

Some researchers, such as psychologist Jean Twenge, say this new world where compliments are better than sex and pizza, in which the self-enhancing bias has been unchained and allowed to gorge unfettered, has led to a new normal in which the positive illusions of several generations have now mutated into full-blown narcissism. In her book The Narcissism Epidemic, Twenge says her research shows that since the mid-1980s, clinically defined narcissism rates in the United States have increased in the population at the same rate as obesity. She used the same test used by psychiatrists to test for narcissism in patients and found that, in 2006, one in four U.S. college students tested positive. That’s real narcissism, the kind that leads to diagnoses of personality disorders. In her estimation, this is a dangerous trend, and it shows signs of acceleration. Narcissistic overconfidence crosses a line, says Twenge, and taints those things improved by a skosh of confidence. Over that line, you become less concerned with the well-being of others, more materialistic, and obsessed with status in addition to losing all the restraint normally preventing you from tragically overestimating your ability to manage or even survive risky situations. In her book, Twenge connects this trend to the housing market crash of the mid-2000s and the stark increase in reality programming during that same decade. According to Twenge, the drive to be famous for nothing went from being strange to predictable thanks to a generation or two of people raised by parents who artificially boosted self-esteem to ’roidtastic levels and then released them into a culture filled with new technologies that emerged right when those people needed them most to prop up their self-enhancement biases. By the time Twenge’s research was published, reality programming had spent twenty years perfecting itself, and the modern stars of those shows represent a tiny portion of the population who not only want to be on those shows, but who also know what they are getting into and still want to participate. Producers with the experience to know who will provide the best television entertainment to millions then cull that small group. The result is a new generation of celebrities with positive illusions so robust and potent that the narcissistic overconfidence of the modern American teenager by comparison is now much easier to see as normal.

Bookshops are oceans and sections are like tides, they grow and they shrink, they grow and the shrink. It depends on the season and what's selling and what new trends are emerging. Scandi Noir, Dystopian YA, Adult Coloring In, Hygge. It only takes one bestseller to start a tsunami of copycats. Just as you think the swell is here to stay, sales start to taper off and the bookshop breathes and contracts and swallows whatever stock didn't sell, reabsorbs it back into the master section, back into crime or YA or crafts and we rearrange everything to fill the gap until the next trend gains momentum. A good bookseller can sense when the tides are turning, when sales are starting to wane. A bad bookseller doesn't adapt to change, will cling to those declining sales instead of embracing the next big thing. A really bad bookseller will favor their personal taste over customer interest.

HSBC's executives saw an emerging class of global rich as the bank's path to prosperity. The superwealthy were increasingly stateless. They banked in Geneva. Lived in London and New York. Shopped in Paris and Milan. And they held their assets through offshore companies registered in places like the British Virgin Islands. HSBC executives were reading the telltale signs of a new age of inequality, even if they didn't recognize it as such. Governments were retreating from providing their citizens pension and health organizations, and HSBC strategy report observed. The stateless rich balked at paying taxes in their home countries, to which they felt little allegiance. It made sense to them to base their operations inside tax havens and to bank in Switzerland, where discretion was woven into the country's DNA. These trends represented an opportunity for the wealth management industry.

The 1950s and 1960s: philosophy, psychology, myth There was considerable critical interest in Woolf ’s life and work in this period, fuelled by the publication of selected extracts from her diaries, in A Writer’s Diary (1953), and in part by J. K. Johnstone’s The Bloomsbury Group (1954). The main critical impetus was to establish a sense of a unifying aesthetic mode in Woolf ’s writing, and in her works as a whole, whether through philosophy, psychoanalysis, formal aesthetics, or mythopoeisis. James Hafley identified a cosmic philosophy in his detailed analysis of her fiction, The Glass Roof: Virginia Woolf as Novelist (1954), and offered a complex account of her symbolism. Woolf featured in the influential The English Novel: A Short Critical History (1954) by Walter Allen who, with antique chauvinism, describes the Woolfian ‘moment’ in terms of ‘short, sharp female gasps of ecstasy, an impression intensified by Mrs Woolf ’s use of the semi-colon where the comma is ordinarily enough’. Psychological and Freudian interpretations were also emerging at this time, such as Joseph Blotner’s 1956 study of mythic patterns in To the Lighthouse, an essay that draws on Freud, Jung and the myth of Persephone.4 And there were studies of Bergsonian writing that made much of Woolf, such as Shiv Kumar’s Bergson and the Stream of Consciousness Novel (1962). The most important work of this period was by the French critic Jean Guiguet. His Virginia Woolf and Her Works (1962); translated by Jean Stewart, 1965) was the first full-length study ofWoolf ’s oeuvre, and it stood for a long time as the standard work of critical reference in Woolf studies. Guiguet draws on the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre to put forward a philosophical reading of Woolf; and he also introduces a psychobiographical dimension in the non-self.’ This existentialist approach did not foreground Woolf ’s feminism, either. his heavy use of extracts from A Writer’s Diary. He lays great emphasis on subjectivism in Woolf ’s writing, and draws attention to her interest in the subjective experience of ‘the moment.’ Despite his philosophical apparatus, Guiguet refuses to categorise Woolf in terms of any one school, and insists that Woolf has indeed ‘no pretensions to abstract thought: her domain is life, not ideology’. Her avoidance of conventional character makes Woolf for him a ‘purely psychological’ writer.5 Guiguet set a trend against materialist and historicist readings ofWoolf by his insistence on the primacy of the subjective and the psychological: ‘To exist, for Virginia Woolf, meant experiencing that dizziness on the ridge between two abysses of the unknown, the self and

An Aside   To break with this routine I have written this manuscript in a way that challenges my reader to explore on the edge of language instead of drowning in devices intending to take for granted meanings and draw false assumptions burdened by planted biases. In your face are thrown one lie after another that defy what is actually seen and offer nothing of balance to either perspective or clarity on a daily basis... yet, it seems natural to you. Because there is no power to your sense of expectation. None. You are boxed into what is possible and what is not, even unsure of the shape of the earth. Led into debates over something as idiotic as that while you balk at having neighbors from elsewhere. So enormous is this Universe and yet you would limit its possibility to produce any of the wonders on some tiny grain of sand found on a beach in comparison. From written history anomalies have been spied and reported accomplishing what nothing today can. Trans Lunar Phenomena, recorded hundreds of years with thousands of reports demonstrate intelligent presence on the moon while nothing of this is factored into your narrow credulity. When one emerges who can answer resolution to so many anomaly, predicts events with accuracy, and offers what is needed to help you survive a planet crippled to the point of extinction, you cannot quit your routine of acquired preference for the mundane suited to a boxed-in comfort zone long enough to check him out. The few above this are too few. I feel quite privileged to have found four. Others are awakening yet still not shown to be at a point of no return to stifling group thought. If you are, then show me. Show me you are aware we near the point where nothing is left to lose. Where resolute action need not be possessed of fear. I will say this, unified consciousness would have no trouble with accepting this challenge I throw at your feet, but then conditions so favorable to enslavement here may be your problem and not that solely attributable to split consciousness. I am willing to engage with you to the very end of hope to find out. Wake up to the signs and ramifications of the trends set I have touched upon. Help awaits a world ready to receive it.

The negative perception of a changed city aligned with dispensational eschatology. A drastic change from above would be required to stop the flood of secularism and societal decay. With their embrace of dispensationalism, evangelicals shifted their focus radically from social amelioration to individual regeneration. Having diverted their attention from the construction of the millennial realm, evangelicals concentrated on the salvation of souls and, in so doing, neglected reform efforts.8 An individualistic soul-saving soteriology emerged from a dispensational theology. Theologically conservative Christians had shifted their priority from concern for both the individual and larger society to more exclusively a concern for the individual, and the first half of the twentieth century witnessed the formation of this shift. In The Great Reversal, David Moberg asserts that “there was a time when evangelicals had a balanced position that gave proper attention to both evangelism and social concern, but a great reversal in the [twentieth] century led to a lopsided emphasis upon evangelism and omission of most aspects of social involvement.”9 Marsden notes that “the ‘Great Reversal’ took place from about 1900 to about 1930, when all progressive social concern, whether political or private, became suspect among revivalist evangelicals and was relegated to a very minor role.”10 Fundamentalists developed a suspicion about social engagement and withdrew from social concerns spurred by their rejection of larger society. This rejection of secular culture arose from anxiety about the changes that occurred in the early part of the twentieth century when fundamentalists felt they were under siege from secular society. Marsden recognizes that “fundamentalism was the response of traditionalist evangelicals who declared war on these modernizing trends. In fundamentalist eyes the war had to be all-out and fought on several fronts. At stake was nothing less than the gospel of Jesus’ blood and righteousness.”11 The twentieth century witnessed fearful white Protestants yielding to the temptation to withdraw from the city and engaging in the exact opposite behavior demanded by Jeremiah 29:7 to “seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile.” There was an intentional abandonment of the city in favor of safety and comfort. Jerusalem was to be rebuilt in the suburbs.

The trends speak to an unavoidable truth. Society's future will be challenged by zoonotic viruses, a quite natural prediction, not least because humanity is a potent agent of change, which is the essential fuel of evolution. Notwithstanding these assertions, I began with the intention of leaving the reader with a broader appreciation of viruses: they are not simply life's pathogens. They are life's obligate partners and a formidable force in nature on our planet. As you contemplate the ocean under a setting sun, consider the multitude of virus particles in each milliliter of seawater: flying over wilderness forestry, consider the collective viromes of its living inhabitants. The stunnig number and diversity of viruses in our environment should engender in us greater awe that we are safe among these multitudes than fear that they will harm us. Personalized medicine will soon become a reality and medical practice will routinely catalogue and weigh a patient's genome sequence. Not long thereafter one might expect this data to be joined by the patient's viral and bacterial metagenomes: the patient's collective genetic identity will be recorded in one printout. We will doubtless discover some of our viral passengers are harmful to our health, while others are protective. But the appreciation of viruses that I hope you have gained from these pages is not about an exercise in accounting. The balancing of benefit versus threat to humanity is a fruitless task. The viral metagenome will contain new and useful gene functionalities for biomedicine: viruses may become essential biomedical tools and phages will continue to optimize may also accelerate the development of antibiotic drug resistance in the post-antibiotic era and emerging viruses may threaten our complacency and challenge our society economically and socially. Simply comparing these pros and cons, however, does not do justice to viruses and acknowledge their rightful place in nature. Life and viruses are inseparable. Viruses are life's complement, sometimes dangerous but always beautiful in design. All autonomous self-sustaining replicating systems that generate their own energy will foster parasites. Viruses are the inescapable by-products of life's success on the planet. We owe our own evolution to them; the fossils of many are recognizable in ERVs and EVEs that were certainly powerful influences in the evolution of our ancestors. Like viruses and prokaryotes, we are also a patchwork of genes, acquired by inheritance and horizontal gene transfer during our evolution from the primitive RNA-based world. It is a common saying that 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder.' It is a natural response to a visual queue: a sunset, the drape of a designer dress, or the pattern of a silk tie, but it can also be found in a line of poetry, a particularly effective kitchen implement, or even the ruthless efficiency of a firearm. The latter are uniquely human acknowledgments of beauty in design. It is humanity that allows us to recognize the beauty in the evolutionary design of viruses. They are unique products of evolution, the inevitable consequence of life, infectious egotistical genetic information that taps into life and the laws of nature to fuel evolutionary invention.

As a result of these broad trends, contemporary Christian ethicists appear in public as figures struggling with the paradoxical task of articulating the insights emerging from their primary language to an audience they (perhaps mistakenly) believe either does not recognize the language, denies the validity of this

When would you feel more pride, when you purchase a product at a reduced price or at the listed price? We can afford luxury or we can’t, that is the way it is.

When the world one loves is seen to be dying, the viewer dies a little with it. A great American painter, Reginald Marsh, exemplifies this truism. Every day until his death at the age of 56, he sketched and painted the most earthy, sweaty and lusty examples of humanity he could lay his eyes upon. His productive voyeurism led him through the entire spectrum of cheap cafes, carnivals, amusement parks, skid rows, exclusive clubs, opera openings, coming-out parties and everything in-between. His super-realistic canvases were jammed with the kind of people he loved to watch in the environments he loved to haunt. As his closing years approached, Reginald Marsh grew depressed at the changing scene. New styles were emerging and it now became more difficult to immerse himself in the vistas from which he had so long drawn, both in his paintings and life itself. His canvases of lumpy women and pot-bellied men were too unappealing for the “think thin” era of the 1950s, and his floozies violated the then-current Grace Kelly/Ivory Soap look. His disdain for modern masters (“Matisse draws like a three-year-old, “Picasso ... a false front”) became exemplified as he summed up modern art as “high and pure and sterile — no sex, no drink, no muscles.” Marsh’s “out of date” feeling reached its zenith when he was asked to take part in an art symposium. The first speaker, who was a then-popular New York painter, enthusiastically championed current trends. Then followed a professor who advocated new and dynamic experimentation in visual appeal. At last it was Reginald Marsh’s turn to speak. He stood on the platform for a moment, as if trying to collect his thoughts. A sad look of resignation appeared in his eyes as he gazed down at the audience. The talented watcher of his innermost secret lusts and life-giving scintillations declared softly, “I am not a man of this century,” and sat down. He died shortly thereafter.

In recent years, a trend toward a more restrictive approach to transfusion therapy has emerged.9,10 For example, as per the American Society of Anesthesiologists Task Force transfusion guidelines, RBC transfusion is rarely indicated when the hemoglobin (Hgb) concentration is above 10 g/dL and is usually indicated when the hemoglobin is less than 6 g/dL.2

Several premises shaped the Marshall Plan: that the gravest threat to western interests in Europe was not the prospect of Soviet military intervention, but rather the risk that hunger, poverty, and despair might cause Europeans to vote their own communists into office, who would then obediently serve Moscow’s wishes; that American economic assistance would produce immediate psychological benefits and later material ones that would reverse this trend; that the Soviet Union would not itself accept such aid or allow its satellites to, thereby straining its relationship with them; and that the United States could then seize both the geopolitical and the moral initiative in the emerging Cold War.

Pointing to a trend in Western democracies, Agamben posits that the declaration of an emergency state of exception itself has gradually been replaced by a “generalization of the paradigm of security as the normal technique of government” (2003/2005, 14), that is, the state of exception or emergency has become integrated in the normal functioning of the state.

If one considers the characters in the plays of Shakespeare, in the poems of the Roman poet Ovid, in the Greek tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides, and even in the hieroglyphics of ancient Egypt, they can be recognized in our daily lives. Their actions were driven by the same motives as ours—ambition, love, pride, fear, anger, sympathy, and fun.

In Seattle, Washington, in 1971, Howard Schultz, the owner of a local coffee roasting and distribution company, noted the increasing affluence of the American public and their desire to receive gracious treatment in their daily activities. Schultz recognized that there was a market for small businesses featuring top quality coffee and an opportunity to relax in an attractive environment. To take advantage of these emerging Minitrends, Mr. Schultz initiated the very successful Starbucks chain which offers top quality coffee drinks in a friendly and relaxed atmosphere Starbucks has a long record of appreciating Minitrends, but failed to recognize the trend that more economically-stressed customers were beginning to opt for similar, lower-cost drinks offered by fast food restaurants such as McDonald’s. While still popular, in summer 2008, the Starbucks company announced the termination of 1,000 employees, and in November 2008, the company reported a 98 percent decline in profit for the third quarter of the year. To be more economically competitive, Starbucks has recently introduced a line of instant coffee.

A fuller picture of the year-end trends emerged Tuesday when the Commerce Department, in separate reports, said the U.S. economy expanded at a 5% seasonally adjusted annual rate in the third quarter, its strongest pace in 11 years, and reported that consumer spending accelerated last month amid rising incomes and falling gasoline prices.

that American economic assistance would produce immediate psychological benefits and later material ones that would reverse this trend; that the Soviet Union would not itself accept such aid or allow its satellites to, thereby straining its relationship with them; and that the United States could then seize both the geopolitical and the moral initiative in the emerging Cold War.

as inflation has fallen, so bonds have rallied in what has been one of the great bond bull markets of modern history. Even more remarkably, despite the spectacular Argentine default - not to mention Russia’s in 1998 - the spreads on emerging market bonds have trended steadily downwards, reaching lows in early 2007 that had not been seen since before the First World War, implying an almost unshakeable confidence in the economic future.

Micro-learning or bite-sized courses are an emerging trend in the online education industry. Adapting to the shortening attention span of today’s audience, services try to wedge between busy schedules and teach people something new, even though it’s not always about academic disciplines or college-level knowledge.

It was beginning to dawn on both Sundeep and Aditya that they had become victims of their own rigid beliefs. Unwilling to change the way they went about their business, they had refused to look at emerging trends. The world around them was changing. They could either adapt or perish. What Varun had brought to the table was a fresh approach. Had Sundeep or Aditya looked at the business from the point of view of consumers, who were largely the youth of the world, they would probably have arrived at the same conclusion as Varun. It’s not often that a novice beats seasoned bankers at strategy. But this was not strategy. It was a simple case of having ears to the ground.

Negative rates are a function of global abundance (brought on by technological advances), and a trend that cannot be stopped even by the strongest central bank . . . For rates to stay positive we have to hoard almost everything in the world from the people that need it, if it is to have value. The artificial scarcity tactics that have been used through the ages to achieve this are getting harder to execute because of technological liberation—which is enabling the emergence of collaborative economy which bypasses rates of return.

Who is as free as a writer? Nadie es tan libre como un escritor . . . No one is as free as a writer!

Good questions are those that show that you not only want the job, you are prepared to knock the ball out of the park once you have it. So ask, “What would a successful year in the job look like?” or “What did you most value in the person who left?” You’ve done a Google search of the field and the company, of course, and one of your questions could be about emerging trends. Interviewers love it when questions relate to them and their accomplishments (“I’ve heard you made some exciting changes recently. What has the outcome been?”).

reached its second or third or final stage.”10 (Indeed, on November 2, 1947, writer Thomas Mann, a German émigré, said precisely that: “I am painfully familiar with certain political trends, spiritual intolerance, political inquisitions, and declining legal security, and all this in the name of an alleged ‘state of emergency’ … that is how it started in Germany. What followed was fascism and what followed fascism was war.”)11

Thomas Mann, a German émigré, said precisely that: “I am painfully familiar with certain political trends, spiritual intolerance, political inquisitions, and declining legal security, and all this in the name of an alleged ‘state of emergency’ … that is how it started in Germany. What followed was fascism and what followed fascism was war.”)

With the end of the Cold War, China’s efforts to establish more friendly relations with its neighbors extended to India and tensions between the two lessened. This trend, however, is unlikely to continue for long. China has actively involved itself in South Asian politics and presumably will continue to do so: maintaining a close relation with Pakistan, strengthening Pakistan’s nuclear and conventional military capabilities, and courting Myanmar with economic assistance, investment, and military aid, while possibly developing naval facilities there. Chinese power is expanding at the moment; India’s power could grow substantially in the early twenty-first century. Conflict seems highly probable. “The underlying power rivalry between the two Asian giants, and their self-images as natural great powers and centers of civilization and culture,” one analyst has observed, “will continue to drive them to support different countries and causes. India will strive to emerge, not only as an independent power center in the multipolar world, but as a counterweight to Chinese power and influence.”48

The deepening chill that had started when mud buried the redwoods continues to the modern day. Like the Eocene’s climate, the temperature of the intervening years has staggered up and down. We owe the origin of our own species to this cooling trend. When Africa’s forests retreated in a particularly cold and dry spell, our prehumen ancestors strode into the emerging savannah and grasslands. Homo sapiens evolved from these apes of the open country, and all our species’ history has unfolded in relatively cold times. The calm that I feel as I survey the scenery around the Big Stump- open vistas of grasslands and tree copses, created by cool aridity- is perhaps a judgment of the landscape wired deep in my human mind. An affinity for savanna-like grasslands is one of the neurological quirks that we humans carried with us as we spread across the world. Another is the desire to collect curios, especially pieces of the past. We’re a storytelling species, so perhaps these artifacts are anchors and touchstones for the tales from which we find our reality.

- Welcome to the 21st Century: Where SEX is FREE & LOVE is EXPENSIVE, where LOSING phone is more PAINFUL than LOSING your VIRGINITY, where MODERNIZATION means NUDITY, where if you don't SMOKE or DRINK you are out of FASHION, where if you don't CHEAT so you are not SMART, where the BATHROOMS have become PHOTO STUDIOS, where TEMPLES become DATING POINTS, where doing WORSHIP TO GOD is DIFFICULT, where LIES become REALITIES, where the WOMEN fear PREGNANCY more than STD's , where a PIZZA DELIVERY is FASTER than EMERGENCY RESPONSE. PERSPECTIVES & DRIP DECIDE the value of person, where the BOYS/GIRLS are AFRAID of MARRIAGE but they love HAVING SEX, where KILLING HUMAN is a PLEASURE,where INSULTING THE GOD becomes the TRENDS of the era, where REVILING is a COURAGE where whoever PLAYS the MINDS always get happiness but whoever PLAYS the HEART gets HURT ,.... MODERNITY LOVE and LIQUID EDUCATION !!!

Emerging trends offer the prospect of entering when an industry is still forming. An emerging trend can be especially beneficial if large corporations find it difficult to jump on the trend without major disruptions to their existing business.

To find an advantage, entrepreneurs need to know how to develop products that better satisfy unmet needs, especially in emerging industries, emerging trends, or emerging markets.

Before focusing only on a product, consider the total needs and experience of the ultimate customer. To make your platform more competitive, examine your customers’ unmet needs and your competitors’ weaknesses. Then seek the right technology advances and jump on the right, emerging trends.

A new industry, or an existing industry that is being impacted by a revolutionary trend, is chaotic. Highly successful entrepreneurs see through the chaos, noise, and clutter of a new, emerging industry or the patterns of change in a fragmented industry, and find the right opportunity and strategy to dominate it. That is the essence of revolutionary visioning.

The concept of inclusive education, discussed here in relation to students with disability, has emerged from a global trend aimed at ensuring the most marginalised and vulnerable students can access and participate in education (Carrington et al. 2012).

THE FUTURE DOESN’T simply arrive fully formed overnight, but emerges step by step. It first appears at seemingly random points around the fringe of society, never in the mainstream. Without context, those points can appear disparate, unrelated, and hard to connect meaningfully. But over time they fit into patterns and come into focus as a full-blown trend: a convergence of multiple points that reveal a direction or tendency, a force that combines some human need and new enabling technology that will shape the future.

Lazaridis already had a successful suite of products, so he and his team weren’t watching the fringe. They weren’t paying attention as a new trend emerged—smartphones that would become all-purpose mobile computing devices, with the power of a PC right in our pockets. Rather than carrying a BlackBerry for business and an iPod or a laptop for personal use, consumers would naturally gravitate toward one device that could meet all the demands of their everyday needs and work tasks.

futurism” as a new academic discipline. It’s an interdisciplinary field combining mathematics, engineering, art, technology, economics, design, history, geography, biology, theology, physics, and philosophy. As a futurist, my job is not to spread prophecies, but rather to collect data, identify emerging trends, develop strategies, and calculate the probabilities of various scenarios occurring in the future.

The main problem, when an organization wants to map the future of x, is that it too often defines x far too narrowly, using the old market research paradigm. To identify emerging trends, you must gather information and observations from the fringe. But you must also broaden your definition of x.

Mergers and talent acquisitions would indicate that Apple and Microsoft were onto something similar, and to me, that indicated a possible emerging-trend candidate in ubiquitous virtual assistants. This trend—ubiquitous virtual assistants—meant that our machines would soon learn about us, anticipate our needs, and complete tasks in the background, without our direct request or supervision. The ubiquitous virtual assistant trend would be pervasive, spanning mobile phones at first before moving to other ambient interfaces and operating systems. Perhaps in the future, we might subscribe to a single assistant capable of interoperating with all of the people, devices, and objects in our lives.

If we can’t see or even visualize a trend as it is emerging, we subjugate it to the distant future and assume that we can have no bearing on it today. This is why you see so many predictions, where experts in various subject areas guesstimate when a particular tech innovation will arrive. We assign a timeline that sounds far-off (twenty-five years from now, fifty years from now), and then we essentially allow ourselves to stop tracking it. This is especially true of trends that are still emerging from the fringe, such as a Brainet connecting a cardiologist, a vascular expert, and a roboticist with cardiac and thoracic surgeons for a complex operation. In order to calculate where a trend is on its trajectory, we have to resolve our own belief biases and fight against our desire to confirm the existence of a future scenario before we believe in its plausibility.

Centuries of readership, revision and editing have shaped the Baillie that has been transmitted to us in the form of Laing's Letters and Journals. Neither a hero nor a villain, then, Baillie quietly vanished from the records he had painstakingly gathered, only to be replaced by a caricature - the dutiful letter-writer, the virulent critic, the unashamed time-server and the embarrassing vacillator. The myths that emerged to explain this period in Scottish history of regrettable violent extremism and intemperate religious belief had no place for a character like Baillie. As interest in the Covenanters declined early in the twentieth century, Baillie likewise was consigned to a place of relative neglect and those few commentators relied on recycled facts and hagiographic narratives to fill out his biography. We read, then, of Baillie's comments on a riot in Edinburgh or Baillie's description of the Solemn League and Covenant without any acknowledgement of the role that he took in the events that he had described. Through contingencies related to textual transmission and shifting historiographical trends, Baillie's life, his biography, that he so clearly and vividly detailed, has largely been forgotten. In its place, we have become accustomed to reading about the period in which Baillie lived, described by a man consigned to a footnote.

Not surprisingly, my number-one rating goes to India. Its scale and underinvestment in infrastructure and its urbanization trends give it phenomenal potential. Add to that the first apparently progressive, pro-business government in its history, led by Prime Minister Modi, and India is off the charts in terms of investment potential. India is the only major emerging country to reach new highs over its 2007 peak because of this.

There are six countries in the developed world with “echo boom” generations larger than the generation of their parents, the baby boomers. In rough order of demographic strength, they are Israel, Australia, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, and New Zealand. The next global boom, between 2020 and 2037, will be dominated by the stronger demographic and urbanization trends in the emerging countries, and these few “winners” in the developed world will also be the best places to invest.

MY DEMOGRAPHIC RESEARCH makes it crystal clear that emerging countries, outside of China and a few others like Thailand, will dominate demographic growth in the next global boom. But the even more powerful factor is the urbanization process, with the typical emerging country only 50 percent urbanized, as compared with 85 percent in the typical developed country. In emerging countries, urbanization increases household income as much as three times from its level in rural areas. As people move into the cities, they also climb the social and economic ladder into the middle class. With the cycles swirling around us for the next several years and the force of revolution reshaping our world, emerging markets are in the best position to come booming out the other side. That’s why investors and businesses should be investing more in emerging countries when this crash likely sees its worst, by early 2020. My research is unique when it comes to projecting urbanization, GDP per capita gains from it, and demographic workforce growth trends and peaks in emerging countries. It’s not what I’m most known for, but it’s the most strategic factor in the next global boom, which emerging countries will dominate. As a general guideline, those in South and Southeast Asia, from the Philippines to India and Pakistan, have strong demographic growth, urbanization trends, and productivity gains ahead. This is not the case for China, though. Latin America has mostly strong demographic growth, but limited continued urbanization and productivity gains. Much of the Middle East and Africa have not joined the democratic-capitalism party, but those regions otherwise have the most extreme urbanization and demographic potential. One day they’ll be the best places to invest, but not yet.

Analysts such as Jeremy Rifkin believe that today’s emerging horizontal networks of renewable energy generation and 3D printing are set to amplify this trend. If they do, it could result in a great deal of economic value that was once sold at a profit in the marketplace being shared for low or no cost in the collaborative commons.

Unfortunately, for many people the movement toward self-realization is disrupted due to neglect, rejection, abuse, or other forms of childhood trauma. The child subjected to this early wounding is unable to say: “My parent has personal problems which are having an effect on me”, but rather the child is only able to conclude that the world is unsafe. Hence, they become plagued by what Horney calls “basic anxiety” which initially renders them helpless and overwhelmed, but over time propels them to find ways to cope with life despite their fears. They develop what Horney calls unconscious “neurotic trends” which sculpt their personality so as to give them the semblance of safety in what is perceived to be a threatening environment. And when they emerge into adulthood these neurotic trends do not disappear, but rather they continue to influence their attitudes and behaviors and wreck havoc on their well-being. Rare is the individual who lives completely free from these unconscious relics leftover from childhood.

has been said that Nazism is not a philosophy but a passion for destruction. Destruction, however, cannot be achieved with the Nazi consistency or on the Nazi scale, except by means of a certain philosophy and as an expression of it. It has been said that the Nazis are not ideologists but power-lusters. In fact, they are power-lusters whose power depends on a specific ideology. It has been said that the Nazis are not thinkers but criminals. The truth is that they are criminals spawned by thinkers, i.e., philosophically produced criminals—which is what gave them the kind of world-historical role denied to any plain criminal. The intellectuals of the West today (as at the time of Hitler) are a product of the same philosophical trend. Most of them, still reflecting some remnant of a better past, condemn the actions of Hitler, while advocating the same basic ideas that he did (though in different variants). Such men are helpless to understand Nazism or to explain its emergence or to fight it.

Provide copious resources, and a high degree of success, and a society will trend liberal. Restrict resources, and watch as confrontational, aggressive psychologies emerge, and liberalism retreats into the shadows. Of

By the time I emerged from the end of the Gauntlet, my eye had almost swollen shut. Coach Fritz grinned when he spotted me. “Run into trouble, did you?” “Nope. I’m just trying to start a new fashion trend—black-eye foundation,” I said, cupping a hand over my eye. The pain made me forget the dangers of mouthing off, but to my shock, Fritz chuckled. “Well, then, I’d say you’re off to a great start.” Asshole. But Fritz’s sudden receptiveness to my sarcasm put me on edge, and I dropped all the snark from my voice as I said, “Um, can I go to the infirmary?” Fritz’s grin widened. “I don’t think that’s necessary. A little bruising never hurt anyone. You can wait until after class.” “But I have detention after class.” Fritz’s shoulders rose and fell in an exaggerated shrug. “Not my problem. But I’m sure the teacher will understand if you’re late.” Something about Fritz’s triumphant tone told me that he knew very well who my detention was with and that Corvus would be about as understanding as a swarm of pissed-off killer bees.

The new leaders will not be content to sit back and let the cruise control do the driving. They will be looking forward, scanning the landscape, watching the competition, spotting emerging trends and new opportunities, avoiding impending crises. They will be explorers, adventurers, trailblazers. Advanced technology will give them an interactive, real-time connection with the marketplace; and they will get feedback from sensors at the peripheries of the organization. But they will be led just as much by their own intuition. Sometimes they will decide to ignore the data and drive by the seat of their pants. Tomorrow’s successful leaders will be what Warren Bennis calls ‘leaders of leaders’. They will decentralize power and democratize strategy by involving a rich mixture of different people from inside and outside the organization in the process of inventing the future.

And, as inflation has fallen, so bonds have rallied in what has been one of the great bond bull markets of modern history. Even more remarkably, despite the spectacular Argentine default – not to mention Russia’s in 1998 – the spreads on emerging market bonds have trended steadily downwards, reaching lows in early 2007 that had not been seen since before the First World War, implying an almost unshakeable confidence in the economic future. Rumours of the death of Mr Bond have clearly proved to be exaggerated. Inflation has come down partly because many of the items we buy, from clothes to computers, have got cheaper as a result of technological innovation and the relocation of production to low-wage economies in Asia. It has also been reduced because of a worldwide transformation in monetary policy, which began with the monetarist-inspired increases in short-term rates implemented by the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and continued with the spread of central bank independence and explicit targets in the 1990s. Just as importantly, as the Argentine case shows, some of the structural drivers of inflation have also weakened. Trade unions have become less powerful. Loss-making state industries have been privatized. But, perhaps most importantly of all, the social constituency with an interest in positive real returns on bonds has grown. In the developed world a rising share of wealth is held in the form of private pension funds and other savings institutions that are required, or at least expected, to hold a high proportion of their assets in the form of government bonds and other fixed income securities. In 2007 a survey of pension funds in eleven major economies revealed that bonds accounted for more than a quarter of their assets, substantially lower than in past decades, but still a substantial share.71 With every passing year, the proportion of the population living off the income from such funds goes up, as the share of retirees increases.

The stark and sobering reality is that, for reasons largely unrelated to actual crime trends, the American penal system has emerged as a syste of social control unparalleled in world history.

One assumption that is already being shattered is the idea that only routine, semi-skilled jobs like taxi driving, food delivery, or household chores are susceptible. Even traditional professions like medicine and law are proving to be susceptible to platform models. We’ve already mentioned Medicast, which applies an Uber-like model to finding a doctor. Several platform companies are providing online venues where legal services are available with comparable ease, speed, and convenience. Axiom Law has built a $200 million platform business by using a combination of data-mining software and freelance law talent to provide legal guidance and services to business clients; InCloudCounsel claims it can process basic legal documents such as licensing forms and nondisclosure agreements at a savings of up to 80 percent compared with a traditional law firm.11 In the decades to come, it seems likely that the platform model will be applied—or at least tested—in virtually every market for labor and professional services. How will this trend impact the service industries—not to mention the working lives of hundreds of millions of people? One likely result will be an even greater stratification of wealth, power, and prestige among service providers. Routine and standardized tasks will move to online platforms, where an army of relatively low-paid, self-employed professionals will be available to handle them. Meanwhile, the world’s great law firms, medical centers, consulting partnerships, and accounting practices will not vanish, but their relative size and importance will shrink as much of the work they used to do migrates to platforms that can provide comparable services at a fraction of the cost and with far greater convenience. A surviving handful of world-class experts will increasingly focus on a tiny subset of the most highly specialized and challenging assignments, which they can tackle from anywhere in the world using online tools. Thus, at the very highest level of professional expertise, winner-take-all markets are likely to emerge, with (say) two dozen internationally renowned attorneys competing for the splashiest and most lucrative cases anywhere on the globe.

One of Pagel’s graphs shows that the decreasing diversity of languages with latitude is almost identical to the decreasing diversity of species with latitude. At present neither trend is easily explained. The great diversity of species in tropical forests has something to do with the greater energy flowing through a tropical ecosystem with plenty of warmth and light and water. It may also have something to do with the abundance of parasites. Tropical creatures are subjected to a constant barrage of parasitic invasions, and being an abundant creature makes you more of a target, so there is an advantage to rarity. And it may reflect a lower extinction rate in a more climatically equable zone. As for languages, the need to migrate with the seasons must homogenise the linguistic diversity of extremely seasonal landscapes, in contrast to tropical ones, where populations can fragment into smaller groups and each can survive without moving. But whatever the explanation, the phenomenon illustrates the way human languages evolve automatically. They are clearly human products, but they are not consciously designed.

The Great Acceleration marks the phenomenal growth of the global socio-economic system, the human part of the Earth System. It is difficult to overestimate the scale and speed of change. In little over two generations—or a single lifetime—humanity (or until very recently a small fraction of it) has become a planetary-scale geological force. Hitherto human activities were insignificant compared with the biophysical Earth System, and the two could operate independently. However, it is now impossible to view one as separate from the other. The Great Acceleration trends provide a dynamic view of the emergent, planetary-scale coupling, via globalization, between the socio-economic system and the biophysical Earth System. We have reached a point where many biophysical indicators have clearly moved beyond the bounds of Holocene variability. We are now living in a no-analogue world.

I was in charge of decisions and marketing, and Sean was in charge of research and operations. When we were trying to identify our target customer, he spent a ton of time putting together spreadsheets comparing all the different markets we should consider. When he showed them to me and asked me what I thought, I replied, “Yoga.” Huh? “We could easily do multiple products serving people who do yoga,” I told him. “It’s an emerging trend. And I know a ton of those people; I can ask them what they want. Let’s start a yoga business.” Sean’s initial response was, “That’s not a quantitative analysis, Ryan!” I’ve never been one to overthink things—most people spend way too much time in the research period. I make decisions fast and adjust later. With our target customer identified, we made a list of possible products and chose our gateway product—a yoga mat. With that, we began the process of product development. We looked up the top-selling yoga mats on Amazon and read through the reviews; we asked questions on Facebook groups, subreddits, and Instagram influencer accounts. It didn’t take long before we had an idea of the main pain points we needed to address with our first product. I remembered Don’s advice and began looking for people to make the product. With a quick scroll and a click, we could choose between a wholesaler in China, a private label supplier out of India, or a contract manufacturer in Vietnam. For about fifty bucks, we were able to order a set of yoga mat samples that had the exact features we were looking for. It was that easy. Samples in hand, we needed to refine our product idea to make sure we were really hitting the pain points we’d identified. At that time, I’d done yoga maybe two or three times in my life, and I wasn’t nearly the right demographic for our mats anyway. That forced me to ask questions. We were targeting yoga-loving millennials, so I went where they often congregate: Starbucks. There, I did the kind of tough field work that really makes an entrepreneur sweat: asking young women questions over coffee. “Which yoga mat do you prefer? Why?” “What makes the difference between a bad yoga mat and a good one?” “What’s wrong with your current yoga mat?” “What do you think of this one? And what about this one?” Next, I headed over to local yoga studios to see how our samples stacked up against the strenuous demands of a yoga class. A few classes later, Sean and I had everything we needed to narrow down our product development. Armed with all our data, we went back to the manufacturers. From a couple yoga-clueless guys, we’d become knowledgeable enough to know not just what a good yoga mat looked like, but how it had to feel and perform. We knew what we needed our yoga mat to do. Now we just had to find the manufacturer to supply it.

When you visit those different sites and see the same story told from different perspectives, you really begin to see the trends emerge. - Scott Davis

Effective off-sites provide executives an opportunity to regularly step away from the daily, weekly, even monthly issues that occupy their attention, so they can review the business in a more holistic, long-term manner. Topics for reflection and discussion at a productive Quarterly Off-Site Review might include the following: Comprehensive Strategy Review: Executives should reassess their strategic direction, not every day as so many do, but three or four times a year. Industries change and new competitive threats emerge that call for different approaches. Reviewing strategies annually or semiannually is usually not often enough to stay current. Team Review: Executives should regularly assess themselves and their behaviors as a team, identifying trends or tendencies that may not be serving the organization. This often requires a change of scenery so that executives can interact with one another on a more personal level and remind themselves of their collective commitments to the team. Personnel Review: Three or four times a year, executives should talk, across departments, about the key employees within the organization. Every member of an executive team should know whom their peers view as their stars, as well as their poor performers. This allows executives to provide perspectives that might actually alter those perceptions based on different experiences and points of view. More important, it allows them to jointly manage and retain top performers, and work with poor performers similarly. Competitive and Industry Review: Information about competitors and industry trends bleeds into an organization little by little over time. It is useful for executives to step back and look at what is happening around them in a more comprehensive way so they can spot trends that individual nuggets of information might not make clear. Even the best executives can lose sight of the forest for the trees when inundated with daily responsibilities.

Online Marketing Strategy and Trends to Dominate in 2022 After observing some marketing strategies and trends that have emerged in the last few months, it seems fitting that we just hop on the bandwagon and give our take on them as well. After all, the landscape of online marketing is always changing. What worked last year might not do as much this year. And the same thing can be said of what will work and not work in the coming years. But our observations right now show a landscape full of new opportunities to try out. 2021 was a bit of a roller coaster for Meta. Besides just changing their name, they introduced something that appears to have gained a large foothold Don’t misunderstand, this isn’t just Facebook anymore. This is an entirely new world within the aspects of virtue and augmented reality. Before fully introducing this concept last October, it was just thought that the Metaverse would just be another video game console. As it turns out, it could be the next evolution of social media. This opens the doors for a new era of marketing strategy, with many brands already taking advantage of what the Metaverse has to offer. No matter what avenue you decide to take, always make sure you are creating top-notch quality content. Your marketing strategy has a higher chance of success when you do. Don’t get caught up in the rush to create as much content as possible. If you’re doing it by yourself, allow yourself to go slow at first. As you get comfortable with your new skills, you can then start to churn out more content that is high quality. As always, no matter what marketing strategy you decide, we at the Marketing Agency in Utah are here to assist you. Contact us to set up a consultation where we can discuss these and other marketing strategies that best fit your business needs!

The moment of euphoria at the end of the Cold War generated an illusion of harmony, which was soon revealed to be exactly that. The world became different in the early 1990s, but not necessarily more peaceful. Change was inevitable; progress was not. Similar illusions of harmony flourished, briefly, at the end of each of the twentieth century’s other major conflicts. World War I was the “war to end wars” and to make the world safe for democracy. World War II, as Franklin Roosevelt put it, would “end the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the balances of power, and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries — and have always failed.” Instead we will have “a universal organization” of “peace-loving Nations” and the beginnings of a “permanent structure of peace.”7 World War I, however, generated communism, fascism, and the reversal of a century-old trend toward democracy. World War II produced a Cold War that was truly global. The illusion of harmony at the end of that Cold War was soon dissipated by the multiplication of ethnic conflicts and “ethnic cleansing,” the breakdown of law and order, the emergence of new patterns of alliance and conflict among states, the resurgence of neo-communist and neo-fascist movements, intensification of religious fundamentalism, the end of the “diplomacy of smiles” and “policy of yes” in Russia’s relations with the West, the inability of the United Nations and the United States to suppress bloody local conflicts, and the increasing assertiveness of a rising China.

The waves of liberation movements from the 1960s have disenchanted us vis à vis ‘old-fashioned’ restrictive values but have also forced upon us new codes of thought and behaviour, summarised in the clumsy phrase ‘political correctness’ and the morality of uncritical respect for difference and diversity. (I lazily say ‘us’ and, of course, this is not true for everyone.) We have learned from psychoanalysis that whatever is repressed will emerge projectively later or elsewhere, often in even more virulent forms. Hence, in recent years we have seen waves of paedophile scandals, celebrated cannibal cases, serial murders, school shootings and mass murders committed by terrorists. The naivety of the nice peaceful Left runs parallel to the converse unbridled greed of bankers, internet criminals, drug dealers and pornographers. These trends might scotch any illusions of linear and easy progress but they do not. If Dostoevsky’s over-quoted ‘If God does not exist, everything is permitted’ is true, nihilism steps into the vacuum, and subsequently moralistic alarm steps in to call for a return to traditional values. But Pandora’s box will not close, every demon is now loose.

Recently, the opposite trend has emerged—products like Uber and email company Superhuman, have started at the top of the market as a luxury product, and worked their way down.

For some, this idea was a shade too close to the lifestyles our Nordic cousins. Hygge and lagom, the Danish and Swedish movements of living well. But while these movements laid the groundwork for a similar trend to emerge in Scotland, coorie has some obvious differences. Where hygge is concerned with the pursuit of happiness through candles, coffee and togetherness, coorie seeks to make the most of what comes from Scotland to feel satisfied. Lagom is the art of balancing frugality and fairness to create a balanced existence. Coorie takes into account being kind to the earth and our wallets, but can also extend to premium experiences once in a while. Crucially, neither of these Scandinavian lifestyle approaches took their starting point from what is dug out of the earth. Coorie is more than simply being cosy. Sure, it is linked, but more importantly it focuses on working out how to be in tune with our surroundings to evoke that feeling.

There are also political reasons for increased pessimism. When I wrote the first Six Degrees, I did not imagine that the governing political party in the world’s most powerful nation (the US Republican Party) would adopt overt climate denialism as one of its core philosophies. Indeed the prospect would have seemed absurd. I assumed that climate denialism was just a flash-in-the-pan response to heavy political spending by fossil fuel companies. Nor did I expect that this bizarre phenomenon of science denialism would be accompanied by conspiracy theorising and broad-ranging assaults on the very concept of truth throughout the political system, including at the level of the presidency. If the trend towards populism continues throughout the world, overt denial of climate change may become consistently more prominent over future decades, even alongside worsening impacts of climate chaos. Humanity in aggregate, therefore, may not be as clever as many of us like to think. The proverbial boiling frog was at least just a passive and ignorant victim; we would be active and enthusiastic participants in our own demise.

But rather than a poster child for technological failure, flying cars—or the lack thereof—illustrate why spotting trends is so difficult. Flying cars are trendy, shiny objects; the concept emerges every ten years with regularity.

A trend evolves as it emerges. We didn’t progress in a straight line from wheeled carts to self-driving Google cars. Technological innovations lead to new ways of thinking, and, as a result, new kinds of vehicles. Each iteration includes learning from past successes and failures

Fundamentally, a trend leverages our basic human needs and desires in a meaningful way and aligns human nature with emerging technologies and breakthrough inventions.

Put another way, what would have been the value of DEC’s lead engineers dreaming big about the artificially intelligent computers of the far future? No one at DEC could have built one of these machines. But in pursuit of the future, they would have recognized emerging trends. That foresight might have led them to develop the first laptop. With a constant push, they might have envisioned the fourth era of computing—and perhaps beyond.

Probable futures. If we assume that a current trend is likely to continue—for example, automated transport—then what is highly likely, given the technology that exists today and the emerging research being worked on in labs?

Forecasting the future is a matter of listening to, recognizing, and acting on signals. Every step isn’t entirely about logic and data—the process also requires active dreaming and creativity. Rather than prophesying, seeing trends is a matter of looking for emerging changes at the fringe, within organizations, and in our societies. It cannot be relegated to inventive visionaries, nor can it be mapped entirely by left-brain thinkers. Great trends forecasting unites opposing forces, harnessing both wild imagination and pragmatism.

Exploring the Benefits of Continuous Glucose Monitors (CGMs) In the world of diabetes management, Continuous Glucose Monitors (CGMs) have emerged as a game-changing technology. These small devices are designed to provide real-time data on blood glucose levels, offering numerous advantages for individuals living with diabetes. In this article, we'll delve into the benefits of CGMs and why they are becoming an indispensable tool for managing diabetes. Real-Time Monitoring: Continuous Glucose Monitors provide a continuous stream of data, allowing users to monitor their glucose levels 24/7. This real-time feedback helps individuals make informed decisions about their diet, exercise, and insulin administration. Improved Glycemic Control: With constant glucose tracking, users can spot trends and patterns in their blood sugar levels. This insight enables them to make proactive adjustments to their diabetes management plan, leading to better glycemic control. Reduced Hypoglycemia and Hyperglycemia: CGMs can provide early warnings of impending hypoglycemia (low blood sugar) or hyperglycemia (high blood sugar), reducing the risk of severe blood sugar fluctuations and related complications.

In the bustling, culturally diverse city of Hyderabad, an emerging trend has been steadily gaining momentum - the Hyderabad baby photoshoot. These heartwarming photoshoots are not just a reflection of changing times but a testament to the enduring importance of capturing the innocence, joy, and beauty of early childhood. The Hyderabad baby photoshoot has transformed from a fleeting trend into a celebrated tradition in Hyderabad and around the world. The arrival of a new member in the family brings unbridled joy and wonder, making it the perfect occasion for a professional photoshoot. In the chaotic rush of life, the early days of a child are fragile and fleeting. Baby photoshoots offer a way to preserve these moments, capturing the beauty, innocence, and love that surround a child's arrival. These photographs are not just images; they are a portal to revisit and cherish the most precious moments of early childhood.

Revolutionizing Healthcare: The Role of CGM Devices in Diabetes Management In recent years, Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) devices have emerged as a game-changer in diabetes management, offering patients a real-time view of their glucose levels and revolutionizing the way they monitor their condition. Among the pioneers in providing these life-changing devices, Med Supply US stands out as a reliable source, offering CGMs from various renowned brands like Abbott, Dexcom, and more. This article explores the significance of CGM devices and highlights the contribution of Med Supply US in making them accessible to those in need. Understanding CGM Devices: For individuals living with diabetes, maintaining optimal blood glucose levels is crucial to prevent serious health complications. Traditionally, this involved frequent finger-prick tests, which could be inconvenient and sometimes inaccurate. CGM devices, however, have transformed this process by providing continuous and real-time glucose level readings. These devices consist of a small sensor inserted under the skin that measures glucose levels in the interstitial fluid. The data collected is then transmitted to a receiver or a smartphone app, allowing users to track their glucose levels throughout the day and night. Benefits of CGM Devices: The introduction of CGM devices has brought about a paradigm shift in diabetes management due to their numerous benefits: Real-time Monitoring: CGM devices offer a real-time insight into glucose trends, enabling users to make informed decisions about their diet, exercise, and insulin dosages. This real-time feedback empowers individuals to take timely action to maintain their glucose levels within a healthy range.

In recent years, Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) devices have emerged as a game-changer in diabetes management, offering patients a real-time view of their glucose levels and revolutionizing the way they monitor their condition. Among the pioneers in providing these life-changing devices, Med Supply US stands out as a reliable source, offering CGMs from various renowned brands like Abbott, Dexcom, and more. This article explores the significance of CGM devices and highlights the contribution of Med Supply US in making them accessible to those in need. Understanding CGM Devices: For individuals living with diabetes, maintaining optimal blood glucose levels is crucial to prevent serious health complications. Traditionally, this involved frequent finger-prick tests, which could be inconvenient and sometimes inaccurate. CGM devices, however, have transformed this process by providing continuous and real-time glucose level readings. These devices consist of a small sensor inserted under the skin that measures glucose levels in the interstitial fluid. The data collected is then transmitted to a receiver or a smartphone app, allowing users to track their glucose levels throughout the day and night. Benefits of CGM Devices: The introduction of CGM devices has brought about a paradigm shift in diabetes management due to their numerous benefits: Real-time Monitoring: CGM devices offer a real-time insight into glucose trends, enabling users to make informed decisions about their diet, exercise, and insulin dosages. This real-time feedback empowers individuals to take timely action to maintain their glucose levels within a healthy range. Reduced Hypoglycemia and Hyperglycemia: By providing alerts for both low and high glucose levels, CGMs help users avoid dangerous hypoglycemic episodes and hyperglycemic spikes. This is particularly beneficial during sleep when such episodes might otherwise go unnoticed. Data-Driven Insights: CGM devices generate a wealth of data, including glucose trends, patterns, and even predictive alerts for potential issues. This information can be shared with healthcare providers to tailor treatment plans for optimal diabetes management. Enhanced Quality of Life: The convenience of CGM devices reduces the need for frequent finger pricks, leading to an improved quality of life for individuals managing diabetes. The constant insights also alleviate anxiety related to unpredictable glucose fluctuations. Med Supply US: Bringing Hope to Diabetes Management: Med Supply US has emerged as a prominent supplier of CGM devices, offering a range of options from reputable brands such as Abbott and Dexcom. The availability of CGMs through Med Supply US has made these cutting-edge devices accessible to a wider demographic, bridging the gap between technology and healthcare. Med Supply US not only provides access to CGM devices but also plays a crucial role in educating individuals about their benefits. Through informative resources, they empower users to make informed choices based on their specific needs and preferences. Furthermore, their commitment to customer support ensures that users can seamlessly integrate CGM devices into their daily routines.

Exploring the Benefits of Continuous Glucose Monitors (CGMs) In the world of diabetes management, Continuous Glucose Monitors (CGMs) have emerged as a game-changing technology. These small devices are designed to provide real-time data on blood glucose levels, offering numerous advantages for individuals living with diabetes. In this article, we'll delve into the benefits of CGMs and why they are becoming an indispensable tool for managing diabetes. Real-Time Monitoring: CGMs provide a continuous stream of data, allowing users to monitor their glucose levels 24/7. This real-time feedback helps individuals make informed decisions about their diet, exercise, and insulin administration. Improved Glycemic Control: With constant glucose tracking, users can spot trends and patterns in their blood sugar levels. This insight enables them to make proactive adjustments to their diabetes management plan, leading to better glycemic control.

Exploring the Benefits of Continuous Glucose Monitors (CGMs) In the world of diabetes management, Continuous Glucose Monitors (CGMs) have emerged as a game-changing technology. These small devices are designed to provide real-time data on blood glucose levels, offering numerous advantages for individuals living with diabetes. In this article, we'll delve into the benefits of CGMs and why they are becoming an indispensable tool for managing diabetes. Real-Time Monitoring: CGMs provide a continuous stream of data, allowing users to monitor their glucose levels 24/7. This real-time feedback helps individuals make informed decisions about their diet, exercise, and insulin administration. Improved Glycemic Control: With constant glucose tracking, users can spot trends and patterns in their blood sugar levels. This insight enables them to make proactive adjustments to their diabetes management plan, leading to better glycemic control.

I anticipate diagnostic AI will exceed all but the best doctors in the next twenty years. This trend will be felt first in fields like radiology, where computer-vision algorithms are already more accurate than good radiologists for certain types of MRI and CT scans. In the story “Contactless Love,” we see that by 2041 radiologists’ jobs will be mostly taken over by AI. Alongside radiology, we will also see AI excel in pathology and diagnostic ophthalmology. Diagnostic AI for general practitioners will emerge later, one disease at a time, gradually covering all diagnoses. Because human lives are at stake, AI will first serve as a tool within doctors’ disposal or will be deployed only in situations where a human doctor is unavailable. But over time, when trained on more data, AI will become so good that most doctors will be routinely rubber-stamping AI diagnoses, while the human doctors themselves are transformed into something akin to compassionate caregivers and medical communicators.

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