Signtific Lab

Top 20 Outliers from the forecasting team at Cisco's IT Executive Summit

Many thanks to the forecasting team at Cisco's IT Executive Summit in San Francisco, California!

The Lab found several major patterns of interest in your forecasts, and super-interesting areas for future forecasting work:

• unintended impacts from Cubesats on financial markets, legal systems, and governance

• tangentially related fields of science & technology that could experience breakthroughs as a result of Cubesat industry

• opportunities to create personalized agriculture, fishing and food industries

From the more than 200 micro-forecasts you submitted, here are some of our favorite outlier ideas. And for outliers from Free Space experiments around the world, visit the Signtific Lab. And for more signals from the future of science, join our main Signtific community!

If you'd like to keep chewing on this scenario, you can read more about the research behind this scenario, or get ready for a Cubesat future here:

Cubesat community: The Cubesat Project
How-to: The Cubesat Kit
The Signtific take: The Future of Space

More ideas: Some ideas about what might be done with cubesats
Beginners' guide: How Satellites Workand Cubesats on Wikipedia
Get access to space now: Spacehack

Blended Realities Wrap Up!

Thank you to everyone who came out and blended the reality of 2019 with us! This time around we implemented a plethora of new and addictive community engagement tools. These included an improved Live dashboard, smoother user interface, keyword analysis, follow-ups and feedback, integrated card feeds, and much more!

The top 5 players in the Blended Realities thought experiment (all of which were new to Signtific Lab) dominated the leader board throughout the 24 hour trial, that of which are:

The "Super-Interesting" card feed is always the best place to see the "outlier" ideas in a Signtific Lab game. The lab guides still haven't finished sifting through all of the cards from this trial - but keep an eye out since we will continue to do so over the next 8 hours, and your's just might end up in the outlier pile!

Here's a selection of outliers from the Super-Interesting card feed!

The Keyword Analysis was introduced this game, which allowed players to view cards by keyword. By clicking on a keyword players were transported to a page that showed all cards with that term. This allowed players to spot trending terms and outlying claims. Below is a cross-section of the dynamic keyword function.

Thanks to everyone at The Institute for the Future's Ten Year Forecast for participating for the first time, and to the growing Signtific and Signtific Lab communities for faithfully coming back to try their hands at a new trial of the Lab!

- The Signtific Lab Team (Jane, Cesar, Mathias, Nathan, Alex, and Natalie)

Can You Spot the Outliers?

Here's the first Signtific Lab + Wordle Mash-up! All of the words represented are the keywords played during the Blended Realities thought experiment. The larger ones are the terms the crowds are gathering around the most and talking up. The smaller ones are the outliers - pay close attention to these details because these are the ideas, no less important, that are the most interesting and least talked about!

Leave a comment about your favorite outlier and perhaps a card that plays off it! Or, stitch together your own forecast with some of these and make a Wordle forecast!

Round 1 Awards for Blended Realities!

Announcing the Round 1 Awards for the first ever Blended Realities forecasting experiment! This experiment is headquartered at IFTF's annual Ten Year Forecast in the Marin Headlands of California. Over the past 16 hours these players have made outstanding contributions to the conversation. 

We'll be giving out awards periodically over the next few hours as the game play comes to an end. Come back often to check out awards and outliers!

TED TALK:	Micro-forecast most worthy of an 18-minute elaboration*
MACARTHUR GENIUS:	Micro-forecast most worthy of five-year funding**
HAWKING:	Micro-forecast with the clearest sense of the very big picture
FEYNMAN:	Micro-forecast with the clearest sense of the very small picture
VENTER:	Micro-forecast that makes the biggest paradigm shift
HEISENBERG:	The player that had the biggest impact of the conversation

*does not come with an actual invitation to present at the TED conference
**does not come with $500,000 funding

Awards for Round 1:

"daryl" acknowledged with a Feynman for his Positive Imagination card!

"canker" given a Feynman for their Momentum card!

"josholalia" honored with a Hawking for their Momentum card!

"Manojalpa" bestowed a Ted Talk for these cards!

Superstruct your reality! Join us TODAY in the Signtific Lab for a brand new experiment

You’ve conquered Free Space. So what’s next?

A new scenario – and a new lab dashboard!

Today -- Tuesday April 21st -- the Institute for the Future is launching a brand new Signtific experiment… and you’re invited to play.

The Superstructed Realities experiment is live until 4 PM Pacific Time TODAY. This experiment is headquartered at IFTF’s annual Ten Year Forecast in the Marin Headlands of California.

THE NEW SCENARIO

Join us to imagine a future where real life and digital life merges together completely. Where every living thing is an opportunity for interaction. Where everyone is a media channel. Where everything is rehearsed and relived. Where everybody is a data stream. And where every place is both physical and virtual.

In 2019, your superstructing tool kit includes:

·         Geolocation tools

·         Biometrics and accelerometers

·         Handheld augmented reality

·         Simulation engines

·         Lifecasting platforms

·         Social networks for every living thing

·         Avatars everywhere

·         Virtual worlds based on real worlds

What will you make? What will you play? What will you learn?

THE NEW DASHBOARD

You told us the features and tools you wanted. We’ve built them for you.

We’ve added a customized dashboard for you to track all the follow-ups to your card, and get alerts when a card of yours is marked super-interesting. You can also set up feeds to track just your favorite players’ cards, and use the keyword cloud to browse the cards by theme.

THE LAB IS OPEN!

Uncover the future of superstructed reality with us right now – this experiment will run today and tomorrow only!

The Signtific Lab Team

Free Space Experiment #3 Wrap Up

And thus ends the 3rd and final Experiment in the Free Space Trilogy. Jane McGonigal wrapped up the game at the closing keynote at Etech, and to start the process of sharing the games' results with you the players, here are the slides from Jane's talk:

Etech 09: The End of Free Space

View more presentations from avantgame.

We at Signtific would like to send a HUGE thanks to everyone who joined the experiments these past couple months, and please stay tuned to this space, and to Signtific, for information about upcoming experiments.

~The Signtific Team

freespace

Time is Running Out! Round 3 Outliers at Etech

We are coming into the final stretch of Trial #3! Brady Forrest, of O'Reilly Media, recently twittered out ...

"Free Space Update: 2851 micro-forecasts from 114 players. Just 650 forecasts shy of a world record! Play b4 2:20." (that's 2:20pm PST)

The cards below have helped us reach that 2,851 micro-forecast number and the Lab Guides are hoping that the outliers you have yet to play will help us make a new world record! The guides concur, this is the most diverse set of cards we have yet to see in the Free Space thought-trials. Push hard in the next few hours to make this the most dynamic game ever played in the Signtific Lab!

Talk about a chain reaction! These cards are pulling players down the rabbit hole!

 

Large, small, and complex

In his short, brilliant book Our Cosmic Century, astronomer and Royal Society president Sir Martin Rees argues that in the 21st century, science will concern itself with three things: the very large, the very small, and the very complex. Rees' summary has always impressed me for its elegance; and so I'm impressed to see that players in the latest round of the Free Space game have discovered these three applications themselves.

At the level of the very small, there are two cards by sbisson and iHuckDisc, on using cubesats to develop customized medicines in microgravity:

In the realm of the very large, ap0phenia and corntoole explore the possibilities created by having swarms of cubesats, sometimes thousands of miles apart, work together:

Finally, in the realm of the very complex, corntoole suggests:

Space exploration takes us back home

(image via UA Steward Observatory)

In my last post, I touched on how collaborative cubesats can use their combined power to achieve greater goods, citing a better understanding of our Earth as an example.

Today, I want to dive into forecasts that explore this topic further. History points to how an overwhelming amount of new knowledge can benefit our society's future:

I found the concept of space exploration leading us back to understanding ourselves to be intriguing. This thought process isn't solely about critical thinking – participatory exploration is all about actively getting involved. Players brainstormed ways in which the cubesats could not only further our knowledge, but take action to protect our home planet:

Of course, other forecasts think that it might not all be sunshine and rainbows:

The balance between large arrays of cubesats reflecting sunlight to protect us versus blocking out the sun to destroy us is interesting. A few months ago on the Discovery Channel, Roger Angel explored actually building a prototype of this concept. The results of the prototype were reported as a letdown. While critics say geoengineering is a waste of time in the fight to protect our planet, I would argue that limiting any imaginations to save life risks the possibility of not creating the one (or many) "ridiculous" execution that does work.

---

Ariel Waldman is the founder of Spacehack.org

Etech Extraordinaires! Awards for Round 2

New forecasting extraordinaires are up on the blog for Round 2 Awards. Congratulate them in the game by playing off their cards!

Think a card and/or player should receive an award? Message us on Twitter with your suggestion!

Drum roll please!

PattyRyan is asked to give a Ted Talk on their Positive Imagination card!

ka.johansson received a Hawking award for their Positive Imagination card!

ninaksimon is recognized with a Ted Talk for her Momentum card!

sporkthrower is bestowed a Venter for a Positive Imagination and a Momentum card!

wdonohue is acknowledged with a Feynman for their Momentum cards!

kxlsyd is promoted with a Ted Talk for their Positive Imagination card!

Pronoia is honored with a Venter for a stunning Positive Imagination card!

_june is on the board again, and is asked to give a Ted Talk on their Momentum card!