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Futurist Friday: Economic “Ifs”
The Economist just released the 2015 edition of “The World If“– a companion to their annual compilation of predictions. I’m working through it today, and you can, too.The editors pose one of my favorite questions: … -
New Economic Models for Field Wide Research
On my desk is a report from Reach Advisors’ Museums R+D membership program. It’s on museums and trust. Before I opened the report, the latest data I had on this critical subject was a survey about public attitudes toward museums that AAM … -
Laboring over Art
I have a super-quick musing for you today, sparked by something I read last Friday: Looking at How Performers Are Paid for Performance Art There has been a lot of talk lately about labor conditions and pay equity in museums (looking at … -
Futurist Friday: 10 Bite-sized Stories of the Future
Popular Science has released their annual collection of “Dispatches from the Future,” a collection of microscenarios solicited from sci-fi writers. At a few hundred words each, these provide a nice short pop of futurist … -
A Bodacious Commitment to Diversity
Yesterday the Mellon Foundation released a report based on the first comprehensive survey of the demographics of art museum staff. For the most part, it documents what we already knew: “professional” staff in museums (e.g., directors, … -
So this museum geek walks into an academic research meeting…
Earlier this month I was in London, participating in the Diversity, (In)equality and Differences workshop organized by the Trans-Atlantic Platform for Social Sciences and Humanities. As I shared in an earlier post, I was one of about … -
Monday Musing: Thinking the Unthinkable
The other week I included a sobering story from the New Yorker in Dispatches from the Future of Museums*. The Really Big One, by Kathryn Shulz, looks at the Cascadia fault line that runs for 700 miles down the coast of the Pacific … -
Futurist Friday: Rise of the (Cute, Self-aware) Robots
Have you seen Ex Machina yet? I watched it on a flight back from London. Its depiction of artificial intelligence is way, way ahead of the actual state of the field, but this week we saw a hint, just a tiny bit of evidence, that we may be … -
Notes from the Team: An Introduction, or Why Predict the Future, Anyway?
I am so pleased to introduce a new member of the CFM team—Nicole Ivy will be working with me for the next two years, supported by a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. I invited Nicole to introduce herself today—you … -
Futurist Friday: Seeing the Bigger Picture
You can follow FiveBooks (& their cutemanatee mascot) on Twitter@five_books Today, for your weekly fix of futurism, I recommend you bop over to the Five Books site to read this wonderful interview with Andrew Curry, director of The …
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