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  • Futurist Friday: Compiling a Summer Reading List

    Earlier this week I tweeted about the search by UCLA law professor Ted Parsons for reading/viewing to assign for his upcoming seminar “Law in Futurist Social Visions.” The course will use speculative fiction to explore challenges that may …
  • Yah, Museums Do That

    I want to share this video the Alliance recently released. It shares a couple of great stories demonstrating museums’ role in the growing “vibrant learning grid” connecting educational resources in the US. These stories …
  • Meet Watson, Your Personal Museum Learning Agent

    A recent post by Steve Hamm wrote on the IBM Smarter Planet sparked a new thought about a role for AI (artificial intelligence) in museums. Steve writes about IBM Watson’s new gig: improving the customer experience, as demonstrated in this …
  • Futurist Friday: Heads Up

    When Jeff Bezos announced last year that Amazon was going to introduce “Prime Air,” a drone delivery service, he was roundly mocked and Amazon quickly backed off the claim. But, in fact, the barriers to drone delivery are …
  • Museums in the World of Open Data

    Yesterday IMLS gave a webinar explaining the methodology that went into compiling the 34,144 records in their recently released Museum Universe Database File (MUDF).  The big news isn’t so much the count, though that is important, as …
  • Futurist Friday: Robotic Emoticons

    I will be writing soon about CFM’s experiments with robots (telepresence robots and drones) at the annual meeting in Seattle last month. Spoiler alert: some people found our robot guests charming, others were more than a bit creeped …
  • A Recap of Big Data

    The good news about the CFM Big Data session in Seattle is that it was very well attended. Actually, that was the bad news, too, as the room was overflowing and we had to turn folks away. I suppose there are worse problems to have—I am …
  • Synesthesia: Multisensory Publication in a Multisensory World

    As soon as TrendsWatch 2015 published in March, I started searching for stories that extend my exploration of this year’s themes. The “synesthesia” trend is, predictably, yielding some of the most playful, pleasurable and simply joyful …
  • Monday Musing: For Profit for Good & the Challenge of Scale

    Last week Forbes featured the company TechChange in an article titled “When and How to Scale: DC Startup at Crossroads.” The piece caught my eye for three reasons: TechChange is an example of the “for profit for …

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