Apply by December 31 for one of 20 $100,000 grants offered by the Thiel Foundation to those under 20 to develop their entrepreneurial dreams.

The Thiel Foundation is offering $100,000 grants to innovators age 19 or younger who want to skip college and focus on their work, their research, and their self-education—Deadline Dec 31.

Breakthrough Philanthropy presentation videos are available on You Tube.

The Foresight Institute was one of eight future-oriented organizations chosen by Peter Thiel to present at a ‘Breakthrough Philanthropy’ event attended by a couple hundred wealthy individuals.

Longtime Foresight supporter John Gilmore writes: “I noticed a story that reminded me of something Foresight wanted to encourage in society.  Wired reports that the CIA uses decision analysis software ‘Analysis of Competing Hypotheses’, and has funded a rewritten version for shared networked analysis by many people.  But the gov’t contractors got into a hassle [...]

The Open Science Summit on July 29-31 in Berkeley is looking better and better. Topics include OpenPCR, DIY biology, open source hardware, brain preservation, synthetic biology, gene patents, open data, open access journals, reputation engines, crowd-funding and microfinance for science, citizen science, biohacking, open source biodefense, cure entrepreneurs, open source drug discovery, patent pools, tech transfer, and [...]

I’ll be speaking at the following event. If you miss the early registration rate, you can get 20% off regular registration with the discount code ‘Foresight’: Open Science Summit 2010: Updating the Social Contract for Science 2.0 July 29-31 International House Berkeley http://opensciencesummit.com Ready for a rapid, radical reboot of the global innovation system for [...]

The debate held at Foresight 2010 between Robin Hanson and Mencius Moldbug on the subject of futarchy is now online at Vimeo. Watch it online or download it: 1. Get a vimeo account by registering. 2. Option-click on the download link close to the bottom right on the video’s page 3. Wait an hour It’s [...]

Glenn Reynolds, a past Foresight Director, writes some analysis of the recent special election in Mass.: Of course, what the GOP apparat does is less important nowadays than it was. As I noted before, there’s a whole lot of disintermediation going on here — Scott Brown got money and volunteers via the Internet and the [...]

The other day I got a worried call from my mother-in-law.  My wife usually calls her during her commute but that day she neither called or answered her phone. Turns out my wife’s iPhone had crashed — the software had wedged and there was no way to reboot.  The amusing, if you can call it [...]

Religious creeds are a great obstacle to any full sympathy between the outlook of the scientist and the outlook which religion is so often supposed to require … The spirit of seeking which animates us refuses to regard any kind of creed as its goal. It would be a shock to come across a university [...]

“You have given considerable study to the Bible, haven’t you, Mr. Bryan?” “Yes, sir; I have tried to … But, of course, I have studied it more as I have become older than when I was a boy.” “Do you claim then that everything in the Bible should be literally interpreted?” “I believe everything in [...]

The evolution of science moves, in Kuhn’s famous theory, not in a smooth accretion of knowledge but in a series of punctuated equilibria. This means that before a paradigm shift happens, there is an overhang where the majority of scientists believe something that the mojority won’t a scientific generation later. Thomas Bouchard, the psychologist who [...]

Reading this essay by Peter Thiel, I was struck by an amusing (though almost certainly coincidental) parallel. Thiel mentions three areas in which people interested in freedom may manage to get out from under the thumb of excessive government: cyberspace, seasteading, and outer space. The parallel is to three fronts on which people are pursuing [...]

A “Call for Participation” for the first post-US election Prediction Markets Summit and Collective Intelligence Conference of 2009 has been announced.

An increasingly serious research effort is being mounted to ensure the safe development and commercialization of nanotechnology (see, for example, this news from a couple weeks ago). The recent formation of an international alliance to establish the methods used to test the safety of nanotech materials is not only encouraging for the development of nanotechnology [...]

From The Economist, a look at Russia’s technology, including nanotech: After years of high oil prices, money is again no object: in 2007 Russia put 130 billion roubles ($5.5 billion) into a state corporation for nanotechnologies that is being likened to the Manhattan Project… But the big problem for high technology in Russia is neither [...]

It’s great to see ambitious goals being set in nanotechnology, like these “molecular mini-factories“. Researchers from a wide range of disciplines at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) will be joining forces in the Institute for Complex Molecular Systems (ICMS). They will be investigating the exact mechanism behind self-organization, the principle behind all life on earth. [...]

We’ve been critical in the past of Saudi Arabia’s policy of having women researchers in nanotechnology (and of course other fields as well) work separately from male researchers. Now King Abdullah has moved personally to fund, at the US$10 billion level, a new graduate-level university with a new policy toward women, to be advised by [...]

Jamais Cascio offers four nanotechnology policy scenarios over at CRN, looking at options resulting from two axes: centralized vs. decentralized, and precautionary vs. proactionary. His two decentralized scenarios describe some territory similar to that which Foresight is investigating as part of our Decentralized Physical Security project: The third scenario, combining Distributed rule-making and Proactionary technology [...]