Robert Hooker (an Information Technology professional living in London) is today's featured guest.

Topics: powerful software which is totally free to download and use (such as: Open Office, Gimp, and Ubuntu); Web 3.0 verses 2.0; the buzzword The Cloud and what it means to users; trends in Microsoft Office and its global popularity; and the overwhelming reason why users have not adopted Linux even though it is excellent and free.

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the July 8, 2009 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 30 minutes]

Robert Hooker has a Bachelors degree in Cognitive Sciences from the University of Chicago, and a Masters degree in Sociology from the Open University in Britain. For most of the 1990s Robert worked first as a researcher in Artificial Intelligence at Northwestern University Institute for Learning Sciences (ILS) and then as Web Developer and Entrepreneur. While at  the Institute for Learning Sciences he worked with Virtual Reality, web based video delivery, Internet learning and content indexing. Current he works for Fujitsu Services in the United Kingdom. He has lived in London for the last 10 years.

Robert Hooker (an Information Technology professional living in London) is our featured guest.

Topics: trends in England and Europe compared to the USA especially involving cell phones, Internet connections, and other technologies. Robert also talks about: the lack of national unity in the UK; bigotry and prejudice in Europe against non-European immigrants and against Eastern Europeans; how globalization is changing Europe (for good and bad); why the impact of China and India are large but completely different; and his observations of trends in North Africa based on the time he spend living in a suburb of Tunis, Tunisia.

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the July 1, 2009 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 37 minutes]

Robert Hooker has a Bachelors in Cognitive Sciences  from the University of Chicago and a Masters in Sociology from the Open University in Britain. For most of the 1990s Robert worked first as a researcher in Artificial Intelligence at Northwestern University Institute for Learning Sciences (ILS) and then as Web Developer and Entrepreneur. While at  the Institute for Learning Sciences he worked with Virtual Reality, web based video delivery,  Internet learning and content indexing. Current he works for Fujitsu Services in the United Kingdom. He has lived in London for the last 10 years.

Tom Atwood (Editor-in-Chief of Robot Magazine) is our featured guest.

Topics: the latest in 3D displays for TV and for video games; self-fueling robots; robots in warfare now and in the near future; robots as smart weapons; robotic fighter jets; educational robots; robotic dance competitions; fighting methods used by TV battle robots; diversity of robotic body styles; and getting started in robotics without much money or without having to build your robot.

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the June 24, 2009 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 32 minutes]

Robot Magazine covers every aspect of the rapidly exploding field of robots. It has 'how-to' for robot hobbyists, 'what's going on' for robot enthusiasts and 'what's innovative' for tech and engineering professionals. Strong on education, it offers parents, teachers and kids guidance on using and playing with the latest consumer, toy and hobby robots that serve as educational tools and recreational fun. Every issue is full of hundreds of full color photos of robotic fun, gee whiz and hands on experience.

Tom Atwood (Editor-in-Chief of Robot Magazine) is our featured guest.

Topics: the astounding progress being made in all areas of robotics such as: how vacuum cleaning robots are getting improved house-mapping abilities; what's happening in artificial intelligence for robots; trends in Japanese robots; the brilliant new way in which robots are being used in physical therapy for post-operative patients; and which needs to advance more to put robots to work in our homes as cooks, house cleaners, gardeners and laundry workers -- artificial intelligence or the basic mechanics of robotic bodies.

Tom Atwood also talks about his conversation with Sebastian Thrun of Stanford University, winner of the Second DARPA Grand Challenge, about how Sabastian's team programmed their car to win the robotic auto race. (The DARPA Grand Challenge is a series of very long -- some might say 'grueling' -- road races sponsored by DARPA in which all the participants are computer controlled motor vehicles. Not toy cars; but full-sized cars and trucks with no human driver.  DARPA is the Defence Advanced Research Project Agency: the organization that created the Internet.)

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the June 17, 2009 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 33 minutes]

Robot Magazine covers every aspect of the rapidly exploding field of robots. It has 'how-to' for robot hobbyists, 'what's going on' for robot enthusiasts and 'what's innovative' for tech and engineering professionals. Strong on education, it offers parents, teachers and kids guidance on using and playing with the latest consumer, toy and hobby robots that serve as educational tools and recreational fun. Every issue is full of hundreds of full color photos of robotic fun, gee whiz and hands on experience.

Tom Atwood (Editor-in-Chief of Robot Magazine) is our featured guest.

Topics: Robots are in a world-wide boom time. Hundreds of thousands of hobbyists are building robots. Competitive robot events draw Rock-Star-sized crowds and are doubling in attendance each year. High schools and colleges are using the building and programing of robots (from scratch and from kits) to get students enthused about science, math, logic, engineering, programming and many other crucial subjects. Open source collaboration is driving innovation in robotic software as well as hardware. Tom emphasizes how these learning benefits are also beginning to work their way into grade schools, and how all this learning forms a foundation for the future of the students and of our world.

Tom Atwood also describes an experiment in which rat brain tissue (grown in a culture dish) was wired to a robot and taught to successfully navigate an obstacle course.

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the June 10, 2009 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 34 minutes]

Robot Magazine covers every aspect of the rapidly exploding field of robots. It has 'how-to' for robot hobbyists, 'what's going on' for robot enthusiasts and 'what's innovative' for tech and engineering professionals. Strong on education, it offers parents, teachers and kids guidance on using and playing with the latest consumer, toy and hobby robots that serve as educational tools and recreational fun. Every issue is full of hundreds of full color photos of robotic fun, gee whiz and hands on experience.

James Maxey (author of the Dragon Age fantasy series and Nobody Gets the Girl) is our featured guest.

Topics: trends in medicine and the possibility that cancer may someday become completely curable. Privacy vs life-logging, twitter and the incessant text-messaging some people do about the trivial minutia of their daily lives. James suggests that 'When Orwell wrote in 1984 about people being watched by their TVs, what he didn't understand about the human condition is that a lot of people wanted the TV to watch them.' The compulsion of Googling one's own name, as well as  time travel paradoxes and human longevity.

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the June 3, 2009 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 47 minutes]

James Maxey is the author of the Dragon Age fantasy series which includes the novels Bitterwood, Dragonforge, and Dragonseed. Set a thousand years in the future, after the fall of our modern civilization, in a world dominated by the intelligent dragons we created through genetic engineering. Humans are reduced to slaves, and the remnants of long forgotten nanotechnology make the world a wondrous place of magic.

James Maxey (author of the Dragon Age fantasy series and Nobody Gets the Girl) is our featured guest.

Topics: the current search for other earths and what effect their discovery might have on people: the demise of circus freaks as professional performers; and (despite James' long-term atheism) his fascination with Angels, both in their original source material and in the popular culture.

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the May 27, 2009 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 39 minutes]

James Maxey is the author of the Dragon Age fantasy series which includes the novels Bitterwood, Dragonforge, and Dragonseed. Set a thousand years in the future, after the fall of our modern civilization, in a world dominated by the intelligent dragons we created through genetic engineering. Humans are reduced to slaves, and the remnants of long forgotten nanotechnology make the world a wondrous place of magic.

Also in this episode we begin a 12 part serialization of a complete story from Jim Baen's Universe Magazine. The story is the Hugo Award nominated Article of Faith, written by Mike Resnick and read by Walt Boyes.

James Maxey (author of the Dragon Age fantasy series and Nobody Gets the Girl) is our featured guest.

Topics: the various ways our modern civilization might come to an end (all the usual suspects along with  total economic collapse); disruptive technologies such as the large scale use of cheap solar cells which could lead to the abandonment of the electric power grid; how the differences between men and women may affect their acceptance of the robotic husbands and wives which will become available within a decade or two; life-sized anatomically-correct sex dolls of today and the 2007 movie, Lars and the Real Girl, which co-stars one such doll.

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the May 20, 2009 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 35 minutes]

James Maxey is the author of the Dragon Age fantasy series which includes the novels Bitterwood, Dragonforge and Dragonseed. Set a thousand years in the future -- after the fall of today's civilization, in a world dominated by the intelligent dragons we created through genetic engineering -- humans are reduced to pets and slaves, and the remnants of long forgotten nanotechnology make the world a place of wondrous magic.

Aliese, a college student, is today's featured guest.

Topics: trends in college in general, as well as in classes, dorm life, students and teachers. Also how personal computers and cell phones improve or degrade the learning experience. As well as YouTube, Facebook, Charlie Chaplin and wedding photography.

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the May 13, 2009 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 38 minutes]

Aliese is studying for a degree in photography and fine arts, and has completed one year at a school with about 1,000 students.

Stephen Euin Cobb is today's featured guest. (This is the second half of the experiment in which the questions I normally pose to others I ask of myself.)

Topics: Why I am an atheist and why I am not an anti-theist; my insistance that there is a rapidly growing need for a new and different kind of tolerance, greater than any this world has ever seen before; how this universe will end, and why I think we will someday engineer other universes; why past predictions of the future have always been so wrong; the probability that we will invent faster-than-light travel; and my estimation of the probability of The Singularity.

Also described are: why I started doing this show, why I chose the future as my topic, and how doing this show for three years has completely re-written my understanding of the future.

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the May 6, 2009 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 34 minutes]

Stephen Euin Cobb is an author, futurist and the host of the award-winning podcast The Future and You. He is also a columnist and contributing editor for Jim Baen's Universe Magazine, the online magazine from Baen Books. His articles have also appeared in Space and Time Magazine, H+ Magazine and >[gRiM][cOuTuRe]