Volunteer Form 2012 - Relay For Life: Fill & Download for Free

What are some instances that the future was predicted?In his dystopian novel Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner correctly predicted so many future events that it is unbelievable the book is little-known outside of science fiction fangroups. Here are some of the things he predicted:Random acts of violence, mostly at schools, and the frequent occurrence of terrorist violence at home and abroad, challenging American interests. In 2019, the United States suffered 434 firearm-related incidents involving multiple victims that fit into the criteria of “mass-shootings”, although this definition is disputed. The controversial issue of school shootings have become more prominent in American political debates, as the number of school attacks have seen a notable increase since the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, 30 years after the book’s publication. The start of the 21st Century has also largely been defined by the US-led Global War on Terrorism, in the wake of the September 11 attacks. In the past 2 decades, acts of terrorism have disrupted life across the world for many years. In 2017, Afghanistan suffered a staggering 1083 terrorist incidents in the span of one year. The United Kingdom was no less safe, and had 122 terrorism-related incidents within the same period.The world population would reach 7 billion people in the year 2010. The world’s population would exceed the 7 billion mark less than a year later - in 2011.A geopolitical rivalry between China and the United States. It was unfeasible at the time, but Brunner’s book focused on a world where the Soviet Union was gone and the People’s Republic of China became the US’s chief competitor for global influence. This prediction was even less feasible after the Sino-Soviet Border Incident a year later, which brought China closer to the United States and formed a relationship between the nations that lasted until the 1990s. Today, however, many forget that the Cold War happened, as China becomes the chief balancing power against the United States after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. In 2010, the year of Stand on Zanzibar, China’s economy grew 10.3%. Today, the two countries are locked amidst a trade war, which accompanies multiple other problems such as territorial disputes, regional influence, innovation, and the issue of human rights in ensuring the world remains in a delicate balance between Washington and Beijing.Race relations between Whites and Blacks in American society will remain poor, despite initiatives to promote racial equality. On February 26, 2012, Trayvon Martin was fatally shot by a volunteer of Sanford, Florida’s Neighbourhood Watch, George Zimmerman. The ensuing drama and acquittal of Zimmerman caused the Black Lives Matter movement to abruptly come into fruition. The deaths of more black civilians in similar fashion only added fuel to the movement. Today, there still remains a large rift in race relations that was at least influenced by this critical event.The birth of electric cars. While the idea was no more than hocus-pocus at the time, Brunner wrote of a world where cars are powered by electric fuel cells. He also mentioned Honda, which did not produce automobiles at the time, as a supplier of these “electric cars”. Today, in the midst of the widespread publicity around climate change, a move is underway for a transition from fuel-powered vehicles to environmentally friendly solutions, such as electric cars.The collapse of Detroit’s auto industry and the ensuing rise of a music genre eerily similar to the actual Detroit techno. Speaking of cars, the city of Detroit didn’t seem to fare too well in Brunner’s predictions of 2010. The book was published in 1969, and although Detroit by this point was showing signs of decline they still held prestige as America’s still-booming auto city. However, in the decades after the book’s publication, Detroit fell into stagnation and in 2013 became the largest American city to file for bankruptcy. In the midst of the city’s decline, a sci-fi-themed music movement became prominent in the city, similar to real-life Detroit techno.A social network exists that allow for people to communicate in short bursts of information, primarily to relay news. Sound familiar?The legalization of recreational marijuana. There is a current global trend towards the legalization of Cannabis for recreational use. Within the United States, 11 States plus the District of Columbia have decriminalized the usage of pot for personal consumption as of February 2020.There are many more predictions that hail from this seemingly prophetic book to the point where it’s actually sad the novel isn’t more well-known. A lot of its ideas, none more than Brunner’s creative imagination, have since come to fruition in today’s society and world.Oh, and I need to mention one last one…A world leader by the name of“Obomi”. This one’s pretty self-explanatory.

Let's start from what computing and communications in general will be like in 20 or 30 years. I assume they'll be:more pervasive (seamless connectivity, internet of things, etc.),more wearable or built-in (contacts, cochlear implants, dermal displays, etc.),and we'll have new services to help us bring that universe from overwhelm to whelm.One more assumption: Natural Language Processing will completely blur the lines between spoken and written language, and even which language (Hindi, Pirate, American Sign Language) you use. So you'll be able to choose how you want to communicate.So, in that hypothetical future, email is part and parcel of the whole mix of conversational media. Conversational media have several basic events:discovery,conversation initiation,consumption (reading, listening, watching, feeling, smelling, haptic senses), andexpression (speaking, drawing, singing, writing, gesturing, etc.).Discovery. How do you find who to talk to? In the 2010s, work-persona directories (LinkedIn (product)) and enterprise discovery services help find the person or group of people to contact for a given purpose. Since we'll be awash in personal data long before 2040, we'll have more than "white pages", "yellow pages", or "social networks" to find people. People Match systems, serendipity services, topic networks, reputation networks like Connect.me, tribal event networks like Meetup (company), and location services will help you discover the right person to work with or talk to at the right time.Initiation. In thirty years your software agent/proxy/broker will field offers of new conversation before they reach you. Think spam filter meets alerting service meets professional assistant. Services will compete on how well they interact with you, how accurately their filters reflect your preferences for interruption and notification, and how well they negotiate a mutually agreeable blend of time and media. These "inboxes" will have a wealth of data to use to calculate whether, when, and how to notify you or to start a conversation: social proximity (you're both friends of your ex-husband), prior interactions with you and others, affiliations (works for x, belong to y) and endorsements (your mentor says you should take this call), verification of identity, commercial offers (will pay 元10 for nine minutes in the next hour or a Starbucks cup of coffee), alternative ways to spend your time (you're in line for a concert), your interest in the subject, whether you're on company/personal/family time, etc. In 2013, Facebook decides which updates of thousands from those you trust fit into the fewer than 100 updates the average person reads in a day; in 2040 you'll have more control of what shows up in your inbox.[Side bet: Microsoft or Google will be better than you at choosing which 'inbox' items are the most interesting to you by 2020 based on user satisfaction tests.]Consumption. One of the things people like about Skype is it's easy to throttle up and down a ladder of intimacy. At the low end are slow-changing mood messages and presence indicators. IM lets you throttle up from asynchronous messaging to live back-and-forth chats. When that's not enough you can add voice. And when you need to see faces and body language, you move up to video. In thirty years we'll have more UI presentation methods to choose from like holographic avatars or Rapid serial visual presentation or having your tweets sung to you in the style of Taylor Swift (musician). You'll have new metaphors and design surfaces for consuming asynchronous conversation. And we'll find it smooth to rapidly switch among any media and any visualization paradigm.Expression. Thirty years' ago in the early 1980s we didn't have Internet, smartphones, electric cars, free video conferencing, private spacecraft or nanotechnology. We're now in the 1980s of 2040, the subject of costume dramas and kids ironically 3D Printing our fashions. By 2040 we should have at least a few more billion people connected to cyberspace, some very intimately. The range of available connectivity, devices, and media will continue to diverge with haves and have-nots.When talking human-to-human you'll be able to toss original content – data from what you say or perform – into the conversation flow. The channel should take care of converting it from how you choose to express yourself (longhand, typing, talking, foxtrot) into forms preferred or needed by the other other person; consider this automation of the interpreter relay services provided for the visually impaired or the deaf on phones today.Your channel will let you play "live streaming producer" on your part of the conversation, feeding media objects into the conversation as you like. You'll even be able to merge and fork live threads/streams (think git for live conferences).You'll also have some control or influence about other attributes of your conversation. Who has the right to share the record of this conversation? How much? With whom? Can records of this conversation be destroyed in real time the way some email services delete email after expiry? Can we have this conversation permanently archived in public? How much anonymity or pseudonymity will you accept?Toasters and insulin pumps. But email is not solely the province of people. We've been hooking up machines to email for decades. By 2040 we'll have trillions of sensors and devices engaging in conversation with people and each other. Notifications from our bodies (Quantified Self), our things, and our places will be in our Personal Clouds. Our inboxen will test Inquiries from stranger devices just like inquiries from strange people: Is this notification from the bus you're riding worth your attention now? If so, what's the best context and form for engaging with it given you're in a space where it's impolite to talk and you're using your hands to hang on for dear life? Some conversations just don't need words, after all. You may just need to see a chart or hear a message; you may just need to grunt or wave in response. Remember to buy a premium personality for your pacemaker: for an extra two percent, the Bollywood star of your choice will be its living avatar.Personal vs. Work. Do you remember when you had separate email accounts for each job, for your personal life, from your school, and for volunteer gig? Umpteen mailboxes? Whilst it keeps your peas from touching your potatoes and your boss from talking with your mistress, the actual act of juggling mutliple accounts is painful. You'll have one queue, one spew of inbound offers to talk from every part of your life. You may offer different faces/handles/personas for each context the way you hand out personal and business email addresses now, but your single, seemingly self-aware "inbox" will let you wear the appropriate mask and project the appropriate identity for each. New legal constructs, like The Limited Liability Persona, will support this.Work vs. Talk. You asked specifically about email for business. Email and other electronic media are part of how labor markets work today and how workers get things done together. So let's talk about the Future of Work for a moment. Thirty years from now, on the other side of wars, famines, depressions, disruptions, and alien invasions, many elements of work will be the same: many of us will rent our time to people or organizations that will pay us. But expect much of that work, to be done with, if not through, your communication channels. There will be no need to have separate toolkits for conversation vs. metawork (work about work, like scheduling, to-do lists, project management, budgeting, etc.) vs. collaboration. Context providers will let you "skin" your full-body-browser to add the features that blend work, metawork and conversation together. Think of it as Bring Your Own Inbox/Phone/Reality. So whether you're sortieing with your squad for work, tweaking your bots for fun, or negotiating a contract for your family, you'll use the same conversational media.Somewhere in 2040, email as we know it in 2012 will continue to flow. But we'll be thinking about "email" then the way we think about teletype consoles and punch cards now: antiques that paved the way.

The general trend is no, while everyone’s personal story could be different.This question is partially answered in Joseph Fewsmith & Stanley Rosen’s “The Domestic Context of Chinese Foreign Policy: Does ‘Public OPinion’ Matter?” in the 2001 book The Making of Chinese Foreign and Security Policy in the Era of Reform, 1978–2000, edited by David Lampton. They observed that the general atmosphere among intellectual was cosmopolitanism in the 1980s, while nationalism started to attract more attention in the 1990s, both in the elites and the general public. One reason is “the broad disillusionment with the West in recent years” (pp.160), caused by “wider and more frequent exchanges with the United States” - “As intellectuals have come to know the United States better, they have acquired the knowledge and the boldness to become more critical” (pp.161).Foreign Policy magazine conducts online surveys on similar topics too. In their 2015 survey (Do Years Studying in America Change Chinese Hearts and Minds?), they found mixed results: “Chinese students in the United States learn much from the contrasts between America’s education system, media, and social and intellectual life and those they find at home. And they often emerge with more admiration for the United States as a result. But they also gain more respect for the enormity of the task involved in running China — and learn that America’s streets aren’t exactly paved with gold.”There are at least three things in this story: the pre-existing opinions of the students, the bad quality of the anti-CPC propaganda outside, and the over-exaggerated images of U.S. spread by a large number of pro-U.S. people in China.The first reason is simple: most of Chinese students who come to study in U.S. are either disinterested in politics, or some kind of USA fans (and most of the USA fans in China are somewhat anti-CPC and pro-democracy). Thus, usually for anti-CPC guys, they have already made up their mind before they leave China, so they don’t “become” anti-CPC, but their experiences “confirm” their pre-existing perceptions. They usually prefer to stay in U.S. or outside mainland China, so they have relatively low impact on people back home, or they only discuss politics with people who share similar ideas. Some of them even cut their ties with their old friends or even families. These makes them minority in the whole population.Many answers have already touch on the bad quality of the anti-CPC propaganda outside. I just give two more examples. One on Falungong: every year, they claims that “several ten million” CPC party members quit the party. Considering that CPC nowadays has about 90 million people, the Party could not exist if you add on the numbers in their reports. Also, they hold “Shen Yun Performing Arts” in many cities annually. According to a friend of mine who attended once, they claimed that they performed traditional Chinese cultural and art performance which were “destroyed” by CPC and people in Mainland China had no chance to see such things. However, their performance was not as good as what we can see frequently from our own TV shows. The other case is the Anti-CNN movement in 2008: a lot of reports on the Tibet riot and the Beijing Summer Olympics torch relay was biased or even tailored to fit a negative image of China (i.e., some media used a photo to accuse China of arresting the people, while there was “急救” (“first aid” in Chinese) on the car in that photo, which implied that it was an ambulance), so a large number of oversea Chinese formed the action (April Media - Wikipedia). It was a volunteer movement at that time.The last one is about the over-exaggerated images of U.S. When lots of people inside and outside China blame Chinese Internet as pro-Beijing and nationalistic nowadays, it was not the case ten years ago. Discussions on the Internet and a lot of commercialized media (media which were theoretically owned by the government but ran on their own) were generally speaking, anti-government in the 2000s, with big pro-U.S. forums like Kaidi (www.kdnet.net) and some leftist forums like “乌有之乡” (literally means “place does not exist” or “utopia”. Interestingly, it was shut down temporarily by the government in 2012 while Kaidi was as far as I know, uninterrupted all the time).During this period of time, a large number of pro-U.S. people spread a fake image of U.S.: free (or extremely low price) for healthcare, housing, education; good human right records that (literally) everyone’s rights were protected; low or even no inflation; high-tech in all industry; no corruption, etc. The worst thing is that they attributed any bad thing in China to “no voting right”.One of the most hilarious stories (by my favorite magazine when I was a kid) was that Americans will stop at right light 3 o’clock in the morning if they walk with a kid, in order to set an example for the kid about how to follow the rules. Sound ridiculous? When I studied at Syracuse University in 2012, my roommate from Beijing asked me with cautious that why Americans jaywalked, since that was against he pre-existing belief, shaped by the story I mentioned. Other examples include stories that the biggest corruption case in U.S. was an official put less than 3000 dollars in his pocket.These over-exaggerated images backfire when more and more people travel and live abroad. The information flows, so we know more about the real life in other countries. Thus, when many people look back, a lot of people understand more about what kind of good job CPC has achieved in at least past 30 years (there are still more controversies over the history before 1979), and also, voting does not solve everything. Running a country is a complicated task, and a successful society requires far more than a “right” political system. Even though they want some other form of government, they become more positive on CPC (like what FP survey shows).Last but not least: Fan of U.S. and party membership are not mutually exclusive, even for some loyal party members. Admitting that China should learn from U.S. does not necessarily mean that he/she would be regarded as a traitor. Just like a lot of us watch Japanese movies and cartoons, listen to Japanese music, and travel to Japan, while we still believe that Diaoyu Dao/Senkaku Islands are part of our indisputable territory and Japan does not apologize enough for their war crimes in the WWII.