What's New? - 13 April 2017
Front page
We’ve simplified the front page to speed it up and enable quicker navigation to services of interest to you.
The number of central buttons has been reduced to 3 and continue to offer free use without registration. However, access to Sector Prospects, Risks & Opportunities, Year-by-year, G20 Watch, and a new listing of Key Organizations now requires registration. They are available from the ‘View Forecasts’ link on the front page.
Database Page
By popular request, we have added a new ‘Reports’ section to the left-hand navigation. Thanks, particularly to Burson Marsteller for this suggestion.
Within reports, members can now add reports, view and export their reports and see latest news all of which were previously shown under Sources.
Within the ‘Forecasts’ section, members can see the full list of free summary reports, including a new ‘Key organizations’ page.
To accommodate the new ‘reports’ section on the left, ‘library’ has been moved to the top bar.
Personal assistant
Athena, our robot, was born in September 2013. We taught her how to scan the future and analyse emerging change. More recently (December 2016), Athena also took on the role of our chatbot, answering your questions immediately whenever she can.
Now, we are adding to her competencies by giving her the roles of a cognitive, empathetic, by-your-side teaching companion, digital assistant and site guide.
So, you will start to notice Athena showing you advisory notifications whenever she acts on your behalf, alerts you to an issue and offers the means to solve it or provides friendly advice on how to better develop your strategic foresight.
We hope you like this shift to a more alive and soulful service. Watch this space as we develop Athena’s more human-like and useful features.
Fake News
We’ve never added content from known sources identified as 'Fake News' but now our robot, Athena, is filtering each internet domain through OpenSources. This is a continuously updated and professionally curated list, the aim of which is to preserve the integrity and transparency of information on the internet.
Each is analyzed, looking for extreme biases, lack of transparency and other kinds of misinformation.
The following classification is used:
- Fake News: entirely fabricate information, disseminate deceptive content, or grossly distort actual news reports
- Satire: use humor, irony, exaggeration, ridicule, and false information to comment on current events.
- Extremely biased: particular point of view and may rely on propaganda, decontextualized information, and opinions distorted as facts.
- Conspiracy: well-known promoters of kooky conspiracy theories.
- Rumor: traffic in rumors, gossip, innuendo, and unverified claims.
- Propaganda: Domains in repressive states operating under government sanction.
- Junk Science: promote pseudoscience, metaphysics, naturalistic fallacies, and other scientifically dubious claims.
- Hatred: actively promote racism, misogyny, homophobia, and other forms of discrimination.
- Unreliable: may be reliable but whose contents require further verification.
Here is the list of classified domains.
It is our view that anything reliable found in these sources will be quoted elsewhere and that Athena will pick these up in her daily work from more reputable sources.
Mind-map: We have renamed mind-map to topic map to better reflect its purpose.
Forecast listings: We have added the source to forecasts' listings.
Happy futuring
The Shaping Tomorrow team