WaspReporter – Augustus 2023

Virtual girl bands

HISTORY OF THE FUTURE

HURRICANE HUNTERS Payback time

Hello everyone,

In 1973 a group of enthusiastic English teachers launched Wasp Newsletter. They were looking for better and more topical and engaging texts to teach their students English. Now, 50 years later, WaspReporter Magazine is still going strong, while the underlying concept has never changed. Each year our editorial team does its utmost to compile five issues filled to the brim with interesting and thought-provoking articles about current affairs, enabling our readers to practice not only their reading skills, but also writing, speaking, and listening in English.

Even though the basic idea behind our publication hasn’t changed, that does not mean that WaspReporter hasn’t kept up with the times. Fifty years ago, we started out as a stencilled greyscale newsletter with just a few subscribers. Half a century later, we have evolved into a modern, full-colour publication with a wide readership –supported by an interactive, digital platform that promotes independent learning.

To celebrate our anniversary we have given WaspReporter a fresh look. Our art directors have given the Magazine as well as the Student and Teacher Files a complete makeover. The result is now in front of you and we hope you like it as much as we do!

All that remains for me to say is a big thank you to the generations of readers that have made our success possible. We look forward to serving the English language learning community in the Netherlands and Belgium for at least another 50 years!

SCAN THE QR CODE TO ACCESS THE AUDIO FILES

For this issue, Sheila interviewed her friend Carol, who is a Cockney market trader in London. You will hear more about what it means to be a Cockney and what Carol’s work is like.

1

NIGHTMARE ON LAKE SUPERIOR

One

It was meant to be another boys’ trip, the latest in a tradition that went back more than two decades. Every other year, the old friends – Jim Farrington, an electrical lineman, Sean Royston, an electrical grid systems manager, and Tolan Annis, the co-owner of a craft distillery – went on an expedition. This time they decided to kayak Lake Superior’s Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, a challenging out-and-back route.

A 7-DAY TRIP

One September morning, they loaded up on food and camping gear, put on waterproof pants and quick-dry T-shirts, and zipped up their life jackets. The forecast called for winds building to ten knots and seas rising

to one to three feet by early afternoon, then stronger winds overnight. The three men climbed into their sea kayaks anyway and pushed off from the beach at Sand Point. They planned to return in a week.

The trio kayaked through small waves and headed north-east. Soon the national lakeshore’s famous cliffs began to rise on their right. Their next chance to get out of their kayaks would be some five miles ahead, beyond a tourist spot called Miners Castle Point.

Away from the shore, the headwind grew to the forecasted ten knots and kept rising. The waves grew to four feet. Still, they never considered turning around. They’d already travelled around four miles, and they had kayaked in worse conditions.

They’d been paddling maybe 90 minutes when, suddenly, the waves grew to six feet and steepened. The wind rose to 20 knots. ‘When it went bad, it went bad fast,’ says Annis, who was in the lead, about 60 feet ahead of Farrington. Royston was another 40 or 50 feet behind Farrington.

WIND AND WAVES

Royston was the first to go overboard. It was a bad place for a swim. The water was cold, and the wind and waves were pushing him toward the cliffs nearby. Miners Castle Point was maybe a quarter-mile away, and the closest safe landing beach was another quarter-mile beyond that.

After Royston tipped, Farrington quickly paddled over to him. He brought his boat parallel to Royston’s and steadied it as Royston climbed into his kayak, which was now full of water. He began using the small plastic hand pump but couldn’t stay ahead of the waves. Meanwhile, the wind pushed them closer to the cliffs, where the waves became even steeper. One wave rolled both Royston and Farrington into the water.

Farrington managed to get back into his boat, as did Royston. When they looked up, they saw Annis in the water, clinging to his boat. Farrington and Royston pressed their kayaks together for stability, each holding on to the other’s kayak with one hand while paddling with the other. But with the boats heavy with water, and facing big waves and 20-knot winds, they couldn’t make any progress. Annis was on his own.

‘By then my arms were giving out,’ Royston says. ‘I looked at Jim and said, “I can’t do this any more.” We kept getting closer and closer to the cliffs, and at some point, I said, “We have to call now.”’ Using a radio clipped to his life jacket, Farrington called, ‘Mayday, three kayakers stranded at Miners Rock.’ But there was

no response, because no one heard the calls. The tall cliffs blocked the radio signal from reaching the park’s headquarters or anyone else on land, and no boats were on the lake. Another wave crashed into the boats, and Farrington capsized a second time. When he got back into the kayak, the radio was gone, as were his mobile phone and GPS unit.

SEPARATED

It was roughly 12:30. Two hours after starting out, all three men were now separated. As far as Farrington knew, Royston was likely already dead. And Annis was nowhere to be seen. Now he was stranded on the rocks, and his radio and mobile phone likely were somewhere on the bottom of Lake Superior.

Farrington tried walking the narrow strip of shoreline like a tightrope artist, but the waves kept knocking him off the rocks. As he clawed his way out of the water a third time, Annis came floating by, holding his boat with one hand. He’d been kicking toward Miners Castle Point for more than an hour, trying to get around the point to land at Miners Beach, but he had lost ground in the powerful wind. The men yelled to each other, but communication was hopeless. Soon, Annis disappeared from sight around another small group of rocks.

Alone again, Farrington found a broken tree trunk and used it to climb about halfway up the 90-foot cliff face. He could climb no further; it was too steep. The Miners Castle Point overlook was just above him, close

‘THE BOAT WAS FULL OF WATER AND THE WAVES WERE BEATING IT HARD’

enough that he could hear the sound of car doors closing as families visited the scenic attraction. He screamed and yelled but no one heard him.

ROYSTON

Royston struggled in the water until the waves finally carried him away from the shoreline and further out in the lake. Exhausted, he floated on his back and considered his options. Miners Castle was just a quarter-mile to the north-east, but with the wind and the waves coming from that direction it may as well have been on the moon. He decided to turn downwind toward Sand Point, where they had started that morning, three-and-a-half miles away.

But the distance wasn’t all that worried him. Though he didn’t feel particularly cold, Royston knew it was only a matter of time until hypothermia set in. He needed to get out of the water, and quickly. ‘I’m a swimmer,’ he says, ‘and I thought, Well, let’s just start kicking.’

After about three hours, Royston made it most of the way back to Sand Point, where the cliffs finally gave way to a cedar swamp. He was able to walk up and grab some of the branches. After half an hour of wading through thick vegetation, he came to the mouth of a creek. It gave him just enough of an opening to get himself out of the water.

He followed the creek and saw a hiking trail. He started down the trail as fast as his shaky legs could walk until he reached the parking lot. And that’s when dumb luck finally took a shine to Sean Royston. A park ranger happened to be driving by. Royston waved him down.

It was just before 5 p.m. Royston, Farrington, and Annis had gone into the water four-and-a-half hours earlier. Finally, a search-and-rescue operation set out to help locate his missing friends.

FARRINGTON

Since becoming separated from Royston, Farrington hadn’t moved much from where he was standing midway up the 90-foot cliff. Wearing his bright red paddling top and life jacket, he was like a beacon against the sandstone wall. Though he’d lost his glasses in the water, he saw a flashing light bar coming around a bend. ‘The biggest relief in my life was seeing those blue flashing lights that no one ever wants to see in the rear-view mirror,’ Farrington says. Using the boat’s loudspeaker, rangers told him to stay put. A rescue was underway.

The helicopter arrived at 6:29 p.m. It wasn’t going to be an easy rescue. To get Farrington from his spot, the pilots would have to hover uncomfortably close to the cliff. They would have to lower a rescuer more than five times

the preferred height – using 210 feet of cable when they normally use only 40 – all in 20-knot winds. Leaves, twigs, and debris rained down on Farrington as the rescuer was lowered. He strapped himself to Farrington, then the two were hoisted back into the helicopter.

The streetlights were glowing when the chopper set down after 7 p.m. in the parking lot of Munising Memorial Hospital, where Farrington was finally reunited with Royston. After refuelling, the helicopter lifted off to search for Annis, who by now had been in the water for seven hours.

REUNITED

When Annis capsized, he was about 150 feet from the others – too far away for them to help or communicate. About a mile from Sand Point, where their journey began, he saw his chance: a low spot in the cliff with a thick tree root reaching down.

‘The boat was full of water and the waves were beating it hard, so as I was trying to grab this root, the boat became a weapon against me,’ he says. Annis made the difficult decision to let the kayak go. He pulled himself up the tree root on the cliff. Then he grabbed the phone he kept in a waterproof box. ‘The 911 operator knew who I was,’ he says. ‘She told me, “We’ve already got the other two. Stay put.”’

Soon, the helicopter was circling directly above Annis. It held steady to mark Annis’s position as a team of National Park Service rangers made their way to him. The rangers judged him well enough to hike out, and together they walked a half mile back to Sand Point, where his journey had begun.

When he arrived at the emergency room, Annis found Farrington and Royston. They had changed out of their wet clothes and into hospital clothes and socks. Annis took them shoe shopping at the only store still open, a supermarket. ‘All they had were women’s flip-flops with sparkles, so they bought a couple of pairs,’ says Annis. The restaurants were all closed, but workers at a nearby casino listened to their story and reopened the kitchen for them. When the server came over and asked what they wanted, Annis, the distillery owner, ordered first: ‘Whiskey.’ The three friends toasted their good fortune. 

HURRICANE HUNTERS

These women chase hurricanes to gather crucial weather data

‘You’re always taught to stay away from hurricanes.’ Lieutenant Commander Danielle Varwig says that’s what most pilots would tell you – but she isn’t like most pilots. As a hurricane hunter for the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Varwig spends her working day chasing the eye of the storm.

It’s not for the thrills, though. Flying over tropical storms and hurricanes across the Caribbean and Atlantic Basin, Varwig and her team at NOAA collect weather data that can help forecast where and when hurricanes will reach the coast. They say that by putting themselves in danger, they hope to keep others out of it. ‘It’s lives at risk. We are doing this to help others on the ground,’ says Varwig.

A FLYING SCIENCE LAB

Varwig pilots a Gulfstream IV jet that flies over the hurricane. When skies above the hurricane are clear, she says it’s possible to get a ‘surreal’ bird’s eye view of the whole storm. More often than not, 1 , visibility is poor. ‘We’re in the clouds, trusting our instruments and flight directors,’ says Varwig.

Meteorologist Nikki Hathaway is one of these flight directors. She works with Varwig, guiding her through

some of the most difficult flying conditions possible. Hathaway also accompanies pilots on NOAA’s P-3 Orion planes, which can fly directly into the storm. These aircraft are ‘flying science labs’ that carry up to 18 engineers, data technicians, scientists, and researchers, as well as technology to help the team gather data, says Hathaway. The data goes to the National Hurricane Centre, where it’s used ‘to make life-saving decisions for the people on the ground that may be in harm’s way,’ says Hathaway.

An important piece of tech is a dropsonde, a device that can be dropped from the aircraft and collects weather data such as pressure, temperature, and humidity as it falls to Earth. But a dropsonde can only collect data in a single location, and the meteorologists can’t control it once it’s falling down, limiting the range of data they can gather.

HURRICANE-HUNTING DRONES

Nowadays, the team is also using storm-chasing drones to gather more data than ever before on their hurricane-hunting missions. NOAA has been experimenting with the drones, which can be operated remotely, gathering ‘a totally different scale’ of information, says Hathaway. Last year, it began testing

Created by atmospheric disturbances over warm ocean water, hurricanes are one of the most powerful weather events –and are often deadly and destructive. They can grow to be hundreds of miles across and cause a lot of damage when they hit the shore.

Hurricanes need four main ingredients to form and strengthen:

• warm ocean water;

• lots of moisture in the air;

• a low change in the wind’s direction and speed with height;

• an earlier disturbance (e.g., a cluster of thunderstorms).

Just like making a perfect cookie, a hurricane needs all the ingredients for it to grow. Change any ingredient too much and the cookie will be too flat, too dry, too crumbly, etcetera. The same is true for hurricanes: if any of the four main ingredients changes too much, the storm cannot form or will weaken.

Once a hurricane forms, scientists shift their focus to where it is going and how strong it will be when it gets there. Where a hurricane goes depends on the large-scale weather patterns around it at the time. If it moves over land, it brings with it a very strong wind, lots of rain, dangerous flooding, and sometimes tornadoes.

Anyone who has experienced a hurricane knows how much damage it can do to life and property. Flooding is one of the biggest concerns when a hurricane comes ashore, and climate change will likely make that worse. With effects of climate change (like sea level rise) already happening, the chances of a billion-dollar disaster from a hurricane are very high.

an unmanned aircraft called Altius, which was used during Hurricane Ian in September 2022 – the first hurricane in six years to hit the shore in Florida.

With an eight-foot wingspan and weighing just 27 pounds, these drones can fly where the hurricane hunters’ planes cannot. During Hurricane Ian, Altius gathered data on temperature, pressure, and moisture levels in the eye of the storm. It also flew around the hurricane at different altitudes and recorded wind speeds of more than 216 miles per hour.

The drone can fly down to the edge of the hurricane, the part just above the ocean where heat and moisture cause extremely strong winds. Collecting information about the turbulence there will help scientists better understand how these storm systems work.

The drones are still being tested, but Hathaway is excited about how they will improve hurricane modelling and predictions. ‘Getting that data in this lowest level of the storm is going to be very important for hurricane forecasting in the future,’ she adds.

PUSHING BOUNDARIES

The work of these hurricane hunters is becoming more and more important – and dangerous – as climate change causes more destructive hurricanes with greater wind speeds and rainfall.

Based in Florida, Hathaway and her team have witnessed first-hand the threat posed by these

extreme weather events. When Hurricane Ian hit their state, it caused once-in-a-thousand-years rainfall and floods, killing at least 125 people. ‘When it’s your people, when it’s threatening your home, there’s that extra element of stress in the back of your head,’ says Hathaway. Rising sea levels are likely to worsen flooding from storms in the future, making NOAA’s predictions ever more necessary.

NOAA isn’t just promoting technological innovation at home. Earlier this year, the organisation went on a ‘groundbreaking mission’ to the coast of West Africa, near the Cape Verde Islands, where many of North America’s severe storms start. It was the first time the hurricane hunters crossed the Atlantic – and they hope that by studying storms before they are fully formed, they can greatly improve forecasts and understand their storm tracks better.

As a mother of two, Varwig is aware of the risks she takes – and more motivated to take them. ‘I do everything for them,’ says Varwig of her children. 2 Varwig doesn’t like the label of ‘female pilot’; she knows that there aren’t many women in her field – and hopes she can inspire her children and others to follow their dreams. As a black woman, ‘I want to be a role model to little girls, to little black girls, people who feel like they may not be able to do what I do or anything similar to that,’ says Varwig, adding, ‘I want to make sure that others can look to me and say, “OK, well she’s doing it, then I can too.”’

‘WE ARE DOING THIS TO HELP OTHERS ON THE GROUND’

Since releasing their debut single ‘I’m Real’ in 2021, K-pop girl group Eternity have racked up millions of views online

Virtual girl bands

They sing, dance, and interact with their fans just like any other band. In fact, there’s only one big difference between K-pop band Eternity and any other pop group you might know – all 11 members are virtual characters. Nonhumans, hyper-real avatars made with artificial intelligence. ‘The business we are making with Eternity is a new business. I think it’s a new genre,’ says Park Jieun, the woman behind Eternity.

The cultural tidal wave of Korean pop has become a multibillion-dollar force over the last decade. With its catchy tunes, high-tech production, and slinky dance routines, K-pop has smashed into the global mainstream, becoming one of South Korea’s most 1 and influential exports. But the top K-pop stars, their legions of loyal fans, and the business-owners looking to capitalise on their success are all looking to the future. With the explosion of artificial intelligence (AI), deepfake and avatar technologies, these

pop idols are taking their fame into a whole new dimension.

Fantasy faces

The virtual faces of Eternity’s members were created by deep learning tech company Pulse9.

Park Jieun is the organisation’s CEO. Initially the company generated 101 fantasy faces, dividing them into four categories according to their charms: cute, sexy, innocent, and intelligent. Fans were asked to 2 . Inhouse designers then set to work animating the winning characters. For live chats, videos, and online fan meets, the avatar faces can be projected onto anonymous singers, actors, and dancers, contracted by Pulse9. The technology acts like a deepfake filter, bringing the characters to life.

As deepfake technology moves into the mainstream, there have been concerns that it could be used to manipulate people’s images without permission or generate dangerous

misinformation. ‘I’m always trying to make it clear that these are fictional characters,’ says Park Jieun. She says Pulse9 uses the European Union’s draft ethical AI guidelines when making their avatars.

And Park Jieun sees advantages in virtual bands where each avatar can be controlled by their creators. ‘The scandal created by real human K-pop stars can be entertaining, but it’s also a risk to the business,’ says the CEO. She believes she can put these new technologies to good use and 3 for overstressed K-pop artists.

Over the past years, K-pop made headlines for various social issues – from dating gossip to online trolling, fat-shaming, and extreme dieting of band members. The genre has also spurred a conversation about mental health and cyberbullying in South Korea, after the tragic death of young K-pop stars, which many believe 4 their following.

In 2019, singer and actress Sulli was found dead in her apartment, friend Goo Hara, another bright K-pop artist, was also found dead at her home in Seoul soon after. Before taking her own life, Goo was fighting for justice after secretly being filmed by a boyfriend, and was being viciously abused online for that.

Threat or aid?

For the human stars working around the clock to train, perform, and interact with their fans, having avatar assistance in the virtual world could provide some relief. Becoming a K-pop star doesn’t happen overnight, and with new groups making their debut every year, it can be 5 . Han Yewon, 19, is the lead vocalist of newly launched girl group mimiirose. She spent almost four years as a trainee, waiting for her opportunity to be thrust into the limelight.

‘I went to work around ten in the morning and did my vocal warm-ups for an hour. After that, I sang for two or three hours, I danced for three to four hours,

and worked out for another two hours’, says the vocalist. ‘We practised for more than 12 hours in total. But if you aren’t good enough, you end up staying longer.’

Yet the prospect of virtual avatars flooding the industry worries Yewon. ‘Because technology has improved so much lately, I’m afraid that virtual characters will 6 human idols,’ she says.

Other K-pop groups, however, have been quick to adopt new avatar technologies – and the business is forecast to grow steadily. The digital human and avatar market size is estimated to reach £429bn globally by 2030, according to projections by market consulting company Emergen Research.

Using virtual copies of themselves allows K-pop groups to reach fans across time zones and language barriers – in ways that 7 would never be able to do. Girl band aespa, for instance, consists of four human singers and dancers (Karina, Winter, Giselle, and Ningning) and their four virtual counterparts – known as ae-Karina, ae-Winter, ae-Giselle, and ae-Ningning. The avatars can explore virtual worlds with the fans and be used across multiple platforms.

Meanwhile, chart-topping girl band Blackpink made history with the help of their virtual twins, winning the first-ever MTV Award for Best Metaverse Performance in 2022. More than 15 million people from around the world tuned in to popular online gaming platform PUBGM to watch the group’s avatars perform in real time.

But there are concerns in the wider industry about ethical and copyright issues that avatar technologies can present. ‘There’s a lot of unknowns when it comes to artists in the metaverse,’ Jeff Benjamin, Billboard’s K-pop columnist says. ‘It might be the

fact that the artists themselves might not be in control of their image and that can create 8 .’

‘Too soon to know’

For fans like Lee Jisoo, 19, K-pop has been a welcome distraction during times of stress. She has been a dedicated Billlie fan since the group launched in 2019. Jisoo collects fan albums and merchandise, while also interacting with the band online and in the virtual world. ‘I feel emotions through Billlie that I wouldn’t have felt if I didn’t like them,’ she says. ‘I think this is a positive thing for me.’

But the virtual world can also be 9 , with regulations to prevent cyberbullying or abuse lacking or rarely being enforced. The industry has been rocked by online bullying and smear campaigns waged against successful stars. ‘I get stressed out when I see mean comments on Billlie online because it’s also an insult to the things I like,’ says Jisoo.

Child and adolescent psychiatrist Jeong Yu Kim, who works in Seoul, says it’s too soon to know how the rise of AI characters will affect young people. ‘I see the real problem is that we’re not seeing each other 10 ,’ Jeong Yu says. ‘In virtual worlds, you can do things that you can’t do outside, you can be someone else. This K-pop industry is really responsive to what the public wants, and they would want their artists to fulfil that.’

In the fast-changing K-pop industry, it might be too soon to say whether virtual idols are a short-term fad or the future of the music industry. But for now, for fans like Jisoo the choice of whom to follow is an easy one. ‘Honestly, if someone asks me, “Do you want to watch Billlie on the metaverse for 100 minutes or in real life for ten minutes?”, I’ll choose to see Billlie for ten minutes in real life.’

The future has a history. The good news is that it’s one from which we can learn; the bad news is that we very rarely do. That’s because the clearest lesson from the history of the future is that knowing the future isn’t necessarily very useful. But that has yet to stop humans from trying.

Methodologies

People have long tried to find out more about the shape of things to come. These efforts, while aimed at the same goal, have differed across time and space in several significant ways, with the most obvious being methodology.

Since the earliest civilisations, the most important distinction in this practice has been between individuals who have an intrinsic gift or ability to predict the future, and systems that provide rules for calculating futures. The predictions of oracles, shamans, and prophets, for example, depended on the capacity of these individuals to access other planes of

Humans have long tried to determine

shape of

HISTORY OF THE FUTURE

being and receive divine inspiration. Strategies of divination such as astrology, palmistry, numerology, and tarot, however, depend on the practitioner’s mastery of a complex theoretical rule-based system, and their ability to interpret and apply it to particular cases. Interpreting dreams or the practice of necromancy might lie somewhere between these two extremes, depending partly on innate ability, partly on acquired expertise. And there are plenty of examples, in the past and present, that involve both strategies for predicting the future. In the last century, technology legitimised the latter approach, as developments in IT provided more powerful tools and systems for forecasting.

At the same time, rather than depending on technological advances, other forecasters have turned to the strategy of crowdsourcing predictions of the future – polling public and private opinions. It then requires careful interpretation, whether based in quantitative (like polls of voter intention) or qualitative analysis. The latter strategy harnesses the wisdom of highly specific crowds. Assembling a panel of experts to discuss a given topic, the thinking goes, is likely to be more accurate than individual prognostication.

This approach resonates in many ways with yet another forecasting method – war-gaming. Beginning in the 20th century, military field exercises and manoeuvres were increasingly supplemented, and sometimes replaced, by simulation. Undertaken both

the

what’s to come. But even the most advanced technology can’t solve the fundamental issues with predictions

by human beings and by computer models, this strategy is no longer confined to the military, but is now used extensively in politics, commerce, and industry. The goal is to increase present resilience and efficiency as much as it is to plan for futures.

Communal futures

As these strategies have continued to evolve, two very different philosophies for predicting communal futures have emerged, particularly at the global, national, and corporate level. Each reflects different assumptions about the nature of the relationship between fate, fluidity, and human agency.

Understanding previous events as indicators of what’s to come has allowed some forecasters to treat human history as a series of patterns, where clear cycles, waves, or sequences can be identified in the past and can therefore be expected to recur in the future. This is based on the success of the natural sciences in crafting general laws from accumulated empirical evidence.

More recently, research at MIT has focused on developing algorithms to predict the future based on the past, at least in the extremely short term. By teaching computers what has ‘usually’ happened next in a given situation – will people hug or shake hands when they meet? – researchers are echoing this search for historical patterns. But, as is often a flaw in this approach to predictions, it leaves little room, at least at this stage of technological development, to 1 .

Another set of forecasters, meanwhile, argue that the pace and scope of techno-economic innovation are creating a future that will be qualitatively different from past and present. Followers of this approach search not for patterns, but for emergent variables from which futures can be extrapolated. So rather than predicting one definitive future, it becomes easier to model a set of possibilities that become more or less likely, depending on the choices that are made.

But if predictions based on past experience have limited capacity to anticipate the unforeseen, extrapolations from techno-scientific innovations have a distressing capacity to be deterministic. Ultimately, neither approach is necessarily more useful than the other, and that’s because they both share the same fatal flaw – the people framing them.

Proximity to power

Whatever the approach of the forecaster, and however sophisticated their tools, the trouble with predictions

is their proximity to power. Throughout history, futures have tended to be made by white, wellconnected, cis-male people. This homogeneity has had the result of limiting the framing of the future, and, as a result, the actions then taken to shape it. Further, predictions resulting in expensive or undesirable outcomes, tend to be ignored by those making the ultimate decisions. 2 , no one predicted the extent to which political leaders would be unwilling to listen to scientific advice. Even when futures did have the advantage of taking into account human error, they still produced predictions that were systematically disregarded where they conflicted with political strategies.

Which brings us to the crucial question of who and what predictions are for. Those who can influence what people think will be the future are often the same people able to command considerable resources in the present, which in turn help determine the future. But very rarely do we hear the voices of the populations governed by the decision makers. It’s often at the regional or municipal level that we see efforts by ordinary people to predict and shape their own communal and familial futures, often in response to the need to distribute scarce resources or to limit exposure to potential harms.

Future approach

The central message sent from the history of the future is that it’s not helpful to think about the Future. A much more productive strategy is to think about futures; rather than ‘prediction’ it pays to think probabilistically about a range of potential outcomes and evaluate them against a range of different sources. Technology has a significant role to play here, but it’s critical to bear in mind the impact that assumptions have on eventual outcomes. The danger is that modern predictions with an AI imprint are considered more scientific, and hence more likely to be accurate, than those produced by older systems of divination. But the assumptions underpinning the algorithms that forecast criminal activity, or identify potential customer disloyalty, often reflect the expectations of their coders in much the same way as earlier methods of prediction did.

Rather than depending purely on innovation to map the future, it’s more sensible to 3 . It would perhaps be more helpful to think in terms of diagnosis, rather than prediction, when it comes to imagining – or improving – future human histories. 

Two very different philosophies for predicting communal futures have emerged

Twelve hard words to pronounce in the English language

With about 20 vowel sounds, 25 consonant sounds, and numerous irregularities in spellings and pronunciations, English can be a tricky language for foreigners to learn. If you’re struggling to learn the language, you’re not alone when it comes to deciphering these hard-to-pronounce words.

colonel • noun | [Colonel Sanders]

/ ˈkɜːn ᵊl /

Worcestershire • noun | [Worcestershire sauce]

/ ˈwʊst ə ʃ ə /

mischievous • adjective | [mischievous children]

/ ˈmɪs tʃɪv əs /

draught • noun | [draughts of oxygen]

/ drɑːft /

quinoa • noun | [a quinoa salad]

/ ˈkiːn wɑː /

onomatopoeia • noun | [‘mew’ is an example of onomatopoeia]

/ˌɒn ə mæt ə ˈpiː ə /

scissors • noun | [a pair of scissors]

/ ˈsɪz əz /

anemone • noun | [a sea anemone]

/ ə ˈnem ən i /

squirrel • noun | [a ground squirrel]

/ ˈskwɪr l /

ignominious • adjective | [an ignominious defeat]

/ ˌɪɡ nə ˈmɪn i əs /

sixth • ordinal numeral | [a sixth sense]

/ sɪksθ /

isthmus • noun | [the Isthmus of Panama]

/ ˈɪs məs /

Don’t forget to check out our interactive digital platform: eDition. Ask your teacher for more information on how to log in.

While we have made every effort to trace the copyright holders of articles and illustrations contained in this issue, we would be grateful for any information that might assist us in identifying sources we have as yet been unable to find.

Editor Johan Graus

Editorial assistant Aafke Moons

Compiled by Marleen Cannegieter, Erik Cats, Christien van Gool, Johan Graus, Caspar van Haalen, Aafke Moons, Marieke Nijhof, Ine Sanders

Teaching enquiries Johan Graus, jgraus@xs4all.nl

Photo on cover patronestaff / Shutterstock

Editorial agency Marjan den Hertog, Deventer

Graphic design Studio Michelangela, Utrecht; Maura van Wermeskerken, Apeldoorn

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