"[,,,] radio-powered roller skates"

From: leemaslibros

"Sci-fi writers have been predicting the future for centuries. Jules Verne was describing rocket ships and submarines before these vehicles of exploration even existed. Although we don't delve into the ocean's depths inside of 'a long object, spindle-shaped, occasionally phosphorescent, and infinitely larger and more rapid in its movements than a whale,' his prediction, while distorted, more or less came true.

     This presents a 'chicken or the egg?' sort of question: Do writers simply notice the direction a cultural phenomenon is heading in, or do their ideas inspire cultural and technological change? In some cases, a fiction writer's imagination serves as a sort of catalyst for new technologies. But sometimes, like with Edward Belamy's lost classic Looking Backwards, it's difficult to say whether or not the author had anything to do with the eventual inventions.
     Here are 7 sci-fi predictions that came true:"
— Huffington Post

From: davidszondy

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"A day at the office in 1972 as seen from 1922. We've got your radio-controlled planes, your radio-controlled ships, radio-powered heaters, radio-powered clock, radio-powered roller skates (roller skates?), and your gigantic and very terrifying power-transmitting radio tower. Do you have a feeling that radio was going to be a big thing in the future?
     Take a look at the man's work station. On the right you have a radiophone/television set for talking to the wife and kids. The globe on the right isn't ornamental, it's the future's version of a switchboard/yellow pages. Stick the pin in the globe and hope your hand is steady enough so you get New York instead of Jersey City. To the left is the radio business controller. We use our desktop marvels to make spreadsheets, play freecell, and download porn. This chap is using his to do everything up to and including unloading a ship by remote control. How does he manage this feat of science? Apparently courtesy of two very large rheostats.
   Whatever happened to those huge open-faced rheostats with the bare copper connectors? Technology just hasn't been the same since they went out of fashion."
— Davidszondy
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"wet bias"

From: Retronaut

"Predictions are hard—especially about the future. It must have taken superhuman will for New York Times FiveThirtyEight blogger and columnist Nate Silver to avoid quoting Yogi Berra in the course of writing his engaging and sophisticated new book, The Signal and the Noise, especially because the line is so directly on point. The essential problem of prediction is that while forecasts are 'about' the future, the data on which they’re based are generally data about the past….

     Good forecasters are meticulous, open-minded, eager for more data, and rigorous in checking their ideas. You want foxes, in Isaiah Berlin’s terms, rather than hedgehogs who simply assimilate new information into a strongly held big idea. Ideologues do a poor job of making political forecasts, presumably for reasons of bias. It’s easier to make good predictions when you have large samples of solid data, as in baseball, than when forced to deal with sketchy information or small samples.

     Forecasts may even be deliberately biased: The National Weather Service is pretty good at short-term weather predictions, but local TV newscasts deliberately and systematically overstate the chances of rain. This 'wet bias' occurs because the audience is more upset when they’re caught in an unexpected shower without their umbrella than when predicted rain fails to materialize."
— Matthew Yglesias, Slate
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More or less...

"Genealogy and population fascinate us all. Who are we? Where do we come from? And crucially nowadays, how many more of us can we accommodate? Can we survive the impending crisis and, if so, how?

     Danny Dorling, one of the UK's leading experts, tells us not to worry. His latest of several books on population [Population 10 Billion] takes to task the United Nations and its recent predictions of a world that will explode to 10 billion people….
     This 10 billion mark is proving talismanic, with a spate of doom-laden books presaging the moment. One eagerly awaited tome, by Stephen Emmott, will be published shortly, with a message to be very scared. Dorling, by contrast, is more sanguine.

Coney Island, 1950 (from: Ptak Science Books)

     Several factors, he argues, are driving down fertility rates. One is education. Another is public health. More intriguing is his contention about migration: 'People tend to rapidly adopt the fertility rates of the places they move to. If Europeans want to be well cared for in our old age, and we also want fewer future people in the world, the last thing we should be doing is trying to reduce migration to Europe.'"
— John Kampfner, The Guardian
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