Despite fears of so-called showrooming, some stores are opening up to wireless internet.
FORTUNE -- For years, retailers frowned on shoppers visiting their
stores merely to scope out products before returning home and buying
them online for less. The phenomenon became so common that it earned a
name -- showrooming.
The practice has only expanded with the proliferation of smartphones.
Shoppers can use them to quickly compare the price of a Fossil handbag,
for example, with the same version on Amazon.com (AMZN). There's
nothing store managers can do to stop them. The shoppers have won the
war.
Recognizing their defeat, many retailers have made a u-turn and are now helping shoppers get online. ...
... To connect to a network, shoppers must first agree to a terms of
service that appears on their smartphone screens. The agreement
generally spells out that the network is not secure and that the stores
will track the Web sites customers visit and the type of devices they
use.
Such data could eventually be used to help stores offer personalized
coupons and identify merchandise to add to their shelves, said Bryan
Wargo, chief executive of Nearbuy Systems, a start-up that helps stores
monitor customer behavior on Wi-Fi networks and dissect the data.
Customers frequently using the Wi-Fi network to search a rival's Web
site for red cashmere sweaters, for instance, could signal that the
store should start stocking them. ...
The digitisation of the world's books reveals how the popularity of English words and phrases has evolved since the 16th century. And the Top 100 lists for each year are now free to browse online.
The digitisation of the world's books reveals how the popularity of English words and phrases has evolved since the 16th century. And the database is now freely browsable online.
Last year, the Google Books team released some 4 per cent of all the books ever written as a corpus of digitised text, an event that has triggered something of a revolution in the study of trends in human thought. The corpus consists of 5 million books and over 500 billion words (361 billion in English) dating from the 1500s to the present day.
In a single stroke, this data gives researchers a way to examine a whole range of hitherto inaccessible phenomena. Since then a steady stream of new results has emerged on everything from the evolution of grammar and the adoption of technology to the pursuit of fame and the role of censorship. ...
Doc Holiday uses the expression "I'm your Huckleberry," in the movie Tombstone. Basically, he was saying, "I'm game." I had never heard that expression before the movie. I entered that term at the first mention in the books appears to be in 1880. The events depicted in the movie were in 1881. Interesting!
I expect I may end up wasting too much time on this site. ;-)
"... Drawing on data from the [Harvard] university's library collections, the animation below maps the number and location of printed works by year. Watch it full screen in HD to see cities light up as the years scroll by in the lower left corner. ..."
4. a U-shaped happiness curve, consistent across cultures, shows happiness declines from childhood until about our mid-forties and then begins to improve as I grow old. It appears it may hold true in primates as well. Our ability to discount bad news, even when we shouldn't, follows the same U-shaped curve. Our brains and experience are optimal for discerning bad news in middle age. It turns out that ignorance (or maybe denial) truly is bliss. Viewpoint: How happiness changes with age. On a related note, it appears that Elderly Brains Have Trouble Recognizing Untrustworthy Faces.
5. The holiday season is in full swing, and many people falsely believe this is a time of elevated suicide rates. Actually, spring and summer have the highest rates, and Nov - Jan have the lowest. In 2010, July was the highest, and December was the lowest. Holiday suicide myth persists, research says
"Michael" was in the top 3 names for boys from 1953-2010. It dropped to sixth last year. Want to know how your name ranks for each year since 1880? Go to the Social Security Online's Popular Baby Names. The Baby Name Wizard is also pretty cool.
"For the first time in Barbie’s more than 50-year history, Mattel is introducing a Barbie construction set that underscores a huge shift in the marketplace. Fathers are doing more of the family shopping just as girls are being encouraged more than ever by hypervigilant parents to play with toys (as boys already do) that develop math and science skills early on.
It’s a combination that not only has Barbie building luxury mansions — they are pink, of course — but Lego promoting a line of pastel construction toys called Friends that is an early Christmas season hit. The Mega Bloks Barbie Build ’n Style line, available next week, has both girls — and their fathers — in mind.
“Once it’s in the home, dads would very much be able to join in this play that otherwise they might feel is not their territory,” said Dr. Maureen O’Brien, a psychologist who consulted on the new Barbie set...."
And this reminds me of last year, or the year before when cooking sets were becoming big with boys. They've been watching Emeril Lagasse on the Food Network. "Bam!" New merchandising angle.
11. Love them or hate them, the Koch brothers are intriguing. Many political junkies know of them, but few others seem to know about them. Forbes has an interesting feature article in the most recent issue on the Koch Empire and its influence: Inside The Koch Empire: How The Brothers Plan To Reshape America
14. "Data-driven healthcare won't replace physicians entirely, but it will help those receptive to technology perform their jobs better." Technology will replace 80% of what doctors do
"Scientists have designed an energy-efficient light of plastic packed with nanomaterials that glow. The shatterproof FIPEL technology can be molded into almost any shape, but still needs to prove it's commercially viable."
"... Last month, at the first ever conference of the Sustainable Nanotechnology Organization in Washington DC, Michail Roco of the National Science Foundation, and architect of the U.S. National Nanotechnology Initiative provided a response. He said, “every industrial sector is unsustainable…and nanotechnology holds the promise of making every one of them sustainable.”
It’s my belief that that is true: nanotechnology, or the ability to manipulate matter at a scale of one billionth of a meter, has far-reaching implications for the improvement of sustainable technology, industry and society.
Already, it is being used widely to enable more sustainable practices. Safer manufacturing, less waste generation, reusable materials, more efficient energy technologies, better water purification, lower toxicity and environmental impacts from chemotherapy agents to marine paints are all current applications of nanotechnology. There is no reason for this technology to develop in an unsustainable manner.
In the past, a lack of foresight has resulted in costs to society – people, businesses, and governments, and— that could have been avoided by proactive efforts to manage risks. Today, the tools to develop safer technologies and less harmful products exist. Let us not miss this opportunity. ..."
"It used be that news of death spread through phone calls, and before that, letters and house calls. The departed were publicly remembered via memorials on street corners, newspaper obituaries and flowers at grave sites. To some degree, this is still the case. But increasingly, the announcements and subsequent mourning occur on social media. Facebook, with 1 billion detailed, self-submitted user profiles, was created to connect the living. But it has become the world's largest site of memorials for the dead."
20. From the "That's just not right!" file. Harvard Economics Department does their version of "Call me maybe."
After years of bad headlines the industry finally has some good news
... Many papers have been raising the price of their subscriptions and news-stand copies, which has helped to stem losses. But a more important contributor to the change of mood in newspapers is what Ken Doctor of Outsell, a consultancy, terms a "revolution in reader revenue". "Paywalls", methods of charging readers for online content, have become popular. The number of American newspapers with some sort of paywall has at least doubled this year. More than a quarter of newspapers now have one, and most big groups that do not have plans to charge for digital access. This is a global trend: newspapers in Brazil, Germany and elsewhere are fed up with giving away their articles for nothing on the internet.
Charging for content online used to be the privilege of the lucky few, such as the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal, offering market-sensitive information readers would pay for. General newspapers opposed charging because they feared their traffic would drop—and their fragile digital ad revenues would fall rather than rise.
Several factors have changed their mind. For one, technology has got better and cheaper. Online pay systems were expensive to build and test, but Press+ changed that. The firm, which was founded in 2010—and was bought last year by RR Donnelley, a big printing and marketing firm—licenses the technology for newspapers to erect a pay system in return for a cut of digital revenues. So far 566 (mostly American) papers have signed up, and 400 of them have launched.
Tablets and other mobile devices have also been a boon for news organisations, because they make paid digital subscriptions more attractive. Many newspapers have started offering "all access" editions, bundling print and digital subscriptions (sometimes at a slightly higher price). Executives say that if they can train people to pay for digital subscriptions, they will be less threatened by print's persistent and inevitable decline, since digital editions bring in fatter margins. ...
... But it has also become clear that digital advertising dollars will never offset what newspapers are losing in print advertising—which is why papers want to be less dependent on ad revenue. Advertising, which is high-margin, has historically contributed around 80% of American newspapers' revenues, far more than in most other countries. This is changing, mostly because advertising has slid so far. In the third quarter the New York Times earned more than 55% of its revenues from circulation, compared with only 29% in 2001. Newspaper bosses say they are moving their papers to a model where they get half their revenues from advertising and half from circulation. ...
The article explains that many challenges still exist, and paywalls won't work for everyone. Advertising will still need to be a part of the mix, and it is unclear if the ad revenue decline can be stabilized or reversed.
Do you have any pay subscriptions for news? Do you anticipate buying online subscriptions for one of your favorite news sources if they create a paywall?
Here are the links. BTW, if you haven't already, you can "like" the Kruse Kronicle Facebook page and see daily links in your Facebook feed.
1. As a kid, I watched Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom on Saturdays. That was the beginning of my life-long appreciation for big cats. One of the organizations we support is the Turperntine Creek Wildlife Refuge for big cats in Arkansas. Check out this Nat Geo super slo-mo video of a running cheetah. Be sure to go to this five-minute video and see him from the front. His head barely moves. Just amazing!
7. If you are a man, getting along with the in-laws means you have a 20% higher chance of not getting divorced. If you are a woman, getting along well with the in-laws makes you 20% more likely to get divorced. Getting Along With The In-Laws Makes Women More Likely To Divorce
"The Supreme Court announced Friday it would review a case testing whether human genes may be patented, in a dispute weighing patents associated with human genes known to detect early signs of breast and ovarian cancer. A 2009 lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union claimed among other things the First Amendment is at stake because the patents are so broad they bar scientists from examining and comparing the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes at the center of the dispute. In short, the patents issued more than a decade ago cover any new scientific methods of looking at these human genes that might be developed by others."
I am guessing there are some bioethics questions to consider here as well. ;-)
15. 4.5 billion years of the earth's evolution as if it happened in 24 hours.
"The Pew Research Center announced Nov. 29 that the U.S. birth rate fell to its lowest level since at least 1920, when reliable record-keeping began. That was true—but not news. The National Center for Health Statistics reported that way back on Oct. 3.
What was news was Pew's analysis of the government data, which showed that the birth rate decline was greatest among immigrant women. "We were the first to point that out," Gretchen Livingston, the lead author of Pew's report, said in an interview. ..."
... New research shows that Catholics now report the lowest proportion of "strongly affiliated" followers among major American religious traditions, while the data indicates that evangelicals are increasingly devout and committed to their faith.
According to Philip Schwadel, a sociologist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, in the 1970s there was only a five-point difference between how strongly Catholics and evangelicals felt about their religion.
By 2010, he said, that "intensity gap" had grown to around 20 points, with some 56 percent of evangelicals describing themselves as "strongly affiliated" with their religion compared with 35 percent of Catholics. Even mainline Protestants reported a higher level of religious intensity than Catholics, at 39 percent. ..."
"Indeed, for America's Amish, much is changing. The Amish are, by one measure, the fastest-growing faith community in the US. Yet as their numbers grow, the land available to support the agrarian lifestyle that underpins their faith is shrinking, gobbled up by the encroachment of exurban mansions and their multidoor garages.
The result is, in some ways, a gradual redefinition of what it means to be Amish. Some in the younger generation are looking for new ways to make a living on smaller and smaller slices of land. Others are looking beyond the Amish heartland of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Indiana, seeking more space in states such as Texas, Maine, and Montana."
21. Finally, one of the things I found interesting about the presidential election was Team Romney's seeming confidence they were winning. I think every losing candidate often tries to spin things positively until the very end, but I had the sense that Team Romney wasn't faking it. They believed they were winning. I think post-election analysis reveals that it was true. From The New RepbulicThe Internal Polls That Made Mitt Romney Think He'd Win
JCPenney can offer shoppers something no online retailer can: food and drinks to enjoy while they spend money.
CEO Ron Johnson said the retailer was planning on replacing traditional cash registers with coffee and juice bars, reports Sapna Maheshwari at Bloomberg News. A prototype he showed reporters in August included a Caribou coffee stand. ...
... Johnson has also announced plans to give associates iPads and eliminate most cash registers. ...
Johnson is the guy who introduced upscale products at Target and created the Apple brick-and-mortar model. He recently did away with most of JC Penny's model of using sales and coupons to bring people into the store, and sales have suffered as a result. But this was only the first step in a move to remake the JCPenny shopping experience ... and I would say "experience" is the operative word.
Eight years ago, Joseph Pine did a TED Talk What consumers want. He explains that we had a commodity economy throughout most of human history. We grew things or extracted things from the ground. Then we figured out how to form commodities into goods. We became an industrial economy. But eventually, goods became so standardized that they became commodities, and everything was about the lowest price. Then came customization of goods, which entailed offering services that would distinguish goods. Enter the service economy. But now, due to the internet revolution, services are almost a commodity. Many people are now looking for an experience from their economic exchanges. Studies already show that many people scope out products online but still go to a brick-and-mortar store for the shopping experience.
It sounds like Johnson is in accord with Pine's perspective. Johnson's critics are legion right now. It will be interesting to see if he pulls this off.
As Google continues to build its high-speed Google Fiber network in Kansas City, more startups are moving into the neighborhood to make the most of the new service.
The first neighborhood to get Google Fiber, known on the map as Hanover Heights but locally as the Kansas City Startup Village, is the new home of early stage startups co-locating near one another to collaborate, leverage resources and to build a community based around growing a tech business.
“The number of startups in this region of several blocks is over 10 now, but it’s happened quickly and every day I hear of someone new moving in,” Mike Farmer of mobile search app Leap2 tells Mashable. “The Kansas City Startup Village was not formed with some grand strategy or goal in mind — it came together organically.”
Leap2 is among the first wave of startups moving to the village. In early November, the company — which was founded in 2011 — moved its offices from a non-Google Fiber neighborhood in Kansas City to a connected one. The KC Startup Village consists of other companies such as Local Ruckus, Eye Verify, Trellie and Form Zapper, as a part of an initiative to make it a new startup tech hub. ...
"What if all objects were interconnected and started to sense their surroundings and communicate with each other? The Internet of Things (IoT) will have that sort of ubiquitous machine-to-machine (M2M) connectivity. Since there are estimates that between 50 billion to 500 billion devices will have a mobile connection to the cloud by 2020, here's a glimpse of our possible future.
Your alarm clock signals the lights to come on in your bedroom; the lights tell the heated tiles in your bathroom to kick on so your feet are not cold when you go to shower. The shower tells your coffee pot to start brewing. Your smartphone checks the weather and tells you to wear your gray suit since RFID tags on your clothes confirm that your favorite black suit is not in your closet but at the dry cleaners. After you pour a cup of java, the mug alerts your medication that you have a drink in-hand and your pill bottle begins to glow and beep as a reminder. Your pill bottle confirms that you took your medicine and wirelessly adds this info to your medical file at the doctor's office; it will also text the pharmacy for a refill if you are running low.
Your smart TV automatically comes on with your favorite news channel while you eat breakfast and browse your tablet for online news. After you've eaten, while you are brushing your teeth, your dishwasher texts your smartphone to fire up your vehicle via the remote start. Because your "smart" car can talk to other cars and the road, it knows what streets to avoid due to early morning traffic jams. Your phone notifies you that your route to work has been changed to save you time. And you no longer need to look for a place to park, since your smartphone reserved one of the RFID parking spaces marked as "open" and available in the cloud. Don't worry about your smart house because as you exited it, the doors locked, the lights went off, and the temperature was adjusted to save energy and money.
Does it sound too farfetched for 2020? It shouldn't since a good part of that is in the works now. ..."
4. Regarding computers, technology lovers will appreciate that the World's Oldest Computer Gets a Reboot.
"The Congressional Budget Office has a new study of effective federal marginal tax rates for low and moderate income workers (those below 450 percent of the poverty line). The study looks at the effects of income taxes, payroll taxes, and SNAP (the program formerly known as Food Stamps). The bottom line is that the average household now faces an effective marginal tax rate of 30 percent. In 2014, after various temporary tax provisions have expired and the newly passed health insurance subsidies go into effect, the average effective marginal tax rate will rise to 35 percent.
What struck me is how close these marginal tax rates are to the marginal tax rates at the top of the income distribution. This means that we could repeal all these taxes and transfer programs, replace them with a flat tax along with a universal lump-sum grant, and achieve approximately the same overall degree of progressivity."
7. What conservative streams and thinkers are likely to influence the evolving future of conservatism in the United States? David Brooks has some interesting insights into The Conservative Future.
... From here [Des Moines] to Omaha to Kansas City — a region known more for its barns than its bandwidth — a start-up tech scene is burgeoning. Dozens of new ventures are laying roots each year, investors are committing hundreds of millions of dollars to them, and state governments are teaming up with private organizations to promote the growing tech community. They are calling it – what else? – the Silicon Prairie.
Although a relatively small share of the country’s angel investment deals – 5.7 percent – are done in the Great Plains, the region was just one of two (the other is the Southwest) that increased its share of them from the first half of 2011 to the first half of this year, according to a report commissioned by the Angel Resource Institute, Silicon Valley Bank and CB Insights. About 15 to 20 start-ups, most of them tech-related, are now established each year in eastern Nebraska, a more than threefold increase from five years ago, according to the Omaha Chamber of Commerce. Today, there is more than $300 million in organized venture capital available in the state, as well as tax credits for investors; six years ago there was virtually none, according to the chamber.
About a dozen start-ups have flocked to a single neighborhood in Kansas City, Kan., alone after Google Fiber installed its first ultrafast Internet connection there last week. And over the past seven months, about 60 start-ups have presented their ideas in Kansas City at weekly forums organized by Nate Olson, an analyst with the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. In Iowa, Startup City Des Moines, an incubator financed with $700,000 in public and private money, including a quarter-million dollars from the state, received applications from 160 start-ups over the past two years. It has accepted nine so far....
Yes sir! Everything is up to date in Kansas City! ;-)
3. "British people - and many others across the world - have been brought up on the idea of three square meals a day as a normal eating pattern, but it wasn't always that way." Breakfast, lunch and dinner: Have we always eaten them?
7. "It's a common grumble that politicians' lifestyles are far removed from those of their electorate. Not so in Uruguay. Meet the president - who lives on a ramshackle farm and gives away most of his pay." Jose Mujica: The world's 'poorest' president
8. You may have heard that there was a presidential election last week. Here is a map showing how the counties voted, with red being the most intensely Republican and blue being the most Democrat. (Source: The Real Reason Cities Lean Democratic)
9. Speaking of the election, a lot has been written about how the GOP will need to change if they want to win national elections. As a right-leaning guy, I thought this article in Slate, The New Grand Old Party, and Bobby Jindal's article, How Republicans can win future elections, were among the best.
13. Nanotechnology just keeps getting more impressive. "The latest invention from Stanford University's Department of Electrical Engineering sounds like something a superhero would have. A self-repairing plastic-metal material has been developed by a team of professors, researchers and graduate students." New Self-Repairing Material Invented at Stanford
15. Speaking of 3D-Printing, how big a deal is it? "Chris Anderson has exited one of the top jobs in publishing - Editor-in-Chief of Wired magazine - to pursue the life of an entrepreneur, making a big bet that 3D printers represent a massive new phase of the industrial revolution." Chris Anderson: Why I left Wired - 3D Printing Will Be Bigger Than The Web
"A flash mob (or flashmob) is a group of people who assemble suddenly in a place, perform an unusual and seemingly pointless act for a brief time, then disperse, often for the purposes of entertainment, satire, and artistic expression. Flash mobs are organized via telecommunications, social media, or viral emails." [Wikipedia accessed 11.12.12] How do you define a church?"
... In Latin America, Mexico City is not unique. Use of social media is growing at a breathtaking pace across the region. When Facebook passed the 1 billion user mark in October, few people noticed that 19 percent of those users live in Latin America (which only accounts for 8 percent of the world's population). The governments of virtually all large Latin American cities now use social media to engage with citizens, and smaller cities are quickly following suit. The Inter-American Development Bank recently found that social media is used by governments in 70 percent of the region´s 140 "emerging cities" (those having 100,000 to 2 million residents and above-average economic growth rates).
Although the press has focused on Latin American presidents who have embraced social media as a potent new channel for old-fashioned political communications, something very different is happening at the municipal level.
Mayors seem to be betting that by micromanaging urban issues via Twitter or Facebook, they will give voters concrete evidence of their effectiveness in office. This is a risky tactic, of course. Many local governments that find it easy to virtually "engage" with constituents may not have the budgets, the organization, or the staff to actually solve the problems that generate complaints. The result, in that case, could be a voter backlash amplified, ironically, over the same social media channels. ...
... Over the coming decade, hundreds of millions of city dwellers in emerging economies such as Mexico, Brazil, India and China are likely to rise from poverty. Much has been written about how their increasing expectations will pressure governments like never before to deliver tangible improvements that make urban life safer, healthier, and more egalitarian.
I predict that social media will have a highly disruptive but largely positive effect in this context. At a minimum, these technologies will give new vitality to the ancient ideals of participation and accountability. At best, they might shorten the wait for new lights in a darkened park. In either event, the next mayor of Mexico City, like others across the developing world, will not really have the option of ignoring social media. That's where people are choosing to speak, and where they expect to be heard.
AFRICA'S "mobile decade", when telephones at last reached most corners of the continent, has meant a huge improvement in the lives of the poor. But quantifying it is hard. How useful can a mobile phone be to someone living on less than $2.50 a day, the World Bank's standard benchmark of poverty? Researchers in Kenya have given a partial answer. They find that people will skip a meal or choose to walk instead of paying for a bus fare so that they can keep their phone in credit. ...
... Still, only 16% of respondents said they were using their phones to browse the internet. The real breakthrough in the Kenyan market has been in people's ability to send and receive money, with more than two-thirds doing so by phone. East Africa's biggest success has been M-Pesa, a mobile-based money-transfer system pioneered by Safaricom, a leading Kenyan operator. Its simple interface, which works on any phone, has brought financial services to Kenya's poor majority, enabling the movement of some $8.6 billion in the first half of this year. ...
There has been a big interest in microfinance in recent years. Many organizations aimed to make loans available to the poor so they could start businesses and foster economic growth. But Daryl Collins et al., in Portfolios of the Poor: How the World's Poor Live on $2 a Day, show that business formation is not the highest priority for the poor. They had hundreds of poor families in India, Bangladesh, and South Africa fill out diaries recording their financial transactions for one year. They learned that the poor's biggest financial challenge is cash flow management. Money does not come in in a steady stream across the year. Yet if you save up money, it is tough to keep it safe. Having money readily at hand also makes it harder not to spend. Banking by phone is proving to have a major impact on financial management for poor people. Increased ability to manage finances will also come with a greater capacity for entrepreneurial activity.
In a national online longitudinal survey, participants reported their attitudes and behaviors in response to the recently implemented metered paywall by the New York Times. Previously free online content now requires a digital subscription to access beyond a small free monthly allotment. Participants were surveyed shortly after the paywall was announced and again 11 weeks after it was implemented to understand how they would react and adapt to this change. Most readers planned not to pay and ultimately did not. Instead, they devalued the newspaper, visited its Web site less frequently, and used loopholes, particularly those who thought the paywall would lead to inequality. Results of an experimental justification manipulation revealed that framing the paywall in terms of financial necessity moderately increased support and willingness to pay. Framing the paywall in terms of a profit motive proved to be a noncompelling justification, sharply decreasing both support and willingness to pay. Results suggest that people react negatively to paying for previously free content, but change can be facilitated with compelling justifications that emphasize fairness.
... Beyond the United States, global statistics point undeniably toward progress in achieving greater peace and stability. There are fewer wars now than at any time in decades. The number of people killed as a result of armed violence worldwide is plunging as well — down to about 526,000 in 2011 from about 740,000 in 2008, according to the United Nations. ...
... Most top Pentagon officials say the statistics showing that the world is safer are irrelevant and don't reflect the magnitude of the risks. The result is what Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has dubbed a "security paradox." The world may seem safer, Dempsey says, but the potential for global catastrophe has grown as the planet has become more interconnected and potential enemies have greater access to more powerful weapons and technology. ...
9. How much difference is there in the coming-of-age experience between Baby Boomers and Millennials? Mother and daughter team Robin Marantz Henig and Samantha Henig are interviewed about their new book: What's the Matter With Millennials?
"The online startup Kaggle assembles a diverse group of people from around the world to work on tough problems submitted by organizations. The company runs data science competitions, where the goal is to arrive at a better prediction than the submitting organization's starting 'baseline' prediction. Results from these contests are striking in a couple ways. For one thing, improvements over the baseline are usually substantial. In one case, Allstate submitted a dataset of vehicle characteristics and asked the Kaggle community to predict which of them would have later personal liability claims filed against them. The contest lasted approximately three months, and drew in more than 100 contestants. The winning prediction was more than 270% better than the insurance company's baseline.
Another interesting fact is that the majority of Kaggle contests are won by people who are marginal to the domain of the challenge — who, for example, made the best prediction about hospital readmission rates despite having no experience in health care — and so would not have been consulted as part of any traditional search for solutions. In many cases, these demonstrably capable and successful data scientists acquired their expertise in new and decidedly digital ways"
4. Inhabitat reports on The World's First Commercial Vertical Farm Opens in Singapore. "The dense metropolis of Singapore is now home to the world's first commercial vertical farm! Built by Sky Greens Farms, the rising steel structure will help the city grow more food locally, reducing dependence on imported produce. The new farm can produce 1 ton of fresh veggies every other day, which are sold in local supermarkets."
5. The New Republic has a very lengthy article The Mormon Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. It offers interesting insights into Mormonism's road from communalism to economic individualism, a trajectory followed by many Protestant sectarian movements. Jackson Lears writes:
"Mormons embraced economic individualism and hierarchical communalism; they distrusted government interventions in business life but not in moral life; they used their personal morality to underwrite their monetary success. They celebrated endless progress through Promethean striving. They paid little attention to introspection and much to correct behavior. And their fundamental scripture confirmed that America was God's New Israel and the Mormons His Chosen People. It would be hard to find an outlook more suited to the political culture of the post–Reagan Republican Party."
"A number of students asked foreign policy questions, and then a young woman asked me about the responses I have received to my Atlantic cover story from this past summer, "Why Women Still Can't Have It All." I answered, and several other young women followed up. After ten minutes, I saw that the roughly 50 percent of guys in the room had gone completely silent. When I commented on the suddenly one-sided nature of the conversation, one young man volunteered that he "had been raised in a strong feminist household" and considered himself to be fully supportive of male-female equality, but he was reluctant to say anything for fear he would be misunderstood. A number of the other guys around the table nodded in agreement."
7. French and Spanish legal documents from colonial Louisiana are being digitized, opening up a new window on colonial history in that part of the world. Colonial La. records shed new light on US history
8. People who know me know I tend to use sarcasm and double meaning in spoken communication. One of my biggest blogging challenges is editing most of this out of posts. Emoticons can help, but some of the biggest misunderstandings I have had come from people not being able to see my wink or big grin as I write certain things. For that reason, I found this interesting: The Strange Science Of Translating Sarcasm Online
"In their new book "Religion and AIDS in Africa" (Oxford University Press), sociologists Jenny Trinitapoli and Alexander Weinreb seek to challenge the widespread view that religious beliefs and communities have unwittingly assisted in the spread of the disease through their resistance to preventative sex education. They also show that not only have religious groups had a largely positive role in AIDS prevention, but also how the epidemic has shaped religious beliefs in unexpected ways."
A team of University of Washington students has developed a machine that can "print" large plastic objects out of garbage.
When he was working for the Peace Corps in Ghana and Panama, Matthew Rogge started to dream of turning waste plastic, abundant and freely available, into useful objects that would solve vexing Third World engineering problems.
Sound far-fetched?
He and a team of University of Washington students have done it.
Last week, Rogge — who went back to school to become a mechanical engineer precisely to learn how to do this — and two fellow student engineers won an international competition for their proposal to turn plastic garbage into composting toilets.
They've developed an inexpensive 3-D printer that can turn shredded, melted plastic waste into just about anything.
3-D printers have been around for at least 25 years, although they have become more widely available, better-known and cheaper in recent years. They use computer-aided design to create three-dimensional objects by laying down super-thin layers of a material, such as plastic, much like a regular printer lays down ink.
But until now, nobody had figured out how to cheaply build a large-scale printer that used recycled plastic as its raw material, said UW mechanical-engineering professor Mark Ganter. ...
And that's something of a challenge for the collaborative encyclopedia going forward
For about the last five years, Wikipedia has had trouble getting and keeping new volunteer editors. The foundation behind Wikipedia has made building up the editor base a major goal, and is attacking it from all angles, such as encouraging a culture that is friendlier to newbies, creating an easier sign-up page, and making the editing process more intutitive.
But what if the decline in engagement has little to do with culture or the design of the site? What if, instead, it's that there's just less for new Wikipedians to do?
It may seem impossible for an encyclopedia of everything to ever near completion, but at least for the major articles on topics like big wars, important historical figures, central scientific concepts, the English-language Wikipedia's pretty well filled out. (There is, of course, room for improvement in articles that have received less attention, but that is a different, yet still very important, set of challenges.) There's always going to be some tidying -- better citations, small updates, new links, cleaner formatting -- but the bulk of the work, the actual writing and structuring of the articles, has already been done. "There are more and more readers of Wikipedia, but they have less and less new to add," writes historian and Wikipedia editor Richard Jensen in the latest issue of The Journal of Military History. ...
I spend considerable time scanning headlines each week as I look for stories to blog about at the Kruse Kronicle. I clip them into an Evernote Notebook and usually twice a day, I select one or two to link and discuss. Several interesting stories never make it onto the blog.
So this week, I'm beginning what I hope will be a regular Saturday feature. Each Saturday, I will post links I did not use the previous week. For now, I will call it "Saturday Links." Happy clicking!
3. Icon of the American Libertarian movement, Murray Rothbard, once asked, "Why won't the left acknowledge the difference between deserving poor and undeserving poor? Why support the feckless, lazy & irresponsible?" Chris Dillow gives a libertarian response affirming the need to support the undeserving poor.
"I can easily imagine my graph in a Julian Simon or Steven Pinker chapter on human progress and the decline in violence. Even though I have no philosophical objection to the death penalty, it's hard not to interpret this 400-year pattern as a strong sign of human betterment."
Open source shouldn't just stop at the world of software. In fact, more and more manufacturers are warming up to the cause.
FORTUNE -- The term "open source" was first coined in response to Netscape's January 1998 announcement that the company would make freely available the source code for its web browser, Navigator. Since then, the philosophies of universal access and free redistribution of source code have revolutionized the software industry.
While we have seen how open source communities can foster creativity and collaboration in software (think of the Android app store), open source has not ventured too far beyond this space. This is partly because software is inherently modular, instantly accessible from anywhere, and easily altered.
Yet open source ideas have tremendous potential beyond software. All you need to create a successful open source community are participants who both contribute to, as well as benefit from, shared content. Such networks of transparency, collaboration, and trust can be tremendously beneficial in other industries as well, from pharmaceuticals to manufactured goods. ...
... Although the open source model has not yet been broadly applied to manufactured goods, there are promising emerging examples -- particularly in the not for profit sector. One nonprofit group, Open Source Ecology, is experimenting with ways to cheaply construct from scratch over 50 crucial machines, from bakery ovens to back hoes, with basic materials. Founder Marcin Jakubowski publishes all the blueprints and schematics for each piece of his Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) on a Wiki for contributors from all over the world to access and tweak. Groups throughout the country have developed blueprints for Open Source Ecology, while machines are prototyped and improved on the Factor e Farm in rural Missouri. According to the group's website, 12 of the 50 machines are in their prototyping and documentation phase, including a microtractor, backhoe, and CNC circuit mill. Through this construction kit, Open Source Ecology aims to lower barriers to entry for farming, building, and manufacturing in rural communities, urban neighborhoods in need of renovation, and developing nations. ...
Despite early signs of success, there are, admittedly, real challenges to implementing open source principles to for-profit manufacturing. ...
If machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do?
... Bill Joy's question deserves therefore not to be ignored: Does the future need us? By this I mean to ask, if machines are capable of doing almost any work humans can do, what will humans do? I have been getting various answers to this question, but I find none satisfying.
A typical answer to my raising this question is to tell me that I am a Luddite. (Luddism is defined as distrust or fear of the inevitable changes brought about by new technology.) This is an ad hominem attack that does not deserve a serious answer.
A more thoughtful answer is that technology has been destroying jobs since the start of the Industrial Revolution, yet new jobs are continually created. The AI Revolution, however, is different than the Industrial Revolution. In the 19th century machines competed with human brawn. Now machines are competing with human brain. Robots combine brain and brawn. We are facing the prospect of being completely out-competed by our own creations. Another typical answer is that if machines will do all of our work, then we will be free to pursue leisure activities. The economist John Maynard Keynes addressed this issue already in 1930, when he wrote, "The increase of technical efficiency has been taking place faster than we can deal with the problem of labour absorption." Keynes imagined 2030 as a time in which most people worked only 15 hours a week, and would occupy themselves mostly with leisure activities.
I do not find this to be a promising future. First, if machines can do almost all of our work, then it is not clear that even 15 weekly hours of work will be required. Second, I do not find the prospect of leisure-filled life appealing. I believe that work is essential to human well-being. Third, our economic system would have to undergo a radical restructuring to enable billions of people to live lives of leisure. Unemployment rate in the US is currently under 9 percent and is considered to be a huge problem.
Finally, people tell me that my concerns apply only to a future that is so far away that we need not worry about it. I find this answer to be unacceptable. 2045 is merely a generation away from us. We cannot shirk responsibility from concerns for the welfare of the next generation. ...
Vardi's point?
We cannot blindly pursue the goal of machine intelligence without pondering its consequences.
One of the challenges of creative destruction is that we can see what is being destroyed but it is exceedingly difficult to see what is being created. As we have moved through the industrial era into the modern age, this fear that change was about impoverish the masses has been a recurring them. Futurists like Gene Rodenberry saw a day where most goods would be so plentiful or easily created that there would be little need for money or possessions. You wouldn’t need a job as a means to survival.
What do you think? Do Yardi’s concerns worry you? Or is the arrival of AI a godsend?
... Alter ego Clark Kent is resigning from the post of star reporter at the Daily Planet, the Metropolis newspaper where he has worked since the first Superman comics were published in the 1940s.
DC Comics, which publishes the Superman stories, says Kent will walk out in protest that hard news has given way to too many "soft" entertainment stories.
The move has been prompted by the Daily Planet's takeover by a conglomerate.
The publisher has hinted that the Man of Steel might even go the way of many journalists and become a blogger, in an effort to get his views across to a wider audience. ...
Many have been inspired by Star Trek to become scientists, and some are starting to make its gadgetry a reality.
Destination Star Trek London has kicked off at the ExCeL exhibition centre, and I'm willing to bet that among those heading down for a weekend of pointy-eared fun, there'll be a high proportion of scientists and engineers.
Many have been inspired by Star Trek to take up a career in science, technology or engineering. I think the franchise deserves more respect as a science popularisation medium – how many other prime-time TV shows would allow their characters to toss out phrases like "I performed a Fourier analysis on the harmonics, Captain"?
Since its inception in 1966, Star Trek has familiarised us with the lingo and applications of science. At least, that was the case for me. I felt pretty disenfranchised from science at school: it wasn't until I discovered science fiction that I realised I could understand "difficult" technical concepts.
Since the show began, many of us have become more tech-savvy than we could possibly have imagined at school. More than that, we're now seeing emergent technology here on Earth that was once little more than a Star Trek scriptwriter's dream. To get you in the mood for this weekend's festivities, here's a roundup of some of the best Star Trek-inspired technology.
Replicators - ... Three-dimensional printers have been on the open market commercially for most of the 21st century. ...
Transporters - Earlier this year, Nature reported that photons had been teleported 89 miles, between La Palma and Tenerife. OK, it wasn't exactly transportation ...
Bioneural circuitry - ... And in February of this year, the Scripps Research Institute published details of a DNA-based biological computer based on an original design by Alan Turing. ...
Nanites - ... They've constructed a set of nanorobots, with inbuilt chemical sensors, that can silence genes within cancerous cells. ...
Androids - Japanese scientists have created some remarkably human-looking androids, though they wouldn't beat Data in a game of three-dimensional chess. ...
Of course, we already have personal communication devices. But as someone recently pointed out, while we all have communication devices, we don't see people in Star Trek constantly looking down at them and running into things. ;-) Warp drive would be pretty cool. Any other Trekkie devices that you want to see?
... Grocery stores that found success on the internet are instead returning to the physical world with a hybrid business model: the "virtual" supermarket, a shop for smartphone users that carries photographs and bar codes instead of food. After the success of locations in mass transit stations from Seoul to Philadelphia, the virtual supermarket is about to hit the city above ground. Chinese supermarket giant Yihaodian announced this week it is opening 1,000 brick-and-mortar locations. ...
... Grocery stores want to reach time-starved commuters, but they also seem to be capitalizing on consumers' desire to browse. It's one of the reasons why many people at least claim to still prefer physical bookstores, even as the monstrous success of websites like Amazon seem to negate that notion.
If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Yihaodian has also experimented with subway stores, but the announcement this week marks a big move back into physical space. No longer will "virtual supermarkets" be only in mass transit stations. They'll occupy actual retail space in the city.
Email, like paper letters delivered by horseback, has become an unproductivity tool and may just be the biggest time killer in the modern workplace. Here's where companies are headed next. ...
So what's the solution? Our idea: Turn email into a conversation. Get rid of the inbox. Build an online platform where departments can post and respond to messages on central discussion threads, Facebook-style. Then integrate that with Twitter and Facebook so great ideas can be broadcast--with a click--to the world. Conversations isn’t a revolutionary concept; it’s a duh-it’s-about-time concept. And it’s worked for us and 5 million clients. A year from now, we may well be reading email its last rites. Here’s why:
Email has become an unproductivity tool. Right now, the typical corporate user spends 2 hours and 14 minutes every day reading and responding to email ...
Email is linear, not collaborative. Email was never intended for collaborative work. ...
Email is not social. Email is where good ideas go to die. ...
Your inbox is a black hole. You may be able to quickly and easily search your inbox, but odds are the rest of your department or company can’t. ...
Today marks the 30th anniversary of a musical format many of us grew up with: the compact disc. It's been three decades since the first CD went on sale in Japan. The shiny discs came to dominate music industry sales, but their popularity has faded in the digital age they helped unleash. The CD is just the latest musical format to rise and fall in roughly the same 30-year cycle.
Compact discs had been pressed before 1982, but the first CD to officially go on sale was Billy Joel's 52nd Street.
The CD was supposed to have the last word when it came to convenience and sound quality. And for a while, it did. The CD dominated record sales for more than two decades — from the late 1980s until just last year, when sales of digital tracks finally surpassed those of physical albums. It's a cycle that has played out many times in the history of the music industry, with remarkable consistency.
Sam Brylawski, the former head of the recorded sound division at the Library of Congress, says, "If you look at the last 110, 115 years, the major formats all have about 20 to 30 years of primacy."
He says one of the biggest factors driving this cycle is a desire on the part of manufacturers to sell new players every generation or so. "The real money — the real profits — for companies have been in the sales of hardware. That is to say, machines that play back recordings." ...
Managing irrigation pumps and water systems is a difficult and costly task for many farmers in developing countries. The amount of time and energy farmers spend watering their crops often compromises time that could otherwise be used for family and community obligations. It also compromises their safety at night, when they are most vulnerable to animal predators. A new innovation from the India based company, Ossian Agro Automation, called Nano Ganesh seeks to transform the way farmers manage their water systems by giving them the freedom to turn pumps on and off, from any location, with their mobile phone. ...
... In 2008 Ostwal altered the technology so that it could function over an unlimited range granting farmers the flexibility to start and stop the flow of water from anywhere there is a mobile connection. Nano Ganesh also allows farmers to check the availability of electricity to the pump and verify the on and off status of its operation. Both of these features offer cost-saving benefits to farmers who otherwise may not be able to shut their pumps off before their fields have become overly saturated. This is important for two reasons. One is that over-watering can lead to soil erosion and nutrient depletion. The second reason is that the inability to remotely shut-off water pumps leads to unintentional water and electricity waste. With the help of Nano Ganesh farmers will be able to conserve water and electricity more effectively. This will minimize the environmental and financial costs of farming. In fact, the product description suggests that farmers can recover the cost of the technology in just 11 days from the water and electricity savings it will produce. ...
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — With Google’s promise last year to wire homes, schools, libraries and other public institutions in this city with the nation’s fastest Internet connection, community leaders on the long forlorn, predominantly black east side were excited, seeing a potentially uplifting force. They anticipated new educational opportunities for their children and an incentive for developers to build in their communities.
But in July, Google announced a process in which only those areas where enough residents preregistered and paid a $10 deposit would get the service, Google Fiber. While nearly all of the affluent, mostly white neighborhoods here quickly got enough registrants, a broad swath of black communities lagged. The deadline to sign up was midnight Sunday.
The specter that many blacks in this city might not get access to this technology has inflamed the long racial divide here, stoking concern that it could deepen. ...
... The animated infographic displays wind flowing over America, measured between one and 30 miles per hour. It uses data from the National Digital Forecast Database, which is updated hourly. One can appreciate the northerly midwestern gales, and dramatically see Hurricane Isaac threatening New Orleans.
The Viégas and Wattenberg team have distinguished themselves by combining fascinating data with brilliant design to tell stories that cannot be so easily told in any other way. Among Mr Wattenberg's celebrated visualisations is one of his earliest, a "map of the market" (at the side), which colorfully tracked the daily rise and fall of share prices by degree, direction, sector and firm, scaled by market capitalisation—all in a single glance. ...
You must go to the link above to see the interactive map. It blew me away! ;-)
"Just cleared by the FDA late last month, this new ingestible sensor from California-based Proteus Digital Health is about the size of a grain of sand and can be integrated into an inert pill or medicine. Once in the stomach, it is powered solely by contact with stomach fluid and communicates a unique signal that identifies the timing of ingestion. This information is transferred through the user’s body tissue to a battery-operated patch worn on the skin that detects the signal along with physiological and behavioral metrics such as heart rate, body position and activity. That data, in turn, gets relayed by the patch to a mobile application, where it can be made accessible by caregivers and clinicians."
Over the coming months, A Matter of Life and Tech will feature a range of voices from people building Africa’s tech future. This week, United Nation’s mobile learning specialist Steve Vosloo argues phones could be the future of education on the continent.
... If mobile learning is to have a real impact, we need to also rethink what we mean by education, schooling and what skills it delivers.
Recently, a United Nations task team led by UNESCO produced a think piece on education and skills beyond 2015. The piece predicts there will be a shift away from teaching in a classroom-centred paradigm of education to an increased focus on learning, which happens informally throughout the day. A core feature of mobiles is that they support ‘anywhere, anytime’ learning. Because they are personal and always at hand, they are perfectly suited to support informal and contextual learning.
The report also predicts that there will be an increased blurring of the boundaries between learning, working and living. Mobiles already support skills development in a range of fields including agriculture and healthcare, and provide paying job opportunities for mobile-based ‘microwork’.
In addition to education basics such as literacy and numeracy, the reports says, there will be a need for digital and information literacy, as well as critical thinking and online communication skills. With the guidance of teachers, mobiles provide a medium for developing these skills for millions of Africans who go online ‘mobile first’ or even ‘mobile-only’.
On a continent where education change – what should be taught, how it should be delivered and assessed, and where learning happens – is inevitable, and mobiles are more affordably and effectively networking people to each other and information than ever before, the combined promise is bigger than the sum of the parts. Mobile learning is here to stay and will only influence and enable learning more and more.
The website The Bookscore rounds up book reviews, assigns a ranking, and lets readers discuss literary news.
Why rely on one book review when you can read five?
The website The Bookscore aims to fill that need with its collection of aggregated reviews for new titles. On The Bookscore, the articles for a certain book are gathered so that, like on movie websites like Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic, a website visitor can look at a title and get an overall score for a book, averaged from multiple reviews. For example, “Wild” by Cheryl Strayed currently holds a score of 8.8; “Bring Up the Bodies” by Hilary Mantel” is the proud possessor of a 9.1.
“The Bookscore sets itself apart by including reviews from the only the most trusted sources, by giving users a complete online forum for news and discussion to go along with the reviews, and by allowing the users to contribute to the content directly by requesting books to be scored,” said co-founder Sam Griswold, who founded the site with Chris Laursen. ...
A bioengineer and geneticist at Harvard’s Wyss Institute have successfully stored 5.5 petabits of data — around 700 terabytes — in a single gram of DNA, smashing the previous DNA data density record by a thousand times.
The work, carried out by George Church and Sri Kosuri, basically treats DNA as just another digital storage device. Instead of binary data being encoded as magnetic regions on a hard drive platter, strands of DNA that store 96 bits are synthesized, with each of the bases (TGAC) representing a binary value (T and G = 1, A and C = 0).
To read the data stored in DNA, you simply sequence it — just as if you were sequencing the human genome — and convert each of the TGAC bases back into binary. To aid with sequencing, each strand of DNA has a 19-bit address block at the start (the red bits in the image below) — so a whole vat of DNA can be sequenced out of order, and then sorted into usable data using the addresses. ...
... Just think about it for a moment: One gram of DNA can store 700 terabytes of data. That’s 14,000 50-gigabyte Blu-ray discs… in a droplet of DNA that would fit on the tip of your pinky. To store the same kind of data on hard drives — the densest storage medium in use today — you’d need 233 3TB drives, weighing a total of 151 kilos. In Church and Kosuri’s case, they have successfully stored around 700 kilobytes of data in DNA — Church’s latest book, in fact — and proceeded to make 70 billion copies (which they claim, jokingly, makes it the best-selling book of all time!) totaling 44 petabytes of data stored.
Looking forward, they foresee a world where biological storage would allow us to record anything and everything without reservation. Today, we wouldn’t dream of blanketing every square meter of Earth with cameras, and recording every moment for all eternity/human posterity — we simply don’t have the storage capacity. There is a reason that backed up data is usually only kept for a few weeks or months — it just isn’t feasible to have warehouses full of hard drives, which could fail at any time. If the entirety of human knowledge — every book, uttered word, and funny cat video — can be stored in a few hundred kilos of DNA, though… well, it might just be possible to record everything (hello, police state!) ...
... Whatever people pay, however, it hasn’t always been easy for administrators and lay leaders to get them to donate regularly and increase their contributions each year, no matter their faith. Over the last decade or so, entrepreneurs have seized on the opening and tried to automate the process.
One big player is a service called ParishPay, which works with many Catholic churches and a few synagogues to help sign up worshipers to pay via credit or debit card or automatic payment from their bank accounts. Nearly 1,000 institutions have joined the service, and it claims a 20 to 30 percent increase in giving by individuals who enroll.
That’s a nice lift, though the process is a bit antiseptic given that no money changes hands at the house of worship (though Jews are not supposed to handle money on Shabbat). Marty Baker, the lead pastor at Stevens Creek Church in Augusta, Ga., came up with the idea for an in-church giving kiosk in 2003, when he wondered whether attendees with pockets full of plastic might give more than they were depositing in the collection plate if he found a way to accept their cards.
Today, his for-profit company SecureGive has kiosks in churches, Hindu temples and some zoos and hospitals, too. “You could do this at home or online,” he said. “But there is something about swiping that card at church. It’s a reminder that your gifts are making a difference in a broader context.”
Few things are more visceral than the collection plate, however, and it persists for many reasons. “The liturgical act of placing an offering of money into the offertory plate is understood to be a form of worship,” said the Rev. Laurel Johnston, the officer for stewardship in the Episcopal Church. Episcopalians generally make annual pledges in the fall and fulfill them throughout the year through electronic payments or by making periodic payments via an envelope that they put in the collection plate.
Regular worshipers with a regular paycheck may also appreciate the formality of handing over hard currency each week if they believe in the idea of paying God first. Then, there are the parents who like the fact that their children see everyone else giving and can toss in a few coins of their own.
Finally, there’s the peer pressure of having others’ eyes on you as the plate goes around. “Some would call it Catholic guilt,” said Matt Golis, a lifelong Catholic and chief executive of ParishPay’s parent company, YapStone. Many churches that allow electronic giving encourage those who have used it to drop a symbolic receipt of sorts into the collection plate if they wish. ...
... The convergence of smartphone technology, social-media data and futuristic technology such as 3-D printers is changing the face of retail in a way that experts across the industry say will upend the bricks-and-mortar model in a matter of a few years.
"The next five years will bring more change to retail than the last 100 years," says Cyriac Roeding, CEO of Shopkick, a location-based shopping app available at Macy's, Target and other top retailers.
Within 10 years, retail as we know it will be unrecognizable, says Kevin Sterneckert, a Gartner analyst who follows retail technology. Big-box stores such as Office Depot, Old Navy and Best Buy will shrink to become test centers for online purchases. Retail stores will be there for a "touch and feel" experience only, with no actual sales. Stores won't stock any merchandise; it'll be shipped to you. This will help them stay competitive with online-only retailers, Sterneckert says.
Branding strategist Adam Hanft says this all might sound futuristic, but much of it is rooted in reality. He says satellite stores will open in apartment buildings and office centers. FedEx and UPS will delve deeper into refrigerated home delivery. Google trucks will deliver local services. Clothing — even pharmaceuticals — will be produced in the home via affordable 3-D printers.
"Every waking moment is a shopping moment," says Steve Yankovich, head of eBay's mobile business, which expects to handle $10 billion in transactions this year. "Anytime, anywhere."
Game-shifting tech — such as smartphones, location-based services, augmented reality and big data, which makes sense of all the data on mobile devices and social networks — will most assuredly upend several multibillion-dollar retail markets, forcing retailers to adapt or die, say venture capitalists and analysts.
Eventually, 3-D printers will let consumers produce their own towels, utensils and clothes. While in their infancy, the devices have been used to print hearing aids, iPad cases and model rockets, says Andy Filo, an expert on 3-D printers. The technology is several years away, however, from being widely available and affordable, he says.
And almost all of it will be paid with … your phone. ...
... Driving the future
All of this will be possible within several years because of:
•Smartphones. Location-based services and the growing adoption of Near Field Communication — a wireless technology standard for one-tap payment — will turn consumers' phones into stand-ins for credit, debit and loyalty cards, says Bill Gajda, head of mobile at Visa. Meanwhile, Nordstrom, among many, is phasing out cash registers this year in favor of smartphones with store-designed apps for purchases and inventory.
•The death of cash. If credit cards diminished use of cash in the 1950s, powerful smartphones and tablets will hasten its demise. Both are reshaping the relationship between merchant and customer as newfangled wallets, and each is edging toward becoming credit card readers and (cash) registers.
"Cash has dug in its heels for small-value transactions, but with the arrival of each new tech offering (providing) an alternative way to pay for little stuff — text your parking payment, Starbucks mobile app, Square, etc. — cash is being further and further marginalized," says David Wolman, author of the book The End of Money.
•Augmented reality. The increasingly popular technology adds a visual layer of information on top of surfaces such as a mirror. One breakthrough might come at the mall, with AR mirrors that let consumers shop based on data projected on glass, say social-media experts such as Brian Solis.
Another intriguing option is Google Glass, which puts computer-processing power, a camera, a microphone, wireless communications and a tiny screen into a pair of lightweight eyeglasses. Ultimately, Google hopes the "smart" glasses — which are a few years away — will be able to access information in real time, including the ability to identify locations and provide additional information about your whereabouts.
Harnessing social media
As smartphones and tablets grow in popularity, retailers are trying to get their hands around Facebook, Twitter and social media, and cater to consumers, says Niraj Shah, CEO of Wayfair, an e-commerce company that recently passed Crate & Barrel to become the No. 2 Internet retailer of home products. It racked up a record $500 million in revenue last year.
Only 8% to 13% of retail shopping in the USA is done online. Impressive as future retail technology might look, it will take good old-fashioned customer service to boost those figures, says Will Young, who heads Zappos Labs. ...
Leonard Sweet says that higher education is where the Roman Catholic Church was on the eve of the Reformation. Go to the Ashford page at youtube to see their other videos. Technology Changes Everything
... For many politicians, “outsourcing” is a four-letter word because it involves jobs leaving “here” and going “there.” But for many C.E.O.’s, outsourcing is over. In today’s seamlessly connected world, there is no “out” and no “in” anymore. There is only the “good,” “better” and “best” places to get work done, and if they don’t tap into the best, most cost-efficient venue wherever that is, their competition will.
For politicians, it’s all about “made in America,” but, for C.E.O.’s, it is increasingly about “made in the world” — a world where more and more products are now imagined everywhere, designed everywhere, manufactured everywhere in global supply chains and sold everywhere. American politicians are still citizens of our states and cities, while C.E.O.’s are increasingly citizens of the world, with mixed loyalties. For politicians, all their customers are here; for C.E.O.’s, 90 percent of their new customers are abroad. The credo of the politician today is: “Why are you not hiring more people here?” The credo of the C.E.O. today is: “You only hire someone — anywhere — if you absolutely have to,” if a smarter machine, robot or computer program is not available.
Yes, this is a simplification, but the trend is accurate. The trend is that for more and more jobs, average is over. Thanks to the merger of, and advances in, globalization and the information technology revolution, every boss now has cheaper, easier access to more above-average software, automation, robotics, cheap labor and cheap genius than ever before. So just doing a job in an average way will not return an average lifestyle any longer. ...
... Amazon.co.uk has said that sales of its Kindle ebooks are now outstripping its sales of printed books.
Underlining the speed of change in the publishing industry, Amazon said that two years after introducing the Kindle, customers are now buying more ebooks than all hardcovers and paperbacks combined. According to unaudited figures released by the company on Monday, since the start of 2012, for every 100 hardback and paperback book sold on its site, customers downloaded 114 ebooks. Amazon said the figures included sales of printed books which did not have Kindle editions, but excluded free ebooks. ...
... Three of the top 10 most popular Kindle authors of 2012 – Nick Spalding, Katia Lief and Kerry Wilkinson – were published by Amazon's own Kindle Direct Publishing. ...
One of the first essays I ever read about economics in college was Leonard Read's I, Pencil, written in the year before I was born. While a little outdated in some ways, it still does a wonderful job illustrating the market process's wonder and complexity. The Institute for Faith Work and Economics has just released a four-minute clip that updates "I, Pencil" compellingly and entertainingly.
Now let me add a caveat, especially for my readers who are skeptical of markets and free enterprise. Markets are not a quasi-deity. They do not solve every problem. They aren't perfect. They don't prevent evil people from doing evil things. But what they do, by historical measures, is astounding. Until very recently, human beings were trapped in low-productivity labor. There was minimal ability to trade with others beyond the immediate community. There was no way for us to coordinate with and mutually benefit from the work of countless strangers from across the globe. Markets make that possible. Markets made this very conversation possible that you and I are having right now because there would be no computers and no internet to enable this interaction without it. And for that reason, markets can be celebrated, even as we wrestle with many implications arising from the emergence of well-coordinated markets.
WASHINGTON, July 17, 2012 --- Around three-quarters of the world’s inhabitants now have access to a mobile phone and the mobile communications story is moving to a new level, which is not so much about the phone but how it is used, says a new report released today by the World Bank and infoDev, its technology entrepreneurship and innovation program. The number of mobile subscriptions in use worldwide, both pre-paid and post-paid, has grown from fewer than 1 billion in 2000 to over 6 billion now, of which nearly 5 billion in developing countries. Ownership of multiple subscriptions is becoming increasingly common, suggesting that their number will soon exceed that of the human population.
According to Information and Communications for Development 2012: Maximizing Mobile, more than 30 billion mobile applications, or “apps,” were downloaded in 2011 – software that extends the capabilities of phones, for instance to become mobile wallets, navigational aids or price comparison tools. In developing countries, citizens are increasingly using mobile phones to create new livelihoods and enhance their lifestyles, while governments are using them to improve service delivery and citizen feedback mechanisms.
"Mobile communications offer major opportunities to advance human and economic development – from providing basic access to health information to making cash payments, spurring job creation, and stimulating citizen involvement in democratic processes,” said World Bank Vice President for Sustainable Development Rachel Kyte. “The challenge now is to enable people, businesses, and governments in developing countries to develop their own locally-relevant mobile applications so they can take full advantage of these opportunities.” ...
This video is a wonderful window into the complexity of one tiny market (delivery pizza) among millions of goods and services that trade hands every day. The complexity is staggering, all coordinated by the price mechanism ... supply and demand. And, yes, (the obligatory disclaimer for some of my readers) markets are not perfect, and they are not appropriate for every type of human exchange, but we massively underestimate the benefits that free markets bring to our lives. It is too massively complex to comprehend.
And, yes, I'm aware some will become fixated on the point that this example is using junk food and will use that as a reason to dismiss it, but the point is that nearly ANYTHING you buy has this complexity built in, right down to a #2 pencil or a paper clip. Markets will efficiently and inexpensively deliver everything from the noble to the ignoble. Markets are good because they allow us to benefit from each other's productivity. But evil things will come from markets because markets are equally proficient at coordinating bad behavior. Free markets are vital to human flourishing, but that does not imply that every market should be permitted or that everything emerging from the market exchange is equally useful.
Here is the YouTube setup:
"AMERICA REVEALED takes viewers on a journey high above the American landscape to reveal the country as never seen before. Join host Yul Kwon (Winner of "Survivor: Cook Islands") to learn how this machine feeds nearly 300 million Americans every day. Discover engineering marvels created by putting nature to work, and consider the toll our insatiable appetites take on our health and environment. Embark with Kwon on a trip that begins with a pizza delivery route in New York City, then goes across the country to California's Central Valley, where nearly 50 percent of America's fruits, nuts and vegetables are grown, and into the heartland for an aerial look at our farmlands. Meet the men and women who keep us fed - everyone from industrial to urban farmers, crop-dusting pilots to long-distance bee truckers, modern-day cowboys to the pizza deliveryman."
We think of Google and Facebook as Web gorillas. They’ll be around forever. Yet, with the rate that the tech world is moving these days, there are good reasons to think both might be gone completely in 5 – 8 years. Not bankrupt gone, but MySpace gone. And there’s some academic theory to back up that view, along with casual observations from recent history. ...
... In the tech Internet world, we’ve really had 3 generations:
Web 1.0 (companies founded from 1994 – 2001, including Netscape, Yahoo! (YHOO), AOL (AOL), Google (GOOG), Amazon (AMZN) and eBay (EBAY)),
Web 2.0 or Social (companies founded from 2002 – 2009, including Facebook (FB), LinkedIn (LNKD), and Groupon (GRPN)),
and now Mobile (from 2010 – present, including Instagram).
With each succeeding generation in tech, it seems the prior generation can’t quite wrap its head around the subtle changes that the next generation brings. Web 1.0 companies did a great job of aggregating data and presenting it in an easy to digest portal fashion. Google did a good job organizing the chaos of the Web better than AltaVista, Excite, Lycos and all the other search engines that preceded it. Amazon did a great job of centralizing the chaos of e-commerce shopping and putting all you needed in one place.
When Web 2.0 companies began to emerge, they seemed to gravitate to the importance of social connections. MySpace built a network of people with a passion for music initially. Facebook got college students. LinkedIn got the white collar professionals. Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon showed how users could generate content themselves and make the overall community more valuable. ...
... Social companies born since 2010 have a very different view of the world. These companies – and Instagram is the most topical example at the moment – view the mobile smartphone as the primary (and oftentimes exclusive) platform for their application. They don’t even think of launching via a web site. They assume, over time, people will use their mobile applications almost entirely instead of websites.
We will never have Web 3.0, because the Web’s dead.
Web 1.0 and 2.0 companies still seem unsure how to adapt to this new paradigm. Facebook is the triumphant winner of social companies. It will go public in a few weeks and probably hit $140 billion in market capitalization. Yet, it loses money in mobile and has rather simple iPhone and iPad versions of its desktop experience. It is just trying to figure out how to make money on the web – as it only had $3.7 billion in revenues in 2011 and its revenues actually decelerated in Q1 of this year relative to Q4 of last year. It has no idea how it will make money in mobile.
The failed history of Web 1.0 companies adapting to the world of social suggests that Facebook will be as woeful at adapting to social as Google has been with its “ghost town” Google+ initiative last year. ...
... The bottom line is that the next 5 – 8 years could be incredibly dynamic. It’s possible that both Google and Facebook could be shells of their current selves – or gone entirely.
They will have all the money in the world to try and adapt to the shift to mobile but history suggests they won’t be able to successfully do it. I often hear Google bulls point to the market share of Android or Eric Schmidt’s hypothesis that Google could one day charge all Android subscribers $10 a month for value-added services as proof of future profits. Yet, where are all the great social success stories by Web 1.0 companies? I imagine we’ll see as many great examples of social companies jumping horses mid-race to become great mobile companies. ...
... The Googles and Facebooks of tomorrow might not even exist today. And several Web 1.0 and 2.0 companies might be completely wiped off the map by then.
Fortunes will be made by those who adapt to and invest in this complete greenfield.
Those who own the future are going to be the ones who create it. It’s all up for grabs. Web monopolies are not as sticky as the monopolies of old.
According to the United Nations (UN), by 2030 the world population will reach 8.3 billion. Millions of these individuals are being empowered by the social and technological progress of the last decades. The main drivers of this trend are, first and foremost, the global emergence of the middle class, particularly in Asia, near-universal access to education, the empowering effects of information and communications technology (ICT), and the evolution in the status of women in most countries. These transformations are increasing the autonomy of individuals and powerful non-state actors vis-à-vis the state.
In 1990, about 73 percent of the world population was literate. In 2010, global literacy rates reached 84 percent and the literacy rate may pass the 90 percent mark in 2030. Women are becoming empowered throughout the world, a trend that is likely to continue into the future. Women now have better access to education, information, and economic and political opportunities, all of which contribute to greater gender equality. However, progress is very uneven from region to region and between different social groups, with girls, indigenous, immigrant or low-caste women remaining especially vulnerable.
The middle class will increase in influence as its ranks swell to 3.2 billion by 2020 and to 4.9 billion by 2030. The middle class will be the protagonist of the universal spread of information societies. Citizens will be interconnected by myriad networks and greater interpersonal trans-national flows. It can therefore be assumed that the citizens of 2030 will want a greater say in their future than those of previous generations.
More and more people will live in the ‘information age’ as improved technology that is more portable and affordable makes information more universally accessible. The digital divide will not disappear over the next 20 years, but it will narrow considerably. By 2030, it is estimated that more than half of the world’s population will have internet access. However, new information technologies will remain unavailable to many people because of illiteracy and lack of access to electricity, although in regions as deprived as Sub-Saharan Africa the availability of mobile phones may compensate for limited access to electricity. (12-13)
The European country where Skype was born made a conscious decision to embrace the web after shaking off Soviet shackles.
... In a tiny (population: 1.4 million) and newly independent country like Estonia, politicians realised computers could help quickly compensate for both a minuscule workforce and a chronic lack of physical infrastructure.
Seventeen years on, the internet has done more than just help. It is now tightly entwined with Estonia's identity. "For other countries, the internet is just another service, like tap water, or clean streets," said Linnar Viik, a lecturer at the Estonian IT College, a government adviser and a man almost synonymous in Estonia with the rise of the web.
"But for young Estonians, the internet is a manifestation of something more than a service – it's a symbol of democracy and freedom."
To see why, you just have to go outside. Free Wi-Fi is everywhere, and has been for a decade.
Viik says you could walk 100 miles – from the pastel-coloured turrets here in medieval Tallinn to the university spires of Tartu – and never lose internet connection.
"We realised that if the government was going to use the internet, the internet had to be available to everybody," Viik said. "So we built a huge network of public internet access points for people who couldn't afford them at home."
The country took a similar approach to education. By 1997, thanks to a campaign led in part by Ilves, a staggering 97% of Estonian schools already had internet. Now 42 Estonian services are now managed mainly through the internet. Last year, 94% of tax returns were made online, usually within five minutes. You can vote on your laptop (at the last election, Ilves did it from Macedonia) and sign legal documents on a smartphone. Cabinet meetings have been paperless since 2000.
Doctors only issue prescriptions electronically, while in the main cities you can pay by text for bus tickets, parking, and – in some cases – a pint of beer. Not bad for country where, two decades ago, half the population had no phone line. ...
... To a British audience, the ID card will have a whiff of Big Brother. But many Estonians argue the opposite: that it allows them to keep tabs on the state, rather than the other way round.
"You'd think, given our history, we'd have a problem with it," said Ilves, in an oblique reference to the days when the KGB had an office down a cobbled street in central Tallinn.
"But I feel much more secure with a digital ID. If anyone goes into my files, they're flagged. Whereas if my files – which would exist anyway – were made of paper, no one would know who was looking at them."
Every Estonian can see who has visited their data, and they can challenge any suspicious behaviour. In one famous case, a policewoman was caught accessing information about her boyfriend. ...
The story mentions Mart Laar, the first Estonian Prime Minister after the Russian occupation. He was 32 at the time. I had the privilege of having dinner with him a few years ago at an Acton Institute event. What an amazing story. Then I had an opportunity to see a screening of the documentary The Singing Revolution with the director present. If you have never seen the documentary, you need to get it on your list. One of the most amazing stories of hope and reconciliation in the face of incredible threats. I hope to visit Estonia someday. Here is a trailer for the documentary.
... By analyzing satellite imagery, archaeologist Jason Ur and computer scientist Bjoern Menze have identified thousands of settlement sites in one section of the Fertile Crescent. They've mapped more than 14,000 settlement sites in a 23,000-square-kilometer region in northeastern Syria, and they suggest that their method can be used to map the entire region. Their work appears in this month's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Ur and Menze trained a computer program to analyze the satellite imagery's pixels to detect large concentrations of "anthropogenic sediments" – the remains of buildings and settlements now turned to dust, mounding up from the alluvial basin of this part of Syria, and detectable through radiation from the near infrared and infrared spectrum.
"One of the conclusions that we've drawn – and this won't be a terrible shocker – is settlements that were closer to perennial water sources or in areas of higher rainfall tended to have longer life histories, they tended to be larger in volume," says Ur. ...
... This new map also challenges previous ideas that the earliest cities were official constructs, created by kings or rulers. Ur says that places like Tell Brak show that early urbanization developed organically.
"We're talking about 6,000 years of urban development in one place. And cities change through time. This is one thing that’s really emerging from intensive research that’s been done in the last ten years: there's no one model for the city," says Ur. "There are any number of different approaches."
Emma Edwards, 26, has no control over the fine motor muscles in her hands, which stay tightly and awkwardly clenched. She also can’t talk, walk or move her arms more than 20 inches at a time.
Edwards, who suffered a traumatic brain injury in 2001, can write e-mails, though, and she’s revisiting a favorite pastime, sketching, for the first time in a decade, thanks to her iPad and software applications that can cost as little as $7.
That’s a switch from the $15,000 communication device she had tried, a 9-pound machine approved by her insurer that tracks eye movement on a special grid corresponding to the alphabet. That device kept her tied to those in the room around her. The iPad, along with several other consumer-driven apps, has reopened the world to her.
“You see the joy on her face” when she’s using it, said her mother, Jill. “It represents freedom for her.”
Edwards, of Rochester, Minnesota, is part of a grassroots movement sweeping the $1 billion-a-year assistive-technology market. While Pittsburgh-based DynaVox Inc. (DVOX), closely held Tobii Technology from Stockholm and Prentke Romich GmbH of Kassel, Germany, dominate the field, the advent of Apple Inc. (AAPL)’s iPad and an open operating system that enables anyone to create software is changing the way thousands of disabled people communicate and take care of their daily lives. ...
After 244 years, the Encyclopaedia Britannica is going out of print.
Those coolly authoritative, gold-lettered reference books that were once sold door-to-door by a fleet of traveling salesmen and displayed as proud fixtures in American homes will be discontinued, company executives said.
In an acknowledgment of the realities of the digital age — and of competition from the Web site Wikipedia — Encyclopaedia Britannica will focus primarily on its online encyclopedias and educational curriculum for schools. The last print version is the 32-volume 2010 edition, which weighs 129 pounds and includes new entries on global warming and the Human Genome Project.
“It’s a rite of passage in this new era,” Jorge Cauz, the president of Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., a company based in Chicago, said in an interview. “Some people will feel sad about it and nostalgic about it. But we have a better tool now. The Web site is continuously updated, it’s much more expansive and it has multimedia.” ...
I remember having a set (1960 edition, as I recall) in our living room. From my earliest days, I remember thumbing through a volume looking at pictures, and reading entries that caught my eye as I learned to read. I especially spent endless hours studying the world atlas.
