Institutional distrust is so high right now, and cognitive bias so strong always, that the people who fall for hoax news stories are frequently only interested in consuming information that conforms with their views — even when it’s demonstrably fake.
A lot of technological innovation has gone into figuring out how to take a chaotic mix of items and separate it into relatively pure streams of materials. But being able to do so isn't enough—it has to be made into a sustainable business. So today, a lot of the innovation that is taking place in the recycling industry must dually focus on the economics.
Disney’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens just had the greatest opening weekend of all time. But the world barely noticed that Disney’s stock price plunged about 5%. What gives? While most people were watching the box office numbers (or the movie), investors were focused on big-picture strategy. Ford and Google met earlier this month to discuss the idea of self-driving cars (which) was widely dismissed as impossible only a decade ago
At too many companies in too many industries, “People are our most important resource,” is the most cynical of platitudes. But in a customer service-intensive business, no truer words could ever be spoken. You can’t even come close to creating a customer-centric organization until you learn to effectively recruit, retain, and develop employees.
Data is expected to double every two years for the next decade, hitting 45,000 exabytes in 2020.
Amazon accounts for a quarter of every new $1 of growth in all of retail, including brick-and-mortar sales.
Apple is worming its way into every crevice in your digital life—your car, your doctor’s office, your wallet, your house. With iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite, it also deepened the links between its different product lines, making it easier to bounce information around among your various Apple devices.
'White Christmas,' 'Rudolf,' 'Let It Snow,' etc
Just Capital will rank corporations on how “justly,” they treat employees, society and the environment. The idea is to laud companies that offer better pay, happier workplaces and greater transparency — and perhaps shame others to follow suit. This kind of moral index, Mr. Jones said, “could not only impact investors, it could impact consumers, it might impact the way companies hire, the way people go and work with companies; it will impact boardrooms.”
.‘Tis the season for some to take offense when a store clerk says “happy holidays” instead of “merry Christmas,” or when a coffee chain converts to plain red cups.
Yet another reason why calculating the value of intangibles deserves greater respect. Anyone who has had microeconomics knows that an income transfer, as opposed to a gift in-kind, gets you to a higher level of utility. Putting theory under the tree is another matter.
Nearly one in three Americans will take a trip this holiday season, with 100.5 million expected to journey 50 miles or more from home. This represents a 1.4 percent increase over last year and the seventh consecutive year of year-end holiday travel growth. The year-end holiday travel period is defined as Wednesday, December 23, 2015 to Sunday, January 3, 2016.
The National Electronic Injury Surveillance System has specific codes for Christmas-related injuries. Nearly half of all Christmas-related injuries (47 percent) were the result of a fall while decorating or putting decorations away.
Selling trees on the sidewalks of New York City in the dead of winter. Why? The short answer: Money. Christmas trees in New York City are a peculiar market. A salary plus commission after a certain quota for the month, which comes out to considerably more than a month of working a full time job for $20 an hour. For a lot of the flexibly employed people selling Christmas trees, it’s enough to live a couple months of the new year without having to work.
One advantage to this new way of signing in is the protection against phishing (the attempt to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords, and credit card information by masquerading as a trustworthy entity). Because the phone becomes the password, so to speak, users can’t exactly hand their device over via a text message, email, or err … over the phone
Walmart decided it needed less cluttered-looking stores, so it cleaned out its aisles and tried to streamline its merchandise and in-store promotions. They were wrong. Sales declined, resulting in more than $1 billion in lost revenue. Stuff went back into the aisle and sales went back up. Ron Johnson, a veteran of Target and Apple, tried to streamline the stores of J. C. Penney. Sales dropped 25 percent, and Mr. Johnson was out of a job the next year.
Investors are clear on which gizmo makers are worth owning: None. It's been a bust of a year for investors in gadget makers. Five of the six consumer electronics stocks in the Russell 3000, including camera maker GoPro (GPRO) are down this year. They're not down a little. An equal-weighted index of the stocks is down more than 21%.
Autonomous weaponized robots are already being used by the military to patrol borders, and a Texas company has created a drone to hover over private property and, without human instruction, fire a Taser dart to keep a potential intruder under shock until the authorities arrive. Imagine facial-recognition capability. Don’t forget: They can be hacked
Google gets a partner to help it handle the expense and hassle of actually manufacturing autonomous vehicles, especially if it plans to make cars available for personal ownership as well as transportation systems. Google has said (it) plans to work with “top-tier OEMs” instead of keeping everything in-house and will find partners to build cars. Ford (gets) an edge over rivals.
If the corporate defense side gets what they’re asking for, class actions involving privacy or violations of the wage and hour laws will shrink dramatically, and in many cases become impossible.
Cab drivers have long complained that taxi owners' failure to innovate helped facilitate Uber's rise to prominence. A smartphone in every car is the only way to advance the taxi industry, and we now have a mobile platform that can replace every expensive and outdated piece of taxi hardware.
Target app’s Application Program Interface (API) is easily accessible over the Internet. An API is a set of conditions where if you ask a question it sends the answer. The Target API does not require any authentication. The only thing you need to parse all of the data automatically is to figure out how the user ID is generated.
Economists are interested in sales, not because they want cheap stuff (well, maybe they’re as partial to a deal as anyone), but because price flexibility—how quickly prices adjust to changes in costs or demand—is crucial to understanding how fiscal and monetary policy affect economic performance.Temporary markdowns barely respond to changes in costs and economic conditions, suggesting that monetary policy generates only muted change.
Beware of spurious correlations. I have difficulty understanding where the physical act of clicking or the writing a few thoughts ‘engages’ me fully cognitively or affectively in an issue, brand, or whatever.
Microlending programs had little to no effect on participants’ income or financial well-being. Studies find no evidence that borrowers are, on average, hurt by the loans. But they don’t appear to be helped much. None of the studies found statistically significant increases in household income or spending. Four of the six found no change in food consumption.
A way to more accurately assess risks? Big Data technology – genetic profiling and behavioural analytics – give us the chance to draw an empirical distinction between when ill health is caused by bad choices, and when it’s down to genetic factors beyond our control. (But) ethical concerns, such as privacy, need to be taken very seriously.
Open sourcing hardware designs can help reduce the cost of the machines. If more companies start using the designs, manufacturers can build the machines at a lower cost. And if more companies use the designs to do more AI work, it helps accelerate the evolution of deep learning as a whole—including software as well as hardware. So, yes, Facebook is giving away its secrets so that it can better compete with Google—and everyone else.
We don't have a rich and deep government-provided social-safety net. If we look to the government as the place the social-safety net is going to come from, we'll fall short. At least for now, industry and workers will have to figure out a way forward on their own, while regulators and laws play catch up.
What has set apart Disney is its determination to put storytelling at the heart of its business, and its ability to get its hands on new characters capable of bringing fans back again and again. Disney is making a fortune and safeguarding its future by buying childhood, piece by piece
Geography has come roaring back as a determinant of economic fortune. Throughout most of the country’s history, American government pursued policies designed to preserve local control of businesses and to check the tendency of a few dominant cities to monopolize power over the rest of the country. Each of these policy levers were flipped in the opposite direction, usually in the guise of “deregulation.”
Some analysts expect BlackBerry to sell off its handset business once its software division has sufficient scale.
Private cloud companies are being valued at 11.8 times revenue, down from a peak multiple of 15 earlier in the year. IPOs remained weak, with tech companies going public at the slowest rate since 2009, and most of those that hit the market failing to reward late-stage investors.
Amazon is fed up with the third-party carriers being a bottleneck to their growth.
That has led Amazon to consider handling more of its own delivery. The company has approached several cargo-aircraft lessors to line up planes. Leasing 20 jets would be a significant expansion of an Amazon trial operation out of Wilmington, Ohio
The premise of Porter’s competitive advantage— increase the whole by optimizing each of the the parts in isolation—has become untenable. Machine intelligence is replacing human cognitive power much like machines replace(d) muscle power a century ago. What drives value is the ability to collaborate with both humans and machines. In the past, we could dominate by accumulating resources and driving efficiency, but now agility and interoperability rule the day.
There's a strong indication that fans will be able to hear "Hey Jude" on Thursday, Dec. 24. (Keep an eye out for whether Liverpool's most famous sons unseat Justin Bieber's streaming record.)
Do the interests of an elite club of Silicon Valley billionaires really align with the interests of humanity?
Cynics might suggest this is mostly an attempt to stop the advantages of artificial intelligence being monopolised by a single corporation or person.
The data show that officers who rack up many complaints are more likely to end up having a complaint sustained, suggesting they really are bad cops. Officers with a history of one or two complaints in 2011-13 have a 30 percent to 37 percent chance of receiving a complaint in the following two years. Repeaters — those with 15 or 20 incidents — are certain to have a complaint against them in 2014-15. There is a clear signal in the data of the bad actors and, whether they are going to commit misconduct.
The three experience environments that all organizations much focus on are: physical, cultural, and technological.Some common themes start to emerge, namely around the role of leadership, open collaboration and communication, transparency in the workplace, embracing vulnerability.
The vehicles have racked up a crash rate double that of those with human drivers.
The glitch?
They obey the law all the time, as in, without exception.
Wall Street analysts again become anxious about whether iPhone sales can continue to grow over the coming year. Apple has seen huge growth in the scale of device production, particularly the iPhone, which grew shipments by more than a third last year.
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As a Partner and Co-Founder of Predictiv and PredictivAsia, Jon specializes in management performance and organizational effectiveness for both domestic and international clients. He is an editor and author whose works include Invisible Advantage: How Intangilbles are Driving Business Performance.
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