Demand your personal data from Google and Facebook urges Tim Berners-Lee

Berners-Lee

Tim Berners-Lee

Inventor of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, has urged internet users to demand their personal data from online giants such as Google and Facebook to usher in a new era of highly personalized computer services “with tremendous potential to help humanity”.

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The aftermath of BP oil spill: mutant seafood

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Signs of the impact on the regional ecosystem are ominous: mutated shrimp, fish with oozing sores, underdeveloped blue crabs lacking claws, eyeless crabs and shrimp – and scientists and fishermen point fingers towards BP’s oil as being the cause.

Two years after BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, fishermen are finding deformed fish and mutant shrimp in their seafood catch…

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Scientific retractions increasing exponentially

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In an article in today’s New York Times, “A sharp rise in retractions prompts calls for reform,” Carl Zimmer documents and analyzes the sharp increase in the proportion of papers retracted in the scientific literature. From 2000-2009 the trend is disturbing (pictured above).

The article notes:

In October 2011, for example, the journal Nature reported that published retractions had increased tenfold over the past decade, while the number of published papers had increased by just 44 percent. In 2010 The Journal of Medical Ethics published a study finding the new raft of recent retractions was a mix of misconduct and honest scientific mistakes…
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Brain scans can predict who will gain weight or have sex in the next 6 months

brain scan

Women whose nucleus accumbens reacts strongly to pictures of appealing food are more likely to gain weight in the next six months.

The activity in the nucleus accumbens, a region of the brain associated with reward, can predict who will gain weight or have sex in the next six months, according to new research.

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Digital coupons rival print in effectiveness

online-coupons

Consumers perform online product research, make purchases.

Price-conscious consumers have been driven online by the battered US economy to do research before making a purchase, and eMarketer estimates that there will be 92.5 million online coupon users by the end of 2012. Those savings-savvy consumers will no doubt be helped by electronic circulars, which now rival their print counterparts in penetration, according to a November 2011 study of US internet users by Yahoo! and Ipsos.

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Wearable computing devices are next big thing

wearable computers

Wearable computers

A report released by Forrester Research says that the wearable computing wars are about to begin. They predict that consumers will begin experimenting more with wearable computers over the coming year, specifically around health and fitness, navigation, social networking and gaming. This new theme among consumers will hasten big tech companies to begin creating wearable computing products.

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To envision sustainable business, We must reimagine our economy

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From senior executives identifying the profit motive as an obstacle to sustainability to corporations questioning the very nature of capitalism as we know it, the plus side of the recent financial crisis and ongoing slow recovery has been that tough questions are finally being asked about how our economy functions and whose interests it serves.

On May 2nd Forum for the Future—whose work on system innovation aims to create change across entire sectors of our economy—are hosting an event in New York which will explore better ways of doing business in a post-Great Recession world…

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