2019 – Page 76 – Impact Lab

Big Problems, Employment, Science & Technology News

Baby boomers upend the workforce one last time

March 10, 2019

As older workers look to retire, companies reckon with how to replace departing skill sets

Baby boomers are entering their final years in the workforce, and their relationships with their employers are changing. Some companies are considering offering older workers partial-year employment and shorter hours.The youngest baby boomers are around 55 years old. The oldest are in their 70s. MostAmericans don’t remember a workforce without the largest generation.

And yet, as boomers enter their final years in the workforce, their retirements are taking companies by surprise.

In the next five years, almost three-quarters of the companies surveyed in 2018 by Willis Towers Watson, a risk-management and insurance brokerage company, expect to face significant or moderate challenges from late retirements. But because nothing is predictable, a significant share are also worried about early ones.

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Big Problems, Food, Science & Technology News, Shopping, Transportation

Americas trucker shortage is about to hit consumers where it hurts

March 10, 2019

The U.S. Is Facing A Truck Driver Shortage

And autonomous trucks won’t arrive in time to fix it.

America’s trucker shortage is about to hit consumers right where it hurts: in the kitty litter.

McDonald’s Corp.’s long-time distributor Martin-Brower Co. is raising delivery fees, imperiling low menu prices, and Procter & Gamble Co., Church & Dwight Co. and Hasbro Inc. are sounding the alarm that higher freight fees could be passed on to consumers of everything from Crest toothpaste to Arm & Hammer cat litter to My Little Pony figurines. And it’s all because transport companies can’t find drivers.

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Bitcoin, Blockchain, government, Money Talk, Science & Technology News

Sweden: How to live in the world’s first cashless society

March 8, 2019

Sweden goes from being the first in adopting banknotes in Europe in 1661 to introducing its own digital currency in 2021, and becoming the first world’s cashless society in 2023.

How is a country becoming the world’s first cashless society? Sweden, one of the most technologically advanced nations on the planet, is leading the way.

Sweden is expected to become the world’s first cashless society by March 2023. By then, cash will not be accepted any longer as a means of payment in Sweden.

Sweden has always been one of the first countries in embracing new technologies. There is a tradition in Sweden about being the first. This is noticeable throughout the Scandinavian country’s history. And its financial system is not the exception.

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AI, Artificial Intelligence, Food, Science & Technology News

AI trained on decades of food research is making brand-new foods

March 8, 2019

IRON CHEF

IBM’s AI scientists teamed up with McCormick & Company’s food developers to enhance food research.

FlavorBot

You may not think that Tuscan chicken’s creamy, garlicky flavor is due for a high-tech upgrade, but advanced artificial intelligence is on the case all the same. An AI algorithm is about to analyze and improve that and other classic recipes before designing some brand-new foods as well.

And if it goes well, we can expect AI to play a bigger role in developing the foods we eat every day. Right now, some big names are working to amass the expertise of all the world’s food experts, head chefs, and flavor scientists into a single artificial intelligence algorithm that concocts new foods better and faster than any mere human.

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Big Problems, Healthcare, Medicine, Science & Technology News

The future of pain management

March 8, 2019

Access to painkilling medications that can’t cause addiction, abuse, and overdose would make life easier for prescribers and could save the lives of patients.

Development of such drugs has been slow-going, in part because scientists don’t completely know how chronic pain works. They believe the body has multiple pathways to chronic pain, and that means multiple targets for painkillers. But researchers don’t have proven ways to identify which pathway is causing the pain in each person.

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3D Printer, Automation, Robotics, Robots, Science & Technology News

The future is here. Robots can now 3D print…themselves

March 8, 2019

https://futurism.com/videos/the-future-is-here-robots-can-now-3d-print-themselves

Analysis, Futurist, Human Behavior, Science & Technology News

Why Futurism has a cultural blind spot

March 8, 2019

We predicted cell phones, but not women in the workplace

In early 1999, during the halftime of a University of Washington basketball game, a time capsule from 1927 was opened. Among the contents of this portal to the past were some yellowing newspapers, a Mercury dime, a student handbook, and a building permit. The crowd promptly erupted into boos. One student declared the items “dumb.”

Such disappointment in time capsules seems to run endemic, suggests William E. Jarvis in his book Time Capsules: A Cultural History. A headline from The Onion, he notes, sums it up: “Newly unearthed time capsule just full of useless old crap.” Time capsules, after all, exude a kind of pathos: They show us that the future was not quite as advanced as we thought it would be, nor did it come as quickly. The past, meanwhile, turns out to not be as radically distinct as we thought.

In his book Predicting the Future, Nicholas Rescher writes that “we incline to view the future through a telescope, as it were, thereby magnifying and bringing nearer what we can manage to see.” So too do we view the past through the other end of the telescope, making things look farther away than they actually were, or losing sight of some things altogether.

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Alzheimer's Disease, cutting edge, Genes, Medical Breakthrough, Science & Technology News

A novel dementia treatment will flood people’s brains with a low-risk version of a key gene.

March 7, 2019

No one knows for certain what causes Alzheimer’s disease. But one fact about the condition has gained nearly irrefutable status. Depending on what versions of a gene called APOE you inherit, your risk of the brain disorder can be half the average—or more than 12 times as high.

Sometimes called “the forgetting gene,” APOE comes in three common versions, called 2, 3, and 4. Type 2 lowers a person’s risk, 3 is average, and 4 increases the chance dramatically. The risk is so great that doctors avoid testing people for APOE because a bad result can be upsetting, and there’s nothing to do about it. There’s no cure, and you can’t change your genes, either.

Well, today you can’t. But doctors in New York City say that beginning in May, they will start testing a novel gene therapy in which people with the unluckiest APOE genes will be given a huge dose to their brain of the low-risk version.

Continue reading… “A novel dementia treatment will flood people’s brains with a low-risk version of a key gene.”

Advertising, Human Behavior, Science & Technology News, Shopping, Social Media

Today’s influencer economy can be explained by a 19th century economic theory

March 7, 2019

At the end of the 19th century, American economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen said that people take their cues about what to consume from the social class immediately above their own. They want things just beyond their reach.

A new paper in the journal Communication, Culture and Critique shows how this theory explains some dynamics of the influencer economy and the rules that govern Instagram. In it, researchers Emily Hund and Lee McGuigan at the University of Pennsylvania investigate the mechanics of “a shoppable life.” The term describes the contemporary phenomenon of influencers marketing their lifestyles, then selling aspects of it, like the beauty products they use or elements of their home’s decor, through nearly seamless technological infrastructure, and the finding that more and more commercial opportunities rise with the way people present themselves and interact with each other.

One influencer told the researchers that a favorite part of her job is getting freebies, like a new set of furniture, from brands that want to be promoted in her channels. “They’re things that I love and never could have afforded on my own, and it’s going to bring a lot of value to the blog, so I’m excited about those just for that reason.”

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Automation, Business, Robotics, Robots, Science & Technology News

The big American robot push

March 7, 2019

In a challenge to the narrative of a declining American advantage in the global tech race, U.S. factories are installing record numbers of robots — and elite universities, endowed with huge new contributions, are adding vast centers to study artificial intelligence.

Why it matters: As we have reported previously, China has a massive global lead in the absolute number of new factory robots, and is pouring large sums into developing AI. But the twin U.S. trendlines — a surge in university research spending and the spike in robots — suggest a still-robust competition to dominate technologies of the future.

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3D Printer, Analysis, Clothing, Science & Technology News, Shopping

The perfect pair of pants is just a 3D body scan away

March 6, 2019

LIKE SO MANY women, Meghan Litchfield dreaded shopping for jeans. There were the garden-variety complaints: inconsistent sizing between brands, the way back pockets stretched or sagged, the humiliation of walking into a dressing room with half a dozen options only to walk out empty-handed. Even the best candidates were ill-fitting. Most of the time, she’d buy jeans one size up to fit her hips, then ask a tailor take them in at the waist.

Litchfield, formerly a vice president at GoPro, figured there must be a way to shop that wasn’t so demoralizing. Instead of taking off-the-rack clothes to the tailor, what if she could buy her clothes tailor-made? And what if she could make that happen for other women, too?

A solution arrived late last year with Redthread, the startup Litchfield created to make bespoke clothing for anyone with a smartphone. Customers choose an item from Redthread’s website, fill out a “fit quiz,” and capture a series of full-body photos with their phone. Redthread pulls 3D measurement data from those photos and, combined with a customer’s fit preferences, creates a made-to-order item.

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Computer Security, Latest Trend, mobile technology, Science & Technology News

Android is helping kill passwords on a billion devices

March 6, 2019

IT’S MORE IMPORTANT than ever to manage your passwords online, and also harder to keep up with them. That’s a bad combination. So the FIDO Alliance—a consortium that develops open source authentication standards—has pushed to expand its secure login protocols to make seamless logins a reality. Now Android’s on board, which means 1 billion devices can say goodbye to passwords in more digital services than seen before.

On Monday, Google and the FIDO Alliance announced that Android has added certified support for the FIDO2 standard, meaning the vast majority of devices running Android 7 or later will now be able to handle password-less logins in mobile browsers like Chrome. Android already offered secure FIDO login options for mobile apps, where you authenticate using a phone’s fingerprint scanner or with a hardware dongle like a YubiKey. But FIDO2 support will make it possible to use these easy authentication steps for web services in a mobile browser, instead of having the tedious task of typing in your password every time you want to log in to an account. Web developers can now design their sites to interact with Android’s FIDO2 management infrastructure.

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