Analysis – Page 16

AI, Analysis, Artificial Intelligence, DNA, Medical Breakthrough

Face-scanning A.I. can help doctors spot unusual genetic disorders

January 25, 2019

Facial recognition can help unlock your phone. Could it also be able to play a far more valuable role in people’s lives by identifying whether or not a person has a rare genetic disorder, based exclusively on their facial features? DeepGestalt, an artificial intelligence built by the Boston-based tech company FDNA, suggests that the answer is a resounding “yes.”

The algorithm is already being used by leading geneticists at more than 2,000 sites in upward of 130 countries around the world. In a new study, published in the journal Nature Medicine, researchers show how the algorithm was able to outperform clinicians when it came to identifying diseases.

The study involved 17,000 kids with 200-plus genetic disorders. Its best performance came in distinguishing between different subtypes of a genetic disorder called Noonan syndrome, one of whose symptoms includes mildly unusual facial features. The A.I. was able to make the correct distinction 64 percent of the time. That is far from perfect, but it is significantly better than human clinicians, who identified Noonan syndrome correctly in just 20 percent of cases.

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Analysis, China, Economy, Future

Chart: The World’s Largest 10 Economies in 2030

January 21, 2019

The Chart of the Week is a weekly Visual Capitalist feature on Fridays.

Today’s emerging markets are tomorrow’s powerhouses, according to a recent forecast from Standard Chartered, a multinational bank headquartered in London.

The bank sees developing economies like Indonesia, Turkey, Brazil, and Egypt all moving up the ladder – and by 2030, it estimates that seven of the world’s largest 10 economies by GDP (PPP) will be located in emerging markets.

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Analysis, Latest Trend, Report

Book sales are up this year over last year, and physical books are thriving

January 21, 2019

It’s a tale as old as time, or, at least, the internet: None of us are reading any more, the physical book is dead, Amazon has killed the independent bookstore, and it’s all only going to get worse. But this year, the story looks like just that—a fiction. We are buying books—especially the kind with physical pages—and we’re doing so, increasingly, in well-loved indie bookstores.

In the UK, the Guardian reports, Nielsen BookScan recored year-on-year book sale growth of 22 million pounds ($28 million). It’s likely that 2018 will top 2016’s total sales of 1.59 billion pounds, too, with booksellers on both sides of the Atlantic noting an anecdotal uptick in sales and browsing customers. It’s been good news for British book chains—the country’s largest bookseller, Waterstones, made its first profit since the 2008 financial crisis—and for independent bookshops, too: this year was the first since the advent of Amazon where the number of stores actually went up, rather than down.

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Analysis, Historical Perspectives, Human Behavior

America’s most & least trusted professions

January 20, 2019

When it comes to honesty in the workplace, some professions have a better reputation than others. For example, some people might question a doctor’s honesty or ethics when it comes to a diagnosis or blame the salesperson when a newly purchased used car breaks down after 20 miles on the road. That begs the question: what professions do American trust the most and the least today? Gallup delved into the issue and released an interesting poll about honesty and ethical standards in the workplace in late December. Once again, nurses are top of the honesty league and they have been there for 17 years in succession.

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3D Printer, Analysis, Engineering, Science & Technology News, Software Development

Engineers can now reverse-engineer 3D models

January 12, 2019

A system that uses a technique called constructive solid geometry (CSG) is allowing MIT researchers to deconstruct objects and turn them into 3D models, thereby allowing them to reverse-engineer complex things.

The system appeared in a paper entitled “InverseCSG: Automatic Conversion of 3D Models to CSG Trees” by Tao Du, Jeevana Priya Inala, Yewen Pu, Andrew Spielberg, Adriana Schulz, Daniela Rus, Armando Solar-Lezama, and Wojciech Matusik.

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Alzheimer's Disease, Analysis, Health & Fitness, Human Behavior

New research says men who marry intelligent women live longer

January 10, 2019

New research has shown that if a man wants to live a long healthy life, marrying a smart woman will go a long way in fulfilling this desire. Besides increasing longevity, having an intelligent wife can negate the chances of a man catching dementia. The right partner will definitely help enrich a person’s life.

However, intelligence is not the only criteria for a happy relationship. Compatibility is another key factor. Just like the old adage says ‘do not judge a book by its cover,’ so too a person’s outward appearance should not be the yardstick for the selection of a partner. Younger people are generally attracted to the physical aspects of a person and sometimes fail to look beyond that. This often results in bad relationships or marriages in the later years. Choosing mind over matter can, therefore, have great benefits for both.

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AI, Analysis, Artificial Intelligence, government, Science & Technology News

The welfare state is committing suicide by Artificial Intelligence

January 3, 2019

Denmark is using algorithms to deliver benefits to citizens—and undermining its own democracy in the process.

Everyone likes to talk about the ways that liberalism might be killed off, whether by populism at home or adversaries abroad. Fewer talk about the growing indications in places like Denmark that liberal democracy might accidentally commit suicide.

As a philosophy of government, liberalism is premised on the belief that the coercive powers of public authorities should be used in service of individual freedom and flourishing, and that they should therefore be constrained by laws controlling their scope, limits, and discretion. That is the basis for historic liberal achievements such as human rights and the rule of law, which are built into the infrastructure of the Scandinavian welfare state.

Yet the idea of legal constraint is increasingly difficult to reconcile with the revolution promised by artificial intelligence and machine learning—specifically, those technologies’ promises of vast social benefits in exchange for unconstrained access to data and lack of adequate regulation on what can be done with it. Algorithms hold the allure of providing wider-ranging benefits to welfare states, and of delivering these benefits more efficiently.

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Analysis, Big Problems, Birth

Older adults projected to outnumber children for the first time in U.S. history

January 3, 2019

If you’re feeling old, you’re in good company and apparently a lot of it. New statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau show that for the first time in U.S. history, older people are projected to outnumber children. And they expect it to happen in a little over a decade.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2017 National Population Projections, the year 2030 will mark an important demographic turning point in the country’s history.

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Analysis, Food, Health & Fitness

How data mining reveals the world’s healthiest cuisines

December 29, 2018

Algorithms are teasing apart the link between food and health to provide the first evidence that we really are what we eat.

Jean Brillat-Savarin was a 19th-century French lawyer famed for his writings on gastronomy. In his most famous work, he said: “Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es.” Or “Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are.”

This idea—that you are what you eat—has become increasingly popular. Since Brillat-Savarin’s time it has been used as the title of various cookbooks and health guides; for some it is a way of life.

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Analysis, Driverless vehicles, Transportation

Teens trust driverless cars: Older folks, not so much

December 29, 2018

A poll shows the plain truth: The youth of today is much more willing to get behind the wheel (but not use the wheel) of a driverless car than any other age group.

In a poll featured on Statista and conducted by iAccenture and Harris Interactive of 21,000 respondents ages 14 and up, people were asked if they were willing to be passengers in a so-called self-driving vehicle—a.k.a. an autonomous car.

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Analysis, Human Behavior, Memory

A Nobel Prize-winning psychologist says most people don’t really want to be happy

December 29, 2018

We think we want to be happy. Yet many of us are actually working toward some other end, according to cognitive psychologist Daniel Kahneman, winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics.

Kahneman contends that happiness and satisfaction are distinct. Happiness is a momentary experience that arises spontaneously and is fleeting. Meanwhile, satisfaction is a long-term feeling, built over time and based on achieving goals and building the kind of life you admire. On the Dec. 19 podcast “Conversations with Tyler,” hosted by economist Tyler Cowen, Kahneman explains that working toward one goal may undermine our ability to experience the other.

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Analysis, Housing, Human Behavior, Latest Trend

The challenge of rural depopulation: Facing the scenario of demographic deserts in the EU

December 28, 2018

The rural exodus has been triggered in Europe since the early decades of the second half of the twentieth century. Many people, especially the younger members of society, continue to migrate to the cities looking for job opportunities, better felicities, and higher wages than in the countryside. Over the years, the exodus to the vibrant urban centers together with the negative natural growth has led to an unstoppable dynamic of population decline in many EU territories, which in addition generate substantial gaps between regions of the same country. As a result, Europe must face today the scenario of demographic deserts threatening throughout the ‘old continent’.

The European Commission report on poverty in rural areas identified the exodus and aging problem, the remoteness, the lack of education facilities and the labor market issues (such a lower employment rates and seasonal work) as the four main factors to determine the risk of poverty and social exclusion. It is not a coincidence that these deficiencies are features of sparsely populated and underpopulated regions. According to a Joint Research Centre report, if the current economic and demographic trends continue, one would expect a growing number of regions to be classified as ‘less developed’.

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