Monthly spending on certain cancer patients in Washington was $12,345 vs. $6,195 in British Columbia
Despite paying double, Americans died slightly faster than Canadians in the study
(CNN)Americans paid twice as much as Canadians for health care, but they didn’t get twice the benefit, according to a new study of patients with advanced colorectal cancer who lived, in some cases, mere miles from each other.
Continue reading… “Same cancer, worse results and twice the cost in the US”
Smart speaker users will reach 76.5 million by 2020, according to the latest eMarketer forecast.
The average smart speaker user is still an older, millennial male, but the devices are gaining traction with younger, Gen X women with kids.
Amazon Echo is the most popular, but is losing share. Google Home will likely slow Echo’s growth.
Smart speaker adoption has been so strong, US adult users will surpass wearable users this year.
US women are having fewer and fewer babies. In some ways, it’s a sign of progress.
The number of births in the US dropped by 2 percent between 2016 and 2017, to 60.2 births per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44, continuing a general downturn that started with the great recession of 2008. Getty Images/Ikon Images
American women are having so few babies these days that the fertility rate has hit a historic low, according to stunning provisional data just published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Continue reading… “The historically low birthrate, explained in 3 charts”
The first independent tests of the EmDrive suggest there’s a mundane explanation for the wildly controversial device.
Spaceflight is hard. Blasting heavy cargo, spacecraft, and maybe people to respectable speeds over interplanetary distances (not to mention the luxury of stopping at destinations) requires an amount of propellant too massive for current rockets to haul into the void.
That is, unless you have an engine that can generate thrust without fuel.
Continue reading… “NASA’s ‘impossible ‘ space engine tested-here are the results”
Psychopaths are difficult to spot most of the time. They’re not the “Jack the Ripper” caricatures you see in films or read about in books. Often, psychopaths appear normal, which makes them hard to identify.
In the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM-5, someone with a psychopathic personality type is defined as having an inflated, grandiose sense of themself, and a knack for manipulating other people. But a diagnosis is rarely simple.
One thing psychopaths tend to have in common is the careers they go for. For example, you’re likely to find a lot of them in leadership positions because of their ruthlessness, charisma, and fearlessness. They’re very good at making snap decisions, but not so good at the empathetic professions like nursing or therapy.
Continue reading… “These professions attract the highest number of psychopaths”
Richard Florida: One of the most persistent myths in America today is that urban areas are innovative and rural areas are not. While it is overwhelmingly clear that innovation and creativity tend to cluster in a small number of cities and metropolitan areas, it’s a big mistake to think that they somehow skip over rural America.
A series of studies from Tim Wojan and his colleagues at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service documents the drivers of rural innovation. Their findings draw on a variety of data sets, including a large-scale survey that compares innovation in urban and rural areas called the Rural Establishment Innovation Survey (REIS). This is based on some 11,000 business establishments with at least five paid employees in tradable industries—that is, sectors that produce goods and services that are or could be traded internationally—in rural (or non-metro) and urban (metro) areas.
Continue reading… “The rise of the rural creative class”
Rotman School of Management professor Ajay Agrawal explains how AI changes the cost of prediction and what this means for business.
With so many perspectives on the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) flooding the business press, it’s becoming increasingly rare to find one that’s truly original. So when strategy professor Ajay Agrawal shared his brilliantly simple view on AI, we stood up and took notice. Agrawal, who teaches at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management and works with AI start-ups at the Creative Destruction Lab (which he founded), posits that AI serves a single, but potentially transformative, economic purpose: it significantly lowers the cost of prediction.
Continue reading… “The economics of artificial intelligence”
Heads up, cities: Economic growth does not necessarily go hand-in-hand with economic and racial inclusion.
That’s the finding of a new, in-depth analysis by the Urban Institute (UI) of the 274 largest cities in America. The report and accompanying data tool show how economic shifts in these cities since the 1980s have corresponded with “inclusion”—the ability of low-income residents and people of color to benefit from and contribute to the city’s economic gains.
Continue reading… “The most inclusive U.S. cities, mapped”
Across the world, the pace of industrial automation is steadily accelerating. According to the International Federation of Robotics, there were 66 installed industrial robots per 10,000 employees globally in 2015 and that increased to 74 in 2016. Broken down by region, average robot density in Europe is 99 units per 10,000 workers, while’s it’s 84 in the Americas and 63 in Asia. Even though China has recorded the most dynamic development of robot density in recent years, South Korea has the highest level of density of any country on the planet.
Continue reading… “The countries with the highest density of industrial robots”
Close to half of the over 100 startups analyzed made this mistake — and never recovered.
CBI Insights recently analyzed 101 startup post-mortems (reports they wrote after they failed). The researchers extracted the top reasons startups fail, including things like a pivot going wrong; legal challenges; disharmony within the team or with investors; poor marketing; and of course the one frequently cited: running out of cash money.
But the number one reason was none of those.
It was far simpler: the startup didn’t solve a big enough problem.
Continue reading… “42 percent of startups fail for this one simple reason (It’s not what you think)”
Cancer has always been thought of as something that grows rapidly and uncontrollably, but this view may be wrong. New evidence suggests that cancer alternatively uses the “accelerator” and the “brake” in order to survive.
Continue reading… “Cancer dormancy: Why do cancer cells go to sleep?”
Making a drug is like trying to pick a lock at the molecular level. There are two ways in which you can proceed. You can try thousands of different keys at random, hopefully finding one that fits. The pharmaceutical industry does this all the time – sometimes screening hundreds of thousands of compounds to see if they interact with a certain enzyme or protein. But unfortunately it’s not always efficient – there are more drug molecule shapes than seconds have passed since the beginning of the universe.
Alternatively, like a safe cracker, you can x-ray the lock you want to open and work out the probable shape of the key from the pictures you get. This is much more effective for discovering drugs, as you can use computer models to identify promising compounds before researchers go into the lab to find the best one. Now a study, published in Nature, presents detailed images of a crucial anti-ageing enzyme known as telomerase – raising hopes that we can soon slow ageing and cure cancer.
By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.
Learn More about this exciting program.