Analysis – Page 3 – Impact Lab

Analysis, Big Problems, Environment, Science & Technology News

World wildlife plummets more than two-thirds in 50 years: index

September 17, 2020

Graphic outlining the environmental degredation of the oceans caused by human activity.

Global animal, bird and fish populations have plummeted more than two-thirds in less than 50 years due to rampant over-consumption, experts said Thursday in a stark warning to save nature in order to save ourselves.

Human activity has severely degraded three quarters of all land and 40 percent of Earth’s oceans, and our quickening destruction of nature is likely to have untold consequences on our health and livelihoods.

The Living Planet Index, which tracks more than 4,000 species of vertebrates, warned that increasing deforestation and agricultural expansion were the key drivers behind a 68 percent average decline in populations between 1970 and 2016.

It warned that continued natural habitat loss increased the risk of future pandemics as humans expand their presence into ever closer contact with wild animals.

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Analysis, Historical Perspectives, Internet, Science & Technology News

Dozens of scientific journals have vanished from the internet, and no one preserved them

September 16, 2020

Most open-access journals lack the technical means and plans to preserve their articles, despite a mandate from some funders that they do so.

Eighty-four online-only, open-access (OA) journals in the sciences, and nearly 100 more in the social sciences and humanities, have disappeared from the internet over the past 2 decades as publishers stopped maintaining them, potentially depriving scholars of useful research findings, a study has found.

An additional 900 journals published only online also may be at risk of vanishing because they are inactive, says a preprint posted on 3 September on the arXiv server. The number of OA journals tripled from 2009 to 2019, and on average the vanished titles operated for nearly 10 years before going dark, which “might imply that a large number … is yet to vanish,” the authors write.

The study didn’t identify examples of prominent journals or articles that were lost, nor collect data on the journals’ impact factors and citation rates to the articles. About half of the journals were published by research institutions or scholarly societies; none of the societies are large players in the natural sciences. None of the now-dark journals was produced by a large commercial publisher.

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Analysis, Business, Coronavirus, Science & Technology News, Trending

‘Do I really need this much office space?’ Pandemic emptied buildings, but how long?

September 10, 2020

Empty offices sit above empty retail stores on Broadway in downtown Manhattan.

As commercial real estate continues to lie vacant around the U.S., it may contribute to a vicious economic cycle that reshapes our cities.

Adam Johnson enjoys going into the office. It helps that he works in one of the nicest buildings in Midtown Manhattan: a 35-story art deco high-rise at the corner of 58th Street and Fifth Avenue, overlooking Central Park and the Plaza Hotel.

Johnson’s a stock picker — he writes an investment newsletter called Bullseye Brief — and, ostensibly, he shares the sixth floor with a real estate showroom and an assortment of hedge funds. They all left months ago.

“I am the only person who’s been coming in here since April 1st,” he says.

Continue reading… “‘Do I really need this much office space?’ Pandemic emptied buildings, but how long?”

Analysis, Big Problems, Coronavirus, Healthcare, Science & Technology News

CDC: 94% of Covid-19 deaths had underlying medical conditions

September 4, 2020

This image depicts the exterior of the CDC’s “Tom Harkin Global Communications Center” located on the organization’s Roybal Campus in Atlanta, Georgia.

ATLANTA, Ga. (WEYI) – The Centers for Disease Control released information showing how many people who died from COVID-19 had comorbidities or underlying conditions as they are sometimes referred to by doctors.

According to the CDC, comorbidity is defined as: ” more than one disease or condition is present in the same person at the same time. Conditions described as comorbidities are often chronic or long-term conditions. Other names to describe comorbid conditions are coexisting or co-occurring conditions and sometimes also “multimorbidity” or “multiple chronic conditions.”

Comorbidity and underlying conditions can both be used to describe conditions that exist in one person at the same time. These can also contribute to a persons death who has been diagnosed with COVID-19.

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Analysis, brains, Health & Fitness, New Viewpoints, Science & Technology News

The surprising upsides of worrying

September 3, 2020

Anxiety can be exhausting, but there is often a reason for it – and there are some surprising benefits to certain kinds of worrying.

“I’m a near-professional worrier,” admits Kate Sweeny ruefully. She’s struggled for much of her life with anxiety over things she can’t entirely control – including, these days, whether her parents are following social-distancing guidance during the Covid-19 pandemic.

A constant hum of low-grade worry affects many people, but what’s distinct about Sweeny is that it partly motivated her career choices. As a health psychologist at the University of California, Riverside, she specialises in understanding worry and stress.

“Not everybody uses their own life as fodder for research,” she laughs, but she’s found inspiration in her own experiences. One of her surprising findings has been that worrying can be beneficial in a variety of situations, from waiting for exam results to safeguarding health.

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2020 Predictions, Analysis, Coronavirus, Entertainment, New Viewpoints, Science & Technology News

The Event Industry is being confronted by its Napster moment

September 1, 2020

All types of business events are in danger of their revenue streams of tickets, sponsorships, memberships, and other types of fees being eroded. This is happening as the world gets used to digital formats and alternatives emerge to physical networking, matchmaking, and other tasks we get out of these events. The threat sounds familiar?

I won’t bury the headline: the vast, global events industry is going through its Napster moment through this pandemic, and is in denial on what this will do to it.

Everything about the underlying economics of this sprawling, diverse, chaotic and highly profitable sector is being undercut by the move to virtual, and 2019 may be the year where the industry’s revenues peaked. This year could be the event industry’s 2000 moment à la what happened to the music industry.

I was there during the music industry’s Napster moment in late ’90s, a cub reporter covering the vast promise of early internet, and wrote hundreds of stories about what happened to labels and the economic structure of music industry and music acts. I wrote about the atomization of the album into singles and the download boom with rise of Apple’s iTunes, and then the start of the streaming boom that led to Spotify and others since.

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Analysis, Health & Fitness, Medicine, Science & Technology News

World-first database catalogs 1,000s of viruses in our gut microbiome

August 31, 2020

A new study detected over 33,000 unique virus populations that reside in human gut microbiomes

Researchers from Ohio State University have created the first catalog of viral populations known to inhabit the human gut. Called the Gut Virome Database, the study suggests each person’s gut viral population is as unique as their fingerprints.

Our gut microbiome has become a major focus of research over the past few years after the trillions of micro-organisms living in out digestive system were found to play a key role in maintaining human health. The vast majority of these organisms in our gut are bacteria, but the gut microbiome isn’t just a massive bacterial population – it also consists of parasites, fungi and viruses.

Cataloging these other microbiome inhabitants is not easy. Viruses, unlike bacteria, lack any universal genomic markers. In fact, anywhere from 40 to 90 percent of viral genomic sequences are known as “viral dark matter,” meaning they don’t align with any known reference virus sequences.

So the first step for the researchers was to compile data from dozens of prior studies looking at viruses in the human gut. The ultimate dataset compiled encompassed nearly 2,000 people spanning 16 countries.

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Analysis, Coronavirus, Healthcare, Medicine, Science & Technology News

Why do Covid fatalities remain low when infection numbers are rising?

August 28, 2020

While some scientists believe the virus has become less deadly, others look at the factors that suggest otherwise

Are Covid-19 death rates decreasing?

Most statistics indicate that although cases of Covid-19 are rising in many parts of Europe and the United States, the number of deaths and cases of severe complications remain relatively low. For example, patients on ventilators have dropped from 3,000 at the epidemic’s peak in Britain to 70. At the same time, the number of cases in the UK have begun to rise in many areas.

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Analysis, Coronavirus, Education, Science & Technology News, Trending

New global data reveal education technology’s impact on learning

August 3, 2020

The use of technology in education has become a lifeline during the COVID-19 pandemic. As students return to the classroom, school systems must carefully consider the longer-term role of technology.

The promise of technology in the classroom is great: enabling personalized, mastery-based learning; saving teacher time; and equipping students with the digital skills they will need for 21st-century careers. Indeed, controlled pilot studies have shown meaningful improvements in student outcomes through personalized blended learning.1 During this time of school shutdowns and remote learning, education technology has become a lifeline for the continuation of learning.

As school systems begin to prepare for a return to the classroom, many are asking whether education technology should play a greater role in student learning beyond the immediate crisis and what that might look like. To help inform the answer to that question, this article analyzes one important data set: the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), published in December 2019 by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

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Analysis, Big Problems, Environment, New Viewpoints, Science & Technology News

This is now the world’s greatest threat – and it’s not coronavirus

August 3, 2020

An environmental worker stands near an excavator amid waste at Tianziling landfill in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, China August 7, 2019.

Affluence is the biggest threat to our world, according to a new scientific report.

True sustainability will only be achieved through drastic lifestyle changes, it argues.

The World Economic Forum has called for a great reset of capitalism in the wake of the pandemic.

A detailed analysis of environmental research has revealed the greatest threat to the world: affluence.

That’s one of the main conclusions of a team of scientists from Australia, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, who have warned that tackling overconsumption has to become a priority. Their report, titled Scientists’ Warning on Affluence, explains that true sustainability calls for significant lifestyle changes, rather than hoping that more efficient use of resources will be enough.

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Analysis, Coronavirus, Science & Technology News, Shopping, Trending

Touchless transit payments increased 187% since April: Visa

July 29, 2020

Visa released new data on Thursday that found contactless transactions for transit fares increased 187% through the end of June, up from an all-time global low in April. The company now works with more than 500 cities globally to implement or expand contactless payment solutions.

To further engage in this trend, Visa announced a new global partnership agreement with Cubic Transportation Systems to “enable the delivery of next generation fare payments and new mobility solutions to Cubic’s customers based on Visa’s global payment standards and frameworks,” according to a company press release.

Visa also announced a milestone of 150 total partners in its Visa Ready for Transit certification program, up from 100 partners in October 2019. The Visa Ready for Transit program fosters collaboration with fare system solutions providers and consultancies to simplify transit agencies’ implementation of contactless fare systems.

Continue reading… “Touchless transit payments increased 187% since April: Visa”

Analysis, Business, Coronavirus, Hot Issues, New Viewpoints, Science & Technology News

This is what chief economists think about the global economy right now

July 29, 2020

Successfully rebuilding the economy will be about far more than growth.

The World Economic Forum’s latest Chief Economists Outlook asks 40 chief economists for their views on the post-pandemic recovery.

It identifies three key emerging challenges facing governments and business leaders.

The crisis has made inequality worse – but it also provides unique opportunities to address it.

We need to broaden the set of targets we use to define success as we rebuild the global economy after the pandemic.

That view is among the insights from the World Economic Forum’s latest Chief Economists Outlook – Emerging Pathways Towards a Post-COVID-19 Reset and Recovery. For the report, the Forum asked its community of nearly 40 leading chief economists to assess the current economic outlook and consider how business leaders and policymakers need to respond.

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