Four-fifths of all antibiotics are consumed by the meat industry

Livestock consumption of antibiotics reached a record nearly 29.9 billion pounds in 2011.

The Food and Drug Administration, last year,  proposed a set of voluntary “guidelines”designed to nudge the meat industry to curb its antibiotics habit.  Since then, the agency has been mulling whether and how to implement the new program. Meanwhile, the meat industry has been merrily gorging away on antibiotics—and churning out meat rife with antibiotic-resistant pathogens—if the latest data from the FDA itself is any indication.

 

 

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Top 15 emerging technology trends: Forrester

“We went a level deeper in our research by examining how today’s hot technology create platforms for future disruption,” analyst Bryan Hopkins writes.

Forrester, a research firm, understands that everyone who’s been listening  knows that mobile, social, cloud, and data are big freight trains of change that are blowing up old business models and old business practices.

 

 

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Yandex surpasses Bing in the world’s top search engine rankings

Logo for the Russian search engine, Yandex.

The biggest search engine few people have ever heard of. is probably Yandex.  According to Search Engine Watch,  the Russian search engine has surpassed Microsoft’s Bing in the world’s top search engine rankings.  Search Engine Watch got its data from ComScore.

 

 

 

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The search for data scientists grows frantic as startups produce more data

There are nowhere near enough “data scientists.”

It is currently accepted that the people who understand Big Data – the enormous datasets of information being collected with nearly every click of every computing device on the planet – will rule the roost in the future. If you can predict behavior by measuring and monitoring people’s machines down to an almost atomic level, you can make both your customers and your shareholders much happier.

 

 

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Startups can learn a lot from ‘end-ups’

End-ups are old companies and institutions that want to be become more like start-up, and startups want to become more like end-ups.

At the DLD Conference in Munich, John Maeda, President of RISD, sat onstage with the co-founder and CPO of Airbnb, Joe Gebbia. They discussed the unique creative culture at Rhode Island School of Design, where Joe went to college, and where John currently serves as president. Joe shared some of his secrets of being a successful designer-founder. He asked John what it’s like to run a 136-year-old institution like RISD.

 

 

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The origins of ‘big data’

Digital technology is changing both how words and ideas are created and proliferate, and how they are studied.

The fundamental building blocks of language and culture are words and phrases, much as genes and cells are to the biology of life.  Words are how we express ideas.  Tracing their origin, development, and spread is not just an academic pursuit but a window into a society’s intellectual evolution.

 

 

 

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DARPA to use brain scans to recruit the smartest military dogs

DARPA plans to pre-select the smartest recruits using newly available brain-scanning methods.

Long before Rin Tin Tin, dogs have been been an important part of military operations—from bomb-sniffing to supply-delivery. But training military working dogs is an expensive and time-consuming process. Anyone who’s spent any time trying to get a dog to even follow the “sit” command knows that some dogs are sharper than others.

 

 

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