According to Taleb the future will not be cool.
What will your future surroundings look like in five, 10 or 25 years. Your imagination will probably see new things in it, things we call innovation, improvements, and killer technologies. These common concepts concerning innovation, we will see, are not just offensive aesthetically, but they are nonsense both empirically and philosophically.
Continue reading… “Nassim Nicholas Taleb tells us why futurists get it wrong”
Many studies have found that women tend to be more averse to risks and losses than men.
The world of business can be brutal and competitive. People often need to take high risks with big payoffs in order to succeed. Attitudes that are risk-taking attitudes are often seen as masculine. The language used to describe such behavior is riddled with phrases like “testosterone-charged” and “cowboys”. Women are seen as being more risk averse. And then there are articles that have asked if the financial crisis might have unfolded differently had women been in charge.
Futurist Thomas Frey: When you buy a stock, you place a bet on how that stock will perform in the future. In a perfect world, where market insiders and manipulators are removed from the equation, the market is a terrific tool for determining the true value of companies being invested in.
“I should have used protection!”
Quote of the Day: “Anything worth doing is worth overdoing.” – David Letterman
Brand-name drug prices rise sharply while generic drug prices plummet.
Brand-name prescription drug prices are rising faster than the rate of inflation, while the price of generic drugs has plummeted, creating the largest gap so far between the two,according to a report published Wednesday by the pharmacy benefits manager Express Scripts.
Much of what we believe to be factual has an expiration date.
In primary school you learned that there were nine planets in the solar system. There weren’t any that were known to exist outside of it. Since then, astronomers have spotted over 800 planets around other stars (and thousands more “candidates”) and demoted Pluto to a mere “dwarf planet”. Even a cursory glance at other fields reveals similar patterns.
Continue reading… “Samuel Arbesman explains ‘The Half-life of Facts’”
Kim Jung-un, ruler of North Korea
On Wednesday, the People’s Daily online deleted a story and 55-photo slide show that named Kim Jong-un, the young, chubby ruler of North Korea, as the “Sexiest Man Alive of 2012.”
Continue reading… “North Korea leader is no longer the ‘Sexiest Man Alive of 2012’”
TV remains top tops for influencing purchase decisions.
Most consumer commerce transactions still take place offline, in physical stores, yet ecommerce makes deeper inroads every year. Similarly, the majority of online purchases still occur on the desktop, but smartphone and tablet commerce are assuming greater prominence.
Continue reading… “TV remains the greatest influence on purchase decisions”
A manifesto on the future of news published by Columbia University’s center for digital journalism argues that the news industry as we know it no longer exists.
Over the past few years there has been a lot written about the future of the news industry. They have written about how the rise of the web and social media have disrupted it, and how traditional players and others can recover from this disruption and repair their business models by using things like paywalls. But the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University says that trying to figure out how to repair or rebuild the news industry is a waste of time: the paper’s authors argue that there is no such thing as the “news industry” any more, in any realistic sense, and the sooner both new and existing players get used to that idea the better off everyone will be.
Continue reading… “How can post-industrial journalism adapt to the new realities of news?”
Companies that had collected unstructured data (texts, emails, reports, and so on), but had no idea about what to do once it was stored.
Even though Big Data is all the rage it’s rare that you’ll hear real case-studies from companies that are storing, processing and analyzing vast stores of data.
Continue reading… “Companies store data but have no idea what to do with it once it’s stored”
Black Friday still reigns supreme on mobile devices.
When it comes to Black Friday and Cyber Monday, it looks like Black Friday still reigns supreme on mobile devices. According to data compiled by the mobile data compression company Onavo, when it comes to increases in usage, mobile apps from Amazon, Newegg, and Gilt all saw significantly higher gains on Black Friday compared to Cyber Monday.
Continue reading… “Mobile shopping on Black Friday saw higher gains compared to Cyber Monday”
According to this Gallup poll, 25 percent of Americans are still “seriously trying to lose weight.”
A recent Gallup poll asked Americans about their dieting habits and what they consider an ideal weight. Sixty percent of Americans say that their weight is about right. This is good news considering research like that of Peter Muennig from Columbia University found that women who were concerned about their weight had more mental and physical illnesses than those who were happy with their size, regardless of their weight. As it turns out, people don’t take care of things they hate, and that includes their bodies. So more people liking their bodies means more people who believe those bodies are worthy of care.
Continue reading… “Sixty percent of Americans happy with their weight: Denial or acceptance?”