Companies trade In hunch-based hiring for computer modeling.
When the Xerox Corp. was looking for workers to staff its call centers they used to pay lots of attention to applicants who had done the job before. Then, a computer program told the printer and outsourcing company that experience doesn’t matter.
If you start a business, odds are that your company will fail.
It may look easy from the outside. An entrepreneur with a hot technology and venture-capital funding becomes a billionaire in his 20s. But now there is evidence that venture-backed start-ups fail at far higher numbers than the rate the industry usually cites.
Continue reading… “Three out of four startups fail – a venture capital secret”
One of the characteristics of the modern media age is that we are surrounded by vast clouds of rapidly changing information, whether it’s blog posts or news stories or Twitter and Facebook updates. That’s great if you like real-time content, but there is a not-so-hidden flaw — namely, that you can’t step into the same stream twice, as Heraclitus put it. In other words, much of that information may (and probably will) disappear as new information replaces it, and small pieces of history wind up getting lost. According to a recent study, which looked at links shared through Twitter about news events like the Arab Spring revolutions in the Middle East, this could be turning into a substantial problem.
Continue reading… “Information decay is eating away our web history”
The new Middle East
There are remarkable and little-reported-on tech startup communities in the Middle East – from Cairo to Amman to Beirut to Dubai – and no one is rocking this scene more than the women entrepreneurs.
Continue reading… “Middle Eastern women at the center of a startup ecosystem”
Either you get with the code or get left out in the cold.
As technology becomes more and more ingrained in our everyday lives, you have to make a choice: Are you a consumer of tech, or are you someone who understands it?
Buying the latest iPhone and keeping up with the who-works-where, who’s-launching-what tech gossip is all good and fine, but if you can’t code, you ain’t no kind of techie.
Startups like Codecademy are making it easy to learn coding online — easy enough for school children, in fact. More intense programs like DaVinci Coders take learners from total noob to novice programmer in an 11 week bootcamp. And one game, Coderacer, will have you on the ground and coding in just five minutes…
Continue reading… “Why every single one of you should learn a little code”
South Dakota School of Mines and & Technology
South Dakota School of Mines & Technology graduates are earning more money than Harvard University graduates after a decade-long commodity bull market created shortages of workers and minerals.
Continue reading… “Mining school grads beat out Harvard grads in pay”
Do you need an artery for bypass surgery or custom cartilage for that worn-out knee? One day you will be able to print an artery.
Biomedical engineers in about a dozen major university and corporate laboratories are working on ways to print living human tissue. There is the hope of one day producing personalized body parts and implants on demand. Still far from clinical use, these tissue-engineering experiments represent the next step in a process known as computerized adaptive manufacturing, in which industrial designers turn out custom prototypes and finished parts using inexpensive 3-D computer printers.
Continue reading… “Medical inkjet printer could one day print living tissue on demand”
An estimated 3 million patients visit urgent cares each week.
In Annapolis, when Emily Auerswald and her children need care for minor illnesses or injuries, they head to a shopping center that has a Starbucks, a Five Guys hamburger joint and an urgent care center. Doctors Express, an urgent care center, is open nights and weekends, and accepts walk-ins without an appointment.
Continue reading… “Growth of urgent care centers worries some doctors”
Where do humans fit in?
Nikolas Janin, who lives in Silicon Valley, get’s up every morning for his 40-minute commute to work just like everyone else. He is the shop manager and fleet technician at Google. In the mornings Janin gets dressed and heads out to his Lexus RX 450h for the trip on California’s freeways. That’s when his the car takes over. Mr. Janin’s ride is one of Google’s self-driving vehicles and it is equipped with sophisticated artificial intelligence technology that allows him to sit as a passenger in the driver’s seat.
Continue reading… “The artificial intelligence revolution is here and how it is changing our lives”
PCs consumed the majority of memory chips since sometime in the 1980s until 2012.
We have been hearing for years about the so-called Post-PC Era. But now it seems pretty hard to argue with. Personal computers no longer consume the majority of the world’s memory chip supply as of this year.
Continue reading… “Is the era of the personal computer over?”
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzSXTWhBUD0&hd=1[/youtube]
The cost of sequencing genomes has declined 50% faster per year than the cost of computers, since 2007. Declining sequencing costs have been due to a combination of Moore’s law and massive scaleups. An author and an expert on the life sciences industry, Juan Enriquez, runs a venture capital fund that invests in life science startups that could produce useful products and treatments within the next five years. He also engages in more long-term forecasting. In an interview for Next Big Future, Enriquez discusses the exponential rate of change for biotechnology with Sander Olson. Enrique also discusses why he believes that the changes wrought by the biosciences during the next three decades could surpass the industrial revolution in importance. (video)
Continue reading… “DNA sequencing is improving faster than Moore’s law”
.
The DaVinci Inventor Showcase will take place on Oct 13th
The economic downturn has forced us to rethink our lives. For many, this means a time of stepping into the workshop to give shape to ideas that have been waiting for the right opportunity to emerge.
While Hollywood likes to portray inventors as the wacky mad-scientist type, nothing is further from the truth. Inventors may be wired differently, but for the most part they are very dedicated, hard-working individuals bent on making the world a better place.
But in the business world, few things go according to plan. New products are especially prone to commercial failure. Many of the failures stem from common misconceptions that steer us radically off course. Here are five big lies that will give you a more realistic picture of how to make the grade in the world of invention…