Impact Lab – Page 601 – A Laboratory of the Future Human Experience

Which U.S. cities have the most families with kids?

January 25, 2019

Spoiler alert: It’s simply not the case that families with kids have disappeared from urban America.

Look around a hip neighborhood in Lower Manhattan or downtown San Francisco, and you’ll see lots of young people, and Baby Boomers whose kids have left the nest. There are also some stylish moms (or nannies) pushing tots in strollers. But you won’t see many traditional nuclear families with school-age children.

There’s a growing consensus that our cities are becoming “childless.” This past October, Axios ran a story on the ”great family exodus,” showing data that the share of families with children under the age of 20 has fallen in 53 large cities across the country. As far as I can tell, the phrase “childless cities” was first advanced in 2013 by Joel Kotkin in an essay of that title for City Journal.

Several factors are said to be pushing families with kids out of cities: the expensiveness of city living; the lagging performance of urban versus suburban public schools; and the preference of immigrant families for the suburbs over urban locations. But just how childless are our cities, really?

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Batteries, Elon Musk, Science & Technology News, Solar Energy, Solar Power, Tesla

Tesla proposes microgrids with solar and batteries to power Greek islands

January 25, 2019

Tesla has met with the Greek government to propose ways to modernize the electric grid of the country’s many islands in the Mediterranean sea with microgrids and renewable energy to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels.

Several Greek islands are relatively remote and rely heavily on fossil fuels to power their electric grid.

Over the years, Tesla has acquired some experience in building microgrids to power remote islands using solar panels and its energy storage systems, like the Powerpack.

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China, Health & Fitness, Healthcare, Medicine

Ping An Good Doctor launches commercial operation of One-minute Clinics in China

January 25, 2019

Ping An Good Doctor’s first One-minute Clinic in Wuzhen, outside of Shanghai. Credit: Ping An Good Doctor.

The company announced last week then it had placed its One-minute Clinics across 8 provinces and cities in China and signed service contracts for nearly 1,000 units.

Last year, Ping An Good Doctor, a one-stop healthcare ecosystem platform from China, piloted unstaffed clinics that employ artificial intelligence called “One-minute Clinics” in the Wuzhen Scenic Area outside of Shanghai, which connect patients with a clinician on Ping An Good Doctor’s in-house medical team. Just last week, the company announced that it had placed its One-minute Clinics across 8 provinces and cities in China and signed service contracts for nearly 1,000 units, providing healthcare services to more than 3 million users.

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AI, Analysis, Artificial Intelligence, DNA, Medical Breakthrough

Face-scanning A.I. can help doctors spot unusual genetic disorders

January 25, 2019

Facial recognition can help unlock your phone. Could it also be able to play a far more valuable role in people’s lives by identifying whether or not a person has a rare genetic disorder, based exclusively on their facial features? DeepGestalt, an artificial intelligence built by the Boston-based tech company FDNA, suggests that the answer is a resounding “yes.”

The algorithm is already being used by leading geneticists at more than 2,000 sites in upward of 130 countries around the world. In a new study, published in the journal Nature Medicine, researchers show how the algorithm was able to outperform clinicians when it came to identifying diseases.

The study involved 17,000 kids with 200-plus genetic disorders. Its best performance came in distinguishing between different subtypes of a genetic disorder called Noonan syndrome, one of whose symptoms includes mildly unusual facial features. The A.I. was able to make the correct distinction 64 percent of the time. That is far from perfect, but it is significantly better than human clinicians, who identified Noonan syndrome correctly in just 20 percent of cases.

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3D Printer, Biotech, Medical Breakthrough

Bio-Printers are churning out living fixes to broken spines

January 25, 2019

A new study showed that 3D-printing a spinal cord implant, shown here, restored movement in injured rats.UCSD JACOBS SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING

FOR DOCTORS AND medical researchers repairing the human body, a 3D printer has become almost as valuable as an x-ray machine, microscope, or a sharp scalpel. Bioengineers are using 3D printers to make more durable hip and knee joints, prosthetic limbs and, recently, to produce living tissue attached to a scaffold of printed material.

Researchers say that bio-printed tissue can be used to test the effects of drug treatments, for example, with an eventual goal of printing entire organs that can be grown and then transplanted into a patient. The latest step toward 3D-printed replacements of failed human parts comes from a team at UC San Diego. It has bio-printed a section of spinal cord that can be custom-fit into a patient’s injury.

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AI, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Science & Technology News

A neural network can learn to organize the world it sees into concepts—just like we do

January 25, 2019

Generative adversarial networks are not just good for causing mischief. They can also show us how AI algorithms “think.”

GANs, or generative adversarial networks, are the social-media starlet of AI algorithms. They are responsible for creating the first AI painting ever sold at an art auction and for superimposing celebrity faces on the bodies of porn stars. They work by pitting two neural networks against each other to create realistic outputs based on what they are fed. Feed one lots of dog photos, and it can create completely new dogs; feed it lots of faces, and it can create new faces.

As good as they are at causing mischief, researchers from the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab realized GANs are also a powerful tool: because they paint what they’re “thinking,” they could give humans insight into how neural networks learn and reason. This has been something the broader research community has sought for a long time—and it’s become more important with our increasing reliance on algorithms.

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Coding, Education, Higher Education, Internet, New Viewpoints

How to get a world-class education for free on the internet

January 26, 2019

As crucial as a university degree has become for working in the modern economy, it is not the only route forward into a wildly lucrative and satisfying career—just ask famous dropouts Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Michael Dell, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg.

In the future, a single bachelor’s degree in a particular subject will no longer suffice for many of us anyway. As robots and automation sweep the global workforce, hundreds of millions of people—the majority of whom do not have the time or money to go pick up a brand-new four-year degree—will have to “re-skill” in order to land new jobs. The question that employees and employers alike face is how to get that done quickly, efficiently, and, most importantly to many, cheaply.

The internet, luckily, is already a booming resource. Whether you find yourself seeking new employment mid-career, curious about alternatives to a college education, or simply are interested in learning for learning’s sake, Quartz At Work has compiled some of the most dependable, high-quality materials you can access to learn anything on the internet.

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Ford Motor Company, Home Technology

Ford’s noise-cancelling doghouse keeps pups calm during fireworks

January 25, 2019

Rover can stay relaxed during the holidays.

Many dogs and other pets are terrified of fireworks, and for good reason — their more sensitive hearing makes that pleasant popping turn into a cacophony of sounds. Ford, however, might provide some relief. The company (which is no stranger to high-tech beds) has built a doghouse that uses noise cancelling to minimize canine agony during fireworks shows. Like the technology in some headphones and Ford’s own Edge SUV, the kennel detects explosions with microphones and counteracts them by pumping out frequencies that mitigate the sounds or eliminate them altogether. The body includes soundproofing cork panels, anti-vibration risers and even soundproofed ventilation, while an automatic door helps your pooch quickly take shelter.

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Advertising, Big Data, facebook

Pew: 74% of users don’t know Facebook records their ad preferences

January 24, 2019

Facebook has been in the news quite a bit for its ad targeting over the past year, most notably with reports that the now-defunct Cambridge Analytica used improperly obtained data to develop “personality” profiles on U.S. voters and target ads toward them during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. But many users are still unaware what information Facebook actually collects for ad targeting purposes.

A new survey out this morning from Pew Research found that 74 percent of Facebook users surveyed did not know there was a “your ad preferences page” where they could see which ad categories Facebook had placed them into, based on interests and information they’ve shared with the service. Pew surveyed 963 U.S. adults with Facebook accounts between September 4 and October 1, 2018.

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Internet, Latest Trend, Shopping

Retailers rethink physical stores as click-and-collect catches on

January 24, 2019

Buy online, pick-up in store is often heralded as the future of retail: Customers shopping on their own terms, as efficiently as possible. But it might end up being a bigger lift than expected for retail stores.

Large retailers like Target, Walmart, Kroger and Home Depot are using store pickup to cut delivery costs, encourage customer interaction with associates, and drive in-store sales growth. It’s a strategy that seems to be working: according to an International Council of Shopping Centers 2018 holiday season survey, 86 percent of U.S. shoppers purchased something new while picking up e-commerce orders in stores. Target saw a 5.7 percent holiday sales bump for November and December, in part due to store pickup. And three out of every four digital Target orders are fulfilled by a store, evidence of the central place stores can play in an e-commerce supply chain.

“We consider our stores our single biggest competitive advantage; they function as service hubs, fulfillment hubs, and they’re incredible showrooms for inspiration,” said Target CEO Brian Cornell at the National Retail Federation’s Big Show this week.

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Automobiles, cutting edge, Transportation

Hyundai’s four-legged car isn’t the future we imagined, but we’ll take it

January 24, 2019

It’s clear at this point that the future of the automotive world revolves around bleeding edge technology that’s self-driving or, perhaps, even flying. But what if it’s none of those things? What if it’s a car that walks on four legs?

Hyundai puzzled CES audiences the world over at this year’s event with a concept that focused on exactly this. It’s on-trend, with an electric power plant. But unlike the Tesla’s of the world, Hyundai’s “Elevate” concept ditches the wheels in favor of four legs capable of navigating nearly any type of terrain.

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3D Printer, Healthcare, Medical Breakthrough

How 3D technology is revolutionizing face transplants

January 23, 2019

From modeling to printing, it’s all about seeing inside someone’s head.

Face transplants are an ideal setting to fuse medicine with the growing world of 3D printing and imaging. The left image is a rendering of what face transplant recipient Cameron Underwood’s face looked like before his surgery; the right is a planned rendering based on the donor’s face.

Cameron Underwood received a new face on January 6, 2018. By the time his surgery ended, everything below Underwood’s eye sockets had been replaced with the face of organ donor William Fisher.

A face transplant is exactly what it sounds like—replacing the disfigured face of one person with the whole, undamaged face of a very recently deceased person. Eduardo Rodriguez, plastic surgeon and face transplant specialist at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York who performed surgery on Underwood, insists this surgery is a way to give these patients “a second chance at life.” Without a new face, patients like Underwood have great difficulty speaking, swallowing, eating, expressing themselves, as well as all the other things we do with our faces that we never think twice about.

A physician in France performed the first successful face transplant surgery in 2005. Since then, only 40 other such surgeries have been done around the world. Rodriguez has performed three of those surgeries, including Underwood’s.

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