One recent afternoon, Christine Ryan didn’t head to the doctor’s office or emergency room when her ear was aching; she went to her local CVS store in Cambridge.
Continue reading… “Walk-in clinics forcing traditional health care providers to rethink”
Innovation is the reason China’s solar is cheap
You may hear quite often that “the only reason solar is so cheap is because China is dumping cells. ”Let me correct it. Here is the price, as of February 2015, of solar modules, per watt sold in Europe. SE Asia (Malaysia, mostly) is cheapest. China is next. Japan, Korea, and Germany are slightly above that.
Continue reading… “Innovation is the reason China’s solar is cheap”
Top 20 cities Americans are ditching
It might come as a surprise that New York City, Los Angeles, and Honolulu are among the cities U.S. residents are fleeing in droves. They’re all places you would think would be popular destinations for Americans.
Continue reading… “Top 20 cities Americans are ditching”
Top 6 shifts coming soon to energy markets near you
Trillions of dollars will be invested in renewable energy over the next 25 years. This will drive some of the most profound changes yet in how humans get their electricity. That’s according to a new forecast by Bloomberg New Energy Finance that plots out global power markets to 2040.
Continue reading… “Top 6 shifts coming soon to energy markets near you”
Marriage in America is going out of style
June is the time of year when we’re supposed to hear wedding bells. The invitations start coming in and you find yourself scurrying to order gifts from registries and block off summer weekends to attend ceremonies and parties.
Continue reading… “Marriage in America is going out of style”
Engineering the Secret Engines of Off-Grid Living
Futurist Thomas Frey: Having just returned from a trip to Alaska, it occurred to me that most of the 660,000 sq miles of this beautiful state will never be habitable until a more complete off-grid solution is found. In Alaska, they’ve already figured out how to turn every one of their 3 million lakes into a landing strip, so transportation is far less of an issue than power, heat, lights, water, and communications.
Continue reading… “Engineering the Secret Engines of Off-Grid Living”
Machine generated TED-Talks: TED RNN
By samim23: Recently, I experimented with Recurrent Neural Networks as applied to political speech writing. The result, Obama-RNN generated a fair amount of buzz and fuelled a productive debate, including speculation that Sara Palin is a bot. For the next experiment I decided to apply the system to TED.
Continue reading… “Machine generated TED-Talks: TED RNN”
Coding Education & Tech Trends of 2014
Audrey Watters: “The business of ed-tech” is also the “politics of ed-tech.” The business and the politics of ed-tech together dictate almost all the other trends that I’ll cover in this year-end series. MOOCs. Big data. Learning analytics. Privacy. Competency-based education. Buzzwords.
One way to identify the dominant ed-tech trends is to look at what venture capitalists are funding. Another is to look at what government policies are demanding. The state of Maryland, for example, said this year that it would need to invest $100 million in technology upgrades in order to be ready for the new online testing mandated by the Common Core State Standards.
New hardware. New infrastructure. New curriculum. New expenditures. So… who benefits?
Continue reading… “Coding Education & Tech Trends of 2014”
Highly skilled immigrants are losing interest in the United States: LinkedIn data
According to a new study, the U.S. is quickly losing its appeal to the world’s most talented immigrants. Stanford and the University of Washington researchers have culled a large dataset from LinkedIn and found that the the number of Ph.D.s choosing the U.S. as their home base fell by nearly half (29 percent in 2000 vs. 18 percent in 2012).
Top 10 most profitable businesses in the U.S.
Big data analytics answers the question of what the most profitable industries are.. The most profitable sector in the United States is electrical equipment manufacturing, according to Powerlytics, a big data analytics company that offers financial insights into millions of businesses.
Continue reading… “Top 10 most profitable businesses in the U.S.”
‘Smart garments’ will be the hottest trend of 2015
Gartner predicts sales of smart clothing will exceed 10 million in 2015.
Some of the hottest products of 2014 are smartwatches and fitness bands. We’ve seen a dizzying array of watches from many major manufacturers, and fitness bands released by some of the biggest tech firms in the world. (Videos)
Continue reading… “‘Smart garments’ will be the hottest trend of 2015”
Top 10 Articles on ImpactLab.net
The articles posted on the Impact Lab represent an unusual mix, all of which are oriented around future trends, future thinking, or recent innovations that may more may not alter the course of history.
With that in mind, here are the posts that caught most people’s attention over 2014.
Continue reading… “Top 10 Articles on ImpactLab.net”