By the late 1800s hypodermic syringes were widely available, though there were few injectable drugs (less than 2% of drugs in 1905). Insulin was discovered in 1921. This drug had to be injected into the bloodstream, so it created a new market for manufacturers of hypodermic needles and drugs.
The Big Five personality dimension Openness/Intellect is the trait most closely associated with creativity and creative achievement.A related paper outlined the overall relationship between the Big Five, by grouping them into two complementary categories - Stability and Plasticity.
We confirmed the hypothesis that whereas Openness predicts creative achievement in the arts, Intellect predicts creative achievement in the sciences. Inclusion of performance measures of general cognitive ability and divergent thinking indicated that the relation of Intellect to scientific creativity may be due at least in part to these abilities. Lastly, we found that Extraversion additionally predicted creative achievement in the arts, independently of Openness. Results are discussed in the context of dual-process theory.
Perhaps the most stunning overreach is in the company’s claim that Watson for Oncology, through artificial intelligence, can sift through reams of data to generate new insights and identify, as an IBM sales rep put it, “even new approaches” to cancer care. STAT found that the system doesn’t create new knowledge and is artificially intelligent only in the most rudimentary sense of the term.IBM denies the assertions and says that the technology is on track "to offer guidance about treatment for 12 cancers that account for 80 percent of the world’s cases" by the end of the year.
a discussion of why now is the right time to be thinking about this new technology and some of the recent developments that have been made, laying the groundwork for the future of this computing model.
The technology figures to take off in China first because of the country’s attitudes toward surveillance and privacy. Unlike, say, the United States, China has a large centralized database of ID card photos. During my time at Face++, I saw how local governments are using its software to identify suspected criminals in video from surveillance cameras, which are omnipresent in the country. This is especially impressive—albeit somewhat dystopian—because the footage analyzed is far from perfect, and because mug shots or other images on file may be several years old.
Facial recognition has existed for decades, but only now is it accurate enough to be used in secure financial transactions. The new versions use deep learning, an artificial-intelligence technique that is especially effective for image recognition because it makes a computer zero in on the facial features that will most reliably identify a person.
We tracked the activities and moods of over 28,000 people in real time and demonstrated that people seek mood-enhancing activities when they feel bad and unpleasant activities when they feel good. These findings clarify how emotions shape behavior and may explain how humans trade off short-term happiness for long-term welfare. Overcoming such trade-offs might be critical for our personal well-being and our survival as a species.
For decades, computing speed has increased as silicon transistors have shrunk, but they’re currently near their size limits. So scientists have been experimenting with carbon nanotubes, rolled-up sheets of carbon atoms just 1 nanometer, or a billionth of a meter, in diameter.
But difficulties working with the material have meant that, for optimal performance, nanotube transistors have to be even larger than current silicon transistors, which are about 100 nanometers across. To cut that number down, a team of scientists used a new technique to build the contacts that draw current into and out of the carbon nanotube transistor. They constructed the contacts out of molybdenum, which can bond directly to the ends of the nanotubes, making them smaller. They also added cobalt so the bonding could take place at a lower temperature, allowing them to shrink the gap between the contacts.
Electrical tests showed their new transistors to be faster and more efficient than ones made of silicon. Silicon Valley may soon have to make way for Carbon Valley.
If post-2000 trends continue, the probability of meeting the global obesity target is virtually zero. Rather, if these trends continue, by 2025, global obesity prevalence will reach 18% in men and surpass 21% in women; severe obesity will surpass 6% in men and 9% in women. ...High body-mass index (BMI) is an important risk factor for cardiovascular and kidney diseases, diabetes, some cancers, and musculoskeletal disorders.
In the world of personal exchange (recurring-specific - ES), it pays for parties to an exchange to cooperate, because the parties have personal knowledge of the other players and there is the possibility for repeat dealings between the parties. But in a world of impersonal exchange, it pays for the parties to defect, ceteris paribus. With impersonal exchange, the world is one in which there is not an iterated game.... One does not know anything about the other players, and indeed there are a large number of players.That is, in traditional transactions players on both sides have incentives to cheat because they don't know each other personally or through a personal network. Therefore, in 1999 North suggested that to make the global marketplace efficient and scalable a new model had to be invented:
...we are going to have to devise institutions de novo that attempt to confront and deal with worlds of impersonal exchange.Remarkably, new service models, such as Airbnb, Uber, Amazon, Alibaba, Instaply and others provide a glimpse of the institutions to come. Since identities of sellers, buyers and recommenders are known, parties are less likely to cheat; therefore, the number and quality of transactions shows rapid growth. Although the solution is not perfect, it is a lot more efficient than all attempts to introduce global regulations. It's exciting to see how social networking technologies are redefining the rules of commerce and provide a working alternative to law.
Entrepreneur Jay Kaplan, co-founder and CEO of Synack, describes how the idea of creating a cybersecurity service for enterprise businesses by crowdsourcing hackers went from sounding like a long shot to launching as a venture capital-backed startup. Kaplan, previously a senior analyst at the National Security Administration, talks about the virtues of government work and the nuances of “white hat” hacking.
When Samuel Colt, of revolver fame, was trying to sell the U.S. government a system of naval mines, he had to establish that his device was original without giving away its secret. His imaginative solution was to submit the plan to the Patent Office, obtain a confirmation of its originality, and then withdraw the application before the patent was granted, thereby avoiding the publication of the patent specifications.*The Colt's approach exemplifies a powerful problem-solving technique often called "Separation in Time." According to the principle:
Seventy thousand years ago, our human ancestors were insignificant animals, just minding their own business in a corner of Africa with all the other animals. But now, few would disagree that humans dominate planet Earth; we've spread to every continent, and our actions determine the fate of other animals (and possibly Earth itself). How did we get from there to here? Historian Yuval Noah Harari suggests a surprising reason for the rise of humanity.
Poker requires reasoning and intelligence that has proven difficult for machines to imitate. It is fundamentally different from checkers, chess, or Go, because an opponent’s hand remains hidden from view during play. In games of “imperfect information,” it is enormously complicated to figure out the ideal strategy given every possible approach your opponent may be taking.
Bitcoin gives us, for the first time, a way for one Internet user to transfer a unique piece of digital property to another Internet user, such that the transfer is guaranteed to be safe and secure, everyone knows that the transfer has taken place, and nobody can challenge the legitimacy of the transfer. The consequences of this breakthrough are hard to overstate.Despite its great promise, this major breakthrough has not materialized yet. Nevertheless, the Google Trends chart above shows a noticeable uptick in Bitcoin-related interest in 2017. For example. a recent post on CloudTech by James Bourne titled "Blockchain beyond Bitcoin: Assessing the enterprise use cases" states that the technology "has serious potential to disrupt a multitude of industries." Also, Cade Metz in a January 6, 2017, Wired article titled "Bitcoin Will Never Be a Currency—It’s Something Way Weirder" reports on the general sentiment about Bitcoin, "Bitcoin is not something the average person will ever use to buy and sell stuff... It’s not something that will improve what the world has, such as money or stock. It’s something that will give the world stuff it has never had."
