The woes of the retail industry are well known, and are usually blamed on the impact of the Internet. Credit Suisse projects that 8,600 brick-and-mortar stores will close in 2017, which would beat the record set in 2008, at the height of the last recession. There are "zombie malls," full of empty stores but not yet shuttered. And then there's health care, where the retail business is booming. In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Christopher Mims set forth Three Hard Lessons the Internet is Teaching Traditional Stores. The lessons are: Data is King, Personalization + Automation = Profits, Legacy Tech Won't Cut It.
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Halamka on "The Dark Side of E-commerce"
By John D. Halamka, MD | April 26, 2017
As I mentioned in a recent post, Amazon has focused on the convenience of the customer instead of the convenience of their business. Yesterday’s New York Times highlighted the trend for the hotel industry to do the same. In my post, I lamented that some industries including old school industrial companies and healthcare have not widely adopted customer focused technologies. To their credit, Marvin Windows followed up with me and promised to accelerate their automation efforts. I was impressed. However, all is not completely rosy in the transformation from brick and mortar to e-commerce...
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Clicks-and-Mortar: Health Care's Future
By Kim Bellard | April 25, 2017
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Health Datapalooza 2017 – The Data Revolution Rolls On
By Greg Downing | April 24, 2017
The 8th annual Health Datapalooza returns on April 26 – 28 and offers a re-imagined vision of health and health care through the lens of data. In years past, Health Datapalooza has set its sights on health-care startups, apps, big data, electronic health records – you name it – but the main thrust was always more about the business of health care and how tech and data are used to innovate. The annual conference for data geeks, developers, health tech venture capitalists, and start-up wannabes, among others, will this year triangulate around the idea that the patient should be at the center of health care.
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Developer Opportunities to Code for Good
By Don Watkins | April 22, 2017
As I was searching for open source projects that help learners with disabilities, such as blindness or dyslexia, I came across Bookshare. That led me to Bookshare's parent company, Benetech, a technology nonprofit based in Palo Alto, CA which focuses on empowering communities in need. Read more about Benetech in our interview with CEO Jim Fruchterman: Open source product development most effective when social. I reached out and spoke with Anh Bui, Vice President of Benetech Labs, Benetech's new product development arm that explores areas of social need by engaging with communities in the United States and beyond...
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Upbeat, Collaborative, and Focused: Educators at SXSWedu Reflect on the Value and Future of Citizen Science in Education
By Catherine Hoffman, and Katie Levedahl | April 21, 2017
These were some of the questions we set out to discuss at the Citizen Science Meet-up at SXSWedu. SXSWedu is an annual conference that attracts thought-leaders from the worlds of education, technology, policy, and the media. This year, 7,000 participants from 38 countries—including bestselling authors, TED-talking professors, and quirky teachers—came together to discuss the future of teaching and learning. At SciStarter and the California Academy of Sciences, we believe that citizen science is an integral part of that future, so we joined forces to bring our ideas to the participants of SXSWedu...
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Do I Need to Provide Access to Source Code Under the AGPLv3 License?
By Jeffrey Robert Kaufman | April 20, 2017
The GNU Affero General Public License version 3 (AGPLv3) is a copyleft license nearly identical to the GPLv3. Both licenses have the same copyleft scope, but materially differ in one important way. The AGPLv3's Section 13 states an additional condition not present in GPLv2 or GPLv3: "Notwithstanding any other provision of this License, if you modify the Program, your modified version must prominently offer all users interacting with it remotely through a computer network (if your version supports such interaction) an opportunity to receive the Corresponding Source of your version by providing access to the Corresponding Source from a network server at no charge, through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software"...
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Healthy Soil Is the Real Key to Feeding the World
By David R. Montgomery | April 19, 2017
One of the biggest modern myths about agriculture is that organic farming is inherently sustainable. It can be, but it isn’t necessarily. After all, soil erosion from chemical-free tilled fields undermined the Roman Empire and other ancient societies around the world. Other agricultural myths hinder recognizing the potential to restore degraded soils to feed the world using fewer agrochemicals. When I embarked on a six-month trip to visit farms around the world to research my forthcoming book, “Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life,” the innovative farmers I met showed me that regenerative farming practices can restore the world’s agricultural soils.
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Healthcare Innovation: Think Bigger, Fail Often.
By Kim Bellard | April 18, 2017
Alan Kay recently outlined some of the principles that he thought made Xerox's PARC so successful (if you don't know who Alan Kay is or why PARC was so special, you should try to find out). One was: "'It's baseball,' not 'golf'...Not getting a hit is not failure but the overhead for getting hits." That doesn't quite square with my impression of golf, but I take the point. It's about the price of success. As psychologist Dean Simonton pointed out in Origins of Genius: "The more successes there are, the more failures there are as well." "Quality," he wrote, "is a probabilistic function of quantity." We talk a lot about innovation these days, especially "disruptive innovation." Why not? It sounds cool, it allows people to think they're on the cutting edge, and it often excites investors. But perhaps we've lost sight of what it is supposed to actually be...
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How the Trump Budget Undercuts Security Risks Posed by Pandemics
By Maureen Miller | April 18, 2017
President Trump proposed a US$54 billion military budget increase to solidify the security of our nation. However, the government also recognizes pandemic threats as an issue of national security – one that knows no borders. In the last four years, we have faced the Ebola epidemic – contained after significant loss of life – and Zika, which is still not contained. Collectively, we will feel these effects for a generation, while children born with Zika-related defects and their families will feel the effects every day of their lives...
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How Disaster Relief Efforts Could Be Improved with Game Theory
By Anna Nagurney | April 17, 2017
The number of disasters has doubled globally since the 1980s, with the damage and losses estimated at an average US$100 billion a year since the new millennium, and the number of people affected also growing. Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was the costliest natural disaster in the U.S., with estimates between $100 billion and $125 billion. The death toll of Katrina is still being debated, but we know that at least 2,000 were killed, and thousands were left homeless. Worldwide, the toll is staggering. The triple disaster of an earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown that started March 11, 2011 in Fukushima, Japan killed thousands, as did the 2010 Haiti earthquake...
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