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Category: economics – Page 128

Cities change as they grow — not only by adding area or population but also in a variety of other ways, from the length and width of their roads to economic growth to the distribution of elementary schools. Social scientists often clash over the best way to measure change as a city swells. Traditionally, they’ve taken a cross-sectional approach, which means collecting data on a large number of cities of diverse sizes at the same moment in time. More recently, some researcher…

New work reconciles divergent methods used to analyze the scaling behavior of cities.

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Every crisis is an opportunity. With everyone staying home, this is the perfect opportunity for e-commerce, e-learning, online jobs, and big tech to expand. This is the beginning of a huge tech revolution. 2020 will be the techade (technology decade).

The virus is hitting China’s economy hard, but this is likely only temporary. China’s immune system is fighting back — building hospitals in record time, completely locking down a city and most importantly the entire nation uniting as one voice of support and solidarity.

Mario Cavolo called out the global response to the Coronavirus in his post “Something’s not right here folks” which originally went viral on LinkedIn and then subsequently all over Chinese social media. He compares the media response to Coronavirus with the H1N1 outbreak in the US, saying, “it’s not a conspiracy, it’s just a tragedy,” and “this vicious, political, xenophobic racist attacks and smearing of all things China needs to stop.”

What doesn’t break you only makes you stronger, and the Chinese people are resilient and will find ways to rise out of this crisis, likely coming back even stronger than before. How long that will take no-one yet knows, but the Chinese spirit is not even close to being broken, and we’ve seen how Chinese ingenuity in a time of crisis has led to entirely new operating models.

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Circa 2019

Technology has long been helping to hack world hunger. These days most conversations about tech’s impact on any sector of the economy inevitably involves artificial intelligence—sophisticated software that allows machines to make decisions and even predictions in ways similar to humans. Food waste tech is no different.

A report from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and Google estimates that technologies employing AI to “design out food waste” could help generate up to $127 billion a year by 2030. These technologies range from machine vision that can spot when fruit is ready to be picked to algorithms that forecast demand in order to ensure retailers don’t overstock certain foods.

One London-based startup that has been generating headlines by reducing food waste is Winnow Solutions. The company took in $20 million in October from equity investments and loans to scale its AI platform, Winnow Vision, which identifies and weighs food waste for commercial kitchens. It then automatically assigns a dollar value to each scraped plate of fettuccine Alfredo or bowl of carrots dumped into its smart waste bin.

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The Pacific Ocean is becoming more acidic, and the cash-crabs that live in its coastal waters are some of its first inhabitants to feel its effects.

The Dungeness crab is vital to commercial fisheries in the Pacific Northwest, but lower pH levels in its habitat are dissolving parts of its shell and damaging its sensory organs, a new study found.

Their injuries could impact coastal economies and forebode the obstacles in a changing sea. And while the results aren’t unexpected, the study’s authors said the damage to the crabs is premature: The acidity wasn’t predicted to damage the crabs this quickly.

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Editor’s note: Geoff Woollacott is Senior Strategy Consultant and Principal Analyst at Technology Business Research. IBM and NC State are coperating on quantum computing development.

HAMPTON, N.H. – JPMorgan Chase announced on Jan. 22 the hiring of Marco Pistoia from IBM. A 24-year IBM employee with numerous patents to his credit, Pistoia most recently led an IBM team responsible for quantum computing algorithms. Algorithm development will be key to developing soundly engineered quantum computing systems that can deliver the business outcomes enterprises seek at a faster and more accurate pace than current classical computing systems.

A senior hire into a flagship enterprise in the financial services industry is the proverbial canary in the coal mine, as TBR believes such actions suggest our prediction of quantum achieving economic advantage by 2021 remains on target. Quantum executives discuss the three pillars of quantum commercialization as being:

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The Pentagon made $35 trillion in accounting adjustments last year alone — a total that’s larger than the entire U.S. economy and underscores the Defense Department’s continuing difficulty in balancing its books.

The latest estimate is up from $30.7 trillion in 2018 and $29 trillion in 2017, the first year adjustments were tracked in a concerted way, according to Pentagon figures and a lawmaker who’s pursued the accounting morass.

The figure dwarfs the $738 billion of defense-related funding in the latest U.S. budget, a spending plan that includes the most expensive weapons systems in the world including the F-35 jet as well as new aircraft carriers, destroyers and submarines.

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Most people believe that modern day capitalism “does more harm than good in the world,” according to a new survey.

The closely-followed 20th annual Edelman Trust Barometer — an annual survey of 34,000 people across 28 countries that measures the public’s trust in NGOs, business, government, and media — underscored how a strong global economy and a booming stock market have failed to completely allay the public’s worries about their own economic prospects.

Edelman released the survey timed to the 50th annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. This year’s forum centers around the idea of stakeholder capitalism, proclaiming that a company’s purpose goes beyond generating wealth and instead should be measured by its environmental, social, and good governance objectives.

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