Most people will tell you based on routine life experiences that our legal system is out of control. The land of the free has become a legal minefield particularly for teachers and doctors, whose work has been paralyzed by fear of suits. What's the answer? Lawyer Philip K. Howard shares his 4 basic ideas to fix what's broken.
Philip Howard is the founder of Common Good, a drive to overhaul the US legal system. His new book is Life Without Lawyers. Full bio and more links
Barron's minute asks wether Apple's stock will become less attractive. Now that the company is the largest technology firm by market cap questions are being raised as to whether Apple can continue to perform.
Working in the fitness and wellness world is a blessing on many levels. More than helping people get healthy is the fact you get to work with a lot of smart and fun folks, particularly the FitPro team. As you might know, I write a lot about technology and innovation. But interestingly there is a lot of great innovation that isn't as much about technology as it is about great ideas that generate a great solution. Organizations that figure this type of stuff out reflect the many years of experience necessary to see obvious opportunities. This is where a new product like the ViPR comes into play.
ViPr (Vitality, Performance and Reconditioning) uses the four pillars of human movement: gravity infused, stretch-to-shorten, tri-planar and integrated. Brilliant innovation. Check it out with the product's creator, Michol Dalcourt at Equinox below.
The third driver to the current revolution in business and institutions is shifting demography and not just age, but of culture. Global migration is the least understood and least governed area of globalization. The labor pool and customer base is being shifted in ways that have far reaching implications and you should take note of it. The video from the Economist above reflects migration patterns and economic implications.
Theorists sometimes call the movement of people around the world the "third wave" of globalization, after the movement of goods and the movement of money that began in the previous century. Trade and finance follow global norms and are governed by institutions: the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund. There is no equivalent group with “migration” in its name. The most personal and perilous form of movement is the most unregulated. States make and often ignore their own rules, deciding who can come, how long they stay, and what rights they enjoy.
A recent NYT report titled, "Global Mogration, A World Ever More on the Move" pointed to this and other important facts as the globalization of cultures is increasingly having an impact on our world.
"While global trade and finance are disruptive — some would argue as much as migration — they are disruptive in less visible ways. A shirt made in Mexico can cost an American worker his job. A worker from Mexico might move next door, send his children to public school and need to be spoken to in Spanish.
One reason migration seems so potent is that it arose unexpectedly. As recently as the 1970s, immigration seemed of such little importance that the United States Census Bureau decided to stop asking people where their parents were born. Now, a quarter of the residents of the United States under 18 are immigrants or immigrants’ children.
The United Nations estimates that there are 214 million migrants across the globe, an increase of about 37 percent in two decades. Their ranks grew by 41 percent in Europe and 80 percent in North America. “There’s more mobility at this moment than at any time in world history,” said Gary P. Freeman, a political scientist at the University of Texas.
Watch the video clip below to learn more and consider - are we moving to the age of the global citizen where nationality will be less of an important factor?
Computer scientists have been pursuing artificial intelligence, using computers to simulate human thinking, for sometime and with little success. Recently, however, great progress has been made to create devices that can listen, speak, see, reason and learn. According to scientists the result is not only that artificial intelligence will transform the way humans and machines communicate and work together, but also that it will eliminate millions of jobs, create many others and change the nature of work and daily routines.
Steve Lohr and John Markoff wrote a recent article in the NYT titled, "Smarter Than You Think" to learn how "AI" is progressing very rapidly and being experimented in the mainstream businesses today. Here is one of their observations:
The artificial intelligence technology that has moved furthest into the mainstream is computer understanding of what humans are saying. People increasingly talk to their cellphones to find things, instead of typing. Both Google’s and Microsoft’s search services now respond to voice commands. More drivers are asking their cars to do things like find directions or play music.
The number of American doctors using speech software to record and transcribe accounts of patient visits and treatments has more than tripled in the past three years to 150,000. The progress is striking. A few years ago, supraspinatus (a rotator cuff muscle) got translated as “fish banana.” Today, the software transcribes all kinds of medical terminology letter perfect, doctors say. It has more trouble with other words and grammar, requiring wording changes in about one of every four sentences, doctors say.
Watch this video from KQED on the latest in Artificial Intelligence to learn more. The tool will increasingly impact our lives more than we realize.
