Tagged: Technology

In the span of one year, a business can achieve record-breaking profits, or suffer staggering financial losses – and despite the size of its product or the confidence with which it’s marketed, the automotive industry has proven to be no exception. You only have to look as far back as March of last year – when a massive earthquake and tsunami in Japan took the lives of thousands, set off an international nuclear scare, and sent Toyota’s quarterly profits plummeting as production was delayed, and parts suppliers were wiped out.

Twenty eleven was a big year for personal computing, from the explosion of cloud technology and the tablet computer to the death of Steve Jobs and our introduction to his iphone brainchild, the personal assistant named Siri. Here to tell us what might be coming next is Rob Fleischman. He’s a computer scientist, serial tech entrepreneur, and our favorite explainer of all things technology related.

In 1948, a plane crash in a remote Alaskan mountain range killed everyone on board …twenty-four merchant mariners returning to the US from Shanghai, and six Northwest Airlines crew members. The crash site was quickly covered by snow and eventually entombed in ice…where it remained until 1999. It was then that a pair of former US Airforce pilots turned their hobby of solving forgotten aviation mysteries into an investigation.

Back in the mid-2000's, peer to peer lending web sites like Prosper and Lending Club bet that ordinary people could take the place of banks. The business model was both daring and consistent with the hyper-connected internet culture. The idea was that people who needed loans could connect with investors willing to bet on getting paid back with a little interest. Prosper’s faith in crowd-sourcing replacing traditional risk-assessment tools used by banks turned out to be a mistake.

The CEO of Reppify, a start up offering employers a new way to measure prospective employees by their use of social media, explains why "Klout" is what it's all about.   

The hospital delivery room is not a fun place for surprises - the more parents and medical staff know going in, the better the outcome usually is. The Predibirth system helps keep surprises to a minimum by MRI-scanning Junior in the womb* and running virtual simulations of labor - if it sees a potentially serious problem, like baby's head being bigger than expected, doctors can consider planning a c-section in advance.

Here’s a story worth sharing on your smartphone: new research says there is NOT an epidemic of teen sexting.

Janis Wolak is senior researcher at the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire. She’s co-author of two studies on sexting being released in today’s edition of the journal Pediatrics, and she tells All Things Considered host Brady Carlson the UNH data shows a rate of sexting much lower than the 20 percent number commonly cited in news reports.