Why Apple Pay Is a Huge Milestone in Payments
Breakthrough A service that makes it practical to use your smartphone as a wallet in everyday situations. Why It Matters Credit card fraud damages the economy by raising the costs of goods and services. Key Players Apple Visa MasterCard Google When Apple Pay was announced in September, Osama Bedier was unimpressed. Yet when Apple Pay launched just a few weeks later, Bedier was a convert. Momentum for mobile payment technologies was building even before Apple Pay debuted last fall. None of the individual technologies is novel, but Apple turned them into a service that is demonstrably easier than any other. But even if Apple didn’t invent mobile payments, it has significantly enhanced them. That doesn’t mean most of us will be ditching our wallets and waving phones in every store in 2015—far from it. Still, Apple has done a lot of things right, suggesting that Apple Pay will turn out to be a milestone. As a result, Apple is now cementing standards for the payment industry. —Robert D.
George Lakoff
George P. Lakoff (/ˈleɪkɒf/, born May 24, 1941) is an American cognitive linguist, best known for his thesis that lives of individuals are significantly influenced by the central metaphors they use to explain complex phenomena. The more general theory that elaborated his thesis is known as embodied mind. He is professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1972. Work[edit] [edit] Although some of Lakoff's research involves questions traditionally pursued by linguists, such as the conditions under which a certain linguistic construction is grammatically viable, he is most famous for his reappraisal of the role that metaphors play in socio-political lives of humans. Metaphor has been seen within the Western scientific tradition as purely a linguistic construction. He suggested that: "Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature." Linguistics wars[edit] Embodied mind[edit]
Five routes to more innovative problem solving - McKinsey Quarterly - Strategy - Strategic Thinking
Rob McEwen had a problem. The chairman and chief executive officer of Canadian mining group Goldcorp knew that its Red Lake site could be a money-spinner—a mine nearby was thriving—but no one could figure out where to find high-grade ore. The terrain was inaccessible, operating costs were high, and the unionized staff had already gone on strike. In short, McEwen was lumbered with a gold mine that wasn’t a gold mine. Then inspiration struck. Attending a conference about recent developments in IT, McEwen was smitten with the open-source revolution. McEwen intuitively understood the value of taking a number of different approaches simultaneously to solving difficult problems. This article presents an approach for doing just that. The flexons approach Finding innovative solutions is hard. Obviously, people do not always have think tanks of PhDs trained in various approaches at their disposal. Networks flexon Imagine a map of all of the people you know, ranked by their influence over you.
Science Rap B.A.T.T.L.E.S. Bring Hip-Hop Into The Classroom : Code Switch
This story comes to us from our friends at the science desk. They produced the 7-minute video documentary you see above. "Modern-day rappers — all they talk about is money, and all these unnecessary and irrelevant topics," says Victoria Richardson, a freshman at Bronx Compass High School. Richardson's rhymes tackle a much less-popular subject: DNA. Richardson and her teammates were finalists at the Science Genius B.A.T.T.L.E.S. "Science Genius is about harvesting the power of urban youth culture," says Christopher Emdin, a professor of education at Columbia University's Teacher's College who created the program. hide captionJayda Neor and Kephra Shaw Meredith, seventh-graders from KIPP Bridge middle school in Oakland, Calif., perform a rap song about the discovery of DNA's structure in front of a green screen. Tom McFadden The students researched and wrote rhymes about everything from gravity to evolution.
Networks of Genome Data Will Transform Medicine
Breakthrough Technical standards that let DNA databases communicate. Why It Matters Your medical treatment could benefit from the experiences of millions of others. Key Players Global Alliance for Genomics and Health Google Personal Genome Project Noah is a six-year-old suffering from a disorder without a name. A match could make a difference. In January, programmers in Toronto began testing a system for trading genetic information with other hospitals. One of the people behind this project is David Haussler, a bioinformatics expert based at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Haussler is a founder and one of the technical leaders of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health, a nonprofit organization formed in 2013 that compares itself to the W3C, the standards organization devoted to making sure the Web functions correctly. The unfolding calamity in genomics is that a great deal of life-saving information, though already collected, is inaccessible. —Antonio Regalado
AIDA
Disciplines > Sales > Sales methods > AIDA Attention | Interest | Desire | Action | And... | See also AIDA is a simple acronym that was devised a long time ago as a reminder of four stages of the sales process (Strong, 1925). It is, in modern terms, a fairly simplistic model. Attention First get their attention. When you are talking to them, the first few seconds are essential as they will listen most then and rapidly decide whether you are worth giving further attention. It is generally better to open with something that pulls them towards you rather than something that scares them (as this may push them away). Good openers address their problems and begin with such as: Have you ever...? Bad openers give them something to object to, demonstrate your disrespect, or just bore them to tears, and may begin with such as: I've got just the thing you want...? Interest Once you have their attention, sustain that attention by getting the other person interested. You can get interest by: Desire Action
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What Is Science? From Feynman to Sagan to Asimov to Curie, an Omnibus of Definitions
by Maria Popova “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious — the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.” “We live in a society absolutely dependent on science and technology,” Carl Sagan famously quipped in 1994, “and yet have cleverly arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. That’s a clear prescription for disaster.” Little seems to have changed in the nearly two decades since, and although the government is now actively encouraging “citizen science,” for many “citizens” the understanding of — let alone any agreement about — what science is and does remains meager. So, what exactly is science, what does it aspire to do, and why should we the people care? Stuart Firestein writes in the excellent Ignorance: How It Drives Science: Real science is a revision in progress, always. Science does not purvey absolute truth, science is a mechanism. Carl Sagan echoed the same sentiment when he remarked: Later:
