At just over 25 percent of total spending on hospital care (or 1.4 percent of total United States economic output), American hospital administrative costs exceed those of all the other places. The Netherlands was second in hospital administrative costs: almost 20 percent of hospital spending and 0.8 percent of that country’s G.D.P.
At the low end were Canada and Scotland, which both spend about 12 percent of hospital expenditures on administration, or about half a percent of G.D.P.
Hospitals are not the only source of high administrative spending in the United States. Physician practices also devote a large proportion of revenue to administration. By one estimate, for every 10 physicians providing care, almost seven additional people are engaged in billing-related activities.
Lolo Peak’s tab ran to $48 million, and about $49 million were spent at Rice Ridge. And these are but two of the 71,499 wildfires that, combined, torched more than 10 million acres throughout the West last year. Congress now appropriates around $4 billion annually for battling wildfires, and billions more are spent by state and local governments. Yet even this drastically understates the true price. According to a 2017 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “Other societal costs, including real-estate devaluation, emergency services, and post-fire rehabilitation total about thirty times the direct cost of firefighting.”
These astronomical sums are often assumed to be an unavoidable consequence of increasingly catastrophic fire seasons, which require an expensive array of technology and machines. But while Poncin acknowledged the usefulness of aircraft, bulldozers, and smoke jumpers, he steered my thinking away from the technical aspects of wildfire. “One of the things I have learned in my time is that large fire is a social issue,” he told me. “It involves biological processes. There’s a physical side of it, but it’s really a social issue.”
Government Data Science News
The EU walloped Google with a $5.1 billion fine for anti-trust violations. Google’s battalion of lawyers is diligently preparing an appeal. Nevertheless, “if Google does not start altering its mobile phone practices in 90 days, it faces penalties of up to 5 percent of the worldwide average daily revenue of its parent company, Alphabet.” Investors don’t care. The $GOOG price plot showed a gentle dip before rising steadfastly, steeply, to the right.
Next week, the US Department of Health and Human Services will shutter the website it uses to host medical care guidelines. The site is a singular resource for best practices in patient care with 200,000 visits per month. Apparently, the agency does not have the $1.2 million it costs to run the site.
The Department of Defense is building a large Joint Artificial Intelligence Center for applied artificial intelligence development. It will cost $1.7 billion.
“Science Finds–Industry Applies–Man Conforms.” That was the motto of the Chicago 1933 International Exposition. I used it as the epigraph of my 1993 book, Things That Make Us Smart, suggesting that it be flipped to read “People Propose, Technology Conforms.” I have helped develop design principles that make technology easier to use and understand, principles that evolved into my book Design of Everyday Things, and that today are called human-centered design.
But if these principles are so powerful and useful, why do they continually have to be taught and retaught? Why does each new industry repeat the failures of earlier industries? I now realize that my approach was wrong: We were addressing the symptoms, not the core, fundamental issues. The phrase “man conforms” is technology-centered, rather than people-centered. That much is obvious, but what was not so obvious was how much this view has permeated everything we do.
We have unwittingly accepted the paradigm that technology comes first, with people relegated to doing the actions that the machines cannot do. This requires people to act like machines, ever ready to take over when things go wrong.
Experts say the database of carefully curated medical guidelines is one of a kind, used constantly by medical professionals, and on July 16 will ‘go dark’ due to budget cuts.
Data science has become a critical business component in insurance, but there is a severe skills shortage. Life insurer Northwestern Mutual knew it needed to attract and nurture more data science talent in order to remain competitive and fill the gap.
To that end, the company has increased its commitment to develop and retain data science talent in its home city of Milwaukee. It recently partnered with Marquette University and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee to invest nearly $40 million to create the Northwestern Mutual Data Science Institute. In addition, in partnership with several other companies in Milwaukee, the company released a comprehensive study of technology talent and its impact on the local Milwaukee economy.
Ten highly innovative projects ranging from creation of a data pipeline for freshwater science data repositories to characterizing the variations of gut microbial composition with age and age-related inflammation and diseases, have been chosen to receive University of Wisconsin–Madison Data Science Initiative funding.
Facebook’s new artificial intelligence research lab in Pittsburgh will take over a space on Carnegie Mellon University’s campus that has been vacant since February, when The Walt Disney Co. vacated its research post there.
Two CMU professors with expertise in robotics will head the lab, but Facebook maintains that their new positions will not distract from their current responsibilities — nor should the new roles impede or supersede any university-affiliated research.
Jessica Hodgins, a professor at CMU’s School of Computer Science and a researcher at the Robotics Institute, will head Facebook research in the university’s Collaborative Innovation Center in Oakland, said Yann LeCun, chief AI scientist for Facebook.
Without fanfare, the University of Pennsylvania has agreed to invest up to $50 million over the next three years in at least 10 biotech companies, the Inquirer has learned.
The goal of the pilot program is to convince more local Ph.D.s and M.D.s to establish their companies near the school’s West Philadelphia campus, instead of moving to traditional venture-capital centers in Massachusetts, California, and other states where funding has been more readily available, until now.
Listen carefully to the footsteps in the family home, especially if it has wooden floors unmuffled by carpets, and you can probably work out who it is that is walking about. The features most commonly used to identify people are faces, voices, finger prints and retinal scans. But their “behavioural biometrics”, such as the way they walk, are also giveaways.
Researchers have, for several years, used video cameras and computers to analyse people’s gaits, and are now quite good at it. But translating such knowledge into a practical identification system can be tricky—especially if that system is supposed to be covert. Cameras are often visible, are fiddly to set up, require good lighting and may have their view obscured by other people. So a team led by Krikor Ozanyan of the University of Manchester, in England and Patricia Scully of the National University of Ireland, in Galway have been looking for a better way to recognise gait. Their answer: pressure-sensitive mats.
IBM are showing no signs of slowing its rampage across the blockchain sector: now teaming up with prestigious Columbia University to solidify its role in the industry.
Inventively named the Columbia-IBM Center for Blockchain and Data Transparency, the partnership is looking to leverage Columbia’s academic and scientific networks to further develop blockchain technology.
In the last few decades, China has made huge progress in science and technology. This new age of innovation has seen the birth of ‘unicorn’ tech companies like media giant Tencent, the ‘Uber of China’ Didi Chuxing, and the world’s biggest drone builder, DJI.
Now, for the first time, China has broken into the top 20 of a global list of the most innovative economies.
The latest Global Innovation Index singles out China for its rapid transformation into an innovation powerhouse. It has risen consistently up the rankings, in 2015, it was in 29th place, the following year it rose four places to 25th place and in 2017 up three places to 22nd.
San Francisco, CA July 26. “@Pinterest Labs presents a Distinguished Lecture by prof. Michael Bernstein (@msbernst) from @Stanford on Crowds, Computation, and the Future of Work. Thu 7/26 at 5:30pm @Pinterest.” [rsvp required]
San Francisco, CA July 31 at UCSF Mission Bay. “Join us on July 31 to hear from OCS scientists and learn how the FDA is leveraging computational tools, services and training into the scientific review process.” [free, registration required]
In March we unveiled the brand-new redesign of Condé Nast Traveler. While a great deal of work went into the fit and polish of the front-end, we also made several notable improvements to the way we handle data. One of the most important and challenging improvements was migrating our existing systems for recording location information, channel fields, and text tags into a new system of categorization. This system allows us to establish relationships between pieces of content and unlocks new ways for our readers, editors, and other users to explore the large amount of content our brands have amassed over the years. In this post we’ll give an overview of this system and some of the benefits we’ve found in enabling exploration via categories through our content graph.