Group items tagged

Governments should stop thinking about refugee camps as temporary places

"These are the cities of tomorrow,"

The average stay today in a camp is 17 years. That's a generation."

Penguin Random House announced Wednesday it will release an abridged young adult version of The Da Vinci Code for teenage audiences.

The plot of the novel will remain largely the same but will be protracted for younger readers.

With huge-flat screen TVs becoming more affordable — and more original TV content being produced — cinemas have to step up their game to keep pace in the arms race with home theaters. That’s why theater chains are coming out with better food, reclining chairs, and more supersized screens like Imax to take full advantage of the special effects in many tentpole blockbusters.

The theater, which opens to the public Friday night, now has a lobby that’s part of the show (and soon, a camera-based audience data gathering tool to go with it), and a cinema equipped with the showpiece Barco Escape, which combines three screens in a U-shaped pattern that gives the viewer almost a cockpit-type perspective of the action.

“The Maze Runner” and its sequel, “Maze Runner: Scorch Trials,” were the first — and only — two films with scenes optimized for Barco Escape, but with dozens of Imax films coming out every year, there needs to be a much broader pipeline of content to compete with other large format

A convoy of self-driving trucks recently drove across Europe and arrived at the Port of Rotterdam.

the technology would effectively double the output of the U.S. transportation network at 25 percent of the cost.

While the efficiency gains are real — too real to pass up — the technology will have tremendous adverse effects as well. There are currently more than 1.6 million Americans working as truck drivers, making it the most common job in 29 states.

Many cities are now facing impacts such as water scarcity, flooding and heatwaves, which are expected to become more frequent and intense than they are used to. Cities need to start investing in adaptation measures using ideas and best practice from around the world.

Climate change adaptation should be flexible to accommodate uncertainty

Adaptation should work with nature, not against it.

whole countries such as Mauritius and Tuvalu will need to evacuate due to rising sea levels. But while coastlines in much of the world may suffer, climate change will be a positive development in some areas. Specifically, Canada; northern Europe; Russia; Alaska; Patagonia, Argentina; and southern Africa may all experience real estate booms.

Continuing with the New York example, Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently proposed a $20 billion climate change plan for the city.

The plan is designed to mitigate damage from another Sandy-sized storm and would drastically change everyday life for New Yorkers, with sharply increased taxes and large construction projects in most seaside neighborhoods.

In around two months, the team behind the solar-powered aircraft Solar Impulse 2 will attempt the first ever around-the-world flight powered only by sunlight.

After taking off in Abu Dhabi, the Solar Impulse 2 will make stops in Oman, India, Myanmar, China, the US, and Southern Europe or North Africa before landing back in Abu Dhabi sometime in August.

The Solar Impulse 2's across-the-world flight should clock 500 hours total flight time and around 21,748 miles

Consumers in China spent $116.8 billion on luxury goods abroad in 2015

This translates to 46% of the global volume of high-end goods, which includes branded leather goods, cosmetics and electronics, according to consultants at Beijing-based Fortune Character Group, which derived these figures from the revenues of some 20,000 brands.

The government says that 120 million Chinese tourists — just about 1% of the population — went overseas in 2015, and contributed to 12% of global spending on their holidays.

M-Pesa’s success has been phenomenal. Recent statistics show that fully one-quarter of the Kenyan economy flows through M-Pesa.

Other countries are taking a crack at a similar mobile digital currency. Vodacom

has launched M-Pesa in other African nations, as well as India and parts of Eastern Europe. In Latin America, Ecuador recently announced it would launch a nationwide digital currency, residing largely on people’s smartphones

Russian Railways wants to build one, as part of a massive road and rail project that would stretch from New York to London by way of Canada, Alaska, Russia, and continental Europe.

The plan is called the Trans-Eurasian Belt Development, and Russian Railway president Vladimir Yakunin proposed it earlier this year.

A 520 mile stretch of road would carry travelers — and, presumably, trade goods — west from the Canadian border, through Fairbanks and Nome, to the shores of the Seward Peninsula.

Banks are quickly approaching their "automation tipping point," and they could soon reduce headcount by as much as 30%.

"Banks' Uber moment will mean a disintermediation of bank branches rather than the banks themselves

it will mean the shift to mobile distribution being the main channel of interaction between customers and the bank

The biggest impact of artificial intelligence will be to help humans make discoveries we couldn’t make on our own.

AI’s greatest economic impact could come from its potential as a new “method of invention” that ultimately reshapes “the nature of the innovation process and the organization of R&D.”

It is taking more researchers and money to find productive new ideas, according to economists at Stanford and MIT. That’s a likely factor in the overall sluggish growth in the US and Europe in recent decades.