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From staff-free ticket offices to students who can learn online, it seems there is no corner of economic life in which people are not being replaced by machines.

One of the reasons Google is investing so much is that whoever owns the communications system for driverless cars will own the 21st century's equivalent of the telephone network or money clearing system: this will be a licence to print money.

The only new jobs will be in the design and marketing of the cars, and in writing the computer software that will allow them to navigate their journeys, along with the apps for our mobile phones that will help us to use them better

With technology keeping us connected around-the-clock, the divide between our professional and personal lives continue to be blurred.

A workplace sabbatical would provide eligible full-time employees with a pre-determined schedule for taking extended time off to pursue personal interests or to be with family.

Not only would your employees be recharged by virtue of a sabbatical, but they would be very clear that their company cares about their well-being and not just the bottom-line.

Many firms, including 25 percent of Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For, now offer sabbaticals. These typically four- to 10-week pauses allow employees time out to focus on their needs instead of the organization’s. 

Most organizations offer sabbaticals to employees who have been there for a certain period of time (at least five to seven years is common), and employees may take multiple sabbaticals so long as they work a minimum number of years in between. This provides an incentive for workers to remain at a company longer.

Adobe Systems encourages its employees to use their breaks to do volunteer work. Then they promote the good deeds in the Adobe Life magazine, a website directed at attracting new talent. Companies that have formal career pauses advertise them as part of the benefits package, like Boston Consulting Group’s Time For You/Flexleave program, which allows workers with just 12-months of time onboard to take an eight-week unpaid break to recharge.

If data from personal biometric devices is ever going to be truly useful to researchers, big medical centers will have to pull it into electronic health records (EHRs), de-identify it, and make it public. Without the medical data found in EHRs, like CT scans, X-rays, and blood tests, researchers have little context for wearable sensor data and there is little useful information that can be gleaned from just the raw data

Practice Fusion, a popular EHR company, will begin opening up its API over the next year to pull in data from wearable sensors to its platform.

Basis, a startup that makes a health sensor-laden watch, is working on the first step: a device-agnostic platform that puts all of a person’s health sensor data into a single online repository.

по мнению гендиректора Swatch Group,

умные часы – это быстро устаревающая бытовая техника и она не станет конкурентом механическим часам, которые служат десятилетиями и передаются из поколения в поколение.

В Swatch Group есть компания под названием EM Microelectronic, которая является поставщиком компонентов для многих производителей умных браслетов – Garmin, например, – а также для производителей смартфонов, название которых я не могу разглашать.