Everywhere from business to medicine to the climate, forecasting the future is a complex and absolutely critical job. So how do you do it—and what comes next?
Category: business
The coronavirus death toll in Italy’s worst-hit region has surpassed 3,450 in the last 24 hours after a rise of 360 fatalities in Lombardy.
Ministers in Rome have been forced to plunge all 60million citizens into lockdown, while ordering all non-essential businesses in the country to shut amid the Covid-19 outbreak.
The pandemic has taken a choke-hold on everyday life, with even Pope Francis retreating indoors to make his weekly address via videolink.
At least five downtown Denver hotels have closed temporarily to stem the coronavirus spread, and the statewide industry is bracing for a hit that could lead to as many as 72,000 job losses in a sector that produces a $13.4 billion annual gross domestic product statewide.
While only a handful of mountain resorts had shut down by early this week, that number has ballooned in recent days as hotels across the metro region are reporting vacancy levels below 10% during a month many had predicted would be record-setting, Colorado Hotel and Lodging Association President/CEO Amie Mayhew said. Among those that have announced they will shutter until May 11 or 12 are the Grand Hyatt Denver, the Oxford Hotel, the Crawford Hotel and The Maven Hotel at Dairy Block.
All of those except for the Grand Hyatt are operated by Sage Hospitality Group of Denver, whose CEO, Walter Isenberg, issued a letter Thursday saying he’d made “the very difficult decision to temporarily suspend business operations at a portion of our hotels and restaurants in order to protect the health and safety of our guests, our associates and our communities.”
As they increasingly log on from home, Americans are having to meld their personal technology with professional tools at unprecedented scale. For employers, the concern isn’t just about capacity, but also about workers introducing new potential vulnerabilities into their routine — whether that’s weak passwords on personal computers, poorly secured home WiFi routers, or a family member’s device passing along a computer virus.
The dramatic expansion of teleworking by US schools, businesses and government agencies in response to the coronavirus is raising fresh questions about the capacity and security of the tools many Americans use to connect to vital workplace systems and data.
At one major US agency, some officials have resorted to holding meetings on iPhone group calls because the regular conference bridges haven’t always been working, according to one federal employee. But the workaround has its limits: The group calls support only five participants at a time, the employee noted.
“Things have worked better than I anticipated, but there are lots of hiccups still,” said the employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak on the record.
Greetings everyone! The Futures Agency (my company) recently launched the new digital conference series which is generating huge interest from around the globe; the last one had 650 signups and 330 people attending. Not only are these events utterly needed and appreciated as we are all fighting the lock-downs, loss of income and many other consequences of covid19, I think that online conferencing will be a huge business, going forward . We are currently using the amazing Zoom.us platform for our events, but are investigating many other ones as well, such as Vimeo Live, Crowdcast and Lifestorm. I think we won’t ever give up meeting each other in real-life but online meetings and conferences will certainly become the new normal.
So join me for our next event, details below (Zoom direct sign-up is here)
We must keep meeting, learning and collaborating - if we fail to adapt we will fail to exist:)
Greetings from Zürich and stay well!!
Gerd Leonhard
Futurist & Humanist, Keynote Speaker Author of “Technology vs. Humanity”
Zurich, Switzerland
www.futuristgerd.com Youtube: www.gerdtube.com
CEO of www.thefuturesagency.com LinkedIn Twitter
March 26, 6pm CET : FREE Digital Conference with Futurists Anton Musgrave, Gerd Leonhard, Liselotte Lygnso, KD Adamson: The Future of BusinessDescriptionDanish futurist Liselotte Lygnso has just been added as guest-speaker, see https://thefuturesagency.com/speakers/liselotte-lyngso/ for more details on Liselotte. Blue Futurist’ KD Adamson will join us as well see https://thefuturesagency.com/speakers/k-d-adamson/. The latest updates will be shared here: https://gerd.fm/39ZgAsN
We are living in an age of perpetual VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) — and given that we are also moving at exponential pace, FORESIGHT is now mission-critical. Being ‘future-ready’ is everyone’s job now, and it requires more than good data, sharp analysis and domain expertise. To ‘have a get feel’ for what’s coming is probably more of an art than a science — imagination and intuition are just as important as experience and knowledge: EQ AND IQ.
Hence, this session will focus on what we call PRACTICAL WISDOM, i.e. we will share our insights and foresights about the next decade and apply them to the here and now. We will present for 15 minutes each, and then take questions and have live discussions with the audience.
We will talk about the 10 Game-Changers impacting every business in the near future, and the Megashifts see www.megashifts.digital focussing on near future scenarios and ‘practical wisdoms’. Have a look at www.futuristgerd.com and https://thefuturesagency.com/speakers/anton-musgrave/ for more Details on what we do.
More details will be published on http://www.theconference.digital soon!
Please note that this is a FREE event, for now, as we are trying out new ideas and concepts. This may change in the future.
GERD’s CONTENT
**** Announcing Digital Conferences
My 2020 film ‘How the Future Works’
My 2019 film on AI: We Need to Talk about AI
Read about The Megashifts, download the free PDF
On Happiness: Chapter 9 from my book, free pdf
On Thursday, March 18, Austin-based Everlywell announced that it will begin selling home tests for COVID-19 beginning Monday, March 23. The business already offers dozens of at-home testing kits for anything from cholesterol levels to fertility to food sensitivities, but it is the first U.S. company to announce an at-home COVID-19 test. Everlywell has an initial supply of 30,000 COVID-19 tests and is working with multiple laboratories to scale that number to 250,000 tests weekly.
The test can be requested online for people experiencing COVID-19 symptoms. To access a test, consumers can go to everlywell.com and complete a screening questionnaire. According to the website, the test is shipped to customers with everything needed to collect a sample at home and safely ship that sample to a CLIA-certified lab partner. (All of Everywell’s laboratory partners conducting COVID-19 testing are complying with the FDA’s Emergency Use Authorization for COVID-19 symptoms.) The samples will then be shipped to partner labs overnight, and secure digital results will be available online within 48 hours of the lab receiving the sample. Free telehealth consultations with an independent, board-certified physician will also be available to those with positive results. The test is $135, at no profit to Everlywell, and is covered by participating HSA and FSA providers. The brand has reached out to government officials to see if the test can be made available for free.
Intel Corp. is releasing an experimental research system for neuromorphic computing, a cutting-edge method that simulates the way human brains work to perform computations faster, using significantly less energy.
The system, called Pohoiki Springs, will be made available this month over the cloud to members of the Intel Neuromorphic Research Community, which includes academic researchers, government labs and about a dozen companies such as Accenture PLC and Airbus SE.
Others, including International Business Machines Corp., are also researching the technique.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said he supports direct payments of $1,000 per adult and $500 per child to Americans within three weeks if Congress backs the plan.
“The president is determined that we are going to support” those affected, Mnuchin said in a Fox Business interview Thursday morning.
Cash handouts to all American households are gaining support in Congress as the best way to shore up an economy brought to a near-standstill by the coronavirus response.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. and TARRYTOWN, N.Y., March 16, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — Sanofi and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc today announced they have started a clinical program evaluating Kevzara® (sarilumab) in patients hospitalized with severe COVID-19. Kevzara is a fully-human monoclonal antibody that inhibits the interleukin-6 (IL-6) pathway by binding and blocking the IL-6 receptor. IL-6 may play a role in driving the overactive inflammatory response in the lungs of patients who are severely or critically ill with COVID-19 infection. The role of IL-6 is supported by preliminary data from a single-arm study in China using another IL-6 receptor antibody.
This U.S.-based trial will begin at medical centers in New York, one of the epicenters of the U.S. COVID-19 outbreak, and will assess the safety and efficacy of adding Kevzara to usual supportive care, compared to supportive care plus placebo. The multi-center, double-blind, Phase 2/3 trial has an adaptive design with two parts and is anticipated to enroll up to 400 patients. The first part will recruit patients with severe COVID-19 infection across approximately 16 U.S. sites, and will evaluate the impact of Kevzara on fever and patients’ need for supplemental oxygen. The second, larger part of the trial will evaluate the improvement in longer-term outcomes including preventing death and reducing the need for mechanical ventilation, supplemental oxygen and/or hospitalization.
“At Sanofi, we are taking a leading role in addressing the global challenge of COVID-19 disease. Scientific evidence has emerged to suggest that Kevzara may be a potentially important treatment option for some patients, and this trial will provide the well-controlled, rigorous scientific data we need to determine if IL-6 inhibition with Kevzara is better than current supportive care alone. Additionally, we expect to rapidly initiate trials outside the U.S. in the coming weeks, including areas most affected by the pandemic such as Italy,” said John Reed, M.D., Ph.D., Sanofi’s Global Head of Research and Development. “In addition to Kevzara, Sanofi Pasteur, the vaccines global business unit of Sanofi, is leveraging previous development work for a SARS vaccine as part of our goal to quickly develop a COVID-19 vaccine.”
A group of neuroscience and neurotechnology researchers have conducted extensive research and developed a new brain imaging technology in two EU projects led by Aalto University. As a result of the successful research, a new project funded by Business Finland just started with the aim of making the devices usable for patients. The project’s budget is one million euros.
“More accurate measurements can be helpful in locating epileptic brain activity before surgery. The new device is also expected to help distinguish brain tumours from healthy tissue more accurately prior to cancer surgery. In addition, the device will increase our understanding of the connections between the different brain regions. This will help us understand abnormal brain activity in connection with, for example, depression or the progress of Alzheimer’s disease,” explains Professor Risto Ilmoniemi, Head of Aalto University Department of Neuroscience and Biomedical Engineering.
The improved accuracy can also be useful in the study of stroke, autism and brain injuries; and especially as part of basic brain research.