Only two years after appearing on the game show Jeopardy! IBM’s Watson supercomputer is making startling progress in advancing the future of health care. In the past week, three new Watson-related “cognitive” technologies have been unveiled.(Two at the Cleveland Clinic and one at The Anderson Cancer Center in Dallas.) “WatsonPaths” incorporates feedback from the physician…

Data mining is going to be big business in the near future. To understand why, consider that the food retailer, The Schwan Food Company, has used data mining to bolster its revenue by 3 to4 percent. That might not sound like a lot but in the retail industry, it’s huge. According to this insightful article,…

   “Don’t wanna learn from nobody what I gotta unlearn.” Bob Dylan     Question: Which of the following characteristics has a higher correlation to the success of a Hollywood movie: the involvement of a famous movie star or the location(s) where the movie is shot?   The answer, to the surprise and chagrin of…

Recently, I gave two presentations on the topic of my latest book, Jump the Curve, at a State Managers Conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I discussed a great many topics, but I would like to highlight just one: “Embracing counter-intuitive findings.” Today, a great many people, including education, public health and law enforcement officials are certain as…

Late yesterday, Google released a very cool new mobile application which employs voice recognition technology. The question is not so much what the technology can do today, the question is what will the technology be able to do in the near future—and how might it require professionals in the education, health care, and a host of other…

I live in a major metropolitan area and the traffic situation drives me crazy. If someone then told me that they were going to close a road in order to reduce traffic congestion, I’d likely think they were either crazy or stupid. As I mention in my book, Jump the Curve, emerging technologies can, however,…

On December 30, 1936, over 17,000 fans packed into the old Madison Square Garden to watch Long Island University, the country’s top-ranked basketball team, take on Stanford. It was slated to be a great game. Long Island was putting up its 43-game winning streak up against the reigning Pacific Coast Conference champions. More than that,…

The future is unknowable. There are far too many variables for even the most foresighted individual or powerful supercomputer to accurately forecast what tomorrow—let alone next year or the next decade—will look like with precision. Nevertheless, this fact neither discounts the importance of forecasting, nor does it diminish the work that those individuals (myself included)…

It is easy to believe that having more choices will lead to a greater level of happiness. However, as this new study suggests, people may be more satisfied when selecting from a smaller set of options. There are a couple of reasons for this somewhat counter-intuitive finding, but the most poignant seems to be that…

One of the reasons I have established this blog on unlearning on Typepad is because it allows me to maintain and modifiy the site easily without knowing a lick of computer programming or software development. And, trust me, I don’t know jack about those fields. Nevertheless, I recently stumbled upon this old article, The Joy…