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Largest estate agents set to lose £26m after letting fees ban
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The ban on letting fees payable by tenants due to come into force next year in the UK is likely to cost the country's three biggest estate agents at least £26m ($34.8m) in lost profits, according to market analysts Peel Hunt. Countrywide is predicted to lose the most, with an £18m fall, while LSL and Foxtons also face significant profit reductions. The analysts added that traditional agents are also under pressure from online and hybrid agents, with Purplebricks seen as the market leader among them.
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http://www.propertyindustryeye.com/countrywide-lsl-and-foxtons-facing-26m-annual-profit-cut-from-lettings-fee-ban-analyst/
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2017-09-28 12:11:44.243000
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The UK’s three biggest listed estate agencies could have their profits hit by a combined £26m once the lettings fee ban is introduced.
A report by analysts Peel Hunt, looking at the prospects of listed agencies Countrywide, LSL and Foxtons, paints a bleak picture for them and the wider market.
Analyst Gavin Jago predicts the ban, expected in 2018, would hit Countrywide’s profits by £18m, offsetting any ongoing cost-cutting measures.
He said: “A cost-cutting/branch closure exercise is well underway, but the full effect on profits of a reduced presence on the high street is yet to be seen.
“A full ban on letting fees could materially impact profits from 2018. This will not help the leveraged balance sheet or the scope for dividends. We cut our dividend forecasts and target price, and retain our negative stance.”
Interestingly, the report was written when Countrywide’s share price closed at 123p on September 21 and showed a target price – the point at which a trader may sell – of 115p from 145p previously. But the share price has now hit a low of 113p.
Jago holds a similar stance with LSL, recommending investors reduce their holding. He predicts the agent will see its profits reduce by £8m from the fee ban.
He said: “To date, LSL’s branch closures have been small in number as management believes traditional agents will continue to represent the vast majority of the sales market until 2025.
“This remains to be seen, but what is more certain is the lettings fee ban that is now widely expected to come into force in 2018. Management has not provided a figure for the group’s exposure to lettings fees. However, we estimate that it could amount to around £8m per annum.”
Jago maintains a sell recommendation for Foxtons, predicting a £3m hit on lettings per year. He also warns its high commission fees are impacting the firm’s activity and may need to be reduced.
He said: “Trading remains challenging for Foxtons due to the low levels of housing activity in the capital.
“In our view, this is being exacerbated by the group’s relatively high commission fees, which are increasingly detached from average rates charged by its competitors.
“Self help could come in the form of a reduction in fees but, as yet, management seems reluctant to take such action. The lettings fee ban looks set to come into force in 2018, which will create a further drag on profitability.”
The report is kinder to Savills – and glowing about Purplebricks.
Jago recommends Savills stock as a hold, backing the diversity in the business, and backs Purplebricks as a buy. He claims profits from its US operations could eclipse the UK and Australia by 2022.
Jago said: “Against a backdrop of a slower UK housing market, Purplebricks’ growth has been very strong. Its market share of total transactions has doubled in the last year and it remains the dominant player amongst the online/hybrid peer group.
“The Australian business has been operational for a year and is trading ahead of the UK at the equivalent point of evolution. If Purplebricks captures only a small fraction of the US market, we estimate that US profits could be bigger than the UK and Australia combined by 2022.”
Looking at the wider agency market, the report says fees have fallen to 1% and are at 0.5% to 0.75% in some areas.
It claims the number of consumers using physical branches is diminishing due to the rise of hybrid and online agents, with Purplebricks the “clear winner”.
The report claims this is putting traditional agents under pressure and will mean more branch closures and less activity.
Read the full report
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First engineering classes begin at Dyson's private university
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There first engineering undergraduates at vacuum-cleaner giant Dyson's Institute of Engineering and Technology have begun their degree studies. Of 850 applicants, 33 were accepted onto the four-year course, which pays students a salary throughout their studies and offers the prospect of a job with Dyson upon graduation. The company said 27% of entrants are female, compared with the UK average of 16%. The course is taught by company scientists and University of Warwick academics at the institute's Wiltshire campus. Dyson has invested in education to tackle what it says is a shortage of skilled engineers in the UK.
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http://www.eurekamagazine.co.uk/design-engineering-news/dyson-institute-of-engineering-and-technology-opens-its-doors-to-first-undergraduates/160670/
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2017-09-28 11:51:05.280000
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Today, engineering undergraduates begin their degree studies at the Dyson Institute of Engineering and Technology on the Dyson technology campus in Malmesbury, Wiltshire. Over 850 students applied for 25 places on the course and due to the exceptionally high calibre of candidates, 33 Undergraduate Engineers were accepted onto the four-year engineering degree.
According to Dyson, 27% of the undergraduate engineers starting this year will be female, significantly more than the UK average of 16%. Students who accepted places at the Institute included those with offers from top universities including the University of Cambridge and Imperial College London and 66% achieved at least one A* at A-Level.
The Dyson Institute builds on Dyson’s previous work in schools and universities to overcome the lack of engineers in the UK and is the first University of its kind following the passage of the Higher Education and Research Act on 27th April 2017.
The undergraduate engineers will be mentored by Dyson’s practicing scientists and engineers who will teach alongside academics from WMG, the University of Warwick. They will benefit from learning high level science and engineering theory, combined with real-world application on live projects.
Earning a salary throughout the course and the prospect of a graduate role with Dyson on completion of their degree means the students should come away from higher education debt-free.
James Dyson said: “Dyson’s undergraduate engineers will develop new technology alongside world-leading engineering practitioners, creating real products that end up in homes around the world and all alongside their academic work. I am looking forward to seeing what exceptional things they achieve over the next four years and hope they will want to work at Dyson for many years to come.”
Applications for 2018 entry open today (14th September 2017).
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UK homeowners dash to remortgage expecting rise in interest rates
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UK homeowners drove remortgages to record levels in August, as many sought out lower interest rates in anticipation of the era of low rates coming to an end, according to Connells Survey & Valuation. It revealed remortgage valuations had risen three percentage points year on year to make up 37% of the lending market. "With so much economic uncertainty and hints of a base rate rise, many are choosing to lock into a lower rate to see them through the next few years," said John Bagshaw, corporate services director of Connells Survey & Valuation.
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https://www.buyassociation.co.uk/2017/09/28/remortgaging-on-the-up/
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2017-09-28 11:42:25.003000
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Remortgaging was responsible for a record proportion of valuations in August, according to the latest research from Connells Survey & Valuation.
“Remortgaging is quickly becoming the dominant activity in the lending market,” commented John Bagshaw, corporate services director of Connells Survey & Valuation. “The record high in August was driven by consumers seeking out better value borrowing. Having benefited from a decade of low interest rates, consumers are sensing the risk that this era is nearing an end. Many older mortgage deals are expiring this autumn which will mean moving onto more expensive standard variable rates. As a result, homeowners on these deals are opting to refinance, taking advantage of the intense competition in the mortgage market right now.”
According to Connells, the proportion of remortgage valuations has risen three percentage points year-on- year to make up 37% of the entire market.
The growth in remortgaging, including buy-to- let remortgaging has been driven by high levels of competition from lenders who are reducing their rates to attract potential borrowers. Consumers are opting to lock in these lower rates, securing long-term, fixed-rate remortgages ahead of a potential base rate rise later in the year.
“Despite a slight slowdown in transactions this August, official figures suggest house price growth has held up,” continued Bagshaw. “This rise in property prices means homeowners could now get a better loan-to- value ratio when remortgaging than when they first borrowed – potentially allowing them to lower monthly repayments. With so much economic uncertainty and hints of a base rate rise, many are choosing to lock into a lower rate to see them through the next few years.”
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MIT engineer develops robot that detects leaks in water pipes
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An engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, You Wu, has developed a low-cost, flexible robot that can detect leaks in water pipes, potentially saving many thousands of gallons of water. Dubbed Robot Daisy, the shuttlecock-shaped device floats along within water pipes while sensors on its "skirt" detect the suction effect caused by water outflows. The data is then collected and analysed, enabling any leaks to be spotted early. Wise County, Virginia, the Lingang Industrial Zone in Shanghai, China and Monterrey, Mexico, which all suffer significant losses to piped water supply, have all signed up to purchase Robot Daisy.
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https://qz.com/1085752/an-mit-phd-student-designed-a-soft-robot-named-daisy-to-save-cities-millions-in-water-leaks/
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2017-09-28 10:58:15.117000
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Around the world, one in five people don’t have enough water, according to the United Nations, but that’s not because there isn’t enough fresh water for people to drink, bath, wash their clothes, or even water their lawns. It’s mainly because either the water has been polluted, pipes don’t exist to take water from lakes and streams, or aging infrastructure allows water to leak.
In 2008, Saudi Arabia approached MIT’s Mechatronics Research Laboratory to fund new technologies to help tackle the third problem. The country, notorious for its expensive desalinated drinking water, was losing one-third of its water every day due to leaking pipes, but existing detection methods, developed for metal pipes, proved incompatible with the plastic infrastructure.
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After nine years of research and development, You Wu, a fifth-year MIT mechanical engineering PhD candidate, has created an elegant solution. His invention: Robot Daisy, a flexible intelligent device that resembles a shuttlecock—or a blue-skirted woman, from which it gets its name.
Daisy works by floating through pipes and pinpointing water leaks. When water leaks through a crack in the pipe, it creates suction that grows linearly with its size and can be measured with sensors. These sensors compose Daisy’s rubber skirt. To identify leaks in a pipeline network, a technician inserts her into the underground piping through a fire hydrant, and she logs the location and force of any tugs on her skirt as she floats downstream. Once the technician retrieves her from the pipes, the computer chip storing all the data in her body connects to wifi and downloads a map of the leaks.
The design works regardless of piping material and comes different sizes to accommodate different pipe diameters. It also operates with a higher degree of precision and granularity than traditional acoustic-based technology. This allows Daisy to catch leaks in their early stages, which “could equate to preventing the loss of millions of gallons of water annually,” Mark Gallager, director of engineering and distribution at the Cambridge, Massachusetts water department, told MIT News. It could also “minimize the damage to infrastructure and the loss of water services to homes and businesses” during a pipe failure, he said.
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It took 11 prototypes for Daisy to successfully traverse the pipe infrastructure at a testing site in Saudi Arabia. Initial prototypes couldn’t distinguish the suction force from a leak from disturbances from dirt and rust caked on the pipes’ interiors. Nor could they clear sharp turns at T-junctions and adapt to changes in pipe size. Through iterative design improvements, Wu fine-tuned Daisy’s detection software and gave her a squishier body to squeeze around corners and through tighter diameters. Wu is now on prototype 16, which costs $150 of raw materials and four hours to build. He estimates the costs will drop once Daisy is manufactured at scale.
Wu incorporated PipeGuard earlier this year with co-founders Jonathan Miller and Daniel Gomez to commercialize Daisy and the company has raised funding from several pitch competitions, including the Booz Allen Hamilton Data Analytics Award and MIT’s Solve Challenge Finals, and received inquiries from dozens of utility companies and regional governments.
Wu, now in the final year of his PhD, has committed to three customers in the coming year: Wise County, Virginia, which loses nearly half of its water to leaks; the Lingang Industrial Zone in Shanghai, China, which loses 30%; and Monterrey, Mexico, which loses 42%, according to data from the respective utility authorities. After graduation, Wu plans to offer Daisy’s expertise as a service to more cities around the world.
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Wu says shortages in electricity growing up in Shanghai influenced his interest in developing something that helps fix water shortages. Factories were then required to stagger work hours to accommodate the energy grid, so he only saw his parents once a week. “I got this feeling of what a shortage of resource feels like, so I have this personal interest of sustainability,” he says.
“I have this fear about the future and about resource shortage,” he continues. “If the population grows to an extent that everyone has to sacrifice something, one day we won’t have water for showers so that someone else will have water to drink. This was basically my personal motivation behind it: How to make sure that one day we won’t have a no shower Mondays.”
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Johnson Matthey to invest £200m in developing batteries for EVs
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British specialist metals and chemicals firm Johnson Matthey has unveiled plans to invest £200m ($270m) in electric vehicle (EV) battery technologies next year. The company believes that by the time EV market penetration reaches 10%, the estimated total value of EV products could be at least $30bn. Johnson Matthey also said it had achieved a breakthrough in lithium nickel oxide, which is used extensively in EV batteries. Its shares closed 15% higher following the announcement. The firm is a specialist in vehicle exhaust catalysts so the investment is aimed at protecting its future as internal combustion engines are phased out.
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http://www.climateactionprogramme.org/news/johnson-matthey-will-invest-200-million-in-battery-storage-technology-in-20
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2017-09-28 10:34:30.150000
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The British multinational giant Johnson Matthey announced that it will make an initial investment of £200 million in 2018 in the wake of the anticipated rapid growth of the electric vehicle market in the years to come.
The British multinational giant Johnson Matthey announced that it will make an initial investment of £200 million in 2018 in the wake of the anticipated rapid growth of the electric vehicle market in the years to come.
According to the company’s estimations, by the time the electric vehicle market penetration reaches around 10 percent, the potential market value of its products could be more than $30 billion.
The information was revealed in the company’s recent Capital Markets Day, during which, the company outlined its strategy for growth and value creation across all its sectors.
Dr. Alan Nelson, Sector Chief Executive, New Markets and Group CTO said that the company is working on three new market opportunities, - i.e. alternative powertrains, life science technologies, and medical device components, of which battery materials to support alternative powertrains offer the greatest opportunity.
The £200 million investment in high-energy battery materials will be enough to manufacture up to 10,000 metric tons from 2021 to 2022.
The company will focus on a wide portfolio of cathode materials which will be able to be used in a wide range of electric vehicle applications.
At the moment, Johnson Matthey operates a Clean Air department, where it offers emission control catalysts and exhaust treatment solutions, including catalysts for light and heavy duty vehicles, diesel retrofits and stationary emissions control.
With regards to Clean Air, the company estimated that it will continue to be a lucrative sector for the next 2-3 years, but growth will fall as a result of the shift away from light-duty diesel vehicles worldwide.
Rober MacLeod, Chief Executive in Johnson Matthey said: "We will enhance our leadership in the high margin, technology driven growth markets we operate in through focused investment and efficiency throughout the group”.
“We are world class chemists. We have the expertise to solve our customers' complex and increasingly challenging problems by scaling up fundamental chemistry to provide commercial solutions which drive our growth”.
"This will create value and a cleaner and healthier world. Through the strategy, we aim to be one of the best performing, most trusted and admired specialty chemical companies in the world”.
Johnson Matthey first entered the lithium-ion battery market in 2012.
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Johnson Matthey to invest £200m in developing batteries for EVs
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British specialist metals and chemicals firm Johnson Matthey has unveiled plans to invest £200m ($270m) in electric vehicle (EV) battery technologies next year. The company believes that by the time EV market penetration reaches 10%, the estimated total value of EV products could be at least $30bn. Johnson Matthey also said it had achieved a breakthrough in lithium nickel oxide, which is used extensively in EV batteries. Its shares closed 15% higher following the announcement. The firm is a specialist in vehicle exhaust catalysts so the investment is aimed at protecting its future as internal combustion engines are phased out.
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https://www.standard.co.uk/business/market-report-johnson-matthey-charges-up-after-200m-electric-car-breakthrough-a3641511.html
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2017-09-28 10:34:30.150000
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W ill the wheels come off for Johnson Matthey once roads are packed with electric cars?
Investors were feeling far more confident about the catalytic converter maker’s future after yesterday’s capital markets day, as analysts urged them to pile in.
As well as revealing a £200 million investment in battery technology, Liberum said Johnson Matthey shocked guests with its claim of a breakthrough in enhanced lithium nickel oxide, the material used in electric vehicles.
“It would be remarkable and impressive if JM has pulled off a game-changing breakthrough so quickly,” analyst Adam Collins said.
Many have predicted Johnson Matthey, which makes most of its sales from exhaust catalysts, will suffer as drivers switch to electric cars.
Credit Suisse analysts were also impressed by the electric vehicle ambitions, topping up their target price by 200p to 3700p.
Even after yesterday’s rally, there was no sign of profit taking as the shares climbed a further 90p, or 2.7%, to 3480p.
Markets were on edge amid concerns about North Korea’s plans to detonate a hydrogen bomb as equities around the world drifted lower.
The FTSE 100 only suffered a minor fall though, down 2.51 points at 7261.39 as investors awaited Theresa May’s speech in Florence where she was expected to put forward the Government’s latest Brexit proposals.
Coca-Cola HBC, the soft drinks bottler, joined Johnson Matthey higher on the blue-chip index after an upgrade from Morgan Stanley.
The investment bank raised its rating from Underweight to Equal-Weight, encouraged by “good progress” towards its ambitious margin targets for 2020.
“Whilst we continue to believe the soft drinks industry faces structural challenges, we note that improving macro and a healthier consumer outlook across CCH markets should support a sustainable improvement in topline growth,” Morgan Stanley said.Shares rose 33p, to 2536p.
Engineer Smiths Group fell 75.78p, or 4.7%, to 1529.67p after its annual results showed its largest businesses, oil and gas arm John Crane and Smiths Medical, were under pressure.
Investors were concerned by comments that the performance for 2018 will be weighted towards the second half of the year.
Investors were encouraged by Pets at Home’s capital markets day yesterday. The pet supplies retailer, whose shares have come under pressure this year, was up 11.4p to 206p today.
Oil rig maker Lamprell plunged 9.5p to 89.75p after warning on revenues.
The company, which famously issued five profit warnings in 2012, said annual revenues would be between $370 million and $390 million, below previous guidance, which it blamed on “market conditions”.
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Frozen vegetable market to be worth $30bn worldwide by 2022
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The frozen vegetable market, valued at around $24.5bn globally this year, is set to grow at a 4.23% CAGR to around $30.2bn by 2022, according to a new report. Expansion in the market is being driven by factors including rising awareness of product's health benefits, increasing urbanisation and an expanding middle class. Changing lifestyles and larger disposable incomes in the Asia Pacific region are also expected to make a significant contribution to the expansion of the market. Key companies profiled in the report include Ardo, Bonduelle, Findus, General Mills, H J Heinz and Simplot.
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https://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/z6qjt7/global_frozen
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2017-09-28 10:22:21.967000
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NEED HELP FINDING THE RIGHT PRODUCT? Becky will help you find what you are looking for.
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Arizona to offer free power to balance renewable energy system
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Arizona's public utility company APS is piloting a system of offering free energy supplies at times of excess generation from renewable sources. The state's power grid experiences a fall in demand outside of the hottest summer months, leading to negative pricing on the Energy Imbalance Market. The "reverse demand response" programme being introduced by APS is aimed at giving non-residential users access to extra power during times of negative pricing. To qualify, the required energy must not be used for essential operations and should preferably be directed to projects that serve the community.
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http://www.utilitydive.com/news/arizona-utility-will-use-reverse-demand-response-to-avoid-renewables-curt/505943/
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2017-09-28 10:21:24.100000
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If you are looking for a good deal on energy in Arizona, here's a hint: around lunchtime in the month of March, it's usually free.
Arizona Public Service recently proposed a slate of efficiency and demand-side measures that include many of the usual suspects, along with new takes on traditional resources. The utility's plan includes incentives for smart thermostats, electric vehicle charging infrastructure, energy storage and water heater timers — along with a new "reverse demand response" product that aims to balance system load with excess renewable generation.
"Reverse demand response is really a reflection of our demand side planning and APS' commitment to partner with customers to act as system resources," explained Kent Walter, manager of customer technology and product development for the utility.
Source: California ISO load settlement reports
APS is a summer-peaking utility that experiences mild temperatures through three seasons. As temperatures heat up in the summer months, air conditioning sucks up available generation. But with more moderate temperatures nine months out of the year, the utility has access to an excess of energy that often has nowhere to go.
The utility is a member of the California ISO's Energy Imbalance Market, a real-time marketplace that helps several balancing areas voluntarily trade energy. The market sends 5- and 15-minute price signals, which on mild sunny days can show up as negative pricing: renewable generation that customers get paid to take, in order to avoid curtailments.
"We see a lot of load needs during the fall, winter and spring, reflecting themselves in negative pricing and steep ramps coming out of negative pricing periods," said Walter. "With the growth of solar generation, load growth hasn't kept up … We see opportunities to be able to engage our customers to help better balance the system in real-time, but also absorb negative pricing, which also lowers their bills."
Different than load shifting
"Reverse demand response is very different than load shifting," he added. "We encourage customers to shift loads and we have demand charges within our (commercial and industrial) rates ... we try to have customers manage the load, but reverse demand response is very different."
Specifically, APS is looking for dispatchable loads that "serve the community in some way," said Walter. The program has a relatively small budget of $200,000 to get off the ground, but is uncapped in the volume customers could take.
APS has left the program flexible, open to all non-residential dispatchable loads with at least 30 kW of demand. That could include C&I customers, but the loads must be non-essential. "They can't be counting on it," Walter said. Beautification efforts like, a town fountain that only runs during negative pricing, for instance, might be a qualifying load.
APS has a Power Supply Adjuster, so any benefit the utility receives from that Energy Imbalance Market goes directly to customers. During negative pricing periods, consumers able to take the power are paid by generators who want to avoid curtailment. Those revenues are used to help lower bills.
One more tool for integrating renewables
Brett Feldman, principle research analyst for Navigant, is working on a report due out this fall examining renewables integration through demand response, storage, reverse demand response and similar programs being used to balance the growing volume of intermittent resources on the grid. Lowering demand in times of tight supply is a well-known concept, he said, but so far the idea of turning up demand is relatively new.
"I definitely wouldn't say it's common, I only know a few programs," he said. But "as you see more wind and solar on the system, it's picking up... a lot of it can be addressed by energy storage, but this is a perfect application."
While APS' program is specific to dispatchable non-essential loads, Feldman said the same concepts can apply to a wide range of load types. Electric vehicle charging is one possibility, as is grid-connected energy storage. He pointed to a project between Bonneville Power Administration and EnerNOC a few years ago aligning refrigeration storage with excess wind energy.
On the residential side, some appliance usage could be shifted into negative pricing events.
"Normally you shift appliances to off-peak, but in theory you could do some of those things whenever you need to increase the load," said Feldman.
Texas is another area that has dealt with large amounts of renewables, and the balancing and pricing issues that accompany the resource. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas is an isolated system, with significant wind resources. Some utilities have offered free electricity to customers during off-peak hours.
"Load serving entities can make money by having more load. Even if they give it away for free to customers, they still make a profit because they're actually getting paid for it," said Feldman.
Creative uses for free energy
While traditional demand response signals the customer to decrease demand, and time varying rates incentivize shifting load, APS' reverse demand response is distinct. In instances where a customer in the reverse demand response program would access negative pricing, all other economic solutions have already been run through. It means the types of loads capable of participating may be limited, but APS said it expects customers to find creative uses for free energy.
"I like that we have remained flexible to work with customers around what brings value to them. We don't have a prescribed technology or approach. It really is an opportunity to flexibly engage our customers," said Walter, "And flexibility as a resource is important."
Negative pricing is not a new phenomenon, particularly in California. But as Utility Dive reported earlier this year, what has changed is the regularity and reliability of the events. CAISO curtailments rose steadily in the second half of 2016 as solar penetration reached new highs.
In March of this year, CAISO curtailed about 80,000 MWh — up from 47,000 MWh in March 2016.
But APS is hoping reverse demand response program will help balance the system and avoid renewables curtailments, while also creating value for the utility's customers.
"Because of our power supply adjustment, this is not something APS receives a direct benefit for," Walter said. "The value goes back to our ratepayers."
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HSBC launches mobile open banking platform
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HSBC UK will test its mobile banking platform, HSBC Beta, with 10,000 customers starting from the end of October. HSBC Beta allows users to see details of all their accounts, mortgages, loans and savings together in one place, regardless of who they bank with. A series of additional features, aimed at helping people spend wisely and save efficiently, will be rolled out in due course, according to the bank. HSBC Beta is built on the SmartSave app, which was developed last year in the Financial Conduct Authority's sandbox. The app is set to launch nationwide in early 2018.
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http://www.information-age.com/hsbc-takes-first-steps-open-banking-123468766/
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2017-09-28 10:18:54.430000
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HSBC UK announced today that it is making its first foray into open banking by launching a new test and learn mobile banking platform ahead of introducing a new app for customers in early 2018. The platform, HSBC Beta, will have a range of innovative new features that give customers more control over their money.
In a first from a major UK bank, the initial feature will allow customers to see all of their accounts on one screen, no matter who they bank with. Customers can add accounts from up to 21 different banks including Santander, Lloyds and Barclays and will allow users to see not only their current account but loans, mortgages and savings, too, if they are visible via online banking services.
>See also: Open banking: a friend of foe to traditional banks?
This is the starting point for a raft of new features such as Safe Balance and Spend Analysis that will be released on Beta over the next few months, including:
• Safe Balance – shows how much disposable money you have before the next payday.
• Spend Analysis – categorises spending, adds tags, notes and photos to transactions and analyse patterns for more informed decision making.
• Digital Coach – provides insights into spending and allows users to learn how to spend and save better.
• Goals – helps create savings goals and provides tips on how to reach your goals sooner.
• Savings Rules – building on the successful SmartSave trial, it helps you to save as you spend by rounding up amounts and sending the extra to a savings account.
HSBC has found that there are two main attitudinal groups of customers: ‘Planners’ want to know their actions now will pay off in the future, whereas ‘Responders’ want to focus on the things they really care about today. For both groups, time is their most precious asset.
>See also: Open banking leading financial services revolution
Becky Moffat, head of Personal Banking and Advance said: “As one of the UK’s biggest retail banks, it’s our job to understand our customers’ ever-changing relationship with their money and their financial needs. Customers now bank at home, on the bus, at work and even in bed, but managing money is still too often a complex and complicated task.”
“We want to provide customers with greater control and make their lives easier. Through our Beta app we want to give our customers a complete and joined-up view of their financial life and make it easier for them to choose confidently, taking the hassle out of checking dozens of statements and manually calculating what’s left.”
Raman Bhatia, Head of Digital, UK & Europe added: “Lots of people ask us if a big bank like HSBC is relevant in today’s competitive FinTech landscape. What sets us apart is that we have millions of customers, which provides a unique insight into how we can continue to improve our digital banking offering.”
“The HSBC Beta platform allows us to test, learn and develop in a live environment, and then deploy the new technology at scale. To achieve this, we have changed from the inside out putting in place digital delivery teams that are completely cross-functional, including all the skills we need in one place – developers, designers, risk and compliance and marketing.”
>See also: 2018: the year open banking shakes up Fintech
“This joined-up view of your money is just the starting point for new features that will be added to the Beta platform over the coming months. These features were developed to answer specific customer needs, such as joined-up banking, and allows us to examine behaviour in early demos before launching a brand new app to customers early next year.”
HSBC Beta builds on the SmartSave app, conducted last year in the FCA Sandbox, which applied smart algorithms to identify when it’s safe to spend through nudges and auto rules.
The customers saved £126 on average over a two month trial, and the best features of the trial and will be integrated into an updated version of SmartSave on Beta.
HSBC Beta will be trialled with 10,000 customers from the end of October ahead of general release in early 2018
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Estate owners set to benefit from Trump's tax reforms
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US President Donald Trump recently unveiled plans to eliminate the estate tax, a change which stands to financially benefit his own estate. This contradicts Trump's earlier statements that his plans for tax cuts were "not good for me, believe me". The Republican party has long complained that the levy stifles the growth of family-owned businesses, particularly small farms. However the tax, which applies to estates worth more than $5.5m, would only affect around 50 small farms this year, according to the non-partisan Tax Policy Center.
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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/09/27/trumps-tax-plan-could-actually-benefit-wealthy-people-like-him/709648001/
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2017-09-28 10:02:48.130000
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Heidi M Przybyla
USA TODAY
WASHINGTON – President Trump is making one thing clear about his plan to cut taxes: It won't be a windfall for the richest Americans, including him.
"It's not good for me, believe me," Trump said in a speech unveiling the tax reform blueprint on Wednesday.
"We're targeting relief to working families," Trump said in Indianapolis. "We will make sure benefits are focused on the middle class, the working men and women, not the highest-income earners."
A lot would have to change before that's true.
Trump's initial plan – backed by Republican leadership on Capitol Hill – would eliminate the individual Alternative Minimum Tax and estate taxes. It would also tax so-called "pass through" businesses at 25%.
Both of these changes could greatly benefit Trump and his family's business empire.
More:Trump plans to enlist grassroots and Democrats to sell tax plan he will call biggest in history
More:How President Trump's tax plan affects you, and what we still don't know about it
More:In Indiana, Trump promises 'revolutionary change' to tax code
More:Analysis: Trump's political losses this week could hurt his policy agenda
Trump chose to maintain ownership of his businesses while president, an arrangement that government watchdogs have criticized due to the potential for conflicts of interest.
The Alternative Minimum Tax, or AMT, prevents people from avoiding tax entirely through deductions and credits – and is overwhelmingly paid by the rich. Previous analyses found repealing the AMT would have saved Trump $31 million in 2005, the year for which a partial Trump tax return is available.
Trump's initial plan also would tax so-called "pass through" businesses at 25%, instead of the income tax rate their owners would pay. Most U.S. businesses are taxed under their owners' individual income tax rate instead of the corporate rate. According to Vox, the “vast majority” of the Trump Organization is considered "pass through" as it revolves around real estate and branding deals, though it's unclear whether Trump's businesses would fall under this rate or not.
What's more, Trump wants to eliminate the estate tax, which is levied on the distribution of property as it passes from deceased persons to their heirs. This could save the Trump family as much as $1.4 billion, assuming a Forbes estimate that Trump is worth $3.5 billion. Currently, Trump's children would inherit $2.1 billion, assuming the top 40% estate tax rate.
Finally, Trump's plan collapses individual income brackets to three, lowering the top rate from 39.6% to 35%, which critics say would be a significant increase for the wealthiest Americans.
The White House pointed to language in the GOP framework that would allow the bill's negotiators to add a surcharge on high-income households to ensure it is "at least as progressive" as the current code. It also vows to eliminate "itemized deductions that primarily benefit the wealthiest families." Yet it doesn't identify those loopholes, other than a state and local deduction that is also used by many middle-class families living in coastal and blue states.
It’s impossible to determine exactly how much Trump would personally benefit since, unlike every U.S. president since Richard Nixon, he has never released his tax returns.
Trump is making clear he intends to succeed on taxes where his effort to repeal Obamacare failed – by working with Democrats.
His plan is likely to undergo significant changes in Congress if Trump wants to win their approval. For instance, he may be pressed to drop his bid to end the estate tax. Yet eliminating the estate tax has been a longtime goal of the GOP, which argues that it stifles family-owned businesses, including in the farming industry.
As he rolled out the plan in a Wednesday speech, Trump was joined by Sen. Joe Donnelly of Indiana, one of the most endangered Democrats sitting for reelection in 2018. Trump is courting moderate Democrats such as Donnelly and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, who've yet to indicate what it will take to get their votes.
However, according to a Democrat familiar with their thinking, these lawmakers are unlikely to support the plan unless it brings in about the same amount of revenue from upper-income earners as the current tax code.
Progressive Democrats are already seizing the moment to renew their calls for the release of his tax returns.
Meanwhile, Trump is touting several provisions that will help lower income earners.
For instance, he said the first $12,000 in personal income for individuals and $24,000 for married couples would pay no taxes. Trump would also expand the child care tax credit and create a new $500 caregiver credit.
It's possible that, as the plan comes together, some of the substantial benefits the wealthy stand to gain will be offset by closing loopholes they currently benefit from.
Yet, until Republicans outline which loopholes are ending, the blueprint released this week promises substantial benefit for wealthier taxpayers.
The estate tax is charged only on estates worth about $5.5 million or more. It was created in part to reduce the ability of a small number of families to amass huge wealth over time. Supporters of its elimination say it can force family-owned businesses to be broken up and sold to pay taxes, affecting workers' jobs.
Yet according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, only roughly 50 small business and small farm estates nationwide will face any estate tax in 2017, owing on average less than 6% of their value in tax. The provision also brings in significant revenue to the federal Treasury.
It's a similar story with the Alternative Minimum Tax. A small minority, 3% of all taxpayers, had to pay the AMT, according to IRS data of the 2014 tax year reviewed by Forbes magazine. Doing away with it would be costly, as it brought in over $28 billion in revenue the same year.
The precursor to the AMT was created in 1969 in response to outrage over a small minority of wealthy taxpayers earning over $200,000 a year who paid nothing in federal income taxes by maximizing preferences and special write-offs.
Finally, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, "pass through" income is highly concentrated among the wealthiest Americans.
Contributing: Herb Jackson
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European EV market surges 32% as German plug-in sales double
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Sales of battery and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (EVs) rose to 135,100 during H1 2017, up 32% on the same period last year, according to EV world sales database EV-volumes.com. While Germany saw plug-in sales double during the first six months of the year, Norway remained significantly ahead of other European nations in terms of EV share. The report said the Scandinavian country's combination of generous tax and toll savings for EVs and a well-developed charging infrastructure provided a model for other nations to follow.
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http://www.ev-volumes.com/news/europe-plug-in-sales-for-q2-and-h1-of-2017/
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2017-09-28 09:28:04.427000
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Europe Plug-in Sales for H1 of 2017 + Updates for July and August
Plug-in vehicle sales in Europe reached 135 100 units in the first half of 2017, 32 % higher than for the same period of 2016. These include all Battery Electric Vehicles (BEV) and Plug-in Hybrids (PHEV) in Europe, of passenger cars and light commercial vehicles. Plug-in share of the European light vehicle market reached 1,63 % in June, the trend so far indicates further increases during the reminder of the year. Results from July and preliminary August indicate that growth is accelerating.
The German market is the highlight of 2017, with over 100 % increase over 2016 H1, making it the second largest market for plug-ins in Europe, after Norway. Plug-in share in Norway is 29 % for BEV and PHEV combined. A good indication of what is possible with compelling savings on vehicle taxes, much lower running cost and a well developed charging infrastructure.
Nearly all countries post growth for 2017, many of them over 100 %, but from still low volumes. For the full year of 2017 we expect 305 - 310 000 plug-ins to be delivered in Europe, up 25 000 units from our previous forecast.
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Prescription drug pricing is totally broken, even for generics—here’s what happened
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Epipens. Sovaldi. Tysabri. Acthar. Harvoni. Every month, it seems, there’s fresh outrage–from president Trump, the Congress, in the media, and among the public–over the soaring cost of prescription drugs.
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https://qz.com/1087981/prescription-drug-pricing-is-totally-broken-even-for-generics-heres-what-happened/
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2017-09-28 09:21:26.907000
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Epipens. Sovaldi. Tysabri. Acthar. Harvoni. Every month, it seems, there’s fresh outrage–from president Trump, the Congress, in the media, and among the public–over the soaring cost of prescription drugs.
With good reason: The cash price for the average brand-name prescription drug has increased 48% since 2013. These increases put desperately needed treatments out of reach for many, and cost taxpayers (via Medicare and Medicaid) billions of dollars more every year.
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But as expensive as they are, the brand name drugs in the headlines actually treat relatively few people.
Much less attention has been paid to the price of prescription drugs that tens of millions Americans take every day–that is, the 85% of prescriptions that treat common chronic conditions such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol, chronic pain, diabetes, and depression–and are usually generic medications, not brand-name drugs. Generics are the versions of drugs that get released after a manufacturer’s patent expires, allowing other makers to sell the same compound for less money–well, that’s how it’s supposed to work, at least. More than 3 billion prescriptions are written for generics every year. And the story of generic drug pricing is even weirder than brands.
We should start with the good news: generic drugs are, on average, getting cheaper. Patents on many blockbuster drugs–Crestor, Abilify, Nexium–have expired in recent years, and in some drug categories–statins or anti-depressants, for example–most treatments are now available as generics.
In theory, that should mean cheaper prices. In practice, not so much. Here’s why:
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Until the last few years, insurance covered the cost of most generics; patients would chip in an average co-pay of about $10 and never think twice about the cost of their medications. Over the last decade, however, the $10 copay has slowly begun to disappear, and patients are exposed to prices that can vary wildly.
Part of this is driven by Obamacare. The ACA included prescriptions as an Essential Health Benefit, but it also allowed for very limited formularies, (the lists of drugs covered by insurers), extensive use of prior authorizations, (requiring extra approvals from doctor and insurer), and startlingly high deductibles–as high as $6,500 a year for entry-level Bronze plans–before those old-fashioned $10 co-pays kicked in.
At the same time, employee-provided insurance also changed dramatically. Plans that used to provide just one or two tiers of drug coverage now have as many as six, with patient costs ratcheting up with every tier. Meanwhile, copays are being replaced with “coinsurance”, where the consumer’s financial exposure is far greater–a percentage of the total cost, rather than a flat fee.
All this means that the average American has been quickly exposed to what’s called “usual and customary” (U&C) prices, which are the staggeringly high list prices for prescriptions that were never really intended for consumers to actually pay. Think of these prices like the sticker price on a car–most buyers know that the MSRP is a fool’s price, and the real, lower price is hashed out directly with the dealer. Same with the U&C price on drugs, except there’s no back office for consumers to negotiate with.
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Take atorvastatin, which came on the market as Lipitor but has been available as a generic since 2011; the cash price for the most common dosage is $120 or more per prescription. Gabapentin, an oft-prescribed pain reliever, has a cash price of $75. Nexium, which went generic in 2015, has a cash price at $250 per fill. The story is even worse with diabetes drugs, including insulin, which are often not covered on insurance formularies altogether, (same with medications for erectile dysfunction and many dermatological conditions).
These prices aren’t just what people without insurance–which still numbers 30 million Americans and could rise substantially if current laws change–will pay. Add up the people in high deductible plans, on Obamacare, and more than 50% of Americans are at risk of paying the full cash price for generic medications.
Fortunately, there are now ways for consumers to comparison shop and access tools to make prescriptions more affordable, even when insurance can’t help. Some pharmacies have created programs to discount limited lists of prescriptions. Manufacturers are beginning to provide discounts and assistance programs to help reduce costs for cash-paying patients. And, over the past decade, pharmacy benefit managers–the companies that actually negotiate prices between manufacturers, insurers, and pharmacies–have launched discount cards that offer lower prices. Together, all of these discounts can provide significant savings; up to 75% off more expensive generics. The company I co-founded, GoodRx, has brought the same technology used to compare prices for plane tickets and TV’s to healthcare. We built a comprehensive database of all available discounts that shows consumers to the best available discount based on pharmacy and location, free of charge. It’s just one solution among many that are needed.
Every year, more Americans are diagnosed with chronic conditions, adding to the 50% of Americans currently coping with such diseases. These are conditions where medicine can’t promise a quick cure, but more typically offers years of coping through one or more medication. For these Americans–which sooner or later will include most of us–it’s essential that any solution coming out of Washington, or out of the drug industry, look beyond the headlines about expensive brand name drugs, and include the vast number of drugs taken by the vast majority of Americans. If we’re really going to address the high cost of drugs in America, we need to understand the real problem.
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Why the War Over Health Care Isn’t Over
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The Trump era has conditioned us to brace for chaos, upheaval, and the next story. On Tuesday, after Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, decided not to schedule a vote on a last-ditch Obamacare-repeal bill put forward by Senators Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy, it took only a few hours for the political world and much of the news media to move on to the next item on the White House’s agenda: tax reform.
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https://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/why-the-war-over-health-care-isnt-over
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2017-09-28 09:14:27.620000
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The Trump era has conditioned us to brace for chaos, upheaval, and the next story. On Tuesday, after Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, decided not to schedule a vote on a last-ditch Obamacare-repeal bill put forward by Senators Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy, it took only a few hours for the political world and much of the news media to move on to the next item on the White House’s agenda: tax reform. But, before running forward into this new legislative battle, it’s worth dwelling on what we’ve learned over the past few months, as successive G.O.P. health-care bills have faltered. Some of the lessons are encouraging, and some aren’t. Let’s start with the uplifting stuff.
Seven and a half years after Congress passed the Affordable Care Act, the central value it enshrines—that affordable health care should be available to everyone, regardless of age, income, or medical history—is now widely accepted. Opinion polls show almost universal support for this proposition. Donald Trump says he supports it, and so do Republican leaders such as House Speaker Paul Ryan (although they tend to use weasel words like “accessible” rather than “affordable”). That is why the Republicans got into such political trouble when—after years of promising to repeal Obamacare—they finally had to release details of their plans for doing so. It turned out that their ideas would lead to millions of poorer Americans losing coverage, while many seniors and sick people would see their out-of-pocket costs soar. The Party’s hypocrisy was exposed.
Another progressive idea included in the A.C.A. that has proven durable is the notion that expanding health-care coverage is important enough to justify higher taxes on the wealthy. When Donald Trump took office, Republicans were determined to repeal two Obamacare tax increases that had hit households earning more than a quarter of a million dollars a year: a 0.9-per-cent surcharge on Medicare taxes and a 3.8-per-cent investment tax. These increases had helped pay for the law’s insurance subsidies and its big expansion of Medicaid. Yet going after these tax increases left Republicans open to the accusation that their real motivation was to help the Party’s wealthy donors. After McConnell’s Better Care Reconciliation Act died, in mid-July, Republicans quietly stopped pushing to get rid of these taxes. McConnell’s so-called “skinny repeal,” which was voted down in the early hours of July 27th, and the Graham-Cassidy bill both would have left these taxes in place. For a Republican Party that views cutting taxes on the rich as one of its central missions, that was a big retreat.
The general point is that the enactment of Obamacare, despite all the criticisms it has received, has permanently shifted the political debate. It is no longer enough for Republicans to argue that America can’t afford a decent health-care system, or that the way to fix things is to simply repeal the A.C.A. and leave the rest to the market. Having seen the pluses and minuses of Obamacare, most Americans aren’t willing to junk it in exchange for vague promises. Any potential replacement must be able to withstand some detailed comparison shopping. Thus far, no Republican plan has been able to meet that challenge.
The ubiquity of the Internet has played a role here. As the action on Capitol Hill proceeded, practically everybody had access to the latest health-care analyses from independent institutions like the Congressional Budget Office, the Kaiser Family Foundation, and the Commonwealth Fund. Most people didn’t actually read the studies these organizations produced, of course. But the news media helped transmit the key findings, and so did the round-the-clock social-media efforts of experts including Kaiser’s Larry Levitt, the former Obama Administration official Andy Slavitt, and the Center for American Progress’s Topher Spiro. The C.B.O.’s studies, which showed that the G.O.P.’s plans would lead to big drops in coverage and much higher premiums for people older than fifty-five and those with preëxisting conditions, were arguably the single biggest factor in public opinion turning against McConnell and Ryan’s efforts. This month, when the Republicans tried to rush through the Graham-Cassidy bill, they scheduled things so that the C.B.O. wouldn’t have enough time to do a proper scoring. But this tactic rebounded: it was widely, and rightly, seen as subterfuge.
For once, real news and real analysis won out over fake news, and democratic activism defeated procedural stunts on Capitol Hill. On Tuesday, I noted that health-care-advocacy groups and Democratic activists had for months pursued Senator Susan Collins, of Maine, putting pressure on her to vote against her Party’s bills.
Of course, Collins might have decided to oppose the Republican repeal bills even without the protests. (And, as I noted, the nation owes her its thanks.) But there can be no doubt that the activism had an effect. Think back to what happened during April and May in the House of Representatives, when Paul Ryan, trying to pass his American Health Care Act, faced defections from moderate Republicans who represent places such as New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, and who were being subjected to regular protests in their home districts. Ryan ultimately got his plan through the House, but the wider repeal effort never really recovered its momentum.
On the other side of the ledger, it must be acknowledged that, as the Duke of Wellington is reputed to have said of the Battle of Waterloo, it was a damn close-run thing. Had Collins, Lisa Murkowski, or John McCain voted the other way on the “skinny repeal,” back in July, the legislation would have proceeded to a House-Senate conference, where it would probably have been broadened and passed. We don’t know for sure how many Republicans would have supported the Graham-Cassidy bill if it had come to an actual vote, but it surely would have been close, too. Republicans have comprehensively lost the intellectual arguments: they can’t cite a single reputable study showing that their bills would preserve affordable coverage for the old, the sick, and the poor. But that doesn’t appear to be enough to sway most G.O.P. senators. Either because they feared primary challenges from the right or because they had trotted out the anti-Obamacare patter for so long that they had come to believe it, the vast majority of them toed the Party line. Especially after Tuesday’s Senate primary result in Alabama—where the insurgent Roy Moore defeated the Party favorite Luther Strange—there is no reason to expect this attitude to change. And there’s also no reason to believe that the Republican Party won’t, at some point, launch yet another repeal effort. In fact, it is only a question of when.
On Wednesday, Lindsey Graham, who had just watched his bill die, said that the Party would return to health care immediately after passing tax reform. But a legislative window for pushing through a health-care measure with just fifty votes is closing, and, going forward, the Republicans will need sixty votes to break a Democratic filibuster. Unless, of course, they pass another budget-reconciliation bill, which would give them another chance at a fifty-vote victory. Or they could get rid of the filibuster altogether, a step which Donald Trump urged them to do on Wednesday.
For now, it looks like the next repeal effort will have to wait until after the 2018 midterms. But another thing we’ve learned in the past few months is that you should never underestimate the determination of the Republicans, and of their wealthy donors, to dismantle Obamacare, or their eagerness to embrace practically any tactic that might help them achieve their goal. “Bottom line is the ACA is not remotely safe between now & 2018 election,” Andy Slavitt tweeted on Wednesday. The forces of enlightenment and progress have won another big battle. But the war isn’t over.
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Most Medicare members say they aren't getting recommendations about chronic conditions
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that three out of four Americans 65 and older have multiple chronic conditions. Engaging people with co-morbidities is often a way to improve health conditions, but the HealthMine survey found that’s not the case for many in the Medicare population.
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http://www.healthcaredive.com/news/most-medicare-members-say-they-arent-getting-recommendations-about-chronic/505813/
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2017-09-28 09:11:28.357000
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Dive Brief:
Although most Medicare members have at least one chronic disease, only 10% of those recently surveyed said they received reminders or recommendations about their conditions, according to a new HealthMine Survey.
The survey found 44% of survey respondents said their health plan never communicates with them about their chronic condition.
The most frequently reported chronic conditions among those surveyed were high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, obesity, asthma and symptoms of depression.
Dive Insight:
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that three out of four Americans 65 and older have multiple chronic conditions. Engaging people with co-morbidities is often a way to improve health conditions, but the HealthMine survey found that’s not the case for many in the Medicare population.
Research shows that engaging patients, especially those with chronic diseases, can improve health. The industry can also cut costs by figuring out how best to engage patients with chronic conditions. The Partnership to Fight Chronic Disease recently reported that chronic disease will cost the U.S. $42 trillion between 2016 and 2030, including $2 trillion in medical costs. The report predicted that 83 million Americans will have three or more chronic diseases by 2030 unless there are health improvements. That's more than twice the number of Americans with three or more chronic diseases now.
The issue of chronic illness and engagement isn’t just a Medicare population issue either. About 59% of Americans have at least one chronic disease, and those patients are driving healthcare costs, especially if they have co-morbidities. Only 5% of people account for 50% of healthcare spending.
Bryce Williams, president and CEO of HealthMine, a healthcare technology company that communicates health information to members in hopes of creating better outcomes and lowering costs, said corresponding with Medicare members is “imperative.” He added that health plans “have the data to connect with meaningful, timely help for reminders to members — and learn member’s communication preferences.” However, HealthMine's study found the Medicare population isn't benefiting from those communications.
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Messing With Medicare’s Prescription Drug Program Will Hurt Low-Income Seniors
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Members of Congress should never be forced to choose between low-income children and low-income seniors. However, that is the decision that lawmakers will face if congressional leaders rework Medicare benefits to pay for an extension of the Children’s Health Insurance Program.
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http://www.insidesources.com/messing-medicares-prescription-drug-program-will-hurt-low-income-seniors/
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2017-09-28 09:10:48.033000
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Members of Congress should never be forced to choose between low-income children and low-income seniors. However, that is the decision that lawmakers will face if congressional leaders rework Medicare benefits to pay for an extension of the Children’s Health Insurance Program.
The plan under discussion would dramatically increase out-of-pocket costs for low-income seniors who need brand-name prescription drugs. The change would effectively make this medicine more expensive for the Medicare population that can least afford higher prices.
This is a very real concern for people who can barely afford their existing drug coverage. Most of the people who qualify for low-income subsidies under Medicare, also known as “Extra Help,” make less than $18,000 a year. And they are more likely to suffer from a range of common ailments, including diabetes, heart failure and chronic kidney disease.
This is the problem with tinkering with patients’ co-pays. People often base their health-care decisions on financial incentives, but doctors and diseases do not. Low-income patients are particularly vulnerable to these changes because studies show they are more inclined to choose lower-cost medicine if the price increases for another, even if doctors recommend other treatments that would be more effective.
For Americans struggling to make ends meet, every penny matters, and research shows that even a modest uptick in out-of-pocket costs will force patients to choose lower-priced alternatives, even if they are less effective. Some forgo treatment entirely. One study found small increases in co-pays for cancer patients on Medicaid prompted them not to take the medicines they need.
Increasing co-pays for branded pharmaceutical products pose the biggest threat to patients who suffer from diseases for which there are not as many generic treatments. Low-income Americans are more likely to suffer from HIV, for example, and the most prevalent HIV treatments are branded biopharmaceutical products. Similarly, a change could limit the options available to physicians looking to treat psychiatric conditions.
This is not typically a partisan issue. Prominent Republicans have supported Extra Help in the past. The credits were established by the prescription-drug bill former President George W. Bush signed into law with the help of GOP majorities in the House and Senate. At the time, Oregon Rep. Greg Walden, who is now chairman of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee, penned an editorial endorsing the program and encouraging lower-income Oregonians to enroll.
Medicare’s prescription-drug benefit is hugely successful by every possible measure. A survey of 2,000 seniors over the summer found 87 percent are satisfied with their Part D drug coverage and 90 percent think the costs they pay for prescription drugs would be much higher if they didn’t have this coverage. In July, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced that premiums for the popular prescription-drug plans will fall. The announcement was a welcome sign that Medicare is already helping to tame prescription-drug costs.
The program is also helping seniors live healthier lives. A study by the University of Illinois released earlier this year found that expanded access to prescription drugs has resulted in a noticeable drop in the mortality rate for American seniors. That means seniors, on average, are living longer lives.
This program is working well and has a demonstrated history of helping seniors from every income bracket. It does not make any sense to disrupt such a wildly successful program, especially for the very seniors who need it the most.
Medicare was designed to help older Americans meet their basic health care needs, just as the Children’s Health Insurance Program does for lower-income kids. Pitting one group against the other defeats the purpose of both programs. Surely Congress can find other ways to finance both programs, preserving two basic backstops for two groups who need the most help.
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Meals on Wheels America and Aetna Form Innovative Collaboration to Improve Senior Care
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Meals on Wheels America announced today a new national program with Aetna to collaborate on groundbreaking research and innovative models for patient care coordination. The nonprofit and Fortune 50 health company will work together to facilitate access to critical health and social services for America’s seniors at all stages of medical need, from preventive to post-hospital discharge.
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https://www.mealsonwheelsamerica.org/national/press-room/2017/09/27/meals-on-wheels-america-and-aetna-form-innovative-collaboration-to-improve-senior-care
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2017-09-28 09:07:31.063000
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Arlington, VA – September 27, 2017 – Meals on Wheels America announced today a new national program with Aetna to collaborate on groundbreaking research and innovative models for patient care coordination. The nonprofit and Fortune 50 health company will work together to facilitate access to critical health and social services for America’s seniors at all stages of medical need, from preventive to post-hospital discharge.
The objective of the collaboration is to create a best in class model for care coordination, integrating Meals on Wheels’ daily nutritious meals, social support and critical safety checks into a continuum of care required as people age. Meals on Wheels and Aetna will pilot this model in several markets, and identify best practices intended to improve vulnerable seniors’ health outcomes. Results from these pilots will help build a scalable operational model that will address the challenges seniors face in their daily living.
“More than three-quarters of older adults have at least two chronic conditions. Having a reliable support system in place to observe their health on a regular basis can be just as important as the care they receive at the doctor’s office,” said Mark T. Bertolini, Aetna chairman and CEO. “Our work with Meals on Wheels America will help us make better connections with seniors in their homes and communities, and enable us to establish truly meaningful relationships that can improve the lives of this vulnerable population.”
With the senior population projected to double by the year 2050, this joint program is intended to create a replicable model that will encourage healthcare entities across the country to utilize home- and community-based service providers to address the significant challenges present in the nation’s health care system.
“This collaboration is an important step to fully integrate Meals on Wheels into the health care system,” said Ellie Hollander, president and CEO of Meals on Wheels America. “We are thankful to Aetna for its generous support and leadership in working with health- and community-based service providers, and together, I am confident that we can support seniors in receiving the holistic care they need and deserve.”
About Meals on Wheels America
Meals on Wheels America is the oldest and largest national organization supporting the more than 5,000 community-based programs across the country that are dedicated to addressing senior isolation and hunger. This network exists in virtually every community in America and, along with more than two million staff and volunteers, delivers the nutritious meals, friendly visits and safety checks that enable America’s seniors to live nourished lives with independence and dignity. By providing funding, leadership, education, research and advocacy support, Meals on Wheels America empowers its local member programs to strengthen their communities, one senior at a time. For more information, or to find a Meals on Wheels provider near you, visit www.mealsonwheelsamerica.org.
About Aetna
Aetna is one of the nation’s leading diversified health care benefits companies, serving an estimated 44.7 million people with information and resources to help them make better informed decisions about their health care. Aetna offers a broad range of traditional, voluntary and consumer-directed health insurance products and related services, including medical, pharmacy, dental, behavioral health, group life and disability plans, and medical management capabilities, Medicaid health care management services, workers’ compensation administrative services and health information technology products and services. Aetna’s customers include employer groups, individuals, college students, part-time and hourly workers, health plans, health care providers, governmental units, government-sponsored plans, labor groups and expatriates. For more information, see www.aetna.com and learn about how Aetna is helping to build a healthier world. @AetnaNews
Media Contacts:
Jenny Bertolette Young
Meals on Wheels America
571-339-1603
[email protected]
Ethan Slavin
Aetna
(860) 273-6095
[email protected]
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Aging populations often thoroughly contemplate housing decisions, researchers find
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As people approach their final stage of life, whether they decide to remain in their home or seek to move to a more supportive place, it's often a well-thought-out choice and not a reactive decision, according to a new study that includes a University of Kansas researcher.
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https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-09-aging-populations-contemplate-housing-decisions.html
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2017-09-28 09:06:51.213000
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Credit: Pexels.com
As people approach their final stage of life, whether they decide to remain in their home or seek to move to a more supportive place, it's often a well-thought-out choice and not a reactive decision, according to a new study that includes a University of Kansas researcher.
"The literature discusses housing choices and decisions as people reacting to events, such as they become sick or the neighborhood changes around them," said David Ekerdt, professor of sociology and gerontology. "This model is that people are reacting to external events, but our view is that people are proactive and always thinking about what might happen and whether their living arrangement is good for them."
Ekerdt is the corresponding author of a study, "Residential Reasoning and the Tug of the Fourth Age," which will appear in the October issue of the journal The Gerontologist. His co-author on the paper is Catheryn Koss, a KU graduate, who is now at Sacramento State University.
The researchers interviewed 30 community-dwelling retirees ages 67-97 in the United States about how they prepared for the future, including their housing decisions.
Gerontology researchers have termed the "third age" as an active retirement where people have left their traditional work and family roles though they are still relatively independent. The "fourth age" refers to the next phase, which might include disability or a health decline toward the end of one's life.
The study is part of the larger international project "Aging as Future" supported by a grant from the Volkswagen Foundation in Germany. Ekerdt has joined with researchers from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, North Carolina State University at Raleigh, the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany and the University of Jena in Germany.
Ekerdt said the findings about how people later in life think about their housing decisions is important because it provides a different angle to the perception that people often wait and react based on a health event or some other immediate circumstance.
"In this case, people are constantly having the specter of the fourth age ahead of them. They are continually thinking about, 'Where is the best place that I should grow old?'" he said. "People are continually thinking about and evaluating the residences where they live."
The researchers did identify two categories of people based on how they did approach their housing decisions: pre-emptive and contingent. Participants who used pre-emptive reasoning anticipated their current homes would be suitable over the long term, and they explained why. Those who engaged in contingent reasoning imagined a possible future move to more supportive housing and possibly had a destination in mind.
Several factors could also influence which camp respondents landed in, Ekerdt said, including the effects of peers and relationship with spouses and children.
Either way, the process was something that seemed to be well thought out, he said.
"The fourth age is remarkably present to people's imagination about the future," Ekerdt said. "'What would happen if I was to become unable to function in the place that I'm living?'—as opposed to other decisions you might make and put aside."
These findings might be good news for companies who market senior housing or for those who renovate homes, he said.
"There is a great opportunity to try to reach people as they are processing their setting and their dwellings," Ekerdt said. "Later-life housing also has other implications. Homes are very important to health care and people's ability to fit into their environments. A dwelling not just a place to live. It's a place to manage your health."
More information: Catheryn Koss et al. Residential Reasoning and the Tug of the Fourth Age, The Gerontologist (2016). DOI: 10.1093/geront/gnw010
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CHRONIC Act, which expands Medicare coverage for telemedicine, passes in Senate
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Senate Bill 870, the Creating High-Quality Results and Outcomes Necessary to Improve Chronic Care Act of 2017, or CHRONIC Act for short, has passed in the Senate by a unanimous vote. Among other things, the bill, which was originally introduced in April by Senator Orrin Hatch (R - Utah), includes provisions that would expand Medicare coverage for telemedicine.
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http://www.mobihealthnews.com/content/chronic-act-which-expands-medicare-coverage-telemedicine-passes-senate
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2017-09-28 09:06:08.500000
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Senate Bill 870, the Creating High-Quality Results and Outcomes Necessary to Improve Chronic Care Act of 2017, or CHRONIC Act for short, has passed in the Senate by a unanimous vote. Among other things, the bill, which was originally introduced in April by Senator Orrin Hatch (R - Utah), includes provisions that would expand Medicare coverage for telemedicine.
Along with expanding telemedicine coverage under Medicare Advantage Plan B in 2020 and giving Accountable Care Organizations more freedom to use telemedicine, key provisions in the CHRONIC bill extend the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ home-based primary care teams for people with multiple chronic conditions. The bill would extend this “Independence at Home” demonstration to two years and increase the maximum allowable number of Medicare beneficiaries in the program from 10,000 to 15,000.
One proposal in the bill would allow a patient’s home dialysis facilities to count as a recognized originating site for telehealth visits. Another eliminates location restrictions on telestroke consultations.
“The Finance Committee has been working hard to address and improve healthcare outcomes for Medicare beneficiaries with chronic conditions for the last two years,” Hatch said in a statement. “The CHRONIC Care Act is a culmination of a bipartisan, committee-wide effort, which included rigorous engagement and feedback from affected stakeholders. This legislation will improve disease management, lower Medicare costs and streamline care coordination services – all without adding to the deficit. Addressing these issues is critical for the increasing number of individuals who live with multiple chronic conditions and will age into the Medicare program over the next two decades. The CHRONIC Care Act is one of the few bipartisan healthcare bills to pass the Senate this Congress, and I urge my colleagues in the House to act quickly on this legislation and get it to the president’s desk to be signed into law.”
In the House, the various provisions of the bill have been presented as seperate pieces of legislation. HR 3727 is the bill that includes the telemedicine expansion under Medicare Advantage; it was approved by the House Ways and Means committee and now heads back to the floor. Similarly, HR 1148, which includes the telestroke provisions, has been approved by the House Energy & Commerce committee. Finally, the kidney dialysis provisions are contained in HR 3178, which the House passed back in July. Assuming all these measures pass, they can be unified with the Senate's CHRONIC Act in conference and head to the president's desk.
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Hospice in crisis
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It might seem odd to talk about “innovations in dying,” but in recent decades the hospice movement has become an important new pathway for the most difficult phase of life. As American health care has become ever more high-tech and expensive, the hospice model of home-based care for terminally ill patients has enabled millions of Americans to die peacefully in their own houses, without painful medical procedures—often greatly reducing stress on both the families and the health care system.
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http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/09/27/how-hospice-works-000526
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2017-09-28 09:04:13.453000
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It might seem odd to talk about “innovations in dying,” but in recent decades the hospice movement has become an important new pathway for the most difficult phase of life. As American health care has become ever more high-tech and expensive, the hospice model of home-based care for terminally ill patients has enabled millions of Americans to die peacefully in their own houses, without painful medical procedures—often greatly reducing stress on both the families and the health care system.
Now, however, the hospice model is coming under stress of its own. Some of that’s because the industry has changed, with a lot more for-profit hospice agencies and investor-owned chains, which are coming under scrutiny from regulators. But much of the stress comes from shifts in how we die, how we live—and with whom. These are big demographic changes that make the original conception of hospice harder to carry out as it was once intended.
With baby boomers aging and likely to live with serious illness for several years, understanding how best to take care of the aged and the dying is becoming an ever more pressing issue in America—emotionally, morally, and financially. “We need to address this very quickly,” said Joan Teno of the University of Washington, a prominent geriatrician who both practices and researches end of life care. “The tsunami of frail elderly people with complex multiple illnesses is coming.”
In theory, hospice would be an ideal system to deal with this tsunami. From the time it was developed in Britain in the 1960s and ‘70s, it represented a pushback against the over-medicalization of death, emphasizing comfort care and emotional support over disruptive medical interventions. It put great emphasis on family; hospice care is often delivered by close relatives rather than medical staffers. And it was originally designed with cancer in mind, at a time when cancer killed quickly.
Nowadays, however, dying itself has changed. Cancer isn’t the death sentence it was, and thanks to new waves of drugs that prolong life in late-stage disease, it can be hard to know when it’s time to stop treatment and emphasize pain relief. More than half of hospice patients have dementia, heart disease, and other slow-progressing disorders—and most of those have more than one such diagnosis, and a panoply of symptoms. That makes it harder to prognosticate just how much time someone may have left to live. Given that hospice care is generally available only to people likely to die within six months, prognosticating is important. Even to the practiced medical eye, it’s not always clear exactly when a patient is crossing that almost imperceptible line between “very sick” and “dying.”
Families, too, have changed since hospice took root in the U.S. health system. They tend to be smaller, and live farther apart. More women work–making it harder for them to take on traditional roles as full-time caregivers. And millions of old, frail Americans—divorced, widowed, or never married—now live alone without family nearby, or without family at all. The most isolated are sometimes called “the unbefriended.”
“We have different illnesses, and different social situations than the traditional hospice user,” said David Stevenson, an expert on aging at Vanderbilt Medical School.
What hasn’t changed is the basic payment system—a per diem system—and the basic regulatory framework. Hospice is largely covered by Medicare, which pays a flat daily rate—usually around $145 to $160, with some variation based on geography and length of stay. Hospices get paid more for limited spells of crisis care in the home setting (and “home” can include a nursing home or an assisted living facility) or when a patient does get inpatient hospice care, usually briefly, in a hospice house or hospice-designated bed or wing in a hospital.
No matter how good and caring the hospice team—nurses, aides, social workers and, as desired, chaplains—much of the work falls to the family. And even when the family is willing and well-equipped, as my own family was as we took care of my father with hospice in the final months of his life, it’s not so easy to die at home.
For those with less support—it can be monumentally difficult. But no less important.
“There are people who would literally rather die than leave home. And they are really left without a good option,” said Dr. Drew Rosielle of the University of Minnesota, who, like his fellow palliative care physicians, works hard to keep his patients safe at home as long as possible. “The patients who genuinely don’t have loved ones who can essentially move in with them—most of those people do not die at home.”
They end up getting care they don’t want, in a place they don’t want to be in—and it costs more. “The ER, a hospital bed or a nursing home. That is our long-term care system for people who don’t have a support system.” said Edo Banach, the new president and CEO of the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization, who took the job knowing it’s time for some fresh thinking about hospice—and the rest of American health care.
Even strong advocates of hospice know that it’s time for changes to match the complex medical needs of today’s patients and the demographic realities of the country—as well as trends arising from long-term use of hospice in existing institutions like nursing homes. But in the near future, there aren’t a whole lot of fabulous solutions, at least not ones that don’t cost a lot of money.
This is where Washington might come in. But a comprehensive national long-term care program is so challenging economically and politically that hardly anyone in the capital even bothers talking about it. Medicaid offers long-term services and supports in the community or in nursing homes—but only to poor people, or people who become poor after spending all their money on care. Plus, congressional Republicans want to cut Medicaid, not grow it. The Obamacare repeal plans would take hundreds of billions from Medicaid, raising questions about how America plans to pay for its elder care as that bill rises.
By default, improvisation becomes policy. “We spend a lot of time cutting and pasting,” said Dr. Christian Sinclair, a former president of the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine, who is now practicing mostly outpatient palliative care at the University of Kansas Medical Center. And patching together care from friends, neighbors, some volunteers from church, is an increasingly inadequate response to the tidal wave of baby boomers now growing old. Can it be fixed?
IN SOME WAYS, hospice is a throwback to how we died before the surge of medical machinery and ICUs, and it can seem jarring that the movement would take root in contemporary America at all. When patients elect hospice, they must usually give up on curing or containing their disease—a difficult decision to make in a system that dangles the promise of a medical fix just within reach. In practice, people often turn to hospice for only a handful of days, at the very end, after using up a lot of expensive high-tech care that may have drawn out death more than it extended life.
Once they do elect hospice, a whole different philosophy of care begins. It’s more than easing physical pain and managing symptoms, though there’s that. It’s built around team-based care, both physical and emotional, and it’s intended to support the family as well as the patient. Surveys over the years, as well as Medicare’s new “Hospice Compare” quality project, have found high satisfaction rates with hospice care.
LEFT: Ann Mitchell, CEO of Montgomery Hospice House, sits on a bench in Rockville, Maryland. Mitchell has spent years trying to make hospice more humane. RIGHT: A memorial walkway at Montgomery Hospice House. | M. Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO
But dying people can require companionship around the clock—and the paid hospice team isn’t there 24/7, not even close. Families—or home aides when a family can afford to hire them—fill the gap. The care is complex and intensive, not in the sense of “intensive care,” but hands-on intense. “It’s a person who is dying,” said Ann Mitchell, the CEO of Montgomery Hospice outside Washington, a veteran of hospice since its early days. “That takes a lot of care and a lot of time.”
Family support is so crucial that some hospices won’t even try to arrange home care for someone on their own; the last big survey of hospices, conducted a decade ago, found that more than one in 10 hospices refused to take on a patient without a family caregiver. But most doctors and hospices work to keep that patient at home, safely. “We try to have a plan in place,” said Dr. Holly Yang, a hospice and palliative care physician at Scripps Health in San Diego, who like the other physicians interviewed for this article is engaged in both patient care and public policy.
Patients who are mostly on their own may do OK for a while, but decline is inevitable. They may not be able to prepare their meals, feed themselves, get out of bed—or manage their meds. They may experience acute pain, disorientation, shortness of breath. And when that happens, instead of calling the hospice nurse, the instinct is to call 911.
Even if the hospice patient who is rushed to the hospital ends up back home, all those transitions likely made things worse. Care gets disrupted, protocols get changed, mistakes get made—and costs rise—with each handoff. “It impacts the quality of care,” said Teno, the geriatrician, who has studied care transitions extensively and who has been a medical director in nursing homes and hospice. “It’s crying out for someone to fix it.”
If the Medicare agency and Congress aren’t diving into reinvention of hospice, doctors and policy experts have some ideas of their own—though not always with clear-cut ways to pay for them. By and large, they are still in the “floating ideas” stage, not agenda items for Congress or the Medicare agency.
Some physicians interviewed suggested tiered payments, which would replace the one size fits all daily rates. In other words, they could pay more for a patient with a particularly complex condition, or for a patient who can’t stitch together the necessary social support system. Another idea is to create more flexibility on how Medicare defines “continuous care”—a higher level of care for which the hospice gets a higher rate. Right now “continuous care” means an eight-hour block of hospice-provided care. Some doctors think paying for smaller blocks, like four hours, might be more practical.
One researcher mused about shifting the myriad quality markers that Medicare and private health plans now require so they have a sharper focus on end of life, and rewarding those that do it well. Hospitals measure and refine, for instance, how quickly they can get a heart patient in to the room for cardiac procedures; why not do the same for getting a dying patient into the most appropriate and compassionate setting?
One doctor suggested that four or five hospice patients could live together, sharing the cost of caregivers, who know to quickly summon the hospice nurse, not an ambulance, when things get tough. It wouldn’t be the same as staying “at home” for patients who really wanted to live out their days in their own homes. But it could be a home-like substitute, and there are scenarios where the arrangement could make the caregiving costs more affordable for some.
Some experts see promise in using more inpatient care, whether in a freestanding “hospice house”—a more formal and regulated setting for care—or a section of hospital or nursing home. Hospice houses are more common than they were 20 years ago, but they are still not the norm. By 2015, the proportion of deaths in America that took place under inpatient hospice care rose to 8 percent, from zero in 1999, according to research recently published in Health Affairs. With soup on the stove, cookie dough in the fridge, and places for those who do have family and friends to gather, such houses don’t feel institutional. Mostly they’re used for a brief stay to control a crisis, or for a few days of respite care for family caregivers. But some who have studied hospice extensively, like Elizabeth Bradley, a health policy expert who recently became president of Vassar College, say it’s worth thinking about how this inpatient setting can take on a bigger role, at least toward the end. “It makes a lot of sense,” she said. “It’s not home—but it’s homelike. And it’s set up to pass you through the end of life.”
It’s appealing, but comes with its own cultural and financial challenges. For one thing, it’s not how most hospices, still attuned to home-based family care, see their mission, at least not now. Nor can they afford it under the equally home-centric Medicare fee structure, unless they have a lot of philanthropic support. “We’ve hit a few cases where we didn’t feel safe with the patient home situation, where we brought them in for a respite stay and we added routine days onto that because there was no safe discharge plan,” Dr. Patrick White, chief medical officer of BJC Hospice in Missouri, said of the 16-bed hospice house it opened a few months ago. “But it’s really frustrating for us that financially the hospice takes a huge hit for that. It’s not economically viable.” To get Medicare to even think about paying more for the inpatient model, there’d probably have to be a crystal clear economic case that it would save health care dollars elsewhere, and not be one more big bill tacked on to the last year of life.
ONE INNOVATION THAT does help people stay at home independently is telemedicine or telecare—health care delivered remotely, over the internet or by phone. Medicare doesn’t pay for telemedicine in most settings. But it’s catching on under the per-day payments that hospice gets, and under other “value-based” or lump-sum payments that are emerging.
It has also caught the eye of the Department of Veterans Affairs, whose administrator, David Shulkin, has declared it a top priority to allow veterans to die in their homes if they wish. “I want to be able to assure every veteran that it’s their right to do so,” said Shulkin, who calls this policy his “moon shot.” He’s working on getting more paid caregivers into the home, and expanding home technology as part of the solution.
Though the recent growth of telemedicine has often come to mean fancy apps, sensors, and monitors, with hospice it can be less expensive, as simple as a regular check-in phone call from a nurse trained to pick up on red flags or stress—heading off that 911 call, said Dr. White of BJC. “It’s cheap and simple—and it’s proactive, especially for patients with lower health literacy who may not have caught a sign or symptom.” For patients at home alone, it’s a layer of protection.
A hospice patient visits with family in an outdoor courtyard at Montgomery Hospice House on Sept. 12. | M. Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO
Tech is also showing promise in helping create hospice-like end-of-life care in remote areas, where people may just live too far from the nearest hospice organization to tap into its care. In an isolated rural stretch of Northern California, Dr. Michael Fratkin, founder of a company called Resolution Care, is “virtually visiting” seriously ill patients at home with a phone, a laptop, and free teleconferencing software. Many of Fratkin’s patients have scant family support; in addition to physical illness, some are dealing with poverty, food insecurity, and homelessness. He makes in-person visits, too, as do nurses and community health workers. The care he provides is not hospice, but it’s similar, paid for by Medicaid managed care plans in California and a few big insurers.
Recalling one patient, a veteran with liver cancer who lived way out in the country, Fratkin said: “I walked him through the last eight or nine months of his life, on the land where he lived it.” Fratkin ’s already getting a lot of interest from other doctors and health organizations, and his approach would easily fit into hospice. The technology is accessible enough for patients. “I’m not that much of a geek,” Fratkin said.
Another development in medicine, embodying some of the philosophy and benefits of hospice, is the relatively new specialty of palliative care. This is an option for patients with advanced diseases, instead of or prior to hospice itself. But palliative care patients don’t have to give up curative care, like chemotherapy, so the transition is less of a rupture, and more of a gentle slope. Similarly, some hospices now offer “open access” or “concurrent care,” allowing the patient to start hospice but to keep getting “regular” treatment.
Medicare’s Innovation Center is running a multi-year test of that approach for four diseases, including advanced cancer. The idea is that patients who get the symptom management and emotional supports of hospice and palliative care, and who come to better understand their own illness, make different choices. “If we walk earlier with that patient, and he or she starts realizing the burdens of treatment outweigh the benefits. … It’s a more humane way of doing it, and I think it will save money,” said Ann Mitchell of Montgomery Hospice. That money could then be used to meet all sorts of needs we don’t pay for now—like more help at home.
On a broader level, the steps needed to create the next iteration of hospice may dovetail with the steps being taken to address the bloated, expensive American health care system. “The focus isn’t just on diagnosis and medical tests and drugs and durable medical equipment, but on meeting the patients’ whole needs. That’s really where it’s at,” said Joe Rotella, a long-time hospice doctor now working with the hospice and palliative medicine academy, which has put forth its own ideas for reform. “We’re just kind of waiting for the system to catch up.”
A raft of experiments are under way aimed at shifting how we finance and deliver care; some are advanced through the more esoteric provisions of Obamacare, the ones the country hasn’t spent eight years fighting about. Others are linked to a bipartisan new law that will change how Medicare pays physicians—with an emphasis on value of care, not volume of care. Many of the ideas being tested and explored entail more and better management of chronic diseases—the slow-motion killers that, eventually, bring people to hospice’s door.
If these experiments bear fruit, we could move toward a system where families can be supported, not exhausted. Where patients can get the holistic approach pioneered by hospice, without “giving up” on more aggressive treatment. Where patients who understand their choices can get off the conveyer belt of high-tech medicine, and find whatever balance of curative and palliative care is right for them. For both those who are surrounded by family, and the “unbefriended,” it could become a little less hard to die at home.
Joanne Kenen is POLITICO Pro's health care editor.
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Senior medicine: When ‘more’ isn’t better
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Dr. George Taler still makes house calls, driving his scuffed green Toyota sedan from one apartment to another, carrying a blue satchel with a laptop, hand sanitizer and a few medical tools. Inside each apartment, he practices medicine with old-fashioned care, spending half an hour with each patient. He takes out a stethoscope, a blood pressure cuff, a pulse oximeter.
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http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/09/27/choosing-wisely-medical-care-costs-000527
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2017-09-28 09:03:42.907000
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Dr. George Taler still makes house calls, driving his scuffed green Toyota sedan from one apartment to another, carrying a blue satchel with a laptop, hand sanitizer and a few medical tools. Inside each apartment, he practices medicine with old-fashioned care, spending half an hour with each patient. He takes out a stethoscope, a blood pressure cuff, a pulse oximeter. And if all goes well, when the visit ends, the patient ends up getting less—not more—medical care than if she'd shown up at a medical office.
Visit No. 4 on a recent morning was Maggie Barnes, an 82-year-old stroke patient with diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol. She sat in a wheelchair and shared some easy banter with a doctor she’d been seeing for more than a decade. “I feel good!” Barnes said.
“She’s got James Brown Syndrome,” Taler said, grinning. Barnes’ main worry is the wheelchair. It was six or seven years old and getting creaky—a piece had come off—and she was worried she’d fall out in the street. As for medications, Taler noted approvingly that she was down to one pill each for her diabetes, cholesterol, stroke and blood pressure, and not in pain.
For four decades, Taler, a senior physician at the MedStar Washington Hospital Center, has been trying to practice what he calls “slow medicine.” His clients are elderly people with chronic disease, individuals who typically cost the health care system around 10 times more than the average patient. And at the center of his philosophy is the idea—radical in today’s medical environment—that less can be much more.
Taler is an adherent of the guidelines of Choosing Wisely, a 5-year-old medical initiative based on the premise that the best outcomes often result from saying “no” to tempting procedures, tests and prescriptions. “Medications can be toxic as well as therapeutic,” he says. “It’s as important to cull the list on a monthly basis as it is to try new medications.”
According to some estimates, as much as a fifth of U.S. medical care is unnecessary. This represents $250 billion annually—and perhaps more important, it means patients are undergoing hundreds of thousands of procedures and prescriptions that have no benefit, and quite possibly cause them some harm. A third of medical care goes to the elderly, though they make up just 14 percent of the population. Older people with chronic illnesses stemming from obesity and age tend to get a lot of pills and procedures that aren’t helpful. Since they are more frail, they are most likely to suffer severe harm from things like drug side effects and surgeries that go wrong.
Choosing Wisely is one of the tendrils of reform that have been creeping into the U.S. health care system over the past several years as government and private-sector leaders try to find the points where cost control and better care can actually go hand in hand. The American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation started the Choosing Wisely initiative in earnest in 2012; the board’s members, largely general practitioners, had started to worry about the expanding costs and contradictions of medicine, and thought they could reduce waste by encouraging physicians and patients to talk about what care was needed, debunking the notion that more is automatically better.
So far, 80 U.S. clinical and pharmaceutical specialty societies have joined their campaign, each creating lists of five to 10 things that their members shouldn’t do—at least without thoughtful discussion with the patient. The American Gastroenterology Society recommends against colonoscopies more often than once every 10 years; the allergy and immunology society agreed that doctors should avoid prescribing antihistamines as first-order treatment of severe allergic reactions. The American Academy of Ophthalmology recommends its members not to require preoperative tests like electrocardiograms before eye surgery unless the patient has a known heart condition. The program, which publishes resources on a website and provides patient information through Consumer Reports, amounts to a broad-based effort to figure out what patients don’t really need, and then ensure they don’t get it.
But for doctors like Taler, who try to integrate those ideas into their practice, it’s clear that much of U.S. medicine is not embracing the principles of Choosing Wisely, which is colliding with a whole host of issues in medicine, from payment systems to the scattered way many patients receive their medical care, to a prevailing culture in which both doctors and patients have trouble saying “no” to more medicine.
It’s important that this change succeed, Taler said. With health care accounting for a swelling chunk of the U.S. economy—about 18 percent at last count – something has to give. If doctors and health systems can’t better shepherd our resources, bean counters may do it for them—in a way that no one likes.
ITS PROPONENTS SEE Choosing Wisely as an attempt to bridge the divide between two driving philosophies in U.S. medicine—the idea of physician autonomy built upon an almost mystical “physician-patient dyad,” as a recent writer described it, and a century’s worth of momentum toward evidence-based improvement and standardization of medicine.
In theory, doctors’ goals and patient health should be perfectly aligned. But in practice, for a variety of reasons including patient demands, lack of clarity or scarcity of evidence, in practice, doctors often employ procedures and medications that haven’t been shown to help much—and they don’t like being told how to practice in their fields.
Earlier efforts to tamp down on excessive care ran aground on those rocks—and on the American medical system’s aversion to making decisions based on cost. Physicians and patients alike bridled at the Health Management Organizations, or HMOs, where, in the pre-Obamacare days, cost-conscious reviewers meddled intensely in medicine, deciding when insurance would pay for a drug or procedure. More recent efforts to trim spending have been merged with care improvement schemes called Accountable Care Organizations, where physicians are more in the driver’s seat, and get bonuses or penalties depending on how efficient their care is—and how well their patients do overall.
Dr. Robert Jayes, with George Washington University Medical Faculty Associates, makes a house call in September for an 84-year-old patient recovering from a fall last year in her Washington, D.C., residence. | M. Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO
The Affordable Care Act and the 2015 Medicare payment reform measure known as MACRA both push in this direction, with the government trying to encourage better medicine by increasingly paying for value—as best it can define this elusive quality—instead-of-individual services. Choosing Wisely takes a different, purely voluntary tack: A “bottom up” approach led by physician organizations rather than being foisted on doctors by the government.
“It’s a movement of clinicians taking responsibility for an issue that’s about overuse, but also better quality and safety and doing no harm,” said Daniel Wolfson, executive vice president of the American Board of Internal Medicine Foundation. “The byproduct is that it reduces cost. So we think we have solved the quality-safety-cost issue in a unique way that begins with cultural change.”
Individual hospitals have incorporated specific guidelines with success. Doctors at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in New Hampshire reduced unnecessary preoperative tests from 23 percent to 4 percent over a three-month period by incorporating Choosing Wisely guidelines into the electronic records their doctors use, according to a recent study. Certain behaviors targeted for cessation by the campaign—such as threading tubes through the nose and throats of patients suffering from advanced Alzheimer’s disease in order to feed them—have declined dramatically, said Joan Teno, a University of Washington physician who works with the elderly. She attributes that change largely to the Choosing Wisely campaign.
It has also attracted skeptics, including physicians who feel it’s another threat to their autonomy—this time coming from professional societies, rather than the government as practitioners of the art of medicine. Others have pointed out that some of the Choosing Wisely recommendations have been withdrawn—including an American College of Cardiology recommendation for a heart attack treatment procedure—and say it is foolhardy to issue a blanket “no” against procedures that the next wave of research may bring back into favor.
Neither the government nor insurers were able to provide data on the extent to which Choosing Wisely has cut unnecessary medicine across the country. In part, this is because it simply hasn’t penetrated the system thoroughly: A survey last year at a Massachusetts health system—presumably among the more well-versed communities in medical research found about only half of primary care physicians and a third of specialists had even heard of Choosing Wisely.
If Choosing Wisely has a cheering section, it’s the geriatricians, doctors like Taler and Teno who specialize in elderly care. Geriatrics first became a major specialty in Britain, where today its practitioners constitute the largest single group of primary care physicians. In the United States, the specialty is far smaller and has more of a consulting role. In many instances, the geriatrician acts as a firefighter called in when an elderly patient’s medical care has spun out of control.
Geriatricians like Taler come in, talk to the patient, examine their pills and make recommendations that ideally are aimed at the whole patient, not just his or her heart or lungs or pancreas. With a frail elderly patient who may not have many years to live, some of the established drugs and procedures don’t make sense anymore.
Are a diabetic patient’s other doctors pushing too hard to lower his blood sugar, raising the risk of a faint, which could result in a broken hip? Is an orthopedist recommending arthroscopic surgery—a procedure, research shows, that doesn’t cure arthritis? All those expensive Mohs procedures to remove precancerous growths—given how slow-growing they are, is it always worth the time, expense and strain on the patient to remove them so carefully?
“A lot of what we do is try to prevent harm by other providers,” said Sei Lee, associate medical director at the University of California Center for Geriatric Care in San Francisco. “The cultural norm in geriatrics is that we are trying to do more with less. We try to protect our patients from some of the iatrogenic harms. We were the choir when Choosing Wisely came out.”
“Often I’m arguing with a cardiologist who says, ‘This person’s blood pressure target is X, we should get him there.’ And my argument is, ‘He’s already on three medicines and we’ve gotten him from terrible to almost there. What’s the marginal benefit of adding a fourth medicine to get him to an optimal reading?’”
For doctors like Taler and Lee, a program aimed at voluntary moderation is a godsend: It bolsters their belief that it’s a good idea to keep patients out of the hospital and off multiple pills, and offers guidelines to other specialists that can prevent conflicts. It still isn’t easy, though: Patients and physicians often resist the recommendations for entirely practical reasons. Tranquilizers may lead to brain fog and falls, but “anyone who has taken a benzodiazepine and slept better at night and not fallen or had a car accident will say ‘I didn’t see the harm,’” says Paul Mulhausen, an Iowa geriatrician. Anti-psychotic drugs have often been abused to exert control over elderly dementia patients, but they sure come in handy when an older spouse is trying to care for an angry Alzheimer’s patient at home rather than commit him to an institution.
Some elderly patients don’t understand why they’re being told they no longer need mammographies or colonoscopies—or they do understand, and don’t like the implications. The regular procedures, like their frequent visits to the doctor, offer the psychological sense of normalcy and imply a kind of optimism that there’s life in them yet. “My 95-year-old mother is always saying, ‘When you get old they just throw you away,’” says geriatrician Joanne Lynn. “They just throw you away.’”
AND THEN THERE'S the entirely predictable obstacle to Choosing Wisely that arises in the medical specialties themselves. “The answer is money,” says Taler. “What was the question?”
Certain medical groups have been hesitant to declare as “wasteful” procedures that can be quite profitable. For example, the Choosing Wisely list for orthopedic surgeons includes somewhat ancillary issues: “Don’t use glucosamine and chondroitin to treat patients with symptomatic osteoarthritis of the knee” is one item; “Don’t use post-operative splinting of the wrist after carpal tunnel release for long-term relief” is another.
Left off the list is arthroscopic knee surgery, the most commonly performed orthopedic procedure in the United States, yet one that helps only a slim percentage of patients—and is of almost no value to the frail elderly patients who suffer most from arthritis.
In recent years, physicians have had another reason not to follow Choosing Wisely recommendations—they come into conflict with other “quality improvement” measures sponsored by the government or private insurers. Some doctors shun wise choices because making them risks penalization by Medicare.
An example is pushing for low blood sugar levels in diabetic patients. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ new payment schema punishes physicians treating patients under Medicare if they fail to achieve a 9 percent HbA1c level, a measure of blood sugar. Other programs push for 7.5 percent. This goal, enshrined in quality improvement programs run by Medicare and many insurers, is based on a landmark 1993 study showing that the lower thresholds protected patients with juvenile diabetes from suffering kidney, eye or nerve damage, said Victor Montori, an endocrinologist at the Mayo Clinic. Subsequent research on adult-onset diabetes patients without symptoms did not duplicate that result, however—and yet the standard remains for all diabetes patients. Doctors who ignore it risk payment cuts or poor “star ratings” in published reports.
Aggressive blood sugar control is especially questionable in frail older patients whose diabetes is not going to be the thing that kills them. If blood sugar gets too low, it can lead to fainting, dizziness and falls that cause broken arms or hips. And when multiple drugs are needed to reach the low threshold, as is often the case, the regimens can become cumbersome and the likelihood of bad side effects rises.
When the American Geriatric Society tried to include easing of blood sugar control in its Choosing Wisely campaign, however, some endocrinologists became concerned and managed to water down the recommendations after a lengthy email back-and-forth, according to a geriatrician who was involved in making the list. The final list includes only a soft recommendation against the use of multiple anti-diabetes drugs.
“Quality and performance measures often lead to overtreatment,” said Kenneth Covinsky, Lee’s colleague in the UC-San Francisco geriatrics program. “They say, ‘We’re going to penalize you if your blood sugar levels are too high.’ Well, they are actually not too high. The guidelines were developed for people in their 50s and they are influenced by the drug companies.”
“If the patient’s going to be angry, insurance is going to pay and the doctor doesn’t want to get dinged, it’s a perfect storm to make sure you get extra mammograms, cancer screenings and aggressive control of asymptomatic conditions like hypertension and diabetes,” said Lynn.
THE CHOOSING WISELY campaign has its contradictions and challenges, but it seems to be helping to move physicians in the direction that American medicine overall is taking, if haltingly and uncertainly under the Trump administration, which has hinted that it wants to slow the reform experiments incorporated into the ACA.
As long as the government has purchased health care from physicians—and today the government is by far the largest payer—it has paid them by the specific services they render, evidenced in the thousands of so-called CPT codes that doctors use in billing. Increasingly, though, medicine has moved toward “value-based care,” in which payments are based not on the quantity of diagnoses, prescriptions and procedures, but rather on quality, based in part by measuring patient outcomes. A percentage of the federal payments to the new accountable care organizations is based on outcomes and evidence of good medical stewardship—including wise medical choices. Although Choosing Wisely per se is not enshrined in the payment schemes, they do depend more on holistic, “full-patient” views of medical care, which includes saying “no” to tempting but wasteful tests and procedures.
Dr. George Taler arrives at the home of Maggie Barnes in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 20. Barnes has diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol, but had recently simplified her medications and was upbeat. “I feel good,” she said. | M. Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO
Though slowly, health care is moving in the direction of using less to do more. “I can’t think of a health care system that’s not interested in reducing utilization,” says Scott Halpern, a professor of epidemiology, bioethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania.
Taler, who started making house calls on his own initiative in the 1970s after seeing it done in England during a medical school fellowship there, has had a number of benefactors over the decades. For the last five years his practice, MedStar Total Elder Care, has been partially funded through a congressionally mandated demonstration project that also includes 13 other medical centers around the country. Funding runs out next month but Taler expects a new bill to extend the program for another two years.
“If Congress doesn’t want to support the triple aim [of better patient experience, population health and lower costs], I’ll go to an office and make money instead,” Taler said (he wasn't speaking literally).
The federal Medicare and Medicaid offices has reported that the 14 pilot sites, which see about 10,000 patients total, saved the health care system $32 million in two years. That number is open to some debate, he admits, because the analysis is based on a counterfactual—the quantity of trouble and medical expense his patients would have suffered without someone looking after them the way he does. And there are ambiguities involved.
He ordered the new wheelchair for Maggie Barnes because the old one was damaged enough to cause her to worry that she might fall out of it. Taler was not sure she needed a new wheelchair; the old one still rolled. By some calculus, his decision might be seen as a bit extravagant. As her doctor, though, Taler saw that Barnes’ wheels were vital to her, and her peace of mind an important part of her care.
WHILE SOME DOCTORS are slow to pick up the Choosing Wisely recommendations, there’s also a vanguard of health care organizations already moving on to more radical measures. An example is run by Farzad Mostashari, a former Health and Human Services official who heads Aledade, a company that sets up and oversees accountable care groups in 17 states. Its physicians get bonuses for good outcomes, rather than numerous procedures, and Aledade uses a special technique to screen out doctors who game the system by doing unnecessary procedures.
“We’ll ask a gastroenterologist, ‘If you were an unscrupulous gastoenterologist, what would you be doing?’” Mostashari said. The company uses that knowledge to look through a doctor’s billing claims. When it finds specialists who do things motivated by padding their billable procedures rather than best medicine, they are excluded from Aledade’s networks, he said.
Although his company is attempting even more aggressive waste-cutting, Mostashari said he appreciates Choosing Wisely. “It provides consensus support for the fundamental understanding that more is not better,” he said. “That sounds trivial, but it’s a hard concept.”
In the meantime, Taler waits for American medicine to catch up with him.
“What we’re doing is a bleeding edge operation,” he said as he drove from Barnes’ apartment to the next patient. “We’re losing money, but it’s where health care is going. And when the payment system changes, it will be coin of the realm.”
Arthur Allen is the eHealth editor for POLITICO Pro. Joanne Kenen contributed to this report.
This article was written with the support of a journalism fellowship from New America Media, the Gerontological Society of America and the Commonwealth Fund.
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1 in 3 Seniors Take Sleep Aids, Despite Dangers
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One-third of older Americans take something to help them sleep, but most don't discuss their sleep problems with a doctor, a new survey finds.
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http://www.webmd.com/healthy-aging/news/20170927/1-in-3-seniors-take-sleep-aids-despite-dangers
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2017-09-28 09:02:23.050000
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During normal sleep, you cycle through REM and four stages of non-REM (NREM) sleep numerous times a night. Stage 1 of NREM sleep is the lightest, while stage 4 is the deepest. When you're repeatedly interrupted and can't cycle normally through these types and stages of sleep, you may feel tired, fatigued, and have trouble concentrating and paying attention while you're awake. Sleepiness puts you at greater risk for car wrecks and other accidents.
What Are Sleep Disorders? Circadian Rhythm Disorders Typically, people sleep at night -- thanks not only to the conventions of the 9-to-5 workday, but also to the close interaction between our natural sleep and alertness rhythms, which are driven by an internal "clock." This clock is a small part of the brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus of the hypothalamus. It sits just above the nerves leaving the back of our eyes. Light and exercise "reset" the clock and can move it forward or backward. Abnormalities related to this clock are called circadian rhythm disorders ("circa" means "about," and "dies" means "day").
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Housing charity warns against Corbyn-backed total rent controls
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Total control of rents, backed in the past by Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, would increase the risk of homelessness, UK housing charity Shelter has warned. It supports the Opposition party's current policy of restricting private rent rises by linking them to inflation but warns that seeking to dictate the entire rent would hurt those on low incomes. Such controls would prompt many landlords to sell, reducing the supply of affordable homes for low earners and raising the likelihood of homelessness.
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http://blog.shelter.org.uk/2017/09/old-fashioned-rent-control-what-is-it-good-for/
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2017-09-28 09:01:45.033000
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Eye-catching retail offers on housing have become a party conference tradition, as much part of the furniture as the stuffy airless room or terrible phone signal.
Today Jeremy Corbyn stepped up to the plate with his.
A centrepiece of this was some intriguing language around rent control. He said:
“And we will control rents…Rent controls exist in many cities across the world and I want our cities to have those powers too and tenants to have those protections.”
This is clearly a play for the hard-pressed private renters that, as we’ve argued before, were so crucial in the Conservatives losing their majority.
The exact detail is unclear, but the language suggested it could go further than what was in the 2017 manifesto.
So is this the right or wrong move?
To make sense of it, it’s worth knowing that there’s two basic ways you can ‘control’ private rents.
The first is essentially capping increases. The landlord is free to set the initial rent but the increases are restricted. This could be done, as we’ve campaigned for, through changing the law to make the standard tenancy a five-year contract where the landlord sets the initial rent but increases are linked to inflation.
It’s this that was in the 2017 manifesto, and indeed the 2015 manifesto (where it unhelpfully gained the moniker of ‘Venezuelan rent controls’, making it sound slightly more dramatic than it really was).
It could make a real difference.
The second approach is indeed more dramatic. It involves completely dictating the entire rent. A local authority, for instance, would tell landlords they can’t charge more than £10 per square metre, or no more than £500 a month for a one bed, and so on. In reality it would force rents down, not limit their increase.
Corbyn has expressed support for this approach before, so it may be where he wants to take things. Or it could be somewhere in the middle.
So what’s Shelter’s view?
Essentially, controlling increases is fine. There’s a variety of ways you can do this, of which the best is probably Labour’s current policy.
But setting the entire rent can cause big problems. And those problems come with big risks that could hurt the people Labour say they care about – those on low incomes.
We’ve looked at this in some detail over the years. There is no crystal clear picture. But the evidence, summarised in the table below, suggests that old fashioned controls – setting the rent, not just controlling the increase – would force a significant number of landlords to sell their home, as they could make more money that way.
Now, that might be good for middle earners – a glut of homes suddenly for sale might become available.
But this is where the risk comes in for low earners. They can’t afford to buy and increasingly rely on the private rented sector. As landlords sell up, they would be left with fewer places to live.
In the absence of a much larger supply of council and social housing, that risks pushing people into homelessness.
This is probably not a gamble worth taking.
A more flexible, local approach might mitigate some of the risks. But we’d strongly suggest that this idea of controlling rents, as it develops, restricts itself to regulating increases.
All that said, it’s no wonder old fashioned rent controls are very popular. People are desperate for big solutions after years of fiddling around the edges by governments of all stripes. One of my main take aways from conference was the disparity of the discussion between the traditional fringe scene and the Momentum-run The World Transformed outside. At the former, well-meaning people talked about big problems but too often pushed incremental tinkering. At the latter, people talked in radical language with bold solutions.
That doesn’t make all those solutions good ideas. But it does lay down a challenge to come up with alternatives on the same scale. This includes the government – if nothing else Corbyn’s speech today has firmly put the ball back in the government’s court.
So in that spirit, here are three alternatives:
Firstly, end the freeze on housing benefit and re-link it back to rents. This would make an instant difference to those on lower incomes, stemming the tide of families being made homeless after falling on hard times only to find they don’t get enough financial support to keep a roof over their head. The NAO recently pointed this out. But bafflingly it’s a call Labour have still refused to back, including in Corbyn’s speech today, despite spending pledges in other areas. Secondly, build a new generation of good quality homes at low rents – both for those at the sharpest end and workers on low wages. This could be council housing or others models, such as living rent. Done well, this would provide a better alternative to the private rented sector for families on all kinds of incomes, rather than tinkering with trying to force for-profit landlords to change their behaviour. Thirdly, reform the housebuilding system so it builds more homes people want. This would involve radical reform of the land market. For more see our New Civic Housebuilding work.
All of these are big solutions that would make a difference and send a signal to voters. All of them will help those on low incomes as well as middle incomes. And all of them are a safer bet than old fashioned rent control.
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Wandercraft close to unveiling walking-aid exoskeleton
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A recent €15m ($17.56m) funding boost has brought Paris-based mobility-tech start-up Wandercraft closer to unveiling a robotic exoskeleton that can help paraplegics move about in an upright position. The semi-autonomous Atalante prototype moves in response to gestures or muscular stimuli from its wearer. This follows a round of "promising patient trials" of the device and the release of images of it in action.
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https://www.engadget.com/2017/09/27/wandercraft-exoskeleton-paraplegic-help-walk/#/
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2017-09-28 08:49:46.910000
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There's a reason you've never seen fully autonomous exoskeletons that help the disabled walk without crutches: Building one is crazy hard. But the founders of a Paris-based startup called Wandercraft are uniquely qualified to do it. They're roboticists who happen to have loved ones in wheelchairs, giving them both the expertise and motivation to develop an exoskeleton that helps users walk again. After years of development, they're nearly ready to show it to the public, following a round of promising patient trials.
Wandercraft ran successful preliminary trials with a handful of clients using "Atalante," its latest prototype. "There was such a strong emotional response from our test subjects," said Managing Director Matthieu Masselin. "For a lot of them, it was the first time they had been able to walk since their accidents."
A lot of companies have tried to develop exoskeletons for paraplegics, but models from Ekso Bionics, ReWalk and others require crutches, which heavily stress patients' shoulder muscles. That limits training and rehab sessions, as patients often need days to recover from muscle fatigue.
Gallery: Wandercraft exoskeleton for paraplegics | 10 Photos
/10 Gallery: Wandercraft exoskeleton for paraplegics | 10 Photos
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Paraplegics want a device that lets them be vertical and walk a bit, preferably as often as possible. That would help them deal with a host of medical problems that able-bodied folks don't experience, like cardiovascular issues, pressure sores, incontinence, loss of muscle tone and depression, to name a few.
Being able to stand and walk without the discomfort of crutches would not only provide a huge psychological boost but also help reduce or eliminate many of those symptoms. "Our friends in wheelchairs told us, 'OK, if there was a device that would enable us to be able to walk again, there is no price that I wouldn't pay,'" said Masselin.
Without crutches, assistive exoskeletons (or "exos," as the team prefers to call them) are orders of magnitude more complex. Wandercraft's latest device, the fourth-generation model, weighs nearly 130 pounds (60kg) and must have perfect, humanlike balance so it won't fall over and injure the patient. "We discovered that stability and the human gait are some of the hardest problems we've ever encountered in robotics," Masselin said.
Unlike most current exos, which are more like motorized braces, the Wandercraft is a rigid, robotic structure. It has multiple powerful, compact electric motors at the hips, knees and ankle joints. A large battery is fitted at the back, along with an Intel Core i7-equipped microcomputer that does the complex math needed to ensure the machine can balance and walk.
Building a robot is hard enough, but attaching a human to it multiplies the degree of difficulty. "If the exo bends the knee, it has to stop before the knee of the person breaks, obviously," Masselin noted.
To make such a complex device work, the company recruits top roboticists, mechanical engineers and coders -- all fields in high demand. It must also enlist folks from biomedical, medical, biomechanical and other diverse areas and train them to work with the development team. To top it off, the exoskeleton and the code have to conform to medical protocols, and Wandercraft must run an elaborate regulatory gauntlet before patients can ever use it.
After five years of dealing with those nearly overwhelming challenges, the company finally tested its Atalante exo with patients. They're not ready to show video to the public yet -- for reasons I'll explain shortly -- but I was able to see it in action during a private showing.
Patients are first attached to the device by straps that are specially designed to distribute pressure evenly, at the waist, hips, knees and ankles. Those can fully support users' weight while their feet are placed on metal walking pads with rubber grips.
You start by sitting in the device and then make a gesture to stand up by bending at the waist. That activates motors that automatically drive the exoskeleton to a standing position. Walking can then be cued either by patient gestures or automatic programs started by the therapist.
The gait movement is obviously slow, but patients can take multiple steps without any crutches or external assistance. They assume a slightly bent posture, but it looks far more comfortable than the demonstration I saw of Ekso Bionics' system back in 2013. I'd describe the motion as controlled lurching, but keep in mind that such tech has never been tried and many of the test subjects hadn't risen from their wheelchairs in years. With time, patients would develop more skill, and the exoskeleton is bound to get smoother.
Gallery: Wandercraft patient photos | 19 Photos
/19 Gallery: Wandercraft patient photos | 19 Photos
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Despite the limitations, Wandercraft, and particularly the patients, saw the trials as a success. "It was huge for the team, because we'd been working so hard on this device for many years," Masselin said. "But for those people, real users, it was even stronger, emotionally speaking, because they could really see the potential of the device. And a lot of them told us they were sad to have to stop the test."
Despite their obvious enthusiasm, Wandercraft is quick to tamp down expectations. "Showing people too early what you're doing and giving them grand visions that you are not going to be able to deliver after that, we think is very, very negative," said Masselin. "We don't want to stress people by giving them false hope." For those reasons, it plans to show doctors and physical therapists video of the device in action before the public sees it.
The company just received a much-needed €15 million ($17.6 million) funding boost and has a careful plan to deliver its exoskeleton to market. The design and development is now finished, so Wandercraft is entering the specification phase to define exactly how patients and medical personnel can use it. By the end of the year, Wandercraft will unveil its exoskeleton via a demonstration video to the public.
The next step after that is the so-called CE Marking, or European equivalent of FDA certification. It hopes to receive that sometime in 2018. Afterwards, it can sell the suit in Europe for use in medical facilities under the strict supervision of trained specialists. The company expects to put its first exeoskeletons in medical facilities by the end of 2018. It will eventually chase FDA approval so it can market the device in the US.
Wandercraft Managing Director Matthieu Masselin with "Atalante"
Wandercraft has bigger dreams though. Next, it wants to build a lighter, fully autonomous version of its suit for personal use by paraplegics. Once users strapped it on, they could go out of their homes and walk in a park or other uncrowded location. That requires even more advanced tech, as the suit would need to be able to handle obstacles like stairs. As it stands right now, even a pebble can throw off such devices.
The company has taken on a risky and possibly not financially rewarding type of product. And yet it has recruited some insanely talented young people, including Physics Olympiad-caliber employees. So why would these folks do it, when there are more potentially lucrative opportunities in AI, self-driving and other areas?
The answer might lie on the company's LinkedIn page, of all places. When you see the callow money-centric culture of some major companies, Wandercraft's recruiting call is life-affirming. "You will have stunning colleagues, chosen because they are selfless team players and not lone geniuses," it reads. "We make advanced technology exo[skeletons]s that help mobility impaired persons and impact their health and happiness -- not pizza delivery apps."
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Insurers can use social media to investigate fraudulent claims
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Social media is a tool that insurers can use to investigate claims when there's a suspicion of fraud, according to the Canadian Life and Health Insurance Association. Public social media posts can be used in tandem with other data sources, like physical surveillance, to assess the validity of a claim, the association added. Insurers are also reportedly checking clients' pets, relationship statuses and health habits via social media platforms.
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https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/lose-insurance-coverage-facebook-post-190449219.html
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2017-09-28 07:56:24.900000
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This photo caused an insurance company to revoke a U.S. woman’s insurance policy. (The Doctors CBS)
Horror stories of people losing their jobs from poorly thought out social media posts aren’t uncommon. If you’re not careful, what you post on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram could also cost you your insurance coverage, too.
According to US Insurance Agents, insurers are now checking social media for relationship statuses, information on pets and to determine if you’re a smoker.
Selfies showing risky behaviour, including photos that appear to be taken while driving, could also come against you.
Even photos of your property that have been geotagged with its location could be used to argue negligence on your part.
Insurance company Nationwide cancelled Melina Efthimiadis’ application for a personal umbrella liability insurance plan when they believed she had an ineligible dog breed that she failed to disclose.
Nationwide used a photo found on her Facebook page to argue that she has a potentially dangerous Rottweiler mix breed, but her dog, Zeus, was actually a lab/hound mix.
Nationwide went back on their cancellation once finding out Zeus was eligible, but by then it was too late and Efthimiadis went with another company.
She said the experience has caused her to rethink what she post on social media.
“It’s sad that you can’t post pictures of your beloved pet on your own Facebook page and have it public,” she told ABC 11. “Unfortunately, I had to go and change some of my pictures just to feel more comfortable about it.”
While the Insurance Bureau of Canada, which deals with home, auto and business insurance companies, told Yahoo Canada Finance that they weren’t aware of any of their member companies collecting information on clients from social media posts, the Canadian Life and Health Insurance Association said publicly available social media posts are a tool, alongside others like physical surveillance, data mining and predictive analysis, that could be used in fraud investigations.
“It’s not that there’s going to be action based on someone’s social media,” Karen Voin, vice president of group benefits and anti-fraud at CLHIA, said. “It’s going to be part of an overall investigation.”
Similarly, The Workplace Safety and Insurance Board says social media activity maybe looked at as “a tool to corroborate evidence of wrongdoing,” but last year that only occurred in a handful of claims.
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Millennials prefer humans to robo-advisers: LendEDU
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Many young investors prefer human advisers to robo-advice platforms, US-based online marketplace for loan refinancing LendEDU has noted. More millennials believe robo-advisers are more likely to make a mistake than their human counterparts, with 52% saying they thought humans were less fallible. A majority of millennials surveyed by LendEDU also said robo-advisers were more likely to lose their money than human advisers.
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http://www.hrdive.com/news/tech-savvy-millennials-still-prefer-real-people-as-financial-advisers-stud/505789/
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2017-09-28 07:51:31.397000
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Dive Brief:
As tech savvy as millennials are, they still want to talk finances with a real human being over a robo-adviser, says LendEDU. An online marketplace for student loan refinancing, LendEDU polled 502 millennials, age 18 to 34. All respondents said they were saving for retirement, and robo-advisers' popularity has grown substantially.
But when asked who would manage their money best and who would make mistakes in doing so, LendEDU says 51.6% of millennials said a robo-adviser is more likely to make errors versus 48.4% who thought a human adviser would be more likely to make mistakes.
The LendEDU survey also found that most millennials (62.4%) think robo-advisers are more likely to lose their money. Only 37.7% of respondents thought a traditional adviser would do so.
Dive Insight:
Robo-advisers have garnered substantial attention as of late for their affordability and accessibility. But as in many cases of automation, it's hard to completely replicate the human touch.
Millennials are proving to be as savvy about saving for retirement as they are about technology. The largest generation in the workplace is reportedly the biggest savers when it comes to retirement. The 2016 Willis Towers Watson's Global Benefits Attitudes Survey found that millennials are willing to pay more for secure retirement benefits.
Although a 2016 Financial Finesse study said women millennials were 28% behind their male counterparts in saving for retirement, the generation as a whole is surpassing boomers' savings levels. Employee Benefits Adviser reported in late 2016 that millennials are out-saving boomers, who got caught in the transition employers have made from defined benefits plans to defined contribution plans, such as 401ks.
Millennials have expressed the desire to learn more from their employers about investing for retirement. And because 35% of millennials are willing to turn down a job offer because of inadequate benefits, according to an Anthem survey, employers who accommodate them might have an edge in recruiting and retaining these young workers.
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Early results promising for Alexa orders: Domino's
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Pizza chain Domino's has said that early results from its voice-activated delivery ordering system are encouraging. Domino's began offering the service through Amazon's Alexa device in July, and now reports that one in five customers using the chain's one-click service did so through the system. The service is the latest milestone in the company's move towards an "Easy Order" service, modelled after Amazon's one-click functionality. Other companies including Unilever and Diageo are developing voice searches for their products.
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https://digiday.com/marketing/dominos-getting-people-order-pizza-amazon-alexa/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=digidaydis&utm_source=uk&utm_content=170928
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2017-09-28 07:50:18.303000
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Domino’s is letting people order pizza through voice-controlled devices, and the early results are promising.
One in five customers who can order a pizza with one click through the pizza chain’s Easy Orders option has asked Amazon Alexa instead, two months after making the feature available there, said Nick Dutch, head of digital for Domino’s UK.
Domino’s introduced Easy Orders in 2013 and debuted the feature on Alexa at the end of July. To use it, customers must create a Easy Order account, which lets them save their favorite order and submit it through platforms including Domino’s website and app, Facebook Messenger and Google Home. The pizza chain sees Easy Orders as a way to apply Amazon’s one-click shopping model to pizza ordering and aggressively promoted its Alexa skill in the summer to get people to buy and track their orders this way.
Domino’s doesn’t break out voice or Easy Order sales as a percentage of its online earnings, but Dutch said the initial orders on Alexa proved it “backed the right horse.”
Voice could be key to Domino’s growing the Amazon-style model, given it is looking for the next big sales channel after desktop and mobile. The pizza maker has opted to sell direct to customers rather than through online delivery companies like UberEats and Deliveroo, which could leave it exposed should its online sales dwindle and those companies continue to grow.
Domino’s same-store sales in the 26 weeks ended June 25 declined 13 percent from the previous year. While voice, and more broadly, Easy Orders aren’t a quick fix to the decline, they simplify the ordering process, making it easier to get people to buy. It worked so well for Amazon that it patented its 1-Click process in 1999 and fought hard to prevent others from copying the process until the patent expired earlier this month.
“The reality is right now there aren’t millions of people who are doing that [making voice orders],” said Dutch, speaking on Sept. 27 at a We Are Social event. “We’re building for the future, and we need to leverage this [early growth] … in the hope that over time, more people use the technology.”
Domino’s immediate focus is on growing direct sales from voice-controlled devices with options such as letting customers pick different toppings and locating their nearest store. At some point, however, the company will need to consider search ads, particularly if comScore’s prediction that 50 percent of all searches will be done by voice by 2020 comes true.
Elsewhere, Diageo and Unilever have recently revealed their own plans for voice searches. Unilever’s Cleanipedia Amazon Echo skill, which answers questions about home cleaning with a direct link to e-commerce, now has 15,000 users in the U.K., where it debuted. The consumer goods company plans an 11 percent increase in investment in voice.
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Google's sister company expands drone research
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The Google sister company known as X has partnered with the Australian Capital Territory's Rural Fire Service to expand its research into drone delivery tech. Founded in 2010, X has been responsible for a number of notable achievements, including driverless cars and Google Glass. “Project Wing” will involve testing routine drone deliveries in the locality of Royalla, and gathering feedback from the local community on their attitudes to the new technology. The project also aims to explore how drones might be able to assist fire fighters in difficult-to-reach places.
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http://www.theage.com.au/act-news/google-sister-company-teamsup-with-act-rural-fire-service-for-drone-tests-20170927-gypjr0
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2017-09-28 07:42:26.080000
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The Google sister company behind the self-driving car is teaming up with the ACT's Rural Fire Service for its latest research project.
In recent months the company - called "X" - has been trialling an automated drone delivery system at Fernleigh Park in Googong.
Project Wing co-leader James Ryan Burgess with the delivery drone. Credit: Sitthixay Ditthavong
Now the initiative, called Project Wing, is moving to Royalla to ramp-up its testing in collaboration with the ACT Rural Fire Service.
Project co-leader James Ryan Burgess, from San Francisco, said hundreds of homes in the Royalla region could soon benefit from the automated drone technology.
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Texas state workers left without doctors after insurance switch
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State employees in the Texas panhandle are scrambling to find a doctor, with some forced to travel for hours to see a specialist, after the Employees Retirement System of Texas switched their insurance plan on 1 September. Thousands of people, now under the Blue Cross Blue Shield HealthSelect plan, are learning some doctors won't accept it. "I think when doctors hear Blue Cross HMO they automatically assume it's the Obamacare network and they don't want to take that one because the reimbursement is so poor," said Bryan Williams, president of Moxie Healthcare Solutions. ERS is said to be working to find a solution.
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http://www.newschannel10.com/story/36471034/thousands-struggle-to-find-doctors-who-accept-new-state-insurance-plan
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2017-09-28 07:42:22.463000
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Source: Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas
Source: Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas
AMARILLO, TX (KFDA) - Thousands of state employees in the panhandle are having to search for new doctors following a change in their health insurance plan offered by the state.
People in our area who now have Blue Cross Blue Shield HealthSelect insurance have been calling their doctors only to learn they will not accept this new plan.
All state employees were switched to this plan on September 1st.
The decision was made by the Employees Retirement System of Texas (ERS), which is aware that thousands of people in the panhandle are struggling to use this program and are working to solve it.
Some panhandle residents are now having to travel to to see specialists no longer available in Amarillo under their new insurance, which is not easy for most people.
"We have to rely on going to Lubbock, which is a two hour trip, maybe an hour and a half if I drive fast," said one concerned HealthSelect carrier. "My husband, he doesn't get around too well, so I have to take off a day when we go to Lubbock."
Some local doctors have already changed their plans to include HealthSelect coverage, like all Texas Tech doctors, Family Care Clinic of Pampa, and Amarillo Stat Care.
"I probably had about 10 calls before, starting in July that they needed me to switch to continue to see me," said Kayla Mabery, FNP-C and Owner of Amarillo Stat Care. "I found out we were not in network, and actually switched my plans with Blue Cross Blue Shield to include HealthSelect."
One health insurance creditor said he thinks more doctors aren't signing up to cover HealthSelect because they think it's a low-reimbursement plan.
"I think a lot of providers get confused when they hear Blue Cross Blue Shield HMO they think of another HMO product that Blue Cross has called Blue Advantage HMO and that's the product for Obamacare plans," said Bryan Williams, President of Moxie Healthcare Solutions. "So I think when doctors hear Blue Cross HMO they automatically assume it's the Obamacare network and they don't want to take that one because the reimbursement is so poor on that plan."
Some doctors in Amarillo will not be working to adjust their plans.
Amarillo Medical Specialists sent a letter to their patients (pictured below) stating they would not be taking HealthSelect insurance because of the low reimbursement.
State Senator Kel Seliger said he's gotten lots of calls to his office about the plan and is working with ERS and Blue Cross Blue Shield to fix this problem.
"If people can't use their insurance, it's the same as having no insurance," said Seliger. "Everyone's been responsive so far. We have an ongoing dialogue with the Employees Retirement System and with Blue Cross and we're expecting some time next week to start getting an explanation."
Blue Cross Blue Shield has declined to comment on the matter.
Mabery reminds patients that it's up to them to check with their doctors any time there's a change in insurance to make sure they're still covered.
Copyright 2017 KFDA. All rights reserved.
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China, Serbia to boost IT ties on Information Silk Road
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Trade representatives from China and Serbia have met in Belgrade to discuss boosting ties in e-commerce, logistics and market information, smart cities technology and online tourism. They agreed to begin talks as part of the so-called Information Silk Road project - a platform aimed at pulling down communication and information barriers between European and Asian countries.
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http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/bizchina/2017-09/28/content_32587453.htm
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2017-09-28 07:31:37.907000
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BELGRADE - China-Serbia cooperation on the development of Information Silk Road is due to start with exchanges in fields of electronic trade, logistics and market information, smart cities and online tourism, representatives of the two countries agreed on Wednesday in Belgrade.
At the opening of the conference "Information Silk Road for Informational Interconnection," Wu Hao, deputy general manager of the department for High-Tech industry at the National Development and Reform Commission of China and Tatjana Matic, state secretary at the ministry of trade, tourism and telecommunications of Serbia, signed a plan of activities on the implementation of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on Information Silk Road in front representatives of IT companies of both countries.
The aim, according to Wu, is to motivate deeper and wider cooperation in the field of information technology between governments, institutions and companies of the two countries within the Information Silk Road, a platform aimed to break down barriers in communication and facilitate flow of information between Asian and European nations.
Wu said that the agreement with the Serbian ministry will help "achieve results for the 21st century" with the participation of companies from the two countries.
Matic said that the MoU with China represents an opportunity to advance cooperation in trade, tourism and telecommunications, as well as other fields such as health services and economy.
"We have decided to create pilot zone for economic cooperation within the Information Silk Road, where each side will give its suggestions and propose cities which will become part of this zone. We will also create a database of all joint projects that we are going to realize. One of the key points is also to establish an international industrial alliance within the Information Silk Road at the Institute for the Information Silk Road in China in order to promote companies within the sector of the digital economy," she explained.
Matic predicted that the implementation of the MoU will create a stable digital foundation for the greater inclusion of Serbia in the Belt and Road Initiative and highlighted smart cities, telemedicine, broadband networks, satellite services and new industries as some of the areas of cooperation.
"We believe that the implementation of this agreement will give a key contribution to the cooperation between Serbia and China in the area of information and communication technologies, and that this will motivate more companies to become actively involved into the establishment of the Information Silk Road," Matic concluded.
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tZero launches ICO joint venture with RenGen and Argon
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Fintech tZero, together with RenGen and Argon Group, is seeking to launch an alternative trading system allowing security tokens issued in an initial coin offering to be traded in compliance with regulations laid out by the US Securities and Exchange Commission and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. The system will make use of tZero's blockchain trading technology with RenGen serving to provide liquidity for the platform. It will also make use of Argon's ICO advisory experience. ICOs have raised more than $2bn this year and cryptocurrencies have a market cap of $137bn.
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https://www.econotimes.com/Overstock-subsidiary-to-launch-exchange-for-SEC-compliant-ICO-token-trading-923419
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2017-09-28 07:24:06.547000
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tZERO, the fintech arm of online retail giant Overstock.com focused on blockchain technology, has embarked on a joint venture with RenGen and Argon Group to transform the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) market.
The companies have teamed up to launch an Alternative Trading System (ATS) for the trading of security tokens issued in ICOs in compliance with SEC and FINRA regulations (Joint Venture).
Blockchain-based digital tokens is a rapidly emerging asset class, witnessing tremendous growth. This is evidenced by the fact that these tokens have raised over $2 billion so far this year alone and cryptocurrencies overall (including digital tokens) have a current market cap of $137 billion.
However, global regulatory authorities including the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA), and the Monetary Authority of Singapore(MAS), among others, have recently issued guidance on how ICO tokens may be subject to securities laws. The SEC has made clear that any digital token with an income stream is a security, and furthermore that security tokens may only be traded on an ATS or a National Securities Exchange.
The joint venture aims to redefine the way the ICO market looks at security tokens and enhance liquidity to accelerate development.
“tZERO has been at the forefront of the blockchain revolution for years, working closely with regulators since 2015 – launching the world’s first SEC compliant ATS for blockchain assets, the first private blockchain bond offering, and the first ever public issuance of a blockchain security,” said Patrick M. Byrne, CEO of Overstock. “Now, by combining our expertise with Argon's advisory services and RenGen's electronic trading, deep liquidity and market making capabilities, we are in a position to launch the only U.S. SEC compliant token trading venue.”
According to the official release, the joint venture will be built in an exclusive collaboration that draws on the distinct strengths of each company, combining tZERO’s blockchain-based trading platform with RenGen’s ability to provide liquidity, market making and algorithm technology, and the Argon Group’s premier ICO advisory experience and security token clients. It will also take advantage of SaftLaunch for AML and KYC capabilities.
“This Joint Venture allows us to continue achieving our goal of leveraging our existing U.S. equity market infrastructure and smart order routing technologies within the blockchain space,” said Joe Cammarata, President of tZERO.
FxWirePro launches Absolute Return Managed Program. For more details, visit http://www.fxwirepro.com/invest
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Pinterest shares 'visual search' tool with US retailer Target
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Customers of US retailer Target will be able to use Pinterest's "visual search" function to take a picture of a product when they are out and about and then receive details of similar merchandise stocked by Target, in a deal announced by Pinterest. The deal came as Pinterest's CEO, Ben Silbermann, said the company is focusing on developing "an advertising product that really works", citing the platform's "safe" and "positive" ethos as a strength for attracting brands. The company reported 200 million monthly users and has been valued at around $12bn by analysts, but has no immediate plans to go public.
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https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/26/pinterest-ipo-no-immediate-plan-or-timeline-ceo-ben-silbermann-says.html?utm_source=CB+Insights+Newsletter&utm_campaign=5a25ed4c1c-WedNL_9_20_2017&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_9dc0513989-5a25ed4c1c-87071009
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2017-09-28 07:04:57.983000
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"One is growing the user base .... and the second, of course, is creating an advertising product that really works — to bring in new customers, that's very measurable, that lets people see emerging consumer trends and merchandise against them."
"Really, the company's focused on two things," CEO Ben Silbermann told CNBC's Julia Boorstin in an interview that aired on " Closing Bell. "
Social media upstart Snap may have braved the public market, but as of Tuesday, Pinterest doesn't have an IPO announcement in the works, the CEO said.
Pinterest, which makes money through advertising, announced that Target's app will use Pinterest's "visual search" tool. In essence, it would let users who are out and about take a picture of any product and receive a list of similar items at Target.
Silbermann declined to share Pinterest's revenue figures (which would be revealed during a public offering). But he said the Target partnership is an example of the kind of deal that supports Pinterest's massive valuation — pegged at $12.3 billion by CB Insights.
"Target was one of the earliest advertisers on the platform," Silbermann said. "It means they've seen really good results."
Pinterest's concept — which allows users to collect and categorize images, the way one might use a corkboard — is often adopted by users planning big events like a wedding or a remodel. But Silbermann said Pinterest's technology learns users' tastes, and generates suggestions to keep users hooked.
Earlier this month, Pinterest said it had 200 million monthly users.
Silbermann also said Pinterest's "safe" and "positive" environment — which tends more toward culture, recipes and fashion and away from politics and "memes" — has been an attraction for advertisers "over the last couple of years."
"It's been one of the reasons why we've been able to make a lot of progress with our advertisers," Silbermann said.
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Revenues from video are a mirage for most publishers
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Publishers seeking to boost revenues from video are being caught in a "terrible trap", as large viewing figures are not translating into big revenues, according to industry insiders. Issues such as an inability to effectively monetise videos on third-party sites, viewability problems and the percentage of revenue snapped up by hosting platforms have combined to put a dent into publishers' CPMs and revenues. Publishers are much better able to monetise video on their own platforms, but, unfortunately for most of them, the vast majority of views take place on third-party sites such as Facebook, where their revenues are much less.
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https://digiday.com/media/pivoting-video-publishers-face-big-monetization-gap/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=digidaydis&utm_source=uk&utm_content=170928
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2017-09-28 06:47:52.967000
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Publishers are pivoting to video, hoping it’ll pay off in ad dollars. But despite the big view numbers they’re generating, the revenue is often a mirage.
The majority of those views take place off those publishers’ own platforms and occur on platforms that have tons more scale (Facebook, Instagram and YouTube) and have optimized themselves around video. That could be because, like BuzzFeed or NowThis, they deliberately built their business on social distribution.
The chart below illustrates the gap. For these publishers that have made a big push into video lately, most of their views take place off their own site.
“It’s a terrible trap,” said Andy Feinberg, CEO of Brightcove, which powers video players on publishers’ sites. “[Publishers] have to be on these platforms to retain their audiences and make sure their brand is being presented to a broad audience, and their competitors are there. But the ability to monetize on these platforms is not the same as their ability to monetize on their owned-and-operated platforms. Their CPMs are low; their revenue streams are suffering.”
Second, the big view numbers publishers are getting off their own sites are somewhat deceptive because for various reasons, not all those videos can be monetized. Facebook is testing mid-roll ads in publishers’ videos, but video has to run at least 90 seconds to be eligible for the test — and viewers have to make it to the break. That doesn’t help publishers that specialize in short videos, which often is true of news clips. The mid-roll test is still just a test, and publishers who are participating in it have said they’re only making a little money on it at this point.
Then, there are self-imposed limits. Case in point is Bleacher Report. It can sell ads against all the videos it runs on its own site. But most of its views take place on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube, and while marketers pay to sponsor those videos, Bleacher Report is careful to limit the sponsorships it runs on video-heavy Instagram to about one out of four videos, so it doesn’t turn off viewers with a constant stream of “brought to you by” messages. Publishers participating in Facebook’s mid-roll test took a similar position since mid-roll was new.
“On social, if every video has a ‘brought to you,’ it might diminish the [user experience],” said Keith Hernandez, Bleacher Report’s svp of strategy. “And you’re not the only publisher that’s in someone’s feed.”
When publishers do monetize their distributed video, it’s not as lucrative for several reasons. There are measurement gaps by companies that track social video, which limits publishers’ ability to sell their video audience to advertisers. There’s an issue of whether the video ad gets counted as being seen, which is dubious given how fast people scroll through their news feeds. Then, publishers have to take into account the share of revenue that the host platform keeps (45 percent in the case of Facebook’s mid-roll ads, the same as YouTube’s split).
Bleacher Report said the CPM on its social video is roughly half what it gets on its own site. For USA Today, the ad rate on social video is one-third to one-half what it gets on its own site. One video exec at another premium publishing company said that while video on the publisher’s own site can command a $70 CPM, on Facebook and YouTube, the effective ad rate drops to around $20.
The conundrum publishers face is that they have to go where the audiences are, even though the monetization lags. The Washington Post makes money on 80 percent of its video on Facebook and all its YouTube video, but because of the platforms’ tracking limitations and their revenue share, “the monetization still has a lot of room to grow,” said Micah Gelman, director of editorial video at the Post.
Years ago, Feinberg said, publishers were happy to take YouTube’s money to run their video on the platform. This helped train audiences to watch video on YouTube and the like, instead of publishers’ own sites. The technology costs of serving video on your own site are decreasing, but it’s expensive to make high-quality video, and monetization still lags on social video. Progressive publishers are starting to think of social as a discovery vehicle, a place to put their less timely, less premium video, while keeping their more valuable video for their own sites.
Other publishers like the Post cope by not expecting distributed video to drive their business. Bleacher Report values engagement it gets on videos over mere views because it can use engagement as a selling point to advertisers.
“The inclination is that every video view needs to be monetized and also that video view is the North Star metric for success,” Hernandez said. “I say, quality of user experience is key. You want an active, not passive, viewer that’s so excited about what you’re doing that they want to share it.”
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Trivago buys AI personalisation firm tripl to boost slowing sales
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German online travel comparison site Trivago has acquired Hamburg-based tripl, which has developed an artificial intelligence-driven algorithm that offers customers personalised travel recommendations based on their social media data. The move is in response to the slowly declining share of the online hotel booking market in Europe and Asia, now at 70%, as people increasingly book directly with hotels. The tripl purchase followed a hike in ad spend across Germany and France. However, the company's "tube takeover" campaign on the London Underground has backfired somewhat. Commuters have said being constantly confronted by an advertisement featuring the same person made them feel as if someone was "stalking" them.
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https://www.emarketer.com/Article/Trivago-Turns-AI-Travelers-Increasingly-Book-Directly/1016540
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2017-09-28 06:46:36.020000
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In 2022, over 90% of all digital display ad dollars will transact programmatically.
Thanks to a growth in connected TV (CTV), 2022 marks the first year that video will surpass nonvideo formats in programmatic ad spending.
Do you work in the Advertising, Media, and Marketing industry? Get business insights on the latest tech innovations, market trends, and your competitors with data-driven research.
2021 was a big year for digital advertising. Year-over-year (YoY) growth in digital ad spending far exceeded expectations, due in part to prosperity in programmatic display.
Programmatic display advertising is booming, with marketers increasing their spend despite lingering uncertainty as third-party identifiers are slowly phased out. Programmatic will continue gaining ground in years to come, as advertisers, ad tech platforms, and publishers collectively work toward a new normal.
What is programmatic digital display advertising?
Programmatic digital display advertising includes digital display ads transacted or fulfilled via automation, including everything from publisher-erected APIs to more standardized real-time bidding technology. It includes native ads and ads on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.
Programmatic digital display ad spending in 2022
Programmatic also owes its 2021 growth spurt to the burgeoning connected TV advertising market, which, in addition to bringing more video inventory to the web, has been increasing its use of automation since 2017.
Although growth in programmatic digital display ad spending will slow in 2022, advertisers will spend a healthy $123.22 billion. As a testament to its flexible nature and continued growth in connected TV (CTV), programmatic display will maintain a growth rate just over 2 percentage points higher than that of the total digital ad market through 2023.
In 2022, over 90% of all digital display ad dollars will transact programmatically. Within mobile display ad spending, programmatic crossed the 90% threshold in 2019, thanks largely to social media’s influence. Since then, the share of CTV digital display ad spending shifting into programmatic channels has increased dramatically as advertisers continue to shed the burden of insertion orders in favor of automated purchasing avenues.
Programmatic display advertising with video
2022 marks the first year that video will surpass non-video formats in programmatic ad spending. CTV is the primary driver behind that shift. Without CTV, video would account for just 39.7% of programmatic digital display ad spending. Programmatic CTV will sustain its double-digit ad spending growth next year as well.
Most programmatic video ad spending goes to mobile—65.2% in 2022. Ad spending against non-video formats on mobile will still account for more than half of mobile programmatic display ad spending through 2023. However, given recent growth of social video advertising and increasing interest in TikTok among advertisers, it’s likely that video will continue to gain share of mobile programmatic display.
Programmatic advertising forecast
Retail media networks are set to become the third big wave of digital advertising. In programmatic, this means more ad supply that is close to the point of purchase with the added benefit of consumer data.
Dozens of retail media networks have launched over the past few years, with virtually every leading digital marketplace, mass merchandiser, national grocery chain, category-specific retailer, and delivery provider getting into the game.
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Sprint trials signal-boosting drone tech
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Kansas-based wireless carrier Sprint is working on a drone which allows temporary mobile phone coverage for up to 10 square miles. The drone would carry a downsized version of the company's Magic Box, a device for boosting mobile signal in homes, allowing it to act as an improvised cell tower. More work needs to be done to make the Magic Box lighter, but the device could be used in disaster scenarios or to temporarily increase network capacity during large sporting or entertainment events, said Sprint's COO Günther Ottendorfer.
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https://www.cnet.com/news/sprint-turns-drones-into-cell-towers/#ftag=CAD590a51e
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2017-09-28 06:38:49.257000
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Sprint is taking cell service airborne by mounting lightweight cellular radios to drones.
The wireless carrier said this week that it has successfully adapted its Magic Box signal boosting technology to fit on a drone and provide temporary cell coverage over as many as 10 square miles. The company tested the setup, which uses a lighter version of the mini cell tower and a drone from CyPhy Works, last week in Texas, 30 miles outside of Dallas.
Sprint launched the Magic Box earlier this year. The box, which is the size of a shoe box, normally sits in your house to improve indoor 4G LTE service using Sprint's 2.5GHz spectrum. Unlike other signal boosters, Magic Box doesn't require a broadband connection. Instead, it uses a dedicated cellular channel to the nearest Sprint cell tower.
Now Sprint has adapted the technology to use it on a drone and temporarily increase network capacity during special events, like a concert or a sports contest, or to restore cell phone service following a disaster like a hurricane, said Günther Ottendorfer, COO of technology at Sprint. Wireless carriers often use cell towers on wheels and other temporary equipment to boost capacity at special events or to provide additional network coverage when permanent infrastructure has been damaged.
Ottendorfer said a drone equipped with a cellular signal booster is just another tool the carrier can use to improve and restore service. The advantages include faster deployment and a wider area of coverage, because the drone can be deployed up to 400 feet in the sky.
He added that more needs to be done to make the Magic Box equipment lighter, but he expects Sprint to be using the technology in its network next year.
"It's an exciting proof of concept," he said.
Wireless carriers have already begun using drones in the wake of big disasters. Following Hurricane Harvey, which devastated areas around Houston and the Gulf coasts of Texas and Louisiana, all four major US wireless carriers flew drones in flooded areas to assess damage to towers and other infrastructure. Sprint is one of the first carriers to adapt a cellular radio to use a drone to provide cellular coverage. AT&T last year announced plans to connect drones to its 4G LTE network. The carrier tested its so-called Flying COW in February, transmitting and receiving high speed data from a drone.
First published Sept. 27 at 3:35 p.m. PT.
Update Sept. 28 at 4:26 p.m.: Adds information about AT&T's connected drone program.
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Zuckerberg responds to Trump's accusation of Facebook bias
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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has hit back at a tweet from US President Donald Trump, in which he accused the social media site of being biased against him. In a post on his own Facebook page, Zuckerberg wrote: "Trump says Facebook is against him. Liberals say we helped Trump. Both sides are upset about ideas and content they don't like". He went on to say the platform saw discussions about a range of topics related to the election, far beyond what was reported in the media.
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https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/28/trump_vs_zuckerberg/
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2017-09-28 06:16:26.930000
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United States president Donald Trump has declared that Facebook was always against him and tossed it into the same bucket as The New York Times, which he regards as fake news, and The Washington Post, which he says is biased against him because it's owned by Amazon's Jeff Bezos.
Facebook was always anti-Trump.The Networks were always anti-Trump hence,Fake News, @nytimes(apologized) & @WaPo were anti-Trump. Collusion? — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 27, 2017
As is Trump's habit, his allegation of collusion was offered without a shred of evidence. Perhaps that is why Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's response comes off as a little terse.
“I want to respond to President Trump's tweet this morning claiming Facebook has always been against him,” he opens, going on to opine that “Trump says Facebook is against him. Liberals say we helped Trump. Both sides are upset about ideas and content they don't like.”
Zuckerberg adds that the mere presence of Facebook meant that “ Every [election] topic was discussed, not just what the media covered.” He also laid on his usual “we host so many conversations about everything and that's awesome because it builds communities” line.
But he also felt the need to defend Facebook.
In one such passage he notes that “Campaigns spent hundreds of millions advertising online to get their messages out even further. That's 1000x more than any problematic ads we've found.”
The other says “after the election, I made a comment that I thought the idea misinformation on Facebook changed the outcome of the election was a crazy idea. Calling that crazy was dismissive and I regret it.”
Zuck goes on to say: “This is too important an issue to be dismissive. But the data we have has always shown that our broader impact - from giving people a voice to enabling candidates to communicate directly to helping millions of people vote - played a far bigger role in this election.”
Comment
Zuckerberg appears to be arguing that fake news and deliberately divisive ads did impact the 2016 US elections, but less so than the dialog on Facebook. But he ignores the fact that dialog on Facebook is not always the civil exchange of ideas he promotes. There's also no comment on the fact that Facebook was late to implement effective filters for hate speech or fake news, but did take the time to screen pictures of womens' breasts as they are deemed too offensive for members to view. ®
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Facebook, Google and Twitter asked to testify to US Congress
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Representatives from Facebook, Twitter and Google have been invited to publicly testify before the Senate intelligence committee investigating the extent of Russia's alleged meddling in the 2016 US presidential election. While the Trump administration and Russia have both dismissed the allegations of interference, Facebook recently revealed that Russian-aligned parties bought $100,000 worth of ads between June 2015 to May 2017, and will hand over to Congress details of Russian-linked ads aimed at swaying voter intention. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the site would "defend against nation states attempting to spread misinformation and subvert elections".
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http://www.zdnet.com/article/facebook-google-twitter-execs-to-testify-at-russia-hearings/#ftag=RSSbaffb68
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2017-09-28 06:14:06.427000
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Executives from Facebook, Google, and Twitter have been asked to testify to the United States Congress as lawmakers continue to investigate Russia's alleged interference in the 2016 US presidential election, committee sources have said on Wednesday.
The Senate intelligence committee asked that the executives testify at a public hearing on November 1, 2017.
"In the coming month, we will hold an open hearing with representatives from tech companies in order to better understand how Russia used online tools and platforms to sow discord in and influence our election," the committee's Democrat representative Adam Schiff and Republican representative Mike Conaway said.
While the representatives did not specify which technology companies would be testifying, Facebook and Google confirmed they had received invitations from the Senate committee.
Some US lawmakers -- increasingly alarmed by the evidence suggesting Russian hackers used the internet to spread fake news and otherwise influence the 2016 election in favour of US commander-in-chief Donald Trump -- have been pushing for more information about the influence of social media platforms.
Early Wednesday, Trump posted a tweet accusing Facebook of always being "anti-Trump", adding that television networks and publications such as The New York Times and the Washington Post, have also been anti-Trump.
"But the people were Pro-Trump! Virtually no President has accomplished what we have accomplished in the first 9 months-and economy roaring," he added.
Facebook founder and frontman Mark Zuckerberg subsequently responded to Trump's tweets in the form of a Facebook post, saying both Trump and liberals are accusing the social media giant of influencing election results.
"Both sides are upset about ideas and content they don't like. That's what running a platform for all ideas looks like," Zuckerberg said in the post.
He went on to explain Facebook's influence in the 2016 presidential election, saying that "more people had a voice in this election than ever before", with "billions of interactions" about a variety of issues that "may have never happened offline". Some of these issues were not reported in the media, Zuckerberg added.
"[The] data we have has always shown that our broader impact -- from giving people a voice to enabling candidates to communicate directly to helping millions of people vote -- played a far bigger role in this election," he said in his post.
The CEO also said it was the "first" US election where the internet was the primary medium of communication between candidates and the electorate.
"Every candidate had a Facebook page to communicate directly with tens of millions of followers every day," he said, adding that campaigns spent "hundreds of millions" advertising online, which is "1000x more than any problematic ads we've found."
Facebook revealed earlier this month that suspected Russian trolls purchased more than $100,000 worth of divisive ads on its platform between June 2015 to May 2017, a revelation that triggered calls for new disclosure rules for online political ads.
Facebook said the purchases came from around 500 "inauthentic" accounts and pages that seemed to be affiliated with each other. The social media giant shut down the active accounts and pages -- which it said appeared to have been operating from Russia -- for violating its policies.
Facebook last week said it will turn over to the US Congress Russian-linked ads that may have been intended to sway the 2016 US election.
"We support Congress in deciding how to best use this information to inform the public, and we expect the government to publish its findings when their investigation is complete," Zuckerberg said at the time.
In his recent post, Zuckerberg additionally recalled Facebook's efforts in encouraging people to vote.
"[Our efforts] helped as many as 2 million people register to vote. To put that in perspective, that's bigger than the get out the vote efforts of the Trump and Clinton campaigns put together," he said. "That's a big deal."
Zuckerberg said Facebook will do its part to "defend against nation states attempting to spread misinformation and subvert elections".
"We'll keep working to ensure the integrity of free and fair elections around the world, and to ensure our community is a platform for all ideas and force for good in democracy," he added.
The Daily Beast, citing anonymous sources, also reported that a Facebook group called the "United Muslims of America" was a fake account linked to the Russian government. The group was reportedly making false claims about politicians, including Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
The Senate and House intelligence committees are the main congressional panels investigating allegations that Russia interfered in the latest US presidential election, as well as possible collusion between Trump associates and Russia.
The general consensus of law enforcement, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the conclusion of the Central Intelligence Agency's own investigations suggest Russia was involved in election scheming, something that Trump and Russian officials have continued to dismiss, with the latter describing the allegations as "amusing rubbish".
Russian president Vladimir Putin had also insisted that Russia as a country never engaged in hacking activities, but conceded that some "patriotic" individuals may have, likening a hacker's free will to that of an artist, in a speech delivered to news agencies in June.
At the time, Putin lamented what he described as "Russo-phobic hysteria" in the US, saying such rhetoric makes it "somewhat inconvenient to work with one another or even to talk", adding that "someday this will have to stop".
He also alleged that some evidence pointing at Russian hackers' participation in cyber attacks -- although he did not specify which -- could have been falsified in an attempt to smear Russia.
"I can imagine that some do it deliberately, staging a chain of attacks in such a way as to cast Russia as the origin of such an attack," Putin said in June.
"Modern technologies allow that to be done quite easily."
Earlier this week, Russia's communications watchdog Roskomnadzor said it will block access to Facebook next year if the social media giant does not comply with a law requiring websites to store personal data of Russian citizens on Russian servers.
With AAP
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UN sees robots as potential threat to world peace
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The United Nations has established an institution to study the potential dangers of AI, including the threat to world peace and stability. The Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics is based in the Netherlands, and will study technological advances in the field to look for possible threats and opportunities. A major concern is the application of AI in warfare, a goal which a number of countries are understood to be pursuing. A group of over 100 AI and robotics experts, including Tesla CEO Elon Musk, warned the UN about the danger in August, urging them to take action.
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https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/27/robots-destabilise-world-war-unemployment-un
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2017-09-28 05:28:13.997000
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The UN has warned that robots could destabilise the world ahead of the opening of a headquarters in The Hague to monitor developments in artificial intelligence.
From the risk of mass unemployment to the deployment of autonomous robotics by criminal organisations or rogue states, the new Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics has been set the goal of second-guessing the possible threats.
It is estimated that 30% of jobs in Britain are potentially under threat from breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, according to the consultancy firm PwC. In some sectors half the jobs could go. A recent study by the International Bar Association claimed robotics could force governments to legislate for quotas of human workers.
Meanwhile nations seeking to develop autonomous weapons technology, with the capability to independently determine their courses of action without the need for human control, include the US, China, Russia and Israel.
Irakli Beridze, senior strategic adviser at the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute, said the new team based in the Netherlands would also seek to come up with ideas as to how advances in the field could be exploited to help achieve the UN’s targets. He also said there were great risks associated with developments in the technology that needed to be addressed.
“If societies do not adapt quickly enough, this can cause instability,” Beridze told the Dutch newspaper de Telegraaf. “One of our most important tasks is to set up a network of experts from business, knowledge institutes, civil society organisations and governments. We certainly do not want to plead for a ban or a brake on technologies. We will also explore how new technology can contribute to the sustainable development goals of the UN. For this we want to start concrete projects. We will not be a talking club.”
In August more than 100 robotics and artificial intelligence leaders, including the billionaire head of Tesla, Elon Musk, urged the UN to take action against the dangers of the use of artificial intelligence in weaponry, sometimes referred to as “killer robots”.
They wrote: “Lethal autonomous weapons threaten to become the third revolution in warfare. Once developed, they will permit armed conflict to be fought at a scale greater than ever, and at time scales faster than humans can comprehend. These can be weapons of terror, weapons that despots and terrorists use against innocent populations, and weapons hacked to behave in undesirable ways.”
Last year Prof Stephen Hawking warned that powerful artificial intelligence would prove to be “either the best or the worst thing ever to happen to humanity”.
An agreement was sealed with the Dutch government earlier this year for the UN office, which will have a small staff in its early stages, to be based in The Hague.
Beridze said: “Various UN organisations have projects on robotic and artificial intelligence research, such as the expert group on autonomous military robots of the convention on conventional weapons. These are temporary initiatives.
“Our centre is the first permanent UN office for this theme. We look at both the risks and the benefits.”
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Tesla sales surge forecast under China's EV tax proposals
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Tesla could see sales surge if the government in Beijing decides to allow the skirting of import and sales rules for electric vehicles (EVs) manufacturers in China. A new tax proposal is being considered to incentivise foreign brands to set up wholly-owned EV segments in Chinese free-trade zones. Analysts at investment bank Piper Jaffray say Tesla, in particular, could benefit from the move, with China potentially becoming its biggest revenue source.
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https://www.benzinga.com/analyst-ratings/analyst-color/17/09/10108551/teslas-opportunity-in-china-could-double-on-relaxed-reg
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2017-09-28 05:17:27.703000
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Foreign automakers have long been disincentivized to sell in China, where imports see a 25-percent tax and locally produced cars must be sold through 50/50 joint ventures with domestic entities. But the Chinese government, prioritizing a shift from fossil-fuel to electric vehicles, is reportedly considering a loophole.
A recent proposal would allow nonnative brands to set up wholly owned EV segments in free-trade zones, and Tesla Inc TSLA is positioned to win big, according to Piper Jaffray.
“It seems possible that Tesla will be allowed to book 100 percent of the profit associated with locally-produced EVs, while most global competitors will probably continue booking only 50 percent (due to their entrenched JV structures),” analysts Alexander Potter and Winnie Dong wrote in a Wednesday note.
Tesla’s Play
If Tesla capitalizes on potential regulatory changes, it could see growth in China notably steeper than this year’s estimated 136-percent year-over-year delivery increase.
In fact, China could become Tesla’s biggest revenue source, according to Potter and Wong.
The company could benefit from China’s growing demand for luxury cars, standard vehicle sales that far outpace U.S. records, and non-competitive environment. China has little exposure to foreign brands, and although its firms lead global markets in EV production, with unit sales up 70 percent year over year, none pose a veritable threat to Tesla.
“We find most of China's EVs are chintzy in comparison to Tesla's products (with the exception of NIO's soon-to-be-released SUV), and realistically Tesla's most capable global peers are probably years away from releasing locally-built luxury EVs,” Potter and Wong wrote. “In the meantime, traditional (gas) luxury vehicles constitute TSLA's primary competition.”
And the government’s phasing those out.
Big Upside
Considering Tesla’s potential in the Chinese market, Piper Jaffray reiterated an Overweight rating on the stock with a $386 price target.
“There's still plenty of uncertainty, but all else equal, we think recent developments have unfolded in TSLA's favor,” the analysts wrote. “The company was wise to delay investment, but once these JV-related policy details are finalized, we expect Tesla to announce its China strategy in relatively short order.”
Related Links:
Gene Munster Goes The Distances On Tesla: A Look At Short- Vs. Long-Term Expectations
A Better Idea? Ford In Talks To Build Electric Cars With Chinese Giant
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TalkTalk TalkTalk second most complained about fixed broadband service
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UK telecoms company TalkTalk has been named the country's second most complained-about broadband provider, beaten only by BT, according to a quarterly report from regulator Ofcom. Covering April-June this year, the data revealed that although complaints had dropped, some providers were still "falling a long way short on customer service". Ofcom has previously suggested implementing automatic compensation for customers experiencing delays or missed appointments. About 300 complaints a day are made to Ofcom.
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https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/27/bt_and_talktalk_top_ofcom_whinge_list/
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2017-09-28 04:40:47.060000
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BT and TalkTalk are the providers most moaned about, according to UK comms regulator Ofcom's quarterly whinge data between April and June – a result that will surprise no one.
Ofcom receives 300 complaints a day for mobile, broadband, phone and paid TV services.
Out of every 100,000 customers for fixed broadband services, BT generated the most gripes (28), mainly due to faults, service and provision issues, but also bill handling, pricing and charges. TalkTalk came second (24) followed by BT's subsidiary Plusnet (20).
In contrast, Virgin Media and Sky generated the fewest grumbles, with 13 and 7 respectively.
TalkTalk once told GCHQ: Cyberattack? We'd act fast – to get sport streams back up READ MORE
Jane Rumble, Ofcom's director of consumer policy, said complaints about telcos are dropping this year but added that "some providers are falling a long way short on customer service."
"There can be no room for complacency. We expect providers, particularly those who have been consistently underperforming, to make service quality and complaints handling their number-one priority."
An Ofcom report earlier this year found that just over half of broadband and mobile customers who complained to their provider were satisfied with how their issues were handled.
The regulator has proposed requiring providers to pay automatic compensation to landline and broadband customers who suffer slow repairs, late installations or missed engineer appointments.
Last week TalkTalk was named the worst UK internet provider in a biannual survey by consumer association Which? for the fifth consecutive time. ®
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TalkTalk Talktalk downgraded by Credit Suisse to 'underperform' rating
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UK telecommunications company TalkTalk has been dealt a blow by Credit Suisse, having its stock downgraded to the "underperform" rating. The financial institution blamed increasing "structural headwinds", including the near-saturation of the UK broadband market and small margins in the fibre-to-the-home sector. The move came in spite of Credit Suisse praising changes in management and strategy which led to a 25% year-to-date increase in TalkTalk's shares.
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https://www.digitallook.com/news/broker-recommendations/credit-suisse-downgrades-talktalk-on-structural-headwinds--2883186.html
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2017-09-28 04:38:29.310000
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TalkTalk was under the cosh on Thursday as Credit Suisse downgraded the stock to 'underperform' from 'outperform' and cut the price target to 170p from 210p saying that structural headwinds are growing.
The bank pointed out that since the change of management and strategy, the shares have recovered 25% year-to-date, materially outperforming the European telecoms sector and trading on a significant premium.
"Whilst we agree with the renewed focus on core broadband, the stock has recovered to our previous target price of 210p, and we are now cutting longer-term forecasts as structural challenges are growing, and establishing a new target price."
Among the challenges facing the company, CS highlighted a material slowdown in growth in the UK broadband market over the last two years as UK household broadband penetration approaches 90%, which has coincided with deteriorating economic growth.
According to Credit Suisse, the slowdown in UK broadband market growth accelerated in the first half of 2017,with the market adding only 162,000 subscribers in the three months to the end of March and just 66,000 in the three months to the end of June. It attributed the slowdown to a deteriorating UK economy and fixed-to-mobile substitution.
In addition, it noted TalkTalk is exposed to the challenges from fibre-to-the-home. CS said the pressure on European telcos to invest in FTTH is growing as demand for speed rises, cost to build falls, financing becomes more available and government policy shifts to gigabits speeds.
"BT is now considering a 10m FTTH build which would favour those telcos willing to co-invest, and present a challenge to DSL unbundlers. TalkTalk already has thinner margins in the FTTc market than DSL, whilst margins available to TalkTalk in FTTH would likely be yet lower with Ofcom seeking to create investment incentives."
At 0925 BST, the shares were down 3.1% to 203.80p.
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Lloyd's pays first of $4.5bn hurricane claims
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The largest insurance market in the world, Lloyd’s of London, has begun to pay the first of the claims arising from the damage caused by storm Harvey and Hurricane Irma, totalling $4.5bn. Catastrophe modelling companies have estimated totals of between $50bn and $70bn in insured damage caused by the two events, a statistic Lloyd's has used to calculate its own payout. Hurricane Maria, which recently hit Puerto Rico, is thought to have resulted in between $40bn and $85bn in insured losses. Analysts at Jefferies expect Maria and the Mexican earthquake to cost Lloyd's an addition $1bn.
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https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/sep/28/lloyds-of-london-harvey-irma-claims-maria
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2017-09-27 22:00:00
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Lloyd’s of London, the world’s biggest insurance market, has started paying out the first of $4.5bn (£3.6bn) of claims related to tropical storm Harvey and Hurricane Irma, which wreaked havoc in the southern US and Caribbean.
Inga Beale, the Lloyd’s of London chief executive, said: “The market is assessing claims and starting to make payments that will help local communities and businesses get back on their feet as quickly as possible.”
Catastrophe modelling companies have estimated the insured damage caused by Harvey and Irma at $50bn to $70bn (£37bn-£52bn). Hurricane Maria, which recently ripped through Puerto Rico, is estimated to have caused $40bn-$85bn in insured losses.
Beale said Lloyd’s was using those estimates to work out its share of the losses, about $4.5bn for Harvey and Irma. The market is still working out its liability for Hurricane Maria, the earthquake in Mexico and typhoons in Asia.
Analysts at Jefferies estimate a further $1bn hit for Maria and the Mexican earthquake. They expect that Lloyd’s has the capital to absorb these losses without drawing on its central reserves. The cost of property insurance cover in the US is likely to rise “materially” as a result, but Asian prices should be unaffected.
“It is clear that 2017 is a major catastrophe year,” said Simon Kilgour, an insurance partner at the law firm CMS. “The current-year losses are expected to wipe out industry earnings and impact capital for the first time since 2005.”
Lloyd’s is closely monitoring the impact of climate change. Beale said rising sea levels raised the losses caused by Hurricane Sandy in 2012 by 30%.
Another big challenge is Brexit. As part of its planning, Lloyd’s is about to file an application with the Belgian authorities to set up a subsidiary in Brussels. Beale said this was “a bit more complex” for a market with 83 syndicates than it would be for an individual company, but she still expects the new subsidiary to be up and running by the middle of 2018.
Beale welcomed Theresa May’s plan for a two-year transition period. “The transition would be very helpful for the financial services sector,” she said.
While the Brussels subsidiary will ensure that Lloyd’s can write new business in EU countries after the UK leaves, Beale stressed that it was vital for insurers to be able to fulfil their liabilities for existing policies, adding that the outlook was “still very uncertain”.
Lloyd’s has thrown its weight behind proposals for a free trade agreement for financial services that would ensure UK and EU companies can trade in each other’s countries without tariffs or quotas.
Beale’s comments came as Lloyd’s reported a pretax profit of £1.2bn for the first half of this year, down from £1.46bn a year ago. It excludes the impact of the storms and other recent natural disasters.
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Marine plastic enabling coastal species to cross oceans
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Plastic waste is enabling communities of coastal species to cross oceans, for the first time in recorded history, according to marine scientists. Almost 300 species from Japan reached North America alive between 2012 and 2017, after travelling on plastic objects such as crates which entered the pacific after the Japanese earthquake and tsunami in 2011. Whilst this disaster was an extreme example of such transit, scientists believe that storm surges are causing many non-native species to travel on “rafts” of marine plastic aided by storm surges. Mollusks, bryozoans, crustaceans and worms were the species most likely to have survived transit.
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http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/09/japanese-tsunami-transported-hundreds-species-united-states-and-canada-video-reveals
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2017-09-27 22:00:00
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When the massive tsunami waves of the 2011 eastern Japan earthquake rolled back out to sea, they pulled with them fragments of docks, boats, and buoys that sometimes contained living stowaways. These hitchhikers—including crustaceans, mollusks, and fish—rode debris "rafts" through ocean currents over thousands of kilometers before finally washing ashore on Hawaiian and North American coastlines, sometimes years later. Now, researchers who studied hundreds of Japanese marine species living in and on this tsunami debris conclude that they were witnessing a "transoceanic biological rafting event with no known historical precedent," they report today in Science . The scientists studied more than 600 pieces of tsunami-ejected debris—mostly nonbiodegradable fiberglass and polystyrene foam—that had swept up along Hawaiian, U.S. mainland, and Canadian shores. They counted nearly 300 Japanese species colonizing the debris, including roughly 80 different species on the largest piece, a 170-ton section of dock. In many cases, the scientists found that the animals had successfully reproduced along their journey. That's evidence that the relatively slow movement of the debris (2-4 kilometers per hour) helped species adapt to changing conditions across the Pacific Ocean, the team wrote. But life hitching a ride between continents might have a dark side, the researchers noted: Debris could transport invasive species, forever changing ecosystems.
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UK’s major chicken supplier alters food safety records
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2 Sisters Food Group, the biggest supplier of chicken to UK supermarkets, has altered food safety records to sell meat that's past its use-by date, according to an investigation by the Guardian and ITV News. The group, which supplies Aldi, Lidl, Marks & Spencer, Tesco and Sainsbury’s, produces a third of all the poultry consumed in the country. It is part of a £3bn ($4bn) operation that also includes Bernard Matthews, Fox’s Biscuits, Giraffe and Goodfella’s pizza.
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http://www.itv.com/news/2017-09-28/potential-food-safety-breaches-uncovered-at-uks-largest-supermarket-chicken-supplier-in-itv-news-guardian-investigation/
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2017-09-27 22:00:00
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Update: Since this story was published, Marks and Spencer and Aldi have stopped taking fresh chicken from the 2 Sisters factory featured in this investigation. Read more here
You probably haven't heard of the 2 Sisters Food Group but, if you like chicken, the chances are you have eaten some of the meat it processes.
2 Sisters is the largest supplier in the UK of chickens to supermarkets but an investigation by ITV News and the Guardian has uncovered a series of potential breaches of food safety rules in one of the company’s factories.
Our undercover reporter got a job at "Site D" in the West Midlands, which processes fresh chicken for Tesco, Sainsbury's, Aldi, Lidl and Marks and Spencer. But he found evidence that suggests some of the chicken 2 Sisters produces from this factory may not be as fresh as the use by date suggests.
Our reporter filmed workers changing both the date of slaughter and the source codes on crates of chicken crowns in such a way that artificially extended the meat’s shelf-life and rendered it almost untraceable in the event of an outbreak of food poisoning.
On several occasions he witnessed workers returning chicken to the production line after it had fallen to the floor. This may have caused it to become contaminated.
He saw meat of different ages being mixed together and he filmed Tesco's "exclusive" Willow Farms range being topped up with drumsticks that were originally packaged for Lidl.
We have spoken to more than 20 workers, past and present, who have stated that such practices take place.
Some also claim that the chicken supermarkets reject is often repackaged at the factory and sent out again.
2 Sisters employs people to patrol the production line and enforce food safety rules but the quality assurance workers we spoke to told us that they are intimidated by production managers and fear being sent home if they intervene.
2 Sisters is the largest supplier in the UK of chickens to supermarkets. Credit: ITV News
A former employee told us they were treated like "the enemy" by production staff and that they felt their job was "pointless".
We shared our findings with Professor Chris Elliot, a food scientist at Queen's University Belfast, who led the government's inquiry into food safety following the horsemeat scandal in 2013.
"There are major concerns about food hygiene...I think [your] report absolutely calls out for a full investigation," he told us. "I think the Food Standards Agency will take this very seriously, they will inspect and look at the premises and see if there are grounds to close the facility down."
Professor Elliot has inspected many food businesses in the past four years and insists he's never seen such poor standards. More generally, he believes government spending cuts have damaged the effectiveness of local authority inspections.
"It is my view that the environmental health services in the UK have been cut to the bone and cut to such an extent that things like this are probably happening more frequently than they should," he said.
Our reporter uncovered a series of potential breaches of food safety rules. Credit: ITV News/the Guardian
Dr Richard Hyde, an expert in food law at the University of Nottingham, told us: "If you are placing a use by date that is incorrect, that is a breach of law. If you place food on the market that doesn't have the correct traceability information, that is a criminal offence.
"There are a basket of potential offences here that the regulators need to look at and decide whether further action is required".
2 Sisters Food Group was founded in West Bromwich in 1993 by Ranjit Singh Boparan, who has built the business into one of the UK's largest food producers, employing 23,000 staff.
The 2 Sisters empire is vast but Ranjit Singh Boparan is still known in the West Midlands as "The Chicken King" and the bulk of the group’s sales come from processing poultry.
Boparan and his wife, Baljinder, own the business and The Sunday Times estimates their wealth to be £544 million.
Experts were shocked by the footage we showed them. Credit: ITV News
2 Sisters is dependent on the five biggest supermarkets for its income. The group’s accounts note that the loss of any of these “key customers” as a potential risk to the business. The same section notes that “product quality and safety issues are paramount to the groups’ success”.
2 Sisters Food Group told us that it takes these allegations extremely seriously. It said: “Hygiene and food safety will always be the number one priority within the business, and they remain at its very core.
"We also successfully operate in one of the most tightly-controlled and highly regulated food sectors in the world.
"We are subject to multiple and frequent unannounced audits from the FSA, BRC, Red Tractor, independent auditors as well as our customers. By example, our facility in the West Midlands under investigation received nine audits (five unannounced) in the months of July and August alone.
Employees at the factory told us about what it is like working there. Credit: ITV News
"However, we are never complacent and remain committed to continually improving our processes and procedures. If, on presentation of further evidence, it comes to light any verifiable transgressions have been made at any of our sites, we will leave no stone unturned in investigating and remedying the situation immediately.”
We took our findings to the supermarkets supplied by 2 Sisters Food Group. They told us that they take hygiene and traceability very serious. All said they would be investigating the allegations.
The responses from supermarkets to our investigation
There is no suggestion the supermarkets were aware of these practices.
They told us:
We take hygiene and traceability very seriously and have extremely high production standards. We are now looking into these allegations with our supplier. Marks & Spencer
We operate to the highest possible food quality and safety standards, carrying out our own regular audits at all of our suppliers to ensure these standards are maintained. As such, we take these allegations extremely seriously and will be carrying out our own rigorous investigation. Tesco
Lidl UK takes the issue of food safety extremely seriously and, as such, we conduct independent audits to ensure that our high quality and safety standards are met. Therefore, we are very disappointed to learn of these allegations and will be urgently investigating this matter with the supplier. Lidl
All of our suppliers are expected to meet our high standards. We are concerned by these findings and are investigating. Sainsbury's
We require all suppliers to adhere to the highest possible food hygiene and traceability standards at all times. Aldi
The response from the FSA
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UK’s major chicken supplier alters food safety records
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2 Sisters Food Group, the biggest supplier of chicken to UK supermarkets, has altered food safety records to sell meat that's past its use-by date, according to an investigation by the Guardian and ITV News. The group, which supplies Aldi, Lidl, Marks & Spencer, Tesco and Sainsbury’s, produces a third of all the poultry consumed in the country. It is part of a £3bn ($4bn) operation that also includes Bernard Matthews, Fox’s Biscuits, Giraffe and Goodfella’s pizza.
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https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/sep/28/uks-top-supplier-of-supermarket-chicken-fiddles-food-safety-dates
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2017-09-27 22:00:00
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The largest supplier of chicken to UK supermarkets has been tampering with food safety records in moves that could dupe consumers into buying meat past its use-by date.
An investigation by the Guardian and ITV News recorded undercover footage of workers altering the slaughter date of poultry being processed at a 2 Sisters Food Group plant. The group produces a third of all poultry products eaten in the UK and supplies top grocers including Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Marks & Spencer, Aldi and Lidl.
When informed of the evidence, all five retailers responded to say they would launch immediate investigations.
The discovery comes just four years after the 2013 horsemeat scandal, which has resulted in prison sentences for those convicted of a conspiracy to pass off cheaper horsemeat as beef.
Experts said the practice of changing “kill dates” could artificially stretch the commercial life of meat products by triggering the food processor to print incorrect use-by dates on supermarket packaging.
Chicken being relabelled to change the date of kill at the 2 Sisters plant. Photograph: Guardian/ITV
Workers at the company confirmed they had been asked to switch these labels on other occasions. It is illegal to place incorrect use-by dates on food, which are set for safety reasons and differ from “best before” dates.
The joint investigation, which involved taking secret recordings during a spell of 12 working days inside 2 Sisters’ plant in West Bromwich, also captured evidence that:
Chicken portions returned by supermarket distribution centres are being repackaged by 2 Sisters and sent out again to major grocers.
Workers drop chickens on the floor of the processing plant and return them to the production line.
Workers alter records of where chickens were slaughtered, potentially hindering authorities from recalling contaminated meat during food scares.
Chickens slaughtered on different dates are mixed on the production line. Workers said use-by dates printed on the packets of the mixed chicken tended to reflect the age of the freshest, rather than oldest, meat in the batch.
Chicken is picked up from the floor for processing in the West Midlands plant. Photograph: Guardian/ITV
Having been shown the evidence, Prof Chris Elliott, a food safety academic from Queen’s University Belfast who led the UK government’s independent review of food systems following the 2013 horsemeat scandal, said: “Over the past three to four years I have conducted many inspections of food businesses right across the UK. I have never seen one operate under such poor standards as your video evidence shows.
“I think [this] absolutely calls out for a full investigation. We need to get environmental health officers, we need to get the Food Standards Agency to do a thorough investigation. The Food Standards Agency will take this very seriously. They will look at the premises and see if there are grounds to close the facility down.”
The company said it had not been given enough time or detail to respond to the allegations, which it described as “false”.
2 Sisters Food Group's response to our investigation We have been made aware of several broad allegations made by the Guardian/ITV in relation to inappropriate procedures, food safety and hygiene issues at two of our poultry processing facilities. We view these allegations extremely seriously. However, we have not been given the time or the detailed evidence to conduct any thorough investigations to establish the facts, which makes a fulsome and detailed response very difficult. What we can confirm is that hygiene and food safety will always be the number one priority within the business, and they remain at its very core. We also successfully operate in one of the most tightly-controlled and highly regulated food sectors in the world. We are subject to multiple and frequent unannounced audits from the FSA, BRC, Red Tractor, independent auditors as well as our customers. By example, our facility in the West Midlands under investigation received nine audits (five unannounced) in the months of July and August alone. However, we are never complacent and remain committed to continually improving our processes and procedures. If, on presentation of further evidence, it comes to light any verifiable transgressions have been made at any of our sites, we will leave no stone unturned in investigating and remedying the situation immediately.
A letter from 2 Sisters Food Group’s legal advisers, Schillings, said: “Food safety and hygiene are 2SFG’s top priorities. To the extent that you have identified any shortcomings (which is not admitted), these could only be isolated examples which our clients would take very seriously, and they are investigating the allegations made.”
During the course of the investigation, the Guardian and ITV interviewed more than 20 workers at 2 Sisters about standards within the company.
One worker said: “I have [changed the slaughter dates] lots of times when I was working in that area. My supervisor, he asked me do it … If you are buying fresh chicken it can be older chicken.”
A second worker claimed that 2 Sisters quality control staff in the West Midlands were working in a “pointless job” and could feel intimidated and be overruled by production supervisors who treated them as “enemies”.
On one occasion the Guardian/ITV footage captured workers altering the “kill date” of hundreds of chickens to one day later at the group’s West Bromwich plant in August. Other workers added that they had witnessed dates being altered by more than a day.
Supermarket products typically have a use-by date around 10 days after the bird has been slaughtered.
Speaking about how chicken is returned by supermarket distribution centres, a third 2 Sisters worker said: “They will repack [the returned meat] like [it is] today’s production ... It is sent back on [the line] like today’s production. They mix it with today’s production.”
Supermarkets return chicken to suppliers for a variety of reasons that can include packaging and labelling errors. Being returned does not mean it is unfit to eat. However, if older meat is mixed with fresher meat, the use-by date should reflect the age of the oldest meat in the batch.
A fourth worker added: “I try to make them change the [use-by] date to [reflect the] older DOK [date of kill] but that doesn’t happen – they mix.”
The footage shows chicken that has been processed and packed for Lidl being reopened and mixed with other pieces of poultry. The drumsticks re-emerge at the end of the line showing in packets saying they have come from Tesco’s Willow Farms. The labelling on the pack says the contents are “reared exclusively for Tesco”.
Schillings said: “The Willow Farms brand is exclusive to Tesco, but the raw material is not. 2SFG meets the raw materials specifications for the Willow Farms brand.”
The Guardian and ITV showed the undercover footage to four government meat inspectors, who would speak only on condition of anonymity. All of them said they believed the film showed potential breaches of food regulations.
Food law experts also added that the film amounted to prima facie evidence that the company had potentially committed offences.
The 2 Sisters plant in West Bromwich. Photograph: David Sillitoe/The Guardian
Dr Richard Hyde, an expert in food law at Nottingham University, added: “If you are placing a use-by date that is incorrect that is a breach of law. If you place food on the market that doesn’t have the correct traceability information that is a criminal offence. There are a basket of potential offences here that the regulators need to look at and decide whether further action is required.”
The food processor said that Elliott and Hyde had not visited 2 Sisters sites or considered its policies, so their comments “cannot be, in any way, objective expert evidence, but are completely unbalanced, based on biased selective information”.
2 Sisters Food Group is the UK’s second largest food company by turnover and claims to process around 6 million chickens every week.
It is owned by Ranjit Singh Boparan and his wife, Baljinder Kaur Boparan, and the chicken operations – which include 12 sites in the UK – are part of a sprawling £3bn food empire that separately includes the turkey producer Bernard Matthews, the restaurant chains Harry Ramsden, FishWorks and Giraffe, plus food brands such as Fox’s Biscuits and Goodfella’s pizza.
The Boparans, who have always shunned publicity, are worth £544m, according to the Sunday Times rich list.
The company added: “2SFG ensures all staff are fully trained on hygiene and safety matters, and enforces a number of policies to ensure compliance with all regulations. It is subject to regular audits in these areas and staff have a number of ways in which to voice their concerns.
“2SFG has reviewed its [whistleblower hotline] records for Site D from the previous 12 months and there are no complaints from any quality assurance staff resembling those cited.”
The five big supermarkets supplied by 2 Sisters’ West Bromwich plant all said they took quality and safety standards very seriously and were investigating.
A Tesco spokesperson said: “We operate to the highest possible food quality and safety standards, carrying out our own regular audits at all of our suppliers to ensure these standards are maintained. As such, we take these allegations extremely seriously and will be carrying out our own rigorous investigation.”
A Lidl spokesperson said: “Lidl UK takes the issue of food safety extremely seriously and, as such, we conduct independent audits to ensure that our high quality and safety standards are met. Therefore, we are very disappointed to learn of these allegations and will be urgently investigating this matter with the supplier.”
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Cenovus sells Suffield assets to IPC for $512m
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Canada's Cenovus Energy has reached an agreement to sell its Suffield oil and gas assets for $512m to International Petroleum Corp., its second deal this month as it pushes ahead with its debt reduction plan following the $16.8bn acquisition of oil sands assets from ConocoPhilips earlier this year. Cenovus is targeting $5bn from asset sales to pay down the debt $3.6bn of debt it took on to finance the Conoco deal. So far it has announced $1.5 billion in divestitures, including the latest sale. Analysts said the price tag for Suffield was within estimates, and that while the sale was positive for the company, other assets for sale may not be as attractive to buyers.
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http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/cenovus-suffield-international-petroleum-1.4305795
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2017-09-27 16:55:32
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Canada's Cenovus Energy Inc has reached an agreement to sell its Suffield oil and gas assets for $512 million to International Petroleum Corp, striking its second deal this month as it pushes ahead with its debt reduction plan.
Calgary-based Cenovus said on Monday proceeds from the sale will be used to cut the $3.6 billion in debt it took on to buy oil sands assets from ConocoPhillips this year. Cenovus is targeting $5 billion from asset sales to pay down the debt and so far it has announced $1.5 billion in divestitures, including the latest sale.
Cenovus shares rose as much as 3.9 per cent to $13.18 in early morning trade, before retreating to $12.71 by late morning. The benchmark Canada share index was flat..
Analysts said the price tag for Suffield was within estimates, and that while the sale was positive for the company, other assets for sale may not be as attractive to buyers.
"On balance, we continue to recommend investors take a cautious stance toward the broader asset sale process for Cenovus," said Raymond James analyst Chris Cox, adding that other sales may "disappoint to the downside."
The $16.8 billion ConocoPhillips deal effectively doubled Cenovus' producing assets, but dented its pristine balance sheet and sent Cenovus shares tumbling. It prompted some investors to revolt and resulted in the resignation of chief executive Brian Ferguson.
International Petroleum Corp, a spinoff of Norway's Lundin Petroleum AB, said the acquisition more than triples its production and reserves. Its shares jumped 6.5 per cent to $5.22.
Earlier this month, Cenovus agreed to sell its Pelican Lake heavy oil operations in Alberta for $975 million to Canadian Natural Resources Ltd.
Other assets Cenovus plans to sell include the company's Weyburn and Palliser oil assets, which it hopes to announce by the end of the year. It may also sell some of the Deep Basin natural gas assets that it acquired from ConocoPhillips.
Reuters reported in July the company hopes to raise as much as $2.5 billion by selling Weyburn and Palliser oil assets, in-line with analysts' valuations.
Desjardins analyst Justin Bouchard said Deep Basin's infrastructure assets could be sold for up to $1.5 billion, helping the company meet or even surpass its divestiture target.
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Out-of-pocket health costs hit old, poor, women hardest
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JP Morgan Chase Institute has found that older US citizens, low-income people and women pay more of their incomes for out-of-pocket healthcare expenses than others. The Institute’s report also found that there was a strong correlation between the period of time when Americans get their income tax refunds, the months of March and April, and when people pay their out-of-pocket health expenses. The report took into account the spending habits of over two million Americans between 2013 and 2016, finding that the top 10 percent of healthcare spenders represented 49 percent of all the out-of-pocket spending in 2016, putting around 9% of their take-home pay on these costs. The Institute has said that many Americans and their families do not have the financial buffer to accommodate these types of unexpected payments. The proposed Graham-Cassidy bill could cause extra pressure on Americans to pay these out-of-pocket expenses, removing the protection from the Affordable Care Act that mandates that a minimum of “essential” benefits are covered without incurring extra expenses. Out-of-pocket expenses rose by 4.3 percent on average during that three-year period, with the average annual spend on out-of-pocket spending being $629 for families in 2013 and rising to $714 in 2016. The average percentage of take-home pay for a family was 1.6 percent, but was higher for female-led households (1.8 percent) and for those aged 55 to 64 (1.9 percent). The report found that when citizens had the ability to pay, they paid for health care, but when there was a lack of income, healthcare was either neglected or unpaid. The Graham-Cassidy bill could increase the burden on lower-income people already without the means to pay for out-of-pocket expenses, with the report stating that the demographics experiencing the most burden will be the ones to see the greatest negative effect of the proposed changes.
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https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/25/out-of-pocket-health-costs-hit-old-poor-women-hardest.html
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2017-09-27 16:53:27.033000
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Sisters Shaylin Sluzalis, left, and Brittani Sluzalis, members of the disability rights group ADAPT, embrace while waiting in line before a Senate Finance Committee hearing to consider the Graham-Cassidy-Heller-Johnson proposal in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Monday, Sept. 25, 2017.
Low-income Americans, older people and women pay a greater share of their incomes toward out-of-pocket health costs than do others, according to a new report issued Tuesday.
The broad analysis of spending by more than 2 million Americans also found that there is a strong correlation between when people tend to pay their out-of-pocket health costs and the months of March and April, when most people get their income tax refunds.
And the report from the JP Morgan Chase Institute found that out-of-pocket health spending was highly concentrated among relatively few families.
"The top 10 percent of health-care spenders contributed 49 percent of total out-of-pocket spending in 2016," the report said. That top 10 percent on average spent 9 percent of their take-home pay on out-of-pocket health costs.
Out-of-pocket costs are health expenses not covered by a person's insurance plan, and include charges such as co-payments, deductibles and coinsurance.
"The reality is that many American families don't have the cash buffer to withstand the volatility created by out-of-pocket health-care payments," said Diana Farrell, president and CEO of JP Morgan Chase Institute.
"We need to better understand the correlation between financial health and physical health."
The report comes as Republican leaders in the Senate are pushing a last-ditch bill to repeal and replace much of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.
Health experts have predicted that the bill, known as Graham-Cassidy, could greatly weaken, or eliminate in some states, ACA rules that mandate health insurance plans cover a minimum set of so-called essential health benefits, without imposing out-of-pocket charges on patients.
The institute for the report looked at spending from 2013 through 2016 by about 2.3 million Chase checking account customers. That data was "de-identified," meaning it was not linked to people by name.
The time period examined includes the first three full years of implementation of Obamacare. Critics of that law predicted it would lead to increased health costs.
However, the Chase report found that overall out-of-pocket health spending rose modestly during the time frame, by 4.3 percent on average, and ended up being less of a share of take-home income over time.
In 2013, average annual out-of-pocket health-care spending by a family stood at $629, representing 1.7 percent of take-home pay, the report said.
That grew to $645 per family in 2014 — a 2.6 percent increase — and to $690 per family in 2015, a rise of 6.9 percent.
In 2016, out-of-pocket spending grew to $714 per family, up 3.6 percent from the prior year.
However, from 2014 through 2016, the total spent on out-of-pocket costs on average in each of those years was 1.6 percent of the average family's household take-home pay — slightly less than the level seen in 2013.
But the burden on certain groups of people was much higher.
Families that earned less than $24,000 annually spent, on average, 2.8 percent of their take-home pay on out-of-pocket costs in 2016. That was up from 2.6 percent of take-home pay in 2015.
The next highest average burden was among families earning between $24,000 and $38,000 annually, which paid 1.6 percent of their take-home pay to out-of-pocket costs. As incomes rose after that, the burden of out-of-pocket costs dropped.
In households where the primary checking account was held by a woman, families paid, on average, 1.8 percent of their take-home pay toward out-of-pocket health costs in 2016, according to the report.
That compares to 1.5 percent among families where men were the primary checking account holders.
The report also found out-of-pocket cost burdens increased in direct correlation to a person's age.
While people 18 to 25 years old paid just 1.2 percent of their pay toward such costs in 2016, that rose to 1.6 percent for people 35 to 44 years old, and to 1.9 percent for people 55 to 64 years old, the report said.
Farrell, the CEO of the JP Morgan Chase Institute, said that while the overall average burden from out-of-pocket health costs remained stable in the past four years, many people were feeling more pinched from those costs.
"What we hear all the time.. is that these costs are increasing quite significantly, and we note that, too," Farrell said.
"But why is the burden stable? ... By and large people are spending a certain fraction of their income on out-of-pocket health care spend, and then they won't spend anymore," she said.
"That means if they get the health care — fine. If that means they won't pay for something that they're due to pay, they're probably not doing it, because we see this tight linkage between ability to pay, and pay," Farrell said. "It's almost as though people cap how much they will spend on health care... so when they have more ability to pay, when incomes go up, they pay. When they don't, they won't get the health care or they won't pay for the health care."
Farrell also said that if the Graham-Cassidy bill that would replace Obamacare becomes law, it will increase the burden on low-income people who already are struggling with out-of-pocket health costs.
"The demographic groups that are really carrying the heavier burden are the ones more likely to feel the impact of the changes," she said. "Because the last several years have been relatively helpful to those groups, even though the outcome is more burdensome to them."
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Senate Republicans Say They Will Not Vote on Health Bill
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Senate Republicans have officially stated that they will not vote on the Graham-Cassidy bill for the alteration of the Affordable Care Act, signaling the end of the last attempt to meet the promise of the Trump administration. Republican leaders would have been short of the number of votes necessary to pass the repeal proposal. Thirteen lawmakers across 12 separate states have resisted at least one of the five past efforts to repeal the ACA since the initiation of the Trump administration. The next vote to take place will likely be on the tax code overhaul, another Republican target. Democrats’ reaction to the news was to encourage the new opening of bipartisan negotiations for health insurance market stabilization, which had been put aside in favor of the repeal proposal. The decision not to vote may be the final nail in the coffin for the battle over health insurance in the US, a long debate that will likely be shelved for some time. However, there will likely be a revival of the discussion in the 2018 midterm elections, particularly as premiums are due to increase next year. The bill was due to take the regular funding for insurance subsidies on a state level, as well as the expansion of Medicaid, and to change the funding to a block grant. The bill would have lowered the spending on Medicaid by $1 trillion over a 10-year period, and putting millions of beneficiaries out of insurance. Democrats are hoping to pass the Alexander-Murray stabilization package which would send money for subsidies currently given to insurance companies as a reimbursement for lowering out-of-pocket costs for low-income citizens, and giving states more leeway to reform their insurance markets. The bill may prove unpopular with Republicans, who view the payments as a “bailout”.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/26/us/politics/mcconnell-obamacare-repeal-graham-cassidy-trump.html
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2017-09-27 16:28:15.823000
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WASHINGTON — Senate Republicans on Tuesday officially abandoned the latest plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act, shelving a showdown vote on the measure and effectively admitting defeat in their last-gasp drive to fulfill a core promise of President Trump and Republican lawmakers.
The decision came less than 24 hours after a pivotal Republican senator, Susan Collins of Maine, declared her opposition to the repeal proposal, all but ensuring that Republican leaders would be short of the votes they needed.
“We haven’t given up on changing the American health care system,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, said after a lunchtime meeting of Republican senators. “We are not going to be able to do that this week, but it still lies ahead of us, and we haven’t given up on that.”
Mr. McConnell said Republicans would move on to their next big legislative goal: overhauling the tax code, a feat that has not been accomplished since 1986.
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Insurtech Lemonade launches no-punishment claims product
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To mark its first anniversary, insurtech Lemonade is allowing new and existing customers to buy a "zero deductible" policy that allows two claims a year at no extra cost and with no effect on premium rates. Since its launch, the firm has leapfrogged established carriers among first-time rental-home insurance buyers in its New York home state. Allstate, GEICO, Farmers, Liberty Mutual, Progressive, State Farm and USAA are among the legacy insurers it's said to have overtaken in terms of market share among the demographic.
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https://www.crowdfundinsider.com/2017/09/122373-making-lemonade-even-sweeter-zero-deductible-launched-first-anniversary/
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2017-09-27 15:49:55.283000
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Lemonade, the insurance company powered by artificial intelligence and behavioral economics, has launched a new product called Zero Deductible which offers new and existing Lemonade members a ‘zero deductible’ upgrade, so they can make up to two claims each year with no deductible payments, and no rate hikes. The launch of Lemonade’s Zero Deductible also marks the company’s first year anniversary. Launched in New York in September 2016, Lemonade has since expanded to California, New Jersey, Illinois and Texas, and has been licensed- and will launch soon- in 15 more states, reaching more than 50% of the US population.
“One of the motives behind Lemonade was to rebuild insurance around what makes sense to people, not insurance companies. That’s how Zero Deductible was born,” explained Lemonade cofounder and CEO Daniel Schreiber. “People resent being ‘punished’ for using the product they paid plenty to use. Zero Deductible is something new and different. It allows you to truly receive your full replacement value, twice per year, every year, all without your rates jumping. There’s nothing like it in market.”
[clickToTweet tweet=”[email protected]_Inc celebrates 1st anniversary with zero deductible @crowdfundinside @daschreiber” quote=”Lemonade’s new Zero Deductible allows customers to receive full replacement value, twice per year, every year, all without rates jumping. “]
With today’s launch of Zero Deductible, the platform aims to move from rethinking the fundamental business model of insurance and its customer experience, to tackling the underlying policy, and ensuring its alignment with consumers’ wishes. Zero Deductible is the closest thing to truly “undoing” a loss.
“We want people to think about their Lemonade insurance as an Undo button for their life. You pay a premium to have that undo button at hand, and you expect it to work as advertised when bad things happen,” added cofounder and Chief Lemonade Maker Shai Wininger. “No gotchas, no paperwork, no faxes and no phone calls. Lemonade’s Zero Deductible is a seamless, technology-powered product that undoes losses, in seconds.”
In the year since launching, Certified B-Corp Lemonade has attained a notable market share, especially among first time insurance buyers. In New York State alone, Lemonade reportedly overtook Allstate, GEICO, Farmers, Liberty Mutual, Progressive, State Farm, USAA and all other legacy insurers among first time buyers of renters insurance. New users can opt for Zero Deductible when getting a policy, simply by choosing the Zero Deductible option before purchasing a policy. Existing users can upgrade to Zero Deductible instantly thanks to Lemonade’s Live Policy.
Lemonade is on the radar for new competitors and disruptors; German Insurtech company ONE (part of the Wefox Group) yesterday pledged to outgrow US based Lemonade in service growth soon after its late September launch.
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Robo-adviser assets could top $1.5tn in next five years
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Assets managed by robo-advisers could top $1.5tn in the next five years after reaching $1tn in 2020, according to research from Boston-based consultants Aite Group. Robo-advisers could become the default form of investing over the next decade, particularly if paired with home-assistant devices like Amazon's Alexa. The potential growth suggests younger clients are comfortable with an automated investment process.
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https://www.financial-planning.com/slideshow/the-1t-digital-advice-milestone-advisors-wont-celebrate?brief=00000153-6773-d15a-abd7-efff45d10000
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2017-09-27 15:38:33.033000
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Robo advisors are neither going away, nor are they dying off.
Instead, they will get much stronger, expected to collectively top $1 trillion in assets under management in fewer than five years.
The booming popularity of micro-investing firms will partly feed such growth. With over 60% of millennials already subscribed to apps like Acorns, the sector will expand as they devote more money to investing, reports Boston-based consulting firm Aite Group.
“Digital advising will become less focused on Generation Y and begin to resemble the traditional investor,” says Javier Paz, a senior analyst with Aite and the author of “U.S. Digital Advice,” a study released in September.
Robos will become the norm within a decade, he suggests, joined by virtual assistants like Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri, as comfort with automated investing increases.
The research estimates AUM from robo advisors will hit the $1 trillion milestone by 2020 and will rise to $1.5 trillion the following year. Taking a conservative approach, the research did not account for AUM on upcoming digital platforms by Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, and UBS expected later in 2017.
“We’re being bombarded with digitization,” Paz says. “This is just one more form.”
The firm conducted a year-long study that wrapped up in July. As part of their research Aite interviewed industry executives from some of the industry’s largest firms and analyzed public filings. (The study projected its 2017 data).
Click through the slideshow to see how mobile-first investing will change the investment landscape in the coming years.
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Marijuana-related injuries in Canada could initiate GL policies
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If employees of Canadian businesses, impaired by the legal use of marijuana, cause injury to third parties, it could trigger general liability insurance policies, according to Leszek Bialy, vice president and head of alternative risk transfer for Zurich Canada. While insurers are not presently redrafting underwriting applications, they are being urged to monitor the emerging risk posed by usage of the drug. Medical marijuana is already legal in Canada, with legalisation for recreational use slated to come into law next year.
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https://www.canadianunderwriter.ca/insurance/marijuana-impairment-related-losses-potentially-trigger-gl-policies-rims-speaker-1004121137/
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2017-09-27 15:34:39.300000
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Insurers would be well-advised to track the evolving marijuana risk to determine if impairment-related loss history could trigger defence and indemnification obligations under employers’ general liability policies, it was suggested Tuesday during a session at the RIMS Canada Conference in downtown Toronto.
“An employee who is under the influence of marijuana while at work could injure others, including customers, third parties or employees,” Leszek Bialy, vice president and head of alternative risk transfer for Zurich Canada, noted during the conference session, Joint Accountability: A Risk and Insurance Focused Marijuana Primer.
“An employer’s general liability policy would typically provide defence and indemnification to the employer for alleged injuries to an injured party on or off of the premises,” Bialy explained.
Use of medicinal marijuana is already legal in Canada and the impending legalization of recreational marijuana, which could be next July 1, means associated risks and possible insurance implications are receiving plenty of attention.
Are insurers currently redrafting underwriting applications in light of the evolving marijuana risk? Bialy asked attendees.
“At this time, I’m going to say no. However, the risk is deemed to be an evolving risk and insurers are watching. If there’s a loss history suggesting impairment, don’t be surprised if an insurer asks more questions and looks to confirm guidelines and policies to manage risk,” he pointed out.
The form would likely be “no different than they would for auto claims and looking at MDRs for alcohol use today,” said Bialy (pictured right).
Related: Marijuana legalization raises legal issues related to property policies, liability coverage and auto insurance, ARC Group Canada event hears
To address the risk, “from an underwriting perspective, the biggest issue underwriters are going to have is the lack of data,” suggested Alexis Moulton, a partner with McLennan Ross LLP.
“There’s simply not enough information out here right now. It makes pricing hard; it’s going to take a big effort on the part of the insurers, the brokers, the underwriters, the clients, the insured, etc. to understand this risk,” Moulton told attendees.
“Underwriters need to consider the what ifs, but you can’t price it out of the range of what the growers can afford,” she emphasized.
Consider if there are bad strains, effects from taking edibles or health side effects after using marijuana recommended by a dispensary employee, said Moulton.
If a person has a severe side effect, for example, “he’s going to sue. He’s going to sue the employee, he’s going to sue the dispensary, he’s going to sue the landlord, he’s going to sue the tenant. It goes on and on,” she argued.
Bialy suggested GL issue could be “closely tied to workers’ compensation and employment practices in terms of being able to mitigate the risk.”
His advice? Take account of the human element and put in place health and safety workplace guidelines. “By enforcing those guidelines, you’re going to be able to have control over those third parties, especially those of you in industries like construction or those industries that have contractor-type exposures,” he suggested.
With regard to third-party contractors, “how far do you take this focus as far as medical marijuana? Will there be – should there be – an element of contractual liability to address this risk?” Bialy asked.
“When you’re going to write a cannabis policy, you’re going to be writing policies to cover security, E&O (errors and omissions), property, crop, liability, fire, transportation, distribution,” Moulton (pictured left) told session attendees.
Related: With marijuana legalization impending, now is not the time to lower the legal alcohol limit, CAA-Quebec argues
Noting that “growers can have 50 to 60 different strains of cannabis, with multiple growing cycles,” how these crops are insured will be different, she added.
Other types of insurance policies that could potentially come into play with marijuana include property and auto, Bialy said.
In both Canada and the U.S., “your firm can be held responsible for damages stemming from an auto incident or accident involving an employee or yours who tests positive for marijuana impairment,” he pointed out.
For example, south of the border, “most state laws legalizing some aspect of marijuana use does not mean a business cannot set workplace drug policies, again, particularly with safety-sensitive positions,” Bialy said.
Related: One in 10 polled Canadians admit to driving under the influence of marijuana, State Farm Canada survey finds
More coverage of the 2017 RIMS Canada Conference
Brokers placing fidelity coverage should be ‘involved early on’ in fraud investigations: RIMS speaker
Autonomous vehicles will require a reassessment of liability: RIMS Canada Conference speaker
ORIMS presents Tony Lackey with 2017 Donald M. Stuart Award at RIMS Canada Conference
Cyber attacks could include ‘extorting a security guard to look the other way,’ RIMS Canada speaker warns
Cybercriminals will shift focus from data to threatening human life, cybersecurity expert predicts
Third-party drone services developing, immediate post-incident use still a challenge
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Is Health Care a Right?
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The United States' current debate over healthcare has led to the question of whether healthcare is a fundamental right. The high cost of healthcare, even with insurance, is prohibitive for many Americans. However, some see healthcare access as a right, but the cost is a burden that individuals should pay, rather than the taxpayer. A right to healthcare, from a conservative standpoint, would allow both the deserving and the undeserving to benefit. A more liberal approach sees healthcare as a necessity, much like the potable water that the government must provide. The balance must be found over maintenance of the belief that collective action results in collective benefit. Medicare, as a system where everyone pays in, is perceived more favorably to Medicaid, as all Americans benefit from the system past age 65.
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https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/02/is-health-care-a-right
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2017-09-27 15:14:00.957000
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No other country in the world has built its health-care system this way, and, in the era of the gig economy, it’s becoming only more problematic. Between 2005 and 2015, according to analysis by the economists Alan Krueger and Lawrence Katz, ninety-four per cent of net job growth has been in “alternative work arrangements”—freelancing, independent contracting, temping, and the like—which typically offer no health benefits. And we’ve all found ourselves battling over who deserves less and who deserves more.
The Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild spent five years listening to Tea Party supporters in Louisiana, and in her masterly book “Strangers in Their Own Land” she identifies what she calls the deep story that they lived and felt. Visualize a long line of people snaking up a hill, she says. Just over the hill is the American Dream. You are somewhere in the middle of that line. But instead of moving forward you find that you are falling back. Ahead of you, people are cutting in line. You see immigrants and shirkers among them. It’s not hard to imagine how infuriating this could be to some, how it could fuel an America First ideal, aiming to give pride of place to “real” Americans and demoting those who would undermine that identity—foreigners, Muslims, Black Lives Matter supporters, feminists, “snowflakes.”
Our political debates seem to focus on what the rules should be for our place in line. Should the most highly educated get to move up to the front? The most talented? Does seniority matter? What about people whose ancestors were cheated and mistreated?
The mistake is accepting the line, and its dismal conception of life as a zero-sum proposition. It gives up on the more encompassing possibilities of shared belonging, mutual loyalty, and collective gains. America’s founders believed these possibilities to be fundamental. They held life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to be “unalienable rights” possessed equally by all members of their new nation. The terms of membership have had to be rewritten a few times since, sometimes in blood. But the aspiration has endured, even as what we need to fulfill it has changed.
When the new country embarked on its experiment in democracy, health care was too primitive to matter to life or liberty. The average citizen was a hardscrabble rural farmer who lived just forty years. People mainly needed government to insure physical security and the rule of law. Knowledge and technology, however, expanded the prospects of life and liberty, and, accordingly, the requirements of government. During the next two centuries, we relied on government to establish a system of compulsory public education, infrastructure for everything from running water to the electric grid, and old-age pensions, along with tax systems to pay for it all. As in other countries, these programs were designed to be universal. For the most part, we didn’t divide families between those who qualified and those who didn’t, between participants and patrons. This inclusiveness is likely a major reason that these policies have garnered such enduring support.
Health care has been the cavernous exception. Medical discoveries have enabled the average American to live eighty years or longer, and with a higher quality of life than ever before. Achieving this requires access not only to emergency care but also, crucially, to routine care and medicines, which is how we stave off and manage the series of chronic health issues that accumulate with long life. We get high blood pressure and hepatitis, diabetes and depression, cholesterol problems and colon cancer. Those who can’t afford the requisite care get sicker and die sooner. Yet, in a country where pretty much everyone has trash pickup and K-12 schooling for the kids, we’ve been reluctant to address our Second World War mistake and establish a basic system of health-care coverage that’s open to all. Some even argue that such a system is un-American, stepping beyond the powers the Founders envisioned for our government.
In fact, in a largely forgotten episode in American history, Thomas Jefferson found himself confronting this very matter, shortly after his Inauguration as our third President, in 1801. Edward Jenner, in England, had recently developed a smallpox vaccine—a momentous medical breakthrough. Investigating the lore that milkmaids never got smallpox, he discovered that material from scabs produced by cowpox, a similar condition that afflicts cattle, induced a mild illness in people that left them immune to smallpox. Smallpox epidemics came with a mortality rate of thirty per cent or higher, and wiped out upward of five per cent of the population of cities like Boston and New York. Jefferson read Jenner’s report and arranged for the vaccination of two hundred relatives, neighbors, and slaves at Monticello. The President soon became vaccination’s preëminent American champion.
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But supplies were difficult to produce, and the market price was beyond the means of most families. Jefferson, along with his successor, James Madison, believed in a limited role for the federal government. They did not take expanding its power and its commitments lightly. By the time Jefferson finished his two terms as President, however, city and state governments had almost entirely failed to establish programs to provide vaccines for their citizens. Thousands of lives continued to be lost to smallpox outbreaks. Meanwhile, vaccination programs in England, France, and Denmark had dramatically curbed the disease and measurably raised the national life expectancy. So, at Jefferson’s prompting, and with Madison’s unhesitating support, Congress passed the Vaccine Act of 1813 with virtually no opposition. A National Vaccine Agent was appointed to maintain stocks of vaccine and supply it to any American who requested it. The government was soon providing free vaccine for tens of thousands of people each year. It was the country’s first health-care entitlement for the general population. And its passage wasn’t in the least controversial.
Two centuries later, the Affordable Care Act was passed to serve a similar purpose: to provide all Americans with access to the life-preserving breakthroughs of our own generation. The law narrowed the yawning disparities in access to care, levied the taxes needed to pay for it, and measurably improved the health of tens of millions. But, to win passage, the A.C.A. postponed reckoning with our generations-old error of yoking health care to our jobs—an error that has made it disastrously difficult to discipline costs and insure quality, while severing care from our foundational agreement that, when it comes to the most basic needs and burdens of life and liberty, all lives have equal worth. The prospects and costs for health care in America still vary wildly, and incomprehensibly, according to your job, your state, your age, your income, your marital status, your gender, and your medical history, not to mention your ability to read fine print.
Few want the system we have, but many fear losing what we’ve got. And we disagree profoundly about where we want to go. Do we want a single, nationwide payer of care (Medicare for all), each state to have its own payer of care (Medicaid for all), a nationwide marketplace where we all choose among a selection of health plans (Healthcare.gov for all), or personal accounts that we can use to pay directly for health care (Health Savings Accounts for all)? Any of these can work. Each has been made to work universally somewhere in the world. They all have their supporters and their opponents. We disagree about which benefits should be covered, how generous the financial protection should be, and how we should pay for it. We disagree, as well, about the trade-offs we will accept: for instance, between increasing simplicity and increasing choice; or between advancing innovation and reducing costs.
What we agree on, broadly, is that the rules should apply to everyone. But we’ve yet to put this moral principle into practice. The challenge for any plan is to avoid the political perils of a big, overnight switch that could leave many people with higher costs and lower benefits. There are, however, many options for a gradual transition. Just this June, the Nevada legislature passed a bill that would have allowed residents to buy into the state’s Medicaid plan—if the governor hadn’t vetoed it. A similar bill to allow people to buy into Medicare was recently introduced in Congress. We need to push such options forward. Maintaining the link between health coverage and jobs is growing increasingly difficult, expensive, and self-defeating. But deciding to build on what’s currently working requires overcoming a well of mistrust about whether such investments will really serve a shared benefit.
My friend Betsy Anderson, who taught eighth-grade English at Athens Middle School for fifteen years, told me something that made me see how deep that well is. When she first started out as a teacher, she said, her most satisfying experiences came from working with eager, talented kids who were hungry for her help in preparing them for a path to college and success. But she soon realized that her class, like America as a whole, would see fewer than half of its students earn a bachelor’s degree. Her job was therefore to try to help all of her students reach their potential—to contribute in their own way and to pursue happiness on their own terms.
But, she said, by eighth grade profound divisions had already been cemented. The honors kids—the Hillary Clintons and Mitt Romneys of the school—sat at the top of the meritocratic heap, getting attention and encouragement. The kids with the greatest needs had special-education support. But, across America, the large mass of kids in the middle—the ones without money, book smarts, or athletic prowess—were outsiders in their own schools. Few others cared about what they felt or believed or experienced. They were the unspecial and unpromising, looked down upon by and almost completely separated from the college-bound crowd. Life was already understood to be a game of winners and losers; they were the designated losers, and they resented it. The most consistent message these students had received was that their lives were of less value than others’. Is it so surprising that some of them find satisfaction in a politics that says, essentially, Screw ’em all?
I met with Mark, a friend of Arnold’s, at the Union Street Diner, uptown near the campus of Ohio University, which makes Athens its home. The diner was a low-key place that stayed open twenty-four hours, with Formica tables and plastic cups, and a late-night clientele that was a mixture of townies and drunken students. I ordered a cheeseburger and onion rings. Mark ordered something healthier. (He asked me not to use his last name.) The son of a state highway patrolman, he had graduated from Athens High School five years ahead of me. Afterward, he worked as a cable installer, and got married at twenty-three. His wife worked at the Super Duper grocery store. Their pay was meagre and they were at the mercy of their bosses. So, the next year, they decided to buy a convenience store on the edge of town.
Mark’s father-in-law was a builder, and he helped them secure a bank loan. They manned the register day and night, and figured out how to make a decent living. It was never a lot of money, but over time they built up the business, opening gas pumps, and hiring college students to work the counter part time. They were able to make a life of it.
They adopted a child, a boy who was now a twenty-five-year-old graduate of the local university. Mark turned fifty-seven and remained a lifelong conservative. In general, he didn’t trust politicians. But he felt that Democrats in particular didn’t seem to recognize when they were pushing taxes and regulations too far. Health-care reform was a prime example. “It’s just the whole time they were coming up with this idea from copying some European model,” he said. “And I’m going, ‘Oh shit. This is not going to end up good for Mark.’ ” (Yes, he sometimes talks about himself in the third person.)
For his health coverage, Mark trusted his insurance agent, whom he’d known for decades, more than he trusted the government. He’d always chosen the minimum necessary, a bare-bones, high-deductible plan. He and his wife weren’t able to conceive, so they didn’t have to buy maternity or contraceptive coverage. With Obamacare, though, he felt forced to pay extra to help others get benefits that he’d never had or needed. “I thought, Well, here we go, I guess I’m now kicking in for Bill Gates’s daughter’s pregnancy, too.” He wanted to keep government small and taxes low. He was opposed to Obamacare.
Then, one morning a year ago, Mark’s back started to hurt. “It was a workday. I grabbed a Tylenol and I go, ‘No, this isn’t going to work, the pain’s too weird.’ ” It got worse, and when the pain began to affect his breathing he asked his wife to drive him to the emergency room.
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XL Catlin launches accident and health solution in Italy
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XL Catlin launched an accident and health insurance solution for Italian clients. The solution consists of three distinct products: group policy accident insurance, business travel accident insurance and health care coverage for clients' employees and their families.
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http://xlcatlin.com/insurance/news/xl-catlin-in-italy-launches-accident-and-health-insurance-solution
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2017-09-27 13:50:04.453000
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Global economies still at risk and ill-prepared for robots: WEF
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The World Economic Forum (WEF) has called on governments and business to boost productivity, warning that worldwide economies remain vulnerable to financial shocks a decade after the financial crisis. In its latest competitiveness report, the WEF also said economies were woefully unprepared for incoming "automation and robotisation". "The prospects for a sustained economic recovery remain at risk due to a widespread failure on the part of leaders and policy makers to put in place reforms necessary to underpin competitiveness and bring about much-needed increases in productivity," the WEF warned. It urged governments to create more flexible labour markets that can cope with encroaching robotisation.
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https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/27/wef-warns-of-vast-numbers-of-jobs-being-disrupted-by-automation-and-robots.html
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2017-09-27 13:37:59.047000
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Hans-Peter Merten | Getty Images
Global economies remain at risk from further shock and are "ill-prepared" for the next wave of "automation and robotization," according to the World Economic Forum's (WEF) latest global competitiveness report. The Switzerland-based organization's 2017 Global Competitiveness Index, published Wednesday, assesses various factors driving countries' productivity and prosperity – including its institutions, infrastructure, education, innovation and labor market efficiency, among others, and showed a sharp divide between major global economies. "Ten years on from the global financial crisis, the prospects for a sustained economic recovery remain at risk due to a widespread failure on the part of leaders and policy-makers to put in place reforms necessary to underpin competitiveness and bring about much-needed increases in productivity," WEF stated of its findings. In 2017, the report found that Switzerland retained top spot as the most competitive economy, closely followed by the U.S. and Singapore. Also in the top 10 were the Netherlands in fourth place, followed by Germany, Hong Kong, Sweden, the U.K. (which had fallen from sixth to eighth place), Japan and Finland. With the usual suspects populating the rankings again this year, Margareta Drzeniek-Hanouz, head of Economic Progress at the World Economic Forum, told CNBC on Wednesday that there had not been much effort at structural reforms that would improve competitiveness.
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"Global growth has been mainly fueled by monetary policy and low interest rates over the last few years so we do not see much progress on productivity, so that is reflected in the ranking. At the same time, we should be seeing more (productivity) in order to keep growth going forward," she told CNBC Wednesday. Major BRICS economies lagged far behind, however, with China standing at number 27 in the forum's ninth year of competitiveness rankings, Russia at 38, India at 40, South Africa at 61 and Brazil at 80. There was also much divergence between the high-ranking northern European economies and southern European ones, including Spain (34), Italy (43) and Greece (87). The organization said that that its 2017 report highlighted three key areas of concern, including the robustness of the financial system, a lack of flexibility in labor markets and an imbalance between investments in technology and efforts to promote their adoption in the wider economy.
The 'Age of Talentism'
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Climate change may make some assets uninsurable
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There is a fear among risk assessors that an increasing frequency of substantial storms during the Atlantic hurricane season may render some assets uninsurable as the impact of extreme weather causes the rate and size of claims to rise ahead of the income generated by premiums. One solution, according to Swiss Re, is to prepare adequately for a payout in the wake of significant storms, while interacting closely with clients and brokers.
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http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/countingthecost/2017/09/insurance-age-climate-change-170924062646501.html
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2017-09-27 12:53:24.903000
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Europe is turning to Africa’s gas, while the US, China and Russia are racing for economic influence on the continent.
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Experts accused of hiding epilepsy drug links to birth defects
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Regulators knew that epilepsy drug sodium valproate could cause birth defects and developmental problems in babies more than 40 years ago but kept it quiet for fear it "could give rise to fruitless anxiety". Catherine Cox of the Fetal Anti-Convulsant Syndrome Association accused medical experts at a public hearing of making a "deliberate decision not to publish" warnings. The drug, manufactured by Sanofi, is also used to treat bipolar disorder and migraines. Campaigners estimate that around 20,000 children in the UK may have been affected by the drug, which is undergoing a risk assessment by the European Medicines Agency.
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https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/sep/26/sodium-valproate-birth-defect-risks-known-40-years-ago-campaigners
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2017-09-27 12:49:00.683000
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Warnings to young women who might become pregnant that the epilepsy drug sodium valproate could cause birth defects and developmental problems in their babies could have been made public more than 40 years ago, according to campaigners.
“These warnings could have and should have been given in 1974,” said Catherine Cox from the Fetal Anti-Convulsant Syndrome Association at a public hearing of the European Medicines Agency, which is conducting a risk assessment of the drug. “However, there was a deliberate decision not to publish them.”
Regulators knew about the risks when they were considering licensing sodium valproate for the control of seizures in epilepsy. But documents from 1973 show they thought telling patients “could give rise to fruitless anxiety”.
A “Dear Doctor” letter warned health professionals: “This compound has been shown to be teratogenic in animals, meaning it could harm the human foetus.”
But the then Committee on Safety of Medicines said the warning should “not (go) on the package inserts, so that there would be no danger of patients themselves seeing it”.
The EMA’s risk assessment committee will decide what extra measures should be taken to safeguard young women who might become pregnant and their children from sodium valproate. The drug, used to treat epilepsy but also bipolar disorder and migraine, has long been controversial.
While many campaigners would like an outright ban for women of childbearing age, doctors say there are some for whom it is the only drug that will control their epileptic seizures. Campaigners estimate that up to 20,000 children in the UK may have been harmed.
Babies whose mothers are given the drug during pregnancy run a 11% risk of birth defects and a 40% risk of developmental problems. Karen Keely, from the Organisation for Anti-Convulsant Syndrome in Ireland, told the EMA that her three sons, Lee, Lorcan and Harry, all have birth defects after she was prescribed Epilim, one of the brand names of sodium valproate.
“Two of my three boys require life-long care and will never live a normal life, will never be able to have children or get married,” she said. “The effects of sodium valproate have been unbearable.
“I have been mourning my children since the day they came into my life and I’m determined to not let this injustice happen to other families in the same way that it has happened to mine.”
Women are still unaware of the risks of the drug, even after a “toolkit” was produced last year for doctors and patients by the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency, which replaced the Committee on the Safety of Medicines, with the help of stakeholders.
But Clare Pelham of the Epilepsy Society said a survey last month of 2,000 young women with the condition found that 68% did not know about it, which was a slight increase on the 64% from the years before when the toolkit had only just been introduced.
She called on the inquiry to make warnings to women mandatory, rather than voluntary. The health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, should require GPs to review any woman on the drug face to face every 12 months. “It is a very straightforward measure,” she said.
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First film funded and distributed via blockchain in production
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New York-based entertainment production company SingularDTV, which uses blockchain technology to support the film-making process, is set to release its first documentary next spring exploring blockchain's potential to change the world. The as-yet-untitled film will be directed by Bill and Ted star Alex Winter and its production process is intended to demonstrate how blockchain and a tokenised ecosystem can enable the creative process, from development to distribution. "Blockchain represents the next evolution of content creation," said Geoff Clark, the president of Futurism Studios, which is co-producing the documentary.
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https://futurism.com/award-winning-director-alex-winter-will-helm-the-untitled-blockchain-film/
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2017-09-27 12:29:18.917000
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The Story of Blockchain
Dozens of clips claim to explain the blockchain or tell you everything you need to know about Bitcoin. But the story of cryptocurrencies and the technology that makes them possible demands more explanation than is possible in a cursory two-minute animation.
These topics may be garnering a lot of mainstream attention right now thanks to skyrocketing valuations and interest from multi-billion dollar organizations like IBM and Microsoft, but they've actually been around for decades. The story of how they managed to land in the spotlight in 2017 is both compelling and complex.
Luckily, filmmaker Alex Winter has taken on the daunting task of telling it.
Winter's face isn't new in the entertainment industry. He began his career as an actor, starring in several popular films such as The Lost Boys and, perhaps most famously, the Bill and Ted franchise. He then moved behind the camera to direct several narrative features and award-winning documentaries. His recent work reflects his interest in decentralization and the rise of internet-based communities — two of his documentaries, Downloaded and Deep Web, center on these themes. His next project, the "Untitled Blockchain Film," is a feature specifically focused on the blockchain and its potential to change the world.
"This film is an opportunity to examine the future as opposed to the distant past or the immediate past: where we are, where we're going, and the frenzied, exciting, and precarious world that we are currently in, particularly as that relates to the blockchain and crypto," Winter explains in an interview with Futurism.
To do that, the director will travel the world, interviewing the investors and innovators playing a major role in the evolution of blockchain and decentralization. He'll also seek out those using the technology to address important real-world problems, such as world hunger and income inequality.
Winter notes that he has been studying the rise of cryptography and its impact on global culture since the late 1980s. But he is excited to see where the process of creating this film takes him. "Every movie is a journey of discovery and disorientation for me," says Winter. "That's what I love about making them."
Could blockchain upend the film industry? Get ready. This award-winning director just announced the world’s first blockchain film. Posted by Futurism on Thursday, September 28, 2017
An Industry Redefined
The subject of Winter's new documentary isn't the only thing about it that's cutting-edge — everything from how the film is being funded to how it will be distributed is forward-thinking, thanks to SingularDTV, the EnTech company producing the film alongside Futurism Studios (a wholly owned subsidiary of Futurism LLC).
SingularDTV's Ethereum-based production and distribution platform utilizes blockchain technology to give filmmakers and artists everything they need to bring their projects to fruition.
"We're creating the ecosystem for entertainment industry artists and creators to be able to do everything — raise funds, market their projects, rent equipment — through a tokenized ecosystem," Kim Jackson, president of entertainment at SingularDTV, tells Futurism. "The different applications we're building support artists all the way from development to distribution."
Geoff Clark, president of Futurism Studios, notes that this pivotal moment for blockchain technology makes this an especially exciting time for filmmaking. "We have the rare opportunity to redesign our finance and distribution models from the ground up, ensuring a more sustainable and equitable future," he says. "I believe Blockchain represents the next evolution of content creation, and we are excited to partner with top technologists and creatives to bring that vision to life.”
Scheduled for release in Spring 2018, the "Untitled Blockchain Film" is the first project in SingularDTV's slate of original productions, and Jackson says she was thrilled Winter was available to direct it. "He was just such an obvious choice for this project given his background," Jackson says. "He totally understands the different avenues to explore with this new technology, and it was just really serendipitous that he was available to direct this film."
Winter hopes the film will clear up some of the public's misconceptions of the blockchain, but in this project, as in those before it, he seeks to entertain as well as inform. "I hope the audience comes away with a deeper understanding of this seemingly confusing and impenetrable world," says Winter. "That being said, I make movies, not journalism or infotainment, so more than anything I want the audience to feel they've watched a good, satisfying story."
Disclosure: Several members of the Futurism team, including the editors of this piece, are personal investors in a number of cryptocurrency markets. Their personal investment perspectives have no impact on editorial content.
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Bauer finds branded videos 10 times as interactive as unbranded
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Bauer Media found its branded videos receive 10 times as many interactions as its unbranded videos after it launched a two-month campaign for fashion retailer Very. The videos, distributed on both Bauer and non-Bauer sites, are designed to raise brand awareness and provide shoppable videos for consumers. Bauer has not yet released the number of sales made through the videos; however, for its recent campaign for Adidas on its Grazia site, dwell times on the videos were 200% higher than the average for other videos.
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https://digiday.com/media/bauer-media-tries-prove-ads-work-using-shoppable-videos/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=digidaydis&utm_source=uk&utm_content=170927
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2017-09-27 11:57:00.707000
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Bauer Media is trying to show its ads can drive sales with shoppable videos for clients such as Adidas and Very.
This month, Bauer launched a two-month campaign for online fashion retailer Very that included 25 videos where viewers choose which items they want stylists in the video to wear. The first in the series shows different ways to wear a leather jacket: Viewers choose whether the stylist wears a floral print shirt or a Breton-style jumper; ripped jeans or floral embroidered jeans; and Chelsea boots or three-strapped heels. The items get more seasonal as the series continues; the second video is on how to style knitwear.
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Uber criticised in US over assault reporting prior to London ban
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Uber has been accused of failing in relation to law enforcement by several women in the US who have spoken to The Guardian. The allegations come in the wake of Transport for London’s decision last week not to renew the company’s licence in the city, based partly on Uber’s failure to report sexual assaults to the police. The company, which was criticised by a judge in California for refusing to comply with a warrant in a case of sexual assault, is facing lawsuits from a number of women in the US who claim that they were assaulted in Uber cars.
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https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/27/uber-london-ban-sexual-assault-california-case-police
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2017-09-27 11:43:16.747000
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When Uber refused to comply with a warrant in a California sexual assault case, police, prosecutors and the judge were bewildered.
Lt Brian South told the Guardian that in more than 15 years on the job, he had never seen anyone so brazenly defy a judge’s order for records. A prosecutor testified that Uber was actively preventing law enforcement from protecting riders from violence, and a judge attacked the ride-share corporation for a “horrific” pattern of ignoring police, describing its typical response as “give as little as possible, be as uncooperative as possible”.
The judge’s forceful rebuke – in a criminal case where a driver was accused of restraining and attacking a female passenger – is one of many allegations across the globe of Uber neglecting the safety of riders and drivers by failing to work with law enforcement and ignoring standard regulations. Last week, Uber lost its license in London in part due to the government’s concerns about the company’s failure to report sexual assaults to police.
While Uber is fighting London to stay in operation there, critics throughout the world are pushing other local municipalities to follow suit – and some say the law enforcement concerns cited in the UK are far from unique. Several women in the US, who say they were sexually assaulted in Uber cars, are now filing fresh lawsuits against the company and spoke exclusively with the Guardian this week about their claims of fundamental public safety problems at Uber.
The San Francisco-based firm is facing widespread pressure after months of bad press surrounding corporate misconduct and sexual harassment, shady tactics to evade law enforcement and claims that Uber mistreats and underpays its drivers.
In Moraga, a city 20 miles east of Uber’s San Francisco headquarters, court records reveal particularly damning allegations related to the company’s evasion of police. After a driver was arrested on suspicion of sexual battery in May, prosecutors successfully obtained a warrant for information related to the more than 1,000 rides the suspect had given in the previous 90 days.
Uber claimed the order was overly broad, ignored the warrant, missed the deadline imposed by the judge and failed to properly communicate with police, according to a court transcript. Prosecutors were then forced to delay the investigation and bring Uber to court in an unusual hearing where Judge Clare Maier sanctioned the company and angrily demanded it comply with the order she had already signed.
An anti-Uber protest in New York in February 2017. Photograph: Michael N/Pacific/Barcroft Image
“The reputation of Uber for cooperating with law enforcement is horrific,” said Maier, whose $1,000 sanction was first reported in the East Bay Times. “The fact that Uber resists search warrants gives me grave concern that there is an ulterior motive here and not any desire to cooperate.”
The judge said she was further concerned Uber was blocking an investigation into a man who could be a repeat offender.
“I don’t think you have the authority to just resist a search warrant,” the judge later said. “You’ve dragged your feet on every aspect of it.”
South, the police lieutenant on the case, said in an interview: “I’ve never had somebody flat-out refuse to comply with a search warrant.”
Uber’s lawyer Candace Kelly testified that it was a “technology company” that put strangers together in cars where “bad things” can happen, and that Uber did not “want to be the cause of delay in solving those incidents”.
A spokesperson for Uber, which subsequently complied with the warrant, declined to comment.
‘They turn their back on women’
Women who say they have been attacked during Uber trips said the company should be liable and should have done more to help police hold assailants accountable.
“Uber is allowing this to happen and providing the means to make it so easy for predators,” said Indra, a Virginia woman who said she was sexually assaulted by a driver last year and requested not to use her full name. Her subsequent conversations with Uber left her with the impression that the company’s position was “this kind of thing is common and they just didn’t care”, she said. “That’s just abhorrent. They didn’t seem concerned about me as a person.”
Indra, 38, is one of several women who is now bringing lawsuits against Uber with Lisa Bloom, a high-profile California attorney who has brought sexual misconduct cases against Fox News, Bill Cosby and Donald Trump.
They didn’t seem concerned about me as a person Indra, from Virginia
A Los Angeles woman, who filed a case anonymously as Jane Doe on Tuesday, alleged in a lawsuit that after she reported a driver fondling her in a car, an Uber representative told her: “Do whatever you want to about the incident.”
In an interview, Jane Doe, 25, said Uber never even refunded her ride or followed up with her to let her know if the driver had been permanently banned. She said it was not clear whether Uber had done everything it could to work with police: “If there’s any sort of battery or sexual assault claims – anything that’s putting a driver or passenger at risk – they should be fully willing to comply with the police and give them any information they need.”
Uber typically does not disclose information to passengers or drivers about alleged assailants, citing privacy concerns, and complies with law enforcement requests for data only when given subpoenas. The Jane Doe suit alleges that this policy can hamper police investigations and discourage criminal charges, arguing that “non-cooperation with law enforcement agencies means that Uber has provided its drivers with tacit assurance that their misconduct will not be detected by law enforcement”.
Uber’s failure to work with police means that for some victims, their only option is to file a civil suit, Bloom said in an interview.
“They have all this information. It’s a very simple matter for them to cooperate,” she said. “It’s just shocking how they are turning their back on women customers and allowing this to go on.”
Bloom also filed a lawsuit Tuesday on behalf of a passenger who claimed she was sexually harassed and falsely imprisoned by an Uber driver.
A recent lawsuit filed in Kansas City alleged that an Uber passenger was raped by a driver a month after Uber was explicitly warned by a member of the public that the man was dangerous. The driver had also previously been convicted of attempted first-degree murder, according to the suit.
Kate Lewis, a former Uber driver, also publicly accused the company of failing to do enough to support a criminal investigation after she reported that a passenger had groped and sexually assaulted her throughout a ride last year.
“They were very defensive and not very sympathetic,” she said in a recent interview, adding that police told her that lack of communication by Uber was impeding the investigation. “Uber made it worse by not letting me get closure.” Police, however, claimed Uber cooperated in that investigation.
Uber declined to comment on specific cases. The company said it has a 24/7 customer support team and employs former law enforcement professionals who work with police.
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Climate change made Europe’s 2017 heatwaves more likely: WWA
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Heatwaves that rolled across Mediterranean countries this summer were made 10 times as probable by man-made climate change, according to analysis by scientists at the World Weather Attribution (WWA) group. The study also found that “Lucifer”, a particularly deadly heatwave which affected Croatia, France and Italy in August, was four times more likely to happen as a result of climate change. Without action on global warming, 40C temperatures during summer will be standard for Europe by 2050, according to the research.
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/27/climate-change-made-lucifer-heatwave-far-more-likely-scientists-find
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2017-09-27 11:38:32.003000
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The scorching temperatures across Europe’s Mediterranean nations this summer were made at least 10 times more likely by climate change, according to scientists.
Furthermore, without action to tackle global warming, such summer heatwaves with temperatures soaring over 40C will become normal by 2050.
The new analysis by the World Weather Attribution (WWA) group also analysed the particular “Lucifer” heatwave which struck south-east France, Italy and Croatia in early August and found it was made at least four times more likely by human-caused climate change.
The Lucifer heatwave saw temperatures fail to drop below 30C for three days and nights in the hottest spots, and was linked to a 15% surge in emergency hospital admissions in Italy. Prolonged heat is known to be very dangerous to health and a severe heatwave in Europe in 2003 was linked to 75,000 deaths by subsequent analysis.
“Summers keep getting hotter,” said Friederike Otto at the University of Oxford, UK, also part of WWA. “Heatwaves are far more intense than when my parents were growing up in the 1950s. If we do nothing to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, the kind of extreme heat we saw this past summer will be the norm when my young son is a grown man.”
The fast-growing science of climate change attribution tackles the question of what impact global warming is having on extreme weather and the people it affects. No event can be said to be caused by climate change because random extremes occur naturally. But by comparing extremes with historical measurements and computer models of a climate unaltered by carbon emissions, researchers can show how global warming is already heavily loading the dice of dangerous weather.
In June, WWA showed the extreme heatwave that saw deadly forest fires blazing in Portugal and Spain was made 10 times more likely by global warming. In Portugal, 64 people died. Previous work has demonstrated floods in England and France – even as far back as 2000 – were made more significantly likely by climate change.
Research in Australia has shown the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef was 175 times more likely due to greenhouse gas emissions, while the recent hot winter was made 60 times more likely.
Hurricanes are much more complex and time consuming to analyse than heatwaves and WWA is currently working on Hurricane Harvey. But scientists are clear that climate change is most likely to have made the giant storms that have ripped across the Caribbean and the US this year more destructive. This is because greater heat means more storm energy and rainfall, while rising sea level means storm surges reach further inland.
The new research analysed this summer’s heat across Spain, southern France, Italy and the Balkans. It compared the measured temperatures with four different groups of climate models in which the heating effect of the last century of carbon emissions were omitted. This showed the high level of heat in June, July and August was at least 10 times more likely than it would have been in the early 1900s.
A cyclist waits to cross a road in Valencia, Spain, where the temperature is 41C. Photograph: Manuel Bruque/EPA
The researchers did the same for the Lucifer heatwave, examining its three-day peak in early August. They found the intensity of such heatwaves has increased by 1C to 2C since 1950 and that overall climate change has quadrupled the change of them happening.
In June, the Guardian revealed that the UK government’s failure to update building regulations for homes, hospitals and schools could cause a tripling of heatwave deaths by 2040.
“It is critical that cities work with scientists and public health experts to develop heat action plans because such extreme heat will become the norm in the middle of the century,” said Robert Vautard, a researcher at the Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences in France. “Climate change is impacting communities right now and these plans save lives.”
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Researchers harness evaporation energy to produce electricity
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A recent study shows that, theoretically, utilising natural water evaporation could produce more than 325 GW of electricity in the US more efficiently than burning coal. Columbia University researchers developed a technology they claim can harnesses the motion of Bacillus subtilis spores, which contract and expand as they absorb and release air moisture, to drive generators. Vitally, they continue doing so when dormant or dead. The technology remains in its laboratory stage and co-author of the paper, Ozgur Sahin, warned that it is a "thought experiment" not a "literal development proposal".
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https://www.technologyreview.com/s/538571/scientists-capture-the-energy-of-evaporation-to-drive-tiny-engines/
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2017-09-27 11:38:26.207000
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The idea sprang from research into the mechanical properties of the subtilis spores, which can exist in a dormant state for hundreds of years. “It struck me as amazing how much mechanical energy they seem to have,” says Ozgur Sahin, an associate professor of biological sciences at the university. “They are so rigid that as the material’s shape changes it produces a lot of energy.”
Sahin glued the spores to a tape made of polyimide—a polymer used in fuel cells, computer displays, and various military applications—and surrounded them with a shutter mechanism that controls the passage of moisture. The shutter is essentially an oscillator, a mechanical switch like an electrical circuit, that opens and closes in response to the force produced by the spore changing shape. The opening and closing of the switch produces the regular pulsing of the swelling and shrinking spores. When the shutter is open, moisture escapes to the air and the spore dries out; when it closes, moisture fills the gap, the humidity increases, and the material expands.
An eight-centimeter by eight-centimeter water surface can produce about two microwatts of electricity (a microwatt is one-millionth of a watt), on average, and can burst up to 60 microwatts, says Sahin. That doesn’t sound like a lot of electricity; so far Sahin and his team have used the evaporation engines to power an LED and a miniature car that weighs a tenth of a kilogram.
“We made a lot of compromises in creating this version in hopes of creating a self-sufficient device,” he says. “We know actually that it can be made 100 times more powerful by solving a number of problems.”
Those solutions include adjusting the size of the moisture cavities and the mechanism of the shutters that control the flow of moisture. Sahin believes that arrays of the devices on the surface of lakes or other bodies of water could produce a scalable renewable energy technology, but that is likely years off, if it ever happens at all. One possible use could be to create battery-size “bricks” of spores than can be activated to produce electricity—just add water.
The tiny engines may have no practical applications in the near term, but they’re still a useful demonstration of the ubiquity of natural energy that can—at least in theory—be harnessed by relatively simple and cheap devices.
As Sahin says, unlike solar and wind power, “Evaporation is not intermittent.”
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Researchers harness evaporation energy to produce electricity
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A recent study shows that, theoretically, utilising natural water evaporation could produce more than 325 GW of electricity in the US more efficiently than burning coal. Columbia University researchers developed a technology they claim can harnesses the motion of Bacillus subtilis spores, which contract and expand as they absorb and release air moisture, to drive generators. Vitally, they continue doing so when dormant or dead. The technology remains in its laboratory stage and co-author of the paper, Ozgur Sahin, warned that it is a "thought experiment" not a "literal development proposal".
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https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608949/evaporation-engines-could-produce-more-power-than-coal-with-a-huge-caveat/
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2017-09-27 11:38:26.207000
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That, however, would require covering the surface of every lake and reservoir larger than 0.1 square kilometers in the lower 48 states, excluding the Great Lakes, with arrays of the devices. Obviously, that would directly conflict with existing economic and recreational uses, and raise a host of serious aesthetic and environmental concerns. Notably, interfering with evaporation on a large enough scale, across a big enough lake, could even alter local weather.
But study coauthor Ozgur Sahin says that the paper is more of a thought experiment designed to underscore the potential of the technology and the importance of advancing it beyond lab scale, rather than any sort of literal development proposal.
Sahin, an associate professor of biological sciences and physics at Columbia University, believes it could make a significant contribution to clean-energy and climate goals, even if it's never rolled out at anywhere near the potential extent highlighted in the study.
He says that early use cases could include remote reservoirs already generating hydroelectric power, where it's not as likely to interfere with other uses. It could offer the added benefit of reducing water loss through evaporation, increasing the amount available for energy generation, irrigation, and other needs.
The team of scientists also created a tiny, evaporation-powered car, dubbed Eva.
Sahin and colleagues at Columbia have been working on this technology for years. In a 2015 paper, the team described an evaporation engine that relied on Bacillus subtilis spores adhered to stacks of film attached to shutter mechanisms. When the device is placed above water, the spores absorb moisture from natural evaporation and expand, opening the shutter and allowing moisture to escape. The spores then dry out and contract, closing the shutter once again, and allowing additional air moisture to flow in and restart the process. When the device is connected to a generator, the continual oscillating motion generates a tiny amount of power.
As MIT Technology Review previously reported: "An eight-centimeter-by-eight-centimeter water surface can produce about two microwatts of electricity (a microwatt is one-millionth of a watt), on average, and can burst up to 60 microwatts."
The team has continued to work on improving the efficiency and scalability of the technology, exploring additional materials and means of spore adhesion. Because the technology is largely based on biological materials, the eventual cost could be lower than solar photovoltaic cells and other technologies that require specially manufactured materials, Sahin believes.
Crucially, Bacillus subtilis spores continue to perform the necessary mechanical motion even when they're dead or dormant.
In addition, the technology largely avoids the intermittency limitations of wind and solar power because, while evaporation rates change, they don't stop. Moreover, since the devices decrease the evaporation rate, they also raise the temperate of surface water. Modeling in the new study showed that by deliberating altering the rate of this process, they could create a kind of thermal water battery that balances out generation and demand. When throttled up, the heat in the water would increase evaporation, boosting power generation.
“We could match power demand on an hourly basis about 98 percent of the time in warm and dry places,” Sahin says. “Which means you don’t need an external battery to adjust for intermittency.”
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Hurricanes show need for building regulations, says US architect
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US federal and state policymakers' decisions to scrap some building regulations to save construction costs and taxpayers' money will make buildings less resilient to extreme weather and more costly to rebuild after natural disasters, argues Thomas Vonier, the president of the American Institute of Architects. For example, last month the Trump administration issued an executive order to ease rules governing environmental reviews for infrastructure projects and reduce restrictions on federally funded projects in flood-prone areas. Vonier says this relaxing of standards is ill advised, particularly considering the damage done by Hurricanes Harvey and Irma.
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http://www.brinknews.com/code-red-the-unacceptable-dangers-of-weaker-building-regulations/?utm_source=BRINK+Subscribers&utm_campaign=e86f9b6d1c-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_09_26&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c3639d7c98-e86f9b6d1c-110036825
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2017-09-27 11:06:06.557000
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Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Designing buildings to be sustainable, resilient and safe is at the core of what architects do. Resilient, energy-conscious buildings are good for the environment and for economic policy.
Yet in recent months, policymakers in Washington and in some states have proposed and even succeeded in rolling back regulations that have made America’s buildings among the safest and most advanced in the world. This is ill-advised public policy, especially in the aftermath of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma.
Late last month, the administration issued an executive order to roll back rules governing environmental reviews for infrastructure projects and to lift restrictions on federally funded projects in flood-prone areas. This is part of ongoing efforts to streamline regulations, ostensibly to speed the rebuilding of aging U.S. infrastructure. Red tape should be eliminated, of course, but why would we abandon requirements to keep federally funded projects outside of FEMA-defined flood plains?
Common-Sense Regulations
It is a mistake to roll back common-sense programs that make people safer in order to save taxpayers money. Designing projects to avoid exposure to natural disasters—floods, fires and earthquakes—is not just important to citizen health, safety and welfare, it makes basic economic sense. In 2016 alone, we spent $46 billion in the wake of natural disasters, and that was just in direct costs. The damage wrought by Harvey and Irma will total at least five times that much.
Efforts to weaken sound design policies are gaining traction in the states, too. The catastrophic damage from Hurricane Andrew 25 years ago led to more stringent Florida building codes, which have made the state’s newer buildings and homes resilient even to the most recent major storms. But in June of this year, Florida Governor Rick Scott signed legislation that will imperil Floridians’ ability to withstand future storms by no longer requiring the state to adopt new editions of nationally recognized, state-of-the-art model building codes.
Energy-conserving, sustainable buildings save lives and they save money, a fact that policymakers should realize.
The American Institute of Architects asked the governor to veto this legislation, noting that weaker codes could lead to much higher costs for rebuilding following major disasters—at the very moment that policymakers in Washington are looking to reduce funding for FEMA and other programs that help communities after disasters. The Wall Street Journal reports that Florida houses built after the state adopted the more stringent building codes survived Hurricane Irma in much better shape than those built under previous versions of the code.
And when Indiana was on the brink of allowing its energy code to expire last fall, last minute lobbying by architects convinced then-Governor Mike Pence to extend the code, keeping buildings warm in winter and cool in summer at reduced costs and lower rates of energy use.
Cost-Effective Policies
These are matters of common sense, but how do we convince states to maintain sound regulations and sensible policies to keep buildings efficient and resilient?
One solution is on the horizon. Shortly before the administration took office this January, a cash-starved FEMA proposed a regulation that would help the government meet the staggering costs of disaster recovery. FEMA proposed imposing a ”state disaster deductible”—a requirement that states shoulder some of the disaster recovery costs up front, before receiving federal dollars. The deductible would be reduced for states that applied stricter building codes, or took other steps to reduce vulnerability to disasters.
These kinds of cost-effective, innovative policies will help to ensure that the federal government does its part to make our buildings safer. So far, this proposal has been spared in efforts to gut building regulations, but the perception remains among some policymakers that good design is more expensive and not worth pursuing.
Energy-conserving, sustainable buildings save lives and they save money, a fact that policymakers at all levels of government should realize.
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London sees seventh emergency air alert in 13 months
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London experienced its seventh emergency air quality alert in 13 months on Wednesday. The alert, triggered by the capital’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, came as polluted air from the continent joined with toxic air within the city to produce an atmosphere likely to contain high levels of PM2.5 and moderate levels of PM10 particulate pollution. Khan called on the government to introduce a national diesel scrappage scheme and to increase his powers to combat non-transport pollution.
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/sep/27/london-issues-red-alert-for-extremely-high-air-pollution
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2017-09-27 10:37:34.043000
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The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has triggered the capital’s emergency air quality alert as polluted air from the continent combines with toxic air in London to create dangerous levels of pollution.
The alerts will see warnings displayed at bus stops, road signs and on the underground. Khan has also asked TV and radio stations across the capital to warn their viewers and listeners in news bulletins.
Anyone with lung or heart problems is advised to reduce strenuous exercise, especially outside. The young and elderly are particularly vulnerable.
Today’s alert has been triggered by “high” levels of air pollution. It is the seventh time in 13 months that the mayor has used the alert system. One instance was because the level of pollution was deemed “very high”, and on six occasions because it was “high”.
Khan said: “The shocking and illegal state of London’s filthy air means once again I am triggering a high air pollution alert today under my new comprehensive alert system.”
The government’s committee on the medical effects of air pollutants advises adults and children with lung problems, and adults with heart problems, to reduce strenuous physical exertion, particularly outdoors, and particularly if they experience symptoms. People with asthma may find they need to use their reliever inhaler more often. Older people should also reduce physical exertion.
Khan is implementing a range of measures to try to tackle the air pollution crisis in the capital, and he called on the government to do more.
“I am doing everything with the powers I have at City Hall and it’s now time for the government to step up by introducing a national diesel scrappage fund to rid our streets of dirty diesels, and to give me the powers I need to tackle non-transport sources of pollution.”
Responding to the news that the capital’s air quality emergency alert had been triggered, Prof Jonathan Grigg from Doctors Against Diesel said “dirty air is seriously damaging Londoners’ health and wellbeing.”
Grigg called on Khan to do more to tackle it. “Vulnerable people shouldn’t have to restrict their activities to stay safe,” he said. “Sadiq Khan must bring London’s air pollution down to legal levels as soon as possible, and commit to phase out diesel vehicles by 2025 to protect Londoners’ lungs.”
The government has come under increasing pressure over the UK’s air quality. It has suffered a string of humiliating defeats in the courts over its failure to clean up the nation’s air. Its latest proposal, released in July, was met with widespread criticism from clean air campaigners and regional politicians.
The latest episode of dangerously polluted air has been caused by mist, low cloud, fog and slow wind speed in London that has lead to a build up of pollution. This has combined with air arriving from the continent that has travelled slowly over industrial polluted areas giving it time to pick up emissions on the way. Experts say this is likely to produce high levels of PM2.5 and moderate levels of PM10 particulate pollution across areas of London and the south-east.
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Regus Regus opens workspace on top floor of Sayeh Tower in Tehran
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Flexible workspace provider Regus has opened its first location in Tehran with the aid of business services firm Edge Business Group. Regus Tehran occupies the top floor of the Sayeh Tower, close to major retail areas and Mellat Park. Regus aims to explore the “world’s largest untapped market”, with GDP growth in the region predicted to reach 4.5% by the end of 2017. With the addition of the Tehran site, Regus will have a location in 120 countries. Clients include Iran fashion e-commerce brand Modiseh and Emminence, Iran's largest consulting group.
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http://www.c-mw.net/regus-hits-new-workspace-height-tehrans-sayeh-tower/
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2017-09-27 10:30:11.370000
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Iranian companies and business visitors can now benefit from flexible work and meeting spaces in Tehran with the arrival of Regus. The international serviced office and meeting room provider launched its first flagship location in the Iranian capital in partnership with EDGE Business Group.
Regus Tehran is on the top floor of the Sayeh Tower, located on Valiasr Avenue – one of Tehran’s main thoroughfares and commercial centres. Benefits of the area include five-star hotels, top restaurants, banks and shopping centres in addition to Mellat (Nation) Park opposite the building.
Regus believes its centre will help meet the growing demand for world-class office space in what many business analysts call the world’s largest untapped market since the fall of the Soviet Union.
GDP growth in the MENA region’s second largest economy is expected to hit 4.5% by the end of the year, and as Iran’s economy continues to develop after the landmark nuclear deal in 2016, it is becoming an exciting market to consider for global brands.
With the addition of Iran to its global network, Regus now boasts a presence in 120 countries.
“It is exciting to see Regus coming to Iran and its presence there is testament to Iran being a thriving hub for business. Both local and international businesses will be able to benefit from this high-quality and ultra-modern workspace, whether they are looking to expand an existing business or start up a new one,” said Dr Mohsen Talaie, senior board advisor to Edge Business Group, Regus’s local partner in Iran.
Mark Dixon, chief executive of Regus, said: “Modern, dynamic businesses need to be able to work where they want and when they want, so I am very excited we are adding Iran to a growing global network. Whether you are a multi-national global corporation or a start-up, more than ever before you need flexibility, agility and the right location to succeed. Now firms in Iran or visitors can join over two million Regus customers who enjoy those benefits as part of our international network.”
Regus clients include Iran’s first and largest fashion e-commerce brand, Modiseh; the first global concierge service provider in Iran, Emminence; Iran’s largest consulting group, Ara Enterprise; Iran’s Largest FMCG company, Golestan; and one of the largest PR agencies in the world, MC Group.
The official launch ceremony took place on 13 September in the presence of government leaders, local business leaders, foreign companies’ representatives and guests from the chambers of commerce and foreign diplomatic corps in Tehran.
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Sirin Labs seeks ICO funding for 'blockchain phone'
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Swiss consumer electronics firm Sirin Labs is launching a crowdsale event in October to fund its next project, an open-source smartphone running on blockchain technology. The Finney will be followed by a personal computer, with both devices operating on an independent blockchain network. Sirin Labs said the smartphone will be the only model secure enough to hold cryptocurrencies. The Finney is set to cost $1,000 and will be available only to holders of Sirin Labs' SRN tokens. Its launch will follow that of the firm's $14,000 Solarin phone, which was released last year.
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https://www.engadget.com/2017/09/26/blockchain-smartphone-sirin-finney-solarin/
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2017-09-27 10:07:11.477000
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Sirin Labs, the company behind the $14,000 Solarin smartphone, is now developing an open-source model that runs on a fee-less blockchain. The Finney -- named in honor of bitcoin pioneer Hal Finney -- will be the only smartphone in the world that's fully secure and safe enough to hold cryptographic coins. Or so says the company, which is launching a crowdsale event this October (date to be confirmed) to support the phone's development.
According to Sirin, all Finney devices (there's an all-in-one PC coming, too) will form an independent blockchain network powered by IOTA's Tangle technology. The network will operate without centralized backbones or mining centers cluttering up the transaction process, using the SRN token as its default currency (only SRN token holders will be able to purchase the device). And it'll all run on a Sirin operating system specially designed to support blockchain applications such as crypto wallets and secure exchange access.
The phone comes with all the bells and whistles you'd expect from a device with a $1,000 (£740) price tag, including a 256GB internal memory and 16MP camera, plus a hefty suite of security measures. A behavioral-based intrusion prevention system, physical security switch and blockchain-based tamper proof feature mean that, in theory, it's going to take considerable effort to hack. But the question is whether anyone would want to. "The crypto community" is still a niche market, certainly more niche than the affluent business market the $14,000 Solarin was intended for, and that didn't work out so well -- only 10 months after its launch the company laid off a third of its staff, claiming it would be "pursuing new directions to a new product line". Some have suggested the Solarin was a product ahead of its time, and the Finney may well be too.
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DuPont HF alkylation process could offer alternative to diesel
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The clean fuel alkylate could become a widespread alternative to diesel, thanks to the development of a safer hydrofluoric acid (HF) alkylation conversion process. The fuel, a type of petrol, could help meet increasingly stringent emissions standards. Scientists at US chemicals giant DuPont have devised a cost-effective reactor design that replaces HF alkylation units with sulphuric acid alkylation units, sulphuric acid being a safer option than the more volatile HF. In the US, there are around 100 alkylation units in use with approximately half using HF alkylation technology that could be converted to sulphuric acid alkylation.
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http://www.hydrocarbonprocessing.com/magazine/2017/september-2017/special-focus-refining-technology-developments/hf-alkylation-conversion-is-finally-within-reach-part-1
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2017-09-27 09:51:43.407000
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- DuPont, Overland Park, Kansas
Jason Nunez is a Senior Technical Service Engineer at DuPont Clean Technologies for the alkylation and hydroprocessing businesses. He has more than 14 yr of experience in the refining and petrochemical industries. Prior to joining DuPont in 2014, he served in various roles at Citgo Petroleum Corp. and the Saudi Aramco Mobil Refinery. Mr. Nunez holds BS degrees in chemical engineering and environmental science from McNeese State University.
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BMO Harris issues credit card giving SMEs contactless payments
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Chicago-based lender BMO Harris Bank has launched a credit card for small US businesses, giving them access to its own Masterpass digital wallet as well as Apple Pay, Samsung Pay and Android Pay. The Small Business Mastercard also includes zero-liability protection.
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http://www.cardsinternational.com/news/company-news/bmo-harris-launches-new-credit-card-to-facilitate-contactless-payments-for-smbs/
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2017-09-27 09:51:35.827000
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BMO Harris Bank, a US-based lender, has released a new credit card especially for small businesses in the country.
The new offering, known as Small Business Mastercard, will enable the banks’ small merchants to add the card details to the BMO Harris Bank Masterpass, Apple Pay, Android Pay and Samsung Pay digital wallets to make contactless payments.
Using these digital wallets, small business customers can make transactions from their mobile devices without the need of wallet or a card.
The new zero liability protection eliminates unauthorised purchases and also supports the bank’s mission in providing small business customers an efficient way to make business purchases.
BMO Financial Group head of North American Retail Payments Jennifer Hawkins said: “Small business owners are busy, and we’re here to help by offering them a simpler purchasing experience on their smartphone devices.
“Our digital wallets are secure and easy to use, making for a simple, straightforward buying experience.”
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Insightin's AI-driven chatbot helps patients manage healthcare
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Maryland-based firm Insightin Health has launched the In360 app, a text-based chatbot that's powered by artificial intelligence (AI). It offers users real-time access to their health data and enables them to make informed decisions about treatment, in particular, by helping to manage how they pay for and receive care. The app integrates fully with Insightin Health's main platform and is one of a suite of features for patients that the company is planning to roll out. Insightin CEO Enam Noor said the preference-driven nature of the technology makes customers more likely to adopt it "because they are in control".
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http://www.mobihealthnews.com/content/insightin-launches-ai-powered-patient-facing-healthcare-decision-app
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2017-09-27 09:41:36.530000
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Patients deciding the next step of their care may soon be doing so with the help of an AI on their phone. Today, Insightin Health — a Gaithersburg, Maryland-based company that develops a data-based clinical decision-making platform — announced that it has launched a consumer-facing version of its machine learning-based service, which presents all of a user's health data and future options via a text-based chatbot.
The In360 app will offer users real-time access to streamlined data collection and personal decision-making tools. The platform incorporates users’ behavioral trends to make predictive recommendations and gauge care options, while presenting the information in a straightforward way that Insightin CEO and founder Enam Noor says provides an edge over competing services.
“There are many good consumer facing apps out there that are great, but as a consumer I may need several of these to manage my care, and they are likely unconnected,” Noor told MobiHealthNews. “Our user friendliness comes from our simple, intuitive design, and simple user interface.”
More specifically, the app condenses several aspects of paying for and receiving care in a way that is easy to understand, and then begins planning the next best option in a way that reflects the user’s tendencies.
“When a patient visits a doctor, pays a bill, schedules a preventative screening, claims a reward, or provides a quality rating, In360 gathers [information], connects the data, and provides the consumer with the next steps along their path to wellness,” Noor said. “The way people interface with their health insurer, doctor, or wider care team is changing, and we offer a multi-channel experience that is preference driven, and that alone makes the consumer more apt to engage because they are in control.”
In360 is available to consumers through an app or web browser, and Noor says that the app will eventually allow users to voice chat with the AI bot. The app is fully integrated with Insightin Health’s larger platform, which is marketed to health plans as a means to examine member acquisition, retention, engagement, and competitive analysis. In360 is the first of several consumer-facing features that will be launched as part of Insightin’s platform.
“The overarching goal we are solving is to empower the [consumers] to be healthier by engaging in preventative care with knowledge,” Noor said. “Healthier outcome for the member is a win-win for both the member and health plan.”
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Trump pushes $200m of funds towards STEM education
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The US president, Donald Trump, has signed a memorandum directing the Department of Education to make science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education a priority, and allocate at least $200m in annual grant funding to it. The memo also indicated Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos should take STEM education into account when awarding grants, creating an incentive for schools to teach computer science. Hadi Partovi, the CEO of non-profit Code.org, said the policy would benefit US children "that feel most targeted by some of the things that you may disagree with from this administration".
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https://www.edsurge.com/news/2017-09-25-president-trump-earmarks-200-million-in-federal-grants-for-stem-computer-science-programs
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2017-09-27 09:38:24.357000
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“Does that sound like big bucks? What do you guys think?”
That’s what President Donald Trump asked a young student today in the Oval Office. Surrounded by children, educators, Ivanka Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, the President signed a presidential memorandum that expands K-12 computer science and STEM education in the United States with at least $200 million in annual grant funding.
In a memo directed to DeVos, President Trump acknowledged that STEM skills, particularly computer science, will be necessary for workers to attain jobs in the future. Yet, as he noted, many American schools don’t offer computer science courses, or teachers qualified to teach these subjects.
The memo affirms that computer science education should be one of the Department of Education’s priorities, and instructs DeVos to take that into account when awarding grants to schools. In addition, the Department of Education should make helping districts recruit and train teachers in STEM subjects—in particular, computer science—a priority.
According to the memo, “The Secretary of Education (Secretary) shall, consistent with law, establish the promotion of high-quality STEM education, including Computer Science in particular, as one of the priorities of the Department of Education. The Secretary shall take this priority into account, to the extent permitted by law, when awarding grant funds in fiscal year 2018 and in future years.”
There appears to be no new federal funding for this new initiative. Rather, the memo directs the Department of Education to devote at least $200 million in existing grant funds to support computer science education efforts. (Department officials did not respond , and neither did the White House ).
In an interview with EdSurge, Hadi Partovi, CEO of Code.org, a nonprofit dedicated to expanding computer science education, says the Department of Education is being directed to focus existing grant funding on computer science programs.
Partovi does not seem concerned about how that stipulation may impact non-computer science programs at schools. “What it does is it focuses existing funds towards schools that teach CS,” he says, also adding that “it is going to create an incentive for schools to begin teaching computer science.” School districts that are applying to the Federal government for grants can get the same funding they were before, and “they’re now encouraged to include a proposal to expand access to computer science, with a focus on diversity.”
The memo also directs the education department to submit an annual report the Office of Management and Budget on “whether these actions succeeded in promoting and expanding access to high-quality STEM education, including Computer Science in particular, both generally and with respect to underserved populations.”
An Iranian-American, Partovi points out that he’s “probably the most unusual spokesperson to defend something done” by the Trump Administration, as his own community is being “directly targeted” by its policies. (Trump also announced a new travel ban on countries including Iran today.) He says he can distinguish and celebrate computer science education from other policies, contending that this initiative will help underprivileged children in American schools.
“It’s completely obvious to me that this policy will help American students, American children and, especially more than anything else, American children in communities, backgrounds and races that feel most targeted from some of the things that you may disagree with from this administration,” Partovi adds.
On Tuesday, Ivanka Trump, who is credited with leading this initiative, will join business leaders in Detroit to share more details about the tech sector’s support. Salesforce is one of the confirmed companies.
Trump’s announcement adds yet another twist in his relationship with the tech industry, which has largely condemned his position and policies surrounding immigration and citizenship.
Gerard Robinson, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who served as an education advisor on Trump’s transition team, says even though most tech companies don’t agree with the Trump administration’s policies, in politics, business people will still seek areas where they can agree.
“If Amazon and the tech companies believe this is important because this will help bolster the number of people available for them to hire, then they’ll see that as a good thing,” Robinson explains. “So for this, they'll work together. On other issues, they won’t.”
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Twitter allows select users to test new 280 character limit
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Twitter has raised its maximum character limit for selected users from 140 to 280, arguing that the limit unfairly impacted speakers of some languages. Only 0.4% of Japanese tweets reach 140 characters, for instance, with the average being 15 characters long. In English, by contrast, 9% of tweets hit the 140 character cap, and the average tweet is 34 characters. The social network commented that although there might be an “emotional constraint” to the old 140 character limit, it is not concerned about damage to the platform's overall appeal.
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http://www.silicon.co.uk/mobility/twitter-character-limit-222363?inf_by=59cb9079681db89a608b4a1f
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2017-09-27 09:34:59.063000
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Twitter has increased the 140-character limit for posts for the first time in its history.
The social network is allowing a number of its users to test a new 280 limit, claiming the previous restriction meant speakers of some languages were constrained when compared to others.
For example, only 0.4 percent of Tweets in Japanese are 140 characters in length compared to nine percent in English. The average Japanese Tweet is 15 characters long, while the English figure is 34.
Twitter character limit
“For example, when I (Aliza) Tweet in English, I quickly run into the 140 character limit and have to edit my Tweet down so it fits,” said Aliza Rosen, Twitter Product Manager.
“Sometimes, I have to remove a word that conveys an important meaning or emotion, or I don’t send my Tweet at all. But when Iku Tweets in Japanese, he doesn’t have the same problem. He finishes sharing his thought and still has room to spare.
“This is because in languages like Japanese, Korean, and Chinese you can convey about double the amount of information in one character as you can in many other languages, like English, Spanish, Portuguese, or French.”
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While Twitter has experimented with a number of new features that have drastically changed the experience, such as quoted Tweets, threads and images that don’t count towards the limit of a post, the 140 limit has remained sacrosanct.
The same constraint on Direct Messages was lifted in 2015 however.
Twitter said that although there might be an “emotional constraint” to the old limit, it is not worried that longer posts will damage the appeal of the platform.
“This is a small change, but a big move for us,” said CEO Jack Dorsey. “140 was an arbitrary choice based on the 160 character SMS limit. Proud of how thoughtful the team has been in solving a real problem people have when trying to tweet. And at the same time maintaining our brevity, speed, and essence!”
What do you know about mobile apps? Try our quiz!
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San Diego Congressman Holds Town Hall For Seniors
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California faces drastic federal funding cuts under a Republican proposal to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. Among the hardest hit populations would be low-income seniors. Rep. Scott Peters, D-San Diego, held a town hall Q & A Friday with a group of seniors to talk about their concerns.
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http://www.kpbs.org/news/2017/sep/22/san-diego-congressman-holds-town-hall-seniors/
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2017-09-27 09:31:45.877000
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California faces drastic federal funding cuts under a Republican proposal to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. Among the hardest hit populations would be low-income seniors. Rep. Scott Peters, D-San Diego, held a town hall Q & A Friday with a group of seniors to talk about their concerns.
The event was held at the Serving Seniors center downtown, which offers meals and services to hundreds of seniors. The seniors packed a dining hall to tell Peters their worries about Medicare and Medicaid.
The congressman said the GOP bill is being rushed through without expert analysis or a thorough discussion in the House of Representatives.
RELATED: Graham-Cassidy Health Bill Would Shift Funds From States That Expanded Medicaid
"If this bill passes that the Senate's considering — Graham Cassidy — that means tens of billions of dollars of lost Medicaid money for California. And it's really gonna hit this group of people really hard," Peters said.
Peters said he plans to continue fighting the proposal when he returns to Washington on Monday.
The seniors also shared concerns over the region's hepatitis A outbreak. Peters said he has requested for the Centers for Disease Control to provide additional treatment programs and oversight.
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Hepatitis deaths grow by one as cases continue to rise
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The death toll in San Diego’s hepatitis A outbreak increased by one Tuesday, and the region’s top public health official said she has not seen any signs yet of a slowdown in the public health emergency that has now killed 17 people.
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http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/health/sd-me-hepa-update-20170926-story.html
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2017-09-27 09:31:15.347000
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The death toll in San Diego’s hepatitis A outbreak increased by one Tuesday, and the region’s top public health official said she has not seen any signs yet of a slowdown in the public health emergency that has now killed 17 people.
Dr. Wilma Wooten said there are currently 49 suspected hepatitis cases and one death still under investigation. That number sat at 44 one week ago and has bounced around from roughly 30 to 50 cases under investigation at any given time for several months, public health officials have said.
“Until the numbers start dropping, we won’t have a clear indication of whether we have turned the corner or not,” Wooten said after making a presentation to the county Board of Supervisors.
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She said the total case count in the current outbreak jumped to 461 Tuesday with 315 hospitalizations since November and 17 deaths. That’s one more death, 17 more cases and 10 more hospitalizations than a week ago.
Labs at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta have confirmed current case counts, and Wooten said her office is still waiting for word from the CDC that an 18th death was caused by one of the 1B hepatitis strains responsible for outbreak cases in San Diego and several other California communities.
The CDC sent two of its workers to San Diego for a three-week period after the health department requested assistance in May. Dr. Nick Yphantides, the health department’s medical director, said the CDC will send representatives to San Diego next week for a planning meeting with local public health staffers.
San Diego County saw a major uptick in hepatitis A vaccinations since Yphantides led a group of local government and health care workers who stood together one week ago to announce a public education campaign, encouraging vaccinations for at-risk groups, frequent hand-washing and other hygiene and sanitation efforts.
In less than one week the number of vaccinations provided throughout the region jumped from nearly 23,000 to more than 42,000, Wooten said Tuesday.
Given that the county’s homeless population was estimated to be about 9,100 in the annual January count, some might think that the vaccination work is finished. But Wooten said there is more to do. She said that the number estimated to have “unstable” living circumstances is about 25,000.
“They might be living on somebody’s couch today, but they’re on the streets tomorrow,” Wooten said.
Illicit drug users are another major cohort of the hepatitis A cases confirmed so far. Wooten said that this population, across all types of drugs, is estimated to be 400,000 countywide. If half of those are already immune, that would leave about 200,000 who could benefit from immunization. So, while 42,000 vaccinations looks like a lot, that number, Wooten said, is probably far from what’s necessary to reach a large percentage of those who are most at risk.
During Tuesday’s meeting, Supervisor Kristin Gaspar wondered about the roughly 25 percent of cases who are not homeless and don’t use illicit drugs.
While these folks may not be in one or both of these high-risk groups themselves, the county has said that many have links to people who are in those high-risk categories. Gaspar asked for more information on precisely how many of the 461 cases occurred among the general population with no link to a high-risk group.
She said knowing that number could go a long way toward easing the fears of the larger community, especially businesses.
“I know that there is a heightened level of concern which trickled down and has impacts on our small business community, our local restaurants, for example, people that might be considering traveling to San Diego,” Gaspar said. “We want people to be informed, but we don’t want people walking around fearful to touch a doorknob.”
Wooten said she did not have a precise breakdown of that 25 percent available Tuesday morning but said the county, with the assistance of the CDC, is working on answering the question.
“We do know that a significant number of that group has had relationships with or worked or had some association with the at-risk groups. But a significant number have not. Staff and the CDC … will be working over the coming weeks to try to characterize any relationships or demographics of that group,” Wooten said.
Meanwhile, the city of San Diego has been busy on the sanitation front. Four portable restrooms went in at Tailgate Park. Located downtown at 14th and L streets, the facilities will be disinfected twice per day and will be monitored by full-time security. The addition brings the total number of downtown restrooms accessible to the homeless to 22, about half of which are open 24 hours a day.
Dozens of hand-washing stations have been installed around San Diego’s urban core and Wooten said work is underway to install more stations in outlying communities.
There were also fresh maneuvers Tuesday on the political front.
In a move to step up pressure on the mayor’s office to address homelessness and the hepatitis A outbreak, four City Council members released a memo Tuesday pushing for a ballot measure focused exclusively on addressing the homeless crisis and the need for affordable housing.
In the meantime, the council members said that Mayor Kevin Faulconer should redirect the $5 million that had previously been allocated in the city budget for a special election to “accelerate the citywide efforts to combat homelessness.”
The statement was signed by Council President Myrtle Cole and members David Alvarez, Barbara Bry and Georgette Gomez, all Democrats.
Their memo comes amid ongoing efforts by a coalition of tourism and civic leaders to get a citizens initiative on the June 2018 ballot that would raise the hotel tax to fund a convention center expansion, expand homeless services and fund road repairs. Some homeless advocates have opposed the effort, arguing that the homeless crisis deserves a ballot measure of its own. So far, no firm measure has been released.
“The position of the four of us is that if we’re going to put anything forward, it should be focused on homelessness and an affordable housing component that keeps people from becoming homeless,” Alvarez said. “The message we’re sending is we’re not interested in holding the homeless hostage to try and pursue other initiatives and another agenda.”
Councilwoman Bry said that, unlike the homeless crisis, expanding the convention center is not an emergency.
“If they were to collect enough signatures for something that focuses on the convention center expansion, my only decision would be what ballot it would go on. And I would vote to put it on the November 2018 ballot,” she said
Craig Gustafson, the mayor’s spokesman, did not address the notion that the homeless issue should be separated from convention center expansion and road repairs, focusing instead on what Faulconer’s proposal would do for the homeless if the council supported it.
“Earlier this year the Mayor proposed a ballot measure to create the first-ever dedicated funding stream for homeless services and affordable housing in the city’s history,” Gustafson said in an email. “It’s unfortunate the Council majority chose to delay the Mayor’s plan for homeless funding until next year, but he remains committed to working with the Council to take meaningful action to reduce homelessness.”
Staff writers Lori Weisberg and David Garrick contributed to this report.
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Treating patients as consumers — the key to improving revenue cycle health
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With an increase in high deductible plans, access to mobile healthcare and more transparency into price and quality, patients are more in charge of their health and are shouldering greater financial responsibility for the care they receive.
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https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/finance/treating-patients-as-consumers-the-key-to-improving-revenue-cycle-health.html
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2017-09-27 09:30:36.280000
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With an increase in high deductible plans, access to mobile healthcare and more transparency into price and quality, patients are more in charge of their health and are shouldering greater financial responsibility for the care they receive.
Patients are becoming the healthcare industry's largest payers, with more than 51 percent having a health plan with a deductible of more than $1,000, according to Carrie Moneymaker, vice president of solution design at Zotec Partners. This makes collecting patient payments vital to the hospital's bottom line. At Becker's Hospital Review 3rd Annual Health IT + Revenue Cycle Conference in Chicago, Ms. Moneymaker presented a way for hospitals to collect patient payments and retain a functional revenue cycle — treating the patient as a consumer.
"It's especially important for healthcare providers to recognize that patients should now be viewed as the consumer. They search the web for this care and the price of this care…We are no longer business to business. We are consumer to business," Ms. Moneymaker said.
Ms. Moneymaker suggested that providers establish a patient portal that allows patients to access their data at all times to allow patients to set up payment plans, place a credit card on file for easy payment and print their statements. Providers should also educate patients early on about upfront payments and their health savings account, set expectations that the service requires payment, strive to have the best customer service and create policies and procedures that are always followed, Ms. Moneymaker added.
In addition, since patients take an average of two times longer than insurers to pay their bills and require more touch points, Ms. Moneymaker said mobile technology such as texting will be a key transforming agent in the future healthcare climate.
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How Failure of the Obamacare Repeal Affects Consumers
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Obamacare repeal is dead, again. But the months of Republican attacks on the health law will still have consequences for some consumers. For now, people who get their insurance through Medicaid can rest easy. While some states have applied to make minor changes to their programs, the demise of the Graham-Cassidy legislation on Tuesday means no major cutbacks are on the immediate horizon.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/26/upshot/how-the-failure-of-obamacare-repeal-affects-consumers.html
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2017-09-27 09:28:55.273000
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Obamacare repeal is dead, again. But the months of Republican attacks on the health law will still have consequences for some consumers.
For now, people who get their insurance through Medicaid can rest easy. While some states have applied to make minor changes to their programs, the demise of the Graham-Cassidy legislation on Tuesday means no major cutbacks are on the immediate horizon. But almost every health bill that Republicans proposed this year called for subjecting the program to caps, so that idea seems unlikely to disappear.
Those with employer insurance can also coast along with the status quo; there have been no policy changes affecting the price or comprehensiveness of workplace health plans. The Republican bills would have eliminated rules requiring large employers to offer health benefits and could have weakened protections against annual or lifetime limits on workers’ coverage.
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Obamacare Repeal Fails Again: What’s Next for Health Care?
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"Game of Thrones" fans know that what is dead may never die. The saying may hold true for Obamacare repeal as well. The collapse of the Senate’s latest health care bill means that Republicans will miss the deadline for repealing the Affordable Care Act this year using a process that would require only 50 votes.
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http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/2017/09/26/What-s-Next-Health-Care
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2017-09-27 09:25:43.417000
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"Game of Thrones" fans know that what is dead may never die. The saying may hold true for Obamacare repeal as well.
The collapse of the Senate’s latest health care bill means that Republicans will miss the deadline for repealing the Affordable Care Act this year using a process that would require only 50 votes. The budget rules that enable that process expire on September 30, the end of fiscal year 2017.
Senate Republicans had to decide Tuesday whether to bother with a vote on the doomed bill. Was it better to try to show the conservative grassroots that they tried or to avoid the spectacle of failure on the Senate floor? They opted to pull the bill. But Republicans aren’t giving up entirely on the goal of Obamacare repeal. “We haven’t given up on changing the American health care system,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said. “We are not going to be able to do that this week, but it still lies ahead of us, and we haven’t given up on that.”
Here’s where the health care debate goes next:
The Final Margin Still Matters: Even without a vote, the margin of defeat matters for the future, writes David Leonhardt of The New York Times. “The more senators who oppose Graham-Cassidy, the less likely that yet another version of Trumpcare will emerge. … If Republicans come to terms with their total lack of a reasonable repeal plan, more of them will be open to a bipartisan compromise to fix Obamacare’s flaws.” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) issued a statement Tuesday decrying the “lousy process” for the Graham-Cassidy bill, but she did not indicate how she would have voted.
Another Repeal Attempt Could Happen: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Republicans are moving on to tax reform, but some GOP lawmakers reportedly hope to start over by having health care included in the budget blueprint for 2018 — the same blueprint that’s supposed to include instructions for tax reform so that it can pass with a simple GOP majority. Squeezing in health care could threaten the chances that a budget vehicle passes, potentially torpedoing tax reform in the process, and prominent lawmakers in both the House and Senate have already come out against the idea. Still, Graham predicted that his bill could return. “There are 50 votes for the substance,” he said. “There are not 50 votes for the process.” Even if Obamacare repeal is left out of the 2018 budget, Congress could still come back to it soon: One option is to use the fiscal 2019 budget. “It’s not a question of if, but when,” Graham said.
A Bipartisan Fix Seems Unlikely Right Now: About 70 percent of Americans want Congress to work on stabilizing the ACA marketplaces. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said again Monday that once Obamacare repeal is off the table, Democrats are willing to work with Republicans on that. And Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and Patty Murray (D-WA) had made some progress on a plan to guarantee federal subsidies for low-income Americans in exchange for additional flexibility for states on how that money could be spent. But the bipartisan effort stopped when the last-ditch Obamacare repeal appeared to be gaining momentum, and it now looks stalled. "We stopped the bipartisan talks last week because my goal wasn't just to get a bipartisan agreement — it was to get a bipartisan result,” Alexander said Monday. “I didn't see any way to get one in the current political environment." On Tuesday, he said he would consult with Murray to try to find consensus on steps that would help in 2018 and 2019. But other Republican leaders “indicated they have little interest in shoring up the existing insurance market,” The Washington Post reported Tuesday. “Instead, they suggested, the ongoing instability would backfire on Democrats and build momentum for the ACA’s eventual repeal.”
So the 2018 Insurance Market Will See Steep Rate Hikes: Insurers have until Wednesday to finalize contracts with the federal government to sell health plans through the Obamacare marketplace next year. Premiums are set to climb by double digits in many places, and insurers have placed at least part of the blame on the ongoing uncertainty about whether the Trump administration will continue to make cost-sharing reduction payments. The Trump administration has made the payments so far, but has not committed to continuing them. Any Obamacare stabilization efforts at this point are far more likely to affect 2019 rates. A safe bet for the next year: We’ll hear a lot more criticism of the health care law from Republicans, lots of complaints from Obamacare supporters about the administration’s sabotaging the exchanges, and plenty of complaints from Americans about rising health care costs.
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Premiums Likely to Rise Amid Fallout From Graham-Cassidy Health Bill
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In taking one last shot to overhaul the Affordable Care Act, Senate Republicans derailed a rare bipartisan push to stabilize the nation’s health insurance marketplaces and prevent double-digit rate hikes for many Obamacare customers next year.
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https://morningconsult.com/2017/09/26/premiums-likely-rise-amid-fallout-graham-cassidy-health-bill/
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2017-09-27 09:25:09.087000
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In taking one last shot to overhaul the Affordable Care Act, Senate Republicans derailed a rare bipartisan push to stabilize the nation’s health insurance marketplaces and prevent double-digit rate hikes for many Obamacare customers next year.
Earlier this month, there was a glimmer of hope that partisan warfare over the ACA had finally fizzled on Capitol Hill. Returning from the August recess, the Senate’s health committee launched a bipartisan effort — backed by health insurers and governors — to stabilize the ACA before a critical Sept. 27 deadline.
The push focused on short-term fixes to stave off increases in health insurance premiums, including extending key cost-sharing reduction payments that President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to cut off and granting states more flexibility to establish reinsurance programs, which help insurers pay for their most expensive claims.
But that effort died last week amid the resurgence of partisan health care proposals, most notably after some Senate Republicans, with support from the White House, pushed an 11th-hour bid to revive a repeal effort before the end of the month. While that last-ditch Obamacare repeal push floundered Tuesday, there is little residual momentum among Republicans who supported the stabilization bill to resume negotiations with Democrats.
Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), who spearheaded the bipartisan effort with ranking member Patty Murray (D-Wash.), blamed both sides for killing momentum on a bipartisan fix: Republicans for resuming their Obamacare repeal push and some Democrats for rallying behind a single-payer health care proposal.
“We stopped bipartisan talks last week because my goal wasn’t just to get a bipartisan agreement, it was to get a bipartisan result,” Alexander told reporters Monday. “And I didn’t see any way to get one in the current political environment.”
But on Tuesday Alexander — who said he supported the latest GOP repeal push — reversed course, saying in a statement he would reach out to committee members of both parties about resuming discussions about a “limited bipartisan plan.”
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Graham-Cassidy Would Lead to Unaffordable Costs for Older Adults Who Get Sick or Have a Pre-Existing Condition
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The Graham-Cassidy bill, as released on September 13, 2017 and on September 25, 2017, would lead to unaffordable increases in health care costs for older adults ages 50-64 who get sick or have a pre-existing condition. AARP examined the potential impact of Graham-Cassidy on two typical older consumers in select states and counties.
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http://www.aarp.org/ppi/info-2017/graham-cassidy-would-lead-to-unaffordable-costs-for-older-adults-who-get-sick-or-have-a-pre-existing-condition.html
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2017-09-27 09:23:33.313000
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The Graham-Cassidy bill, as released on September 13, 2017 and on September 25, 2017, would lead to unaffordable increases in health care costs for older adults ages 50-64 who get sick or have a pre-existing condition. AARP examined the potential impact of Graham-Cassidy on two typical older consumers in select states and counties.
Health insurance premiums and out-of-pocket costs could skyrocket under the bill. For example, in Cumberland County, Maine, a 50 year old consumer who is diagnosed with colon cancer could see her total health care costs increase by as much as $53,000 a year. And a 60 year-old consumer with preexisting conditions including diabetes, heart disease, and high blood pressure, could see his total health care costs increase by as much as $30,200 a year.
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Public-private partnerships could bring long-term telemedicine to resource-poor areas
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While telemedicine has been touted as a potential care delivery strategy in remote and low-resource settings, successfully sustaining these services has proved difficult. The key to long-term deployment, recent research suggests, could lie in key partnerships between public health systems and entrepreneurial providers of telemedicine.
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http://www.mobihealthnews.com/content/public-private-partnerships-could-bring-long-term-telemedicine-resource-poor-areas
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2017-09-27 09:20:05.053000
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While telemedicine has been touted as a potential care delivery strategy in remote and low-resource settings, successfully sustaining these services has proved difficult. The key to long-term deployment, recent research suggests, could lie in key partnerships between public health systems and entrepreneurial providers of telemedicine.
“Telemedicine is very helpful in extending the reach of healthcare to medically underserved regions.” Radha K. Mahapatra, professor in the Department of Information Systems and Operations Management at the University of Texas at Arlington’s College of Business, told MobiHealthNews. “However, implementing telemedicine in rural areas in low-income countries poses many challenges due to lack of resources, from technical infrastructure to human capital and financial capital.”
In his case study, which was presented at the Americas Conference on Information Systems 2017, Mahapatra and colleague Sahadeva Sahoo, a retired employee of the Indian Administrative Service, investigated a model currently employed by OTTET Telemedicine, a non-profit, non-government organization servicing India’s Odisha state. OTTET entered an arrangement with the state’s government to augment the local public health system by linking to private specialty hospitals or other large state-run medical facilities.
These connections, Mahapatra and Sahoo wrote, were enabled by information communication technologies (ICT). OTTET built 127 Telemedicine Operations Centers (TOCs) outfitted with laptops, video cameras, mobile diagnostic devices, and patient health record software in rural areas that could link with non-local private care partners.
The program has been a long-running success, according to the study, with 900 telemedicine technicians trained and approximately 500,000 patients served since 2009.
These results, they wrote, can be attributed to multiple factors inherent to the public-private partnership model. When the funding grants of other public health development projects expire, systems often fail due to a lack of local ownership. OTTET’s model, on the other hand, sought “micro entrepreneurs” willing to offset the $9,000 to $12,000 TOC startup costs and have a stake in the locally-operated centers. OTTET also gained local support for the telemedicine program’s success by training unemployed local youths to man each center and operate the telemedicine technology. All the while, these centers enjoyed the support of the state government’s regulatory oversight and technical support — services that required little to no additional costs to the public health service.
Mahapatra and Sahoo’s analysis suggests that OTTET’s program is not only sustainable, but appears to still be growing despite the various difficulties of introducing telemedicine to rural populations. The organization’s strategy to link government services with private stakeholders should be further examined, they argued, and should serve as a blueprint for future rollouts of rural telemedicine programs and other similar initiatives.
“There is a need to conduct more studies to understand the contingent conditions that lead to sustainable development through ICT-based projects. OTTET Telemedicine certainly offers a significant data point in this stream of research, and shines a light on the path to sustainable development,” they concluded.
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Buyer beware: Long-term care costs are surging, survey says
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Long-term care costs are surging and the most expensive option — a private nursing home room — may soon top $100,000 per year.
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https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/retirement/2017/09/26/long-term-care-costs-surging-survey-says/703254001/
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2017-09-27 09:18:52.630000
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Tom Murphy
The Associated Press
Long-term care costs are surging and the most expensive option — a private nursing home room — may soon top $100,000 per year.
Growing labor expenses and sicker patients helped push the median cost of care that includes adult day care and assisted living communities up an average of 4.5% this year, according to a survey released Tuesday by Genworth Financial. That's the second-highest increase since Genworth started its survey in 2004.
The cost of home health aide services climbed the most, rising 6%, to $21.50 an hour. Private nursing home care now costs more than $97,000.
Many Americans don't plan for these expenses or understand them until they face them, said Joe Caldwell of the National Council on Aging, which is not tied to the study.
"People don't like to think about it and talk about it ahead of time, so they kind of put off planning and saving for it financially because they don't think it's going to happen to them," he said.
Long-term care can impose a crushing financial burden on individuals or families in part because Medicare, the federal health coverage program for people over age 65, provides limited help. That can force people who don't have private coverage to spend down their assets until they qualify for the government's health insurance program for the poor, Medicaid.
Genworth Financial Inc. sells long-term care coverage and didn't address that cost in its study, which was based on information from 15,000 long-term care providers.
Coverage costs are rising as well, Caldwell said, noting that few employers offer help with that expense like they do with more common forms of coverage such as health insurance.
Initial premiums for long-term care coverage can cost well over $2,000 annually, depending on the customer's age, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center, which researches health care issues.
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A third of Americans 40 and older have done no planning for their long-term care needs, according to a 2016 Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey.
Caldwell said many people don't realize the limits of Medicare coverage, and he expects the need for long-term care to soar.
"There is this aging baby-boom population that's going to be really hit hard in the coming decade," he said. "We need to figure it out."
For 2017, long-term care prices climbed in part because the cost of labor rose, according to Genworth. Care providers had to raise pay to compete for workers in a tight job market or comply with state requirements for minimum wages. Many also have started providing health insurance to their workers to comply with the Affordable Care Act. The federal law requires all companies with 50 or more full-time employees to offer coverage.
Genworth researchers say costs also are rising because care providers are working with patients that have more complex medical needs and live longer than they did a decade ago. Plus Medicaid offers reimbursement that can fall below the cost of care, which forces long-term care providers to make that up in their prices.
Genworth sees no sign that long-term care expenses are starting to slow, said David O'Leary, CEO of the company's U.S. life division.
"We only see cost of care increasing," he said.
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Automation a threat to workers: Corbyn
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The leader of the UK Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, has suggested that companies which replace their staff with robots ought to be taxed. In a speech delivered at the party's annual conference in Brighton, Corbyn discussed the problem of people being made redundant by machines, saying: "If planned and managed properly, accelerated technological change can be the gateway for a new settlement between work and leisure, a springboard for creativity and culture, making technology our servant and not our master at long last".
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http://www.alphr.com/politics/1007167/jeremy-corbyn-wants-to-tax-robots-no-really
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2017-09-27 08:56:59.933000
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Robots are, in many ways, better than humans – especially if you work in HR. Robots never ask for a pay rise. Robots never steal someone else’s milk from the fridge. Robots almost never make a scene at the Christmas party. So it’s no surprise that automation threatens a lot of jobs, especially as in the long run they’re a fair bit cheaper than humans that consistently draw a salary, get sick and take the skills elsewhere after a time.
Robots may be good for company owners, who get to maximise profits, but it’s not so hot for society as a whole. If an entire workforce is displaced, then what do they do for work? How do they survive? These are difficult questions with serious repercussions that governments have been ducking for some time, as I wrote about in more depth here.
Today at the Labour Party conference, Jeremy Corbyn will attempt to answer some of these questions, and while it’s far easier to do this from the comfort of the opposition benches, it does at least start a discussion. Corbyn’s answer is for companies that replace workers with robots to be taxed in a “new settlement between work and leisure.”
“We need urgently to face the challenge of automation; robotics that could make so much of contemporary work redundant,” the Labour leader will say. “That is a threat in the hands of the greedy but what an opportunity if it’s managed in the interests of society as a whole.
“If planned and managed properly, accelerated technological change can be the gateway for a new settlement between work and leisure, a springboard for creativity and culture, making technology our servant and not our master at long last.”
The Wider Picture
You can disagree with the methods, but this feels quite an important moment to me. People on the fringes of politics have been talking about automation and robotics for a while, but for a keynote speech from a party leader, this could be a watershed moment.
When I wrote about this from my time at Futurefest 2016, a quote from Futurologist David Smith stuck with me: “If you think about the language, it’s very old: we use the ideas of retirement, pensions, taxation, welfare, how we generate money. The language is all wrong. This is half the problem – we can’t really have a conversation until we rethink how it really works.
“There needs to be a debate among politicians who have a view of the future – and there aren’t many – for a political system that has more long-term thinking,” he added. Quite so: our politics simply isn’t built for long-term planning. All a party needs to think about is the next election in five years time. Ten, 20 or 30 years away is somebody else’s problem – until it isn’t anymore.
Corbyn’s intervention may not be fully formed, but the more people that are thinking about the serious issues that automation raises the better.
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Tesco promises more from rebranded in-store payment wallet
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UK retail giant Tesco is rebranding its PayQwiq in-store payments system two years after being trialled. Now named Tesco Pay+, the app includes all its predecessor's features but Tesco has promised additional functionality in the future. As an incentive, until 14 January, customers are being offered a bonus loyalty-card point for every £4 ($5.3) spent via Tesco Pay+, which has a higher spending threshold than other contactless payment methods. Tesco said customers using the app visit stores 20% more often and that the payment system frees up staff to do more useful shop-floor tasks.
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https://retailanalysis.igd.com/news/news-article/t/tesco-launches-new-mobile-payments-app/i/17563
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2017-09-27 08:49:32.067000
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Tesco has officially launched Tesco Pay+ in a move designed to make payments in-store faster and easier. A replacement for PayQwik Tesco Pay+ replaces PayQwik from Tesco, the popular digital wallet service. First trialled two years ago and now rolled out to stores nationwide, the app has…
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AdBlock Plus launches filter for Facebook ads
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Open-source browser extension Adblock Plus has launched a tool capable of blocking ads on Facebook. The solution goes beneath the parent level of a web page to find hidden elements marked with advertising signatures, a practice Facebook employs to hide its ads from blocking software. However, Adblock doesn't expect to outsmart its rivals for long. "We're reasonably sure that Facebook's IT army will eventually outfox our outfoxing", the company said.
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http://www.zdnet.com/article/adblock-plus-offers-facebook-advert-filter/#ftag=RSSbaffb68
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2017-09-27 08:39:51.840000
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Adblock Plus has struck online advertising another blow by offering a new filter for users who want to block Facebook ads.
Ad-blocking apps, plugins, and software are used to strip the majority of advertising out of website pages, social media networks, and other online services.
While they can prevent malvertising -- fraudulent and malicious ads -- from potentially placing users at risk, they can have a massive knock-on effect for companies that rely on advert-generated revenue to stay afloat and keep offering free content online.
There's no easy option -- although The Pirate Bay has recently turned to visitor CPU cryptocurrency mining as an alternative to ads -- beyond negotiation between vendor and ad-block provider, or making ads more seamless to prevent users from turning to such software in the first place.
Some of the time, a game of cat-and-mouse comes into play, with adblockers on a campaign to block adverts, and vendors changing tactic to stop it occurring.
Adblock Plus and Facebook have been battling for some time now. Every time an ad-blocker introduces ways to remove ads, Facebook plays whack-a-mole and brings ads back to the forefront once more.
This week, Adblock Plus swung again, by announcing the addition of a new filter capable of blocking out likely adverts on the social networking site.
The new filter depends on a new "has" filter -- currently available only on Chrome and Opera -- to "read" Facebook posts and pick out the telltale signs of an advert. If elements which appear to be advertising appear, then the post is blocked.
Adblock Plus says that web elements at the top or parent level are often marked with advertising signals. However, Facebook obfuscated these signals by moving ad signatures below the parent level, rendering ad blockers ineffective.
The new filter allows the blocker to snoop under the top of the sub-elements below it, resulting in potentially some success with removing adverts.
"We're outfoxing Facebook's latest attempt to hide the ads on their site so ad blockers can't block them," Adblock says. "We're reasonably sure that Facebook's IT army will eventually outfox our outfoxing. Just like death and paying taxes, Facebook will continue the cat-and-mouse game, ushering in a fix that will stop ad blockers.
"The difference this time around, versus the back and forth our community shared with Facebook last fall, is that due to our community's hard work, we'll be able to respond more quickly to Facebook's next anti-block volley," the company added.
Previous and related coverage
Malvertising campaign strikes top websites worldwide Web domains including The New York Times, BBC, AOL, and MSN became victims of the campaign, designed to spread the Angler exploit kit. Malvertising reached new heights in 2016 The rise in such fraud is giving not only consumers a headache, but also ad agencies and firms which have to mitigate the threat. White Ops, Trade Desk partner to tackle ad fraud The companies aim to block fraudulent ad impressions before they are purchased.
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'Second tipping point' opens door to replacing all existing power
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The first tipping point for renewable energy, where solar and wind power is cheaper to install than thermal capacity, is upon us in many places already, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance founder Michael Liebreich. The second tipping point, when it is cheaper to build new renewable capacity than it is to keep existing thermal resources going, will be here by around 2030, increasing the addressable market for renewables to “everything” from incremental replacements, he said.
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https://about.bnef.com/blog/michael-liebreich-state-industry-keynote-bnef-emea-summit-2017/
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2017-09-27 08:05:13.683000
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Michael Liebreich, BNEF Chairman of the Advisory Board, gives his much-anticipated ‘state of the clean energy industry’ keynote at BNEF’s Future of Energy EMEA Summit in London, September 2017. View the presentation slides or the related opinion piece .
About BloombergNEF
BloombergNEF (BNEF) is a strategic research provider covering global commodity markets and the disruptive technologies driving the transition to a low-carbon economy. Our expert coverage assesses pathways for the power, transport, industry, buildings and agriculture sectors to adapt to the energy transition. We help commodity trading, corporate strategy, finance and policy professionals navigate change and generate opportunities.
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Teambrella P2P crypto-based insurance launches in two markets
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Russian based insurtech Teambrella is trialling its peer-to-peer blockchain-based platform in South America and the Netherlands. The firm is making use of blockchain to create "teams" of self-insured customers, insuring their pets in Peru and Argentina and their bikes in Holland. The goal is to create a platform where peers can insure each other, bypassing an insurance company. Lauded as the first decentralised autonomous organisation for insurance, Teambrella aims to make use of smart contracts which payout following a team vote in the event of a claim.
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https://btcmanager.com/teambrella-first-insurance-dao-starts-in-s-america-and-holland/
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2017-09-27 07:53:12.600000
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Teambrella wants to solve some problems of the insurance industry by eliminating insurance companies. Utilizing smart contracts and cryptocurrencies the Russian developers have built a decentralized insurance platform. Now the first projects have launched, covering pets in South America and bicycles in the Netherlands. Due to the fees, the developers switched from Bitcoin to Ethereum.
Until now, bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have mostly demonstrated, that you can build and maintain money in a decentralized way, without states and central banks. That marks a historic innovation, which started a silent revolution that will need decades to penetrate the whole of society.
Money is just the Beginning
For some, however, this is just the beginning. Smart contracts are said not just to revolutionize money, but the concept of a company as a whole. The reason is that with blockchain driven smart contracts you can decentralize any process in which a group of people decides what is done with money under certain rules. The DAO has been an impressive demonstration, that it is possible to use smart contracts to build a complex organization like an investment company – without a company, but just with decentrally organized peers. The DAO failed, but the idea it symbolized lives on. It just started.
One of the most thrilling DAOs is Teambrella. The Russian developers behind the project have worked on the platform, which aims to create a decentralized insurance company, for almost two years. Now they have launched the project with insurance teams in South America and the Netherlands.
Solving Insurance Problems by Eliminating Insurance Companies
“Insurance companies and policyholders have conflicting interests,” the whitepaper explains the problems with traditional insurance, “This is reflected in various bad faith practices of the companies, such as unreasonable delays, denial of payment, etc. Though some jurisdictions try to mitigate this by adopting the tort of insurance bad faith, the general public has a very negative perception of the industry. This, in turn, leads to a high amount of frauds committed by otherwise law-abiding persons.” The developers of Teambrella believe that these problems can be reduced or eliminated by implementing a peer-to-peer (P2P) insurance organization. Further, an insurance DAO can bring insurances to areas in which no insurance is available right now.
The concept of Teambrella is to let peers build groups, for example, to insure bicycles. The peers decide about rules, what is covered, what documents need to be submitted and so on. Formulas from insurance math connect values like risk, reimbursements, and value of the insured object. The members of the team can decide on their own, how much they pay, which is at the same time the maximum amount others pay when they submit a damage by themselves.
When there is a case, every team member can vote in relation to the reimbursement payments it made in the past. To make it more simple to use Teambrella in larger groups, it is possible to give your vote to another member, which receives parts of the reimbursements as a fee. Such “pro-voter” can be a freelancer for insurance companies, which could have the same responsibilities as employees for insurance companies.
The monthly payment of the team members is made in cryptocurrencies on multisig addresses. These addresses are designed in a way that funds can only be released after a defined number of team members signed their vote.
Pioneering with Pet Insurance in Peru and Argentina
After years of development, Teambrella recently started. The first teams are niche cases in South America and the Netherlands. “We are interested to see how Teambrella will work in different contexts and cultures. These first teams are the pioneers; we want to go further in exploring more opportunities for P2P coverage and collaborating with the various communities,” developer Alex Paperno explains.
There are two teams; one connects cat owners in Peru with dog owners in Argentina to insure their cats, in case they get sick or need surgery. The second group covers bicycles in the Netherland, the country famous for its love of this particular mode of transport. Both teams have just started, Paperno explains, “In Peru, we have a team of 80 pet owners, in Argentina and the Netherlands we are still accepting new team members.”
Switching from Bitcoin to Ethereum
During the first years of development, Teambrella used P2SH addresses for bitcoin payments. However, during the past month, the team switched to Ethereum. Paperno explained why:
“While bitcoin was naturally the best choice back then, we did not design Teambrella to be bound by one cryptocurrency. Using bitcoin turned out to be a challenge as long as the fees were growing up to $5, and that is incompatible with our model. If the situation with Bitcoin changes, we may reconsider the decision, though we plan to implement support of ShapeShift soon so we could work with multiple cryptocurrencies.”
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FT.com uncovers $1.3m a month of domain spoofing against its site
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The Financial Times is urging fellow publishers to adopt the Interactive Advertising Bureau Tech Lab’s tool ads.txt, after it uncovered £1m ($1.3m) a month worth of fraudulent inventory that purported to be the FT's posted across 10 ad exchanges and 15 video exchanges. "The industry continues to waste marketing budgets on what is essentially organised crime,” said Anthony Hitchings, the FT’s digital advertising operations director, who would only say the exchanges were "known names". In February, the domain spoofing scheme Methbot fooled more than 6,000 US publishers.
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https://digiday.com/media/ft-warns-advertisers-discovering-high-levels-of-domain-spoofing/
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2017-09-27 07:43:25.333000
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The Financial Times has investigated the scale of domain spoofing occurring against its site, and has been shocked by the results.
The publisher has found display ads against inventory masquerading as FT.com on 10 separate ad exchanges and video ads on 15 exchanges, even though the FT doesn’t even sell video ads programmatically, with 300 accounts selling inventory purporting to be the FT’s. The scale of the fraud uncovered is vast — the equivalent of one month’s supply of bona fide FT.com video inventory was fraudulently appearing in a single day. The FT has estimated the value of the fraudulent inventory to be £1 million ($1.3 million) a month.
“The scale of the fraud we found is jaw-dropping,” said Anthony Hitchings, the FT’s digital advertising operations director. “The industry continues to waste marketing budgets on what is essentially organized crime.”
Jon Slade, Financial Times chief commercial officer, on Sept. 27 planned to notify the exchanges in question by mail to remove the fraudulent inventory, with the promise that the FT will check back in a month to ensure action has been taken. Hitchings wouldn’t say which exchanges were at fault but added that they are “known” names. A second letter is on its way to 11,000 of the FT’s client and agency contacts, explaining the problem and asking them to watch out for inventory that isn’t sourced from the two exchanges the FT sells its display inventory through, Google AdX and TrustX.
The fraud investigation coincided with the FT’s adoption of ads.txt, the Interactive Advertising Bureau Tech Lab’s tool created to help publishers combat ad fraud — specifically domain spoofing, but also arbitrage via unauthorized reselling. Other publishers including the Guardian and News UK have also adopted ads.txt, though uptake has been slow in the U.K. In his letter, Slade urged the buy side to push for publisher adoption of ads.txt.
“We are working with partners to support the adoption of ads.txt by all publishers, as part of our ongoing efforts to help clean up digital advertising. By eliminating this extremely widespread form of fraud, budgets will work that much harder for advertisers and the revenue will reach working media to fund the independent, high-quality journalism which society, especially today, depends upon,” Slade wrote in the letter to client and agency contacts.
Domain spoofing has long dogged digital advertising, and premium publishers are top targets for fraudsters, as advertisers will pay a lot for their inventory. The scale at which publishers have become domain-spoofing targets was brought under a sharp spotlight in February after the “Methbot” scheme, which spoofed more than 6,000 publishers in the U.S.
“This is what inspires fraudsters to take a vanilla URL and dress it up as a comScore top 50 site, so it appears more attractive to DSPs. This results in the fraudsters getting paid, the advertiser having to deal with some terrible PR about their brand appearing on a random site and the publisher is left out of pocket. Ads.txt is going to help stamp a lot of these bad actors out,” said ad tech consultant Paul Gubbins.
The Financial Times has long favored direct deals with advertisers, so programmatic ads only account for 5 percent of its advertising revenue. That could mean other publishers who rely more on programmatic revenue could have an even bigger domain-spoofing problem.
It’s not the first time the FT has looked into fraud on its own site, although it is the first time it has conducted this particular test. Previously, a bank came to the FT to talk about poor performance of its ads, which the bank had bought via a trading desk, according to Hitchings. “The brand thought they had bought a homepage takeover for the day and were expecting high impact. Not a single ad appeared,” he said.
We’ll discuss the next phase of programmatic at the Digiday Publishing Summit Europe. Learn more here.
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Start-up allows fans to invest in music artists' royalties
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A start-up called Royalty Flow is aiming to allow fans to invest in the potential future royalties of music artists. Founded by producers for rapper Eminem, the firm is aiming to raise between $11m and $50m from fans for a stake in up to 25% of the artist's song catalogue. The income stream to investors will be provided by royalties generated by albums released by Eminem between 1993 and 2013.
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https://qz.com/1087300/you-can-invest-in-eminem-via-a-new-publishing-startup-called-royalty-flow/?mc_cid=b963862094&mc_eid=34c4551471
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2017-09-27 07:34:59.983000
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Steely Dan’s 69-year-old Donald Fagan has to go back on tour. Luis Fonzi and Daddy Yankee’s “Despacito” may have lost out on millions. Liam Gallagher can’t afford people to make his “fucking tea.”
The truth is that digital music streaming, as beloved as it is amongst listeners for its accessibility and cheapness, just doesn’t make all that much money for artists. But there is good news yet. Streaming is so popular these days that it’s actually growing the once-dying music business—giving the industry a lift for the first time in decades, and offering a glimmer of hope to the producers and musicians who had been watching profits crash down year after year.
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Off the heels of that sudden renewal of optimism, a new music startup, called Royalty Flow, plans to sell shares of rapper Eminem’s royalties—banking on future industry growth as well as the idea that fans will be eager to “own” part of an artist’s work. Jeff and Mark Bass, the two producers who first signed the rapper, are behind the effort, pledging to sell up to 25% of their holdings in his song catalog to the new company. Royalty Flow has just filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission to raise between $11 million and $50 million via a crowdsourced fundraising and list on the Nasdaq if successful.
The income stream will include royalties from studio albums that Eminem released between 1993 and 2013, such as The Eminem Show and The Marshall Mathers LP. (Note that this venture has nothing to do with the real Slim Shady; Eminem “was not consulted,” his record label Interscope stated, and is not selling his own publishing.)
Some in the music industry are skeptical of the project, drawing parallels to the “Bowie bonds” that were issued in the 1990s and never saw their promised success—but the odd new era of streaming is volatile and unpredictable enough that things may be different, this time around. According to Nielsen Music, Eminem’s catalog has sold 172 million albums worldwide, 47.4 million of them in the US, to date.
A new report from the Recording Industry of America this month shows that streaming—which is up 48% so far this year—is now 62% of the US music business.
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San Francisco studies solar-plus-storage disaster power backup
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A solar power-plus-storage solution would be the best way for San Francisco to ensure critical services have access to back-up power following a disaster, rather than relying on diesel generators, according to a report funded by the Department of Energy and San Francisco city. The proposal had been initially costed at $40m but private-sector investment could bring the city's commitment down to $26m, the report says.
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http://www.utilitydive.com/news/san-francisco-studying-solar-plus-storage-systems-to-boost-local-resiliency/505828/
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2017-09-27 06:48:58.927000
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Dive Brief:
San Francisco city officials are considering installing solar-plus-storage systems at as many as 12 community buildings, the San Francisco Examiner reports.
Backers of the proposed project say the installations would be designed to provide energy for critical loads for up to five days to help the city survive a major disaster, such as an earthquake.
Whether or not the city moves forward with the project could depend on costs. Consulting group Arup, hired to study the viability of the solar-plus-storage systems, put the price tag at $40 million.
Dive Insight:
Much of San Francisco’s current resiliency planning relies on diesel generators to provide electricity should the city be hit by a disaster. But obtaining fuel for those generators could be difficult during a major disaster that disrupts supply chains.
According to a three year study funded with $1.3 million from the Department of Energy and $300,000 in San Francisco city funds, solar-plus-storage installations at community centers would provide fuel-free backup power for critical services such as refrigeration for medical supplies, lighting for shelters, and communications.
It is still unclear, however, how the city would pay for the proposed installations. The $40 million price tag could be reduced to about $26 million, if the city can find a private sector partner for the installations.
“We are still looking forward to working collaboratively with our fellow city agencies to think about how implementation of these projects might fit into the city’s bigger picture around emergency response, resiliency and also bringing more renewables onto our grid,” Department of the Environment spokesperson Peter Gallotta told the Examiner.
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UN sustainability goals can help institutional investors
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Institutional investors can generate economic gains and investment returns by paying attention to the United Nation's sustainable development goals, a panel of executives speaking at the Principles for Responsible Investing Conference have said. Investing according to these principles can aid the development of sustainable economies while also adding greater diversity to portfolios since they necessitate investing globally, noted pension fund managers from the US, Australia and the Netherlands. The executives also suggested the success of the UN's sustainability initiative may depend on significant institutional investment.
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http://www.pionline.com/article/20170926/ONLINE/170929902/pension-fund-execs-call-for-investors-to-use-uns-sustainable-development-goals?newsletter=daily&issue=20170926
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2017-09-27 05:54:27.100000
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The United Nations' sustainable development goals can help institutional investors to invest in new opportunities and identify future areas of risk in portfolios, said pension fund executives.
Speaking on a panel discussion at the Principles for Responsible Investment annual conference in Berlin on Tuesday, executives outlined the ways they are using the UN's 17 sustainable development goals in their portfolios and why they are important.
Alexandra West, portfolio head, strategy and innovation at the A$40 billion ($32 billion) Cbus, Melbourne, Australia, said there are two reasons why the goals are important. The first is "because they will ensure a sustainable economy and they will drive economic growth," and the second is that they "need us. Without mainstream institutional investment" the goals will not be achieved, she said.
Anne Simpson, investment director of sustainable investments at the $336.2 billion California Public Employees' Retirement System, Sacramento, agreed. "These are not just a moral imperative," but an "economic necessity" given CalPERS' size, which means the fund has "nowhere to hide from the world's problems and the world's risks. However, we are not in a position, even though we are a large fund, to tackle these … without a public policy framework."
The goals also present potential for returns. Ms. Simpson said CalPERS relies on economic growth globally and cannot invest in only one place.
"I think we have our part to do … not out of charity, but mutual interest to ensure those goals are met." Ms. Simpson added that the goals will "underpin our ability to pay pensions" over generations to come.
For the €394 billion ($470.4 billion) Stichting Pensioenfonds ABP, Heerlen, Netherlands, the goals "are a gift from the United Nations to the world," said Josepha Meijer, vice chairwoman and member of the board of trustees at the fund.
Executives at ABP see a number of areas where the goals are relevant: "They provide a widely supportive frame of reference, and also a vision to the world." She said the goals can be used as an "overarching framework" in portfolios. "ABP wants to invest in solutions … that contribute to SDGs … through investments that meet our risk/return requirement, but also (have a) positive impact," said Ms. Meijer.
But not all goals are investible, added Ms. West. Some never will be, and others will require policy changes. She said investors have three levers they can pull: allocate capital, engage and "advocate either for others to join you or for policy changes to make things more investible."
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UK firm eyes US market for its liquid-air energy-storage tech
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London firm Highview Power Storage is seeking US projects for its liquid air energy storage (LAES) system, after being granted £1.5m ($2.03m) from the UK government’s Innovate UK programme. Highview's LAES system cools and compresses air into a liquid and stores it in a thermos-like chamber. Upon release, the liquid air expands and drives a turbine, creating electricity. Richard Riley, Highview’s business development manager for North America, said the low-cost system is ideally suited to large-scale projects, while the US is considered to have the healthiest energy storage market.
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http://www.utilitydive.com/news/hybrid-compressed-liquid-air-storage-technology-could-be-coming-to-the-us/505660/
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2017-09-27 02:46:11.623000
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A new, hybrid storage technology could be making its way to the United States, if a U.K. company’s plans pan out.
Last month, Highview Power Storage won £1.5 million ($2.03 million) in funding for a new hybrid configuration of its existing Liquid Air Energy Storage (LAES) system from the U.K. government’s Innovate UK program.
The funding will pay for the addition of supercapacitors and flywheel technology to Highview’s existing 5 MW, 15 MWh LAES facility at Viridor’s Pilsworth landfill gas plant in Bury, near Manchester, U.K. That project was the recipient of £8 million ($10.8 million) in funding from the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy in 2014 and is due to come online by year end.
Quick response
A LAES system has a ramp rate similar to a gas-fired peaking plant. Adding flywheels and supercapcitors gives the system the ability to respond even more quickly to the U.K.’s frequency response market and enables it to layer on more revenue streams, said Richard Riley, Highview’s business development manager for North America.
“The next step is to build a complete system,” Riley told Utility Dive. The minimum size for a commercial scale LAES plant is 10 MW, which would cost between $40 million and $60 million, he said.
Highview wants to take its technology to that next step, from demonstration to commercial scale, and is looking for projects in the U.S. “The U.S. is probably the most healthy storage market,” particularly states such as California, Hawaii and New York, Riley said.
Riley acknowledged that there is a challenge in the U.S.’ patchwork of state regulatory regimes, buts said the state of regulation for energy storage in the U.S. is “promising.” Energy regulation in the U.K. is slower moving and more “deliberative,” he said.
While a LAES system itself is new, its component parts rely on existing technology. “A lot of the equipment comes from the oil and gas industry. It is all catalogue equipment,” Riley said. The most expensive component in the system is air liquefaction equipment.
Liquid air storage
Liquid air has been used industrially for decades, but it did not appear as a storage technology until about 2001 when it was developed by Peter Dearman, a garage inventor in Hertfordshire. “Dearman engines” are being explored for use in liquid nitrogen fueled vehicles, including zero emission refrigerated trucks. Highview Power was created to use Dearman's technology for energy storage and move it to the commercial stage.
A LAES system cools and compresses air into a liquid that is stored in what is essentially a giant thermos. When the air is released, it expands rapidly and is used to drive a conventional expansion turbine. To increase the efficiency of that process, the air is heated as it expands. The system also incorporates devices that can store heat from the air liquefaction process and cold from the process of moving the air back to ambient temperature in order to further increase system efficiency.
A LAES system also can be paired with other industrial plants to gain efficiencies by using waste heat and cold. Highview’s 350 kW, 2.5 kWh demonstration project in Slough, U.K., uses waste from a biomass plant. Highview says another application for its technology would be to pair it with a liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant that compresses natural gas into a liquid.
The roundtrip efficiency of a LAES system is about 60%, but Highview says it can boost that up to about 70% by gaining efficiencies from thermal storage or hosting. The biggest cost in operating the system is purchasing power to run the compressors for the initial air liquefaction process. The system also has a parasitic load of about 10%, says Riley.
Compressed air energy storage
In many ways, a LAES system is comparable to a compressed air energy storage (CAES) project or the CAES technology that Hydrostor is tweaking by pumping the air that stores the energy into an underground reservoir instead of an underground cavern.
Among the benefits of those systems are that they have a long life span and longer duration or discharge times than battery storage systems. A LAES system could last for 30 years and can discharge for "tens of hours or even days," Riley said. The heat loss of energy from the storage tanks is about 0.1% a day, he said. Those systems also can be configured to very large sizes for energy storage, up to hundreds of megawatts.
That is one of the chief benefits of LAES, Riley said. It can be scaled to very large sizes with very low lifetime costs. That also means that LAES lends itself to certain applications more than others. It would not be good for residential storage, for instance, but could provide peaking power or be used to “chop peaks” or as a non-wires alternative for a substation upgrade, Riley said.
For some applications such as those, “LAES is the lowest cost system that is unconstrained by geography, meaning that it can be located where the value of storage is highest,” Riley said. He cited to Lazard’s levelized cost of energy storage study that put the low end cost of LAES – or thermal storage as Lazard calls it – at $227/MWh compared with $152/MWh for pumped hydro and $116/MWh for compressed air.
Riley said Highview is already “engaging with utilities” in the U.S. for sites and applications for its next installation and hopes to initiate the company’s first commercial projects in the next 12 months.
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Medicaid Has A Bull’s-Eye On Its Back, Which Means No One Is Entirely Safe
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The latest proposal by Republicans in the Senate has been criticised for potentially crippling Medicaid, a system that 74 million Americans, by scrapping present expansions and reducing federal funding. The new proposal is being pushed for a vote before September 30th, when it will only require 50 votes to pass. More than one in five Americans relying on the service for medical assistance from all walks of life, and it is used as and when necessary, particularly for those in poverty. All states use Medicaid, though in New Mexico 44 percent of citizens use the service and in California and West Virginia almost one in three do. Medicaid was created in 1965 as part of a national health insurance program created by President Lyndon Johnson, and has expanded from welfare program to general healthcare cover, now including anyone earning below 138 percent of the poverty line ($16,394). The cost of maintaining the system is significant, with federal and state officials spending approximately $575 billion in the past 12 months. Medicaid’s financial support not only helps those in need of treatment, it helps to pay for school nurses, therapists, screenings, wheelchairs, buses and more. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 75 of the public have a favorable attitude towards Medicaid, including 84 percent of Democrats and 61 percent of Republicans. However, Medicaid is a target for cuts, putting it into a potentially dangerous position as a bill has already been passed to cut $800 billion from the service’s funding.
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http://californiahealthline.org/news/medicaid-has-a-bulls-eye-on-its-back-which-means-no-one-is-entirely-safe/
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2017-09-26 17:15:53.083000
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About Capitol Desk Capitol Desk delivers the latest in health care policy and politics from Sacramento and around the state. Have an idea? Let us know.
This special series examines the reach and the role of Medicaid, the federal-state program that began as a medical program for the poor but now provides a wide variety of services for California as well as a large swath of America. More Stories
When high levels of lead were discovered in the public water system in Flint, Mich., in 2015, Medicaid stepped in to help thousands of children get tested for poisoning and receive care.
When disabled children need to get to doctors’ appointments — either across town or hundreds of miles away — Medicaid pays for their transportation.
When middle-class older Americans deplete their savings to pay for costly nursing home care, Medicaid offers coverage.
The United States has become a Medicaid nation.
Although it started as a plan to cover only the poor, Medicaid now touches tens of millions of Americans who live above the poverty line. The program serves as a backstop for America’s scattershot health care system, and as Republicans learned this year in their relentless battle to replace the Affordable Care Act, efforts to drastically change that can spur a backlash.
The latest Republican proposal — by Sens. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) and Bill Cassidy (La.) — is being pummeled by doctors, insurers, hospitals and patient advocates because it would scrap the health law’s Medicaid expansion and reduce federal funding for Medicaid. Senate leaders are trying to get a vote before Sept. 30, when special budget rules would allow the package to pass with only 50 votes.
Today, Medicaid is the nation’s largest health insurance program, covering 74 million, or more than 1 in 5 Americans. Over the next weeks, Kaiser Health News will explore the vast reach of the program. About 25 percent of Americans will be on Medicaid at some point over the course of the year — many are just a pink slip away from being eligible.
This KHN story also ran on NPR . It can be republished for free ( details ).
Medicaid funding protects families from having to sell a home or declare bankruptcy to pay for the care of a disabled child or elderly parent. It responds to cover disaster relief, public health emergencies and programs in schools that lack other sources of funding.
Millions of women who don’t qualify for full Medicaid benefits each year obtain family planning services paid for by Medicaid. These women have incomes as high as triple the federal poverty rate, or over $36,000 for an individual. And thousands of women, who otherwise don’t qualify for the program, get treated each year for breast and cervical cancers through Medicaid.
“Instead of cutting Medicaid, [lawmakers] increased public awareness of its value and made it even harder to cut in the future,” said Jonathan Oberlander, professor of health policy and management at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and a supporter of the federal health law. The Medicaid cuts passed the House, but the ACA overhaul legislation fell short in the Senate in July.
Medicaid is the workhorse of the health system, covering:
39 percent of all children.
Nearly half of all births in the country.
60 percent of nursing home and other long-term care expenses.
More than one-quarter of all spending on mental health services and over a fifth of all spending on substance abuse treatment.
Unlike Medicare beneficiaries, who keep that insurance for life, most Medicaid enrollees churn in and out of the program every few years, depending on their circumstances.
Such numbers underline the importance of Medicaid, but also provoke alarm among conservatives and some economists who say the U.S. cannot afford the costs over the long run.
Bill Hammond, director of health policy of the fiscally conservative Empire Center for Public Policy in Albany, N.Y., said Medicaid has been a big help for those it was designed to cover — children and the disabled. But it has grown so big that the cost hurts state efforts to pay for other necessary public services, such as education and roads. “I can’t think of any other anti-poverty program that reaches so many people. … It’s too expensive a benefit.”
“We need to transition people to get coverage in the private sector,” he said, noting how millions on the program have incomes above the federal poverty level.
It May Be The Person Down The Block
Joana Weaver, 49, of Salisbury, Md., who has cerebral palsy, has been on and off Medicaid since birth. For the past few years, it’s paid for home nursing services for six hours a day to help her get dressed, bathed and fed. That’s kept her out of a nursing home and enabled her to teach English part time at a local community college.
“For me, Medicaid has meant having my independence,” Weaver said.
Like Weaver, many people getting Medicaid today are not easily typecast. They include grandmothers — one-quarter of Medicaid enrollees are elderly people or disabled adults.
Or the kid next door. About half of Medicaid enrollees are children, many with physical or mental disabilities.
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Many of the rest — about 24 million enrollees — are adults under 65 without disabilities who earn too little to afford health insurance otherwise. About 60 percent of non-disabled adult enrollees have a job. Many of those who don’t work are caregivers.
“It’s the mechanic down the street, the woman waiting tables where you go for breakfast and people working at the grocery store,” said Sara Rosenbaum, a health policy expert at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
While all states rely on Medicaid, it’s used more in some places than others because of varying state eligibility rules and poverty rates. As of August, about 44 percent of New Mexico residents are insured by Medicaid. In West Virginia, as in California, the rate is nearly 1 in 3.
Jane and Fred Fergus, in Lawrence, Kan., said Medicaid has been a cornerstone in their lives since their son, Franklin, was born eight years ago with a severe genetic disability that left him unable to speak or walk. He is blind and deaf on one side of his body.
Although the family has insurance through Fred’s job as a high school history teacher, Franklin was eligible for Medicaid through an optional program that states use to help families let their children be cared for at home, rather than moving to a hospital or nursing home. Medicaid pays all his medical bills, including monthly transportation costs to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, where for the past 18 months he has been receiving an experimental chemotherapy drug to help shrink tumors blocking his airway, Jane Fergus said. It also covers his wheelchair, walker and daily nursing care at home.
“We have such great health care for him because of Medicaid,” his mother said.
Jane Fergus was never politically active until this year, when she feared that the GOP plans to cut Medicaid funding would reduce services for her son.
“If there is a silver lining in all this debate, it’s that we have been given a voice, and people in power are being educated on the role of Medicaid,” she said.
Moving Beyond Its Roots
Medicaid was born in a 1965 political deal to help bring more support for President Lyndon Johnson’s dream of Medicare, the national health insurance program for the elderly.
Over the past 40 years and in particular since the 1980s, Medicaid expanded beyond its roots as a welfare program. In 1987, Congress added coverage for pregnant women and children living in families with incomes nearly twice the federal poverty level (about $49,200 today for a family of four).
In 1997, Congress added the Children’s Health Insurance Program to help cover kids from families with incomes too high for Medicaid.
And since September 2013, Obamacare allowed states to expand the program to anyone earning under 138 percent of poverty (or $16,394 for an individual in 2016), adding 17 million people.
In addition, more than 11 million Medicare beneficiaries also receive Medicaid coverage, which helps them get long-term care and pay for Medicare premiums.
“Medicaid is plugging the holes in our health system,” said Joan Alker, executive director of the Georgetown University Center for Children and Families, “and our health system has a lot of holes.”
But that comes at a steep price.
A Blessing And A Curse
With increasing enrollments and health costs steadily rising, the cost of Medicaid has soared. Federal and state governments spent about $575 billion combined last year, nearly triple the level of 2000.
Those dollars have become both a blessing and a curse for states.
The federal government matches state Medicaid spending, with Washington paying from half to 74 percent of a state’s costs in 2016. Poorer states get the higher shares.
The funding is provided on an open-ended basis, so the more states spend the more they receive from Washington. That guarantee protects states when they have sudden enrollment spikes because of downturns in the economy, health emergencies such as the opioid crisis or natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina.
The program is the largest source of federal funding to states. And Medicaid is often the biggest program in state budgets, after public education.
“Medicaid is the elephant in the room for health care,” said Jameson Taylor, vice president for policy for the Mississippi Center for Public Policy, a free-market think tank. He said states have become dependent on the federal funding to help fill their state budget coffers. While the poorest states, such as Mississippi, get a higher percentage of federal Medicaid dollars, that still often isn’t enough to keep up with health care costs, he said.
Extensive Benefits
Medicaid provides significant financing for hospitals, community health centers, physicians, nursing homes and jobs in the health care sector.
But the revenue stream flows further. Billions in annual Medicaid spending goes to U.S. schools to pay for nurses; physical, occupational and speech therapists; and school-based screenings and treatment for children from low-income families, as well as wheelchairs and buses to transport kids with special needs.
Medicaid also often covers services that private health insurers and Medicare do not — such as non-emergency transportation to medical appointments, vision care and dental care. To help people with disabilities stay out of expensive nursing homes, Medicaid pays for renovations to their homes, such as wheelchair ramps, and personal care aides.
Rena Schrager, 42, of Jupiter, Fla., who has severe vision problems, has relied on Medicaid for more than 20 years. Although she often has difficulty finding doctors who will accept Medicaid’s reimbursements — which are often lower than private insurance and Medicare — she is grateful for the coverage. “When you do not have anything else, you are glad to have anything,” Schraeger said.
As it’s grown, Medicaid has become more popular, another reason why politicians are cautious to curtail benefits or spending.
A recent survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation showed three-fourths of the public, including majorities of Democrats (84 percent) and Republicans (61 percent), hold a favorable view of Medicaid. That’s nearly as high as Americans’ views on Medicare. (Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent program of the foundation.)
But it may still have a bull’s-eye on its back.
“The fact that the House passed a bill to cut $800 billion from Medicaid and it came one vote short to passing the Senate shows Medicaid is stronger than maybe many Republican leaders anticipated,” said Oberlander. “But politically it is still in a precarious position.”
Update: This story was updated on Sept. 25 to clarify that Medicaid doesn’t cover all home modifications for enrollees with disabilities. It was also updated on Nov. 17 to correct a statistic. Twenty-five percent of Americans will be on Medicaid at some point over the course of the year, not over the course of their lives.
This story was produced by Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation.
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Samsung to follow Apple and make an AI chip for mobile
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Samsung is joining the likes of Apple and Huawei by developing an AI-centric CPU core for its upcoming smartphone processors. Today’s AI tasks such as voice recognition and big data processing are usually offloaded to the cloud, to be retrieved by the user when needed. Samsung’s new Exynos chip, however, will have AI processing built in and will reduce cloud-based processing dependency. The chip is set to be brought to market in the next couple of years. Samsung's Bixby smart assistant is expected to be a beneficiary of the new technology.
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https://www.lowyat.net/2017/142700/samsung-developing-chip-ai-processing/
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2017-09-26 14:30:03.087000
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Samsung is joining Apple and Huawei in developing AI-centric CPU cores for its upcoming processors. The new Exynos chips will supposedly be able to process data from AI directly on the smartphone without offloading it to the cloud.
Set to be commercialised in the next couple of years, the new AI co-processor will reduce cloud-base processing dependency by instead processing the data in the smartphone itself. Today’s AI tasks (voice recognition, big data processing) are offloaded to the cloud, and then retrieved when needed by the users.
This will be very useful as Samsung’s Bixby is still in the early days of developing into a proper smart assistant.
As one of the major semiconductor manufacturer, Samsung is well equipped to start developing the co-processor. This will contribute to a 3% global revenue growth that semiconductor manufacturers are expected to see from 2018 until 2022 according to market intelligence firm TrendForce.
With AI Processing becoming a fast growing trend among OEMs, having a leg’s up in the game will benefit Samsung to differentiate it from the other manufacturers in the market.
(Source: Korea Herald via Android Authority )
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Amazon to bring AWS cloud to the Middle East by early 2019
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Amazon is bringing its cloud services to the Middle East, with the opening of three "availability zones" in Bahrain by early 2019. The online retailer's web division, Amazon Web Services, was launched in 2006 and provides IT cloud services to companies around the world. Its rivals in the sector, Microsoft and Google, have announced the introduction of their cloud services into Africa and South America respectively, but Amazon is the first to announce plans for the Middle East. Alongside the expansion, AWS is planning to open new offices in Dubai and Bahrain.
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https://venturebeat.com/2017/09/25/amazon-to-open-its-first-aws-region-in-the-middle-east-by-2019/
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2017-09-26 14:18:53.287000
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Amazon’s cloud computing arm, Amazon Web Services (AWS), has announced its first data center region in the Middle East, with three availability zones planned for Bahrain by “early 2019,” according to the company.
Launched in 2006, AWS serves companies of all sizes with cloud computing capabilities, negating the need for them to have their own on-site servers. AWS currently offers server infrastructure in 16 regions, including seven in the Americas (across the U.S., Canada, and Brazil), three in Europe (across the U.K., Ireland, and Germany), and six in Asia Pacific (across Singapore, Japan, Australia, South Korea, India, and China).
For 2018, Amazon has already announced a host of new regions around the world (including in the Nordics), while additional server infrastructure will also be arriving in new regions in France, China, and Hong Kong over the next year.
Battle heats up
The Middle East represents a notable move for AWS as the battle for the cloud services market intensifies. Earlier this year, rival Microsoft beat both Google and Amazon to announce its first African data centers, which are expected to open in 2018, while last week Microsoft revealed it was adding availability zones (different geographical locations within a region) to its Azure cloud platform. Earlier this month, Google opened its first Cloud Platform regions in Germany and Brazil, the latter representing its first in South America. However, AWS has offered a cloud region in Brazil since way back in 2011, while Microsoft followed suit three years later.
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“AWS customers are already making use of 44 availability zones across 16 geographic regions,” noted Jeff Barr, chief evangelist at AWS. “Today’s announcement brings the total number of global regions — operational and in the works — up to 22.”
Amazon is the first of the three companies to announce a cloud region in the Middle East, and it should go some way toward helping AWS attract new customers in the area — local server infrastructure means lower latency and faster data transfer speeds. The news also comes just a few months after Amazon completed its $580 million acquisition of Souq, the Middle East’s biggest ecommerce site. And the company recently announced plans to open new AWS offices in Dubai and Bahrain.
“As countries in the Middle East look to transform their economies for generations to come, technology will play a major role, and the cloud will be in the middle of that transformation,” said AWS CEO Andy Jassy.
Additionally, Amazon revealed plans to open a new CloudFront Edge location (effectively a conduit for end users to access cached content with lower latency) in the United Arab Emirates in 2018.
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Chinese insurance regulator plans stricter stance
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The China Insurance Regulatory Commission (CIRC) has said it is aiming to put an end to "special companies" playing loose with certain regulations. While acting head of the regulator Chen Wenhui did not expand on the definition of "special" companies, he also said the focus of the CIRC should be to regulate the industry, rather than encouraging its expansion. Spurious capital claims, aggressive acquisitions and volume selling of short-term products are among evidence for the previous loose policy of the regulator, commentators noted.
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http://www.scmp.com/business/banking-finance/article/2112895/chinas-insurance-watchdog-bans-special-firms-tolerated
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2017-09-26 14:10:12.673000
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China’s top insurance regulator said it will enforce existing rules and strengthen risk control as former chairman is handed over to prosecutors to face criminal charges
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Intel experiments with chip that mimics how the brain learns
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Intel is working on a "self-learning" chip that could have big implications for artificial intelligence. The Intel Loihi test chip features "digital circuits that mimic the brain’s basic mechanics, making machine learning faster and more efficient while requiring less compute power", according to Michael Mayberry, the managing director of Intel Labs. The chip could be used for a variety of AI-intensive applications, but may prove particularly useful in industrial automation and personal robotics. Intel plans to begin working with universities and other researchers next year to develop its prototype further. The chip is "neuromorphic", meaning that it is able to learn from its environment.
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http://mashable.com/2017/09/25/intel-self-learning-chip-ai/#4M1wsY_U0mqO
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2017-09-26 13:34:28.487000
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Intel just introduced a new type of chip that could have big implications for artificial intelligence.
The company is experimenting with a new "self-learning" chip that's designed to learn like the human brain.
Called the "Intel Loihi test chip,"(opens in a new tab) the processor is what Intel calls a "neuromorphic chip," meaning it's designed to learn from its environment. The chip could be used for an array of AI-intensive applications, but the company says it will be particularly impactful in industrial automation and personal robotics.
"The Intel Loihi research test chip includes digital circuits that mimic the brain’s basic mechanics, making machine learning faster and more efficient while requiring lower compute power," Michael Mayberry, managing director of Intel Labs, wrote in a statement(opens in a new tab).
This could help computers self-organize and make decisions ...
"This could help computers self-organize and make decisions based on patterns and associations."
Intel isn't the first to develop a chip specifically for AI applications. Google has its cloud-based Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), which also aim to speed up machine learning processes. But Intel's approach is different in that the Loihi test chip is designed to work and learn locally on whatever machine it's inside of.
Having self-learning capabilities localized on a chip also has unique advantages over cloud-based systems, according to Intel. It could end up being much faster, for one, since a system can learn without data needing to move back and forth between the chip and the cloud.
Intel says it also doesn't need the same type of training as most AI systems currently do, making it more efficient.
The chip is still a prototype for now, but the company plans to begin working with universities and other researchers next year to develop it further.
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Nvidia to supply Chinese tech giants with Volta GPUs to power AI
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Nvidia will supply Chinese behemoths Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu with its Volta-based graphics processing unit (GPU) hardware, designed to accelerate artificial intelligence (AI), as the firms upgrade their data centres and cloud services platforms. Nvidia's Volta-based system features the V100 GPU, said to be five times faster than its current Pascal series.
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http://www.scmp.com/business/companies/article/2112864/nvidia-inks-ai-chip-deals-alibaba-baidu-and-tencent-accelerate
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2017-09-26 13:31:27.597000
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The new chip is claimed to be up to five times more powerful than the current Pascal-based chips deployed by the Chinese firms
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Nvidia claims its TensorRT will accelerate AI inferencing
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California-based Nvidia has unveiled its TensorRT software, which it claims speeds up artificial intelligence (AI) inferencing by as much as 40 times. Revealed during a series of announcements at the company's GPU Technology conference in Beijing, the TensorRT software is the world’s first programmable inference accelerator, and could lead to improvements in self-driving cars and robots. Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Baidu and Alibaba are among the big-name companies already using Nvidia's inference platform. Inferencing is the process by which a neural network learns to recognise objects or patterns.
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https://venturebeat.com/2017/09/25/nvidia-targets-china-with-hardware-and-unveils-software-to-slash-ai-costs/
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2017-09-26 12:28:49.073000
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The Chinese are racing ahead with artificial intelligence research, and Nvidia is helping make that possible, as evidenced by several announcements the graphics chip maker’s CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, made today at a big AI event in Beijing, China.
Santa Clara, California-based Nvidia has pivoted over the past decade, adapting its graphics chips to do artificial intelligence processing. And a number of big Chinese companies — from Baidu to Tencent — are endorsing Nvidia’s approach. That’s important in a world where 60 billion video frames are uploaded per day to YouTube, and where Google Translate translates 140 billion words per day.
Of the multiple announcements made at Nvidia’s GPU Technology conference in Beijing, the most interesting could be about Nvidia’s TensorRT software, which dramatically accelerates AI inferencing, or the process by which a neural network learns how to recognize an object or pattern. Inferencing can take a huge amount of computing power, but Nvidia’s TensorRT enables inferencing to be done as much as 40 times faster, slashing the cost of the inferencing on Nvidia-based AI hardware.
“AI inferencing is exploding,” said Paresh Kharya, Nvidia’s product marketer for accelerated computing, in an interview with VentureBeat.
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Image Credit: Nvidia/JD.com
With better inferencing, we’ll get much faster image and speech recognition, which in turn will improve everything from self-driving cars to robots. With Nvidia Tesla graphics processing units, the TensorRT software can accelerate processing up to 40 times faster than central processing units (CPUs) at a tenth of the cost.
“Internet companies are racing to infuse AI into services used by billions of people. As a result, AI inference workloads are growing exponentially,” said Nvidia’s Huang, in a statement. “Nvidia TensorRT is the world’s first programmable inference accelerator. With CUDA programmability, TensorRT will be able to accelerate the growing diversity and complexity of deep neural networks. And with TensorRT’s dramatic speed-up, service providers can affordably deploy these compute intensive AI workloads.”
More than 1,200 companies have already begun using Nvidia’s inference platform across a wide spectrum of industries to discover new insights from data and deploy intelligent services to businesses and consumers. Among them are Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google; as well as leading Chinese enterprise companies like Alibaba, Baidu, JD.com, iFflytek, Hikvision, Tencent and WeChat.
TensorRT 3 is a high-performance optimizing compiler and runtime engine for production deployment of AI applications. It can rapidly optimize, validate, and deploy trained neural networks for inference to big data centers and other AI platforms.
In other news, Huang said that China’s big hardware makers — Huawei, Inspur, and Lenovo — are using the Nvidia HGX AI server technology across their data centers. Nvidia is providing those companies with early access to its HGX reference designs for data centers. Those companies will use HGX as a starter recipe for using graphics processing units (GPUs) in the data center. The HGX has eight Nvidia Tesla V100 GPUs on a single server board.
“The V100 deployment in Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent are extremely remarkable,” said analyst Chirag Dekate at Gartner, in an email. “Hyperscale/webscale companies like Baidu, AWS, Azure, Tencent, Alibaba, and others are working aggressively to provision [service] solutions for deep learning environments. And users are increasingly exploring clouds as a means of starting their AI journeys. Nvidia through its global strategy of engaging leaders across cloud service providers is embedding itself to be the main architecture of choice for deep learning workloads.”
Image Credit: Nvidia/JD.com
Nvidia also announced today that Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent are incorporating new Volta architecture-based Nvidia Tesla V100 GPU accelerators into their data centers and cloud-service infrastructures. All three of the major companies are upgrading their data centers with the new Nvidia Tesla V100 GPUs.
In addition, Nvidia is announcing that its Jetson-based robotics platform will be used by ecommerce firm JD.com in its JDrone and JDrover automated delivery drones and robots to delivery packages to consumers. Nvidia and JD.com are collaborating on using AI in logistics and delivery machines. JD.com’s JD X lab is doing pilot testing of drones and robots to deliver packages to consumers. JD X estimates it will release more than 1 million drones over the next five years, and it plans to use Nvidia’s Jetson platform.
“AI is the most important technology development of our time, with the greatest potential to help society,” Huang said. “As the world’s leading cloud providers deploy the world’s best AI platform, with Volta GPUs and Nvidia software, we’ll see amazing breakthroughs in medicine, autonomous transportation, precision manufacturing, and much more.”
Lastly, Nvidia said that Alibaba and Huawei are adopting Nvidia’s Metropolis AI Smart Cities platform, which simplifies the process for getting data from Internet of Things sensors, such as smart traffic lights, to data centers where the information can be analyzed and used to improve overall traffic. A total of 50 companies are currenty using Nvidia’s Metropolis platform.
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Kanye West denies Lloyd's counterclaim in $10m no-show row
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Rapper Kanye West has fired another salvo in his $10m legal row over a series of gig no-shows last year, demanding that the matter be taken before a jury. West's lawyers lodged a document with US courts, saying that insurers at Lloyd's of London had no legitimate reason to refuse his claim for lost earnings. The filing also denied allegations made by the insurance market that West had brought the illness, which led to the cancellation of the tour, on himself.
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https://hiphopdx.com/news/id.44704/title.kanye-west-fires-back-at-lloyds-of-london-countersuit#
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2017-09-26 12:15:15.073000
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Los Angeles, CA -
The abrupt end to Kanye West’s Saint Pablo Tour last year caused an ensuing legal fiasco that has yet to be resolved.
After West canceled the remainder of the tour due to sleep deprivation and exhaustion, the belief of West’s camp was an insurance policy filed with Lloyd’s of London would bail him out.
A little over a year later, with a lawsuit filed by West as well as a countersuit filed by Lloyd’s denying his claim, it looks like the legal firestorm has only intensified.
After the countersuit denied West’s claim, West’s camp responded in a new court document to refute Lloyd’s claims.
Back in August 2017, West and his Very Good Touring, Inc. moved to receive the insurance claim that had been delayed for eight months at that point. To do this, they filed a $10 million lawsuit against Lloyd’s.
A couple of weeks later after the initial suit, Lloyd’s fired right back with its own countersuit against Very Good Touring, INC. saying the 40-year-old rapper’s cancellation reasons weren’t beyond his control, denying his claim. In the response, West said the reasons for denial weren’t legitimate and reiterated points from the first lawsuit.
According to the original suit filed by West, it states that insurance company employees “suggested that they may deny coverage of the claim on the unsupportable contention that use of marijuana by Kanye caused the medical condition.
Read West’s original suit in full below and the new one above.
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Number of UK working mothers with dependent children on the rise
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The number of UK working mothers with dependent children has risen by over a million in the past 20 years, according to the country’s Office for National Statistics (ONS). Nearly 73.7% of women in this category are now employed, up 11.8% from 1996. Women with children aged between three and four were the least likely to work full-time, and the most likely to have part-time employment, though even this group has seen drastic growth.
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https://www.ons.gov.uk/releases/familiesandthelabourmarketengland2017
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2017-09-26 12:14:00.830000
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Number of UK working mothers with dependent children on the rise
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The number of UK working mothers with dependent children has risen by over a million in the past 20 years, according to the country’s Office for National Statistics (ONS). Nearly 73.7% of women in this category are now employed, up 11.8% from 1996. Women with children aged between three and four were the least likely to work full-time, and the most likely to have part-time employment, though even this group has seen drastic growth.
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https://www.theguardian.com/money/2017/sep/26/surge-number-uk-working-mothers-dependent-children-employment
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2017-09-26 12:14:00.830000
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The number of mothers with dependent children employed in England has surged by more than a million over the past two decades, according to official figures.
The Office for National Statistics said there had been a step-change in the employment rate for working mothers since records began in 1996 with almost three-quarters of women with dependent children either in full-time or part-time work.
Encouraging women with young children back into the jobs market has been a priority for Labour and Conservative governments, with the latest initiative an offer of 30 hours free childcare for eligible working families.
The ONS said the figures showed there were 4.9 million mothers with dependent children in work in 2017, up from 3.7 million in 1996. The employment rate rose by 11.8 percentage points to 73.7% over the same period.
Although the ONS said women with three- and four-year-old children were least likely to work full-time – and the most likely to work part-time – it found there had been a marked increase in employment among this group.
Mothers were more likely to have a full-time job when their children went to secondary school at 11, the ONS said. Childcare responsibilities tended to make it more likely that mothers of younger children worked part-time.
The ONS statistician Emily Glastonbury said: “The continuing rise in the number of working mothers has been a major feature of the labour market in England in the last two decades. Reasons for this might include more flexible working practices, shared parental leave and changes to government policy on the availability of childcare.”
The ONS said single parents were less likely to be in employment than parents in a couple. In 2017, 71.7% of single fathers were working, compared with 93% of fathers in a couple; and 68.5% of single mothers were in employment, as opposed to 75% of mothers in a couple.
Single mothers were least likely to be employed when the youngest dependent child was aged under three, at 48.4%. Single fathers were least likely to be in employment when their youngest dependent child was aged three or four (62.3%).
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UK clothing company relocates to renewable factory
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UK T-Shirt Printing, a division of fashion brand Rapanui, has relocated to a low-carbon factory on the Isle of Wight. The new 12,000 sq ft facility runs entirely on renewable energy, including hydroelectric, solar and wind power. The company prints onto organic cotton t-shirts produced by Rapanui in an “ethically accredited” factory in India, and creates branded items for groups including Lush Cosmetics, The Marine Conservation Society and the RSPCA.
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https://www.ecotextile.com/2017092622982/materials-production-news/uk-t-shirt-firm-goes-green.html
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2017-09-26 12:10:48.440000
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COWES – Garment manufacturer, UK T-Shirt Printing, has moved its operations to a new low carbon factory on the Isle of Wight, which is powered entirely by renewable energy.
The company is a division of fashion brand Rapanui, and says the decision was a result of a substantial upturn in business related to its sustainable branded merchandise and in recognition of its supply chain’s commitment to sustainability and traceability.
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