Sarah_Yu's Profile

This app is doing the best it could under current healthcare system, making appointment scheduling fast and efficient. But the underlining issue with shortage, and inefficient utilization of medical resources is still to some degree contribute to high cost and long wait time when seeking care. But in foreseeable future with AI and deep learning, we are in light of having dr. “watson” to fill in some resource gaps by providing basic diagnostic functions to regions with limited access to doctors and medical facilities.
http://fortune.com/ibm-watson-health-business-strategy/

I’m also bullish on the selfdriving trucks. If say on average a truck driver gets paid 40k/year, then 3million truck driver will save 120b per year for the employers. Not only it benefit the employers, the freed up labor will be generating additional productivities. Just like how after washer is invented, more and more women joined workforce from being tied to houseworks. Imagine how much productivities it provide to the society. The only caveat is that this change might come sooner than people are ready for, and therefore how to deal with a huge number of retired truck drivers, how to re-train and equip them with needed skills to fill the gap and contribute to the society in different ways will be a challenge when changes come in too soon.

It’s interesting to read about this startup and thanks for sharing your thoughts. I am interested in data analytic applications in oncology study, particularly genetical correlations to cancer. However, looks like Flatiron’s short term development area is still in enhancing their EHR system and basic patient data collection and process. I’m not sure how much patient genetic data they have collected but looks like it is not their immediate focus in the short term.

Interesting read, thanks for the article. I think the value of the product is two folds, one is direct labor cost saving for end customer (bars), one is potential savings from better supply chain planning. Data collected by these iKegs can be used for customers to better project demand to order. If this data is shared with distributers and manufacturers from more and more end users, it will be valuable in inventory cost reduction. However, it’s interesting to know who actually owns the data, because i could see manufacturers paying for the end user data to better understand their own distribution chain, their end customers (bars) by region, and so on.

It is fascinating to read about the rapid shift into mobile payment in India. And I found it interesting that government policies and directions have such a big impact on economic behaviors. It looks like not being the first movers into some technologies (PC and credit card in this case) allows India to frog-leap into mobile payment quicker and faster than many. With that, I’d assume the importance of having physical marketplace where cash exchange happens, no matter it’s a store or a bank branch, is diminishing.

I had once toured a residential development site where DOW was providing a complete solution in building “negative energy consumption” houses. It was 8 years ago, when they were testing their solar singles (small roof singles acted like individual solar panels), with energy generated stored in a battery pack in the basement, and DOW insulating materials around external walls and base floors. The house actually was able to provide all the energy a typical family of 4 would need, plus generating net energy output to local grid. Pretty amazing stuff, and definitely is where the future direction is.

I agree to some degree that Uberpool drive sharing economy that reduce consumption, however, the fact that traffic is getting worse in cities like san francisco, where people used to either take public transportations, or walk, and who now switched to cars, make me question if there is overuse out of it. Would people prefer to pay $2 to ride bus with 50 other people, or $3 to carpool with 1-2 others? If latter, then end result is you have 10 more cars’ energy consumption and emission vs 1 bus. I think lower the cost does result in overuse to some point, and therefore just how “green” is the sharing economy is up to debate.

I’m surprised by the per capita consumption of papers in Europe and N.America. Paper making is bad for environment mainly due to high water consumption and chemical pollutions. Having toured in an paper plant, my understanding is that water saving is quiet hard as existing manufacturing process and equipment are built to industry standard, water saving methods adopted by each plant does little to help. Until any technology advancement challenges the current process, it will likely continuo to be high energy consumption industry. However, government can take actions for example impose regulations, taxes, etc to push energy saving initiatives, and in the end consumers will pay the bill. However, thinking about just how much paper we received in mailbox in a day, I sometimes hope it’s a bit more expensive for companies to pay for paper commercials.

It’s interesting to read about all the initiatives UPS is taking to go green. With the steep growth in e-commerce, and expansion of the delivery coverage areas, it could really be a game changer for them with technology like drones and self driving vehicles. But before that’s coming, how to best utilize resources and lower per parcel per distance cost could also be optimized with advanced algorithms and data science.

I think that integrated solution, such as incineration at a large scale is also a way to reduce overall energy consumption and generate less waste per quantity of material treated. In this case, just by expanding the incineration scale potentially improves energy utilization, although it’s better to reuse and recycle more.