mobile technology
Is technology distracting us from the real relationships in our lives? We talk with Sherry Turkle, professor at MIT and author of Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other. Read more...
An email pops up in your mailbox: do you open it? BJ Fogg of Stanford University's Persuasive Technology Lab is an expert in getting technology to influence our behavior. Read more...
If you’ve ever sat behind the wheel of a car – especially between, say, the hours of 6 to 9 in the morning, or 4 to 6 at night – you’ll know exactly what Former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell means when he says he’s fed up with traffic. “What frustrates me,” Rendell says, “is traffic delays because we haven’t kept up with capacity.” Since 1980, the number of vehicles on the road has increased by 104%, while lane capacity has inched forward by only 4%. So Rendell decided to do something about it.
When journalist Steven Brill first began investigating the American health care system for his article "Bitter Pill, he started in a familiar place: medical bills. What he found shocked him. One patient, for example, paid $2,293 per day just for room and board in a hospital - about ten times more than he would have paid for a hotel room - and had little choice in the matter.
"There's no marketplace at all," Brill says. "The person buying the service has no leverage, no power, and no visibility into the cost."
