Category «Economy»

Return to Office Mandates Don’t Improve Employee or Company Performance

Ding, Yuye and Ma, Mark (Shuai), Return-to-Office Mandates (December 25, 2023). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4675401 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4675401 “Using a sample of Standard and Poor’s 500 firms, we examine determinants and consequences of U.S. firms’ return-to-office (RTO) mandates. Results of our determinant analyses are consistent with managers using RTO mandates to reassert control over employees and …

Subjects: Economy, Financial System, Knowledge Management

Authors Are Fighting Amazon’s Audible

Libro.FM Blog: “Amazon’s impact on the book industry is no secret to most readers. From taking business from independent bookshops—business they depend on, unlike Amazon—to limiting accessibility of audiobooks with Audible Exclusives, the company’s dominance threatens diversity of the publishing ecosystem. According to WordsRated, Amazon “controls between 50% and 80% of the book distribution in …

Subjects: E-Commerce, Economy, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Libraries

Paying for news: What Google and Meta owe publishers

Vox EU CEPR: “…Our new research calculates what Meta and Google would owe US publishers under a fair payment for the use of their content, and we provide the methodology for calculating these payments so that others can replicate our work. We (conservatively) estimate that Facebook should provide an annual compensation of US$1.9 billion to …

Subjects: Economy, Financial System, Internet, Knowledge Management, Legal Research, Marketing, Search Engines

PFAS Maryland Fish Consumption Advisory Map

“Brent Walls, Upper Potomac Riverkeeper, has become an expert on the growing issue of PFAS – toxic “legacy” chemicals – which we are finding in more and more places. He has created a map which identifies monitoring locations where Maryland’s Department of the Environment (MDE) collected fish tissue samples from various species, oyster sampling and …

Subjects: Climate Change, Economy, Energy, Environmental Law, Health Care, Legal Research, Legislation

How Walmart’s Financial Services Became a Fraud Magnet

ProPublica: “Scammers have duped consumers out of more than $1 billion by exploiting Walmart’s lax security. The company has resisted taking responsibility while breaking promises to regulators and skimping on training…America’s largest retailer has long been a facilitator of fraud on a mass scale, a ProPublica investigation has found. For roughly a decade, Walmart has …

Subjects: Courts, Economy, Financial System, Legal Research

Return-to-Office Mandates

Subjects: Economy, Knowledge Management, Legal Research

The Continued Threat to Personal Data: Key Factors Behind the 2023 Increase

The Continued Threat to Personal Data: Key Factors Behind the 2023 Increase. Professor Stuart E. Madnick, Ph.D. December 2023: “Around the world, individuals’ most private, most personal data has become a target for cybercriminals. Attacks and data breaches across the globe continue to increase. Even as organizations work to fight back, cybercriminals are constantly finding …

Subjects: Cryptocurrency, Cybercrime, E-Records, Economy, Financial System, Government Documents, Health Care, Legal Research

Beyond AI Exposure: Which Tasks are Cost-Effective to Automate with Computer Vision?

futuretech January 22, 2024: “Neil Thompson along with Maja S. Svanberg and Wensu Li from the MIT FutureTech, Martin Fleming from The Productivity Institute, and Brian C. Goehring from IBM’s Institute for Business Value, have published a new article. This article introduces an innovative AI task automation model. It offers an end-to-end assessment framework, focusing …

Subjects: AI, Economy, Education, Knowledge Management

AI far too expensive to replace humans in most jobs

Fortune – MIT study: Artificial intelligence can’t replace the majority of jobs right now in cost-effective ways, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found in a study that sought to address fears about AI replacing humans in a swath of industries. In one of the first in-depth probes of the viability of AI displacing labor, researchers …

Subjects: AI, Economy, Education

Does Working from Home Boost Productivity Growth?

Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Economic Letter, January 16, 2024: “The U.S. labor market experienced a massive increase in remote and hybrid work during the COVID-19 pandemic. At its peak, more than 60% of paid workdays were done remotely—compared with only 5% before the pandemic. As of December 2023, about 30% of paid workdays …

Subjects: Economy, Financial System

World scientists’ warning: The behavioural crisis driving ecological overshoot

Merz JJ, Barnard P, Rees WE, et al. World scientists’ warning: The behavioural crisis driving ecological overshoot. Science Progress. 2023;106(3). doi:10.1177/00368504231201372 “Previously, anthropogenic ecological overshoot has been identified as a fundamental cause of the myriad symptoms we see around the globe today from biodiversity loss and ocean acidification to the disturbing rise in novel entities …

Subjects: Climate Change, Economy, Marketing

Is A.I. the Death of I.P.?

The New Yorker [free to read]: “Intellectual property accounts for some or all of the wealth of at least half of the world’s fifty richest people, and it has been estimated to account for fifty-two per cent of the value of U.S. merchandise exports. I.P. is the new oil. Nations sitting on a lot of …

Subjects: AI, Courts, Economy, Financial System, Intellectual Property, Legal Research

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