Now the former Google engineer is turning that dream into a reality with Built Robotics, a startup that’s developing technology to allow bulldozers, excavators and other construction vehicles to operate themselves.
“The idea behind Built Robotics is to use automation technology make construction safer, faster and cheaper,” said Ready-Campbell, standing in a dirt lot where a small bulldozer moved mounds of earth without a human operator.
“We need all of the robots we can get,...
Life insurance has been steadily declining in popularity in the United States for decades. In 1965, Americans bought a total of 27 million policies, whether individually or through their employers. In 2016, with a population double that in 1965, Americans bought the same number of policies. The reasons for this decline are somewhat enigmatic and seem to defy behavioral expectations.
See Peter Orszag, Peter Orszag: The Decline Of Life Insurance Is A Mystery, Financial Advisor, February 27, 2018.
Research also detected that risk perceptions are influenced by the emotional state of the perceiver (Bodenhausen, 1993). According to valence theory, positive emotions lead to optimistic risk perceptions whereas negative emotions incite a more pessimistic view of risk (Lerner, 2000).
The earliest psychometric research was performed by psychologists Daniel Kahneman (who later won a Nobel Prize in economics with Vernon Smith “for having integrated insights from psychological research into economic...
In a March 13, 2018 post, LiveScience.com contributor Jasmin Malik Chua published an article on the value of optical illusions. Entitled “What This Optical Illusion Reveals About the Human Brain”, Ms. Chua replicates a 19th century optical illusion which can be either a rabbit or a duck, but not both at the same time. She explains: “…First published in 1892 by a German humor magazine, the figure was made popular after the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein used it to illustrate two ways of seeing....
In important contexts, people prefer option A to option B when they evaluate the two separately, but prefer option B to option A when they evaluate the two jointly. In consumer behavior, politics, and law, such preference reversals are often a product of the pervasive problem of "evaluability." Some important characteristics of options are difficult or impossible to assess in separate evaluation, and hence choosers disregard or downplay them; those characteristics are much easier to assess in joint...
For a person dealing with conflict and training people in principled WIN-WIN negotiation, it is always very frustrating to meet with dirty tricks in negotiation. Those inherently adversarial unethical (and/or not broadly accepted as ethical) negotiation ploys misuse some of the cognitive biases in favour of the active party to the detriment of the opposing party.
The most common commonly known dirty trick would be walkouts but there are some more sophisticated ones as calling higher authority and bad...
The theory of insurance is considered here when an insured individual may be able to sue another party for the losses that the insured suffered — and thus when an insured has a potential source of compensation in addition to insurance coverage. Insurance policies reflect this possibility through so-called subrogation provisions that give insurers the right to step into the shoes of insureds and to bring suits against injurers. We show that subrogation provisions are a fundamental feature of optimal...