U.S. sets $1 billion healthcare innovation initiative
WASHINGTON - The Obama administration on Wednesday announced a $1 billion initiative to fund innovations in federal healthcare programs aimed at cutting costs while improving the health results.
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Found 3 days ago on channel
Reuters
Sequoia Supercomputer Sets Record With 'Time Warp'
Nerval's Lobster writes "The 'Sequoia' Blue Gene/Q supercomputer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has topped a new HPC record, helped along by a new 'Time Warp' protocol and benchmark that detects parallelism and automatically improves performance as the system scales out to more cores. Scientists at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and LLNL said Sequoia topped 504 billion events per second, breaking the previous record of 12.2 billion events per second set in 2009. The scientists believe that such performance enables them to reach so-called "planetary"-scale calculations, enough to factor in all 7 billion people in the world, or the billions of hosts found on the Internet. 'We are reaching an interesting transition point where our simulation capability is limited more by our ability to develop, maintain, and validate models of complex systems than by our ability to execute them in a timely manner,' Chris Carothers, director of the Computational Center for Nanotechnology ...
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Payments Network Dwolla Raises $16.5 Million Series C From Andreessen Horowitz & Others, Expands To San Francisco
Building new infrastructure for digital payments may not sound sexy, but it’s an area that’s ripe for innovation. The legacy payments networks in existence today are bogged down with outdated technology, slowing progress. Des Moines-based Dwolla decided that the way to innovate in payments was to essentially blow up the outdated infrastructure entirely and start over by building out a new network from scratch. Today, that work has scored the company $16.5 million in new funding, in a Series C led by Andreessen Horowitz. The company’s previous investors, Village Ventures, Thrive Capital, and Union Square Ventures also participated in the round. Dwolla is sometimes confused as an alternative to PayPal – and though it may compete with PayPal more directly on some initiatives, like MassPay which undercuts PayPal’s fees on a service business’ use in lieu of writing checks – that’s only a result of the new payments infrastructure the company has built, not the entire vision ...
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Apple Will Initiate Share Repurchases To Increase Dividends (And Boost Apple Shares)
Apple now has $145 billion in cash and it needs to do something about it. That’s why Apple CEO Tim Cook just announced that the company will initiate a stock buyback. It means that Apple will used part of its cash to repurchase existing shares, taking them out of the market, increasing existing stockholders’ shares. That investment will go directly to existing investors in the form of a dividend. Tim Cook announced this program just after reiterating that Apple’s culture is what sets the company apart. “We have a tremendous culture of innovation,” Cook said. “It’s the same culture that bought the iPhone and the iPad,” he continued. Last year, Apple announced that it would spend $45 billion over multiple years to give as a dividend. It is more than doubling this program to $100 billion by the end of 2015. The $55 billion that were set aside today will be used for the share repurchases as well as dividends. The advantage of a share buyback program is that Apple shows that it ...
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China Leads in "Clean" Energy Investment
derekmead writes "According to a new study (PDF) from Pew Charitable Trusts, China was the world leader in clean energy investment in 2012. The U.S., meanwhile, saw its grip loosen on many of the clean energy technologies it developed. According to the research, total clean energy investment totaled $269 billion worldwide last year, a decline from 2011's record high of $302 billion. However, clean energy investment in the Asia and Oceania markets grew by 16 percent to $101 billion. In terms of investment — which is an indicator that a country or region has offered compelling projects, struck a good regulatory balance, and has a strong economy — that makes Asia the epicenter of the global clean energy market. The Pew researchers thus labeled the U.S. clean energy sector as 'underperforming,' largely for a trio of reasons. First, China's boom and manufacturing prowess has taken investment away from the U.S.. Second, the U.S. regulatory environment for clean energy is horrifically unstable ...
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