Science

  • Mindset Matters

    I have a picture in my conference room that says energy might be the most important thing to measure.

     

    Energy Might Be The Most Important Thing To Measure_GapingVoid

    via GapingVoid

    It means exactly what it sounds like – but also a lot more. 

    We use A.I. to trade.  So, measuring performance is important.  But, so are all sorts of production, efficiency, and effectiveness measures. 

    While there are hundreds of important metrics we track day-to-day, energy affects everything. 

    Energy affects how you feel, what you do, and what you make it mean.  That means it is a great way to measure your values too.

    Consequently, even if you don't recognize it, energy has a lot to do with who you hire and fire. It affects where you spend our time. Ultimately, it even affects the long-term vision of our company.

    If something brings profit and energy, it is probably worth pursuing. 

    In contrast, one of the quickest ways to burn out is by fighting your energy.  Figuring out who and what to say "no" to is an important way to make sure you stay on path and reach your goals.

    At a recent Genius Network event, I shared a mindset scorecard I created during one of their exercises.  I hope it helps!

    Normally, Genius Network is private, and these recordings are for internal use only; but I asked permission to share my impromptu session with you. 

    Check it out. In the first 5 minutes, I will introduce the scorecard. For the next 10 minutes, you'll get an extra look at the resulting group discussion. 

     

    I use this tool to diagnose where we are during meetings, while ranking opportunities, and even for HR and partnership decisions.

    Think of each comparison as a spectrum. They're not necessarily "one-or-the-other", but they can help identify where you are on the scale of "what to avoid" versus "what you want".

     

    • Blaming <—–> Encouraging
    • Insistent <—–> Inspirational
    • Fearful <—–> Abundant
    • Steadfast <—–> Curious
    • Clogging <—–> Cleansing
    • Resentful <—–> Grateful
    • Zero-Sum <—–> Relational
    • Small-Minded <—–> Visionary

     

    These words mean something to me, but they may need tooling to work in your company. Changing the names, the order of the comparisons, the number of comparisons, etc. can have a profound effect on the usefulness of this scorecard to you. 

    I encourage you to think about how you could use this scorecard, and how you can bring attention to those people and actions that best embody the traits that are vital to your business. 

  • BBQ Fest – A New Tradition

    Once a year, I go to the World BBQ Championship at Memphis in May. 

    It's three days of friends, food, fun, and bad puns (like #AporkalypseNow and  #MeatDrinkAndBeMerry).

    You've heard the phrase  "Put your money where your mouth is …"  This year we sponsored a tent and brought some of the Capitalogix team to enjoy the festivities. 

     

    IMG_3630_2

     

    Here's a look at what was cooking in our tent.  It had Brazilian "churrasco" flair. 

    IMG_3677

    Our Grill Master was Blake Carson, who took a traditional Brazilian Steakhouse cooking style – and innovated upon it – creating the Carson Rodizio kit (which started as a Kickstarter project).  It is a multi-rotisserie rack that converts your favorite backyard grill into an open and spinning Brazilian style Steakhouse.  It's clever, functional, and cool… and it's been used to win multiple barbecue championships.

    I love to experience an entrepreneur's mind at work.  

    It's not always about what you add.  Sometimes, it is about what you take away.  Less is often more. 

    Here is a one-minute interview I shot with Blake.

     


     

    Innovation, like opportunity, is all around you.

    It's not there for you if you don't see the opportunity, and seize it.

  • Here Are Some Links For Your Weekly Reading – April 12th, 2019

    Image-1

    Here are some of the posts that caught my eye recently. Hope you find something interesting.

    Lighter Links:

    Trading Links:

  • Microsoft: Are They Where They Thought They’d Be in 2019?

     In 2009, Microsoft released a video anticipating the world in 2019. That was only 10 years ago. 

    I recently showed you how much Social Media has changed in 10 years – so how close was Microsoft's guess?

    Watch this video to find out: 

     

     

    The answer is …. not as close as I would have thought.  Nonetheless, they just hit a Trillion Dollar market cap.  So, they must have gotten something right! 

    It's interesting to think about which factors or missing innovations caused the difference between their imagined vision and reality.

    They really bought into scaleable, HD, transparent, touch screen displays being not only available, but located in everything by now … which suffice to say, isn't the case. 

    The reality is …

    • A lot of these innovations actually have little use – Not every situation needs a transparent monitor – they're worse than standard monitors in almost every way. You end up using absurdly expensive screens to display a digital version of a post it note or handwriting. The desk/monitor hybrid would be covered in sheets of paper, office supplies, and your coffee. A boarding pass being a screen is highly inefficient for so many reasons – and so is a digital newspaper. We have those – they're called phones.  
    • They assumed batteries would be way farther along – The thinner your monitor, the more transparent, the harder it is to create a high-performance high-fidelity battery to maintain it. Unfortunately, batteries haven't had nearly the boom like the rest of our tech (though they are getting better). 
    • IoT Adoption/Security – One of the biggest problems with IoT is that the more these pieces communicate the harder it is to prevent hacks. A chain is only as strong as the weakest link – and a smart coffee maker isn't nearly secure as your computer. 
    • Fingerprints (Glass) – I get this isn't a "real" concern – but every piece of technology they showed was transparent/glass. On top of being very breakable (see Samsungs new foldable phones) Could you imagine how smudged/dirty everywhere would appear? Imagine a New York subway with this technology.
    • Expense v. Convenience – A lot of technologies are feasible – but aren't cost-effective. Look at the slow adoption of Solar cells as their efficiency per cost went up.

    Making everything a device/screen means more opportunity for companies to serve you ads and retarget you ad infinitum. 

    Ultimately, I find this perceived "modern digital office environment" very inefficient. A lot of these "innovations" are less dynamic and easy to use than their analog counterparts. Mechanical keyboards serve a purpose. 

    In reality, a lot of the trends we've adopted to increase collaboration and sharing have been counterproductive. Not every office needs an open floor plan – not every team needs 15 subteams with 4 bosses – and using 20 different productivity tools actually decreases productivity. 

    That being said, we've come a long way in 10 years. Think about the quality of your phone in 2009 or your desktop computer – whirring loudly as it tried to access the disk, or the internet, or anything really. 

    What we have now isn't perfect – but it's leaps and bounds ahead of where we were. A lot of technology seems like science fiction – like the Babel fish from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

  • Here Are Some Links For Your Weekly Reading – May 5th, 2019

    224706

     

    Here are some of the posts that caught my eye recently. Hope you find something interesting.

    Lighter Links:

    Trading Links:

     
     

  • Gartner’s 2018 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies

    With all the "fake news" and manufactured social buzz, it's hard to identify what technologies are reaching maturity and which ones are fads. Gartner's Hype Cycle attempts to solve that problem. 

    What's a "Hype Cycle"?

    As technology advances, it is human nature to get excited about the possibilities and to get disappointed when those expectations aren't met. 

    At its core, the Hype Cycle tells us where in the product's timeline we are, and how long it will take the technology to hit maturity. It tells us which will survive the hype have the potential to become a part of our daily life. 

    Gartner's Hype Cycle Report is a considered analysis of market excitement, maturity, and the benefit of various technologies.  It aggregates data and distills more than 2,000 technologies into a succinct, contextually understandable, snapshot of where various emerging technologies sit on the hype cycle.

    Here are the five regions of Gartner's Hype Cycle framework:

    1. Innovation Trigger (potential technology breakthrough kicks off),
    2. Peak of Inflated Expectations (Success stories through early publicity),
    3. Trough of Disillusionment (waning interest),
    4. Slope of Enlightenment (2nd & 3rd generation products appear), and
    5. Plateau of Productivity (Mainstream adoption starts). 

     

    Understanding this hype cycle framework enables you to ask important questions like "How will these technologies impact my business?" and  "Which technologies can I trust to stay relevant in 5 years?"

    What's exciting this year? 

    Currently, people are probably "too" excited about IoT platforms, Deep Learning, and Virtual Assistants. The idea isn't they won't stand the test of the time, but there's an artificial influx of people inflating the adoption numbers. Once the chaff is separated from the wheat – you can expect these to succeed. Autonomous driving, connected homes, and mixed reality have matured past the hype phase. 

    For comparison, here's my article from last year, and here's my article from 2015. Click the chart below to see a larger version of this year's Hype Cycle.

    PR_490866_5_Trends_in_the_Emerging_Tech_Hype_Cycle_2018_Hype_Cycle via Gartner

    This year, Gartner organized the 17 highlighted technologies into 5 encompassing trends:

     

    • Democratized AI (autonomous driving, conversational AI, deep neural nets, etc.) is one of the most disruptive classes of technology. It's becoming more readily available due to open source and cloud computing. There's a burgeoning field of "makers" inspired to push the boundaries of what's possible.  
    • Digitalized Ecosystems ( blockchain, IoT) support emerging technologies by being the foundations for dynamic systems. There's a shift from discrete infrastructure systems to comprehensive ecosystems. Think of blockchains potential impact on tracking and communication.  
    • Do-It-Yourself Biohacking (biotech, biochips, exoskeletons, AR) is something I've talked about before. Dave Asprey is a public face of this movement and we shot a video together last year. The future is bringing implants to extend humans past their perceived limits and increase our understanding of our bodies; biochips with the potential to detect diseases, synthetic muscles, and neural implants. 
    • Transparently Immersive Experiences (connected home, smart dust, volumetric displays) represent the blending of where human stops, work starts, and things exist. Imagine a theoretical smart workspace where electronic whiteboards capture all your notes and disseminate them, sensors let you know where people are and what they're working on, and everything in your office interacts directly with your IT platform. This creates much more contextual and personalized experiences.  
    • Ubiquitous Infrastructure (5G, carbon nanotubes, quantum computing) means that infrastructure is becoming a less competitive advantage. As infrastructure becomes cheaper, more ubiquitous, and faster, it becomes background noise.  

     

    Looking at the overarching trends of this year, it's also fun to look at what technologies are just starting their hype cycle. 

    • Artificial Tissue (Biotech) could be used to repair or replace portions of, or whole, tissues (cartilage, skin, muscle, etc.)
    • Flying Autonomous Vehicles can be used as taxis, but also as transports for other things such as medical supplies, food delivery, etc. Amazon and Uber are likely excited about this development – and expect it in the next couple of years. 
    • Smart Dust opens up the possibility of monitoring essentially everything by creating a vast network of minuscule sensors that can detect various inputs. 
    • Artificial General Intelligence
    • 4D Printing would theoretically allow us to print objects that reshape or self-assemble over time. 

     

    Which technologies do you think will survive the hype?

  • Social Media Is Changing Everything: A Reprisal

    I came across a post from 2009 about social media. 10 years later, with the knowledge of how much data we use today, it's quite a read.

    Here it is in its full glory. 

    Social Media Is Changing Everything: October 18th, 2009

    My son won't use e-mail the way I did. So how will people communicate and collaborate in the next wave of communications?

    Here is a peek into the difference that is taking hold.  I was looking at recent phone use.  The numbers you are about to see are from the first 20 days of our current billing cycle.

      • My wife, Jennifer, has used 21 text messages and 38 MB of data.
      • I have used 120 text messages and 29 MB of data.
      • My son, at college, used 420 text messages, and is on a WiFi campus so doesn't use 3G data.
      • My son, in high school, used 5,798 text messages and 472 MB of data.

    How can that be?  That level of emotional sluttiness makes porn seem downright wholesome. 

    But, of course, that isn't how he sees it.  He is holding many conversations at once.  Some are social; some are about the logistics of who, what, when, where and why … some are even about homework.  Yet, most don't use full sentences, let alone paragraphs.  There is near instant gratification.  And, the next generation of business people will consider this normal.

    Is social media a fad? Or is it the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution?

    Welcome to the World of Socialnomics.  This video has a bunch of interesting statistics … and is fun to watch. 

     

     

    Other Resources:

    Social Media Is Changing Everything: April 20th, 2019 

    Looking at the stats from 2009 is pretty funny

    • My son was using 472 MB of data a month
    • Hulu had grown from to 373 million total streams in April 2009
    • Only 25% of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video on their phone

    For some context, I looked up the comparative numbers for 2018. 

    • I picked a random month in 2018 … in August my son used 10.85 GB of data. He doesn't text as often – but has sent/received 282,000 snapchats since downloading it 5 years ago.
    • Hulu has over 20 million subscribers who streamed more than 26 million hours a day in 2018 
    • People spend over five hours a day on their smartphones on average. 70% of web traffic happens on a mobile device, and more than 50% of videos are watched on mobile (93% of twitter videos). 

    Here's what happens every minute of every day on the internet

    D0-86c4XcAMTmla

    via Lori Lewis and Chadd Callahan

     

    A little different than 2009 …

  • Here Are Some Links For Your Weekly Reading – April 21st, 2019

    224171

    Here are some of the posts that caught my eye recently. Hope you find something interesting.

    Lighter Links:

    Trading Links:

     

  • Photographing a Supermassive Black Hole: The Gravity of This Situation is Immeasurable

    The Eye was rimmed with fire, but was itself glazed, yellow as a cat's, watchful and intent, and the black slit of its pupil opened on a pit, a window into nothing. – Frodo seeing Sauron through the Mirror of Galadriel in The Fellowship of the Ring

    The Event Horizon Telescope just released the first-ever image of a black hole … specifically a supermassive black hole with a mass 6.5 billion times heavier than our sun. This behemoth of a black hole is over 50 million light-years away in a galaxy we call M87. The little blob (in the picture below) is 25 billion miles across, and the bright part is brighter than all of the billions of other stars in that galaxy combined.  To put it in context … the black hole, shown below, is larger than our entire Solar System. 

    Here's a link to the original RAW (183 mb) image. 

     

    A-Consensusvia National Science Foundation

    The image shows a bright ring formed as light bends in the intense gravity around a black hole that is 6.5 billion times more massive than the Sun

    In my opinion, the black hole image is even more amazing when you zoom out and see the entire m87 galaxy. The little black dot inside the orange is the black hole.

     

    190414 black-hole-photo-amazing-zoom-out-1200x630

    via NASA/CXC/VILLANOVA UNIVERSITY/J. NEILSEN 

    To take a step back, a black hole is a celestial object that has a gravitational field so strong that light cannot escape it and that is believed to be created especially in the collapse of a very massive star.  It warps spacetime and superheats all surrounding materials. 

    “In space no one can hear you scream; and in a black hole, no one can see you disappear.” 
    ― Stephen Hawking

    Before today, black holes had only been observed indirectly. We had math that "proved it."  Now, we have direct, observable, and corroborated evidence for everyone to see.

    Do you understand the gravity of that? 

    In my lifetime, Black holes have gone from a fringe theory to a possibility, to a probability, and now, to reality.  

    It is amazing to think about how right Einstein's theory of general relativity was … especially considering that he did the math in 1915, before we had the technology and science to back it up.  The basic idea is that the relative velocity of light doesn't change, therefore it must be a constant in our universe. Using his math, we were able to predict how a black hole would "look", and it was supported by the Event Horizon Telescope's image. 

    Veritasium puts understanding the image into better perspective. Check it out. 

     

    via Veritasium 

    For a side note, the first proposal of black holes actually goes back to John Michell in 1784

    "If there should really exist in nature any bodies, whose density is not less than that of the sun, and whose diameters are more than 500 times the diameter of the sun, since their light could not arrive at us; or if there should exist any other bodies of a somewhat smaller size, which are not naturally luminous; of the existence of bodies under either of these circumstances, we could have no information from sight; yet, if any other luminous bodies should happen to revolve about them we might still perhaps from the motions of these revolving bodies infer the existence of the central ones with some degree of probability, as this might afford a clue to some of the apparent irregularities of the revolving bodies, which would not be easily explicable on any other hypothesis; but as the consequences of such a supposition are very obvious, and the consideration of them somewhat beside my present purpose, I shall not prosecute them any further." 

    It took a massive amount of work to produce the photos of the black hole shown in this post. The ingredients: 200 researchers, 20 years, over 9 petabytes of data, 8 telescopes, and immense vision. Oh yeah, I almost forgot, it also took the 104 years of research since Einstein's theory. 

    Powerful stuff. 

    For more:

  • Robocalls and Taxes: These Are A Few Of My Favorite Things

    What're everyone's two favorite things? Paying taxes and receiving robocalls, obviously. 

    Phone scammers used to just target the elderly or those with poor English skills, but today, they go after everyone. In fact, Americans received over 30 billion robocalls last year … and it's only getting worse. Around half of those are "legal," but more and more are scams.

    Those scams increase during tax season. 

    Several of my friends have received calls from the "IRS" demanding immediate payment. That is a scam. The IRS has stated repeatedly, they will not call you asking for your credit card numbers over the phone, they will not threaten lawsuits, and they will not call you unless they've already tried reaching you by mail. 

    According to the FTC, robocall complaints in March and April are 20% higher. They're the icing on the tax season cake. 

     

    Screen Shot 2019-04-05 at 9.24.44 AMvia allareacodes

     

    If increased robocalls weren't enough, you can expect your refund to be 8% lower than last year. Though the average refund is still several thousand dollars, and my home state of Texas can expect the highest returns. 

     

    Tax-refund-by-state-(1)-1eb6

    via HowMuch

    Texas tops the list (Everything IS bigger in Texas) with $3,206 as the average tax refund. Maine inhabitants bottom out the list with $2,336.

    It's worth mentioning that these refunds represent federal figures, and don't take into account any refunds from your state government – meaning there's likely more money flowing back to taxpayers than this map illustrates. 

    What many people don’t understand is that the size of your tax refund isn’t solely based on tax cuts or raises.

    Getting a refund feels like a win, but it represents an interest-free loan to the government for the last year. In an ideal world, you'd have a refund of $0 – meaning you paid exactly what you were supposed to.

    Don't forget to file your taxes (Monday, April 15th is the deadline to file without an extension) and if you want to protect yourself from robocallers, here are some tips: 

    • Don't answer calls from unknown phone numbers – let them go to voicemail and call back if necessary
    • If you do accidentally answer a spam call, don't press any buttons or speak, as that simply alerts them that they've reached a working phone number
    • Don't call a scammer back, and don't engage with them … it's like talking with cops, Anything you say can and will be used against you 
    • To decrease legal calls sign up for the federal and state do not call lists
    • Check out CTIA's tip sheet on How to Stop Robocalls to see a list of apps available to prevent robocalls on your mobile OS