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

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

Lighter Links:

• Here's How Google Knows in Less Than 5 Minutes If Someone Is a Great Leader. (Inc)
• What Amazon Knows About You. (Axios)
• Julio Iglesias Has an Absolutely Massive Net Worth and Owns an Airport.(CNW)
• Scientist: Alien Life Now Seems Inevitable and Possibly Imminent. (Futurism)
• This Trick Helped 96% of WWII US Military Pilots Learn to Fall Asleep within 2 Minutes, Even After Drinking Coffee. (BusinessInsider)

 

Trading Links:

• One Out of Every 11,600 People in San Francisco is a Billionaire. (Vox)
• Here's Who Stands to Get Rich from Uber's IPO. (ComplianceX)
• Vegan-Friendly, Celeb-Backed Beyond Meat Has 2019'S Best U.S. IPO. (Time)
• If You Invested $1,000 in Apple in 2009, Here's How Much You'd Have Now. (CNBC)
• Man Credited With Calling the 2008 Crisis Says the Next 20 Years in the Stock Market Will Break a Lot of Hearts'. (MarketWatch)

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

 

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

Lighter Links:

• These are Amazon's 38 Rules for Success. (FastCompany)
• Amazon Used an AI to Automatically Fire Low-Productivity Workers. (Futurism)
• Cornell Scientists Create Living' Machines that Eat, Grow, and Evolve. (TheNextWeb)
• Drinking Tequila Could Help You Lose Weight. (Elle)
• Is It True that It's More Painful to Come Second Rather Than Third? New Insights from the 2016 Olympics. (Digest)

 

Trading Links:

• Making Sense of the Market in the Age of Algorithmic Trading. (Barrons)
• The next Gig Economy Will Be On-demand Knowledge.(WEForum)
• Central Banks Extraordinary Policies: What Could Go Wrong.(SeeItMarket)
• Super Rich Ditching Jet Ownership for a Portfolio of Aviation Options. (Bloomberg)
• If You Invested $1,000 in Microsoft in 2009, Here's How Much You'd Have Now. (CNBC)

 

 

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.

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:

• • Here is a link to a short-version of this video.
  • This reminds me of the "Shift Happens!" video.
  • Worth Looking At ... Here are the Stats.

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

via Lori Lewis and Chadd Callahan

 

A little different than 2009 ...

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

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

Lighter Links:

• What are the Most Promising Uses for Blockchain We Haven't Seen Yet? (Forbes)
• Sperm and Sensibility: The Modern World of Designer Children. (TLS)
• Thousands of Amazon Workers are Listening in on Echo Audio, Report Says. (AppleInsider)
• Strength Training for the Lungs: Why Heavy Breathing Could Be a Shortcut to Improving Your Health. (Telegraph)
• Forecasting the Future: Can the Hive Mind Let Us Predict the Future? (Futurism)

 

Trading Links:

• NVIDIA AI Research Points to an Evolution of the Chip Business. (ZDNet)
• Philip Morris International is Sticking with E-Cigs, Not Marijuana. (Fool)
• This Simple Map Shows the Biggest Employers in Each State. (Good)
• Lyft's I.P.O. is Making the Same Circle of Men Rich, Again. (New York Times)
• The Future of Electric Cars is Happening Now in China. (Quartz)

 

 

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. 

 

via 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.

 

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:

• Here's a Reddit "Ask Us Anything" with the scientists from the Event Horizon Telescope 
• Here's a TED talk from Dr. Katie Bouman in 2017, about taking a photo of the black hole.  Katie went to MIT and led the creation of a new algorithm that helped produced today's image.
• Here are the six published papers by the EHT on today's achievement
• Here's another great video from the Perimeter Institute of Theoretical Physics on today's image 

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. 

 

via 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. 

 

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

Here Are Some Links For Your Weekly Reading - April 7th, 2019

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

Lighter Links:

• Scientists Plead to Stop Creation of Killer Robots: We're at 'The Brink of a New Arms Race'. (FoxNews)
• Moratorium on Human Genome Editing: Time to Get It Right. (HastingsCenter)
• 'Those Who Obeyed the Rules Were Favored by Evolution'.(Spiegel)
• Meet the World's Oldest Confirmed Person, 116-Year-Old Kane Tanaka. (TwistedSifter)
• Why Democrats Want to Abolish the Electoral College and Republicans Want to Keep It. (Fortune)

Trading Links:

• Why Companies that Wait to Adopt AI May Never Catch Up.(HBR)
• Iranian Hackers Have Hit Hundreds of Companies in past Two Years. (Wall Street Journal)
• What is an Inverted Yield Curve and What Does It Really Mean? (TheStreet)
• S&P 500 Posts Best First Quarter in 21 Years. (FoxBusiness)
• Bill Gates is Back in the $100 Billion Club, and Not All Thanks to Microsoft. (CNW)

 

 

Sardines in a Tincan Hurtling Through The Air

I fly a lot.

In fact, I just hit five million "butt-in-seat" miles on American Airlines. 

 

 

I don't expect to continue at this place forever ... but now is the time to push.

I have a different workflow when I travel, and it works for me.

Ultimately, I believe that good things happen when you are in motion! 

Many people, however, are focused on the hassle.

The practical realities of travel mean I spend some time thinking about the things airlines do well or poorly.  Nonetheless, I appreciate the benefits more than the frustrations.

Yes, it is true ... Status means much less today than it used to.  Every week it feels like they make the space between seats smaller while the time for finding overhead luggage space gets shorter. 

Yet, the planes themselves are getting better.  Here, for example, is what an empty 787 looks like. 

 

 

It looks more like a set from Star Trek then the hellscape passengers complain about on a regular basis. 

What about the boarding process? 

Here is a video that presents the findings from studies on experimental boarding methods that work better. 

 

via CGP Grey

If you really don't like commercial flying, you can fly on any of the "economical" private options like JetSmarter or WheelsUp. Or, better yet, you could be like this guy and buy the world's only private Boeing 787 Dreamliner. 

 

via Sam Chui

You can rent it out for a measly $70k an hour ... What a bargain!