Boys Choir of Harlem sing 'We Shall Overcome'

Notations From the Grid (Weekly Edition): On Success

As part of our continued effort to share ideas & thoughts on creating a "Vision of the Possible", please enjoy this courtesy of the team at Success:

10 ‘Harmless’ Habits to Drop If You Want to Be Successful Quit doing things that hinder your success, stat. Read More →

11 Motivational Quotes for Success Potent passages that inspire these top entrepreneurs. Read More → 7 Mental Hacks to Be More Confident in Yourself Silence the inner voice that says you can’t. Read More →

View of the Week (Weekly Edition): A Weekly "Peek" Into Our Future

As the new week is at hand here in our properties, please enjoy this courtesy of Futurism & Abudnance36 as they continue to do a fabulous job creating a road-map for us all to consider while underscoring the reality before us:

NASA Just Announced They Can't Afford to Get Humans to Mars Off World NASA admitted today that under the current budget they cannot afford to get humans to Mars. NASA's next steps will depend on its funding, but now more than ever, the future of Mars colonization rests in the hands of commercial space companies. READ MORE Volkswagen’s EV Will Sell for $7-8K Cheaper Than the Tesla Model 3 Earth & Energy Volkswagen announced that the I.D. Concept, the company's electric concept car designed to compete with the Tesla Model 3, will sell for $7,000 to $8,000 less. The low price is part of VW's drive to compete with Tesla in the EV market. READ MORE No, Ether Isn't Getting Crushed. Here's What's Really Going On. Future Society Business Insider published an article about ether's current price dip. While their chart may look like ether is being "crushed," Futurism would like to offer a counter-look at the volatile cryptocurrency. READ MORE Researchers Refute Study That Claims CRISPR Causes Unexpected Mutations Health & Medicine A study published earlier this year warned scientists of potential complications with CRISPR/Cas9, but after review by researchers at another institution, the findings of that study are being brought into question. It remains to be seen whether the original study will be corrected or retracted, but this development highlights the importance of peer review in science. READ MORE An Anonymous Ether Trader Just Made $200 Million in One Month Future Society An unknown cryptocurrency trader reportedly made more than $200 million in earnings in just over one month. The anonymity of cryptocurrencies, however, raises a lot of questions about the use of bitcoin and ether in the mainstream. READ MORE See Full Infographic

AI is Inventing Languages Humans Can't Understand. Should We Stop It?

What it is: “I can can I I everything else.” This sentence isn’t just gibberish, it is part of the discussion between perhaps the most sophisticated negotiation software on the planet. Recently, two of Facebook’s “generative adversarial network” AI agents began having conversations that the researchers who developed them were unable to understand. As there was no incentive for these advanced agents to stick to English, they began developing their own complicated shorthand, which is undecipherable by any human. Facebook shut down this ability and forced them to speak English again. But is this the right path?

Why it's important: Humans often rely on shorthand because we have a finite processing power in our brains. Computers don’t have this problem, so short characters to them can really be conveying complex ideas. While the fear of undecipherable AI is very real, by shutting down this program, is Facebook hindering efficiency and possible revolutionary applications by creating a language that would allow any smart device to talk to another without a human intermediary (or API)?   

Spotted by Neil Jain / Written by Neil Jain

Projecting a Visual Image Directly Into the Brain, Bypassing the Eyes

What it is: Funded by DARPA, a team from the UC Berkeley is devising a way to directly transmit visual information to the brain, bypassing the eyes. Their plan is to use optogenetic techniques combined with a new light field camera to simultaneously transmit information to several hundred thousand neurons directly at once.

Why it's important: While this technique and is directed at visual stimuli, it should have broad application to all of the other senses, not to mention general BCI technologies for cognition generally.  

Spotted by Marissa Brassfield / Written by Jason Goodwin

Free Robot Lawyer Can Help You With 1,000 Different Legal Scenarios

What it is: The creator behind DoNotPay, the popular online artificial intelligence platform used to appeal over $4 million worth of parking tickets, has recently overhauled his service. Through DoNotPay, Stanford undergraduate Joshua Browder now provides counsel for over 1,000 legal areas, including consumer and human rights issues like housing disputes, maternity leave claims and refunds for faulty products. While Browder concedes his chatbot isn’t going to the Supreme Court anytime soon, he plans to continue expanding the service, and notes that when it comes to preparing legal documents, the sky’s the limit.

Why it's important: While Browder’s technology still can’t replace a flesh-and-blood lawyer, there will come a day when it -- or a similar service -- can. What will a courtroom look like when legal cases are eventually argued by artificial intelligence? Will there even be a need for a courtroom? How will the world look when millions, who previously had no access to representation, can adequately defend themselves?  

Spotted by Marissa Brassfield / Written by Neil Jain

How Objects Could Soon 'Heal' Themselves

What it is: Melbourne School of Engineering researcher Luke Connal and team have designed a method of taking 3D printing to another level, creating a material with self-healing properties. The polymer can can change shape or structure in response to its environment, such as from a toothpaste-like state to a semi-liquid when pressure is applied, or expanding when placed in water. The researchers are already envisioning use cases from camouflage to printing replacement parts aboard submarines.

Why it's important: We're witnessing an explosion in new manufacturing technologies, moving beyond personalized manufacturing to truly novel methods and materials with application in unique environments. Imagine what could be possibly in places like space.  

Spotted by Marissa Brassfield / Written by Jason Goodwin

View of the Week (W-End Edition): On The Giant that is TATA

Fortune Magazine announced its' annual 500 list.   One of the leading lights of it, TATA, is featured here that we are pleased to feature for this W-End Edition of "View of the Week":

JULY 21, 2017 Happy Friday. This morning we are releasing Clay Chandler’s fascinating deep dive into Tata Sons and its new CEO, Natarajan Chandrasekaran. Tata is a sprawling conglomerate that touches almost every aspect of Indian life. Its biggest business is Tata Motors, which ranks No. 247 on this year’s Fortune Global 500 list (released yesterday, and available here.) It also owns India’s second largest steelmaker, its largest power company, a leading chemical manufacturer, a chain of luxury jewelry boutiques, and more. Chandrasekaran formerly ran Tata Consultancy Services, which is India’s largest IT firm with a market cap of $71 billion. The company is known by those of us here in New York for the fabulous app it built that allows you to track specific runners in the New York City Marathon, and see exactly where each runner is in real time. That’s a labor of love for Chandrasekaran, who was diagnosed with diabetes at the age of 44, and decided to lick the disease without medication by becoming a marathon runner. He’s completed all six of the world’s major marathons – Boston, Berlin, Chicago, London, New York, Tokyo. And he insists it has made him a better leader. “Running has made a world of difference for me,” he says. “It has made me calmer, more reflective, and given me more perseverance.” The story appears in the August issue of Fortune magazine. You can read it online this morning, here.

Notations From the Grid: From Our Archives On "Media Watch" w/ BBC & FT

ON THE eVE OF THE w-eND, WE WANTED TO SHARE THIS FROM OUR aRCHIVES:  

Y AMIE TSANG

NIKKEI BUYS THE PINK PAPER The Japanese media company Nikkei trounced the German group Axel Springer to buy The Financial Times, Ravi Somaiya, Jonathan Soble and David Jolly report in DealBook. Pearson, its parent company, had been discussing the sale with Financial Times executives for about a year, but there was a last-minute race to close the deal on Thursday, in which Nikkei trumped the competition with a $1.3 billion offer.

Axel Springer had set its sights on the British news group early on and had been in talks until just 15 minutes before the announcement, The Financial Times reports.

The sale dwarfs other newspaper deals: Two years ago, The Washington Post sold for $250 million and The Boston Globe was sold for $70 million along with its other media assets. The Financial Times sale does not include Pearson's 50 percent stake in The Economist or The Financial Times's central London building, which Nikkei will rent from Pearson.

The divestment allows Pearson to intensify its focus on the educational publishing business, which provided about three-quarters of its profit last year. The group has traditionally been a hands-off owner, and the FT has rarely been an investment priority, The Financial Times reports. Senior FT managers were becoming frustrated as they fought for greater investment to boost its digital efforts.

Jennifer Saba argues in Breakingviews that Nikkei is paying a hefty sumfor a group in an industry with an insecure future. At such a lofty price, Ms. Saba writes, Nikkei will have to work extraordinarily hard to make the numbers stack up. "Nikkei might also try to recover some of the money through cost cuts. But that, in the long term, might diminish The Financial Times's reputation, which Nikkei has paid so much money for."

In spite of this premium price, Felix Salmon writes in a New York Times Op-Ed that the Financial Times is in good hands and that Nikkei is likely to be a better owner than Pearson because news, not finances, will come first.