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Know Laboratories
Thriving in an Age of Accelerating Uncertainty
Table of Contents
Change and Disruption
Grabbing an Option While Falling Through Space
Real Estate Investments
Five Options for Unlocking Equity
Find Experts for Sophisticated Financial Strategies
Manage Operations and a Marketing Campaign
Factors Influencing Real Estate Markets
Demographic Lifestyles and Buying Power
Who’s Free to Move About the Country?
Wireless Resorter or High Country Eagle?
Trends and Forces Shaping Your Work and Investments
Millennials and Boomers Shape the Economy
Emerging Trends in Innovation and Future Jobs
Forces of Change and Disruption
When Will Your Industry Get Turned Upside Down?
Driving Radical and Incremental Innovation
Artificial Intelligence, Quantum Computing and the Future of Work
The Future’s Arriving Faster than You Think. Now What?
Open Innovation, Crowdsourcing Platforms and Disruptive Technologies
What Does It Take to Capitalize on Digital Transformations?
8 Forecasts to Help You Stay Ahead of the Curve
When’s the Next Recession? Will You Be Ready This Time?
If a New Era of Technology is in the Driver’s Seat, Where Are We Going?
Which forces have peaked or are reversing themselves?
What Do You Need To Know As AI Changes Your World?
Looking Through the Glass Door: Cloudy With a Chance of Disruption
Consciousness, Disruption and Chaos. It’s All Good!?
Is It Too Late to Stimulate Your Creative Juices?
Is Doing What You Already Know Ever Enough? New Possibilities. More Choices.
Is Now the Time for You to Digest, Pivot and Profit?
Is It Time to Inhale the Future and Exhale the Past? Just Ask Walmart.
Knowing About New Possibilities Gives You More Choices. Check These Out.
Change Itself Doesn’t Hurt. What Hurts is Our Resistance to Change.
“Markets and most businesses will figure out how to survive. New businesses will keep launching. New technologies will thrive. We will continue to need food, shelter, transportation, communication, and all the things we think of as normal today. This will all happen while technology “eats” jobs faster than it creates them. It was all well and good when we went from 80% of the workforce on farms to 1% today. But that happened over several generations and centuries. We are going to see that kind of upheaval in many industries in half a generation. Can you blame frustrated workers? People wishing that they can have their jobs protected? Wanting the government to do something? In the coming decade, I think politics will be more important to markets than ever before. That is not to say investors can’t figure it out. Recovery from the Great Recession was the slowest on record. The next recovery will be even slower.” 
“The experts of 
“The brain can’t directly encode the passage of time, but recent work hints at a workaround for putting timestamps on memories of events. Invigorated by empirical support for their theory, he and his colleagues have been working on a broader framework, which they hope to use to unify the brain’s wildly different types of memory, and more: If their equations are implemented by neurons, they could be used to describe not just the encoding of time but also a slew of other properties — even thought itself. But that’s a big if. Since the discovery of time cells in 2008, the researchers had seen detailed, confirming evidence of only half of the mathematics involved. The other half — the intermediate representation of time — remained entirely theoretical. Until last summer.” Jordana Cepelewicz, Staff Writer 
“Research like this has the potential to lead to an understanding of how objective biomarkers can play a crucial role in medical decision making. In the future it might be possible to develop ways to externally modulate these conscious signatures and restore some degree of awareness or responsiveness in patients who have lost them, for example by using non-invasive brain stimulation techniques such as 
“For many support workers, robotic surgery is much less satisfying than open surgery. There’s a huge amount of solitary setup work to allow the robot to work, then there’s a big sprint to get the robot draped and docked to the patient. And then…everyone watches the procedure on TV. While the surgeon is operating via an immersive 3-D control console, the scrub folds his arms and waits. The nurse sits in the corner at a PC entering data, or sometimes checking email or Facebook. There’s not a lot to do, but you always have to be ready. Compared to open surgery, it’s clean, safe, and dull work.” 
“Researchers suggest artificial intelligence is now better and faster at detecting cancer than clinicians. Squamous carcinoma. An AI system distinguishes dangerous skin lesions from benign ones. More accurate than dermatologists. An 
“Businesses are changing right before our eyes as the digital transformation takes place around the world. And yet many dinosaur leaders, as I like to call them, are still in these businesses risking extinction if they can’t adapt to this ever-changing environment. It’s true that leaders must be willing to 
”Technology- and data-based transformation has arrived in full force. And if you think that your company or industry is immune, think again. Only twelve percent of the Fortune 500 companies who were in business in 1955 are still around. Before stepping down as CEO of Cisco Systems in June of 2015, John Chambers spoke at a conference and bluntly told attendees, “40 percent of businesses …unfortunately, will not exist in a meaningful way in 10 years. If I’m not making you sweat, I should be. In an era of constant disruption and economic volatility, more and more companies are being forced to confront the reality of diminishing profits, stagnating growth and organizational uncertainty. Regaining the agility to compete comes down to more than simply cutting costs. It’s about embracing new ways to drive cost-consciousness and transparency, identifying mispent (sic) resources in order to unlock new sources of revenue and growth, and creating an operating model that can deliver on business strategy while supporting a culture of continuous transformation.” 
“Turo has a stable of owners who want to rent out their vehicles. Then there are people like me who want to try different makes of cars. Based in San Francisco, Turo makes its money on the margin between what the car owner charges it and what the rental customer is willing to pay, less its costs for insurance, overhead, etc. The company has been around since 2009, but under a different name, RelayRides. It was rebranded in 2015, and has grown exponentially. Turo is now in 49 states (not New York, for insurance reasons) and has about six million customers and 250,000 cars up for rent, according to a company spokeswoman. Satellite operations are now in 56 countries. Once I installed the Turo app on my iPhone and signed up for the service, I put in the dates that I wanted my Corvette, and where I wanted to pick it up.” 
“Hosting applications on cloud platforms is becoming increasingly common, if not an enterprise standard. Among the potential benefits are rapid scalability and elasticity—enabling systems to grow with changing business demands while minimizing costs—as well as on-demand availability, providing agility and faster deployment. Such benefits can be particularly valuable for innovation, which may help explain why cloud computing is growing so quickly. Worldwide, public cloud services revenue is 
“A typical 600-megawatt power plant used at half capacity to handle peak power demand uses as much water as 100,000 people would in a year. Cooling towers at power plants use massive amounts of water–in the U.S., around a trillion gallons a year–to cool down high-temperature steam. Right now, much of that water is just goes back into the atmosphere as plumes of vapor. Varanasi estimates at a 600-megawatt plant, the new technology could save 150 million gallons of water per year.For power plants, or other buildings with cooling towers, using the new equipment could save millions on water bills, in some cases. Industry could reuse the captured water directly. But because the cooling towers create distilled water, it could also be treated further and used for drinking water. “If you install a cooling tower, it’s like doing desalination,” says Varanasi, who estimates that the technology could offset the need for building 70% of new desalination plants in the next decade.” 
“With blockchain technology, South Tyrol can create a chain of certification that authenticates and maintains people’s data indefinitely — instead of having to verify every instance of someone’s data each time a citizen enters their personal information. Moreover, Gasslitter believes blockchain can act as an integration layer to help simplify the province administration’s IT landscape. He says, “We have more than 1,000 different software applications to store and use citizens’ data. Every agency is like a small kingdom and doesn’t share data. Our goal is to simplify processes and increase transparency. We’re creating a model of data sharing within South Tyrol that we hope can be scaled across Italy.” 
“Spider silk transformed into fiber for tissue reconstruction; paper that conducts electricity; renewable diesel fuel; and new techniques for regenerating aging or diseased skin. These are just a handful of examples from a new 
“It took us months to realize what was going on here: The most resistant scientists and engineers saw open source methods as a fundamental challenge to their professional identities. They defined themselves as “problem solvers,” but open innovation crowdsourcing platforms didn’t let them play that role; instead, they had to frame problems for someone else to solve. “I’ve always been attracted to places that allow you to be able to think and solve greater problems,” one scientist told us, “If I can’t do it at NASA, what is keeping me from going somewhere else?” By contrast, there were other scientists and engineers who perceived the open methods as an opportunity to enhance their role and capabilities. As some engineers described it, this transition was a shift from thinking “the lab is my world” to “the world is my lab.” They argued for the need to let go of the “how” of their work and refocus on the bigger “why.” They called on their colleagues to shift their professional identities from “problem solvers” to “solution seekers.” 
“But in this moment, few business trends can compete with the magic of 
“Earlier, entrepreneurs used to call data analysis “business intelligence,” which perfectly characterizes the essence because data could provide a competitive advantage to those who used and interpreted them properly. Nowadays, a new term for referring to business intelligence was coined: “big data.” This name also makes a good sense because since the times of “business intelligence” the volumes of data became incredibly large. As the result, more effort should be applied to deal with them and make it useful for analytics professionals.” 1. 
“Entrepreneurs and investors operate leanly. They know big-bang innovation rarely ever works. Instead, they take small, smart steps toward a solution without worrying about nitty-gritty features. In contrast, enterprise teams are content to chew through budgets on the wrong things because they worry they won’t receive the same monies the next year if they don’t. Talk about wasteful! See your product or service from a scrappy, entrepreneurial viewpoint. Don’t waste time on that obscure API or flashy layout. If users want it, they’ll tell you during the prototyping phase. Spend where your product provides value, and innovation will follow. Far too many firms don’t connect the dots between their budgetary input and innovation output. It’s not as simple as spending more money. The truth is, it’s about agile planning, frequent failure, and regular reallocation of resources. The sooner your innovation budget accounts for those things, the better your balance sheet will look.” 
“Many of these problems can be traced back to a basic economic distinction: the difference between invention and innovation. Invention is defined as the discovery of a new exciting idea, product or approach. Innovation means applying that idea through changes in operating models and mindsets. Too many areas today contain the invention but not the innovation. This harmful decoupling is driven by a combination of biases, blind spots and inertia (knowing you need to do something different but ending up doing more of the same). In too many cases, the flaw has less to do with the need to come up with a brilliant idea, and more a matter of embracing it and adapting accordingly. That requires being curious, open-minded, willing to listen, open to experimentation, creating safe zones for candid discussions and learning from failure. Economics has persistently failed to address this fundamental — and solvable — problem. The gaps between inventions and innovations have led to too many foregone welfare-enhancing opportunities for individuals, companies, governments and society.” 
“It will likely take a decade or so until some AI technologies become the norm. While that provides plenty of lead time for the transition, few companies are taking action now to train their workers. Another little-noticed problem is that the AI systems themselves are being created with data and algorithms that don’t reflect the diverse American society. Accenture research shows business leaders don’t think that their workers are ready for AI. But only 3% of those leaders were reinvesting in training. At a Davos meeting held by Accenture, Fei-Fei Li, an associate professor at Stanford University and director of the school’s AI lab, suggested using AI to retrain workers. “I think there’s a really exciting possibility that machine learning itself would help us to learn in more effective ways and to re-skill workers in more effective ways,” she said. ‘And I personally would like to see more investment and thought going into that aspect.‘” 
“Clarifying these seven factors for each critical decision throughout your organization will help you get started on identifying opportunities for AIs to either reduce costs or enhance performance. Here we discussed a decision associated with a specific situation. To get started with AI, your challenge is to identify the key decisions in your organization where the outcome hinges on uncertainty. Filling out the AI Canvas won’t tell you whether you should make your own AI or buy one from a vendor, but it will help you clarify what the AI will contribute (the prediction), how it will interface with humans (judgment), how it will be used to influence decisions (action), how you will measure success (outcome), and the types of data that will be required to train, operate, and improve the AI.” 
“In quantum technology, information is carried on quibits, single photons. For the quibits to be actually useful in quantum technologies, though, they need to be produced by Single Photon Emitters that work at room temperature (it’s just practical, really) and at telecom wavelength (the most efficient way to transfer information via optical fibres) all at once. It wasn’t easy, but they’ve done it. Those plucky Australian Scientists have gone and done it. And they did it using a material found in DVDs.” 
”’Dick Feynman relished the pleasure of finding things out, and he had a remarkable knack for conveying the excitement of science to a general audience,’ says John P. Preskill, Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at Caltech. ‘We hope this event will capture some of that boundless curiosity and sense of fun that made Feynman such a treasured colleague.’ The event will be divided into two days, with an evening celebration on Friday, May 11, and a scientific symposium during the day on Saturday, May 12.” 
“The notion of an underlying quantum probability proved to be too much for Einstein (and Schrödinger as well), who would now turn his back on the new quantum mechanics forever to pursue his dream of a causal unified field theory. In the end, Einstein would never realize this final dream, and the “strangeness” of quantum mechanics continues with us today.” 
“With innovative information technology, however, executives sometimes lose their rational decision approaches. Certainly it’s true that in times of radical technological change there’s a lot of figuring out to do. Executives have to understand what new technologies can do, and understand their impact on markets, products/services, and distribution channels. These decisions are inevitably influenced by hype from vendors and the media, expensive consultants offering “thought leadership” insights, many high profile experiments, and a few exciting success stories that keep people wanting more. A charismatic CIO or Chief Digital Officer may make it even harder to be level-headed in those heady times.” Thomas H. Davenport George Westerman Harvard Business Review
“As new technologies are developed, affected industries are forced to adapt or be replaced. The newest technology that is quickly becoming the next major disruption is blockchain technology. Blockchain is a digital ledger system used to securely record transactions. It is poised to impact the way business is done across the globe. Here are nine prominent industries that are slated to be overhauled by blockchain technology in the near future. 1. The Banking Industry 2. The Real Estate Industry 3. The Healthcare Industry 4. The Legal Industry 5. The Cryptocurrency Exchange Industry 6. Politics 7. The Startup Industry 8. The Video Industry 9. The Education Industry.” John White CREDIT: Getty Images
“Yet if you do have enough wind velocity information, combined with an array of readings from barometers, thermometers, and such, you might ask a weatherman, particularly a trained meteorologist with access to state-of-the-art computers and software, to make a sound forecast. We often plan our outdoor activities these days with the help of newscasts, websites, apps, and voice assistants that provide reasonable forecasts hours or days in advance. It is rather amazing that meteorology can perform such a feat. Lorenz not only discovered chaos, he also identified its key mechanism. When he graphed his data along several axes, he noted the strange property that iterating (plotting the trajectory over time) any two nearby points resulted in their separation. The gap would grow greater and greater with each iteration until the mathematical “offspring” of the two points would be so widely separated that they be in completely different regions of the cloud of information.” Paul Halpern, Forbes. Hellisp of Wikimedia Commons / Created by XaosBits using Mathematica and POV-Ray
“My core innovation principles are very simple no matter if I share it with my students, my employees, or my kids,” added Dror. “Have more dreams than achievements. Chase your dreams as fast as you can and fail fast if needed, but always, always ask ‘WHY?’.” Take a step back from what you do, and reflect on how you do it. Analyze the tasks and the roles you perform. Ask yourself a few questions.” Jay Sullivan , Forbes, Shutterstock
“The precision of the nanorobots, which is what makes their potential for safe cancer treatment so great, is due to their meticulously crafted structure. The drug-holding “package” is made up of DNA sheets, measuring 60 by 90 nanometers, that wrap around thrombin molecules. On the outside of the folded sheets are molecules that zero in on nucleolin, a protein that’s present in the lining of blood vessels associated with growing tumors. These nanorobots show great promise, but they aren’t ready for humans yet. To get there, the researchers are seeking out clinical partners to further develop this treatment pathway. Still, the fact that it seems to work in mice and pigs makes it likely that nanorobots like these will be available as cancer treatments within our lifetimes.” Peter Hess inverse.com
“Now, researchers have developed a process that can purify water, no matter how dirty it is, in a single step. Scientists from Australian research organization CSIRO have created a filtration technique using a graphene film with microscopic nano-channels that lets water pass through, but stops pollutants. The process, called “Graphair”, is so effective that water samples from Sydney Harbor were safe to drink after being treated. And while the film hails from graphene, Graphair is comparatively cheaper, faster and more environmentally-friendly to make, as its primary component is renewable soybean oil, which also helps maximise the efficiency of the purifying technique’s filter counterpart”. Rachel England, Engadget CSIRO
“In a paper published to the journal Carbon, the team eventually discovered that trace quantities of manganese contamination from the original graphite or reactants actually hide within the graphene lattice. When the graphene enters the right conditions – such as in a fuel cell – those minute metal bits activate the ORR. The reason that analysis was unable to discover this until now is because the contrast between carbon and manganese atoms is so slight that the tools used to analyse them weren’t sensitive enough.” Colm Gorey Image: Angel Soler Gollonet/Shutterstock
“The researchers used a special type of qubit (the quantum version of a classical computer’s bits) called spin qubits to run two different quantum algorithms on a silicon chip. Other quantum systems, like Intel’s breakthrough 49-qubit computer, rely on superconductive materials and near perfect-zero temperatures. A spin qubit doesn’t require either, it’s an electron that’s been agitated by microwave pulses. While other quantum systems are closer to being useful, the idea here wasn’t to create a better computer but one that would work with existing infrastructure. Intel, it’s worth mentioning, is the world leader in silicon chip sales.” TNW · Tristan Greene
“Consider the simplest scenario, where two players, Alice and Bob, want to exchange a simple bit of information, i.e. either 0 or 1,” Dakić explained to Lisa Zyga at Phys.org. “They encode their respective bits or messages at the same time, directly into the superposition state of a quantum particle. Once the information is encoded, the partners send their parts of quantum particle towards each other.” What’s then needed is some kind of smart device and mechanism between our two players, which can route the parts of the particle depending on its contents. “For example, if the particle ends up with Alice, she would know that Bob’s bit was just opposite from her bit, and vice versa,” says Dakić. Alice and Bob have therefore sent and received a message in the same time as it would take a message to pass from one to the other under a classical physics system.” DAVID NIELD, ScienceAlert (ktsimage/iStock)
“The danger lies in the fact that, before long, someone will build a quantum computer that can crack our most powerful encryption methods – the mathematical tricks that turn data into unreadable secret code to hide it from prying eyes. The only way to defend ourselves is to build codes that even the most powerful machines conceivable cannot crack. Which is exactly why some of the world’s smartest mathematicians have been attempting to invent a whole new class of encryption algorithms. Having submitted their best designs to the post-quantum cryptography group at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Maryland, scores of teams are now engaged in a global race to identify the most secure by trying everything they can think of to crack each other’s codes. If we find an algorithm that survives every attack, it will emerge as the 21st-century’s gold-standard digital padlock.” Michael Brooks. newscientist.com Raymond Biesinger
“It’s not the number of qubits; it’s what you do with them that counts. Here’s what that really means. – Though there are some potentially promising applications, such as precisely designing molecules (see “10 Breakthrough Technologies 2018”), classical machines are still going to be better, faster, and far more economical at solving most problems. “Using a quantum computer would be like chartering a jumbo jet to cross the road,” says Oxford University’s Benjamin. He suggests that rather than “quantum supremacy,” we should be talking about attaining “quantum inimitability”—in other words, specific tasks that only quantum computers can do. Other researchers have suggested names like “quantum advantage” or “quantum ascendancy.” Martin Giles and Will Knight MIT Technology Review GOOGLE