• WORK MEETINGS ARE AMONG THE TOP ‘PRODUCTIVITY KILLERS,’ mostly from “too much communicating or socializing” according to a recent Career Builder survey. While team communication is critical to creativity, meetings often get “derailed and lose their focus due to an overly chatty teammate.” Tips for better controlling a meeting: (1) Distribute an advance Outline/Agenda noting discussion items and meeting length; (2) Prioritizing items and reminding participants before each segment whether timing is on track; (3) Anticipating ‘triggers’ which typically usurp time – like participants who tend to elaborate on past experiences or ideas – and guide them by acknowledging the value of what they have to say, but noting that after-the-meeting will allow time to explore; (4) “Keep in mind that everyone has a different personality type and some may not even be aware they are overly chatty, so always avoid belittling them in front of the team.” [U.S.NEWS & WORLD REPORT – June 13, 18]
  •  AMERICA NOW POSSESSES THE WORLD’S MOST POWERFUL SUPERCOMPUTER. The ‘Summit,’ built by IBM, utilizes over 185 miles of fiber optic cables, two tennis-courts worth of floor space, and nearly 37,000 processors. It can perform 200 quadrillion calculations per second (that’s 200,000,000,000,000,000 or 200 Petaflops – roughly “a million times faster than a typical laptop, and nearly twice the peak performance of the next most powerful machine (in China).” The next milestone in large-scale computing is targeted by 2021, named ‘Aurora,’ which would multiply power five times, to 1000 petaflops. [WIRED – June 6, 18]
  • “DESPITE YEARS OF SANCTIONS, INDICTMENTS, AND OTHER ATTEMPTS TO COMBAT HACKERS, attacks continue and experts warn it could be twenty years before the situation is under control… In the absence of a clear legal framework (as politicians try to wrap their heads around the concept of ‘The Cyber’) hackers and spy agencies are experimenting to see what they can & cannot get away with, creating a free-for-all online… The oft-forgotten reality is that all countries commit espionage (even against their own allies) to understand capabilities and intentions… Some are looking for trade secrets, some for weaknesses that could be used in future attacks, and others want to just stir up trouble… So making a clear distinction between what they consider standard (if unsavory) elements of ‘statecraft’ and those activities less acceptable (like industrial espionage, election meddling, destructive cyberattacks) has proven difficult. Hacking is cheap, easy, deniable, and everybody is doing it. No wonder it’s proving so hard to stamp out.” [TECHREPUBLIC.COM – Jun 18, 18]
  • “ENGAGING IN ‘SUPERSTIOUS’ ACTS MAKES PEOPLE BELIEVE IN MYSTERIOUS FORCES RATHER THAN PROBABILITY (whether consciously or unconsciously), where outcomes are simply meant to be.” Research at Northwestern University found that superstition affects the way people think about risk and the odds of success or failure; that they “stop making rational deliberations about probability and, instead, believe that outcomes are predetermined… The simple act of crossing one’s fingers or clutching a rabbit’s foot keychain somehow flips ‘loss aversion’ on its head – i.e. that people will take significant risks to avoid losing money, but will not accept that risk in hope of receiving a windfall… While performing superstitious actions, people just look at the endpoints (gain or loss) without thinking about expectancy – fatalism at its finest.” [INSIGHT.KELLOGG.NORTHWESTERN – Jun 4, 18]
  • ‘BLOCKCHAIN’ IS STILL AN IMMATURE TECHNOLOGY but continues to attract billions of dollars in capital investment; IBM alone has funded over $200 million and hired over a thousand staff. In simplest terms, the core advantages of Blockchain are “decentralization, cryptographic security, transparency and immutability… resulting from a database shared across a public or private computing network where each computer node holds a copy of the ledger, so there is no single point of failure. Every piece of info is mathematically encrypted and recorded with various consensus protocols required to validate a new block before it can be added to the chain of historical records, with automatic triggering when certain transactional conditions (i.e. dangers) are met. This prevents fraud or double spending without requiring 3rd party authority.”   [McKINSEY- Jun 18]
  •  THOUGHTS FOR THE WEEK: “It’s not whether you win or lose, but how you place the blame.”

       The absurd fake news argument that MS13 gangs belong in America is based on a “gigantically irrelevant, painfully idiotic cliché that the vast majority of poor Latin Americans pouring into our country ‘enroll in school and stay out of trouble’… Yes, and the vast majority of boa constrictors stay out of trouble too. Let’s put them in our schools!” Read the details:  http://humanevents.com/2018/06/13/meanwhile-10-miles-from-the-white-house/?utm_source=coulterdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nlm