If you’ve used Wi-Fi, windshield wipers or a dishwasher — and who hasn’t? — you have a woman to thank.
Male inventors such as Henry Ford, Nikola Tesla and Alexander Graham Bell get all the press. But this Women’s History Month, it’s important to note that women have been the masterminds behind some invaluable creations, too.
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Take Radia Perlman. She holds more than 100 US patents and paved the way for the development of the internet. Or Beulah Louise Henry, known as “Lady Edison” after she obtained 49 patents for her inventions, including an ice cream freezer. Or Carolyn Bertozzi, named on 50 US patents, who invented her own field of study: bio-orthogonal chemistry. The list goes on.
Mention McDonald’s to someone today, and they’re more likely to think about Big Mac than Big Data. But that could soon change: The fast-food giant has embraced machine learning, in a fittingly super-sized way.
McDonald’s is set to announce that it has reached an agreement to acquire Dynamic Yield, a startup based in Tel Aviv that provides retailers with algorithmically driven “decision logic” technology. When you add an item to an online shopping cart, it’s the tech that nudges you about what other customers bought as well. Dynamic Yield reportedly had been recently valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars; people familiar with the details of the McDonald’s offer put it at over $300 million. That would make it the company’s largest purchase since it acquired Boston Market in 1999.
The burger giant can certainly afford it; in 2018 alone it tallied nearly $6 billion of net income, and ended the year with a free cash flow of $4.2 billion. But that still doesn’t address the bigger question of why. For that, you have to head to the drive-thru.
Get ready for the next generation of wifi technology: Wi-fi 6 (for so it is named) is going to be appearing on devices from next year. But will you have to throw out your old router and get a new one? And is this going to make your Netflix run faster? Here’s everything you need to know about the new standard.
A brief history of wifi
Those of you of a certain age will remember when home internet access was very much wired—only one computer could get online, a single MP3 took half an hour to download, and you couldn’t use the landline phone at the same time.
Thank goodness for wifi technology then, which gradually became cheap and compact enough to fit inside a router suitable for home use. The first wifi protocol appeared in 1997, offering 2Mbit/s link speeds, but it was only with the arrival of 802.11b and 11Mbit/s speeds in 1999 that people seriously started thinking about home wifi.
MANAGEMENT books have a deservedly poor reputation.Too often they are written by people who confuse insight with jargon, the types who love to call a spade a “manual horticultural utensil”. At the other end of the scale are tomes containing a plethora of pithy platitudes about “breaking the mould” and “worshipping the kill”. The choice, in short, is between the incomprehensible and the inconsequential.
My daughter recently started kindergarten, and for the first couple of weeks of school, I was an eager mom, waiting to pick her up at the end of the day and hear all about her new adventures. I’d step through the classroom door, stretch my arms open and say, “Hi, lady!” and then wait for her to run and embrace me like she often did when she was in preschool.
Instead, she’d glance up, slump over and drag her feet over to her backpack. On the drive home, things would only go downhill. “So …” I’d say, smiling at her in the rearview mirror. “How was your day?” She’d grunt. Then she would whine about something (usually how much she wants to watch a show on the iPad, and why, why, why won’t I let her?) and we’d start arguing. By the time we’d get to the house, she’d be a pouty mess and I’d be counting down the minutes until bedtime.
On the Northwest coast of Norway sits a small, completely flat island called Giske. It’s surrounded by fjords and mountains on one side, and the vast North Atlantic ocean on the other.
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With around only 700 inhabitants, life here is often very quiet, despite the almost constant roar of the wind.
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But Giske has been host to a number of highly-respected musicians. With the likes of Arcade Fire, Sampha and 1980s legends A-ha all making their way to this remote location.
CBD, the chemical found in hemp and marijuana plants, is showing up in shampoos, lattes, body oils, gummy bears and dog treats. It’s being sold in coffee shops and farmer’s markets, mom-and-pops and high-end department stores and most recently, drugstore chain CVS.
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“Literally overnight, you’re seeing CBD all around you and in everything,” said Troy Dayton, CEO of The Arcview Group, an Oakland, California-based cannabis investment and research firm. “This is a product that is going from relative obscurity to being on everyone’s mind: producers, consumers and especially entrepreneurs.”
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The CBD floodgates opened after President Donald Trump signed the Farm Bill into law in December. Among other things, the bill legalized the production of hemp, which contains high levels of cannabidiol, or CBD. CBD is non-psychoactive, meaning it won’t get you high. (THC, or tetrahydrocannabinol, is the chemical in cannabis that does that.) Instead, CBD is marketed for everything from helping to relieve pain and inflammation to reducing stress and anxiety.
About four years ago I decided to read 100 new books a year. I’ve kept up that habit until recently.
I stopped reading two new books a week because I forgot almost everything I learned more than a year earlier. And there’s no way you can remember even a quarter of a book you read three years ago.
I made this discovery this year when I started worrying about random things in my life. I thought, “Didn’t I deal with this issue years ago?”
And I was right, I’ve read a lot about worrying, I’ve coached people, and I even wrote a book about it. But I’m not a machine—I’m not immune to the challenges that we all face. No one is.
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
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Calm workplace
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