Weekend Digest: The Rewind Edition
by November 28, 2014 11:23 pm 99 views
For our weekend business and political readers.
On this week’s edition of Talk Business & Politics, we’ll replay portions of our recent exclusive interviews with Sen.-elect Tom Cotton and Gov.-elect Asa Hutchinson. What are their priorities for their new positions?
Plus with all the talk of the historic 2014 Election Night returns, we go back 22 years ago to arguably the most historic of Election Nights in Arkansas: the 1992 Presidential Election. Arkansas’ 42nd Governor had just been elected the 42nd President. We’ll replay Bill Clinton’s speech to the nation and the world on that once-in-a-lifetime evening.
We’ll also run through the latest business and political headlines of the week. Tune in to Talk Business & Politics on Sunday morning at 9 a.m. on KATV Ch. 7.
A LOOK INTO THE NEW YEAR FOR TWITTER
What should we expect from Twitter in 2015? That’s a question posed by Mashable after a whirlwind 2014 when Twitter went public.
Twitter enjoyed a honeymoon with Wall Street in its first three months as a public company, with the stock briefly soaring above $70 a share. That came to an abrupt end the day that Twitter released its first earnings report in February. Twitter beat Wall Street estimates for revenue and earnings, but user growth came in below estimates. The stock fell by more than 20% overnight.Some version of that episode has repeated itself after multiple earnings reports since then, forcing Twitter’s top execs to stress user growth above all else and prove to investors that it is a mainstream service like Facebook. Twitter’s CEO deputized and then replaced a series of execs to help reignite growth, but with minimal results.
Click on this link to find out what executives say will be on the table for Twitter in 2015 including “a wide range of new features.”
CNN Tech says it’s, “R.I.P checkbook, adios PIN number.”
And if you’ve ever worried about who might be looking over your shoulder at the ATM machine, or the exorbitant fee that money transfer will cost you, don’t fret.In years to come – not even that many – these problems won’t even exist as the way we bank and control our finances will change vastly.
In fact CNN says it’s moving so fast, five years from now the technology used to manage your banking and finances will be “unrecognizable.”
Follow this link for a look into the not-so-distant future at “five things you most likely won’t need in five years to keep your finances ticking along.”
Imagine a country being able to double the size of its economy, almost at the touch of a button, or the click of a mouse. The tiny Baltic state of Estonia aims to do just that. Next month, Estonia will become the first country in the world to offer foreigners so-called “e-residency,” which could hugely expand its customer base without increasing the size of its physical population of 1.3 million people.
It’s one of the most e-connected places on the planet with almost every home, office, factory and classroom hooked up to the internet, and most government business is conducted online; Estonia even uses e-voting in its general elections.
So how does Estonia’s digital infrastructure parlay into outsiders becoming “e-residents”? How much will it cost, how many e-residents is Estonia estimating it will gain and why would anyone want to do this?
Answers at this link.
They are called Generation Y or Millennials. Millennials are the children of Baby Boomers or Generation Xers. Born between 1981-1996 they are 18 to 33 years old.
In a recent post, Forbes reports there is “Good news, bad news in Generation Y workplace trends.”
Forbes says the findings came from a new survey “compiled by Payscale and Millenial Branding, incorporating results from hundreds of thousands of Gen Y (Millennials), Gen X and Boomers surveyed over a two-year period, 2012-2014.”
The gender wage gap is shrinking with the millennial generation. When corrected for job choice, experience and hours worked, the gender wage gap is smaller for members of Generation Y at all job levels than either Gen Xers or Baby Boomers. However, the gap still widens for Gen Y (as it does for all other generations) as responsibility level increases. So, female executives across all generations see a greater disparity in pay than individual contributors.
For the full survey with some other very surprising results, click here.
In that election, the birth control mandate in the Affordable Care Act — a crucial aspect of the war on women rhetoric — was hotly debated.It wasn’t clear even in 2012 that this rhetoric worked. On the one hand, we found that supporters of the birth control mandate were more likely to vote for Obama, even after accounting for other factors.
But The Washington Post says, “Regardless of whether the ‘war on women’ messaging was actually effective, many Democratic leaders in 2014 believed that the party’s success depended in part on making it a central campaign plank.
“What was the key reason it failed? Go to this link for the complete story.
Most of their candidates were crushed this year, even as their party won big. Now, many tea party activists are embracing a strategy for 2016 that’s strikingly at odds with the movement’s take-no-prisoners approach.It’s time, they say, to show a little restraint.
Though many of the conservatives noted that just the threat of a primary challenge can pull a mainstream Republican senator to the right, some questioned the wisdom of targeting relatively reliable conservatives this year, such as Kansas’ Pat Roberts and Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell.
What do analysts say the Tea Party should do instead in the future and will “strategic change be easier said that done?” For the full story, dial up this link.
“The permanent fight over the presidency’s limits is as much a fixture of our constitutional order as biannual elections or freedom of speech,” says Politico.”For better or worse, the American founders started this fight for a reason.”
It’s not that Ted Cruz and John Boehner, respectively, are right about the president’s immigration order — it’s that the presidency itself is built to attract just these kinds of criticisms. If Obama were the first president to be painted as a king, we’d have good reason to reach for the nearest pitchfork; but when presidents of all parties have been “kings” for more than two centuries, it’s a sign that something deeper is at work.
What exactly is at work and how did a French philosopher come to play in the founders’ model of government power roles?
For a fascinating look at the chain of hierarchy you perhaps may never have heard about before, click on this link.
We’re talking about the SEC West of course and everyone knows there is no better football played in college than there, right?
“Not so fast my friend,” as Lee Corso is fond of saying.
After shutting out LSU 17-0 and Ole Miss 30-0, Arkansas is one of the hottest teams around, the best story in the second half of the season — and the perfect example for why the SEC should get two teams into the College Football Playoff.Or, the best illustration for why it should not.
Oh my. Want more? Go here.
The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation believes that more academic research should be free and open to the public.
Vox reports, “Starting in January 2017, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will require all of the research it funds to be published in a manner that is free for the public to read.”
The Gates Foundation rules are in conflict with current policies at many top journals such as Science, which generally charge for access for at least the first few months.Still, the organization has a lot of clout and may be able to push for more open access.
Vox says, “The Gates Foundation spends about $900 million each year funding scientific research — which results in about 1,400 research papers on various aspects of global health.”
Under the new policy, the researchers that the organization funds will only be able to publish papers that are “immediately freely accessible to the public.”
Go to this link to learn more about the Gates Foundation’s new policy and the growing movement it has joined.
We’ve taken our cues from a few spots: a bioengineering grad student named Kendra Nyberg, who co-taught a class at the University of California, Los Angeles called Science and Food, and chef and cookbook author Tessa Arias, who writes about cookie science on her site, Handle the Heat.There’s also an illuminating TEDEd animation on cookie science. And if you really want to go nuts (or no nuts, your call), Serious Eats offers 21 painstakingly tested steps for the “Perfect Cookie,” including kneading times and chocolate prep techniques.
You don’t say? Science gave us the perfect chocolate chip cookie.
Want the recipe? Well, here’s the problem.
There’s not just one, because some like them crispy, some like them soft, etc. But guess what? Go to this link from NPR, for perfection that’s guaranteed to suit your own chocolate chip fetish. Enjoy.