Weekend Digest: The billion-dollar surprise, Panama Papers, tough on Ted, and rat brains edition

SUNDAY TV PREVIEW
On this week’s TV edition of Talk Business & Politics, which airs Sundays at 9:30 a.m. on KATV Channel 7 in Central Arkansas and now in Northeast Arkansas on KAIT-NBC, Sundays at 10 a.m.:

• Arkansas Works
Gov. Asa Hutchinson wins on the policy front in comfortable fashion. Now, comes the heavy lift: how to pay for it? What did we learn in this week’s special session on health care reform? State Senate Majority Leader Jim Hendren joins to explain.

• Talk Politics
Our Talk Politics roundtable includes Jessica DeLoach Sabin and John Burris. We’ll get their analysis of this week’s legislative activity and what happens next.

• Sen. John Boozman
Plus, U.S. Senator John Boozman on the state of the Presidential race, a Supreme Court nomination, and debating his Democratic challenger, Conner Eldridge. We’ll visit with the state’s senior senator from Washington, D.C.

Tune in to Talk Business & Politics in Central Arkansas on KATV Channel 7, Sundays at 9:30 a.m. and now in Northeast Arkansas on KAIT-NBC, Sundays at 10 a.m.

DIRE PREDICTION ON THE NEXT RECESSION
Marketplace reports, “The man who predicted the Great Recession says we’re not ready to handle the next downturn.”

If you want to know where the economy’s going, who would you want sit next to on a plane? Fed chair Janet Yellen is a good answer. So is Ray Dalio, a legendary and successful investor. Dalio is founder and CEO of Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedge fund manager in the world. Dalio bases his investment decisions less on abstract financial data, and more on his reading of the macro economy. He’s very focused on how central bank interest rates are running close to zero these days.

“Dalio joined Marketplace Morning Report host David Brancaccio to talk about the future of the economy when central banks run out of firepower.”

Catch the interview at this link.

THE NEXT BILLION-DOLLAR BUSINESS NO ONE SAW COMING
“When Amazon executive Dave Limp first saw the pitch for the product that would become Echo in 2011, his main reaction was doubt,” reports Business Insider.

“This is going to be hard,” Limp recalls thinking. “It foretold a magical experience. But it would require a lot of inventions.”

The reaction was understandable given the lofty goals outlined in the Echo’s original plan: It envisioned an intelligent, voice-controlled household appliance that could play music, read the news aloud and order groceries — all by simply letting users talk to it from anywhere in the house.

“Since that time, the Echo has emerged as Amazon’s sleeper hit, a hot-selling gadget that’s being hailed as the standard-bearer for an entirely new computing paradigm in which Amazon suddenly has an edge on rivals such as Apple and Google.”

All from a “gadget that was stuck in Amazon’s in-house lab for years.” Go to this link for the story behind Echo’s success.

WHAT LAUNCHED THE PANAMA PAPERS?
It was a simple note from a John Doe, reports The Washington Post.

It began with a message — anonymous, of course: “Hello. This is John Doe. Interested in data?”

“The recipient, German newspaper reporter Bastian Obermayer, promptly responded that he was. What followed was almost unimaginable: “Doe” began forwarding files that ultimately contained 11.5 million documents, four decades’ worth of digitized records from a Panamanian law firm that specializes in setting up offshore companies for wealthy clients.

The Doe data dump to Obermayer and his colleague Frederik Obermaier in 2014 eventually triggered a unique cooperative project among journalists around the world.”

The effort culminated on Sunday when, in a coordinated release, dozens of news organizations began publishing stories about the Panama Papers. The vast cache outlines how world leaders, celebrities and individuals have used offshore companies to shield their wealth from public disclosure, and in some cases possibly to avoid taxes or mask illegal activity.

Full story here.

WORK-LIFE BALANCE IS EASIER WHEN YOUR MANAGER KNOWS HOW TO ASSESS PERFORMANCE
A contributor for Harvard Business Review says, “Of course, child care, flexible scheduling, and family leave policies are important, but in my experience the best thing we can do to support working parents (and all employees) is to get better at one of the most basic and poorly executed functions of managers: performance appraisals.”

Too many managers resort to measuring face time instead of actual work performance, but they rarely admit it. And that’s why the best thing managers can do for all their employees — and especially those facing work-family conflicts — is to do the hard work of actually evaluating performance, not chair time or face time. And changing the way we evaluate goes to the very core of good management. Think about how much more competitive your whole organization would be if managers …

Find out at this link.

GOODBYE WISCONSIN NICE, HELLO BIG APPLE BRAWL
“From the moment he stepped out of his black SUV Wednesday morning, it was readily apparent Ted Cruz wasn’t in Wisconsin anymore,” posts U.S. News and World Report.

“This is an immigrant community!,” a woman screamed as the Texas senator landed at his campaign kickoff in New York, wading through a swarm of media and some combination of well-wishers and protesters.

But inside the eatery a man donning a Yankees cap was waiting to make a harsher point. “He’s a racist who represents the white supremacy,” the man claimed in Spanish, angrily jabbing his finger at Cruz’s blue campaign banner. “We’re not going to allow that in our neighborhood!”

“Welcome to the Empire State presidential primary – where the voters come with attitude, the media prides itself on being merciless and candidates placed on defense are losing.”

Follow this link for more on this story.

MEET DONALD TRUMP’S DELEGATE MANAGER
His name is Ed Brookover and, “The man charged with managing delegates for Donald Trump believes that the business mogul will prevail even at a contested presidential nominating convention in Cleveland this summer — though he insists it won’t come to that.”

Brookover asserted in an interview with The Hill that Trump is “easily going to surpass” the magic number of 1,237 delegates required to capture the nomination before the convention.

“Skeptics suggest Trump’s task is significantly more difficult after his stinging loss to Ted Cruz in Tuesday’s Wisconsin primary. Trump gained only six delegates in that contest, and Cruz won 36, according to The Associated Press.”

Brookover said that getting any delegates at all from Wisconsin was “a bonus” for the Trump campaign. He argued that the businessman’s path to the nomination was through other states, including his home state of New York, which will vote on April 19.

“The rest of the calendar works very much in our favor,” he said.

Click on this link to learn more about Brookover and his delegate predictions.

WHAT HAPPENED AT THE LAST GOP OPEN CONVENTION?
“It was riotous,” reports POLITICO Magazine.

“A Republican Party tearing at the seams amid an open convention. Candidates desperately wrangling and wooing delegates. Backroom battles over changes to the rules and the platform. John Kasich on the floor, haggling individual delegates for last minute votes. Many of the contested convention scenarios Republican candidates are bracing for ahead of Cleveland this summer already happened — even down to the Kasich cameo — over four muggy days in August 40 years ago at the Kemper Arena in Kansas City, Missouri.”

We tend to think of modern party conventions as staid, choreographed affairs, but not the 1976 convention, which was an electric party confab that drew gavel-to-gavel coverage on the networks.

Who were the candidates and what did 20 attendees, who were actually there have to say about it? Find out by following this link.

WHY IS THE FBI SO SLOW ON CLINTON E-MAIL PROBE?
The Boston Globe reports, “If FBI Director James Comey feels no deadline pressure to wrap up the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s e-mail server, he should.”

“The urgency is to do it well and promptly. And ‘well’ comes first,” Comey told local law enforcement agents in Buffalo on Monday, according to the Niagara Gazette.

“Well” is important. But so is “promptly,” and the FBI’s definition of that is unclear.

“The probe, underway for a year now, addresses a fundamental question: Did Clinton intentionally or recklessly forward classified information in a way that put the country at risk? Getting the answer sooner rather than later seems only fair.”

Complete post at this link.

20 AMAZING WAYS LIFE WILL BE DIFFERENT IN 2030
“For more than 90 years, The Kiplinger Letter has been alerting its readers to important emerging technologies and how they will impact businesses, consumers and investors.

Over the decades, the Letter has helped readers understand the implications of a wide array of technologies — from airplanes, televisions and satellites to the Internet, smartphones and much, much more.”

Forecasting the future is no easy task. Kiplinger reporters and editors dig deep, leaning on experts in academia and the private sector. We tap our sources in government to understand how regulations will affect emerging technology. Moreover, we look at past and present trends and apply careful, considered judgment to forecast and analyze coming developments.

What are the next 20 amazing forecasts by Kiplinger? Look no further than this link.

ANOTHER FACEBOOK REVAMP
“Facebook isn’t slowing down its push into live video anytime soon,” reports Forbes.

The social media giant launched a host of new live features on Wednesday to make it easier for users to share, discover and interact with videos on “Facebook Live.”

“Some of the new tools include ways to broadcast live video to a specific Facebook Group or Event, for example, giving a gym instructor the option to stream a live workout to clients, or letting a friend broadcast to people who are part of a birthday party event on Facebook. The overhaul also includes the ability to use Emoji Reactions such as “Love,” “Haha,” “Wow,” “Sad” or “Angry,” which appear at the top of live video streams in real time, five filters which broadcasters can select and tools to doodle on a video while broadcasting.”

Learn what else is new, here.

HERE’S HOW A MONTH OF EXERCISE AFFECTED MY BRAIN
It’s been long known that physical activity produces mental benefits, but are all exercises equal when it comes to brain boosts?”, asks Fast Company.

Recently the New York Times reported on a Finnish study published in the Journal of Physiology that found, as long thought, that physical exercise could have a positive impact on brain health. What made the Finnish study so interesting, however, was it found that the brain benefits varied depending on the type of exercise performed.

“Specifically, the study examined three types of exercises on adult male rats—running, weight training (yes, they tied weights to the rats), and high-intensity interval training—and the effects each exercise had on their brain’s abilities to grow and develop new nerve cells. In biology, this process is known as neurogenesis, and while the benefits of increased neurogenesis aren’t fully understood, many believe the ability to increase the number of new nerve cells in specific areas of the brain can help with problem-solving skills, creativity, rehabilitation, and reducing stress.”

Of course, rats are rats. And the findings of rat studies don’t always translate to comparable findings in humans. That’s why my editor, who knows I like to experiment with things to see how they affect my brain, suggested I do my own unscientific study on how the three types of exercises the rats went through affected my mental abilities.

Find out what happened at this link.