Weekend Digest: The float like a butterfly, sting like a bee edition

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 in Northeast Arkansas on KAIT-NBC, Sundays at 10 a.m.:

Chamber Agenda
The State Chamber of Commerce touts its agenda. What’s on tap? CEO Randy Zook joins us for a conversation on the state of the state’s economy, tax cuts, medical marijuana and more.

Medicaid MOU
The governor signs an agreement to work with the state’s nursing home industry to save $250 million in Medicaid. How will that agreement work? Rachel Davis and David Norsworthy from the Arkansas Health Care Association are guests.

Talk Politics Roundtable
It’s been a wild ride in national politics this past week as Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton give us a preview of the November election. We’ll talk politics with KATV’s Janelle Lilley and Elicia Dover and TB&P’s Frank Scott.

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

MUHAMMAD ALI, ‘THE GREATEST’, DIES AT 74
Boxing legend, Olympic athlete, and outspoken political, religious and social activist Muhammad Ali has died at age 74 after a three-decade bout with Parkinson’s Disease.

Read Robert Lipsyte’s epic obituary from The New York Times on the life and times of Cassius Clay, the Louisville Lip, The Greatest, Muhammad Ali.

WHAT KEEPS COMPANIES GROWING?
Well it’s three things according to Harvard Business Review.

Growth creates complexity, and complexity is the silent killer of growth. This paradox explains why only about one company in nine has sustained more than a minimum level of profitable growth during the past decade, and why 85 percent of executives blame internal factors for their shortfall, not external ones beyond their control. The roots of sustained performance start deep inside.

Our research shows that, despite their many differences, most companies that achieve sustainable growth share a common set of motivating attitudes and behaviors that can usually be traced back to a bold, ambitious founder who got it right the first time around. Such companies possess a clear sense of mission and focus that everyone in the company can understand and relate to (in contrast with the average company, where only two employees in five say they have any idea what the company stands for).

HBR has a special name for this type of focus and to learn more about it and “The Three Things that Keep Companies Growing,” click on this link.

A BATTLE FOR THE AIRWAVES THAT RUINED A FRIENDSHIP
Marketplace says, “The Federal Communications Commission is gonna do a little dabbling in the electromagnetic spectrum market next Tuesday. The FCC controls the airwaves — the radio frequencies that broadcasters and wireless companies use to get us the content we want. They’re going to buy back parts of that spectrum from traditional broadcasters, then turn around and sell it back to wireless providers.

Not the stuff of a gripping radio story, but that’s kind of the point. Because a hundred years ago, the fight over the airwaves was pretty dramatic.

More often than not it came down to a 40-year friendship between two men. A brilliant but troubled inventor named Edwin Armstrong, and David Sarnoff, the head of the Radio Corporation of America, better known as RCA.

The story is told in a new book by Scott Woolley called “The Network: The Battle for The Airwaves.” For a fascinating excerpt of a part of American history you’ve probably never known, go to this link.

FROM SCIENCE FICTION TO REALITY
TECH.CO reports on an amazing new device straight out of the pages of science fiction, but no more.

In the popular sci-fi series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Arthur Dent travels the universe with his best friend and secret alien Ford Prefect. And while the inhabitants of other planets obviously don’t speak English, Arthur was able to communicate with them through the use of the Babel Fish, a small, yellow, leech-like animal that can translate any language into the user’s native tongue. And, as the Guide puts it, “it’s probably the oddest thing in the Universe.” While science fiction has brought us many great inventions, this technology has eluded us for years. Until now.

It’s an earpiece that will translate any language in real-time.

Who invented it and how does this amazing technology work? Click here for the story.

TECH BILLIONAIRES FANTASIZE ABOUT BUILDING NEW WORLDS
Business Insider says, “Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are the latest in a long line of tech CEOs spouting increasingly lofty rhetoric and laying out wild plans for the future of humanity.”

In April this year, BuzzFeed published an article titled “In The Age Of Trump, Tech CEOs Cast Themselves As The New Statesmen.” It argues that the Silicon Valley elite are becoming ever more ambitious in goals and rhetoric, talking about “global” issues and framing themselves as world leaders.

We got our latest reminder of this on Wednesday as SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk casually described the best form of governance for his planned Martian colonies.

Musk plans to launch a human expedition to Mars in 2024 — in just eight years’ time — and is now openly discussing the planned social structure of his new Martian civilization.

Most likely the form of government on Mars would be a direct democracy, not representative,” the CEO said in response to an audience member’s question at the Recode conference. “So it would be people voting directly on issues. And I think that’s probably better, because the potential for corruption is substantially diminished in a direct versus a representative democracy.

Musk’s comments come just a day after Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos chimed in on the future of the species, calling (again, at the Recode conference) on humanity to move its heavy industry off the planet in the next century.

For the complete post, follow this link.

DOUBTS CREEP INTO TRUMP-CLINTON POLLS
The Hill reports, “Doubts are creeping in among opinion pollsters over how accurately they will be able to predict the outcome of a presidential election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

The two prospective nominees’ high unfavorable ratings, and their fame, mean pollsters are facing one of their most difficult tasks in conducting polls that correctly model who will vote in November’s election.

As many people are likely to come to the polls this fall to vote against the candidate they dislike as to vote for a candidate they support — something that makes polling difficult.

More on this post at this link.

WHAT BATTLEGROUND REGIONS WILL DECIDE IF “THE DONALD” CAN WIN
The New York Times says, “With Donald J. Trump pulling even or ahead of Hillary Clinton in a series of recent national polls, the once unthinkable has become at least plausible. But if he is to be elected the 45th president, he must compete on a political map that, for now, looks forbidding.”

In the Republican primaries, he proved a master of nationalizing the political debate, appealing to voters across regional lines with jeremiads about immigration and crime that captivated an almost uniformly white primary electorate. At the outset of the general election, Mr. Trump has dominated the day-to-day political combat on national television and social media.

In the general election, however, his fate will be determined not by his Twitter followers or a relatively homogeneous Republican electorate, but by a set of interlocking and increasingly diverse regions, home to some 90 million Americans, that hold many of the 270 electoral votes he needs to win.

What are those regions and what does Trump have to do to win them? Read more analysis here.

WHAT 30 YEARS OF C-SPAN’S SENATE BROADCASTS HAVE TAUGHT THE AMERICAN PUBLIC
“On Thursday, C-Span II is celebrating its 30th anniversary of gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Senate floor, something that is taken for granted in today’s culture of 24-hour political news. But back then, allowing TV cameras onto the Senate floor was an encroachment on the august chamber’s tradition,” posts The Washington Post.

C-Span began airing House floor proceedings in 1979, but the Senate held out. Critics worried, in some cases legitimately, that senators would preach to the cameras and not actually debate, boosting their own image at the expense of legislative give-and-take.

Among the biggest skeptics of broadcasting Senate proceedings was a freshman senator who had won his 1984 election in part by mocking a Democratic incumbent for his low Senate visibility. “I remember thinking it would be a big mistake, and voting against it,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told C-Span in a special interview celebrating the anniversary.

“Though there is plenty of showboating by senators, the cameras have long been welcomed as a means for the public to get a glimpse at its elected leaders. And some doubters became believers.”

Click on this link for an in-depth look at how C-Span changed the Senate and what it has taught the people.

ELECT THIS
His name is RoboDino and is “one of the robot pundits that will appear as part of MTVs “Elect This” campaign,” according to POLTICO. It’s a new campaign to “engage the youth vote.”

MTV may have jettisoned its famous “Choose or Lose” election campaign in 2012, but the cable network still wants to have a voice in this year’s unpredictable and feisty election.

Citing internal research that shows younger voters care more about particular issues than candidates or parties, the channel’s new campaign is called “Elect This.” The campaign will highlight issues that MTV found are important to young voters, including social justice, student debt, healthcare and national security, and will try and direct them in ways to help or advance or those issues.

Click here for the full post.

UNCOVERING VAMPIRE GRAVES
Now wait a minute. This couldn’t be, or could it?

Probably not.

Archaeologists excavating a Medieval cemetery site in Kałdus, Poland, recently discovered hundreds of graves — among them, they found 14 anti-vampire burials. Some of these people were decapitated, others buried face-down, and still more were weighted down with stones. One of the major theories about ancient “vampire” graves is that people buried in this way were unhealthy or disabled, causing their compatriots to treat them differently in death because of their physical differences in life.

Go to this link from Forbes on more of the “bloody” truth on the graves.

SPIDER ROBOT FACTORY WORKERS
In another chapter of science fiction coming to life, Fast Company posts, “Instead of doing one job like typical factory bots, Siemens wants autonomous robots to work together to figure out how to tackle projects.”

Siemen’s solution: a swarm of general-purpose worker robots that can be assigned a task and then figure out among themselves how to get it done. Dalloro’s team at Siemens’s lab in Princeton, New Jersey, has built spider-like 3-D printers that crawl around as a coordinated team. Looking like an arachnid Wall-E wearing a fez, each bot has a head with a 3-D depth-sensing camera similar to an Xbox Kinect. On top of that is an infrared laser scanner to further gauge the surroundings. Off-the-shelf circuit boards running Linux on multicore CPUs handle tasks like analyzing the immediate terrain. The spiders chat over Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, reporting how much ground each can cover so that their collective mind can break up the job and assign out portions of it.

Oh my. If you are intrigued go on to this link … (and we can’t stand it, but we’ll say it) … on the “web”.

LIKE TO SLEEP LATE?
Then according to Elite Daily you “are actually smarter and more creative.” How about that for shedding the lazy tag?

“To you, there’s nothing to wake up for but so much to stay awake through. That’s when your ideas happen, your bursts of energy explode and your moments of peace come over you: when there are no distractions, no plans and no obstacles in your way but the expanding horizon of light.”

That’s also why you’re smarter. According to research published, those who deviate from the normal sleep schedule are considered more intelligent. This finding is supported by research suggesting that those who create new evolutionary patterns (compared to those who stick with the normal patterns developed by our ancestors) are the most progressive.

It makes sense. After all, those who are the first to change (to seek out novelty) are always the most progressive and intelligent in a society. And according to researchers at the University of Madrid, after analyzing the sleeping patterns of 1,000 students, they found that those who went to bed later (and consequently woke up later) scored higher on inductive reasoning tests, a test normally associated with general intelligence.

So morning sleepy-head have your boss or nagging spouse read the rest of this post, to learn you’re not lazy, but “progressive” and smart.