Your Curated Morning (#152) for August 15, 2024 is Here!
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The Main Thing: Ensuring that you are on the right path is crucial for success. When you encounter a fork in the road or an obstacle, it becomes a catalyst for clarifying your thinking. Obstacles prompt you to pause and consider the potential outcomes. If I choose 'A,' this will be the result, or if I opt for 'B,' a different scenario will unfold. This week's post explores how obstacles assist business leaders and others in charting a clear path and refining their thought process. It provides real-life examples of individuals who faced obstacles and used them to determine their next steps. Why should you buy me a cup of coffee? It keeps my caffeine levels high, allows me to work more effectively, and helps keep this newsletter free!
To Dominate in AI, the US Needs Silicon Innovation by Will Knight | WIRED Interview It is one thing to produce a semiconductor chip; it's another to package it. What is packaging? Packaging is a significant part of chip production. It is fitting the chips into something that works for the purpose for which they were made. For example, a tire is only meaningful if attached to a car or vehicle. Otherwise, it is simply a round piece of rubber. In this interview with Laurie Locascio, undersecretary of standards and technology at the Department of Commerce and director of the National Institute of Standards and Technologies, she explains why the CHIPS Act and other federal investment in chip production, design, packaging, and interaction with AI are so necessary to the security of the United States. Whether it is chip production, packaging, or even research into materials, scaling, and production methods, Locascio is ensuring the USA stays on top. Canvue, a division of Alphabet (the parent company of Google), is unveiling a “connected and automated corridor” or CAV corridor. The groups putting it together are calling it intelligent road deployment. Canvue and the Michigan Department of Transportation hope the short segment on I-94 eventually stretches to 39 miles between Ann Arbor and Detroit. According to the article, the press release indicated that Cavnue’s system encompasses “advanced digital and physical infrastructure, including sensors, advanced wireless communications, and a full digital twin of the roadway.” in the current deployment, sensors were installed on poles every 200 meters, within a three-mile corridor. These sensors can relay information about traffic including crashes, adverse weather, and congestion—to the Michigan Department of Transportation. In July of 1969, after a hot day at the lake, my family watched on our big console television set as man first walked on the moon. It was an occasion that captured the attention of the world. After that, we saw several other moon landings take place (sorry, deniers, it really did happen). What John F. Kennedy promised at the beginning of the decade actually took place. The US had won the space race. Between 1969 and 1972, a total of six crewed landings on the moon took place, with twelve brave men making the historic walk on the lunar surface. This remarkable feat of human exploration and ingenuity is a testament to the potential of space exploration. Now, the US is on the verge of an exciting new phase in space exploration. With cutting-edge technology and powerful new rockets, we are set to return to the moon in the next few years. The linked article provides a comprehensive overview of this journey, detailing our ambitious plans and the groundbreaking discoveries we hope to make. This future of space exploration is filled with promise and potential, igniting a sense of excitement and hope. Other Articles of Interest this week: Leadership -- Build your personal board of advisors: An entrepreneur explains the importance of mentors by Rebecca Geldard | World Economic Forum -- A good mentor is a coach. They guide you so you can clarify your decision-making. “What makes a good mentor, it's someone who provides an opinion but doesn't impose their perspective. They help someone think through the thought, the question, and the dynamic. And through that, I am just helping work the thought process with the mentee.” A Blog Post You Should Read: Chip Conley is one of the wisest and most studied individuals around when it comes to wisdom. Sharing wisdom, which he defines as “metabolized experience shared with others,” is common in many cultures, but in the USA, elders with wisdom are often cordoned off in the room as “old ideas” because of our obsession with youth. Conley has written about his experience as a “mentern,” a portmanteau of Mentor and Intern working at AirBnB. While he reported to Brian Chesky, the CEO, who was 21 years his junior, he also was learning from him. In the post, he quotes Alessandra Gallo, a senior design researcher at the Sutherland Labs, who said, “Young researchers are better at mastering tools of speed and bringing a sense of drive to the project,” she said, “while those of us who are older have more peripheral vision and also bring a sense of calm and long-term perspective. This makes us more effective as a team, and we benefit greatly from learning from each other.” This post can be found in the Harvard Business Review. If you are interested in how different generations can work together, you can read more here. Overheard : This quote, or more appropriately, passage, came from Tim Ferriss's 5-Bullet Friday newsletter last week. Read this, think about it for a few minutes, and decide whether you should take action regarding your own noise-to-signal ratio. The more frequently you look at data, the more noise you are disproportionally likely to get (rather than the valuable part, called the signal); hence the higher the noise-to-signal ratio. And there is a confusion which is not psychological at all, but inherent in the data itself. Say you look at information on a yearly basis, for stock prices, or the fertilizer sales of your father-in-law’s factory, or inflation numbers in Vladivostok. Assume further that for what you are observing, at a yearly frequency, the ratio of signal to noise is about one to one (half noise, half signal)—this means that about half the changes are real improvements or degradations, the other half come from randomness. This ratio is what you get from yearly observations. But if you look at the very same data on a daily basis, the composition would change to 95 percent noise, 5 percent signal. And if you observe data on an hourly basis, as people immersed in the news and market price variations do, the split becomes 99.5 percent noise to 0.5 percent signal. That is two hundred times more noise than signal—which is why anyone who listens to news (except when very, very significant events take place) is one step below sucker. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile Listen, Eat, Drink, WATCH, READ, View Have you ever done something just for the fun of it? That's exactly what Craig Samborski, a Minnesota native and festival organizer, did when he created Mama and her son Timmy in 2014. Mama, a 61-foot-tall rubber duck, travels around the country and Canada, bringing joy and thrill to people with her colossal size, and, well... she’s just a rubber duck! Like me, you probably love people like Samborski, who create things purely for fun and to thrill us Rubber Duck fans. The article lists places to catch a glimpse of the rubber duck, or perhaps your community is eager to bring the duck to a local festival. For a schedule of appearances or to bring Mama to your local festival, you can find more information here. If you're intrigued by Mama's story and want to learn more, click here for a deeper dive. Listen, Eat, Drink, WATCH, READ, View In 1979, I saw the movie Animal House starring John Belushi, among others. It was a story about a downtrodden fraternity struggling to survive. In one scene, Belushi, playing a character called "Blutto," instigated a "food fight" in the college cafeteria they were attending, resulting in the expected chaos. While there's likely never been a food fight scene in cinema, this wasn't the original food fight. I've seen several YouTube videos of this crazy event, and somehow, my high school/college-age mind wants to go and throw tomatoes at people. Read the history of La Tomatina here. Watch some videos of the event here and here. Listen, Eat, Drink, Watch READ, View As I write this, the Olympics have been going on for a couple of weeks. We have seen the expected and the unexpected. Underdogs have won, and events we never knew were part of the Olympics are now included, i.e., “breaking.” When I was recently sitting in a lounge in an airport, I watched two athletes, one from China, the other from France, go at each other in a furious ping-pong match; I’m sorry, a table tennis match. The speed and accuracy at which they played was a joy to watch. A fascinating chart displays the total number of medals won throughout Olympic history, underscoring the weight of this legacy. The USA leads significantly, followed by the former Soviet Union. You can view the chart, courtesy of Statista, here. Did you know that winning a medal at the Olympics can bring more than just glory? Many countries reward their medalists with cash prizes and other gifts. The amount can vary widely, from over $700,000 to just a few hundred dollars. For instance, American gold medalists receive around $ 37,000. In South Korea, a gold medal comes with a unique reward: Exemption from compulsory military service.
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