Did you know TNW Conference has a track fully dedicated to bringing the biggest names in tech to showcase inspiring talks from those driving the future of technology this year?Tim Leberecht, who authored this piece, is one of the speakers.Check out the full Impact program here.

If there is pain, nurse it, and if there is a flame, dont snuff it out, dont be brutal with it. Withdrawal can be a terrible thing when it keeps us awake at night, and watching others forget us sooner than wed want to be forgotten is no better. We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of 30 and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything what a waste!

These are the words of theclosing monologue of the movieCall Me By Your Name(based on the namesake book by Andre Aciman); the monologue of the father, Mr. Perlman, who assures his son Ellio of the inconceivable magnitude of emotions, insisting that even the most conflicted ones are better than none.

These lines could not be more timely. We have begun to realize that feeling more not only makes for richer lives but is also the best antidote to a world of self-optimization and efficiency, in other worlds, a world of machines.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos this year, Alibaba co-founder and executive chairmanJack Mamade the case for investing in our emotional capacities and even proposed a love quotient. Management thinkers believe that socio-emotional skills are going to be a key asset in tomorrows marketplace, simply because tasks requiring operational excellence and efficiency are likely to be performed much more effectively by AI and robots. Emotions, however, remain a human bastion. Our very weakness is our strength.

In a 2016survey, the World Economic Forum ranked socio-emotional skills as increasingly critical for future career success. Business schools are adjusting their curricula to include them, and private educational institutions such asThe School of Lifehave made it their mission to teach them.

Read: [Humility, trust, and empathy: The skills needed to work with robots]

And yet, despite our most ambitious efforts to demystify them, emotions remain utterly mysterious and elusive. They are better felt than explained, better portrayed often through works of arts than analyzed. We dont understand them unless we feel them, and feeling them, of course, is the very blind spot that may prevent us from ever objectively understanding them.

There even appears to be some confusion as to what counts as human emotion and what does not, and which of our emotions are distinctive. For a considerable period of time, common wisdom held that there is a base set of six classic emotions: happy, surprised, afraid, disgusted, angry, and sad. But in 2014, a study by theInstitute of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of Glasgowclaimed there are only four basic emotions happy, sad, afraid/surprised, and angry/disgusted. Ah, wouldnt life be easy and yet oh-so-boring if that were the case!?

However, in 2017, a new study by theProceedings of National Academy of Sciencessuggested that there are as many as 27 different categories of emotions, and that they in fact occur along a gradient and are not sharply distinguishable or mutually exclusive. This new set of emotions ranges from admiration, adoration, awe, and surprising outliers such as aesthetic appreciation, to envy, excitement, horror, and empathetic pain to equally unexpected contenders such as nostalgia, romance, or triumph.

Looking at this comprehensive list, a few emotions stand out. One wonders whether romance is an emotion or a feeling, an interpretation of an emotion, or simply a way to relate to the world. Similarly, the omission of loneliness is glaring, although in this case, too, one could argue that it is a feeling, not an emotion. Per neuroscientistDr. Sarah McKays definition, feelings aremental experiences of body states, which arise as the brain interprets emotions, themselves physical states arising from the bodys responses to external stimuli. Yet the line between the two remains blurry.

Moreover, some emotions may not have been listed because they areculturally unique, e.g.Schadenfreude, the very German joy over another persons mishap or misfortune. Or these Bantu, Taglog, and Dutch terms:mbuki-mvuki the irresistible urge to shuck off your clothes as you dance kilig the fluttering feeling as you talk to someone to whom you are attracted oruitwaaien the refreshing effects of taking a walk in the wind. Others that were included in the list such as triumphappear to be a temporary sign of our times more than a fixed emotion: in our winner-takes-all societies, winning is arguably the one emotion that is putting all the others in second place. The winner feels it all.

How will digital technology, specifically AI and robotics, affect our emotions?

Researchers have long studied our emotional relationship to machines. Numerousstudieshave proven that we quickly form emotional attachments to robots, and it might indeed be worthwhile exploring which social skills we need in order to collaborate with them.

So-called Artificial Emotional Intelligence (AEI), advanced by firms such asAffectiva,Emotient(acquired by Apple), andEmotion Research Lab, now seeks to analyze our emotions by scanning our facial expressions and body language. From studyingMark Zuckerbergs behavior during the congressional hearingsto the use for candidate assessments in job interviews (HireVue), AEI, like any technology, can be used for benevolent and malicious purposes, from boosting our emotional intelligence to manipulating and emotion-engineering us as citizens and consumers, from helping autistic children recognize their emotions (see, for example, theKaspar project) topenalizing us at the workplace for not being happy.

Empathetic robots occur at the timely convergence of two trends: empathy and AI. As we fear the loss of civility and with xenophobia, racism, and nationalism on the rise in many liberal societies, empathy has become a hot topic, and initiatives to muster it range from podcasts with those who are not like us or even bully us (e.g.Conversations with People Who Hate Me) toMITs Deep Empathyinitiative orGoogles Empathy Lab, to using VR and other immersive technologies as the great empathy machines.

At this yearsConsumer Electronics Showin Las Vegas, several robots were exhibited that can apply empathy and emotional intelligence toward their human user, e.g. the social robot Buddy; the table-tennis playing Forpheus that can read its opponents body language to anticipate their moves; or Pepper, which is capable of interpreting a smile, a frown, your tone of voice, as well as the lexical field you use and non-verbal language such as the angle of your head, according to its manufacturer, SoftBank. InJapan, a society with an aging population, empathetic robots like Paro, applied in elderly care, are becoming a mainstream phenomenon.

Analyst firmGartnerrecently predicted that by 2022 smart machines will understand our emotions better than our close friends and relatives, which of course is an outrageous claim, as the ethnographerJonathan Cookhas pointed out: The more certain research firms claim to be in their ability to measure emotion with quantitative precision, the more incompetent they are likely to actually be at accomplishing the task because they have lost touch with what emotion actually is, he writes.

And yet, the question remains: If robots become better at reading and responding to our human emotions, could technological advances in AI and robotics lead to the emergence of new emotions that were not only previously unmeasured, unnamed, and unidentified, but also un-felt?

You could argue that all possible human emotions have always been present and that we just lacked the words to describe them and only over time simply refined our understanding of them. But there are good arguments for accepting the notion of a history of emotions, the belief that emotions, like our bodies and cognitive abilities, have evolved over time as well, in response to everchanging environments and social stimuli.

Piotr Winkielman and Kent Berridge, psychologists at the UC San Diego and the University of Michigan, conducted an experiment in 2014 in which they showed participants sad and happy faces in such fast order that these had no conscious awareness of seeing any faces at all. When participants were asked afterward to drink a new lemon-lime beverage, those who had subliminally been exposed to the happy faces rated the drink better and also drank more of it than the others. The researchers took this as evidence to suggest the existence of unconscious emotions: feelings we have without actually feeling them. Evolutionarily speaking, the ability to have conscious feelings is probably a late achievement, they concluded. In other words, asentimental education, the education of our hearts, may indeed have been an accomplishment of civilization, a blessing and curse of modern man alike.

Aside from our consciousness of emotions, evolution may have caused new emotions to form. Take envy, and specifically status envy, as a more recent phenomenon, as a product of the industrial revolution and growing consumerism in developed countries. Envy necessitates a materialistic culture. Envy, if you will, is the refined, commoditized version of jealousy. It describes the disappointment and humiliated self that doesnt possess or receive what another one does, a self that finds itself excluded from the marketplace and not able to participate in the transaction.

The natural companion to envy in todays experience economy isFOMO the Fear-Of- Missing-Out. This fear is about missing out onexperience: it is a preemptive fear of loss as much as it is an envy for anothers, possibly richer and more rewarding experience. Ultimately, FOMO is a fear of dying dying without having lived.

While FOMO is its perverse version, boredom is the realhorror vacui. At first glance, it seems like an increasingly precious good. In fact, boredom might become extinct because of the proliferation of smart phones and other devices that deprive us of any vacant moment in time. However, due to automation and the loss of traditional employment, many of us will face more unstructured time in the future and will need help to combat the numbness of boredom as it engulfs our lives.

At the TED conference this year, science writerJessa Gambleheld a fascinating workshop on awe, an emotion triggered, by say, entering the St. Peters Basilica or experiencing the vastness of a desert.

Gamble referenced Stanford researcherMelanie Ruddwho studied the effects of awe on consumer behavior and claims that after feeling awe we tend to choose experiential goods like a movie over material goods like clothes. She further concludes that it also makes us more willing to volunteer in our communities. It looks like we need not only citizenship classes but also experiences of awe to build more civil societies.It is important though to note that awe empowers and disempowers at once. It makes us bigger and smaller. Gamble pointed out that the smaller self was both a prerequisite and consequence of awe: awe overpowers the self. That is both inspiring and humbling.

This very sentiment is at work in our relationship to AI and robots: we are in awe of them, which means, we are enamored and terrified at the same time. The uncanny valley a term used to describe the creepiness of an AI that is nearly fully artificial nor fully flesh, that is arrested at the blurry border between robotic and human, just humanoid enough to trigger our perception of human derangement will be our constant state for the foreseeable future.

It is this tension, this kind of contradictory feeling, that might serve as a blueprint for the future of emotions. The range of what we feel may increase, and it will be less and less binary. Even our language will have to catch up and come up with neologisms expressing this ambivalence. As always, the Germans are especially skilled at inventing new verbs, just consider Verschlimmbessern (which, loosely translated, means making something significantly worse by trying to make it incrementally better).

On the one hand, we are witnessing a radicalization of our emotions, as they are fleeing to the extreme edges (most of us will nod their heads in response to a book title like Pankaj Mishras The Age of Anger); on the other hand, our emotions are becoming more mixed, more conflicted, with different kinds of emotions overlaying each other.

At the same time, the volatility and complexity of our digital times are popularizing emotional states that are simple and balanced, such as mindfulness or the Japanese concept ofikigaithat is attracting more and more followers in the Western world. The Japanese island of Okinawa, whereikigaihas its origins, is said to be home to the largest population of centenarians in the world, and one of the allures of ikigai is the promise of longevity.Ikigaiis the convergence of four primary elements: What you love (your passion), what the world needs (your mission), what you are good at (your vocation), and what you can get paid for (your profession).

Ikigai is similar to the Western concept of purpose that has emerged as the holy grail of organizational and personal transformation. Whats your purpose? as a brand, company, individual, and even nation is the biggest and yet the smallest question everybody is happy to ask and only rarely really able to answer, despite an army of consultants and agencies devoted to it. It is not an entirely new concept. The American philosopher and civil rights leader Howard W. Thurman put it best: Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

Mindfulness, ikigai, or purpose are neither emotions nor feelings they are techniques to help us restore balance as our emotions become more extreme and tools to help us refine how we manage them.

Naturally, emotions, too, are affected by the digitization, the atomization of our lives. In our fast-paced daily interactions, micro-aggressions the subtle humiliation by a cranky waiter can sour our mood as much as moments of micro-attachment the smile of a stranger on the subway can make our day. It appears that were transitioning from one emotional state to another much more quickly (the psychologist Susan David has coined the term emotional agility to pinpoint a new skill we must develop to cope with this phenomenon), that were losing the middle ground, the common thread, as well as the stability and continuity of long-term relationships. Instead, we are satisfying our emotional needs either through the instant kicks of the dopamine economy online, little escapisms (social media, gaming, movies, travel), or big ones: assuming an alternate identity, an avatar, a fluid self.

This virtualization of our selves may ultimately lead to the virtualization of our emotions, too, with us going from experiencing age-old emotions in new virtual environments to experiencing new emotions in digital or at least partly digital interactions, to full-on surrogate emotions, digital placeholders of the real thing: fake intimacy, virtual grief, and so on.

Japanese roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro, who builds humanoid robots and was recently portrayed in this rivetingWired story,is convinced that human emotions are nothing more than responses to external stimuli. David Levy, in his seminal 2007 book,Love and Sex With Robots, subscribes to this point of view: If a robot behaves as though it has feelings, can we reasonably argue that it does not? He argues that human emotions are no less programmed than those of an AI: We have hormones, we have neurons, and we are wired in a way that creates our emotions. Levy projects that roughly by the year 2050 humans will want robots as friends, sexual partners, and even spouses.

This raises some big questions: Will it matter if our human emotions are increasingly manipulated by smart algorithms or even un-real, or does it suffice that wefeelthem? Have emotions ever been pure and can they? Arguably, weve never had much control over them. Emotions are never fully ours rather, despite our insisting on their private nature, theyre part of the public commons and some sort of open-sourced software. And yet, so much of what we feel we are incapable of sharing. We seem to lack the full code for unlocking it, which causes great frustration and a great desire to overcome it. Perhaps, in the future, hacking our brains may involve hacking our emotions, too. Technology may allow us to (re-)mix our emotions together with those of others, as the ultimate form of deep connection.

What makes us human is our proclivity to fall for the other: somebody who is not us, something beyond our control, greater than ourselves. We cant help but be drawn to persons, objects, or experiences that promise us new emotions, new sensations, new highs and lows, new joy and happiness, but also new heartbreak and suffering.

Although we are calling them by our name (Alexa, Buddy, Sophia, Kaspar, Samantha, Erica.), as a mirror of ourselves, the AI bots remain elusive. They are the enigmatic other, the greatest desire of all, the ultimate romance. If they can help us feelmoreand feel new emotions, and if we refine these emotions through more advanced emotional intelligence, with the arts and humanities as our interpreters, then the very machines that are growing adept at analyzing and manipulating how we feel will ensure that we stay a step ahead of them.

This article was originally published by Tim Leberecht, an author, entrepreneur, and the co-founder and co-CEO of The Business Romantic Society, a firm that helps organizations and individuals create transformative visions, stories, and experiences. Leberecht is also the co-founder and curator of the House of Beautiful Business, a global think tank and community with an annual gathering in Lisbon that brings together leaders and changemakers with the mission to humanize business in an age of machines.

Read next: The sustainability of wearables will depend on how we use them

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Human emotions must adapt to thrive in the machine age - TNW

But hes not always sure. Admitting that the neurophysical facts shed only a monochrome light on human experience, he extols art as another dimension. We gain access to worlds otherwise uncharted, he says. As Proust emphasized, this is to be celebrated. Only through art, he noted, can we enter the secret universe of another, the only journey in which we truly fly from star to star, a journey that cannot be navigated by direct and conscious methods.

Two main themes run through this story. The first is natural selection, the endless inventive process of evolution that keeps molding organisms into more and more complex arrangements and codependencies. The second is what Greene calls the entropic-two step. This refers to the physical property known as entropy. In thermodynamics it denotes the amount of heat wasted energy inevitably produced by a steam engine, for example as it goes through its cycle of expansion and contraction. Its the reason you cant build a perpetual motion machine. In modern physics its a measure of disorder and information. Entropy is a big concept in information theory and black holes, as well as in biology.

We are all little steam engines, apparently, and everything we accomplish has a cost. That is why your exhaust pipe gets too hot to touch, or why your desk tends to get more cluttered by the end of the day.

In the end, Greene says, entropy will get us all, and everything else in the universe, tearing down what evolution has built. The entropic two-step and the evolutionary forces of selection enrich the pathway from order to disorder with prodigious structure, but whether stars or black holes, planets or people, molecules or atoms, things ultimately fall apart, he writes.

In a virtuosic final section Greene describes how this will work by inviting us to climb an allegorical Empire State Building; on each floor the universe is 10 times older. If the first floor is Year 10, we now are just above the 10th (10 billion years). By the time we get to the 11th floor the sun will be gone and with it probably any life on Earth. As we climb higher we are exposed to expanses of time that make the current age of the universe look like less than the blink of an eye.

Eventually the Milky Way galaxy will fall into a black hole. On about the 38th floor of the future, when the universe is 100 trillion trillion trillion years old, protons, the building blocks of atoms, will dissolve out from under us, leaving space populated by a thin haze of lightweight electrons and a spittle of radiation.

In the far, far, far, far future, even holding a thought will require more energy than will be available in the vastly dissipated universe. It will be an empty and cold place that doesnt remember us. Nabokovs description of a human life as a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness may apply to the phenomenon of life itself, Greene writes.

In the end it is up to us to make of this what we will. We can contemplate eternity, Greene concludes, and even though we can reach for eternity, apparently we cannot touch eternity.

Original post:
Just a Few Billion Years Left to Go - The New York Times

CHARLESTON West Virginia is on the list of prospective sites for Virgin Hyperloop Ones Hyperloop Certification Center, according to a company representative.

While the company is still eying several states as potential homes for the research and development center, a team of West Virginia officials has been working to try to bring the revolutionary transportation technology to the Mountain State.

Kristen Hammer, business development manager for Virgin Hyperloop One, said the company is in the process of whittling down its list.

We are very conscious to make this a very thoughtful process in general, she said. We dont want to be like some other companies that may have made less friends and more enemies in their process, because realistically whoever we dont build the Certification Center with, we still like to talk about building commercial hyperloop routes with. Its a lot of relationship building for us.

The state that is ultimately chosen will be in line for training and employment opportunities, Hammer said.

Theres a lot of good things for the region and the community (we choose), she said.

This kind of becomes a hub of hyperloop technology, wherever we build it. A lot of places like West Virginia understand that is a really exciting thing for the state and the region, she said.

Leadership from Virgin Hyperloop One recently made a second trip to the Mountain State for a series of scheduled meetings with multiple groups of stakeholders.

Company officials met with representatives from West Virginia Universitys Vantage Ventures, representatives from the offices of Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., and officials from Marshall University.

Company officials also met with state officials, including leadership in the state Development Office, National Guard, Department of Environmental Protection, Tourism Office, Department of Revenue, the Higher Education Policy Commission and the Community and Technical College System.

Gov. Jim Justice said he was excited to welcome Virgin Hyperloop Ones team back to West Virginia.

I directed members of my Cabinet to be on hand to answer any of their questions and to show them our West Virginia hospitality, Justice said. My entire administration is committed to helping Virgin Hyperloop One explore all that the Mountain State has to offer, and we hope and pray that West Virginia will become their next almost heaven home.

Hyperloop is an emerging mode of high-speed mode of transportation that involves moving people and goods in pods through a vacuum tube, using magnetic and electronic propulsion technology to reach travel speeds in excess of 600 miles per hour.

Its kind of the next evolution from high-speed rail, Hammer said.

The technology has zero direct-carbon emissions and is fully autonomous and enclosed, Hammer said.

The concept and technologies involved in hyperloop are still currently in early development and testing phases.

The Hyperloop Certification Center would work to establish regulatory standard to allow Virgin to continue its work perfecting the technology.

The concept that has become hyperloop dates back to the early 20th century.

In 1909, rocketry pioneer Robert Goddard proposed a vacuum train very similar in to the Hyperloop, and in 1972, the RAND Corporation conceived a supersonic underground railway called the Vactrain.

Tesla Inc. and SpaceX founder Elon Musk reintroduced the idea in 2013 with the publication of his Hyperloop Alpha white paper and Virgin Hyperloop One was founded a year later.

According to Jordan Damron, a communications official with Justices office, the governor has been interested in the Virgin Hyperloop One project since November, when company officials first visited the state.

During the November meeting Justice said landing the Hyperloop Certification Center could have enormous potential for the Mountain State.

We have really changed in this state from being the end of a bunch of bad jokes to where were now working to become a leader in innovation, Gov. Justice said. Think about it: you have Virgin Hyperloop One here in West Virginia today because they are interested in us. We could never thank you or appreciate you enough.

Justice was joined at the November meeting by top cabinet leaders from the State Department of Commerce, Department of Revenue, Department of Transportation, Department of Environmental Protection and the West Virginia National Guard to meet with company leaders and get a feel for what it would take to locate the HCC facility in West Virginia.

Weve brought all the kings horses and the kings men to answer any of your questions and let you see just how committed we are to exploring this incredible opportunity, Justice said.

Since then, the governor has remained in contact with Virgin Hyperloop One leadership and even wrote a letter to CEO Jay Walder in December, Damron said.

In his letter, the governor told Hyperloop officials that he has directed all Cabinet secretaries and other state leaders to be completely accessible. He also pledged to personally work with the company to provide access to our local, state and federal leaders, Damron said. West Virginias federal delegation has also been assisting in clearing pathways for the company to have the bandwidth they need to operate as efficiently as possible.

Senior Staff Writer Charles Young can be reached at 304-626-1447 or cyoung@theet.com

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WV on the list for potential Virgin Hyperloop site - WV News

February 19, 2020 Columns By John Sullivan Baker | February 19, 2020

Cornellians crave order. Our campus teems with neurotic overachievers who meticulously plan their days, their semesters and their careers. But Cornell, an inherently disorderly institution, often leaves these order-seekers wanting.

Cornells disorganization might be most evident in its campus landscape; to the chagrin of many, the buildings that form the East Hill skyline are a seemingly incoherent mishmash of architectural styles. But we should value Cornells architectural hodgepodge, as it reflects our identity as a non-pretentious college, (as historian Morris Bishop 13, Ph.D. 26 put it), and embodies the once-radical principles that have guided the university for more than 150 years.

As Andrew Dickson White, Cornells co-founder and first president, dreamt of a uniquely American university worthy of the state and nation, he imagined air castles on queenly site above New Yorks fairest lake. His vision was a self-conscious one; his institution would rival the great universities of Europe, with towers as dignified as those of Magdalen and Merton and quadrangles as beautiful as those of Jesus and St. John. And, of course, it would have a lofty campanile . . . a clock tower looking proudly down the slope, over the traffic of the town, and bearing a deep-toned peal of bells.

But White would be forced to compromise. Alas! he wrote, I could not reproduce my air-castles. The founders lacked the time and money to fulfill Whites dream of a Gothic campus, and, in any case, frugal Ezra Cornell, according to architectural historian Kermit J. Parsons, was not particularly concerned with innovation in building style or arrangement. So Cornells first buildings, Morrill Hall and White Hall, would be, in Whites words, simple, substantial, and dignified, and built from inexpensive, sturdy and locally-quarried Ithaca bluestone. Though these unexciting, get-the-job-done structures just met Whites minimum standards, they were far from ideal campus buildings; Goldwin Smith, whose namesake building would face Stone Row from across the Arts Quad, once opined that nothing can redeem [Morrill, McGraw, and White] but dynamite.

In 1891, with the construction of McGraw Tower, White got his wish for a proud campanile, a vaguely Italian bell tower that would come to define our university. Later, in 1906, nearly 40 years after the 1868 opening of both Morrill Hall and Cornell University, White would celebrate the opening of Goldwin Smith Hall, whose towering columns and dominant presence gave it European-style gravitas. And though Gothic Baker Tower and Founders Hall would be constructed on West Campus near the end of Whites life, his vision was left only partially fulfilled. An ambitious plan to expand the Gothics to cover a wide swath of West Campus never came to fruition.

Though a campus dominated by Oxford-style air castles would be a breathtaking sight, its for the best that White was disappointed. Cornell, needless to say, is not Oxford, and the British institutions beautiful yet ostentatiously elitist architectural aesthetic would be out of step with the egalitarian, populist principles on which Cornell was founded. Some ostentation is a good thing; in moderate doses, it commands respect, especially when balanced with the plain yet confident utilitarianism of buildings like the Libe Slope bluestones, but it shouldnt dominate.

Architecturally uniform universities that cling too tightly to traditional conventions can project a disconcerting sense of institutional insecurity, something Cornell, as Ive previously argued in these pages, needs to kick. A few years ago, I visited a well-regarded public institution in my home state of Ohio, nearly all of whose buildings, whether historical or modern, had been designed in the same Georgian Revival style yes, I did have to look this up. Though I was able to take plenty of nice pictures, the campus made me uncomfortable; the quads were a little too perfect, so close to the collegiate ideal that I wondered if the school was compensating for something. It seemed painfully evident that the midwestern institution self-consciously sought to appropriate the Colonial-Era gravitas (or pretension) of the oldest Eastern universities.

Cornells disorderliness, on the other hand, suggests the campus has evolved naturally and un-self-consciously, even if Whites original vision was a deeply intentional invocation of the aesthetic spirit of Europe. Instead of appropriating another schools architectural tone, Cornell blazed its own path, incorporating traditional styles from the Gothics to Willard Straight to Myron Taylor alongside groundbreaking modern architecture from the Johnson Museum to Gates Hall to the Mui Ho Fine Arts Library.

In doing so, Cornell has paid homage to the traditions of the ancient European universities and their Colonial-Era American heirs, while simultaneously asserting its identity as an institution determined to defy social convention and upend educational norms. Cornells mold-breaking campus landscape suits an institution committed since the 1800s to coeducation, non-sectarianism, racial integration, pedagogical innovation, academic freedom and responsibility and the pursuit of useful if unglamorous practical studies. These commitments sound standard today, but only because the rest of academia has evolved to catch up with Ezras institution; at the time of its founding, Cornell was nothing short of a radical experiment.

And because Cornell is a school thats never played it safe, its produced boldly awful but lovable buildings that define the campus experience. The view from Uris Hall is beautiful because you cant see Uris Hall, Ives is the labyrinthine high school/prison fusion no one ever asked for and the freshmen condemned to the low rises would probably be better off living in tents. And yet these buildings glaring flaws keep us tethered to reality in an ivory tower that can breed arrogance. Its tough to let your Ivy League status go to your head when youre lost for the 6th time on the way to your 10:10 a.m. ILR class or youre sweating bullets in Ithacas oppressive September heat because your allegedly riot-proof dorm doesnt have air conditioning.

Finally, Cornells juxtaposition of the old and new can symbolize our universitys social and moral evolution. Most notably, the symbiotic relationship between sleekly modern Klarman Hall and staidly traditional Goldwin Smith Hall is a manifestation of progressive poetic justice. Prof. Goldwin Smith, the 19th-century academic celebrity whose reputation and wealth helped establish Cornell as an elite institution, was once dubbed the most vicious anti-Semite in the English-speaking world and was a prolific author of racist anti-Jewish tirades. Seth Klarman 79, the billionaire benefactor who funded the construction of his namesake building attached to Goldwin Smith Hall, is one of Americas most successful Jewish businessmen. Though Smith contributed a great deal to Cornell, his noxious racism was an affront to the radically tolerant ideals of nonsectarianism and racial integration on which this university was founded. By contrast, Klarman Hall, whose bright, open spaces reflect the welcoming spirit that should define a progressive university, is a symbol of our universitys values and a repudiation of Smiths vile ideology.

Whether you embrace the Cornellian hodgepodge or seethe at its disorderliness, theres no doubt the words of our alma mater ring true. Reared against the arch of heaven, looks she proudly down.

John Sullivan Baker is a senior in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations. He can be reached at jsullivanbaker@cornellsun.com. Regards to Davy runs every other Tuesday this semester.

Original post:
SULLIVAN BAKER | Our Campus is an Architectural Hodgepodge. We Should Treasure It. - Cornell University The Cornell Daily Sun

If youre feeling all dreamy about the universe, heres a pro tip: dont tell Brian Greene. That guy can chill your cosmic buzz fast. I recently swung by the office of the Columbia University theoretical physicist full of happy, giddy questions and came away pretty much empty. Is there such a thing as a natural moral order? I wondered. Not in this universe, there isnt. What about a purpose to the universe, thenthe reason the whole 13.8 billion-year-old shebang with its hundreds of billions of galaxies and trillions of planets happened in the first place? Nope, Greene says, no such purpose, adding, And thats O.K. Maybe for him it is.

Surely, though, Greene will grant the existence of free willthat first item on the wish list of every freshman-year philosophy student who ever lived. Sorry, not a chance.

Your particles are just obeying their quantum-mechanical marching orders, Greene says. You have no ability to intercede in that quantum-mechanical unfolding. None whatsoever.

But heres the thing about Greene, founder of the World Science Festival; host of multiple TV series on PBS; and the author of five books, including the blockbuster The Elegant Universe and the just-released Until the End of Time: he says it all with such ebullience, such ingenuous enthusiasm, that if he told you the whole cold, amoral universe was ending tomorrow youd roll with it the way he wouldas just one more dramatic chapter in an extraordinary tale in which we all have a precious if fleeting role. Thats not to say everyone embraces his cosmic view so easily.

Ill be frank, Greene says. I have some students come in crying. And they say, This is kind of shaking my world up, and I say to them, Thats not a bad thing. Its fine to have your world shook. The pieces may fall back in the end to where you were, and they may not.'

On the day I saw him, the man who has made himself the master of some of the most abstruse aspects of physicssuperstring theory, spatial topographywas instead being mastered by one of the more basic ones: gravity. He was struggling about on crutches, the result of two ruptured spinal disks, which can give out over time whether or not youre the kind of person who can explain the attraction between the mass of the earth and the mass of your back.

When he makes his way from desk to couch, he drops down gratefully. Behind him is a whiteboard with a storm of equations written on it. The numbers and glyphs frame his face in a perfect metaphor for the impossibly complex ideas that play out in his head, then somehow emerge comprehensibly and coherently on the page.

Its a busy time for Greene. His World Science Festival will begin its 13th season in May in New York City and its fifth year in its satellite venue in Brisbane, Australia, in March. The Down Under version attracted a total of 700,000 visitors in its first four years. The New York edition has drawn a cumulative 2 million people and more than 40 million online views of its content.

Greene, 57, is also preparing for a promotional tour for his new book, and keeps up a full schedule of teaching, holding office hours and advising graduate students. During our conversation, he mentioned that he was booked to give an evening talk on superstring theory to a gathering of the universitys Society of Physics Students. Its a Friday night, a party night, but for the students and Greene, talking superstrings is a party.

Ive found that the theoretical physicists Ive spent the most time with are the ones who are just enthralled by the ideas and the minutiae of an equation working out, he says. The only difference I have seen relative to my colleagues is Ive never found pure research to be enough. Ive always felt like the world is so big and rich that I need to engage with it in different ways. And that can be the books, it can be the TV shows.

Greene comes by his love of performance rightly. His father was a vaudeville entertainer as well as a composer and voice coach. But Greenes own passion was math and science and then big sciencethe kind that seduces you with questions that both demand and defy answers, that can cross the line from science to something else entirely. Here, too, a close family member helped.

My brother is a Hare Krishna devotee, Greene says. Hes 13 years older than I am. When I was little and getting interested in math and physics, hed say, What are you learning? Id describe the Big Bang, and hed pull out the Vedas and read to me from them. It was a very interesting back-and-forth over the decades between the scientific pathway toward a certain kind of truth and the spiritual, religious pathway to a certain kind of truth.

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That tension plays out elegantly in Greenes new book, and to make sure no one misses the dialectic, the chapter names make it clear: Duration and Impermanence, Origins and Entropy, Particles and Consciousness. Greene takes one of his most powerful whacks at entropy, attacking the nettlesome business of the second law of thermodynamicsthe broad truth that all systems tend to disorder, which is often used to challenge the truth of evolution itself: that profoundly complex order can emerge from the chaos.

I resolve that tension in Chapter 3, Greene says, a boast that could pass as arrogant except that, well, he does resolve the tension in Chapter 3. It relies on the force of gravity. Without gravity, everything just spreads out, diffuses, and thats all there would be. But gravity has this wonderful capacity as a universally inward-pulling force which can undertake the following magic trick: it can pull things together, making it more orderly here, at the expense of releasing heat that makes it more disorderly out there. I call it the entropic two-step.'

Theres a lot of satisfaction in such neat solutions to head-cracking problems. But there is an equivalent neatness to the ostensibly dispiriting conclusions Greene reaches in his books and in his research: that unhappy business of a cold universe, an insentient universe, of the individual as just a quantum contraption, behaving as a product not of choice but of probabilities and randomness. Its where the free-will thing comes in: the universe is guided by quantum probabilities, and your choices are simply a part of that, the way a local breeze is part of the global weather system.

My feeling is that the reductionist, materialist, physicalist approach to the world is the right one, Greene says. There isnt anything else; these grand mysteries will evaporate over time. But despite such empirical bravado, Greene says more tooand whether he likes it or not, its not reductionist, and if its written in a book like Until the End of Time, it could be written in the Vedas as well.

Rather than feeling, Damn, theres no universal morality, Damn, theres no universal consciousness,' he says, how wondrous is it that I am able to have this conscious experience and its nothing more than stuff? That stuff can produce Beethovens Ninth Symphony, that stuff can produce the Mona Lisa, that stuff can produce Romeo and Juliet? Holy smokes, thats wondrous. The rational physicist with the deeply spiritual brother surely meant the holy as just a figure of speechbut if so, he picked an apt one.

This appears in the March 02, 2020 issue of TIME.

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Going to Australia in January for a family wedding gave us an opportunity to see some of the animals that represent earlier stages of mammal evolution.

Observing the living fossils of early mammals and seeing my nephew make a conscious choice to marry and continue our branch of the human species made me think of the Roman god Janus. He was the god of gates and doors who had two faces looking in opposite directions. He could see both the past and the future.

Australia broke away from the other continents first carrying a variety of animals with it about 175 million years ago during the Jurassic Period. Before that break, geologists believe that all the continents were together in one supercontinent called Pangaea near the equator.

There in the Paleozoic and Mesozoic Eras dinosaurs roamed the earth, and mammals were just emerging.

Many of the curious creatures shown on the news during Australias fires last December are marsupials. They have a pouch where their developing young can nurse in a protected place until they are ready to survive on their own. These little joeys can go out and back as they get grow stronger. The best known Australian marsupials are Kangaroos.

We were able to walk among midsized Kangaroos and Wallabies at the Cleland Wildlife Park run by the Department of Water and Natural Resources near Adelaide, Australia.

They came up to visitors for food, and they would allow us to touch them gently. Although their large hind legs were great for jumping, they were very awkward and ineffective for walking on all fours. When the Roos stood on their back legs and held up their small front arms, I wondered if they were an experimental evolutionary species preparing for us to stand on two legs.

Modern Australia is about the size of the United States, and much of the land is sandy or rocky desert near the center of the continent. The green coastal areas support most of the wildlife. The Eucalypt Forests along the eastern coast line are home to the furry Koala. They are marsupials, and they are not carnivorous like true bears. They live in Eucalypt trees and eat the leaves staying in the trees most of the time.

The Koala are endangered by the spread of Chlamydia, a venereal disease that causes the females to become sterile. The remaining healthy Koalas were on Kangaroo Island, and many of them died in the recent fires. Australian nature preserves are working to find ways to treat the disease to save some of these animals.

Animal lore to be continued next week.

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Recent years have seen breakthroughs in neural network technology: computers can now beat any living person at the most complex game invented by humankind, as well as imitate human voices and faces (both real and non-existent) in a deceptively realistic manner. Is this a victory for artificial intelligence over human intelligence? And if not, what else do researchers and developers need to achieve to make the winners in the AI race the kings of the world?

Background

Over the last 60 years, artificial intelligence (AI) has been the subject of much discussion among researchers representing different approaches and schools of thought. One of the crucial reasons for this is that there is no unified definition of what constitutes AI, with differences persisting even now. This means that any objective assessment of the current state and prospects of AI, and its crucial areas of research, in particular, will be intricately linked with the subjective philosophical views of researchers and the practical experience of developers.

In recent years, the term general intelligence, meaning the ability to solve cognitive problems in general terms, adapting to the environment through learning, minimizing risks and optimizing the losses in achieving goals, has gained currency among researchers and developers. This led to the concept of artificial general intelligence (AGI), potentially vested not in a human, but a cybernetic system of sufficient computational power. Many refer to this kind of intelligence as strong AI, as opposed to weak AI, which has become a mundane topic in recent years.

As applied AI technology has developed over the last 60 years, we can see how many practical applications knowledge bases, expert systems, image recognition systems, prediction systems, tracking and control systems for various technological processes are no longer viewed as examples of AI and have become part of ordinary technology. The bar for what constitutes AI rises accordingly, and today it is the hypothetical general intelligence, human-level intelligence or strong AI, that is assumed to be the real thing in most discussions. Technologies that are already being used are broken down into knowledge engineering, data science or specific areas of narrow AI that combine elements of different AI approaches with specialized humanities or mathematical disciplines, such as stock market or weather forecasting, speech and text recognition and language processing.

Different schools of research, each working within their own paradigms, also have differing interpretations of the spheres of application, goals, definitions and prospects of AI, and are often dismissive of alternative approaches. However, there has been a kind of synergistic convergence of various approaches in recent years, and researchers and developers are increasingly turning to hybrid models and methodologies, coming up with different combinations.

Since the dawn of AI, two approaches to AI have been the most popular. The first, symbolic approach, assumes that the roots of AI lie in philosophy, logic and mathematics and operate according to logical rules, sign and symbolic systems, interpreted in terms of the conscious human cognitive process. The second approach (biological in nature), referred to as connectionist, neural-network, neuromorphic, associative or subsymbolic, is based on reproducing the physical structures and processes of the human brain identified through neurophysiological research. The two approaches have evolved over 60 years, steadily becoming closer to each other. For instance, logical inference systems based on Boolean algebra have transformed into fuzzy logic or probabilistic programming, reproducing network architectures akin to neural networks that evolved within the neuromorphic approach. On the other hand, methods based on artificial neural networks are very far from reproducing the functions of actual biological neural networks and rely more on mathematical methods from linear algebra and tensor calculus.

Are There Holes in Neural Networks?

In the last decade, it was the connectionist, or subsymbolic, approach that brought about explosive progress in applying machine learning methods to a wide range of tasks. Examples include both traditional statistical methodologies, like logistical regression, and more recent achievements in artificial neural network modelling, like deep learning and reinforcement learning. The most significant breakthrough of the last decade was brought about not so much by new ideas as by the accumulation of a critical mass of tagged datasets, the low cost of storing massive volumes of training samples and, most importantly, the sharp decline of computational costs, including the possibility of using specialized, relatively cheap hardware for neural network modelling. The breakthrough was brought about by a combination of these factors that made it possible to train and configure neural network algorithms to make a quantitative leap, as well as to provide a cost-effective solution to a broad range of applied problems relating to recognition, classification and prediction. The biggest successes here have been brought about by systems based on deep learning networks that build on the idea of the perceptron suggested 60 years ago by Frank Rosenblatt. However, achievements in the use of neural networks also uncovered a range of problems that cannot be solved using existing neural network methods.

First, any classic neural network model, whatever amount of data it is trained on and however precise it is in its predictions, is still a black box that does not provide any explanation of why a given decision was made, let alone disclose the structure and content of the knowledge it has acquired in the course of its training. This rules out the use of neural networks in contexts where explainability is required for legal or security reasons. For example, a decision to refuse a loan or to carry out a dangerous surgical procedure needs to be justified for legal purposes, and in the event that a neural network launches a missile at a civilian plane, the causes of this decision need to be identifiable if we want to correct it and prevent future occurrences.

Second, attempts to understand the nature of modern neural networks have demonstrated their weak ability to generalize. Neural networks remember isolated, often random, details of the samples they were exposed to during training and make decisions based on those details and not on a real general grasp of the object represented in the sample set. For instance, a neural network that was trained to recognize elephants and whales using sets of standard photos will see a stranded whale as an elephant and an elephant splashing around in the surf as a whale. Neural networks are good at remembering situations in similar contexts, but they lack the capacity to understand situations and cannot extrapolate the accumulated knowledge to situations in unusual settings.

Third, neural network models are random, fragmentary and opaque, which allows hackers to find ways of compromising applications based on these models by means of adversarial attacks. For example, a security system trained to identify people in a video stream can be confused when it sees a person in unusually colourful clothing. If this person is shoplifting, the system may not be able to distinguish them from shelves containing equally colourful items. While the brain structures underlying human vision are prone to so-called optical illusions, this problem acquires a more dramatic scale with modern neural networks: there are known cases where replacing an image with noise leads to the recognition of an object that is not there, or replacing one pixel in an image makes the network mistake the object for something else.

Fourth, the inadequacy of the information capacity and parameters of the neural network to the image of the world it is shown during training and operation can lead to the practical problem of catastrophic forgetting. This is seen when a system that had first been trained to identify situations in a set of contexts and then fine-tuned to recognize them in a new set of contexts may lose the ability to recognize them in the old set. For instance, a neural machine vision system initially trained to recognize pedestrians in an urban environment may be unable to identify dogs and cows in a rural setting, but additional training to recognize cows and dogs can make the model forget how to identify pedestrians, or start confusing them with small roadside trees.

Growth Potential?

The expert community sees a number of fundamental problems that need to be solved before a general, or strong, AI is possible. In particular, as demonstrated by the biggest annual AI conference held in Macao, explainable AI and transfer learning are simply necessary in some cases, such as defence, security, healthcare and finance. Many leading researchers also think that mastering these two areas will be the key to creating a general, or strong, AI.

Explainable AI allows for human beings (the user of the AI system) to understand the reasons why a system makes decisions and approve them if they are correct, or rework or fine-tune the system if they are not. This can be achieved by presenting data in an appropriate (explainable) manner or by using methods that allow this knowledge to be extracted with regard to specific precedents or the subject area as a whole. In a broader sense, explainable AI also refers to the capacity of a system to store, or at least present its knowledge in a human-understandable and human-verifiable form. The latter can be crucial when the cost of an error is too high for it only to be explainable post factum. And here we come to the possibility of extracting knowledge from the system, either to verify it or to feed it into another system.

Transfer learning is the possibility of transferring knowledge between different AI systems, as well as between man and machine so that the knowledge possessed by a human expert or accumulated by an individual system can be fed into a different system for use and fine-tuning. Theoretically speaking, this is necessary because the transfer of knowledge is only fundamentally possible when universal laws and rules can be abstracted from the systems individual experience. Practically speaking, it is the prerequisite for making AI applications that will not learn by trial and error or through the use of a training set, but can be initialized with a base of expert-derived knowledge and rules when the cost of an error is too high or when the training sample is too small.

How to Get the Best of Both Worlds?

There is currently no consensus on how to make an artificial general intelligence that is capable of solving the abovementioned problems or is based on technologies that could solve them.

One of the most promising approaches is probabilistic programming, which is a modern development of symbolic AI. In probabilistic programming, knowledge takes the form of algorithms and source, and target data is not represented by values of variables but by a probabilistic distribution of all possible values. Alexei Potapov, a leading Russian expert on artificial general intelligence, thinks that this area is now in a state that deep learning technology was in about ten years ago, so we can expect breakthroughs in the coming years.

Another promising symbolic area is Evgenii Vityaevs semantic probabilistic modelling, which makes it possible to build explainable predictive models based on information represented as semantic networks with probabilistic inference based on Pyotr Anokhins theory of functional systems.

One of the most widely discussed ways to achieve this is through so-called neuro-symbolic integration an attempt to get the best of both worlds by combining the learning capabilities of subsymbolic deep neural networks (which have already proven their worth) with the explainability of symbolic probabilistic modelling and programming (which hold significant promise). In addition to the technological considerations mentioned above, this area merits close attention from a cognitive psychology standpoint. As viewed by Daniel Kahneman, human thought can be construed as the interaction of two distinct but complementary systems: System 1 thinking is fast, unconscious, intuitive, unexplainable thinking, whereas System 2 thinking is slow, conscious, logical and explainable. System 1 provides for the effective performance of run-of-the-mill tasks and the recognition of familiar situations. In contrast, System 2 processes new information and makes sure we can adapt to new conditions by controlling and adapting the learning process of the first system. Systems of the first kind, as represented by neural networks, are already reaching Gartners so-called plateau of productivity in a variety of applications. But working applications based on systems of the second kind not to mention hybrid neuro-symbolic systems which the most prominent industry players have only started to explore have yet to be created.

This year, Russian researchers, entrepreneurs and government officials who are interested in developing artificial general intelligence have a unique opportunity to attend the first AGI-2020 international conference in St. Petersburg in late June 2020, where they can learn about all the latest developments in the field from the worlds leading experts.

From our partner RIAC

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DUBLIN, Feb. 21, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Nanoemulsion Market by Type and Application: Global Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast 2019-2026" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

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According to the report, the global nanoemulsion market was valued at $2.1 billion in 2018, and is projected to reach $4.9 billion by 2026, growing at a CAGR of 11.5% from 2019 to 2026. In 2018, North America accounted for nearly 41.8% share of the nanoemulsion market.

The growth in value sales for emulsifiers is attributable to surge in demand for different emulsifiers, which facilitate better taste. Thus, increase in willingness of customers for different tastes in food & beverages is expected to fuel the demand for nanoemulsifiers.

The food industry has been evolving in terms of innovations and demand. Manufacturers focus on key innovations that cater to the requirements of their target consumers. Increase in awareness toward health and wellness has been witnessed among people residing in developed as well as developing countries. This has led customers to indulge in various physical activities, such as jogging, running, and related activities.

Among these health-conscious consumers, few customers are indulged in performance enhancement programs by keeping a track of their performance and health on a daily basis. This has resulted in increased demand for various types of special proteins made using nanoemulsifying techniques. Thus, nanoemulsifiers are gaining increased traction among nutrition manufacturers, which significantly drives the nanoemulsion market growth.

Nanoemulsions specially made from food grade ingredients are being predominantly used to encapsulate the biologically active lipids such as polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs), and Omega-3 fatty acids. Omega-3 fatty acid supplementation proves protective effect against cancer, sudden death, cardiac death, asthma, cognitive aging, myocardial infarction, and inflammation. Alpha-Linolenic Acid (ALA), also known as an Omega3 fatty acid, is one of two essential fatty acids. ALA is necessary for health and it cannot be synthesized within the human body.

Nanoemulsions with droplet size less than 100 nm are finding numerous applications in the field of cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, and food industries owing to its small size advantage. These nano particles gives freshness to food, increase stability, and also improves digestibility of the food.

Nanoemulsifiers have witnessed higher rate of penetration in North America and Europe. However, low availability has been observed for this product in some major parts of Asia-Pacific and LAMEA, which is attributable to low performing macro-economic factors such as internet penetration and aggressive marketing strategies by the manufacturers. Thus, lower penetration of such products limits the growth of the nanoemulsion industry.

There has been an increase in number of users in various social media sites with rise in internet penetration. Taking this into consideration, most of the key players in the nanoemulsion market strategize on promoting their products on these social media platforms. Thus, through social media marketing strategy, nanoemulsion market sights critical opportunity in gaining traction.

The key players operating in the global market include AQUANOVA AG, Keystone Foods, Shemen Industries Ltd., Frutarom Group, Jamba, WILD Flavors and Specialty Ingredients, Unilever Group, Nestle S.A., DuPont, and the Kraft Heinz Company.

Key Findings

Story continues

Key Topics Covered

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: Market Overview 2.1. Market Definition and Scope 2.2. Parent/Peer Market Overview 2.3. Key Findings 2.3.1. Top Investment Pockets 2.4. Porter's Five Force Analysis 2.4.1. Bargaining Power of Suppliers 2.4.2. Bargaining Power of Buyers 2.4.3. Threat of New Entrants 2.4.4. Threat of Substitution 2.4.5. Intensity of Competitive Rivalry 2.5. Market Evolution/Industry Roadmap 2.6. Market Dynamics 2.6.1. Drivers 2.6.1.1. Growing Use of Nanoemulsion in Food & Beverages Industry 2.6.1.2. Rising Trend of Nanostructured Food Ingredients and Additive in Food & Beverages 2.6.2. Restraints 2.6.2.1. Higher Cost of Nanoemulsion Technology 2.6.3. Opportunities 2.6.3.1. Nano Technology Enduring Its Trend in Various Industry

Chapter 3: Nanoemulsion Market, By Type 3.1. Overview 3.2. Small-Molecule Surfactant 3.3. Protein-Stabilized Emulsions 3.4. Polysaccharide

Chapter 4: Nanoemulsion Market, By Application Type 4.1. Overview 4.2. Beverages 4.3. Dairy 4.4. Bakery

Chapter 5: Nanoemulsion Market, By Region 5.1. Overview 5.2. North America 5.3. U.S. 5.4. Canada 5.5. Mexico 5.6. Europe 5.7. U.K. 5.8. France 5.9. Netherlands 5.10. Germany 5.11. Turkey 5.12. Rest of Europe 5.13. Asia-Pacific 5.14. China 5.15. Japan 5.16. India 5.17. South Korea 5.18. Australia 5.19. Rest of Asia-Pacific 5.20. LAMEA 5.21. Brazil 5.22. South Africa 5.23. United Arab Emirates 5.24. Rest of LAMEA

Chapter 6: Competitive Landscape 6.1. Market Player Positioning, 2018 6.2. Competitive Dashboard 6.3. Competitive Heatmap

Chapter 7: Company Profiles 7.1. Aquanova AG 7.2. Dupont Nutrition & Biosciences 7.3. Frutarom Industries Ltd. 7.4. Jamba 7.5. Keystone Foods 7.6. Nestle S.A. 7.7. Shemen Industries Ltd. 7.8. The Kraft Heinz Company (Heinz) 7.9. Unilever Group 7.10. Wild Flavors and Specialty Ingredients

For more information about this report visit https://www.researchandmarkets.com/r/uxzrp0

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The Nanoemulsion Market: Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast 2019-2026 - Yahoo Finance

After a six-year hiatus and an open-ended conclusion, Star Wars:The Clone Warsis finally back and has a new home on Disney+ for its seventh and final season. Rather than the whole season getting released at once like the previous season, called The Lost Missions, which was dropped on Netflix in 2014, Clone Wars is doing weekly releases starting with The Bad Batch, the first episode in a new arc.

The clone soldier Captain Rex (Dee Bradley Baker) reports that the Separatists enemies are predicting their tactics. He announces to his Jedi General that hes infiltrating a Separatist base to investigate the situation. He doesnt tell his Jedi General one thing though: he has a theory that the Separatists are procuring their information from a surviving clone brother by the name of Echo, who supposedly perished back in The Citadel. Along with Commander Cody, he enlists the assistance of a four-crew team of clones with desirable mutations, clones that didnt come out with standardized physicality and possess abilities deemed useful on the battlefield. The team includes the leader Hunter, the brawny Wrecker, the nerdy bespectacled Tech, and the strong-and-silent type Crosshair.

Created by Dave Filoni and inspired by the 2003 proto-canon Genndy Tartakovsky hand-drawn Clone Wars, the prequel era-setClone Wars was initially quite distinctive in the Star Wars animated realm for its grit. The series had a rocky start back in 2008, but gained a slow and steady fanbase as quality rose. Releasing a series of anthologized arcs taking place within the same war, Clone Wars took advantage of the television format to unravel the idiosyncrasies of familiar characters like Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Yoda while expanding on background characters like the clones and fleshing out a grimy space fantasy world trapped in ceaseless war and politics that were left untouched by the movies.

When compared to the previousClone Wars episodes, which was the finale at the time, this season 7 premiere is a big technical step up. The CGI-renderings are slicker and more polished on a technical level, the show has grown significantly. In the days where Clone Wars wasnt expecting a revival, fans who watched the quasi-rendered version back in Unfinished Tales: Clone Wars panel at the 2015 Star Wars Celebration (which are online) know most of the beats of this final product, but fortunately, there is noticeable evolution in the script, especially in Rexs emotional odyssey for autonomous thinking highlighted by the new element of him burrowing his personal theoryand his sorrow as well. Rexs secretiveness about his theory about Echos survival underlines his long-term burgeoning independence from his military and birth conditioning.

Baker, once again, does the heavy-duty of voicing all the clones, accentuating each with personality and individual existence despite their identical appearance and voices. The Clone storylines were always the strongest when any clone character dealt with the existentialism of being bred into expendability, whether theyre conscious of it or not, and this premiere doubles down on that. As for the Bad Batch themselves, they pop as if they exist in their own spin-off universe somewhere, needing more fleshing-out as of now.

This first episode of an arc offers little more than some pulpy action, a slickly staged action sequence, and an enticing cliffhanger. The Bad Batch is not a spectacular comeback, all things considered, but its good to be back in the world. The clones, as well as Bakers vocal performance, anchor this episode. But so far, they deserve moreand I look forward to it.

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Star Wars The Clone Wars The Bad Batch Review - /FILM

Thesis Summary

Ambev S.A. (ABEV) is a distributor of beverages focused in Latin America. Currently, it is trading at historical lows which could offer a good entry point. I believe the business model is solid and expect it to remain profitable in the future. With a solid balance sheet, plenty of cash and an implied 2% yield, the company offers an interesting investment opportunity.

Ambev produces, distributes and sells alcoholic beverages and other refreshments. Its main products are beers which include Skol, Corona, and Budweiser. However, the company also sells a variety of juices, sodas and coconut water. Ambev operates in three segments which are divided geographically; Central America and the Carribean, Latin America South, and Canada.

The company has recently put out some disappointing results and the stock is now trading at its lowest ever, $3.63/share as of writing this. In this article, we will try to make sense of this to determine if this is a potential value buying opportunity. First, lets start with the most recent results available:

Source: Investor Relations 3Q Results

Both the quarter to quarter and yearly comparisons show a similar dynamic. Revenues have grown at a reasonable pace in the last year, around 7%, while EPS has not increased at all. This is due to a reduction in the gross and EBITDA margins.

Looking at the income statement, we can see that this is due to substantially higher costs of goods sold

Source: Investor Relations 3Q Results

Another interesting change is the difference between tax expenses, which in 2018 contributed $141 million while in 2019 it became an expense of $222 million.

In the section below I will cover some of the most relevant strongpoints of the company.

I like the Balance sheet, as the company is not overly indebted, with a Debt/Equity ratio of 0,04 and a quick ratio of 1. Looking at the evolution of the last few years, Ambev has done a good job of reducing its debt and this is no exception in the last year.

Source: Investor Relations 3Q Results

In the last year, the company has managed to increase assets and reduce total liabilities. Looking back, in 2009 Ambec had over $1 billion in long.term debt. Today, that number is much closer to $200 million. This is a testament to the proficient management and cash-generating ability of the company.

Ambev has the right to sell and distribute some of the biggest beer brands in the world, including the likes of Budweiser, Becks, and Corona. In terms of brand identity, the company has been for a long-time talking about Premiumization and is executing this practice quite well.

Source: cbc.co

Premiumization is the result of a change in the beer market. Consumers of beer are demanding more in terms of taste and branding, not every beer is made equally. To this extent, Ambev os well positioned as it has exclusive rights to some premium brands and is also developing and rebranding its beers. Recently it launched Skol Hops. Since close to 77% of the premium market in Brazil is dominated by the top 4 brands, there is plenty of room to take a bigger slice of the market from the incumbents. Furthermore, the company has a moat like characteristic, as it is the only distributor of these big names.

More importantly, Ambevs portfolio includes more than beer, with a wide array of other beverages that have in recent times performed quite well. Lets take Brazil, for example, one of the worst-performing segments.

Source: Investor Relations 3Q Results

NAB, (Non-Alcoholic Beverages) grew by 13.6% in terms of revenue. While profitability is still an issue here, it is clear that the company has a wide array of products that are in demand.

Finally, it is worth mentioning that Ambev pays a dividend, and why wouldnt they? Despite lower profitability, the company still has a healthy and growing cash & ST investment position of over $3.5 million. The company has consistently been paying out around 10 cents per share a year. This gives it a yield of around 2.71% at a payout ratio of only 20.17%. While there are many higher yields out there, it is an attractive source of income. Combined with the current potential for capital appreciation, this makes an investment in Ambev even more attractive.

In the section below I will cover some of the most relevant weaknesses of the company.

One of the main headwinds Ambev has been facing is that of reduced profitability. Even though the company remains quite profitable, with a 59.51% Gross margin, it is undeniable that the trend in the last 5 years has been downward.

Source: Seeking Alpha

As we can see. Gross Margin has decreased by over 10% in the last 5 years. This is due to increased input prices and also differences in local currencies purchasing power. Will Ambev be able to stop the bleeding? In this regard, the company is integrating various forms of logistical and data related technologies to optimize distribution. We should see this affects the next couple of years. Secondly, we can expect margins to improve if/when the South American region begins to grow quicker and people have more disposable income

This is another interesting point that can be seen as a weakness. While Ambev has a very well-diversified portfolio in terms of products, most of its operations are centered in Latin America. This means the future of the company is very much tied to the macroeconomic growth of the area. However, it is important to realize that, in the long-run, microeconomic factors should outweigh the macro. If you believe in the profitability of Ambevs business model, this shouldnt be a reason for concern.

Overall, it is not just Ambev that has been underperforming, but the whole sector. We must understand that markets are always changing, and to keep growing companies must adapt to the new demands of consumers. For example, people growing up now have become a lot more health-conscious, and alcohol is losing its appeal, as are sugary soft drinks. In terms of beer, there has been a great shift in recent years to craft beer. People want to feel that what they are drinking is special, and that is part of what premiumization is about. Changes in demand offer both a great challenge and an opportunity.

In terms of valuation, Ambev is now trading somewhat below the market. It has a P/E of 22, 6.72% below the market, and it is also quite undervalued if we look at EV/EBITDA. While this in and of itself is not enough for me to invest, combined with the relatively secure dividend, the current price offers an opportunity to capitalize on what could be a low-point in terms of the share price.

Overall, the company still has profitable operations and has a certain degree of resilience to competition and recession. My rating for this stock is just above neutral although I do not have a position.

Disclosure: I/we have no positions in any stocks mentioned, and no plans to initiate any positions within the next 72 hours. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.

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Ambev: Value And Income - Seeking Alpha