What should be the role of religion in higher education? Should colleges and universities that are funded by a particular religion solely teach that theology? Should administrators use their faith to guide them to expose students to a broad set of views? Or should academics set their faith aside and allow a free-ranging debate? Give us your best arguments, ideas or personal experiences from a faith perspective.

Email your response to faith@dallasnews.com. Please limit the response to 250 words, and include your full name, address and phone number.

We plan to publish reader opinion on this question in coming weeks on the Living Our Faith page online and in the Sunday Opinion print section.

Get the weekly reader question and a roundup of the project in your email inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Living Our Faith newsletter.

Read these essays for inspiration on this weeks topic.

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What should be the role of religion in higher education? - The Dallas Morning News

Teachers Pay Teachers represents a growing online marketplace once dubbed the Etsy of Education that now has seen 6 million teachers in the past year buy or sell classroom resources. Its part of an effort to help teachers help one another in creating fresh approaches to instruction while getting paid for their work.

And school districts are getting on board.

As a first-year teacher, you arent handed very much to work with, and you are expected to learn the ropes of being a great teacher while at the same time creating much of the material you use in your class, says Kristin Hodgson, vice president of brand marketing and communications. Many, many great teachers came before [founder Paul Edelman], and the things he was creating had already been created. He thought, What if I could get access to amazing resources from other teachers around the world?

Edelman, a former New York City public school teacher and now a Teachers Pay Teachers board member, created the site in 2006. Since then, there have been more than 1 billion downloads, and 4 million resources are available today.

Some educators sign up as authors/sellers, while others browse the site for materials that could work in their classrooms. The teacher-buyer is getting what they need and solving the problems around time and access, and the teacher-author is getting compensated for their work, Hodgson says. The average resource costs less than $5, and the average transaction totals about $15.

The resources span K-12 and include everything from math curriculum to art lessons, reading materials and science labs. Because we represent the collective wisdom of teachers, it is a swath of what has been tested and used across the community, Hodgson says.

Teachers Pay Teachers doesnt vet or review the teacher-authors of the roughly 150,000 of them, several thousand do the majority of the selling, creating community followings but users can rate each seller on the site.

Internal research has found that 98 percent of buyers use the lessons from the site to differentiate instruction in their classrooms at least once a month, and 67 percent do it at least weekly.

I find that many of my teachers just want additional lessons to either help students that are struggling with the concept or to enrich and push students who have mastered the concept and can work with the skill at a higher level, says April Becherer, principal at Parkview Elementary in Illinois.

Some lessons contain videos that model how to properly present the lesson or guide implementation of the resource, and once a purchase is made, the teacher has the right to future updates when the author adds, modifies or extends the material. This is something that is useful, says Becherer, as education continually evolves and changes.

As the site has grown, Hodgson says, its 130 employees have, among other things, created a crowdsourcing option to help specific teachers ask others to chip in for the resources they need. In the early launch stages in summer 2019, the pilot program saw 10,000 teachers quickly raise $100,000 toward resources. The initial signals show that by unlocking more access for teachers and getting them more funds, we are going to allow them to get more of what they need to reach their students, Hodgson says. That is the priority we are focused on.

Link:
Meet the Etsy of Education: Online Marketplace Lets Teachers Buy and Sell Millions of Classroom Materials and Lessons - The 74

It's only February and theS&P 500 has already set record highs multiple times this year. With the economy looking strong, an election making risky political moves unlikely, and new trade policies in place with China, Mexico, and Canada, 2020 is shaping up to be another bullish year.

There have already been a number of big winners this year. Tesla shareshave more than doubled this year on hopes for the company's disruptive potential in electric cars, batteries, and renewable energy, andVirgin Galacticshares have nearly tripled as bulls have pushed the only pure-play commercial space travel stock to new altitudes.

These won't be the only big winners this year. Let's take a look at three other stocks that could double by this summer.

Image source: Getty Images.

It may be surprising to see the struggling home goods retailer on this list, but investors are already starting to get clued in to the company's turnaround potential. The stock rallied all the way from $7.31 per share in August to more than $17 in December, after Mark Tritton was named as the new CEO in October. Tritton comes to Bed Bath & Beyond(NASDAQ:BBBY) after serving as Chief Merchandise Officer atTarget, where he helped guide that retailer to successful turnaround in part by launching a number of new owned brands at the big-box chain.

When Tritton has dropped hints about his strategy for Bed Bath & Beyond, investors have reacted favorably. Earlier this week, he said the company would sell personalizationmall.com for $252 million to help fund improvements in its stores, supply, and digital initiatives, pushing the stock up 7%.

It's also become clear that there's a lot of low-hanging fruit for Tritton to pick as he attempts to streamline the company. For instance, since taking the helm in November, he's cut the number of can openers the company sells from more than a dozen to three, and sales in the category rose. Doing so not only makes the customer experience better, but eliminates inventory and should help drive down costs and create economies of scale as the company can make bigger orders from the same suppliers.

The company earlier reported that comparable sales fell by an adjusted 13% in December and January, so its April earnings report will likely be a dud, but Tritton is preparing to roll out a comprehensive new strategy at an investor conference in May. If investors like what they hear and results improve, shares could make some serious gains.

China stockshave been rocked by the coronavirus outbreak, and it's still unknown how long the outbreak will persist and disrupt everyday business in China. However, some stocks have been surprising winners on the threat.

Youdao(NYSE:DAO), a Chinese online education specialist, spiked in the initial days after the outbreak became serious. As an online education provider, the stock was in a unique position to benefit from the coronavirus, which forced schools to close.

Schools are still closed indefinitely in China,but 200 million children are taking classes online.

Such an event gives Youdao the opportunity to raise its profile and grow its business. The company offers a number of online courses for K-12 students and others, as well as educational apps and devices like translators. The recent IPO is set to report fourth-quarter earnings on Wednesday, Feb. 26. The stock is lightly covered with just one analyst forecasting revenue of $453.7 million, but a better-than-expected report and a bullish outlook for 2020 could lift the stock and propel further gains over the coming months. Other Chinese online education stocks likeTAL EducationandNew Oriental Educationhave already been big winners, and Youdao could easily follow in their footsteps.

Another IPO debutante,Bill.com,(NYSE:BILL) has made a big splash since its December debut on the market. The stock jumped 60% on opening day and gained again in its first earnings report as a publicly traded company earlier in February.

Bill.com is a provider of cloud-based software to handle back office operations, including payments for small and-medium-sized businesses. In its second-quarter earnings report, which came out in February, revenue jumped 50% to $39.1 million, smashing expectations at $33.8 million, and subscription revenue rose 61%, a promising sign for a SaaS model.

In its outlook, Bill.com's forecast was also much better than analyst expectations, indicating Wall Street may have underestimated this stock's potential growth. What's also attractive about Bill.com is its strong position in payments, a business that has generated significant profits for peers likePaypal. It spends much less than many cloud stockson sales and marketing, which is also a bullish sign for future profitability as the company is able to grow rapidly without spending heavily on marketing. In the first half of the year it spent about 30% of its revenue on sales and marketing, but more went to research and development.

Bill.com won't report earnings again until May, but if tailwinds continue in cloud stocks and the company delivers another round of strong results, shares could move significantly higher.

The rest is here:
3 Stocks That Could Double by This Summer - The Motley Fool

Coronavirus

The sudden uptick in early stage investment into Chinese online education may provide temporary relief for a sector suffering from a slowdown in appetite since the summer of last year. However, investors may struggle to pick the wheat from the chaff.

February 20, 2020

The coronavirus outbreak in China has delayed the opening of the school spring term across the country. But rather than letting their Children watch TV, parents are required to supervise them while they take online classes instead.

The rebound in online education has reignited the attention from investors it seems. On February 18, Whale English Elite Education announced the completion a Rmb100 million $14 million Series B fundraising. Sino-Ocean Capital led the fundraising, while Hike Capital and Fresh Capital participated in the round. China TH Capital was the financial advisor on the deal.

This is the tenth investment in Chinese online education to complete in the...

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A trivia night being held March 6 in the lobby of the Black Knight Fieldhouse will be raising funds for scholarships to be given to Farmington High School students through the Farmington Educational Foundation.

The Farmington Educational Foundation is hosting a trivia night at 7 p.m. Friday, March 6, in the lobby of the Black Knight Fieldhouse.

Doors open at 6:20 p.m., with the trivia contest starting at 7 p.m. Teams will be made up of eight to 10 players with a fee of $10 per person. Student teams have a $5 per person fee.

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In addition to the trivia contest, the event will also feature a silent auction, games and prizes. Pizzas and popcorn will be provided. Players are welcome to bring outside snacks, but no alcohol is permitted.

To preregister a team; sponsor a round; or donate a silent auction item or door prize, contact Sally Shinn by email at sallyshinn@sbcglobal.net

All proceeds from the event will go toward scholarships for the Farmington High School Class of 2020.

The Farmington Educational Foundation is a 501(c)3 not-for-profit. Its mission is to enhance the educational opportunities for students in the Farmington R-7 School District.

We'll send breaking news and news alerts to you as as they happen!

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Education foundation to host trivia night - Daily Journal Online

Grover Beach residents will soon have to pay more for false alarms.

According to city data, the Grover Beach Police Department responds to about 300 false alarms every year, each taking about 30 minutes to investigate. Its about seven days and $30,000 spent every year responding to them and it takes resources away from real crime.

The hour spent investigating a false alarm is an hour not spent patrolling our city, said Matthew Bronson, Grover Beach City Manager.

False alarms happen when your security system accidentally goes off and police officers respond to your home or business and find no evidence that a crime occurred or was attempted.

It does not apply to smoke alarms or medical emergencies, but instead security systems like ring doorbells. Fees can also apply to robbery and panic button false alarms.

The city is looking to avoid wasting resources, so they are asking property owners to register their security systems with the city to avoid paying more in fines.

If you don't register your security system and have a false alarm, you'll have to pay:

If you register your system for $25 every year, the fine for false alarms is less expensive:

The city defines a "false alarm" as an Alarm Dispatch Request to the Police Department, which results in the responding officer finding no evidence of a criminal offense or attempted criminal offense after completing a timely investigation of the Alarm Site.

The registration will allow the police department to identify who to contact when an alarm goes off so they can bring a matter to a close faster than they can now," Bronson said.

The cities of Arroyo Grande, Pismo Beach and San Luis Obispo also have similar ordinances in place, with San Luis Obispo seeing about a 50% decrease in false alarms.

One Grover Beach resident said she's going to pay for the permit but worried it could be expensive for others.

It's worth it. I'm on a tight income myself and I know there are people on tight incomes but it's your safety, number one," said Linda Muoz, who has an alarm system at her Grover Beach home.

According to the city, you can waive the first false alarm fee if you take an online education course. This option is only available if your alarm is permitted.

Police said if you have a false alarm, realize it and cancel it before officers arrive, then you won't be charged.

The ordinance goes into effect April 1, 2020. Click here for more information or to register your alarm system.

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Local News Grover Beach PD increases fines for false alarms to avoid wasting resources Megan Healy - KSBY San Luis Obispo News

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.

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