ishadyfartcollector-blog

[ishadyfartcollector-blog]

When China announced on Thursday that it had successfully landed on the far side of the moon, it wasn't just a scientific breakthrough. To Beijing, its expanding space mission also carries an increasingly powerful symbolic message.

[ishadyfartcollector-blog]

Time is right to bet big on India: Stephen Schwarzman, Chairman, Blackstone Read more at: //economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/67085290.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

[ishadyfartcollector-blog]

Former England captain Michael Vaughan believes India captain Virat Kohli is a better batsman across the three formats than legends such as Sachin Tendulkar, Brian Lara and Ricky Ponting. Kohli on Sunday became the second fastest player to score 25 Test centuries. He achieved the feat in 127 innings, behind Sir Donald Bradman's 68 innings.

  His 123-run innings was his sixth Test hundred on Australian soil, joining boyhood hero Sachin Tendulkar. "I have not seen a better player. I'm not disrespecting Sachin Tendulkar, Brian Lara or Ricky Ponting but across three formats of the game I have not seen anyone better," Vaughan wrote about Kohli in his column for Foxsports. "He has such high skill levels and an incredible mentality when it comes to dealing with the pressure of the chase. All that while dealing with a weight of expectation and adulation that only Sachin would have experienced." Vaughan also praised India's four-man pace attack.

[ishadyfartcollector-blog]

Audi presents car of the future: The all-electric PB18 e-tron

[ishadyfartcollector-blog]

National Entrepreneurship Awards 2018 invite nominations for India’s most promising entrepreneurs

[ishadyfartcollector-blog]

Imagine walking into a meeting room. You shake hands with colleagues, then everyone sits down. Within seconds they all start sniffing their palms, picking up clues about you from the chemical traces left over from the handshakes. Sniffing palms after a handshake, usually within 30 seconds of the interaction, would likely help people learn about someone’s health and genetic compatibility, according to a 2015 study by researchers in Israel. Sniffing can also offer information on people’s emotional state, such as if they are happy, sad or fearful. The smeller gleans these emotions subconsciously, of course. For decades, scientists believed humans were not very good at detecting and identifying odors. Our animal ancestors used their noses way more than we do in modern society, says Jessica Freiherr, a neuroscientist at RWTH Aachen University, in Germany, and the author of several studies on human olfaction. “We are disconnected from our noses,” she says. “We need them much less in everyday life. And our vision overrides the sense of smell in a lot of situations.” But that doesn’t mean we don’t have powerful smell potential. A 2014 study showed that we can distinguish at least 1 trillion different odors — up from previous estimates of a mere 10,000. Awareness of our innate smelling abilities, however, is complicated because the human language doesn’t have words for a trillion smells, and much of smelling happens under the radar of our consciousness. Unlike our other senses, the olfactory nerves do not proceed directly to the brain’s thalamus, the gateway to consciousness. Instead, information feeds from the nose to cortical areas to arouse emotions and memories without our awareness. When it comes to smells, people can be influenced and not realize it.

[ishadyfartcollector-blog]

" Pure Clean Positive Energy Vibration" Meditation Music, Healing Music, Relax Mind Body & Soul

[ishadyfartcollector-blog]

In a tunnel lined with blazing white lights, workers can look for tiny imperfections in the finished product. Elsewhere, they slide a 16-cylinder engine into its home just behind the driver's seat. Occasionally, they gather at a central table for a meeting.

There is no assembly line here. It would make no sense to set one up. Only a few cars are being built here at any one time.

  This is the home of Bugatti in France's Alsace region. I'm standing inside a factory but Bugatti would never use that word. The company's executives always refer to it as "the atelier," the workplace of an artist or an artisan. A little pretentious, maybe, but the word fits.

Built in 2005 by Bugatti's corporate owner, Volkswagen Group, the Bugatti's headquarters in the town of Molsheim stands on land that was Ettore Bugatti's in the early 1900s, when he was building some of the world's fastest, most expensive and most beautiful cars.

Volkswagen has gone to incredible lengths to recreate the essence of what Ettore Bugatti's small shop was doing in the first half of the twentieth century.

  Just three decades ago, Bugatti was, for practical purposes, extinct. After Ettore Bugatti's death in 1947, the brand never fully recovered. There had been sporadic attempts at reviving it, including one that produced a few examples of a well-regarded supercar, the EB110, which was made in Italy. None of these attempts ultimately succeeded.

By the time Volkswagen purchased Bugatti out of bankruptcy in 1998, there was little left of it but a name and a red oval logo.

  Volkswagen has revived the Bugatti brand, known for making some of the fastest, most beautiful cars in the world.

But rebuilding brands is something Volkswagen has proven it can do particularly well. In the same year Volkswagen bought the Bugatti brand, it also bought the British ultra-luxury brand Bentley. Under the decades long ownership of Rolls-Royce, Bentley had been largely reduced to a badge placed on cars that were otherwise little different from Rolls-Royces. With the introduction of visually striking cars like the Continental GT, Volkswagen returned Bentley to its roots as a maker of luxurious but fast and sporting automobiles, clearly distinct in feel and image from those of its former owner. (The Rolls-Royce brand was purchased by BMW, which built a new factory and set about restoring that brand's image as well.)

[ishadyfartcollector-blog]

Google is making it easier for users to delete their search history. Previously, users had to visit their Google account landing page to see and erase past queries, but now it's possible to do from within search itself. Tapping the three lines on the left side of any Google search will call up a "Your data in Search" option. From there, Google shows recent queries and provides deletion options. This new functionality launches on desktop and mobile web on Wednesday, and in the Google app for iOS and Android in several weeks. It will appear in Google Maps next year. Google's update follows a handful of recent data privacy scandals. In August, The Associated Press revealed that Google was still storing time-stamped location data even when a user paused their "Location History." In late September, the company backtracked on changes to its Google Chrome browser that would automatically sign a user in if they wanted to use any other Google service, like Gmail. Most recently, Google discovered a software bug that gave developers access to the private profile data of Google+ users. It subsequently shut the social network down.

[ishadyfartcollector-blog]

"With greater brand visibility, you get to connect with new segments of your audience and turn them into consumers. They are introduced to your brand through a trusted channel and are more likely to boost your bottom line." https://t.co/ZyVPqTC9GC

[ishadyfartcollector-blog]

It’s in our nature to want to be better, faster and stronger. To be successful in a competitive world, we have to keep pushing to improve our creativity, intelligence and energy levels. The worlds of entrepreneurialism and science have come together in recent years to research our daily lives and biological makeup to determine how we can grow past what we were yesterday. This is the world of biohacking. To learn more about the industry and get some simple methods we can all try at home, I connected with leaders in the field, beginning with one of the founders of the movement, Bulletproof’s Dave Asprey. Bulletproof Of course, for years we’ve all bio-hacked in our own way, from exercise and nutrition to that morning cup of coffee. Dave Asprey is the Founder of Bellevue, Washington-Based Bulletproof, creator of Bulletproof Coffee, and one of the leaders of the biohacking boom. Bulletproof Coffee is a recipe he developed with a unique blend of coffee mixed with healthy butter and Medium Chain Triglycerides (MCT) oil, which provides additional fuel to energize one’s brain throughout each day. Bulletproof has grown 80% since 2012 and has top-selling products in Whole Foods and Sprouts grocery stores. In 2017 Bulletproof raised $17 million in funding from the same VC firm that initially invested in Starbucks and another $40 million series C from Trinity Ventures this year. Prior to Bulletproof, Asprey spent almost 20 years running a non-profit anti-aging research and education group in Palo Alto. Asprey immersed himself in the subject matter because he used to weigh 300 pounds, was diagnosed with arthritis in his knees when he was 14 and had chronic fatigue syndrome. He’s now 203 pounds with 9.6% body fat, without dieting or exercising regularly. He was also a successful entrepreneur in his mid-twenties as a co-founder of the company that held Google’s first servers, and though his career had taken off, his brain wasn’t working well and he felt it not working. His doctors couldn’t help and he decided that he needed to hack his energy and focus in the same way that they were hacking computer systems. He then proceeded to spend more than $1 million of his own money trying to hack his biology. “If someone had told me all of the knowledge that had existed and I could have absorbed it when I was 20 or 25 it would have saved me hundreds of thousands of dollars and a lot of pain and struggle,” says Asprey. Aprey and team are currently raising $20 million to further develop Upgrade labs, a space in Santa Monica, CA, next to the Bulletproof retail store, where they are testing $1 million worth of gear that’s used by special forces, astronauts, celebrities, and others. It’s currently open to the public and is a great place to learn about biohacking methods such as cryotherapy, light therapy, and pulsed electro-magnets that can change bone density. Upgrade Labs is also researching methods to gain 3 times more muscle per minute than lifting weights, to do the equivalent of 2.5 hours of cardio in 21 minutes using a combination of pressure, temperature, and timing, how to train the cells in your body using changes in atmospheric pressure, and even to exercise while breathing air that has no oxygen in it, each which Asprey says have profound effects on the body. “The core definition (of biohacking) is changing the art and science of the environment around you and inside of you so that you have full control of your biology,” says Asprey. “People want to be able to do a lot of things whether it’s to look or feel a certain way, to run faster, to lift heavy things, to have enough energy to play with one’s kids after a full day of work, or be able to run a company and then be able to go to sleep at night.” Asprey gave us a few of his personal tips for biohacking at home.

[ishadyfartcollector-blog]

According to CSO Insights, salespeople who complete highly rated sales training programs have 10% higher win rates.

For a 100-person sales team with $1 million individual quotas and a $50,000 average deal size, that translates to a $20 million increase in revenue.

But with thousands of options, finding the best sales training program for your budget, team size, focus, and your needs isn’t always easy.

Here are the evaluation criteria to use when picking a sales training program:

Location: Is training delivered virtually, or will the trainer come to you?

Length: How will you fit training into your and/or your sales team’s schedule?

Focus: Does the theme address a challenge you or your reps are facing?

Price: Can you anticipate the return of the training will be at least 5X its price?

Intended audience: Are you in the relevant industry, market, or role?

We’ve rounded up some of the most valuable training programs at a variety of price points, locations, themes, and delivery options.

On-Site Sales Training Programs

Your SalesMBA™ Workshops

Vendor: Jeff Hoffman

Location: Boston, MA and Menlo Park, CA

Length: Half-day

Focus: Prospecting, negotiating and closing, social selling, and sales management

Intended audience: Sales reps and managers

Price: $395-$595 per attendee (depending on the workshop)

Jeff Hoffman’s workshops span the entire sales cycle, from getting your prospect’s attention to successfully winning their business. His seminars are relatively short but packed with information -- which means they’re ideal for salespeople who can’t leave the office for long but are eager to improve their performance.

Selling With Stories

Vendor: Hoffeld Group

Location: Varies

Length: Two days

Focus: Sales messaging and communication

Intended audience: Salespeople, managers, trainers, and business leaders

Price: Contact Hoffeld Group

The right story, presented in the right way, can change the course of a sale. In this hands-on workshop, you’ll learn the science behind telling persuasive stories. The lessons include when to tell stories in the sales process for maximal impact and the four parts of a compelling narrative. Attendees will also have the opportunity to create their own stories -- so they’ll be ready to inspire change in their prospects by the time they leave.

Driving to Close

Vendor: John Barrows

Location: On-site

Length: One day

Focus: Sales meetings, objection handling, and closing

Intended audience: B2B sales teams

Price: Contact John Barrows

In a single day, John Barrows will help you and your team members run effective meetings with potential customers, boost your ability to analyze opportunities, address objections in a way that suits your personality and selling style, and use different closing techniques depending on the situation. He’ll also provide a customized manual with sample emails, calls, and templates. This resource allows you to immediately adopt the takeaways you’ve picked up.

Sales Presentation Training

Vendor: Sales Readiness Group

Location: Varies (can be delivered on-site or via your own facilitators)

Length: 1.5-2 days

Focus: Delivering a value presentation

Intended audience: B2B sales teams

Price: Varies, depending on team size

[ishadyfartcollector-blog]

A start-up called North, formally Thalmic Labs, is introducing a pair of smart glasses that it thinks will appeal to the masses because the design looks so similar to normal glasses. They're called Focals, and they cost around $1,000.

[ishadyfartcollector-blog]

Using the right digital medium can allow you to communicate brand values, recognize individual achievement and build an organizational culture. #organization #EmployeeEngagement https://t.co/6vr2mbJLY2

[ishadyfartcollector-blog]

War between Brands and masses! Reason- #Advertisements #Influencer #Marketing #Digital #SocialMedia #Adblock https://t.co/zKPjJox8eW

[ishadyfartcollector-blog]

How many brands do you see around people? #SocialMedia #Marketing #Digital #InfluencerMarketing @CafeCoffeeDay https://t.co/EeeqxN2jX1

[ishadyfartcollector-blog]

The Transhumanist movement is made up of people of various political leanings. There are those who skew left-of-center, those with a more libertarian mindset, and there are even some who are archly conservative. But they all share a belief that science and technology can be wielded to cheat death. And they’re all completely tone deaf.

I first came to Transhumanism in my work as a journalist. In my career, which has spanned a decade of reporting and editorial writing on the intersection of human rights, policy, and science, nothing has raised my hackles as much as this movement’s quest for immortality and the ignorance of the inherent inequality of the discussion around that idea.

It was actually this ignorance, or perhaps willful callousness, that made me pivot my career to focus on bioethics, in which my main areas of research are biohacking, DIY science, and fringe technologies. I overlap with Transhumanist interests more often than not in my career. And it’s not all negative. In fact, I very much agree with the other maxims of the movement, including self-experimentation and morphological freedom, and I enjoy investigating the ethical challenges associated with using scientific knowledge to enhance the limits of the human body.

My disagreement with transhumanists isn’t that they want to be immortal. That goal has been a popular pastime of the wealthy, fearful, and bored for at least a millennia. It’s not the quest for immortality that seems unreasonable to me.

It’s the timing.

We live in an age where civil liberties are constantly under threat. People are in fear of being assaulted, detained, or even killed by state-sponsored actors from municipal police forces to ICE. It seems that our freedoms are eroded daily in favor of catering to the fleeting temper tantrums of one man. Trying to unleash radical life-extension strategies in this political climate is at best vain and misguided, and at worst offensive to anyone who doesn’t possess freedom over their bodies, or doesn’t possess the privilege to even think about living forever.

Some of us are just trying to make sure we’re alive at the end of the week.

Memento mori? Nah, bro.

There are several so-called “life-extension” technologies, some of them absolute bunk, others questionable-but-possible, and some theoretical-but-perhaps-legitimate. None of them are currently able to keep us alive for longer than a normal human lifespan, which currently hovers around 80 years old in most developed countries.

There is simply no logical reason to invest money in being frozen.

It’s true, we have already used modern medicine to extend our lives significantly over the past couple decades, and by some estimates, the first person to live to 150 has already been born. But radical longevity enthusiasts aren’t just hoping for an extra century or two. The moonshot is true immortality, and the investments by Randian billionaires into tremendously questionable efforts by private companies seeking secret ways to avoid dying are staggering — perhaps even reaching into the trillions of dollars.

Cryonics, or the idea that a dead body can be frozen at extremely low temperatures and resurrected at some point in the future when technology has evolved to bring frozen people back from the dead, is a big-ticket theory with Transhumanists. There are global conferences dedicated to the study of cryonics, a technology that is said to preserve tissue so well that this tissue is essentially still alive. Or so the story goes.

Max More, one of the original founders of the modern transhumanist movement, and the author of a 1990s Transhumanist manifesto, owns and operates Alcor, one of the country’s largest cryonics facilities. There, those hoping to simply press pause on their deaths and join humanity as a reanimated corpse can buy a tank for themselves, their loved ones, or their pets, for a pretty price. Alcor charges a minimum of $200,000 for whole-body preservation. (The running price of preserving a loved one at the Cryonics Institute, another major operation, starts at $35,000.)

Unfortunately, cryonics is bullshit.

Scientists agree that the freezing process damages cells irreparably, by creating what are essentially cellular icicles. Not to mention that reheating a human body — cells, membranes, and so on — also mangles the many proteins and pieces that comprise us. One BBC investigation into cryo-preservation pointed out that organs often need different temperatures and environments to maintain functionality, something we know from preserving them for donation.

There is simply no logical reason to invest money into being frozen. It doesn’t work now, it likely won’t ever work, and by the time it ever does work, no one who was frozen now will be able to be successfully resurrected.

  A similarly dubious technological attempt at dodging death is brain uploading. This concept is basically just the plot of Transcendence. A major proponent of brain uploading is Transhumanist luminary Martine Rothblatt,the founder of SiriusXM satellite radio and the highest-paid female CEO in the country. When the time comes, Rothblatt would like to upload her wife, Bina, to the cloud — a project that is already underway with Bina48, a social robot that has Bina’s personality — and her own Twitter account.

The concept behind brain uploading is that someday, everyone will be able to upload their entire consciousness and personality to a server and preserve themselves digitally, only to be transferred at some point into some other vessel, if they so desire. (Popular options are humanoid robots or similar household objects.)

This is a fun pastime for people who can afford it, no doubt. Talking to robots is awesome. (My kid’s first word will likely be “Alexa.”) And AI and robotics technologies are progressing at an incredible pace. However, true mind uploading is incredibly far off, because there is no evidence that personality traits reside within brain tissue, and there is no proven way to harness memories or creativity, or any of the other things that make you “you.”

Still, one provocative start-up is currently enrolling patients who want to try out this tech. (You just have to die first).

The most realistic-seeming life extension technique lie somewhere in the realm of regenerative medicine, a fringe of largely theoretical ideas based in real science that is progressing rapidly. Aubrey de Grey, the famed Cambridge gerontologist, who is also a figure in the Transhumanist movement, leads this charge. He is followed by a number of stem cell experts, geneticists, and otherwise legitimate characters who have taken up the mantle of the study of genetics and telomeres.

Telomeres are the timekeepers of human genes. They are small capsule-like pieces that make up the bottom of chromosomes and are often described as the little plastic nubs at the end of a shoelace. Their length appears to be indicative of lifespan because they seem to shrink as humans age. The longer the telomere, the longer you’ve got on the terrestrial plane, or so the theory goes.

This is real science, and there are plenty of legitimate aging studies underway that involve measuring telomeres and to see how they correspond to aging and disease. Unfortunately, there is a lot of bad science surrounding the theory as well.

Liz Parrish, the CEO of a company called BioViva, claims to be the first person to have elongated her telomeres through gene therapy that she perhaps performed on herself, possibly in Colombia. The details are foggy, but what’s clear is that BioViva’s science is happening without any regulatory oversight, peer review, or pre-clinical trials.

After she allegedly used gene therapy to reverse her body’s aging process, Parrish plastered the internet with blog posts claiming she was “Patient Zero”for this unproven and untested idea. Genome editing pioneer George Church, who despite being listed as a scientific advisor for Parrish’s company, referred to her gene therapy project as “a one-person show” in an article in MIT Technology Review.

I understand natural curiosity, the thrill of science, and the quest for innovation. But Transhumanist leaders have made science into a circus.

It is irresponsible, if not actively harmful, to pursue radical life extension as a serious goal, while so many Americans fear that they won’t be able to make through the next few years.

Zoltan Istvan, formerly the head of the Transhumanist Party and self-described “science candidate,” traversed the country campaigning during the 2016 presidential election in a vintage RV decorated like a coffin. Because becoming immortal and alleviating existential risk was his actual campaign platform. Most recently, Istvan also ran for governor of California, and once again suggested that governments should divert more resources into scientific and technological research to “cure death.”

Istvan, like so many other life extension advocates and Transhumanists, is a supporter of the concept of “morphological freedom,” or the idea that anyone has the right to do what they will with their own body. I also believe in morphological freedom, and I feel privileged to have it. But until every American also gets the chance to enjoy freedom over their bodies and choices, I remain exceedingly skeptical about investing outrageous sums into longevity research or prioritizing it above the needs of living people.

Until every American can say that they enjoy morphological freedom, including every woman who wants access to safe, affordable reproductive care, I don’t want to hear about Peter Thiel or Larry Page spending billions on flimsy science for life extension. Only 28 states require insurers to cover contraception, and 6 states moved to ban all abortions in 2017, while a further 28 states introduced legislation that would “ban abortions under some circumstances.”

Instead of funding life extension, let’s fund pro-choice candidates, build health clinics, and train midwives. Let’s fight for all women to have control over their own bodies.

Until every American has the freedom to live without fear of the state impeding their natural lifespans, I don’t want to hear about funding brain uploading initiatives. Nearly 1,000 people were shot by police in 2017. People of color actively fear for their lives every day in this country, from militant police forces and unwieldy federal immigration officials.

Instead of talking about the rights of the wealthy and educated to dabble in dubious science, let’s focus first on making sure that everyone, regardless of class or color, can feel safe on our streets.

Transhumanists list “curing death” as the number one item on their political platforms. To the people researching life extension, death is a “disease.” But I have never heard any of the people advocating that they have a human right to live forever also demanding universal healthcare. In fact, there is an ongoing debate within Transhumanism about whether universal healthcare is a human right at all.

In the U.S. in 2016, 3.2 million children did not have access to health insurance. In Zoltan Istvan’s home state, California, that number was 268,000.

I don’t see longevity supporters rallying for these causes. I don’t see them en masse wearing Black Lives Matter t-shirts, telling GOP senators to leave the ACA alone, carrying signs for Planned Parenthood, or building a float for Pride. But they will rally across the US to “oppose death.” And raise $28,000 for Istvan to build a mobile coffin.

Without also advocating for civil liberties for others, longevity proponents can be seen as a truly unethical example of what happens when the uber-privileged from Silicon Valley lose touch with how bad things really are. It is irresponsible, if not actively harmful, to pursue radical life extension as a serious goal, while so many Americans fear that they won’t be able to make through the next few years.

Forever isn’t even a consideration.