Tag: business brokerages

The principal value of a business broker is to act as a buffer between the buyer and the seller

2 former Navy Seals are using robot submarines to build ‘Google Earth’ for the ocean

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In 2005, Joe Wolfel and Judson Kauffman were a year into their Navy Seal careers when they received a briefing on the USS San Francisco , a nuclear-powered submarine that crashed into an undersea mountain, in large part due to uncharted waters. Joe Wolfel (left) and Judson Kauffman [Photo: courtesy of Terradepth] “The Navy really doesn’t have charts or maps of very much of the seafloor at all,” Kauffman says. Even now, 80% of the ocean remains unmapped, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration . “That was the first time that either one of us understood the level of ignorance that exists around this subsea world, so that kind of planted a seed.” Still, their scheme for hurdling that challenge wouldn’t germinate for another dozen years, after the pair parlayed their military experience into a business consultancy and began noting the burgeoning array of space exploration robotics. “One day we looked at each other and said, ‘Why isn’t anybody taking this technology—autonomy, AI, and machine learning—and finding a way to map the ocean?’ ” Kauffman says. “There’s a whole lot of room for modern technology to come in and disrupt the world of ocean exploration and the industry of ocean surveys.” [Image: courtesy of Terradepth] That vision has since blossomed into Austin-based Terradepth , a data service company that has developed a new type of robotic submarine to autonomously map the ocean and its varied environments. [Photo: courtesy of Terradepth] The 30-foot-long submersible uses a camera and sensor suite to collect data, then employs machine learning to process it, discern what’s important, and reprogram itself to return to a location and test for additional information—all without human intervention. The system relies on edge computing, which can analyze information and solve problems at the data source in near real time. The team successfully ran the submarine through its first on-site paces in nearby Lake Travis earlier this month, paving the way for more robust testing in the Gulf of Mexico within three weeks and the Florida coast after that. Along with a camera, the submarine utilizes two types of sonar as well as depth, navigational, temperature, and geolocation instruments. It can dive to nearly 20,000 feet, the depth of 98% of the ocean Read More …

In a world of screens, Sherry Turkle wants to make eye contact

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Sherry Turkle would prefer not to tweet. “My publisher said, ‘Look, you have to tweet, you have to force yourself, you have to learn how to do that!’ ” Her publisher being the one that just released The Empathy Diaries , a gripping, elegant memoir in which the psychologist and scholar and critic of technology finally puts herself under the microscope. The megaphone of social media is more complicated. “I’m really not very good at it, so I just keep saying things like ‘surreal that . . .!’ ‘Thrilled to see my exciting . . .’ I never say that. I feel like such a jerk. And then I started an Instagram account. And I said, ‘I can’t do this. . . . I mean, I barely can keep up with my email.’ And considering all the people we have to be, it was just one extra person that I couldn’t attend to right now.” Though, she admits, “Once the pandemic is over, I may change my mind.” Minds and selves and how they change have long been fascinations for Turkle, the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé professor of the social studies of science and technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. So this pandemic time, as awful and deadly and isolating as it is, is also interesting. It’s also a time when the digital technology that she’s studied for so long has become increasingly entwined with our minds and bodies—and just at the moment when we were asking some of the urgent questions that Turkle’s been asking for years now. Like, How do our objects objectify us? Sherry Turkle with her mother, 1953. [Photo: courtesy of Sherry Turkle] In The Empathy Diaries , Turkle describes a long personal relationship with what anthropologist Victor Turner calls “liminal moments,” transitions and inflection points that can also be thresholds to new ways of thinking. Born in postwar Brooklyn to a working-class Jewish family, she read and wrote her way to Radcliffe—which she attended when it was folded into all-male Harvard—and then studied in Paris in 1968, when student protests were giving way to new ideas about the mind. Read More …

A Trump social network could get sued out of existence

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Donald Trump is “holding high-powered meetings” to start his own social network in the next two to three months, according to the ex-president’s adviser Jason Miller, who appeared on the Fox News show Media Buzz on Sunday. The former president was, of course, booted from Twitter and suspended from YouTube and Facebook (pending review), after spewing misinformation about the 2020 election and, arguably, inciting a riot at the Capitol on January 6. Sunday night, many on the right were joyous about the idea of a Trump social networking site. “BarYohai,” a commenter on FoxNews.com, summed up the sentiment nicely : This is how the free market works. People “vote” with their wallets. Trump’s social media platform will be widely successful and, additionally, it will create an incentive for people to close their Twitter (and perhaps even Facebook) accounts. Amazon and other self-appointed “speech police” will also feel the economic pain as dissatisfied customers seek substitutes for, and then “cancel” the “cancel culture” businesses. But running a social network is hard, as Trump may soon find out if Miller is right. People post untrue, defamatory, threatening, and conspiratorial things on social networks, requiring a major investment in content moderation staff and systems. It might get even harder this year if Congress decides to scale back or repeal Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields social networks from civil suits arising from hosting (or removing) user content. Actually, repealing Section 230 was one of Trump’s go-to threats against the Big Tech companies that run social networks, especially Twitter. Days after Twitter began applying truth labels to his tweets, Trump released an executive order directing Congress to remove the 230 protections. #BREAKING : President Trump signs executive order strip liability protection from companies that censure content: “Companies that engage in censoring or any political conduct will not be able to keep their liability shield.” https://t.co/D5ooUw1fNz pic.twitter.com/FHs7kUvJH1 — The Hill (@thehill) May 28, 2020 Many of Trump’s executive orders had little effect, but that one spurred some of his GOP devotees in Congress, such as Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, to introduce bills restricting the Section 230 protections. Hawley’s 2019 Ending Support for Internet Censorship Act reserves Section 230 protections only for content removals the social network can prove were “politically neutral.” A House bill from Arizona Republican Paul Gosar proposed revoking Section 230’s legal exemptions for social networks that remove content they deem “objectionable.” Other bills condition the legal protections on more transparent content monitoring and faster removal of toxic content. Reforming Section 230 is one of the few issues in Congress that’s garnered support from both Democrats and Republicans, if for different reasons Read More …

What the science says about 7 common COVID-19 vaccine myths

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This story is part of Doubting the Dose, a series that examines anti-vaccine sentiment and the role of misinformation in supercharging it.  Read more here . The Pfizer-BioNtech, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson/Janssen vaccines may be miracles of modern medicine, but they were also developed in a remarkably short time frame, amid a sea of misinformation and conspiracy theories. So it’s understandable that some may feel initially hesitant about getting vaccinated. While there is an immediate need to get many people vaccinated quickly in order to reduce infection rates and the chance that further dangerous mutations will occur, convincing the vaccine-hesitant may take time. Best practices for talking about the importance of COVID-19 vaccination include genuinely listening to the concerns that others express and only providing answers you know to be true. If you’re unsure about a fact, it’s fine to say so and to direct the person to a reputable source or do more research yourself. With all the misinformation floating around, we rounded up seven common vaccine myths that may dissuade people from getting vaccinated. Here’s what the science tells us about the COVID-19 vaccines. Myth: The vaccines were rushed to market, so we don’t know their long-term impacts Read More …

This science-backed athletic wear can help you sit up straight

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Working hunched over a desk or a kitchen table or reclined on a couch is probably ruining your posture. So is staring at your phone for prolonged periods of time or walking with your head down. But what if you could wear something that made you sit just a little taller during the day? A company called Formewear (previously called IFGfit Labs) has created shirts, leggings, and sports bras that physically help people shift their shoulders backward and better align their spines. The clothing not only helps relieve back problems—it also improves a person’s ability to breathe. “If you wear [the clothes for] one to two hours a day in various activities for several weeks, you will start to see a noticeable change,” says Seiji Liu, cofounder and chief operating officer of Formewear. “Over several weeks people will be able to stand taller.” The Formewear signature men’s shirt has tension bands on the inside that pull shoulders back and down, so they sit where they’re supposed to. The sports bra physically pushes shoulders back so they form a straight line, perpendicular to the spine. The goal of this clothing is to assist people in having better posture as well as train them through muscle memory to maintain that posture. The leggings, both for men and women, are designed to encourage good form during cardio workouts. Perhaps the greatest technological innovation in these clothes is good tailoring based on complicated biomechanics Read More …