COVID-19: Cutting Through The Noise

A lot of information is available online, from legitimate to questionable, from hypothetical to factual. Yet what if you wanted to get a summary of the current state of affairs when it comes to the COVID-19 pandemic? What if you wanted to get a summary of the elements at play when it comes to how the pandemic pans out? What if you want to understand certain concepts behind the analysis, like the different rates that may be quoted? Well, there is an article that does just that.

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The Value of Intellectual Property

By Louis-Pierre Gravelle (Link) and Cliff Pavlovic, Ph.D. (Link)

With the growth of the knowledge-based economy, the value of a company will be increasingly formed by its intangible assets, such as intellectual property (IP) and know-how. It is estimated that, currently, 70% of the valuation of companies is comprised of these type of assets (The Telegraph, January 2017), and that trend is not likely to stop.

There is also a push for open-innovation and using open-source tools, allowing for easier research and development, and being accessible at a much lower cost than using proprietary solutions. This in turn leads to the creation of even more intellectual property and know-how, which can be provided via very accessible licensing terms (such as the use of Creative Commons Licensing) or by hiring the right people (as showcased by the generous salary conditions of Twitter’s head engineer, at over $10 million USD a few years back; Link).

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An Analog Childhood and a Digital Adulthood

So thanks to societal naming conventions and the need for classification of human beings into groups, often for the sake of statistics and the study of the evolution of society, I am now classified as a “Xennial”.

Now let’s deal with a possible point of confusion: We are talking here about “Xennial”, a noun describing a generational category, and not “Xenial”, which is an adjective describing someone who is friendly, especially to visiting strangers. Of course, a “Xennial” could be “xenial”. With this out of the way, time to leave the quotation marks behind and delve into the subject at hand.

So what are Xennials? Within the construct that is time, they are a sub-generation that straddle Gen Xers (born in the 1960s and 1970s) and Millennials (born in the 1980s and 1990s). Approximately, those born from 1977 to 1983. The word itself was coined by writer Sarah Stankorb, and first appeared in September 2014 in GOOD magazine.

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Website: A Fresh Start

With the passing of Google+, which I used as my source (i.e. feeder) for posts, the site is getting a fresh start.

Meaning that there will be original content from this point on, made on site. Furthermore, accessing my various social media streams has been made easier (and hint: I’m active on Instagram and Twitter for all, and Facebook for friends).

As for the old posts, they will be archived and perhaps an attempt will be made to clean them up over time (since a number of them already have broken links, due to the use of Google+).

There you go. Stay tuned.