Ken Garen, CPA, Co-Founder and President, UBCC

'Intelligent' robots could be running your company within 10 years, experts warn 15:35, 20 JAN 2016 UPDATED 18:57, 20 JAN 2016 BY AGENCY STAFF Robots are moving into homes, hospitals, shops and restaurants - and could soon be running your company How would you feel about having a robot on your board of directors? Implantable mobile phones. 3D-printed organs for transplant. Clothes and reading-glasses connected to the Internet. Such things may be science fiction today but they will be scientific fact by 2025 as the world enters an era of advanced robotics, artificial intelligence and gene editing, according to executives surveyed by the World Economic Forum (WEF). Nearly half of those questioned also expect an artificial intelligence machine to be sitting on a corporate board of directors within the next decade. Welcome to the next industrial revolution. After steam, mass production and information technology, the so-called "fourth industria...

Technology Is Destroying Our Inner Lives By Carol Becker  1:14 PM ET     Carol Becker is the dean of Columbia University School of the Arts and author of Thinking in Place: Art, Action, and Cultural Production. "As a result of our 'always-on' ethos, we have neither time nor space within which to lose ourselves in reflection" Two years ago, I started using the Kindle app on my iPad to read those big heavy biographies and novels that I had been lugging around the world. I still wasn’t using it to read books I might reference in my writing, but nonetheless I was glad to discover, by chance, the underline function. While immersed in Pico Iyer’s The Art of Stillness, underlining as I read, I was completely unnerved when a message popped up to announce: “You are the 123rd user to underline this same passage.” Shocked by this intrusion, I threw the iPad onto the bed and nearly out the window. A sickening feeling came over me. Then I became afraid. So...

Volvo promises deathproof cars by 2020 by Peter Valdes-Dapena   January 20, 2016: 11:22 AM ET Volvo has made a shocking pledge: By 2020, no one will be killed or seriously injured in a new Volvo car or SUV. Seriously. "If you meet Swedish engineers, they're pretty genuine," said Lex Kerssemakers, CEO of Volvo Cars North America. "They don't say things when they don't believe in it." There is one big caveat. If someone really wants to hurt themselves, or is just really, really stupid... well, Volvo can't do anything about that. But, assuming you're not a suicidal maniac or a total idiot, in four years, you'll be safer driving a new Volvo than you are climbing a ladder to screw in a light bulb. Fatality-free vehicles are not unprecedented. In fact, there already are some, and they're not just Volvos. According to data from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, there are nine vehicle models -- including the Vol...

Internet providers want to know more about you than Google does, privacy groups say By Brian Fung January 20 at 11:41 AM Most of us know, at least in the abstract, that Google and Facebook are tracking our every move online. Even Netflix collects detailed information on our binge-viewing habits, the better to make decisions about which films to drop from its catalog or what new TV series to invest in. But what if I told you there are companies that can go much deeper than firms like Google and Facebook in their data-gathering prowess? Companies that not only know that you watch Netflix for two hours a day but also how long you spent reading this article before going back to Twitter and, at the same time, that you soon intend to go on a vacation because of all the time you spend browsing airfare sites? Tech companies might enjoy access to a handful of these insights based on the data they gather when you visit their properties. But telecom and cable companies are in a p...

Google's new algorithm will make Chrome run much faster A new compression algorithm called Brotli By Micah Singleton on January 20, 2016 09:49 am Chrome is about to load web pages a lot faster than you've experienced up until now. Thanks to a new compression algorithm called Brotli, which Google introduced last September, Chrome will be able to compress data up to 26 percent more than its existing compression engine, Zopfli, which is an impressive jump. According to Google's web performance engineer Ilya Grigorik, Brotli is ready to roll out, so Chrome users should expect to see a bump in load times once the next version of Chrome is released. Google also says Brotli will help mobile Chrome users experience "lower data transfer fees and reduced battery use." The company is hailing Brotli as "a new data format" that Google hopes will be adopted by other web browsers in the near future, with Firefox seemingly next in line to adopt it. But for ...

Tech’s ‘Frightful 5’ Will Dominate Digital Life for Foreseeable Future By Farhad Manjoo STATE OF THE ART JAN. 20, 2016 There’s a little parlor game that people in Silicon Valley like to play. Let’s call it, Who’s Losing? There are currently four undisputed rulers of the consumer technology industry: Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google, now a unit of a parent company called Alphabet. And there’s one more, Microsoft, whose influence once looked on the wane, but which is now rebounding. So which of these five is losing? A year ago, it was Google that looked to be in a tough spot as its ad business appeared more vulnerable to Facebook’s rise. Now, Google is looking up, and it’s Apple, hit by rising worries about a slowdown in iPhone sales, that may be headed for some pain. Over the next couple of weeks, as these companies issue earnings that show how they finished 2015, the state of play may shift once more. But don’t expect it to shift much. Asking “who’s losing?” misses...

The US Military Wants a Chip to Translate Your Brain Activity Into Binary Code By Adam Clark Estes Yesterday 5:40pm The US Military Wants a Chip to Translate Your Brain Activity Into Binary Code It’s been a weird day for weird science. Not long after researchers claimed victory in performing a head transplant on a monkey, the US military’s blue-sky R&D agency announced a completely insane plan to build a chip that would enable the human brain to communicate directly with computers. What is this weird, surreal future? It’s all real, believe it or not. Or at least DARPA desperately wants it to be. The first wireless brain-to-computer interface actually popped up a few years ago, and DARPA’s worked on various brain chip projects over the years. But there are shortcomings to existing technology: According to today’s announcement, current brain-computer interfaces are akin to “two supercomputers trying to talk to each other using an old 300-baud modem.” They just aren’t...