Category Archives: Futurist

Rocket ships, brain chips, music streaming, autonomous driving, solar power, underground roads with elevators it might be easier to list all the stuff that doesnt capture Elon Musks active imagination.

Best known as a car mogul, the founder and CEO of Tesla Inc (NASDAQ: TSLA) has even teased an interest in building an Iron Man suit for the Pentagon, a fitting venture for a tycoon who may have a Tony Stark fixation (or vice versa).

When he isnt battling existing state laws requiring carmakers to have a separate dealer network to sell, he's doing other stuff.

Heres a brief tour through the varying interests (distractions?) that constitute Musks million-dollar musings.

Space

SpaceX succeeded in launching two of its Dragon 9 rockets over a 48-hour stretch last weekend, one to deliver Bulgarias first telecom satellite on Friday and a second on Sunday. The latter was to deliver 10 satellites for Iridium Communications Inc (NASDAQ: IRDM), which is setting up a global positioning system for commercial aircraft.

Delivering satellites and carrying payloads for NASA to the International Space Station are lucrative priorities reusing rockets and capsules is essential to Musks space business model but he has higher aspirations, such as colonizing Mars.

Cyborgs

The stuff of sci-fi, Musks people are working on a neural interface that would allow the brain to directly control a computer and, theoretically, everything a computer controls. The venture even has a name Neuralink, according to the Wall Street Journal. The company, with a target of four years, aims to sell a product for people with brain injuries. It would eventually allow the human brain to connect to cloud storage, turning people into cyborgs with the ability to combat the rise in Artificial Intelligence, brain-for-brain, in a fight for dominance. No, really.

Entertainment

Musk just doesnt want to make autonomous electric cars, Martian colonies and space ships; he wants to get into the media content business, beginning with music.

Recode, quoting music industry sources, said Tesla is in talks with major music labels about licensing a proprietary music service that would be bundled with its automobiles. This report certainly came out of left field, but at this point, the world should have learned not to be surprised by Elon Musk's seemingly limitless entrepreneurial ambitions, Forbes said.

Food

Its not really Elon, but his brother, Kimbal. A year younger, Kimbal Musk, like Elon, worked for a bit on the family farm in Canada. Hes seeking to overhaul the worlds nutritional values and the way the food supply is grown, harvested and distributed. "[My brother] told me it was crazy to get into the food business; I told him it was crazy to get into the space business," Kimbal Musk told CNBC. "It's working out fine."

Health

Its telling that sectors that havent caught Musks attention (as far as we know) are, well, clamoring for it. Some health experts say if Musk wants to colonize the cosmos, hed better get going on diagnostic tools, health sensors and 3D-device printing to deal with specialized health care required for humans in space.

E-Commerce

Right, been there. Musk made his first fortune as co-founder of Paypal Holdings Inc (NASDAQ: PYPL), which revolutionized the way people buy stuff online. Moving on.

Cue The Sun

SolarCity Corporation, which seeks to monetize and reduce costs of companies switching to solar energy. The multi-billion corporation, which was founded by a couple of Musk cousins on the advice of Elon, is now owned by Tesla.

Boring

The Boring Company is looking into boring traffic tunnels underground, where elevators would take multiperson vehicles to traffic-lite thoroughfares and transport people on high-speed sleds. Flying cars also are in the mix.

Related Link: Earth To Elon: Musk Wants To Conquer Music

_______ Image Credit: By Jurvetson - https://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/2944375891/, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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The Futurist Scorecard: A Look At (Almost) Everything That Interests Elon Musk Besides Building Cars - Yahoo News

Every Chief Compliance Officer (CCO) and compliance practitioner who thinks about their compliance program one, three or five years down the road is a budding futurist. The Compliance Week 2017 Annual Conference opened this year with a Futurist, Dr. Brian David Johnson, who talked to the assembled group about where the compliance profession might be heading down the road. I thought about Dr. Johnsons talk when I read an article in the most recent issue of the MIT Sloan Management Review by Amy Webb, entitled The Flare and Focus of Successful Futurists. One of the things that struck me was her opening line which reads, Futurists are skilled at listening to and interpreting signals, which are harbingers of whats to come. They look for early patterns pre-trends, if you will as the scattered points on the fringe converge and begin moving toward the mainstream.

While futures forecaster may sound exotic, Webb cited to one theoretical physicist for about the most down to earth explanation I have read. She quoted Joseph Voros who related that forecasting informs strategy making by enhancing the context within which strategy is developed, planned, and executed. That is about as straight-forward a description of a CCO as one can find.

Webb believes the greatest problem for futures forecasting is the variance of logic based forecasting and creative based forecasting. She calls this the duality dilemma as the creative people felt as though their contributions were being discounted, while the logical thinkers whose natural talents lie in managing processes, projecting budgets, or mitigating risk felt undervalued because they werent coming up with bold new ideas. Your team undoubtedly had a difficult time staying on track, or worse, you might have spent hours meeting about how to have your next meeting. She goes on to say that one can harness both strengths in equal measure by alternately broadening (flaring) and narrowing (focusing) its thinking.

To overcome this duality and help move forecasting forward, Webb has developed a six-step approach for forecasting methodology. I found it useful for any CCO or compliance practitioner to use when forecasting where your compliance program will be one, three or five years out.

What I found most interesting about Webbs process is that it allows you to consider compliance innovations looking at outliers and seeing where technologies and services might take you. Obviously, the use of data beyond simply numbers of training sessions or calls to the hotline can inform a wide variety of business processes. This will further allow the operationalization of compliance. Webb ended by noting you can create the future in the present tense.

And what of the Futurist, Dr. Johnson at Compliance Week 2017? He related the importance of compliance would grow, together with the increasing importance around ethics and corporate governance. He believes that Artificial Intelligence (AI) will increase the speed at which business decisions could be made will make a robust compliance program, operationalized into the fabric of an organization more critical. AI will first allow more and quicker business decisions. It will be the compliance program which is most closely integrated into the DNA of an organization so it can respond to ever-shifting market conditions. Not simply in sales but moving seamlessly between third party sales representatives and those from the Supply Chain. A robust compliance program does not slow down a business but, properly functioning, allows it to move more quickly and more nimbly.

Dr. Johnson sees the necessity for compliance to be integrated into an organization. The Department of Justice (DOJ) says compliance should be operationalized into a company. It seems that the legal side of things is pointing the direction in which you should be moving your compliance regime. I think both Webb and Dr. Johnson would agree.

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The CCO as a Futurist - JD Supra (press release)

Wyndham Lewis was a painter, poet, publisher and picker of fights. No target was too grand or too trivial: sentimental Victorians and the modern man of government; shark art dealers and the atrocious Royal Academy; compilers of honours lists and editors of literary reviews; thin flapper girls and the fat Belgian bumpkins of Peter Paul Rubens; men who read detective stories and women who liked bowl-of-apple paintings by second-rate Czannes. People who lived in Putney.

The poet Edith Sitwell, who sat for an unfinished portrait by Lewis, was one of his most hoary, tried and reliable enemiesI do not think I should be exaggerating if I described myself as Miss Edith Sitwells favourite enemy. Sitwell was a fierce opponent. When worsted in argument, she throws Queensberry Rules to the winds. She once called me Percy. He had been born Percy Wyndham Lewis (18821957), but was Wyndham by the time he was old enough for Rugby and the Slade.

His best enemies were the Bloomsbury Set, those Fitzroy tinkerers and conscientious objectors, who spent the war pruning trees and planting gooseberries in Sussex, while he watched rats bicker for cheese at Passchendaele. The Bloomsbury grievance kept him going for decades. Roger Fry, director of the Omega Workshops, was a Pecksniff, a hypocrite, a shabby trickster, whose chairs stuck to the seat of ones trousers. The critic Raymond Mortimer was a middle aged man-milliner. Virginia Woolf was a timid peeper at the lives of others; her A Room of Ones Own a highbrow feminist fairyland. A Lewis review never failed to give Woolf one of her headaches. Ive taken the arrow of W.L. to my heart, she wrote after one attack in 1934. She was decapitated by him in 1938, and awaited his poisoned dart in 1940.

He styled himself The Enemy and imagined swaggering out in a Stetson, a cigar between his teeth, swinging bandoliers loaded with vitriol. After breakfast raw meat, blood oranges, a shot of vodka he talked of taking pot shots at the sub-Sitwells and sheep in Woolfes clothing of literary London.

A picker, too, of the wrong side: Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy, Franco in Spain. Having fought in the first world war, he didnt want a second and thought these men were the ones to stop it. That lonely old volcano of the Right, W.H. Auden called him. Nothing fired him up like a quarrel, a squabble, a skirmish. But war was another matter.

In this, the centenary year of the Battle of Passchendaele, the battle-bog in which Lewis saw his fellow gunners shelled and drowned, the Imperial War Museum North has mounted a superb retrospective of the artists life and work. It makes no apology or excuse for him. The exhibition opens with broadsides from choice enemies. A malicious, thwarted and dangerous man, said Sacheverell Sitwell, brother of Edith. A curious mixture of insolence and nervousness, said E.M. Forster. We do not have to like him for his writing, painting, pamphleteering, to think hes worth remembering.

The war, wrote Lewis, was a landmark as tremendous as the birth of Christ: We say pre-war and post-war, rather as we say BC or AD. Pre-war he had been a troublemaker. He had fallen in with Augustus John at the Slade and travelled to Holland, France, Germany and Spain on his allowance. He returned in 1908 with an exotic wardrobe, an absurd haircut and a moustache. He fired his first shots, made early enemies: I am all in favour of a young man behaving rudely to everyone in sight. This may not be good for the young man, but its good for everyone else.

England was in a somnolent state, still mooning over the pale aestheticism of Oscar Wilde and Kate Greenaways syrupy infants. In July 1914, he launched Blast a battering ram of a magazine and with it the vorticist manifesto a mass of excited thinking, of wild and whirling words. Vorticism was a queasy, uneasy art. Paintings were tipped on their axes, the viewer left motion-sick and dizzy. Bodies and landscapes were angular and abstracted. The mathematician Euclid was one hero, Andrea Mantegna, with his crisp, etch-like outlines, another.

Eleven artists, among them the poet Ezra Pound and sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, signed the vorticist manifesto. Lewis would later claim the movement was all down to a very vigorous One.

Vorticism was written up as an English off-shoot of Italian futurism, but Lewis was against Marinetti and his gang. He wouldnt dignify them with the name futurist. They were Milanese automobilists obsessed with speeding cars and aeroplanes. When Marinetti lectured in Bond Street, Lewis went to heckle. Never had he heard such a lot of hot, noisy air: a day of attack upon the Western Front, with all the heavies hammering together, right back to the horizon was nothing to it.

Blast and vorticism had short lives. Wars have made it impossible to get on with anything for very long, but I am glad that I got in, at the very beginning, a resounding oath. The blast was heard beyond Londons squares and salons. Drilling his squad at Mentsham Camp, Lewis was called over by the adjutant and sergeant-major. Bombardier, said the adjutant, what is all this futurism about? They thought it a great joke. Was this funny gunner really the revolutionary they had read about in the papers? In his war memoir, Blasting and Bombardiering, Lewis noted that the sergeant-major was killed within a fortnight of being sent to the Front.

The war was a stupid nightmare. He had a row with the war artist Sir William Orpen, who insisted: war is hell. Lewis wouldnt accept this infernal clich: I said it was Goya, it was Delacroix all scooped out and very El Greco. But hell, no.

He did not paint the war like Goya, but in the fidgety, jagged style of vorticism. It was right for the pitted, splintered, broken landscape of France, and the shell-shocked, sleepless men who fought there. He could not, he said, have begun to paint a milkmaid in a field of buttercups, but when Mars with his mailed finger showed me a shell-crater and a skeleton, with a couple of shivered tree-stumps behind it, I was still in my abstract element. In paintings like Shell-Humping (1918), Officers and Signallers (1918) and A Battery Shelled (1919) the men arent quite human. They are metallic and riveted with howitzer arms and bayonet legs.

The war ended but Lewis carried on fighting with pen and in paint, prolific and furious. He wrote 50 books and left more than 100 paintings and 1,000 drawings. Even after he lost his sight in his late sixties, he wrote polemics by dictaphone. Blindness was like being pushed into an unlighted room, the door banged and locked for ever.

A Self Portrait of 1932 has him scowling under a hat. Who next for a blast? A Woolf, a Sitwell, an Academy stooge? Rage made him bitter and isolated. He was often wrong, occasionally brilliant and always his own worst enemy.

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Flappers, futurists, Bloomsbury and Putney Wyndham Lewis's many enemies - Spectator.co.uk

Rocket ships, brain chips, music streaming, autonomous driving, solar power, underground roads with elevators it might be easier to list all the stuff that doesnt capture Elon Musks active imagination.

Best known as a car mogul, the founder and CEO of Tesla Inc (NASDAQ: TSLA) has even teased an interest in building an Iron Man suit for the Pentagon, a fitting venture for a tycoon who may have a Tony Stark fixation (or vice versa).

When he isnt battling existing state laws requiring carmakers to have a separate dealer network to sell, he's doing other stuff.

Heres a brief tour through the varying interests (distractions?) that constitute Musks million-dollar musings.

SpaceX succeeded in launching two of its Dragon 9 rockets over a 48-hour stretch last weekend, one to deliver Bulgarias first telecom satellite on Friday and a second on Sunday. The latter was to deliver 10 satellites for Iridium Communications Inc (NASDAQ: IRDM), which is setting up a global positioning system for commercial aircraft.

Delivering satellites and carrying payloads for NASA to the International Space Station are lucrative priorities reusing rockets and capsules is essential to Musks space business model but he has higher aspirations, such as colonizing Mars.

The stuff of sci-fi, Musks people are working on a neural interface that would allow the brain to directly control a computer and, theoretically, everything a computer controls. The venture even has a name Neuralink, according to the Wall Street Journal. The company, with a target of four years, aims to sell a product for people with brain injuries. It would eventually allow the human brain to connect to cloud storage, turning people into cyborgs with the ability to combat the rise in Artificial Intelligence, brain-for-brain, in a fight for dominance. No, really.

Musk just doesnt want to make autonomous electric cars, Martian colonies and space ships; he wants to get into the media content business, beginning with music.

Recode, quoting music industry sources, said Tesla is in talks with major music labels about licensing a proprietary music service that would be bundled with its automobiles. This report certainly came out of left field, but at this point, the world should have learned not to be surprised by Elon Musk's seemingly limitless entrepreneurial ambitions, Forbes said.

Its not really Elon, but his brother, Kimbal. A year younger, Kimbal Musk, like Elon, worked for a bit on the family farm in Canada. Hes seeking to overhaul the worlds nutritional values and the way the food supply is grown, harvested and distributed. "[My brother] told me it was crazy to get into the food business; I told him it was crazy to get into the space business," Kimbal Musk told CNBC. "It's working out fine."

Its telling that sectors that havent caught Musks attention (as far as we know) are, well, clamoring for it. Some health experts say if Musk wants to colonize the cosmos, hed better get going on diagnostic tools, health sensors and 3D-device printing to deal with specialized health care required for humans in space.

Right, been there. Musk made his first fortune as co-founder of Paypal Holdings Inc (NASDAQ: PYPL), which revolutionized the way people buy stuff online. Moving on.

SolarCity Corporation, which seeks to monetize and reduce costs of companies switching to solar energy. The multi-billion corporation, which was founded by a couple of Musk cousins on the advice of Elon, is now owned by Tesla.

The Boring Company is looking into boring traffic tunnels underground, where elevators would take multiperson vehicles to traffic-lite thoroughfares and transport people on high-speed sleds. Flying cars also are in the mix.

Related Link: Earth To Elon: Musk Wants To Conquer Music

_______ Image Credit: By Jurvetson - http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/2944375891/, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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2017 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.

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Everything That Interests Elon Musk Besides Building Cars | Benzinga - Benzinga

Former defense contractor-turned-author and futurist David Treichler -- writing as dhtreichler -- sheds startling light on the twists and turns of the "Armaments Bazaar" process in his new book, and portrays weapons sales to contentious Middle East countries as sometimes problematic -- and even dangerous.

Drawn from Treichler's real-world experiences in the Middle East, it offers insights into espionage, intelligence failures and the cat-and-mouse games played in suppressing the peoples of the region. He details transactions with often life-and-death consequences for both the citizens of these nations -- and their sovereign neighbors.

The fiction-based-on-fact book, called simply, Rik's, is available at http://amzn.to/2q9iDWV. In addition, you can view a video book trailer at https://youtu.be/8u5ZtDX-ToY.

As time has proven, the sale of weapons and intelligence systems can prove pivotal to countries like Iraq, Iran, Turkey and, currently, Syria, under strongman Bashar al-Assad.

Treichler admits he -- like his lead character in the novel -- sometimes had misgivings about the end use of the weapons he sold. But, in the final analysis, following U.S. policy to maintain arms parity in the volatile region was the only option, he says.

The book is about an American State Department official whose day job is to help U.S. companies reach trade agreements.

By night, however, he gathers intelligence and arranges the sale of military hardware to maintain the balance of power in the region. In the novel, he is also the CIA station chief who has fallen in love with a broadcast journalist.

"Five stars for Rik's," writes the Midwest Book Review. "It speaks eloquently about such vital issues as patriotism, comradeship, and the lengths to which love will go. This gritty read will ring true with any follower of America's foreign interventions."

It is also available online at dhtreichler.com.

Media Contact: David Treichler, Author dtreichler1@verizon.net (817) 909-2128 (cell phone)

To view the original version on PR Newswire, visit:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/noted-futurist-looks-back-how-espionage-arms-deals-and-recent-history-sowed-the-seeds-of-todays-terrorism-300479353.html

SOURCE dhtreichler

http://dhtreichler.com/

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Noted Futurist Looks Back: How Espionage, Arms Deals and Recent History Sowed the Seeds of Today's Terrorism - PR Newswire (press release)

In the run-up to 2016s US presidential election, I suffered from anxiety and insomnia; I live and work in Shanghai, and US politicians have started talking about China in ways that make me concerned about my livelihood.

Theres a YouTube video that strings together Trump uttering the word China in various speeches; three minutes long, he utters the word sometimes angrily, sometimes with excitement, and sometimes with a puzzled, lost tone of voice. After watching, Id go to sleep easily; there was no way this loser would become president.

Our culture has a long and knotty engagement with China, mostly based on fantasies and projections that dont correspond to any reality. From Macartneys ill-fated visit in 1793 to Coleridges opium dreams, China has been a synonym for mystery, cruelty, revolution: whatever our obsessions of the moment, we managed to discover them in China often without even needing to go to China or to speak with Chinese people about it.

As China has experienced meteoric economic growth that increasingly manifests in investments around the world, from London to Ethiopia, the question of what China actually is, and what it means, has ceased to be some sort of fun trivia for poets. For the sake of our economy, our environment, and our cultural heritage, we really need to understand what Chinas society is. Otherwise, we run the risk of projecting paranoiac visions onto the nation that is the only real alternative to western capitalist society and whose economic relationship with Britain grows every day.

Artists working in a vein called sino-futurism have started to explore the Chinese city as a generic future landscape. Still, one cant help feeling that our understanding of what China is, and the ways that our imaginary visions have shaped Chinese realities, remains limited.

When Shanghais new district, Pudong, was being built, there were no tenants in the high-rises; the illusion of a growth spurt became a reality. The ghost cities such as Ordos that weve heard about recently, the empty British-themed suburb of Thames Town, new cities such as Xiongan which seem to materialise overnight In many ways, Chinas economy is driven by real estate, built on powerful fantasies and projections of the future. So is Londons.

Weve come a long way from Coleridges Xanadu. The last few decades have seen a flood of representations of Asian cities as futuristic, cruel, and mysterious; where once we had Fritz Langs Metropolis, now we have Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell. British artists like Lawrence Lek and academics like the mildly demented Nick Land have made the Chinese cityscape into the site of very British worries and aspirations.

But the same could be said of Boris Johnson, who airily dismisses worries about Brexit with allusions to India and China as some sort of cure-all. If we cant build a new tube line, we reflect on the fact that China can; if London suffers from air pollution, we observe with horror that its worse than Beijing; Iain Sinclair, visiting the Shangri-La in the City, finds the sinister forces of global capital embodied in Fu Manchu-style Chinamen.

Sadly, these representations dont have much to do with reality. We need to get the facts straight; China and Chinese people are a fact of life in British universities, cities, architectural practices, arts institutions, and pretty much everything else, and our future depends on the ways that British society can engage with China. No more #fakenews, please.

Near that inscrutable and wicked Shangri-La is the DLR station for Limehouse, the former Chinese slum. China might be our future, but its also our past; and China is a place, but its also a population.

So far, when we represent China, we typically do so in terms of the built environment; its easier to describe what we can see with our own eyes than to understand the humans who live in China.

However, as the debacle surrounding Scarlett Johanssens casting in Ghost in the Shell illustrates, theres a problem with representing China as a generic space evacuated by humanity. Its not; China is crowded, weird, and very human. Chinas population is diverse, the cities in China are filled with oddities, and within the vast terrain of Chineseness there are endless variations; we dont grasp any of that when we represent a China as a set of buildings, with people scuttling around them like insects transfixed by neon lights.

China the place, with its cities, ghost or otherwise, is a place that many British entrepreneurs, artists, politicians etc will visit; you should go too. But China as a population impacts Britain in a more direct way. When Steve Bannon tells us about an inevitable war with China; when Brexiteers suggest Singapore be a model for a British future; when we hear what China has done in terms of investments, pollution, human rights violations, and so on we betray a naivet that is positively dangerous. Would we talk about what France has done? Or would we talk about what specific French persons have done, within a context of understanding that probably other French people may disagree?

From education to architects to financial services, Britains role in a new Chinese economy is defined by our cultural heritage and the mixed successes of articulating a shared humanity and common set of rights. Wed better start understanding that a Chinese future isnt just a set of buildings or mirage-like skylines; it is you, and me, and that man in the off license, and were all in this together.

Shanghai was partly built by British architects; and London, by Chinese laborers. These are two cities in which we can hopefully get together and start understanding each other better.

Jacob Dreyer is a Shanghai based writer and editor.

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Sino-futurist art seeks to explore the cities of the future: on Western visions of China - CityMetric

Campaigners who want to save Scarborough's Futurist Theatre have been ordered to pay 10,000 in costs to the council.

It's after they failed in their bid for a judicial review into the decision to demolish the venue.

Their request was refused by a judge in Leeds last Friday, the campaign group say they'll meet with their legal team to consider their next move.

The campaign group recently became a Limited company in order to take the legal action against the council. They launched a fundraising page to help pay for their legal team, the page has raised a little under three thousand pounds so far.

Cllr Helen Mallory, Deputy Leader of Scarborough Borough Council said:

We have always been confident that the decisions made by Full Council and Cabinet in relation to the Futurist theatre earlier this year were made properly and in accordance with legal requirements. We are therefore pleased with the High Court judges ruling to refuse permission for a Judicial Review of those decisions. The judge found in the councils favour on all grounds raised by the claimant, Save The Futurist Theatre (Scarborough) Ltd and also ordered the claimant to pay costs to the council of 10,000.

Last Fridays ruling comes on the back of the outcome of a Local Government Ombudsman ruling into a complaint made about the same matters, which also found no evidence of fault in how the council had acted.

We are continuing to work with Flamingo Land on their exciting plans for a brand new attraction for Scarborough South Bay and we look forward to progressing these further in the coming months.

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10000 Bill For Futurist Campaigners - Yorkshire Coast Radio

Under Armour made a big splash today as they have officially released the ArchiTech Futurist, a 3-D printed training sneaker.

The Under Armour Architech Futuristreflects past, present, and future UA innovations. Past influence comes with the compression lacing system with a center-placed 1/4 zipper for a tailored fit. The present comes courtesy of the Speedform Upper, a premium, microfiber synthetic leatherthat molds to your foot. Finally the future can be seen on the sole unit with the 3-D printed midsole that contains a dynamic lattice network that provides infinite cushioning and support.

Additional details include debossed Under Armour branding on the heel, a full-length Micro G midsole that provides a stable platform built for versatile performance, and rubber outsole pods with rounded, mini-lug pattern for excellent traction & durability.

You can pick up the Under Armour ArchiTech Futurist at select UA retailers now for $300.

via: Sneaker Politics

Available Now on Kixify & eBay

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The 3-D Printed Under Armour ArchiTech Futurist Just Released - KicksOnFire.com

wbur Xenia Rubinos. (Courtesy)

Last September, musician Xenia Rubinos kicked off a tour to promote her sophomore album, Black Terry Cat, at Great Scott in Allston. Headliners at the college dive bar sometimes dont get started until as late as 11 p.m., so Rubinos lurked unobtrusively at the back of the club, chatting quietly with some friends, while the openers played. When she finally emerged onstage it was without whatever outer layer had allowed her to blend so seamlessly into the shadows. Clad in a peach jumpsuit with spaghetti straps, she wrested the microphone from its stand and bounded out from behind her keyboard. She danced with the kind of exuberant swagger that implored the audience to move, and they did.

The music on Black Terry Cat contains hip-hop beats and funky bass lines, but it is also complicated, zig-zaggy, strange. Rubinos could be forgiven if she chose to perform it cerebrally theres a lot to focus on, many complex passages to execute.

And indeed, there was a time when the Brooklyn-based singer and multi-instrumentalist might have shied away from the spotlight. A graduate of Berklee College of Music, she began her studies intending to major in vocal performance, but after a year turned her focus to composition. For a while, she didnt even really sing.

"I felt like an outcast and I couldnt find my way," says Rubinos, who will return to Great Scott on Wednesday, June 28. I was really into jazz music at the time, and jazz really tends to be a more male-centric, male-dominated, macho kind of environment. I felt like singers especially female singers weretreated like a pretty girl that doesn't know anything about music.

She describes an environment in which students jockeyed to show off their knowledge: Could you name all the players on that rare B-side from 1956? Could you solo over a time signature in seven?Rubinos resented the culture of one-upmanship, and at the same time yearned to belong. I wanted to know all the things that the guys did and I wanted to be taken seriously and I wanted to be accepted, she says.

Needless to say, it was a confusing time, but also a really great time. At Berklee, Rubinos discovered the soul-inflected experimentations of Charles Mingus and Bjrks intrepidpop. It was there, too, that she met her primary collaborator, the drummer and producer Marco Buccelli.

In 2012, Rubinos self-released her debut album Magic Trix. (It was re-released by indie rock/pop label Ba Da Bing! Records in 2013.) Magic Trix was a bare-bones affair, all sharp angles and distorted key parts. The album also contained Spanish lyrics Rubinos traces her roots on her mothers side to Puerto Rico, on her fathers side to Cuba and for a brief moment it seemed as though the media was determined to understandher as a Latin artist, despite the fact that her sound connected more directly to jazz and rock.

In the intervening years, Rubinos appears to have transcended misconceptions about her musicthat might have undermined her.On "Black Terry Cat," which was released on the eclectic Anti- Records,Rubinos emerges as a true polyglot, gesturing deftly toward hip-hop and R&B even as she continues to rummage gleefully through the grab bag of avant-garde inflections that have long been her musical stock and trade. At the same time, despite singing mostly in English, Rubinos wears her identity proudly. You know where to put the brown girl when shes f---ing it up, she intones on the tenacious, slightly zany See Them. Where you gonna put the brown girl now shes tearing it up?

The question of her identity who she is, where she belongs, who to claim as her people is one that Rubinos, who grew up in Hartford, Connecticut, has always grappled with. I've never felt like I've belonged here, but also when I've visited Puerto Rico or Cuba, which is where my family is from, I don't belong there, either, she says. Growing up, I wasn't white enough like nobody looked like me in the places that I wanted to be or the places that I was.

Rubinos says she didnt set out to write an album about that struggle per se. But nowshe sees that certain things were clearly in her thoughts.

I was like, Oh, I'm thinking about my body image and how I'm seen or just racial tensions, racial issues, she says. So Black Lives Matter was on my mind, gun violence was on my mind.

And, for the first time, Rubinos decided to hone her lyrics something she had always been afraid to do, without really knowing why. It was always easier to pretend that words didnt matter. I think part of it, ultimately, is the obvious answer of just feeling afraid to be judged or to be wrong, Rubinos says. Being called out. And maybe that's imposter syndrome like you don't really know that thing. But the way that I fought against that was to talk about things that are really personal to me. I'm not prescribing anything or telling anyone what they should do or what time it is. I'm just telling you what time it is for me.

Rubinos most deeply-felt verses draw onpain namely, the slow decline, and eventual passing, of the singer's father, who suffered from Parkinsons disease. But for Rubinos, the personal is political, too. On the singsongy Mexican Chef, she neatly unpacks the hypocrisies and ignominies embedded in Americas reliance on exploitable labor immigrant labor, brown labor in plain, devastating language: Brown cleans your house/ Brown takes the trash/ Brown even wipes your granddaddys ass, Rubinos croons. Its a party across America/ Bachata in the back. And later, with brutal clarity: Brown has not/ Brown gets shot/ Brown gets what he deserved cause he fought.

Rubinos says she did not set out to write a political song. I was really in a moment of musical joy, she recalls, explaining how Mexican Chef started out as a jokey rhyme that she made up while she was running errands in her neighborhood.Riffing on a bass line inspired by Rufus'Tell Me Something Good, she and Buccelli fleshed out the rest of Mexican Chef in the studio. It was only later that Rubinos understood its impact on listeners. I certainly didnt think that it would be a single on the record, she says. There is power, it turns out, in telling things like you see them.

As rewarding as it is to analyze Rubinos lyrics, it can be devilishly difficult to articulate her sound. Sometimes, in my most optimistic moments, her music feels to me like a premonition of pops future: adventurous, unexpected and defiantlydanceable.

The aesthetic I was going for in the album was this concept of rough elegance, Rubinos tells me. Something that has hard edges but then is also really beautiful or beautiful in an unusual way.

When considering Rubinos artistry, it makes sense tohomein on her ideas an impulseencouraged, no doubt, by that long-ago pivot away from singing and toward authorship, that early bid for respect.Paradoxically, the move may have contributed to the diminishment of Rubinos main tool: her voice. Long before she was a composer, a keyboardist or a bass player, she was a singer. Her voice cannot be detached from her musicianship, of course, but it is worth studying and appreciating on its own merits, a weightless, supple thing that seems to vibrate with its own electrical current.

And so, even as her visible interaction with instruments and technology has helped her to be taken seriously, Rubinos greatest triumph has arguably been getting out from behind that keyboard.

"That show in Boston was one of the first times that I've really ever gotten to do that with my music. Just being free with my body, being free with my voice," she says. The pressure to prove herself, to show off her chops, has finally receded. "It's like, no Im a singer. I love singing. And feeling like: Im enough."

Amelia Mason Music Reporter/Critic, The ARTery Amelia Mason is a music critic and reporter for WBURs The ARTery, where she covers everything from indie rock to avant-garde to the inner workings of the Boston music scene.

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Pop Futurist Xenia Rubinos Is A 'Brown Girl Tearing It Up' - WBUR

Futurist says artificial intelligence is the most important achievement of 21st century

MOSCOW, JUNE 21, ARMENPRESS. In future the engagement of technologies and humanity is going to be more active which will have both positive and negative consequences, futurist Jean-Christophe Bonn said during a press conference dedicated to the 20th anniversary of Kaspersky Lab, reports Armenpress.

New technologies will greatly affect our life and future. Inventing printing in 15th century, Gutenberg managed to change the type of persons mind exchange since the person had a chance to easily type ideas after that. Currently everything is being digitized in the world, and a person can operate any app with the help of one finger. You need to order a car, for that purpose just an app is required, the futurist said.

He said its necessary to increase the education level in the world.

We need to put an emphasis on education and making people get ready to understand what is happening and how they can get used to new technologies. In 1995 Nelson Mandela wrote a book in one of the correctional facilities of the South African Republic where he said the most powerful weapon in the world is education, the futurist said.

According to him, if in the 20th century the most valuable achievement of humanity was the atomic weapon, that of the 21st century is going to be the artificial intelligence. He stated that 20 years later dozens of professions will disappear and millions of people will be unemployed.

Already three states are moving forward in various spheres of automation, Japan, Germany and South Korea. One robot replaces 10 people, and the technology development will change the society. The society is already changing by the impact of technologies and this change will gradually accelerate. When there is no need for taxi drivers or other professions, new professions will emerge for new generation, he said.

According to Jean-Christophe Bonn the man will utilize the entire technology potential to reach his goal and satisfy his needs.

It is possible 20 years later there will be man-made robots. It is possible that time will come when people will say that robots are neither man nor animal and they have no rights. It is possible a special organization will be created which will protect the robots rights, he said.

The scientist is concerned over the disproportionate development of the world and believes that everyone must have a chance to use new technologies.

We really divided the humanity in two parts: the ones who have money and the ones who dont have, as well as the ones who have information and the ones who dont. The issues faced by a number of African, South American countries are completely different: they fact water, electricity problems and their people just survive. I think people in future will be divided in two groups, the ones who have more functions technologically and the ones who dont. Thus, everyone must have a chance to use new technologies and to be educated, Jean-Christophe Bonn concluded.

Karen Khachatryan

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Futurist says artificial intelligence is the most important achievement of 21st century - Armenpress.am