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Cloud has become a given for most organizations: according to PwC’s 2023 cloud business survey, 78% of companies have adopted cloud in most or all parts of the business. These companies have migrated on-premises systems to the cloud seeking faster time to market, greater scalability, cost savings, and improved collaboration.

Yet while cloud adoption is widespread, research by McKinsey shows that companies’ concerns around the resiliency and reliability of cloud operations, coupled with an ever-evolving regulatory environment, are limiting their ability to derive full value from the cloud. As the value of a business’s data grows ever clearer, the stakes of making sure that data is resilient are heightened. Business leaders now justly fear that they might run afoul of mounting data regulations and compliance requirements, that bad actors might target their data in a ransomware attack, or that an operational disruption

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Last year, as the harvest season drew closer, Olabokunde Tope came across an unpleasant surprise. 

While certain spots on his 70-hectare cassava farm in Ibadan, Nigeria, were thriving, a sizable parcel was pale and parched—the result of an early and unexpected halt in the rains. The cassava stems, starved of water, had withered to straw. 

“It was a really terrible experience for us,” Tope says, estimating the cost of the loss at more than 50 million naira ($32,000). “We were praying for a miracle to happen. But unfortunately, it was too late.”  

When the next planting season rolled around, Tope’s team weighed different ways to avoid another cycle of heavy losses. They decided to work with EOS Data Analytics, a California-based provider of satellite imagery and data for precision farming. The company uses wavelengths of light including the near-infrared, which penetrates plant canopies

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In 1983, while on a field recording assignment in Kenya, the musician and soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause noticed something remarkable. Lying in his tent late one night, listening to the calls of hyenas, tree frogs, elephants, and insects in the surrounding old-growth forest, Krause heard what seemed to be a kind of collective orchestra. Rather than a chaotic cacophony of nighttime noises, it was as if each animal was singing within a defined acoustic bandwidth, like living instruments in a larger sylvan ensemble. 

Unsure of whether this structured musicality was real or the invention of an exhausted mind, Krause analyzed his soundscape recordings on a spectrogram when he returned home. Sure enough, the insects occupied one frequency niche, the frogs another, and the mammals a completely separate one. Each group had claimed a unique part of the larger sonic spectrum, a fact that not

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If you took a walk in Hayes Valley, San Francisco’s epicenter of AI froth, and asked the first dude-bro you saw wearing a puffer vest about the future of the interface, he’d probably say something about the movie Her, about chatty virtual assistants that will help you do everything from organize your email to book a trip to Coachella to sort your text messages.

Nonsense. Setting aside that Her (a still from the film is shown above) was about how technology manipulates us into a one-sided relationship, you’d have to be pudding-brained to believe that chatbots are the best way to use computers. The real opportunity is close, but it isn’t chatbots.

Instead, it’s computers built atop the visual interfaces we know, but which we can interact with more fluidly, through whatever combination of voice and touch is most natural. Crucially, this won’t just

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