Google will allow employees to work from home until July 2021, according to media reports.

The tech giant had announced the decision in light of the surge in Covid-19 cases across the globe.

Wall Street Journal which first reported the news said that the decision will impact around two lakh full-time and contract employees across Google and its parent company Alphabet Inc.

“To give employees the ability to plan ahead, we are extending our global voluntary work from home option through June 30, 2021 for roles that don’t need to be in the office,” wrote Google CEO Sundar Pichai in an email to employees as quoted by The Verge.

Type “entrepreneurial child” into any stock image site and the results show kids in suits, kids holding meetings in boardrooms, kids behind thriving lemonade stands and kids shaking hands with other kids. Let’s make one thing clear. I do not care if your child starts a business. What I do care about, however, is that if your child decides, of their own accord, at some point in their life, that they want to start a business, they can.

Image: How to raise entrepreneurial kids PIXABAY

Buy and hold investing is an investment strategy where you purchase an investment, like a stock or mutual fund, and keep it for a long period of time. Many famous investors, such as Benjamin Graham and Warren Buffett, are stalwart fans of buy-and-hold investing.

Spotting patterns, trends, and formulas make our work (and life) easier. But I never thought I'd see someone unlocking the formula for the hardest job of all: raising super-successful children.

Harvard professor Ronald Ferguson, author of "The Formula: Unlocking the Secrets to Raising Highly Successful Children," recently told the Harvard Gazette he's done exactly that.

Never before have prospective vaccines for a pathogen entered final-stage clinical trials as rapidly as candidates for Covid-19.

Just six months ago, when the death toll from the coronavirus stood at one and neither it nor the disease it caused had a name, a team of Chinese scientists uploaded its genetic sequence to a public site. That kicked off the record-breaking rush to develop vaccines — the salve that experts say could ultimately quell the pandemic.

For the second year, Fast Company is recognizing organizations that have created cultures enabling employees at all levels—not just top executives, computer scientists, or researchers—to innovate. We’ve expanded the list from 50 to 100 companies, schools, and nonprofits of all sizes, from SōRSE Technology, a 30- person startup, to Siemens, a 173-year-old conglomerate employing nearly 400,000 people worldwide. We’re also introducing a whole new category to this year’s list, having invited companies to nominate internal groups for recognition as Innovative Team of the Year.

Since the first case of COVID-19 was identified in December 2019, the illness has become a pandemic, touching every corner of the planet. The maps and charts below show the extent of the spread, and will be updated daily with data gathered from dozens of sources by the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering.

Image: https://time.com

The global pandemic is a hinge in history. Hundreds of thousands of lives lost globally; trillions in economic damage. It is as if the 1918 flu and the 1929 crash happened in the same year. It is the kind of event that alters the course of history so much that we measure time by it: before the pandemic — and after. It is a Sputnik moment.

Image: Astronaut Buzz Aldrin walks on the surface of the moon on July 20, 1969. (Neil Armstrong/NASA via AP)

Taiwan’s government cannot take sole credit for flattening that country’s curve during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. The work was supported by an extraordinary collaboration of tech-savvy citizens who used their expertise to help spread valuable information to the public, according to a case study by Steven O. Kimbrough, Wharton professor of operations, information and decisions, and Christine Chou, business professor at National Dong Hwa University in Taiwan. In this opinion piece, Kimbrough and Chou explain how this grassroots effort coalesced and what it signals for Taiwan’s future.

Airbus' new eVTOL just took to the skies for the first time in public during a demonstration flight for a German politician.

CityAirbus, as the electric aircraft is called, is part of Airbus' vision for "flying taxi" aircraft and currently being developed by the manufacturer's helicopter division. The remotely piloted aircraft first flew independently in December, according to Aviation Today, but the July 20 demonstration flight for Bavarian Minister-President Markus Söder saw CityAirborne go airborne for the first time in front of public officials and the media, eVTOL.com reported.

Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CityAirbus_concept.jpg

It costs a minimum of $3,000 to join Stanford 2020, which now has about 175 student investors with a waiting list of 50 who want to add another $500,000.

One silver lining of the COVID-19 crisis has been to show businesses how to manage better and achieve greater speed, quality, and cost control. A wartime mindset—defined by decisive crisis management, scenario planning, and a human reflex attuned to the economic and health shocks affecting employees—has been the hallmark of leaders in the crisis so far. Now, as the world feels its way toward recovery and the new opportunities of the next normal, another risk looms. It is that inertia will set in, along with a longing for a return to the operating style of the days before COVID-19.

Future pandemics—and suffering of the kind inflicted by COVID-19—could be avoided if we troubled ourselves to see where dangerous pathogens lie in wait. We could, two unrelated studies suggest, save ourselves untold woe and conserve our fortunes if we were to look into matters geographic, zoologic, and genomic. More specifically, we need to keep our eyes wide open when we venture into the planet’s last wild places. There, we may run into wild animals that are infected with pathogens harboring wild genetic traits—which is to say, genetic traits that evolved naturally, beyond our gaze, and that waited patiently, perhaps decades, for a chance to strike.

ROCHESTER, N.Y., July 28, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Heart Health Intelligence (HHI) has joined the American Heart Association’s Center for Health Technology & Innovation’s (the Center) Innovators’ Network. The Center is focused on building and fostering health tech relationships to develop innovative and scalable solutions. Innovators’ Network members have access to the Association’s digital guidelines, recommendations, and best-in-class science as they develop various digital healthcare technologies.

HHI creates healthcare technologies that enable daily effortless heart health monitoring. HHI’s solution is The Heart Seat™, a cloud-connected self-contained toilet seat-based cardiovascular monitoring system that measures over 9 clinical-grade metrics that have been tested through multiple peer-reviewed research studies (2018 and 2019).

Survey after survey has shown that 2020’s prospective college students are rethinking their plans. And while it’s too early to tell how many students colleges will lose, skyrocketing interest in gap-year programs could signal what’s to come.

According to Ethan Knight, the Gap Year Association, where Knight is the executive director and founder, has seen unique page views on its website double and a 380-percent jump in searches of its program directory compared to July of last year. Some gap-year programs report filling their cohorts a month early and opening more slots to meet the demand. And gap-year consultants predict those numbers will grow as colleges solidify their plans for the fall.

Image: PHOTO BY SHONA ESTEY-EDWARDS - https://www.chronicle.com

As a culture, we’re in love with the idea of genius. We point to people like Steve Jobs and Edison and think: They must be born with it. That type of innovation can’t be taught.

Maybe that’s true for a select handful of people. We’re not all going to popularize the lightbulb, or reinvent the phone. But that doesn’t mean we all can’t be more innovative. In fact, innovation is a baseline requirement for survival for many industries today. The idea that innovation is a natural talent that can’t be measured (let alone taught) is a pretense. It provides an excuse not to invest in making our companies, and ourselves, more innovative.

COVID-19 updates: A June 29 update shared that the fall semester will begin on campus on August 26 with several new regulations, like that a classroom can't be more than 40% full. After that, all courses will be conducted remotely. 

A June 8 update shared that all students and faculty will be required to wear a face mask or covering inside buildings on campus and that the university is working on a plan for voluntary coronavirus testing for students. 

As far as disruptions go, how we work has been completely upended by COVID-19. With more people working from home, the fact that 44.9% say they feel more productive is good news for businesses. Another 20.6% say they don’t see a change in productivity, leaving 34.5% who say they are more productive in the office. The data comes from a detailed survey and report from SellCell. With more than 2,000 telecommuters, the survey didn’t hold any punches when it comes to the questions. The respondents were made up of 49.7% (1012) men and 50.3% (1026) women between the ages of 23 and 60 in America.

Canada is looking for innovators to grow the ocean economy in a way that has never been done before.

Launching its second Canada-wide Call for Proposals for its Accelerated Ocean Solutions Program (AOSP), Canada’s Ocean Supercluster (OSC) is offering up hundreds of thousands of dollars to innovators looking to develop new technologies for projects that can be completed in less than two years.

“We had an incredible response to our first Call for Proposals under the accelerated program in May that saw an influx of new OSC members and some very exciting new projects that we look forward to announcing in the fall,” said OSC CEO Kendra MacDonald.

Image: https://seawestnews.com

A new survey provides a snapshot of corporate boards’ resilience to challenges and risks posed by the pandemic.

A crucial role of any board is risk management. This responsibility includes setting the appropriate risk level, monitoring management’s actions against that benchmark, scanning the horizon for potential problems and helping management deal with potentially value-destroying events when they occur.