Jay-Z's  The Story of O.J. draws from a song by Nina Simone, the famous Civil Rights activist and great soul diva. Nina Simone's Four Women tells the struggles and fate of four women, based on the color of their skin: black, yellow, tan, and brown..

Rhiannon Giddens is a singer and multi-instrumentalist best known for her unparalleled mastery of the banjo. According to Rhiannon, in America, "in the first 100 years of its existence, the banjo was known as a plantation instrument, as a black instrument."

It is believed that the next technological frontier to be crossed by humans is the Internet of Things (IoT). But what is the Internet of Things (IoT), or, Internet for Things, as one of the early co-founders of the concept, Kevin Ashton calls it?

IoT is a system of interrelated computing devices, mechanical and digital machines, objects, appliances, buildings, vehicles, animals, plants,  or people that are provided with unique identifiers and the ability to transfer data over a network without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction. Brief, IoT is about connecting devices or things, over the internet, letting them communicate with us, with applications, and with each other. 

IoT is not a new concept, having been discussed and tried as early as 1982 at Carnegie Mellon University, with a Coke machine being the first Internet-connected appliance. IoT is now becoming a reality for most of us. 

IoT will benefit from Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) which has addressed the limitations imposed by  IPv4. IPv6 has extensively increased the address space, allowing humans to assign an IP address to every "thing" on the planet. The advances in Machine Learning have improved  communication and interaction among humans and machines. 

However, the success of IoT will also be dependent on how humans, and intelligent machines,  will be able to address the cencerns around data privacy, ownership, sovereignty, and security.

Karen Marie Garret: One of my best New Age  and Easy Listening music composers.

This is "Tip Toe Dancer and The Sea of Pearl" from the album "It is All About the Rose."