Mark Ray

In the heart of Louisville’s Innovation District sits the Thrive Center, a 7,500-square-foot space dedicated to showing how technology can enhance the lives of older adults. And in the center of the center is the prototype of a smart home — including kitchen, living room, bedroom and bathroom — that demonstrates how technology can help older adults age in place and allow their caregivers and loved ones to keep a virtual eye on them.

Tens of thousands of Scouts and Scouters from around the globe will attend this summer’s World Scout Jamboree at the Summit Bechtel Reserve in West Virginia.
But international Scouts and Scouters have been coming to America since the BSA’s earliest days, bringing with them ideas and traditions that have made the BSA better.

In 2007, two years after founding the Huffington Post Media Group, Arianna Huffington awoke in a pool of blood, her worried daughter hovering at her side. The hard-driving executive had worked herself into a state of exhaustion that led her to fall asleep at her desk and break her cheekbone. Save for her injury, Huffington’s situation wasn’t unusual; in 2008, the Sleep Foundation’s Sleep in America poll found that 29 percent of people had either fallen asleep or become very sleepy at work.

You can’t judge a book by its cover, but most people do exactly that with humans.

“We so frequently do judge people by their appearances or their identity or their religion or gender — you name it,” says librarian Susan Lauricella of the Wilton Library in Wilton, Conn. “There are all these assumptions instantly made whether you want to acknowledge it or not.” There are also sincere questions you might want to ask but can’t.

Pastor Larry Stoess and his wife, Kathie, create community one meal at a time.

Pick up a bottle of the new Kirkland Signature™ Local Raw Unfiltered Honey, and
you’ll see just one ingredient on the label. (Honey, of course.) But there’s more inside that bottle. Depending on where you live, you’ll also find a taste of your own backyard.

While opioid abuse is not as large an issue outside the U.S., it could easily become a major problem without the right guardrails in place.

What can we learn from the U.S. pain addiction epidemic and the crisis response measures being implemented? And what preventative measures, and checks and balances are in place in countries around the world to help avoid a repeat of the crisis?

Your teenage son comes home from school, mutters a few unintelligible words when you ask about his day and retreats to his room to play videogames. Your teenage daughter comes home from school, parks herself in the kitchen and unloads all her troubles in a tsunami of words. In both cases, you struggle to find the right words and the right tone.
What you need, clinical psychologist Dr. Wendy Mogel says, are some voice lessons.

Floods, tornados, forest fires and hurricanes are equal-opportunity disasters that strike young and old alike. Or are they? Not according to Dr. Samir K. Sinha, a member of the American Red Cross Scientific Advisory Council and director of geriatrics for Toronto’s Sinai Health System and the University Health Network in Toronto.

You could say that Rex Tillerson’s path to the corner office began on a portage trail in the Boundary Waters of Minnesota and Ontario.

As a 14-year-old Scout from Stillwater, Okla., the future Exxon Mobil CEO traveled to the Charles L. Sommers Canoe Base for a 10-day canoeing adventure. But adventure turned to anxiety the first time he tried to portage a canoe from one lake to another; it seems his 115-pound body was no match for a canoe that weighed upwards of 85 pounds.

In a Medium post a few years ago, entrepreneur Ryan Holmes revealed a key secret that let him build tech start-up HootSuite from seven employees in Vancouver, B.C., to more than 1,000 around the world in its first decade. His secret, perhaps surprisingly, was yoga.

Digital security has never been so important or perhaps so easy. You can unlock your phone with your fingerprint or your face. You can use a password manager to store all your login credentials behind a single master password. And you can secure many online accounts with two-factor authentication (where a website sends a one-time code to your phone).

When you were a child, did you worry about monsters hiding under your bed or lurking behind your closet door? It turns out one monster — clostridium difficile, or C. diff — may actually be closer at hand, at least in hospitals and nursing homes.

Necessity may be the mother of invention, but some mothers are pretty inventive in their own right. Take Penny Clark. Back in 1982, she sent her 8-year-old son, Joel, around the family's Utah neighborhood selling pancake mix out of a red wagon. This wasn't just any pancake mix, however. It was a version of an old family recipe that called for egg whites, baking soda and vinegar, as the instructions she stapled to each brown paper lunch sack explained.

Joel quickly sold his stock, but Penny decided....

A quarterly alumni newsletter I wrote for the Boy Scouts of America