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Showing posts from January, 2017

Koch network could serve as potent resistance in Trump era - The Washington Post

Koch network could serve as potent resistance in Trump era - The Washington Post : INDIAN WELLS, Calif. — The weekend gathering of wealthy donors who help finance the conservative Koch network was supposed to serve as a celebration of the policy victories within reach now that Republicans control Washington: a repeal of the Affordable Care Act, a rollback of environmental regulations, perhaps even a corporate tax overhaul. But with President Trump already embroiled in chaos and controversy, the conservative financiers assembled at a desert resort here were also forced to contend with a new uncertainty: whether the new president will be an ally or an obstacle. In their first formal break with the administration, top network officials Sunday condemned Trump’s travel ban on some refugees and immigrants, calling it “the wrong approach.” Some here expressed alarm that Trump has staked out positions anathema to the network’s libertarian principles, targeting individual companies that pro...
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(1) What is the literal translation of the Sanskrit word for war? - Quora

(1) What is the literal translation of the Sanskrit word for war? - Quora : The cow is sacred to the Hindus. Cow is Symbol of purity, motherhood and ahimsa (non-violence). Gau Daan – (‘Gau’ means cow and Daan means donation) is important belief in Hinduism, since ancient times cows have been donated by kings, Kshatriya (Warriors- in ancient times) and other people to Brahmins and others. Although it can be donated any time, but it is believed that at least one cow must be donated in one man’s life time. War leads to deaths and it was important to donate the cows before one die or someone from family can donate on behalf, so that one can have ease while passing over the river Vaitarni after death. That’s why War is “A desire of more cows” – more death would lead to desire for more cows for the rituals.
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What Is Michael Burry Doing Today? ‘The Big Short’ Character Is Still Weary Of The Financial Market

What Is Michael Burry Doing Today? ‘The Big Short’ Character Is Still Weary Of The Financial Market : "Fresh, clean water cannot be taken for granted. And it is not — water is political, and litigious. Transporting water is impractical for both political and physical reasons, so buying up water rights did not make a lot of sense to me, unless I was pursuing a greater fool theory of investment — which was not my intention. What became clear to me is that food is the way to invest in water. That is, grow food in water-rich areas and transport it for sale in water-poor areas. This is the method for redistributing water that is least contentious, and ultimately it can be profitable, which will ensure that this redistribution is sustainable. A bottle of wine takes over 400 bottles of water to produce — the water embedded in food is what I found interesting."
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A Dozen Things I’ve Learned from Dr. Michael Burry about Investing | 25iq

A Dozen Things I’ve Learned from Dr. Michael Burry about Investing | 25iq : When Burry says: “Lost dollars are simply harder to replace than gained dollars are to lose” it is another way of saying what Warren Buffett has said many times: “The first rule of investing is: don’t lose money; the second rule is don’t forget Rule No. 1.” Joel Greenblatt agrees: “Look down, not up, when making your initial investment decision. If you don’t lose money, most of the remaining alternatives are good ones.” Seth Klarman writes in his book of the same name: “A margin of safety is achieved when securities are purchased at prices sufficiently below underlying value to allow for human error, bad luck, or extreme volatility in a complex, unpredictable and rapidly changing world.”
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'Big Short' Hero Is Wrong This Time - Bloomberg View

'Big Short' Hero Is Wrong This Time - Bloomberg View : The crisis, incredibly, made the biggest banks bigger. The major reform legislation, Dodd-Frank, was named after two guys bought and sold by special interests, and one of them should be shouldering a good amount of blame for the crisis. Banks were forced, by the government, to save some of the worst lenders in the housing bubble, then the government turned around and pilloried the banks for the crimes of the companies they were forced to acquire.
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Michael Burry on why you won't be the next Warren Buffett - Business Insider

Michael Burry on why you won't be the next Warren Buffett - Business Insider : If you are going to be a great investor, you have to fit the style to who you are. At one point I recognized that Warren Buffett, though he had every advantage in learning from Ben Graham, did not copy Ben Graham, but rather set out on his own path, and ran money his way, by his own rules ... I also immediately internalized the idea that no school could teach someone how to be a great investor. If it were true, it'd be the most popular school in the world, with an impossibly high tuition. So it must not be true.
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Nanosats are go! | The Economist

Nanosats are go! | The Economist : ALTHOUGH widely used, satellites are expensive to build and to launch. That began to change last year. On November 19th Orbital Sciences, an American company, launched a rocket from the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. It carried 29 satellites aloft and released them into low-Earth orbit, a record for a single mission. Thirty hours later, Kosmotras, a Russian joint-venture, carried 32 satellites into a similar orbit. Then, in January 2014, Orbital Sciences carried 33 satellites up to the International Space Station (ISS), where they were cast off a month later. Many of these 94 satellites were built in a standard format known as a CubeSat, a 10cm (4 inch) cube weighing 1.3kg (2.9lb) or less. Some comprised units of two or three cubes. After a decade of fits and starts, during which some 75 CubeSats were launched, satellites of this scale and other small satellites are moving from being experimental kit to delivering useful scientific data and co...
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Video: "A tourist club" - Liverpool fan brilliantly explains problem with Anfield’s atmosphere - This Is Anfield

Video: "A tourist club" - Liverpool fan brilliantly explains problem with Anfield’s atmosphere - This Is Anfield : “When you look in English stadiums especially, so many tourists haven’t any connection to the club they support. They’re just customers. “But as a football club you also need fans, you need people who say, ‘OK, now my club is ruined or we have been relegated, but I love this club. “You can’t run a business only with tourists. The English Premier League isn’t an English Premier League, you could also say it’s just an international Premier League, because there are not so many English players on the pitch, not so many English fans in the stadium. “They could play it in China.”
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Soccer Fan Mutinies, All Over England - The New York Times

Soccer Fan Mutinies, All Over England - The New York Times : The message, for Fish and his group, is that Blackburn’s owners — the Rao family, proprietors of Venky’s, an Indian poultry conglomerate — are no longer welcome. The Raos stand accused, in Fish’s words, of “destroying” the club they bought in 2010, thanks to a series of what he called “disastrous decisions and empty promises.”
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"Pierre De Coubertin's Ideology of Beauty from the Perspective of the History of Ideas" by Segrave, Jeffrey O.; Chatziefstathiou, Dikaia - Proceedings: International Symposium for Olympic Research, Annual 2008 | Online Research Library: Questia

"Pierre De Coubertin's Ideology of Beauty from the Perspective of the History of Ideas" by Segrave, Jeffrey O.; Chatziefstathiou, Dikaia - Proceedings: International Symposium for Olympic Research, Annual 2008 | Online Research Library: Questia
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Lawsuit claims Snap Inc. hasn’t been honest about its pre-IPO performance metrics | TechCrunch

Lawsuit claims Snap Inc. hasn’t been honest about its pre-IPO performance metrics | TechCrunch : Anthony Pompliano, the one-time head of Snap’s growth and user engagement team, is seeking an injunction and�monetary relief�after�being fired just�three weeks into his tenure.�Mr. Pompliano, now a venture capitalist at his own firm, alleges that�he was fired for cause after trying to bring attention to systemic misrepresentation of of the company’s internal key performance metrics — resulting in�the loss of his employee stock options and potential salary in addition to creating�a major eye-sore on his resume. Afterwords,�Mr. Pompliano alleges that on multiple occasions, when called for reference, Snap Inc. prevented him from getting hired in similar roles at other�companies�by falsely presenting him as�incompetent. In a suit filed with the�L.A. County Superior Court,�Pompliano’s lawyers outline the tragic story of a whistleblower caught in the fury of an angry tech company seeking�to p...
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Trump Strategist Stephen Bannon Says Media Should ‘Keep Its Mouth Shut’ - The New York Times

Trump Strategist Stephen Bannon Says Media Should ‘Keep Its Mouth Shut’ - The New York Times : “The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while,” Mr. Bannon said in an interview on Wednesday. “I want you to quote this,” Mr. Bannon added. “The media here is the opposition party. They don’t understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States.”
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Automation Is the Next Phase of the Collaborative Economy

Automation Is the Next Phase of the Collaborative Economy : This may come as a shocker to many, but in the next few years, the peer-based sharing/collaborative economy will shift to automation. I’ve studied this market closely and want to make some clear predictions on where things will head. Four years ago, I mapped out the Collaborative Economy, which is the phase where humans get what they need from each other (peer-to-peer commerce). In the next phase, the Autonomous World, robots will augment and replace humans, and they will serve humans. In some cases, robots will serve other robots as we advance further.
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The Positive Reframe: Why Trump’s Inauguration is Not the Beginning of an Era — but the End

The Positive Reframe: Why Trump’s Inauguration is Not the Beginning of an Era — but the End : Trump is a symptom of something much bigger and more fundamental going on in the world. So are the people behind Brexit in Great Britain. They are not driving the change, they are reacting to the change. They are not showing the way forward, they are making desperate attempts to cling to the past, a past that is gone forever. The world is in the relatively early stages of an almost inevitable transition to what can be best understood as a new 21st-century civilization. Relatively early — meaning roughly one-third of the way through. And almost inevitable — meaning it can be derailed if we make some catastrophic political choices. There are three fundamentally different characteristics of this civilization: One, it will be run totally on digital technologies, smarter and smarter, more and more interconnected computers. Two, it will be totally global and operate on a planetary scale. And three...
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Distraction Is Actually Ruining This Country

Distraction Is Actually Ruining This Country : Bear with me. Earlier this month, a new paper came out on the Chinese government’s practice of blanketing social media with fake comments, racking up a total of about 448 million fabricated posts a year. For years, Chinese social media users had speculated about the posts and their objective: were they intended to steer sensitive conversations in a pro-government direction? Or to argue with people who criticized the establishment? As the researchers found, the posts in fact did only one thing: shower praise on all things China. They tended to emerge in bursts around events that might stir protest — for example, the riots in Xinjiang province in 2013 (1,100 fake posts), the rail explosion in Urumqi the following year (3,500), and the Qingming festival, a time often characterized by political unrest (18,000). The fabricated posts’ sole purpose? To distract people from the temptation to organize — by stealing users’ time and mental energy. T...
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A lawyer rewrote Instagram’s terms of use ‘in plain English’ so kids would know their privacy rights - The Washington Post

A lawyer rewrote Instagram’s terms of use ‘in plain English’ so kids would know their privacy rights - The Washington Post : Probably very little, according to a report released last week�— and dense terms and conditions that are “impenetrable and largely ignored” are partly to blame. “‘Terms and conditions’ is one of the first things you agree to when you come upon a site,” Jenny Afia, a privacy lawyer and partner at Schillings law firm in London, told The Washington Post. “But of course no one reads them. I mean, most adults don’t read them.” Afia was a member of a “Growing Up Digital” task force group convened by the Children’s Commissioner for England to study Internet use among teens and the concerns children might face as they grow up in the digital age. The group found more than a third of Internet users are younger than�18, with 12- to 15-year-olds spending more than 20 hours a week online. Most of those children have no idea what their privacy rights are, despite all o...
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Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election Hunt Allcott, New York University and NBER ∗

Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election Hunt Allcott, New York University and NBER ∗ Matthew Gentzkow, Stanford University and NBER January 2017 Abstract We present new evidence on the role of false stories circulated on social media prior to the 2016 US presidential election. Drawing on audience data, archives of fact-checking websites, and results from a new online survey, we find: (i) social media was an important but not dominant source of news in the run-up to the election, with 14 percent of Americans calling social media their “most important” source of election news; (ii) of the known false news stories that appeared in the three months before the election, those favoring Trump were shared a total of 30 million times on Facebook, while those favoring Clinton were shared eight million times; (iii) the average American saw and remembered 0.92 pro-Trump fake news stories and 0.23 pro-Clinton fake news stories, with j...
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Michelle Obama's Shocking Rumored Memoir Plans

Michelle Obama's Shocking Rumored Memoir Plans : The $15 million to $20 million price tag for Barack's post-presidency memoir is in line with past book deals, as Bill took in $15 million for "My Life," his 2004 memoir, according to Fortune. But in order to receive top dollar, Barack would need to write a tell-all, particularly regarding the Clinton family, including Hillary's email server, Benghazi, and her unsuccessful bid for the presidency, notes Oppenheimer.
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Top-Secret Snowden Document Reveals What the NSA Knew About Previous Russian Hacking

Top-Secret Snowden Document Reveals What the NSA Knew About Previous Russian Hacking : Jeremy Scahill describes the extraordinary scene from the middle of the Women’s March on Washington. “This is a good indication of the kind of resistance that we’re going to see going forward,” he says. (Video by Cameron Hickey; Edited by Lauren Feeney.)
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Tim Cook On Why He Met With President Elect Trump

Tim Cook On Why He Met With President Elect Trump : Last week you joined other tech leaders to meet President-elect Donald Trump. How important is it for Apple to engage with governments?� It’s very important. Governments can affect our ability to do what we do. They can affect it in positive ways and they can affect in not so positive ways. What we do is focus on the policies. Some of our key areas of focus are on privacy and�security, education. They’re on advocating for human rights for everyone, and expanding the definition of human rights. They’re on the environment and really combating climate change, something we do by running our business on 100�percent renewable energy. And of course, creating jobs is a key part of what we do by giving people opportunity not only with people that work directly for Apple, but the large number of people that are in our ecosystem. We’re really proud that we’ve created 2 million�jobs, just in this country. A great percentage of those are app d...
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AdReaction Gen X, Y and Z

AdReaction Gen X, Y and Z http://storage.pardot.com/73302/113063/Kantar_Millward_Brown_AdReaction_GenXYZ_Global.pdf, http://go.millwardbrown.com/l/73302/2016-11-27/6sx78r
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Google Contributor in its current form will be discontinued in January, new version coming�soon

Google Contributor in its current form will be discontinued in January, new version coming�soon : Users, myself included, are receiving�emails from Google announcing that Contributor in its current form�is being discontinued, to be replaced early next year with a new version. Billing and ad removal will cease in mid-January as well with refunds going out for any remaining account balance.
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Andy Rubin’s ‘Essential’ working on AI gadgets, starting w/ bezel-less smartphone in mid-2017 | 9to5Google

Andy Rubin’s ‘Essential’ working on AI gadgets, starting w/ bezel-less smartphone in mid-2017 | 9to5Google : Aesthetically, the phone will have metal edges and a ceramic back. At CES 2017, Rubin reportedly held talks with various carriers, including Sprint in the US. Foxconn is apparently in the running to manufacture this�new device.
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Tony Fadell Shares New Details on Prototype iPhone Software With Virtual iPod Clickwheel - Mac Rumors

Tony Fadell Shares New Details on Prototype iPhone Software With Virtual iPod Clickwheel - Mac Rumors : We tried everything. We tried having little buttons on the clickwheel so you could click. There was a Nokia phone where they had a circular pattern for the numbers, in hard buttons, and Steve was like "Go make that work." So we tried that. And we went, "Steve, give it up, it's going to be too hard. It's not going to work." So we were halfway through, like four weeks or five weeks into it, and we said "This is not working." We pushed this for like another four, five weeks to keep trying, and we're saying, "This is a waste of time." But we had to be ready, because that's what he wanted.
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Apple Plans to Launch Original TV Shows Comparable to 'Westworld' and 'Stranger Things' By End of 2017 - Mac Rumors

Apple Plans to Launch Original TV Shows Comparable to 'Westworld' and 'Stranger Things' By End of 2017 - Mac Rumors : Because it is looking at just a handful of carefully selected shows, and potentially films, it doesn’t appear Apple is preparing to spend the hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars it would need to spend annually to become a direct competitor to Netflix Inc., Amazon.com Inc.’s Prime Video or premium cable networks. Rather, it would escalate the arms race between Apple Music and Spotify, which both offer essentially the same catalog of tens of millions of songs, by adding other content that could distinguish Apple’s service.
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Apple Aiming to End iTunes Music Downloads in Two Years [Update: Apple Says 'Not True'] - Mac Rumors

Apple Aiming to End iTunes Music Downloads in Two Years [Update: Apple Says 'Not True'] - Mac Rumors : Back to the story, the sources indicated that a range of shutdown timetables are being considered by Apple, though one executive noted that "keeping [iTunes music downloads] running forever isn't really on the table anymore." Also under discussion is a plan to "ride the [iTunes music download offering] out for the next 3-4 years, maybe longer," when paid music downloads are likely to be an afterthought in a streaming-dominated industry. [...] According to one source, an initial shutdown could take place in 'tier 1' countries like the United States, UK, and leading countries in Europe and Asia, with 'tier 2' and 'tier 3' countries experiencing a staggered shutdown in subsequent years.
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THE INNOVATION MINUTE

Must Read Digest MEDIUM LAYS OFF DOZENS AS IT TRIES TO FIND A PUBLISHING BUSINESS MODEL THAT MAY NOT ACTUALLY EXIST YET But what happens to the publishers who gave up some measure of their independence for the platform? Link. FOR SALE: CONDÉ NAST TREASURES Publisher's archive of millions of photographs and illustrations will soon be the stuff of limited-edition prints, made-to-order T-shirts, coffee mugs, tote bags, pillows and such. Link. COULD CHANGING THE WAY BYLINES LOOK HELP INCREASE TRUST WITH READERS? How does journalism signal its trustworthiness to an audience that has lost confidence in its ability to be fair? Link. THE BOSTON GLOBE'S MAJOR OVERHAUL IS UNDERWAY Boston Globe outlines a massive reorganization aimed at reinventing the newspaper for the digital age. Link. IT'S TIME TO STOP SAYING 'OLD MEDIA' Legacy newsrooms were found doing the work of digital journalism. Link. FORBES REACHED RECORD U.S. TRAFFIC, CREDITS MOBILE USERS comScore dat...
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What is the most popular MongoDB admin GUI? - Quora

What is the most popular MongoDB admin GUI? - Quora : I’m currently working on Mongoclient which has taken place in MongoDB Admin UI page. Mongoclient offers: A nice UI and easy queries. File management without struggling shell commands Dump/Restore User management Aggregate pipeline builder Supports 2.4 - 3.2 MongoDB version. (2.2 and older versions are not being supported by MongoDB as well) And the most important part, it’s completely free and open-source Supports OSx, Windows, Linux, as well as can be compiled as a web application Database monitoring Query histories Configurable timeouts, result views and more Have a look at mongoclient on github page, I’m developing mongoclient by emphasizing on end user’s requests. So don’t hesitate to share your requests
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Enigma Machine | The Weekly Standard

Enigma Machine | The Weekly Standard : Sartre was more talked about than read: His philosophical masterwork Being and Nothingness was just too long. But Camus was perfect for reading, his short novel The Stranger and his essay "The Myth of Sisyphus" each coming in at less than 200 pages. He was, at any rate, a better incitement to deep thought than Aristotle's De Anima or the Prior Analytics. But as a budding philosophy major, I was directed in college to Aristotle rather than Existentialism and managed not to read Camus's novel for many years, perhaps in part because I was wary of the hype generated by its extraordinary success. Now, to tell the story of that success, we have a first-rate account by Alice Kaplan, a professor of French, rich with the intriguing details of how it all happened. Professor Kaplan is best known for an engaging memoir, French Lessons, and her writing is notable for its unpretentious clarity and vigorous life. Her claim is that no one yet ...
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The Long and Brutal History of Fake News - POLITICO Magazine

The Long and Brutal History of Fake News - POLITICO Magazine : Fake news took off at the same time that news began to circulate widely, after Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1439. “Real” news was hard to verify in that era. There were plenty of news sources—from official publications by political and religious authorities, to eyewitness accounts from sailors and merchants—but no concept of journalistic ethics or objectivity. Readers in search of fact had to pay close attention. In the 16th century, those who wanted real news believed that leaked secret government reports were reliable sources, such as Venetian government correspondence, known as relazioni. But it wasn’t long before leaked original documents were soon followed by fake relazioni leaks. By the 17th century, historians began to play a role in verifying the news by publishing their sources as verifiable footnotes. The trial over Galileo’s findings in 1610 also created a desire for scientifically verifiable...
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How to Become a Famous Media Scholar: The Case of Marshall McLuhan - Los Angeles Review of Books

How to Become a Famous Media Scholar: The Case of Marshall McLuhan - Los Angeles Review of Books : Like most celebrity ascensions, McLuhan’s was the product of a conscious publicity campaign. Handlers, press agents, and impresarios worked together to make “McLuhan” a household name. He was packaged and promoted like a promising starlet, with multimedia gusto. Understanding Media garnered a few mainstream print reviews upon publication, but McLuhan’s break came in early 1965, when a pair of San Francisco prospectors — one, Gerald Feigen, a physician, the other, Howard Gossage, an ad-agency executive — “discovered” McLuhan and promptly arranged to visit the Canadian in Toronto. Feigen and Gossage were self-fashioned avant-gardists, using profits from their business consulting firm for “genius scouting”; the doctor read Understanding Media and alerted his partner. Together they plotted a full-fledged publicity rollout, starting with cocktail parties in New York City with media and publish...
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Homepage - MyStar

Homepage - MyStar iBGStar® blood glucose meter iBGStar® connects to your iPhone® or iPod® touch making it easier to view and share blood glucose readings. It helps you manage your diabetes and your insulin on the go. MODERN AND INTUITIVE SUPPORT iBGStar® connects to your iPhone® or iPod® touch. Insert a test strip and directly get your blood glucose reading IBGSTAR DIABETES MANAGER APP iBGStar® comes with the iBGStar® Diabetes Manager Application which presents your values in a simple way. DISCREET AND COMPACT Winner of Red Dot® design award for outstanding product design (category Life Science and Medicine) and the prestigious Good Design® Award in 2011 (Medical Category).
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Pattern recognition (psychology) - Wikipedia

Pattern recognition (psychology) - Wikipedia : In psychology and cognitive neuroscience, pattern recognition describes a cognitive process that matches information from a stimulus with information retrieved from memory.[1] Among others, the recognized patterns can be those perceived in facial features,[2] units of music,[3] components of language[4] or characters and other symbols.[1] One theory understands patterns as a set of characteristic features extracted from the stimulus, but it does not comprehensively describe the process or the role of context and there is a multitude of other theories with different approaches.[a] Pattern recognition does not occur instantly, although it does happen automatically and spontaneously.[citation needed] Pattern recognition is an innate ability of animals.[citation needed]
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Do wireless Bluetooth headphones cause cancer? - Quora

Do wireless Bluetooth headphones cause cancer? - Quora : The same argument could be used for the reverse hypothesis, to support the idea that Bluetooth radiation could, by some unknown mechanism, be healthy. If you want to be as prudent as possible, I would suggest that you stay updated on this subject, read studies ---not just the results, but the complete papers--- and decide for yourself, instead of trusting individual scientists too much.
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I'm a Scientist, and I Don't Believe in Facts - Scientific American Blog Network

I'm a Scientist, and I Don't Believe in Facts - Scientific American Blog Network : Well, let me tell you a secret about science; scientists don’t prove anything. What we do is collect evidence that supports or does not support our predictions. Sometimes we do things over and over again, in meaningfully different ways, and we get the same results, and then we call these findings facts. And, when we have lots and lots of replications and variations that all say the same thing, then we talk about theories or laws. Like evolution. Or gravity. But at no point have we proved anything. Don’t get me wrong. The scientific method is totally awesome. It is unparalleled in its ability to get answers that can help us extend life, optimize output, and understand our own brains. Scientists slowly break down the illusions created by our biased human perception, revealing what the universe actually looks like. In an incremental progress, each study adds a tiny bit of insight to our understand...
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