Want To Watch?? Future of Transportation World Conference

Published on Jul 9, 2017

Views: 14

14:00 - July 6th 2016, Reframing discontinuities and restoring forecasting throughout large-scale industry disruption. Julian Cox, consulting partner, EV-Volumes. In an about-face of the hyperbole of tech disruption, the presentation explores functional equivalence between technologies, the common profit drivers of labour, materials and energy efficiencies and the continual shifts in business models from batch to recurring revenue streams. These are the underpinnings of today and tomorrow. The purpose: to restore a baseline in which the past and the future make common sense simultaneously, for restored confidence in forecasting and in the making of large-scale value judgements otherwise obscured by paradigm-specific norms and nomenclature. The outcome: some counterintuitive insights into the future history of energy and transportation.

Conference: http://www.thefutureoftransportconfer...

The Great Crash 1929 - Documentary

A decade later > War
Published on Jul 9, 2017
Views: 2,898

Time To Sell The Product >WHAT 5 NEW DRONES TELL US ABOUT THE FUTURE OF UNMANNED FLYING || WARTHOG...

Published on Jul 9, 2017

5 New Drones, and The Future Technology

Eyes Wide Open > Expanding Surveillance Scooped-Up In Public

Excerpts from The Intercept

“Show Me Your Papers” Becomes “Open Your Eyes” as Border Sheriffs Expand Iris Surveillance

By George Joseph 08 July 2017 6:10 a.m. 

Since his inauguration, President Donald Trump has found little funding for his “big, beautiful wall.” In the meantime, however, another acquisition promised to deter unauthorized immigrants is coming to the border: iris recognition devices.

Biometric Identification
BI2 Technologies™ - Biometric Intelligence and Identification Technologies - is a worldwide leader in the development and implementation of innovative and affordable iris, fingerprint and facial biometric identification and recognition technologies and solutions.

Thirty-one sheriffs, representing every county along the U.S.-Mexico border, voted unanimously on April 3 to adopt tools that will capture, catalogue, and compare individuals’ iris data, for use both in jails and out on patrol.

Biometric Intelligence and Identification Technologies, the company behind the push, has offered the sheriffs a free three-year trial, citing law enforcement’s difficulties in identifying unauthorized immigrants . . . for Biometric Intelligence and Identification Technologies, which frequently goes by BI2, rapid border expansion means its existing national iris database will receive a huge influx of biometric information on unauthorized immigrants, boosting its product’s capabilities to potential law enforcement clients across the country. . .

Here's a Testimonial on http://www.bi2technologies.com/

Testimonials

"From an officer-safety perspective, to find out who we are dealing with, this literally leapfrogged us ahead in the ability of law enforcement to best protect our community"
- Sheriff Paul Babeu, Pinal County Arizona
America’s 2011 “Sheriff of the Year 

In the coming months, BI2’s iris recognition devices will be installed in every sheriff’s department along the U.S.-Mexico border. Each department will receive both a stationary iris capture device for inmate intake facilities and, eventually, a mobile version, . .

HOW IT WORKS: The technology works by taking a high-resolution image of a person’s iris with a special infrared illumination camera, and then creating an individualized iris template based on that image. The templates exploit nearly 240 unique characteristic elements in the iris, compared to the 40 to 60 used for fingerprints, resulting in far fewer false matches. To make an identification, BI2’s iris recognition program compares an individual’s iris against the over 987,000 iris scans held in its private database, which collects images from over 180 law enforcement jurisdictions nationwide.

CAUTION: Giving law enforcement the ability to check and collect people’s irises for criminal history and, in effect, their citizenship information during stops could lead to racial profiling, said Nathan Wessler, staff attorney with the Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. “In this country, we’ve long resisted being a ‘show me your papers’ society, but this moves us to that because you increasingly can’t avoid your identity being scooped up in public,”

Adam Schwartz, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s civil liberties team, said local law enforcement should not be collecting biometric data to help federal immigration agencies, like U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “Just because you are walking in a border town and a cop says, ‘Hey, can I talk to you?’ you have no diminished expectations of privacy, and your biometrics should not be collected,” Schwartz told The Intercept. “Whatever legitimate interest police have in capturing biometrics to do ordinary law enforcement jobs, it is not proper to share that information with ICE.” Currently, ICE has direct access to many law enforcement databases.

Kelly Lytle Hernandez, an associate professor in the University of California, Los Angeles’s history department, argues the legal consequences of this development tie in to a much larger story about the U.S.-Mexico border. “It’s particularly interesting that this technology is being sold as a way to identify ‘chronic offenders’ of unauthorized re-entry, a crime that was invented in 1929 by Coleman Livingston Blease, a white supremacist senator from South Carolina who wanted to control the in-flow of Mexicans,” Hernandez said in an interview. “Any technology promising to ratchet up unauthorized re-entry charges is obviously wrapped up in that history.”

Schwartz, the EFF lawyer, worries that law enforcement agencies are not doing enough to ensure residents’ sensitive data is protected. “If the government is saying we just capture the data, push a button, and vendor takes care of it, that is wholly inadequate,” he said. “Every time the data is stored or transmitted there is a risk of breach. And, unlike an address or social security number, you can’t change your iris. So if the government is going to purchase tools from vendors that amass biometric data, it is necessary that they employ privacy officers who know how to prevent security breaches and move the data securely

“The argument that there are extraordinarily violent individuals living within these populations has always been a part of immigrant exclusion projects,” Hernandez said. “Especially for Mexican-Americans, there was a clear shift in the middle of the 1950s, after Operation Wetback” — a 1950s crackdown on immigration rife with civil rights violations — “which was supposed to have solved the problem of immigration but didn’t actually stop it. So to rationalize the ongoing immigration, authorities explicitly no longer spoke about immigrants as workers, but as criminals. We’ve been stuck with that discourse ever since.”
BI2’s iris surveillance expansion on the border is moving ahead full steam despite these concerns

 

Mall Guts! | Retail Archaeology Dead Mall Documentary

Published on Jul 7, 2017
Views: 1,138
In this episode we check out the guts of Fiesta Mall, a dead mall in Mesa, AZ!

What? Cross-Asset Quants Take A Dive > What does it mean??

From Bloomberg

Cross-Asset Quants Are Facing Their Worst Losses in a Decade

By Dani Burger @daniburgrMore stories by Dani Burger Bloomberg.com |Hawkish signals from central bankers have punished stocks and bonds alike in the past week.

Also punished: investors who make a living operating in several asset classes at once. They’ve been stung by the concerted selloff that lifted 10-year Treasury yields by 25 basis points and sent tech stocks to the biggest losses in 16 months. Among the hardest-hit were systematic funds who -- either to diversify or maximize gains -- dip their toes in a hodgepodge of different markets all at the same time.

Losses stand out in two of the best-known quant strategies:

1. Trend-following traders known as commodity trading advisers, and

2. Risk parity funds.

 

CTAs dropped 5.1 percent over the past two weeks, their worst stretch since 2007, according to a Societe General SA database of the 20 largest managers. The Salient Risk Parity Index dropped 1.8 percent, the most in four months.

To a category of critics, it’s an environment where the potential for snowballing losses becomes greater, as the overseers of such funds take steps to reduce risk. So many face losses at once, the theory goes, that a chain reaction of selling ensues with the potential to whack markets further... On the surface, it’s strange that both strategies suffered over the past week since they’re supposed to behave differently.

 

May 2017 REAL DATA/REAL FACTS: Goods & Services Deficit=$46.5 Billion$$$$$$$$$

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE AT 8:30 A.M. EDT, Thursday, July 6, 2017
The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) has issued the following news release today:

BEA News: U.S. International Trade in Goods and Services, May 2017

The U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, through the Department of Commerce, announced today that the goods and services deficit was $46.5 billion in May, down $1.1 billion from $47.6 billion in April, revised. May exports were $192.0 billion, $0.9 billion more than April exports. May imports were $238.5 billion, $0.2 billion less than April imports.
The full text of the release and data tables in this release on BEA's Web site can be found at www.bea.gov/newsreleases/international/trade/tradnewsrelease.htm 

These data are not in the BEA press release

NOTES:
All statistics referenced are seasonally adjusted; statistics are on a balance of payments basis unless otherwise specified. Additional statistics, including not seasonally-adjusted statistics and details for goods on a Census basis, are available in Exhibits 1-20b of this release.
For information on data sources, definitions, revision procedures, and scheduled release dates through December 2017, see the information section on page A-1 of this release. The next release is August 4, 2017.

The U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, through the Department of Commerce,announced today that the goods and services deficit was $46.5 billion in May, down $1.1 billionfrom $47.6 billion in April, revised. May exports were $192.0 billion, $0.9 billion more than Aprilexports. May imports were $238.5 billion, $0.2 billion less than April imports.
The May decrease in the goods and services deficit reflected a decrease in the goods deficit of$0.9 billion to $67.5 billion and an increase in the services surplus of $0.2 billion to $21.0
billion.
Year-to-date, the goods and services deficit increased $27.0 billion, or 13.1 percent, from the same period in 2016. Exports increased $54.3 billion or 6.0 percent. Imports increased $81.4 billion or 7.3 percent.
Goods by Selected Countries and Areas: Monthly – Census Basis (Exhibit 19)
The May figures show surpluses, in billions of dollars, with South and Central America ($2.4),Hong Kong ($2.3), Singapore ($0.8), Brazil ($0.8), and United Kingdom ($0.7). Deficits were recorded, in billions of dollars, with China ($30.1), European Union ($10.7), Mexico ($6.8), Japan ($6.4),Germany ($4.7), Italy ($2.4), Canada ($2.2), India ($2.0), Taiwan ($1.7), France ($1.7), OPEC ($1.1), South Korea ($0.8), and Saudi Arabia ($0.2).