So, unfortunately for patient reader,
the trend continues as the powers that be decree the cat video pivot now
has to be combined with something as well. So here's strutting the
catwalk. I am so sorry....
Thank goodness the subjects of the stories are now doing the combining for us!
From The Verge:
Because human models are so last season
It’s 2018, and as further proof that we’re already living in the future, what’s more fashionable than drones? Drones with handbags,according
to Italian luxury fashion house Dolce & Gabanna, which sent a bunch
of flying drones down its runway during the house’s fashion show in
Milan on Sunday.
Fashionista reports
that audience members were asked to turn off Wi-Fi on their phones, as
well as any personal hot spots. The show was also 45 minutes late to
start, and now we know why....MORE
We like D&G and not just for their response to a boycott threat from some group or other:
Or, in the words of the philosopher Larry the Cable Guy:
"I don't care who you are, that's funny"
Although, truth be told, since they discontinued the By Dolce & Gabbana cologne I don't stop by as often.
I missed a trick on the cologne. When D&G discontinued the scent you could still procure it in size for $95-125. It's now being offered out at $400-500 on eBay albeit with the huge caveat: there are a lot of knock-offs.
Anyhoo somehow related to all of the above, the intro to 2017's "Fashion: Bernie Sanders Is the Inspiration For Balenciaga’s Fall 2017 Menswear Collection":
A couple weeks late to this but interesting as a reflection of bizarro world Zeitgeist.
That said however, should Dolce & Gabbana come out with an Eau De Bernie I will probably just curl up in a corner of the office to await the end times....
The
two new species, note a team of scientists led by Bernard La Scola from
Aix-Marseille University, have a protein shell, known as a capsid,
around 450 nanometres long and a cylindrical tail roughly the same
length. The tail is the largest ever discovered.
By comparison, a polio virus is typically just 70 nanometres long. A smallpox virus tops out at about 300 nanometres.
The
two closely related species were discovered in, or near, Brazil, one in
a soda lake, and the other in sediments at the bottom of the deep ocean
– both extreme environments known to support ancient lifeforms....MORE
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the Solar System, other little critters are doing Monty Python bits:
Pablo Picasso, Mousquetaire et nu assis (1967). Courtesy of CHRISTIE'S IMAGES LTD. 2018.
On a chilly, snow-spattered
evening, Christie’s kicked off a fortnight of auctions in London that
are expected to collectively generate as much as £782 million ($1.1
billion). If achieved, it will be a record for a series of Impressionist
and Modern and contemporary art sales in London, where a peak of £709.5
million ($1.2 billion) including premiums took place in February 2014.
Aiming high—and without regard for anyone’s
dinner plans—the house piled 97 lots into their evening sale. In front
of the packed room, in which many had attended in order to catch a
preview of the Rockefeller treasures that will be sold later this spring
in New York, the sale realized a healthy £149.6 million, squarely
within its estimated total of £122 million-£167 million. (Prices include
premium, estimates do not.)
The total was Christie’s second highest in
this category for a London sale and included £36 million from a
catalogue of 34 Surrealist works. Twenty-two percent of the total lots
failed to sell.
A modest four lots were guaranteed in the Impressionist and
Modern section, including the top two by value. One of Picasso’s many
late musketeer paintings sold for £13.7 million (with a £12 million low
estimate). The buyer was Harry Smith, chairman of the London-based art
advisors and valuers Gurr Johns. It last appeared at auction in 2007,
when it sold for £6.8 million. Smith then went on to buy all seven
Picassos in this section of the sale, spending more than £40 million of
his client’s money and outbidding challengers from Asia, and the
Acquavella and Lefevre galleries—all without ever breaking into a smile.
But strangely he left before the Surrealist sale, in which there were
other Picassos.
Edgar Degas, In the Wings (1982-85). Courtesy of Christie’s Images, 2018.
The second top lot, Edgar Degas‘s theatrical scene In the Wings
(1882-85), had been bought in Paris in 1997 for £2.5 million, doubling
its estimate. Now guaranteed with an £8 million low estimate and,
although not designated as such in the catalogue, known to be the
property of British billionaire collector Lord Graham Kirkham, it sold
apparently to the third-party guarantor without competition for £9
million. A sale nonetheless....
Ex-Cisco CTO's Chinese electric car startup eyes $2 billion U.S. IPO
A U.S. IPO that could raise as much as
$2 billion could be coming later this year from the Chinese electric
vehicle company whose American headquarters is in San Jose.
Reuters cited unnamed sources who said that Nio has hired eight banks, including Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, to work on an offering that would raise between $1 billion and $2 billion in the second half of this year.
Nio's U.S. operations are led by Padmasree Warrior, the former chief technology officer at Cisco Systems Inc. (NASDAQ:CSCO).
At the high end of the projected IPO range, Nio's offering would be the
biggest Chinese listing in the U.S. since Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.
(NYSE:BABA) raised $25 billion in 2014. The next biggest after that is
the October 2016 IPO in which ZTO Express (NYSE:ZTO) raised $1.41
billion....MORE
We've looked at the correlation a few times, one of the posts after the jump.
From Barron's Commodities Corner, Oct. 31, 2015:
NASA predicts fewer sunspots, which may mean cooler weather, lower crop yields, and higher prices. Betting on a correlation as old as Galileo.
A decades-old government crop report, combined with the very latest data from NASA, seem to indicate that there will be poor growing conditions and lower grain yields over the next few years. As a result, traders should expect prices for wheat and corn to rise.
The report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, published almost four decades ago, studied crop yields in the U.S. from 1866 to 1973. The paper, “Do Sunspot Cycles Affect Crop Yields?” by Virden Harrison, an agricultural economist with the commodity economics division of the USDA’s economic-research service, matched historical crop-yield data for wheat, corn, rice, and cotton with sunspot activity. And National Aeronautics and Space Administration forecasts for sunspots forming on the solar surface suggest that the sun is commencing lower activity that will last for the next five years.
THAT’S BAD NEWS FOR growers because historically fewer sunspots are associated with colder weather and lower crop yields. It has only recently become apparent that the solar cycle hit its peak last year, with the sunspot count in decline since then. “Sunspots are a proxy for the total solar effect,” says Joe D’Aleo, chief meteorologist for agriculture at Weatherbell Analytics. The activity manifests itself as more, or less, ultraviolet radiation, cosmic rays, and geomagnetic activity, all of which act as “magnifiers” to warm, or cool, the planet, he said in a 2014 white paper for INTL FCStone.
It’s worth noting that there are plenty of skeptics who would disagree as to how much alterations in solar activity affect temperatures around the globe and if there is any causation between sunspots and weather. Whether it’s a coincidence is irrelevant for investors as long as the correlation holds, which it has for some time now.
In fact, says Don Coxe, of Coxe Advisors, “It’s a coincidence that has occurred consistently since Galileo’s time.”
Broadly speaking, fewer sunspots, as NASA is projecting, mean chillier weather. That results in lower crop growth and reduced yields. “On the basis of this [forecast for fewer sunspots], we feel the chances of having the kind of growing weather we have had recently is decreasing,” Coxe adds.
HE SAYS THAT THE actual effect partly will depend on where you are on the globe. Most of the world’s grain is produced within northern climates....MORE
This story at Accu-weather reminded me of William Herschel:
Herschel Takes A Picture; Endeavour Tank
Astronews!
As you may know, the Herschel and Planck spacecraft were launched back
in May. The first images captured by Herschel have come back to Earth,
and as luck would have it, they are of one of my favorite Messier
Objects; M51, the Whirlpool Galaxy, in constellation Canes Venatici.
Herschel took the first images using its Photodetector Array Camera and
Spectrometer (PACS) instrument. Charles Messier first observed the
object around 1773 and it lies about 35 million light-years away; it was
the first galaxy discovered with a spiral structure. The image was
taken at 70, 100 and 160 microns after Herschel's cryocover (essentially
its lens cap) was opened. Herschel is the first space-based observatory
to cover the entire wavelength spectrum from the far Infrared to the
sub-millimeter band (60-670 micrometers)....MORE
See important note.*
During a misspent youth one of my follies was following in William Herschel's footsteps.
First, this report on prices at the Minneapolis Grain Exchange for Hard Red Spring Wheat (the good stuff)....
***
...And Herschel? In 1801 he announced** he had spotted a correlation between sunspots and wheat prices. Here's a mention in the Edinburgh Philosophical Journal, 1823.
The
question has been argued for 200 years and Herschel has, off and on,
been the subject of ridicule***. Here's a headline from the New York
Times in 1903:
SUN SPOTS NO PROPHETS; Science Destroys Theories That Disasters Follow Their Appearance. Interesting as Solar Curiosities with Possible Relation to Electrical Conditions of Earth....Source
A
while later I came on the scene, couldn't figure out how to make money
out of Herschel's idea and having the attention span of a gnat, moved
on. So why bring it up? Since I first looked at the matter there's been a
lot of research and it appears the correlation may not be as spurious
as I thought. The wheat price series is one of the longest we have, it
extends back to 1250, I've got a paper chart that starts in 1300
(although some of the prices are dubious).
Google Scholar has 285 ref's
to Herschel and wheat prices. Gregory Yom Din of the Israel Cosmic Ray
Center, Tel Aviv University and Israel Space Agency, seems particularly
interested, here, here, here, and note below. *I am not saying current wheat prices are trading off the solar cycle. La Niña, the very low carry-over and corn planting in former wheat fields is enough to account for today's prices. But looking ahead....
We seem to be in an unusual solar cycle. The start of cycle 24 has been
delayed longer than usual, so we're stuck at the quiet end of 23. From NASA:...
Well, 24 finally got started, it was much weaker than the preceding three or four cycles, we're sliding into another cycle minimum but this time it might be a grand minimum along the lines of the Dalton or, hopefully not, Maunder, and it's time to play our theme song:
I'll be referring back to this paper sometime next month so this post is as much an aide-memoire as anything.
Via IEEEexplore:
Abstract:
The
paper is to investigate features of fluctuation of international dry
bulk shipping market using Baltic dry bulk freight index. After
fundamental statistical analysis on data, R/S and GPH tests are employed
to model long memory of volatility of the indices, which interprets the
existence of long memory and then leverage effect in the market
subdivided by ship types including Handymax, Panamax, and Capesize.
Moreover, VaR (value-at-risk) of spot freight rates in the dry bulk
shipping market with EGARCH (Exponential ARCH) VaR model is used to
further the study on volatility of the indices because of the daily
return series with factors of volatility clustering and significant ARCH
(Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedastic) and the distribution with
characteristics of fat tail. The empirical results suggest the operators
and investors in the dry bulk shipping market to increase operational
profits and reduce investment risks according to the long memory and the
VaR.
Kazakh mining company Eurasian Resources Group (ERG), formerly known as
ENRC, is working on a plan to eventually spin off and list some of its
assets to help repay debt, three banking sources said.
The company, then called Eurasian National Resources Corporation (ENRC),
was taken private by its three founders and the Kazakh government in
2013 in a $4.5 billion buyout, six years after listing on the London
stock exchange.
While listed in London, the company was dogged by boardroom
battles, weak commodity prices and an investigation into fraud and
bribery at some of its subsidiaries.
ERG, which is
registered in Luxembourg, has ferrochrome, aluminum, iron ore and energy
operations in Kazakhstan, copper and cobalt assets in Africa and iron
ore mines in Brazil.
The assets sales will help ERG pay
off some of its debt, the sources said. VTB agreed last year to extend
the terms covering $3 billion of ERG’s debt to 2022. As of July 2016,
ERG owed $5.8 billion to its main creditors, VTB (VTBR.MM) and Sberbank (SBER.MM).....MORE
Mr. Hume is the commodities editor of the FT. Back in 2016 we politely queried: "a small request for the Financial Times: Can you tell us what the old ENRC is up to these days?" Now I'll add:
Many market participants think they heard Fed Chair Powell give a fairly strong signal that he favored a more aggressive course. The implied yield on the December Eurodollar futures rose five basis points to 1.535%. The December Fed funds futures contract rose three basis points. The market moved not to pricing in a fourth hike this year, but to fully price in the third hike, which the December dot plots implied. A third hike would bring the effective Fed funds rate to 2.17% and the implied yield of the January 2019 Fed funds futures contract is 2.155%. It took Powell's apparent comfort with a more aggressive path to convince the market of something the Fed's dot plot indicated more than two months ago.
We do not think that Powell will be pleased with the market's reaction. It seemed to misconstrue. He prefaced his comment by saying he did not want to prejudge the FOMC, but that his personal outlook for the economy had strengthened. This is important. What strengthened? Powell's outlook. What does that mean? We think it means that he is more confident that the Fed is on course to reach its mandated objectives. We continue to believe that the superior strategy here is not to change the dot plot to four hikes this year. The anti-inflation credibility of the Powell Fed will already be bolstered by a hike at his first meeting as Chair. The Fed need not signal its intention to hike more aggressively. By the June FOMC meeting, the trajectory of prices and the economy will be clearer. Ironically, a couple of hours before Powell testified, data were reported that prompted economists to revise down Q1 18 GDP forecasts. Taking the recent softness in housing starts into account as well, the Atlanta Fed GDPNow tracker lowered its estimate to 2.6% down from 3.2% on February 16. It began the month near 5.4%. It is the lowest estimate in four months. To be sure, it is not just in the US that the synchronized global recovery has met the New Year. Surveys and sentiment indicators in the euro area warn that economic momentum may have peaked. One exception to a string of mostly softer than expected reports was the February German employment data released today. Unemployment fell more than expected, with the unemployment queues shrinking by 22k instead of the 22k the median in the Bloomberg survey expected. Unemployment fell by an average of almost 16k a month in 2017. The three-month average now stands at a -25.3k, the most since April 2011. Price pressures remain steady. Today the preliminary estimate of February CPI was reported at 1.2%, in line with expectations, down from 1.3% in January. Last February headline eurozone inflation reached 2.0%. The core rate was steady at 1.0%. It was steady at 0.9% throughout Q4 17, which is also where it was in February 2017. Progress? The Japanese economy practically stagnated in the last three months of 2017. It has begun the new year on weak footing. Consider January retail sales. The 1.8% drop in the month was three-times more than expected and is worth six-month of sales at the average monthly gain in 2017 (0.3%). Industrial output slumped 6.6% in January. It is the largest decline since 2011. The market had expected around a 4% fall after December's 2.9% gain. China disappointed as well. ...
...the introduction to the Plasma Universe entry on Birkeland:
Kristian Olaf Bernhard Birkeland (13 December 1867 - 15 June 1917) was a Norwegian scientist who has been called "the first space scientist"[1] and "the father of plasma experiments in the laboratory and space"[2][3][4]. He is perhaps most well-known for his scientific work on the aurora using a terrella
(a magnetized globe), and as inventor of an electromagnetic cannon,
and, a method of electrically producing artificial fertilizer. He also
became a full professor of physics at the University of Oslo at the age
of 31.
Birkeland also had astrophysical research published on cathode rays,[5] the Zodiacal lights,[6] comets,[7] the Sun and sunspots,[8] the origin of planets and their satellites,[9] the Earth's magnetism.[10]
Some of Birkeland's other contributions to science included:[2] • Derived the general expression for the Poynting vector • Gave the first general solution to Maxwell's equations [11]
• Pioneered the field of charged-particle beams • Utilized the concept
of "longitudinal mass" • Constructed the first foil diodes • Pioneered
the field of visible-light photography of electrical discharges •
Advocated charged-particle propulsion engines for space travel • Created
Norsk Hydro's nitrogen-fertilizer industry (the Birkeland-Eyde method
for production of potassium nitrate) • Invented an electromagnetic rail
gun capable of firing a 10-kg projectile • Established Birkeland's
Firearms company • Anticipated cosmic rays (discovered in 1911) with his
calculations involving energies of several billion electron volts •
Held patents on the electromagnetic cannon,[12] electric blankets, solid margarine, and hearing aids.
In 1969 when field-align currents had been identified in the Earth's atmosphere, they were named in his honor: Birkeland currents.[13]....
He also co-founded Norsk Hydro and got his picture on the cover of the Rolling Stone Norway's 200 kr banknote:
The note will become invalid at the end of this year and the old boy will be replaced by a cod and a herring....
It was that Norsk Hydro bit that is important to this tale.
Norsk Hydro made nitrogen fertilizer using giant arcs to fix nitrogen in the air to nitric oxide which could be further manipulated to become nitric acid which can then be used to make explosives or fertilizer or other stuff. The process was very energy inefficient but hey, it was the early 20th century and we're talking Norway. They have a few waterfalls. Fast forward thirty years and despite the efforts of Birger and Andreas the Nazis have invaded and are intent on grabbing them some heavy water, of which Norsk Hydro has become the go-to source, as a byproduct of the now-modernized (no more Birkeland-Eyde process) fertilizer operation.
And it is here the story of February 28, 1943 really begins. From The Conversation via Scientific American:
Operation Gunnerside: The Norwegian Attack on Heavy Water That Deprived the Nazis of the Atomic Bomb
February 28 marks the 75th anniversary of one of the most dramatic and important military missions of World War II
The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research.
After handing them their suicide capsules, Norwegian Royal Army
Colonel Leif Tronstad informed his soldiers, “I cannot tell you why this
mission is so important, but if you succeed, it will live in Norway’s
memory for a hundred years.”
These commandos did know, however, that an earlier attempt at the same mission by British soldiers had been a complete failure.
Two gliders transporting the men had both crashed while en route to
their target. The survivors were quickly captured by German soldiers,
tortured and executed. If similarly captured, these Norwegians could
expect the same fate as their British counterparts, hence the suicide
pills.
Feb. 28 marks the 75th anniversary of Operation Gunnerside, and
though it hasn’t yet been 100 years, the memory of this successful
Norwegian mission remains strong both within Norway and beyond.
Memorialized in movies, books and TV mini-series, the winter sabotage of the Vemork chemical plant in Telemark County of Nazi-occupied Norway was
one of the most dramatic and important military missions of World War
II. It put the German nuclear scientists months behind and allowed the
United States to overtake the Germans in the quest to produce the first
atomic bomb.
While people tend to associate the United States’ atomic bomb efforts with Japan and the war in the Pacific, the Manhattan Project—the American program to produce an atomic bomb—was actually undertaken in reaction to Allied suspicions that the Germans were actively pursuing such a weapon. Yet the fighting in Europe ended before either side had a working atomic bomb. In fact, a rehearsal for Trinity—America’s first atomic bomb test detonation—was conducted on May 7, 1945, the very day that Germany surrendered.
So the U.S. atomic bomb arrived weeks too late for use against
Germany. Nevertheless, had the Germans developed their own bomb just a
few months earlier, the outcome of the war in Europe might have been
completely different. The months of setback caused by the Norwegians’
sabotage of the Vemork chemical plant may very well have prevented a
German victory.
Nazi bomb effort relied on heavy water
What Colonel Tronstad, himself a prewar chemistry professor,
was able to tell his men was that the Vemork chemical plant made “heavy
water,” an important ingredient for the Germans’ weapons research.
Beyond that, the Norwegian troops knew nothing of atomic bombs or how
the heavy water was used. Even today, when many people have at least a
rudimentary understanding of atomic bombs and know that the source of
their vast energy is the splitting of atoms, few have any idea what
heavy water is or its role in splitting those atoms. Still fewer know
why the German nuclear scientists needed it, while the Americans didn’t.
“Heavy water” is just that: water with a molecular weight of 20
rather than the normal 18 atomic mass units, or amu. It’s heavier than
normal because each of the two hydrogen atoms in heavy H2O weighs two
rather than one amu. (The one oxygen atom in H2O weighs 16 amu.) While
the nucleus of a normal hydrogen atom has a single subatomic particle
called a proton, the nuclei of the hydrogen atoms in heavy water have both a proton and a neutron—another
type of subatomic particle that weighs the same as a proton. Water
molecules with heavy hydrogen atoms are extremely rare in nature (less
than one in a billion natural water molecules are heavy), so the Germans
had to artificially produce all the heavy water that they needed.
In terms of their chemistries, heavy water and normal water behave
very similarly, and you wouldn’t detect any differences in your own
cooking, drinking or bathing if heavy water were to suddenly start
coming out of your tap. But you would notice that ice cubes made from heavy water sink rather than float when you put them in a glass of normal drinking water, because of their increased density.
Those differences are subtle, but there is something heavy water does
that normal water can’t. When fast neutrons released by the splitting
of atoms (that is, nuclear fission) pass through heavy water,
interactions with the heavy water molecules cause those neutrons to slow
down, or moderate.
This is important because slowly moving neutrons are more efficient at
splitting uranium atoms than fast moving neutrons. Since neutrons
traveling through heavy water split atoms more efficiently, less uranium
should be needed to achieve a critical mass;
that’s the minimum amount of uranium required to start a spontaneous
chain reaction of atoms splitting in rapid succession. It is this chain
reaction, within the critical mass, that releases the explosive energy
of the bomb. That’s why the Germans needed the heavy water; their
strategy for producing an atomic explosion depended upon it.
The American scientists, in contrast, had chosen a different approach to achieve a critical mass. As I explain in my book, “Strange Glow: The Story of Radiation,” the U.S. atomic bomb effort used enriched uranium—uranium that has an increased concentration of the easily split uranium-235—while the Germans used unenriched uranium.
And the Americans chose to slow the neutrons emitted from their
enriched uranium with more readily available graphite, rather than heavy
water. Each approach had its technological trade-offs, but the U.S.
approach did not rely on having to synthesize the extremely scarce heavy
water. Its rarity made heavy water the Achilles’ heel of the German
nuclear bomb program.
Stealthy approach by the Norwegians
Rather than repeating the British strategy of sending dozens of men
in gliders, flying with heavy weapons and equipment (including
bicycles!) to traverse the snow-covered roads, and making a direct
assault at the plant’s front gates, the Norwegians would rely on an alternate strategy.
They’d parachute a small group of expert skiers into the wilderness
that surrounded the plant. The lightly armed skiers would then quickly
ski their way to the plant, and use stealth rather than force to gain
entry to the heavy water production room in order to destroy it with
explosives...MUCH MORE
Google – plus Facebook and Twitter – also gets a shoeing from Obama, newspapers
There is no love for online giants Google and Facebook right now, with even their friends sticking the boot in.
Audio of a secret address given by Barack Obama last week has emerged
in which the 44th US President criticized the monster corporations for
not recognizing the dangerous negative impact they are having on
society.
"Our social media platforms are just a tool," he
noted. "ISIS can use that tool. Neo-Nazis can use that tool. I do think
the large platforms - Google and Facebook being the most obvious,
Twitter and others as well, are part of that ecosystem – have to have a
conversation about their business model that recognizes they are a
public good as well as a commercial enterprise. They're not just an
invisible platform, they're shaping our culture in powerful ways."
Obama and his administration had an especially tight relationship with Google while Barry was in power – Google execs met senior White House officials an extraordinary 230 times in the first five years of Obama's term, averaging once a week, while Comcast, for example, had just 20 such meetings.
But despite that long relationship, (oh, and here's two more instances) it didn't stop Obama sticking the boot in when it comes to fake news and Russian bots.
Opinions count
"Essentially we now have entirely different realities
that are being created with not just different opinions, but now
different facts," Obama said. "And this isn't just by the way Russian
inspired bots and fake news. This is Fox News versus The New York Times
editorial page. If you look at these different sources of information,
they do not describe the same thing. In some cases, they don't even talk
about the same thing. And so it is very difficult to figure out how
democracy works over the long term in those circumstances."
He argued that Facebook and Google would do well to
keep in mind that the US government will ensure that "basic rules of the
road [are] in place that create level playing fields."
PAC-man
Talking of newspapers, the News Media Alliance (NMA),
which represents over 2,000 papers in the United States, has also had
enough of Facebook and Google and their special status.
It has launched a new political action committee – yes, a PAC – to
"ensure that regulatory and legislative initiatives facilitate
investment in news media and allow member companies to operate and
develop new business models."...
The European Commission wants to tax large digital companies’ revenues
based on where their users are located rather than where they are
headquartered at a common rate between 1 and 5 percent, a draft
Commission document showed.
The proposal, seen by Reuters, aims at increasing the tax
bill of firms like Amazon [AMZN.O], Google [GOOGL.O] and Facebook [FB.O]
that are accused by large EU states of paying too little by re-routing
their EU profits to low-tax countries such as Luxembourg and Ireland.
The
plan resembles a French proposal on an equalization tax that was
supported by several big EU states. However, it is likely to face
opposition from small countries that fear becoming less attractive to
multinational firms.
The document says the tax should
be applied to companies with revenues above 750 million euros ($922
million) worldwide and with EU digital revenues of at least 10 million
euros a year....MUCH MORE
The latest GPU market report from Jon Peddie research
has been released and shows that AMD gained a good chunk of the GPU
market share during fourth quarter of 2017. At the same time, both
NVIDIA and Intel witnessed decline in GPU market share.
AMD Gained Huge Chunk of GPU Market Share in Q4 2017, NVIDIA and
Intel Fall Behind – Crypto Miners End Up Gobbling Over 3 Million
Discrete Graphics Cards
According to the report from Jon Peddie,
the overall GPU shipments decreased in Q4 2017 when compared to the
previous quarter. The decrease was about -1.5% which follows normal
seasonal shipments. Then again, year to year comparison shows that GPU
shipments decreased -4.8%, the desktop graphics decreased -2% and
notebook graphics decreased -7%. The report also states that 3 million
discrete graphics cards were consumed by miners alone during 2017 which
amounted to $776 million in sales.
When breaking down the numbers, it looks like AMD won this quarter
big time with a market share increase of 8.1%. At the same time, NVIDIA
decreased -6% while Intel decreased -2%. The current market share looks
like the following:
AMD @ 14.2% (versus 13.0% Last Quarter)
NVIDIA @ 18.4% (versus 19.3% Last Quarter)
Intel @ 67.4% (versus 67.8% Last Quarter)
AMD was the main benefactor [sic] of the total mining hardware sales of
$776 million as reported in the article. When comparing the graphics
chip market segments, almost the entire industry saw a downward trend in
Q4 2017 which includes discrete graphics for desktop, notebook
integrated and embedded for mobility systems. The discrete notebook
market and desktop integrated and embedded platforms saw an increase in
growth rate of 3.6% and 3.0% respectively....MORE
John Hennessy has had a busy month. The former president of Stanford University was just named chairman of the board for Alphabet, Google’s parent company. And he just helped name the first class of 49 Knight-Hennessy scholars,
his new program aimed at turning graduate students into leaders that
will improve the world. (He called all of them personally to give them
the news—he was that excited.)
I caught up with Hennessy to find out a little more about how he
plans to juggle his multiple roles, how Google can “Do the right thing”
(as the company’s new motto states), and his views on current hot-button
issues in technology. Here’s what he had to say.
On taking on the chairmanship of Alphabet, and how it fits with his day job:
How much time will Alphabet take? Hennessy says: “I’m planning to be
down there once a month—twice as much as before. [In order to do that] I
will probably compress my schedule a little bit, I’ll take some things
off. I’m finishing up a book on leadership that I’ve been working on for
the past year, so that will free some time.” He will continue on as
director of the Knight-Hennessy scholars program, and teaching will
likely stay in the mix. At the moment, he says, “I’m teaching a graduate course on advanced multicore computer architectures.”
On not being evil, doing the right thing, and changing things for the positive:
Google in recent years changed its company motto
from “Don’t be evil” to “Do the right thing.” The Knight-Hennessy
scholars will “Change things for the positive.” Fine differences in
meaning, to be sure, but different nonetheless. Hennessy explained his
perspective on doing good and avoiding evil: “The change from ‘Don’t be
evil’ to ‘Do the right thing,’” he says, “was an attempt to push the
company in the direction of using technology to do the right thing,
that’s more than just avoiding evil.”
“For Google, sometimes that means the right answer is to change
something. Sometimes it’s to make what you have better,” he adds.
Doing the right thing, Hennessy says, also means thinking about what
will be good for both users and shareholders in the long term. “If you
focus so much on the short-term money,” he says, “you won’t be doing
either your long-term shareholders nor your users any particular good. I
worry today that there are too many startups that just want a quick
hit, not to make a long-term investment, and that’s not what Silicon
Valley was built around. You look at our history—at Hewlett and Packard
or Gordon Moore. They built great companies because they believed those
companies could produce products that could make people’s lives
better—that is what we should be aiming for.”
On the dangers of “fake news,” social media, and the presence of technology everywhere:
“It’s not technology that has created the rifts in our communities,”
says Hennessy, “so much as it is that the country and the world are
divided; tech just enables anyone to put their opinions out there.”
“However,” he says, “we should be able to determine and control truly
fake news, information that is patentable false. And we should be able
to figure out how to identify videos that truly incite violence and not
be associated with that.”
He acknowledges: “That’s not going to be easy; censorship is a
difficult thing to do. It presents a big challenge for the tech
industry.”
Hennessy also worries “about young people becoming so focused on
electronic devices that they reduce personal interactions, reading
books, and other experiences. When I was growing up, we had extremely
strict limitations on when we could watch TV or not; there was
absolutely no TV during the week, and only limited viewing time on
weekends,” he says. “We have to do the same with young people and their
devices today.”
On artificial intelligence (and why it’s not overhyped):
“I think AI is a gigantic change,” says Hennessy. “We argue back and
forth about whether it is an even bigger change than the Internet
itself; it might not be, but it is going to change a lot of things.”
AI has taken off, he says, thanks to the increase in computational power, of course, but also, oddly enough, thanks to spam.
“One of the early successes for machine learning was spam detection,”
Hennessy points out. “What made that possible was that we had millions
of messages tagged by users as spam or not spam....
...Here we show, by means of agent based simulations, that
if the latter two features actually hold in a given model of an
organization with a hierarchical structure, then not only is the Peter
principle unavoidable, but also it yields in turn a significant
reduction of the global efficiency of the organization.
Within a game theory-like approach, we explore different promotion strategies and
we find, counterintuitively, that in order to avoid such an effect the
best ways for improving the efficiency of a given organization are
either to promote each time an agent at random or to promote randomly
the best and the worst members in terms of competence.
Here is the paper presented at Econophysics Colloquium 2009 (55 page PDF)...MORE
“Take the probability
of loss times the amount of possible loss from the probability of gain
times the amount of possible gain. That is what we're trying to do. It's
imperfect but that's what it's all about.”
— Warren Buffett
You can train your brain to think like CEOs, professional poker
players, investors, and others who make tricky decisions in an uncertain
world by weighing probabilities.
All decisions involve potential tradeoffs and opportunity costs. The
question is, how can we make the best possible choices when the factors
involved are often so complicated and confusing? How can we determine
which statistics and metrics are worth paying attention to? How do we
think about averages?
Expected value is one of the simplest tools you can use to think
better. While not a natural way of thinking for most people, it
instantly turns the world into shades of grey by forcing us to weigh
probabilities and outcomes. Once we've mastered it, our decisions become
supercharged. We know which risks to take, when to quit projects, when
to go all in, and more.
Expected value refers to the long-run average of a random variable.
If you flip a fair coin ten times, the heads-to-tails ratio will
probably not be exactly equal. If you flip it one hundred times, the
ratio will be closer to 50:50, though again not exactly. But for a very
large number of iterations, you can expect heads to come up half the
time and tails the other half. The law of large numbers dictates that
the values will, in the long term, regress to the mean, even if the
first few flips seem unequal.
The more coin flips, the closer you get to the 50:50 ratio. If you
bet a sum of money on a coin flip, the potential winnings on a fair coin
have to be bigger than your potential loss to make the expected value
positive.
We make many expected-value calculations without even realizing it.
If we decide to stay up late and have a few drinks on a Tuesday, we
regard the expected value of an enjoyable evening as higher than the
expected costs the following day. If we decide to always leave early for
appointments, we weigh the expected value of being on time against the
frequent instances when we arrive early. When we take on work, we view
the expected value in terms of income and other career benefits as
higher than the cost in terms of time and/or sanity.
Likewise, anyone who reads a lot knows that most books they choose
will have minimal impact on them, while a few books will change their
lives and be of tremendous value. Looking at the required time and money
as an investment, books have a positive expected value (provided we
choose them with care and make use of the lessons they teach).
These decisions might seem obvious. But the math behind them would be
somewhat complicated if we tried to sit down and calculate it. Who
pulls out a calculator before deciding whether to open a bottle of wine
(certainly not me) or walk into a bookstore?...
In the peaceful French village of Thiel-sur-Acolin, retired farmer
Marc Bernardet is ambivalent about having a Chinese billionaire for a
neighbour.
Over the past four years Hu Keqin has quietly snapped up 3,000 hectares
of wheat fields in the central Indre and Allier regions, including next
door to Bernardet.
His purchases are part of a Chinese buying-spree in recent years
stretching from the US to Australia. And in France, struggling farmers
fear a landgrab.
“It’s a piece of French heritage that is being taken, but that’s
globalisation and that’s the trend at the moment,” Bernardet told AFP.
“If it wasn’t the Chinese, it would be someone else.”
The fields may be bare for winter, but Hu has big dreams: eventually
they’ll provide some of the flour for 1,500 French bakeries in China,
catering to a burgeoning middle class.
But he is keenly aware of the suspicions his project faces in France,
where farmers say their traditional family ownership model is under
threat from a huge rise in investor purchases.
“We take extremely good care of our land, and we’re using only French
people to cultivate it,” the 57-year-old insisted in an interview at his
Beijing offices.
“Many foreign investors are buying land in France,” added the
understated businessman with a net worth estimated at $1.22 billion by
Forbes magazine.
“Are we so different from the Germans or the English? Shouldn’t we, like the others, encourage the local economy to develop?”
Macron vows crackdown
Hu cannily used legal loopholes – buying almost all of each farm rather
than the entirety – to skirt rules that can allow the French government
to block sales of farmland...
We've been posting on British Farmland for years but, outside of the odd
Chateau listing and the effects of climate on wine growing I think this
is the first French farmland post.
Two things to be very, very wary of: The Common Agricultural Policy and the French tax code....
From Motherboard:
Craig Wright is being sued by Ira Kleiman, brother of deceased coder Dave Kleiman and representative of his estate.
Bitcoin’s origins are shrouded in mystery, but two people have lurked
at the edges of its mythology for years: A paralyzed coder named Dave Kleiman who died in 2013 as a result of complications from an illness, and Australian Craig Wright, who claimed to be Bitcoin’s anonymous creator in 2016.
Now
Dave Kleiman’s estate is suing Wright for up to 1,100,111 bitcoins
worth over $10 billion USD and intellectual property related to Bitcoin
software, according to a lawsuit filed in a Florida court February 14.
The suit, filed on behalf of Ira Kleiman, Dave’s brother and the
representative of his estate, alleges that Wright and Kleiman mined
bitcoins together in the currency’s early days, and that since Kleiman’s
death Wright has “perpetrated a scheme” to “seize Dave’s bitcoins.”
The lawsuit (embedded below) admits that the amount of bitcoins at issue
must be determined at trial—basically, Kleiman isn’t sure how much is
really at stake. But Kleiman’s lawyers have Wright’s own statements to
go from, from which they extrapolated that, in their view, Wright owes
Ira Kleiman up to one million bitcoins, which is the full amount of
bitcoins allegedly mined by Wright and Kleiman. Ultimately, the lawsuit
is seeking somewhere between 300,000 and 1.1 million bitcoins.
Notably, the lawsuit makes no claim on whether Kleiman or Wright, or
both of them (or neither of them) actually created Bitcoin. It does,
however, allege that the pair were in communication as early as March
2008—the Bitcoin white paper was published in October 2008—and that Dave
told his brother Ira in 2009 that “he was creating ‘digital money’ with
a wealthy foreign man, i.e. Craig.” The suit alleges that Kleiman and
Wright “and two others” conducted a Bitcoin transaction on January 12,
2009, nine days after the very first block of Bitcoin transaction data was created by Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym used by Bitcoin’s inventor....MORE
In other theft news:
Someone Stole Steve Wozniak's Bitcoins
Back in October, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak revealed that he was a
huge fan of bitcoin - which he bought back when it was $700 - telling Bitcoin Magazine that
it was better than both gold and the dollar, which is "kind of phony",
while bitcoin is "genuine and real." The burly multi-millionaire also
said that he likes bitcoin because "it is based on mathematics."
"Bitcoins to me was a currency that was not manipulated by
the governments. It is mathematical, it is pure, it can’t be altered," Wozniak has said, explaining also why governments hate it so much....
"I had seven bitcoins stolen from me through fraud. Somebody bought them from me online through a credit card and they cancelled the credit card payment. It was that easy!"
Insider confirms that Chinese multinational will buy the company as a whole, in a deal reportedly worth about US$9.5 billon
Rumors circulating that Alibaba was planning the acquisition of Ele.me, one of the major online food delivery platforms in China, has been confirmed by an insider close to thedeal, Yicai.com reported.
Alibaba will buy the company as a whole, while the final
purchase price is still in discussion. The current valuation of the
platform is about US$9.5 billion.
What has become the focus is how Ele.me
will be integrated into Alibaba. The report said it is highly possible
that the firm will be placed under the leadership of Zhang Yong,
Alibaba’s CEO, to act as the infrastructure of Alibaba’s new retail
strategy....
Today's headline story is from Investor's Business Daily:
Sociedad Quimica y Minera de Chile (SQM), Albemarle (ALB) and other lithium stocks tumbled Monday, on worries that surging output to meet demand from Tesla (TSLA) and other makers of electric vehicles will weigh on prices.
Analysts at Morgan Stanley said that new and expanded lithium mines
in Chile "threaten to add" roughly 500,000 metric tons per year to
global supplies by 2025. They predict lithium prices will crash 45% by
2021.
Tesla and other electric car manufacturers use lithium ion batteries to power their vehicles. Last month, SQM and the Chilean government reached a deal to increase production as battery demand climbs.
Morgan Stanley downgraded Albemarle to underweight from equal weight
and lowered its price target to 85 from 100, and also downgraded SQM to
underweight from equal weight.
Albemarle shares plunged 9.1% to 107.95 just past midday on the stock market today. SQM tumbled 8.3%. FMC Corp. (FMC) was down 3.1%. Global X Lithium & Battery Tech ETF (LIT), which has holdings in Albemarle, SQM and FMC, fell 4.2%.
Tesla rose 1.5% to 357.38.
Albemarle will report quarterly earnings Tuesday, and SQM is on tap for Wednesday....MORE
Eighteen months ago we went with cobalt over lithium as the battery
material that would be in shortest supply and think that is still a
correct assessment. However, if long-suffering reader is interested the
'search blog' box has quite a few hits for 'lithium'....
Commodity Trading Advisors, the trend-following computer boffins
responsible for almost a tenth of hedge fund assets under management,
had a terrible February meltdown. The FT has a run down of lots of the better known names on Monday.
A small flavour:
Man
AHL’s $1.1bn Diversified fund lost almost 10 per cent in the month to
February 16, while the London investment firm’s AHL Evolution and Alpha
funds were down about 4-5 per cent over the same period. The flagship
funds of GAM’s Cantab Capital, Systematica and Winton lost 9.5 per cent,
7.2 per cent and 5.3 per cent respectively between the start of the
month and February 16.
To that, we‘d add a couple of milestones highlighted by JP Morgan, with our emphasis:
"Pure Trend Following CTAs... lost almost 11 per cent in the week ending Feb 8 th.
This 11 per cent is the second highest recorded weekly loss since the
12 per cent Pure Trend Following CTAs lost in the week ending 5 th March 2007...."
The US Army wants something we have already seen in literature: to
enlist an “army” of sea creatures to help them track enemy submarines in
the sea. The Persistent Aquatic Living Sensors program could also modify existing species to make them better spies.
To be more specific, behind this controversial program that has
already encountered strong opposition from activist groups, DARPA,
currently the research and development wing of the Pentagon, is
located. The agency explained a few days ago through its website what
PALS was about:
It is a program that will study natural and modified
organisms to determine which can better support the sensor systems that
detect the movement of unmanned and unmanned submarine vehicles.
If the military can develop a system to detect the reactions of
marine life to passing ships, in theory it could monitor all the world’s
oceans in search of enemy activity, and do it more economically and
effectively than with purely artificial sensors. According to DARPA.
Beyond pure ubiquity, sensor systems built around living organisms would offer a number of advantages over hardware alone....
From Amazon's D.C. attorney's, Gibson Dunn via the Securities and Exchange Commission:
January
9, 2018 VIA E-
MAIL
Office of Chief Counsel
Division of Corporation Finance
Securities and Exchange Commission
100 F Street, NE
Washington, DC 20549
Re: Amazon.com , Inc. Shareholder Proposal of AFL- CIO Reserve Fund Exchange Act of 1934—Rule 14a-8
Ladies and Gentlemen:
This letter is to inform you that our client,
Amazon.com
, Inc.
(the
“Company”), intends to
omit from its proxy statement and form of proxy for its
2018 Annual
Meeting
of
Shareholders
(collectively, the
“2018 Proxy Materials
”) a shareholder proposal
(the
“Proposal”) and statement
s in support thereof (the “Supporting Statement”)
received from
the AFL
-CIO Reserve Fund (the “Proponent”
).
Pursuant to Rule 14a-8(j), we have:
•
filed this letter with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the
“Commission
”) no later than eighty (80) calendar days before the Company
intends to file its definitive
2018 Proxy Materials with the Commission; and
•
concurrently sent copies of this correspondence to the Proponent.
Rule 14a-
8(k)
and Staff Legal Bulletin No. 14D (Nov. 7, 2008)
(“SLB 14D”)
provide that
shareholder proponents are required to send companies a copy of any correspondence that
the proponents elect to submit to the Commission or the staff of the Division of Corporation
Finance (the “
Staff”). Accordingly, we are taking this opportunity to inform the Proponent
that if the Proponent
elect
s to submit additional correspondence to the Commission or the
Staff with respect to this Proposal, a copy of that correspondence should be furnished
concurrently to the undersigned on behalf of the Company pursuant to Rule 14a-8(k) and
SLB 14D
.
GIBSON
DUNN
Office of Chief Counsel
Division of Corporation Finance
January
9, 2018
Page 2
THE
PROPOSAL
The Proposal r
elates to the Company’s growth and commercial success
. Specifically, the
Proposal
states:
RESOLVED, that shareholders of Amazon.com Inc. (“Amazon”) urge the Board of
Directors (the “Board”) to analyze and report to shareholders on the risks arising
from the public debate over Amazon’s growth and societal impact and how Amazon
is managing or mitigating those risks.
The report should address risks related to
Amazon’s role in providing physical and digital infrastructure, use of and control
over data about customers and competitors, increasing reliance on automation and
influence on the quality and diversity of content.
In the Supporting Statement, the Proponent states that “[a]s Amazon has grown, so has
public debate over its size, dominant platforms and impacts on key constituencies.”
The
Proponent then cites to numerous websites
that appear to raise concerns about the
Company’s growth, such as the Company’s “informational advantages in product
development and pricing” and the Company’s “impact on places in which it operates.”
A copy of the Proposal, as well as related correspondence
with
the Proponent, is attached to
this letter as Exhibit A
.
On a lighter note, after checking Amazon's Investor Relations page to see if the proxy materials were out yet (they are not) I did a quick Google search for Amazon rule 14A and the second hit to come up was:
I too have fallen under the spell of the allure and mystique of guano.
From 99% Invisible:
In 2014, President Obama expanded the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument,
making it the largest marine preserve in the world at the time. The
expansion closed 490,000 square miles of largely undisturbed ocean to
commercial fishing and underwater mining.
Boundaries of the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument via NOAA
The preserve is nowhere near the mainland United States nor is it all in
close range to Hawaii. Still, President Obama was able to protect this
piece of ocean in the name of the United States.
To understand how the U.S. has jurisdiction over these waters in the
middle of the Pacific Ocean, one has to look back to the 19th Century
when, for a brief period, the U.S. scoured the oceans looking for rock
islands covered in guano. That is: seabird poop.
Guano
was a great fertilizer and many believed it would revolutionize
farming, which traditionally involved cycling crops or simply depleting
soil nutrients and moving to new land.
While novel to Americans and Europeans, using bird poop as fertilizer
was nothing new to the Quechua people of Peru who had long mined it
from the Chincha Islands
off the southwest coast of Peru. For centuries, seabirds nesting on the
islands had piled up guano, sometimes close to a 100 feet deep, making
it a rich and ready source of the stuff.
Europeans hadn’t shown any interest in guano until the Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt
visited the Peruvian coast in 1804, and saw laborers unloading ships
filled with seabird poop. Von Humboldt took a sample and brought it back
to Europe. A German chemist named Justus Von Liebig subsequently began
promoting a theory that soil fertility came down to a few critical
nutrients—nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. Peruvian guano was rich
in all three.
It was the agricultural analogue to discovering gold.
The Peruvians began to mine guano on a commercial scale. Their
operations relied on an abusive labor system, first with locally coerced
laborers and then with imported Chinese workers. Miners lived on the
islands in tents and shacks, working up to 17 hours a day. The wages
were low, and the conditions were awful; guano is acrid, and caustic
when inhaled.
The guano trade made its way to Europe via British merchants, and
soon farmers across the continent were using Peruvian guano on their
fields. Word of the fertilizing power of seabird poop reached the United
States, and by the late 1840s the country had entered a state of what
historians have called “guano mania.” Tens of thousands of tons of guano
were being imported to the U.S. every year.
Mining a mountain of guanoBritish firms controlled the Peruvian trade, and guano was expensive.
American interests resolved to break the monopoly. Entrepreneurs in the
United States petitioned Congress to create a mechanism to help them
claim their own guano islands. Some lawmakers opposed this effort, on
the grounds that it smacked of the same kind of imperialism that various
European countries were engaged in around the world at the time.
The U.S., of course, already had its own approach to imperialism,
having taken over much of North America by stealing territory from
indigenous people. But political leaders didn’t think of this as
imperialism, since these lands were incorporated into the country, first
as territories and then as states.
Ultimately, a compromise was reached: the guano islands would not be
considered as subject to the sovereignty of the U.S. but rather as
“appertaining” to the United States. While few knew what this meant from
a legal perspective, it was softer than claiming full ownership.
In 1856, the Congress passed the Guano Islands Act. Over the next several years U.S. companies claimed more than 70 islands throughout the Pacific and the Caribbean....MORE
A subject near and dear to my heart. I may be the only
person I've ever met who read every page of The Cowles Commission's
Common Stock Indexes 1871-1937.
[you must be a blast at parties -ed]
Mr. Cowles is quite explicit as to the reasons the Commission didn’t go further back than 1871. (pg. 4)
A big one is the paucity of publicly traded industrials. My favorite tidbit is the listing, among the pre-1871 industrials, of New York Guano.
Some things never change.
Islands and the Law: An Interview with Christina Duffy Burnett
...Christina Duffy Burnett is a professor of law at Columbia University,
where she teaches legal history, immigration, citizenship, and the US
Constitution. Much of her work deals with the legal problems that arise
at the margins of empire. She spoke with Sina Najafi by phone in June of
2010.
This is a very general question, but let’s take a stab at it anyway: do islands matter in the law?
The best way to get at this may be to start with something quite
specific. In the summer of 2003, I stumbled on a 969-page typescript
treatise which is kept in the library of the US State Department.
Flipping through this great leather-bound brick of onion-skin pages, I
gradually absorbed that the whole massive volume had been put together
in the 1930s by a lawyer working for the US Government who’d been given a
killer assignment. Apparently somebody had walked over to the desk of
this poor functionary, scribbling away in some basement office, and said
something along the lines of: “You know, we have a bunch of islands in
the Pacific and the Caribbean—little islands. How about you figure out
what the deal is with all these places, legally speaking.” I was holding
the result: The Sovereignty of Islands Claimed Under the Guano Act and of the Northwest Hawaiian Islands, Midway, and Wake.
And it was splendid to behold: nearly a thousand pages of intricate
legal arguments and historical documentation on the strange history of
the United States’ nearly invisible, but surprisingly vast, insular
empire.
The Guano Act? What is guano? It’s bat excrement, right?
Yes. And bird doo, too. In this case, it refers to the bird version.
So there was a US law about bird droppings that somehow proves important for thinking about the law of sovereignty?
Indeed. The Guano Islands Act of 1856 arguably laid the legal groundwork for American imperialism....MORE, if interested.
.... But that’s not the interesting part, really—although it’s curious
enough, and there are some great stories about what goes down on these
islands: shanghaiing Polynesian laborers, piracy (of course), mutiny,
etc. Some of the islands are still claimed by various shady types.
Indeed, a rather mysterious gentleman contacted me some years ago in
connection with his alleged title to an uninhabited guano island in the
Caribbean.
A James Bond villain-type? I don’t think I can speak any further on that matter over an unsecure line...
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/58821251/getty_images_drone_fashion_show_1600x1066.0.jpg)
Boundaries of the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument via NOAATo understand how the U.S. has jurisdiction over these waters in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, one has to look back to the 19th Century when, for a brief period, the U.S. scoured the oceans looking for rock islands covered in guano. That is: seabird poop.
