Capitalogix

How Amazon's AI Is Changing How You Stock A 'Pantry'

Normally, we see stores and warehouses organized by section - Cereals, Cheese, Fruit. This makes sense because as humans, it's easier to find everything if it's organized logically for us. 

Amazon is changing that. 

Their new service, "Prime Now," promises thousands of items delivered to you in around an hour.

That level of immediacy and activity creates an interesting set of logistical problems.  For example, how would you organize the warehouse to enable that level of service?  The answer might surprise you.

 

Tech Insider via Yahoo

The answer is you don't.  If you walked into one of Amazon's PrimeNow warehouses, you'd see a bunch of pods with random items next to each other.  You might find cleaning supplies next to a children's toy, or maybe even an adult toy. 

While this may seem weird or counter-intuitive ... with numerous "shoppers" all going through the warehouse at the same time, if the warehouse was organized by category or popularity,  the result would be traffic jam bottlenecks and less throughput. 

By organizing items randomly, and having the list of items ready ahead of time, Amazon's computers can create an optimum path for each "shopper" that takes into account the position of the items, where the checkout is, and where other shoppers are grabbing items.  

That optimum path is critical in getting your order on time.   This is another example of organized chaos – where human logic (or common sense) is not the most efficient or effective path to an optimal solution.

Pretty Cool!

Here Are Some Links For Your Weekly Reading - September 25th, 2017

Interesting week in the Twit-o-Sphere as Steph Curry and Donald Trump feud, and Ted Cruz is "caught" liking porn on Twitter. 

Who would have guessed Twitter would play such a strong a role in today's political climate?

I believe that everyone deserves the right to my opinion (as much as anyone) ... Still, sometimes silence is the best policy.

Here are some of the posts that caught my eye recently. Hope you find something interesting.

Lighter Links:

• This Company Wants to Grow A.I. by Using Blockchain. (CNBC)
• New Neuroscience Reveals 4 Rituals that Will Make You Happy. (TheLadders)
• Google Wants You to Know What Data It Has on You. (Fortune)
• Marriage vs. the Single Life: Who Has It Better? (PsychologyToday)
• Hackers Could Program Sex Robots to Kill. (NYPost)

Trading Links:

• One-Tenth of Global GDP is Now Held in Offshore Tax Havens. (ZeroHedge)
• Goldman Sachs Thinks Fintech Has As Much Potential as Trading. (Quartz)
• Cowboys Are World's Most Valuable Team at $4.8 Billion. (AP News)
• Social Finance: Where Wealth and Values Meet. (Forbes)
• Obama Goes from White House to Wall Street in Less Than One Year. (Bloomberg)

The A.I. Revolution: Humans Need Not Apply?

We're in the midst of a revolution, and no, I don't mean a political one. 

Artificial Intelligence has been around since the 1950's.  But, we are at an inflection point.  It is no longer an "if" ... it is a "when".  And the answer is probably "Now!"

AI technologies are expanding into broad and diverse markets.

Artificial Intelligence is no longer seen as a massive R&D effort – it is becoming a core competency.

Here is a chart showing  AI adoption in various industries. (replace image with non-blurry one)

 

McKinsey Global Institute via Vox

While AI is promising on many fronts, this "revolution" elicits fear from many.

For example, Elon Musk told the National Governors Association that the risks posed by A.I. are so great that it needs to be proactively regulated before it's too late. 

What about you?  Are you afraid of Skynet turning on, becoming self-aware and setting out to destroy the human race.? Or, are you looking to benefit from the new capabilities and possibilities AI creates for us?

 

Here Are Some Links For Your Weekly Reading - September 17th, 2017

Hillary is now on a book tour for her new book "What Happened" ... I haven't read it, but Politifact has. 

 

Here are some of the posts that caught my eye recently. Hope you find something interesting.

Lighter Links:

• Hackers Have Already Started to Weaponize Artificial Intelligence. (Gizmodo)
• Your Future Sex Robot Could Be Hacked and Programmed to Murder You. (BGR)
• You Can Actually Be Allergic to Exercise. (Popular Science)
• Multivitamins a Waste of Money and Just Create 'Very Expensive Urine'. (TheGuardian)
• iPhone X Impressions: 'Striking' Display and 'Sensational-Looking' Design Make High Price Worth It. (MacRumors)

Trading Links:

• In China's Hinterlands, Workers Mine Bitcoin for a Digital Fortune. (New York Times)
• Janet Yellen Has Reached Breakfast-With-The-President's-Daughter Levels of Job Insecurity. (DealBreaker)
• Finance: How It Made Civilization Possible. (CFAInstitute)
• The Blockchain Will Do to Banks and Law Firms What the Internet Did to Media. (HBR)
• 16 Quotes from Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's Right-Hand Man. (BInsider)

An Elegant Use of Brute Force in Photography

Photographers do some crazy things to get the perfect shot.   

Nevertheless, this photographer's approach to getting water droplets behind his model was innovative (and pretty funny).

I call it "an elegant use of brute force."

 

via PetaPixel

It's hard to argue with results ... and sometimes the answer doesn't have to be creative (it just has to work).

It's the same with modern computing.  We can perform better and faster than ever before, and a lot of it is because of prettier code, and smarter tools, and more skilled employees.  But, sometimes, what it takes is an elegant use of brute force!

Onwards.

Cyber Security: A Human Weakness

Last year, I shared an e-mail my son sent me about security.

With the Equifax breach, I was reminded of something else he told me. 

"It's not whether or not you've been hacked ... because you have ... it's whether you've been targeted."

As data becomes more valuable, and IP more coveted, security concerns grow, but the biggest security concern isn't where you would expect it to be. 

When people think of hacking they often think of a Distributed Denial Of Service (DDOS) attack or the media representation of people breaking into your system in a heist.

In reality, the greatest weakness is people, it's you ... the user.  It's the user that turns off automatic patch updating.  It's the user that uses thumb drives.  It's the user that reuses the same passwords.

 

via xkcd

Whether it's malicious or unintentional, humans are often the biggest security weakness. 

As proof, watch the first few minutes of the video below to watch a social engineer find out this man's email and gain access to his cell phone account. She locks him out of his account at the same time.

I started the video at the interesting part so you don't have to search for it.

 

 

As for passwords ... I recommend not knowing them.  You can't disclose what you don't know.  Consequently, I recommend a password manager like LastPass or 1Password.

How many cyber security measures you take comes down to two simple questions ... First, how much pain and hassle are you willing to deal with to protect your data? And, second, how much pain is a hacker willing to go through to get to your data?

It doesn't make sense to put all your data in a lockbox computer that never connects to a network ... nevertheless, it might be worth it to go to that extreme for pieces of your data.

Think about what the data is worth to you, or someone else, and protect it accordingly.

What Do You Need To Know About Equifax's 143 Million Consumer Hack?

You probably heard that one of the biggest credit-reporting bureaus got hacked recently.  It was pretty bad.

Equifax, TransUnion and Experian are the big three providers of credit scores (and other data, including: social security numbers, full names, addresses, birth dates, and even drivers licenses and credit card numbers for some) to potential lenders and consumers. 

Hackers have had access to this information between May and July, and it's taken five weeks for the company to disclose the breach.

Equifax claims that they responded immediately, but three Equifax executives sold shares of their company before they publically announced the breach on Thursday.

Since the breach became public, Equifax's (EFX) stock is down over 13 percent.

 

via MarketWatch

How is Equifax responding to the risk? 

Equifax has made public statements that the leak has been fixed ... but that does not protect or remedy the data that already leaked. 

As a result of the breach, Equifax created a website for you to determine if you've been affected.

Regardless of whether or not you were affected, they are offering "Trusted ID Premier" monitoring free for a year as an extra layer of protection.  But, beware, TechCrunch has pointed out that agreeing to their ToS seems to waive your right to sue Equifax.

Situations like this are reminders to pay even more attention to your own online security.

Related articles

Fraud Expert Offers Advice In Wake Of Equifax Breach

ScamSafe: Equifax Data Breach - 3 Steps To Protect Yourself

Swarm Intelligence: The Power of Ants in Hurricane Harvey

Houston, Texas is currently recovering from Hurricane Harvey (which dropped an average of 30 inches of rain, and up to 51.88 inches in Cedar Bayou). 

To put it in perspective, if they weren't evacuating, residents were told to write their name and social security numbers in sharpie on their arms. 

Nature is the great equalizer, and in a disaster like this you the fight is for survival and escape ... and not just by humans. 

Check out this "raft" of ants banding together to survive the storm.

 

NBCNews via Youtube

An ant is pretty cool. It can lift more than 50 times its weight and handle pressures up to 5000 times its weight. 

But, what makes ants interesting is what they do when there's a colony (or swarm) of them. 

An ant can only be "so" smart - their heads are tiny - but a colony of ants is a superorganism whose collective intelligence is much greater than the sum of its parts. 

Ants release pheromones from glands all over their bodies that can tell their colony an array of things. It can tell them how many ants they need to accomplish a task, it can tell them where there's food or danger, and it can even be used to relocate their whole colony to a new geography.

Clearly, it can also be used to communicate that the best way to survive danger is to create a mass of each other and allow the most possible to survive ... there's no fear or greed, only what's best for the colony. 

In a very real sense, this is where technology and trading are starting to move.  I say starting, but swarm intelligence has been an area of research in technology since the late 80's.

There are many simple applications of swarm intelligence in creating CGI crowds, telecommunication networks and more, but technological advances are drastically increasing the power and uses of swarms. 

Using the communication of various systems in order to gain real-time data from their actions and interactions will create hidden opportunities that we couldn't capitalize on previously.

We're in a golden age of innovation ... How cool is that?

 

 

NFL - Boom or Bust

Are you ready for some Football?

This chart may explain why my foreign friends prefer a different form of "football" ... It shows how many Super Bowl Championships each region has.

 

 

The regular season is about to start, and the buzz is building ... but, not all of it is good. 

Violence ... drugs ... concussions ... There has been a lot of bad press surrounding the NFL lately.

The Cowboys, alone, have somewhere between  4 to 7 players (depending on appeals) subject to miss games due to league suspensions for misconduct.  

 

The Teflon League:  NFL Revenues and Viewership Are Up.

 

Currently, the NFL is the 11th most important private company in the USA according to Fortune, and has the highest revenue of any sports league worldwide. 

via howmuch

While critics contend that something needs to be done about the various issues surrounding the NFL, it's hard to conclude that those issues affect viewership.  The NFL currently dominates attendance per game, viewership, and revenue.

In an experience economy, the NFL puts out an extraordinary product.

Long term may prove to be a different story, however.  Each year there are less high-school football players and more competition. 

I guess we'll see.

Regardless ... "How About Them Cowboys!"

 

Here Are Some Links For Your Weekly Reading - August 20th, 2017

Change is the only constant.

 

  

Here are some of the posts that caught my eye. Hope you find something interesting.

 

Lighter Links:

• AI Beats the World's Best Gamers after Just Two Weeks of Learning. (NewAtlas)
• Russia-linked Hackers Targeted Hotel Guests across Europe: Security Firm. (Reuters)
• One Year after Rio: What's Left behind after the Flame Goes Out. (ESPN)
• Humans and Robots are on the Cusp of a Sexual Intimacy We May Never Reverse. (Quartz)
• Elon Musk Just Shared His 4-Step Plan for Mars - Colonists Should Be "Prepared to Die". (ScienceAlert)

 

Trading Links:

• Ray Dalio Urges Investors to Hedge Against Possible North Korea War. (FN)
• There Has Never, Ever, Been this Many Trades Betting on VIX. (ZH)
• Amazon Could Start Selling Event Tickets in the U.S. (TechCrunch)
• South Korea Introduces World's First Robot Tax. (ZeroHedge)
• The Number of Cash Payments Dipped 11 Per Cent Last Year - But It's Still the Most Used Payment Method. (CityAM)