Capitalogix

Here Are Some Links For Your Weekly Reading - December 8th, 2019

For a candidate with an "age" issue, not sure if this was a smart move ...

 

 

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

Lighter Links:

• Don't Apologize for Having High Standards. (LinkedIn)
• Automation is Not Intelligence. (Forbes)
• How to Talk to Aliens. (Economist)
• 52 Things I Learned in 2019. (Medium)
• McLaren Unveils $1.7 Million Supercar with No Roof and a Windshield Made of Air. (CNN)

 

Trading Links:

• When to Buy into Aramco. (Wall Street Journal)
• How Spices Have Made, and Unmade, Empires. (New York Times)
• The First New US Airport since 2010 is in North Dakota's Oil Country. (TPG)
• This Widening Crack in the Mortgage Market Could Sink U.S. Home Prices. (MarketWatch)
• One Man's Quest to Challenge Wall Street With a New Silicon Valley Stock Exchange. (Telegraph)

Is WiFi Becoming Part of Our Hierarchy of Needs?

My wife's mother and sister were staying with us last week.  We also had two other house guests.  And our Internet service went out.  Not just momentarily, but for days.  Catastrophe!

Is Internet access becoming one of our basic human needs?

In 1943, psychologist Abraham Maslow published his famous “Hierarchy of Needs”. The idea was simple: the essential survival needs in the lowest level of the pyramid must be satisfied before the individual can turn his or her attention to the next level, and so on. Maslow’s “essential needs” are physiological; food, water, shelter, and physical safety.

Today, as we approach the 2020s, perhaps we need to add one more layer to Maslow’s pyramid: WiFi.

 

 

OK, humans probably don’t really need WiFi more than food, but without it, we feel frustrated and "twitchy". 

My solution: dual providers and a fail-over router.  

On a higher level, is Internet access a "basic human right" that should be handled like the New Deal treated electricity at the beginning of the 20th Century?

Expect to hear more about this (and not just because Bernie Sanders made it a campaign issue).

Here Are Some Links For Your Weekly Reading - December 1st, 2019

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

Lighter Links:

• How Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning is Changing Medicine. (NewsNetwork)
• The Lines of Code that Changed Everything. (Slate)
• Why All Birds CEO Just Asked Amazon to Steal Its Idea. (Inc)
• Storytelling is a Powerful Communication Tool Here's How to Use It, from TED. (Ideas)
• 3,000-Year-Old Tablet Describing Babylonian Noah's Ark Tale Could Be 'Earliest Ever Example of Fake News,' Scholar Says. (FoxNews)

 

Trading Links:

• Eyeing Presidential Bid, Michael Bloomberg Makes Big Television-Ad Buys. (Wall Street Journal)
• This Invisible Company Powers Almost the Entire Finance Industry. (Forbes)
• Malls are Dying. the Thriving Ones are Spending Millions to Reinvent Themselves. (Washington Post)
• These Maps Show How Many People Will Lose Their Homes to Rising Seas – And It's Worse Than We Thought. (Popular Science)
• Billionaire Hedge Fund Manager Ray Dalio Says the Economy Isn't Growing Because 'The World Has Gone Mad'. (CNBC)

Here Are Some Links For Your Weekly Reading - November 24th, 2019

Hope you are ready for the Thanksgiving holidays.

 

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

 

Lighter Links:

• Gartner's Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2020: the Good, the Obvious, the Renamed & the Missing. (Forbes)
• New Cardiology A.I. Knows If You'll Die Soon. Doctors Can't Explain How It Works. (DigitalTrends)
• The Science is Extremely Clear: You Need to Prioritize Sleep. (Wired)
• How to Get Die-Hard Meat Eaters to Try Impossible Burgers: Trick Them. (Wall Street Journal)
• Japan's Cheapest Hotel Will Charge You Just $1 Per Night If You Don't Care About Privacy. (OddityCentral)

 

Trading Links:

• The USPTO Wants to Know If Artificial Intelligence Can Own the Content It Creates. (TheVerge)
• 100 of the World's Most Promising Start-ups to Watch in 2019. (CNBC)
• Bezos Interested in Seahawks? Maybe. NFL Interested in Bezos? Definitely. (WashingtonPost)
• The American Dream is Alive in China. (Palladium)
• How Jim Simons Became the Most Successful Investor of All Time. (Economist)

Sea-Thru Sea

An engineer and oceanographer, Derya Akkaynak, created an algorithm that removes the water from underwater images - meaning it takes away the haze & tint that come with most underwater photos. It doesn't require a color chart either (though it does need distance information it gathers through numerous photographs from different angles). 

Check it out. 

 

via ScientificAmerican 

From the abstract: 

The Sea-thru method estimates backscatter using the dark pixels and their known range information. Then, it uses an estimate of the spatially varying illuminant to obtain the range-dependent attenuation coefficient. Using more than 1,100 images from two optically different water bodies, which we make available, we show that our method with the revised model outperforms those using the atmospheric model. Consistent removal of water will open up large underwater datasets to powerful computer vision and machine learning algorithms, creating exciting opportunities for the future of underwater exploration and conservation.

Essentially, the algorithm goes through every pixel and color balances the image based on collected data on distance/color degradation.

As with most algorithms of this type - the more data we feed it, the better it gets. Sea-thru already has great applications for furthering ocean-based research, but the follow-up question is can this algorithm be extrapolated outward to deal with other atmospheric conditions outside of water - smog, etc. 

What other uses can you imagine?  It is not hard to imagine how this could be applied to market data either ... Interesting stuff! 

Here Are Some Links For Your Weekly Reading - November 17th, 2019

The holiday season is coming fast.

 

 

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

Lighter Links:

• What's New in Gartner's Hype Cycle for AI, 2019. (Forbes)
• What Monkeys Can Teach Us About Being Human. (NPR)
• Why It's Time to Take Electrified Medicine Seriously. (Time)
• What's CRISPR Doing in Our Food? (Gastropod)
• The Problem that Google Solved with Quantum Supremacy.(DataScienceCentral)

 

Trading Links:

• Why Hedge Fund Billionaire Ray Dalio Loves Silicon Valley.(Finance)
• Tokenized Venture Capital. (DailyFintech)
• Betting on Bitcoin Prices May Soon Be Deemed Illegal Gambling. (Economist)
• Map: The Richest Person in Each U.S. State. (Money)
• Here's What Quantum Supremacy Does and Doesn't Mean for Computing. (TechReview)

Here Are Some Links For Your Weekly Reading - November 10th, 2019

Here's a quick reminder about Veterans Day.

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

Lighter Links:

• Why Futurists are (Almost) Always Wrong. (ZDNet)
• AI Rising: How Companies, Police and the Public are Already Grappling with Artificial Intelligence. (GeekWire)
• Macallan Bottle Sells for $1.9 Million, Breaks Whisky World Record Again. (Forbes)
• Suzy Batiz's Empire of Odor. (NewYorker)
• The 35 Best CEOs in the World, According to Harvard Business Review. (BusinessInsider)

 

Trading Links:

• Lilium is One Step Closer to Making Its Flying Car a Reality. (FastCompany)
• Gartner: Corporate Blockchain Won't Take off for Another Decade. (News)
• Singapore is the World's Most Competitive Economy. What Can Others Learn? (WEForum)
• The Countries with the Most Millionaires. (Statista)
• The Unicorn Bubble is Bursting. (SeekingAlpha)

 

 

A Roller Coaster of Emotions

I recently saw this video during a presentation.

It's hilarious – and a great reminder that it doesn't matter how simple something is (if the stakes are high enough) and the environment is distracting enough. 

That's where automation comes in. Enjoy. 

 

Eliminating fear and greed are great steps to take in the pursuit of eliminating discretionary mistakes.

Think about how many other places this video explains the "why" behind disappointing results.

Here Are Some Links For Your Weekly Reading - October 27th, 2019

 

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

Lighter Links:

• Jeff Bezos: This is the 'Smartest Thing We Ever Did' At Amazon. (CNBC)
• The Next Big Thing in AI/ML Is. (DataScienceCentral)
• The Pope's First Wearable is a $110 Rosary that Tracks Your Prayers. (FastCompany)
• Science Says You Only Need to Work out for 13 Minutes to Make a Difference. (Parents)
• The 'Blob': Paris Zoo Unveils Unusual Organism Which Can Heal Itself and Has 720 Sexes. (CNN)

 

Trading Links:

• Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff: Capitalism as We Know It as Dead. (TheVerge)
• Google Claims a Quantum Breakthrough that Could Change Computing. (New York Times)
• Tesla Turns a Profit and Builds a Chinese Factory Very Fast. (Wired)
• There Are Now 11 Blockchain Unicorns in the World, with over $1B Valuation, Including Binance, Ripple, and Coinbase. (TheBlockCrypto)
• SoftBank Says It Has Now Invested $18.5 Billion in WeWork, More Than the GDP' of Bolivia, Which Has 11.5 Million People. (TechCrunch)

Happy Halloween: The Trick To Treats

Good data visualizations are few and far between. Bad data visualizations spread lies, misrepresent content, or are sometimes just plain unreadable. 

In honor of Halloween, here's an example of a fun data visualization put together by Mariona Banyeres based on FiveThirtyEight's "The Ultimate Halloween candy power ranking." Compared to simpler charts it may be harder to read, but it's interactive, it's themed, and if you hover over points, it will add extra context. Click to go to Mariona's interactive Tableau DataViz. 

Mariona Banyeres via FiveThirtyEight

 

To skip the data visualization, here are the results of FiveThirtyEight's competition. 

via FiveThirtyEight

Hope you have a Happy Halloween.