It’s Worth the Trip: Skip the amenities and try these beaches instead – Press Herald

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During the hottest days of summer, theres no better place to be than the beach toes buried in the sand, ocean surf crashing on the shore, sun shining up above.

Sand beaches are something of a rarity in Maine. Our coast is more famous for rugged, rocky coastline than sand, and the most popular stretches of beach like Old Orchard Beach and York Beach in the south, and Acadias Sand Beach farther north can get crowded pretty quickly. Where can you take your blanket if you want to enjoy beach weather without waiting in traffic, looking for parking or searching for an open spot on the sand?

If youre willing to forego the fried food stands and T-shirt shops of southern Maines popular destinations, a trip up the coast to Port Clyde and Owls Head will take you to a couple of my favorite, less-crowded sand beaches in the state. And while there are no arcades near these spots, the fun doesnt have to stop at the beach theres so much to do nearby that you can easily turn a beach trip into an all-day excursion.

(One note about these beaches: keep an eye on the tides. Theres plenty of space to lay out your blanket when the tide is low, but real estate disappears quickly when the tide comes in, and theres little to no space on the sand at high tide. Aim for low tide if you want to relax on the beach, then explore the surrounding villages and attractions when the water rises.)

DRIFT INN BEACH

Drift Inn Beach, near the village of Port Clyde, is the beach my family beelined toward on every blistering summer day when I was a child. Theres sand for sunbathing, rocks for kids to scramble over and great views of the islands off the St. George peninsula green Mosquito Island most prominent to the east and The Brothers poking out of the water to the south. Tidal pools around the rocks hold hidden treasures, both living (like snails, periwinkles and crabs) and otherwise (sea glass, clam shells and skipping stones).

To find this gem, take Route 1 to the town of Thomaston, then follow Route 131 south toward St. George. Bear left after the village of Tenants Harbor; in a little more than three miles youll find the beach parking lot, accessible from Route 131 or Drift Inn Road.

BIRCH POINT BEACH STATE PARK

In nearby Owls Head, the small state park at Birch Point Beach a cute crescent beach known geologically as a pocket beach offers a beautiful stretch of sand along a protected cove, with short trails into the trees covering the rocks of Birch Point and Otter Point on either side. Fishing is allowed at Birch Point, and human anglers arent the only ones who take advantage; cormorants, seagulls and other shore birds wheel through the air and try their luck in the waves. Since the beach is in a state park, there is a fee charged, but that cost pays for amenities like bathrooms, trash cans, and grills and picnic tables for preparing and enjoying a meal at waters edge.

To reach the access road, follow Route 73 south from Rockland for about four miles, then turn onto Dublin Road at The Keag in South Thomaston. In about a mile and a half, look for the signs on Ballyhac Road that lead to the state park.

NEARBY ATTRACTIONS

Drift Inn Beach is less than three miles from Marshall Point Lighthouse, famous in film as the easternmost end of Forrests cross-country run in Forrest Gump. At low tide, there are plenty of tidal pools to explore (including one particularly large one at the base of the light) for visitors seeking out starfish, crabs, snails and sea cucumbers. Theres also a short, interpretive path around the lighthouse that guides you through the surrounding trees and flowers. The lighthouse museum features an engaging history of the lighthouse and the village, as well as a gift shop.

A few points northeast of Birch Point State Park, youll find Owls Head Ledge and Owls Head Light State Park, where the eponymous light sits atop a steep rise, looking out over Penobscot Bay. The short walk to the lighthouse is well worth it, as its high position offers panoramic views, looking toward Islesboro to the north, North Haven and Vinalhaven to the east, and Matinicus far to the south. The park also features a rocky beach, where its easy to spend hours relaxing on the water (as long as you dont mind some bumps under your beach blanket).

Inland, between St. George and Owls Head on Route 73, the Owls Head Transportation Museum is a fun stop for visitors young and old. The huge hangar boasts more than 200 antique aircraft and automobiles, some dating to the 1800s. If youd like to see vintage aircraft in action, their biggest event of the year the Wings and Wheels Spectacular is coming up Aug. 5-6, and will feature a B-17 Flying Fortress and many other antique planes.

Jake Christie is a freelance writer living in Portland. Along with his brother, Josh, he writes about great Maine destinations for outdoors enthusiasts. Jake can be reached at:

[emailprotected]

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It's Worth the Trip: Skip the amenities and try these beaches instead - Press Herald

Business and Beaches – Easy Reader

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Added on July 20, 2017 Easy Reader Staff Manhattan Beach

by Tony Cordi

Commercial vacancy rates in Manhattan Beach are impossibly low.Demand for space downtown has become so high that we are seeing $10 per square foot lease rates, double what they were just six years ago. This sounds enticing for an investor, but good luck finding a property to add to your portfolio.

Sales of commercial properties here are almost as rare as Strand home sales. In fact, the most heavily trafficked online commercial real estate site, LoopNet, did not have a single commercial property listed for sale in Manhattan Beach at the time of this writing.Many properties have remained with families for generations, some for over 60 years.This has investors looking elsewhere and the Sepulveda corridor has become the new mecca.

We are in the midst of a serious transformation from Marine Avenue on south into Hermosa Beach.

What is somewhat surprising about this is that just a few years ago the lease rates on Sepulveda were curiously consistent along the entire axis, from LAX through the Riviera Village on PCH, including Manhattan Beach.However, we have seen commercial lease rates in Manhattan Beach along Sepulveda double in just the past two to three years.Given that the value of most commercial property depends on a multiple of net income, its like winning the lottery.

Maryl Binney of Highland Partners Corp. cites the limited opportunities in downtown Manhattan, the repositioning oftheSepulvedacorridor, and strong traffic counts as key factors driving this jump. She adds that desirabledemographics and high disposable incomes make the area increasingly attractive, to retailers in particular.

However, Binney emphasizes that it is really the repositioningandincreasing availability of largerparcels that hascreated the opportunity formajor retailersto enter the market. Binney should know. Sherepresented the developers in leasing the Gelsons project,which consists of34,000square feet ofretail space,while her colleagues at Highland Partnersrepresented the seller ofthe El Torito Grill property last month, to longtime investor Stuart Sackley.

The classic definition of the capitalization rate, or cap rat, is the rate of return on a real estate investment based on the income that the property is expected to generate.All things being equal, it remains a fair way to gauge the relative merit of opportunities in different locations.Yet, all things are rarely equal.Lease rates can increase at different paces in different areas. The concept of the repositioning of Sepulveda, as alluded to by Binney, has manifested in a significant increase in the demand for space, which in turn has resulted in the rapid increase in lease rates.

Sackley has been buying up properties on Sepulveda for 20 years and has amassed close to 200,000 square feet of land.He likes the high car count and his ability to keep his spaces leased without much effort.Its that simple.No investment models or cap rate calculations are required for him.The fact that Forbes recently placed Manhattan Beach in the top one-tenthof 1 percent out of 29,500 zip codes tracked nationwide certainly doesnt hurt.

The substantial investments being made on Sepulveda from the Manhattan Village Mall to Walgreens, Manhattan Toyota, Target, Gelsons, and the Skechers expansion, among other projects, continue to transform the corridor and yield impressive returns for investors there.

Tony Cordi can be reached at tony@theinnategroup.com ER

comments so far. Comments posted to EasyReaderNews.com may be reprinted in the Easy Reader print edition, which is published each Thursday.

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Business and Beaches - Easy Reader

Ideal Beaches for Shark Week – TravelPulse

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PHOTO: Shark season is upon us. (photo via Flickr/Malkusch Markus)

Most of the time, people want to avoid swimming with sharks. But Shark Week is different.

Shark Week has become a phenomenon, and tourists travel all around the world to get up close and personal with some of the most dangerous animals in the ocean. For those who have not yet been swept away by the Shark Week mania, it is a week-long TV programming block created in 1988 by the Discovery Channel which features shark-based shows, events and activities.

The 29th anniversary of Shark Week officially starts on July 23, but travelers looking to go deep-sea diving or swim with the sharks to celebrate should be forewarned, there are several beaches in the United States dealing with the ocean predators.

For the tourists running toward the shark-infested beaches instead of away, travel metasearch engine liligo.com has compiled a list of beaches with the most recorded shark attacks dating all the way back to 1828.

Dubbed the Shark Attack Capital of the World, Daytona Beach, Florida, has been the home of 275 shark-related incidents since 1882. Florida also takes up the No. 2 and No. 3 spot on the list, with Cocoa Beach and Palm Beach recording130 attacks and 69 attacks, respectively.

READ MORE: 4 Places Where You Can Swim with Sharks

Another spot to avoid (or check out) is Hawaii. There have been 56 attacks since 1828 on Maui. Oahu has witnessed 38 recorded attacks during the same time period, but 13 of those incidents took place in 2013 alone.

For the rest of us, watching Shark Week on television is close enough.

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Ideal Beaches for Shark Week - TravelPulse

This summer, try amateur astronomy – By Tom Seymour – Rockland … – Courier-Gazette & Camden Herald (subscription)

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We in Maine are more fortunate than many realize. Maine enjoys dark skies, undiluted by artificial light. During nights when the atmosphere is stable and fog or cloud cover doesnt interfere, a person almost anywhere in Maine can look up and clearly see the Milky Way, our home galaxy.

It is sad to note that in so many places in our country, people live their lives out without ever seeing the Milky Way. But here, we can revel in the sight of a river of stars running across the sky, far too many to count, and so numerous as to defy our ability to fully appreciate them.

And within the Milky Way, we can plainly see a ribbon of black, separating this star river. Its called the Great Rift and it effectively blocks out everything behind it, at least from our point of view here on Earth.

Pareidolia, the phenomenon responsible for people's seeing images in clouds and the man in the moon, also works for us as we try to visualize the various geometric, random and fanciful shapes we see in the night sky.

Some of these shapes are, indeed, constellations. In 1930, the International Astronomical Union chose 88 official constellations. These include every star in the heavens. And while a star may belong within the boundaries of a certain constellation, it may not be part of any recognizable pattern.

Some easily recognized patterns are not constellations, but are called asterisms. Prominent among these are The Big Dipper, an asterism in Ursa Major; The Summer Triangle, formed of stars belonging to three different constellations; and The Northern Cross, a group of stars in the constellation Cygnus, the Swan.

Add to this the planets and deep-sky objects, such as star clusters, galaxies and nebulae, and we have enough viewing to satisfy the most eager amateur astronomer.

Here, then are some suggestions for how, when and where to begin this exciting journey into the nighttime skies.

1. Naked-eye viewing

You dont need optical aids to enjoy the heavens. Your eyes can take in enough to fill an entire evening under the stars. The first goal here is to learn to recognize as many constellations as possible. To do this, either download an astronomy app for your smartphone, or send for a planisphere. A planisphere is a device that looks like a wheel, with numbers on the edges. Another wheel, movable and attached to the larger circle, can accurately indicate all constellations within your sphere of view. Just align the dates and numbers (its easy, and besides that, directions are included) while holding the planisphere up to the sky and you can begin to nail down one constellation after another.

Planispheres are available from astronomy shops everywhere, as well as from many gift shops. Amazon sells several good-quality planispheres at very reasonable prices.

Its hard to describe the feeling of accomplishment when, after a few nights, you can accurately name most of the constellations in view.

2. Binocular viewing

The next step in your development as an amateur astronomer is to begin using binoculars to view the heavens. Binoculars are wonderful for wide, or spread-out objects. In fact, most people use binoculars in conjunction with their telescopes. I like to locate hard-to-find objects first with my binoculars and then view them with my telescope.

With the possible exception of opera glasses-style binoculars, any old set of binoculars will work for stargazing. Most full-size binoculars can do the trick for amateur observers. Of these, 10 X 50 is the best choice for the casual astronomer. These numbers, by the way, refer first to magnification and second, to field of view. The larger the second number, the greater the field of view.

When stargazing with binoculars, it helps to steady them by sitting in a folding chair and bracing your elbows on your hips or even on the arm of the chair. This helps to cut down on wobble. It is nearly impossible to hold binoculars steady when standing up. That is, unless you use IS, or image-stabilized binoculars.

These IS binoculars use electronic gyroscopes to hold an image solidly with no shake or wobble. Just focus on the object you wish to view and then hold down a button and the IS feature will kick in. People trying these for the first time are always amazed at the difference between regular binoculars and IS binoculars. In fact, IS binoculars impart the effect of an increase in magnification. The steadier the picture, the better you can see fine details.

Such binoculars are pricey, but they offer the best and steadiest view possible. Besides that, they are good when viewing terrestrial objects from boats or motor vehicles. And for bird-watching, nothing beats them.

My personal IS binoculars, a 10 X 30 set made by Canon, are worth every penny I paid for them. Some people use their IS binoculars as much as they do their telescopes because binoculars need no lengthy setup and are ideal for checking out the sky when time is limited. Just remove the lens caps and begin viewing.

If all you have, however, is an old set of binoculars stowed away in the closet, by all means use them. Any binoculars are better than no binoculars.

3. Tricks of the trade

Some little things will help you to see better when stargazing. First, it pays, if possible, to let your eyes adapt to darkness by staying outside for 20 minutes before beginning your serious viewing.

And if you need to read your planisphere or sky chart, make sure to use a red light. Red light does not harm night vision. You can buy special astronomy red lights, but the simplest way is to just take a regular flashlight and place some red cellophane over the lens.

Sometimes you know you are viewing the object you seek, but cannot see it clearly. This happens, for instance, when viewing double stars, stars that are either bound together by gravity or stars that are not at all close together but appear that way from our point of view. These are called optical doubles.

The way to make a reluctant twin to a brighter star suddenly stand out is to look at it with averted vision, that is, from the periphery of your eye, rather than viewing it straight-on. It helps to blink once in a while, too. This helps to steady your eyes focus.

4. Telescopes

Telescopes come in several types: reflectors, refractors, Cassegrain reflectors and Catadioptric telescopes. The easiest to use are refractors, but they are the most expensive per inch of aperture. I use a 4-inch refractor made by Explore Scientific, and the ease of setting up makes it the best go-to scope available.

However, the best bang for the buck award goes to Newtonian reflectors. These use mirrors to bounce an image into the eyepiece. It is possible to get a decent-quality tabletop reflector for around $100. And, of course, reflectors range in size from 4-inch models all the way up to 18-inch behemoths. For beginners, a 4-inch or 6-inch reflector will give plenty of viewing pleasure for years to come.

5. Upcoming events

July sees many interesting chances for stargazers. First, for early risers, the Pleiades, the famous star cluster also used as the emblem for Subaru cars (Subaru means "Pleiades" in Japanese), are halfway up the eastern sky about 45 minutes before sunrise.

Also, the planet Venus shines brightly below and to the left (east) of the Pleiades.

Then, at sunset, on the nights of July 24-25, Mercury shines a bit below and to the right (west) of the crescent moon.

And on July 28, the gas giant planet Jupiter, along with its several satellites, sits just below the waxing moon. Look to the west-southwest one hour after sunset.

The moon itself makes a suitable target as well. Just remember that the best lunar viewing occurs during the crescent stage. Then, images around the terminator, or line of darkness, are stark and contrasty.

Stargazers like company, and many come together for the Acadia Night Sky Festival. For more info on this annual event, visit acadianightskyfestival.com.

For now, then, happy stargazing and clear skies to you.

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This summer, try amateur astronomy - By Tom Seymour - Rockland ... - Courier-Gazette & Camden Herald (subscription)

The Sexism of Astrophysics and Why Its Women Have It Much Less Stellar – The Wire

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Featured One would haveassumed thatgender-positive changes would take placeearlierthan in other circles among such highly educated scientists.

Jocelyn Bell. Source: YouTube

The gender ratio of women in editor-in-chief roles of major mainstream journals in astronomy and astrophysics is typically about 5-10 % these days. In the last 50 years of academic records, it is not difficult to find nowomen in such roles at any given time. The same ratio is just about 10-15 % when it comes to the number of keynote speakers, chairpersons of important conference sessions and distinguished award recipients in major conferences and meetings in astronomy/astrophysics.

On New Years Day in 2016, the Oxford University officially appointed a female vice-chancellor for the first time in its entire 921-year history. This goes to show how very few female vice-chancellors there really arein this world,especially when it comes to the top universities. In developing countries like India, recent surveys have shown that the typical gender ratio for female vice-chancellorships hovers around three. Although this situation is slightly better in developed nations, the gender gap in top academic roles remains abysmal. In fact, nation-wide surveys of this kindare almost non-existent in the developed worldas well.

Ironically, the severest levels of gender imbalance occur in the most educated circles among the brightestscholars in colleges, universities, boards of scientific journals and on the committees of prestigious academic prizes. And it is not difficult to note that the gender-balance situation at the top is much better in other areas of taxpayer-funded professional jobs, such like diplomacy, bureaucracy, police, the military and politics.

In June 2013, the astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell gave an enlightening talk at the European Parliament Office in Dublin, aboutthe unbalanced gender ratios and heavy gender gaps at thehigher levels of STEM subjects, and academia in general. Even the personal experience of such an excellent astrophysicist as Bell having beenoverlooked for the Nobel Prize in physics (for the discovery of pulsars) is another example of the prejudices female scientists face this one of winning sciences top honours. Her own personal experience and struggles against male-dominated astrophysics have encouraged more female students in the UK to pursue a career in the subject, so Bells involvement inhighlighting gender issues have brought the issuessomemainstream attention.

In my short career as an astrophysicist, I have had the privilege to attend various meetings, conferences, workshops, summer schools and events related to science and research in about 20 different countries. I have consistently noticed the conspicuouslack of female scientists onorganising committees, as committee chairs, keynote speakers, chairpersons in important conference sessions, among invited speakers and distinguished award recipients. The typical female gender ratio tends to be in the10-15% range. And it didnt matter what the specific branch of astrophysics was: matters were equally poor instellar physics, solar physics, solar system astronomy, galactic astronomy, cosmology andastroparticle physics.

However, there exists an extreme case, one domain ofastrophysics in which there have beeneven fewerfemale scientists.In the last50 years, fewer than 10% of the editor-in-chiefs of the top astronomy and astrophysics journals have been women. The recent historical group of editors-in-chief is a boys club. This travesty renders what enlightenment we have been able to claim as a species that grapples with the universes mysteries suspect.

Also read: Indian science journals produce March editions authored entirely by women

Some senior male scientists have given the excuse thatcore observational astronomy requires scientists to travel to remote, anddifficult-to-reachplaces like the peaks of Ladakh or Hawaii,the deserts at Chile andthe isolated Canary Islands for astronomical observations.They cite safety and the needs of womenas an issue. Some male colleagues have even casually said that women are not fit or ready for such challenges. But from whatever interactions I have had with my female colleagues, they are more than brave and happy to take on such adventures. It is only the male attitudes and their reluctance to give womena chance that are stopping them.

Similarly, some senior men in space agencies have prejudices when it comes to recruiting female astronaut candidates, citing petty excuses of compromised standards in health, fitness and the tough exercise regimen. Again, from whatever I have noticed, female students and researchers are usually quiteenthusiastic to take up such challenges. To be fair,this particular gender gap, among astronauts, is improving faster than it is among astronomers. There are more active female astronauts today thanthere have ever been.

Modern astrophysics projects (compared to other branches of pure science) today often require a a high level of computational expertise and make use of hi-tech supercomputing clusters forsolving research problems. Some international consortia require national andinternational supercomputing collaborations. There are times when I have noticed some senior male colleagues comparing womens programming skills to their driving skills, a decidedly immature argument that seeks to disparage the opportunities women have to be involved in these collaborations and to imply that they may not be good learners.

Such unfair attitudes have a direct effect in the recruitment and appointment of top astronomy jobs. Some older male scientists have alsomade crude remarks about a female speakers or chairpersons way of dressing when they have beenonstage in conferences, which is nothing short ofgross objectification and harassment. An unfortunate number ofwomen astronomers have had togo throughsuch experiences, and for along time.

Arecent group email sent tothe members of a Belgian university instructing female candidates to wear skirts and revealing necklines tobeautify their convocation ceremonytypifies the kind ofdark attitudes some senior men in academia possess, imposing their own illogical agendas on womens choice of attire. It stated: From an aesthetic point of view, we recommend the young ladies wear a dress or skirt, as well as a nice dcollet [a revealing neckline], and for the gentlemen, a suit. The root of all these issues originates from an inherent prejudice the patriarchy hasharboured against womens skills and talents. A bias of a similar nature persists with respect to the number of timesscientific papers written by women have been cited.

I remember an anecdote Bell shared in her talk:all the boys in her university class had beenhowling and jeeringat her because she was the only female student in their class. These boys had been genuinely confused aboutwhat a girl wasdoing in the men-only universe of astrophysics. But later, Bellwent on to become one of the greatest astronomers of our time.Most of the bestwomen astronomers will have a similar story to share(varying in degree and intensity, of course). Asking when such deep-rooted prejudices and restrictive mindsets will change in the context of appointments in mainstream science remains a legitimate question because the answers have not been forthcoming. One would have assumed thatgender-positive changes would take place earlierthan in other circles among such highly educated scientists.

Aswin Sekhar is an Indian astrophysicist working at the Centre for Earth Evolution andDynamics, Faculty of Mathematics andNatural Sciences, University of Oslo.

Categories: Featured, Science, Women

Tagged as: astronomy, astrophysics, astrophysics journals, citations, female astronauts, harassment, Jocelyn Bell, Oxford University, programming skills, women in STEM

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The Sexism of Astrophysics and Why Its Women Have It Much Less Stellar - The Wire

How artificial intelligence is defining the future of brick-and-mortar shopping – TNW

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While online shopping has taken great strides in recent years, the brick-and-mortar retail hasnt managed to keep pace.

Artificial intelligence now permeates every aspect of ecommerce platforms, especially where customer interactions are involved. Smart product suggestions, AI-powered search, cognitive customer service agents are just some of the innovations that have helped make online shopping more personalized and enjoyable for the customerand more profitable for the retailer of course.

Meanwhile, AI advances in brick-and-mortar retail have mostly remained in inventory management and back store operations. The few innovations that have happened in the customer-facing aspects of in-person retail have little or no AI involved, and have failed to make tangible positive impact in the shopping experience and gain wide adoption.

Fortunately, this is something that is fast changing as technological developments enable retailers to gather in-store data and deploy AI-powered solutions. Artificial intelligence can help fix old problems in retail tech as well as introduce new possibilities that were previously inconceivable. Here are some of the trends that are worth watching.

A few years ago, in-store beacons were supposed to be the biggest thing that happened to brick-and-mortar retail, but didnt live up to its hype. Part of the problem with beacons is that they introduce new complexities without solving the real problems customers are facing. Beacons require customers to install an app that does little more than pop up annoying promotions that in no way rivals the personalized suggestions of online shopping platforms.

Now, retailers are experimenting with a new generation of apps powered by machine learning algorithms, whose value go beyond displaying prices and coupons. IBM Watson, a leader in cognitive computing and natural language processing, has partnered with several large retailers to help them better understand and serve the needs of their customers.

An example is Macys On Call, a mobile web application that uses the Watsons cognitive computing power and location-based software to help shoppers get information while theyre navigating the companys stores. The application is able to parse and understand natural language queries about such things as the location of products, departments and services in a particular store, and it responds in a relevant way. As is with all machine learningbased platforms, every customer interaction makes On Call smarter.

Sears Automotive is using the same technology for its Digital Tire Journey in-store web app, which helps shoppers navigate their way through the stores wide assortment of tires using a conversational interface and find whats best for their needs.

While providing value to customers, these apps are enabling retailers to gather a wealth of customter-related data that can in turn be used to fuel other AI-powered solutions.

Retailers annually lose a collective $45 billion to shrinkage, due to non-scans and other errors occurring at the point of sale. This is an especially serious problem at self-checkouts, the technology that was supposed reduce friction and streamline the customer experience but ended up opening a Pandoras box of new problems.

A handful of companies are working toward addressing this problem in real time through artificial intelligence. Everseen, a software company founded in Cork, Ireland, uses computer vision and AI algorithms to analyze video feeds from retailers staffed registers and self-checkout feeds and automatically detect when a product is left unscanned. Whenever Everseen detects unusual activity, it sends a notification to store management via smartwatch, tablet or other mobile device. This will help prevent theft, but it will also help provide assistance at self-checkouts, which are the source of much customer frustration. The companys current AI technology is in use by five of the worlds 10 largest retailers.

StopLift is another company that offers a similar technology. StopLift uses computer vision and video analytics to detect a number of common scams and errors at checkouts. The system compares the items it detects on video to actual POS data to track items that have not been scanned.

Both solutions become better over time as they gather more data and tune themselves to the specifics of each store.

Many believe that in the future, retail will be fully automated by AI, eliminating long lines and obviating the need for checkouts altogether. This means customers can enter a store, grab the items they need and exitwithout getting arrested for shoplifting.

Though the concept is far from mature, a number of companies are making headways in this direction. Last year, Amazon announced Go, a checkout-free retail store that is still in the experimental stages. Go uses computer vision, machine learning algorithms and IoT sensors to understand customers interactions across the store. The technology automatically updates the shopping cart in an associated mobile app whenever a customer picks up or returns an item from a store shelf.

Amazons plan to open its store to the public in 2017 has hit some hurdles. But the complexities have done nothing to deter the online retail giants resolve in creating the store of the future, and its $13.7 billion acquisition of the Whole Foods might have something to do with it.

Neither has Amazons difficulties prevented other companies from making similar moves, including Walmart, the largest retailer in the U.S., which is taking serious strides to incorporate AI in its retail stores.

Everseen, which has been working on a similar concept since 2012, plans to introduce its own checkout-free technology soon. Called 0Line, the solution will provide retailers with an AI-powered network of video cameras, sensors and biometric data to recognize customers. All of this will interact with inventory, POS and a mobile-based payment solution that will enable instant transactions. By the time customers leave the store, their accounts will have been charged and an itemized virtual receipt will be made available to them.

Thanks to a number of developments, AIs reach is fast expanding into every domain of the physical world. These examples show that brick-and-mortar retail is bound for some major transformations. In a few years the in-store shopping experience may look much different from what were used to, maybe even smarter than its online counterpart.

This post is part of our contributor series. The views expressed are the author's own and not necessarily shared by TNW.

Read next: From Uber to Postmates: A tipping guide for the sharing economy

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How artificial intelligence is defining the future of brick-and-mortar shopping - TNW

Artificial intelligence holds great potential for both students and teachers but only if used wisely – The Conversation AU

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Data big and small have come to education, from creating online platforms to increasing standardised assessments.

Artificial intelligence (AI) enables Siri to recognise your question, Google to correct your spelling, and tools such as Kinect to track you as you move around the room.

Data big and small have come to education, from creating online platforms to increasing standardised assessments. But how can AI help us use and improve it?

Researchers in AI in education have been investigating how the two intersect for several decades. While its tempting to think that the primary dream for AI in education is to reduce marking load a prospect made real through automated essay scoring the breadth of applications goes beyond this.

For example, researchers in AI in education have:

These are new approaches to learning that rely heavily on students engaging with new kinds of technology. But researchers in AI, and related fields such as learning analytics, are also thinking about how AI can provide more effective feedback to students and teachers.

One perspective is that researchers should worry less about making AI ever more intelligent, instead exploring the potential that relatively stupid (automated) tutors might have to amplify human intelligence.

So, rather than focusing solely on building more intelligent AI to take humans out of the loop, we should focus just as much on intelligence amplification or, going back to its intellectual roots, intelligence augmentation. This is the use of technology including AI to provide people with information that helps them make better decisions and learn more effectively.

This approach combines computing sciences with human sciences. It takes seriously the need for technology to be integrated into everyday life.

Keeping people in the loop is particularly important when the stakes are high, and AI is far from perfect. So, for instance, rather than focusing on automating the grading of student essays, some researchers are focusing on how they can provide intelligent feedback to students that helps them better assess their own writing.

And while some are considering if they can replace nurses with robots, we are seeking to design better feedback to help them become high-performance nursing teams.

But for the use of AI to be sustainable, education also needs a second kind of change: what we teach.

To be active citizens, students need a sound understanding of AI, and a critical approach to assessing the implications of the datafication of our lives from the use of Facebook data to influence voting, to Google DeepMinds access to medical data.

Students also need the skills to manage this complexity, to work collaboratively and to innovate in a changing environment. These are qualities that could perhaps be amplified through effective use of AI.

The potential is not only for education to be more efficient, but to think about how we teach: to keep revolution in sight, alongside evolution.

Another response to AIs perceived threat is to harness the technologies that will automate some forms of work, to cultivate those higher-order qualities that make humans distinctive from machines.

Amid growing concerns about the pervasive role of algorithms in society, we must understand what algorithmic accountability means in education.

Consider, for example, the potential for predictive analytics in flexi-pricing degrees based on a course-completion risk-rating built on online study habit data. Or the possibility of embedding existing human biases into university offers, or educational chatbots that seek to discern your needs.

If AI delivers benefits only to students who have access to specific technologies, then inevitably this has the potential to marginalise some groups.

Significant work is under way to clarify how ethics and privacy principles can underpin the use of AI and data analytics in education. Intelligence amplification helps counteract these concerns by keeping people in the loop.

A further concern is AIs potential to result in a de-skilling or redundancy of teachers. This could possibly fuel a two-tier system where differing levels of educational support are provided.

The future of learning with AI, and other technologies, should be targeted not only at learning subject content, but also at cultivating curiosity, creativity and resilience.

The ethical development of such innovations will require both teachers and students to have a robust understanding of how to work with data and AI to support their participation in society and across the professions.

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Artificial intelligence holds great potential for both students and teachers but only if used wisely - The Conversation AU

China artificial intelligence bid seeks $59 billion industry – The Denver Post

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China aims to make the artificial intelligence industry a new, important driver of economic expansion by 2020, according to a development plan issued by the State Council.

Policymakers want to be global leaders, with the AI industry generating more than 400 billion yuan ($59 billion) of output per year by 2025, according to an announcement from the Cabinet late Thursday. Key development areas include AI software and hardware, intelligent robotics and vehicles, virtual reality and augmented reality, it said.

Artificial intelligence has become the new focus of international competition, the report said. We must take the initiative to firmly grasp the next stage of AI development to create a new competitive advantage, open the development of new industries and improve the protection of national security.

The plan highlights Chinas ambition to become a world power backed by its technology business giants, research centers and military, which are investing heavily in AI. Globally, the technology will contribute as much as $15.7 trillion to output by 2030, according to a PwC report last month. Thats more than the current combined output of China and India.

The positive economic ripples could be pretty substantial, said Kevin Lau, a senior economist at Standard Chartered Bank in Hong Kong. The simple fact that China is embracing AI and having explicit targets for its development over the next decade is certainly positive for the continued upgrading of the manufacturing sector and overall economic transformation.

Chinese AI-related stocks advanced Friday. CSG Smart Science & Technology Co. climbed as much as 9.3 percent in Shenzhen before closing 3.1 percent higher, while intelligent management software developer Mesnac Co. surged 9.8 percent after hitting the 10 percent daily limit in earlier trading.

AI will have a significant influence on society and the international community, according to an opinion piece by East China University of Political Science and Law professor Gao Qiqi published Wednesday in the Peoples Daily, the flagship newspaper of the Communist Party.

PwC found that the worlds second-biggest economy stands to gain more than any other from AI because of the high proportion of output derived from manufacturing.

Another report from Accenture and Frontier Economics last month estimated that AI could increase Chinas annual growth rate by 1.6 percentage point to 7.9 percent by 2035 in terms of gross value added, a close proxy for GDP, adding more than $7 trillion.

The State Council directive also called for Chinas businesses, universities and armed forces to work more closely in developing the technology.

We will further implement the strategy of integrating military and civilian developments, it said. Scientific research institutes, universities, enterprises and military units should communicate and coordinate.

More AI professionals and scientists should be trained, the State Council said. It also called for promoting interdisciplinary research to connect AI with other subjects such as cognitive science, psychology, mathematics and economics.

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China artificial intelligence bid seeks $59 billion industry - The Denver Post

What sort of silicon brain do you need for artificial intelligence? – The Register

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The Raspberry Pi is one of the most exciting developments in hobbyist computing today. Across the world, people are using it to automate beer making, open up the world of robotics and revolutionise STEM education in a world overrun by film students. These are all laudable pursuits. Meanwhile, what is Microsoft doing with it? Creating squirrel-hunting water robots.

Over at the firms Machine Learning and Optimization group, a researcher saw squirrels stealing flower bulbs and seeds from his bird feeder. The research team trained a computer vision model to detect squirrels, and then put it onto a Raspberry Pi3 board. Whenever an adventurous rodent happened by, it would turn on the sprinkler system.

Microsofts sciurine aversions arent the point of that story its shoehorning of a convolutional neural network onto an ARM CPU is. Itshows how organizations are pushing hardware further to support AI algorithms. AsAI continues to make the headlines, researchers are pushing its capabilities to make it increasingly competent at basic tasks such as recognizing vision and speech.

As people expect more of the technology, cramming it into self-flying drones and self-driving cars, the hardware challenges are increasing. Companies are producing custom silicon and computing nodes capable of handling them.

Jeff Orr, research director at analyst firm ABI Research, divides advances in AI hardware into three broad areas: cloud services, ondevice, and hybrid. The first focuses on AI processing done online in hyperscale data centre environments like Microsofts, Amazons and Googles.

At the other end of the spectrum, he sees more processing happening on devices in the field, where connectivity or latency prohibit sending data back to the cloud.

Its using maybe a voice input to allow for hands-free operation of a smartphone or a wearable product like smart glasses, he says. That will continue to grow. Theres just not a large number of real-world examples ondevice today. Heviews augmented reality as a key driver here. Ortheres always this app, we suppose.

Finally, hybrid efforts marry both platforms to complete AI computations. This is where your phone recognizes what youre asking it but asks cloud-based AI to answer it, for example.

The clouds importance stems from the way that AI learns. AImodels are increasingly moving to deep learning, which uses complex neural networks with many layers to create more accurate AI routines.

There are two aspects to using neural networks. The first is training, where the network analyses lots of data to produce a statistical model. This is effectively the learning phase. The second is inference, where the neural network then interprets new data to generate accurate results. Training these networks chews up vast amounts of computing power, but the training load can be split into many tasks that run concurrently. This is why GPUs, with their double floating point precision and huge core counts, are so good at it.

Nevertheless, neural networks are getting bigger and the challenges are getting greater. Ian Buck, vice president of the Accelerate Computing Group at dominant GPU vendor Nvidia, says that theyre doubling in size each year. The company is creating more computationally intense GPU architectures to cope, but it is also changing the way it handles its maths.

Itcan be done with some reduced precision, he says. Originally, neural network training all happened in 32bit floating point, but it has optimized its newer Volta architecture, announced in May, for 16bit inputs with 32bit internal mathematics.

Reducing the precision of the calculation to 16 bits has two benefits, according to Buck.

One is that you can take advantage of faster compute, because processors tend to have more throughput at lower resolution, he says. Cutting the precision also increases the amount of available bandwidth, because youre fetching smaller amounts of data for each computation.

The question is, how low can you go? asks Buck. Ifyou go too low, it wont train. Youll never achieve the accuracy you need for production, or it will become unstable.

While Nvidia refines its architecture, some cloud vendors have been creating their own chips using alternative architectures to GPUs. The first generation of Googles Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) originally focused on 8bit integers for inference workloads. The newer generation, announced in May, offers floating point precision and can be used for training, too. These chips are application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). Unlike CPUs and GPUs, they are designed for a specific purpose (youll often see them used for mining bitcoins these days) and cannot be reprogrammed. Their lack of extraneous logic makes them extremely high in performance and economic in their power usage but very expensive.

Google's scale is large enough that it can swallow the high non-recurring expenditures (NREs) associated with designing the ASIC in the first place because of the cost savings it achieves in AIbased data centre operations. Ituses them across many operations, ranging from recognizing Street View text to performing Rankbrain search queries, and every time a TPU does something instead of a GPU, Google saves power.

Its going to save them a lot of money, said Karl Freund, senior analyst for high performance computing and deep learning at Moor Insights and Strategy.

He doesnt think thats entirely why Google did it, though. Ithink they did it so they would have complete control of the hardware and software stack. If Google is betting the farm on AI, then it makes sense to control it from endpoint applications such as self-driving cars through to software frameworks and the cloud.

When it isnt drowning squirrels, Microsoft is rolling out field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) in its own data centre revamp. These are similar to ASICs but reprogrammable so that their algorithms can be updated. They handle networking tasks within Azure, but Microsoft has also unleashed them on AI workloads such as machine translation. Intel wants a part of the AI industry, wherever it happens to be running, and that includes the cloud. To date, its Xeon Phi high-performance CPUs have tackled general purpose machine learning, and the latest version, codenamed Knights Mill, ships this year.

The company also has a trio of accelerators for more specific AI tasks, though. For training deep learning neural networks, Intel is pinning its hopes on Lake Crest, which comes from its Nervana acquisition. This is a coprocessor that the firm says overcomes data transfer performance ceilings using a type of memory called HBM2, which is around 12times faster than DDR4.

While these big players jockey for position with systems built around GPUs, FPGAs and ASICs, others are attempting to rewrite AI architectures from the ground up.

Knuedge is reportedly prepping 256-core chips designed for cloud-based operations but isnt saying much.

UK-based Graphcore, due to release its technology in 2017, has said a little more. Itwants its Intelligence Processing Unit (IPU) to use graph-based processing rather than the vectors used by GPUs or the scalar processing in CPUs. The company hopes that this will enable it to fit the training and inference workloads onto a single processor. One interesting thing about its technology is that its graph-based processing is supposed to mitigate one of the biggest problems in AI processing getting data from memory to the processing unit. Dell has been the firms perennial backer.

Wave Computing is also focusing on a different kind of processing, using what it calls its data flow architecture. Ithas a training appliance designed for operation in the data centre that it says can hit 2.9 PetaOPs/sec.

Whereas cloud-based systems can handle neural network training and inference, Client-side devices from phones to drones focus mainly on the latter. Their considerations are energy efficiency and low-latency computation.

You cant rely on the cloud for your car to drive itself, says Nvidias Buck. Avehicle cant wait for a crummy connection when making a split second decision on who to avoid, and long tunnels might also be a problem. Soall of the computing has to happen in the vehicle. He touts the Nvidia P4 self-driving car platform for autonomous in-car smarts.

FPGAs are also making great strides on the device side. Intel has Arria, an FGPA coprocessor designed for low-energy inference tasks, while over at startup KRTKL, CEO Ryan Cousens and his team have bolted a low-energy dual-core ARM CPU to an FPGA that handles neural networking tasks. Itis crowdsourcing its platform, called Snickerdoodle, for makers and researchers that want wireless I/O and computer vision capabilities. You could run that on the ARM core and only send to the FPGA high-intensity mathematical operations, he says.

AI is squeezing into even smaller devices like the phone in your pocket. Some processor vendors are making general purpose improvements to their architectures that also serve AI well. For example, ARM is shipping CPUs with increasingly capable GPU areas on the die that should be able to better handle machine learning tasks.

Qualcomms SnapDragon processors now feature a neural processing engine that decides which bits of tailored logic machine learning and neural inference tasks should run in (voice detection in a digital signal processor and image detection on a builtin GPU, say). Itsupports the convolutional neural networks used in image recognition, too. Apple is reportedly planning its own neural processor, continuing its tradition of offloading phone processes onto dedicated silicon.

This all makes sense to ABIs Orr, who says that while most of the activity has been in cloud-based AI processors of late this will shift over the next few years as device capabilities balance them out. Inaddition to areas like AR, this may show up in more intelligent-seeming artificial assistants. Orr believes that they could do better at understanding what we mean.

They cant take action based on a really large dictionary of what possibly can be said, he says. Natural language processing can become more personalised and train the system rather than training the user.

This can only happen using silicon that allows more processing at given times to infer context and intent. Bybeing able to unload and switch through these different dictionaries that allow for tuning and personalization for all the things that a specific individual might say.

Research will continue in this space as teams focus on driving new efficiencies into inference architectures. Vivienne Sze, professor at MITs Energy-Efficient Multimedia Systems Group, says that in deep neural network inferencing, it isnt the computing that slurps most of the power. The dominant source of energy consumption is the act of moving the input data from the memory to the MAC [multiply and accumulate] hardware and then moving the data from the MAC hardware back to memory, she says.

Prof Sze works on a project called Eyeriss that hopes to solve that problem. In Eyeriss, we developed an optimized data flow (called row stationary), which reduces the amount of data movement, particularly from large memories, she continues.

There are many more research projects and startups developing processor architectures for AI. While we dont deny that marketing types like to sprinkle a little AI dust where it isnt always warranted, theres clearly enough of a belief in the technology that people are piling dollars into silicon.

Ascloud-based hardware continues to evolve, expect hardware to support AI locally in drones, phones, and automobiles, as the industry develops.

In the meantime, Microsofts researchers are apparently hoping to squeeze their squirrel-hunting code still further, this time onto the 0.007mm squared Cortex M0 chip. That will call for a machine learning model 1/10,000th the size of the one it put on the Pi. They must be nuts.

We'll be covering machine learning, AI and analytics and specialist hardware at MCubed London in October. Full details, including early bird tickets, right here.

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What sort of silicon brain do you need for artificial intelligence? - The Register

AI is impacting you more than you realize – VentureBeat

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In todays age of flying cars, robots, and Elon Musk, if you havent heard of artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning (ML) then you must be avoiding all types of media. To most, these concepts seem futuristic and not applicable to everyday life, but when it comes to marketing technology, AI and ML actually touch everyone that consumes digital content.

But how exactly are these being deployed for marketing technology and digital media? We hear about AI being applied in medical and military fields, but usually not in something as commonplace as media. Utilizing these advanced technologies actually enables martech and adtech companies to create highly personalized and custom digital content experiences across the web.

The ultimate goal of all marketers is to drive sales through positive brand-consumer engagements. But a major problem is that marketers have so much content (oftentimes more than they even realize) and millions of potential places to show it, but dont know how to determine the optimal place for each piece of content to reach specific audiences.

With all of these possible placements, it would be incredibly inefficient, if not impossible, for a human being to amass, organize, and analyze this data comprehensively and then make the smartest buying decision in real time based on the facts. Trying to test an infinite number of combinations of creative ideas and placements is like solving a puzzle that keeps adding more and more pieces while you are trying to assemble them.

So how can marketers put this data to work to efficiently and distribute their content across the digital universe using the right messaging to drive the best results?

Human beings can make bad decisions based on incomplete data analysis. For example, someone might block a placement from a campaign based one or two prior experiences with incomplete or statistically insignificant data, but it actually may perform very well. An optimization engine can leverage machine learning to understand the variance in placement performance by campaign and advertiser vertical holistically. This is why computers are simply better than humans at certain tasks.

This does not discount the value of humans, for superior customer service and relationships will always be critical. But the combination of human power plus machine learning will yield a much better result, not only in marketing technology but across all industries that are leveraging this advanced technology.

Machine learning and AI address the real inefficiencies present in digital media and have made tremendous progress pushing the industry toward personalization. Delivering personalized content experiences to todays consumer is incredibly important, especially given the always-on, constantly connected, multi-device life that we all lead.

The power of machine learning and artificial intelligence lies in their ability to achieve massive scale that is not otherwise possible, while also maintaining relevancy. This demand for personalization escalates the number of combinations that would need to be tested to an unimaginable degree. For example, if a marketer wants to build a campaign with a personalized experience based on past browsing behavior, it becomes difficult to glean insight from the millions of combinations of the context in which their advertisement will appear and the variety of different browsing behaviors people exhibit. Even with fast, granular reporting, it is impossible to make all the necessary adjustments in a timely manner due to the sheer volume of the dataset.

Furthermore, it is often impossible to draw a conclusion from the data that can be gathered by running a single campaign. A holistic approach that models the interaction between users and a variety of different advertising verticals is necessary to have a meaningful predictor of campaign performance. This is where the real impact of a bidder powered by machine learning lies, because individual marketers are not able to observe these trends due to the fact that they may only have experience running campaigns in a specific vertical.

An intelligent bidder determines how each placement has performed in previous campaigns. If one specific placement performed poorly for multiple advertisers with similar KPIs, similar advertisers in the future will not waste money testing that placement. The learning happens very quickly and precisely. Instead of humans taking these learnings and adjusting the algorithms, the technology is making the changes as they are detected.

By leveraging the billions of historical data points from digital campaigns, predictions are made for future campaigns and then real-time performance data is applied to revisions. This is not a one-off process. The technology is constantly taking insights from user behavior and feeding them back into the algorithms, enabling personalized content experiences at scale.

The advertising industry has faced major challenges in relevancy for consumers and brand safety for marketers. Lack of relevancy in advertising has led to the advent of ad blockers and poor engagement, causing brands to become even more unsure of where their budgets are going and how users are responding to content. The controversy around brand safety further calls into question not only how budgets are being spent, but potential negative consequences for a brands image.

Machine learning holds the promise of overcoming these challenges by delivering better, smarter ads to engaged consumers and restoring trust for brands in advertising spend and the technology that executes content and media.

Kris Kalish is the Director of Optimization at Bidtellect, a native advertising platform.

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AI is impacting you more than you realize - VentureBeat

How Artificial Intelligence benefits companies and ups their game – Livemint

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After decades of false starts, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already pervasive in our lives. Although invisible to most people, features such as custom search engine results, social media alerts and notifications, e-commerce recommendations and listings are powered by AI-based algorithms and models. AI is fast turning out to be the key utility of the technology world, much as electricity evolved a century ago. Everything that we formerly electrified, we will now cognitize.

AIs latest breakthrough is being propelled by machine learninga subset of AI which includes abstruse techniques that enable machines to improve at tasks through learning and experience.

Although in its infancy, the rapid development and impending AI-led technology revolution are expected to impact all the industries and companies (both big and small) in the respective ecosystem/value chains. We are already witnessing examples of how AI-powered new entrants are able to take on incumbents and winas Uber and Lyft have done to the cab-hailing industry.

Currently, deployed key AI-based solutions, across industry verticals, include:

Predictive analytics, diagnostics and recommendations: Predictive analytics has been in the mainstream for a while, but deep learning changes and improves the whole game. Predictive analytics can be described as the everywhere electricityit is not so much a product as it is a new capability that can be added to all the processes in a company. Be it a national bank, a key supplier of raw material and equipment for leading footwear brands, or a real estate company, companies across every industry vertical are highly motivated to adopt AI-based predictive analytics because of proven returns on investment.

Japanese insurance firm Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance is replacing its 34-strong workforce with IBMs Watson Explorer AI. The AI system calculates insurance policy payouts, which according to the firms estimates is expected to increase productivity by 30% and save close to 1 million a year. Be it user-based collaborative filtering used by Spotify and Amazon to content-based collaborative filtering used by Pandora or Frequency Itemset Mining used by Netflix, digital media firms have been using various machine learning algorithms and predictive analytics models for their recommendation engines.

In e-commerce, with thousands of products and multiple factors that impact their sales, an estimate of the price to sales ratio or price elasticity is difficult. Dynamic price optimization using machine learningcorrelating pricing trends with sales trends using an algorithm, then aligning with other factors such as category management and inventory levelsis used by almost every leading e-commerce player from Amazon.com to Blibli.com.

Chatbots and voice assistants: Chatbots have evolved mainly on the back of internet messenger platforms, and have hit an inflection point in 2016. As of mid-2016, more than 11,000 Facebook Messenger bots and 20,000 Kik bots had been launched. As of April 2017, 100,000 bots were created for Facebook Messenger alone in the first year of the platform. Currently, chatbots are rapidly proliferating across both the consumer and enterprise domains, with capabilities to handle multiple tasks including shopping, travel search and booking, payments, office management, customer support, and task management.

Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) launched Luvo, a natural language processing AI bot which answers RBS, Natwest and Ulster bank customer queries and perform simple banking tasks like money transfers.

If Luvo is unable to find the answer it will pass the customer over to a member of staff. While RBS is the first retail bank in the UK to launch such a service, others such as Swedens SwedBank and Spains BBVA have created similar virtual assistants.

Technology companies and digital natives are investing in and deploying the technology at scale, but widespread adoption among less digitally mature sectors and companies is lagging. However, the current mismatch between AI investment and adoption has not stopped people from imagining a future where AI transforms businesses and entire industries.

The National Health Services (NHS) in the UK has implemented an AI-powered chatbot on the 111 non-emergency helpline. Being trialled in North London, its 1.2 million residents can opt for a chatbot rather than talking to a person on the 111 helpline. The chatbot encourages patients to enter their symptoms into the app. It will, then, consult a large medical database and users will receive tailored responses based on the information they have entered.

Image recognition, processing and diagnostics: On an average, it takes about 19 million images of cats for the current Deep Learning algorithms to recognize an image of a cat, unaided. Compared to the progress of natural language processing solutions, computer vision-based AI solutions are still in developmental stage, primarily due to the lack of large, structured data sets and the significant amount of computational power required to train the algorithms.

That said, we are witnessing adoption of image recognition in healthcare and financial services sectors. Israel-based Zebra Medical Systems uses deep learning techniques in radiology. It has amassed a huge training set of medical images along with categorization technology that will allow computers to predict diseases accurately better than humans.

Chinese technology companies Alipay (the mobile payments arm of Alibaba) and WeChat Pay (the mobile payments unit of Tencent) use advanced mobile-based image and facial recognition techniques for loan disbursement, financing, insurance claims authentication, fraud management and credit history ratings of both retail and enterprise customers.

General Electric (GE) is an example of a large multi-faceted conglomerate that has adopted AI and ML successfully at a large scale, across various functions, to evolve from industrial and consumer products and financial services firm to a digital industrial company with a strong focus on the Industrial Internet. GE uses machine-learning approaches to predict required maintenance for its large industrial machines. The company achieves this by continuously monitoring and learning from new data of its machines digital twins (a digital, cloud-based replica of its actual machines in the field) and modifying predictive models over time. Beyond, industrial equipment, the company has also used AI and ML effectively for integrating business data. GE used machine-learning software to identify and normalize differential pricing in its supplier data across business verticals, leading to savings of $80 million.

GEs successful acquisition and integration of innovative AI startups such as SmartSignal (acquired in 2011) to provide supervised learning models for remote diagnostics, Wise.io (acquired in 2016) for unsupervised deep learning capabilities and its in-house the data scientists, and of Bit Stew (another 2016 acquisition) to integrate data from multiple sensors in industrial equipment has enabled the company to evolve as a leading conglomerate in the AI business.

Industry sector-wise adoption of AI: Sector-by-sector adoption of AI is highly uneven currently, reflecting many characteristics of digital adoption on a broader scale. According to the McKinsey Global Index survey, released in June, larger companies and industries that adopted digital technologies in the past are more likely to adopt AI. For them, AI is the next wave. Other than online and IT companies, which are early adopters and proponents of various AI technologies, banks, financial services and healthcare are the leading non-core technology verticals that are adopting AI. According to the McKinsey survey, there is also clear evidence that early AI adopters are driven to employ AI solutions in order to grow revenue and market share, and the potential for cost reduction is a secondary idea.

AI, thus, can go beyond changing business processes to changing entire business models with winner-takes-all dynamics. Firms that are waiting for the AI dust to settle down risk being left behind.

The author is Founder and Partner of digital technologies research and advisory firm, Convergence Catalyst.

First Published: Mon, Jul 24 2017. 12 12 AM IST

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How Artificial Intelligence benefits companies and ups their game - Livemint

Despite AG rebuke, aerospace exec and big-time Trump donor Peter Zieve runs for office in Mukilteo – The Seattle Times

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The Attorney Generals Office said he fostered a discriminatory company culture. But Mukilteo aerospace entrepreneur Peter Zieve who last year donated $1 million to Donald Trump is now making his own political run.

Last year, Mukilteo aerospace entrepreneur Peter Zieve gave $1 million to support Donald Trumps presidential campaign, becoming one of the New York billionaires top donors nationwide.

This year, Zieve has stepped into politics himself. The 63-year-old founder and president of Electroimpact a major supplier to Boeing and Airbus and employer of roughly 800 people around the world is running for Mukilteo City Council.

It seems like he aims to be the Donald Trump of Mukilteo, wrote local resident Diana Kushner in a letter to the Mukilteo Beacon, one of many Zieves candidacy has generated in the city of roughly 20,000 near Everett.

She noted that he dismisses criticism as fake news, like the president, and last year infamously mailed anonymous postcards alerting city residents to plans for a new mosque.

He has since apologized. But his expression of anti-Muslim sentiments, which for years helped shape Electroimpacts company culture, goes way beyond the postcards and would seem to make him an unlikely political prospect.

In emails circulated at work, he suggested that Middle Eastern refugees are terrorist savages and encouraged his mostly white, male workers to marry and procreate so this country wont be backfilled with rubbish. Those who followed his advice received bonuses.

In March, after the state Attorney Generals Office found that Electroimpact discriminated on the basis of religion and marital status, the company entered into a consent decree that required it to pay $485,000 and take Zieve out of direct hiring.

Some consequently find his council campaign alarming. Hes already created a lot of discord, said Kim Longmore, a local teacher who said she hadnt been political in the past but decided she needed to step things up when she heard Zieve was running.

She wrote a letter to the Beacon calling attention not only to the mosque postcards and the attorney generals finding but to an aspect of Zieves personal life that she and some others cast as disturbing for a candidate whose signs read Elect Zieve for families.

Court and police records show that Zieve and his wife, Mariya Morozova-Zieve, have had volatile arguments over the years, with officers called to their home a half-dozen times, once by a child saying mom and dad were fighting, according to the 2014 police report.

Longmore, who has read the police reports, said its impossible to know the whole story about allegations of aggression by both parties.

What we do know, she said, is that they dont know how to solve things without getting the Police Department involved. If he cant see whats in the best interest of his family, than how is he going to be doing that for our community?

Neither Zieve nor his wife could be reached for comment over the past week.

His estranged sister, Wendy Zieve, calls his campaign kind of bizarre. She referred to what she believes is Electroimpacts desire to keep her brother out of the limelight after the PR nightmare of the past year.

There are other oddities. Mohammed Riaz Khan, head of the group building the mosque Zieve wanted to stop, said his onetime nemesis sought his endorsement, as well as help with mediating his marriage problems.

Zieves and Khans wives have a mutual friend, Khan said. But still, he asked, referring to Zieve and his ironic requests, What kind of person is this?

Khan, who is running for a different council seat Zieve is challenging City Council President Bob Champion for Position 2 said he turned the entrepreneur down on both counts, as he did when Zieve offered a campaign donation.

I dont need it, Khan said he responded. Just wish me good luck, thats all.

Zieve has some prominent endorsements, including current and former local officials. Yet at least two of them arent exactly full-throated.

I endorse everyone that asks me, said Councilmember Scott Whelpley, one backer Zieve lists on his campaign website. Everyone. Its something he does to show he can get along with all sorts.

You understand Im a minority, Peter, Whelpley said he told Zieve when he asked for an endorsement. Whelpley, a Navy veteran, said he looks like a tall white boy, but is half Mexican.

As Whelpley recalled it, Zieve said something like, yeah, OK.

The deal was done, even though Whelpley said he completely disagrees with Zieves views on people of other races and religions. After all, Whelpley said, even Hispanic members of his own family sometimes utter racist remarks.

Whelpley also said he appreciates what Zieve has done for the community, including donating $200,000 for the Boys & Girls Clubs planned construction of a new facility in Mukilteo.

Former two-term Mayor Joe Marine has another reason for his endorsement of Zieve. I felt that I owed him that support, said Marine, explaining that Zieve had always endorsed him and contributed to his campaigns.

Marine, an insurance salesman, said hes gone to some of Electroimpacts elaborate Christmas parties and been impressed by what he saw as a huge family atmosphere. He added that Zieve would bring a business perspective to council.

The only concern I have how do I put this? Hes straightforward in his opinions. On the council, Marine said, you really need to just sit and listen to all sides.

Marine said he also wonders why Zieve would even want to be a council member, a part-time, nonpartisan position that offers a monthly $500 stipend.

I said, Peter, arent you busy enough? Marine recalled. Zieve talked broadly about the city needing help, according to Marine, who was still left guessing. I would assume he probably got upset at something the city was doing or not doing.

The councils recent decision to put a sales-tax increase for transportation improvements on the November ballot certainly irked Zieve. The city needs to learn to live within its means, Zieve says on his campaign site, which also warns of possible hikes in car-tab fees and property taxes. His signs carry the motto: no new taxes.

Zieves website also talks about adding new playgrounds, eliminating permitting requirements for home improvements, and enacting legal force to stop transient and criminal populations from moving into Mukilteo. He draws a distinction between genuine homeless people and people exploiting services for them.

His campaign site does not mention the planned mosque. Zieve told The (Everett) Heraldhe no longer opposes the project.

Still, Tina Over, a real-estate agent who is also vying for Position 2, is skeptical. Referring to the vehemence of his beliefs, she said, You dont change that fast.

Zieve spoke against a resolution put forward at a June council meeting to make Mukilteo a welcoming city to immigrants and minorities a rhetorical measure that carried no policy changes and stopped well short of typical sanctuary city legislation. The meeting was contentious, but Zieve talked only briefly and said nothing memorable, according to Councilmember Richard Emery, who sponsored the ultimately successful measure.

Zieve will have a chance to elaborate on his views at a Monday evening candidate forum at City Hall.

One person who wrote in to the Mukilteo Beacon to support Zieve is his wife.

To police officers and in a 2011 petition for a protection order, Morozova-Zieve, 45, has expressed fear and anger regarding her husband. She said he was cheating on her, called her ugly names in front of the children, repeatedly pushed and grabbed her and, one time in 2011, sprayed Windex in one of her eyes. Zieve told an officer he was aiming for windows, not her, but he was arrested on a misdemeanor assault charge and spent a day in jail.

As recently as February of this year, Morozova-Zieve also was arrested for assault and booked into jail, following a fight in which she allegedly scratched Zieves hand and bit his arm.

Both those cases rare occasions when either party claimed physical violence were dismissed, and Morozova-Zieve emphasized the lack of convictions in her letter to the Beacon.

She also called Zieve a wonderful father to their seven children and stepchildren and touted his commitment to our communitys STEM programs, internship opportunities and monetary donations.

Zieve, in his own letter to the Beacon, seemed to suggest that his family problems were due to a brain tumor his wife has had since 2001, which caused her to lose control of her emotions. Our family is closer together than it has ever been, he wrote.

Zieve has put $50,000 of his own money into the campaign a fortune in Mukilteo politics. That buys a lot of things, said Champion, who also works in aerospace, as a staff scientist specializing in in-flight safety equipment at Honeywell in Redmond. His self-funded campaign war chest totals $5,000.

Even so, Whelpley said he doesnt expect Zieve to get through the Aug. 1 top-two primary, though he noted a faction of people in town quietly agree with Zieve on matters such as immigration.

That may lead to Zieve having something else in common with Trump.

Youre going to be very surprised by how many people vote for him, Whelpley said of Zieve. Youll be shocked.

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Despite AG rebuke, aerospace exec and big-time Trump donor Peter Zieve runs for office in Mukilteo - The Seattle Times

Bahamas needs ‘much’ more FDI than $522m | The Tribune – Bahamas Tribune

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By NEIL HARTNELL

Tribune Business Editor

nhartnell@tribunemedia.net

The Bahamas needs "considerably" more foreign direct investment (FDI) than the $522 million inflows it attracted in 2016, a governance reformer yesterday describing this as "critical" to faster economic growth.

Robert Myers, a principal with the Organisation for Responsible Governance (ORG), told Tribune Business that "stimulating FDI is vital" if the Bahamas is to hit the 5.5 per cent annual GDP growth rate identified as key to workforce stability.

He was speaking after the World Investment Report 2017, published by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), revealed that Baha Mar's construction resumption boosted FDI flows to the Bahamas by 27.8 per cent in 2016.

The Bahamas attracted the second highest FDI inflow among small island developing states (SIDS), coming in behind only Jamaica, which gained $900 million in capital from overseas in 2016.

"Although flows into the 10 Caribbean economies in the group slipped to $2 billion (down 13 per cent), they still absorbed almost 60 per cent of total inflows to the 29 SIDS members. The largest recipient economy in this region was Jamaica, followed by the Bahamas and Barbados," the World Investment Report said.

"In the Bahamas, FDI flows bounced back by 28 per cent to $522 million, as FDI in construction picked up. Yet the volume remained less than one-third of its previous peaks ($1.6 billion in 2014 and $1.5 billion in 2011)."

The report shows how the Bahamas 'put its eggs in one basket' with respect to Baha Mar, with the $4.2 billion Cable Beach-based resort project effectively 'the only game in town' when it came to FDI, and generating employment and economic activity, for the past five years.

The FDI flows measured by the World Investment Report bear this out, as the peaks coincide with Baha Mar's 2011 construction start and the 2014 'race to the finish' that ultimately failed. The project's 2015 Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection filing, and subsequent protracted legal battle, coincide with a sharp decline in capital invested in the Bahamas.

Between 2011 and 2014, FDI inflows to the Bahamas never dropped below $1 billion. Starting at $1.533 billion in 2011, they remained relatively constant at $1.073 billion and $1.133 billion in 2012 and 2013, respectively, before hitting $1.599 billion in 2014.

However, FDI inflows dropped by almost 75 per cent year-over-year in 2015 to hit $408 million, before recovering somewhat to $522 million due to Baha Mar's construction resumption and payments to creditors in late 2016.

"While FDI in some leading FDI host economies (the Bahamas, Maldives and Mauritius) bounced back, the majority saw their fragile FDI diminish," the World Investment Report said of SIDS generally. "

"The top five FDI recipients in 2016 - Jamaica, the Bahamas, Maldives, Mauritius and Fiji, in that order - accounted for 70 per cent of total FDI received by all SIDS."

While the Bahamas' rebound may look encouraging, the report said Caribbean rivals such as Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago were using FDI more effectively to help diversify their economies.

And it added: "Prospects for attracting more FDI for sustainable development remain dim. A sharp fall in the value of announced greenfield projects from 2015 to 2016 underscores the continuing challenge for SIDS of securing FDI."

Mr Myers, responding to the report's findings, suggested that the Bahamas needed at least $1 billion-plus annually in FDI if it was to have any chance of generating 5.5 per cent annual GDP growth.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) identified that percentage as the threshold for slashing the existing 11.6 per cent unemployment rate in half, and the economy being able to absorb all high school graduates into its workforce with ease.

"It's not enough," Mr Myers told Tribune Business of the Bahamas' increased 2016 FDI inflow. "We've got to get our GDP up to 5.5 per cent."

He explained that the Bahamian economy's current model, with its focus on services exports via tourism and financial services, and narrow domestic investor base, meant it remained heavily reliant on FDI to generate much of its growth.

Mr Myers also highlighted structural impediments to domestic growth, including exchange controls and a relatively high interest rate environment, coupled with a thin manufacturing and export base.

"FDI is a big one for us because manufacturing is absolutely zero to none. It's very low," he told Tribune Business. "All you have is fish and exports like Polymers, aragonite, sand and salt.

"There's also some petroleum products that really skew our GDP. It's money, money out and it doesn't positively impact our economy that much."

Emphasising that the Bahamas will continue to be heavily reliant on foreign capital for the foreseeable future, Mr Myers added: "FDI is a big driver of our economy and always has been.

"We've got to grow the economy, and FDI is a very large part of that. It's a driver of our overall GDP, which needs to be at 5.5 per cent. GDP growth is the gorilla in the room, and FDI is one part of that GDP gorilla.

"We haven't done any specific modelling to understand that number, but I think that over a sustained period of time, if FDI could be $1.2 billion to $1.5 billion a year that's a start."

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Bahamas needs 'much' more FDI than $522m | The Tribune - Bahamas Tribune

Offshore bookmaker has Miami Heat with third-best odds to acquire Kyrie Irving – Sun Sentinel

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First came the report of interest by Kyrie Irving to relocate. Then came the list of possible trade destinations for the Cleveland Cavaliers guard. So, of course, what follows is a betting line on the possibilities.

And, with that, BetDSI.eu, presented a proposition about what might come next, with the Miami Heat among Irving's preferred landing spots.

Which team will Kyrie Irving be traded to?

New York Knicks +350

San Antonio Spurs +400

Miami Heat +550

Minnesota Timberwolves +700

Not Traded Before 2017-18 Regular Season Starts +1000

Field (all other NBA teams) +200

That essentially would make the Cavaliers retaining Irving for the start of next season the longest odds on the board (risking $100 to win $1,000).

The oddsmakers at the book report that their odds on the Cavaliers winning the 2017-18 NBA championship would drop from 4-to-1 to 7-to-1 should Irving be dealt.

That, of course, figures to be a changing variable based on what the Cavaliers could possibly receive in return, should a deal go through. It also speaks volumes of the continued respect for LeBron James nonetheless advancing to an eighth straight championship series.

According to the website, BookMaker.eu was established in 1985 and is located in Costa Rica.

iwinderman@sunsentinel.com. Follow him at twitter.com/iraheatbeat or facebook.com/ira.winderman

For daily Heat mailbag go to sun-sentinel.com/askira

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Offshore bookmaker has Miami Heat with third-best odds to acquire Kyrie Irving - Sun Sentinel

Industry Sways Feds to Allow Offshore Drilling in Laurentian Channel Marine Protected Area – DeSmog Canada

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DeSmog Canada
Industry Sways Feds to Allow Offshore Drilling in Laurentian Channel Marine Protected Area
DeSmog Canada
If an ocean valley becomes federally protected but seismic work and offshore drilling is allowed in more than 80 per cent of the territory, is it really federally protected? That's the question facing Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans, which ...

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Industry Sways Feds to Allow Offshore Drilling in Laurentian Channel Marine Protected Area - DeSmog Canada

New WorkBoat offshore index launched – WorkBoat (blog)

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After over two decades, WorkBoat suspended its monthly offshore service vessel day rate analysis in April due to depressed market conditions.

In our August issue, we are introducing the new WorkBoat Gulf of Mexico (GOM) Index. It replaces the OSV and crewboat day rate and utilization information.

The new index aims to track market conditions in the U.S. Gulf that effect rates and activity levels for OSVs. The new index is comprised of three elements: West Texas Intermediate oil prices taken from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), active U.S. Gulf rig counts taken from the Baker Hughes rig count, and U.S. oil production figures also from the EIA. The baseline for the index is June 2016.

The price of oil is the key element in increasing and sustaining activity in the Gulf of Mexico. It has bounced around from highs in the $100-bbl.-plus range in the last few years and has settled lately in the $40-$50-bbl. range. Positive improvements in the price of oil, measured from the baseline, stimulate activity and are entered as positive numbers. Prices below the baseline are counted as negative numbers.

The active GOM rig count is also a key indicator and is driven both by the price of oil and gas and the costs of offshore exploration and production in the U.S. As each rig employs, on average, 2.5 workboats, an increase in rig count is a positive for the workboat industry.

Finally, the GOM Index incorporates domestic oil production figures. Oil production, and particularly burgeoning shale production, has displaced a significant amount of offshore activity due to its lower cost and higher productivity. That trend looks set to continue. An increase in oil production from the baseline has a negative affect on offshore activity. Conversely, a fall in oil production is positive, due to its potential to stimulate offshore activity.

The GOM Index is then compared with OSV utilization rates from IHS Markit. While there is always a lapse of several months in the OSV markets response to changing conditions in the U.S. Gulf, this index will help readers chart the emerging market trends in U.S. offshore waters.

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New WorkBoat offshore index launched - WorkBoat (blog)

DIANE DIMOND: Hit the high seas, but be careful | Opinion … – Stillwater News Press

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Summertime. Vacation time. No time to let your guard down. Traditionally, crime goes up during warmer weather, with property crimes and aggravated assaults on the rise. In some locations, murder rates increase, too. When temperatures rise, there are more windows left open, more sweaty and irritated people seeking relief outside, and more alcoholic beverages consumed in public, all of which can prompt bad behavior.

Maybe you and your family have decided to take an ocean cruise to get away from it all this summer. Well, beware, because there is crime on the high seas, too sometimes violent crime. And consider this: A vessel might be registered in the Bahamas, headquartered in Miami, traveling in international waters and carrying passengers from any number of foreign countries, so law enforcement jurisdiction is murky.

If the ship departs from, say, Florida, and a crime is committed onboard, the local police might investigate once the cruise liner returns to port. The feds have jurisdiction if a crime has occurred against a U.S. national on a ship that has departed or will arrive back in the States. The FBI might be assigned to investigate. But these professionals will be days removed from when the crime was committed. Every detective will tell you that evidence gathered immediately following a crime is often crucial to prosecution.

The cruise industry says it caters to more than 24 million customers each year and that crime rates on board one of those massive floating hotels is a small fraction of the comparable rates of crime on land.

But on dry land, you can immediately call 911 for help. You likely have a cop shop a few minutes driving distance from your location and a fully equipped hospital nearby. On a cruise ship, perhaps hundreds of miles out at sea, youve got ... well, youve got whatever the ship has to offer.

An official with the Cruise Lines International Association insists there is robust security onboard to assure passengers are safe. But lets get real: Any security officers are working for the cruise line, and their primary allegiance may not be to a victimized passenger. Their efforts gathering evidence, taking witness statements or tracking down suspects may be lacking.

NBC News has reported extensively on cruise line crime and calculated that of the 92 alleged crimes reported on cruise ships last year, 62 were sexual assaults. Im guessing here, but I bet the combination of hot temperatures and free-flowing booze tends to reduce passengers inhibitions. But most frightening is that a majority of the sexual assaults be they committed by crew members or passengers were never prosecuted. A congressional report from a few years ago found that minors were the victims in a third of those sexual assaults.

The dirty secret in the cruise line industry is that crime does occur on cruise ships and very often law enforcement isnt notified, evidence isnt preserved, people arent assisted, said Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut. He is sponsoring a bill in the U.S. Senate that would require cruise lines to report any claim of criminal activity to the FBI within four hours, turn over all video evidence, earmark cases in which youngsters are involved and include a federal officer called a sea marshal on each ship. Id like to add that each vessel be equipped with a proper evidentiary rape kit.

NBCs reporting included stories about victimized teenage girls, one of whom tried to commit suicide after she alleged that she was given alcohol and raped onboard a cruise to the Virgin Islands. Another teen interviewed claimed she was sexually assaulted by a crew member in the ships gym. Jim Walker, a Miami attorney, said his firm has represented many victims of alleged cruise ship crime, including one who was just 3 years old.

The average passenger load on an ocean liner is about 3,000. But some mega-cruise liners can hold up to 6,000. Whenever you get that many people in a finite space, lulled by adult activities over here and supervised children and youth activities over there, trouble can develop.

Im sure the cruise lines do their very best to fully vet and hire suitable employees. It would not be in their best interest to do otherwise. But this summer, if you are taking the family on a once-in-a-lifetime cruise to paradise, dont let your guard down. Have a wonderful vacation, but realize that crime can happen anywhere, and you and yours are not immune.

Diane Dimond is a syndicated columnist and television reporter of high-profile court cases.

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DIANE DIMOND: Hit the high seas, but be careful | Opinion ... - Stillwater News Press

Knoxville church addresses drug epidemic rise in East Tennessee … – WATE 6 On Your Side

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KNOXVILLE (WATE) A Knoxville church is taking steps to address the drug epidemic in the community.

I think its getting worse every day, Knoxville Police Department Capt. Ronald Green said, because its just too easy to get these types of narcotics now and people just use it at will.

In Knox County alone, 183 people have died from drug overdoses in 2017. Thats compared to 237 people who died in 2016. Nationally, the CDC has reported a 140 percent increase in overdose deaths in the U.S.

Just in the month of July, Knox County has seen 19 overdose deaths, with only four days without at least one person dying from an overdose.

Buffat Heights Baptist Church leaders said it is time for them to do their part to help reverse this dangerous trend.

Weve had two overdoses in this church deaths, Donald Elkins, Transformation 180 coordinator at the Buffat Heights Baptist Church, said. We really feel that its not a physical problem but a spiritual problem, and its time for the church to get more intentional about helping our communities with this increasing addiction.

The church is launching a program called Transformation 180, where people can go and seek help.

We got to fill that gap, Knox County Mayor Tim Burchett said. We have people out there who think theyre going to kick these drugs just by sheer will power and I think that will lead to failure. Its important that the churches accept the responsibility that we are failing our communities and our kids and they need to step up.

Captain Green agrees that churches have the ability to make positive change in the drug epidemic.

I think its a huge step in the right direction, Green said. I think a lot of times people dont know where to go to get help.

With overdose death rates on track to nearly double in Knox County this year, church leaders say the drug crisis is no longer an isolated problem.

Its a community problem, Elkins said. These are our kids that are dying. These are our brothers and sisters that are dying so it is our problem. We cant just sit here and say everythings good when we know families are struggling.

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Knoxville church addresses drug epidemic rise in East Tennessee ... - WATE 6 On Your Side

VIEWPOINTS: Environmental Racism Exists – atlantadailyworld

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Environmental racism is the disproportionate impact of environmental hazards on people of color. The lead poisoning of children in Flint is only the latest example of environmental racism in the United States.

Unfortunately, Flints water scandal is a symptom of a much larger disease.The activist organization, Greenaction, has stated that Environmental Racism refers to the institutional rules, regulations, policies or government and/or corporate decisions that deliberately target certain communities for locally undesirable land uses and lax enforcement of zoning and environmental laws, resulting in communities being disproportionately exposed to toxic and hazardous waste based upon race. Environmental racism is caused by several factors, including intentional neglect, the alleged need for a receptacle for pollutants in urban areas, and a lack of institutional power and low land values of people of color.

Research has shown a higher incidence of emphysema, chronic bronchitis and other pulmonary diseases in these communities. Some link the asthma epidemic among African Americans to industrial toxins wafting over poor neighborhoods. Asthma affects twice as many black children as white, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control, and its rate among African-American kids doubled from 2001 to 2009.

Research by the Federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry has shown that lead from plumbing, house paints and contaminated soils reaches many poor children of all races. But in an unexplained disparity, as far back as 1988, studies have concluded that black children, regardless of their families income, are much more likely than white children to have unacceptably high levels of lead in their blood.

Many health experts say lead is the most widespread environmental hazard in minority communities. The effects of lead poisoning can extend from headaches and nausea to permanent brain damage, especially in children.

In 1987,Toxic Waste and Race, (the seminal report that coined the term environmental racism) found race to be more important than socioeconomic status in predicting the location of the nations commercial hazardous waste facilities.

Even food, and where, and how, it is made available is subject to environmental racism.

Right now, in America millions of low-income people live more than a mile from a supermarket, and most dont have access to a vehicle. In these neighborhoods, food typically comes from fast food chains, convenience stores and drug stores, which often means decreased access to fresh fruits or vegetables and higher prices. Poor diets and obesity have been associated with these so-called food deserts, where obesity rates can be five times higher than in communities with access to fresh, healthy foods.

Most food literature on underserved communities focuses on poor nutritional quality of canned and pre-packaged food. Chemicals found in food packaging, however, are also harmful to our health. One of those chemicals is bisphenol A, or BPA. This chemical, banned from baby bottles and sippy cups nationwide, remains in use to line food cans. Intended as a protective barrier between the metal and the cans contents, BPA can actually leach into the food we eat. The effects of leaching BPA are likely most detrimental for pregnant women, babies and children. People of color living in underserved communities have been found to have higher levels of BPA in their blood relative to the rest of the population. One possible explanation is greater reliance on canned foods that are often less expensive and more readily available.

The most significant problem facing people of color is the institutional and cultural racism which results in discrimination in access to services, goods and opportunities. Institutional racism involves polices, practices, and procedures of institutions that have a disproportionately negative effect on racial minorities access to and quality of goods, services, and opportunities.

As economist William J. Kruvant described in a 1975 article:Disadvantaged people are largely victims of middle- and upper-class pollution because they usually live closest to the sources of pollutionpower plants, industrial installations, and in central cities where vehicle traffic is heaviest. Usually they have no choice. Discrimination created the situation, and those with wealth and influence have political power to keep polluting facilities away from their homes. Living in poverty areas is bad enough. Environmental racism makes it worse.

Ill close with a quote from writer,Vann R. Newkirk II. He feels that discrimination in public planning is to blame:The environment is a system controlled and designed by peopleand people can be racist.

Listen to Glenn, every Saturday at 9:00am (EST) on www. wurdradio.com, and Sundays at 8:30am (EST) on http://www.wdasfm.com. For more good health information, visit: http://www.glennellis.com

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VIEWPOINTS: Environmental Racism Exists - atlantadailyworld