Facebook debuts its first dedicated virtual reality app, Facebook 360 – TechCrunch

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Facebook has devoted major resources and billions of dollars to virtual reality, but there has been a pretty clear line between what happens in the main Facebook app and what happens on the Oculus Rift and Gear VR.

Today, Facebook is intertwining the real and virtual worlds of Facebook a bit by launching its first dedicated app, Facebook 360. The app will serve as a hub for the 360 video and photo content posted to the site. Facebook boasts that there have ben more than one million 360 videos posted to the site alongside more than 25 million 360 photos to date. At launch, the Facebook 360 appwill be available only for the Gear VR mobile headset. Users can download the app in the Oculus Store.

At launch, Facebook 360 will feature four main feeds, delivering content into users eyeballs from closer than ever. The Explore tab will give users a birds-eye look at the 360 content that is popular across Facebook from a variety of media companies and creators; meanwhile, the Following tab will let you dial into the content being produced by your friends. Saved gives you an opportunity to experience 360 content you may have seen on the web in a more immersive in-headset experience, while Timeline lets you check out your own 360 photos and videos all in one place.

The app will allow users to post reactions to content, while also being able to save and share360 photos and videos. Facebook said in a blog post that more social features are on the way for the companys first official app.

The wall of separation between Facebook and Oculus is a pretty murky one. With this latest addition, Facebook is asserting its video strength over the Oculus Video app, which has previously been the go-to spot for Gear VR users to engage with videos from Facebook.

In January, Facebook named Xiaomis Hugo Barra as its VP of VR. The appointment was a surprising end to a leadership shakeup at Oculus that began when CEO Brendan Iribe announced suddenly that he would be stepping down as the companys chief executiveand would be leading Oculuss PC VR division instead.

While Facebook continues to work on its own suite of social VR features, its clear that the company has a grand vision in mind for bringing its nearly 2 billion users into the world of VR, and this app may be one of their earliest steps in doing so.

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Facebook debuts its first dedicated virtual reality app, Facebook 360 - TechCrunch

‘Virtual reality, augmented reality will shape the way people collaborate in future’ – Economic Times

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BENGALURU: Emerging technologies like virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and real-time language translation are going to play a significant role in shaping the way people collaborate in future, says Jeffrey Rodman, cofounder of Polycom, one of Silicon Valley's earliest video and content collaboration companies.

Considered as one of the pivotal figures in shaping the now known Silicon Valley, Rodman has spent close to three decades founding and building Polycom. The 26-year-old company makes speakers and video conferencing systems to collaborate with colleagues at workstations and other larger informal settings.

Enter your office conference room and the probability that you wouldn't come across the sound station speaker is very slim.

The triangular device - which now comes in several sophisticated models - was pioneered by Polycom's design team during their early days in the 90s.

"[The triangular sketch] was only another small thing, but it was so powerful, it became the symbol of the company for a while," recounts Rod man in a Medium post.

Rodman believes technologies like VR, which are `massive and clunky' right now, will go through incre mental changes and easy to wear.

BENEFITS GALORE "At some point, they may represent a real benefit for Polycom or its users," he said, adding, "Also, we will come to a place where we are going to have biological implants. The things will happen."

He also said in most of these technologies, Polycom would be more o a user than a developer helping the company provide innovative ways for collaboration in the future. Rodman and Brian L Hinman co founded Poly com in 1990 and since have grown the startup into a billion-dollar company over the past two-and-a-half decades.

In July 2016, the company was acquired by Siris Capital Group for a grand sum of $2 billion.

When asked to compare Silicon Valley with the Indian startup ecosystem, Rodman said: "India has a deep skill set born out of working with American companies and participating in a pretty substantial slice of innovation and product development. With this kind of skill sets and resources, it's only natural that India is moving off to form more startups of their own."

He said startups should not be distracted by million-dollar investments and should take small steps to achieve big goals.

"There is something very tempting about saying let's start a business and get rich. One of the mistakes people and companies make is to go into something without a complete vision or a plan... Without having a view of where you are headed to, you are likely to be deluded," Rodman said.

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'Virtual reality, augmented reality will shape the way people collaborate in future' - Economic Times

Studying altruism through virtual reality – Science Daily

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Science Daily
Studying altruism through virtual reality
Science Daily
In order to overcome these difficulties, researchers created a contextually-rich virtual reality environment in which participants were completely immersed. Indrajeet Patil, a former PhD student at SISSA and lead author of the paper, and currently a ...

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Studying altruism through virtual reality - Science Daily

Hot Sugar’s Romantic Dream World Is Now Available Via Virtual Reality – Papermag

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It's not often you find an artist whose oeuvre of work is so intuitive and atmospheric that it has the ability to ease you into a fantasy world of their own careful creation however, this is something Hot Sugar (aka Nick Koenig) is particularly adept at doing.

That said, his production work is (counterintuitively) never just about sound. Instead, it's an all-encompassing visceral experience that has a strange way of eliciting a nostalgic longing for situations you've actually never encountered. So it only feels right that Koenig's latest dive into the deepest corners of his listeners' psyches is The Melody of Dust, a 13-track album that serves as the gateway to a much larger, more complex world brought to life via virtual reality.

As such, the word "album" in this case feels limiting, especially since The Melody of Dust breaks new ground as the first musical release whose true contents are exclusive to VR. In reality (or at least the supercomputer-generated one Koenig has created), the full album is 87 tracks, all of which are meant to seamlessly blend together based on your actions within the virtual reality world.

But how exactly does one decide to make an album of this scope? Let alone execute it? In Koenig's case, what started as an idea for a movie was put aside after the Viacom rep he was pitching to introduced him to the company's brand new VR division, Viacom NEXT. "I realized there were so many other dynamic points to VR," Koenig said. "The sensory control being the most important one. So I came up with an idea for VR based on that sort of thing."

What resulted a year-and-a-half later was The Melody of Dust, an immersive, interactive experience that invites the viewer to create their own Hot Sugar track by throwing objects think roses, switchblades, etc. scattered around a room straight out of one of his videos into a tornado. Within this scenario, you are given the ability to trigger one of the aforementioned 87 songs via different combinations of objects thrown into the vortex (in our premiere's case, it's a dove, medusa bust and nail polish).

It's a process that's reflective of his theory of associative music, "a modernized branch of musique concrete" that champions the idea that any object in the universe is an instrument whether you know how to play it or not ("it makes a sound and therefore you can turn it into music"). But it is also a unique way of connecting with listeners who are able to participate by providing the elements in the creation of these compositions.

"In a way, they can hear the origins of the song in the objects that they picked up, so it kind of communicates that message even more," Koenig explained. "When you shake the dove, you hear the sound of a dove. Then you throw it into the tornado, that melody has the voice of that dove hitting different notes. That was the original idea, to romanticize what I'm trying to do with music by turning it into a fantasy game."

That said, accessibility is still an issue seeing as how there are only about 100,000 of these VR units currently in existence but it's one that's Koenig feels is worth it in favor of creating "something new that hopefully will stand the test of time". Or at least something that will eventually reveal itself as the ultimate participatory experience once commercial VR technology makes it to the masses.

And while Koenig says there are tentative plans for some sort of set-up at future shows, the only public showing currently on the books is at SXSW. That said, if you're not one of the lucky few able to catch the whole set-up IRL, you can still listen to the haunting, hazy-hued dream that is "The Life of a Goldfish" below, exclusive to PAPER.

The Melody of Dust is out on March 31st via Steam, Spotify and vinyl.

The Melody of DustVR experience is on Tuesday, March 14 from 11am-6pm at the JM Marriott Salon 5 in Austin, Texas.

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Hot Sugar's Romantic Dream World Is Now Available Via Virtual Reality - Papermag

Decoding death: Craig Venter’s quest to uncover secret to immortality in our DNA – Genetic Literacy Project

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Genetic Literacy Project
Decoding death: Craig Venter's quest to uncover secret to immortality in our DNA
Genetic Literacy Project
Craig Venter, the man in the late 1990s who, frustrated by the slow progress of the government-funded Human Genome Project, launched an effort that sequenced human DNA two years earlier than planned[is] back with his most ambitious project since his ...

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Decoding death: Craig Venter's quest to uncover secret to immortality in our DNA - Genetic Literacy Project

Financial Planning + Alternative Medicine – March 8, 2017 … – KHTS Radio

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Hosts: Dr. Gene Dorio, Barbara Cochran

Guests: Arif Halaby, Total Financial Solutions; Kim Wahl, Alternative Medicines Specialist

Topic:Senior Hour

Click Here to Listen!

Right Click Here to Download!

Today on the Senior Hour, Dr. Dorio and Barbara Cochran sit down with Arif Halaby from Total Financial Solutions to discuss ways that seniors can plan for their future, and work to protect their money. Gene and Barbara also welcome Domestic Violence Center to discuss the very real issue of senior abuse, and what people can do to help end it.

Alternative medicinespecialist Kim Wahl joins the gang in-studioduring the second segment to talk about the physiological issues many people face as they grow older.

Ms. Wahl provides tips and remediestorelieve the stress load and ailments that your body is facing, which include avoiding traditional medicine and drugs found in Western medicine.

Full list of theKHTS Podcasts!

Dont miss a thing. Get breakingSanta Clarita Newsalerts delivered right to your inbox.

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Financial Planning + Alternative Medicine - March 8, 2017 ... - KHTS Radio

Sports, doping and supplements: Where do authorities, clubs and leagues stand? – NutraIngredients.com

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Everyone is against doping, but those at the heart of sports and athletics can do more, argues Luca Bucchini.

Everyone is against doping. Present and retired sportsmen and women often speak up against doping; all professional athletes are constantly reminded of their responsibility.

For their part, the media continue to raise the issue, and more importantly, NADO:s (National Anti-Doping Organizations) continue to fight their battles with conviction, often joined by the police, by prosecutors or by regulators.

Even the European Commission has been acting as decisively as it can, trying to put together a coherent strategy against doping.

And, most of the European sports nutrition industry is working hard (and well) to be responsible, by shunning banned substances and subscribing to ever more sophisticated certification programs to avoid the inadvertent presence of doping agents.

Sports Nutrition: Game On!

Catch LucaBucchini discussing the key issues in doping and sport alongsideanti-doping expert Professor John Brewer ofSt Mary's University, UK, as part of the NutraIngredients free-to-attend online event: Sports Nutrition: Game On!

The web conference willlook at the way elite sports nutrition is developing, offer market insights on the EU sports nutrition market, and top insights on the role of polyphenols, omega-3, collagen, and protein in sports and lifestylenutrition.

The event is live NOW, and can be played back 'on demand' for the next three months.

REGISTER NOW

So, is it all well? Unfotunately not

Two recent big disappointments are worth considering.

The first relates to the respected French risk assessment body, ANSES. In a recent assessment made available in both French and English , ANSES stated that DHEA (dehydroepiandrosterone) and PEA (phenylethylamine) are permitted in food supplements in the EU even if the two are banned substances according to the World Anti Doping Agency (WADA).

Experts were surely quick to notice that the report listed as permitted other substances which, in reality, are banned under EU law (vanadium, evodiamine or raspberry ketones) and were quick to conclude that the report was very weak from a regulatory perspective.

However, the public is sure to have been confused DHEA and PEA are banned substances for doping, but they are permitted in food supplements? And if they are not prohibited in supplements, are they ok to consume?

In reality, DHEA and PEA are not permitted in the EU; both have a pharmacological action, and products with the either substance are almost sure to be considered unauthorised medicines (and if not, novel food legislation would take care of them).

Obviously, ANSES did not consult regulators or experts, and did not consider implications for consumers and the less informed food business operators of inaccurate statements.

The ANSES report should have been withdrawn and re-written, but it is still online telling potential consumers - including careless athletes that DHEA and PEA may be unsafe, but are legally ok.

The second:A bigger disappointment is that major clubs, including well known football (soccer) clubs, and even sports leagues accept sponsorship from careless manufacturers or retailers.

E-commerce retailers may be huge, but continue to sell products with banned substances. Presumably because they dont care, dont check, or dont understand the laws and the ethics.

It has been claimed that this is the case for F.C. Internazionale .

Unfortunately, even browsing major generalist e-commerce platforms, you are surprised to see - despite what The Economist says is going to occur products with banned substances.

This is striking. Identifying products with doping substances with automated searches would seem a no-brainer, which suggests no checks to implement the WADA list have been put in place.

If you check responsible e-commerce operators, on the other hand, you will soon find that eliminating products with added banned substances is possible.

Why is this important?

Consumers assume a sponsor of their favorite team or league is both legal and safe.

Reactions of consumers are telling. First, people react with disbelief: a sponsor of a major sports club is assumed to be compliant with the law. Secondly, and more significantly, even if they accept the sponsor selling banned substances, they state that the substances cant really be harmful, even if banned, and the ban is relevant for athletes only.

This is a key perception challenge for the industry.

Food versus OTC

Why do people jump when a pharmaceutical substance is found in a food, when medicines containing the identical substance are perhaps available over the counter (OTC)?

The simple reason is that foods, including sports nutrition products, need to be safe without second thoughts. There is a good reason for being proud of the fact that adverse effects of food supplements are dwarfed (or, better, mega-dwarfed) by the adverse effects of OTC drugs.

There is a regulatory and a public health reason for keeping drugs and foods separate, but there is also a strong business logic: consumers need to have absolute confidence in the harmless nature of food products.

If food supplements have the same safety issues of drugs, this paradigm falls apart.

Another effect of careless sponsorships is a creeping legitimisation of doping for the occasional sportsman.

Why not DHEA for the weekend warrior? Why not 7-keto? Why not DMAA? The magnitude of the change that legitimizing doping for those who are not pro could bring about is huge.

Serious health consequences from doping as a police officer recently put it to me used to be mostly a question for a small minority who would subject themselves to any degree of self-harm for achieving certain performance or aesthetic results.

That minority needed, and still needs, to be protected from themselves.

But if the problem comes to concern huge numbers of especially younger people who are primed to consider banned substances an issue for professional athletes only, or to stay away from steroids only, then things start to look more complex.

So what should responsible clubs and federations do?

It is easy to imagine a few minimum requirements for accepting sponsorships from retailers of foods for sports people:

Millions of fans trust the clubs they support, and those clubs rely on the leagues they belong to.

It is only fair that those clubs and leagues, when accepting sponsorships, ensure that they do not inadvertently promote doping to their fan base. And, if they have made a mistake, they should correct it.

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Sports, doping and supplements: Where do authorities, clubs and leagues stand? - NutraIngredients.com

Insurer denying Pasco teen with life-threatening food allergy – WTSP.com

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The young athlete can only drink amino acid-based shakes that an insurance company won't cover.

Kendra Conlon, WTSP 11:29 PM. EST March 08, 2017

Food is a basic part of our daily lives. We plan holidays and social gatherings around meals. But imagine not being able to eat any food without it making you violently sick. That's the reality for a Pasco County teen.

And now, the familys insurance company is refusing to cover the only thing thats keeping him alive.

Life has thrown 17-year-old Remington Walls a lot of curveballs. The Land O Lakes High baseball player is allergic to food. All food.

Eosinophilic Esophagitis, said Walls of his condition, which doctors diagnosed when he was 4 years old. There's no cure.

When I eat, my white blood cells attack the food, which can cause scarring and ridging in my esophagus, which could eventually cause it to close, Remington explained.

A Neocate EO28 Splash shake, a hypoallergenic amino acid-based liquid formula, is his only source of nutrition. Thats all he has for every meal and every snack, around 18 orange-pineapple shakes a day for the rest of his life.

We are around $2,000 for what he needs per month. Its insane, said his father, Mike Walls.

Insurance has covered that for 13 years, but now the cost is falling on the family.

I was told that we were denied (by insurance), and I was absolutely shocked. I'm like 'What do you mean we've been denied?' They said 'There's been a change in your coverage. The elemental formula is no longer covered,' and I said 'There's got to be some mistake, said Remingtons mother, Stephanie Walls.

Frontier Communications bought out his dad's company last year. The family has been told that the medical costs which Frontier covers through Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield changed in January.

The reason for denial says our plan now excludes the following: vitamins, food and food supplements used as dietary supplements. They're saying it's used as a food supplement! I have nothing else to supplement his food source with, said Stephanie Walls.

"Its his sustenance for life, and if you can't understand that, then let's take food away from you for a week, said Mike Walls.

The familys continuing appeals have been denied. Now they're taking the fight to lawmakers and calling for mandated coverage for anyone who needs this formula to survive.

These companies need to be held accountable, and they can't be allowed to choose the dollar over someone's life. With my sons life, it's his only source of nutrition, and they don't seem to get it, Stephanie Walls says through tears.

10News spoke with representatives from Frontier Communications and Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield. Both companies say theyll look into the familys denied claims.10News will continue pressing for answers.

The family has had an amazing show of support from the community. Since friend Janeen Salzgeber started a GoFundMe page on Friday, they've raised enough to cover Remington's shakes for four months.

You can help: https://www.gofundme.com/remington-walls

2017 WTSP-TV

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Breaking down the Republican health care bill

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What Trump's executive order means for your health insurance

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Insurer denying Pasco teen with life-threatening food allergy - WTSP.com

A&H recalls several dietary supplements – KLTV.com – Tyler … – KLTV

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EAST TEXAS (KLTV) -

A&H Focal is recalling 29 of its dietary products due to the possible presence of undeclared erectile dysfunction ingredients.

According to an announcement by the company, the products have historically been reviewed by the Food and Drug Administration, but they were found to have PDE-5 inhibitors, an active ingredient in an FDA-approved drug for erectile dysfunction, which made these products tainted, unapproved drugs.

A&H added that these products are a threat because the PDE-5 inhibitors could interact with nitrates found in prescription drugs to lower blood pressure to dangerous levels. People dealing with diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol or heart disease sometimes use these nitrates.

The products listed below were marketed as supplements for male sexual enhancement. Any of these products made since January 2014 to now are included in this recall. If you have any of these products, you should stop using them immediately:

Black Ant (4600 mg)

Indian God Lotion

Evil Root (1200 mg)

Germany Black Gold (2800 mg)

Germany Niubian (3000 mg)

Hard Ten Days (4500 mg)

Lang Yi Hao (Chaonogsuopian) (500 mg)

Gold Vigra

Clalis

Ye Lang Shen (5000 mg)

Zhansheng Weige Chaoyue Xilishi (2000 mg)

Zhonghua Niubian (2000 mg)

Stree Overlord (3800 mg)

Max Man (3000 mg)

Hu Hu Sheng Wei

Tiger King

Viagra 100 (2000 mg)

Power V8 Viagra (200 mg)

Dadiyongshi Xiangganglongshengwu

Lien Chan for Seven Days

Maca Gold (6800 mg)

If anyone has any questions about this recall, they can Henry Choo by calling 646-327-8522, Monday through Saturday, 9 a.m.- 6 p.m., eastern standard time. Users should contact their physician or healthcare provider if they have experienced any issues.

The FDA is aware of the recall and market action.

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A&H recalls several dietary supplements - KLTV.com - Tyler ... - KLTV

Metformin And Rapamycin: Signs Of (Extended) Life? How To Monetize? – Seeking Alpha

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For some time I've been tracking work on extending healthy lives and longevity, both from a scientific as well as an investment perspective. I indicated that there are a number of biotech startups that start out seeking to extend lifespan, but as a survival mechanism, end up choosing a disease that is more common with age and seeking to address that.

Life extending drugs Metformin and Rapamycin

Previously I've highlighted two drugs, Metformin and Rapamycin, developed for specific diseases, which might also extend lifespan as a side effect. Here is an update.

Metformin

A good summary of the current status of Metformin has been published recently in Endocrine Today. This article describes the history of Metformin development, which has culminated in it being the recommended first-line drug for treating type 2 diabetes both in the US and worldwide. Because it is available as a generic and is cheap to manufacture, this drug could be used as a long term anti-aging drug (~$4 for 1 month supply).

Metformin has a number of positive health effects beyond its use in treating type 2 diabetes, including applications for treating some patients with obesity.

A six year placebo controlled study on 3000 elderly patients is underway to explore Metformin protection of age related disease occurrence. There are indications that Metformin may be protective against growth of cancer cells.

Of course prescribing Metformin as a life extending/quality of life drug is not an immediate prospect, although there have been some studies on a possible life extending action by Metformin.

The commercial prospects for this drug are limited as it is no longer patented and there seems to be limited opportunity to develop a proprietary formulation as it is easily administered as a daily tablet.

Since it is clear that Metformin doesn't work for everyone, perhaps the future for this kind of life extending drug might be to integrate its use into a wellness portfolio, with screening to see whether you are likely to benefit from the drug. This would mean packaging the drug in an informatics-based service business. Of course the benefits of Metformin need to be better clarified, but after that there needs to be a business model sorted out that doesn't rely on a patented position for the actual drug itself.

Management of patient data is now coming of age with cloud based electronic health records and data management with companies like Commvault (NASDAQ:CVLT). While these companies at present focus on integrating and making available a wide range of patient data, it is a logical step for these kinds of providers to assist health providers to mine and integrate data with a view to promoting wellness and reducing the cost of treatment after people get sick. In fact this approach is already emerging with companies like Nextgen Healthcare (a subsidiary of Quality Systems (NASDAQ:QSII)). Investors looking for future investments in the healthcare area might keep an eye out for how companies like Commvault, and Nextgen are positioning themselves.

It isn't surprising that Craig Venter, who transformed the human genome project, is interested in this space with his company Human Longevity Inc. However, it has been argued that Human Longevity Inc is more a personalised medicine company than a longevity science company. So Human Longevity operates in a similar space to Nextgen Healthcare, except that a core feature of Venter's company is sequencing and annotating individual human genome data.

Rapamycin

The Rapamycin story is different to Metformin as in the case of Rapamycin a number of big pharma companies have a patent position on variants of Rapamycin (Sirolimus). Novartis (NYSE:NVS) Everolimus and Pfizer (NYSE:PFE) Temsirolimus have been investigated for kidney cancer treatments, and also in combination with other drugs for exploring treatment of various cancers. Everolimus may also have fertility sparing attributes for women being treated with chemotherapeutic agents.

Abbott (NYSE:ABT) Zotarolimus and private company Elixir Medical Corp Novolimus (which is an active metabolite of Rapamycin (Sirolimus)) have been tested as a cardiac stent coating. Everolimus has also been used as a cardiac stent coating.

The above patented Rapamycin derivatives leave the way open for a more conventional drug development program for anti-aging and quality of life improvement. No doubt as part of consideration of Rapamycin derivatives for life extension applications, there are senior executives in big pharma trying to work out how this could play out.

Unlike the situation with Metformin where life extension possibilities are being identified through data mining of a large patient base who use Metformin, especially for Type 2 diabetes, in the case of Rapamycin, trials are being established to test low doses both in large animals (dogs) and humans to test more directly life extension and quality of life improvements.

Dog trials: The first phase of the Dog Aging Project has been completed; it involved a low dose of Rapamycin. There were 24 middle-aged dogs treated with placebo or Rapamycin in a trial in Seattle. The key findings, which will be published, were that there were no significant side effects of Rapamycin treatment and also that positive effects on heart function compared to controls were similar to results found after treating old mice. The trial involved a small number of animals and it produced limited, but encouraging results.

The second phase of the Dog Aging Project involves treating middle-aged dogs with low doses of Rapamycin (with a placebo control) for 3 -5 years to understand if Rapamycin does cause increased lifespan and a better elderly life. A number of age-related parameters will be assessed before, during and after the 3-5 year Rapamycin dosing period. Key parameters to be measured include cognitive function, heart function, immunity and cancer incidence. The geographical reach of the second phase trial will extend throughout the US and hopefully overseas. At the low doses used, no adverse effects of Rapamycin are expected.

Human trials: There are currently two human clinical trials assessing low doses of Rapamycin in progress.

One trial sponsored by The University of Texas Health Sciences Center at San Antonio and due for completion in June 2017, involves treating healthy (includes those with chronic disease whose disease is stable) aged volunteers aged 70-95 years with a daily dose of Rapamycin or placebo for 8 weeks. The primary endpoint involves scientific measurements of immune response and T-cell function. Secondary outcomes involve physical performance (grip strength, walking speed) and cognitive performance based on 3 different tests.

A second trial, sponsored by the Mayo Clinic, is a Phase 1 study that involves a small open label trial, which will be followed by a randomized trial involving exercise or exercise plus low dose of Rapamycin. Patients will be 60 years or older. It looks like this study was preceded by a pilot study measuring senescence markers and physical function in elderly patients undergoing cardiac rehabilitation. Rapamycin treatment showed some improvement of senescence markers and physical performance, but no improvement in frailty in the pilot study. The interesting point is that Rapamycin at a low dose unlikely to cause any adverse effects, is being taken seriously as a potential life extension/quality of life treatment. There are interesting developments in Rapamycin-like drugs that may have better potential as life extending drugs than Rapamycin itself.

The next developments here will be if big Pharma starts to do trials on their proprietary (patented) forms of Rapamycin.

Conclusion

As is often the case when new fields of medicine are opened up, the treatment, the drug pricing and the means of commercialisation are all unclear. It is a twist to contemplate taking a drug when you are well, but not without precedent as aspirin is often taken at low doses to prevent heart attack and stroke.

Here I've discussed two business models for old drugs that may have life extension/quality of life improvements. For Metformin I suggest that it could be incorporated in a wellness program. For Rapamycin a more traditional drug development route is possible. Watch this space.

Author's note: I am not a financial advisor. I look for innovation in biotech and try to understand how this may be monetized. If my commentary helps shape your perspective on biotech investment, please consider following me.

Disclosure: I/we have no positions in any stocks mentioned, and no plans to initiate any positions within the next 72 hours.

I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.

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Metformin And Rapamycin: Signs Of (Extended) Life? How To Monetize? - Seeking Alpha

‘Poster Design from Berlin’ exhibition to open soon – Macau Daily Times

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The Anschlag Berlin Poster Design from Berlin exhibition, organized by the Cultural Affairs Bureau (IC), will open at the Tap Seac Gallery on Tuesday at 6.30 p.m. and feature a total of 70 posters by 35 designers from several Berlin-based design studios.

To complement the exhibition, the Cultural Affairs Bureau will organize a seminar entitled From Berlin to Macau: Designers stage.

With its rich historical background and cultural uniqueness, Berlin provides an environment for designers to enhance their creativity by allowing the coexistence of multiple design ideas. The posters featured in this exhibition are works inspired by the Zeitgeist Movement and contemporary Berlin, created by designers from renowned Berlin-based design studios, including Cyan, LSD, HeSign, EPS51, Ruddigkeit, Ariane Spanier, Fons Hickmann m23, and Surface, among others.

The exhibition includes posters relating to art exhibitions, festivals, concerts, performances and social issues. By sharing works that blend art and design, IC hopes to provide Macanese design professionals with a source of inspiration and an opportunity to exchange ideas. To allow for a more in-depth understanding of this exhibition and Berlins graphic design world, IC will also organize a seminar titled From Berlin to Macau: Designers stage, which will be held on March 15 from 6:30pm to 9.30 p.m. at the Tap Seac Gallery. The seminar will be conducted in English with simultaneous translation into Cantonese.

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'Poster Design from Berlin' exhibition to open soon - Macau Daily Times

X-Cruciating! Why is Liberal Media So Keen to Link Hit Blockbuster ‘Logan’ to Trump? – Heat Street

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Heat Street
X-Cruciating! Why is Liberal Media So Keen to Link Hit Blockbuster 'Logan' to Trump?
Heat Street
The X-Men characters have always possessed a knack for tapping into the zeitgeist (the comic book was an allegory for the civil rights movement). While they remain ahead of the curveborder issues and deportation are a big deal right nowhow can ...

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X-Cruciating! Why is Liberal Media So Keen to Link Hit Blockbuster 'Logan' to Trump? - Heat Street

WA election: Death threats, One Nation legal action, stadium stoush campaign trail action – ABC Online

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Posted March 09, 2017 22:52:05

Just two more sleeps until Saturday's election and there was no shortage of action on the WA campaign trail: a former One Nation candidate threatened legal action against the party, another one rebelled, tensions erupted between the Nationals and Liberals, and some Liberal MPs received death threats.

Here are five things you may have missed:

Disendorsed One Nation candidate Sandy Baraiolo, who was running in the seat of Thornlie, has threatened legal action against the party.

She was one of two One Nation candidates disendorsed last month for what the party said was failing to reach required standards.

On Thursday, Mrs Bariaolo served state leader Colin Tincknell and the party with a letter of demand threatening defamation action if an apology and retraction was not issued by close of business.

Ms Baraiolo's legal representative John Hammond said Mr Tincknell did not meet his client's deadline, and she was now considering legal action.

On Wednesday, One Nation powerbrokers Ron Mclean and Marye Louise Daniels said they were pursuing legal action after claiming Mr McLean was dumped from the party for being "too old".

Meanwhile, high-profile One Nation candidate Margaret Dodd said she would boycott the party's how-to-vote directive over party's deal with the Liberals.

Ms Dodd who is running in the seat of Scarborough, told 7.30 that when she joined the party four weeks ago, she was assured that she would be able to decide her own preferences.

In response, One Nation leader Pauline Hanson said: "I certainly wouldn't stand in the way of her leaving the party, in fact, I'd welcome it."

Ms Dodd, whose daughter Hayley was murdered in 1999, is running to push for "no body, no parole" laws which Labor has supported.

Her daughter's body has never been found.

The ABC revealed today at least six Liberal MPs were sent anonymous death threats ahead of Saturday's election.

The author accuses the recipients of "stuffing up their life and business" and directly threatens "women and children".

One of the recipients is Upper House MP and candidate for the seat of Hillarys Peter Katsambanis.

"It's disconcerting for me, it's disconcerting for my family," Mr Katsambanis said.

"When people make direct threats to people's homes about their family, this is no longer fair game in politics."

WA Police confirmed it was investigating the letters.

Labor has released election costings, showing it would return the budget to surplus by 2020, but gave no timeline for paying down state debt.

The costings show a forecast a surplus in 2020 of $205 million, with debt continuing to climb to $39.975 billion over the same period.

Shadow treasurer Ben Wyatt acknowledged Labor's slender surplus and cost projections remained vulnerable to the volatility of WA's resource-based economy, and conceded there was still no clear timeline on when debt would peak.

Treasurer Mike Nahan attacked Labor's independent costings, accusing the appointed experts of having links to Labor, and suggesting they were neither independent nor objective.

Controversy brewed over Labor's proposal to sell naming rights to two of Perth's best known venues.

Labor wants to sell naming rights for Perth Arena and the new Perth Stadium, expecting it would raise $10.5 million over four years.

But Premier Colin Barnett blasted the plan, saying it went against all the work done to promote the Perth brand.

"This stadium is an iconic part of Perth, we are not going to have it taken over by some corporate entity with their naming rights," Mr Barnett said.

Labor leader Mark McGowan dismissed the criticism, saying "appropriate" titles would be chosen and "Perth" would still have to be included in the name.

"This is normal practise for stadiums and arenas around the country and around the world," Mr McGowan said.

Topics: elections, political-parties, wa

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WA election: Death threats, One Nation legal action, stadium stoush campaign trail action - ABC Online

WA election: Labor outlines campaign costings and debt reduction plan – ABC Online

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Posted March 09, 2017 20:55:26

WA Labor has released its election costings showing it would return the budget to surplus by the end of the decade, but offered no timeline for paying down the state's spiralling debt.

The costings show a forecast a surplus in 2020 of $205 million, with debt continuing to climb to $39.975 billion over the same period.

The release of Labor's financial plan comes just 24 hours after the Liberals Treasury-assessed costings showed a $12 billion reduction in debt due to the sale of assets including Western Power, and a tiny $24.3 million surplus by 2020.

Shadow treasurer Ben Wyatt said Labor's cost projections showed a Labor Government would chart a clear course towards balancing the budget, and stabilising debt over the long term.

He acknowledged Labor's slender surplus and cost projections remained vulnerable to the volatility of WA's resource-based economy, and conceded there was still no clear timeline on when debt would peak.

"I can't commit to when that will happen," he said.

"But I can commit to the fact that it's only through running operating surplus positions that we're focused on achieving that you will generate over the long term, that plateauing of debt and then its decline."

Labor refused to submit its costings to Treasury, instead selecting two former public servants to analyse its figures.

But Mr Wyatt said the party had nothing to hide and insisted its plan was credible.

"We have given you every decision we've made around spend," he said.

"We've given you every decision we've made around revenue. And we've given you every decision we've made around savings. We have provided more information than any other opposition before us."

According to Labor's figures, it would spend $2.785 billion over the forward estimates on meeting commitments, including $1.03 billion on Metronet, $224.5 million on health, and $261.2 million on education.

Labor claimed those commitments would be more than offset by $2.982 billion in funding from a range of sources including $1.079 billion reallocated from the Perth Freight Link, $529.5 million from land sales and developer contributions, and $631.1 million from Royalties for Regions.

Treasurer Mike Nahan has repeatedly attacked Labor's independent costings, accusing the appointed experts of having links to Labor, and suggesting they were neither independent nor objective.

He renewed his attack shortly after Labor released its costings.

"We can see now why they did not submit to Treasury for costings and we can see why they held it to the last minute," Dr Nahan said.

"Their program is simply not believable."

Labor's plan projects substantial capital and savings measures across the four years of the budget forward estimates.

It expects to save $750 million from a Service Priority Review of Government.

But Dr Nahan said that would require savings of $250 million a year, which could require sacking 7,500 public servants.

"You cannot sack 2,500 people each year for the next three years without redundancies," he said.

Labor expects to raise almost $530 million from land sales and developer contributions.

Dr Nahan said based on the Government's own intense land sales program, that was unrealistic.

"We have had the most vigorous land sales program ever in the history of Western Australia. Over the last four years, we've been able to spend $140 million worth," he said.

But Labor insists its costing are accurate and credible, and that its methodology was robust, despite not being assessed by Treasury.

"I'm not going to listen or cop for one minute this idea that we should have put it to Treasury when Treasury ticked off on (the Liberals) fully funded, fully-costed (campaign) in 2013," Mr Wyatt said.

Dr Nahan said Labor was trying to fool people with costings that lacked detail and substance, and warned voters it would not be able to deliver on its promises if elected on Saturday.

"If you vote Labor, and they put this in plan, you're going to have a massive increase in debt and deficit and either, they are going to cancel a large number of projects or taxes, charges and fees are going to go up," he said.

Topics: government-and-politics, elections, wa

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WA election: Labor outlines campaign costings and debt reduction plan - ABC Online

Finally, Democrats Have A Pro Wrestler In Their Corner – Huffington Post

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ATLANTA Curtis Wylde wasnt expecting to become one of Missouris representatives to the Democratic National Committee. But when he showed up 20 minutes late to the state partys nominating convention last June, he learned the other members of Missouris Bernie Sanders contingent had nominated him for one of the four open slots.

Wylde known on the Midwests weekend pro wrestling circuit as Volatile Curtis Wylde was surprised, but quickly channeled his wrestling persona to amp up the drama.

A stocky guy with a goatee and a silver-streaked ponytail, Wylde was the last to make his pitch to the voting delegates. The other candidates had delivered their speeches from the middle of the audience, but Wylde strode to the stage at the front of the hall, speaking into the microphone as he walked.

Im gonna start this out doing exactly what I plan to do at the DNC, he said. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is change the dynamic!

He hopped onstage, raised his fist and delivered a four-minute populist pitch: We need to start from the bottom, work our way to the top and take back our government!

It was not unlike the wrestling videos that Wylde whos also known as Lion of the Lou and the Wolf of West County posts on social media, where he melodramatically threatens wrestling rivals, sometimes from the back of a limousine. And it worked. Wylde and the three other representatives running on the Sanders slate swept the race, elected to represent Missouri Democrats for four years.

Which is how, eight months later, this professional wrestler ended up in Atlanta to cast a vote for Keith Ellison to be DNC chair. He crowdfunded his trip, raising over $1,100 much of it in $27 increments, an homage to his political idol to cover airfare and lodging. And while Ellison, seen as the successor to Sanders populist presidential bid, lost to former Labor Secretary Tom Perez in a narrow defeat, Wylde and others from the Sanders/Ellison wing of the party believe they will ultimately be able to take it over from the inside.

Wylde, 36, is new to politics, but not to the stage. Crowds of 350 or so typically show up to watch him clothesline and pile-drive competitors with ringside assistance from his wife Chrissi or Wyldefyre, as she is known in the ring on the Southern Illinois Championship Wrestling circuit.

In the wrestling ring, Im a little more Donald Trump, and in politics, Im a little more Bernie Sanders, Wylde said.

Wylde had a hardscrabble childhood: His father left when he was 2, and his mother, a secretary, had an abusive boyfriend for several years. When she could no longer take the beatings, they would move in with his grandparents.

His mother later met and married a truck driver, who become a stabilizing force in Wyldes life; he calls him Dad. The family followed his job opportunities to Mississippi, Illinois and then back to Missouri.

Wylde dropped out of 10th grade to take care of his 2-year-old sister, when financial pressures forced his mother to return to work. As a teen,Wylde bounced from job to job he was a server in casual dining chains like Red Lobster and Applebees, a bouncer at various clubs and a liquor store clerk. He was invited to join a local biker gang, but he declined.

At 19, he found his passion taking courses at a local wrestling school. He began performing across the Midwest, quickly adopting the role of a wrestling ring villain, or heel. His character leads a flamboyant, reckless life punctuated by suspensions and arrests. As part of his outlaw persona,he frequently cheats in the staged wrestling matches, using illicit weapons and even attacking the referee.

Heels rarely make it to the major championship titles. But Wyldes notoriety has earned him an antihero following. A whole lot more people are cheering me than I would prefer, Wylde joked.

For a while, he supplemented his modest wrestling income by driving the cars that escort oversized loads, and by managing a heavy metal band. Now he has a steady gig as a master of ceremonies at weddings, school dances and other events. With his wifes earnings as a massage therapist and server at a local restaurant, its enough to pay for the double-wide trailer where they live with their 4-year-old daughter, Phoenix.

Curtis Wylde

Prior to Sanders presidential run, Wyldes political involvement didnt go much further than commenting on Facebook. He voted in a presidential election for the first time in 2008, casting his ballot for Barack Obama. He voted to re-elect Obama in 2012, but says he didnt vote in congressional or municipal races.

He developed his political views through an interest in futuristic thinkers like Buckminster Fuller, Nikola Tesla and Jacques Fresco, a contemporary theorist who promotes the idea of a resource-based economy where money is no longer necessary.

I didnt really claim a political standing, Wylde said. I didnt feel there was a place for me, because of these not only these left ideas, but these really, really futuristic left ideas.

He says his political role model is his stepfather, a staunch Republican who died four years ago. While they disagreed on politics, his stepfather instilled in him a philosophy of putting people first, then profit, said Wylde.

If you provide good things, treat people right, then they will treat you right in return and good things will happen, he said.

In late 2015, Wyde began to notice his Facebook friends discussing Sanders campaign. He found himself agreeing with Sanders calls for getting money out of politics, providing universal health care, creating jobs and protecting the planet. Most of all, Sanders appeals for ordinary citizens to get active in politics made him feel like his voice mattered.

Bernie Sanders came along and said, Get involved, Wylde recalled. I always had my dad telling me, You cant make changes from the outside. Youre going to have to get involved. Youre going to have to get in the game if you want to make any plays. And so when Bernie came out and said that, I was bound.

Within weeks, he and Chrissi were organizing a Sanders rally in downtown Saint Charles, Missouri.

When a local party activist suggested Wylde make a bid for for state representative in Missouris 107th District, he went for it. Wylde ultimately lost to Republican Nick Schroer, but he got 36 percent of the vote and on a campaign budget of just over $6,000, compared to Schroers $77,000. He says he hasnt ruled out another run for office, and his role as a state representative to the DNC is certainly getting him more attention in Missouri.

Wyldes got a lot of energy, said Brian Wahby, one of Missouris at-large DNC members. Its also good knowing that there are leftist Democrats in the middle of the heartland.

Wyldes personal path to political awakening has convinced him that progressive policies like universal health care and free college can appeal to Republicans if they are framed as investments in Americas future. Canvassing for Sanders, he said, he also realized the importance of a credible messenger who understands why so many ordinary Americans have lost faith in institutions.

I saw a whole lot of people who may have definitely voted Democrat if Bernie was the nominee, Wylde said. I heard that at the doors of Republicans.

But Wylde was no Bernie or bust holdout. He says he voted for former Secretary of StateHillary Clinton without reservation. And when a contingent of Sanders supporters stormed out of the Democratic National Convention last July, he urged them not to leave the party. In a fiery speech to Sanders fans gathered outside the convention center, Wylde pointed to Missouri Berniecrats successful takeover of the DNC spots as evidence that the party could be changed from within.

Im in the Democratic Party, and Im here to stay, so I have to take it over, he told the crowd. All of you have to take it over!

PATRICK T. FALLON/Getty Images

Wylde has become an informal spokesman for the so-called #DemEnter movement, a loose confederation of progressive activists who want to remake the party in Sanders image. They hope to turn #DemEnter into a fundraising and recruitment vehicle for progressive candidates.

Hes been using the #DemEnter hashtag to pitch disenchanted voters on the idea that the Democratic Party is their natural political home, if theyre willing to get involved and shape it as they see fit. He spends hours on the phone, in person and on social media trying to convince people to come back to the party. Hes planning a series of social events to build excitement, including a #DemEnter progressive dance party.

The work Wylde has been doing isnt about Bernie Sanders, said Chris Reeves, a recently elected DNC member from Kansas. Its all about old-school effort.

But Wyldes also putting pressure on other DNC members to listen to the grassroots activists in their states. And he is clear about his intention to help progressives nationwide replace the legacy Democrats.

Sometimes Wyldes populist instincts lead him to go overboard. After Ellisons loss last month, Wylde fired off an angry message on Facebook.They may have just destroyed the Democratic Party!! he wrote. He apologized in a separate post a few hours later, assuring his friends and followers that he had confidence in Perezs leadership, and saying he was especially pleased to see Ellison named deputy chair.

In fact, Wylde sounds downright optimistic about the future of the DNC.

The vehicle for improvement of the society is the Democratic Party, he said. We just need to get people to see that.

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Finally, Democrats Have A Pro Wrestler In Their Corner - Huffington Post

The optimist’s guide to the robot apocalypse – Quartz

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Machines, you may have heard, are coming for all the jobs.

Robots flip burgers and work warehouses. Artificial intelligence handles insurance claims and basic bookkeeping, manages investment portfolios, does legal research, and performs basic HR tasks. Human labor doesnt stand a chance against themafter the automation apocalypse, only those with spectacular abilities and the owners of the robots will thrive.

Or at least, thats one plausible and completely valid theory. But before you start campaigning for a universal basic income and set up a bunker, you might want to also familiarize yourself with the competing theory: In the long run, were going to be just fine.

Our modern fear that robots will steal all the jobs fits a classic script. Nearly 500 years ago, Queen Elizabeth I cited the same fear when she denied an English inventor named William Lee a patent for an automated knitting contraption. I have too much regard for the poor women and unprotected young maidens who obtain their daily bread by knitting to forward an invention which, by depriving them of employment, would reduce them to starvation, she told Lee, according to one account of the incident. The lack of patent didnt ultimately stop factories from adopting the machine.

Two hundred years later, Lees invention, still being vilified as a jobs killer, was among the machines destroyed by protestors during the Luddite movement in Britain. More than 100 hundred years after that, though computers had replaced knitting machines as the latest threat to jobs, the fear of technologys impact on employment was the same. A group of high-profile economists warned President Lyndon Johnson of a cybernation revolution that would result in massive unemployment. Johnsons labor secretary had recently commented that new machines had skills equivalent to a high school diploma (though then, and now, machines have trouble doing simple things like recognizing objects in photos or packing a box), and the economists were worried that machines would soon take over service industry jobs. Their recommendation: a universal basic income, in which the government pays everyone a low salary to put a floor on poverty.

Todays version of this scenario isnt much different. This time, were warned of the Rise of Robots and the End of Work. Thought leaders such as Elon Musk have once again turned to a universal basic income as a possible response.

But widespread unemployment due to technology has never materialized before. Why, argue the optimists, should this time be any different?

Though Queen Elizabeth I had feared for jobs when she denied Lees patent, weaving technology ended up creating more jobs for weavers. By the end of the 19th century, there were four times as many factory weavers as there had been in 1830, according James Bessen, the author of Learning by Doing: The Real Connection between Innovation, Wages, and Wealth.

Each human could make more than 20 times the amount of cloth that she could have 100 years earlier. So how could more textile workers be needed?

According to the optimists viewpoint, a factory that saves money on labor through automation will either:

Amazon offers a more modern example of this phenomena. The company has over the last three years increased the number of robots working in its warehouses from 1,400 to 45,000. Over the same period, the rate at which it hires workers hasnt changed.

The optimists take on this trend is that robots help Amazon keep prices low, which means people buy more stuff, which means the company needs more people to man its warehouses even though it needs fewer human hours of labor per package. Bruce Welty, the founder of a fulfillment company that ships more than $1 billion of ecommerce orders each year and another company called Locus Robotics that sells warehouse robots, says he thinks the threat to jobs from the latter is overblownespecially as the rise of ecommerce creates more demand for warehouse workers. His fulfillment company has 200 job openings at its warehouse.

A handful of modern studies have noted that theres often a positive relationship between new technology and increasing employmentin manufacturing firms, across all sectors, and specifically in firms that adopted computers.

How automation impacts wages is a separate question. Warehouse jobs, for instance, have a reputation as grueling and low-paying. Will automation make them better or worse? In the case of the loom workers, wages went up when parts of their jobs became automated. According to Bessen, by the end of the 19th century, weavers at the famous Lowell factory earned more than twice what they earned per hour in 1830. Thats because a labor market had built up around the new skill (working the machines) and employers competed for skilled labor.

That, of course, is not the only option, but it is an outcome embraced by the optimist crowd. Similarly positive results of automation: If companies can make more money with the same number of workers, they can theoretically pay those workers better. If the price of goods drops, those workers can buy more without a raise.

As the Industrial Revolution ended, about half of American workers were still employed in agriculture jobs, and almost all of those jobs were about to be lost to machines.

If nothing else had changed, the decrease in agriculture jobs could have led to a largely unemployed society. But thats not what happened. Instead, as agricultural employment dwindled to less than 2% of American workers, jobs in other sectors grew during the same period. They involved working in factories, yes, but also working with computers, flying airplanes, and driving cargo across the countryoccupations that werent feasible in 1900.

Todays optimists believe that the latest automation technologies will create new jobs as well.

What kind of jobs, they really cant say (this is where the optimism comes in handy). About a third of new jobs created in the United States over the past 25 years didnt exist (or just barely existed) at the beginning of that period, and predicting what jobs might be created in the next 25 years is just guessing. In a report on artificial intelligence and the economy, the Obama White House suggested that automation might create jobs in supervising AI, repairing and maintaining new systems, and in reshaping infrastructure for developments like self-driving cars. But, the reports authors note, Predicting future job growth is extremely difficult, as it depends on technologies that do not exist today.

In 2013, researchers at Oxford sparked fear of the robot revolution when they estimated that almost half of US occupations were likely to be automated. But three years later, McKinsey arrived at a very different number. After analyzing 830 occupations, it concluded that just 5% of them could be completely automated.

The two studies obviously counted differently. The Oxford researchers assessed the probability that occupations would be fully automated within a decade or two. But automation is more likely to replace part of a job than an entire job. When Amazon installs warehouse robots, they currently dont replace full workers, but rather, the part of the job that involves fetching products from different shelves. Similarly, when my colleague used artificial intelligence to transcribe an interview, we didnt fire him; he just worked on the other parts of his job. McKinseys researchers model didnt attempt to sort jobs into replaceable and not replaceable, but rather to place them on a spectrum of automation potential.

Almost every occupation that McKinsey looked at had some aspect that could be automated. Even 25% of tasks inside of a CEO job, the analysis found, could be automated. But very few jobs could be entirely automated.

McKinseys conclusion was not that machines will take all of these jobs, but rather, more occupations will change than will be automated away. Our CEO, for example, wont spend time analyzing reports if artificial intelligence can draw conclusions more efficiently, so he can spend more time coaching his team.

This part of the optimists theory argues that if humans arent bogged down by routine tasks, they will find something better to do. The weavers will learn the new job of operating the machines. My coworker will write more articles because hes not transcribing interviews. The warehouse workers will each pack more boxes because theyre not running between shelves collecting each item to be packed.

Any time in history weve seen automation occur, people dont all of the sudden stop being creative and wanting to do interesting new things, says Aaron Levie, the CEO of enterprise software company Box and an automation optimist. We just dont do a lot of the redundant, obsolete work. He points to potential examples like automatically scheduled calendar appointments or automated research services. Why wont we make up that time with doing the next set of activities that we would have been doing? he says. What I think it does is make the world move faster.

What might that look like? Sodexos CEO of corporate services, Sylvia Metayer, offers one example. She says the outsourcing companys building maintenance crew has started using drones to survey roofs for maintenance needs in three locations. Before the drones arrived, a human climbed onto the roof to check things out. Now, that human stays on the ground, which is safer. The service hasnt changed, the clients still need someone to help maintain the roof, she says. If we do it with drones, the people who would have been going up on the roof have more value, talking with clients about what needs to be done.

Examples also exist in back office automation. From what weve actually seen on the ground, in real business operations, weve seen almost zero job loss, says Alastair Bathgate, CEO of Blue Prism, a software company that helps automate tasks within customer service, accounting, and other jobs. One of his clients, a bank, trained the automation software to react when a customer overdrew an account by checking to see if there were a balance in another account that could be transferred to cover it. This was a process that had never been done by humans, because it would be too tedious and expensive. Another bank used the software to allow customer service representatives to direct customers who had a credit card stolen to an automated system that would input their information and close the account. What do they do now? It allows them to take another call, Bathgate says. On-hold time, not head count, went down.

As the birthrate in many countries declines, the share of the working age population will shrink. To maintain todays GDP, those workers will each need to be more productive than workers today, and theyll need to improve at a faster rate than they have in the past. Even if productivity continued to improve at the same rate that it has throughout the last 50 yearswithin which the computer and the internet both became mainstream toolsit wouldnt be enough of an improvement to sustain GDP. Automation technology could be the answer. According to a McKinsey analysis, it could raise global productivity by as much as 0.8% to 1.4% annuallybut only if humans keep working, as well.

The Industrial Revolution eventually led to an unprecedented high standard of living for ordinary workers.

But this prosperity didnt immediately materialize. There was a period in which life inside of factories was miserable for the laboring class. It included paltry wages, terrible working conditions, and child labor.

Today, during what the World Economic Forum has dubbed the fourth industrial revolution, even optimists expect short-term labor displacement, wage depression, and, for some workers, pain. To take just one sector, the Obama White House estimated that nearly 3.1 million people could lose their job to the autonomous car. New jobs in other sectors could be created as these jobs disappear, but the people who are losing driving jobs wont necessarily have the skills to fill the new ones. This is a big deal.

What separates the optimists from the pessimists is that they tend to believe that the economy as a whole will recover from this short-term adjustment period.

Pessimists argue that not everyone will benefit from this industrial revolution in the same way that the standard of living for ordinary workers rose after the last industrial revolution. Over the last two decades, most gains in productivity have gone to the owners of businesses rather than people who work for them. Global inequality has for the last several decades soared.

But theres a lot of stuff going on outside of technological developments, argue the automation optimists, like the decline of unions, weakening of labor laws, tax laws that benefit rich people, and education policies that havent adapted to a changing worldthese are policy problems, and we should fix them rather than blaming technology.

There is, however, one point that cannot be easily brushed aside. Pessimists point to the pace of innovation as a reason that, this time, advances in technology will impact jobs more brutally than they have in the past. In the past, when you had disruption, the economy adjusted and jobs were created elsewhere, says Ethan Pollack, an economist at the Aspen Institute who says he wavers between optimism and pessimism on automation. What happens if [in the near future], each period of disruption comes so quickly, that it never recovers?

There will be fewer and fewer jobs that a robot cannot do better, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk recently mused at the World Government Summit in Dubai, before suggesting that a universal basic income would be necessary. But even as he talked of the threat to jobs, he also spoke of positive impacts of automation technology. With automation, there will come abundance, he said. Almost everything will get very cheap.

The optimism camp tends to have similarly mixed feelings about automations impact. AI can seem dystopian, tweeted Box CEO Levie, because its easier to describe existing jobs disappearing than to imagine industries that never existed appearing. He doesnt deny that automated technology will make some labor obsoletehe just focuses on the long-term, big-picture opportunity for potential benefits.

Both sides generally agree that there should be measures in place to reduce the impact of labor displacement from automation, like education programs for re-skilling workers who will lose their jobs. One side just tends to have a more darker view of what happens after that.

So which side is right? If history is any guide, both.

In the 1930s, economist John Maynard Keynes famously coined the term technological unemployment. Less famous is the argument he was making at the time. His case wasnt that impending technology doomed society to prolonged massive unemployment, but rather that a reaction to new technology should neither assume the end of the world or refuse to recognize that world had changed. From his essay, Economic Possibilities For Our Grandchildren:

The prevailing world depression, the enormous anomaly of unemployment in a world full of wants, the disastrous mistakes we have made, blind us to what is going on under the surface to the true interpretation, of the trend of things. For I predict that both of the two opposed errors of pessimism which now make so much noise in the world will be proved wrong in our own time-the pessimism of the revolutionaries who think that things are so bad that nothing can save us but violent change, and the pessimism of the reactionaries who consider the balance of our economic and social life so precarious that we must risk no experiments.

The Obama White House, in a report about how automation may impact jobs, recommended responding to automation by investing in education; creating training programs for workers, like drivers, who will be displaced by automation technology; and strengthening the social safety net. Bill Gates has suggested that we tax robots productivity similar to how we tax humans income in order to finance retraining programs and jobs for which humans are well-suited, like care-taking. Others have suggested wage subsidies and direct government employment programs. These proposed solutions are not so dissimilar to those provided to President Johnson in 1964, which included a massive program to build up our educational system and a major revision of our tax structure.

Even so, little progress has been made since then in making the US more resilient to job displacement caused by automation. The cost of college education has never been higher. As a society, the US has not shown a commitment in building effective, equal-opportunity re-skilling programs. Inequality continues to increase. And the Trump Administration has so far focused on preventing companies from hiring people into manufacturing jobs overseas rather than preparing the economy for the impact of automation. This is an insufficient approach.

As MITs Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee put it more recently than Keynes in their 2014 book about automations economic impact, The Second Machine Age: Our generation has inherited more opportunities to transform the world than any other. Thats a cause for optimism, but only if were mindful of our choices.

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The optimist's guide to the robot apocalypse - Quartz

Centrelink robodebt resulted in automation false economy: CPSU – ZDNet

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It's no secret that during the second decade of the 21st century, governments are loathe to spend a cent more than they have to, and Centrelink is shaping up to be the touchstone for using automation as its salvation and failing badly at it.

One can easily imagine how the powers that be within Centrelink and its overarching Department of Human Services (DHS) ended up taking the decision it did.

According to Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) National Secretary Nadine Flood, after years on the receiving end of efficiency dividends -- government-speak for reducing spending by a single digit percentage and expecting the same level of output and service -- DHS suffered a 10 percent cut in 18 months.

"It is not an exaggeration to say that the Department of Human Services is an agency is crisis, and it's not something I say lightly," Flood told the Senate Community Affairs References Committee on Wednesday.

Flood said DHS is unable to provide Australians with a basic level of service following a reduction of 5,000 permanent roles by governments of both stripes.

Given such a situation, it is hardly surprising that management decided to automate a decades-old process. But there was a catch. The process itself was not sound, as thousands of former Centrelink recipients found out over the Christmas break.

In the pantheon of decision-making, automating an already bad process is up there with drinking two pots of coffee back to back: It will allow you to do stupid things at a much faster rate.

"The department has been put in a position where it has made decisions, with the recent introduction of the automated debt recovery program, to remove or reduce the role of DHS staff in that crucial hands-on element of the work -- investigating suspected overpayments and advising on appropriate debt recovery actions," Flood said.

"This new approach which removes or reduces human oversight of suspected overpayments and reduces employees' roles at a range of elements of the system has been an absolute disaster for many Centrelink users, but also for the workers charged with implementing a system they know to be deeply flawed and unfair."

Copping some flack for its perceived involvement in the data-matching, the Australian Tax Office was at pains to distance itself from DHS, and said it merely provided annual payment summaries to DHS, as it had done for years. If there was any division by 26 in this process to miscalculate fortnight income and generate debt notices, the ATO was not the source of it.

With an environment focused on saving money, and a budget target of collecting AU$1.2 billion from former welfare recipients, it is disturbing but not surprising that DHS took its human process and ported it across to a machine.

"If we want to look at where robodebt has come from, it is a fairly obvious consequence of a department that no longer has the resources to provide effective services," Flood said.

"It has, of course, proven to be a classic false economy -- and has created costly reverse workflows where staff are taken offline to deal with complex and difficult disputes over incorrectly raised automated debts.

"Sadly, I would suggest in the last few years, one of the things DHS has become an expert in is band-aid solutions as it lurched from one crisis to the next -- this is simply the largest of those."

In its defence, DHS told the committee a lot of the trouble was caused by people not engaging with the notices they were sent.

"I think what we underestimated was how many people would not clarify, and would not engage," DHS Secretary Kathryn Campbell said.

"If I was to sum up what the problem has been, it is that when we wrote those initial letters, that recipients and former recipients didn't engage."

36 million unanswered calls would suggest that when Australians engaged, DHS was wholly unable to cope with what it had unleashed.

Automation has been far from Centrelink's saviour; in fact, it has been a very naughty boy.

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Centrelink robodebt resulted in automation false economy: CPSU - ZDNet

Salesforce’s Big Bet on AI Shows How Automation Will Affect Knowledge Workers – Inc.com

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"We cannot solve our problems with the same kind of thinking that we used when we created them," Albert Einstein supposedly said. One of his namesakes, an artificial intelligence called Einstein that Salesforce is incorporating into all of its products, embodies that sentiment: Salesforce is betting that human cognition won't drive its next wave of commercial growth. Rather, machine learning will push Salesforce's products deeper into its clients' businesses, and help Salesforce penetrate new companies, by augmenting human decision-making.

If Einstein is anywhere near as useful as Salesforce claims, the technology will supplant some human workers -- maybe a lot of them. Salesforce wants to make sales and marketing more efficient, which means that fewer people will be needed accomplish the same tasks. CEO Marc Benioff once wrote, "The only constant in the technology industry is change." Automation has hit factory workers hard, and soon members of the information economy will feel the same pain. The deadline may arrive before most knowledge workers, or the societies they occupy, are prepared.

On Tuesday, Salesforce held a "customer kickoff" event. It executives and partners discussed product development, with a heavy focus on Einstein's artificial intelligence capabilities. IBM CEO Ginni Rometty spoke briefly, apropos the two companies' recently announced partnership. "2017 is the year that AI enters the world at scale," she said. "The cognitive era is just beginning."

Of course, humans have engaged in cognition as long as the species has existed. What Rometty meant is we won't keep our monopoly on thought for long.

AI has been subject to enough hype cycles that default skepticism is warranted. However, recent technological breakthroughs suggest that the frothy press coverage and equally frothy corporate salivation may indicate something real this time. Google's DeepMind division programmed an AI that beat a complex strategy game before anyone expected it to be able to. Andrew Ng, renowned machine learning expert and chief scientist at Baidu, told the Wall Street Journal, "I think we're in the phase where AI will change pretty much every major industry."

Ng added, "Things may change in the future, but one rule of thumb today is that almost anything that a typical person can do with less than one second of mental thought we can either now or in the very near future automate with AI." Perhaps human workers should be frightened, since "there are a lot of jobs that can be accomplished by stringing together many one-second tasks."

Salesforce's Einstein is already doing some of this. In practical terms, the AI will not provoke an immediate revolution -- it's a version of what many SaaS clients expect from the applications they pay for. You could even argue that innovation hides in plain sight. Einstein enables prosaic but immensely useful functions like automated lead-scoring, based on information pulled into Salesforce's system. Einstein can aggregate signals such as whether a contact has looked at marketing materials (e.g. a webinar or whitepaper), and what their role is within the target organization.

"In a world powered by AI, signals are important," chief product officer Alex Dayon noted at the customer kickoff event. Einstein is able to interpret a variety of data inputs without much setup. In fact, most of Einstein's capabilities are available out of the box. Other features like Einstein Vision have to be integrated by developers. Salesforce is bringing automatic customization to all of its customers, while enabling those with greater resources to craft a deeper layer of specialized processes.

Some levels of customization are designed to be leveraged by non-technical users. "I can create a lead-management process with clicks, not code," product marketing EVP Stephanie Buscemi said. Salespeople who use Einstein are "not just smarter, they're also more productive," according to Buscemi.

Today's productivity gains are tomorrow's layoffs. It's not that productivity gains are bad. Rather, increased efficiency simply means that fewer inputs produce greater outputs. As it stands, labor is among the most significant inputs for a majority of businesses. The acceleration of what artificial intelligence can do is poised to multiply the impact of individual human workers -- while obsoleting others.

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Salesforce's Big Bet on AI Shows How Automation Will Affect Knowledge Workers - Inc.com

Broadridge Acquires Message Automation, Fortifying Post-Trade Solutions – Finance Magnates

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Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc. (NYSE:BR), a provider of investor communications and technology-driven solutions for broker-dealers, banks, and mutual funds, has acquired Message Automation Limited, helping extend its global post-trade control capabilities to both the sell-side and buy-side firms across the capital markets space.

Message Automation Limited, is a provider of post-trade control solutions the acquisition will aim to help strengthen Broadridges ability to transform its risk and compliance capabilities. This will include an emphasis on complex asset classes, including capital markets.

The acquisition of Message Automation is also important as Broadridge will be able to utilize its central data model, which is equipped to handle new regulations and market changes, such as the upcoming passage of MiFID II legislation.

The group had already been working with global firms in preparation for the January 2018 deadline, having already teamed up with Broadridge on addressing self-reporting needs for buy-side firms.

According to Charlie Marchesani, President of the Global Technology and Operations division of Broadridge, in a statement on the acquisition: The addition of Message Automation will enhance our ability to help companies to reduce risk and enhance compliance while improving operational efficiency.

This is the third acquisition related to broadening our post-trade and data analytics capabilities. These recent acquisitions in securities financing, collateral management, and derivatives clearing have helped Broadridge establish a comprehensive suite of capabilities across asset classes globally, benefiting our clients who are seeking more efficiency from a single global market provider, he added.

Companies are faced with the growing challenge of improving their regulatory compliance and operational efficiency, under significant deadline pressures, explained Tom Carey, President of Global Technology and Operations International for Broadridge.

Our unique operational and technological insights, complemented by Message Automations leading technology and expertise on derivatives processing models, enable us to help clients address the fragmentation of data and connectivity standards in the post-trade marketplace.

We share Broadridges focus on delivering exceptional business value to clients, and we look forward to leveraging Broadridges scale and relationships to help accelerate industry transformation through our post-trade control solutions, said Hugh Daly, co-founder and CEO, Message Automation.

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Broadridge Acquires Message Automation, Fortifying Post-Trade Solutions - Finance Magnates

The Automation Upheaval Won’t Be Limited to Blue-Collar Jobs – Futurism

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The Age of Automation

Much has been said about how automation will affect employment and the economy. In almost every conversation, the looming threat of job displacement is focused on a very specific sector: the blue-collar job market.

One frequently cited study published back in 2013 by Oxford University and the Oxford Martin School says that 47 percent of jobs in the US will be automated in the next 20 years. In Canada, a study conducted by the Brookfield Institute for Innovation + Entrepreneurship says that 40 percent of jobs in the country will be taken over by machines in the next decade or two. In the UK, theyre predicting that 850,000 jobs will be automated by 2030. And in Southeast Asia, an estimated 137 million workers are in danger of losing their jobs in the next 20 years.

These predictions are premised on the fact that machines are now more than capable of completing repetitive jobs that most blue-collar human workers are handling today. But technology isnt going to stop there. Artificial intelligence(AI)is getting more sophisticated, implying that its not only the jobs defined by formulaic processes that are in danger, but also creative, service and knowledge-based professions.

We are starting to see in fields like medicine, law, investment banking, dramatic increases in the ability of computers to think as well or better than humans. And thats really the game-changer here. Because thats something that we have never seen before, says Sunil Johal, a public policy expert forCBC News.

Granted, the implications of more intelligent automation on white collar jobs are all speculative at this point. Theres little data to support how much automation will affect that job market, mostly because experts believe its impactwill be far more subtle than inblue- collar industries. In white-collar industries, theres more opportunity to shuffle employees around, or slowly phase out jobs, which means the threat of automation wont be as dramatic. That being said, it willchange things.

Johal believes that to keep up, one must actively develop new skills that will adapt to the changing needs of the job market.

If Canada doesnt take this seriously, we are going to see many Canadians left on the sidelines of the labour market, he adds. They are not going to be able to get back into the job force.

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The Automation Upheaval Won't Be Limited to Blue-Collar Jobs - Futurism