#tomorrow? next year? 2025 if the world still exists?

[undercoverdonderwolk]

ok ok so ok... i am wondering if you have any thoughts/feelings/vibes/whatevers about potential performance clauses in perez's new contract

because i'm remembering us all rubbing our hands together in glee when he signed and rumour was rife that it included a bunch and was retroactive for this year, not just next

can't be so many places or points behind max in the wdc, rbr can't lose the wcc, or whatever it was, i don't remember the exact numbers. point being at the time it was great for the dirlie agenda because he was already behind on those targets

but now he's even further behind and rbr are even worse off, and yet he seems even more comfortable than ever

so did the rumour mill get the clauses wrong? or is there so much kit kat money being thrown around that it doesn't matter? maybe something else?

i gotta say though, now that the daniel stress of it all is done, i'm kinda enjoying watching the whole thing go from bad to worse to downright fucking bizarre. i am glad perez is so unhinged, it's enjoyable now 🍿

i don't think the rumor mill got the clauses wrong. there's no doubt in my mind performance clauses were added to perez's contract when he signed after monaco and i do think they could get rid of him tomorrow based on those performance clauses. but i also think that people underestimate how easy it is to rip those contracts up, even with performance clauses. even daniel had leverage to the point where red bull spent a whole bunch of time worrying about whether daniel could sue after summer break. checo has way more leverage than daniel so it'll be even more complicated to just dump him. i think the question will always come down to it is worth the time and money and upheavel it'll cost to get rid of him and i think up until now the answer was no. i think checo's seat is a big problem for red bull, and especially to the outside world because it's one of the few things we can visibly see go wrong for them, but a smaller problem in the sea of other problems red bull seem to have and that the general public isn't privy to. the power struggle between marko and horner, the fucked up car that isn't going to be any better for 2025, max possibly leaving, the lack of rookies coming through the pipeline... like there's a lot going on a red bull and the second seat problem exists in that context. there's more driving that decision than just 'checo sucks', you know? and that's why he's still in that seat, even with performance clauses

[acourtofthought]

Do you think this is SJM hinting that Elucien is a no go? Or just stirring the pot cause she knows this is what the fans are obsessing about?

I go the philosophical route with my next question: We’re talking about fate here, but at what point is a character the agent of their own fate? What happens if someone rejects their mate? (Listen, if I were Fae and I didn’t like my mate, whatever God chose for me is not my business.)

“That’s something I find to be very interesting,” she replies. “What if the forces that be put you with the wrong person? Or what if you just decide, eh, I’m not interested. … There’s a lot to explore within the concept of mates and your agency about it.

“I’m not going to say if I am exploring it in future books or not,” she continues, “but it definitely offers a wealth of things to explore with this concept of freewill and what is true love. Is it something that’s destined? Or is it something that you make? Is it both?”

I think Elucien is still a go for many reasons and I think they are getting the next book.

"There's one book that I'm going to be writing after this next "ACOTAR' book that I'm very excited about. I'm not going to say what world it's in. I'm not going to say anything".

"It's a story that's been brewing in the back of my mind for a long time". "I think it's going to be a very emotional book for me to write, just in terms of the worlds I'll be writing and the characters that might pop up."

Now that could go a few different ways but.....back before ACOWAR was released and right around it's release she said that she knew who the first two spin-offs would be about and was keeping her options open for third with one possibly being set in the past.

In ACOWAR, we have:

Miryam laughed, plopping down on the cushions again. "Your mate was in the middle of telling us your story, as it seems you've already heard ours."

I had, but even as Prince Drakon gracefully returned to his seat and I slid into the chair beside his, just watching the two of them...I wanted to know the entire thing. One day - not tomorrow or the day after, but....one day, I wanted to hear their tale in full. But for now...

The war where they met happened about 500 years ago, the war where Drakon and Miryam met.

We know a young Rhys was in the war. Maybe his sister was even alive then. We know it could be possible the LoA and Helion were having an affair around that time. All character she might be emotional to have glimpses of.

To me, that could be the book she's talking about. And it's possible that the LoA and Helion are a rejected mating bond (the hints are there in ACOWAR).

Or maybe she's got an idea for another TOG book. Which again, who is to say she wouldn't explore a rejected bond there?

E/riels are soooo convinced everything is about Elucien's bond when they forget many other characters exist in all her series and many character could be revealed to have a rejected bond.

But regardless of what that next book comes after, I think it's safe to say that the next ACOTAR book needs to wrap things if she's planning on moving to a different kind of book after that. Where any futher ACOTAR books would most likely be released 3 -5 years later.

And here's why I think Elucien makes the most sense as the book she confirmed she was writing.

I realize that Hulu is at a bit of a standstill but as far as we know, the plan is for them to film the series. And Elain and Lucien's bond is introduced fairly early in the series.

It does not make sense for the author to introduce a bond in book 2, something that became a MAJOR plot point for both Elain and Lucien's characters only to not address it one way or another for almost fifteen years. They were released to the world as mates in 2016. We've got one ACOTAR book coming up (2025??), then a book that is not set as part of the current ACOTAR series with the current characters after that (2027??) and then maybe she'll write another ACOTAR in 2029. And that's just a maybe because we know she's going to be writing CC4.

It seems somewhat necessary to make the decision on their bond so if they do move forward with filming, they know where each of the Archeron sisters will be ending up.

I disagree when E/riels say the book is only about the sisters but I don't think it can be denied that they have been a major driving force for most of Feyre's story and leaving one sisters future uncertain for however many more years doesn't make a lot of sense.

They might turn around and say "but Elain's story could end with Az" but I think CC3 makes it extremely clear that Elain is on a different path then him.

Everything SJM seems to be building up for Az's story, training the Valkryie for battle, being involved in Bryce's arrival, the information JUST introduced about his past, that fact that now that Bryce entered, the characters might wonder who else could come into their world....

That is not next book stuff in my opinion, only for her to walk away from the ACOTAR series for awhile. To me, those storylines are building up to something big enough that I think they are going to be dealt with in her new series and they're things that are more directly tied to the NC. But they're not big enough just yet to be a real threat to the characters yet. It's just a bunch of seeds being laid so they can mature and grow into a new plot after peace across their lands is established.

Even Gwyn and Az's possible mating bond was JUST introduced. He honestly has no idea he has a mate while Lucien has struggled for years. While Elain has been feeling something about it all for years. There is no real "will they ? won't they? in the Gwynriel relationship because right now, they are both kind of in the dark on it all.

I think the goal of the next ACOTAR book is to secure peace in their world, ending Beron. Healing Spring. Stopping Koschei and freeing Vassa, and those are Elain and Lucien storylines through and through.

Time travel? Building up an entire unit of Valkyrie? Where they'd all be trained to work together in battle as an elite female fighting unit?

Those are really big storylines all on their own but they really have nothing to do with the true threats of their world right now as we left them in SF and while they have everything to do with Az and Gwyn, they have nothing to do with Elain.

[shipping-receiving]

Skeins (pt. 1 of ?)

Notes: This is the first bit of a sequel to my colleagues-with-benefits fic titled Strings, which isn’t the Brienne POV (Knots) that I also started on. I’m not supposed to be writing either story because I’m technically on hiatus, but here I am, writing yet another first date scenario (I’ve written first dates for pretty much every single one of my fics, don’t ask me why). I’m not sure how long it’ll take me to get this one done, so I’m going to throw this up on Tumblr for now.

==========

“This is weird,” Brienne says, lifting her cup of coffee to her lips. They have a table outdoors at the cafe she’d suggested—a quaint place that was able to accommodate them after a bearable fifteen-minute wait—and Jaime wonders how quickly her freckles would darken if they weren’t seated under the awning.

“Is it?” He pokes at his eggs with his fork. “We’ve had lots of meals together. Granted,” he gestures the fork at her, “they’d all happened before we’d seen each other naked.”

This observation earns him a swift blow to his shin. “Seven hells,” he hisses, reaching beneath the table to rub his leg. “Is this going to be a regular occurrence, because I might have to reconsider—”

She ignores his question. “Will you—not mention that in public?”

“We’re on a date,” he points out. “People can reasonably assume we’ve fucked.”

“Jaime!” Brienne exclaims, even redder now than she’d been a few seconds ago. The couple seated at the next table go quiet, and clear their throats.

“I’m just saying—”

“You don’t have to. Say anything.”

“We’ll continue this meal in silence, then,” he huffs. “Like we’ve been doing for the past twenty minutes.”

“So it is weird.”

He shrugs. “Anything new is usually pretty weird.”

She nods slowly, her knife rolling a raspberry across the surface of her pancake. “I haven’t been on many dates.”

“Me neither. Not in a… traditional sense.”

The raspberry pauses. He shouldn’t have said that. He hopes she isn’t thinking of Cersei—he hopes she isn’t thinking that he’s thinking of Cersei. He should distract her with:

“Your first date with Hyle Hunt—was that weird too?”

That was not how he meant to distract her.

“Jaime.” She meets his eyes. “I thought we were over this.”

“We didn’t exactly—” he nudges her knee with his— “talk about it.”

She brings her coffee to her mouth again. “No,” she murmurs, and there’s a different shade to her blush now. “We didn’t… talk.”

He’s tempted to suggest revisiting that talk later, then thinks better of it. But he does let his lips curl upwards, and perhaps Brienne’s lips do the same, just at the rim of her cup. They’ll revisit it, he thinks, in a way that won’t leave a bitter taste in his mouth afterwards. Brienne will stay, after; she’ll let him rip her bra from her chest and her panties from her hips, the way he’d wanted to that night, but didn’t. She’ll scold him, maybe, for ruining her things, but she won’t mean it. He’ll buy as many sensible bras and panties for her to make up for it—or none at all, so he can have her just the way he likes.

“Just now,” she says quietly, interrupting his thoughts of her naked and riding him, “you said—people would assume we’re on a date.”

“I believe I said, people can assume that we’ve—”

He feels a blow to his shin again, though it’s gentler this time. “Yes, that,” she whispers. “But I mean—do you think we—look like it? Like we’re on a date?”

There it is again. That… worry. It reminds him of—you once told me I was much uglier in daylight. Jaime has the vague inclination to turn to the couple next to them—who’ve tentatively restarted their conversation—and ask what they’d thought before they’d overheard his declaration. Excuse me, by any chance, did you assume that the two of us…? But Brienne would be embarrassed, and annoyed, and as much as he’s enjoyed embarrassing and annoying her in the past, he doesn’t want to do so now. Instead, he reaches across the table for her hand, the one still gripping the knife. That’s what people do on dates, isn’t it? Hold each other’s hands?

“What are you—” she starts, then stops. She releases the knife, and lets him slip his fingers into her palm. She flinches, a little, but that is to be expected; Brienne flinches at most things she isn’t used to. What he’s learned is: it’s so much better when she flinches at first, then relaxes later. It means something, that tiny jolt through her flesh, when there’s a softening after.

This bothers me.

But I trust you.

He runs his thumb over the ridges of her knuckles. There is, wonderfully, no slenderness to her hands. Only solidity.

“Now there isn’t any doubt,” he says. “If anyone cares to look.”

She curls her fingers ever so slightly around his, and offers no other reply. But this is a good silence, now. This is how their bodies speak.

[davidshawnsown]

COMMEMORATIVE MESSAGE IN HONOR OF THE 80TH YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF THE BEGINNING OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR IN EUROPE

Ladies and gentlemen, to all the people of the United States of America and Canada and of the other combatant countries which formed the victorious Allies of the Second World War, to all our living veterans of the Second World War of 1939-1945 and of all conflicts past and present and their families, to our veterans, active servicemen and women and reservists of the entire United States Armed Forces and the Canadian Armed Forces, to all the immediate families, relatives, children and grandchildren of the deceased veterans, fallen service personnel and wounded personnel of our military services and civil uniformed security and civil defense services, to all our workers, farmers and intellectuals, to our youth and personnel serving in youth uniformed organizations, youth interest and hobby groups, youth sports and cadet organizations and all our athletes, coaches, judges, sports trainers and sports officials, and to all our sports fans, to all our workers of culture, music, traditional arts and the theatrical arts, radio, television, digital media and social media, cinema, heavy and light industry, business and the press, and to all our people of the free world:

It was on this very important day that we mark -

The solemn anniversary of the 1604 transfer of the Guru Granth Sahib, the sacred book of the Sikhs, to the Harmandir Sahib in Amritsar, Punjab,

The anniversary of the 1715 death of King Louis XIV, the longest ever European monarch of his time,

The 1772 founding of Mission San Luis Obispo de Tolosa,

The anniversary of the 1774 Powder Alarm by Massachusetts citizens,

The day in 1864 in which the 4-month old Siege of Atlanta ended,

The anniversary of the 1870 Battle of Sedan,

The 1880 Battle of Kandahar and its British victory,

The anniversary of the opening of the Tremont Street Subway in 1897 in Boston,

and various other events including: The anniversary of the Great Kanto Earthquake (1923), the anniversary of the the ANZUS Treaty (1951), the day of the historic SR-71 Blackbird world record flight of 1971, the anniversary of the Pioneer 11 arrival in Saturn in 1979, the final stage of the Marathon of Hope in Ontario (1980), the 1982 raising of the USAF Space Command, the anniversary of the tragic 1983 shoot down of Korean Air Lines Flight 007, and the beginning of the 2004 Beslan hostage crisis.

And ladies and gentlemen, as we one united people of the world, await the celebrations of the upcoming 74th year since the termination of the Second World War and the Allied victory over the forces of the Empire of Japan, we today mark the 80th anniversary since the beginning of this long war for just as war was already occuring in parts of China and then-occupied Korea between the Japanese and the Chinese armies together with partisans from within China and Korea,  on this day in 1939 the clouds of a global conflict had began to form when the Wehrmacht, acting to implement the provisions of the just recently signed Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, invaded western portions of Poland  (on the same day as the official launch of the Nazi program Action T4, aimed for forced euthanasia of the disabled and the mentally ill), which in turn led to declarations of war pronounced by the governments of France and the United Kingdom against the Axis Powers, marking the official commencement of hostilities of this war in the European contingent and in northern Africa. It would be the beginning of a long and lengthy conflict that would forever change the history of the human race for generation after generation, in a war that would cost millions of lives and tons of economic sectors devastated and cultural relics destroyed.

These 6 years and 2 days of a war that forever changed the world and saw the continous evolution of warfare in these modern times was indeed a war that will forever be a part of our history and affected millions of people all over the globe. For as the new ways of conventional, non-conventional and partisan warfare stunned the world, so too were the millions who suffered under the cruel hand of the Axis Powers in Europe and the Asia-Pacific, especially Jews in Europe, minorities, and political prisoners, as well as the Japanese who were interred by the Allies as well on suspicions of sympathy for their compatriots in the homeland and those serving in the armed forces, and millions of military service personnel and civilians also suffered and died in the fields of battle as well. But that cost would lead up to the long victory against the Axis Powers by the strong and determined men and women of the Allied Powers  - the Greatest Generation – helped and supported by the men and women of the home front, within just 6 years and a day later, the 80th anniversary of which will be marking in just the same time on the 2nd of September, 2025.

That great war of great memory is a war whose great victory still resounds up to this day, as we today mark with solemn remembrance this historic anniversary since the beginning of this war and await with great joy on the forthcoming anniversary of its victorious conclusion. As we reflect upon the millions who perished in this long conflict 80 years on since its beginning, we remember the millions of heroes of the Allies who fought night and day in conventional and unconventional military operations,  and worked tirelessly in the home front to support the men and women in the battlefields, supporting the wounded and comforting the families of the deceased, as well as providing entertainment and material support to all the servicemen and women fighting the Axis Powers, no matter who they were and where they came.   They, the millions who risked their lives for the sake of the future of our people against the Axis political, military, ideological and economic might, they who served in the uniformed services and in the partisan resistance movements within the Axis-occupied territories in Europe, northern parts of Africa and the Asia-Pacific, and those who sustained the war effort in their homes, in industries, culture, the press and mass media and in sports are the ones that we always honor and remember, especially today and tomorrow as we mark once again as one the bookends of this very long conflict in these two important days of our history. Even as only a few remain of the millions of participants of this war from the victorious Allies, in light of recent events and the rising tide of polarizing politics and ideologies of these current days even more important it is now for us to forever perpetuate the eternal legacy left behind by the victorious generations who fought the war to the very end.

The eve of the great victory over Japan and the end of that great and terrible war is upon us and the dawn is about to rise of a world of peace and prosperity, progress and care for the enviroment that we have been called upon to build upon the sacrifices made by the millions who perished in this long global conflict. For as we anticipate this historic 74th  year anniversary since the victory over the Empire of Japan and the conclusion of the Second World War, with great respect to the millions who died and the millions of heroic men and women who fought till the end, as we recall the beginning of this long global war that changed forever the face and destiny of this planet we today take vigil preparing for the festivities of tomorrow as we prepare to mark  the day of the last page in a long history that will forever be a part of our heritage and patrimony, the end of the six-year long global war that forever bears a mark in the historic books and archives all over the world, the diamond jubilee of which will be marked next year. For it is such a day that we indeed remember the conclusion of a huge part of these years of our history, wherein our ancestors and forefathers fought against the Axis menance that exactly eight decades ago threatened the very existence of our freedom and independence and the future of our generation, and made their contribution to the defeat of international fascism, imperialism, racism, xenophobia, dictatorship and totalitarianism symbolized by the Axis Powers. Tomorrow’s anniversary is a reminder to all, especially with the decreasing numbers of living veterans of this war from the millions in active service by the time of the conclusion of this war, to always uphold the values they fought and risked their lives for and to work towards continuing the legacy of the struggle in which they undertook for the sake of our future generations. Indeed, the sacrifice and hard work that these millions of military and police personnel and home front workers did that helped the Allied Powers win this great war against the military forces, governments and people of the Axis Powers, as long as we remain alive and as long as we’ll continue to honor them and their service to their country and people, will remain forever in our hearts and memories for generations to come.

The sacrifice of the millions of servicemen and women of the Allied armed forces and all our milions of Allied partisans and home front workers who helped win this great war, and most of all, of our millions of Allied military personnel and partisans who perished in the field of battle, must never be forgotten, for their contributions to the great victory gave us the freedom and liberty that we all enjoy and cherish this day and for every day of our lives. For as long as there are people forever honoring the memories left behind, the lessons taught to us by this war and the legacies of these millions of heroes will be passed on to future generations.

In conclusion, as we, one united people of the world, mark the 80th year anniversary of the beginning of the Second World War and await with great joy the 74th anniversary of the victory over Japan and the official conclusion of this war, as we once more recall the moments of this war from its beginning in which we mark today up to its conclusion that will be celebrated tomorrow, and remember with our words and actions these very important days in the history of humankind especially to all who served in this war we today hope that with the legacy bequeathed to us by these men and women who served in this great global conflict and keep these sacred  and memorable days of such a great victory with respect and reverence especially for those who went before us we shall be worthy of what they fought for, for building a world of peace, harmony and progress, a clean and preserved  environment, and a brighter future for all our children and grandchildren - truly the very future that is truly worth defending and the very future our forefathers fought with their very own lives. With our greatest gratitude may we always and forever treasure in our hearts all those who have gone before us and have entrusted to us the spirit of defending our freedom and liberty in all those years from the beginning of the war up to the great victories in which we honor today, everyday and in the years and decades to come, and therefore become successors to the legacies of the great victories won in the past and the generation that will bring humanity towards a brighter tomorrow as one united people.

As the men of Easy Company would always say:  WE STAND ALONE TOGETHER!

ETERNAL GLORY TO THE MLLIONS OF THE FALLEN AND THE HEROES AND VETERANS OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR IN EUROPE, NORTHERN AFRICA AND THE ASIA-PACIFIC FROM 1939-1945, WHOSE LEGACY WILL NEVER BE FORGOTTEN BY ALL OF US TODAY AND BY ALL THE GENERATIONS TO COME!

ETERNAL GLORY TO ALL THOSE WHO GAVE THE ULTIMATE SACRIFICE FOR THE FREEDOM AND INDEPENDENCE OF OUR WORLD AGAINST FASCISM, NAZISM AND IMPERIALISM IN THE FIELDS OF BATTLE, THE CONCENTRATION CAMPS, AND IN THE HOME FRONT!

LONG LIVE THE VICTORIOUS MEN AND WOMEN IN THE SERVICE OF THE ALLIES OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR IN EUROPE, NORTHERN AFRICA AND THE ASIA-PACIFIC!

LONG LIVE ALL THE ALLIED MILITARY, PARAMILITARY AND CIVIL VETERANS OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR!

LONG LIVE THE INVINCIBLE AND FOREVER VICTORIOUS PEOPLE OF THE FREE WORLD AND ALL OUR SERVING ACTIVE AND RESERVE SERVICEMEN AND WOMEN AND VETERANS OF THE ARMED SERVICES OF ALL THE COMBATANT ALLIED COUNTRIES THAT HELPED WIN THIS GREAT WAR AGAINST FASCISM, NAZISM AND IMPERIALISM, AS WELL AS ALL OUR ACTIVE AND RESERVE SERVICE PERSONNEL, CIVILIAN EMPLOYEES AND VETERANS OF THE POLICE, FIREFIGHTING, FORESTRY, BORDER CONTROL, CUSTOMS AND RESCUE SERVICES AS WELL AS OUR YOUTH OF TODAY AND THE CHILDREN OF OUR TOMORROW WHO WILL CARRY ON THE LEGACY OF ALL THOSE WHO HAVE GONE BEFORE THEM, ESPECIALLY TO THE MILLIONS OF MEN AND WOMEN WHO TOOK PART IN THIS GREAT WORLD WAR!

LONG LIVE THE GLORIOUS 74TH YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF THE END OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR IN THE PACIFIC THEATER OF OPERATIONS AND THE GREAT VICTORY OVER THE FORCES OF THE EMPIRE OF JAPAN AND THE AXIS POWERS!

GLORY TO THE ARMED FORCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, CANADA, THE UNITED KINGDOM OF GREAT BRITAIN AND NORTHERN IRELAND AND FRANCE, TOGETHER WITH THE ARMED SERVICES OF THE OTHER VICTORIOUS COMBATANT COUNTRIES OF THE ALLIED POWERS, GUARDIAN DEFENDERS OF OUR DEMOCRATIC WAY OF LIFE, OUR FREEDOM AND OUR LIBERTY AND GUARANTEE OF A FUTURE WORTHY OF OUR GENERATIONS TO COME!

TO THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AND TO ALL OVER THE WORLD, AN ADVANCE HAPPY  73RD VICTORY OVER JAPAN DAY!

And may I repeat the immortal words of the Polish National Anthem:

Poland has not yet perished, so long as we still live!

CURRAHEE! AIR ASSAULT! ARMY STRONG! SEMPER FI!

Ooooooooooooooooooraaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!

0800h, September 1, 2019, the 242th year of the United States of America and the 151st of Canada, the 244th year of the United States Army, Navy and Marine Corps, the 125th of the International Olympic Committee, the 122nd of the Olympic Games, the 78th since the beginning of the Second World War in the Eastern Front and in the Pacific Theater, the 74th since the battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa and the victories in Europe and the Asia-Pacific, the 7th since the attacks on Benghazi, the 14th of Operation Red Wings, the 72nd of the United States Department of Defense and the United States Armed Forces and the 52nd of the modern Canadian Armed Forces.

Semper Fortis John Emmanuel Ramos Makati City, Philippines Grandson of the late Philippine Navy veteran PO2 Paterno Cueno, PN (Ret.)

(Requiem for a Soldier) (Honor by Hans Zimmer) (Slavsya from Mikhail Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar) (Victory Day by Lev Leshenko) (Last Post) (Taps) (Rendering Honors)

[captaincanarygotmelike]

Fic: Doors Open ch. 1

A while ago my lovely friend Gabby asked me to expand on the Unconventional universe and nearly two years later, here we are. This is part one of eleven (maybe, we’ll see). Anyone unfamiliar with the series might want to check out the original fic here, bc this might not make a ton of sense (or don’t, you do you).

Read on AO3

Read on Fanfiction.net

Nothing particularly exciting happening during the first year Elsie was on the Waverider.

She got acclimated to the timeship (both Sara and Leonard thought she made the switch to the future remarkably well) and to her new family. She was truly loved on the Waverider, even managing to grow on Rip — he had initially been unsure about Sara and Leonard’s decision to adopt the little girl from the 1930s, however, as he watched Elsie’s relationships with her parents grow (and when he saw that her removal from the thirties didn’t destroy the timeship) he couldn’t ignore the benefit she was bringing to the team. They all enjoyed having Elsie on the Waverider. She added an element of fun to the dynamic amongst the team.

She played dress-up with Kendra and Ray, Jax was teaching her how to play football just like he promised, even Mick had a soft spot for her. Early on in their time on the Waverider, Mick had proven to have quite a knack for cooking, and since Elsie’s arrival, the two had taken to making meals for the team together. She would sit on the metal counter and watch him chop vegetables, and he would always let her stir ingredients together with a big wooden spoon — he even let Elsie stir things on the stove, even though Sara always told her no.

During a brief shore-leave a few months after Elsie moved onto the Waverider, the team returned to the present time and Sara and Leonard introduced their daughter to their families. They legally adopted her on that visit as well, and she officially became Elsie Lance.

“Lance?” Lisa had repeated when they told her.

“The Snart name dies with me,” Leonard had replied, answering her confusion.

“Unless I keep my name when I get married,” Lisa then pointed out.

“That’s not funny,” Leonard had replied seriously.

Elsie’s fourth birthday came and went. They celebrated it on the Waverider with a big game of hide-and-seek that even Rip joined in on, and a trip to Pompeii to watch Mount Vesuvius erupt.

Not too long after, Kendra said goodbye to the team and they welcomed two new members: Nate and Amaya. Rip was relieved to see that Elsie had not become a distraction for the team, but a motivator. Sara had become less reckless on the field, but had lost none of her will or tenacity. Leonard had grown increasingly protective of his team, even the new members. They all seemed to work better together.

Even though Elsie attended all the team meetings and sometimes journeyed into the times they traveled to, she had never joined the team on a mission. That is, she hadn’t joined the team on a mission yet.

“Time to get dressed,” Sara said to Elsie as she walked into her bedroom, “Did you pick out clothes for today?”

“Uh-huh,” Elsie nodded, holding out a bundle of clothing.

“Pink jeans and a pink dress,” Sara commented with raised eyebrows, “Wow. Really?”

“Yup.”

“Okay,” Sara let out a sigh as she shrugged, crouching down to help her get dressed.

“Miss Lance,” Gideon said as Sara helped Elsie pull off her princess nightdress, “Rip would like you to know that he has called a team meeting.”

“Okay,” Sara nodded, “Thanks Gideon.”

“Of course,” Gideon replied. Then she was silent.

“I wanna play with Kendra,” Elsie said.

“We’ve been over this,” Sara said, pulling the cotton dress over Elsie’s head and beginning to help her arms through the sleeves, “Kendra went back to the real world. Then Amaya and Nate came, remember?”

Elsie shook her head

“Yes you do,” she replied, “You played restaurant with them yesterday.”

“Oh,” she replied, gripping her mother’s shoulders as she stepped into the pants Sara was holding out in front of her.

“Ready?” Sara asked, once the pink jeans were pulled up and buttoned.

“You gotta do my hair,” Elsie said.

“I’m gonna do it on the Bridge during the meeting,” she told her, picking up a brush and several hair ties from the surface of Elsie’s dresser, “Let’s go.”

Elsie bounded out the door and down the corridors of the Waverider, Sara following at a much more comfortable pace.

The rest of the team was already at the meeting when Sara arrived; even Elsie beat her to the bridge, waiting for her in a metal chair.

“Miss Lance,” Rip said, “Thank you for finally joining us. Let’s begin.”

Sara crossed the room and sat in her chair next to Leonard. Elsie stood in front of her, leaning against her legs as Sara started to run the brush through her blonde hair.

“Here’s the plan,” Rip said, “Our latest adversary is taking refuge in the year 2025.”

“Hey, that’s close to our time!” Ray said.

“Yes, Mr. Palmer, it is indeed,” Ray nodded, “In 2025, he doesn’t pose any threat to society, but he is in something like a planning mode. He knows what he’s doing, now he’s just getting ready.”

“So what are we trying to do, exactly?” Jax asked.

“Figure out his plan so we can head him off at the proper moment."

“Awesome!” Nate said, “We’re gonna snuff him out before he burns!”

“Did someone say burn?” Mick asked, seeming to tune into the meeting just then, “I’m in.”

“I appreciate the enthusiasm, Mr. Rory,” Rip said, “but we’re going to be doing this mission a little differently. Think early days, Raymond and Kendra buying a house in the fifties. Some of you will be scattered throughout the city. The rest will be posing as the occasional tourist when necessary, and parsing through the information we collect on the Waverider.”

“What happened to diving in and hoping for the best?” Amaya asked.

“Our success rate with that tactic dropped to a level so low it warranted a change in plan. We’re trying something a bit more strategic this time.”

Amaya nodded.

“So,” he continued, “Our new mission will be taking us to València, a coastal city in the south of Spain.

“We’re going to Spain?” Ray exclaimed, “Cool!”

“Yes, Mr. Palmer,” he said, “Our target is Sebastián Reyes. In 2025, he is thirty two years old, and within the following decade, he will become one of the world’s most dangerous people, joining the ranks with Ivan the Terrible, Robespierre, and Osama bin Laden.”

“What exactly is he doing?” Nate asked.

“What any man of his kind does: tries to eradicate what’s unlike him. For him, it is people under a certain tax bracket. It’s his opinion that a lack of money is the result of a lack of intelligence and poor decision-making. There are, of course, other factors involved, but his goal is to eliminate those who earn under a certain amount, take the money they leave behind into the government of Spain and therefore solve the debt crisis and leave more money for the remaining citizens, including, of course, himself.”

“Why are we only hearing about him now?” Sara asked as she wrapped a hair band around one of Elsie’s braids, “If he’s really this bad, why haven’t you ever mentioned him before?”

“Because, until recently, he didn’t exist — that is to say, he wasn’t the person he is now. Something we did in the last month or so changed his story and inspired some terrible actions from Mr. Reyes. We are going to València to fix it.”

“Who are you placing there more permanently?” Nate asked.

“I’m sending Jax and Martin straight onto the campus of the University of València. Martin will be taking up the position of professor of physics and Jax will be a graduate student in the biotechnology department.

“Do they have a good football team?” Jax asked.

“If by football, you mean the game with a black-and-white ball you can’t touch with your hands, then yes, I believe they do,” Rip answered, “To continue, I’m placing Mr. Palmer in the same apartment complex as our target in the hopes that you can get close to him and we can find out more about his day-to-day life.”

“Cool!” Ray said, “I’ve always wanted to be friends with a sociopath!”

He didn’t seem to notice the bemused faces the rest of his team shot him.

“The last group I’m sending in on a slightly more permanent basis will include Sara, Leonard, and of course, Elsie. You three will be placed in a suburban neighborhood a little outside the city. You’ll be posing as a family who moved to the area for work. I have a spot for Elsie in a preschool and jobs lined up for both of you — and I request that you both actually attend them please.”

“Hey!” Sara protested as Leonard said, “That’s fair.”

“The rest of us — Mick, Nate, Amaya, and myself — will be staying on the Waverider to parse through and organize all the information you collect.”

“When do we leave?” Jax asked.

“Tomorrow,” Rip replied, “I suggest those who will leave us start packing.”

“Where are we going?” Elsie asked her mother later that evening.

“We’re going on a vacation,” Sara answered.

“What’s a vacation?”

“What?” she asked absently, “Oh, right.”

Sara often forgot that Elsie had come from the 1930s. She made the jump to the futuristic setting of the Waverider very well, but part of that was because she was going from one extreme to another; her new home held no resemblance to her old one. It existed in a kind of bubble, separate from any particular moment in time, so Elsie still had some gaps.

“A vacation is when you go somewhere else besides where you live, just for fun. Some people go to relax and some go for sightseeing,” she explained.

“Where are we going?” Elsie asked.

“Spain,” Sara replied, “for a mission. Daddy and I will be working, so I guess it’s less of a vacation than actually moving there…for a little while. Daddy and I are gonna go to work and you’re gonna go to school.”

“School?” Elsie repeated.

“Yeah, like how Sofia goes to princess school in that show you watch. You’re gonna go to school and have a teacher and learn new stuff everyday with kids your age.”

“Cool!”

Sara was feeling cautiously optimistic about the mission, although she would be lying if she said she didn’t feel a twinge of worry about the sudden change in tactic. Rip wasn’t wrong in his comment about their previous few missions not going particularly well, but they always accomplished what they needed to. They had a routine: screwing things up before they made things better. Maybe it wasn’t particularly efficient, but it managed to be effective. Changes in their routine might not go over well, and this was the source of Sara’s anxiety. 

Her main concern was Elsie, who had only ever left the Waverider for more than a few days at a time. This was her home, the only one she had known since war-torn Norway. Perhaps choosing this mission, one that would completely uproot her daily life, as her first mission wasn’t the best idea. However, Elsie didn’t seem too fazed by the prospect of moving to Spain for an indefinite amount of time, so Sara chose not to worry — or, rather, pretended not to worry.

Rip had told Sara and Leonard that, to spare them the inconvenience of furnishing an entire house, Gideon had generated everything they would need, down to the silverware and toys. All they had to worry about was clothes and any personal items that would be missed during their time away from the Waverider. Both Sara and Leonard had packed everything they needed into two boxes and while the latter began dinner (the chore wheel had landed on him that day, much to Leonard’s disgruntlement, as he thought he’d get to evade the job entirely for at least several months), Sara began going through Elsie’s clothes, tossing the ones more apt for warm weather into a cardboard box with Elsie’s name printed on it.

She hit a roadblock when she told Elsie to pick just a couple toys to bring with them to Spain.

“But who’s gonna play with them while I’m gone?” Elsie whined.

“Maybe Nate will,” Sara said, trying to hide her frustration, “You can’t take them all. Rip said there’s toys for you at the new house so, like I’ve said seven times, pick three and put them in your backpack. I’ll be back in five minutes.”

She turned away and headed for the door so she wouldn’t have to see Elsie’s pout (she made a mental note to make sure Leonard stayed away from her room for a while — if Sara thought she might cave, he certainly would).

Eventually Elsie picked her three toys — a stuffed elephant, a Rapunzel dress-up dress, and a set of markers that Sara traded out for a deck of rainbow playing cards when she wasn’t looking because she knew Elsie would miss them more (and they would be impossible to find in València because Gideon made them herself). The team ate dinner together in the mess hall (the last team dinner for a while, Ray realized sadly) and then Sara and Leonard let Elsie have dessert — blue popcorn, another one of Elsie’s farfetched requests neither Sara nor Leonard knew how Gideon accomplished — in their bed while they watched a movie.

“What happened to not letting her sleep in our bed anymore?” Leonard asked quietly, gesturing to Elsie who had fallen asleep about an hour into Bridge to Terabithia, curled up in Sara’s arms.

Sara locked down at her daughter.

“Yeah, wishful thinking, I guess,” she replied. She looked to him, furrowing her eyebrows when she saw an expression on his face that usually signified he was having some kind of internal debate, “What?”

He let out a sigh, “I just was wondering if this is a good idea. We never involved her in a mission before, never mind a new type of mission. We don’t know how this is going to pan out.”

“I know,” Sara nodded seriously, “I’ve thought about that too.”

When they decided Elsie should stay with them on the Waverider, they hadn’t been ignorant to the knowledge that having a toddler onboard the timeship during a mission to safeguard all of time would not be easy. Leonard and Sara had quickly agreed they wouldn’t bring Elsie on missions, not even simple reconnaissance trips — they had seen those go sideways — but that still left the concern of what to do with her when they had to be out on the field. More often than not, at least one person from the team wouldn’t need to go on the mission — usually Rip, as of late — and that person would watch her. Occasionally, however, a mission would require the efforts of the entire team. In that case, Gideon had assured Sara and Leonard she could make sure Elsie stayed safe.

Although those types of missions were few and far between, and nothing bad had ever happened during any of them (in fact, the Waverider hadn’t been attacked in a while — not since long before Elsie came onboard), Sara and Leonard still hated the idea of leaving their daughter alone on the Waverider.

“And I know we said we wouldn’t take Else on missions,” Sara continued, “but this is gonna be different. It won’t be like our normal missions where we, you know, kick ass and then get the hell out. It’s gonna be longer, more strategic.”

Leonard nodded his agreement.

“And,” Sara continued, “I actually trust Rip with this stuff. He’s a dad too. He wouldn’t do anything to put her in danger.”

“I know you’re right, but you know me, I get stuck in the hypotheticals. If something happens to her…” he trailed off.

“I know,” she nodded, “We’re just gonna have to be careful. If something bad does happens, we bring her back to the Waverider — and hey, bonus points: we get to hold it against Rip for the rest of his life.”

Sara saw Leonard smirk slightly.

“I should get Else to her bed,” she said, carefully shifting Elsie in her arms and getting to her feet, “Long day tomorrow; we’re moving to Spain.”

[orbemnews]

Can Wall Street's bulls keep climbing a 'wall of worry'? What’s happening: At a press conference Wednesday, Powell reiterated that the central bank does not plan to roll back its massive stimulus efforts until the economic recovery from the pandemic is complete. Wall Street cheered his remarks, sending stocks to fresh records. But by Thursday morning, the mood had changed. Investors dumped US government bonds, sending the yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury up to 1.738%, the highest level in more than a year. Nasdaq Composite futures fell sharply, indicating tech shares could be primed for another drop. The shift displays the mental tug-of-war playing out across markets. While many investors are gearing up for an economic boom later this year, anxiety is growing about adverse side effects — namely inflation, which could force the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates or taper bond purchases sooner than expected. “Strong economic growth — the kind we have been expecting since last summer, closes the output gap and leads to inflationary pressure,” Bank of America’s equity strategists told clients Wednesday. “No surprises there.” The economic picture is brightening. Thanks to President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus package and the vaccine rollout, Fed officials now project that US gross domestic product, the broadest measure of economy activity, will climb 6.5% this year, more than the 4.2% projected in December. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate is expected to fall to 4.5% by year-end. By 2023, the jobless rate could be back at 3.5%, where it sat before the pandemic hit. We’re not there yet, Powell acknowledged. Another 700,000 first-time claims for unemployment benefits are expected in Thursday’s report from the Labor Department. That would be the lowest number of claims since the pandemic started, but still well above the 200,000-some claims typically registered before the virus arrived. The Fed chair emphasized that the central bank plans to scrutinize the latest data when making decisions instead of relying on projections. “We’ve said that we would continue asset purchases at this pace until we see substantial further progress,” Powell said. “And that’s actual progress, not forecast progress.” Even so, some on Wall Street are wondering if the Fed’s choice to sit tight — potentially through 2023 — could mean it’s forced to take more dramatic action down the line, and fear that inflation could stick around longer than officials think. “At the moment this is all fine if the Fed’s assumption that any inflation is transitory is proved correct,” Deutsche Bank’s Jim Reid told clients Thursday. “However, if the market doubts the transitory nature of inflation at any point that’s when the fun and games start.” The team at Bank of America is more sanguine. “There is always some reason or the other since the start of this bull market to complain,” its strategists said. They think investors can climb the “wall of worry,” though, given that markets are awash with cash and corporate earnings growth looks primed to jump. Their advice? “Stay bullish.” SPAC fundraising is up an insane 2,000% from a year ago The SPAC market is so hot that this year’s fundraising haul has already surpassed what was brought in during the entirety of 2020. Now, the world’s biggest asset manager is expressing concerns, my CNN Business colleague Matt Egan reports. “If you look at the SPAC market, there’s some really attractive new companies and new technologies coming to the market that are financing effectively,” BlackRock executive Rick Rieder told CNN Business. “And then there are some that make no sense.” Rieder, BlackRock’s chief investment officer of global fixed income, urged investors to use caution before entering this space. “You’ve got to be really selective about where you go and not just jump onto that train because it’s gotten crazy,” he said. Remember: Special purpose acquisition companies — or shell companies that exist purely to take private entities public — have become all the rage on Wall Street. Even celebrities like Alex Rodriguez and Jay-Z have launched SPACs to capitalize on the trend. US-listed SPACs have raised $83.1 billion so far this year, according to Dealogic. That is up 2,031% from the same point last year. As of Tuesday, the 2021 SPAC market exceeded 2020’s total of $82.6 billion. One concern is that the amount of SPAC money hunting for merger candidates may exceed the number of quality private companies that could be scooped up. Rieder pointed out that some SPACs are going public with lofty valuations of 40 or even 50 times their revenue. “There’s no chance you could ever grow into that,” he said. Volkswagen shares are soaring as the carmaker takes on Tesla Volkswagen’s shares have skyrocketed an eye-popping 22% this week as investors throw their weight behind the automaker’s electric ambitions. The latest: Tesla (TSLA) could be matched sale-for-sale by Volkswagen (VLKAF) as early as 2022, according to analysts at UBS, who predict that Europe’s biggest carmaker will go on to sell 300,000 more battery electric vehicles than Tesla in 2025, my CNN Business colleague Charles Riley reports. Ending Tesla’s reign would be a huge milestone in Volkswagen’s transformation into an electric vehicle powerhouse. Badly burned by its diesel emissions scandal in 2015, the company is investing €35 billion ($42 billion) in electric vehicles, staking its future on new technology and a dramatic shift away from fossil fuels. “Tesla is not only about electric vehicles. Tesla is also very strong in software. They really run the car as a device. They are making good progress on the autonomous thing,” Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess told CNN’s Julia Chatterley this week. “But yes … we are going to challenge Tesla.” UBS analysts told reporters last week that investors have failed to appreciate the speed at which Volkswagen is gaining ground on Tesla, and how much money the German company stands to make by going “all in” on electric cars before other established players including Toyota and General Motors. The bank has hiked its target price for Volkswagen shares by 50% to €300 ($358). Up next Dollar General (DG) and Weibo (WB) report results before US markets open. FedEx (FDX) and Nike (NKE) follow after the close. Also today: Initial US jobless claims post at 8:30 a.m. ET. Coming tomorrow: A big week of central bank announcements closes out with the Bank of Japan. Source link Orbem News #Bulls #climbing #investing #Premarketstocks:CanWallStreet'sbullskeepclimbinga'wallofworry'?-CNN #streets #Wall #Worry

[ericfruits]

Should data be crunched at the centre or at the edge?

Feb 22nd 2020

ONCE A YEAR the computing cloud touches down in Las Vegas. In early December tens of thousands of mostly male geeks descend on America’s gambling capital in hope not of winnings but of wisdom about Amazon Web Services (AWS), the world’s biggest cloud-computing provider. Last year they had the choice of more than 2,500 different sessions over a week at the shindig, which was called “Re:Invent”. The high point was the keynote featuring AWS’s latest offerings by Andy Jassy, the firm’s indefatigable boss, who paced the stage for nearly three hours.

But those who dare to walk the long city blocks of Las Vegas to the conference venues can connect to the cloud, and thus the mirror worlds, in another way. Push a button to request a green light at one of thousands of intersections and this will trigger software from SWIM.AI, a startup, to perform a series of calculations that may influence the traffic flow in the entire city. These intersections do not exist just in the physical realm, but live in the form of digital twins in a data centre. Each takes in information from its environment—not just button-pushing pedestrians, but every car crossing a loop in the road and every light change—and continually predicts what its traffic lights will do two minutes ahead of time. Ride-hailing firms such as Uber, among others, can then feed these predictions into their systems to optimise driving routes.

AWS represents a centralised model where all the data are collected and crunched in a few places, namely big data centres. SWIM.AI, on the other hand, is an example of what is being called “edge computing”: the data are processed in real time as close as possible to where they are collected. It is between these two poles that the infrastructure of the data economy will stretch. It will be, to quote a metaphor first used by Brian Arthur of the Santa Fe Institute, very much like the root system of an aspen tree. For every tree above the ground, there are miles and miles of interconnected roots underground, which also connect to the roots of other trees. Similarly, for every warehouse-sized data centre, there will be an endless network of cables and connections, collecting data from every nook and cranny of the world.

To grasp how all this may work, consider the origin and journey of a typical bit and how both will change in the years to come. Today the bit is often still created by a human clicking on a website or tapping on a smartphone. Tomorrow it will more often than not be generated by machines, collectively called the “Internet of Things” (IOT): cranes, cars, washing machines, eyeglasses and so on. And these devices will not only serve as sensors, but act on the world in which they are embedded.

Ericsson, a maker of network gear, predicts that the number of IOT devices will reach 25bn by 2025, up from 11bn in 2019. Such an estimate may sound self-serving, but this explosion is the likely outcome of a big shift in how data is collected. Currently, many devices are tethered by cable. Increasingly, they will be connected wirelessly. 5G, the next generation of mobile technology, is designed to support 1m connections per square kilometre, meaning that in Manhattan alone there could be 60m connections. Ericsson estimates that mobile networks will carry 160 exabytes of data globally each month by 2025, four times the current amount.

The destination of your average bit is changing, too. Historically, most digital information stayed home, on the device where it was created. Now, more and more data flow into the big computing factories operated by AWS, but also its main competitors, Microsoft Azure, Alibaba Cloud and Google Cloud. These are, in most cases, the only places so far with enough computing power to train algorithms that can, for instance, quickly detect credit-card fraud or predict when a machine needs a check-up, says Bill Vass, who runs AWS’s storage business—the world’s biggest. He declines to say how big, only that it is 14 times bigger than that of AWS’s closest competitor, which would be Azure (see chart).

What Mr Vass also prefers not to say, is that AWS and other big cloud-computing providers are striving mightily to deepen this centralisation. AWS provides customers with free or cheap software that makes it easy to connect and manage IOT devices. It offers no fewer than 14 ways to get data into its cloud, including several services to do this via the internet, but also offline methods, such as lorries packed with digital storage which can hold up to 100 petabytes to ferry around data (one of which Mr Jassy welcomed on stage during his keynote speech in 2016).

The reason for this approach is no secret. Data attract more data, because different sets are most profitably mined together—a phenomenon known as “data gravity”. And once a firm’s important data are in the cloud, it will move more of its business applications to the computing skies, generating ever more revenue for cloud-computing providers. Cloud providers also offer an increasingly rich palette of services which allow customers to mine their data for insights.

Yet such centralisation comes with costs. One is the steep fees firms have to pay when they want to move data to other clouds. More important, concentrating data in big centres could also become more costly for the environment. Sending data to a central location consumes energy. And once there, the temptation is great to keep crunching them. According to OpenAI, a startup-cum-think-tank, the computing power used in cutting-edge AI projects started to explode in 2012. Before that it closely tracked Moore’s law, which holds that the processing power of chips doubles roughly every two years; since then, demand has doubled every 3.4 months.

Happily, a counter-movement has already started—toward the computing “edge”, where data are generated. It is not just servers in big data centres that are getting more powerful, but also smaller local centres and connected devices themselves, thus allowing data to be analysed closer to the source. What is more, software now exists to move computing power around to where it works best, which can be on or near IOT devices.

Applications such as self-driving cars need very fast-reacting connections and cannot afford the risk of being disconnected, so computing needs to happen in nearby data centres or even in the car itself. And in some cases the data flows are simply too large to be sent to the cloud, as with the traffic lights in Las Vegas, which together generate 60 terabytes a day (a tenth of the amount Facebook collects in a day).

One day soon, debates may rage over whether data generation should be taxed

How far will the pendulum swing back? The answer depends on whom you ask. The edge is important, concedes Matt Wood, who is in charge of AI at AWS, but “at some point you need to aggregate your data together so that you can train your models”. Sam George, who leads Azure’s IOT business, expects computing to be equally spread between the cloud and its edge. And Simon Crosby, the chief technologist at SWIM.AI, while admitting that his firm’s approach “does not apply everywhere”, argues that too much data are generated at the edge to send to the cloud, and there will never be enough data scientists to help train all the models centrally.

Even so, this counter-movement may not go far enough. Given the incentives, big cloud providers will still be tempted to collect too much data and crunch them. One day soon, debates may rage over whether data generation should be taxed, if the world does not want to drown in the digital sea.■

The data economy mirror worlds

This article appeared in the Special report section of the print edition under the headline "Spreading out"

https://ift.tt/32czHMC

[giancarlonicoli]

Newsonomics: Inside the new L.A. Times, a 100-year vision that bets on tech and top-notch journalism

It’s a few years behind its East Coast brethren in New York and Washington. But tens of millions in new investment and ambitious digital plans are showing a path back to its former prominence — and beyond.By

KEN DOCTOR

@kdoctor

March 27, 2019, 2:05 p.m.

Look past the view of the 105. Beyond it is the unfolding of the 21st century, delayed but now in full force at the Los Angeles Times.

That’s my big takeaway from a visit to Patrick Soon-Shiong’s new temple to next-stage journalism. Last summer, he moved his just-purchased L.A. Times (whose lease was expiring) to one of the sprawling L.A.’s least glamorous addresses: 2300 E. Imperial Highway, El Segundo, CA 90245. (Google’s satellite view is revealing.) That move stirred some newsroom complaints early on, though the new address seems to have receded as an issue as Soon-Shiong and editor-in-chief Norm Pearlstine have laid out their fast-paced, if still incremental, visions of a new Times.

The visions are big enough, but they stand out even more dramatically in a newspaper business still cutting its way to the future, looking to mergers and acquisitions as a short-term lifeline in the cash-poor trade. Like The New York Times and The Washington Post, the new L.A. Times wants to tell a contrarian story: Investment in the daily press underlines a deep belief in the power of journalism, optimism that it can make both readers’ lives and their democracy run better amid the gobsmacking rate of political and technological change.

“So my concern was editorial, the newsroom. That was my very, very, very first concern,” Soon-Shiong told me in a two-hour interview. “I knew that that’s where I needed to go as my first and highest priority. My second priority now is the business model, but the business model, sadly — and I don’t mean this to sound in any way arrogant — has to be consistent with this next generation, not with the past generation,” says the 66-year-old Soon-Shiong. He’s put his money behind his ideas, taking a loss of about $50 million this year as he marches the Times forward.

Soon-Shiong has been a man of some mystery in the news trade, his entry having been midwifed clumsily by one-time Tronc chairman Michael Ferro. In our wide-ranging interview — to be published in full here tomorrow — the med-tech billionaire connects many of the missing dots that have characterized coverage of him over the last several years.

The Times’ turnaround from those bad old days (actually quite recent!) of the Tronc/Tribune/Ferro reign is nothing less than remarkable.

The Times’ newsroom had unionized as Tronc’s tragicomic handling of its properties reached a denouement, and Ferro made Soon-Shiong an offer he figured he shouldn’t refuse. Soon-Shiong believes that had Tronc/Tribune kept title to the Times, it would have cut as many as another 100 jobs in the newsroom in short order.

His June 2018 purchase stopped any new cuts in their tracks.

Norm Pearlstine, one of America’s top editors whose career had been built at The Wall Street Journal, Time Inc. and Bloomberg, inherited a newsroom of about 440, including part-timers and contractors. That still ranked among the largest in the country; The New York Times counts 1,550, The Washington Post about half that number.

Want a number that symbolizes the Soon-Shiong era? That 440 less than a year ago stands today at 535 newsroom employees.

Many in the business thought that Pearlstine, 76, would play something of a caretaker role — a short opening stint to help orient Soon-Shiong in this business and then stepping aside to pick a younger successor. But Soon-Shiong told me Monday that he’s signed Pearlstine to a new multi-year contract extending his term as executive editor.

“When Norm agreed to come out of retirement and become the executive editor of the Los Angeles Times, we were thrilled,” he said. “He has a long, impeccable track record as a journalist and as a media executive. He is truly enjoying the challenge of guiding the L.A. Times through the transition and positioning the company to succeed. As part of that, he is developing a diverse team of managers and possible successors. We are moving forward in a very positive direction and Norm and I have agreed to a multi-year extension of his term as executive editor. I could not be more pleased.”

How does Pearlstine now look at this almost unique turnaround opportunity? “I’m a little bit torn because I don’t think I’ve ever met an executive who did a turnaround who looked back and said, ‘I went too fast,'” he said. “So the pressure intention is to want to move quickly. But that said, I think we need a pause to just catch our breath and integrate…If you think about [Soon-Shiong’s] ambitions and what the brand lets you do, we need to do additional hiring as we roll out some of these products that we think will induce people to pay for content. What we’ve done over the last eight months has been to fill critical vacancies that had resulted from either layoff, buyouts, or attrition.”

Pearlstine described his Times journey so far in depth in two additional hours of conversations. (We’ll run a transcript of that interviews, like my one with Soon-Shiong, later this week here at Nieman Lab.)

It’s not just the number that matters — it’s also the kind of hires Pearlstine is making, near the top of the newsroom and throughout it. In leadership, he lured away from the East Coast both The New York Times’ Sewell Chan, who heads the news desk and is also responsible for audience engagement, and Slate’s top editor Julia Turner, who is creating the Times’ playbook for upping its arts and entertainment game. In this hiring binge, Pearlstine aims to do both the basic blocking and tackling required to heal an ailing news enterprise and to draw from the new world of digital journalism. His key hires of food critic Bill Addison from Eater and Peter Meehan from Lucky Peach signal an appreciation of journalism that comes from beyond old “newspaper” formulas.

But even that almost 25 percent headcount increase in less than a year marks just the beginning of the Times’ expansion ambitions.

Behold the fifth floor

Among the projects soon to get more attention is on the fifth floor. There, Soon-Shiong says, about 100 new staffers — about 80 of them still to be hired — will operate what he calls a new transmedia operation. The idea — in video, TV, audio, VR, games, and plain old-fashioned social management — is multiplication.

The strategy: Even as fundamental newsroom resources are being rebuilt, magnify their impact across all the means of distribution and audience engagement that technology now enables. Which will work and which will prove to be experiments to retire? Soon-Shiong is the first to say he’s not sure. (A previous transmedia company he backed, Fourth Wall Studios, closed in 2012.) But while his optimism about applying his Nant medical tech to journalism was sometimes lampooned when he first bought into Tronc three years ago, he’s undaunted in explaining tomorrow’s potential.

Take another number: 157,000. That’s the number of digital subscriptions the L.A. Times has today. It’s roughly doubled over the past two tumultuous Times years. The growth rate is significant, as is the fact that it’s more than any other “local” daily in the U.S. But Soon-Shiong sees it as just the first handhold on a towering mountain. He wants to get to 1 million quickly and has a stretch target of 4 million over the next four years.

That quest for fast scale helps explain the Times’ decision to become a major partner of Apple in this week’s launch of the Apple News Plus subscription package. It’s another step in increasing reader revenue. Both The New York Times and The Washington Post declined to join Apple’s service, it makes more sense for Soon-Shiong’s paper. The L.A. Times wants to do everything it can to get “discovered” by new readers, and it has much less to fear from the cannibalization of existing direct digital subscribers. Says Soon-Shiong of the deal: “Apple News editors will be able to curate current and recent coverage from all of our sections…We are delighted to be one of just two U.S. newspapers selected to participate at launch and to share in the revenue from the premium subscription service, which will help fund our journalism.” (Some content, such as the paper’s archives, won’t be accessible through Apple News Plus.)

As for Soon-Shiong’s stretch goal, New York Times CEO Mark Thompson’s recently setting of a 10 million subscriber total by 2025 is instructive. Thompson had laid out that seemingly impossible number two years ago, but back then, he didn’t put a date on it. Now, having reached 4.3 million total subscribers, no one laughs at the 10 million aspiration anymore. That tells us a lot about the digital news business and all the ground Soon-Shiong’s paper will have to make up quickly.

How far is his paper behind The Washington Post or that other Times? (“You mean The New York Times,” he notes several times in our conversation, as if to emphasize there is another Times back in the national media conversation.) Jeff Bezos faced a similar challenge when he bought the Post six years ago, and the paper’s ascent since then has surprised even the most skeptical about the chances of journalistic rebirth. (Amazingly, when Bezos bought the Post, its newsroom staff was smaller than the L.A. Times’.)

Figure the L.A. Times is 6 to 10 years behind its East Coast models, the “papers” it once called its brethren and would like to again.

As it retools, the L.A. Times faces new competition — including from that other Times. The New York Times is intently focused on California, home to 40 million people. It has more digital subscribers in California than in the state of New York. Its California Today newsletter is its Trojan Horse into the Golden State, competing with the L.A. Times’ “Essential California” newsletter. Even as the L.A. Times works to maintain its claim on food coverage, The New York Times went and hired its first-ever California restaurant critic.

Maybe the meaning of the geographic identifiers in these two “newspaper” brands will be something quite different in the years ahead.

Why the long turnaround?

Why might it take the L.A. Times a half decade or more — and continued reinvestment — to enjoy success similar that of The New York Times or The Washington Post?

While any keen Angeleno will tell you that the Times’ troubles began when the Chandler family sold it (and the rest of Times Mirror) to Tribune Company in 2000, it’s been the past decade that inflicted the most pain to what was once one of the most powerful and influential of American press institutions. Certainly, the Chicagoans who ran Tribune — and often tried to run the Times from Chicago — never quite got it right, but it was the seizure of Tribune by bottom-feeder financier Sam Zell in 2007 that sent it into a deepening tailspin.

Throughout it all — Zell’s reign, his five-year “bankruptcy from hell,”Tribune’s split into newspaper and broadcast companies, new management, and then the company’s second legal seizure by the arrivisteFerro in 2016 — the Times resisted. That resistance was both staunch and at times comical. The L.A. Times newsroom would come to be known, rightly or wrongly, as the toughest room in the country.

Amid the turmoil, the L.A. Times was more a punchline than a setter of the news agenda, even though its newsroom through the years (and still today) has produced among the highest-quality newspaper reporting and writing in the country.

There was the midnight firing of publisher Austin Beutner by then-CEO Jack Griffin — who himself was dispatched just five months later by Ferro. Who can forget the three-month tenure of Lewis D’Vorkin as editor-in-chief, after longtime Timesman Davan Maharaj was axed? Or Maharaj’s secret taping of Ferro, chronicled in David Folkenflik’s watchdog reporting on Tronc excess for NPR and giving us the wonderful headline: “Tribune, Tronc And Beyond: A Slur, A Secret Payout And A Looming Sale“? Or the cameo appearances of serial CEO Ross Levinsohn and his sidekick Mickie Rosen in the farce? It all makes the Times’ breakout true-crime podcast Dirty John seem fairly tame. (Anyone written the Times’ screenplay yet?) Keen industry observer Tom Rosenstiel calls the Times, at the time Soon-Shiong bought it, “the most degraded major metro in the country.”

That environment is just part of what Soon-Shiong inherited when he decided to buy. (Ferro had given him a weekend to decide whether he wanted his hometown paper so much that he’d pay a half a billion dollars for it — not allowing him to do much due diligence. In our interview, Soon-Shiong also tells the story of how he entered into a “partnership” after a first whirlwind weekend courtship.)

Soon-Shiong, Pearlstine, COO Chris Argentieri, and the emerging new order of management also inherited a broken technology stack. As Tribune/Tronc reeled for a decade, it had both centralized its operational systems and technologies — and failed to sufficiently invest in them to keep them up to date.

Argentieri describes what taking back the Times from Tronc/Tribune meant operationally: “Tribune operated with a number of functions shared across the company over the last couple of years — well beyond your typical shared services of finance, IT, HR. More than just the back office — so consumer marketing, circulation, national sales. Really, in Los Angeles at the end of Tribune’s ownership, we were essentially left with the newsroom and local advertising — and virtually everything else, including manufacturing, distribution, was all centralized.”

As Soon-Shiong told me, “With regard to the technology, I found it was non-existent. Not even…to fix. Just non-existent. I worried about the systems to the extent that I was worried: Could I run this paper with these systems that are so archaic?”

So even as the L.A. Times became “independent,” it remained — and still remains, roughly through the end of this year — stuck in part on aging, fatigued systems. Observers who wondered why Soon-Shiong signed a “standstill” agreement in January — allowing Tribune to commit to a merger or sale without his assent — have their answer. It was all that old tech that the Times still needs to publish (until its fast-paced plan to replace it all is complete) that was responsible. Soon-Shiong agreed to the standstill — which should make it possible for Tribune to merge with a McClatchy or otherwise sell itself — and in return got his “transition services agreement” extended until June 2020.

There are still many decisions to be made as the clock runs toward that date. Among them: Will the Times keep or replace Arc, The Washington Post’s fast-emerging new newspaper platform standard? Does it believe that Arc can rise to the occasion and help power Soon-Shiong’s expansive vision for the Times?

Overall, says Argentieri, the Times is “probably 40% there, I would say, through transitioning of services.” The big remaining piece, he says, “is to stand up our own traditional IT infrastructure — so our own HRISsystem, our own ERP system, our own infrastructure from a hosting standpoint. All are underway and will happen in 2019.”

Argentieri notes the unique perspective Soon-Shiong brings to the beleaguered newspaper industry. If Jeff Bezos brought the best consumer marketing chops, Soon-Shiong brings his own highly profitable experience.

“Nant [Soon-Shiong’s collection of tech enterprises] brings a pretty deep understanding from a technology standpoint. It’s a little different than how certainly we had looked at things…They look at things from fiber in the ground all the way up through the technology stats. Most, particularly legacy media companies have looked at IT as a major cost center, and put every bit of investment they could make into ‘digital business.’ We’re trying to look at it more holistically, because storage is cheaper, the infrastructure, there’s more things you can do today to have a site and app load faster, and all that leads to better user experience — where we just wouldn’t have focused on moving an infrastructure off servers in a data center in Chicago to somewhere else.”

After the buy and the building, $50 million

All of this transition — in hiring and in technology — comes at a hefty price. Which brings us to the third noteworthy number about the Times: $50 million. That’s the amount Soon-Shiong will have spent on the new Times in his first year of ownership.

How much more investment may be possible? Says Soon-Shiong: “I’m willing to continue to make an investment and collectively, as a collective, to work together” — mindful of the first contract with the News Guild, which unionized the place the week before he took title.

Like most other people of great wealth — Soon-Shiong’s fortune has been reported at over $7 billion — he’s not one to throw money around. Like Bezos, he’ll invest, but “he’s focused on where every dollar goes,” one insider says. As at The Washington Post, good ideas can get funded, but they’re approved by Soon-Shiong on an initiative-by-initiative basis.

How has that tough (and “abused,” as Soon-Shiong puts it) newsroom responded? Conversations with several staffers suggest a wary optimism — about as good as it gets in any newsroom. When the first union contract is concluded, staffers will see raises that mark a clear departure from the experience of their brethren at other dailies, including those still residing within Tribune. Those raises should add up to at least a 10 percent increase over the next three years.

“For staff who are over scale, they would see a 5 percent raise in year 1, 2.5 percent in year 2, 2.5 percent in year 3 under the company’s offer,” says Matt Pearce, a News Guild leader at the Times. “So in other words, pretty much the worst you can do is a guaranteed 10 percent raise across three years. It’s not quite enough to get us to match the pay standards at our East Coast competitors, and doesn’t repair the 10 years the newsroom went without regular raises, but it’s a decent bite out of the apple.”

For those who had been “underpaid,” the impact will be greater. “The company’s last/best/final offer on pay creates a series of pay minimums that would lift up some underpaid staffers fairly dramatically — in some cases, we’re talking raises of 30 percent or more on ratification,” says Pearce.

In addition to wanting a piece of the intellectual property action involved in Soon-Shiong’s multimedia adventures (which Soon-Shiong discusses in our interview), the contract addresses the usual issues: severance, jurisdiction, and seniority. It could be a month or two away from completion.

The guild, representing a workforce still recovering from shellshock, wants to add another clause to the new contract, one on “successorship.” Pearce: “So the contract survives, in the hopefully remote scenario that Patrick decides to sell the paper sometime in the next three years.” Just. In. Case.

Not yet defining the new L.A. Times

If you are reading this hoping to hear the new Times’ leadership clearly outline its strategy for the years ahead — sorry to disappoint you. Ever since Soon-Shiong bought the Times and pledged to rebuild it, people have been wondering about the big strategic questions.

Will the new L.A. Times be more national, expanding still further a fairly robust and re-energized D.C. bureau? More global, seizing the opportunity of the “Asian century” and its spot on the Pacific Rim? More California-centric, seeing a “nation” of 40 million to serve? Or will it be happy to focus on dominating the large and wealthy southern California market?

In other words, what category does the Times fit in now — or will it fit in in a few years? Is it America’s largest local newspaper in the country or its smallest national one?

(In Monday’s keynote, Apple split the difference, calling it “the country’s largest metropolitan newspaper and a rising star.”)

It’s both and neither at the same time, and that makes classifying it tough. “It’s probably safe to say if we’re trying to get to a million digital subscribers over a number of years, we will start with local. But we’ll have to evolve into California stories that have a global relevance,” Argentieri told me. (Former publisher Austin Beutner hired Argentieri, a magazine veteran, back in 2014, and through all the Tronc turmoil, he somehow managed to keep his head down. He widely receives plaudits for his steady hand.) “I think we’ll reach a point of penetration with people that are, you know, ferociously into local content, and we’ll have to go beyond that in some areas that travel better.”

The reality is that the Times is creating the building blocks that could easily be used across multiple strategies and target audiences. For now at least, instead of worrying about classification, let’s watch what’s in at the new L.A. Times. Its ownership is only nine months old, but Soon-Shiong talks about a 100-year vision — there’ll be plenty of time to classify later.

POSTED    

March 27, 2019, 2:05 p.m.

[thomasreedtn]

Timothy Glenn ~ Uranus in Taurus: Illusions Get Shattered

Timothy Glenn commented via email, “Of course volumes could be written about this… .” I agree, but I love his new article — just in time for tomorrow’s shift.

Uranus in Taurus: Illusions Get Shattered

by Timothy Glenn

We had our preview period for Uranus the Liberator transiting the sign of Taurus, from May 15 to November 6, 2018. He then retrograded back into Aries to tie up loose ends. Most earthlings have no clue about the war that has long been raging below the surface of public awareness, but Uranus in Aries forced a few key issues. Certain cabals had their death grip on the world broken.

However, there are many millions of us who not only can sense what is playing out on the world stage, but can recognize the clues and read the codes. The rest of the population will have the opportunity to catch up later.

And now is the time. On March 6, 2019 Uranus enters Taurus to play for keeps. You could batten down the hatches, buckle your seatbelt, or simply let go. The world will not be the same when Uranus begins its triple transit out of Taurus on July 7, 2025.

A Twilight Analogy

In the Twilight film series, Jacob chooses to play Uranus the Awakener for Charlie. Jacob is a Native American shapeshifter/werewolf, and Charlie is a bit of a muggle.

Before shifting into his wolf form, Jacob tells Charlie: “You are not living in the world you think you’re living in.” And then…poof…Charlie’s worldview is blown to smithereens.

This aptly analogizes the anticipated effects of Uranus expressing his unapologetic self in Taurus for the next several years – simply apocalyptic.

It may come as a true Uranian shock to some, but they will be shown what Carl Gustav Jung was talking about when he said: “People don’t have ideas. Ideas have people.”

Suggestion: don’t believe everything you think.

The Capricorn Context

While it is often helpful to refer to previous planetary transits through the various signs, the overall context is never the same. In this case, Uranus in Taurus will best be understood as a supporting role for the star of the current show: the Global Metamorphosis being influenced by Pluto in Capricorn.

Saturn, the ruler of Capricorn, is working its way through the middle of Capricorn this year, and will exactly conjunct Pluto in January of 2020. The “old guard” of the human world is being systematically dismantled, and will be replaced by user-friendly structures.

All of the delicate points in Capricorn that have been getting deconstructed by Saturn or bulldozed by Pluto, will be receiving a supportive trine from Uranus over the next six years or so for the rebuilding phase. A gigantic hand in the universe has clicked on “redo” for this world.

Time to Get Real

Uranus is on a mission. Human delusions will find themselves in the crosshairs of the Revelator, who will appear more like an assassin to the idealogues of the old control systems.

It has been amusing to watch economists trying to project coming trends for the global economic reset. For the most part, their analyses remain based on the rules of the old game that is being phased out of existence.

Here is a fundamental concept to help us understand our planetary shift: all governments, religions and economies are fictions. Even in the legal world, this is the actual designation. Governments only exist because people made them up – they’re fictions. Religions only exist because people made them up – they’re fictions. Economies only exist because people made them up – they’re fictions.

Anything in this world that fails to benefit the Earth and her inhabitants is up for review. Oppressive systems, fictional and otherwise, will be weighed and found wanting. Uranus is indeed on a mission, taking names and numbers.

Taurus involves our valuables, because it represents our values. We will see a massive reprioritizing by the human collective. Anything inauthentic will be cast into the cosmic recycle bin. Indeed, it’s time to get real.

A New Paradigm of Power

We have long been fed the illusion that in the top-down pyramid of control, the power lies at the top. But as usual, that perception is bass ackwards.

So many well-meaning folks are still surrendering much of their own divine creative power to the illusionists at the top of the pyramid – looking for the cause of problems to magically morph into the solution.

Uranus in Taurus will make it plain that the true power in this world rests at the base of the pyramid – the everyday grassroots folk-type humans, and especially the Earth herself.

A lot of what had provided the illusion of safety, security and stability in the old world will be swept away in the gale force winds of change. Comfort will be rezoned, and security blankets will fray and blow away – no more thumb sucking. It’s time for humanity to wake up, grow up, and stand up.

You Are the Creator

Your path through this adventure and all the rest of eternity is yours to create, yours to discover, yours to choose. Everything already exists within the infinite energy field of which we are all expressions. The essence of this Field is what we know as divine love.

Uranus in Taurus will encourage us to create from that infinite essence. Living in the Field of Infinite Possibilities, we can ascend into consciously choosing the possibilities we prefer to experience. Planet Earth is offering to serve as our launching pad into the Infinite. Uranus in Taurus will insist that she be treated with genuine divine love.

Timothy Glenn http://www.soulpurposereadings.com/

from Thomas Reed https://laurabruno.wordpress.com/2019/03/05/timothy-glenn-uranus-in-taurus-illusions-get-shattered/

[robertkstone]

The 2019 Power List – and the Person of the Year Is…

This is the 14th year Motor Trend has scoured the automotive landscape to produce its Power List. We discern the most influential and transformative people of the past year, the ones that make this elaborate industry hum and whirl, speed up and bog down.

As the powertrains of tomorrow transition away from diesels, optimizing gas-engine efficiency and adding electrification, so too do the faces change with the times. There are always CEOs and other C-suite executives on our list, but we look for the people further down in the trenches whose efforts create a buzz. We love this industry and want to reward a job well done. And we try to find the new faces that reflect the trends, new tech, and sometimes new companies that populate the automotive landscape.

This year there were a few big business moves: Aston Martin went public; Tesla pondered going private. There was boardroom drama with a Volkswagen coup, the untimely death of FCA CEO Sergio Marchionne, and the punitive stripping of the chairman’s title from Elon Musk. But largely it was a year of solid product development, with some remakes of classics and launches of a healthy batch of new nameplates.

These are the people behind those successes. Topping the list is the Person of the Year who left an oversized imprint. But the 49 others are the ones to watch in 2019.

50. KLAUS BUSSE

FCA

HEAD OF DESIGN FOR ALFA ROMEO, MASERATI, FIAT, ABARTH, LANCIA

2018 RANK: UNRANKED

Busse spent 10 years with Mercedes in Germany then moved to the U.S. during the DaimlerChrysler years. He chose to stay after the corporate divorce. Now back in Europe and designing FCA’s European brands, he has shaped cars as disparate as the Jeep Grand Cherokee and Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio. His next task? Shoring up Maserati’s styling.

49. TOTO WOLFF

MERCEDES-AMG PETRONAS MOTORSPORT

TEAM PRINCIPAL AND CEO

2018 RANK: UNRANKED

The former racing driver is the managing partner of the Formula 1 team and also leads the Mercedes motorsports program. He has a 30 percent stake in Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix. Teamed with Niki Lauda, Wolff has produced results exceeding expectations with drivers Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas.

48. DAVID FREIBURGER

MOTOR TREND GROUP

CO-HOST OF ROADKILL

2018 RANK: 47

Freiburger is a former editor-in-chief of Hot Rod magazine and one of the stars of the breakout Motor Trend original series, Roadkill. Under his direction, the unscripted reality series, now shown on Motor Trend’s SVOD channel and the Motor Trend Network (nee Velocity), Roadkill has built a huge fanbase on the strength of its authenticity and credibility.

47. THOMAS DOLL

SUBARU OF AMERICA

CEO

2018 RANK: 35

After posting a decade of growth for Subaru, Doll was promoted to CEO while unveiling the Ascent three-row SUV, launching the Crosstrek, and introducing the next-generation Forester. Subaru continues to cater to its loyal buyers and sell cars as fast as it can make them.

46. ALEJANDRO AGAG

FORMULA E HOLDINGS

CEO

2018 RANK: 10

As the auto world goes electric, the Formula E founder sees a future where his series overtakes Formula 1 as the leading motorsports series. Formula E is starting its fifth season with faster Gen2 cars. More automakers are planning to participate with big-name drivers in the years ahead.

45. KEVIN CLARK

APTIV

PRESIDENT AND CEO

2018 RANK: UNRANKED

Aptiv was spun off from Delphi to focus on electronics and software for autonomous driving, connectivity, and active safety systems. Under Clark, Aptiv has grown its market cap and partnered with Hertz to get autonomous vehicles on the road and with Lyft to test a fleet in Las Vegas.

44. PAM FLETCHER

GENERAL MOTORS

VICE PRESIDENT OF INNOVATION

2018 RANK: 16

Fletcher, a top engineer, takes on a new role identifying and accelerating new growth opportunities as GM works to transform. She now reports directly to CEO Mary Barra. Fletcher has distinguished herself in managing teams bent on bringing industry-leading electric and autonomous vehicles to market.

43. DAVID HALL

VELODYNE LIDAR

FOUNDER AND CEO

2018 RANK: UNRANKED

Everybody seems to be working on smaller, lighter, and less expensive autonomous vehicle lidar systems. Fighting off the myriad startups is Velodyne, which dominates in this crucial field. Hall invented 3-D lidar in 2005 and turned his vision into a thriving company that continues to lead the field.

42(0). ELON MUSK

TESLA

CEO

2018 RANK: 2

The mercurial genius got into trouble with the SEC over tweets about going private (never happened), which cost him fines and his chairman title. Model 3 “production hell” led him to sleep in the factory and build cars in a tent. Tesla’s wild ride includes ever-evolving tech, as well as Musk’s promises to build electric big rigs, pickups, and sports cars. More vaporware? Don’t count him out.

41. OLA KALLENIUS

DAMILER/MERCEDES-BENZ

BOARD OF MANAGEMENT, GROUP RESEARCH AND MERCEDES-BENZ CARS DEVELOPMENT

2018 RANK: 27

It’s now official: Kallenius becomes chairman of the board of management at Daimler and CEO of Mercedes-Benz cars next year with the mandatory retirement of Dieter Zetsche. The Swede becomes the first non-German Daimler leader. His clear and transparent leadership style and steady climb up the ranks should make for a smooth transition.

40. KYLE VOGT

CRUISE

CO-FOUNDER AND CEO

2018 RANK: UNRANKED

Vogt’s startup was acquired by GM in 2016 and is the basis for Cadillac’s Super Cruise and a fleet of robotaxis. Cruise received a $2.25 billion infusion from the SoftBank Vision Fund, and Honda will invest a further $2.75 billion over 12 years and take a 5.7 percent stake. Cruise rivals Waymo for autonomous vehicle supremacy.

39. CARLOS GHOSN

RENAULT, NISSAN, MITSUBISHI

FORMER CHAIRMAN, CEO

2018 RANKING: 22

Prior to his sudden arrest on the day the Power List went to press, Ghosn was still chairman of Nissan, Renault, and Mitsubishi and was CEO of the global Alliance he created (as this is written, he retains his titles at Renault). He took three struggling companies and made them stronger than the sum of their parts. Before the allegations, which could end his career, his legacy reflected efforts to create an automotive juggernaut.

38. JOY FALOTICO

FORD

GROUP VICE PRESIDENT LINCOLN, CHIEF MARKETING OFFICER, CHAIRMAN FORD CREDIT

2018 RANK: UNRANKED

The longtime head of Ford Credit has heady new duties—running Lincoln and leading Ford Motor marketing—while remaining Ford Credit chairman. She is proving a quick study as Lincoln gains traction. She’s also shaken up marketing with new advertising partners and a new image for the Ford brand.

37. RALPH GILLES

FCA

GLOBAL HEAD OF DESIGN

2018 RANK: 37

FCA’s five-year plan reads like a to-do list for Gilles, who oversees the design of the varied brands, including tough Ram pickups, iconic Jeep Wranglers, tiny Fiats, family-hauling minivans, American muscle cars, and exotic Italian cars. Gilles continues to deliver the goods, keeping each brand distinct and relevant.

36. ALFONSO ALBAISA

NISSAN MOTOR CO.

SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT FOR GLOBAL DESIGN

2018 RANK: 39

Charged with design for Nissan, Infiniti, and Datsun, Albaisa has been prolific. Infiniti has launched the luxe QX50, and Nissan created the smart Kicks. Infiniti also teased its future with the stunning Q Inspiration, Prototype 9, Prototype 10, and Project Black S.

35. AKIO TOYODA

TOYOTA

CEO AND PRESIDENT

2018 RANK: 13

Why is Toyota bringing back the Supra, sustaining the 86, and supporting Gazoo Racing? Because its CEO loves to drive. But Akio is also positioning Toyota as a player in ride-sharing and autonomous vehicles—while ensuring mainstream best-sellers like the Camry and RAV4 continue to evolve. Most recent negotiation: the joint venture plant with Mazda in Alabama.

34. HERBERT DIESS

VOLKSWAGEN

CEO

2018 RANK: UNRANKED

The Dieselgate coup that ousted CEO Matthias Muller also elevated former BMW veteran Diess. He is orchestrating the expensive plan to launch 80 electric vehicles by 2025—including a resurrection of the iconic Microbus. Diess is restructuring the 12 brands under VW’s aegis and tackling a potential IPO of the heavy truck division.

33. PETER SCHREYER

HYUNDAI MOTOR GROUP

PRESIDENT AND CHIEF DESIGN OFFICER

2018 RANK: 18

This trailblazer is reinventing the world’s view of Korean automakers—in terms of both design and drivability. The Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis brands are gaining sales and acclaim as they add new nameplates and improve existing models at a rapid clip.

32. MARK REUSS

IFTTT

[etechwire-blog]

Silicon chips are reaching their limit. Here's the future

New Post has been published on https://www.etechwire.com/silicon-chips-are-reaching-their-limit-heres-the-future/

Silicon chips are reaching their limit. Here's the future

Main image credit: Intel

We live in a world powered by computer circuits. Modern life depends on semiconductor chips and transistors on silicon-based integrated circuits, which switch electronic signals on and off. Most use the abundant and cheap element silicon because it can be used to both prevent and allow the flow of electricity; it both insulates and semiconducts.

Until recently, the microscopic transistors squeezed onto silicon chips have been getting half the size each year. It’s what’s produced the modern digital age, but that era is coming to a close. With the internet of Things (IoT), AI, robotics, self-driving cars, 5G and 6G phones all computing-intensive endeavors, the future of tech is at stake. So what comes next? 

What is Moore’s Law?

That would be the exponential growth of computing power. Back in 1965, Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, observed that the number of transistors on a one-inch computer chip double every year, while the costs halve. Now that period is 18 months, and it’s getting longer. In truth, Moore’s Law isn’t a law, merely an observation by someone who worked for a chip-maker, but the increased timescales mean intensive computing applications of the future could be under threat.

A smartphone contains over 200 billion transistors. Credit: CC0 Creative Commons

(Image: © CC0 Creative Commons)

Is Moore’s Law dead?

No, but it’s slowing so much that silicon needs help. ”Silicon is reaching the limit of its performance in a growing number of applications that require increased speed, reduced latency and light detection,” says Stephen Doran, CEO of the UK’s Compound Semiconductor Applications Catapult.

However, he thinks it’s premature to be talking about a successor to silicon. ”That suggests silicon will be completely replaced, which is unlikely to happen any time soon, and may well never happen,” he adds.

David Harold, VP of Marketing Communications, Imagination Technologies, says: ”There is still potential in a Moore’s Law-style performance escalation until at least 2025. Silicon will dominate the chip market until the 2040s.”

Computing’s second era is coming

It’s important to get the silicon transistor issue in perspective; it’s not ‘dead’ as a concept, but it is past its peak. ”Moore’s Law specifically refers to the performance of integrated circuits made from semiconductors, and only captures the last 50-plus years of computation,” says Craig Hampel, Chief Scientist, Memory and Interface Division at Rambus.

The race is on to move beyond silicon. Credit: Intel

(Image: © Intel)

”The longer trend of humanity’s need for computation reaches back to the abacus, mechanical calculators and vacuum tubes, and will likely extend well beyond semiconductors [like silicon] to include superconductors and quantum mechanics.”

The topping-out of silicon is a problem because computing devices of the future will need to be both more powerful and more agile. ”Increasingly the problem of computing is that future systems will need to learn and adapt to new information,” says Harold, who adds that they will have to be ‘brain-like’. ”That, in combination with chip manufacturing technology transition, is going to create a revolutionary second era for computing.”

What is cold computing?

Some researchers are looking into new ways of getting higher-performance computers that use less power. ”Cold operation of data centers or supercomputers can have significant performance, power and cost advantage,” says Hampel.

An example is Microsoft’s Project Natick, as part of which an enormous data center was sunk off the coast of Scotland’s Orkney Islands, but it’s only a small step. Taking the temperature down further means less leakage of current and reducing the threshold voltage at which transistors switch.

Microsoft sank a data center in the Atlantic as part of its Project Natick. Credit: Microsoft

(Image: © Microsoft)

”It reduces some of the challenges to extending Moore’s Law,” says Hampel, who adds that a natural operating temperature for these types of systems is that of liquid nitrogen at 77K (-270C). ”Nitrogen is abundant in the atmosphere, relatively inexpensive to capture in liquid form and an efficient cooling medium,” he adds. ”We hope to get perhaps four to 10 additional years of scaling in memory performance and power.”

What are compound semiconductors?

Next-gen semiconductors made from two or more elements whose properties make them faster and more efficient than silicon. This is ‘the big one’; they’re already being used, and will help create 5G and 6G phones.

”Compound semiconductors combine two or more elements from the periodic table, for example gallium and nitrogen, to form gallium nitride,” says Doran. He explains that these materials outperform silicon in the areas of speed, latency, light detection and emission, which will help make possible applications like 5G and autonomous vehicles.

Compound semiconductors will find their way into 5G phones. Credit: AT&T

(Image: © AT&T)

Although they may be used alongside regular silicon chips, compound semiconductors will find their way into 5G and 6G phones, essentially making them fast enough and small enough while also having a decent battery life. 

”The advent of compound semiconductors is a game-changer that has the potential to be as transformational as the internet has been for communications,” says Doran. That’s because compound semiconductors could be as much as 100 times faster than silicon, so could power the explosion of devices expected with the growth of the IoT. 

What is quantum computing?

Who needs the on-off states of a classical computer system when you can have the quantum world’s superposition and entanglement phenomena? IBM, Google, Intel and others are in a race to create quantum computers with enormous processing power, way more than silicon transistors, using quantum bits, aka ‘qubits’. 

The problem is that quantum physicists and computer architects have many breakthroughs to make before the potential of quantum computing can be realized, and there’s a simple test that some in the quantum computing community think needs to be met before a quantum computer can be said to exist: ‘quantum supremacy’.

”It means simply showing that a quantum machine is better at a specific task than a conventional semiconductor processor on the path of Moore’s Law,” says Hampel. So far, achieving this has remained just out of reach. 

What is Intel doing?

Since it pioneered the manufacturing of silicon transistors, it should come as no surprise that Intel is heavily invested in research into silicon-based quantum computing.

”As well as investing in scaling-up superconducting qubits that need to be stored at extremely low temperatures, Intel is also investigating an alternative method,” says Adrian Criddle, Vice President Sales and Marketing Group and UK General Manager at Intel. ”The alternative architecture is based on ‘spin qubits’, which operate in silicon.”

A spin qubit uses microwave pulses to control the spin of a single electron on a silicon-based device, and Intel recently utilized them on its recent ‘world’s smallest quantum chip’. Crucially, it uses silicon and existing commercial manufacturing methods.

Intel’s spin qubit. Credit: Walden Kirsch/Intel Corporation

(Image: © Intel)

”Spin qubits could overcome some of the challenges presented by the superconducting method as they are smaller in physical size, making them easier to scale, and they can operate at higher temperatures,” explains Criddle. ”What’s more, the design of spin qubit processors resembles traditional silicon transistor technologies.”

However, Intel’s spin qubit system still only works close to absolute zero; cold computing will go hand in hand with the development of quantum computers. Meanwhile, IBM has its Q, a 50-qubit processor, and the Google Quantum AI Lab has its 72-qubit Bristlecone processor.

What about graphene and carbon nanotubes?

These so-called miracle materials could one day replace silicon. ”They have existing electrical, mechanical and thermal properties that go much beyond what can be done with silicon-based devices,” says Doran. However, he warns that it may take many years before they’re ready for prime time.

”Silicon-based devices have been through many decades of refinement and have developed along with associated manufacturing technology,” he says. ”Graphene and carbon nanotubes are still at the beginning of this journey, and if they are to replace silicon in the future the manufacturing tools required to achieve this still need to be developed.”

Graphene inks could one day replace silicon. Credit: Jamie Carter

(Image: © Jamie Carter)

The atomic era

Whatever the prospects for other materials, we’re now in an atomic era. ”Everyone is thinking about atoms,” says Harold. ”Our progress has now reached the point where individual atoms count, (and) even storage is finding ways to work at the atomic level – IBM has demonstrated a possible route for storing data on a single atom.” Today, creating a 1 or a 0, the binary digits used to store data, takes 100,000 atoms. 

However, there is a problem. “Atoms are inherently less stable as a means of storing or transmitting information, which means more logic for things like error correction is needed,” adds Harold. So computer systems of the future will probably be layers of various technologies, each one there to counteract the disadvantage of another.

So there’s no one answer to extending the life of silicon into the next computing era. Compound semiconductors, quantum computing and cold computing are all likely to play a major role in research and development. It’s likely that the future of computing will see a hierarchy of machines, but as of now, nobody knows what tomorrow’s computers will look like.

”While Moore’s Law will end,” says Hampel, ”the secular and lasting trend of exponential computing capacity will likely not.”

TechRadar’s Next Up series is brought to you in association with Honor

[netunleashed-blog]

Silicon chips are reaching their limit. Here's the future

http://www.internetunleashed.co.uk/?p=22825 Silicon chips are reaching their limit. Here's the future - http://www.internetunleashed.co.uk/?p=22825 Main image credit: IntelWe live in a world powered by computer circuits. Modern life depends on semiconductor chips and transistors on silicon-based integrated circuits, which switch electronic signals on and off. Most use the abundant and cheap element silicon because it can be used to both prevent and allow the flow of electricity; it both insulates and semiconducts.Until recently, the microscopic transistors squeezed onto silicon chips have been getting half the size each year. It’s what’s produced the modern digital age, but that era is coming to a close. With the internet of Things (IoT), AI, robotics, self-driving cars, 5G and 6G phones all computing-intensive endeavors, the future of tech is at stake. So what comes next?  What is Moore's Law? That would be the exponential growth of computing power. Back in 1965, Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, observed that the number of transistors on a one-inch computer chip double every year, while the costs halve. Now that period is 18 months, and it's getting longer. In truth, Moore's Law isn't a law, merely an observation by someone who worked for a chip-maker, but the increased timescales mean intensive computing applications of the future could be under threat. A smartphone contains over 200 billion transistors. Credit: CC0 Creative Commons Is Moore's Law dead? No, but it's slowing so much that silicon needs help. ”Silicon is reaching the limit of its performance in a growing number of applications that require increased speed, reduced latency and light detection,” says Stephen Doran, CEO of the UK’s Compound Semiconductor Applications Catapult.However, he thinks it's premature to be talking about a successor to silicon. ”That suggests silicon will be completely replaced, which is unlikely to happen any time soon, and may well never happen,” he adds.David Harold, VP of Marketing Communications, Imagination Technologies, says: ”There is still potential in a Moore’s Law-style performance escalation until at least 2025. Silicon will dominate the chip market until the 2040s.” Computing's second era is coming It's important to get the silicon transistor issue in perspective; it’s not ‘dead’ as a concept, but it is past its peak. ”Moore’s Law specifically refers to the performance of integrated circuits made from semiconductors, and only captures the last 50-plus years of computation,” says Craig Hampel, Chief Scientist, Memory and Interface Division at Rambus. The race is on to move beyond silicon. Credit: Intel ”The longer trend of humanity’s need for computation reaches back to the abacus, mechanical calculators and vacuum tubes, and will likely extend well beyond semiconductors [like silicon] to include superconductors and quantum mechanics.”The topping-out of silicon is a problem because computing devices of the future will need to be both more powerful and more agile. ”Increasingly the problem of computing is that future systems will need to learn and adapt to new information,” says Harold, who adds that they will have to be 'brain-like'. ”That, in combination with chip manufacturing technology transition, is going to create a revolutionary second era for computing.” What is cold computing? Some researchers are looking into new ways of getting higher-performance computers that use less power. ”Cold operation of data centers or supercomputers can have significant performance, power and cost advantage,” says Hampel.An example is Microsoft's Project Natick, as part of which an enormous data center was sunk off the coast of Scotland's Orkney Islands, but it's only a small step. Taking the temperature down further means less leakage of current and reducing the threshold voltage at which transistors switch. Microsoft sank a data center in the Atlantic as part of its Project Natick. Credit: Microsoft ”It reduces some of the challenges to extending Moore’s Law,” says Hampel, who adds that a natural operating temperature for these types of systems is that of liquid nitrogen at 77K (-270C). ”Nitrogen is abundant in the atmosphere, relatively inexpensive to capture in liquid form and an efficient cooling medium,” he adds. ”We hope to get perhaps four to 10 additional years of scaling in memory performance and power.” What are compound semiconductors? Next-gen semiconductors made from two or more elements whose properties make them faster and more efficient than silicon. This is 'the big one'; they’re already being used, and will help create 5G and 6G phones.”Compound semiconductors combine two or more elements from the periodic table, for example gallium and nitrogen, to form gallium nitride,” says Doran. He explains that these materials outperform silicon in the areas of speed, latency, light detection and emission, which will help make possible applications like 5G and autonomous vehicles. Compound semiconductors will find their way into 5G phones. Credit: AT&T Although they may be used alongside regular silicon chips, compound semiconductors will find their way into 5G and 6G phones, essentially making them fast enough and small enough while also having a decent battery life. ”The advent of compound semiconductors is a game-changer that has the potential to be as transformational as the internet has been for communications,” says Doran. That’s because compound semiconductors could be as much as 100 times faster than silicon, so could power the explosion of devices expected with the growth of the IoT.  What is quantum computing? Who needs the on-off states of a classical computer system when you can have the quantum world's superposition and entanglement phenomena? IBM, Google, Intel and others are in a race to create quantum computers with enormous processing power, way more than silicon transistors, using quantum bits, aka 'qubits'. The problem is that quantum physicists and computer architects have many breakthroughs to make before the potential of quantum computing can be realized, and there's a simple test that some in the quantum computing community think needs to be met before a quantum computer can be said to exist: 'quantum supremacy'.”It means simply showing that a quantum machine is better at a specific task than a conventional semiconductor processor on the path of Moore’s Law,” says Hampel. So far, achieving this has remained just out of reach.  What is Intel doing? Since it pioneered the manufacturing of silicon transistors, it should come as no surprise that Intel is heavily invested in research into silicon-based quantum computing.”As well as investing in scaling-up superconducting qubits that need to be stored at extremely low temperatures, Intel is also investigating an alternative method,” says Adrian Criddle, Vice President Sales and Marketing Group and UK General Manager at Intel. ”The alternative architecture is based on ‘spin qubits’, which operate in silicon.”A spin qubit uses microwave pulses to control the spin of a single electron on a silicon-based device, and Intel recently utilized them on its recent 'world's smallest quantum chip'. Crucially, it uses silicon and existing commercial manufacturing methods. Intel’s spin qubit. Credit: Walden Kirsch/Intel Corporation ”Spin qubits could overcome some of the challenges presented by the superconducting method as they are smaller in physical size, making them easier to scale, and they can operate at higher temperatures,” explains Criddle. ”What’s more, the design of spin qubit processors resembles traditional silicon transistor technologies.”However, Intel's spin qubit system still only works close to absolute zero; cold computing will go hand in hand with the development of quantum computers. Meanwhile, IBM has its Q, a 50-qubit processor, and the Google Quantum AI Lab has its 72-qubit Bristlecone processor. What about graphene and carbon nanotubes? These so-called miracle materials could one day replace silicon. ”They have existing electrical, mechanical and thermal properties that go much beyond what can be done with silicon-based devices,” says Doran. However, he warns that it may take many years before they're ready for prime time.”Silicon-based devices have been through many decades of refinement and have developed along with associated manufacturing technology,” he says. ”Graphene and carbon nanotubes are still at the beginning of this journey, and if they are to replace silicon in the future the manufacturing tools required to achieve this still need to be developed.” Graphene inks could one day replace silicon. Credit: Jamie Carter The atomic era Whatever the prospects for other materials, we're now in an atomic era. ”Everyone is thinking about atoms,” says Harold. ”Our progress has now reached the point where individual atoms count, (and) even storage is finding ways to work at the atomic level – IBM has demonstrated a possible route for storing data on a single atom.” Today, creating a 1 or a 0, the binary digits used to store data, takes 100,000 atoms. However, there is a problem. “Atoms are inherently less stable as a means of storing or transmitting information, which means more logic for things like error correction is needed,” adds Harold. So computer systems of the future will probably be layers of various technologies, each one there to counteract the disadvantage of another.So there's no one answer to extending the life of silicon into the next computing era. Compound semiconductors, quantum computing and cold computing are all likely to play a major role in research and development. It's likely that the future of computing will see a hierarchy of machines, but as of now, nobody knows what tomorrow's computers will look like.”While Moore’s Law will end,” says Hampel, ”the secular and lasting trend of exponential computing capacity will likely not.” TechRadar's Next Up series is brought to you in association with Honor Source link

[netmetic]

Welcome to the Future: The Analytics Age Has Started

Whether you're a high-tech startup or a decades-old retailer, and whether you like it or not, you're a data company. As enterprises everywhere begin to integrate deeper insights into their operations, those who focus on maximizing their data and analytics capabilities will be best placed to succeed today and tomorrow. According to a recent Gartner survey, across industries, business intelligence and analytics are now ranked as the number one CIO investment priority1. It's a sign that data has become the gravitational center of business—the point around which everything else revolves.

Data and analytics are, of course, intrinsically linked. Data on its own is not interesting, but the insight that can be extracted from it—using analytics—is now being used by many as a competitive advantage. It can help reduce costs, improve understanding of customers, and drive innovation. And it can help organizations react more quickly to industry or market changes or evolving customer needs—a must-have capability in today's digital economy.

So analytics is important for everyone, not just high-tech, blue-chip companies, and there’s no time to lose. The world's data is expected to grow ten-fold in the next ten years2, but, even today, less than one percent of it is analyzed and used3. As these volumes continue to grow, we'll have to boost our ability to turn more of it into valuable insights, otherwise, what’s the point of collecting it?

Create a Data Foundation

Some of the most common factors hindering our ability to better tame our rapidly expanding data assets include:

Disconnected silos of data across the company that are difficult to access and blend

Data that has been archived and is no longer retrievable

Older data infrastructures that aren't designed for ingesting or blending data from multiple sources

Disparate governance rules and inconsistent metadata and formatting

The growing expense of storing data (especially the most timely 'hot' and 'warm' data)

And, of course, working out what to retain and what to analyze

Overcoming these challenges means ensuring the data layer of your IT infrastructure is carefully assessed and prepared for the age of advanced analytics and artificial intelligence (AI). For many organizations, this means transitioning from traditional data warehousing to a more integrated model based on a data 'hub' or 'lake'. These new solutions, often supported by existing hardware and storage infrastructures, are designed to enable real-time analytics across the full spectrum of data types and sources. More details about how to develop such an analytics-ready data infrastructure is available in the new Intel® whitepaper Tame the Data Deluge.

Keep Accelerating Insights

While a strong, modern data strategy is an essential first step on the journey to advanced analytics and AI, it is just that: A first step. It's not enough to make data available to analytics applications, it must also be done at an increasingly rapid pace that keeps up with business demand. Enterprise executives responding to a PwC survey indicated that they expect their analytics to be 75-percent faster and two-times more sophisticated by 20204, so IT has some big expectations to fulfill.

In order to shrink time to insight, it's essential to have a holistic approach across hardware, software, and solutions. Some of the key things to consider, include:

Hardware: The choice of processors, memory capacity, storage media, network technologies, and cluster architecture can all determine improvements in speed.

Software: Adding the right library into your software stack can drive big performance improvements. In addition, optimized versions of industry frameworks and operating systems can make a major impact on speed and efficiency.

Solutions: Using a fully tuned solution stack from a blueprint, such as the Intel® Select Solutions, can help accelerate analytics.

Enable Advanced Analytics Use Cases

While there's a lot of talk about AI, enterprise adoption is still in its infancy. In a recent Forrester survey, 58 percent of business and technology professionals said they were researching AI, but only 12 percent said they are actually using AI systems5. However, as more and more companies adopt increasingly mature advanced analytics techniques, AI will become a standard part of the business toolkit.

The potential use cases for advanced analytics and AI are numerous. One of the beauties of these technologies is that they can be adapted to address almost any business challenge or scenario. It's useful to bear in mind these distinctions between some of the more common technologies discussed in this context:

Artificial Intelligence: A program that can sense, reason, act, and adapt.

Classic machine learning (ML): Algorithms whose performance improves as they are exposed to more data over time.

Deep learning (DL): A subset of machine learning in which multi-layered neural networks learn from vast amounts of data. For example, image/speech recognition, natural language processing, and pattern recognition/detection.

Reasoning: Suitable for large, diverse, complex, structured or unstructured data sets from multiple data sources.

Emerging technologies: New and emerging AI techniques that don't fit the characteristics above. Today, this would include solutions like sequence alignment in computational biology, or binary neural network-based inferencing.

To learn more about getting your organization ready for advanced analytics, read the whitepaper Tame the Data Deluge.

Intel® technologies' features and benefits depend on system configuration and may require enabled hardware, software, or service activation. Performance varies depending on system configuration. No computer system can be absolutely secure. Check with your system manufacturer or retailer or learn more at www.intel.com.

1 Source:  Gartner 2017 survey of 2,500 CIOs

2 Source: Seagate ‘Data Age 2025’, July 2017, https://www.seagate.com/files/www-content/our-story/trends/files/Seagate-WP-DataAge2025-March-2017.pdf

3 Source: Forbes Magazine. ’20 Mind-Boggling Facts Every Business Leader Must Reflect on Now’, November 2015, https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2016/11/01/20-mind-boggling-facts-every-business-leader-must-reflect-on-now/#16b6123120dc

4 Source: PwC's Global Data and Analytics Survey, July 2016: Big Decisions*, https://www.pwc.com/us/en/analytics/big-decision-survey.html

5 Source: Forrester Research. Artificial Intelligence: Fact, Fiction. How Enterprises Can Crush It; What’s Possible for Enterprises in 2017, https://go.forrester.com/blogs/16-11-02-artificial_intelligence_fact_fiction_how_enterprises_can_crush _it/

The post Welcome to the Future: The Analytics Age Has Started appeared first on IT Peer Network.

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[radthursdays]

#RadThursdays Roundup 12/28/2017

All of today's images are from Who's Left: Prison Abolition, a comic drawn by Flynn Nicholls.

Four panels depict a Black woman wearing bright, colorful earrings and glasses. She says, "I’m Mariame Kaba, Director of Project NIA and prison abolitionist." The off-screen interviewer asks, "Is prison abolition a hard thing to explain to people?" She responds, "I get the same questions. 'What about bad people? What about rapists?' I don’t answer those questions anymore."

Issues

We Actually Don’t Need Status Quo Warriors: “What exactly do we stand to lose by allowing space for valid critique? What we lose, of course, is one facet of white supremacy that many of us hold all too dear—the right to never ever have to think critically about anything that might be reinforcing our right to never ever have to think critically about anything.”

Our relationship with work is destroying our humanity: "We are on the verge of total work’s realization. Each day I speak with people for whom work has come to control their lives, making their world into a task, their thoughts an unspoken burden. […] Following this taskification of the world, she sees time as a scarce resource to be used prudently, is always concerned with what is to be done, and is often anxious both about whether this is the right thing to do now and about there always being more to do. Crucially, the attitude of the total worker is not grasped best in cases of overwork, but rather in the everyday way in which he is single-mindedly focused on tasks to be completed, with productivity, effectiveness and efficiency to be enhanced."

How a Gay Friendly and “Very Pro-Choice” Trump Created the Most Anti-Choice, Anti-LGBT Administration in Generations: "Aside from appointments, many advocates have raised concerns with specific actions HHS has taken over the past year – actions signaling that vulnerable populations, including undocumented immigrants, victims of trafficking, and LGBTQ individuals – may be subject to further discrimination. Indeed, 'vulnerable' is one of the Centers for Disease Control’s newly banned words. When the HHS published its draft strategic plan for FY2018-2022 this past fall, it removed all mentions of LGBTQ individuals and ethnic minorities that had appeared in the Obama-era version. The Trump draft plan also rewrote the federal government’s definition of life, emphasizing that life begins 'at conception.'"

The comic panel shows a frightened businessperson reacting to ambiguous, scary-looking shapes (the “other”). In the next pane, part of a (drawn) newspaper is shown with headline reading: “Dog murdered, net worth $1.5 Million, cleared on all charges.” The text reads: "These are posed as questions about safety but are mostly based in fear of the other. Safety for whom? And from what? It doesn’t make sense to answer because there are bad people who have not been incarcerated."

Inequality

Bussed Out: How America moves its homeless: Each year, US cities give thousands of homeless people one-way bus tickets out of town. An 18-month nationwide investigation by the Guardian reveals, for the first time, what really happens at journey’s end.

It's Basically Just Immoral To Be Rich: "The central point, however, is this: it is not justifiable to retain vast wealth. This is because that wealth has the potential to help people who are suffering, and by not helping them you are letting them suffer. It does not make a difference whether you earned the vast wealth. The point is that you have it."

The slippery slope of the oligarchy media mode: "What might be called the 'benevolent billionaire model' for supporting journalism begs the obvious point that not all billionaires are benevolent."

The top pane of this panel shows abstract silhouettes of cameras and police officers, and the bottom pane shows prison bars rendered in bright red. The text reads:

Kaba: "I’d rather talk about having justice without police or surveillance."

Interviewer: "Why abolition? Why not reform?"

Kaba: "The prison system is harmful! There is rampant violence, rape, and deaths in custody."

Witchcraft

How to Destroy the World: “It has been said that 'magic is the knowledge of true names,' but this is not naming. Magic is the knowledge of naming, the theory and practice of critiquing this world and increasing our power. True names are to see the truth of naming: we recognize gentrification as hostile to us who are poor, we identify the police as a gang that enforces and protects this already hostile world, we recognize highways as segregation devices. We develop our own languages for our struggles and our experiences. Magic as the practice of critiquing this world does not mean to be an academic, but to actually push against this world in spaces against naming.”

Witch Kids of Instagram: “Disempowered by society and overwhelmed with physical changes, teenage girls fall in love with the idea of forming covens. . . . the more disempowered people are, the more they long for magic, which explains why magic becomes the province of women in a sexist society.”

The First Witch of Damansara: Fictional short story by Zen Cho. "Vivian’s late grandmother was a witch—which is just a way of saying she was a woman of unusual insight. Vivian, in contrast, had a mind like a hi-tech blender. She was sharp and purposeful, but she did not understand magic."

The top half of this panel shows huge crane-claws descending from the sky and uprooting important institutions (a house, a hospital, an office building / apartment complex). The bottom half shows a group of people working together to form a human archway. The text reads: "So we have to create the conditions that decrease the demand for police and surveillance. You need jobs, healthcare, housing, people need to be able to live their lives. You need to create structures to address harm and hold people accountable. People think abolitionists minimize harm but we take it very seriously. Safety is a collective action."

Technology

Are robots imitating us or are we imitating robots?: “Robots and computers are acting more and more like people. They’re driving around in cars, hooking us up with new lovers and talking to us out of the blue. But is the opposite also true— are people acting more and more like robots? The computers may think so: addicted to our phones, caught in virtual filter bubbles and dependent on just a handful of tech companies, people are acting more and more predictably. The breakthrough of artificial intelligence and immersive media doesn’t just pose the question what technology does to us, but also what we do with this technology.”

‘Tsunami of data’ could consume one fifth of global electricity by 2025: Billions of internet-connected devices could produce 3.5% of global emissions within 10 years and 14% by 2040, according to new research, reports Climate Home News.

The Sad Saps of Neoliberal Reddit Trying to Make Globalism Cool Again: “The Neoliberal subreddit itself has existed for years, one of the thousands of barren, long-abandoned forums on the internet. Its boosters have rarely needed a staging ground or a place for solidarity, and that probably would still be the case if Hillary Clinton were president. Unfortunately for the neoliberal base, Hillary Clinton is not president. In 2016 the “globalists cucks” were handed an earthshaking defeat, and the building blocks of neoliberal philosophy are under attack from both the Breitbart and Bernie wings of the political landscape. And those supposedly fringe alternatives have energized a huge swath of young people who’ve been left cold by the traditional conception of western economics. It’s hard to stand toe-to-toe with the newfound fashionability of socialism, but r/neoliberal is doing its damndest to make globalism cool again.”

The first panel shows a building labeled the "Prison Industrial Complex" that's controlled by a lever turned to "ON" – a person grips it, about to turn it to "OFF". The second panel shows a red prison building in the center of a black and white web. The text reads: “A lot of people think abolitionists want to close prisons tomorrow when we didn’t get there yesterday. Ruthie Gilmore says, ‘Abolition is about presence, not absence. It’s about building life-affirming institutions.’ The prison system sits at the intersection of multiple forms of oppression and facets of society and when you map it out, we’re all in that web."

Activism

Water Is Life: “This Is Not A Symbolic Action” — Indigenous Protesters Occupy Oil Platforms in Radicalized Fight Against Pollution in the Amazon: "'The Western culture looks at the forest and sees money, resources to sell,' Aurelio Dahua, the Quechua chief, told me in Andoas. 'The government and company officials are very professional and have studied in the cities. They think they are going to teach us poor nativos how to live. But what kind of knowledge lets you destroy the lungs of the world? Why don’t they find another way to develop this country? Why not help us protect the forest? They know nothing. They are building their own graveyard.'"

Direct Action Item

As 2017 wraps up, think back on how you've spent your time, energy, money, and other resources this year. Does it reflect your values? What are your values? Take some time this week to share your core values with friends, along with direct action items relating to your values for next year.

If there’s something you’d like to see in next week’s #RT, please send us a message.

In solidarity!

What is direct action? Direct action means doing things yourself instead of petitioning authorities or relying on external institutions. It means taking matters into your own hands and not waiting to be empowered, because you are already powerful. A “direct action item” is a way to put your beliefs into practice every week.

[mthrynn]

Yesterday, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced a massive funding effort to ensure the United States can sustain the pace of electronical innovation necessary vital to both a flourishing economy and a secure military. Under the banner of the Electronics Resurgence Initiative (ERI), some $500-$800 million will be invested in post-Moore’s Law technologies that will benefit military and commercial users and contribute crucially to national security in the 2025 to 2030 time frame.

First made public in June (see HPCwire coverage here), ERI took shape over the summer as DARPA’s Microsystems Technology Office sought community involvement on the path forward for future progress in electronics. Based on that input, DARPA developed six new programs which are part of the overall larger vision of the Electronic Resurgence Initiative. The six programs are detailed in three Broad Agency Announcements (BAAs) published yesterday on FedBizOpps.gov. Each of the BAAs correlates to one of the ERI research pillars: materials and integration, circuit design, and systems architecture.

Planned investment is in the range of $200 million a year over four years. “ERI Page 3 Investments” refers to research areas that Gordon Moore predicted would become important for future microelectronics progress, cited on page 3 of a famous 1965 paper of his, “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits.”

Also joining the ERI portfolio are existing DARPA programs (including HIVE and CHIPS) as well as the Joint University Microelectronics Program (JUMP), a research effort in basic electronics education co-funded by DARPA and Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC), an industry consortium based in Durham, N.C.

DARPA says that with the official roll out of the Electronics Resurgence Initiative, it “hopes to open new innovation pathways to address impending engineering and economics challenges that, if left unanswered, could challenge what has been a relentless half-century run of progress in microelectronics technology.”

DARPA is of course referring to the remarkable engine of innovation that is Moore’s law. Gordon Moore’s 1965 observation about transistor densities doubling at 24-month intervals set the stage for five decades of faster and cheaper microelectronics. But as node feature sizes approach the fundamental limits of physics, the design work and fabrication becomes ever more complex and expensive, jeopardizing the economic benefits of Moore’s dictum.

It’s something of a grand experiment, explained Bill Chappell, director of the Agency’s Microsystems Technology Office (MTO), referring to the scale and scope of the Electronics Resurgence Initiative. DARPA has packaged up into one large announcement six different programs (released in three Broad Agency Announcements – BAAs — on FBO.gov). The six different programs will receive $75 million in investment over the next year alone and on the order of $300 million over four years. Like all DARPA programs, the longevity and funding levels of these programs will be tied to performance.

“If we see that we’re getting broad resonance within the commercial industry and within the DoD industry, and unique partnerships are forming and/or unique capabilities are popping up for national defense, it will continue with the expectation or even grow,” said Chappell.

“We want to figure out what the opportunity space is as we stare at this unique inflection point in Moore’s law,” Chappell shared. “Whether it slows or stops or even continues, we are committed to look at what else is going to provide progress to the electronics community beyond just the scaling of the transistor which has paced our community for the last fifty years, so that’s really at the heart of what binds all of the different programs that we’re announcing today together: looking for alternative vehicles for progress beyond just transistor scaling.

“That’s because transistor scaling has been a great thing for our country, for our national defense and for the commercial sector. We basically have the envy of the world in terms of capabilities in our country and that has been a unique relationship between government investment and much larger and significant follow through within the industry to prop up the capabilities that we enjoy and that’s taken us very very far, but right now the economics of Moore’s law are already straining those traditional relationships.

“For the DoD, it is very difficult for us to manufacture, for us to design and that’s because of just the scale of the designs that are available – we are victim of our own success in that we have so many transistors available that we now have another problem which is complexity, complexity of manufacturing and complexity of design. So whether Moore’s law ends or not, at the DoD, from a niche development perspective we already have a problem on our hands. And we’re sharing that with the commercial world as well; you see a lot of mergers and acquisitions and tumult in the industry as they try to also grapple with some of the similar problems and the manpower required to get a design from concept into a physical product.”

Here’s a rundown on the six programs by their research thrust:

Materials and Integration (link) –

Three Dimensional Monolithic System-on-a-Chip (3DSoC): Develop 3D monolithic technology that will enable > 50X improvement in SoC digital performance at power.

Foundations Required for Novel Compute (FRANC): Develop the foundations for assessing and establishing the proof of principle for beyond von Neumann compute topologies enabled by new materials and integration.

Design (link) —

Intelligent Design of Electronic Assets (IDEA): “No human in the loop” 24-hour layout generation for mixed signal integrated circuits, systems-in-package, and printed circuit boards.

Posh Open Source Hardware (POSH): An open source System on Chip (SoC) design and verification eco-system that enables cost effective design of ultra-complex SoCs.

Novel Computing Architectures (link) —

Software Defined Hardware (SDH): Build runtime reconfigurable hardware and software that enables near ASIC performance without sacrificing programmability for data-intensive algorithms

Domain-Specific System on Chip (DSSoC): Enable rapid development of multiapplication systems through a single programmable device

Chappel gave additional context for the Software Defined Hardware program, noting that it will look at course-grained reprogrammability specifically for big data programs. “We have the TPU and the GPU for dense problems, for dense searches, and dense matrix manipulation. We have recently started the HIVE program, which does sparse graph search. But the big question that still exists is what if you have a dense and sparse dataset? We don’t have a chip under development or even concepts that are very good at doing both of those types of datasets.”

What DARPA is envisioning is a reprogrammable system, or chip, that is intelligent enough and has an intelligent enough just in time compiler to recognize the data and type of data it needs to operate on and reconfigure itself to the need of that moment. DARPA said its done seedlings to demonstrate that it’s feasible but notes, “it’s still a DARPA-hard concept to pull off.”

DARPA will hold a number of Proposers Days to meet with interested researchers. The FRANC program of the Materials and Integration thrust will be run in the form of a webinar on Sept.15 and that thrust’s other program, 3DsoC, will take place at DARPA headquarters in Arlington, VA, on Sept. 22. The Proposers Day for the Architectures thrust’s two programs, DSSoC and SDH, will take place near DARPA headquarters in Arlington, VA, on Sept. 18 and 19, respectively. The Proposers Days for both programs in the Design thrust—IDEA and POSH—will take place on Sept. 22, in Mountain View, Calif. Details about all of these Proposers Day events and how to register, consult the Special Notice, DARPA-SN-17-75, which is posted on fbo.gov.

Asked about the goals ERI writ large, Chappel said, “Overall success will look like we’ve invented the ideas that will be part of that 2025 and 2030 electronics community in such a way that both our defense base has better access to technology, better access to IP, better design services and capabilities than they have today because of these relationships that we are trying to build while simultaneously US interests in electronics in regards to economic development, maintaining our dominant global position is secured because of the new ideas that we are creating through these investments.

“These $75 million next year and $300 million over the course of the next four years that we’re planning is for very far-out research which often times is not something that a commercial entity can do because of its speculative nature and/or not something the DoD can do because it isn’t necessarily solving a today problem, but a tomorrow problem.”

DARPA is known for funding high-risk, high-reward R&D with broad commercial impact, helping to invent both the Internet and GPS.

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via Government – HPCwire