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One of the bigger consumer staples events of the year runs from September 8-10 next week as the virtual version of the Barclays Global Consumer Staples Conference plays out. The timing is interesting with staples outperforming the broad market over the last two days in a bit of a sector rotation out of tech. Headliners of the Barclays event include Walmart (NYSE:WMT) CFO Brett Biggs and Procter & Gamble (NYSE:PG) COO/CFO Jon Moeller. Other companies due to present include Archer Daniels Midland (NYSE:ADM), J.M. Smucker (NYSE:SJM), Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ), Hormel (NYSE:HRL), Hain Celestial (NASDAQ:HAIN), Newell Brands (NASDAQ:NWL), Freshpet (NASDAQ:FRPT), Colgate-Palmolive (NYSE:CL), Dollar General (NYSE:DG), Kellogg (NYSE:K), Coca-Cola (NYSE:KO), Tyson Foods (NYSE:TSN), Clorox (NYSE:CLX), Sysco (NYSE:SYY), Molson Coors (NYSE:TAP), Clorox (CLX), Freshpet (FRPT), Mondelez International (NASDAQ:MDLZ), Reynolds Consumer Products (NASDAQ:REYN), Nomad Foods (NYSE:NOMD), Philip Morris International (NYSE:PM), Keurig Dr Pepper (NYSE:KDP) and more. The Consumer Staples Select SPDR ETF (NYSEARCA:XLP) is up about 9.4% over the last six months.
Technology is making the cost of many things trend towards zero. Things we used to have to pay a lot for are now cheap or even free–think about how much it costs to buy a computer, make long-distance calls, take pictures, watch movies, listen to music, or even travel to another state or country. Down the road even more of our day-to-day needs will join this list–including, possibly, electricity.
That’s great, right? Because, free stuff! Who doesn’t love free stuff?
The energy case, though, is more complex.
The cost of burning coal can only go so low, but the cost of harvesting energy from the sun just keeps dropping. October 2017 saw bids for a Saudi Arabian solar plant as low as 1.79 cents per kilowatt hour, breaking the previous record in Abu Dhabi of 2.42 cents/kWh. Granted, it’s no coincidence that these uniquely low prices are coming from some of the sunniest parts of the world. For comparison’s sake, the average residential price for electricity in the US in 2017 was 12.5 cents/kWh.
Just when we think prices can’t go any lower, they do–and perhaps the most amazing part about the continual price decline is that it’s in spite of, not thanks to, batteries. Cheap, efficient batteries are still the biggest bottleneck for renewables, but once we figure them out, the sky–or, in this case, the floor?–is truly the limit. It’s also only a matter of time until transparent solar cells become a reality and turn every outdoor glass surface into a small-scale power plant.
So what would a world of free energy for all look like? Electricity would become ubiquitous in the many parts of the world where that’s not yet the case. In other places, electric bills would disappear–but that would be the least of it. Manufacturing costs would plummet, as would transportation costs, as would, well, pretty much all costs.
The money we’d save on energy could be put to use on social programs, maybe even spawning a universal basic income that would help bring about more just and equitable societies. If everything cost less, we wouldn’t need to work as much to earn as much money, freeing up our time to pursue creative endeavors or other personal passions.
There’s a flip side to every coin, though, and the old adage about the best things in life being free unfortunately doesn’t necessarily hold true in this case. Let’s look at what’s happened when we’ve made other resources free or cheap.
In the US we made food cheap and abundant by learning how to process it and manufacture it at scale–and now we’re fatter and sicker than we’ve ever been. We figured out how to produce plastic bottles and bags for pennies, and now the oceans are choked with our abundantly cheap, non-biodegradable garbage.
The Jevons Paradox holds that as technological progress increases the efficiency of a product or resource, the rate of consumption of that resource rises because of increasing demand, effectively canceling out any savings in efficiency. That’s right–humanity appears to be, at our core, a species that takes, and free electricity would be no exception.
Middle Eastern countries, where electricity prices are the cheapest in the world, present a telling example. Excessive use of energy is commonplace, and there’s no incentive to rein in use. Ideally, energy use per capita should be reflected in GDP per capita, but countries like Kuwait, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia all have an imbalance in this metric, using much more energy than is needed to achieve their GDPs.
As energy becomes cheaper in other parts of the world, people will use more of it, and the first victim will be the planet. Even though the energy will be renewable, that doesn’t mean there won’t be environmental costs; there could be repercussions we haven’t even imagined yet, just as whoever invented plastic probably never envisioned it poisoning marine life.
So as energy gets cheaper and ultimately moves toward being free, how do we handle its abundance wisely? Government regulation will play a role, as will market forces, despite the absence of economic impetus. As with any new technological development, we may have a phase of adjustment where we go too far, catch ourselves, and swing back the other way.
Free, clean energy will undeniably bring many benefits with it. But we can’t afford to forget that there’s usually a price to pay, too–it’s just not always obvious from the outset.
The upcoming US presidential election seems set to be something of a mess–to put it lightly. Covid-19 will likely deter millions from voting in person, and mail-in voting isn’t shaping up to be much more promising. This all comes at a time when political tensions are running higher than they have in decades, issues that shouldn’t be political (like mask-wearing) have become highly politicized, and Americans are dramatically divided along party lines.
So the last thing we need right now is yet another wrench in the spokes of democracy, in the form of disinformation; we all saw how that played out in 2016, and it wasn’t pretty. For the record, disinformation purposely misleads people, while misinformation is simply inaccurate, but without malicious intent. While there’s not a ton tech can do to make people feel safe at crowded polling stations or up the Postal Service’s budget, tech can help with disinformation, and Microsoft is trying to do so.
On Tuesday the company released two new tools designed to combat disinformation, described in a blog post by VP of Customer Security and Trust Tom Burt and Chief Scientific Officer Eric Horvitz.
The first is Microsoft Video Authenticator, which is made to detect deepfakes. In case you’re not familiar with this wicked byproduct of AI progress, “deepfakes” refers to audio or visual files made using artificial intelligence that can manipulate peoples’ voices or likenesses to make it look like they said things they didn’t. Editing a video to string together words and form a sentence someone didn’t say doesn’t count as a deepfake; though there’s manipulation involved, you don’t need a neural network and you’re not generating any original content or footage.
The Authenticator analyzes videos or images and tells users the percentage chance that they’ve been artificially manipulated. For videos, the tool can even analyze individual frames in real time.
Deepfake videos are made by feeding hundreds of hours of video of someone into a neural network, “teaching” the network the minutiae of the person’s voice, pronunciation, mannerisms, gestures, etc. It’s like when you do an imitation of your annoying coworker from accounting, complete with mimicking the way he makes every sentence sound like a question and his eyes widen when he talks about complex spreadsheets. You’ve spent hours–no, months–in his presence and have his personality quirks down pat. An AI algorithm that produces deepfakes needs to learn those same quirks, and more, about whoever the creator’s target is.
Given enough real information and examples, the algorithm can then generate its own fake footage, with deepfake creators using computer graphics and manually tweaking the output to make it as realistic as possible.
The scariest part? To make a deepfake, you don’t need a fancy computer or even a ton of knowledge about software. There are open-source programs people can access for free online, and as far as finding video footage of famous people–well, we’ve got YouTube to thank for how easy that is.
Microsoft’s Video Authenticator can detect the blending boundary of a deepfake and subtle fading or greyscale elements that the human eye may not be able to see.
In the blog post, Burt and Horvitz point out that as time goes by, deepfakes are only going to get better and become harder to detect; after all, they’re generated by neural networks that are continuously learning from and improving themselves.
Microsoft’s counter-tactic is to come in from the opposite angle, that is, being able to confirm beyond doubt that a video, image, or piece of news is real (I mean, can McDonald’s fries cure baldness? Did a seal slap a kayaker in the face with an octopus? Never has it been so imperative that the world know the truth).
A tool built into Microsoft Azure, the company’s cloud computing service, lets content producers add digital hashes and certificates to their content, and a reader (which can be used as a browser extension) checks the certificates and matches the hashes to indicate the content is authentic.
Finally, Microsoft also launched an interactive “Spot the Deepfake” quiz it developed in collaboration with the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, deepfake detection company Sensity, and USA Today. The quiz is intended to help people “learn about synthetic media, develop critical media literacy skills, and gain awareness of the impact of synthetic media on democracy.”
The impact Microsoft’s new tools will have remains to be seen–but hey, we’re glad they’re trying. And they’re not alone; Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have all taken steps to ban and remove deepfakes from their sites. The AI Foundation’s Reality Defender uses synthetic media detection algorithms to identify fake content. There’s even a coalition of big tech companies teaming up to try to fight election interference.
One thing is for sure: between a global pandemic, widespread protests and riots, mass unemployment, a hobbled economy, and the disinformation that’s remained rife through it all, we’re going to need all the help we can get to make it through not just the election, but the rest of the conga-line-of-catastrophes year that is 2020.
Professional athletes dedicate most of their time in honing and maintain their extraordinary physical talent. Sometimes their good looks combined with the tenacity for hard work makes them in demand as an actor. In fact, many actors choose the big screen after retirement and have gone on to establish pretty successful careers. Here’s our rundown of the top four athletes who created memorable characters that are notable and impressive.
More commonly mentioned as the Terminator, Arnold Schwarzenegger was a beast of a bodybuilder before he went on to star in classics, including films like ‘Predator.’ Body-building is an Olympic sport, and while he was the most famous bodybuilder of all time, he was undeniably the biggest actor in the world for some time.
Johnson is currently the forerunner of this list as he is currently the most popular athlete turned actor. Before his acting career took off, he was already a big star in the WWE. After conquering that world, he is still reining the big screen with his roles in a long-running franchise the Fast & Furious and San Andreas.
This is a lesser-known fact that Terry Crews was drafted into the NFL from 1991-95. He got his break into Hollywood, and from then on, there was no looking back. His iconic role in White Chicks and currently on Brooklyn 99 on the small screen, Terry Crews, has become a household name.
While Statham has established his persona as the tough guy in movies, he was a competitive driver and competed for Britain at the 1990 Commonwealth Games. His recent giant-shark move, The Meg, is synonymous with his trademark of actions movies, which make him the most consistent leading man of this genre. He has made his mark and can only be predicted to imprint that permanently on Hollywood in the future.
It’s never too late to follow a dream of taking a risk; you may be the thing that the world is waiting for. These athletes turned actors have proved that it’s essential to take the first step, put in the work, and leave the rest up to fate. So believe in yourself no matter how late you may think it is. Life doesn’t give too many chances, so don’t regret the ones you didn’t take!
Three big names were added to the S&P this past Friday, Etsy online retailer, semiconductor equipment manufacturer Teradyne Inc. and medical technology firm Catalent Inc. will be included in the S&P as of September 21st. S&P inclusions usually lead to a rise in stock price. Investors were surprised that Tesla was not included as a choice as an into the index. Tesla shares fell sharply this past week, 8% after they announced a plan to raise 5 billion dollar for secondary stock offering. Apples position in the DOW also led towards lower gains after it split as a technology market tumble this week in a much-needed correction.
Etsy has certainly proven itself as a growth stock. Earnings-per-share growth rose 24.6% in 2019. Analysts are looking at a 26.5% growth for the long-term.
“Our extremely strong second quarter results, with consolidated GMS and revenue up 146% and 137% respectively, are a testament to the agility of our team, the strength of our brand, the innovation of our sellers, and the unique and special nature of inventory on our core Etsy marketplace,” said Josh Silverman, Etsy, Inc. Chief Executive Officer. “Our mission to ‘Keep Commerce Human’ matters now more than ever — and we are showing the world just how many purchase occasions our sellers can meet in a truly delightful way. Etsy marketplace GMS increased 125% in the quarter, as we are attracting new buyers and engaging our existing customers more than ever before. Our ‘Right to Win’ strategy provides a clear and enduring roadmap for product and marketing investments that make it easier to shop on Etsy, build top of mind awareness, and solidify buyer trust.
Couple this with the strength of the Reverb marketplace, and we have a solid foundation for long-term growth and are well positioned to build on our momentum.” Source Etsy Investor Relations
From the red carpet to Instagram, celebs like Jennifer Lopez and Heidi Klum keep us wondering how they’re always killing it in the hot bod department. The secret lies in working out with a personal trainer and following their advice on achieving a flawless physique. While many of us won’t be walking down on the runway anytime soon, it doesn’t hurt to seek some expert advice; after all, we’re the celebs of our lives!
Water rules all
Many of us have heard about the many benefits of drinking eight glasses of water a day to flush out unnecessary toxins from our systems but according to celeb trainers, it’s much more crucial than that. Water helps keep our bodies in prime shape, and they recommend drinking at least half a gallon every single day.
Green tea enhances metabolism, and the caffeine improves endurance, which helps you in working out for extended time periods. Green tea is an excellent alternative to other caffeine options such as coffee, which has loads of caffeine but none of green tea benefits.
Abs are made with the proper diet
While V-ups and planks are a great way to tone your midsection, eating poorly will sabotage all the hard work you put in your workout. If you eat healthily, then you don’t need to kill yourself working out at all hours in the gym. Working out three to four times a week is enough if you’re eating clean and healthy.
Do it with plyometrics
There are many options for sweating it out, ranging from yoga to kickboxing, but when looking for something when you’re short on time, some physical exercises are more suited than others. Combining weighted squats with plyometrics or high-intensity heart rate workouts will give you an astonishing burn in less than 10 minutes compared to other alternatives.
Working out and eating right are the super essentials steps in reaching your fitness goals but all of this is futile if you’re stressed. Stress inhibits our bodies from burning fat, so peaceful, relaxing sleep is the key to staying in your best shape. So next time you sleep in just remember that it was all for fitness.
There are no short-cuts when it comes to fitness, so don’t try to achieve results overnight. Stick with it and with the time you will be the envy of your social circle where people flock to you for inside secrets to your fitness.
DOD Reaffirms Original JEDI Cloud Award to Microsoft
The Department has completed its comprehensive re-evaluation of the JEDI Cloud proposals and determined that Microsoft’s proposal continues to represent the best value to the Government. The JEDI Cloud contract is a firm-fixed-price, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract that will make a full range of cloud computing services available to the DoD. While contract performance will not begin immediately due to the Preliminary Injunction Order issued by the Court of Federal Claims on February 13, 2020, DoD is eager to begin delivering this capability to our men and women in uniform.
The contract modernizes the Pentagon’s massive IT infrastructure which has up to a $10 billion valuation for the upgrade for a time period of perhaps 10 years.
(CN) – Researchers in Sweden have identified a small neutralizing antibody that has the capacity to block the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes Covid-19, from entering human cells. In a paper published Friday in Nature Communications, the researchers propose that the nanobody has the potential to be developed as an antiviral treatment.
Single-domain antibodies, also known as nanobodies, are fragments of antibodies that occur naturally in camelids such as camels, alpacas and llamas. Unlike the antibody molecules in most species, camelid antibodies are very specific and can be broken down into nanobodies which target a specific molecule and bind to it. If the nanobody binds to a viral protein, it can be used as a drug to fight the virus.
Nanobodies span less than one-tenth the size of conventional antibodies and are typically easier to produce cost-effectively at scale. Critically, they can be adapted for humans with current protocols and have a proven record of inhibiting viral respiratory infections.
This is the case with the nanobody sequence that researchers from the Karolinska Institutet, Sweden’s largest center of medical academic research, call Ty1 – named after the alpaca Tyson. Ty1 efficiently neutralizes the virus by attaching itself to the part of the spike protein that binds to the receptor ACE2, which is used by SARS-CoV-2 to infect cells. This blocks the virus from slipping into the cells and thus prevents infection.
The team began seeking effective nanobodies in February when an alpaca was injected with the SARS-CoV-2’s spike protein, which is used to enter our cells. After 60 days, blood samples from the alpaca showed a strong immune response against the spike protein.
The team then cloned, enriched and analyzed nanobody sequences from the alpaca’s blood cells to determine which nanobodies should be examined. They found that Ty1 can bind to the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein and neutralize the virus, with no detectable off-target activity.
Preclinical animal studies have begun to investigate the neutralizing activity and therapeutic potential of Ty1 in living creatures.
“We hope our findings can contribute to the amelioration of the Covid-19 pandemic by encouraging further examination of this nanobody as a therapeutic candidate against this viral infection,” said Gerald McInerney, corresponding author and associate professor of virology at the Department of Microbiology, Tumor and Cell Biology at Karolinska Institutet.
Why you don’t need a college degree to work for Google.
Google announced a new online certification program. The courses that lead to a certificate are led by Google employees The certificates are available on Coursera.com for as low as $49.00. No college degree required to work in some of Google’s available jobs. Certificates can be completed between three and six months. Google will consider a completed certificate in data analytics, user experience design (UX), and product management as the equivalent of a four-year degree.
While these certificates can certainly help get you hired at Google, other companies such as Best Buy, Bank of America, Walmart, Intel, Sprint, Hulu, and Sam’s Club are recognizing the Google certificate program to hire employees. 100,000 scholarships for individuals are offered to enrolled students who participate in the program on a need-by- need basis.
Mothers shopping with their babies at Walmart will now have a private and secure pods to breastfeed and pump their babies. Walmart has introduced 100 pods across the United States in partnership with Mamava. Mamava is an app that allows breastfeeding mothers to find locations to safely breastfeed their babies.
The pods have enough access for a wheelchair and a stroller. Breastfeeding should be a right and not a privilege. The two founders. Christine Dodson and Sascha Mayer designed the app to create the problem of mothers finding a safe and secure private area to breastfeed their babies.
The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) in 2010 brought it all together for Mamawa when they launched their app in 2013.
Moms can also control the air flow in the pod and dim the lights via the app.
Walmart received feedback from moms in the three pilot cities that they really appreciated that Walmart offered the pod and really liked the features and convenience of the pod. The company also saw repeat users of the pods, according to Anne Hatfield, Walmart’s director of global communications.
People can find out whether their local Walmart store has a breastfeeding pod via the Mamava app.
“Over the past five years we have placed our pods in airports, stadiums, convention centers, and a myriad of workplaces,” Mamava CEO Sascha Mayer said in a statement. “The Walmart placements are our most public and impactful as they are going to be accessible to many more moms. Our hope is that this sort of infrastructure in store communicates support for the important work of breastfeeding and pumping, and more parents decide to breastfeed because of it.”
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