British Tycoon Impaled on Spikes Following 60ft Fall from Luxury London Penthouse
December 10th, 2014Update: Scot Young
Via: Telegraph:
A financier at the heart of one of Britain’s biggest divorce battles has died after falling from his £3 million home and impaling himself on iron railings.
Scot Young, 52, suffered horrific injuries after plummeting four storeys from a window of his luxury central London penthouse.
His death comes almost a year after an extraordinary legal fight with his ex-wife concluded at the High Court.
Michelle Young, 49, won a £20 million payout after a seven-year legal battle but declared the sum a “disgrace” and is never believed to have received the cash.
She said she thought Mr Young was worth “billions” and claimed that he had hidden his fortune.
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Via: International Business Times:
A man has died in an horrific accident, falling 60 feet from the window of a Marylebone flat after being impaled on iron railings.
He was pronounced dead at the scene and police are not treating the death as suspicious.
Neighbours believe the man, who was in his 50s, worked in banking or the financial services and was from the UK.
Firefighters cut through the 5ft railings with an angle grinder before the body could be moved, according to the Evening Standard.
A neighbour said: “It is horrific and very sad. My cleaners were here and saw the man’s body. They were traumatised.
“It was a very gruesome scene. The body was hanging there for a while.
“Police covered it with a tent straight away when they arrived but quite a few people must have seen it. I couldn’t look, I was horrified.”
A Met spokesman said: “Police were called to Montagu Square, W1 at 17:18hrs on Monday, 8 December to reports of a man having fallen from a fourth floor window. A man, believed aged in his early 50’s, was pronounced dead at the scene. The death is not being treated as suspicious at this time.”
Residents were still in shock at the horrific death. Hanne Kristiansen, a physiotherapist, said: “I tried to look out our window, but the police yelled ‘get back inside’. I saw the police using a chainsaw and sparks went everywhere.”
The man is understood to have lived in the flat with his American girlfriend for the past few months.
Related: Slain MassMutual Executive Held Wall Street “Trade Secrets”
Retail Neuroscience
December 10th, 2014Via: CBS:
Retailers are trying to get into customers’ brains and they now have the technology to do it. It’s called consumer neuroscience and companies are getting valuable shopper intel that can shape the shopping experience.
Facebook AI Assistant for Imbeciles
December 10th, 2014Via: Wired:
Let’s say you’re out drinking with your buddies, things get out of hand, you pull out your smartphone, you take a selfie in the middle of all this drunken revelry, then you take 30 or 40 more, and, without hesitation, you start uploading them to Facebook.
It’s a common thing to do. But Yann LeCun aims to stop such unbridled behavior—or at least warn people when they’re about to do something they might regret. He wants to build a kind of Facebook digital assistant that will, say, recognize when you’re uploading an embarrassingly candid photo of your late-night antics. In a virtual way, he explains, this assistant would tap you on the shoulder and say: “Uh, this is being posted publicly. Are you sure you want your boss and your mother to see this?”
The idea is more than just an idle suggestion. LeCun is the New York University researcher and machine-learning guru who now oversees the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research lab, a team of AI researchers inside the internet giant that spans offices in both California and New York, and this rapidly expanding operation is now laying the basic groundwork for his digital assistant.
Fashioning such a tool is largely about building image recognition technology that can distinguish between your drunken self and your sober self, and using a red-hot form of artificial intelligence called “deep learning”—a technology bootstrapped by LeCun and other academics—Facebook has already reached a point where it can identify your face and your friends’ faces in the photos you post to its social network, letting you more easily tag them with the right names.
A Pacific Isle, Radioactive and Forgotten
December 9th, 2014Via: New York Times:
THERE is no consistent air service to the coral atoll of Enewetak in the Marshall Islands, where the United States tested 67 nuclear weapons between 1946 and 1958. On my first trip to the capital, Majuro, in 2010, to study the danger posed there by the rising ocean, I managed to get on a special flight taking dignitaries to Enewetak for the dedication of a school. From there, I boarded a small boat to visit a nuclear waste dump that the world had all but forgotten.
Senate Report: CIA Misled Public on Torture
December 9th, 2014Update: Rectal Hydration
Via: NBC:
Along with the waterboarding, Mohammed was subjected to days of standing sleep deprivation, slapping and “stress positions,” the report says. And it says that several times he underwent an emergency medical procedure known as “rectal rehydration,” or proctolysis, which standard medical references describe as a way to quickly replace fluids in a patient who is in shock or unconscious.
The report matter-of-factly notes that such treatment was “medically unnecessary” for Mohammed, whom it describes as having been doused with, submerged in or force-fed water hundreds of times. After one session, the medical officer present reported that Mohammed’s gastric contents were “so diluted by water” that Mohammed was in danger of water intoxication. The medical officer later wrote that “in the new technique we are basically doing a series of near drownings.”
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Via: CNN:
The CIA’s harsh interrogations of terrorist detainees during the Bush era didn’t work, were more brutal than previously revealed and delivered no “ticking time bomb” information that prevented an attack, according to an explosive Senate report released Tuesday.
The majority report issued by the Senate Intelligence Committee is a damning condemnation of the tactics — branded by critics as torture — the George W. Bush administration deployed in the fear-laden days after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The techniques, according to the report, were “deeply flawed” and often resulted in “fabricated” information.
Greek Stocks Crash
December 9th, 2014Via: CNBC:
Greece’s stock market plunged 13 percent on Tuesday and bond yields spiked after the country’s government surprised investors by announcing a snap presidential vote.
The election was originally scheduled for the new year, but will now take place next week. The news, announced late Monday, caused the Athens Stock Exchange to fall 13 percent by Tuesday afternoon, and the yield on Greek 10-year government debt to rise to 8.08 percent.
Greece’s banks were among the worst hit, with the National Bank of Greece trading down around 20 percent and Attica bank down 26 percent.
Stocks: Shanghai Down 5%, Greece Down 6%
December 9th, 2014Via: CNBC:
Greek stocks slid 6 percent, with continued political jitters in the country adding to the declines.
…
China was the main focus for investors as the country’s Shanghai Composite (Shanghai Stock Exchange: .SSEC) benchmark tumbled in the final hour of trade. It finished the session down 5.3 percent after rallying to a three-and-half-year high of 3,091 points earlier in the day. It marked its biggest one-day fall in percentage terms since August 2009.
Why Elon Musk’s Batteries Scare the Hell Out of the Electric Company
December 9th, 2014Disclosure: I sell solar power systems in New Zealand.
Via: Bloomberg:
At a sagebrush-strewn industrial park outside of Reno, Nevada, bulldozers are clearing dirt for Tesla Motors Inc. (TSLA)’s battery factory, projected to be the world’s largest.
Tesla’s founder, Elon Musk, sees the $5 billion facility as a key step toward making electric cars more affordable, while ending reliance on oil and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. At first blush, the push toward more electric cars looks to be positive for utilities struggling with stagnant sales from energy conservation and slow economic growth.
Yet Musk’s so-called gigafactory may soon become an existential threat to the 100-year-old utility business model. The facility will also churn out stationary battery packs that can be paired with rooftop solar panels to store power. Already, a second company led by Musk, SolarCity Corp. (SCTY), is packaging solar panels and batteries to power California homes and companies including Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT)
“The mortal threat that ever cheaper on-site renewables pose” comes from systems that include storage, said Amory Lovins, co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, a Snowmass, Colorado-based energy consultant. “That is an unregulated product you can buy at Home Depot that leaves the old business model with no place to hide.”
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The Tesla systems are arriving just as utilities begin to feel increasing pressure worldwide from the disruption posed by renewable energy.
Research Credit: winstonsmith
China’s Sub Launched Nuclear Missile Capability
December 9th, 2014Via: Bloomberg:
China is preparing to arm its stealthiest submarines with nuclear missiles that could reach the U.S., cloaking its arsenal with the invisibility needed to retaliate in the event of an enemy strike.
Fifty years after China carried out its first nuclear test, patrols by the almost impossible-to-detect JIN class submarines armed with nuclear JL–2 ballistic missiles will give President Xi Jinping greater agility to respond to an attack.
The nuclear-powered subs will probably conduct initial patrols with the missiles by the end of this year, “giving China its first credible sea-based nuclear deterrent,” according to an annual report to Congress submitted in November by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.
Betting On The ‘Other’ Oil Black Swan
December 9th, 2014Via: ZeroHedge:
That said, if oil prices go “too low”, there are some very powerful State actors who could become incentivized to precipitate a geopolitical crisis in order to get oil prices back up. E.g. a Saudi Arabian spring, or an attack on a major pipeline? The ISIS-sponsored attack in November in Saudi Arabia’s oil-rich Al Ahsa region did not get a lot of air time, but this is definitely an article worth reading…again from the WSJ: ISIS urging attacks on Saudi
