Third Banker Suicided
January 31st, 2014We have Gabriel Magee and William ‘Bill’ Broeksmit from a couple of days ago and now Mike Dueker.
Any more?
Via: Bloomberg:
Mike Dueker, the chief economist at Russell Investments, was found dead at the side of a highway that leads to the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington state, according to the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department. He was 50.
He may have jumped over a 4-foot (1.2-meter) fence before falling down a 40- to 50-foot embankment, Pierce County Detective Ed Troyer said yesterday. He said the death appeared to be a suicide.
Dueker was reported missing on Jan. 29, and a group of friends had been searching for him along with law enforcement. Troyer said the economist was having problems at work, without elaborating. Dueker was in good standing at Russell, said Jennifer Tice, a company spokeswoman. She declined to comment on Troyer’s statement about Dueker’s work issues.
“We were deeply saddened to learn today of the death,” Tice said in an e-mail. “He made valuable contributions that helped our clients and many of his fellow associates.”
Dueker worked at Seattle-based Russell for five years, and developed a business-cycle index that forecast economic performance. He was previously an assistant vice president and research economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
Google: Lots of Android Phones Taking Video in the Same Area—Alert the Cops?
January 30th, 2014Via: Phandroid:
Excerpt from US Patent #20140025755
“When there are at least a given number of video clips with similar time stamps and geolocation stamps uploaded to a repository, it is inferred that an event of interest has likely occurred, and a notification signal is transmitted (e.g., to a law enforcement agency, to a news organization, to a publisher of a periodical, to a public blog, etc.).”
Research Credit: bretwalda
New 3D Printer Can Print in Carbon Fiber
January 30th, 2014Via: Popular Mechanics:
Gregory Mark co-owns Aeromotions, which builds computer-controlled racecar wings. To make those wings both strong and lightweight, they use carbon fiber. No surprise there—it’s the material of choice for many advanced motorsports parts. The problem is that making custom racecar parts out of carbon fiber is daunting. The only real method available is the expensive and difficult process of laying up carbon fiber pieces by hand.
To improve the process, Mark looked to 3D printing. But nothing on the market could print the material, and no available materials could print pieces strong enough for his purposes. So Mark devised his own solution: the MarkForged Mark One, the world’s first carbon fiber 3D printer.
Mark debuted his Boston area-based startup MarkForged at SolidWorks World 2014 in San Diego with a working prototype. The Mark One can print in carbon fiber, fiberglass, nylon and PLA (a thermoplastic).
Google and DeepMind Technologies
January 30th, 2014Via: MIT Technology Review:
How much are a dozen deep-learning researchers worth? Apparently, more than $400 million.
This week, Google reportedly paid that much to acquire DeepMind Technologies, a startup based in London that had one of the biggest concentrations of researchers anywhere working on deep learning, a relatively new field of artificial intelligence research that aims to achieve tasks like recognizing faces in video or words in human speech (see “Deep Learning”).
The acquisition, aimed at adding skilled experts rather than specific products, marks an acceleration in efforts by Google, Facebook, and other Internet firms to monopolize the biggest brains in artificial intelligence research.
In an interview last month, before the DeepMind acquisition, Peter Norvig, a director of research at Google, estimated that his company already employed “less than 50 percent but certainly more than 5 percent” of the world’s leading experts in machine learning.
Companies like Google expect deep learning to help them create new types of products that can understand and learn from the images, text, and video clogging the Web. And to a significant degree, leading academic scientists have embraced Silicon Valley, where they can command teams of engineers instead of students and have access to the largest, most interesting data sets. “It’s a combination of the computing resources we have and the headcounts we can offer,” Norvig said. “At Google, if you want a copy of the Web, well, we just happen to have one sitting around.”
Cryptogon Readers Send Contributions
January 30th, 2014Thank you.
MH $20
JM $25
Eileen $75
JM asked me to mention freestateproject.org and nhlibertyforum.com.
Deadly Ice Storm Turns Atlanta Into Parking Lot, Strands Thousands
January 29th, 2014Via: Reuters:
A rare ice storm turned Atlanta into a slippery mess on Wednesday, stranding thousands for hours on frozen roadways and raising questions about how city leaders prepared for and handled the cold snap that slammed the U.S. South.
The storm, which has killed at least seven people, on Tuesday swept over a region of about 60 million largely unaccustomed to ice and snow – stretching from Texas through Georgia and into the Carolinas – and forecasts called for more freezing weather on Thursday.
Two Top American Bankers Commit Suicide in London
January 29th, 2014Oh sure.
Via: Daily Mail:
Two top ranking American bankers working in senior positions in London have committed suicide in the space of two days.
Gabriel Magee, a 39-year-old JP Morgan bank executive, died early this morning after he jumped 500ft from the top of the bank’s European headquarters. His body was discovered on the ninth floor roof, which surrounds the 33-story Canary Wharf skyscraper.
Just two days earlier, on Sunday, fellow American banker, William ‘Bill’ Broeksmit, 58, was found hanging in his South Kensington home.
Broeksmit – who retired last February – was a former senior manager at Deutsche Bank and had lived in London many years. He started working for the bank in 1996 but left for a period of 7 years before returning in 2008.
“What have you heard about Barry Seal having flown a get-away plane out of Dallas after the Kennedy assassination?”
January 29th, 2014Via: Mad Cow Productions:
Is there evidence that there was a get-away plane? The answer is yes.
The Minnesota Starvation Experiment
January 29th, 2014Via: io9:
Towards the end of World War II, word got through that certain people in occupied territories were eating a near-starvation diet. American researchers wanted to study the effects of starvation, so they recruited volunteers – and starved them some more.
The Minnesota Starvation Experiment pretty much lived up to its name. It was an early experiment in nutrition prompted by news about the conditions in Europe during World War II. The full horror of concentration camps was still to come, but word came in that people in war-torn territories were living on severely restricted diets. Everyone knew that things were going to get worse before they got better, and concerned researchers wanted to find out the effects of starvation and how to rehabilitate a severely starved person. In November of 1944, at The University of Minnesota, a study began on the effects of starvation.
Iceland Let Banks Fail, Jailed Criminal Bankers and Now Has Only 4% Unemployment
January 29th, 2014Via: Bloomberg:
Iceland let its banks fail in 2008 because they proved too big to save.
Now, the island is finding crisis-management decisions made half a decade ago have put it on a trajectory that’s turned 2 percent unemployment into a realistic goal.
While the euro area grapples with record joblessness, led by more than 25 percent in Greece and Spain, only about 4 percent of Iceland’s labor force is without work. Prime MinisterSigmundur D. Gunnlaugsson says even that’s too high.
