Kevin Slavin: How Algorithms Shape Our World
August 25th, 2011Via: TED:
Kevin Slavin argues that we’re living in a world designed for — and increasingly controlled by — algorithms. In this riveting talk from TEDGlobal, he shows how these complex computer programs determine: espionage tactics, stock prices, movie scripts, and architecture. And he warns that we are writing code we can’t understand, with implications we can’t control.
Gold: Intraday Prints Under $1800
August 24th, 2011Warning: This is not a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any financial instrument.
Spot gold: $1798. That is all…
Update: Initial Pullback Targets Based on Fibonacci Retracements of Recent Ramp Up
Hint: There’s more to that 38.2% level than meets the eye. I’ve left substantial woowoo off this chart, but if you’re looking for a run-and-gun long side play…
Spot Gold, Daily Interval
New York Police Department Runs Intelligence Operations Outside Its Jurisdiction with Help and Personnel from CIA
August 24th, 2011This week in The Land of the Free…
Via: AP:
In New Brunswick, N.J., a building superintendent opened the door to apartment No. 1076 one balmy Tuesday and discovered an alarming scene: terrorist literature strewn about the table and computer and surveillance equipment set up in the next room.
The panicked superintendent dialed 911, sending police and the FBI rushing to the building near Rutgers University on the afternoon of June 2, 2009. What they found in that first-floor apartment, however, was not a terrorist hideout but a command center set up by a secret team of New York Police Department intelligence officers.
From that apartment, about an hour outside the department’s jurisdiction, the NYPD had been staging undercover operations and conducting surveillance throughout New Jersey. Neither the FBI nor the local police had any idea.
Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the NYPD has become one of the country’s most aggressive domestic intelligence agencies. A months-long investigation by The Associated Press has revealed that the NYPD operates far outside its borders and targets ethnic communities in ways that would run afoul of civil liberties rules if practiced by the federal government. And it does so with unprecedented help from the CIA in a partnership that has blurred the bright line between foreign and domestic spying.
Neither the city council, which finances the department, nor the federal government, which contributes hundreds of millions of dollars each year, is told exactly what’s going on.
The department has dispatched teams of undercover officers, known as “rakers,” into minority neighborhoods as part of a human mapping program, according to officials directly involved in the program. They’ve monitored daily life in bookstores, bars, cafes and nightclubs. Police have also used informants, known as “mosque crawlers,” to monitor sermons, even when there’s no evidence of wrongdoing. NYPD officials have scrutinized imams and gathered intelligence on cab drivers and food cart vendors, jobs often done by Muslims.
Many of these operations were built with help from the CIA, which is prohibited from spying on Americans but was instrumental in transforming the NYPD’s intelligence unit.
A veteran CIA officer, while still on the agency’s payroll, was the architect of the NYPD’s intelligence programs. The CIA trained a police detective at the Farm, the agency’s spy school in Virginia, then returned him to New York, where he put his new espionage skills to work inside the United States.
And just last month, the CIA sent a senior officer to work as a clandestine operative inside police headquarters.
Research Credit: MS
How to Get $12 Billion of Gold to Venezuela
August 24th, 2011I think the more immediate and pressing matter will be: How to Get $12 Billion of Gold in the First Place.
Dear Leader Chavez doesn’t actually believe these banks actually kept all of Venezuela’s gold on hand, does he? He can’t be that stupid. So, I see this as a pretty cunning bit of economic warfare.
Did it force the crooked banks, who did who knows what with the alleged gold on their books, to stand on the bid in the spot market recently to come up with physical metal? I don’t know, but it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s what happened.
I’d say that there’s about a 99% chance that fake bars will be passed to Chavez, so the regime had better be ready for that. They might look to James Turk’s GoldMoney for some ideas on how to proceed. (Note: I have no association with GoldMoney at all.)
On a different note: See the part in bold below that reveals how infuriated the mainstream financial press is with people who insist on holding the physical metal. HAHA.
Via: Reuters:
Ever since the news broke last week that Hugo Chávez wanted to transport 211 tons of physical gold from Europe to Caracas, I’ve been wondering how on earth he possibly intends to do such a thing.
There are 99 tons already being held at the Bank of England; according to the FT, the plan is to transfer other gold to the Bank of England from custodians such as Barclays, HSBC, and Standard Chartered; then, once it’s all in one place, um, well, nobody has a clue what might happen. Here’s the best guess from the FT:
Venezuela would need to transport the gold in several trips, traders said, since the high value of gold means it would be impossible to insure a single aircraft carrying 211 tonnes. It could take about 40 shipments to move the gold back to Caracas, traders estimated.
“It’s going to be quite a task. Logistically, I’m not sure if the central bank realises the magnitude of the task ahead of them,” said one senior gold banker.
I put the ever-resourceful Nick Rizzo on the task, but he came up with little more: the market in physical gold is tiny, and largely comprised of nutcases. The last (and only) known case of this kind of quantity of gold being transported across state lines took place almost exactly 75 years ago, in 1936, when the government of Spain removed 560 tons of gold from Madrid to Moscow as the armies of Francisco Franco approached.
Research Credit: alvinroast
Japan Triples Airborne Radiation Checks as ‘Hot Spots’ Spread
August 24th, 2011Ok, so a diabolical regime with no credibility at all is going to step up monitoring efforts. That’s nice.
Via: Bloomberg:
Japan will more than triple the number of regions it checks for airborne radiation as more contaminated “hot spots” are discovered far from Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s crippled Fukushima nuclear power station.
The government said it will increase radiation monitoring by helicopter to 22 prefectures from the six closest to the plant, which began spewing radiation after an earthquake and tsunami struck the station in March. The plan comes after radioactive waste more than double the regulatory limit was found 200 kilometers (125 miles) from the plant this week.
Authorities have refused to give a cumulative figure for radiation released from the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant after estimating in June that fallout in the six days following the quake was equal to 15 percent of total radiation released in the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986. The authorities have been too slow to widen airborne radiation testing, said Tetsuo Ito, the head of Kinki University’s Atomic Energy Research Institute in Osaka.
“The government should have expanded the monitoring area by helicopters much earlier to ease concerns among the public,” Ito said in a telephone interview yesterday.
Officials on Aug. 12 found compost in a kindergarten yard in Tokamachi city, Niigata prefecture containing radioactive cesium measuring 27,000 becquerels per kilogram, Kenichiro Kasuga, an official at the city’s disaster prevention department, said by phone.
Under Japanese law, waste measuring over 8,000 becquerels per kilogram must be treated as radioactive waste and can’t be buried in a landfill.
City officials found sludge measuring 18,900 becquerels per kilogram from radioactive cesium on the same day as part of tests done at 60 educational and childcare facilities, Kasuga said. The city government is storing the waste in drums until the government sets final guidelines for its disposal, he said.
“We still don’t know why this level of cesium was found in the compost,” Kasuga said.
The hotspots in Niigata were likely caused by wind blowing northwest towards the prefecture in the days following the Fukushima accident, Kinki University’s Ito said.
Japan Unveils $100 Billion Effort to Cope With Yen
August 24th, 2011Alternate headline: Japan Willing to Break Its Own Back to Remain Strapped to the Mast of the Sinking USA.
Via: Bloomberg:
Japan unveiled a $100 billion effort to help companies cope with a surging yen, signaling that officials may be resigned to the currency remaining high.
The government will release foreign-exchange reserves to the Japan Bank for International Cooperation for funding to aid exporters and spur purchases overseas, Finance Minister Yoshihiko Noda told reporters in Tokyo today. JBIC, as the lender is known, is a state-run export credit agency.
Related: Japan Rating Downgraded by Moody’s
New York: Judge Says Warrant Required for Cell Phone Location Data
August 24th, 2011Good news? Maybe, a little. It would be better if we had amnesia affecting our knowledge of MAIN CORE, Mark Klein, Russell Tice and official, on-the-record admissions from NSA about position tracking via cell phones.
*sigh*
Via: Ars Technica:
In recent years, the courts have struggled to decide whether the government needs a warrant to access historical records about a cell phone user’s location. Some courts have found that when users turn on their cell phones, they “voluntarily” transmit their location to their cell phone providers and thereby waive any expectation of privacy.
On Monday, Judge Nicholas Garaufis of the Eastern District of New York soundly rejected this line of reasoning. The federal government had asked the courts to order Verizon Wireless to turn over 113 days of location data about a suspect’s cell phone. It did so under a provision of the Stored Communications Act that only requires law enforcement to show that the records are “relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation.”
Does the government violate the Constitution when it obtains location data without meeting the Fourth Amendment’s “probable cause” standard? Some courts have found that it does not. But in a 22-page opinion, Judge Garaufis analyzed and rejected these other courts’ arguments, holding that law enforcement needs a warrant to obtain months of location data.
“The fiction that the vast majority of the American population consents to warrantless government access to the records of a significant share of their movements by ‘choosing’ to carry a cell phone must be rejected,” he wrote. “In light of drastic developments in technology, the Fourth Amendment doctrine must evolve to preserve cell-phone user’s reasonable expectation of privacy in cumulative cell-site-location records.”
A Huge Housing Bargain — but Not for You
August 24th, 2011Via: The Street:
The largest transfer of wealth from the public to private sector is about to begin. The federal government will be bulk-selling the massive portfolio of foreclosed homes now owned by HUD, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to private investors — vulture funds.
These homes, which are now the property of the U.S. government, the U.S. taxpayer, U.S. citizens collectively, are going to be sold to private investor conglomerates at extraordinarily large discounts to real value.
You and I will not be allowed to participate. These investors will come from the private-equity and hedge-fund community, Goldman Sachs and its derivatives, as well as foreign sovereign wealth funds that can bring a billion dollars or more to each transaction.
In the process, these investors will instantaneously become the largest improved real estate owners and landlords in the world. The U.S. taxpayer will get pennies on the dollar for these homes and then be allowed to rent them back at market rates.
Research Credit: Pookie
Strauss-Kahn Criminal Sexual Assault Case Dropped
August 24th, 2011Via: Reuters:
A New York judge dropped all criminal sexual assault charges against former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn on Tuesday, leaving him free to return to France and rebuild a shattered career.
The decision ended a case that brought three months of sordid headlines on both sides of the Atlantic about a hotel maid who accused Strauss-Kahn of attempting to rape her in his luxury Manhattan hotel suite and forced her to perform oral sex.
Prosecutors took the rare step of requesting dismissal of the charges after they had discovered contradictions in the maid’s story and said they now questioned her credibility.
Gold Slammed
August 23rd, 2011Warning: This is not a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any financial instrument.
Bid/Ask 1828.70 – 1829.70
Low/High 1822.70 – 1906.80
Change -69.40 -3.66%
It looks like they fed some gold to the rally monkey and let it loose in that pachinko lounge I laid down a bet in yesterday.
