The Swiss franc fell to a sharp low today after the head of the Swiss National Bank said on November 26 that he was prepared to drive interest rates even further into negative territory. Switzerland already has a -0.75% "overnight" rate for banks that draw from it. One Swiss bank plans to charge customers negative interest if they keep cash in their accounts.

Negative interest rates in Switzerland have made people argue whether cash should be abolished - Business Insider

After the holiday tinsel goes away, you’re left with two piles of gifts: the ones that seemed cool, and the ones that are actually great. After reviewing hundreds of gadgets this year, we’ve made a list of stuff we’d actually buy for our loved ones—or even ourselves.

Best Tech Gifts 2015: Our Favorite Gadgets - WSJ.com

One is the rise of what a commentator calls a "species of hardcore supporters" of Mr Modi, who are derisively called Modi Bhakts - bhakt means worshipper of a deity - by liberal opponents. They are not the fawning, old-fashioned sycophants that India's leaders are used to. Their identification with Mr Modi goes beyond mere spirited support, and they defend their leader with a sense of identification and aggressiveness which is unprecedented in India. Some of them behave more like his self-appointed intellectual guardians.

What the backlash against Bollywood's Aamir Khan tells us about India - BBC News

Notably, it explains why high profits aren’t spurring high investment. Consider those monopolies controlling local Internet service: their high profits don’t act as an incentive to invest in faster connections—on the contrary, they have less incentive to improve service than they would if they faced more competition and earned lower profits. Extend this logic to the economy as a whole, and the combination of a rising profit share and weak investment starts to make sense.

Challenging the Oligarchy by Paul Krugman | The New York Review of Books

I ask my players: ‘We have to play like we are desperate – not every match, every second,’” he exclaims. “I want this philosophy. The day my players relax I get crazy. They know that. I think I am a nice man but also I am demanding.

Claudio Ranieri: ‘Forty points. I can’t change our project at the moment’ | Football | The Guardian

But 3.3 percent is still way too high. In the long run, any deficit that stays higher than the rate of nominal GDP growth is unsustainable. Japan's nominal GDP growth is now about zero. Its long-term potential real GDP growth is no more than 1 percent (due to shrinking population), and the Bank of Japan has not managed to increase core inflation to the 2 percent target despite Herculean efforts. Even if interest rates stay at zero forever -- allowing the country to eventually refinance all its debt in order to bring interest payments down to zero -- borrowing 3.3 percent of GDP every year is just too much. And if interest rates rise, deficits would explode.

Japan's Debt Trap Won't Fix Itself - Bloomberg View

The most creative thing done by central banks since the financial crisis is taking benchmark interest rates into negative territory. But, according Willem Buiter and his team at Citi, the results have ultimately been fairly "unspectacular." "Overall, the striking point is how unspectacular the move to negative rates has been," Buiter and his team wrote in a note to clients on Monday. "Money has not flooded out of the banks, exchange rates have not plunged, thrift has not been destroyed, and inflation has not soared. After many years in which it was virtually unthinkable for interest rates to go below zero, the evidence suggests that there is no discontinuity at the zero bound."

Citi's Willem Buiter on negative interest rates - Business Insider

On the one hand, that's how much the Zero costs - just $5. Here in the UK it costs just £4, or the price of a pint of beer. But it's also worth noting that the $5 bill physically dwarfs the Raspberry Pi Zero. At 65mm x 30mm, the Zero is smaller than a credit card, and it's only 5mm thick to boot. It also weighs just nine grams.

What is Raspberry Pi Zero? All you need to know about the $5 computer

Keith Fons showed up for work Nov. 9 at the Subway he manages in downtown Portland, expecting a normal Monday morning rush. A day earlier, The Oregonian's front page featured a story about Fons and the everyday challenges that low-wage workers face. The 35-year-old father worked as many as 80 hours every week at two Subway shops to provide for his wife, who has multiple sclerosis, and their three young children.

Subway fires 80-hour-a-week worker from 1 job after Oregonian story | OregonLive.com

A new method of delivering data, which uses the visible spectrum rather than radio waves, has been tested in a working office. Li-fi can deliver internet access 100 times faster than traditional wi-fi, offering speeds of up to 1Gbps (gigabit per second). It requires a light source, such as a standard LED bulb, an internet connection and a photo detector. It was tested this week by Estonian start-up Velmenni, in Tallinn.

'Li-fi 100 times faster than wi-fi' - BBC News

Alternatives to stocks next year? Here’s one. Rolling out his Multi-Asset Portfolio outlook on Tuesday, Société Générale’s head of global asset allocation, Alain Bokobza, is looking straight at oil. Over a one-year horizon, he expects outperformance from crude. He advises an 8% chunk in commodities in their balanced portfolio, up from 5% in September. In a forecast not far off Citi’s own predictions yesterday, Bokobza sees U.S. crude at $56 a barrel and Brent at $60 a-barrel by the end of 2016. “We expect a more balanced market by mid-2016, as OPEC members are under pressure to change their current production policy, which is bleeding public finances,” says Bokobza.

This ‘wild card’ could save us from the stock doldrums - MarketWatch

The Goldman analysts listed 35 S&P 500 stocks that currently meet at least two of this recommended investment criteria, i.e., strong balance sheets, high U.S. sales, Goldman Sachs analysts' projections of at least 50 basis points of margin expansion in 2016 and 2017 and revenue growth greater than nominal U.S. GDP growth (roughly 4%) and a part of the S&P 100.

Goldman Sachs Says These 35 Stocks Will Outperform in 2016 - TheStreet

Unemployment across the 19-country eurozone economy has fallen to its lowest level in nearly four years, official figures showed Tuesday, in another positive sign for an economic region that has struggled to get people back to work for years.

Eurozone unemployment rate falls to near 4-year low - Yahoo Finance

The attacks in Paris that killed 130 people and wounded hundreds more are hurting the French economy at a time when the wider 19-country eurozone appears to be growing at the fastest pace in four and a half years, a survey showed Monday.

French economy already hurting from attacks, survey finds - Yahoo Finance

Exasperated Americans have dedicated entire blogs to a whole array of airport gripes, cataloguing everything from crowded terminals and immigration halls to inefficient transport links and endless security checks. Brett Snyder, author of the Cranky Flier, says the lack of space at US airports "drives [him] nuts... they were designed for a different era".

Why do so many people hate US airports? - BBC News

On another shoot I was chatting to one of the top Australian models during lunch. She had just moved to Paris and was sharing a small apartment with another model. I asked her how that was working out. "I get a lot of time by myself actually," she said, picking at her salad. "My flatmate is a 'fit model', so she's in hospital on a drip a lot of the time." A fit model is one who is used in the top designer ateliers, or workrooms, and is the body around which the clothes are designed. That the ideal body shape used as a starting point for a collection should be a female on the brink of hospitalisation from starvation is frightening.

Former Vogue editor: The truth about size zero | Fashion | The Guardian

The air in Beijing is so polluted that breathing it does as much damage to the lungs as smoking 40 cigarettes a day, says a new study.

China air pollution far worse than thought: Study

Google has a new feature in its Chrome browser for mobile that it thinks could save mobile data by up to 70%. How? By automatically stripping out images from web pages.

Google's Data Saver Mode saves up to 70% of mobile data by not loading images - Business Insider

When Steve Nison says candlestick charts are telling him not to buy stocks, people might want to listen. Nison is widely known as the person who introduced candlesticks to the West. He has an M.B.A. in finance, but he started focusing on technical analysis — more than 30 years ago while at brokerage E.F. Hutton. In the late 1980s, while at Merrill Lynch, Nison met a Japanese broker who used terms like “doji” and “harami” in conversations with clients. Intrigued, he wrote a short article for Futures magazine on the more than 200-year-old Japanese technique in 1989.

The ‘candlesticks man’ says he’s not buying stocks - MarketWatch

The cobbled streets of Stockholm may be cold and snowy during winter, but Europe’s fastest growing city is one of the world’s hottest startup hubs and a magnet for international talent. Home to fewer than one million people, Sweden’s capital is the birthplace of Skype, Spotify and Mojang; only Silicon Valley boasts more billion dollar companies per capita, according to investment firm Atomico.

BBC - Capital - The best city for working families?

If you chart it out, Huang says, that means that on average, speech recognition has gotten 20% better every single year for the last twenty years. Which means that the end is in sight. "In the next four to five years, computers will be as good as humans" at understanding the words that come out of your mouth, Huang says.

Microsoft Chief Scientist Xuedong Huang on the future of speech recognition - Business Insider

U.S. business investment advanced just 2.2% from a year earlier in the third quarter, a slowdown that marks one of the worse performances of the six-year-old economic expansion. The trend seems at odds with ultralow interest rates, consistent hiring and steady, if unspectacular, overall economic growth. So what’s causing business investment to slump?

Why Business Investment Is Slumping in Five Charts - Real Time Economics - WSJ

A startup called Mother Dirt has developed an "AO+ mist" — a spray containing a type of bacteria called AOB that you put on your skin, which may restore it to a natural, healthier state. Our extreme, hygiene-obsessed routines are unnecessary, Jasmina Aganovic, president of Mother Dirt, told Business Insider. "We’ve confused 'clean' with 'sterile,'" she said.

I showered myself in bacteria for a week - Business Insider

Results showed that it didn't matter whether students saw recent headshots or yearbook photos — the partners they perceived as more powerful (as in, the partners whose faces looked dominant and mature) inevitably led more profitable firms. In other words, it wasn't as though partners developed a powerful appearance through years of experience — they looked powerful before they'd even gone to law school or launched their careers.

What your yearbook photo says about your future

It took nearly two centuries for candlestick charts to make the leap to the Western hemisphere from Japan — and just a quarter century to become the preferred charting technique of traders from Wall Street to Main Street. It is believed that technical analysis was first used in 18th century feudal Japan to trade rice receipts, eventually evolving into candlestick charting in the early 1800s. Steve Nison, founder of Candlecharts.com, is recognized as having introduced candlesticks to the West in 1989 when he wrote about them for Futures magazine while working for Merrill Lynch.

7 key candlestick reversal patterns - MarketWatch

The study, supported in part by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, explains that “exercise is positively related to alcohol use, and research to date does not suggest that this relation is necessarily harmful to health in non-dependent individuals.”

Study: Exercise and Alcohol May Go Hand in Hand - Reviewed.com Refrigerators

America’s 20 wealthiest people are worth $732 billion, which means they have more wealth than the 152 million people who make up the least wealthy 50% of U.S. households, according to a report by the Institute for Policy Studies.

America's 20 Richest People Have More Money Than 152 Million 'Least Wealthy' People

That's what we learned Thursday when rumors began flying that Uber is raising over $2 billion, increasing its value to more than $62.5 billion. That's with a "B." In other words, Uber and its investors at least think it's worth more than the individual economies of 60 percent of the nations on Earth.

Uber's rumored valuation bigger than most economies on Earth - CNET

So when he read a magazine article about an unusual new method to treat drug addicts, he figured he didn’t have much to lose. The study described how local researchers were using a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation to counteract cravings. He would have to sit in a chair while doctors waved a figure-8-shaped wand over his head to fire magnetic waves into his prefrontal cortex.

Cocaine Cravings Zapped with Magnets | MIT Technology Review

Even in post-Soviet Uzbekistan, an ancient crossroads where torture and bribery allegations are endemic, Gulnara Karimova, the president’s Harvard-educated daughter, stood out for her ruthlessness.

The Silk Road Affair: Power, Pop and a Bunch of Billionaires - Bloomberg Business

A potent fungus is killing off banana plants and could eventually wipe out much of the fruit around the world, according to a new study. Research published in PLOS Pathogens reveals that a disease strain called Tropical Race 4 has affected banana crops in southeast Asia for decades and in recent years has expanded to the Middle East. Eventually the disease is expected to hit Latin America, where the majority of the world’s bananas are grown.

The World’s Most Popular Banana Could Be Wiped Out | TIME

Scientists believe the common diabetes drug metformin could hold the secret of long life and want to start a groundbreaking human trial in 2016

World’s first anti-ageing drug could see humans live to 120 - Telegraph

Mud. Muck. Dirt. Although we have plenty of words for it, we rarely give soil a second thought. But without soil, we would certainly be dead. Soil is crucial to almost every aspect of life on land, from water storage and filtration to climate regulation, flood prevention, nutrient cycling and decomposition. The dirt beneath our feet is also an exceptionally high source of biodiversity: some estimates suggest that at least one quarter of all species live in or on the soil. And we are still discovering its treasures: in January 2015, scientists announced that the first new antibiotic in 30 years had been found in soil bacteria.

BBC - Earth - One amazing substance allowed life to thrive on land

Startup Osaro’s system is designed to make robots learn faster with a combination of deep-reinforcement learning and human help.

From Games to Assembly Lines, Robots Learn Faster Than Ever | MIT Technology Review

Olympic sailor Erik Heil floated a novel idea to protect himself from the sewage-infested waters he and other athletes will compete in during next year’s games: he’d wear plastic overalls and peel them off when he was safely past the contaminated waters nearest shore. Heil, 26, was treated at a Berlin hospital for MRSA, a flesh-eating bacteria, shortly after sailing in an Olympic test event in Rio in August. But his strategy to avoid a repeat infection won’t limit his risk.

Rio 2016: 'Chance of infection very likely' after tests show extent of pollution | Sport | The Guardian