Links for June 6 2016

[admin]

Judging by the number of Quora threads dedicated to sharing tricks for waking up earlier, there are a lot of people who struggle to get out of bed in the morning. That's too bad, considering that rising early can set you up for success: You have time to work with fewer distractions from family and coworkers and to exercise before appointments get in the way. The good news is that some of the easiest strategies for waking up earlier are ones you can employ tonight. We browsed those Quora threads and highlighted ways you can prepare in advance to rise and shine. Try them all and see which ones work for you.

Things you can do today to get up earlier tomorrow - Business Insider

Apps are all the rage nowadays, and for good reason. They can help you out in just about every area of your life, whether it's keeping fit, organizing your schedule, communicating with friends, or even learning a language. Just like any tool though, you need to know how to use it properly to really benefit. Here's a user guide for optimal app use, provided courtesy of an app-addicted superuser.

How To Learn Any Language With An App - Babbel.com

But Europe is a large and diverse place. The risks of being caught in a terrorist incident are miniscule. It seems as bizarre to issue an alert for Europe as it would be for all of Asia or Africa (or indeed the United States).

Fair warning?: America issues a travel alert covering Europe | The Economist

Snapchat has already surpassed Twitter (TWTR) in daily active users. 150 million people use the social media app every day, according to Bloomberg. That’s 150 million people who are playing around with various filters to send their ephemeral selfies. Between 10 and 20 million Snapchat users view live stories each day. More users watched the MTV video music awards on the platform than on TV

The incredible commercial power of Snapchat summed up in one slide - Yahoo Finance

The spice’s ingredients also provide a potent anti-inflammatory effect. This means less swelling and pain after irritation or injury. It has been used to significantly decrease pain and other side effects after acute lung injury (ALI) and acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), which are both linked to high cases of mortality and hospital treatment. Other anti-inflammatory benefits of turmeric and curcumin may include relief from arthritis and tendinitis. And here comes the granddaddy of all news: The curcumin in turmeric could help protect your body against cancer.

Health benefits of Indian spice - Business Insider

[admin]

Jim Cramer sees a lot of investors freaking out when the market drops, which is why he has taken the time to reveal his top tricks to managing the damage to a portfolio during a decline. His tricks simply come down to one word — discipline.

Cramer: Trading vs investing—know the difference! - Yahoo Finance

Stock are going up and to the right, according to the technical analysis team at HSBC. The group, headed up by Murray Gunn, observed numerous key indicators it said pointed to a higher move for the S&P 500 over the next few weeks.

HSBC expects stocks to go up - Business Insider

Academic research on short-selling has for years flirted with the theory that fails-to-deliver represent a binding constraint which prevents informed short-selling in the underlying stock, which thus leads to stock overvaluation. Without the capacity to short-sell efficiently, stocks become illiquid, volatile and overpriced. Or so the theory goes. Thomas Stratman and John W. Welborn, both of George Mason University, beg to differ. In a new piece of research in the Journal of Empirical Finance, they suggest the exact opposite may be true precisely because the capacity to fail-to-deliver can be used as a proxy for naked short-selling.

When fails-to-deliver prompt stock market under performance | FT Alphaville

The next few years will see a massive shift of ads and attention from TV to mobile. A handful of companies, led by Facebook, are poised to make a killing.

Mobile Is Eating Media, and Facebook Is Eating Mobile - The Atlantic

Venture capitalist Mary Meeker’s annual Internet Trends report is always a telling snapshot on tech, and this year’s edition sounds a cautious note about the good times potentially being over while offering some hope for future growth. Meeker, a partner with Silicon Valley VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, ran through 213 slides at the Code Conference on Wednesday, focusing on flat internet user growth, slowing smartphone sales and global economic growth, voice as the next big user interface and the U.S. re-emerging as a center for auto innovation. She also briefly noted the best way to value privately held companies.

Internet status report: Slowing growth, an auto revival and the Chewbacca Mom effect - MarketWatch

[admin]

"The corporate sector has taken on a substantial amount of debt in the current business cycle," LaVorgna wrote in a note to clients. "Non-financial corporate debt has increased by $2 trillion from its trough in Q4 2010." A breakdown from analysts at S&P earlier this month found that corporate debt had risen at the 2,000 or so largest US firms to $6.6 trillion to end 2015, up from $3.8 trillion at the end of 2010.

$6.6 trillion reason US nearing recession - Business Insider

"People forget there are two types of PE compression and two types of PE expansion," market guru Rich Bernstein said.

The dumbest math mistake investors make in the stock market - Yahoo Finance

Wagers against Chinese stocks have become so popular that banks are offering returns exceeding 20 percent to anyone prepared to take the other side. The potential payouts, from firms including BNP Paribas SA and JPMorgan Chase & Co., come in the form of structured products tied to the CSOP FTSE China A50 exchange-traded fund in Hong Kong. The ETF, one of the world’s largest tracking domestic Chinese equities, is a favorite target of hedge funds and other bearish speculators who pushed short interest to a one-year high last month.

How to Make 23% Betting Hedge Funds Are Wrong on Chinese Stocks - Bloomberg

In Copenhagen, bicycles take undisputed priority over cars and even pedestrians. A sizzling restaurant scene has made foodie fetishes of moss, live ants, and sea cucumbers. Despite a minimum wage not far below $20 an hour and some of the world’s steepest taxes, unemployment is almost the lowest in Europe. Parents happily leave infants unattended in strollers on the sidewalk while they stop in to cafes. Clearly the usual rules tend not to apply in Denmark. So it’s no surprise that the country in recent years has added a major new entry to its sprawling repertoire of eccentricities: Since 2012 it’s been a place where you can get paid to borrow money and charged to save it.

Denmark: Land Below Zero Where Negative Interest Rates Are Normal - Bloomberg

But we aren’t moving to a cloud computing-only world. Instead we’re seeing significantly more intelligence and computing power being placed into devices outside the traditional norm. Newer cars, for example, arguably have the most raw computing power of any of the devices that people own, and that’s only going to increase over time.

The End of Hardware? - TechSpot

[admin]

After a long hiatus, George Soros has returned to trading, lured by opportunities to profit from what he sees as coming economic troubles. Worried about the outlook for the global economy and concerned that large market shifts may be at hand, the billionaire hedge-fund founder and philanthropist recently directed a series of big, bearish investments, according to people close to the matter.

Investing legend George Soros returns to trading - MarketWatch

“Schwarze null” is the name generally given in the German press to the budget surplus the country achieved in 2014 and 2015, without the need to take on new debt. Such fiscal restraint is a reason for pride in Germany and is compared favorably with the perceived reckless debt-taking of southern European countries. Still, a new study argues that Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble owes much of this success to the low-rate policy of European Central Bank President Mario Draghi — the same policy Schaeuble criticized in April for robbing German pensioners of their savings and contributing to the rise of right-wing populists... The study estimates that Germany saved a total of 72 billion euros ($82 billion) in smaller interest payments from 2011 to 2015. This compares with a budget surplus of 13 billion euros in 2015.

Germany May Have to Thank Draghi for Its Budget Surplus - Bloomberg

Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Litecoin, and the hundreds of cryptocurrencies out there comprise billions of dollars in fluctuating wealth—none of which would exist in that digital form without blockchain. At its most fundamental level, a blockchain is a string of securely linked data blocks serving as a time-stamped digital history of, well, pretty much anything. In an era where the fluid nature of the internet can be used to alter and rewrite even the most obscure of facts, blockchain meticulously documents every transaction and distributes that cryptographic data across decentralized nodes.

Blockchain A-Z: Everything You Need to Know About the Game-Changing Tech Beneath Bitcoin | PCMag.com

If you go shopping for a Withings scale, you’ll find one that gives you the breakdown of your body composition (fat, muscle, and bone mass, as well as water percentage) and one that will measure your air quality. Its newest scale, the Body Cardio, keeps the former, does away with the latter, and adds a new metric: pulse wave velocity. In addition to giving you your weight, BMI, body composition, and heart rate, the $180 Body Cardio also calculates PWV: “a measurement that is a key indicator of cardiac health and associated with hypertension and risks of cardiovascular incidents,”

The Withings Body Cardio Scale Gives You a Heart Checkup | Digital Trends

Battery efficiency is a major selling point of smartphones, tablets, and laptops alike, so any way to cut back on the amount of power we use to improve their charge-life is a boon. That’s what Opera is hoping will take it into new realms of popularity with its latest update, which it claims can reduce your browser’s battery drain by as much as 50 percent. Of course this feature isn’t brand-spanking-new. We first heard about this last month when Opera released the feature in a beta state and discussed how it have managed to give as much as an extra hour of battery life to a Lenovo laptop in internal testing, versus the Chrome browser.

Opera's Battery Saver Feature is Now Available For All | Digital Trends

[admin]

Recognizing the growing importance of cloud-based computing models, a number of competitors have tried to work their way into the server CPU market but, at last count, Intel still owns a staggering 99% share. Qualcomm has announced some ARM-based server CPUs and Cavium introduced their new Thunder X2 ARM-based CPU at last week’s Computex show in Taiwan but both companies face uphill battles. A potentially more interesting competitive threat could come from AMD. After a several year competitive lull, AMD is expected to finally make a serious re-entry into the server CPU market this fall when their new x86 core, code-named Zen, which they also previewed at Computex, is expected to be announced and integrated into new server CPUs.

The evolution of cloud computing - TechSpot

We all know that fiber is the best technology right now for fast internet connections, but sometimes it's too expensive or time consuming to deploy. This is why any technology that harnesses and improves existing deployments of hybrid-fibre coaxial (HFC) cable is so enticing for internet providers. Nokia's Bell Labs has demonstrated new coaxial cable technology called XG-CABLE that significantly improves throughput over existing HFC cables. In point-to-point tests using 1.2 GHz of spectrum, Bell Labs achieved 10 Gbps in both upstream and downstream throughput. In point-to-multipoint they achieved around 8 Gbps down and 7.5 Gbps up.

Cable is catching fiber: 10 Gbps in both directions demoed by Bell Labs - TechSpot

Everyone makes mistakes, and many people try to cover them up. But if you try to hide an error made behind the wheel of a car made by Tesla Motors, you are liable to be caught out. In fact, trying to hide what really happened in any kind of car accident could soon become just about impossible.

Tesla Knows When a Crash Is Your Fault, and Other Carmakers Soon Will, Too

Virtual reality can be impressively immersive and realistic, but it’s still unusual to have experiences where you really, truly feel like you’re interacting with digital imagery—to the point where you have a ghostly sense of touching or poking something that, logically, you know isn’t there, though all the visuals point to the contrary.

Virtual Reality Actually Feels Real When It Uses Physics

In the world of cancer treatment, early diagnosis can mean the difference between being cured and being handed a death sentence. At the very least, catching a tumor early increases a patient’s chances of living longer. Researchers at Microsoft think they may know of a tool that could help detect cancers before you even think to go to a doctor: your search engine.

Can You Really Spot Cancer Through a Search Engine?

[admin]

There's another banking crisis brewing in Europe - and it all has to do with Swiss franc-denominated mortgages. Back in 2006 to 2008, the majority of mortgages that were issued by banks in Poland were denominated in the Swiss franc. And most of the outstanding stock of Swiss franc mortgages was issued in that period. This was a popular thing to do because borrowers thought that the Polish zloty would continue to strengthen against the Swiss franc. At the time, the Polish currency had appreciated by about 30% against its Swiss counterpart. But then things reversed course in 2009.

Polish mortgages banking crisis Swiss franc - Business Insider

Yet the belief that the board’s most important role is to oversee the corporation’s top executives -- “monitor” them, as the academic jargon has it -- remains entrenched. It informs most journalistic accounts of corporate debacles, and most research into the attributes that make boards effective. It is also behind the big push over the past quarter century to get more outside directors onto boards, and to separate the jobs of chairman and chief executive officer. So here’s a subversive suggestion. Maybe boards are never going to be any good at keeping executives from betraying shareholders, messing up corporations and breaking laws. We should just accept that, stop beating boards up for it and move on.

Boards Will Never Be Any Good at Policing Executives - Bloomberg View

A computer that uses the quirks of quantum physics to work on data should be capable of things far beyond any machine in use today. Governments and large tech companies have spent huge sums trying to prove out that idea. Yet quantum computers have sometimes seemed like one of those technologies that are always 20 years away. Recently some leading research groups have come to think they can see a path to shortening that time considerably. Yesterday Google and researchers from the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain, published results that could lead to a shortcut to the long-awaited first conclusive demonstration of the power of quantum computing.

Google Reports Progress on a Shortcut to Quantum Supremacy

Germany’s finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, has slammed the door on Britain retaining access to the single market if it votes to the leave the European Union. In an interview in a Brexit-themed issue of German weekly Der Spiegel, the influential veteran politician ruled out the possibility of the UK following a Swiss or Norwegian model where it could enjoy the benefits of the single market without being an EU member. “That won’t work,” Schäuble told Der Spiegel. “It would require the country to abide by the rules of a club from which it currently wants to withdraw.

No single market access for UK after Brexit, Wolfgang Schäuble says | Politics | The Guardian

Technological diffusion can be constrained on both the demand and supply sides of the economy. Take the demand side first. In rich economies, consumers spend the bulk of their income on services such as health, education, transportation, housing, and retail goods. Technological innovation has had comparatively little impact to date in many of these sectors.

Innovation Is Not Enough by Dani Rodrik - Project Syndicate

[admin]

The Food and Drug Administration approved OxyContin, a time-release formulation of oxycodone made by Purdue Pharma, in 1995. Over the next five years, Purdue more than doubled its sales staff and aggressively marketed the drug as a "first-line defense" against everything from musculoskeletal pain to pain after surgery. The company assured doctors and patients that OxyContin was less addictive than other pills. It wasn't. The marketing campaign worked: From 1997 to 2002, prescriptions of the drug for noncancer patients increased tenfold. Before long, Purdue was ringing upmore than $1 billion in global sales each year. By that point, the United States was in the midst of a prescription opioid epidemic that continues to this day... The result has been an eye-popping increase in more than just Purdue's bottom line: In 1999, there were 4,000 deaths in the US attributed to prescription painkillers. By 2011, that figure was close to 14,000 - more than the number of overdose deaths from cocaine and heroin combined. In 2014, the most recent year for which figures are available, the number of overdose deaths in the US had risen to 18,893. That's more than 50 people a day.

Opioid prescriptions addiction - Business Insider

There are basically four different activities that all go by the name of macroeconomics. But they actually have relatively little to do with each other. Understanding the differences between them is helpful for understanding why debates about the business cycle tend to be so confused.

Economics Struggles to Cope With Reality - Bloomberg View

For most people, a toilet with a decent seat and flusher is just about all that's necessary for their bathroom experience. But there's a good chance they haven't tried the luxurious Kohler's intelligent Numi toilet and its abundance of features. Not only does the $4,750 toilet open and close automatically, it has a heated seat, foot warmers, a customizable bidet, an air dryer, a deodorizer and speakers to play your favorite music.

13 crazy pricy gadgets you wish you could afford

New research shows that men often underestimate their female partner's interest in sex because they're missing a lot of signals. Here's what psychologists suggest to fix the divide.

Women Are More Interested in Sex Than You Think - MarketWatch

Occasionally, there comes along an opportunity so gigantic that it would be hard to miss. In a round-up of some of its strongest long-term investing themes, Bank of America Merrill Lynch highlighted one such opportunity for businesses and economic growth: the explosion of the global middle class. "In a world starved for growth, we believe that the answer lies in uplifting the 4.5 billion people at the base of the economic pyramid," wrote BAML's thematic investing team.

Market could be biggest in history of commerce - Business Insider