(TNS) -- We were gratified, if a little perplexed, to learn that local and state transportation planners apparently awoke from a deep sleep to discover congestion on Arapahoe Avenue east of the city and a bottleneck on U.S. 36 could be improved by gasp adding lanes to accommodate the traffic volume.

It is an article of ideological dogma in the governments of Boulder and Boulder County that building new roads or lanes doesn't relieve congestion a concept known as "induced demand." In the minds of some officials, this conviction appears to have morphed into the notion that no infrastructure improvements for auto travel are ever appropriate. But a basic rule of traffic engineering still applies: Capacity must be sufficient for the smooth flow of existing demand (unless, of course, you are trying purposefully to inconvenience motorists for other political purposes).

A review of existing demand on Arapahoe between Lafayette and Boulder reveals too many cars to move efficiently on a two-lane road. With population growth and housing development certain to continue in the east county, basic traffic engineering requires the infrastructure to keep up.

This goes against the ideological position of many local officials, who continue to believe that starving motorists of space will convince them to switch to bikes or buses. Unfortunately, actual human behavior indicates this is not true. Despite all sorts of well-meaning public pressure to do just that, the percentage of commuters that drive into Boulder roughly four out of five - hasn't changed in 25 years.

As we have observed before, this is not because motorists want to confound the ideological objectives of Boulder progressives. This is because cycling is not practical for many commuters and mass transit in these parts still presents enormous first-mile, last-mile problems that extend commute times dramatically.

Having finally acknowledged the problem, some local officials remain determined to steer commuters into the behaviors those officials prefer. Hence the enthusiasm to revamp Arapahoe not to accommodate the cars already there but to create dedicated lanes for a bus rapid transit system that does not yet exist.

Boulder City Councilman Aaron Brockett had the temerity some months ago to ask how often such buses would run. Nobody knows, of course. In part, that's because it would be up to the Regional Transportation District. In part, it's because nobody knows what the market demand might be. But it would not be surprising if ideologically-driven county officials devoted large portions of the roadway to a mode few people use at the expense of the mode most people use in yet another attempt at forced behavior modification.

Officials will respond that they are fighting climate change by trying to reduce auto emissions, a laudable goal. But it is far more likely that goal will be achieved by improvements in transportation technology electrification of the automobile fleet, for example than coercion. Political progressives have every right to try to persuade their constituents to behave differently, but purposefully making them miserable to force them to come around goes against the basic concept of public service.

The ramp from Foothills Parkway onto eastbound U.S. 36 was an even more egregious example, if that's possible. When U.S. 36 was rebuilt to add an express lane in each direction, the eastbound express lane made its initial appearance tantalizingly close to the Foothills ramp, but not close enough. That left two lanes of eastbound U.S. 36 and two lanes of Foothills Parkway to merge into . . . two lanes. Naturally, it became a bottleneck, with two lanes of cars backing up on each roadway and producing more emissions, not less.

The state Department of Transportation patted itself on the back for its innovative solution last week restriping the merge area to make room for three lanes which could have been the original configuration if the express lane had started a little earlier.

"This shows how, by thinking a little differently, we can improve operations despite constrained resources and constrained funding," CDOT Executive Director Shailen Bhatt said. "This relatively low-cost project will save 200 to 700 vehicle hours per day, according to our study."

We don't want to seem ungrateful, but anyone who works in transportation for a living and was surprised that the original configuration produced a daily traffic jam might be better off choosing another line of work.

The suspicion of many commuters whose views don't seem to matter much to Boulder transportation planners is that these apparent signs of incompetence are actually intentional coercive measures intended to change commuter behavior.

But they didn't. Traveling by car remains the fastest way for most commuters to get where they're going, even accounting for increasing congestion and some poor traffic engineering along the way. Until that changes, all the lectures in the world from well-meaning officials won't change the basic calculus for people trying to get to and from work as quickly as they can.

Given that fact of human behavior, it's probably best to go back to basic traffic engineering rules and make the system operate as efficiently as possible. That reduces emissions, too.

2017 the Daily Camera (Boulder, Colo.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Read more:
Traffic Engineering Rules Must Be Followed Off the Bat (Opinion) - Government Technology

Artificial Intelligence is a computer program of a higher order and nothing else.

When I saw men fighting off a sinister takeover attempt by machines in Terminator 2- The Judgment Day, 25 years ago, I laughed it off, even though I enjoyed the thrill of the movie.

Man versus machine is probably the second best bogey after God versus Lucifer eternal battle.

Of course, we all want the man to win. We cant imagine ourselves serving some metal bodies, after all. But there may be some among us who are still wondering if the consequences of AI would eventually lead us there.

Recently, a senior manager in analytics in one my client companies, a very large business house indeed, was infatuated with the idea that AI can eventually take over human intelligence. That was surprising because he is not a teenager looking for cheap excitement or someone who does not know what analytics is about.

In fact, he has a pedigree of working for one of the largest analytics companies in the world before he joined my client company. Until now, I thought this idea is for Hollywood filmmakers who are short on creativity. But I think it is better to put this into right perspective as folks are churning enormous hype about AI, confusing everyone as usual.

AI means different things to different people. Some visualise machines working for their own purposes like in Terminator movies. Others imagine something like Watson that is so intelligent that it has solutions to all kinds of problems of mankind. Yet, to some data scientists, it means a piece of python code or a software package which they can run every day to earn a living.

But we can broadly divide AI into two streams: Generalised AI, which we call as Machine Learning (ML) and Applied AI, which focuses on replicating human behavior, such as making robots.

In either of the cases, it is a computer program of a higher order and nothing else!

Let me explain. In programming, we define what a program has to do. We then input data and get an output. We look at the output and if its not satisfactory enough, we go and correct the program. Now, what if, the program itself can look at the output and improve for itself? That is MLor generalised AI. But how does it do that?

Suppose you want to guess the next product a customer is going to buy on Amazon or anywhere else based on her activity until now. If you are a predictive modeler from econometric school, you would want to look at all historical data and find out the factors that determine a customers behavior and use that learning to predict what this customer would do now in the near future.

In reality, these factors can be anything. It can be demographic factors such as her age, marital status, location, education, or occupation. Or it can be the offers of competing products available at that point in time. Or let us say, even the weather influencing her buying behavior, or just that she is frustrated with the results of the American presidential elections. And, lets not forget the influence of her boyfriend on her buying moods?

As we can see, the possibilities are many. And if we consider further possibilities of all the interactions of these different factors among themselves, which means each factor having a partial influence by itself and a combined influence along with some other factors, then the combinations become unmanageable to human attention.

Read the original here:
Artificial Intelligence versus humans, who will win? - YourStory.com

Street signs at Nine Mile Corner near the intersection of Arapahoe Road and U.S. Highway 287. Boulder County officials are looking at ways to relieve congestion on the crowded Arapahoe corridor. (Jeremy Papasso / Staff Photographer)

We were gratified, if a little perplexed, to learn that local and state transportation planners apparently awoke from a deep sleep to discover congestion on Arapahoe Avenue east of the city and a bottleneck on U.S. 36 could be improved by gasp adding lanes to accommodate the traffic volume.

It is an article of ideological dogma in the governments of Boulder and Boulder County that building new roads or lanes doesn't relieve congestion a concept known as "induced demand." In the minds of some officials, this conviction appears to have morphed into the notion that no infrastructure improvements for auto travel are ever appropriate. But a basic rule of traffic engineering still applies: Capacity must be sufficient for the smooth flow of existing demand (unless, of course, you are trying purposefully to inconvenience motorists for other political purposes).

A review of existing demand on Arapahoe between Lafayette and Boulder reveals too many cars to move efficiently on a two-lane road. With population growth and housing development certain to continue in the east county, basic traffic engineering requires the infrastructure to keep up.

This goes against the ideological position of many local officials, who continue to believe that starving motorists of space will convince them to switch to bikes or buses. Unfortunately, actual human behavior indicates this is not true. Despite all sorts of well-meaning public pressure to do just that, the percentage of commuters that drive into Boulder roughly four out of five - hasn't changed in 25 years.

As we have observed before, this is not because motorists want to confound the ideological objectives of Boulder progressives. This is because cycling is not practical for many commuters and mass transit in these parts still presents enormous first-mile, last-mile problems that extend commute times dramatically.

Having finally acknowledged the problem, some local officials remain determined to steer commuters into the behaviors those officials prefer. Hence the enthusiasm to revamp Arapahoe not to accommodate the cars already there but to create dedicated lanes for a bus rapid transit system that does not yet exist.

Boulder City Councilman Aaron Brockett had the temerity some months ago to ask how often such buses would run. Nobody knows, of course. In part, that's because it would be up to the Regional Transportation District. In part, it's because nobody knows what the market demand might be. But it would not be surprising if ideologically-driven county officials devoted large portions of the roadway to a mode few people use at the expense of the mode most people use in yet another attempt at forced behavior modification.

Officials will respond that they are fighting climate change by trying to reduce auto emissions, a laudable goal. But it is far more likely that goal will be achieved by improvements in transportation technology electrification of the automobile fleet, for example than coercion. Political progressives have every right to try to persuade their constituents to behave differently, but purposefully making them miserable to force them to come around goes against the basic concept of public service.

The ramp from Foothills Parkway onto eastbound U.S. 36 was an even more egregious example, if that's possible. When U.S. 36 was rebuilt to add an express lane in each direction, the eastbound express lane made its initial appearance tantalizingly close to the Foothills ramp, but not close enough. That left two lanes of eastbound U.S. 36 and two lanes of Foothills Parkway to merge into . . . two lanes. Naturally, it became a bottleneck, with two lanes of cars backing up on each roadway and producing more emissions, not less.

The state Department of Transportation patted itself on the back for its innovative solution last week restriping the merge area to make room for three lanes which could have been the original configuration if the express lane had started a little earlier.

"This shows how, by thinking a little differently, we can improve operations despite constrained resources and constrained funding," CDOT Executive Director Shailen Bhatt said. "This relatively low-cost project will save 200 to 700 vehicle hours per day, according to our study."

We don't want to seem ungrateful, but anyone who works in transportation for a living and was surprised that the original configuration produced a daily traffic jam might be better off choosing another line of work.

The suspicion of many commuters whose views don't seem to matter much to Boulder transportation planners is that these apparent signs of incompetence are actually intentional coercive measures intended to change commuter behavior.

But they didn't. Traveling by car remains the fastest way for most commuters to get where they're going, even accounting for increasing congestion and some poor traffic engineering along the way. Until that changes, all the lectures in the world from well-meaning officials won't change the basic calculus for people trying to get to and from work as quickly as they can.

Given that fact of human behavior, it's probably best to go back to basic traffic engineering rules and make the system operate as efficiently as possible. That reduces emissions, too.

Dave Krieger, for the editorial board. Email: kriegerd@dailycamera.com. Twitter: @DaveKrieger

Read more here:
Editorial: Traffic engineering rules still apply - Boulder Daily Camera

Even CEOs have to start somewhere.

Some of Americas top executives made humbling debuts as teenagers in the workplace. They scrubbed toilets, cut tobacco, worked at McDonalds.

Such work is becoming less common . Todays youths are more likely to enroll in summer school, do volunteer work or pursue extracurricular activities, especially to improve their prospects for college admission.

At the same time, teens who do want summer work find that adults increasingly occupy the low-skill jobs that once went to younger workers. Overall, the percentage of Americans ages 16-19 who work in July has fallen from 57 percent in 1986 to 36 percent last year.

At a time when a smaller proportion of teens are working summer jobs, some of todays corporate chief executives reminisced to The Associated Press about what they did and what they learned in their earliest jobs.

___

Campbell Soup CEO Denise Morrison worked three summers as a phone operator. At first, her competitive instincts led her to try to field as many calls as possible.

I learned an important lesson about human behavior and the importance of customer service, she says.

Although I wanted to move quickly, there were some callers who required more of my time, and I had to slow down my approach in order to resolve their questions.

The job could be physically exhausting: She had to reroute calls by plugging a cord into a switchboard, a task that eventually was taken over by automation.

It was also the first time I had earned my own money, she says. So I learned the value of a dollar.

___

Sonic CEO Cliff Hudson said he delivered newspapers from ages 11 to 13 but stopped after being hit by a car. He then worked on a construction site for his fathers company.

Tasked with cleaning bathrooms, Hudson was unenthusiastic. His superintendent decided to motivate him by changing how he was compensated. Instead of being paid hourly, he would receive a set amount each time he cleaned something a urinal or a sink.

Quite suddenly, I could see the connection between my output and my compensation, and it really got me going, Hudson says.

Hudson concedes that if his father hadnt owned the company, he probably wouldnt have gotten the job in the first place or, if he had, he would have lost it after his lackluster start.

___

Trump Hotels CEO Eric Danziger worked in McDonalds for a few summers. Before that, in the late 1960s, he sold Black Cat firecrackers until the police shut him down. He also spent a summer hawking sunglasses from fold-up tables outside his home in San Jose, California.

He sold hundreds of pairs and made good money $1,000, he estimates, which translated into about $7,000 today after adjusting for inflation. The sunglasses were discards from a manufacturer where his mother worked as an office manager.

They couldnt sell them at the stores because they had blemishes in them, says Danziger, 63. It was zero cost, and 100 percent (profit) margin.

Danziger started working year-round at 17, skipping college for a job as a bellman at a San Francisco hotel.

He put both his children to work at 16. Not having a summer job, he says, leaves a hole in a teenagers education.

Its learning the value of money, but its also learning the responsibility of people you are working with, says Danziger, who took over the oversight of hotels for President Donald Trumps company in 2015. You have a schedule; people count on you.

___

Panera Bread CEO Ron Shaich says he started his own bagel-and-lox delivery service at 16, using his bicycle to make deliveries.

Shaich learned that business is harder than he had thought. He loved the actual selling, but getting up early to make deliveries took time to adjust to. Hes kept a copy of the advertisement he placed in the local newspaper for the service.

___

Krogers CEO Rodney McMullen got started working on the family farm in Williamstown, Kentucky.

Every summer in my youth consisted of performing different tasks on the farm, he says.

He recalls being paid 6 cents for each stick of tobacco he cut. He started at Kroger at 17 while attending the University of Kentucky.

I worked nights and picked up as many shifts as I could to earn extra money to help pay my way through college, he says.

___

When he was 15, Taco Bell CEO Brian Niccol got his first summer job as a bag boy and range attendant at a Texas golf course. He carried golf bags, cleaned clubs and drove a caged cart that picked up balls on the driving range.

It combined something I was passionate about golf, and a fun environment with great people criteria I think are important at any point in your career.

Early on, Niccol recognized something: He was in the people business, not the golf business.

Those relationships with the golfers, management and the staff showed me that regardless of what youre doing or what your role is, theres a fundamental quality in everything that will prepare you for your next step.

___

Jeffrey Mezger, CEO of Los Angeles-based builder KB Home, worked three summers as a laborer for a masonry contractor, mixing and shoveling mortar, loading bricks, pushing a wheelbarrow.

It was all his fathers idea.

He thought hard manual labor would keep me in shape for football and would keep me out of trouble, Mezger says. There was no question in his mind whether I would be working every summer while in high school and college.

He earned $6.50 an hour, about twice the minimum wage at the time.

Still, I learned that I did not want to do something like that the rest of my life, he says. The older guys working there were worn out.

Excerpt from:
CEOs recall when teens like them actually worked summer jobs - Fairfield Daily Republic

Photo by: Robin Scholz/The News-Gazette

Scott Bennett

Image

Image

Next month will mark 27 years since a 20-year-old Parkland College student was stabbed to death while taking a shower in her apartment near the University of Illinois campus.

It's tragic times like these that memories of Jennifer Amerio's murder haunt those who followed the 1990 case.

"All day, I've been thinking about the young lady stabbed to death almost 27 years ago when I was just three months into my graduate studies at the University of Illinois," Carol Bradford, clinical director at The Prairie Center of Urbana, said Saturday, one day after the FBI announced it believes missing UI scholar Yingying Zhang is dead.

"When something like this happens, it is devastating and very unsettling to everyone. I have two sons, 16 and 23 years old. I hope I never have to face what her poor family is going through right now. I'm so sorry this happened to her."

In Springfield, where state legislators worked overtime to try to hash out a fiscal budget, Scott Bennett took a break to reflect upon the terrible news that left his community back home reeling.

Before becoming a state senator representing a district that includes Champaign and Urbana, he was a prosecutor with the state's attorney's office.

Cases like this one involving a kidnapping allegedly orchestrated by a former UI grad student in broad daylight and others Bennett prosecuted "make victims of the entire community, as they steal our sense of security and force us to look at our hometowns as much scarier places than we previously thought we lived," he said.

"Our community is so vibrant, so diverse and welcoming that sometimes we become lulled into an exaggerated sense of safety. During my days as a prosecutor, I used to see it in the eyes of horrified jurors in the opening minutes of a trial when they first heard of a grotesque crime that happened in 'their' friendly town.

"From my time in the courthouse, I have long understood that evil exists in every community, regardless of how it may appear on the surface. But there are unnerving crimes like this one that can shake us from our peace and leave us a little more guarded, a little less trusting of strangers we would normally welcome. We say to ourselves: 'Maybe this could have happened to me or someone I love.'"

Friday's news left Emma Dorantes with more questions than answers.

As a UI alumna who chose Champaign-Urbana "not just for its reputation and rankings, but for the sense of safety and warmth it gave," the allegation that a former UI grad student and local resident was responsible made her think back to all the times she described Champaign-Urbana to old friends from her hometown of Chicago as "all the culture of the city, but without the crime or the commute."

As an attorney with Champaign's Dodd & Maatuka, reading the affidavit given by FBI special agent Anthony Manganaro was chilling, given that Brendt Christensen's alleged actions "were not out of rage or jealousy, or any of the other usual justifications for bad human behavior, but just for thrills," she said. "Random acts of evil are not something we can ever be prepared for."

And that the UI announced via massmail Friday night that a campuswide memorial would be held Saturday in Ms. Zhang's honor came across as "more than a little tasteless," Dorantes said, "especially since it seems the investigation is ongoing, and there has yet been no final determination about Ms. Zhang's whereabouts."

The memorial was called off Saturday morning, per the family's wishes.

"I'm not ready to give up hope," Dorantes said. "And I think we owe Ms. Zhang's family respect as they continue to seek answers and closure, good or bad, in their ordeal."

Read the original here:
'Evil exists in every community' - Champaign/Urbana News-Gazette

Administrative affairs | Education | For UW employees | News releases

June 29, 2017

Anind K. Dey has been named dean of the Information School at the University of Washington, President Ana Mari Cauce and Provost Jerry Baldasty announced this week. Dey comes to the UW from Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science, where he is the Charles M. Geschke professor and director of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute. His appointment is subject to approval by the UW Board of Regents.

Anind K. Dey

Anind brings great knowledge, insight and experience to the iSchool and the UW, Baldasty said. We are confident that he will build on the remarkable work by Dean Emeritus Mike Eisenberg and Dean Harry Bruce, whose combined vision and leadership has helped make the iSchool one of the premier schools of its kind in the country.

Bruce announced earlier this year his decision to step down as dean. This spring, U.S. News & World Report ranked the iSchool second among U.S. masters degree programs in library and information science.

In his research, Dey uses everyday technology (worn, carried and embedded in the environment) to develop tools and techniques for understanding and modeling human behavior, primarily within the areas of health, transportation, sustainability and education. Some of his work has involved using sensors to collect information on the activities of older people that could be used to better personalize their health care.

Dey has been a professor at Carnegie Mellon since 2005. He has also held positions at Intel Research in Berkeley from 2001 to 2004, and at the University of California, Berkeley, from 2002 to 2005.

Anind earned his bachelors degree in computer engineering from Simon Fraser University in Canada. He holds two masters degrees from the Georgia Institute of Technology one in aerospace engineering and one in computer science. He received his Ph.D. in computer science, also from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Originally posted here:
Anind K. Dey named dean of the UW's Information School - UW Today

June 29, 2017

FINDINGS

Researchers have identified gut microbiota that interact with brain regions associated with mood and behavior. This may be the first time that behavioral and neurobiological differences associated with microbial composition in healthy humans have been identified.

BACKGROUND

Brain-gut-microbiota interactions may play an important role in human health and behavior. Previous research suggests that microbiota, a community of microorganisms in the gut, can influence behavior and emotion. Rodent models have demonstrated the effects of gut microbiota on emotional and social behaviors, such as anxiety and depression. There is, however, little evidence of this in humans.

For this study the researchers sought to identify brain and behavioral characteristics of healthy women clustered by gut microbiota profiles.

METHOD

Forty women supplied fecal samples for profiling, and magnetic resonance images were taken of their brains as they viewed images of individuals, activities or things that evoked emotional responses. The women were divided by their gut bacteria composition into two groups: 33 had more of a bacterium called Bacteroides; the remaining seven had more of the Prevotella bacteria. The Bacteroides group showed greater thickness of the gray matter in the frontal cortex and insula, brain regions involved with complex processing of information. They also had larger volumes of the hippocampus, a region involved in memory processing. The Prevotella group, by contrast, showed more connections between emotional, attentional and sensory brain regions and lower brain volumes in several regions, such as the hippocampus. This group's hippocampus was less active while the women were viewing negative images. They also rated higher levels of negative feelings such as anxiety, distress and irritability after looking at photos with negative images than did the Bacteroides group.

IMPACT

These results support the concept of brain-gut-microbiota interactions in healthy humans. Researchers do not yet know whether bacteria in the gut influence the development of the brain and its activity when unpleasant emotional content is encountered, or if existing differences in the brain influence the type of bacteria that reside in the gut. Both possibilities, however, could lead to important changes in how one thinks about human emotions.

Original post:
Scientists identify link between gut microbiota and mood, behavior - News-Medical.net

In order for Messenger to take off financially, Facebook (NASDAQ: FB) needs to "get a lot of businesses using it organically and build the behavior for people that they reach out to businesses for different things," according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the last earningscall. Therein lies the real opportunity for Messenger to transform the way that consumers interact with companies.

Earlier this year at its F8 developer conference, Facebook announced a new Discover section for Messenger, which is intended to showcase "amazing experiences" for people and businesses. Yesterday, the social network announced that the Discover section is now rolling out across the U.S. There are different types of things in Discover, like reading articles or getting sports news, but by far the most meaningful from an investing perspective is the potential to introduce users to branded chatbots.

Changing established human behaviors is hard, but there's been a growing trend of users turning to social media to reach customer support. That movement mostly started on Twitter (NYSE: TWTR), but Facebook has a real opportunity here to steal the show and run with it, particularly when it comes to creating a business out of the trend.

When this shift starting nearly a decade ago, there was speculationthat Twitter would start charging businesses that were using its service for customer service. Co-founder Biz Stone penned a blog post shooting down the idea, promising that Twitter would remain free for all accounts (corporate accounts or dedicated support accounts) with existing services. At the time, the company was still trying to brainstorm new services that it could offer companies for a fee, but Stone (who just recently returned to Twitter) said Twitter had no announcements to make then. There is now a small "Provides support" indicator next to official support accounts, but that's about it. Indirectly, support accounts may garner some user data from their interactions that could perhaps be used for ad targeting.

In the years since, Twitter has touted itself as an effective customer service platform -- examples here and here -- but has not announced any new revenue-generating products, which is a huge missed opportunity considering the simple fact that there's always more money in enterprise offerings than consumer ones. So while Twitter has seemingly hit a wall in terms of monetizing the growing trend of social media-based customer service, Facebook not only has an opportunity to become a leader, it also has a more viable route to monetization.

What's less clear is if Facebook is currently charging companies a fee to be included in the new Discover section. Considering how new it is, it wouldn't make much sense to charge. In His Zuckness' words, building that behavior is "the first thing that we need to do on Messenger and WhatsApp." Sending a message directly to a company is but a small behavioral step from tweeting at a company.

Automation has long been the hardest part about scaling up customer service for any organization. The chatbots that Facebook has been developing hope to solve that conundrum once and for all, much to the dismay of the roughly 2.7 million customer service representatives in the U.S. (as of May 2016, accordingto the Bureau of Labor Statistics) that could see their jobs threatened by chatbots.

Rudimentary chatbots have been around for decades, since the dawn of computing in the '50s and '60s. You've probably heard of the Turing test. The big difference between then and now is that the modern generation of chatbots hopes to carry conversations that are more organic and intuitive. They need to be able to follow conversations, understand context, and more. This is no easy task: Facebook's chatbot failure rate was recently estimated at 70%. Let's also not forget Microsoft's experimental chatbot Tay from last year, which was immediately commandeered into a genocidal, racist, sexist murderbot by Twitter trolls.

These are the two critical pieces to this puzzle: Facebook needs to both build up the consumer behavior while tackling the technical challenge of creating compelling chatbots for companies to use. Neither one is easy, but Facebook can work on both concurrently. Importantly, Facebook is not under financial pressure, since its core ad business is booming and shares are trading at all-time highs. Facebook can take its time to make sure it executes. You can't say the same about Twitter.

10 stocks we like better than Facebook

When investing geniuses David and Tom Gardner have a stock tip, it can pay to listen. After all, the newsletter they have run for over a decade, Motley Fool Stock Advisor, has tripled the market.*

David and Tom just revealed what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy right now... and Facebook wasn't one of them! That's right -- they think these 10 stocks are even better buys.

*Stock Advisor returns as of June 5, 2017

Evan Niu, CFA owns shares of Facebook. Evan Niu, CFA has the following options: long January 2018 $120 calls on Facebook. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Facebook and Twitter. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

See original here:
Facebook Makes a Step Towards Messenger Monetization - nwitimes.com

Calm, careful, potentially revolutionary, "Food Evolution" is an iconoclastic documentary on a hot-button topic. Persuasive rather than polemical, it's the unusual issue film that deals in counterintuitive reason rather than barely controlled hysteria.

As directed by Scott Hamilton Kennedy, "Food Evolution" wades into the controversy that makes the term GMO (genetically modified organisms) what Jon Stewart once called "the three most terrifying letters in the English language."

For what right-thinking citizen hasn't quailed at the thought of armies of artificially conceived zombie fruits and vegetables marching in lockstep under the command of monster corporation Monsanto until they take over the world.

As environmental activist Mark Lynas says, "its difficult to pay Monsanto a compliment. It's like praising witchcraft."

But taking as his theme a quote attributed to Mark Twain that posits, "It's easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled," filmmaker Kennedy wants us to consider the notion that much of what we feel about GMOs may be wrong.

Previously responsible for the splendid "OT: Our Town" and the Oscar-nominated "The Garden," about the plight of a 14-acre community garden in South Los Angeles, Kennedy is a veteran documentarian.

Here he's engaged the mellifluous voice of science celebrity Neil deGrasse Tyson as narrator and made sure to talk to people on both sides of the issue, partisans who, ironically, all have the same goal: safe, abundant food for everyone without the use of excessive toxic chemicals.

It is in fact the question of how to feed the staggering amount of people in the world more than 7 billion now, 9 billion by 2050 that was one of the stimuli that started Kennedy on this project. And he wants you to remember that trying to modify plants to emphasize desirable aspects is something farmers have been doing for a long time.

"Food Evolution" begins in Hawaii in 2013 when the big island's Hawaii County Council held hearings on whether to make the location into the world's first GMO-free zone.

That was ironic because Hawaii turns out to be a state with a major GMO success story, the rainbow papaya, which enabled papaya farming to come back from the dead after a devastating attack of disease in the 1990s.

While anti-GMO activists like Jeffrey Smith talk darkly of GMOs as "thoughtless, invasive species," the other side wrings its hands about pervasive doomsday tactics and distrust of scientific data.

"It's so much easier to scare people than reassure them," says writer Mark Lynas, with food authority Michael Pollan adding, "I don't believe fear-mongering has helped. I'm careful never to say GMOs are dangerous."

One statistic the film cites reveals the considerable gap 88% versus 37% between what scientists and laypeople say about whether GMOs are safe to eat.

"Food Evolution" takes time to carefully parse several issues that arise in the debate, like tumors in rats who eat GMO food (they get tumors no matter what they eat) and poundage versus toxicity in pesticide use.

The film also emphasizes that decisions made in the developed world can have global implications, exploring difficulties farmers in Uganda are having gaining access to the GMO bananas they want to combat decimation by disease.

"Food Evolution" certainly understands the larger factors that put GMO foods in the crosshairs: societal fury at corporate lying and greed, and distrust of Monsanto in particular as the developer of DDT and Agent Orange.

But finally the film is more troubled by the erosion of trust in science and by anti-GMO activists like Zen Honeycutt who says on camera that she trusts personal experiences of mothers more than the conclusions of scientists. As writer Lynas says, "If you throw science out, there is nothing."

Though it ultimately sides with the pro-GMO camp, "Food Evolution" makes some fascinating points about human behavior along the way, about how we don't make decisions based on facts as often as we think we do. This documentary may not change your mind, but it will make you consider what caused you to decide in the first place.

-------------

Food Evolution

Not rated

Running time: 1 hour, 32 minutes

Playing: Laemmle Monica, Santa Monica

See the most-read stories in Entertainment this hour

kenneth.turan@latimes.com

@KennethTuran

Excerpt from:
Documentary 'Food Evolution' turns to reason to discuss GMO controversy - Los Angeles Times

Milwaukee-based startup Scanalytics Inc. has earned a top award from technology giant Cisco in an IoT for Business development competition.

Joe Scanlin and Matt McCoy founded Milwaukee startup Scanalytics.

Scanalytics, which developed smart flooring technology, earned a first place in the Best Smart Building technology category in the contest, which was held this month at Viva Technology 2017 in Paris. More than 5,000 startups and 68,000 people attended Viva Technology.

Scanalytics has developed a sensor-based engagement and analytics platform that monitors human behavior through foot traffic and predictive analytics. Among the uses the company has tested are retail product sales, in which a salesperson could be alerted if a customer is standing near a product, and business conferences, in which organizers can track booth traffic. The company deployed sensors to more than 100 clients globally in 2016.

Cisco and Scanalytics have now collaborated to create a new use for the smart flooring technology. Joe Scanlin, chief executive officer of Scanalytics, and Petr Bambasek, director of product, worked with Cisco engineers to link its technology to Ciscos Spark cloud collaboration program.

The team created a product through which a chat bot pulls data from Scanalytics application programming interface in real time, and communicates it to a buildings occupants via Spark. Among the potential uses was sending a reminder to employees to get up and move during the work day, and to inform building maintenance staff whether a bathroom needs cleaning based on usage.

We spend a majority of our lives indoors and these environments have a huge impact on everything from business efficiencies and productivity to our overall wellness, Scanlin said.Physical environments need to be properly equipped to capture, store and access information on how we interact with them, so they can operate like an autonomous nervous system and adjust themselves accordingly.

Milwaukee-based startup Scanalytics Inc. has earned a top award from technology giant Cisco in an IoT for Business development competition.

Joe Scanlin and Matt McCoy founded Milwaukee startup Scanalytics.

Scanalytics, which developed smart flooring technology, earned a first place in the Best Smart Building technology category in the contest, which was held this month at Viva Technology 2017 in Paris. More than 5,000 startups and 68,000 people attended Viva Technology.

Scanalytics has developed a sensor-based engagement and analytics platform that monitors human behavior through foot traffic and predictive analytics. Among the uses the company has tested are retail product sales, in which a salesperson could be alerted if a customer is standing near a product, and business conferences, in which organizers can track booth traffic. The company deployed sensors to more than 100 clients globally in 2016.

Cisco and Scanalytics have now collaborated to create a new use for the smart flooring technology. Joe Scanlin, chief executive officer of Scanalytics, and Petr Bambasek, director of product, worked with Cisco engineers to link its technology to Ciscos Spark cloud collaboration program.

The team created a product through which a chat bot pulls data from Scanalytics application programming interface in real time, and communicates it to a buildings occupants via Spark. Among the potential uses was sending a reminder to employees to get up and move during the work day, and to inform building maintenance staff whether a bathroom needs cleaning based on usage.

We spend a majority of our lives indoors and these environments have a huge impact on everything from business efficiencies and productivity to our overall wellness, Scanlin said.Physical environments need to be properly equipped to capture, store and access information on how we interact with them, so they can operate like an autonomous nervous system and adjust themselves accordingly.

See the rest here:
Scanalytics wins Cisco award - BizTimes.com (Milwaukee)