January 24, 2012
James Surowiecki [soor-oh-wik-ee] (b. 1967) is an American journalist. He is a staff writer at ‘The New Yorker,’ where he writes a regular column on business and finance. He was born in Connecticut but grew up in Puerto Rico. He moved back to Connecticut for high school. In 1988 he graduated from the University of North Carolina. He pursued Ph.D. studies in American History on a Mellon Fellowship at Yale University before becoming a financial journalist. He currently lives in Brooklyn and is married to ‘Slate’ culture editor Meghan O’Rourke. He got his start on the Internet when he was hired from graduate school by ‘Motley Fool’ co-founder David Gardner.
In 2002, Surowiecki edited an anthology, ‘Best Business Crime Writing of the Year,’ a collection of articles from different business news sources that chronicle the fall from grace of various CEOs. In 2004, he published ‘The Wisdom of Crowds,’ in which he argued that in some circumstances, large groups exhibit more intelligence than smaller, more elite groups, and that collective intelligence shapes business, economies, societies and nations.
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January 24, 2012
In North America, a tax shelter is generally defined as any method that recovers more than $1 in tax for every $1 spent, within 4 years. Some tax shelters are questionable or even illegal such as offshore companies that exploit differing tax rates and legislation. Others are part of financing arrangements; by paying unreasonably high interest rates to a related party, one may severely reduce the income of an investment (or even create a loss), but create a massive capital gain when one withdraws the investment. The tax benefit derives from the fact that capital gains are taxed at a lower rate than the normal investment income such as interest or dividend.
The offense of these questionable tax shelters are usually that transactions were not reported at fair market value or the interest rate was too high or too low. In general, if the purpose of a transaction is to lower tax liabilities but otherwise have no economic value, and especially when arranged between related parties, such transactions are often viewed as unethical. Continue reading →
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January 24, 2012
Private equity, in finance, is an asset class (investment strategy) consisting of equity securities (stocks) in operating companies that are not publicly traded on a stock exchange. A private equity investment will generally be made by a private equity firm (which specialize in just private equity), a venture capital firm (which invests in start-up companies), or an angel investor (an affluent individual who provides capital for start-ups). Each of these categories of investor has its own set of goals, preferences and investment strategies; each however providing working capital to a target company to nurture expansion, new product development, or restructuring of the company’s operations, management, or ownership.
Among the most common investment strategies in private equity are: leveraged buyouts, venture capital, growth capital, distressed investments, and mezzanine capital. In a typical leveraged buyout transaction, a private equity firm buys majority control of an existing or mature firm. This is distinct from a venture capital or growth capital investment, in which the investors (typically venture capital firms or angel investors) invest in young or emerging companies, and rarely obtain majority control.
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January 21, 2012
Bernie Sanders (b. 1941) is the junior United States Senator from Vermont. He previously represented Vermont’s at-large district in the United States House of Representatives. Sanders also served as mayor of Burlington, Vermont. Sanders is a self-described democratic socialist, and has praised European social democracy (though he has also criticized its contemporary ‘Third Way,’ center-left departure).
He is the first person elected to the U.S. Senate to identify as a socialist. Sanders caucuses with the Democratic Party and is counted as a Democrat for the purposes of committee assignments, but because he does not belong to a formal political party, he appears as an independent on the ballot. He has also been the only independent member of the House during much of his service there.
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January 21, 2012
Soulwax, headed by David and Stephen Dewaele, are an alternative rock/electronic band from Ghent, Belgium. They were first noticed after the release of their album ‘Much Against Everyone’s Advice.’ But after that the Dewaeles started focusing on their other projects such as The Flying Dewaele Brothers and 2manydjs, but also hosting a show on Belgian television, ‘Alter8.’ Other than the Dewaele brothers, Soulwax also includes bassist Stefaan Van Leuven and drummer Steve Slingeneyer. The 2004 album ‘Any Minute Now’ spawned three singles in ‘E Talking,’ ‘NY Excuse,’ and the title track. ‘E Talking’s’ music video was controversial and restricted to post-watershed broadcast on music television channels (typically late at night). Set in London’s Fabric nightclub, everyone in the video is depicted as being on a different drug, from A-Z (including popular drug nicknames).
The duo has also produced a number of official and unofficial remixes, including ‘Daft Punk Is Playing At My House’ and ‘Get Innocuous!’ by LCD Soundsystem, ‘Robot Rock’ by Daft Punk and ‘DARE’ by Gorillaz. David and Stephen are friends of artists Tiga, LCD Soundsystem and Whomadewho. The only official compilation ‘As Heard on Radio Soulwax Pt. 2,’ was released in 2002 and is composed of 45 tracks the Dewaele brothers were able to clear the rights from. They originally requested rights for 187 tracks and got clearances for 114 of them. 62 were refused and 11 remained untraceable.
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January 20, 2012
The analog hole is a fundamental and inevitable vulnerability in copy protection schemes. Once digital information is converted to a human-perceptible (analog) form, it is a relatively simple matter to digitally recapture that analog reproduction in an unrestricted form, thereby fundamentally circumventing any and all restrictions placed on copyrighted work.
Media publishers who use digital rights management (DRM), to restrict how a work can be used, perceive the necessity to make it visible and/or audible as a ‘hole’ in the control that DRM otherwise affords them.
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January 19, 2012
Lights out manufacturing is a methodology (or philosophy), rather than a specific process. Factories that run lights out are fully automated and require no human presence on-site. Thus, these factories can be run with the lights off. Many factories are capable of lights-out production, but very few run exclusively lights-out. Typically, workers are necessary to set up parts to be manufactured, and to remove the completed parts. As the technology necessary for lights-out production becomes increasingly available, many factories are beginning to utilize lights-out production between shifts (or as a separate shift) to meet increasing demand or to save money.
An automatic factory is a place where raw materials enter and finished products leave with little or no human intervention. One of the earliest descriptions of the automatic factory in fiction was the 1955 short story ‘Autofac.’ FANUC, the Japanese robotics company, has been operating a ‘lights out’ factory for robots since 2001. ‘Robots are building other robots at a rate of about 50 per 24-hour shift and can run unsupervised for as long as 30 days at a time. ‘Not only is it lights-out,’ says Fanuc vice president Gary Zywiol, ‘we turn off the air conditioning and heat too.’
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January 19, 2012
Astrochicken is the name given to a thought experiment expounded by theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson. In his book ‘Disturbing the Universe’ (1979), Dyson contemplated how humanity could build a small, self-replicating automaton that could explore space more efficiently than a manned craft could. He attributed the idea to John von Neumann, based on a lecture von Neumann gave in 1948 entitled ‘The General and Logical Theory of Automata.’ Dyson expanded on von Neumann’s automata theories and added a biological component to them.
Astrochicken, Dyson explained, would be a one-kilogram spacecraft unlike any before it. It would be a creation of the intersection of biology, artificial intelligence and modern microelectronics—a blend of organic and electronic components. Astrochicken would be launched by a conventional spacecraft, like an egg being laid into space. Continue reading →
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January 19, 2012
A self-replicating machine is an artificial construct that is theoretically capable of autonomously manufacturing a copy of itself using raw materials taken from its environment, thus exhibiting self-replication in a way analogous to that found in nature. The concept of self-replicating machines has been advanced by Homer Jacobsen, Edward F. Moore, Freeman Dyson, John von Neumann, and in more recent times by K. Eric Drexler in his book on nanotechnology, ‘Engines of Creation,’ and by Robert Freitas and Ralph Merkle in their review ‘Kinematic Self-Replicating Machines,’ which provided the first comprehensive analysis of the entire replicator design space.
The future development of such technology has featured as an integral part of several plans involving the mining of moons and asteroid belts for ore and other materials, the creation of lunar factories and even the construction of solar power satellites in space. The possibly misnamed von Neumann probe (a self-replicating spacecraft) is one theoretical example of such a machine. Von Neumann also worked on what he called the universal constructor, a self-replicating machine that would operate in a cellular automata environment (a computer simulation of life).
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January 19, 2012
Carbon chauvinism is a neologism meant to disparage the assumption that the chemical processes of hypothetical extraterrestrial life must be constructed primarily from carbon (organic compounds), as carbon’s chemical and thermodynamic properties render it far superior to all other elements.
The term was used as early as 1973, when scientist Carl Sagan described it and other human chauvinisms that limit imagination of possible extraterrestrial life. It suggests that human beings, as carbon-based life forms who have never encountered any life that has evolved outside the Earth’s environment, may find it difficult to envision radically different biochemistries.
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January 19, 2012
Artificial life (alife) is a field of study and an associated art form which examine systems related to life, its processes, and its evolution through simulations using computer models, robotics, and biochemistry. The discipline was named by Christopher Langton, an American computer scientist, in 1986.
There are three main kinds of alife, named for their approaches: soft, from software; hard, from hardware; and wet, from biochemistry. Artificial life imitates traditional biology by trying to recreate biological phenomena, such as sexual reproduction and response to stimuli. The term ‘artificial life’ is often used to specifically refer to soft alife.
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January 19, 2012
Non-cellular life is life that exists without a cellular structure. This term presumes the phylogenetic (evolutionary relatedness) scientific classification of viruses as lifeforms. Hypothesized artificial life, self-replicating machines, and most simple molecules capable of self-replication, such as crystals, are not usually considered living. Some biologists refer to wholly syncytial (containing multiple cell nuclei) organisms (such as many fungi) as ‘acellular’ because their bodies contain multiple nuclei which are not separated by cell walls, but they do contain cells. Viral self-assembly has implications for the study of the origin of life, as it lends further credence to the hypothesis that life could have started as self-assembling organic molecules.
The issue of life without cellular structure came again to the fore with the 2003 discovery that the large and complex Mimivirus can make some proteins. This discovery suggests that some viruses may have evolved from earlier forms that could produce proteins independent of a host cell. If so, there may at one time have been a viral domain of life. It is not clear that all small viruses have originated from more complex viruses by means of genome size reduction. A viral domain of life may only be relevant to certain large viruses such as nucleocytoplasmic large DNA viruses like the Mimivirus.
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