Berlin's 'poor but sexy' appeal turning city into European Silicon Valley

A decade ago Berlin's mayor Klaus Wowereit tried to attract creative types to the city by declaring "Berlin ist arm, aber sexy" (poor but sexy).

It worked. The City's astonishingly low rents compared with other European capitals – a one-bed flat a short walk from Alexanderplatz in the centre of town can still be picked up for as little as €450-a-month (£373) – have helped draw arty people from across the world and made Berlin a major centre for artists, writers, musicians and, increasingly, technology and web entrepreneurs.

The city has already produced some globally recognised tech startup successes, including the music sharing service SoundCloud and games company Wooga – and Wowereit wants more.

"Berlin has caught the public's attention as a startup hub," he said. "We want to capture that momentum and drive Berlin's economy forward. [We] will fully dedicate ourselves to becoming Europe's leading startup hub."

The city already boasts 2,500 tech startups, and has attracted hundreds of millions of euros in investment from some of the world's biggest venture capital funds.

Wowereit admits that Berlin has some way to go in overtaking London as Europe's startup capital and has called in Chancellor Angela Merkel to help. She toured the city's new-tech clusters last year, told startups they were "the yeast that makes the industry grow" and promised to help make it easier for foreigners to register to work in the city.

The momentum behind Berlin has been building steadily in the past few months with Microsoft founder Bill Gates leading a $35m (£21m) investment in ResearchGate, a Berlin-based global network for scientists. Other big investments include famous Silicon Valley fund Sequoia Capital pumping $19m into 6Wunderkinder, maker of the popular to-do list app Wunderlist.As part of the investment Sequoia's Welsh partner Sir Michael Moritz will join the board of the three-year-old company that already boasts 6m users. New York fund Union Square Ventures led a $7m investment in the Football App, a mobile football news and information service downloaded by more than 12m people.

Gates's successor at Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, has opened an"accelarator" for startups in a grand building on Unter den Linden, Berlin's most famous boulevard.It joins a long list of other big established companies, including Deutsche Telekom, Deutsche Post, drugs company Bayer, media company Alex Springer and even supermarket chain Rewe and Coca-Cola.

Ballmer said he chose to locate the accelerator in Berlin – alongside Bangalore, Paris, Beijing, Tel Aviv and London – because he had been impressed by the "amazing emerging ecosystems" and "incredible startups" springing up in the city.

Source: theguardian

Forecasts. Gold: 2014 May Not Be Nice to Its Price

Donald Selkin, chief market strategist with National Securities, tells Minyanville that a Fed taper-triggered rise in interest rates, “could exert a negative influence on gold’s price.”
 
Gold, explains Selkin, has also lost its traditional safe-haven appeal “as it did not react in its usual positive way to the banking crisis in Cyprus, the ongoing civil war in Syria, and even the recent partial federal government shutdown here in the US.”    
 
“This negativity toward gold has been reflected in the first annual decrease in exchange-traded products since trading in these instruments began in 2003,” he adds.
 
As government import controls also mean gold demand from India is not projected to increase by much next year and the rising costs of mining suggest no significant supply increase on the horizon, Selkin says he expects the gold price to average around $1,200 to $1,250/oz in 2014.
 
Last week, JPMorgan analysts lowered their gold forecast for next year to $1,263/oz as a result of tapering and low inflation in the US, they said in a research note via Marketwatch. Similarly, Barclays says it is expecting gold to average $1,350/oz in Q1 2014, falling to $1,270/oz by the end of next year, Reuters reports.
 
The Economist Intelligence Unit is forecasting an average gold price of $1,283.80/oz in 2014, and a slightly lower price in 2015.
 
However, a recent gold report by London’s Edison Investment Research argued that “far from tapering causing the gold price to fall, it will merely cause it to rise less quickly.”
 
Edison says the “interplay between interest rates and inflation” are key to the prospects for gold. The group says it calculates a long-term US dollar inflation rate of 10.7% under which it expects gold to average $1,511/oz in 2014 in a negative real interest rate situation. Edison expects a restoration of positive real interest rates to depress the price of gold, and in this scenario, forecasts a gold price of $1,434/oz next year.

As for the miners themselves, according to PwC’s recent gold, silver, and copper price report, they aren’t expecting the gold price to pick up in 2014 either -- only 47% of gold producers expect the price to increase in the next 12 months, compared to 88% last year.

Source: Minyanville

LME Closing Prices

London Metal Exchange				Price      Change    %
Aluminium Alloy Cash Unofficial Confirmed $/m tonne			Fri 20:35	1820.00	-40.00		-2.2
Aluminium Alloy 3mo Unofficial Confirmed $/m tonne			Fri 20:35	1835.00	-20.00		-1.1
Primary Aluminium Cash Unofficial Confirmed $/m tonne			Fri 20:35	1738.00	-17.75		-1.0
Primary Aluminium 3mo Unofficial Confirmed $/m tonne			Fri 20:35	1803.00	-22.00		-1.2
Copper Cash Unofficial Confirmed $/m tonne			Fri 20:35	7335.00	-116.50		-1.6
Copper 3mo Unofficial Confirmed $/m tonne			Wed 16:35	7262.50	-28.00		-0.4
Lead Cash Unofficial Confirmed $/m tonne			Fri 20:35	2168.00	-29.00		-1.3
Lead 3mo Unofficial Confirmed $/m tonne			Wed 16:35	2172.00	-2.00		-0.1
N. American Special Alum Alloy Cash Unofcl Confmd $/m tonne			Fri 20:35	1820.00	-12.50		-0.7
N. American Special Alum Alloy 3mo Unofcl Confmd $/m tonne			Fri 20:35	1840.00	+20.00		+1.1
Nickel Cash Unofficial Confirmed $/m tonne			Fri 20:35	13860.00	-120.00		-0.9
Nickel 3mo Unofficial Confirmed $/m tonne			Wed 16:35	14132.50	+77.50		+0.6
Tin Cash Unofficial Confirmed $/m tonne			Fri 20:35	21595.00	-907.50		-4.0
Tin 3mo Unofficial Confirmed $/m tonne			Fri 20:35	21500.00	-550.00		-2.5
Zinc Cash Unofficial Confirmed $/m tonne			Fri 20:35	2044.00	-51.50		-2.5
Zinc 3mo Unofficial Confirmed $/m tonne			Wed 16:35	2005.00	+8.00		+0.4

Rocky road for Europe to recovery in 2014

In 2013 the Eurozone finally got back on the road to recovery with some tepid growth. For 2014 the big question is: are there enough economic bright spots on the bloc’s horizon to chase the crisis storm clouds away? Many countries are still struggling with austerity reforms, high debt, chronic unemployment and a credit crunch.

Having returned from the edge of the abyss the Euro’s fate now seems secure and the single currency area even expands in January to include its 18th country Latvia. The Eurozone economy is also expected to continue growing in 2014, though at a very slow pace. So is the bloc’s crisis finally over?

"The reality is we’re far from a solid recovery yet. The problems will persist in a number of countries, we still have problems in the financial sector, we have the unemployment problem so overall there’s still a lack of growth impulses. Where’s the growth going to come from?" Fabian Zuleeg, Chief Executive of European Policy Centre said.

To make matters worse public debt remains sky high in many member states, especially Italy, which has only just wiggled out of its longest recession since the end of the Second World War.

“But the two most troubling questions being asked here in Brussels are is France’s recent credit downgrade a warning of trouble ahead for the Eurozone’s second largest economy and can number one Germany continue propping up the rest of the bloc?”

Then there’s the banking union, which will be rolled out in 2014, aimed at restoring faith in Europe’s finance sector.

"This is the beginning of the end of bank bail-outs. Banks not taxpayers will carry the cost for their own mistakes." Jose Manuel Barroso, President of European Commission said.

The real aim is to get banks lending again to households and businesses, but the banking union deal hammered out by leaders in December appears complicated and lacks real firepower. Another major concern is unemployment.

"If we face a situation where for example in Spain and Greece unemployment stays close to 25 percent of the active population then there is a real danger that in the coming years some politicians might propose to leave the Euro so I think the stability so I think the stability of the Euro really depends on how fast unemployment can be brought down in those peripheral countries." Peter Vanden Houte, Chief Eurozone Economist said.

So for the Eurozone and the EU as a whole 2014 is expected to be a year of growth and slow recovery, but with the only big change so far being in confidence and not with the bloc’s still shaky foundations.

Source: CCTV

Plosser warns Fed may have to be 'aggressive' on raising interest rates

Philadelphia Fed President Charles Plosser warned Friday that the central bank may have to be "aggressive" in lifting interest rates and may have to chase market rates higher, if banks were to quickly release reserves. He also suggested the expectations of his colleagues by the end of 2016 that calls for Fed funds rates to be below 2% even when the job market is back to normal may be too low. Plosser also said the central bank could face political pressure not to lift rates. "Technically we can certainly do that, but it will be a question of will," he said. He also said the Fed is monitoring asset prices and leverage to avoid "frothiness" in markets. Plosser is known for his hawkish views and becomes a voting Federal Open Market Committee member this year. The Fed last month started tapering their bond-purchase program, reducing monthly purchases to $75 billion. 

Source: Marketwatch

Is Gold making a double bottom? Should we take a Contrarian approach?

For my blog readers this is a contrarian approach to the trend of the price of gold.It works well when the sentiment gets so negative about the price of a commodity. Short covering MAKES THE TRADE.Good luck.

Change = Opportunity = Gold

january 3, 2014 by adam hewison 3 comments

Let's face it, without change, there can be no opportunity. As traders and investors, we need to see change in order to make money.

One potential opportunity in 2014 could be gold. In 2013, gold suffered what was perhaps its worst performance as an asset in decades, losing over 25% of its value for the year. This was the first time that gold had a year-to-year loss that I can remember. So in 2014, the question has to be, what's going on with gold and is it going to redeem itself?

Looking at the chart which begins in July of 2012, you can see that gold hit its high and then basically for the next 15 months moved consecutively lower. This high is not the all-time high that was seen in August of 2011 at $1904, but the most significant high for our chart work.

The 15-month trend line (1) is the overriding technical aspect for this market in my opinion. The second most important element to this chart is the potential of a double bottom (2), which comes in around the $1,185 level.

1. 15-month downtrend line
2. Double bottom
3. RSI indicator above 50
4. 2-month downtrend line
5. Mini breakout
6. Major resistance at $1,400

On (3), the RSI line moved over 50, indicating that the trend could now be moving higher. Please be aware that this is different from the Trade Triangle technology, which remains neutral to negative.

On (4) I see a mini trend line which has been broken, indicating that a mini uptrend is in place at (5).

Number (6) indicates where major resistance is for gold at the $1,400 level. This area could also be a potential “pivot point” for a double bottom (2) that was formed in July and December 2013. Should that be the case, once the $1,400 level is broken on the upside, a strong argument can be made that gold could move up to the $1,600 level based on the pivot point swing. This level coincides nicely with a Fibonacci retracement of $1,568, not shown on this chart.

The Trade Triangle technology will also need to kick in and confirm that the trend is indeed on the upside. I want to watch very carefully in the days and weeks ahead to see if the weekly Trade Triangle kicks in. The weekly Trade Triangle is the one that's used for the trend in gold. I do not expect the monthly to kick in for some time, so the trend may be somewhat erratic until that happens.

The potential for gold to rebound is fairly strong with Janet Yellen as the new Fed chairman. Her job as the new Fed Chair is to get out of this crazy experiment that the Fed began four years ago with quantitative easing. The only way I can see this happening is basically the return of inflation which will be good for gold and perhaps, not so good for equities.

Conjuncture aside, I will of course always go with the tried and true, market-proven Trade Triangle technology.

Here's to a very successful 2014 for all of our members, traders and friends.

All the best,
Adam Hewison
President, INO.com
Co-Creator, MarketClub

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New MRAM technology promises memorable consumer electronics experience

In his 2005 paper, Professor of Physics Johan Åkerman touted magnetoresistive random access memory (MRAM) as a promising candidate for a "universal memory" that could replace the various types of memory commonly found alongside each other in modern electronic devices. A team of researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) and Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) has now developed a new type of MRAM that could see Åkerman's vision become a reality.

Currently, many devices pack static random access memory (SRAM), dynamic random access memory (DRAM), and Flash memory, with each offering their own particular advantages. SRAM is fast but volatile, meaning the data it stores is lost when the power is switched off. DRAM offers greater memory densities than SRAM and is cheaper, but is also volatile and needs to be refreshed periodically to retain information, making it more power hungry. Finally, Flash memory is non-volatile, meaning it retains data even when the power is switched off, but is still relatively expensive.

MRAM technology offers the potential of providing all the advantages of these three types of memory, with none of the disadvantages. It promises greater storage density, reduced power consumption, and would retain data without power. Although it has been under development since the 1990s, continuing improvements in Flash and DRAM have kept MRAM largely on the sidelines.

Current MRAM technology stores data using magnetic storage elements formed by two ferromagnetic plates separated by a thin insulating layer. However, the reliability of MRAM suffers because these plates, which have a thickness of less than one nanometer, are difficult to manufacture reliably, resulting in memory that is generally only able to retain data for less than a year.

The research team has been able to replace the ferromagnetic plates with an alternative film structure incorporating magnetic multilayer structures as thick as 20 nanometers. The researchers say this technique allows data to be retained for a minimum of 20 years, making their next-gen MRAM chip attractive for a wide range of applications.

"From the consumer’s standpoint, we will no longer need to wait for our computers or laptops to boot up," says Dr Yang Hyunsoo, who led the research team. "Storage space will increase, and memory will be so enhanced that there is no need to regularly hit the 'save' button as fresh data will stay intact even in the case of a power failure. Devices and equipment can now have bigger memory with no loss for at least 20 years or probably more."

"With the heavy reliance on our mobile phones these days, we usually need to charge them daily," adds Dr Yang. "Using our new technology, we may only need to charge them on a weekly basis."

The researchers believe their breakthrough will change the architecture of computers, making them cheaper to manufacture. The team says it has already received strong interest from the semiconductor industry in its new technique, for which it has already filed a US provisional patent. The researchers now plan to apply the new structure in memory cells and are looking for industry partners to help develop a "spin-orbit torque-based MRAM."

  Source:Gizmag

Watch Out Google, AddSearch — Like Swiftype — Wants To Stop In-Website Search From Sucking

The in-website search space is hotting up. Because well, let’s face it, most site search still sucks. The reason for that is that firstly search is a hard, expensive problem to crack. And secondly Google, the dominant search player offering an in-website search product, hasn’t got a huge incentive to help other websites have awesome searches all of their own — since a poor in-website site search invariable sends the user boomeranging back to Google.com. Good for Google, not so good for the original website.

All of which makes in-website search a space that’s ripe for startups to attack. One such startup, Y Combinator-backed Swiftype*, which was founded back in 2012, raised $7.5 million last September  adding to the$1.7 million  in seed funding it snagged in August for its ‘smarter’ site search engine (from Andreessen Horowitz, NEA, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Ignition and several angel investors).

Another newcomer to the space is Helsinki, Finland-based startup ASearch — founded in April last year, but with two years of search tech work under its belt prior to that, it raised $680,000 in seed funding in November ($650,000 from Finnish VC Vision+, with additional support from Tekes, the technology funding agency of the Finnish government).

AddSearch tells TechCrunch it’s currently raising a Series A — in the “multimillion” dollar range. At Helsinki’s Slush conference back in November it was ranked among the top four pitches out of the circa 1,000 startups participating (see the bottom of this post for AddSearch’s Slush pitch video).

Its USP is a claim that it offers the fastest site search in town. And a brief test of AddSearch’s offering  lives up to the speed promise, with search results appearing in real-time, as you type — much like Google Instant.

Results are also displayed as an overlay atop the website, rather than having to wait for a separate page to load.

Mobile is another focus for AddSearch with support for all mobile devices. Site owners can also control which results are the most important — a la Swiftype — and, also similarly, it has focused on offering a low friction installation process to lower the barrier to entry. AddSearch co-founder and CEO Pasi Ilola promises  ”zero maintenance or hassle”. Ergo, a fully hosted search service. 

“Searching on any website is typically a terrible experience: it’s slow, cumbersome and ugly,” says Ilola, discussing the opportunity it’s attacking. ”Site search solutions haven’t developed in years, and implementing a good search is very expensive and time-consuming.”

“Our main competitor is Google, whose Site Search/Custom Search product is widely used. However Google’s product is badly out of date, and hasn’t seen major development in years,” he adds. “Google’s site search is slow and not instant, does not support mobile devices (without very time-consuming customisation) and does not offer control over the search results at all.”

Ilola also argues that its startup rival Swiftype is “old-fashioned” being as the results it offers are not instant. “You have to wait for the search results pages, which makes the search slow and cumbersome as compared to AddSearch,” he says, adding: “The speed of the search is our #1 USP, and we’ve worked extremely hard to make AddSearch the fastest search anywhere.

“We’re currently working with sites with millions of pages, and the search is as fast as what you see in the TC demo.”

AddSearch launched its product in November, at Slush, and isn’t currently disclosing customer numbers, being as it’s still in an “early launch phase”, but Ilola says interest has been “very high”, especially in the enterprise space.

AddSearch’s business model is a freemium subscription offering, with a basic service offered for free to bloggers & small websites, and then paid tiers starting at $9/month — scaling up to enterprise levels of thousands of dollars per month. (Pricing depends on the amount of content on the site.)

Source: techcrunch

Warp drive looks more promising than ever in recent NASA studies

The first steps towards interstellar travel have been taken, but the stars are very far away. Voyager 1  is about 17 light-hours distant from Earth and is traveling with a velocity of 0.006 percent of light speed, meaning it will take about 17,000 years to travel one light-year. Fortunately, the elusive "warp drive" now appears to be evolving past difficulties with new theoretical advances and a NASA test rig under development to measure artificially generated warping of space-time.

The warp drive broke away from being a wholly fictional concept in 1994, when physicist Miguel Alcubierre suggested that faster-than-light (FTL) travel was possible if you remained still on a flat piece of spacetime inside a warp bubble that was made to move at superluminal velocity. Rather like a magic carpet. The main idea here is that, although no material objects can travel faster than light, there is no known upper speed to the ability of spacetime itself to expand and contract. The only real hint we have is that the minimum velocity of spacetime expansion during the period of cosmological inflation was about 30 million billion times the speed of light.

The warp effect uses gravitational effects to compress the spacetime in front of a spacecraft, then expand the spacetime behind it. The bit of spacetime within the warp bubble is flat, so that the spacecraft would float at zero-g along the wave of compressed and expanded spacetime. The net effect is rather like surfing, where you are nearly stationary with respect to the wave, but are traveling with the speed of the wave. Whereas many of the theoretical studies consider a warp bubble moving at ten times the speed of light, there is no known limit to the potential speed.

Such a warp bubble could in principle be used to enable subluminal travel (travel slower than light) as well as superluminal travel (travel faster than light). This may seem a silly choice – why travel slow rather than fast? However, it is likely to turn out far easier to achieve a subluminal warp drive for a number of fundamental reasons. Besides, space travel at 90 percent of the speed of light is far superior to anything we currently have on the books.

This sounds too easy, and in many ways, it is. Thus far, all superluminal warp drives require negative energy and pressure to form and maintain the warp bubble. Matter consistent with such properties does not exist in classical physics. While in quantum mechanics there are certain possibilities for negative energy phenomena, they generally do not seem well suited to generate the required warp bubble.

An additional problem is that a great deal of negative energy is required to initiate a warp bubble. For Alcubierre's original model, it would take more negative energy than the total mass of the Universe to equip a small spacecraft to travel at ten times light speed. Fortunately, refinements to the model have resulted in the energy requirements reducing to the mass equivalent of a few hundred kilograms of matter with negative energy. Mind you, we don't know how to get that quantity either, but it feels a more likely prospect.

Matter with negative energy and negative pressure is usually called exotic matter, and we don't know of any. However, another possibility is to use dark energy to expand spacetime – after all, that is how we know dark energy exists, through observing the accelerated expansion of the Universe. Although nearly three-quarters of the mass-energy of the Universe is dark energy, it is spread thinly, at the equivalent of about ten hydrogen atoms for every liter of space. Given this, harnessing dark energy for warp drives might seem an overwhelming task.

That doesn't mean it's impossible however. To put this into perspective, consider magnetism. The interstellar magnetic field is about a nanoTesla, or about one-fifty thousandth of the Earth's field. If this is all we knew of, harnessing magnetism for any practical purpose would seem unlikely. However, a tiny rare earth magnet exhibits magnetic fields 100 million times stronger than the interstellar field. It isn't wise to recklessly eliminate possibilities.

Source:  Gizmag

Thai telco data usage grew 300% during New Year celebrations thanks to more 3G and chat apps

We’ve just recently reported that leading Thai telco Dtac saw an increase of  175%  in data usage from New Year’s Eve until New Year’s day compared to the same period last year. Another Thai telco AIS  has reported a similar trend, except growth hit 300 percent.

This jump in data usage resulted from theavailability of 3G  in the main cities throughout the country. AIS claims that it has seen a drastic reduction in SMS as a median to wish loved ones a happy new year. The use of apps such as Line, Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, Google Plus,WeChat increased by 300 percent compared to the same time last year.

In addition, AIS revealed that stickers were very popular compared to normal text when using Line. AIS official Line stickers were sent more than 120 million times from December 24 to January 1. On New Year’s Eve alone, more than 60 million stickers were sent. That’s a massive amount considering Thailand’s population is just 66 million.

This is further proof of the decline of SMS. However, it seems likeall three main telcos in Thailand saw it coming and have planned accordingly.

With thepossibility  of a 4G rollout this year, we might even see faster growth of data usage during next year’s New Year’s celebration.

Source:  TECHINASIA

Record low number of Japanese turn 20 in 2013

Fewer Japanese than ever in recorded history will be 20-years old as of January 1st.

Internal affairs ministry estimates suggest 1.21 million people -- 620,000 men and 590,000 women -- turned 20 this year, and will celebrate their coming of age in 2014.That's a drop of 10,000 from a year earlier and the lowest number since the ministry began the estimates in 1968.
The number of 20-year-old Japanese peaked at 2.46 million in 1970, when the first generation of baby boomers came of age.

Source: NewsOnJapan

NASA's LLCD tests confirm laser communication capabilities in space

This week, NASA released the results of its Lunar Laser Communication Demonstration's (LLCD) 30-day test carried out by its Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) that is currently in orbit around the Moon. According to the space agency, the LLCD mission proved that laser communications are practical at a distance of a quarter of a million miles and that such a system could perform as well, if not better, than any NASA radio system.

The LLCD is a demonstration of the practicality of using broadband lasers for deep space communications with download speeds orders of magnitude greater than conventional radio communications. With the ability to download data to Earth at 622 megabits per second (Mbps) and upload at 20 Mbps, the LLCD transmitted arecord-breaking download  on October 20 from lunar orbit using a pulsed laser beam that was picked up by the main LLCD ground station in New Mexico, which is one of three set up in the US and Spain.

Lasers have inherent advantages over radio, not the least of which is that they have a much greater bandwidth capacity and their ability to produce a narrow, coherent beam means that they use less power over longer distances – a prime concern for spacecraft that often have to make do with power levels usually associated with incandescent bulbs.

NASA says that the LLCD mission performed better than expected during its 30-day trial. The laser was able to communicate with the Earth stations in broad daylight and even when the Moon had less than four degrees of separation from the Sun. It also worked without error when the Moon was low on the horizon, forcing the laser to pass through a much thicker layer of atmosphere, with atmospheric turbulence having little effect. The space agency was even surprised that light clouds weren’t an obstacle.

LLCD was able to download the LADEE spacecraft’s entire library of data at unprecedented speeds, sending a gigabyte of information to Earth in under five minutes at a speed that was largely limited by LADEE’s ability to hand the data off to the LLCD. Normally, such a download would take several days.

NASA says that with the LLCD mission complete, the next phase will be the Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LRCD) satellite set to launch in 2017 with a more advanced laser system capable of handling up to 2.880 Gbps from geosynchronous orbit as part of a five-year demonstration.

 Source: Gizmag

Chinese cook rescued by Japan after trying to fly balloon to disputed islands

A Chinese cook who tried to fly a hot-air balloon to islands claimed by both China and Japan has been rescued by Japan's coastguard after crashing into the sea.

Xu Shuaijun, 35, crashed on Wednesday after hitting turbulence as he approached the islands, known in Japan as Senkaku and in China as Diayou, the coastguard said.The coastguard received a missing-person report from Taiwanese officials, and a coastguard helicopter spotted Xu about 20km (12 miles) from the islands, it said.
He was picked up by a boat and later handed over to a Chinese patrol ship, according to the coastguard.

Source: theguardian

Mars One reduces applicant pool for colonists to 1058

   And then there were 1,058. Mars One, the nonprofit organization that wants to send colonists on a one-way lifetime trip to Mars, announced on Monday that it has narrowed its applicant pool down from 200,000 people to just over a thousand. The applicants were notified by email and Mars One says that the next selection phase in 2014 will reduce the pool still further in the search for the first settlers to go to the Red Planet in 2025.

At first glance, the Mars One proposition seems like a 21st century take on Dr Samuel Johnson’s opinion of traveling by ship: It’s like being in a jail, with the chance of dying by explosive decompression. However, within two weeks of applications opening in April 2012, over 78,000 people applied to settle on Mars without a chance of returning to Earth. Though the applications never reached the anticipated half million mark, 200,000 did put their names in by the August 2013 cutoff.

The 1,058 remaining applicants were selected based on a criteria that included health, psychological and emotional stability, resilience, adaptability, curiosity, ability to trust, creativity, and resourcefulness. In a press release, Mars One says that those applicants who did not make the cut may reapply at a later date, which is yet to be announced.

“We’re extremely appreciative and impressed with the sheer number of people who submitted their applications.” says Mars One founder Bas Lansdorp.” However, the challenge with 200,000 applicants is separating those who we feel are physically and mentally adept to become human ambassadors on Mars from those who are obviously taking the mission much less seriously. We even had a couple of applicants submit their videos in the nude!”

According to Norbert Kraft, M.D., Chief Medical Officer of Mars One and recipient of the 2013 NASA Group Achievement Award, the next phase of selection will be more rigorous, though the details will depend on negotiations with media companies involved in the venture. “The next several selection phases in 2014 and 2015 will include rigorous simulations, many in team settings, with focus on testing the physical and emotional capabilities of our remaining candidates. We expect to begin understanding what is motivating our candidates to take this giant leap for humankind. This is where it really gets exciting for Mars One, our applicants, and the communities they’re a part of.”

In addition to the colonist selection, Mars One recently announced that it is developing a Mars lander and orbiter as the vanguard to select a settlement area and prepare it in anticipation of the first arrivals scheduled for 2025.

Source:Gizmag

WSJ: Spain, U.K. Data Highlight Continued European Rebound

Macro Horizons: Spain, U.K. Data Highlight Continued European Rebound

By relaxing its fiscal austerity drive, Spain put itself on the road to recovery. Consumption picked up, as shown by car registrations data, while unemployment has started to shrink. Deflation is still a worry, as consumer prices barely stay in positive territory in annual terms. On the other hand, spreads on Spanish debt yields continue to shrink relative to their German benchmark, with the yield of the 10-year government bond getting below 4% Thursday for the first time in more than three years.

U:K. November mortgage approvals were their strongest since the start of 2008 while December U.K. house prices clocked their biggest monthly gains since August 2009 and their biggest annual increases since the summer of 2010 during what’s normally a slow season. It seems U.K. policymakers are once again chasing property bubbles in order to sustain economic growth. It’ll be interesting to see whether the outcome is any better this time than it was in 2008. 

Source: WSJ