Ken Garen, CPA, Co-Founder and President, UBCC

Japan Dominates The World's Top Supercomputers by Tyler Durden Sun, 06/28/2020 - 23:30 Japanese supercomputer Fugaku zipped past all competitors to claim the top spot in the twice-annual ranking of the world's most powerful computational machines released by research project Top500 . You will find more infographics at Statista Statista's Katharina Buchholz reports that Fugaku, which was developed by Fujitsu in cooperation with the federal Riken research lab, was able to perform almost three times as many computations per second as former leader of the list, U.S.-based supercomputer Summit. Fugaku has not only topped the ranking in the number of computations per second - so-called TeraFLOPS - but in all four categories that supercomputers are judged on by the project. According to the Riken lab, no other computer had achieved this feat so far. Fugaku also had the most cores of all computers ranked, the highest theoretical peak performance for computations and the highes...

Mass-Tracking COVI-PASS Immunity Passports To Be Rolled Out In 15 Countries by Tyler Durden Mon, 06/29/2020 - 03:30 Authored by Raul Diego via MintPressNews.com, COVI-PASS will determine whether you can go to a restaurant, if you need a medical test, or are due for a talking-to by authorities in a post-COVID world. Consent is voluntary, but enforcement will be compulsory. Through the magic of Internet meme culture, most Millennials will be familiar with the famous opening scene of the 1942 film, “Casablanca,” where two policemen stop a civilian in the “old Moorish section” of Nazi-occupied French Morocco and ask him for his “papers.” The subject is taken away at once after failing to produce the required documents. The cinematic exchange has been used ever since as a popular reference to the ever-encroaching hand of the state, which is now on the verge of attaining a level of control over people’s movements that puts the crude Nazi methods to shame. A British cybersecurity company, ...

Meet The Man Who Just Raised $12 Million To Build Out The World's First "Robot Lawyer" by Tyler Durden Mon, 06/29/2020 - 13:50 When Josh Browder, barely a high school graduate, started coding and developing an automated program to help people contest parking tickets back in 2015, he likely had no clue how big his idea was about to get. He programmed the software to help himself out with a "respectable collection of fines" he had assembled, according to Forbes . Some weeks later, he had a program called "DoNotPay" which he shared with friends and touted online. After it became popular on Reddit, it went from having 10 users to over 50,000 users. Today, Browder has parlayed that early success into raising a $12 million Series A round at an $80 million valuation from Coatue, Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund and Felicis Ventures. He had previously raised $4.6 million in a seed round. Browder calls "DoNotPay" the "world's first rob...

China Unveils World's First Robotic And Contactless Restaurant by Tyler Durden Sat, 06/27/2020 - 23:30 We could be looking at one of the world's first-ever robotic restaurants, located in Guangdong, China. The timely opening of the contactless restaurant comes as the industry is hell-bent on reducing human-to-human contact due to virus transmission risks. The Qianxi Robot Catering Group, a subsidiary of Country Garden, recently announced in a press release that is has opened up a robot-powered restaurant in the city of Shunde in China's Guangdong province. "Powered by the latest in advanced technologies, the restaurant has separate sections for Chinese food, hot pot, and fast food and features a wide selection of dishes, each one of which is delivered to the waiting diner within seconds," the release states. The restaurant has more than 20 robots capable of preparing up to 200 menu items that can be served in as little as 20 seconds. Many of the dishes are Ch...

Facebook Tightens Controls on Speech as Ad Boycott Grows Unilever to halt ads on Facebook, Twitter for remainder of year Unilever is suspending U.S. ads on Facebook and Twitter, citing hate speech and divisive content. By  Suzanne Vranica  and  Deepa Seetharaman Updated June 26, 2020 8:44 pm ET Under mounting pressure from advertisers,  Facebook  Inc.  said it would start labeling political speech that violates its rules and take other measures to prevent voter suppression and protect minorities from abuse. The new policies  were announced Friday shortly after The Wall Street Journal reported that consumer-goods giant  Unilever  PLC is halting U.S. advertising on Facebook and  Twitter  Inc.  for at least the remainder of the year, citing hate speech and divisive content on the platforms. Unilever’s move marked a significant escalation in advertisers’ efforts to force changes by the tech companies. In a live stream ...

Accidental discovery leads to Parkinson’s disease cure in mice by Brianna Sleezer June 26, 2020 SAN DIEGO – Sometimes, scientific breakthroughs occur when researchers aren’t exactly looking for them. While attempting to better understand the function of a protein in connective tissue cells, UC San Diego School of Medicine scientists found a way to transform multiple types of cells into neurons. This discovery has led to the development of a treatment that eliminates symptoms of Parkinson’s disease in mice. The protein researchers were studying, called PTB, is known for its general role in activating or deactivating genes within a cell. In an attempt to better understand how PTB contributes to cell function, researchers silenced the PTB gene using a technique called siRNA in a type of connective tissue cell, known as a fibroblast. The researchers grew the fibroblasts in petri dishes, silenced PTB, and waited a couple of weeks to check on the fibroblasts and observe any changes. When t...

"Arthur Andersen 2.0" - Ernst & Young Could Have Uncovered Wirecard Fraud Years Ago: FT by Tyler Durden Fri, 06/26/2020 - 09:12 Now that Wirecard's nearly 15-year-long accounting fraud - the biggest corporate accounting scandal in post-war German history - has been uncovered, the negligence exercised by the company's auditors, auditors who lent the black-box digital payments firm the patina of authenticity that it needed to get listed on the DAX and dupe German regulators into investigating its enemies, must not go undisclosed. Just like Bernie Madoff, or Enron, no accounting fraud of this magnitude can continue for as long as this one did without third-parties looking the other way, or even deliberately conspiring to conceal the fraud. And the lack of transparency combined with diffusion of responsibility inside major accounting firms like Ernst & Young, which signed off on Wirecard's books for a decade, can sometimes create the perfect environment for ...

"Restaurant Of The Future" - KFC Unveils Automated Store With Robots And Food Lockers by  Tyler Durden Fri, 06/26/2020 - 22:05 Fast-food chain Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) has debuted the "restaurant of the future," one where automation dominates the storefront, and little to no interaction is seen between customers and employees, reported  NBC News .  After the chicken is fried and sides are prepped by humans, the order is placed on a conveyor belt and travels to the front of the store. A robotic arm waits for the order to arrive, then grabs it off the conveyor belt and places it into a secured food locker. KFC Moscow robotic-arm takes the order off the conveyor belt Customers use their credit/debit cards and or the facial recognition system on the food locker to retrieve their order.  KFC Moscow food locker A KFC representative told NBC News that the new store is located in Moscow and was...

Are Streamers Muzzling Controversial Documentaries? 6:15 AM PDT 6/26/2020 by Tatiana Siegel Half a dozen hot-button docs have been  pulled from platforms or dropped by digital distributors in the past year, angering filmmakers and viewers: "People do not like to be told they cannot see a film." On May 25, YouTube pulled the Michael Moore-produced environmental documentary  Planet of the Humans , a few weeks after the provocateur launched the film for free on his highly trafficked YouTube channel. The tech giant cited a copyright infringement claim made by photographer Toby Smith over a four-second clip used in the controversial doc, which takes on some of the environmental movement's most beloved figures, including Al Gore and Bill McKibben, and explores big money's influence on sustainability efforts. Smith said in an interview with  The Guardian  that he made the claim because he disagreed with the film's thesis, and YouTube acquiesced. Moore was not ple...

Samsung just patented a new smartphone design, and I’m ready to buy it right now By  Andy Meek   @aemeek June 16th, 2020 at 5:01 PM A patent filing has been published that purports to show a new Samsung phone with a much-improved camera setup. The idea shown in this patent is to bring a six-camera array (including five wide-angle lenses and a zoom camera) possibly to a new Samsung Galaxy phone. The patent documentation was published late last week. It’s always fascinating to watch how Samsung continues to push its camera technology forward in new releases of its Galaxy smartphones, as it continues to do with each generation. For example, the South Korea-based tech giant is getting closer to the  holy grail of smartphone design  — the placement of a camera underneath a phone display to eliminate the need for a notch or a hole-punch selfie camera. Also on the camera front, meanwhile, the company has just patented a design for a...

Hedge Fund Generates 34% Return Using Just AI And Machine-Learning by  Tyler Durden Wed, 06/24/2020 - 14:10 Ever since the advent of active asset management, Wall Street has had two holy grails: finding a consistent source of Alpha (which these days simply means frontrunning the Fed), and finding a replacement to the most expensive cost-center in the asset management industry: analysts. And while many have tried and failed to replace (highly paid) humans, an obscure German hedge fund is appears to have struck gold after generating a 34% gain in 2020 using a machine-learning program targeting need-for-speed markets. While many quants have struggled to exploit the promise of AI over the years, Quantumrock’s $50 million Volatility Special Opportunities Programme has just drawn an additional $500 million of institutional cash - after averaging an impressive 16% annual return since its 2016 inception. And, as Bloomberg reports, with senior personnel hailing from the tech indust...