At this week’s three-day Energy Innovation Summit, organized annually by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA-e for short, experts, entrepreneurs, investors and government officials shared ideas, research results and experiences about challenges facing the generation, transformation, distribution and storage of all forms of energy. VOA’s George Putic gives an overview.
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Month: March 2018
Facebook Inc. on Friday said it was suspending political data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica, which worked for President Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign, after finding data privacy policies had been violated.
Facebook said in a statement that it suspended Cambridge Analytica and its parent group Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL) after receiving reports that they did not delete information about Facebook users that had been inappropriately shared.
Cambridge Analytica was not immediately available for comment. Facebook did not mention the Trump campaign or any political campaigns in its statement, attributed to company Deputy General Counsel Paul Grewal.
“We will take legal action if necessary to hold them responsible and accountable for any unlawful behavior,” Facebook said, adding that it was continuing to investigate the claims.
Cruz, Trump campaigns
Cambridge Analytica worked for the failed presidential campaign of U.S. Senator Ted Cruz and then for the presidential campaign of Donald Trump. On its website, it says it “provided the Donald J. Trump for President campaign with the expertise and insights that helped win the White House.”
Brad Parscale, who ran Trump’s digital ad operation in 2016 and is his 2020 campaign manager, declined to comment Friday.
In past interviews with Reuters, Parscale has said that Cambridge Analytica played a minor role as a contractor in the 2016 Trump campaign, and that the campaign used voter data from a Republican-affiliated organization rather than Cambridge Analytica.
Facebook’s Grewal said the company was taking the unusual step of announcing the suspension “given the public prominence” of Cambridge Analytica and its parent organization.
No ads, administering pages
The suspension means Cambridge Analytica and SCL cannot buy ads on the world’s largest social media network or administer pages belonging to clients, Andrew Bosworth, a Facebook vice president, said in a Twitter post.
Trump’s campaign hired Cambridge Analytica in June 2016 and paid it more than $6.2 million, according to Federal Election Commission records.
Cambridge Analytica says it uses “behavioral microtargeting,” or combining analysis of people’s personalities with demographics, to predict and influence mass behavior. It says it has data on 220 million Americans, two-thirds of the U.S. population.
It has worked on other campaigns in the United States and other countries, and it is funded by Robert Mercer, a prominent supporter of politically conservative groups. Facebook in its statement described a rocky relationship with Cambridge Analytica and two individuals going back to 2015.
Professor’s app
That year, Facebook said, it learned that University of Cambridge professor Aleksandr Kogan lied to the company and violated its policies by sharing data that he acquired with a so-called “research app” that used Facebook’s login system.
Kogan was not immediately available for comment.
The app was downloaded by about 270,000 people. Facebook said that Kogan gained access to profile and other information “in a legitimate way” but “he did not subsequently abide by our rules” when he passed the data to SCL/Cambridge Analytica and Christopher Wylie of Eunoia Technologies.
Eunoia did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Facebook said it cut ties to Kogan’s app when it learned of the violation in 2015, and asked for certification from Kogan and all parties he had given data to that the information had been destroyed.
Although all certified that they had destroyed the data, Facebook said that it received reports in the past several days that “not all data was deleted,” prompting the suspension announced Friday.
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Fingerprints can unlock doors, phones and more, but are consumers ready to pay with them? Visa thinks so. More companies are exploring biometrics, the analysis of unique biological traits to verify identity, but how secure is the technology? Tina Trinh reports from New York
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A one-page job application filled out by Steve Jobs more than four decades ago that reflected the Apple founder’s technology aspirations sold for $174,000 at a U.S. auction, more than three times its presale estimate.
An Internet entrepreneur from England was the winning bidder, Boston-based auction house RR Auction said on Friday, but the buyer wished to remain anonymous.
The application dated 1973, complete with spelling and punctuation errors, had been expected to fetch about $50,000.
The sale price reached on Thursday was $174,757, the auction house said.
The form lists his name as “Steven jobs” and address as “reed college,” the Portland, Oregon, college he attended briefly. Next to “Phone:” he wrote “none.”
Under a section titled “Special Abilities,” Jobs wrote “tech or design engineer. digital.—f rom Bay near Hewitt-Packard,” a reference to pioneering California technology company Hewlett-Packard and the San Francisco Bay area.
The document does not state what position or company the application was intended for. Jobs and friend Steve Wozniak founded Apple about three years later.
RR Auction said the high price reflected the continuing influence of Jobs, who died of cancer in 2011 at the age of 56.
“There are many collectors who have earned disposable income over the last few decades using Apple technology, and we expect similarly strong results on related material in the future,”
Bobby Livingston, executive vice president at RR Auction, said in a statement.
Other highlights from the online auction included an Apple Mac OS X technical manual signed by Jobs in 2001 that sold for $41,806 and a rare signed newspaper clipping from 2008 featuring an image of Jobs speaking at the Apple Developers Conference that sold for $26,950.
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Capturing snowflakes isn’t as easy as sticking out your tongue.
At least not when you’re trying to capture them for scientific study, which involves isolating the tiniest of crystals on a metal card printed with grid lines and quickly placing them under a microscope to be photographed.
“They are very tiny and they are close to the melting point,” Marco Tedesco of Columbia University said as he set up his microscope beside a snowy field. “So as soon as they fall, they will melt.”
Tedesco recently led a team of three researchers who trudged through the snowy hills of New York’s Catskill Mountains with cameras, brushes, shovels, a drone and a spectrometer to collect the most fine-grained details about freshly fallen snowflakes and how they evolve once they settle to the ground.
That data could be used to provide clues to the changing climate and validate the satellite models used for weather predictions. It also could provide additional information on the snow that falls into New York’s City’s upstate watershed, flows into reservoirs and fills the faucets of some 9 million people.
“We’re talking about sub-millimeter objects,” Tedesco said as he stood in shin-deep snow. “Once they get together, they have the power, really, to shape our planet.”
This is the pilot stage of the “X-Snow” project, which organizers hope will involve dozens of volunteers collecting snowflake samples next winter. The specimens Tedesco spied under his microscope on a recent snowy day displayed more rounded edges and irregularities than the classic crystalline forms. This is characteristic of flakes formed up high in warmer air.
Pictures and video from the drone will be used to create a three-dimensional model of the snow’s surface. Postdoctoral researcher Patrick Alexander trudged though the snow with a wand attached to a backpack spectrometer that measured how much sunlight the snow on the ground is reflecting — a factor determining how fast it will melt. Later, Alexander got down on his belly in the field to take infrared pictures of the snow’s layers and its grain size.
“There are a lot of things that happen that we can’t see with our eyes,” said Tedesco, a snow and ice scientist at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “When snow melts and re-freezes, the grains get bigger. And as the grains get bigger the snow absorbs more solar radiation.”
Tedesco grew up in southern Italy near Naples and never even saw snow until he was 6 years old. But as a scientist, he has logged time studying ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica and has studied snow hydrology in the Rockies and the Dolomites. He said snow in the Eastern U.S. has its own character. It tends to be moister than the powdery snow that falls in higher elevation in the West.
Tedesco hopes that a cadre of committed volunteers in the Catskills and the New York City area can take snowflake and snow depth samples next winter. Volunteers won’t need an expensive backpack spectrometer, but he recommends a $17 magnifying lens that clips onto their phone, a ruler, a GPS application and a print-out version of the postcard-sized metal card Tedesco uses to examine fresh snowflakes.
Enlisting volunteers to take snowflake photos is novel and potentially useful, said Noah Molotch, director of The Center for Water, Earth Science and Technology at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Molotch, who is not involved in the project, said the pictures will give information about atmospheric conditions and could be useful in the study of climate change.
“Snowflakes are among the most beautiful things in nature,” he said. “And the more we can do to document that and get people interested and excited about that, I think is great.”
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Imagine building a stronger, cheaper home in as little as 12 hours. That goal now appears feasible with the help of a 3-D printer. A 3-D-printed home was unveiled in Austin, Texas, during the South by Southwest (SXSW) technology conference and music festival this week.
“So I’m standing in front of the first permanent 3-D-printed home in America,” said Jason Ballard, co-founder of Austin-based ICON, a construction company that uses robotics, software and advanced materials to build houses.
The two-bedroom prototype contains space that can be used as a living/dining area, as well as three rooms that can be converted into bedrooms, a study or a bathroom, depending on where the home is located and the resources available. The homes will be anywhere from 56 square meters to 74 square meters in size.
At 35 square meters, the prototype home was successfully printed in a neighborhood near downtown Austin during a rainstorm, as strong winds kicked up dust in the area, according to Ballard.
3-D-printed homes for the poor
The goal is to print homes in developing countries during extreme weather conditions and amid the unpredictability of having electricity and water.
“We work with really the poorest families in the world that don’t have shelters,” said Brett Hagler, founder and chief executive officer with the nonprofit organization New Story. It aims to bring 3-D-printed homes first to Latin America and then expand to other developing countries. Hagler notes that using innovation and new technology will change how homes are manufactured to meet the need for housing around the world.
“The magnitude of the problem that we face is so big, it’s about a billion people that don’t have one of life’s most basic human needs, and that’s safe shelter,” he said.
“What we really need for the size of the issue is exponential growth,” he added, “and that has to come through significantly decreasing cost, increasing speed while doing that without sacrificing quality.”
ICON says the 3-D printer is 4.5-meters tall, 9 meters wide and made of lightweight aluminum. ICON created the device, software and unique mortar material it describes as “proprietary small-aggregate cementitious material” used to print the house. The 3-D printer is transportable because homes are printed on site. Ballard said he can imagine having many 3-D printers scattered around the world making homes.
“It’s actually a lot more simple to build a printer than it is to build a house,” Ballard said.
Faster and cheaper
“We ran this printer at about a quarter speed to print this house, and we were able to complete the house in less than 48 hours of print time,” Ballard said.
At full speed it could be as little as 12 hours to print a house. Building a traditional New Story home would take 15 days.
“Instead of it taking about a year to build a community, we could do it in just a few months,” Hagler said.
A 3-D-printed home is also less expensive.
“Traditional style on a New Story home is about $6,500 per home. We believe over time, we can get the new home below $4,000,” Hagler said.
Ballard said the material used to print the home is another highlight to this innovative way of building the property.
“We believe the comfort and the energy dynamics of this building are actually going to be once again better than conventional buildings. These houses should be more comfortable and they should require less energy to stay comfortable.”
Ballard said that a 3-D-printed house, “is a complete paradigm shift that has unbelievable advantages in speed, affordability, resiliency, sustainability, waste reduction, you name it. This isn’t just a slight improvement. This is a revolutionary improvement that I think is going to be quite disruptive in the industry.”
This new building technology will be brought to the world’s poorest and underserved first. New Story is working with local nonprofits, governments and families to help fund these homes. The nonprofit plans to start printing homes in El Salvador this year.
The goal is to create permanent 3-D-printed homes and communities in developing countries and beyond that will last for generations.
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Imagine building a stronger, cheaper home in as little as 12 hours. That is now possible with the help of a 3-D printer. A 3-D-printed home was unveiled in Austin, Texas, during the South by Southwest (SXSW) technology conference and music festival. VOA’s Elizabeth Lee explains how this new technology could change the lives of families throughout the developing world.
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South by Southwest is a pop-up marketplace of ideas. Held in Austin, Texas, it combines music and film festivals with a tech conference. Its nine days of events draw people from around the world, including Africa, as Tigist Geme of VOA’s Horn of Africa Service reports.
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Cigarette smoking kills nearly a half-million Americans every year and costs the U.S. economy $300 billion in health care and lost productivity, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
To help smokers kick the deadly habit and stop kids from starting, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration proposed rules Thursday to cut the nicotine in cigarettes to minimal or nonaddictive levels.
“This milestone places us squarely on the road toward achieving one of the biggest public health victories in modern history and saving millions of lives in the process,” FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said Thursday.
He said the FDA has a “vision of a world where combustible cigarettes would no longer create or sustain addiction.”
Legal authority
The FDA has the legal authority to regulate nicotine levels in cigarettes, but has always been met by court challenges from tobacco companies.
Nicotine naturally occurs in tobacco. It is not deadly but is a highly addictive drug that helps make cigarettes so pleasurable to smokers.
It is the burning tobacco leaf and the numerous additives used in cigarettes that lead to lung cancer, emphysema, and other deadly diseases and cancers.
Secondhand smoke from cigarettes is also harmful to children and potentially lethal to adults.
Public comment
Gottlieb says the FDA is giving the public time to comment on the proposed mandated cuts in nicotine. He says it will help regulators answer such questions as what an acceptable level of nicotine is, whether the cuts should be introduced gradually or immediately, whether weaker cigarettes will bring on a black market for stronger smokes, and whether smokers will smoke more to compensate for the lower levels of the drug.
The New England Journal of Medicine reports that if the FDA cuts the nicotine to what it regards as a nonaddictive level, 5 million smokers would quit within one year. The Journal says by the turn of the century, the number of American adults who smoke cigarettes would plummet from the current 15 percent to a minuscule 1.4 percent, saving 8 million lives.
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A former midlevel employee of German industrial giant Siemens pleaded guilty Thursday of conspiring to pay tens of millions of dollars to Argentine officials to win a $1 billion contract to create national ID cards.
Eberhard Reichart, 78, who worked for Siemens from 1964 to 2001, appeared in federal court in New York to plead guilty to one count of conspiring to violate the anti-bribery Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and to commit wire fraud.
Reichart was arraigned last December in a three-count indictment filed in December 2011 charging him and seven other Siemens executives and agents with participating in the decadelong scheme, the Justice Department said Thursday.
The men were accused of conspiring to pay more than $100 million in bribes to high-level Argentine officials to win the contract in 1998.
As part of his guilty plea, Reichart admitted in court that he engaged in the bribery conspiracy and that he and his co-conspirators used shell companies to conceal the illicit payments to Argentine officials.
The Argentine government terminated the contract in 2001, but the Siemens executives “sought to recover the profits they would have reaped” through an illicitly obtained contract, said Preet Bharara, former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, in 2011.
“Far too often, companies pay bribes as part of their business plan, upsetting what should be a level playing field and harming companies that play by the rules,” acting Assistant Attorney General John Cronan said Thursday.
In 2008, Siemens pleaded guilty of violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in connection with the Argentine bribery scheme, agreeing to pay the Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission $800 million in criminal and civil penalties.
The company paid the German government another $800 million to settle similar charges brought by the Munich Public Prosecutor’s Office.
The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act bars U.S. companies and foreign firms with a presence in the U.S. from paying bribes to foreign officials.
Last year, 11 companies paid just over $1.92 billion to resolve charges brought under the anti-bribery law, according to data compiled by the FCPA Blog.
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White House trade adviser Peter Navarro said Thursday that President Donald Trump would soon consider new punitive measures against China for its alleged “theft” of intellectual property.
U.S. officials, according to news accounts, are considering imposing as much as $60 billion in annual tariffs against Chinese information technology, telecommunications and consumer exports to the U.S. in an effort to trim its chronic annual trade deficit with Beijing by $100 billion. Last year, the U.S. says it imported Chinese goods worth $375 billion more than it exported to China.
“In the coming weeks, President Trump is going to have on his desk some recommendations,” Navarro told CNBC. “This will be one of the many steps the president is going to courageously take in order to address unfair trade practices.
“I don’t think there’s a single person … on Wall Street that will oppose cracking down on China’s theft of our intellectual property or their forced transfer,” Navarro said.
The new tariffs and other measures would be in addition to the 25 percent tariff on steel imports to the U.S. and 10 percent levy on aluminum that Trump announced last week, some of which affect China.
At a political fundraiser Wednesday, Trump attacked several trading partners for the billions of dollars in trade surpluses they have built up against the U.S. He contended that China had become an economic power — the world’s second biggest economy — because of its trade surplus with the United States.
China warned it would likely retaliate against any new tariffs the U.S. imposes.
Foreign minister spokesman Lu Kang said, “History has proven that a trade war is in no one’s interest.”
He said that “if an undesirable situation arises, China has the intention of safeguarding its legitimate rights.”
Trump’s new tariffs on metal imports have led in recent days to volatility on U.S. stock exchanges, with wide day-to-day swings of hundreds of points in stock indexes.
But Navarro said the U.S. can impose the tariffs in a way that can be good for the American people and good for the global trading system. We can do this in a way that is peaceful and will improve and strengthen the trading system. … Everybody on Wall Street needs to understand: Just relax.”
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Tossing swimmers and boaters a lifeline when they get into trouble on the water takes on a new meaning when that lifeline is attached to a robot. Faith Lapidus explains.
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HSBC will reveal a gender pay gap of 59 percent at its main U.K. banking operation, the biggest yet disclosed by a British bank, according to a copy of the lender’s report on the subject seen by Reuters on Thursday ahead of its publication.
The bank will also disclose a mean gender bonus gap of 86 percent at HSBC Bank Plc, which is the biggest of the lender’s seven entities in Britain and employs 23,507 people.
A spokeswoman for the bank confirmed the contents of the report.
The gender pay gap is the biggest yet reported by a British financial firm, according to government data, with some firms yet to provide figures ahead of an April deadline set by Prime Minister Theresa May last year.
Almost 50 years since the passage of Britain’s equal pay act, the continued gulf in earnings between men and women has attracted significant public attention over the past year or so.
In common with other banks, HSBC said its pay gap was largely accounted for by the bank having fewer women in senior roles.
The gender pay gap measures the difference between the average salary of men and women, calculated on an hourly basis.
HSBC said women held only 23 percent of senior leadership positions in its workforce in Britain, despite accounting for more than half of total staff.
The bank said it was taking a number of steps to reduce the pay gap, including committing to an aspirational target of women holding 30 percent of senior roles by 2020.
Last month, Asia-focused Standard Chartered reported a gap of 30 percent in Britain, while Virgin Money — the only major UK lender run by a woman — said its female staff earned on average 32.5 percent less per hour than its male workforce.
Lloyds Banking Group and Royal Bank of Scotland reported gender pay gaps of 32.8 percent and 37 percent respectively.
Barclays said last month it paid women in its international division, which houses its investment bank, on average 48 percent of what men earned in fixed pay.
The pay gaps have drawn criticism from lawmakers and are likely to spur questions from investors in the upcoming season for shareholder meetings, with stock prices and future earnings potential strongly linked to banks’ efforts to revive their reputations in the wake of the global financial crisis.
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Germany said on Thursday that any escalation of U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs on metal imports into a full-blown trade war could cause tangible damage to the global recovery, although the tariffs themselves should have only a limited effect.
Trump last week ordered the imposition of duties on incoming steel and aluminum and threatened to levy a tax on European cars if the European Union did not remove “horrific” tariffs and trade barriers on a range of goods.
“The German economic upswing is continuing at the beginning of 2018. The global economic environment is still favorable,” the Economy Ministry said in its monthly report. But it said U.S. trade policies were creating a sense of uncertainty.
The tariffs on steel and aluminum will affect trade flows in some regions, but their overall implications for the global economy are likely to be manageable, it said.
“But a possible escalation into a trade war and rising uncertainty among market participants could cause tangible damage,” it added.
European Council President Donald Tusk on Wednesday urged the United States to revive trade talks rather than escalate a dispute over tariffs on metals and cars.
And Swiss National Bank Chairman Thomas Jordan said on Thursday that U.S. protectionism could be a threat to the export-dependent Swiss economy and trigger safe-haven flows that would drive up the value of the Swiss currency.
‘At a crossroads’
Germany’s new economy minister, Peter Altmaier, said Trump was challenging the multilateral trade system as defined by the rules of the World Trade Organization (WTO).
“We are at a very important crossroads,” Altmaier said, warning of a scenario in which countries could start a spiral of tit-for-tat trade restrictions.
“This is a really huge challenge with implications for all of us,” Altmaier added. He said consumers in all countries would end up footing the bill because tariffs would push up prices for many kinds of products.
The threat of a full-blown trade war will also be on the agenda of the G-20 meeting in Argentina, where finance ministers and central bank governors from the world’s 20 biggest economies meet from March 17 to 20.
Germany’s new finance minister, Olaf Scholz, will meet his U.S. counterpart Steven Mnuchin on Sunday or Monday on the sidelines of the meeting to discuss trade, banking regulation and other issues, senior German officials said on Thursday.
“The minister will have bilateral meetings with all G-7 counterparts,” one of the officials said, on condition of anonymity, adding that multilateral trade would “certainly be a big topic” at the G-20 meeting.
The taxation of profits from digital business and regulation of crypto currencies will also be in focus, the official added.
Major U.S. airlines are hiring pilots at a rate not seen since before 9/11, and that is encouraging more young people to consider a career in the cockpit.
Hiring is likely to remain brisk for years. Smaller airlines in the U.S. are struggling with a shortage that will continue as they lose pilots to the bigger carriers, which in turn will need to replace thousands of retiring pilots over the next few years.
Aircraft maker Boeing predicts that the U.S. will need 117,000 new pilots by 2036. Just a decade ago thousands of pilots were furloughed and some abandoned the profession.
The shortage has been felt most keenly at regional carriers where many pilots start their airline careers.
Last summer, Alaska Airlines subsidiary Horizon Air canceled more than 300 flights over two months for lack of pilots. Republic Airways filed for bankruptcy protection in 2016, citing a pilot shortage that forced it to ground flights.
Many regional carriers fly smaller planes for American Eagle, Delta Connection and United Express. Signing bonuses and higher pay have helped them hire more than 17,000 pilots in the past four years, but that only replaced those who moved up to the major carriers, according to the Regional Airline Association.
Demand at the major airlines is expected to grow as thousands of pilots at American, Delta, United and Southwest hit the U.S. mandatory pilot-retirement age of 65 in the next several years.
American Airlines CEO Doug Parker believes the industry will cope.
“Economics is going to take care of this, and I think that’s what is happening now,” Parker says. “The [flight] schools are starting to fill up with people who realize, ‘If I can get myself to 1,500 hours [the minimum flight hours needed to get an airline-pilot license], I can be assured of a career as a pilot.’ That’s not something people could convince themselves of from 9/11 on until now.”
Pilot hiring nosedived after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks that led to a decline in travel, and again during the global financial crisis in 2008-2009. Major U.S. airlines hired only 30 pilots in 2009, according to Future & Active Pilot Advisors, a career-counseling business for pilots.
The job market didn’t pick up significantly until around 2014. Last year 10 of the largest U.S. passenger and cargo airlines hired 4,988 pilots, the most since 2000 when they hired 5,105.
“It’s the best sellers’ market I have seen in the last 45 years of monitoring airline pilot hiring,” says Louis Smith, a retired airline pilot who runs the pilot-counseling outfit.
Smith says forums for aspiring pilots that once drew a couple dozen people now sometimes attract more than 150. Some hope to make a mid-career change, which was rare just a few years ago.
Aaron Ludomirski is one of those career-changers. The 31-year-old from Asbury Park, New Jersey, says he always wanted to be a pilot but studied business instead because the bleak job opportunities for pilots in the years after 9/11 didn’t justify the cost of school and flight training. After college he started an online marketing business.
“Year after year I found myself less and less satisfied with my work,” he says. “I started thinking about what kind of career would really lead me to feeling fulfilled and accomplished, and I kept coming back to aviation.”
Ludomirski did some fresh research and learned that pilots were back in demand — and more would be retiring in the next few years. He quit his job and went to flight school. Now he is working as a flight instructor to gain the required flying time for an airline pilot.
“I can interview for and even accept a conditional letter of employment and know I have my dream job lined up for me when I’m ready,” he says.
Applications for commercial aviation majors at the University of North Dakota, a big aeronautical school, have more than doubled in the last three years, says Elizabeth Bjerke, an aviation professor and one of the authors of the university’s widely watched forecast on pilot supply.
Some students graduate early to take advantage of the job market and the chance to move up the seniority list quickly because so many older pilots are retiring.
“Our graduates will fly at the regionals for a very short period,” Bjerke said. “They are getting picked up by the major carriers in their mid-20s, which would have been just crazy to think of 15 or 20 years ago.”
Michael Wiggins, chairman of the aeronautical science department at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, says his school’s graduates are getting multiple job offers from regional airlines.
Pilots who become captains on jumbo jets that fly international routes can earn more than $300,000 a year. But for anyone starting out in the profession, the training is expensive — upward of $100,000.
A few years ago, those who made it faced starting pay for first officers or co-pilots at regional airlines in the low-$20,000s. With bonuses and higher hourly rates, some regionals now claim to offer starting pay of $80,000 or more, but even that might not be enough to meet future demand.
The Regional Airline Association is pushing to change a 2013 federal rule that requires 1,500 hours of flying time — usually in small, single-engine planes — by replacing some of it with supervised classroom instruction. The group’s president, Faye Malarkey Black, says supervised training would produce aviators with skills more relevant to piloting an airliner.
But a similar proposal appears stalled in Congress, partly due to opposition from families of the 50 people who died in the last deadly crash of a U.S. airliner, a Colgan Air plane in 2009. Black believes the Trump administration has the authority to change the minimum flight hours without waiting for Congress to act, but she admits that will be difficult “as long as those changes are successfully cast as rolling back safety.”
JetBlue Airways is beginning a small-scale program of training people with no flying experience — an approach used by Lufthansa and other international airlines. The JetBlue program costs about $125,000, however, the airline says it is looking into providing financial assistance.
Even with assistance, however, life for newcomers can be taxing. In addition to flying smaller planes for lower wages, they work on holidays and spend lots of time away from home.
Starting pilots need “a passion for flying that drives the thrill of going to work,” says Smith, the career adviser. “It’s certainly not for everyone.”
Amazon.com Inc.’s top television shows drew more than 5 million people worldwide to its Prime shopping club by early 2017, according to company documents, revealing for the first time how the retailer’s bet on original video is paying off.
The documents also show that Amazon’s U.S. audience for all video programming on Prime, including films and TV shows it licenses from other companies, was about 26 million customers.
Amazon has never released figures for its total audience.
The internal documents compare metrics that have never been reported for 19 shows exclusive to Amazon: their cost, their viewership and the number of people they helped lure to Prime.
Known as Prime Originals, the shows account for as much as a quarter of what analysts estimate to be total Prime sign-ups from late 2014 to early 2017, the period covered by the documents.
Viewers to shoppers
Core to Amazon’s strategy is the use of video to convert viewers into shoppers. Fans access Amazon’s lineup by joining Prime, a club that includes two-day package delivery and other perks, for an annual fee.
The company declined to comment on the documents seen by Reuters. But Chief Executive Jeff Bezos has been upfront about the company’s use of entertainment to drive merchandise sales.
The world’s biggest online retailer launched Amazon Studios in 2010 to develop original programs that have since grabbed awards and Hollywood buzz.
“When we win a Golden Globe, it helps us sell more shoes,” Bezos said at a 2016 technology conference near Los Angeles. He said film and TV customers renew their subscriptions “at higher rates, and they convert from free trials at higher rates” than members who do not stream videos on Prime.
$5 billion in video
Video has grown to be one of Amazon’s biggest expenditures at $5 billion per year for original and licensed content, two people familiar with the matter said. The company has never disclosed how many subscribers it won as a result, making it hard for investors to evaluate its programming decisions.
The internal documents show what Amazon considers to be the financial logic of its strategy, and why the company is now making more commercial projects in addition to shows aimed at winning awards, the people said.
For example, the first season of the popular drama The Man in the High Castle, an alternate history depicting Germany as the victor of World War II, had 8 million U.S. viewers as of early 2017, according to the documents. The program cost $72 million in production and marketing and attracted 1.15 million new subscribers worldwide based on Amazon’s accounting, the documents showed.
Amazon calculated that the show drew new Prime members at an average cost of $63 per subscriber.
That is far less than the $99 that subscribers pay in the United States for Prime; the company charges similar fees abroad. Prime members also buy more goods from Amazon than non-members, Bezos has said, further boosting profit.
Amazon’s secret math
Precisely how Amazon determines a customer’s motivation for joining its Prime club is not clear from the documents viewed by Reuters.
But a person familiar with its strategy said the company credits a specific show for luring someone to start or extend a Prime subscription if that program is the first one a customer streams after signing up. That metric, referenced throughout the documents, is known as a “first stream.”
The company then calculates how expensive the viewer was to acquire by dividing the show’s costs by the number of first streams it had. The lower that figure, the better.
The internal documents do not show how long subscribers stayed with Prime, nor do they indicate how much shopping they do on Amazon. The company reviews other metrics for its programs as well. Consequently, the documents do not provide enough information to determine the overall profitability of Amazon’s Hollywood endeavor.
Still, the numbers indicate that broad-interest shows can lure Prime members cheaply by Amazon’s calculations. One big winner was the motoring series The Grand Tour, which stars the former presenters of BBC’s Top Gear. The show had more than 1.5 million first streams from Prime members worldwide, at a cost of $49 per subscriber in its first season.
The documents seen by Reuters reflect Prime subscribers in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Austria and Japan, where Amazon’s programs were available before Prime Video rolled out globally in December 2016.
Analysts estimate that 75 million or more customers have Prime subscriptions worldwide, including about half of all households in the United States.
Bigger bets
About 26 million U.S. Prime members watched television and movies on Amazon as of early 2017. Reuters calculated this number from the documents, which showed how many viewers a TV series had as a percentage of total Prime Video customers.
Rival Netflix Inc had twice that many U.S. subscribers in the first quarter of last year. It does not disclose how many were active viewers.
For years, Amazon Studios aimed to win credibility in Hollywood with sophisticated shows beloved by critics. Its marquee series Transparent, about a transgender father and his family, won eight Primetime Emmy Awards and created the buzz Amazon wanted to attract top producers and actors.
Yet Transparent lagged Amazon’s top shows in viewership.
Its first season drew a U.S. audience half as large as that of The Man in the High Castle, and it fell to 1.3 million viewers for its third season, according to the documents.
Similarly, Good Girls Revolt, a critically acclaimed show about gender inequality in a New York newsroom, had total U.S. viewership of 1.6 million but cost $81 million, with only 52,000 first streams worldwide by Prime members.
The program’s cost per new customer was about $1,560, according to the documents. Amazon canceled it after one season.
Amazon is now working on more commercial dramas and spin-offs with appeal outside the United States, where Prime membership has far more room to grow, people familiar with the matter said.
The effort to broaden Amazon’s lineup, long in the works, will be in the hands of Jennifer Salke, NBC Entertainment’s president whom Amazon hired last month as its studio chief.
Amazon’s Bezos has wanted a drama to rival HBO’s global hit Game of Thrones, according to the people.
In November, Amazon announced it will make a prequel to the fantasy hit The Lord of the Rings. The company had offered $250 million for the rights alone; production and marketing could raise costs to $500 million or more for two seasons, one of the people said.
At half a billion dollars, the prequel would cost triple what Amazon paid for The Man in the High Castle seasons one and two, the documents show. That means it would need to draw three times the number of Prime members as The Man in the High Castle for an equal payoff.
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With the number of endangered Puget Sound orcas at a 30-year low, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee on Wednesday signed an executive order directing state agencies to take immediate and longer-term steps to protect the struggling whales.
The fish-eating mammals, also known as killer whales, that spend time in Puget Sound have struggled for years because of lack of food, pollution, noise and disturbances from vessel traffic. There are now just 76, down from 98 in 1995.
Inslee said the orcas are in trouble and called on everyone in the state to do their part. His directive aims to make more salmon available to the whales, give them more space and quieter waters, make sure they have clean water to swim in and protect them from potential oil spills.
“The destiny of salmon and orca and we humans are intertwined,” the governor said at a news conference at the Daybreak Star Cultural Center in Seattle. “As the orca go, so go we.”
An orca task force forming now will meet for the first time next month and will come up with a final report with recommendations by November.
“This is a wake-up call,” said Suquamish Tribal Chairman Leonard Forsman, adding: “It’s going to take some pain. We’re going to have to make some sacrifices.”
Many people have been sounding the alarm about the plight of the closely tracked southern resident killer whales for years. The federal government listed the orcas as endangered in 2005, and more recently identified them as among the most at risk of extinction in the near future.
A baby orca has not been born in the past few years. Half of the calves born during a celebrated baby boom several years ago have died. Female orcas are also having pregnancy problems linked to nutritional stress brought on by a low supply of chinook salmon, the whales’ preferred food, a recent study found.
“We are not too late,” said Barry Thom, west coast regional administrator for NOAA Fisheries. “From a biology perspective, there are still enough breeding animals, but we need to act soon.”
Whale advocates welcomed the statewide initiative, saying it creates urgency and calls attention to the issue. But some also said it was long overdue.
“I think that everybody would have loved to have seen this five years ago,” said Joe Gaydos, science director for the SeaDoc Society. “It is a crisis. The fact that we’re responding is good.”
Under the order, state agencies will find ways to quiet state ferries around the whales, train more commercial whale-watching boats to help respond to oil spills and adjust fishing regulations to protect key areas and fish runs for orcas.
Orcas use clicks, calls and other sounds to navigate, communicate and forage mainly for salmon. Noise from vessels can interfere with that.
The Legislature passed a supplemental budget Friday that includes $1.5 million for efforts such as increased marine patrols to see that boats keep their distance from the orcas and to boost hatchery production of salmon that the orcas prefer to eat by an additional five million.
Last year, the endangered orcas spent the fewest number of days in the central Salish Sea in four decades, mostly because there wasn’t enough salmon to eat, according to the Center for Whale Research, which keeps the whale census for the federal government.
“I applaud anything that helps (the orcas) through the short term, but the long term is what we really have to look at – and that’s the restoration of wild salmon stocks throughout Washington state,” Ken Balcomb, senior scientist with the Center for Whale Research, said Tuesday.
Balcomb and others say aggressive measures are needed and they have called for the removal of four dams on the Lower Snake River to restore those salmon runs.
J.T. Austin, the governor’s senior policy adviser on natural resources issues, said Inslee thus far does not support removing those dams.
The U.S. Senate voted 67 to 31 Wednesday to ease bank rules, bringing Congress a step closer to passing the first rewrite of the Dodd-Frank reform law enacted after the 2007-2009 global financial crisis.
The draft legislation now heads to the U.S. House of Representatives where Republicans in the majority say they want to add more provisions to ease financial regulations. Those changes have some of the bill’s backers worried that late alterations could upend the deal struck in the Senate between Republicans and Democrats.
The bill would ease tight restrictions on small banks and community lenders, and includes provisions beneficial to all but the largest U.S. banks.
The measure marks the first significant rewrite of financial rules since the passage of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law. The White House said in a statement that President Donald Trump would sign the bill into law if approved by the House.
GOP: Dodd-Frank too much
Republican critics say Dodd-Frank went too far and curbs banks ability to lend, while many Democrats say it provides critical protections for consumers and taxpayers.
The bill would raise the threshold at which banks are considered systemically risky and subject to stricter oversight from $50 billion to $250 billion. It also exempts banks with less than $10 billion in assets from rules banning proprietary trading, as well as exempts smaller banks from several other post-crisis rules.
The bill would allow custody banks such as BNY Mellon and State Street Corp to exempt the customer deposits they place with central banks from a stringent capital calculation requirement.
In House, 30 bills
In the House, conservative Republicans say they want to expand the bill to include additional regulatory relief, identifying roughly 30 bills they have passed for inclusion. But that insistence has some of the bill’s supporters concerned it could disrupt the bipartisan support it needs to become law.
“To expect that the House would have a desire to have some fingerprints on this final product is more than reasonable,” said Representative Bill Huizenga, a Michigan Republican, who wants additions to the bill.
Any changes made in the House would again have to pass the Senate, and Republican additions could drive away Senate Democrats whose support is needed for passage.
“There’s no guarantee that a modified bill would be able to pass the Senate,” said Paul Merski, executive vice president with the Independent Community Bankers of America, which supports the Senate bill. “That’s a real danger.”
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A large-scale United Nations program to halt deforestation in the Democratic Republic of Congo, home to the world’s second-largest rainforest, is harming local communities and failing to protect forests, land rights researchers said on Wednesday.
The U.S.-based group Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) called on the World Bank to withhold funding from 20 current or pending projects in the province of Mai-Ndombe, which has been a test case for a U.N.-backed conservation scheme known as REDD+.
In an area rife with land conflict, an RRI report said the forest protection projects in this western province threatened the rights and incomes of rural women and indigenous groups, including about 73,000 pygmies.
“REDD+ was created to both halt deforestation and benefit local communities — yet the current projects in Mai-Ndombe fail to address both objectives,” said Marine Gauthier, the report’s author.
A spokesman for the U.N.’s REDD+ program did not respond to requests for comment.
One of the focal cases involves U.S. company Wildlife Works Carbon (WWC), which denied the accusations.
The company obtained a large land concession in order to protect a forest from loggers, and uses a share of the money earned from selling carbon credits to benefit people living there, said president Mike Korchinsky.
“Millions of dollars of benefits have gone to the communities,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. He said WWC had built schools, invested in medical clinics, and provided years of agricultural support.
But Gauthier said local communities, which signed agreements with the company, were not properly consulted, and claimed the project had hindered their farming and other activities.
“These communities actually bear the burden of reducing deforestation,” she said.
The World Bank said the funding provided by REDD+ and its partners supported some of the poorest Congolese citizens, while contributing to meeting climate goals.
“We will review the report’s findings and have no plans to withhold funding at this time,” a World Bank spokesperson said in emailed comments.
“The work improves livelihoods, lessens pressure on native forests and reduces emissions of greenhouse gases from deforestation and forest degradation,” the World Bank said. RRI said women and minorities had been worst affected by the REDD+ projects that were up and running, because they often lack formal land rights and are not consulted about decisions.
REDD+, or reduced emissions from deforestation and degradation, was one of the solutions to climate change laid out in the 2015 Paris accord. It offers monetary incentives to scale back deforestation.
Congo could become the first country to sign a REDD+ deal with the World Bank this year, setting an example for more than 50 developing countries that plan to follow suit, said RRI.
However, it warned that deal could exacerbate conflict and set a dangerous global precedent if changes were not made. RRI said it had shared the results and that discussions with donors were underway.
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Eastern China’s Jiangsu province will step up its war on pollution and focus on “high-quality development” following a spike in smog early this year, the China Daily reported, citing the provincial governor.
The province of Jiangsu is a major part of the Yangtze river delta manufacturing hub. Concentrations of breathable smog particles known as PM2.5 soared 20 percent in the region in January.
Jiangsu’s major heavy industrial center, Xuzhou, was also ranked China’s smoggiest city in December 2017, after a winter campaign to cut emissions in northern China led to a significant drop in PM2.5 concentrations in traditional smog zones.
Governor Wu Zhenglong promised “stricter strategies with higher standards” to control emissions, China Daily said.
Despite the January spike, average PM2.5 concentrations in the province still fell from 73 micrograms to 49 micrograms last year, the report added.
Late last month, an environment ministry official urged regions in the Yangtze delta and elsewhere to take responsibility for their air quality problems.
The Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC), said in a report this week that China was winning its war on pollution after cutting average PM2.5 concentrations by 32 percent in just four years.
“The available evidence from our monitoring data indicate that pollution has decreased nearly across the board,” said Michael Greenstone, director of EPIC. “We estimate that just 4 percent of the 900 million residents covered by the monitor network saw pollution rise in their prefecture between 2013 and 2017,” he added.
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Federal officials have killed 10 wolves in northern Idaho at the request of the Idaho Department of Fish and Game to boost elk numbers, and state officials say more might be killed this winter.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services said Wednesday that workers used a helicopter in the Clearwater National Forest in late February and early March to kill the wolves.
“At the request of Idaho, we did remove wolves in that region,” said agency spokeswoman Tanya Espinosa.
Idaho officials say the area’s elk population in what’s called the Lolo zone has plummeted in the last 25 years from about 16,000 to about 2,000, and that wolves are to blame along with black bears, mountain lions and a habitat transition to more forests.
Fish and Game has liberal harvest rules for bears and mountain lions, but wolves are more challenging to hunt. So in six of the last seven years, Fish and Game has sought to kill wolves to boost elk. Elk are a prominent big game species in Idaho and hunters have decried a scarcity of elk in the region. Elk are also a source of revenue through hunting license sales for Fish and Game.
“We’ve made an obligation to try to manage this elk herd at levels at maybe not peak levels, but at least bring it back to levels that we’ve seen in the past that were adequate for hunting,” said Jim Hayden, a biologist with Fish and Game.
Officials say Fish and Game license dollars paid for the federal agency to kill the wolves. State and federal officials didn’t have the cost immediately available.
Environmental groups blasted the killing of the wolves, focusing on the operation being made public only after it happened.
“Now more than ever, Wildlife Services and the Idaho Department of Fish and Game need to be up front with the public about their plans to kill wolves,” said Andrea Santarsiere, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity. “Idaho stopped monitoring wolves last year and stopped releasing annual reports revealing how many wolves remain in Idaho. It’s troubling to see this ever-increasing veil of secrecy fall over the management of Idaho’s wolves.”
The last intensive wolf count in Idaho was in 2015 when officials said the state had an estimated 786 wolves at the end of the year. That’s also the last year Fish and Game was required to do that type of count after wolves were removed from the Endangered Species List.
But Fish and Game has continued to monitor wolf populations. Hayden said that based on DNA samples from more than 700 wolf droppings, nearly 150 remote cameras and other information, at least 11 packs are in the Lolo zone. Hayden said the agency manages populations and doesn’t count individuals. But he said an Idaho wolf pack typically has six to nine wolves. That means there are roughly 65 to 100 wolves in the Lolo zone.
Fish and Game estimates that statewide there are more than 90 packs, Hayden said, far above the state’s minimum requirement of 15 packs. The federal government could take back management of Idaho wolves if the population gets too low.
Hayden said the state and federal agencies do not announce wolf-kill operations out of concern for the safety of the helicopter crew as well as the last-minute nature of the operations. He said a snowy day must be followed by clear flying weather, and there’s a chance that if those conditions occur again this winter federal workers will try to kill more wolves in the Lolo zone.
“After you go after the first one, the wolves are scattering, so it’s not common to take a whole pack,” he said.
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Toys ‘R’ US plans to sell or close all of its US stores, potentially hitting 33,000 jobs, U.S. media reported Wednesday.
The debt-plagued retailer, which filed for bankruptcy protection in September, told employees that the retailer planned to file liquidation papers ahead of a Thursday court hearing, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post reported.
“We’re putting a for sale sign on everything,” CEO David Brandon said on a conference call with staff, according to the Journal.
Company officials did not immediately reply for a request for comment.
Started in 1948 amid the postwar US economic boom, Toys ‘R’ US has 881 stores in U.S. territories and nearly 65,000 employees globally, according to the company’s most recent press release last month.
The New Jersey-based company was saddled with debt following a leveraged buyout in 2005 by a consortium that included the KKR Group and Bain Capital.
Much like other retailers, Toys ‘R’ Us has also been bruised by competition from Amazon and other online retailers.
A weak holiday shopping season weighed on the company’s efforts to reorganize, analysts said.
Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData Retail, blamed the company’s woes on poor leadership.
“As the competitive dynamics of the toy market intensified, management failed to respond and evolve. As such, the brand lost relevance, customers and ultimately sales,” Saunders said in a note Wednesday.
“The main tragedy of liquidation will be the extensive loss of jobs. In our view, those on the shop-floor have been badly let down by management and those doing financial deals.”
The company is exploring strategies for keeping the brand alive, including the sale of 200 U.S. stores that could be packaged with its Canadian business, CNBC and the Journal reported.
Brandon outlined this and other possibilities at the New Jersey meeting, CNBC reported. Brandon also told workers they have 60 more days of employment at the company.
In February, the company’s British business announced plans for an “orderly wind-down” of the company’s store portfolio. Toys ‘R’ Us employs 3,200 people at 100 stores in Britain.
Mossack Fonseca, the Panamanian law firm at the center of the “Panama Papers” scandal, said Wednesday that it was shutting down because of the damage to its business and reputation inflicted by role in the global tax evasion debacle.
The Panama Papers, which consist of millions of documents stolen from Mossack Fonseca and leaked to the media in April 2016, provoked a global scandal after showing how the rich and powerful used offshore corporations to evade taxes.
“The reputational deterioration, the media campaign, the financial circus and the unusual actions by certain Panamanian authorities have occasioned an irreversible damage that necessitates the obligatory ceasing of public operations at the end of the current month,” the firm said in a statement.
Mossack Fonseca said a skeleton staff would remain in order to comply with requests from authorities and other public and private groups.
Nonetheless, the law firm said it would continue “fighting for justice,” adding it would also continue to cooperate with authorities.
Last month, Panamanian prosecutors raided the offices of Mossack Fonseca, seeking possible links to Brazilian engineering company Odebrecht. The Brazilian construction firm has admitted bribing officials in Panama and other countries to obtain contracts in the region between 2010 and 2014.
Ramon Fonseca, a partner at Mossack Fonseca, denied last month that his firm had a connection to Odebrecht, while accusing Panamanian President Juan Carlos Varela of directly receiving money from Odebrecht, Latin America’s largest engineering company.
Varela has denied taking any money from Odebrecht.
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The Trump administration is pressing China to cut its trade surplus with the United States by $100 billion, a White House spokeswoman said Wednesday, clarifying a tweet last week from President Donald Trump.
Last Wednesday, Trump tweeted that China had been asked to develop a plan to reduce its trade imbalance with the United States by $1 billion, but the spokeswoman said Trump had meant to say $100 billion.
The United States had a record $375 billion trade deficit with China in 2017, which made up two-thirds of a global $566 billion U.S. trade gap last year, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.
China reported its 2017 U.S. trade surplus as $276 billion, also about two-thirds of its reported global surplus of $422.5 billion.
The White House spokeswoman declined to provide details about how the administration would like China to accomplish the surplus-cutting goal — whether increased purchases of U.S. products such as soybeans or aircraft would suffice, or whether it wants China to make major changes to its industrial policies, cut subsidies to state-owned enterprises, or further reduce steel and aluminum capacity.
The request comes as the Trump administration is said to be preparing tariffs on imports of up to $60 billion worth of Chinese information technology, telecoms and consumer products as part of a U.S. investigation into China’s intellectual property practices.
It is also unclear if the requested $100 billion reduction would address U.S. complaints about China’s investment policies that effectively require U.S. firms to transfer technology to Chinese joint venture partners in order to gain market access.
The issue is a core part of the probe being conducted under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, a provision seldom invoked since the World Trade Organization was founded in 1995. Trade experts have said tariffs imposed as a result of the China intellectual property probe may fall outside of WTO rules.
U.S. targets Indian subsidies
But Washington showed on Wednesday that it has not abandoned the global trade body, launching a WTO legal challenge to India’s export subsidies for domestic companies, including producers of steel, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, textiles and IT products.
U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said India had failed to remove the subsidies as required by WTO rules after the country reached certain economic benchmarks.
The United States is expected to invoke a national security exception to WTO rules in imposing import tariffs of 25 percent on steel and 10 percent on aluminum announced by Trump last week.
U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross told lawmakers on Wednesday his department would soon publish procedures for product-specific exemptions from the steel tariffs for items that are not available from domestic producers or in short supply. The procedures are due by Sunday.
Anne Forristall Luke, president of the U.S. Tire Manufacturers Association, said the group would be “pressing very hard” for an exemption from tariffs for high-strength wire rod used to make cord for steel tire belts that is not produced by U.S. mills.
The largest sources for the material are Japan and Brazil, she said, adding that U.S. tire producers will lose business to foreign competitors if their steel costs rise.
“We are working this from the product side and the country side. We think we have a very good case,” she told Reuters.
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