Wearable gadgets -- from Google Glass to the Apple ( AAPL , Tech30 ) Watch -- are here to stay. But it's not yet clear what purpose many of these wearable gizmos will serve. They're marketed as everything from second screens for your smartphone to fitness trackers to personal assistants. Meanwhile, there's a less talked-about group of wearable gadgets that has a clear, futuristic purpose: To turn people into superhumans by amplifying their senses and abilities. Many of these gizmos are prototypes, but they paint a portrait of a future in which gadgets hack people -- not the other way around. Related: Apple unveils the Apple Watch Sight: A group of British designers developed a mask called Eidos that allows people to see movement better. The device overlays what you're seeing now with images that it recorded just a few milliseconds ago. The effect is a kind of time-lapse video, only in real time. Eidos allows you to see moving objects more clearly and determine patterns in them. For instance, a rower or golfer could trace her ideal stroke, or security professionals could better track suspicious activity. Hearing: SoundHawk is a kind of a hearing aid on steroids. The wearable device doesn't just amplify all sounds like a traditional hearing aid -- it cuts through background noise, focusing on the speech of the person you want to hear. An app lets you tune the device to listen for specific sounds you'd like to make louder (say, your wife), and reduces other sounds. And Eidos makes another mask that works like SoundHawk. It doesn't look nearly as inconspicuous, but it has the same basic function. Strength: The Ekso body suit is a kind of robotic exoskeleton that gives people super strength. It's kind of like a real-life Iron Man suit. Perhaps one day Ekso will be used to make ordinary people into superhumans. Today, Ekso is marketed for people with traumatic injuries, including victims of strokes, spinal cord injuries or disease and brain injuries. The suit works by powering steps when the wearer shifts his or her weight. Motors push the legs forward . Health: Google ( GOOGL , Tech30 ) , Microsoft ( MSFT , Tech30 ) and some other companies are developing smart contact lenses that measure the glucose levels in diabetics' tears. If successful, the contacts could help to eliminate one of the most painful and intrusive daily routines of diabetics. The prototype contacts are outfitted with tiny wireless chips and glucose sensors, sandwiched between two lenses. They are able to measure blood sugar levels once per second. Google is working on putting LED lights inside its lenses that would flash when those levels are too low or high. Wear all these devices, and you can become a real-life bionic woman. Or a $6 million man -- only for much less.
NYSE Margin Debt Rises To New All Time High As Net Worth Slides To Record Low Submitted by Tyler Durden on 05/28/2013 18:28 -0400 New York Stock Exchange With everything else in uncharted territory: central bank balance sheets, the stock market, global debt, it was only a matter of time before that old-school indicator of exuberance - margin debt - also joined the ranks of things that are "off the charts." Never one to disappoint (except when Waddell and Reed dumps a "massive" 75,000 ES trade which promptly kills its liquidity replenishment points of course), the NYSE has reported that April margin debt, as expected, hit all time records, just in time for the SP's own all time high fireworks spectacular. Rising from the just shy of summer of 2007 levels posted in March, or $380 billion, April margin debt not surprisingly rose to a record high of $384 billion. Additionally, even when netting out account credit metrics, such as Free Credit Cash and Credit Balances in margin accounts, total investor net worth just hit an all time record low of ($106) billion. In short: investors have never been more levered. And that is only looking at legacy metrics. Recall that as per recent regulations requiring that hedge funds expose gross leverage via Form PF , just the top 50 or so HFs have gross exposure of over $1.3 trillion, which means they are levered massively more than their LP realize, and than the naive NYSE margin statistic indicates. But that is a topic for a different day. For now let's just bask in the simplicity of the good old days, where NYSE margin was relevant, and not get too scared by what the true margin level in the market may actually be, especially when one takes into account the leverage on the Fed's own balance sheet. Average: 4.333335 Your rating: None Average: 4.3 ( 6 votes) Tweet - advertisements - Login or register to post comments 7466 reads Printer-friendly version Send to friend Similar Articles You Might Enjoy: Levered Beta Uber Alles: NYSE Borse Margin Debt Jumps To Three Year Highs, Investor Net Worth Remains At Record Lows NYSE Margin Debt Rises To Fresh Five Year High As Short Interest Slide Continues The Real "Margin" Threat: $600 Trillion In OTC Derivatives, A Multi-Trillion Variation Margin Call, And A Collateral Scramble That Could Send US Treasurys To All Time Records... NYSE October Margin Debt Jumps To Highest Since Lehman Failure As Investor Net Worth Is At Lowest Since April Highs NYSE November Margin Debt Rises To Fresh Post-Lehman High
Spoiled Teenager Syndrome Submitted by Tyler Durden on 01/03/2013 11:49 -0500 Federal Reserve Guest Post Reality Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog , Is masking risk, cost and consequence a strategy that leads to success? No; it is a pathway to catastrophic failure. What are the core characteristics of the spoiled teenager? The conventional view is that the spoiled teen "gets everything they want." In my view, the key characteristic of Spoiled Teenager Syndrome is that risk, cost and consequence have been masked. This is a systemic point of view, meaning that the masking of risk, cost and consequence help us understand not just the eventual failure of spoiled teenagers but the eventual failure of every group or enterprise that masks risk, cost and consequence as a strategy to paper over an unsustainable Status Quo. This includes families, companies, states and nations. The spoiled teen is spoiled precisely because the risk, cost and consequence of their choices and actions are suppressed by Mommy and/or Daddy. Since Mommy and/or Daddy diligently cover the cost and mask the eventual consequence of Junior's unrealistic expectations and poor choices, the risks created by Junior's choices and lifestyle are also masked. Junior naturally assumes Mommy and/or Daddy will bail him out of every scrape and "make it right" at no cost to Junior. Masking risk, cost and consequence creates an illusory world that eventually crashes on the unforgiving rocks of reality. Anyone who knows parents who have spoiled their kids has stories that beggar the imagination of those who have no choice but to live in the real world. In one such instance within our circle of friends, the daughter who was caught shoplifting told her Mom that she did not want to go to court, and Mom had to do something so she wouldn't have to face any consequence from her actions. This 16-year old apparently believed that Mommy could push risk, cost and consequence aside in all cases; even the law should give way if it proved inconvenient or painful. Are the values, experiences and skills spoiled teens receive going to help them navigate adulthood, or will they encourage a state of permanent adolescence? When will Mommy and Daddy stop hovering, warding off risk, cost and consequence? We know the answer: when they are finally unable to do so. Did all their "help" masking risk, cost and consequence actually aid their child in the long-term? Or did it cripple the child by leading him into a false sense of security, an illusory state where someone will always save you from consequence? What sort of skills to assess and manage risk does the spoiled teen have in hand when risk has been cloaked? How can the teen understand cost and trade-offs when the true costs of their lifestyle have been hidden? How can the teen navigate adult life, which is characterized by taking responsibility for one's actions and being accountable to others, when the consequences of his choices have been smoothed away by Mommy and Daddy? One intrinsic characteristic of parents who have masked risk, cost and consequence is that they do not perceive themselves as having spoiled their children. Instead, they see themselves as "good parents" who are protecting their children from the unpleasant rough edges of life. In their view, there is plenty of time later in life to learn about risk assessment, short-term and long-term trade-offs, costs (both financial and emotional), accountability, realistic appraisals and consequence. These parents seem blind to the reality that their coddling and hovering have left their children disastrously ill-prepared for adulthood. If there is any recipe for guaranteed unhappiness, it is nurturing expectations that are wildly at odds with what real life offers. Risk and return are indeed causally linked. I have watched in amazement as coddled 19-year olds taking a few classes at community college and dreaming of rock stardom confidently declare that they would be OK with being a firefighter in a wealthy city because the starting pay was $80,000. That there are 1,000 applicants for every opening did not seem to register in this young man's assessment, nor did his inability to clean up a weedy backyard; he stopped after an hour or so because there was no consequence to a sorrowfully half-baked effort. I grieve for young people so ill-prepared for a recessionary economy, not to mention marriage, managing scarce income and capital and a hundred other aspects of unsubsidized adulthood. Their parents have essentially robbed them of the slow and relatively safe part of the learning curve, where you get fired for being late at 16 years of age rather than at 26. Is it any wonder that many young people are boiling with frustration when they exit college and the protected enclave of their parents' home to find a world that doesn't respond to their desires for creative expression and their long list of likes and dislikes, i.e. demands? On the other side of the ledger, I have seen quiet young men and women, residents in youth homeless shelters, who received no buffering at all between the teen years and unforgiving adulthood. Abused at home or simply abandoned, they hit the road as the only alternative open to them. Penniless and without family support, they often face bleak choices. Their appraisals (in my limited experience) are by necessity realistic. Of course they are hurting; but ironically, perhaps, they are in some ways better prepared to navigate adulthood than teens who have yet to be exposed to risk, cost and consequence. Is masking risk, cost and consequence a strategy that leads to success? No; it is a pathway to repeated catastrophic failure. What is the Central Planning strategy being pursued by our Central State and the Federal Reserve? Masking risk, cost and consequence. Masking risk, cost and consequence is disastrous not just for teens, but for entire nations.
Taylor Swift Your beautiful eyes Stare right into mine And sometimes I think of you late at night I don't know why I wanna be somewhere where you are I wanna be where You're here Your eyes are lookin' into mine So baby make me fly My heart has never felt this way before I'm lookin' through your I'm lookin' through your eyes I wake up, I'm alive In only a little while, I'll cry 'Cause your my lullaby So baby come hold me tight 'Cause I I wanna be everything you need I wanna be where You're here Your eyes are lookin' into mine So baby make me fly My heart has never felt this way before I'm lookin' through your I'm lookin' through your eyes Just as long as your mine I'll be your everything tonight Let me love you, kiss you Baby, let me miss you Let me see your Dream about, dream about Dream about your eyes Beautiful eyes
"What The Left Hand Giveth, The Right Hand Taketh Away" Submitted by Tyler Durden on 10/08/2012 16:43 -0400 One of the most insidious side-effects of the centrally-planned New Normal has been the artificial role switch of the two main asset classes, equities and bonds, which as David Rosenberg explained previously , can be characterized as follows: stocks for the yield, bonds for the price. The trouble with this is that it is contrary to everything inherent in investor and trader psychology. This in turn touches on another topic: as a result of collapsing interest rates, interest income from debt has plunged by a whopping $450 billion/year in nominal terms , forcing public corporations to shelve out dividends, as Dividend income takes the place of Interest Income, merely to keep some investor interest in capital markets awake. There is a two-fold problem with the surge in equity dividends: i) it forces management teams to reallocate cash away from projects which generate higher IRR in the longer term, such as CapEx, RD, and innovation, or even simple MA, and ii) the dividend spike is simply not enough to offset the lost interest income. This precisely is one the points of UBS' George Magnus in his newsletter in which he asks Cui Bono from global uncoordinated easing. His observations: "In the US household interest income from assets has dropped to below $1 trillion, compared to $1.4 trillion in 2008. That $400 billion drop is equivalent to a fall from 11.5% to below 7.5% as share of personal income, and, in passing, to the size of President Obama’s stimulus programme in 2009." Of particular note: if interest income as a percentage of total personal income had remained at its 2008 level, the total would now be over $1.5 trillion. It is this $550 billion annual delta that the Fed has directly, though its policies, taken away from US consumers in terms of purchasing power. So while the Fed has taken away the bond market as a venue in which to generate current income, it is the structural failures of equities in a post-HFT world (stories of mini, amd maxi, Flash Crashes are now a daily occurrence) that prevent investors from having the same confidence about current income in a market in which terminal and fatal capital loss are all too real fears. And there are those who still wonder why the US consumer is withering away, and absent such crutches as soaring Federal non-revolving debt, used for anything but its designated purposes, would have less purchasing power now than before the crisis as a result of the Fed's failed policies. As George Magnus so poetically summarizes it " What the left hand giveth, the right hand taketh away ." And yet, it is not true that everyone loses equally from the Fed's policies. Bernanke does benefit one group of people: the ultra-wealthy, aka the "1%", which owns the bulk of its assets in America's $52 trillion in financial assets and which is the most direct beneficiary of QEternity. Magnus' conclusion: it is time Bernanke woke up and smelled the coffee, because what he is effectively doing via Monetary policy could be the most socially disruptive phenomenon seen in developed Western society in ages: Central banks don’t have a social welfare function in their remit. But it can’t make economic sense for them to pursue policies, ad nauseam, that drain interest income from the economy, threaten the solvency of pension plans, and redistribute wealth and income, in effect, to richer households with a low marginal propensity to consume . And it could result in a political backlash when the call for radical economic policy changes and innovative political thinking requires a high level of social cohesion. The flipside to this argument is to just let Bernanke continue with his catastrophic policy, and hope he accelerates the advent of the inevitable end even more, as the final outcome is merely one which ends with the tearing down of the Marriner Eccles building. Sadly at this point, that particular outcome is no longer a question of if, but when. Average: 5 Your rating: None Average: 5 ( 10 votes) Tweet Login or register to post comments 4881 reads Printer-friendly version Send to friend Similar Articles You Might Enjoy: How The Fed's Visible Hand Is Forcing Corporate Cash Mismanagement $450 Billion In ZIRPorized Purchasing Power: Two Charts That Explain The Baby Boomer Dilemma Next: The Great Recoupling The New Normal Of Investing: Bonds For The Price, Equities For The Yield David Rosenberg: "RIP Wealth Effect"
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