David Fuller and Eoin Treacy's Comment of the Day
Category - Technology

    U.K. Faces Food Crisis Threat as Virus Surge Blocks Trade

    This article from Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

    The U.K. confronted threats of food insecurity and panicked shopping days before Christmas as European nations restricted trade and travel to guard against a resurgent coronavirus, offering Britain a preview of the border chaos to come in the absence of a Brexit deal.

    Fearing a fast-spreading new strain of the virus that forced a strict lockdown across England, France on Sunday suspended travel from the U.K. for 48 hours and wants a stricter testing regime before lifting the blockade. Germany and Italy halted arriving flights from Britain with Spain and Portugal following suit. The crisis gave renewed urgency to negotiations for a trade deal with the European Union that remained at a critical stage after weekend talks.

    Late Sunday, the Port of Dover stopped freight moved by truck into France while allowing unaccompanied cargo to keep moving. Traffic into the U.K. is unaffected, though truckers often run supplies in both directions and the latest outbreak in the heart of England may discourage them from entering the island.

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    Quadruple Witching Roils Stock Market, Sparking Bursts of Volume

    This article by Lu Wang for Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

    Coinciding with the event is Tesla Inc.’s widely-watched inclusion in the S&P 500, a development that alone is estimated to force roughly $80 billion of stock trading. While all the turbulence means headaches for traders, some market watchers view it as the final chance for investors to shuffle big holdings before liquidity thins out into Christmas and the New Year’s holidays.

    “Traditionally these are outsized liquidity days, and following the rebalances we expect liquidity to dwindle into year-end,” Wells Fargo & Co. strategist Chris Harvey said. “In other words, Friday is likely the last opportunity to make major portfolio shifts before the 2020 liquidity window closes.”

    Quadruple witching typically fuels trading as large derivatives positions roll over. While spikes in volume usually occur around the open and close, providing windows of robust liquidity, large price swings can happen suddenly at any time of the day.

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    US 'Has Evidence Russia Breached Its Nuclear Networks' in Massive Cyber Attack

    This article by Matthew Field for The Telegraph may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

    President-elect Joe Biden issued a statement Thursday on “what appears to be a massive cybersecurity breach affecting potentially thousands of victims, including US companies and federal government entities.” “I want to be clear," Mr Biden wrote.

    "My administration will make cybersecurity a top priority at every level of government -- and we will make dealing with this breach a top priority from the moment we take office.”

    Federal investigators have been combing through networks in recent days to determine what hackers had been able to access and how much damage might have done in one of the most serious cyber attacks on the US government in recent years.

    Thomas Bossert, Mr Trump's former homeland security adviser, warned that a Russian cyber attack on the US government could take more than six months to resolve and will require a “staggering effort” to rebuild existing IT systems.

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    Chinese EV Makers Trade at High Valuations, Helped by Tesla and National EV Targets

    This note from Dow Jones may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

    NIO, BYD and Xpeng are examples of Chinese electric-vehicle makers that have surged in value, buttressed by national targets regarding electric vehicles on the road and investors' search for the next EV titans. The American depositary receipts in these companies have surged this year and the meteoric rises put their valuations in line with large traditional car makers, such as General Motors and Ford Motor. To help cut carbon emissions, China aims for EVs to make up 20% of car sales by 2025, and 50% by 2035. Tesla's success this year has also fueled investor appetite for the technology. Investors should be aware though that most Chinese upstarts are unprofitable, The Wall Street Journal reported, and they are also selling far fewer vehicles than major automobile groups.

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    Disney Shares Hit Record on Forecast of Streaming Surge

    This article from Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

    In a presentation to investors Thursday, the world’s largest entertainment company outlined plans for dozens of new movies and TV shows from those major brands, with an eye toward becoming a streaming behemoth in four years. The company expects its program spending to reach $14 billion to $16 billion annually by then.

    Disney+, the entertainment giant’s flagship streaming platform, also is getting a price hike. The U.S. monthly rate will climb $1 to $8 in a move that executives telegraphed earlier this year. In Europe, the price will rise 29% to 9 euros ($11) a month, although there it is getting additional content aimed at adults.

    Shares of Disney rose as much as 11% to a record $171 in New York trading Friday. The stock has about doubled since March on the strength of the streaming business.

    “The enormous success of Disney+ inspired us to be even more ambitious,” Executive Chairman Bob Iger said at the event. “Our pipeline is much more robust than we initially anticipated,” he said, adding that the Disney+ cadence should soon hit 100 new titles per year.

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    Facebook Breakup Would Demolish Zuckerberg's Social Media Empire

    This article from Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

    “Breakups are scary for investors because in some ways they could disrupt the business models,” said Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities who called Instagram one of the three best business acquisitions of the past 15 years. Still, Ives thinks the chance of an actual breakup is “slim” without legislative changes from Congress, which he believes are unlikely. “It’s a noisy headline but it doesn’t massively change the situation for Facebook in the near term.”

    However remote the prospects, any sign that the FTC is leaning toward a breakup is likely to weigh further on Facebook’s stock. Facebook acquired these promising rival platforms precisely
    because it expected the main social network to one day fade, and it wanted to be the company deciding what apps people would turn to next. A breakup would undo most of Zuckerberg’s hedging for
    Facebook’s future, just as his immense investments in Instagram and WhatsApp are starting to pay off. Facebook argues that those investments made Instagram and WhatsApp what they are today.

    “Our acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp have dramatically improved those services and helped them reach many more people,” Zuckerberg wrote in a post to employees on Wednesday. “We compete hard and we compete fairly. I’m proud of that.”

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    Email of the day on vaccines and uptake potential

    This article, quite long but worth reading, is by one of my favourite health professionals, Jon Barron.  He is not an anti-vaxxer nor an pro-vaxxer. He provides   a very in-depth  look into the captioned  subject.  If you’re interested in the subject matter, he provides warts and all. You must read the latter part of his article where he suggests using air ionisers to kill airborne viruses. Makes sense to me.

     

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    It will change everything: "DeepMind's AI makes gigantic leap in solving protein structures

    This article by Ewen Callaway for Nature may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

    “It’s a game changer,” says Andrei Lupas, an evolutionary biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen, Germany, who assessed the performance of different teams in CASP. AlphaFold has already helped him find the structure of a protein that has vexed his lab for a decade, and he expects it will alter how he works and the questions he tackles. “This will change medicine. It will change research. It will change bioengineering. It will change everything,” Lupas adds.

    In some cases, AlphaFold’s structure predictions were indistinguishable from those determined using ‘gold standard’ experimental methods such as X-ray crystallography and, in recent years, cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM). AlphaFold might not obviate the need for these laborious and expensive methods — yet — say scientists, but the AI will make it possible to study living things in new ways.

    And

    The first iteration of AlphaFold applied the AI method known as deep learning to structural and genetic data to predict the distance between pairs of amino acids in a protein. In a second step that does not invoke AI, AlphaFold uses this information to come up with a ‘consensus’ model of what the protein should look like, says John Jumper at DeepMind, who is leading the project.

    The team tried to build on that approach but eventually hit the wall. So, it changed tack, says Jumper, and developed an AI network that incorporated additional information about the physical and geometric constraints that determine how a protein folds. They also set it a more difficult, task: instead of predicting relationships between amino acids, the network predicts the final structure of a target protein sequence. “It’s a more complex system by quite a bit,” Jumper says.

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