Thursday, December 17, 2015

Análisis de Resultados Personales 2015 (Edwin Conrado Rivera)

Tradicionalmente todos los años lo comenzamos con repasar los resultados del año que terminó. Comenzamos con las famosas dietas, las metas no alcanzadas y los objetivos realizados.

Para hacer un repaso real del año 2015, me gustaría que no piense en estos temas y se concentre en cuales fueron los temas que tuvieron éxitos y por qué.  Antes de seguir, quiero aclarar que de una experiencia negativa, también sale un aprendizaje positivo.

Esta vez vamos a utilizar La Rueda de la Vida como referencia para conocernos mejor y empezar a preparar las metas y objetivos del próximo año.

Como funciona esta herramienta de análisis:  
Desde el centro hacia afuera comienza en CERO (0) y sale hasta llegar al DIEZ (10). ¿Cuál número real y conscientemente le puede dar a cada uno de los temas?

Crecimiento Personal – que número le asigna (8). Luego sigua con Salud (7),  con relación de Pareja (5). Al terminar todos los temas, una los puntos para ver que figura sale. Esa figura es donde está ahora mismo. Luego marque un nuevo punto en donde quiere estar para el próximo año.


Cuando haga este ejercicio no lo condicione por aspectos externos de otras personas. 

Enfóquese en lo que usted tuvo el control total y absoluto de la situación y de resultados.

No le eche la culpa a nadie porque de alguna manera usted permitió que estos resultados sucedieran.  Sabiendo esto, tomemos control de nuestras decisiones y definamos que queremos hacer diferente para el próximo año 2016.

Salud – ¿Cuándo fue la última vez que me hice los estudios anuales de salud? ¿Cuáles fueron los resultados y que he hecho para mejorarlos? Escoja un cambio para comenzar en el 2016.

Dinero – ¿Tengo control de mi dinero?  Llevo un presupuesto de ingresos y gastos reales, incluyendo los gastos misceláneos de diversiones, regalos y (otros). Si no tienes el presupuesto, ve preparándolo para la clase de enero del proyecto de Innovación que vamos a presentar.

Amigos – Los amigos en ocasiones se convierten en la familia extendida.  ¿Qué hace usted para alimentar sus relaciones interpersonales.  ¿Qué clase de persona lo consideran sus amistades y porque?  Antes de que acabe el año, pregúnteles porque son amigos suyos. Haga un inventario de esas cualidades y únala a los valores para que se mantenga demostrándolas con mayor conciencia. 

Familia – Dicen que la familia es una Institución. Una Institución social que tenemos que alimentar positivamente, corregir y desarrollar los más altos valores de respeto y convivencia entre los mismos y los demás. ¿Cuáles son los valores que está usted demostrando y enseñando en su hogar?

Carrera Profesional / Trabajo / Estudios – Hay un dicho que dice: “El que no se mantiene aprendiendo, se estanca”.  El agua estancada se pudre, así le ha pasado a mucha gente que estudiaron una vez y no lo hicieron más en sus vidas. Cada día salen nuevos productos, servicios y procesos que debemos aprender.

Cada vez que escuche   a una persona quejarse en su trabajo, pregúntele cuando fue la última vez que estudio algo de importancia y que aprendió de ello.

Todos quieren ganar más dinero con el mismo conocimiento que tienen de hace 20 años, y eso ya no funciona así. Por lo general y como un ejemplo básico, el que gana $10 la hora es porque estudio para ese salario, y el que gana $100 la hora es porque estudio o hizo algo diferente para ganar ese salario.

Amor / Pareja – ¿Cuán feliz es en su relación de amor/pareja. Cada día haga algo positivo para alimentarla, no espere que la otra persona ponga todo el esfuerzo en mantener la relación. Haga un análisis de cómo se está comportando y decide que hacer diferente para el año nuevo que está por comenzar.

Creatividad / Auto Expresión / – Cada uno de estos temas deben de desarrollarse al máximo para tener una vida plena y sentirse auto realizado. Le exhorto a que saque un tiempo para reflexionar en ellos y determinar que va hacer diferente en el próximo año con su yo interno.

Diversión / Ocio – La enfermedad del siglo se llama ESTRÉS. Hay que sacar tiempo para el descanso y las diversiones. La clave es saber decidir cómo va a ser. El descanso es primordial para la recuperación celular y las diversiones para el estado mental y emocional. Hay tres áreas de diversiones a desarrollar: Las de Amor/Pareja, las de Familiares/Comunidad y las de Desarrollo Personal.  En cada determina las que te hacen crecer en conocimiento, inteligencia y sabiduría.

Otros temas a considerar pueden ser:

Casa  - Siempre el mantenimiento de la casa es altamente crítico. Es nuestro lugar de reposo, su nido de amor y de compartir con nuestros familiares y amistades más intimas. Debemos cuidarlo y protegerlo con recelo y mucho cariño. ¿Qué tiene pendiente de arreglar antes de que acabe este año?

Ciudad / Comunidad – Cuando no aparecen los familiares y los amigos, los vecinos se conviertes en sus Ángeles guardianes.  ¿Qué hace usted diferente para alimentar las relaciones con sus vecinos y en la comunidad en que vive?

Desarrollo Personal / Vida Espiritual – Dentro del balance de la Rueda de la Vida, el Desarrollo Personal/Vida Espiritual tiene un gran peso. Si no se siente realizado en estas áreas, determine qué quiere hacer y póngale acción inmediatamente para que comience un año mejor definido.

Prepare un resumen escrito de cada uno de los temas u otros de su consideración. Haciendo esto, su vida futura cambiará para siempre.

En el próximo escrito vamos a recomendar unas estrategias para hacer un                                     Análisis de Resultados Personal del año 2016. 


El autor, Edwin Conrado Rivera, MPH - “Tu Amigo del Conocimiento”, es Contador, Auditor, Adiestrador Internacional, Coach y Autor del libro: “La Diabetes: El Árbol de las Enfermedades”.  Para conocer sobre sus productos y servicios, lo puedes conseguir en: EdwinConradoRivera@gmail.com

The First Person to Hack the iPhone Built a Self-Driving Car. In His Garage


George Hotz is taking on Google and Tesla by himself.

A few days before Thanksgiving, George Hotz, a 26-year-old hacker, invites me to his house in San Francisco to check out a project he’s been working on. He says it’s a self-driving car that he had built in about a month. The claim seems absurd. But when I turn up that morning, in his garage there’s a white 2016 Acura ILX outfitted with a laser-based radar (lidar) system on the roof and a camera mounted near the rearview mirror. A tangle of electronics is attached to a wooden board where the glove compartment used to be, a joystick protrudes where you’d usually find a gearshift, and a 21.5-inch screen is attached to the center of the dash. “Tesla only has a 17-inch screen,” Hotz says.

He’s been keeping the project to himself and is dying to show it off. We pace around the car going over the technology. Hotz fires up the vehicle’s computer, which runs a version of the Linux operating system, and strings of numbers fill the screen. When he turns the wheel or puts the blinker on, a few numbers change, demonstrating that he’s tapped into the Acura’s internal controls.

Inside George Hotz’s Acura ILX

After about 20 minutes of this, and sensing my skepticism, Hotz decides there’s really only one way to show what his creation can do. “Screw it,” he says, turning on the engine. “Let’s go.”

As a scrawny 17-year-old known online as “geohot,” Hotz was the first person to hack Apple’s iPhone, allowing anyone—well, anyone with a soldering iron and some software smarts—to use the phone on networks other than AT&T’s. He later became the first person to run through a gantlet of hard-core defense systems in the Sony PlayStation 3 and crack that open, too. Over the past couple years, Hotz had been on a walkabout, trying to decide what he wanted to do next, before hitting on the self-driving car idea as perhaps his most audacious hack yet.

“Hold this,” he says, dumping a wireless keyboard in my lap before backing out of the garage. “But don’t touch any buttons, or we’ll die.” Hotz explains that his self-driving setup, like the autopilot feature on a Tesla, is meant for highways, not chaotic city streets. He drives through San Francisco’s Potrero Hill neighborhood and then onto Interstate 280.

With Hotz still holding the wheel, the Acura’s lidar paints a pixelated image on the dash screen of everything around us, including the freeway walls and other cars. A blue line charts the path the car is taking, and a green line shows the path the self-driving software recommends. The two match up pretty well, which means the technology is working. After a couple miles, Hotz lets go of the wheel and pulls the trigger on the joystick, kicking the car into self-driving mode. He does this as we head into an S curve at 65 miles per hour. I say a silent prayer. Hotz shouts, “You got this, car! You got this!”

The car does, more or less, have it. It stays true around the first bend. Near the end of the second, the Acura suddenly veers near an SUV to the right; I think of my soon-to-be-fatherless children; the car corrects itself. Amazed, I ask Hotz what it felt like the first time he got the car to work.

“Dude,” he says, “the first time it worked was this morning.”

Breakthrough work on self-driving cars began about a decade ago. Darpa, the research arm of the Department of Defense, sponsored the Grand Challenge, a contest to see how far autonomous vehicles could travel. On a course through the desert in the inaugural 2004 event, the top vehicle completed just 7 of 150 miles. In subsequent years, the vehicles became quite good, completing both desert and city courses.

It took a great deal of sophisticated, expensive technology to make those early cars work. Some of the Grand Challenge contestants lugged the equivalent of small data centers in their vehicles. Exteriors were usually covered with an array of sensors typically found in research labs. Today, Google, which hired many of the entrants, has dozens of cars in its fleet that use similar technology, although dramatic advances in computing power, sensors, and the autonomous software have lowered the overall cost.

Artificial-intelligence software and consumer-grade cameras, Hotz contends, have become good enough to allow a clever tinkerer to create a low-cost self-driving system for just about any car. The technology he’s building represents an end run on much more expensive systems being designed by Google, Uber, the major automakers, and, if persistent rumors and numerous news reports are true, Apple. More short term, he thinks he can challenge Mobileye, the Israeli company that supplies Tesla Motors, BMW, Ford Motor, General Motors, and others with their current driver-assist technology. “It’s absurd,” Hotz says of Mobileye. “They’re a company that’s behind the times, and they have not caught up.”

Mobileye spokesman Yonah Lloyd denies that the company’s technology is outdated. “Our code is based on the latest and modern AI techniques using end-to-end deep network algorithms for sensing and control,” he says. Last quarter, Mobileye reported revenue of $71 million, up 104 percent from the period a year earlier. It relies on a custom chip and well-known software techniques to guide cars along freeways. The technology has been around for a while, although carmakers have just started bragging about it. Tesla, in particular, has done a remarkable job remarketing the Mobileye technology by claiming its cars now ship with “Autopilot” features. Tesla’s fans have peppered the Internet with videos of its all-electric Model S sedans driving themselves on freeways and even changing lanes on their own. (In an e-mailed statement, Tesla spokesman Ricardo Reyes writes: “Mobileye is a valued partner, but supplies just one of a dozen internally and externally developed component technologies that collectively constitute Tesla Autopilot, which include radar, ultrasonics, GPS/nav, cameras and real-time connectivity to Tesla servers for fleet learning.“)

Hotz camera kit
The exterior of Hotz’s Acura ILX.

Hotz plans to best the Mobileye technology with off-the-shelf electronics. He’s building a kit consisting of six cameras—similar to the $13 ones found in smartphones—that would be placed around the car. Two would go inside near the rearview mirror, one in the back, two on the sides to cover blind spots, and a fisheye camera up top. He then trains the control software for the cameras using what’s known as a neural net—a type of self-teaching artificial-intelligence mechanism that grabs data from drivers and learns from their choices. The goal is to sell the camera and software package for $1,000 a pop either to automakers or, if need be, directly to consumers who would buy customized vehicles at a showroom run by Hotz. “I have 10 friends who already want to buy one,” he says.

The timing for all of this is vague. Hotz says he’ll release a YouTube video a few months from now in which his Acura beats a Tesla Model S on Interstate 405 in Los Angeles. The point of the exercise is twofold. First, it will—he hopes—prove the technology works and is ready to go on sale. Second, it will help Hotz win a bet with Elon Musk, chief executive officer of Tesla.

Hotz lives in the Crypto Castle. It’s a white, Spanish-tiled house, which, other than the “Bitcoin preferred here” sticker on the front door, looks like any other in Potrero Hill. The inside is filled with a changing cast of 5 to 10 geeks. The bottom floor largely belongs to Hotz. His room is a 15-by-5-foot closet with a wedged-in mattress. The space is lined with shelves packed with boxes, car parts, towels, and a case of women’s clothes left behind by a former resident. There’s a living room in the back with couches and a television. “I hate living alone,” Hotz says. “I was playing Grand Theft Auto with my roommates last night. It was super fun.”

Just a couple feet from his closet is the garage where Hotz works. His two-monitor computer sits on a desk next to a water heater. On a wooden table, there’s a drill, a half-dozen screwdrivers, a tape measure, some black duct tape, a can of Red Bull, and a stack of unopened mail. Most of the garage is taken up by the white Acura. Hotz has decorated its hood with a large, black comma, and the back bumper reads “comma.ai”—the name of his new company—in big, black letters. “A comma is better than a period,” he says.

George Hotz in his garage
Hotz in his garage.

Hotz grew up in Glen Rock, N.J. His father oversees technology for a Catholic high school, and his mother is a therapist. “Like, Freud talking and stuff,” Hotz says. At 14, he was a finalist in the prestigious Intel International Science & Engineering Fair for building a robot that could scan a room and figure out its dimensions. A couple years later he built another robot called Neuropilot that could be controlled by thoughts. “It could detect different-frequency brain waves and go forward or left based on how hard you were focusing,” he says. The next year, 2007, he won one of the contest’s most prestigious awards, a trip to attend the Nobel prize ceremony in Stockholm, by designing a type of holographic display. “I did terrible in high school until I found these science fairs,” he says. “They were the best thing for me. I could build things, and there was the salesmanship, too, that I loved.”

He hacked the iPhone in 2007 while still in high school and became an international celebrity, appearing on TV news shows. Three years later, he hacked the PlayStation 3 and released the software so others could use it. Sony responded by suing him, and the two parties settled their feud shortly after, with Hotz agreeing never to meddle with Sony products again. These achievements were enough to earn him a profile in the New Yorker when he was 22. “I live by morals, I don’t live by laws,” Hotz declared in the story. “Laws are something made by assholes.”

But Hotz wasn’t a so-called black-hat hacker, trying to break into commercial systems for financial gain. He was more of a puzzle addict who liked to prove he could bend complex technology to his will.

From 2007 on, Hotz became a coding vagabond. He briefly attended Rochester Institute of Technology, did a couple five-month internships at Google, worked at SpaceX for four months, then at Facebook for eight. The jobs left him unsatisfied and depressed. At Google, he found very smart developers who were often assigned mundane tasks like fixing bugs in a Web browser; at Facebook, brainy coders toiled away trying to figure out how to make users click on ads. “It scares me what Facebook is doing with AI,” Hotz says. “They’re using machine-learning techniques to coax people into spending more time on Facebook.”

On the side, Hotz produced an application called towelroot, which gave Android users complete control over their smartphones. The software is free to download and has been used 50 million times. He kept himself entertained (and solvent) by entering contests to find security holes in popular software and hardware. In one competition, Pwnium, he broke into a Chromebook laptop and took home $150,000. He scored another $50,000 at Pwn2Own by discovering a Firefox browser bug in just one day. At a contest in Korea designed for teams of four, Hotz entered solo, placed first, and won $30,000.

By the fall of 2012 he was bored with the contests and decided to dive into a new field—AI. He enrolled at Carnegie Mellon University with the hope of attaining a Ph.D. When not attending class, he consumed every major AI research paper and still had time for some fun. At one point, the virtual-reality company Oculus Rift failed to man its booth at a job fair, and Hotz took it over, posing as a recruiter and collecting résumés from his fellow students. None of this was enough to keep him interested. “I did two semesters and got a 4.0 in their hardest classes,” he says. “I met master’s students who were miserable and grinding away so that they might one day earn a bit more at Google. I was shocked at what I saw and what colleges have become. The smartest people I knew were in high school, and I was so let down by the people in college.”

Although Hotz makes his university experience sound depressing, it left him brimming with confidence and eager to return to Silicon Valley. He’d devoured the cutting-edge AI research and decided the technology wasn’t that hard to master. Hotz took a job at Vicarious, a highflying AI startup, in January to get a firsthand look at the top work in the field, and this confirmed his suspicions. “I understand the state-of-the-art papers,” he says. “The math is simple. For the first time in my life, I’m like, ‘I know everything there is to know.’ ”

He quit Vicarious in July and decided to put his conviction to the test. A friend introduced him to Musk, and they met at Tesla’s factory in Fremont, Calif., talking at length about the pros and perils of AI technology. Soon enough, the two men started figuring out a deal in which Hotz would help develop Tesla’s self-driving technology. There was a proposal that if Hotz could do better than Mobileye’s technology in a test, then Musk would reward him with a lucrative contract. Hotz, though, broke off the talks when he felt that Musk kept changing the terms. “Frankly, I think you should just work at Tesla,” Musk wrote to Hotz in an e-mail. “I’m happy to work out a multimillion-dollar bonus with a longer time horizon that pays out as soon as we discontinue Mobileye.”

“I appreciate the offer,” Hotz replied, “but like I’ve said, I’m not looking for a job. I’ll ping you when I crush Mobileye.”

Musk simply answered, “OK.”

“For the first time in my life, I’m like, ‘I know everything there is to know’ ”

Hotz has filled out since his days as a scrawny teenage hacker, although he dresses the same. Most often, he wears jeans and a hoodie and shuffles around the garage in socks. He has a beard of sorts, and some long, stray whiskers spring out from his Adam’s apple. His demeanor doesn’t match the slacker get-up. Hotz’s enthusiasm is infectious, and he explains just about everything with flailing hands and the wide eyes of someone in a permanent state of surprise.

It’s easy enough to draw a connection between Hotz and Steve Wozniak. Like Hotz, Wozniak began his hacking days on the fringes of the law—in the early 1970s, before he and his pal Steve Jobs founded Apple. Woz was making small devices that let people place free long-distance phone calls. Even in Silicon Valley, few people are equally adept at hardware and software. Woz was, and so is Hotz.

Hotz began working in earnest on his self-driving technology in late October. He applied online to become an authorized Honda service center and was accepted. This allowed him to download manuals and schematics for his Acura. Soon enough, he’d packed the glove compartment space with electronics, including an Intel NUC minicomputer, a couple GPS units, and a communications switch. Hotz connected all this gear with the car’s main computers and used duct tape to secure the cables running to the lidar on the roof.

There are two breakthroughs that make Hotz’s system possible. The first comes from the rise in computing power since the days of the Grand Challenge. He uses graphics chips that normally power video game consoles to process images pulled in by the car’s camera and speedy Intel chips to run his AI calculations. Where the Grand Challenge teams spent millions on their hardware and sensors, Hotz, using his winnings from hacking contests, spent a total of $50,000—the bulk of which ($30,000) was for the car itself.

The second advance is deep learning, an AI technology that has taken off over the past few years. It allows researchers to assign a task to computers and then sit back as the machines in essence teach themselves how to accomplish and finally master the job. In the past, for example, it was thought that the only way for a computer to identify a chair in a photo would be to create a really precise definition of a chair—you would tell the computer to look for something with four legs, a flat seat, and so on. In recent years, though, computers have become much more powerful, while memory has become cheap and plentiful. This has paved the way for more of a brute-force technique, in which researchers can bombard computers with a flood of information and let the systems make sense of the data. “You show a computer 1 million images with chairs and 1 million without them,” Hotz says. “Eventually, the computer is able to describe a chair in a way so much better than a human ever could.”

The theory behind this type of AI software has been around for decades. It’s embedded in products consumers take for granted. With the help of Google, for example, you can search for “pictures of the beach,” and AI software will comb through your photo collection to turn up just that. Some of the biggest breakthroughs have come in voice recognition, where smart assistants such as Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana can pick up a person’s voice even in noisy situations. The same goes for instantaneous translation applications, which have largely been taught new languages via deep-learning algorithms that pore over huge volumes of text. With his car, Hotz wants to extend the same principles to the field of computer vision.

The electronics in George Hotz’s glove compartment
The electronics in Hotz’s glove compartment.

In the month before our first drive on I-280, Hotz spent most of his time outfitting the sedan with the sensors, computing equipment, and electronics. Once all the systems were up and running, he drove the vehicle for two and a half hours and simply let the computer observe him. Back in his garage, he downloaded the data from the drive and set algorithms to work analyzing how he handled various situations. The car learned that Hotz tends to stay in the middle of a lane and maintain a safe distance from the car in front of him. Once the analysis was complete, the software could predict the safest path for the vehicle. By the time he and I hit the road, the car behaved much like a teenager who’d spent only a couple of hours behind the wheel.

Two weeks later, we went on a second drive. He’d taken the car out for a few more hours of training, and the difference was impressive. It could now drive itself for long stretches while remaining within lanes. The lines on the dash screen—where one showed the car’s actual path, and the other where the computer wanted to go—were overlapping almost perfectly. Sometimes the Acura seemed to lock on to the car in front of it, or take cues around a curve from a neighboring car. Hotz hadn’t programmed any of these behaviors into the vehicle. He can’t really explain all the reasons it does what it does. It’s started making decisions on its own.

In early December, Hotz took me on a third ride. By then, he’d automated not only the steering but also the gas and brake pedals. Remarkably, the car now stayed in the center of the lane perfectly for miles and miles. When a vehicle in front of us slowed down, so did the Acura. I took a turn “driving” and felt an adrenaline rush—not because the car was all over the place, but because it worked so well.

Hotz’s approach isn’t simply a low-cost knockoff of existing autonomous vehicle technology. He says he’s come up with discoveries—most of which he refuses to disclose in detail—that improve how the AI software interprets data coming in from the cameras. “We’ve figured out how to phrase the driving problem in ways compatible with deep learning,” Hotz says. Instead of the hundreds of thousands of lines of code found in other self-driving vehicles, Hotz’s software is based on about 2,000 lines.

The major advance he will discuss is the edge that deep-learning techniques provide in autonomous technology. He says the usual practice has been to manually code rules that handle specific situations. There’s code that helps cars follow other vehicles on the highway, and more code to deal with a deer that leaps into the road. Hotz’s car has no such built-in rules. It learns what drivers typically do in various situations and then tries to mimic and perfect that behavior. If his Acura cruises by a bicyclist, for example, it gives the biker some extra room, because it’s seen Hotz do that in the past. His system has a more general-purpose kind of intelligence than a long series of if/then rules. As Hotz puts it in developer parlance, “ ‘If’ statements kill.” They’re unreliable and imprecise in a real world full of vagaries and nuance. It’s better to teach the computer to be like a human, who constantly processes all kinds of visual clues and uses experience, to deal with the unexpected rather than teach it a hard-and-fast policy.

In the coming weeks, Hotz intends to start driving for Uber so he can rack up a lot of training miles for the car. He aims to have a world-class autonomous vehicle in five months, something he can show off for Musk. He’s heard that Teslas struggle when going across the Golden Gate Bridge because of the poor lane markings. So he plans to film a video of the Acura outperfoming a Tesla across the bridge, and then follow that up by passing the final test on I-405 in Los Angeles where Musk lives. Hotz’s YouTube videos get millions of views, and he fully expects Musk will get the message. “I’m a big Elon fan, but I wish he didn’t jerk me around for three months,” he says. “He can buy the technology for double.” (Says Tesla spokesman Ricardo Reyes: “We wish him well.”)

There’s really no telling how effective Hotz’s software and self-learning technology ultimately will be. His self-funded experiment could end with Hotz humbly going back to knock on Google’s door for a job. “Yeah, of course there will be skepticism,” he says. “This is part of a great adventure. All I can say is, ‘Watch.’ ”

George Hotz in his Acura ILX

Sitting cross-legged on a dirty, formerly cream-colored couch in his garage, Hotz philosophizes about AI and the advancement of humanity. “Slavery did not end because everyone became moral,” he says. “The reason slavery ended is because we had an industrial revolution that made man’s muscles obsolete. For the last 150 years, the economy has been based on man’s mind. Capitalism, it turns out, works better when people are chasing a carrot rather than being hit with a stick. We’re on the brink of another industrial revolution now. The entire Internet at the moment has about 10 brains’ worth of computing power, but that won’t always be the case.

“The truth is that work as we know it in its modern form has not been around that long, and I kind of want to use AI to abolish it. I want to take everyone’s jobs. Most people would be happy with that, especially the ones who don’t like their jobs. Let’s free them of mental tedium and push that to machines. In the next 10 years, you’ll see a big segment of the human labor force fall away. In 25 years, AI will be able to do almost everything a human can do. The last people with jobs will be AI programmers.”

Hotz’s vision for the future isn’t quite as bleak as The Matrix, where robots mine our bodies for fuel. He thinks machines will take care of much of the work tied to producing food and other necessities. Humans will then be free to plug into their computers and get lost in virtual reality. “It’s already happening today,” he says. “People drive to work, sit in front of their computer all day, and then sit in front of their computer at home.” In 20 years, the sitting in front of the computer part will be a lot more fun, according to Hotz, with virtual worlds that far exceed anything we’ve managed to build on earth. “Stop worrying about the journey,” he says. “Enjoy the destination. We will have a better world. We will be able to truly live in a society of the mind.”

Hotz started the autonomous car work because he sees it as Step 1 in the revolution. Transportation is an area where AI can have a massive impact. He hopes to take his technology to retail next, building systems that provide flawless self-checkout at stores. His desire to have AI take over so many jobs stems partly from a near-religious belief in the power and ultimate purpose of technology. “Technology isn’t good or bad,” he says. “There are upsides like nuclear power and downsides like nuclear bombs. Technology is what we make of it. There’s a chance that AI might kill us all, but what we know is that if you’re on the other side of technology, you lose. Betting on technology is always the correct bet.”

All this talk represents an evolution in Hotz’s hacker ethos. He used to rip apart products made by Apple and Sony, because he enjoyed solving hard puzzles and because he reveled in the thought of one person mucking up multibillion-dollar empires. With the car, the retail software, and the plans to roil entire economies, Hotz wants to build a reputation as a maker of the most profound products in the world—things that forever change how people live. “I don’t care about money,” he says. “I want power. Not power over people, but power over nature and the destiny of technology. I just want to know how it all works.”

Tuesday, December 15, 2015

Tu ruta hacia la seguridad (Comisión Federal de Comercio)

La Comisión Federal de Comercio

Por Lisa Weintraub Schifferle
Abogada, División de Educación del Consumidor y Negocios, FTC


¿Estás instalando una red inalámbrica en tu casa? Para mantenerla segura, no te olvides de tu enrutador. 
¿Por qué hay que prestar atención a esa pequeña caja con luces que titilan? Tu enrutador te permite conectarte a internet y comunicarte con otros dispositivos dentro de tu casa. Así que es tu primera línea de defensa para protegerte contra los ataques de los ladrones de identidad y piratas informáticos.

¿Cómo puedes hacer para que tu enrutador sea más seguro? Empieza con estos pasos:
  • Cambia el nombre de tu enrutador. El nombre de tu enrutador (también llamado SSID o service set identifier) usualmente es un identificador predeterminado asignado por el fabricante. Cámbiaselo por algún otro nombre que solo tú conozcas.
  • Cambia las contraseñas preestablecidas de tu enrutador. Usualmente, tu enrutador también viene con una contraseña predeterminada. Los piratas informáticos conocen esas contraseñas predeterminadas. Así que cambia tu contraseña por otra única, extensa y compleja – piensa que por lo menos debería tener una combinación de números, símbolos y letras minúsculas y mayúsculas de 12 caracteres.
  • Desactiva cualquier función de “administración remota”. Algunos enrutadores ofrecen una administración remota para soporte técnico. No dejes activadas esas funciones. Los piratas informáticos pueden usarlas para entrar a la red de tu casa.
Una vez que hayas configurado tu enrutador, no lo dejes juntando polvo en un rincón. En lugar de eso, actualízalo. Con el transcurso del tiempo, el software que viene con tu enrutador puede necesitar actualizaciones. Visita periódicamente el sitio web del fabricante para ver si hay nuevas versiones disponibles para descargar. O registra tu enrutador con el fabricante y suscríbete para que te envíe las actualizaciones. Si el enrutador pertenece a tu proveedor de servicio de internet, verifica si el proveedor expide actualizaciones automáticamente.
Para más recomendaciones sobre seguridad de enrutadores yseguridad informática, échale un vistazo al artículo actualizado de la FTC sobre cómo proteger tu red inalámbrica. Y si te piratean el sistema y tu información queda expuesta, visita robodeidentidad.gov para consultar un plan de acción.  

Thursday, December 10, 2015

Shale Doesn't Swing Oil Prices—OPEC Does (BusinessWeek)

The oil cartel is still influential, and American shale can't replace the world's true "swing" producer.

The breathtaking crash in oil prices has generated a new conventional wisdom: America’s shale oil industry has supplanted OPEC as the so-called “swing” producer, rendering the 55-year-old cartel powerless to affect the price of crude. Veteran oil analyst Daniel Yergin told Bloomberg TV this week that the emergence of U.S. shale companies as “the swing producer” contributes to oil price volatility “because you’re talking about the impact of decisions made by thousands of individual producers.”

With apologies to Yergin and others saying similar things, this is wrong on several levels. OPEC remains the only group that can meaningfully affect the price of oil by purposely raising or lowering output. American shale producers don’t coordinate their actions strategically the way the Vienna-based organization does; they must take whatever price the market gives them. To the degree that American shale producers do influence world oil prices by independently raising output when prices are high and cutting it when prices are low, they tend to stabilize the market, not add to volatility, as Yergin contends. (A spokesman for Yergin said he was traveling and not available for comment on this story.)

Oil is certainly volatile at the moment. The price of West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. benchmark, stood at slightly over $100 a barrel as recently as June 2014. But soft economic growth and rising production, including from American frackers, has pushed it steadily lower. It broke below $40 on Dec. 4, the day OPEC oil ministers meeting in Vienna announced that production levels would remain unchanged, and it continued to sag in the following days, reaching a six-year low of $37.23 on Dec. 9. Inventories in the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development nations, up 11 percent since June 2014, are at the highest since at least 1996.

Notice that oil’s latest slide didn’t occur after a price-setting conclave of U.S. frackers in Houston—and that's because there is no such gathering. The drop came after a pivotal OPEC meeting in which the cartel’s most important member, Saudi Arabia, chose to maintain market share rather than to cut back production in hopes of pushing the price up for the good of the cartel as a whole. The point is: What OPEC does still matters.

There’s a reason that America’s shale industry is often described—by Goldman Sachs, the Economist, Bloomberg News, and others—as a “swing” producer. It is influential: By contributing to an oil glut, it has prevented OPEC from propping up prices in the triple digits. Also, its output, like OPEC’s, is closely watched by the market for clues to price trends.

But a true swing producer has freedom of action. It has a large market share, spare capacity, and very low production costs, and it is capable of acting strategically—alone or in a cartel—to raise and lower production to affect the price. Saudi Arabia fits that description; America’s shale producers don’t. The shale players are too small to move prices on their own, and they don’t act in concert. Shale producers have essentially no spare capacity because they’re always producing as much as they profitably can. Production costs are also far higher than those of the Saudis or Kuwaitis. In the language of economics, U.S. shale producers are price takers, not price setters. 


“Saudi Arabia is still the swing producer,” said Amy Jaffe, executive director of energy and sustainability at the University of California-Davis. Shale producers, in contrast, are more opportunistic than strategic. They are getting bloodied now, and their output is likely to drop sharply in the next six months as old wells run dry and aren’t replaced with new ones. But they will spring back quickly if oil gets back to a range at which they can make money, said Jaffe: “If I’m a shale producer, you should think of me like the guy with the foldable lawn chair in a game of musical chairs. I’m never getting knocked out of the game.”

Frackers aren’t the ones starting and stopping the music. The imprecise use of swing producer as a “crutch phrase” to describe America’s shale industry has real-world consequences, said David Livingston, an associate in the energy and climate program of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “People see this language and reflexibly accept it. They think that it means the U.S. can balance the oil market,” he said. “It leads people to think they can turn their backs on the role OPEC plays.”

Turning one’s back on OPEC now would not be wise. Gluts are poisonous to any cartel, whether oil or diamonds or cocaine. But if the balance shifts and the glut disappears, OPEC will once again be able to drive prices higher. By letting prices fall, the Saudis hope to kill off some higher-priced competition in the medium term, said Marc Chandler, head of currency strategy at Brown Brothers Harriman. In a Dec. 8 note to clients, Chandler wrote: “The action of a cartel trying to discipline the market and a collapsed cartel may look eerily similar from a high level of abstraction, but they are as different as a surgeon cutting a patient in a surgical procedure and a stabbing.”


Wednesday, December 9, 2015

Uber's new service is literally just a bus


Uber has announced its latest innovation -- a multi-person, ride-sharing scheme that picks up and drops off passengers along a pre-determined route. If that sounds a little similar, to, say, a bus, that's because it is a bus.

Known officially as UberHOP, the idea supposedly blends a traditional wait-and-ride bus service with some of the on-demand convenience of Uber.

Users will be paired with a driver and other commuters going in the same direction, and then be directed to a pick-up location. Once there the driver will load up with the commuters, and drop them off at a "pre-destined" (determined?) stop, "so you can walk the last few blocks to work".

The de facto busses will run "during commuting hours" across Seattle starting 10 December, as part of a pilot scheme. Uber says the service is designed not to replace mass transit, but to augment it "at no extra cost".

"Investment in mass transit is an important part of the solution. But it's expensive and not everyone lives within walking distance of the subway or a bus stop. Uber helps use today's existing infrastructure more efficiently at no extra cost," the company wrote in a blog post.

"Today, 76 percent of commuters in the US drive to work by themselves. If they could easily share the trip (and the cost) with one or more fellow commuters that would dramatically cut congestion, improving everyone’s quality of life."

Uber already has several other ride-sharing services, including UberPOOL, recently launched in London, which allows users to share rides with each other.

The company also announced a second pilot scheme, this time in Chicago, for "uberCOMMUTE", a program for drivers who want to recoup the cost of their commute by sharing the trip. Available between 6am and 10pm in Chicago, anyone with a car will be able to take part if they give Uber access to their driving record and identity.

Uber said it had been inspired by the success of BlaBlaCar in Europe (named one of the continent's hottest startups by WIRED) but claimed it could make the process "more convenient, more reliable and safer" than competitors.

"By making it easy and affordable for people to share rides, we can get more butts into fewer cars," the company explained.

Tuesday, December 8, 2015

Do you want to grow your business?

Do you want to grow your business?
The Small Business Education Program/Grow Miami Initiative at Miami Dade College will offerfree workshops to small-and moderate-sized businesses from specific areas in Miami-Dade County, starting in January 2016.
apply button
Wolfson Campus
Wednesdays
Jan. 20-Feb. 24, 2016
5:30-9:00 p.m.
Application deadline:
Dec. 9, 2015
apply button
Homestead
Wednesdays
March 23 & 30, 2016
5:30-9:00 p.m.
Application deadline:
March 18, 2016
apply button
Spanish-Language Session
Tuesday
March 15, 2016
5:30-9:00 p.m.
Application deadline:
March 11, 2016
For more information about the Small Business Education Program at MDC, visitmdc.edu/smallbusiness, call 305-237-3822 or email smallbusinessprogram@mdc.edu. Space is limited, so apply today!
THIS EVENT IS PRESENTED BY
Miami Dade College logo
AND IS SPONSORED BY
Citi Foundation
The Small Business Education Program/Grow Miami Initiative is presented by Miami Dade College’s School of Business and sponsored by Citi Foundation.

Monday, December 7, 2015

De Orwell a Vargas Llosa...MDCollege

CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN INITIATIVES
INTERAMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR DEMOCRACY
DIARIO LAS AMERICAS

Invitan a Ud. a la presentación del libro:

De Orwell a Vargas Llosa
Apuntes sobre literatura y libertad 
de
Emilio Martínez Cardona


LUNES 7 DE DICIEMBRE DE 2015 A LAS 6:00PM

Wolfson Campus - Miami Dade College
300 NE 2nd Avenue, Miami
Building 6, Room 6100

Emilio Martínez Cardona, escritor y ensayista político, nacido en Uruguay y nacionalizado boliviano.

Títulos publicados: Noticias de Burgundia (1999), Antiguos Jardines (2001), Cuentos para emborrachar la perdiz (2001), Macabria y otros cuentos (2002), El Banquete (2004), Cartografías (2005), Libro de los espejos (2006), X2: lo que Unasur no dijo (2009), La masacre del Hotel de las Américas (2009), Marea Blanca (2009), Relaciones peligrosas (2010), Desde el exilio (2010), Tipnis: la marcha de cambio de la historia (2011), e Introducción al método de la noche (2015).

El autor será presentado por el escritor Carlos Alberto Montaner y el Embajador Armando Valladares

Nota:
Estacionamiento gratuito en el parqueo de Miami Dade College: Calle 5 NE entre 1ra and 2da Avenidas. Frente a la estación de bomberos. 



Juan A BlancoGil
Juan Antonio Blanco Gil (PhD)
Executive Director
Center for Latin American and Caribbean Initiatives
Miami Dade College / Wolfson Campus
300 NE 2nd Avenue, Room 1402, Miami, Florida, 33132-2297
Phone: 1-305-237-3944
Cell Phone: 1-305-975-3248


Thursday, December 3, 2015

Networking Event: December 17th, 2015 @ 6pm



Constant Contact - Email Marketing


and




ARE PLEASED TO INVITE YOU TO THE NEXT BUSINESS NETWORKING EVENT:
 
 Thursday, December 17th, 2015
From 6:00 PM -8:00 PM

@Blue Martini
900 South Miami Ave

Members: FREE
Non-Members: $20
One complimentary drink upon arrival and appetizers served in the first hour


.

Next Event

Dec 10th - French-American Holiday Party
6 to 8pm @ Bagatelle Restaurant Miami Beach
FACC Member $15 | Non Member $30

.

100 N Biscayne Blvd., suite 1105 - Miami, FL 33132
contact@faccmiami.com - (305) 374 5000