Waching daily Jul 2 2018

In China, the robot revolution is coming - and faster than you might think.

Right now, China's manufacturing sector is still mostly human-powered.

There are around 120 million people working in manufacturing, compared to just half a million robots.

But things are changing fast.

China's robotics purchases have gone through the roof over the past few years,

and by next year China will account for half of nearly all global robot shipments.

Beijing's goal?

Triple the number of robots between now and 2020.

Workers are already starting to feel it.

Foxconn, makers of the iPhone, recently announced plans to lay off at least 10,000 people by the end of this year.

It's no secret why: the company has said it aims to go fully automated,

with its first goal being to hit 30% automation by 2020.

So what's going to happen to those 120 million manufacturing workers

as the robot invasion gathers steam and their jobs are eliminated?

To get a clue, you've got to dig deep.

Literally.

Like industrial manufacturing, coal mining has long been a major employer of China's rural, working folks.

Millions of people make their livings in the mines.

But as coal gets less profitable and the Chinese government pushes

for cleaner sources of energy to combat the smog problem,

the coal industry is shrinking.

It's not unusual for a coal company to lay off thousands of workers in one go.

More than 2 million miners are expected to be jobless by 2020.

And those who've still got jobs are seeing fewer hours, which means lower wages.

How are these miners making ends meet?

They're becoming drivers.

Didi, China's ride-hailing giant, employed over a million drivers

who'd been pushed or were being pushed out of major industries like coal in 2016.

That number is almost certainly higher now.

It's likely that as they're replaced by robots, many of China's manufacturing workers will make the same choice.

Driving has particular appeal: it's comfortable, pays decently, and allows them to stay in the city.

Didi claims over 20 million registered drivers, and the demand for rides isn't slowing down.

And of course, Didi isn't the only employer in the gig economy.

Laid-off workers can find at least part-time pay working for food delivery services, or taking on other gigs.

China's gig economy is growing; in fact, it's adding jobs 20x faster than China's overall economy.

An Alibaba research arm projects that 400 million Chinese people

could be self-employed by the mid 2030s thanks to this "Uberificaiton" effect.

What happens when even these gig jobs get replaced by robots?

That's a bit further off, but it's an important unanswered question.

Self-driving car technology, once it's perfected, is likely to displace a lot of human Didi drivers.

Drone delivery - whether in the air or on four wheels - will hurt delivery gig earners.

In the long term, if nothing changes,

China could be facing a future where tens of millions of unskilled laborers can't find work.

But in the short term,

it's likely that a lot of those displaced by China's robot revolution will find...

...that their next job is already waiting for them in their smartphone.

For more infomation >> When the robots come for China's jobs - Duration: 3:13.

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Officials: Winds letting up for High Chateau Fire in Teller County - Duration: 2:54.

For more infomation >> Officials: Winds letting up for High Chateau Fire in Teller County - Duration: 2:54.

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Disabled Veterans Floating The Mississippi For Cancer Research - Duration: 1:58.

For more infomation >> Disabled Veterans Floating The Mississippi For Cancer Research - Duration: 1:58.

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AI for your startup - Duration: 5:56.

AI is a very hyped subject right now, but it will change every industry like how IT has changed

pretty much every industry.

AI is not like a breakthrough.

The breakthrough around AI is the volume of data we can accumulate, we can collect nowadays.

Plus the second breakthrough is like the relatively easy access to computer power.

So data plus computer power makes like AI more and more relevant for any business.

You gotta ask yourselves: Who is AI for?

What problem are you trying to solve?

Are you doing it just because it's a buzzword and everyone's getting into it or

are you really trying to solve a core problem that's going make your job more efficient.

If the customer needs it, we will develop that.

The remittance industry respects what the customer needs.

What the customer needs is: effective, cost efficient, and also convenience and security.

I think AI will be a tool that we can use.

With a lot of like startups, you might not even know that you're collecting all this

information and I think AI is something that they just have to tap into because you know,

whatever business they're doing, they're collecting data.

It's always good to have your own pool of data and your own demographics and customers.

So once you have all this data ready, it's just ways of, you know, harnessing it.

AI is all about like feeding your algorithm, to train your algorithm with data.

Because if you wake up ten years from now and you're like, "I should have collected

this kind of data.

It would've been nice.

I should've structured my information system in a different way."

It's either too late or it would take you a big amount of effort for you to make it,

you know, neat.

Even if you're not coming from a technological background, it's something that you need

to think from day one.

Certainly necessary. Because we are talking about consumer business, consumer experience.

[With] consumers now, you need it fast, you need to be accurate, you need it right on time.

I will say the chance for error is much lesse than a process that goes through 10 humans.

And certainly AI can help to really speed up the process.

One of the limitations is AI is as only as good as the data you put into it.

And so for us, you know, the data is the candidate's CV, the job experience - and that's great but

that may or may not be 100% accurate.

The other limitation is our customers expect AI to be a one-stop solution.

But unfortunately in the cases, AI is at the very early stages now.

So we can't expect AI to do everything.

AI helps but it will never replace

human-to-human interaction.

The limitation sometimes is, now it's actually very difficult to get a reliable vendor or

developer for the AI technology.

And also some, maybe inside the bank [industry], they also find it

very difficult to get in-house talents.

The recruiters costs money right?

So we try to replace the middleman with like fancy algorithms or data science, AI.

But then, you know, AI can be sometimes dangerous because it kind of create like linear career,

you know.

We all know that we don't have a linear career, you know.

So you need to keep the human at the core of your system and try to enhance everything

else around humans.

Because a lot of these startups, especially they're lean startups, you know...

So having open sources out there for developers that, you know, chatbots have open source APIs

for them to integrate into the website.

So I would say the resources are out there, it's just finding, finding the perfect fit,

basically.

AI is becoming more accessible with things like Google Tensorflow and

with AWS Cloud Services.

We hired a few data scientists.

They looked into the problem we're trying to solve, to make our jobs much more efficient

and what we found is actually - hey, we can use ready-made solutions to actually leverage

and take advantage of AI.

There's some Python libraries, for example.

There's a very very famous one called NLTK, for example, for natural language toolkit.

So that's something you can do quite easily today.

I think Hollywood probably does a really bad job in kind of stereotyping AI,

you know.

Every single movie that you've seen with, like, AI, it's always like about

taking over the world.

All this data you've collected are very important information. So AI just really helps filter

and make sense of all that data.

I think AI, it's here to stay as long as we know how to complement with the startups and

the resources here.

I know it's very confusing for the public - like for people who are non-technical that

it looks very scary.

You can read a lot of articles online.

First of all, AI is not that smart.

We're not there.

There's a lot of room for improvement for AI.

It's going to be changing every industry like the IT have been changing all industries

in the past 30 years, and it's just a promulgation of technology.

So nothing to be really scared of.

We should really embrace the change.

Just like before internet came, even before mobile came, you see how much change the world

faces - and AI is just the next wave of technology change,

and so it just makes the world better.

Hopefully. And faster!

For more infomation >> AI for your startup - Duration: 5:56.

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College Football Odds: Alabama Favored for Championship | Heavy.com - Duration: 5:40.

College Football Odds: Alabama Favored for Championship | Heavy.com

Alabama is one of the Vegas favorites for the 2018-19 season.

The College Football Playoff championship game for the 2018 season is Monday, January 7, 2019, at Levi's Stadium.

The top five favorites to win a national title at sportsbooks monitored by OddsShark.com are the Alabama Crimson Tide (+175), Clemson Tigers (+600), Ohio State Buckeyes (+700), Georgia Bulldogs (+750) and Michigan Wolverines (+1600).

Four of those schools could have a new starting quarterback from 2017 come Week 1 of the 2018 season.

The Crimson Tide open just about every year as the national title favorites as they should, having won five of the past nine under Coach Nick Saban.

Jalen Hurts was the team's starting QB all of last season, but he struggled in the first half of the national title game against Georgia and freshman Tua Tagovailoa led the comeback victory.

Tagovailoa is the clearly superior passer, and sits high on the 2018 Heisman Trophy odds, but Hurts has all the experience and is a terrific runner.

That battle will be decided in fall camp; might the loser transfer?.

Clemson does return 2017 starter Kelly Bryant, but he was terrible in the Tigers' College Football Playoff loss to Alabama, potentially opening the door for highly-touted true freshman Trevor Lawrence to take the job.

Another former heralded recruit, sophomore Hunter Johnson, saw the writing on the wall and has transferred out.

Ohio State will have a new starting QB with J.T.

Barrett, one of the best in Big Ten history, having moved to the NFL.

Redshirt sophomore Dwayne Haskins was battling redshirt junior Joe Burrow during spring camp, but Burrow decided to leave for LSU so it will be Haskins under center.

Michigan's Brandon Peters played a decent amount in 2017 and is back in Ann Arbor, but Coach Jim Harbaugh got odds-shifting news in late April when the NCAA ruled that Ole Miss transfer Shea Patterson was eligible to play immediately even though he's not a graduate transfer.

He was considered the No.

1 QB in the entire Class of 2016 and showed signs of stardom for the Rebels.

Patterson left because that program is in some NCAA hot water.

He should win the starting job.

The one school assured of its starting quarterback being under center in Week 1 (barring injury) is Georgia with Jake Fromm.

However, the sophomore might not want to get too comfortable as the top-ranked QB recruit in this year's class, Justin Fields, is already pushing him.

Alabama and Georgia don't play in the 2018 regular season, but it would be an upset if they didn't meet in the SEC title game.

That would seem to preclude another matchup for the national championship.

Remember, Auburn and not Alabama won the SEC West last year.

Michigan and Ohio State do close the regular season against one another as per usual.

Clemson's toughest test should be October 27 at Florida State (+4500), but the Tigers' schedule looks rather weak overall.

Only the SEC and ACC have had at least one representative in every edition of the College Football Playoff.

For more odds information, betting picks and a breakdown of this week's top sports betting news check out the OddsShark podcast with Jon Campbell and Andrew Avery.

Subscribe on iTunes or listen to it at OddsShark.libsyn.com.

For more infomation >> College Football Odds: Alabama Favored for Championship | Heavy.com - Duration: 5:40.

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Woman's search for missing ring sparks fire on social media - Duration: 1:25.

For more infomation >> Woman's search for missing ring sparks fire on social media - Duration: 1:25.

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50/50 "The Grind" - Skatepark Seeking in BTV - Story For City Council - Duration: 7:48.

For more infomation >> 50/50 "The Grind" - Skatepark Seeking in BTV - Story For City Council - Duration: 7:48.

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Propositions to end to daylight saving time, break up California qualify for Nov. ballot - Duration: 2:28.

For more infomation >> Propositions to end to daylight saving time, break up California qualify for Nov. ballot - Duration: 2:28.

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Is Juul Making It Easy for Kids to Vape in School? | Heavy.com - Duration: 7:12.

Is Juul Making It Easy for Kids to Vape in School? | Heavy.com

The Juul vaporizer is the latest advancement in electronic cigarette technology, delivering nicotine to the user from a device about the size and shape of a thumb drive.

Juul has taken the electronic cigarette market by storm experiencing a year-over-year growth of about 700 percent.

In recent months, stories about a possible Juul craze among teenagers have circulated in the media.

In April, The Wall Street Journal reported that parents are fighting a Juul.

epidemic.

In May, The New Yorker told a story about Juul's presence at high schools in America's more affluent ZIP codes.

I study ways to inform public health and policy by using data from social media.

According to new research my colleagues and I conducted that was just published in Drug and Alcohol Dependence, thousands of students sneak this nicotine delivery system on to school grounds to use during school hours.

Using social media for science.

Our study adds to this discussion by considering a novel source: posts to Twitter.

Because posts on social media reflect the attitudes and behaviors of the public in their own words, researchers can treat this data source like a massive focus group.

For this reason, my colleagues and I will often turn to social media to track health behaviors, including the use of emerging tobacco products, to better understand the social and environmental setting in which they are used.

For example, last year we discovered that "cloud chasing," or the act of blowing the largest aerosol cloud possible in a competition, was one of the more appealing characteristics of electronic cigarettes among Instagram users.

In our most recent study, we wanted to document and describe the public's initial experiences with Juul.

We collected posts to Twitter containing the term "Juul" from April 1, 2017 to December 14, 2017.

We analyzed over 80,000 posts representing tweets from 52,098 unique users during this period and used text classifiers (automated processes that find specified words and phrases) to identify topics in posts.

We found that 1 in 25 posts, or 4 percent, was indicative of use of Juul while at high school, middle school and even elementary school.

These posts described young people talking about using Juul on school grounds, in classrooms, in bathrooms, in the library, at recess and during gym.

For example, if the words "school," "principal," "teacher," "elementary" or "recess," among dozens of others, co-occurred in posts with the word "Juul," we identified that post as reflective of a young person using Juul or seeing someone use Juul while on school grounds.

In comparison, a recent national online survey showed that 7 percent of participants 15 to 17 years of age, who would most likely be high school students, reported ever using a Juul.

We only had access to posts from public accounts, so our findings do not reflect posts from private users suggesting our numbers may underreport the amount of youth talking about Juul on Twitter.

Juul's discreetness may facilitate its use in places where vaping is prohibited, also known as "stealth vaping.

How to handle vaping.

Our findings suggest educators may be in need of training on how to identify Juul in the classroom.

School administrators may consider installing vapor detectors in bathrooms and classrooms to deter use of Juul on school grounds.

Our study's data source – posts to Twitter – may highlight a way parents can determine if their child is using Juul.

While we analyzed anonymized data, parents could follow their child's account to monitor such activities.

Twitter does not make its users' demographic information (e.g., age) public in order to protect user privacy.

As such, our study could not determine the exact age of Twitter users.

However, posts contained combined words like "Juul" and "recess" suggesting posts were made by youth.

While Juul is marketed as a "smoking alternative" for adults trying to quit, we found relatively few posts containing phrases like "quit smoking.

" One in 350 posts do.

Electronic cigarettes have stirred national debate where public health officials are trying to determine if these devices, like Juul, will help smokers quit combustible cigarettes or serve as a possible gateway product to combustible cigarette use among youth.

While this debate will likely go on for some time, it is clear that nicotine use of any kind is known to be addictive and harmful to adolescent brain development.

We believe that our findings underscore the need for policies to be implemented to keep such products out of the hands of youth.

Jon-Patrick Allem, Research Scientist, University of Southern California.