The Weather Company, an IBM Business and Rogers Media announced today an agreement to provide weather information and content customized specifically for the Canadian market. With this agreement, The Weather Company will provide in-depth weather data and forecasts, as well as curated content, across Rogers Media properties. In turn, Rogers Media will provide locally relevant articles, photos and video content across the Canadian versions of The Weather Channel app and website (weather.com) to provide residents with the most pertinent information possible. The Weather Company and Rogers Media will also align to enhance advertising across both companies’ properties, with Rogers leveraging its ad sales capabilities to monetize The Weather Channel properties in Canada.

If your timing is just exactly right, you can experience a Disneyland ghost town

Bank of Montreal (BMO), CaixaBank, Commerzbank and Erste Group have joined an initiative launched by UBS and IBM in 2016 to build a new global trade platform based on blockchain technology. This new platform, called Batavia, is built to be openly accessed by organisations of all sizes anywhere in the world, and can support trade finance for transactions across all modes of trade, whether goods are being transported by air, land or sea.

IBM announced today that Mediacorp, Singapore’s largest media company, has completed a digital transformation of its broadcast operations using IBM Hybrid Cloud solutions as part of the move to a new office building in Singapore’s one-north district. The Mediacorp broadcast operations team can now more quickly, seamlessly and efficiently deliver video and audio content to consumers across different platforms, including new mobile apps, interactive televisions and other connected devices.

f

As companies look to embrace Artificial Intelligence (AI) to gain competitive advantage and increase productivity, IBM today unveiled a new data science and machine learning platform and an elite consulting team to help them accelerate their AI journeys.

IBM today announced a research collaboratory in Singapore, where researchers from IBM intend to collaborate with scientists and engineers from public agencies in Singapore to improve the quality of its urban services. The focus of this research effort will be to use sensor networks to more effectively model, predict and manage the use of natural and physical infrastructure resources – water, transport and energy.  

IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced today that the Victoria University of Wellington, on behalf of the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) Consortium, has selected IBM systems technology to help scientists probe the origins of the universe.

IBM y el Instituto Tecnológico de Massachusetts (MIT) anunciaron los planes de IBM para realizar una inversión de 240 millones de dólares por 10 años a fin de crear el Laboratorio de Inteligencia Artificia MIT-IBM Watson. El laboratorio llevará a cabo investigaciones fundamentales de IA y buscará impulsar avances científicos que desbloqueen su potencial. La colaboración tiene como objetivo avanzar en el desarrollo del hardware, el software y los algoritmos de IA relacionados con el aprendizaje profundo y otras áreas, aumentar el impacto de la misma en industrias tales como el cuidado de la salud y la seguridad cibernética, así como explorar sus implicaciones económicas y éticas en la sociedad. La inversión de IBM de 240 millones de dólares en el laboratorio apoyará la investigación de científicos de IBM y del MIT.

Después de un mes de haber iniciado la consultoría pro-bono de IBM, denominada Corporate Service Corps (CSC), el día de hoy se hizo entrega de los resúmenes ejecutivos a cada uno de los Directores de las organizaciones receptoras de este apoyo: DIF-Dirección de Innovación Guadalajara, Cuerpos de Paz-AIPROMADES, Asociación Nacional de Bancos de Alimentos (BAMX).

ANZ, one of Australia and New Zealand’s leading banks, has signed a five-year, AU$450 million strategic agreement with IBM. This partnership will provide ANZ with increased capability to drive productivity and innovation across the Group, as well as improving its capacity to deal with the rapidly growing number of customers and transactions across the bank’s branch, digital and mobile channels and support ANZ’s regional expansion.

La Universidad Anáhuac México e IBM México celebraron hoy la firma de la Cátedra Corporativa en beneficio de la comunidad universitaria. El acuerdo fue signado por el Dr. Cipriano Sánchez, LC, Rector de la Universidad Anáhuac México y Antonio Martins, Presidente y Gerente General de IBM México.

IBM announced today it is making up to €2.2 billion ($3 billion) available to finance IT initiatives in key economic stimulus projects in Europe and Asia-Pacific through IBM Global Financing, IBM’s lending and leasing business segment. Today’s announcement follows the availability of up to €1.5 billion ($2 billion) announced by IBM on April 30 to help jump start US economic stimulus programs.

Vodafone New Zealand, a leading telecommunications services provider, and IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced a partnership to deliver the Digital Vodafone 2021 program in New Zealand. The vision for Digital Vodafone 2021 is to create the most engaging digital customer experience by adopting agile as a way of working, embracing new technologies and simplifying business models. The program is supported by IBM iX, one of the world’s largest digital agencies and global business design partners.

IBM today announced that energy system supplier Alstom, and Ikerlan-IK4, an energy technology research and development organization, are using IBM software to develop wind turbine control systems that significantly improve the performance of sustainable power systems based on wind-generated energy.

A new IBM study of more than 1,700 Chief Executive Officers from 64 countries and 18 industries worldwide reveals that CEOs are changing the nature of work by adding a powerful dose of openness, transparency and employee empowerment to the command-and-control ethos that has characterised the modern corporation for more than a century.

98% de la Génération Z, avec un pouvoir d'achat estimé à 44 milliards de dollars, préfère faire ses achats en magasin

IBM (NYSE: IBM) et Boursorama, filiale du groupe Société Générale, renouvellent leur accord par la signature d’un contrat de Cloud hybride d’une durée de 5 ans afin d’enrichir l'offre de nouveaux produits et services proposés par la banque.

A l’occasion du CES de Las Vegas, IBM annonce le lancement d’Advertising Accelerator with Watson, une solution unique de prédiction d’audiences pour annonceurs.

IBM et Holcim France Benelux annoncent la migration vers Windows 7 des postes de travail de 2500 utilisateurs sur 286 sites en seulement trois mois grâce au savoir-faire d’IBM Global Technology Services.

Australia’s largest 100% family-owned meat processor, Thomas Foods International, and largest independent grocery retailer, Drakes Supermarket have signed on as members to the blockchain-based food ecosystem solution, IBM Food Trust™. The successful pilot can trace the entire lifecycle of a food product, from region to plate, and update the record in real-time.

IBM today announced the opening of a new data centre facility in Fortitude Valley, Brisbane, Queensland. The data centre will augment IBM’s existing recovery centre located nearby, to provide exceptional and unrivalled risk mitigation for client information and data.

IBM Australia (NYSE: IBM) has been awarded a multimillion dollar contract with NBN Co Limited to implement and manage the core business and operational support systems required to operate Australia’s National Broadband Network (NBN).

One hundred IBM (NYSE: IBM) employees from 33 countries – including six from Australia and New Zealand – have been selected to participate in the company's new Corporate Service Corps program. The program is part of the Global Citizen's Portfolio initiative announced by CEO Sam Palmisano to develop leadership skills, while addressing socio-economic challenges in emerging markets.

IBM Q Network to explore practical applications of quantum computing for business and science with University of Melbourne, JPMorgan Chase, Daimler AG, Samsung, JSR Corporation, Barclays, Hitachi Metals, Honda, Nagase, Keio University, Oak Ridge National Lab, and Oxford University.

ASL to benefit from IBM Cloud and IBM PureApplication to deliver for secure real time payments for NPP Australia

One of Australia’s leading digital banks taps cognitive technology to simplify the home loan application process with innovative virtual assistan

Icon Group first in Australia to adopt world-leading technology as part of its comprehensive cancer care offering

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) is adopting IBM social software to support the way thousands of employees connect and interact.

A new IBM (NYSE: IBM) study of more than 1,700 Chief Executive Officers from 64 countries and 18 industries worldwide reveals that CEOs are changing the nature of work by adding a powerful dose of openness, transparency and employee empowerment to the command-and-control ethos that has characterised the modern corporation for more than a century.

INPEX selects IBM to manage operation critical apps in Australia

dollypopinspiration:

nanushka

Pull up a chair ???? via

@jaynemckenna

edit by

@veronika.breuer

#nanushkanyc

dollypopinspiration:

nanushka

Open space with natural light in the Lousiana Museum of Modern Art ✨ via

@mariavannguyen

dollypopinspiration:

eberfigueira

Back to the set I designed for

@herculesuniversal

early September in Brazil. Thanks

@francescosourigues

dollypopinspiration:

Diego Delgado-Elias

http://diegodelgadoelias.com/

In contrast to previous notes, in this set of notes we shall focus exclusively on Fourier analysis in the one-dimensional setting for simplicity of notation, although all of the results here have natural extensions to higher dimensions. Depending on the physical context, one can view the physical domain as representing either space or time; we […]

Bring the galaxy home on May the 4th.

Watch the debut of Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian, the finale of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, and more!

Bonjour! Je serai l'invité d'honneur à Yaoi Generation.

October 21st, Lausanne, Switzerland

This is the event's first year and I think it will be very special! I am not able to visit abroad often, so if you are able to come, I hope we can meet!

I look forward to seeing everyone soon! <3 -Hamlet

Mary Pratt, believed to be the last surviving member of the Rockford Peaches, has died at age 101.

Trump’s Failed Coronavirus Response

The Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic has been a deliberate disaster from the beginning. But don’t take my word for it – just look at the facts.

Here’s the timeline: 

In 2018, he let the pandemic-preparedness office in the National Security Council simply dissolve, and followed up with budget cuts to HHS and CDC this year. That team’s job was to follow a pandemic playbook written after global leaders fumbled their response to Ebola in 2014. Trump was briefed on the playbook’s existence in his first year - had he listened, the government would’ve started getting equipment to doctors two months ago.

The initial outbreak of the coronavirus began in Wuhan, China, in December, 2019.  

By mid-January, 2020, the White House had intelligence reports that warned of a likely pandemic.

On January 18th, HHS Secretary Azar spoke with Trump to emphasize the threat of the virus just as US Diplomats were being evacuated from Wuhan.

Two days later, the virus was confirmed in both the US and South Korea.

That week, South Korean officials immediately drafted medical companies to develop test kits for mass production. The WHO declared a global health emergency. But Trump … did nothing.

As Hubei Province went on lockdown, Trump, who loves any excuse to enact a racist travel ban, barred entry of any foreigners coming from China (it was hardly proactive) but took no additional steps to prepare for infection in the United States.

He said, “We pretty much shut it down, coming in from China,”

He didn’t ramp up production of test kits so we could begin isolating the virus.

By February, the US had 14 confirmed cases but the CDC test kits proved faulty; there weren’t enough of them, and they were restricted to only people showing symptoms. The US pandemic response was already failing.

Trump then began actively downplaying the crisis and baselessly predicting it would go away when the weather got warmer.

Trump decided there was nothing to see here, and on February 24th, took time out of his day to remind us that the stock markets were soaring.

A day later, CDC officials sounded the alarm that daily life could be severely disrupted. The window to get ahead of the virus by testing and containment was closing. 

Trump’s next move: He compared Coronavirus to the seasonal flu…and called the emerging crisis a hoax by the Democrats.

With 100 cases in the US, Trump declined to call for a national emergency.

Meanwhile, South Korea was now on its way to testing a quarter million people, while the US was testing 40 times slower.

When a cruise ship containing Americans with coronavirus floated toward San Francisco, Trump said he didn’t want people coming off the ship to be tested because they’d make the numbers look bad.

It wasn’t until the stock market reacted to the growing crisis and took a nosedive that Trump finally declared a national emergency.

By this time, South Korea had been using an app for over a month that pulled government data to track cases and alert users to stay away from infected areas.

Over the next weeks, as the virus began its exponential spread across the US, and Governors declared states of emergency, closing schools and workplaces and stopping the American economy in its tracks –  Trump passed on every opportunity to get ahead of this crisis.

Trump’s priority was never public health. It was about making the virus seem like less of a nuisance so that the “numbers” would “look good” for his reelection.

Only when the stock market crashed did Trump finally begin to pay attention…and mostly to bailing out corporations in the form of a massive $500 billion slush fund, rather than to helping people. And then, with much of America finally and belatedly in lockdown, he said at a Fox News town hall that he would “love” to have the country “opened up, and just raring to go” by Easter.

At every point, Trump has used this crisis to compliment himself.

This is not leadership. This is the exact opposite of leadership. 

Coronavirus and the Height of Corporate Welfare

With the coronavirus pandemic wreaking havoc on the global economy, here’s how massive corporations are shafting the rest of us in order to secure billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded bailouts.

The airline industry demanded a massive bailout of nearly $60 billion in taxpayer dollars, and ended up securing $50 billion – half in loans, half in direct grants that don’t need to be paid back. 

Airlines don’t deserve a cent. The five biggest U.S. airlines spent 96 percent of their free cash flow over the last decade buying back shares of their own stock to boost executive bonuses and please wealthy investors.

United was so determined to get its windfall of taxpayer money that it threatened to fire workers if it didn’t get its way. Before the Senate bill passed, CEO Oscar Munoz wrote that “if Congress doesn’t act on sufficient government support by the end of March, our company will begin to…reduce our payroll….”

Airlines could have renegotiated their debts with their lenders outside court, or file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. They’ve reorganized under bankruptcy many times before. Either way, they’d keep flying.

The hotel industry says it needs $150 billion. The industry says as many as 4 million workers could lose their jobs in the coming weeks if they don’t receive a bailout. Everyone from general managers to housekeepers will be affected. But don’t worry – the layoffs won’t reach the corporate level.

Hotel chains don’t need a bailout. For years, they’ve been making record profits while underpaying their workers. Marriott, the largest hotel chain in the world, repurchased $2.3 billion of its own stock last year, while raking in nearly $4 billion in profits. 

Thankfully, Trump’s hotels and businesses, as well as any of his family members’ businesses, are barred from receiving anything from the $500 billion corporate bailout money. But the bill is full of loopholes that Trump can exploit to benefit himself and his hotels.

Cruise ships also want to be bailed out, and Trump called them a “prime candidate” to receive a government handout. But they don’t deserve it either. The three cruise ship corporations controlling 75 percent of the entire global market are incorporated outside of the United States to avoid paying taxes.

They’re floating tax shelters, paying an average U.S. tax rate of just 0.8 percent. Democrats secured key provisions stipulating that companies are only eligible for bailout money if they are incorporated in the United States and have a majority of U.S. employees, so the cruise ship industry likely won’t see a dime of relief funding. However, Trump has made it clear he still wants to help them.

The justification I’ve heard about why all these corporations need to be bailed out is they’ll keep workers on their payrolls. But why should we believe big corporations will protect their workers right now? 

The $500 billion slush fund included in the Senate’s emergency relief package doesn’t require corporations to keep paying their workers and has dismally weak restrictions on stock buybacks and executive pay. 

Even if the bill did provide worker protections, what’s going to happen to these corporations’ subcontractors and gig workers? What about worker benefits, pensions and health care? How much of this bailout is going to end up in the pockets of executives and big investors?

The record of Big Business isn’t comforting. Amazon, one of the richest corporations in the world, which paid almost no taxes last year, is only offering unpaid time off for workers who are sick and just two weeks paid leave for workers who test positive for the virus. Meanwhile, it demands its employees put in mandatory overtime.

Oh, and these corporations made sure they and other companies with more than 500 employees were exempt from the requirement in the first House coronavirus bill that employers provide paid sick leave.

And now, less than a month into statewide shelter-in-place orders and social distancing restrictions, Wall Streeters and corporate America’s chief executives are calling for supposedly “low-risk” groups to be sent back to work to restart the economy. 

They’re so concerned about protecting their bottom line that they’re willing to let people die to preserve their stock portfolios, all while they continue working from the safety and security of their own homes. It’s the most repugnant class warfare you can imagine.

Here’s the bottom line: no mega-corporation deserves a cent of bailout money. For decades these companies and their billionaire executives have been dodging taxes, getting tax cuts, shafting workers, and bending the rules to enrich themselves. There’s no reason to trust them to do the right thing with billions of dollars in taxpayer money. 

Every penny we have needs to go to average Americans who desperately need income support and health care, and to hospitals that need life-saving equipment. It’s outrageous that the Senate bill gave corporations nearly four times as much money as hospitals on the front lines. 

Corporate welfare is bad enough in normal times. Now, in a national emergency, it’s morally repugnant. We must stop bailing out corporations. It’s time we bail out people.

Corporations Will Not Save Us: The Sham of Corporate Social Responsibility

Last August, the Business Roundtable – an association of CEOs of America’s biggest corporations – announced with great fanfare a “fundamental commitment to all of our stakeholders” and not just their shareholders. 

They said “investing in employees, delivering value to customers, and supporting outside communities“ is now at the forefront of their business goals — not maximizing profits.

Baloney. Corporate social responsibility is a sham.

One Business Roundtable director is Mary Barra, CEO of General Motors. Just weeks after making the Roundtable commitment, and despite GM’s hefty profits and large tax breaks, Barra rejected workers’ demands that GM raise their wages and stop outsourcing their jobs. Earlier in the year GM shut its giant assembly plant in Lordstown, Ohio.

Nearly 50,000 GM workers then staged the longest auto strike in 50 years. They won a few wage gains but didn’t save any jobs. Barra was paid $22 million last year. How’s that for corporate social responsibility?

Another prominent CEO who made the phony Business Roundtable commitment was AT&T’s Randall Stephenson, who promised to use the billions in savings from the Trump tax cut to invest in the company’s broadband network and create at least 7,000 new jobs. 

Instead, even before the coronavirus pandemic, AT&T cut more than 23,000 jobs and demanded that employees train lower-wage foreign workers to replace them.

Let’s not forget Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon and its Whole Foods subsidiary. Just weeks after Bezos made the Business Roundtable commitment, Whole Foods announced it would be cutting medical benefits for its entire part-time workforce.

The annual saving to Amazon from this cost-cutting move is roughly what Bezos – whose net worth is $117 billion – makes in a few hours. Bezos’ wealth grows so quickly, this number has gone up since you started watching this video.

GE’s CEO Larry Culp is also a member of the Business Roundtable. Two months after he made the commitment to all his stakeholders, General Electric froze the pensions of 20,000 workers in order to cut costs. So much for investing in employees.  

Dennis Muilenburg, the former CEO of Boeing, also committed to the phony Business Roundtable pledge. Shortly after making the commitment to “deliver value to customers,” Muilenburg was fired for failing to act to address the safety problems that caused the 737 Max crashes that killed 346 people.  After the crashes, he didn’t issue a meaningful apology or even express remorse to the victims’ families and downplayed the severity of the fallout to investors, regulators, airlines, and the public. He was rewarded with a $62 million farewell gift from Boeing on his way out.

Oh, and the chairman of the Business Roundtable is Jamie Dimon, CEO of Wall Street’s largest bank, JPMorgan Chase. Dimon lobbied Congress personally and intensively for the biggest corporate tax cut in history, and got the Business Roundtable to join him. JPMorgan raked in $3.7 billion from the tax cut. Dimon alone made $31 million in 2018.

That tax cut increased the federal debt by almost $2 trillion. This was before Congress spent almost $3 trillion fighting the pandemic – and delivering a hefty portion as bailouts to the biggest corporations, many of whom signed the Business Roundtable pledge. 

As usual, almost nothing has trickled down to America’s working class and poor. 

The truth is, American corporations are sacrificing workers and communities as never before in order to further boost runaway profits and unprecedented CEO pay. And not even a tragic pandemic is changing that. 

Americans know this. A record 76 percent of U.S. adults believe major corporations have too much power. 

The only way to make corporations socially responsible is through laws requiring them to be – for example, giving workers a bigger voice in corporate decision making, requiring that corporations pay severance to communities they abandon, raising corporate taxes, busting up monopolies, and preventing dangerous products (including faulty airplanes) from ever reaching the light of day.  

If the CEOs of the Business Roundtable and other corporations were truly socially responsible, they’d support such laws, not make phony promises they clearly have no intention of keeping. Don’t hold your breath.  

The only way to get such laws enacted is by reducing corporate power and getting big money out of our politics.

The first step is to see corporate social responsibility for the sham it is. The next step is to emerge from this pandemic and economic crisis more resolved than ever to rein in corporate power, and make the economy work for all. 

I have been extremely neglectful about posting! Probert turned 6 on Halloween and everyone else is doing great! Here's a picture of Probert in his new crate that Dan magically found in the garbage on the exact same day that I was going to buy Probert a new crate! Look how much he loves it! :)

Continued from Day Four. (From the beginning.) On Friday we packed all of our stuff back up and headed out.  We were barely out of the resort when: This tire is flat. Apparently all that gravel out to Horne Lake Caves the day before also included a small screw.  We limped around the corner to … Continue reading Summer Horrification — Day Five — Englishman River and Rathtrevor

It may be tempting at the start of a new project to create the first database tables manually, or write SQL scripts that you run manually, especially when you first have to spend a significant amount of time on sifting through all the migration libraries and then some more to get it working properly.

Going through this process did slow me down at the start of the project but I was determined to use a migration tool because hunting inexplicable bugs that only happen in production just to find out there is a definition mismatch between the production and development databases is not fun. Using such a tool also motivates you to write both the setup and teardown steps for each table while the current design is still fresh in your mind.

At first I considered a standalone migration tool because I expect them to be very good at that single task. However, learning the idiosyncrasies of a new tool and trying to make it fit seamlessly into my development workflow seemed like more trouble than it is worth.

I decided to stick with a Common Lisp library and found the following seven that work with PostgreSQL and/or Postmodern:

• Postmodern-passenger-pigeon
• database-migrations
• cl-migrations
• Mito
• Crane
• Orizuru-orm
• cl-mgr

I quickly discounted Crane and Mito because they are ORM (Object Relational Mapper) libraries which are way more complex than a dedicated migration library. Development on Crane have stalled some time ago and I don't feel it is mature enough for frictionless use yet. Mito declares itself as being in Alpha state; also not mature enough yet.

I only stumbled onto cl-mgr and Orizuru-orm long after making my decision so I did not investigate them seriously. Orizuru-orm is in any case an ORM which I would have discounted because it is too complex for my needs. CL-mgr looks simple, which is a good thing. It is based on cl-dbi which makes it a good candidate if you foresee switching databases but even if I discovered it sooner I would have discounted it for the same reason as CL-migrations.

CL-migrations looks very promising. It is a simple library focusing only on migrations. It uses clsql to interface with the database which bothered me because I already committed to using Postmodern and I try to avoid adding a lot of unused code to my projects. The positive side is that it interfaces to many different databases so it is a good candidate if you are not committed to using Postmodern. It is also a stable code base with no outstanding bug reports.

The two projects I focused on was Postmodern-passenger-pigeon and Database-migrations because they both use Postmodern for a database interface.

Postmodern-passenger-pigeon was in active development at the time and it seemed safer to use than Database-migrations because it can do dry runs, which is a very nice feature when you are upgrading your production database and face the possibility of losing data when things go awry. Unfortunately I could not get it working within a reasonable amount of time.

I finally settled on Database-migrations. It is a small code base, focused on one task, it is mature and it uses Postmodern so it does not pull in a whole new database interface into my project. There are however some less positive issues.

The first issue is a hindrance during development. Every time the migrations ASDF system (or the file containing it, as ASDF prefers that all systems be defined in a single file) is recompiled it adds all the defined migrations to the migrations list. Though each one will only be applied once to the DB it is still bothersome. One can then clear the list with (setf database-migrations::*migrations* nil) but then only newly modified migration files will be added. The solution then is to touch the .asd file after clearing the migrations list.

The second negative point is quite dangerous. The downgrade function takes a target version as parameter, with a default target of 0. This means that if you execute downgrade without specifying a target version you delete your whole database.

I am currently using Database-migrations and it works well for me. If for some reason I need to switch I will use cl-migrations.

Using Database-migrations

To address the danger of unintentionally deleting my database I created a wrapper function that does both upgrade and downgrade, and it requires a target version number.

Another practical issue I discovered is that upgrades and downgrades happen in the same order as they are defined in the migration file. If you create two tables in a single file where table 2 depends on table 1 then you can not revert / downgrade because Database-migrations will attempt to delete table 1 before table 2. The solution here is to use the def-queries-migration macro (instead of def-query-migration) which defines multiple queries simultaneously . If you get overwhelmed by a single definition that defines multiple tables the other option is to stick with one migration definition per file.