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The firm’s wholly-owned subsidiary Long Island Brand Beverages operates in the non-alcohol ready-to-drink segment of the beverage industry, including the Long Island Iced Tea brand.
A live events and bespoke creative technical solutions company based in Loughborough is seeking a technical project manager to join their growing production team.
You may currently be working be working as an audio-visual/AV project manager or technical production manager in live events or you may be a senior AV technician looking to make the next move in your career.
This position will encompass all elements of technical pre-production from developing and designing technical solutions in order to achieve their clients' briefs, through to managing and where appropriate supervising their execution. The projects they undertake include experiential marketing events, conferences, exhibitions and other live corporate events. The successful candidate will be passionate about driving forward improvements in technical production and working with the team to implement innovative technical solutions.
The role will include both UK and international travel and will require the successful candidate to work non-standard working hours including evenings, weekends and bank holidays.
Noel Gallo, an organ builder who designed a new organ at Xewkija parish church and Paolo Oreni, an international organist from Italy, gave a two-hour masterclass to organists and other musicians at the church. They also briefed pianists on the basics of organ performance and gave demonstrations on how organs are made and how they work. At the end of the session Oreni and Sara Musumeci also performed music by Bach, Liszt and Reubke on the same organ. This was part of a series of concerts and masterclasses given by Gallo, Oreni and Musumeci in Malta and Gozo to encourage people explore the beauty of this instrument. Picture shows Gallo playing the organ watched by Musumeci and Oreni.
The latest report from Violence Policy Center.
I find it ironic and sad that the very day an annual report on violence against women was released, a famed pro athlete was kicked off his team for slugging his wife in the face.
By now you’ve probably heard that Ray Rice, the Baltimore Ravens star running back, was caught on camera hitting his then-fiance and knocking her out with the single blow in an elevator . The March incident cost him a two-game suspension, but when TMZ released the video showing the act, the Ravens terminated his contract and the NFL suspended him indefinitely.
Today I captured the seriousness of domestic violence. The report from the Violence Policy Center shows that South Carolina is ranked the second worst state in the nation for violence against women. The report notes that 50 women were killed in 2012. Spartanburg County had four in 2012. The county has seen two husband-on-wife homicides so far this year and DV cases are some of the most common ones among daily incident reports here. Local leaders tell me it is a significant combination of problems that all need to be dealt with in order to change the status quo surrounding violence against women. Much of it starts with a serious culture change, they tell me.
I was baffled when a colleague of mine pointed out the Fox News morning show “Fox & Friends.” The anchors on the program somehow find a way to joke about Ray Rice knocking out his now-wife and dragging her limp body out of the elevator.
“I think the message is take the stairs,” one anchor quips.
We got right to the point during an interview today with the victim services director at SAFE Homes, a domestic violence shelter and coalition in Spartanburg County.
The gist of the interview was to hold people accountable for their actions and for society to never turn a blind eye.
My full story on the violence against women ranking in South Carolina is at goupstate.com and in Tuesday’s Spartanburg Herald-Journal.
Meet Google's Robot Army. It's Growing.
Google can't stop buying robotics companies. In the past two months, eight of the 12 companies the search giant has acquired have "robotics" in their name or descriptions. Here's your complete breakdown of the robot army presently at Google's command.
As stated in the midst of its buying spree, the company's largely letting its new robotics divisions continue to work on their preexisting projects, and why wouldn't they? The newly acquired companies are doing a damn good job. They're even winning competitions.
Robot technology would help with self-driving cars, certainly, but the range of these acquisitions hints at even broader ambitions. Again, we don't know much. They're all a part of the Google X division, which is top secret by definition. We do know what the new companies in the Google family are up to, though, and that might offer us some clues.
These guys are rockstars. The Japanese team that got its start at Tokyo University just took the top prize at DARPA's Robotics Challenge Trial thanks to the cunning and agility of its 5-foot, 5-inch, 209-pound bipedal robot. After being purchased by Google in early December 2013, Schaft's blue machine proved to be the best at walking on uneven terrain, climbing ladders, clearing debris, and connecting hoses, ultimately scoring an impressive 27 out of 32 possible points.
The company was originally founded to build disaster response robots after the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011 but has since broadened its scope, thanks in part to funding from the U.S. government. Who knows how far they'll go floating on Google's coffers?
Industrial Perceptions, Inc., is an imaging company that spun off of the Menlo Park robotics company Willow Garage. Before being acquired by Google in December—the day after the Schaft acquisition, in fact—IPI was focusing on building advanced technology for 3D vision-guided robots to be used in manufacturing and logistics. This includes the ability to see and sort different objects, say, in a factory. You could imagine a company like Amazon being very interested in this kind of technology, but it's so far unclear exactly what Google wants to do with it.
Redwood Robotics started as a joint venture between Meka Robotics, SRI International, and Willow Garage, IPI's parent. And like IPI, it's always had a very focused mission. Redwood wants to build the "next generation arm" for robots. Meka Robotics founder Aaron Edsinger once said that he wants to do for robotic arms what the Apple II did for computers. Specifically, Redwood wants to build robotic arms that can work alongside people even in the comfort of their own home. That also means being the common arm manufacturer of service robots, so in the future, everybody's personal robot could have Redwood arms. Well, make that Google arms.
Like its cousin, Redwood Robotics, Meka is dedicated to building robots that can live and work with human beings. The company describes its flagship model, the M1 Mobile Manipulator, as having "human-safe, human-soft, and human scale robot technologies that will enable the robots of tomorrow to work alongside people in the home and the workplace." The human-like faces on the robot can even emote, a feature that's as creepy as you let it be.
Even before joining Google, Holomini was a pretty secretive outfit. All we really know from its now shuttered website is the company describes itself as "Creators of high-tech wheels for omnidirectional motion." The image above is just a stock photo guesstimate of what a "high-tech wheel for omnidirectional motion" might look like.
If Redwood and IPI are the engineers in the family, Bot & Dolly are the artists. The company describes itself as "a design and engineering studio that specializes in automation, robotics, and filmmaking" with a mission "to advance motion control and automation as a creative medium." In reality, this means that Bot and & Dolly use robots to help film commercials and movies like Gravity. This doesn't mean that Google wants to get into the movie business, but hey, if a robot's good enough to make a movie, what else can it do?
Boston Dynamics is the real celebrity of the bunch. After acquiring six robotics companies in six days, Google took a couple of days off before announcing this major acquisition. The company is known for building all kinds of futuristic bots from the bipedal, humanoid robot Atlas (above) to the impossibly fast, four-legged Cheetah. Actually, Boston Dynamics brings a whole robot army to Google, one that the military is very eager to recruit.
Google's latest purchase is less interested in building an actual robot than in designing an intelligent robot brain. The self-described "cutting edge artificial intelligence company" that uses "the best techniques from machine learning and systems neuroscience to build powerful general-purpose learning algorithms: comes with a team of 75 researchers and software engineers whose talents could be put to use on anything from the hypothetical Googlebot to the company's flagship search engine and anything in between. Because after all, robots are just another step in Google becoming the company that is everywhere, and does everything.
Thorpe of the New York Trucking and Delivery Association says the decision to raise penalties won’t solve the parking crisis.
For more than a decade, Ken Thorpe has been a soldier in the fight against parking tickets, which has become part of the escalating war for access to the curb. It's a conflict that has intensified in recent years as ride-hail services have clogged roads, New Yorkers have had more of their purchases delivered, and the streetscape has been remade with bicycle lanes, pedestrian malls and restrictions on parking and unloading.
The city "has whittled away at the commercial parking infrastructure," said Thorpe, the chief executive of the New York Trucking and Delivery Association, which he founded in 2004 to deal with parking issues for small and midsize businesses.
At the same time, trucks are making more deliveries than ever, and they must do that regardless of whether there's unloading space available. "Trucking is not a 'choice' situation," Thorpe said. "It's a necessity."
But now the 600 members of his group, as well as large fleet operators such as UPS and FedEx, are facing higher fines—and possibly more paperwork and time in traffic court—as a little-known yet controversial city policy comes under fire. The stipulated-fine program was established in 2004 by the Department of Finance to let businesses pay slightly reduced fines—and no fines at all for some infractions—in exchange for not contesting their tickets.
It was mainly a way to reduce everyone's administrative costs while having delivery companies pay roughly what they would have otherwise. (The reductions were calculated with an eye on the percentage of tickets that were successfully challenged.) But the program was a sore point with advocacy groups such as Transportation Alternatives, which considered it a corporate giveaway that neutered traffic enforcement.
Last month, in a bid at leveling the playing field for businesses not in the program—and furthering the city's congestion-reduction goals—the Finance Department announced that next month it would raise the program's fines, including those now set at zero.
As if that were not bad enough for Thorpe's membership, in the same week five City Council members introduced a bill to abolish the program. They denounced it as a free pass to large corporations and a contributor to reckless parking and congestion.
Thorpe says it's the council bill that's a giveaway—to parking-ticket brokers, who stand to gain business adjudicating tickets. He sees no way that the Finance Department's plan will change driver behavior or have any impact on congestion.
"The theory of the program was there are bad things, good things and some things in between, and it taught the driver you're going to pay a lot to do bad things and little or none to do the others," Thorpe said. "Now they've put the bad and good closer together, removing the driver's incentive for doing the good, because it's going to cost just a little more to do the bad."
In fact, good and bad parking behavior will not be punished that similarly. The most serious violations that get discounts, such as obstructing traffic ($10 off the $115 total), will now get no break at all, while many of the zero-fine infractions will cost $25.
But Thorpe says those increases could cost some of his members hundreds of dollars a week—enough that he would consider taking them out of the program. The $35 fine for double parking outside Midtown is still better than the official $115, but he notes that double parking is legal for the first 30 minutes, and enforcement is not always scrupulous.
In 2011 he sued the city, which for some years had been slapping double-parked delivery trucks with the more expensive violation of blocking a travel lane, which carried a $40 fine. In 2016 the city settled and paid those covered by the lawsuit $14 million.
Even so, the Finance Department, which worked with the Department of Transportation on the new fine schedule, says more needs to be done to ease congestion. The agency says the stipulated-fine program has been sending the wrong signal to the wider parking universe by not reflecting the fact that not all double-parking tickets are dismissed.
"We need the program to have incentives that are aligned with the city's goals to reduce congestion, and we need the program to be fair," said Finance Deputy Commissioner Jeffrey Shear. "We agree that the conversation about congestion is a larger conversation, and there are many other factors, and this program is one small piece. But we don't want to send the wrong message by saying double parking outside of Midtown will cost businesses nothing."
The Transportation Department maintains that it is doing all it can.
The agency is "committed to improving commercial accessibility throughout the five boroughs, especially in the context of our street-improvement projects," a spokeswoman said. As part of those projects, "new curb regulations are installed that are complementary to the larger curb-management goals of the corridor, such as faster bus mobility, reduction of double parking, and better commercial access."
But the Transportation Department is aware that it's a long way from curing congestion when demand for deliveries from myriad e-commerce businesses, including Amazon and Fresh Direct, is bigger than ever.
"Consumer demands and the amount of available space we have at the curb, they're at odds right now," Transportation Commissioner Polly Trottenberg said at a Crain's breakfast forum last month. She added that parking enforcement can only do so much, and larger fixes, including congestion pricing and technology such as license-plate readers, might be part of the answer.
"Right now the demand for the curb exceeds the supply," she said.
Some members of the City Council are not convinced that higher fines will make the program more effective. They say any solution will include abolishing stipulated fines.
"This program doesn't work," said Costa Constantinides, a City Council member from Queens, who introduced the bill to end the program as one of several parking and transportation proposals. "Trucks are still parking in bike lanes. It's been around for years, and I really feel it's prohibiting us from having a real conversation around parking that we desperately need to have."
As part of that conversation, the councilman introduced a bill that would require the Department of Citywide Administrative Services, which oversees city agencies, to have buildings under its jurisdiction receive deliveries between 7 p.m. and 6 a.m.
"The city should lead by example," Constantinides said.
That's not so simple, it turns out. A Transportation Department off-hours delivery program proved unworkable for many businesses, some of which had to add employees to accept the shipments. The councilman said his program would be "one part of the puzzle."
As it happens, parking-ticket broker Glen Bolofsky has contributed more than $4,000 to Constantinides' campaign treasury in the past five years. A spokesman for the councilman dismissed the idea that the bill was intended to help brokers.
"The majority of those that benefit from this [stipulated-fine] program are big-box delivery corporations who flout traffic laws at the expense of pedestrians, cyclists and drivers," the spokesman said.
Bolofsky agreed that ending the program would help brokers, but he insisted the biggest beneficiary would be the public. "Congestion will be reduced," he said. "More money will be raised."
Assuming 70% of double-parking tickets are dismissed, he estimated the city has forfeited $147.5 million over the life of the program by not fining participants for double parking beyond Midtown.
The new schedule will collect about 30% of double-parking fines, but Bolofsky insists the program still benefits the biggest operators the most. He maintains that neither the city nor companies such as UPS will lose money adjudicating tickets, arguing that many companies still have in-house teams for the job, and automation can reduce the expense further. He noted that the city handled 12 million tickets a year in 1990, when they were handwritten, and had to deal with only 10 million last year. Enforcement agents now use handheld devices that reduce the errors and bad handwriting that led to dismissals.
The Finance Department disagrees with his conclusions, saying both the city and the 1,751 companies in the program—encompassing 48,880 vehicles—would spend more without the program.
"We would need more hearing officers," Shear said. "The companies would have to retain brokers or hire staff to defend against these parking tickets. In terms of revenue, there would be no increase to the city."
Apart from whether the program is good for the city, a walk through Midtown with several UPS executives revealed how difficult following parking rules can be.
Another option would be to park at a metered spot a couple of blocks away and cart diamonds by hand truck to recipients, which UPS rules out for security reasons. "It would put our driver and other people in the area at risk," said Axel Carrion, director of state public affairs.
A few blocks away, on West 50th Street, where commercial parking was allowed at that hour, every space between Sixth and Seventh avenues was taken, mostly by delivery and commercial vehicles. There were two idling for-hire vehicles and three cars with "parking authorization" placards—the bane of parking-reform advocates—on their dashboard.
Even when a UPS driver finds a legal spot, regulations can conflict with the company's efforts to operate efficiently. Using new dispatch-planning technology, the company has increased the number of packages a truck will carry to nearly 400 so that one truck does the work of two. But that truck needs to stay in one place much of the workday, doing pickups when it's done with deliveries. Parking rules—which aim to promote the flow of traffic and keep operators from hogging spots—require it to move after three hours.
But circling the block will delay deliveries and the truck could lose the spot, so the driver will stay put. This reduces congestion and pollution. But the ticket, which costs program participants nothing, will set them back $25 under the new schedule.
Overall UPS expects its payments under the fine program to jump 32% next year, to $21.8 million, with a $3.4 million increase from double parking and more than $1 million from unloading in the wrong spot or at the wrong time. The company says it would like to try other solutions, such as paying for spots where a truck could sit all day. Long term, it would like to see new building construction include space for unloading.
Right now the firm is weighing the benefits of staying in the program.
"My drivers can be trained to avoid the ticket, and we have drastically reduced the amount of tickets over the past couple of years," said Dan Byrnes, director of finance at UPS, adding that the city's ticket data aided his efforts. "Now with these changes, [the city] is not really helping. Just raising prices is not going to change behavior."
Michael Schumacher - a seven-time Formula One world champion is "not bedridden or living on tubes", it has been reported as new details about his recovery emerge.
It's nearly five years (December 29, 2013) since the 50 year old hit his head on a rock while skiing with his then 14-year-old son Mick in Meribel in the French Alps.
The multiple head injuries caused blood clots which were not entirely removed by doctors because of the extent of the injury.
He was placed into a medically induced coma to aid recovery from the accident, and he was gradually brought out of the coma in April of 2014.
Schumacher is believed to be receiving nursing and physiotherapy care at an estimated cost of more than £50,000 (Sh6.4m) a week.
According to The Daily Mail via German magazine Bravo, Schumacher is to be moved to a clinic in Dallas, Texas because he is claimed to be either intubated or bedridden.
Mark Weeks, the director, told the magazine: "We have a lot of experience with patients who are suffering this kind of trauma.
Schumacher‘s family have always remained tight-lipped about the German’s condition leaving his fans in the dark about his health.
Currently Schumacher is being cared for by a team of medical experts at his luxury home in Gland near Lake Geneva in Switzerland.
A District Court decision overturning major provisions of three Executive Orders has been appealed. Here is a summary of the arguments made by Justice Department.
Wednesday, December 5th, has been declared a day of mourning by President Trump. Most federal employees will be excused from work, including the Postal Service.
On Wednesday, December 5th, the Federal Government will close in honor of America’s 41st president who died on Friday.
On April 4, 1975, Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft. The small firm used to develop and sell BASIC interpreters. Little did they know that in the next 40 years, their company will become the biggest software firm in the world, and also bag the title for one of the most valuable companies.
Today, there is a little bit of Microsoft in everybody’s life. Whether it is the desktop computer where Microsoft’s Windows has about 90 percent market share or the company’s Office which is unarguably the best productivity suite available. Maybe you are into gaming and own an Xbox One, or your company relies on Azure cloud services.
In the last 40 years, Microsoft -- which once used to sell program language interpreters -- has expanded into several categories, and now makes full-fledged operating systems for not just desktop computers, but smartphones, gaming consoles, servers, as well as Internet of Things devices. Surface tablets and Xbox consoles show the company’s side interest in developing its own hardware modules.
"Early on, Paul Allen and I set the goal of a computer on every desk and in every home. It was a bold idea and a lot of people thought we were out of our minds to imagine it was possible. It is amazing to think about how far computing has come since then, and we can all be proud of the role Microsoft played in that revolution", Gates wrote in an email sent to all Microsoft employees yesterday.
"In the coming years, Microsoft has the opportunity to reach even more people and organizations around the world. Technology is still out of reach for many people, because it is complex or expensive, or they simply do not have access. So I hope you will think about what you can do to make the power of technology accessible to everyone, to connect people to each other, and make personal computing available everywhere even as the very notion of what a PC delivers makes its way into all devices", Gates noted.
"Under Satya's leadership, Microsoft is better positioned than ever to lead these advances. We have the resources to drive and solve tough problems. We are engaged in every facet of modern computing and have the deepest commitment to research in the industry. In my role as technical advisor to Satya, I get to join product reviews and am impressed by the vision and talent I see. The result is evident in products like Cortana, Skype Translator, and HoloLens -- and those are just a few of the many innovations that are on the way".
And this attitude was the reason Windows Phone 7 -- arguably Microsoft's first real take on a mobile operating system-- wasn’t released until 2010. By this time, iPhone had showed its dominance in the world, and Google was upping the ante with Android. Windows Phone is still struggling to gain any substantial market share. The mobile platform still has a wide "app-gap" problem, though the company seems to have found a couple of ways to fix it.
But one of the most exciting things that happened in the company was its decision to open up. Under Nadella, Microsoft finally accepted that it doesn’t have a significant user base in smartphones. The company realized that if it didn't open up to rival platforms, it would miss out on a lot of users. And that’s one of the first things Nadella did after taking the charge of the company. Microsoft launched Office on iOS. Until then Office was only available on Windows, Windows RT, and Windows Phone, and a half-baked mobile version on Android.
The move received an overwhelming response from users, resulting in Office apps -- Word, Excel and PowerPoint -- top the app chart in within 24 hours of their release on the platform. Late last year, the company made premium access to the Office suite free on iOS and Android. Office for iOS was in the works at Microsoft for a long time, but Ballmer used to prioritize its products on Windows devices first. Nadella evidently changed that.
"We have accomplished a lot together during our first 40 years and empowered countless businesses and people to realize their full potential. But what matters most now is what we do next", Gates writes in his email. Microsoft does have a lot of things to look forward to in the coming months and years. Later this year, Microsoft will release Windows 10 for desktop computers, as well as smartphones, IoT devices and Xbox One. In the coming months, Microsoft will also release the next iteration of its productivity suite, Office 2016. For the first time, the company is simultaneously releasing Office on OS X and Windows.
Additionally, Microsoft has showcased a number of products that could change the way we compute and interact with technology. Its augmented reality headset HoloLens is just one example. It will be interesting to see what the company does next and how things work out for it in the coming years.
The democratization of data is a real phenomenon, but building a sustainable data democracy means truly giving power to the people. The alternative is just a shift of power from traditional data analysts within IT departments to a new generation of data scientists and app developers. And this seems a lot more like a dictatorship than a democracy — a benevolent dictatorship, but a dictatorship nonetheless.
These individuals and companies aren’t entirely bad, of course, and they’re actually necessary. Apps that help predict what we want to read, where we’ll want to go next or what songs we’ll like are certainly cool and even beneficial in their ability to automate and optimize certain aspects of our lives and jobs. In the corporate world, there will always be data experts who are smarter and trained in advanced techniques and who should be called upon to answer the toughest questions or tackle the thorniest problems.
Last week, for example, Salesforce.com introduced a new feature of its Chatter intra-company social network that categorizes a variety of data sources so employees can easily find the people, documents and other information relevant to topics they’re interested in. As with similarly devised services — LinkedIn’s People You May Know, the gravitational search movement, or any type of service using an interest graph — the new feature’s beauty and utility lie in its abstraction of the underlying semantic algorithms and data processing.
The problem, however, comes when we’re forced to rely on these people, features and applications to decide how data can affect our lives or jobs, or what questions we can answer using the troves of data now available to us. In a true data democracy, citizens must be empowered to make use of their own data as they see fit and they must only have to rely apps and experts by choice or when the task really requires an expert hand. At any rate, citizens must be informed enough to have a meaningful voice in bigger decisions about data.
The good news is that there’s a whole new breed of startups trying to empower the data citizenry, whatever their role. Companies such as 0xdata, Precog and BigML are trying to make data science more accessible to everyday business users. There are next-generation business intelligence startups such as SiSense, Platfora and ClearStory rethinking how business analytics are done in an area of HTML5 and big data. And then there are companies such as Statwing, Infogram and Datahero (which will be in beta mode soon, by the way) trying to bring data analysis to the unwashed non-data-savvy masses.
Combined with a growing number of publicly available data sets and data marketplaces, and more ways of collecting every possible kind of data — personal fitness, web analytics, energy consumption, you name it — these self-service tools can provide an invaluable service. In January, I highlighted how a number of them can work by using my own dietary and activity data, as well as publicly available gun-ownership data and even web-page text. But as I explained then, they’re still not always easy for laypeople to use, much less perfect.
Statwing spells out statistics for laypeople.
Can Tableau be data’s George Washington?
This is why I’m so excited about Tableau’s forthcoming IPO. There are few companies that helped spur the democratization of data over the past few years more than Tableau. It has become the face of the next-generation business intelligence software thanks to its ease of use and focus on appealing visualization, and its free public software has found avid users even among relative data novices like myself. Tableau’s success and vision no doubt inspired a number of the companies I’ve already referenced.