Massive IBM Announcement Proves Blockchain Has Officially Gone Mainstream

(ANTIMEDIA) —  In January, tech giant IBM was able to happily report to investors that after 22 consecutive quarters — nearly six years — of declining revenue growth, the company saw gains in the last quarter of 2017. In a news release, executives clearly identified the reason for the turnaround at IBM, a century-year-old institution that began as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company. […]

CIA Funding Of Tech Companies

Government funding of companies provides a steady stream of support for tech developing innovations. One vehicle for facilitating this relationship can be found in an entity called, In-Q-Tel. IQT describes their function as: “In-Q-Tel is the independent, not-for-profit organization created to bridge the gap between the technology needs of the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) and emerging commercial innovation. We invest in venture-backed startups developing technologies that provide ready-soon innovation (within 36 months) vital to the IC mission. These technology startups are traditionally outside the reach of the IC; in fact, more than 70 percent of our portfolio companies have never before done business with the government.”

A Fox Business article, In-Q-Tel: A Glimpse Inside the CIA’s Venture-Capital Arm, lists some of the companies and agencies that are involve.

“Founded in 1999 as a way for the U.S. to keep up with the rapid innovation in science and technology, In-Q-Tel has been an early backer of start-ups later acquired by Google (GOOG), Oracle (ORCL), IBM (IBM) and Lockheed Martin (LMT).

While IQT originally catered largely to the needs of the CIA, today the firm supports many of the 17 agencies within the U.S. intelligence community, including the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate.”

Their focus on Startups Backed By The CIA is still a prime objective.

“In-Q-Tel issues a press release every time it funds a new company, but it discloses neither the amount of the investment nor the product it’s focused on. It’s believed that the relationship can lead to the development of off-market products tailored specifically for the CIA. A spokesman for one company funded by In-Q-Tel told Forbes that their investment was focused on a specific project with a yearlong deadline, declining to provide further details.”

In keeping with the corporatocracy economy, government direct funding or indirect assistance has become the model for startups to chase. Whatever happened to the capitalist formula of raising money from private sector investors for an equity interest in a venture?

The rules of the playfield seem to be very different when the end user and customer for the technology is some government agency. Examine the case experiences described in 25 Cutting Edge Firms Funded By The CIA.

“It’s no secret the Central Intelligence Agency has an investment firm that funds startups that could have a big impact for the Agency.

If there is a company out there doing intelligence research, it’s likely that, the CIA’s personal investor, either looked them up or made a check out to them.

It’s all to ensure that the Agency remains on the forefront of tech. Not long ago, In-Q-Tel invested heavily in a company called Keyhole. Never heard of them? Maybe you know their work, a little project eventually known as Google Earth.

So, want to know what’s next for technology? Keep an eye on these 25 companies.”

Note the acknowledgement that the AGENCY maintains an investment stake in companies. Guess the keyhole into the world of high-tech dominance has a code to unlock the fruits of the applications, residing in Langley VA.

An important analysis of How the CIA made Google is a prime source of documentation.

“In 1994 — the same year the Highlands Forum was founded under the stewardship of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the ONA, and DARPA — two young PhD students at Stanford University, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, made their breakthrough on the first automated web crawling and page ranking application. That application remains the core component of what eventually became Google’s search service. Brin and Page had performed their work with funding from the Digital Library Initiative (DLI), a multi-agency programme of the National Science Foundation (NSF), NASA and DARPA.”

With the revelation of the role that the Highlands Forum has in the process of development, it would be important to research their activities. However, that proves difficult, since a login account is required, and no way of registering to access is available. So look at the info on the Highlands Group, for publically disclosed information on the organization.

So what is the point of all these interwoven relationships? The underlying element that permeates these tech companies is that the federal government is systemically involved in the funding, purpose objectives, application acquisitions and equity participation.

Is this the new normal for the economy? Looks like it is, but such an organizational structure does not conform to the standards of free enterprise. This method for invention does not have the identical importance as “The Manhattan Project”, but may well create advance technology that will have the same or greater risks of permanent extinction.

Consider the long history in the quest for Developments in Artificial Intelligence. Mentioning DARPA and RAND Corporation in the same abstract gives pause to anyone familiar with the record of Dr. Strangelove projects.

Lastly ponder the question of corporate control and independent management in the era of government funding. Is Google a real standalone company or is Facebook the social network department for the NSA?

Is the wealth of Bill Gates, the equity positions of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, or the tax dodge shares of Mark Zuckerberg a true reflection of their actual ownership stakes in their respective companies; or are they mere fronts for a shadow government?  Just how many Eric Schmidt types are embedded in high-tech pulling the strings for the intelligence community?

The In-Q-Tel of this world act as the JP Morgan’s of the twenty-first century. Nikola Tesla’s free electricity wireless distribution was killed by the robber baron. Today the role of inventive genius is managed and contained by technocrats following the directions of spooks, who do the bidding of the supra elite.

Some intriguing questions for a Congressional hearing start with just how much money was ‘invested’ and how large of a return did the government get out of these startups? End with what were the sums of money these firms spent on lobbyists? Surely, inquiring minds would like to know.

The post CIA Funding Of Tech Companies appeared first on The Sleuth Journal.

First A.I. ETF Claims It Can Replace An Army Of Research Analysts

“Look Dave, I can see you’re really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill and think things over.”

 

From Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

As if MiFID II wasn’t bad enough, now this “EquBot AI Technology with Watson has the ability to mimic an army of equity research analysts working around the clock, 365 days a year, while removing human error and bias from the process.” That is the claim of Chida Khatua, the ETF’sCEO.Unlike the existing algos used by quant funds, A.I.   the ability to learn from its mistakes without further requiring programming.

This week, EquBot LLC, in partnership with ETF Managers Group (ETFMG) launched the world’s first ETF powered by artificial intelligence, the AI Powered Equity ETF (NYSE Arca: AIEQ). According to Business Wire, the new ETF uses “cognitive and big data processing abilities of IBM Watson™ to analyze U.S.-listed investment opportunities”.

For those in the dark as far as “Watson” is concerned, it’s Wiki entry notes “Watson is a question answering (QA) computing system that IBM built to apply advanced natural language processing, information retrieval, knowledge representation, automated reasoning, and machine learning technologies to the field of open domain question answering. Watson was named after IBM"s first CEO, industrialist Thomas J. Watson. The computer system was specifically developed to answer questions on the quiz show Jeopardy! and, in 2011, the Watson computer system competed on Jeopardy! against former winners Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings winning the first place prize of $1 million. Watson had access to 200 million pages of structured and unstructured content consuming four terabytes of disk storage…but was not connected to the Internet during the game. For each clue, Watson"s three most probable responses were displayed on the television screen. Watson consistently outperformed its human opponents on the game"s signaling device, but had trouble in a few categories, notably those having short clues containing only a few words.”

Business Wire explained how EquBot makes investment decisions “EquBot’s approach ranks investment opportunities based on their probability of benefiting from current economic conditions, trends, and world- and company-specific events, and identifies those equities with the greatest potential for appreciation. EquBot and ETFMG expect the fund’s portfolio to typically consist of 30 to 70 of U.S. equities only and volatility comparable to the broader U.S. equity market…the fund’s underlying technology is constantly analyzing information for approximately 6,000 U.S.-listed equities, including company management and market sentiment, and processes more than one million regulatory filings, quarterly results releases, news articles, and social media posts every day.”

According to Chida Khatua, CEO and co-founder of EquBot LLC “Machine learning is one of the most powerful applications of artificial intelligence. As powerful as many algorithms underlying expensive quantitative hedge funds and other vehicles might be, unless they’re also built with AI and machine learning baked right in, mistakes can be propagated and opportunities for outperformance can be missed.”

Neither of the founders is lacking in confidence when discussing the potential for the new ETF. From Business Wire “With the launch of AIEQ, we’re not only bringing our new fund to market,’ said Art Amador, co-founder and COO of EquBot. ‘We believe we’re pioneering a whole new investment category; one that will soon have investors and advisors diversifying their portfolios among passive, active and AI approaches”

He added “Everyday, there is more information, not less. That information explosion has made the jobs of portfolio managers, equity analysts, quantitative investors and even index builders more challenging.”

He"s not wrong there.

A.I. might be the future of investing, although there have been funds that were so good (LTCM), they didn’t need to post collateral. This is different, obviously as we’re not just talking about a bunch of really "brainy" humans.

But how sad will it be if we go from this...

To this...

To this...

An end up with this...

The regulators are already doing their best to make the investment world less fun.

“Open the pod bays doors, HAL”

Writing about this, we were reminded of another life or death confrontation between humans and technology in Stanley’s Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey”, which also had an oblique reference to an IBM computer. In the movie, there is an argument as to whether the failure of an antenna is due to human error, as the HAL 9000 insists, or HAL, as Mission Control advises. In the ensuing conflict, HAL initially gains the upper hand, kills Poole and almost kills Bowman. Bowman manages to re-enter the ship and get to HAL’s processor core, regressing HAL to his first programmed memory.

“I know everything hasn’t been quite right with me, but I can assure you now, very confidently, that it’s going to be alright again. I feel much better now.”

 

"Reverse Pay Gap?" Female CEOs Make More Than Male Peers

The latest blow to the mainstream media’s misleading narrative about the relationship between gender and compensation has been delivered by the Wall Street Journal’s annual report on CEO pay, which revealed that - country to popular perception - female CEOs of S&P 500 companies actually earn more than their male peers.

In what WSJ described as “an unusual reversal of the gender pay gap,” the paper found that last year, 21 female CEOs of S&P 500 companies received a median compensation package of $13.8 million, compared with $11.6 million for 382 male chief executives.

Contrary to popular belief, women who make it to the top rung on the corporate ladder likely find that their gender – if it has any impact at all – likely works in their favor because, as the WSJ delicately suggests, corporate boards don’t want to risk a PR disaster by underpaying a female chief executive.

Or as Robin Ferracone, head of Farient Advisors LLC, puts it: “Boards don’t want to shortchange their female CEO in today’s environment, when pay equality is such an issue.”

Female CEOs also benefit from the perception that “these women must be exceptional” because so few reach the corner office, Heidi Hartman, president of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, told WSJ.

Male executives still outnumber their female peers by a considerable margin, but WSJ found that female CEOs made more money than male execs during six of the last seven years. What’s more, for the first time in history, three female CEOs rank among the top 10 highest paid corporate execs. They are Meg Whitman at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., Virginia “Ginni” Rometty at International Business Machines Corp. and Indra Nooyi at PepsiCo Inc.

Women-led companies also posted higher returns, on average, than male-led firms. As WSJ reports, S&P 500 businesses now run by women generated a median total shareholder return of 18.4% in 2016, compared with 15.7% for those commanded by men. Returns at female-led firms outpaced returns at male-run companies in three of the previous five years.

Of course compensation still varies widely based on the firm’s performance: At HP Enterprise, which posted a total return of 55% last year, CEO Meg Whitman earned $35.6 million during the year ended Oct. 31 – more than twice what she earned a year earlier when she was running the combined Hewlett-Packard Co.

Though, as WSJ noted, Whitman’s latest package included a special equity grant tied to the debut of HP Enterprise. Aside from such one-time items, “Meg’s target compensation has remained unchanged over the past three years,’’ a company spokeswoman said, describing part of her package.

Mylan NV had the lowest one-year return among women-led companies at minus 29%, and longtime CEO Heather Bresch’s compensation fell to $13.8 million down from $18.9 million the previous year.

To be sure, not all female CEOs are immune to criticism about bloated pay packages: IBM CEO Ginni Rometty earned $32.7 million last year, up from $19.8 million a year earlier, while her company saw revenue decline for the 20th straight quarter.
Her 2016 package included 1.5 million stock options, which she can’t fully exercise unless IBM’s stock price increases as much as 25%, according to the company’s proxy, but she can hold on to those options for 10 years.
About 46% of votes cast at this spring’s annual meeting opposed the company’s executive pay practices, which represents a record level of IBM investor opposition for a “say-on-pay” vote.