Baltic Dry Index. 979 +40 Brent Crude 55.90
"When it becomes
serious, you have to lie"
Jean-Claude Juncker. Failed Luxembourg Prime Minister and ex-president of the Euro Group of Finance Ministers. Confessed liar. European Commission President.
Jean-Claude Juncker. Failed Luxembourg Prime Minister and ex-president of the Euro Group of Finance Ministers. Confessed liar. European Commission President.
For more on artificial intelligence developments,
scroll down to Crooks Corner.
We open today with the oil market.
Despite renewed production and export trouble in Libya, crude oil’s recent
pricing action suggests that OPEC’s production cuts aren’t working as intended,
and March is half way through the six month agreed reduction. I suspect that
without Libya, Crude oil prices would begin a serious decline. The Baltic Dry
Index rally excepted, the global economy seems to be slowing again.
Oil prices slip further, pressed by China growth worries
By Biman Mukherji Published: Mar 7, 2017 12:55 a.m. ET
Oil prices extended their declines on Tuesday over concerns about
rising U.S. oil supplies and pessimism over China’s economic growth outlook for
this year.
On the New York Mercantile Exchange, light, sweet crude futures for
delivery in April CLJ7, -0.13% traded at $53.13 a barrel,
down 7 cents in the Globex electronic session. May Brent crude LCOK7, -0.21% on London’s ICE Futures
exchange fell 11 cents to $55.90 a barrel.
“In H1 2017, we expect persistent macroeconomic headwinds (in China) and
by extension, slower consumption growth at home for certain fuels (diesel, fuel
oil) to maintain the pressure on overall oil demand. Also weighing on imports
will be softer demand by the independent teapot refiners,” BMI Research said.
However, longer term demand in China is likely to be positive with plans
to build-up import and distribution infrastructure in the Shandong province, it
added.
In its annual meeting of the National People’s Congress over the
weekend, Beijing said it expects GDP growth of 6.5% this year compared with
6.7% in 2016.
Near-term outlook for crude
oil remains weak as investors are bracing for a U.S. rate increase next week.
More
U.S. Oil Industry Becomes Refiner to the World as Exports Boom
by Laura Blewitt and Javier Blas
6 March 2017, 05:00 GMT
Within three months, PBF was ready to load its first tanker for shipment
abroad. By late last year, the New Jersey-based company was exporting 22,000
barrels a day of fuel, or 16 percent of that refinery’s output.Now, it wants to boost that to almost 25 percent.
PBF isn’t alone in this push. From major producers such as Chevron Corp. to specialized refiners including Valero Energy Corp., the U.S. refining industry has shifted its game over the last five years, taking advantage of gaps left by struggling refiners in Latin America, Africa and Asia. Along the way, it’s transforming what had long been a largely domestic business into a new global venture.
"U.S. refiners are now the refiners for the world," said Ivan Sandrea, head of Sierra Oil & Gas, which is planning to build infrastructure to import U.S. fuels into Mexico.
U.S. companies last year exported a record 3 million barrels a day of refined products, more than double the 1.3 million barrels a day shipped a decade ago, according to data from the Energy Information Administration. Gasoline led the surge, with exports hitting an all-time high of almost 1 million barrels a day in December, up ten-fold from a decade ago.
The export boom, together with surging
domestic shale oil output, has redrawn the global energy map.
The U.S. a decade ago reported annual
net imports of crude and refined products of 12.4 million barrels a day. Last
year, it received a net 4.8 million barrels a day, the lowest since 1985. In
late 2016, the U.S. exported more crude and refined products to Latin America
than it imported from the region -- a first.
---- Mexico is emblematic of the
shifting landscape. The Latin American country relied on U.S. gasoline last
year for nearly 50 percent of its total consumption as refineries operated by state-owned
oil giant Petroleos
Mexicanos
(Pemex) malfunctioned. In December, Mexico imported a record high of 1.2
million barrels a day of U.S. fuels, particularly gasoline.
More
Finally, in Europe, is Grexit finally
here? Is it all over for Italy?
Greek GDP Revision Shows Slump at Worst in Five Quarters: Chart
by Marcus Bensasson
6
March 2017, 10:58 GMT
Greece’s economy shrank 1.2 percent in
the fourth quarter, three times as much as initially estimated and the most
since the country closed its banks for three weeks and introduced capital
controls in 2015. The revision means gross domestic product shrank 0.1 percent
last year, dealing a blow to Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’s claims that the
recovery has begun. As if anticipating Monday’s huge change, the International
Monetary Fund said in a report last month that frequent and large revisions in
Greek GDP data complicate analysis of the economy.
Births in Italy hit record low in 2016, population ages
Reuters March 6,
2017
ROME (Reuters) - The number of babies born in Italy hit a record low in
2016, the population shrank and the average age crept higher, national
statistics office ISTAT said on Monday.
Births dropped by 12,000 to 474,000 last year, the lowest level since
the unification of Italy in 1861, while deaths totaled 608,000, ISTAT said.
The average Italian is now 44.9 years old, up 0.2 years from 2015, while
some 22.3 percent of the population is over 65, the highest ratio in the
28-nation European Union.
The total population fell by some 86,000 to 60.58 million, with new
migrants helping to offset the falling birth rate.
ISTAT said fertility rates fluctuated wildly between the industrialized
north and the poorer south.
On the island of Sardinia, women had 1.07 children on average, while the
only province where births rose was in Bolzano, near the border with Austria,
where the fertility rate was 1.78.
If applied to the whole country, Bolzano's figures would put Italy among
the most fertile countries in the European Union, ISTAT said, whereas with
Sardinia's rate, "dangerously close to one child per woman, Italy would be
in last place in Europe, and likely the world."
The overall national average was 1.34 children per woman.
More
"If the EU cannot resolve a small problem the size of Greece, what is the point of Europe?"
Romano Prodi, former President of the European Commission, former Italy Prime Minister.
At the Comex silver depositories Monday
final figures were: Registered 34.86 Moz, Eligible 153.47 Moz,
Total 188.33 Moz.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
No crooks,
scoundrels, banksters, or bent politicians today. Today a look into the future
of motor car racing. I’m not convinced that the public will pay to watch
algorithms racing each other, though from the teams’ perspective, the big
advantage is that there’s no expensive driver to pay, plus the cars operate on
artificial intelligence, which they think will be an improvement. Google makes
an AI breakthrough.
320 km/h, no driver: Roborace reveals the Robocar
Scott Collie March 3rd, 2017
With testing underway for the hotly-anticipated 2017 F1 season,
you could be forgiven for forgetting about Roborace, the self-driving race
series supporting Formula E.
After a long gestation
period, the as-yet unproven competition has finally revealed the car
that teams will be programming, and it looks absolutely wild.
Designed by
Daniel Simon, the automotive futurist behind the light cycles in Tron
Legacy, the Robocar is a seriously sophisticated beast. Hidden within its
dog-bone-shaped body are four 300-kW (402 hp) electric motors, enough to propel
the carbon fiber-heavy (and therefore light) body to over 320 km/h (199 mph).
It weighs just 975 kg (2,150 lb) and measures up at 4.8 meters (15.7 ft) long
and 2 meters (6.6 ft) wide.
With no driver
behind the wheel, there are plenty of sensors around the cars to stop them
(hopefully) from bashing into each other. There are five LiDar, two radar, 18 ultrasonic
and two optical speed sensors on the outside of the car, along with six cameras
and a GNSS module. The whole array is powered by a Nvidia Drive PX2 brain,
capable of dealing with up to 24 trillion AI operations every second. Each team
will program the car with its own algorithm, making software the crucial
differentiator in Roboraces.
Michelin will
supply the tires for the car, using the sport as a test bed for its own
next-generation rubber. The tires used on the Robocar will eventually find their
way to the street, as the company looks to use racing experience to improve its
consumer products.
"This is a
huge moment for Roborace as we share the Robocar with the world and take
another big step in advancing driverless electric technology," says Denis
Sverdlov, Roborace CEO. "I am so proud of the entire team and our partners
and particularly the work Daniel has done creating this beautiful machine. It
was very important for us that we created an emotional connection to driverless
cars and bring humans and robots closer together to define our future."
Roborace will be
on show in Mexico City on April 1, but that won't be the first time the
self-driving racers have taken to the track. Just last month, two DevBots took
to the streets of Buenos Aires. A hard collision with the wall means one of the
cars didn't make it back from the outing, but the test did prove driverless
race cars are no longer a pipe dream.
Formula E: Calendar
Google's artificial intelligence can diagnose cancer faster than human doctors
The DeepMind system is able to scan samples to determine whether or not tissues are cancerous
Making the decision on whether or not a patient has cancer usually involves trained professionals meticulously scanning tissue samples over weeks and months.But Google's artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputer DeepMind may be able to do it much, much faster.
The search company has been working with the NHS since September last year to help speed up cancer detection. The software can now tell the difference between healthy and cancerous tissue, as well as discover if metastasis has occured.
"Metastasis detection is currently performed by pathologists reviewing large expanses of biological tissues.
This process is labour intensive and error-prone," explained Google in a white paper outlining the study.
"We present a framework to automatically detect and localise
tumours as small as 100 ×100 pixels in gigapixel microscopy images sized
100,000×100,000 pixels.
"Our method leverages a convolutional neural network (CNN)
architecture and obtains state-of-the-art results on the Camelyon16 dataset in
the challenging lesion-level tumour detection task."
Such high-level image recognition was first developed for Google's
driverless car programme, in order to help the vehicles scan for road
obstructions.
Now the company has adapted it for the medical field and says it's more
accurate than regular human doctors:
More
Solar & Related Update.
With events
happening fast in the development of solar power and graphene, I’ve added this
section. Updates as they get reported. Is converting sunlight to usable cheap
AC or DC energy mankind’s future from the 21st century onwards? DC?
A quantum computer next?
Graphene sheets capture cells efficiently
New method could enable pinpoint diagnostics on individual blood cells.
Date: March 3, 2017
Source: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Summary: Researchers have developed a new method for capturing
cells on a treated graphene oxide surface, which could lead to very low-cost diagnostic
systems for a variety of diseases.
A single cell can contain a wealth of information about the health of an
individual. Now, a new method developed at MIT and National Chiao Tung
University could make it possible to capture and analyze individual cells from
a small sample of blood, potentially leading to very low-cost diagnostic
systems that could be used almost anywhere.
The new system, based on specially treated sheets of graphene oxide,
could ultimately lead to a variety of simple devices that could be produced for
as little as $5 apiece and perform a variety of sensitive diagnostic tests even
in places far from typical medical facilities.
The material used in this research is an oxidized version of the
two-dimensional form of pure carbon known as graphene, which has been the
subject of widespread research for over a decade because of its unique
mechanical and electrical characteristics. The key to the new process is
heating the graphene oxide at relatively mild temperatures. This low-temperature
annealing, as it is known, makes it possible to bond particular compounds to
the material's surface. These compounds in turn select and bond with specific
molecules of interest, including DNA and proteins, or even whole cells. Once
captured, those molecules or cells can then be subjected to a variety of tests.
The findings are reported in the journal ACS Nano in a paper
co-authored by Neelkanth Bardhan, an MIT postdoc, and Priyank Kumar PhD '15,
now a postdoc at ETH Zurich; Angela Belcher, the James Mason Crafts Professor
in biological engineering and materials science and engineering at MIT and a
member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research; Jeffrey Grossman,
the Morton and Claire Goulder and Family Professor in Environmental Systems at
MIT; Hidde L. Ploegh, a professor of biology and member of the Whitehead
Institute for Biomedical Research; Guan-Yu Chen, an assistant professor in
biomedical engineering at National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan; and Zeyang
Li, a doctoral student at the Whitehead Institute.
More
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished February
DJIA: 20,812
+133 Up. NASDAQ: 5,825 +120 Up. SP500: 2,364 +115 Up.
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