All of a sudden, it’s executive pay time. Here is The Purposeful Company, the product of a steering group of seven grandees, a task force of nine more, plus a dozen contributors, together demonstrating that those getting today’s executive pay have nothing useful to say on the subject, as Neil Austin forcefully pointed out on our letters page this week. This followed an earlier suggestion that incoming […]
Photo Residents whose home was destroyed by a fire in the Jewish settlement of Halamish in the West Bank. Credit Menahem Kahana/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images NATAF, Israel — When Rama’s Kitchen, an earthy and much-loved restaurant in the small Israeli village of Nataf, was burned last week by one of the wildfires that raged in the area, the last civilians who stayed to fight the blaze […]
DUBAI// The red, white, green and black of the UAE flag flew proudly across the emirate as thousands of people came out to mark 45th National Day. From street shows and artists to music and traditional dance at City Walk and entertainment at Dubai Mall, it was a moment for Emirati and expatriate alike to celebrate in style. Duha Al Marzooqi, a Emirati mother of two, had […]
First, write out the numbers one to 100 in 10 rows. Cross out the one. Then circle the two, and cross out all of the multiples of two. Circle the three, and do likewise. Follow those instructions, and you’ve just completed the first three steps of an algorithm, and an incredibly ancient one. Twenty-three centuries ago, Eratosthenes was sat in the great library of Alexandria, using this […]
An algorithm is just a series of instructions – a set of rules to solve a problem. You can perform one in your head or with a pencil. But if there is one thing computers are brilliant at, it’s following rules, and the most important algorithms today are all performed by computers, and written in programming language that computers can understand. Type anything into Google and powerful […]
This photo provided by Heritage Auctions shows Thomas A. Edison: Keys to His Menlo Park Laboratory on display. Six keys in all from the famous inventor’s Menlo Park home and work place will be auctioned Saturday, Dec. 3, 2016 in Dallas, along with five lightbulbs, including two that he created. Heritage Auctions will open the bidding on the two lots. (Heritage Auctions via AP) Thomas Edison’s door […]
01 December 2016 Securities Commission Malaysia (SC) today signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with MIMOS, the country’s research and development centre in ICT, to jointly develop a capital market advanced analytics platform. By collaborating with MIMOS, SC will be able to leverage new technology to process a higher volume of data from a variety of sources beyond the traditional data sets, facilitate the usage of RegTech […]
5G subscriptions are forecast to reach 20 million by 2022 in the Middle East and North East Africa, according to new research from tech giant Ericsson. Its Mobility Report for the Middle East and North East Africa also said mobile subscriptions are growing steadily across the region. They are expected to reach 690 million by the end of 2016, making up to 8 percent of the global […]
Your daily guide to community and cultural activities across the Emirates for December 3, 2016, including performances, festivals, art exhibitions, film screenings, health and fitness events, talks, classes, workshops and family fun. newslide Nationwide New movie See The Edge of Seventeen, a coming-of-age film about a young woman in today’s world. Nadine (Hailee Steinfeld), 17, is a bullied high-school student suffering from depression who finds life unbearable […]
The notion of machine-powered facial recognition is one that predates today’s actual technology for it by many years, thanks to robot POV shots from sci-fi films such as The Terminator and Robocop. But while many advances have been made, facial recognition software is far from infallible, as researchers from Carnegie Mellon University recently found. Here are the details from a report in Quartz: Researchers showed they could […]
Credit: Yale University On the wall of Aaron Dollar’s office is a poster for R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), the 1920 Czech play that gave us the word “robot.” The story ends with the nominal robots seizing control of the factory of their origin and then wiping out nearly all of humanity. Dollar, fortunately, has something more cheerful in mind for the future of human-robot relations. He sees […]
The threat of disruption means CIOs and their c-suite peers are under more pressure than ever before to develop creative solutions to business challenges. Almost three quarters (73 per cent) of companies around the world believe they are exposed to digital disruption today, according to Tech Research Asia. Such is the threat of change that 61 per cent of these firms are taking affirmative action and trying […]
The effects of climate change will likely cause smaller but stronger storms in the United States, according to a new framework for modeling storm behavior. Though storm intensity is expected to increase over today’s levels, the predicted reduction in storm size may alleviate some fears of widespread severe flooding in the future. (via WSJ)
Service launches in Turkey with more cities to go live in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt Dubai, December 1, 2016 Fueled by its market expansion strategy to broaden the reach of its services within the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, Careem, the region’s leading app based car booking service, recently launched operations in Istanbul Turkey. Within the GCC itself, Careem is answering the high demand […]
Good morning. Here’s our daily summary of all the media news you need to know. Want to get this briefing in your inbox every morning? Subscribe here. Since Jim VandeHei and John Harris proved most everybody to be idiots, VandeHei can only hope that reflexive suspicion of his new gambit again proves to be entrepreneurial bliss. The two journalists famously pitched the notion of an all-politics digital […]
Despite powering dashboards for at least two years, Android Auto lacked a Google service that is probably one of the most useful for driving, which is the OK Google voice command. Interestingly, the feature had a low-key rollout. As of this writing, Google has not officially issued a statement announcing the update. If not for Reddit user neo5468, the world would probably have trundled on, without ever […]
A head of steam for Italian government bond yields. There are no signs of jitters in the eurozone’s third largest debt market this morning in the last day of trading before the country votes in a closely-watched referendum this weekend. Italy’s 10-year bond yields have fallen by as much as 10 basis points this morning (0.1 percentage points) to 1.95 per cent, outperforming a wider rally in […]
Zahid says all component parties should help each other out, especially during the next general election. KUALA LUMPUR: Other Barisan Nasional (BN) component parties must work as hard as Umno, says the party’s acting deputy president Ahmad Zahid Hamidi. Zahid said he had met with the presidents of BN component parties to discuss this and was confident that a “huge change” would happen soon. “I have urged […]
By Anshuman Daga and Marius Zaharia | SINGAPORE SINGAPORE Singapore’s central bank imposed penalties on the local units of U.K.-based Standard Chartered (STAN.L) and private bank Coutts for money laundering breaches related to Malaysia’s scandal-tainted 1MDB fund and said it was nearing the end of its probes. The penalties – of S$5.2 million ($3.65 million) and S$2.4 million, respectively – were the latest punitive measures taken by […]
ABU DHABI // When John Schneider-Merck landed in the UAE in 1976, he immediately saw it as a country of opportunity. Mr Schneider-Merk was 35 years old when he arrived from Germany to oversee a family business. The business would later shut down, but instead of heading home, he decided to stay and start his own business. “I didn’t know Dubai at all. I looked at the […]
There aren’t very many tourists on my flight from New York to Kingston – it’s mostly Jamaicans going home. The tourists usually favour the trip to Montego Bay, from where they’re immediately shuttled into carefully cloistered resorts and served a jolly medley of reggae and other clichés of island life along with the necessary TVs, ATMs, fast-food chains, souvenir shops and multiple pools. Many travellers who visit […]
Tim Leissner, the former star dealmaker for Goldman Sachs in Southeast Asia, is to be banned from Singapore’s securities industry for 10 years over breaches relating to the multibillion-dollar scandal at Malaysia’s troubled state investment fund 1MDB, while Standard Chartered and Coutts have both been fined. Mr Leissner, who joined Goldman in Asia in 1998 and helped raise $6bn for 1MDB with three bond issuances, is being […]
App-based service now covers six cities Egypt – offering more local residents a convenient, reliable way to get around town Cairo, Egypt, December 1, 2016 Careem, the region’s leading app-based car booking service, launches today in three new cities in Egypt, extending access to its services to a total of six destinations across the country. The app is now live in Mansoura, Tanta and Hurghada, adding to […]
As a microcosm of the wrenches and stresses enterprise services are experiencing, Cognizant‘s week has been pretty fascinating. Last weekend Elliott Management took an activist controlling role in Cognizant, one of the most strategic services firms, with an open public letter to Cognizant’s management essentially chastising them for too much investment in the future and for not squeezing enough money out of the IT services world as […]
