Posts in November 2014

the withings 'activité' fuels a healthy motivation by tracking movements, keeping the wearer continuously informed and supported until the goal is reached.

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Adam Moses is practicing dog command gestures with an Xbox Kinect in his office at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL).

On the screen in front of him, a virtual Labrador dog obediently moves through an empty desert village; together, they're trying to locate a buried improvised explosive device (IED). Says Moses, “ONR [The Office of Naval Research] wanted a way for the human to train with a dog, with a virtual dog, that you can train with anytime, anywhere.”

What looks like a video game is actually a training tool widely used by the U.S. Army, called Virtual Battlespace. After a lot of research into dog behavior, including watching 100s of hours of tapes of handlers and their dogs in Iraq, Moses worked with others to create ROVER. ROVER is a distinct module that employs Virtual Battlespace and helps handlers practice commands and learning to read the dog's silent cues.

“Gestures are important, the whistle commands are important, even the voice commands are important,” says Moses. He wrote what he calls a skeleton tracker program for ROVER, so the Xbox camera can “see” a player's gestures.

“There's a lot of stuff going on in the background,” he says. “Our challenge was not only doing the plume part of it, which is actually the easier part. The harder part was, how do you account for dog psychology?”

Says Lisa Albuquerque, the former ONR Program Manager, “This collaborative effort between ONR and NRL demonstrates [...] our ability to provide multi-disciplinary solutions to warfighter-identified problems. Use of IEDs will persist, and efforts such as this will help our nation to be ready to respond.”

Moses models where an IED is detectable downwind, similar to toxic plumes

Apple just raised $3.5 billion (€2.88 billion) via Europe's bond markets.

But the real benefit Apple got from raising that debt in Europe: a great interest rate.

In a note to clients following Apple's debt raise, analysts at RBC Capital Markets wrote that Apple's "borrowing cost on this raise is lower than US government bonds."

Bond yields reflect, most simply, the risk that investors are being compensated for by lending an entity money. A lower yield implies a lower chance that a company will default or fail to pay back lenders, and a higher yield a higher chance of default.

On eight-year notes issued in Europe, Apple's bonds will yield 1.082%, while 12-year notes will yield 1.671%.

US 10-year Treasury yields are currently at about 2.35%.

When companies raise debt, it is typically benchmarked off whatever local government bonds are yielding. All around the world government yields are low, but European bond yields are among the lowest in the world (except for Japan).

And so while Apple just launched the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus and the company is expected to launch Apple Watch next year, the company also finds ways to innovate financially.

RBC also notes that because Apple is a US-based entity, the company will "receive the proceeds in the US and will likely use a swap to convert the euros to [dollars]," which the firms sees as most likely giving Apple no repatriation issues. (When a company repatriates cash from overseas to the US, it pays taxes on it. Usually large ones.)

As Business Insider's Jay Yarow quipped after news first broke that Apple would raise debt in Europe:

And here's how German and Swiss 10-years stack up to US 10-years.

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