Kenneth Scott, Author at Argyll Free Press

PwC will pay $25 million for mishandling Tokyo-Mitsubishi

August 18, 2014 By Kenneth Scott Leave a Comment

The New York State’s Department of Financial Services has proclaimed that it has determined to take an action against a consulting firm. The company was responsible for the monitoring of its operations.

A superintendent of the New York State’s Department of financial Services Benjamin Lawsky stated after an inquiry that people will see the consequence of this investigation this summer.

PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP was the organization which was appointed by financial institution. This service network will be banished for two years and will have to pay almost $25 million in order to resolve accusations of New York state regulators. The New York sate regulators’ make allegations that the company mismanaged its work for Bank of Tokyo-Mistsubishi UFJ.

The New York State Department of Financial Services claimed that PwC reduced an anti-money laundering report of Japanese Bank which the company put forth to the regulators.

On the other hand, PwC stated that it has assented the fine and ban and that ban will put a stop on the functioning of one of its units with NEW York- regulated banks.

The New York Time will overtly announce it on Monday, alleged by some informants

Furthermore, Lawsky said that they have to evaluate the works of these banks, which is rather a difficult task. Since these are the banks which reimburse and give employment to them.

The similar case happened in 2013 when a Deloitte LLP unit made a settlement of $10 million and agreed one year consulting ban for New York regulated banks. The regulators’ claimed that the firm produced a heap of its anti-money laundering work for U.K bank Standard Chartered PLC.

Remnants of the Jonestown victims found- after 35 years

August 18, 2014 By Kenneth Scott Leave a Comment

300 years ago, 900 people were died in a suicide murder in Jonestown Guyana. These people were compelled to drink a cyanide –laced grape punch.Most of them were laid in a huge grave in California while the rest of the dead bodied were handed over to their families.

On Thursday a groundbreaking news was aired on the television that some of the remnants of nine dead bodies were found in the funeral home of Dover. Officials found 38 containers in total and 33 of them were identified, but the names of those nine people are not disclosed since their relatives are not yet called. The officials discovered five other containers of which are extremely complex to recognize.

Yulanda Williams, a survival as well as a sergeant of San Francisco police department grieved on this news and expressed that it is extremely difficult task to forget a horrible incident like this. Moreover, he said that several years he tried hard to heal the wounds and suddenly a big news revealed which again sprinkled salt on the wounds.

According to the funeral director William Torbert said that officers would do whatever the relatives of those nine people would ask them to do.

Laser ascends the sensitivity of Atomic Force Microscope

August 18, 2014 By Kenneth Scott Leave a Comment

The limitation of Optical microscope is not associated with the technology of the microscope rather than it is linked with the property of light. Whereas, nucleus microscope can be utilized for higher technology along with a thin and non-living specimens. The Atomic Force Microscopes are accountable for this predicament since they can assist researchers in stealing a look into the nano scale world. There is merely one negative aspect of these microscopes

Before digging into the downside, let us see how an Atomic Force Microscope works. Foremost, allow me to present some insight about the working of this microscope. This Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) is a form of scanning probe microscope (SPM). They are utilized in the measurement of height, friction, magnetism and other local properties. The SPM raster scans probe on an area of the sample in order to get a proper image. In the meantime, it also assesses the local attributes of that image.

Then the nanowire probe is exceptionally thin and its thinness can be imagined by the fact, since it is 500 times tenuous than a hair. The function of this nano wire is to stimulate on the surface of the sample for the measurement. The sole drawback of this microscope probe is that it cannot be used along with the light of a laser. The reason behind this is that the energy of laser over power the sensitive measurement.

Frequent switching of the laser light is the only way out of this problem. Speedily take measurements when the laser is off and as soon as the nano probe arrive back at the room temperature switch it on again. Repeating the procedure will provide you with a correct value.

The Atomic Microscopes have thousand times higher resolution as compared to the Optical Microscopes

Users annoyed as Twitter turns favorites into retweets

August 18, 2014 By Kenneth Scott Leave a Comment

Much to their users’ dismay, Twitter has started displaying Favorited tweets on some users’ timelines. As part of a Facebook style experiment Twitter has started treating some users’ Favorited tweets as retweets. The new tweak is probably part of a plan, to get users more engaged in content on the social network. If that is it, it doesn’t seem to be working well since most people don’t seem to be happy about it.
A user complained, “WHY is my timeline cluttered with other people’s favorites and who they follow? Annoying and useless now!”
Another added, “Is on @Twitter a ‘favorite’ and ‘retweet’ [n]ow just the same? Why am I having my followers favorite someone else’s tweet in my timeline?”

Twitter has not yet responded to the criticism from its disappointed users, it has however, pointed to a blog post in which it justifies its experiments like this one. “A common thread across recent releases has been experimentation. We’ve tested various features with small groups of our 200 million users before determining what we’ll release. These tests are essential to delivering the best possible user experience.” The firm also added, “We also experiment with features that may never be released to everyone who uses Twitter.” The last part seems to suggest that the feature may never actually be released on a wider rollout.

China Caught Mercedez-Benz Guilty for Vertical Price-Fixing

August 18, 2014 By Kenneth Scott Leave a Comment

The government of China has accused Mercedes-Benz of violating anti-monopoly laws and charging excessive prices for parts. Regulators found that they were engaged in “vertical price-fixing” by abusing their control over supplies of replacement parts according to reports by the Xinhua News Agency. They also said that, investigators from the eastern province of Jiangsu found that prices were so high that purchasing the parts for one Mercedes C-class car would be equal to buying 12 other vehicles. Regulators in China have investigated industries including foreign auto, technology, pharmaceutical and dairy companies since the past two years, using the 2008 anti-monopoly law to force down consumer prices.

“Mercedes-Benz is a typical case of vertical price fixing — that is, the use of its dominant position in after-market parts to maintain price controls,” said Zhou Gao, chief of the Jiangsu price agency’s anti-monopoly unit, according to Xinhua.

No indication was given as to the company’s penalty. China has used the 2008 anti-monopoly law against foreign companies more excessively. Other companies being investigated include Microsoft Corp., and Qualcomm Inc.

Mercedes did respond to the investigation earlier, by cutting the price of their replacement parts. They reduced the prices of their windshields by 38%, this was also done by Audi.The European Union Chamber of Commerce in China, in a statement last week, expressed concern foreign companies might be “disproportionately targeted” by regulators.The chamber said it had received reports of “intimidation tactics” by regulators who pressure foreign companies to accept punishments without a full hearing or involving their governments.
“Competition law should not be used as an administrative instrument to harm targeted companies or serve other aims, such as administratively forcing price reductions,” the chamber said.

A cure for Alopecia Areata?

August 18, 2014 By Kenneth Scott Leave a Comment

A new drug has been found which restored the hair of three patients within five months. Scientists think they may have discovered a cure for the autoimmune disease alopecia areata.

Alopecia areata is particularly identified with bald patches rather than complete baldness. Researchers at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) identified the immune cells responsible for destroying hair follicles in people with alopecia areata. Initial results were reported from an ongoing clinical trial of an FDA approved drug which has produced complete re-growth of hair in patients with moderate to severe alopecia areata: Three participants experienced total regrowth withing five month of the start of the treatment.

“We’ve only begun testing the drug in patients, but if the drug continues to be successful and safe, it will have a dramatic positive impact on the lives of people with this disease,” said Raphael Clynes, who led the research, along with Angela M Christiano, professor in the Departments of Dermatology and of Genetics and Development at CUMC. The disease can occur at any age and affects men and women equally. Hair loss in alopecia areata occurs when cells from the immune system confuse the hair follicles as foreign bodies and starts attacking them . This causes the hair in that region to fall off and enter a dormant state. Initially, in the study mice were used. The study suggests that a danger signal in the hair follicles of patients attracts the immune cells to the follicle and fuels an attack. The study used the mice to trace the danger signal backwards to identify the T-cells responsible for attacking the follicles. Further investigation revealed how the T-cells were instructed to attack and identified a pathway that the new class of drug called, JAK inhibitors could target. The two JAK inhibitors tested by the researchers were ruxolitinib and tofacitnib. These drugs blocked these pathways and managed to stop the attack on the hair follicles.

These effects seem to be quite promising, for a disease which could be devastating, especially for young people. If the drugs work and have no problematic short term or long term side effects, this seems to be a great breakthrough in drug therapy. Not just because of the apparent recovery, but also because of the identification of the pathways with which the disease is linked, this may shed some further light on the etiology of the disease in general.

Alibaba: $9.4 Billion expected with new Alipay deal

August 13, 2014 By Kenneth Scott Leave a Comment

After striking a new deal with the payment processor, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. will get atleast $9.4 billion from future value of its finance affiliate. If Alipay or its parent company seek an initial public offering, China’s biggest e-commerce operator will be entitled to the payment. Alibaba also gets the perpetual right to 37.5 percent of the finance arm’s pretax earnings and can buy a stake of about one-third if regulators approve.

Since billionare founder Jack Ma spun off Alipay into a Chinese company in 2011, their relationship with the finance business has been contentious. Alibaba may be headed towards the largest IPO in history, the deal locks in a share of earnings from the payments unit, which has expanded into money markets and controls more than 574 billion yuan of funds.

According to Wang Weidong, an analyst at Shanghai based Internet consultant firm IResearch, ”The financial unit is adding more services and becoming bigger in scale and complete in services.” According to what was said in the US regulatory filing, the new deal will transfer Hangzhou based Alibaba’s small business lending arm to Zhejiang Ant Small & Micro Financial Services Group Co. who is the parent of Alipay, for $518 million in cash and annual fees for seven years. The implications of the sale are that financial service assets will be owned by Chinese nationals instead of global investors that may buy shares in the IPO. Yahoo gave a statement saying that the terms outline in yesterday’s filing were negotiated through collaboration and that it supported the agreement. Softbank Corp. led by Masayoshi Son who owns more than 30 percent of Alibaba seems to think the deal is beneficial for both parties.

Confusion among the climate scientists

August 12, 2014 By Kenneth Scott Leave a Comment

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently requested a figure for its annual report, to show temperature trends over the last 10,000 years there seemed to be an evident problem.

Zhengyu Liu from the University of Wisconsin says that data from observation suggests that the Earth is cooling while the physical data suggests the complete opposite.

The problem has been termed the Holocene temperature conundrum. It has tremendously important implications for understanding climate change and evaluating climate models. The authors have however emphasized that this does not negate the evidence of human impact on global climate beginning in the 20th century. The question however remains, who is right? Liu suggests that maybe none of us are completely right, he suggests a data problems or perhaps a model problem, for example some physical mechanisms may be missing from the model.

Liu says that they are certain that during the last 10,000 years, atmospheric carbon dioxide rose by 20 parts per million before the 20th century. He thinks that these physical changes suggest that, the annual mean temperature should have continued to warm, even as regions around the world experienced cooling.

Liu and his colleagues created three models which took two years to complete, they ran simulations of climate influences that spanned from the intensity of sunlight on Earth to global greenhouse gases, ice sheet cover and meltwater changes. Each indicates global warming over the last 10,000 years. However, the bio and geo-thermostats used in last year’s study in the journal Science indicates global cooling beginning around 7000 years ago and continuing until the mark of humans became apparent. Liu says, in the North Atlantic there is cooling and warming data that the climate change community has not been able to figure out. Liu thinks that with the current knowledge in perspective, it is difficult to imagine any physical forces in the last 10,000 years that could have been strong enough to curtail the warming indicated by the increase in global greenhouse gases. Climate scientists are to meet this fall to discuss this baffling issue.

AMD is introducing custom 64-bit ARM processors

August 12, 2014 By Kenneth Scott Leave a Comment

Similar to the way it made customized chips for Xbox One and PlayStation 4, Advanced Micro Devices is willing to make custom ARM server chips to suit the needs of the customer. During a presentation at the Hot Chips conference in Cupertino, California, Sean White who is an engineer with the company explained that the company will consider customizing its 64-bit ARM server processors to meet specific customer needs, as the market for these new types of servers expands.

He further explained that ARM chips are mostly used in mobile devices but interest continues to grow in using the low power processors for Web-hosting and cloud applications.

The company also designs x86 chips on which it competes with the more dominant Intel. Intel is also already making custom processors based on the Xeon chips for large data centers like eBay. AMD increased its focus on custom chips since last year as evident decrease in the PC market became apparent. Because of the millions of gaming consoles being shipped, the company is already making strong custom chip revenues.

At Hot Chips, the company also shared the technical details of its 64-bit ARM processor called Opteron A1100, code named Seattle. It has two DDR3 and DDR4 memory channels and will have up to 4 MB L2 cache with two cores sharing 1MB. A new specification to the ARM chips is the ECC memory, which is essential for servers to correct data errors. Other features include, engines to encrypt and decrypt data, along with compression and decompression of data. The company has started shipping a reference board with the Seattle processor to pick customers that want to write and test applications.

Xbox One gets EA Access Subscription

August 12, 2014 By Kenneth Scott Leave a Comment

Electronic Arts has introduced the EA Access subscription to all Xbox users globally on Monday.
The gaming service was initially available to select users and was announced late in July. On 29th July EA had announced the subscription for the EA Access to Xbox One offering gamers unlimited access to EA titles at a monthly subscription of $4.99 and an annual subscription of $29.99.

Furthermore, EA Access subscriptions will be available to purchase from local retail stores, Gamestop and on Amazon, for Xbox One gamers across Europe, as well as at EB Games in Canada. Looking for more? The game service would also offer Xbox One users 10% off on digital purchases of EA games and downloadable content for the console and in addition to that the expansion packs for game titles can be purchased at a 10% discounted price.

It must be noted that the Xbox One rival, Sony PlayStation 4 will not be getting the EA Access service for its customers. In fact, Sony has reportedly said that the nwe EA Access subscription for Xbox One does not provide ‘good value’ for its customers.

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