Author: Businessam Staff

On Thursday, Stratolaunch rolled its low orbit launch aircraft out of the company’s hangar in the California desert for the first time.

With wings spanning 385 ft, it is the world’s largest airplane by wingspan — besting the AN-225’s 290 ft. wingspan.

The aircraft is also 238 ft. long and 50 ft. tall.

Like the AN-225, the Statolaunch plane is also powered by six high-bypass ratio turbofan engines.

Stratolaunch — owned by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen — intends to use the aircraft to move forward with its vision to “provide convenient, reliable, and routine access to low Earth orbit.”

Stratolaunch Systems Corporation”This marks a historic step in our work to achieve Paul G. Allen’s vision of normalizing access to low Earth orbit,” Stratolaunch Systems Corporation CEO Jean Floyd said in a statement. “We have a lot of exciting activity ahead as we enter the testing process, and we look forward to sharing our progress during the coming months.”

Ahead of the roll out, Stratolaunch removed the three-story high scaffolding around the plane and lowered the 500,000 lbs. craft onto its 28 wheels for the first time. The Stratolaunch plane is expected to undergo ground tests, engine runs, and taxi tests before ultimately making its first flight.

Stratolaunch Systems CorporationThe company plans to use the aircraft as a platform to launch rockets into orbit. Which is why it has a designed maximum takeoff weight of 1.3 million pounds. In fact, Stratolaunch believes the aircraft will be one day be able to deliver as many as three rockets into orbit on a single mission.

According to Stratolaunch, the aircraft is on track to perform its first launch demonstration in 2019.

Stratolaunch Systems Corporation

John Cushman, Purdue University distinguished professor of earth, atmospheric and planetary science and a professor of mathematics, is commercializing a technology that could provide an “instantly rechargeable” method forelectric and hybrid vehicle batteries through a quick and easy process similar to refueling a car at a gas station. Credit: Purdue University

A technology developed by Purdue researchers could provide an “instantly rechargeable” method that is safe, affordable and environmentally friendly for recharging electric and hybrid vehicle batteries through a quick and easy process similar to refueling a car at a gas station.

The innovation could expedite the adoption of electric and hybrid vehicles by eliminating the time needed to stop and re-charge a conventional electric car’s battery and dramatically reducing the need for new infrastructure to support re-charging stations.

John Cushman, Purdue University distinguished professor of earth, atmospheric and planetary science and a professor of mathematics, presented the research findings “Redox reactions in immiscible-fluids in porous media – membraneless battery applications” at the recent International Society for Porous Media 9th International Conference in Rotterdam, Netherlands.

Cushman co-founded Ifbattery LLC (IF-battery) to further develop and commercialize the technology.

“Electric and hybrid vehicle sales are growing worldwide and the popularity of companies like Tesla is incredible, but there continues to be strong challenges for industry and consumers of electric or hybrid cars,” said Cushman, who led the research team that developed the technology. “The biggest challenge for industry is to extend the life of a battery’s charge and the infrastructure needed to actually charge the vehicle. The greatest hurdle for drivers is the time commitment to keeping their cars fully charged.”

Current electric cars need convenient locations built for charging ports.

“Designing and building enough of these recharging stations requires massive infrastructure development, which means the energy distribution and storage system is being rebuilt at tremendous cost to accommodate the need for continual local battery recharge,” said Eric Nauman, co-founder of Ifbattery and a Purdue professor of mechanical engineering, basic medical sciences and biomedical engineering. “Ifbattery is developing an energy storage system that would enable drivers to fill up their electric or hybrid vehicles with fluid electrolytes to re-energize spent battery fluids much like refueling their gas tanks.”

The spent battery fluids or electrolyte could be collected and taken to a solar farm, wind turbine installation or hydroelectric plant for re-charging.

“Instead of refining petroleum, the refiners would reprocess spent electrolytes and instead of dispensing gas, the fueling stations would dispense a water and ethanol or methanol solution as fluid electrolytes to power vehicles,” Cushman said. “Users would be able to drop off the spent electrolytes at gas stations, which would then be sent in bulk to solar farms, wind turbine installations or hydroelectric plants for reconstitution or re-charging into the viable electrolyte and reused many times. It is believed that our technology could be nearly ‘drop-in’ ready for most of the underground piping system, rail and truck delivery system, gas stations and refineries.”

Mike Mueterthies, Purdue doctoral teaching and research assistant in physics and the third co-founder of Ifbattery, said the flow battery system makes the Ifbattery system unique.

“Other flow batteries exist, but we are the first to remove membranes which reduces costs and extends battery life,” Mueterthies said.

Ifbattery’s membrane-free battery demonstrates other benefits as well.

“Membrane fouling can limit the number of recharge cycles and is a known contributor to many battery fires,” Cushman said. “Ifbattery’s components are safe enough to be stored in a family home, are stable enough to meet major production and distribution requirements and are cost effective.”

Ifbattery licensed part of the technology through the Purdue Research Foundation Office of Technology Commercialization and has developed patents of its own. The company is a member of the Purdue Startup Class of 2017.

“We are at a stage in the company’s growth that we are looking for additional financing to build large-scale prototypes and subsequently manufacturing partners,” Cushman said.

Courtesy Newsrep

World stocks hit record highs, having gained 11 percent so far this year, and the dollar recovered more ground on Friday as upbeat U.S. economic data allayed concerns over growth ahead of payrolls figures due out later in the day.

Robust U.S. jobs numbers should cement expectations of a Federal Reserve interest rate hike at its June 13-14 policy meeting.

The dollar, coming off its worst fortnight in a year against the euro and the basket of currencies used to measure its broader strength .DXY on concern about the Trump administration’s ability to deliver a substantial boost to growth, clawed back some of those losses.

The dollar index was little changed although the greenback was up 0.1 percent against the yen JPY=.

“The move this morning is in dollar yen,” said Niels Christiansen, a strategist with Sweden’s Nordea Bank.

“Good numbers yesterday and the record highs in equities if anything are dollar positive. The data hasn’t done a great deal for the dollar recently, but we’ll certainly be looking at the wage numbers today – that is crucial for inflation and the rate outlook.”

A strong payrolls report would effectively seal the case for a Fed rate hike this month despite sluggish wage gains.

Nonfarm payrolls probably increased by 185,000 jobs last month, according to a Reuters survey of economists, after surging 211,000 in April.

Forecasts from Fed officials suggest that a median of two more hikes are planned before the end of the year.

Data showing a healthy uptick in private sector hiring and factory activity during May bolstered expectations that the U.S. economy was picking up speed and lifted stocks on Wall Street after two days of losses.

Those gains filtered through to global stocks, lifting the MSCI All-Country World index .MIWD00000PUS 0.3 percent to a record high.

Stocks in Europe joined the party with euro zone blue-chips .STOXX50E up 0.9 percent and UK’s FTSE 100 .FTSE up 0.4 percent and hovering near its highest-ever levels.

In commodities, oil prices resumed their slide with key futures contracts down more than 2 percent amid worries that U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to abandon a global climate pact could spark more crude drilling in the United States, stoking a persistent glut in global supply.

Global benchmark Brent crude futures LCOc1 fell to $49.63 a barrel, while U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude CLc1 by more than a dollar to $47.36 per barrel.

A stronger dollar and broadly buoyant global stock markets dented appetite for safe-haven gold XAU=, which hit its lowest levels in a week.

Courtesy Reuters

Our cellphones can reveal a lot about ourselves: where we live and work; who our family, friends and acquaintances are; how (and even what) we communicate with them; and our personal habits. With all the information stored on them, it isn’t surprising that mobile device users take steps to protect their privacy, like using PINs or passcodes to unlock their phones.

The research that we and our colleagues are doing identifies and explores a significant threat that most people miss: More than 70 percent of smartphone apps are reporting personal data to third-party tracking companies like Google Analytics, the Facebook Graph API or Crashlytics.

When people install a new Android or iOS app, it asks the user’s permission before accessing personal information. Generally speaking, this is positive. And some of the information these apps are collecting are necessary for them to work properly: A map app wouldn’t be nearly as useful if it couldn’t use GPS data to get a location.

But once an app has permission to collect that information, it can share your data with anyone the app’s developer wants to—letting third-party companies track where you are, how fast you’re moving and what you’re doing.

The help, and hazard, of code libraries

An app doesn’t just collect data to use on the phone itself. Mapping apps, for example, send your location to a server run by the app’s developer to calculate directions from where you are to a desired destination.

The app can send data elsewhere, too. As with websites, many mobile apps are written by combining various functions, precoded by other developers and companies, in what are called third-party libraries. These libraries help developers track user engagement, connect with social media and earn money by displaying ads and other features, without having to write them from scratch.

However, in addition to their valuable help, most libraries also collect sensitive data and send it to their online servers—or to another company altogether. Successful library authors may be able to develop detailed digital profiles of users. For example, a person might give one app permission to know their location, and another app access to their contacts. These are initially separate permissions, one to each app. But if both apps used the same third-party library and shared different pieces of information, the library’s developer could link the pieces together.

Users would never know, because apps aren’t required to tell users what software libraries they use. And only very few apps make public their policies on user privacy; if they do, it’s usually in long legal documents a regular person won’t read, much less understand.

Developing Lumen

Our research seeks to reveal how much data are potentially being collected without users’ knowledge, and to give users more control over their data. To get a picture of what data are being collected and transmitted from people’s smartphones, we developed a free Android app of our own, called the Lumen Privacy Monitor. It analyzes the traffic apps send out, to report which applications and online services actively harvest personal data.

Because Lumen is about transparency, a phone user can see the information installed apps collect in real time and with whom they share these data. We try to show the details of apps’ hidden behavior in an easy-to-understand way. It’s about research, too, so we ask users if they’ll allow us to collect some data about what Lumen observes their apps are doing—but that doesn’t include any personal or privacy-sensitive data. This unique access to data allows us to study how mobile apps collect users’ personal data and with whom they share data at an unprecedented scale.

In particular, Lumen keeps track of which apps are running on users’ devices, whether they are sending privacy-sensitive data out of the phone, what internet sites they send data to, the network protocol they use and what types of personal information each app sends to each site. Lumen analyzes apps traffic locally on the device, and anonymizes these data before sending them to us for study: If Google Maps registers a user’s GPS location and sends that specific address to maps.google.com, Lumen tells us, “Google Maps got a GPS location and sent it to maps.google.com”—not where that person actually is.

Trackers are everywhere

More than 1,600 people who have used Lumen since October 2015 allowed us to analyze more than 5,000 apps. We discovered 598 internet sites likely to be tracking users for advertising purposes, including social media services like Facebook, large internet companies like Google and Yahoo, and online marketing companies under the umbrella of internet service providers like Verizon Wireless.

We found that more than 70 percent of the apps we studied connected to at least one tracker, and 15 percent of them connected to five or more trackers. One in every four trackers harvested at least one unique device identifier, such as the phone number or its device-specific unique 15-digit IMEI number. Unique identifiers are crucial for online tracking services because they can connect different types of personal data provided by different apps to a single person or device. Most users, even privacy-savvy ones, are unaware of those hidden practices.

More than just a mobile problem

Tracking users on their mobile devices is just part of a larger problem. More than half of the app-trackers we identified also track users through websites. Thanks to this technique, called “cross-device” tracking, these services can build a much more complete profile of your online persona.

And individual tracking sites are not necessarily independent of others. Some of them are owned by the same corporate entity—and others could be swallowed up in future mergers. For example, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, owns several of the tracking domains that we studied, including Google Analytics, DoubleClick or AdMob, and through them collects data from more than 48 percent of the apps we studied.

Users’ online identities are not protected by their home country’s laws. We found data being shipped across national borders, often ending up in countries with questionable privacy laws. More than 60 percent of connections to tracking sites are made to servers in the U.S., U.K., France, Singapore, China and South Korea—six countries that have deployed mass surveillance technologies. Government agencies in those places could potentially have access to these data, even if the users are in countries with stronger privacy laws such as Germany, Switzerland or Spain.

Even more disturbingly, we have observed trackers in apps targeted to children. By testing 111 kids’ apps in our lab, we observed that 11 of them leaked a unique identifier, the MAC address, of the Wi-Fi router it was connected to. This is a problem, because it is easy to search online for physical locations associated with particular MAC addresses. Collecting private information about children, including their location, accounts and other unique identifiers, potentially violates the Federal Trade Commission’s rules protecting children’s privacy.

Just a small look

Although our data include many of the most popular Android apps, it is a small sample of users and apps, and therefore likely a small set of all possible trackers. Our findings may be merely scratching the surface of what is likely to be a much larger problem that spans across regulatory jurisdictions, devices and platforms.

It’s hard to know what users might do about this. Blocking sensitive information from leaving the phone may impair app performance or user experience: An app may refuse to function if it cannot load ads. Actually, blocking ads hurts app developers by denying them a source of revenue to support their work on apps, which are usually free to users.

If people were more willing to pay developers for apps, that may help, though it’s not a complete solution. We found that while paid apps tend to contact fewer tracking sites, they still do track users and connect with third-party tracking services.

Transparency, education and strong regulatory frameworks are the key. Users need to know what information about them is being collected, by whom, and what it’s being used for. Only then can we as a society decide what privacy protections are appropriate, and put them in place. Our findings, and those of many other researchers, can help turn the tables and track the trackers themselves.

Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez is a Research Assistant Professor at the IMDEA Networks Institute, Madrid, Spain, and Research Scientist at the Networking and Security, International Computer Science Institute based at, University of California, Berkeley. Srikanth Sundaresan is a Research Fellow in Computer Science at Princeton University.

Courtesy Newsrep

Wealthy people are dodging even more tax than previously thought, according to new research.

The wealthiest 0.01 per cent evaded 30 per cent of their personal taxes on average, compared to just 3 per cent in the population as a whole, economists Annette Alstadsæter, Niels Johannesen, and Gabriel Zucman found.

They studied data from the Panama Papers and Swiss Leaks which contain millions of documents revealing offshore activities.

Because these leaks contain only a small snapshot of the shady world of global tax avoidance, the researchers needed another source in order to come to a more general conclusion.

They found it in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark where transparency laws require unusually detailed disclosure of income and tax records.

By combining the datasets they were able to make an estimate of the true size and scope of tax evasion. As the graph below shows, the richer someone is, the higher proportion of tax they evade, by many multiples. The poorest groups are on the left, the richest on the right. The last five points on the graph represent the top one per cent of the income distribution.

(Annette Alstadsæter, Niels Johannesen, and Gabriel Zucman)

In the past it has been argued that average citizens are just as likely to not pay their dues as the super-rich, by for example, paying cash in hand for building work, buying goods on the black market or underestimating earnings on a personal tax return. The findings counter that position.

The data, of course, only relates to three Scandinavian countries but the authors of the research posit that the scale of tax evasion is likely to be worse in more unequal countries such as the US and UK.

It is also likely to be boosted in those countries by the fact that disclosure rules are much lighter. The random audits that occur in the UK, for example, do less to discourage tax evasion than the more stringent regimes of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, the authors suggest.

Courtesy Newsrep

The richest 0.01% of households, involving those with more than £31m assets, evade paying 30% of their taxes on average, according to an academic study of tax evasion based on data revealed in the Panama Papers and the leaks concerning the HSBC Swiss private bank.

Economists, who matched people named in the leaks with public wealth records, found that “the probability to hide assets rises very sharply with wealth”.

The paper found that the super-rich evaded more than 10 times as much of their due taxes as the wider population, which on average evaded 2%.

Most of the tax was evaded by hiding wealth in offshore accounts, which the researchers said was “extremely concentrated” in the hands of only the very wealthy, who could afford accountants, lawyers and bankers to advise them on setting up such holdings.

“The probability to hide wealth offshore rises very steeply within the top 1%,” the paper, entitled Tax Evasion and Inequality, said. “By our estimate, the top 0.01% of the [wealth] distribution owns about 50% of [the wealth].”

The study, led by researchers at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences and the University of Copenhagen, only studied the wealth of people in Norway, Sweden and Denmark, where detailed records of personal wealth are available. The researchers suggested that similar or higher levels of tax evasion were likely to be found among the super-rich in other countries.

The researchers said they found that about 40% of the richest 0.1% of households in Norway hid on average about 50% of their assets offshore. “Because most Latin American and many Asian and European economies own much more wealth offshore than Norway, the results found in Norway are likely to be lower than for most of the world’s countries,” they said. “Our results highlight the need to move beyond tax records to capture the income and wealth of the very rich, even in countries where tax compliance is generally high.”

The researchers, led by Annette Alstadsaeter, said their goal was to “correct global inequality statistics in a systematic way so as to better capture the very rich”.

Courtesy Newsrep

Oil prices tumbled below $50 on Friday amid worries that U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to abandon a global climate pact could spark more crude drilling in the United States, stoking a persistent glut in global supply.

Global benchmark Brent crude futures was down 1.7 percent, or 80 cents, at $49.75 a barrel, as of 0725 GMT, Reuters reports.

U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude futures dropped 87 cents, or 1.81 percent, to $47.46 per barrel.

Commodity markets were absorbing news the United States would withdraw from the landmark 2015 global agreement to fight climate change, a move that fulfilled a major campaign pledge but drew condemnation from U.S. allies.

“This could lead to a drilling free-for-all in the U.S. and also see other signatories waver in their commitments,” said Jeffrey Halley, senior market analyst, OANDA.

“This outcome could increase the supply-side equation from the United States and complicate OPEC’s forward projections. A scenario that would not be favourable to oil prices.”

Surging U.S. production has put a strain on OPEC members’ efforts to curb production to drain a global crude supply overhang.

A week ago, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and some non-OPEC members met in Vienna to roll over an output cut deal to reduce 1.8 million barrels per day (bpd) until the end of next March.

Russian Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich said on Friday he did not think that the global output cut agreement would be altered should prices go lower.

Russia’s Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin also said the market cannot stabilise unless all producers cut output.

Oil prices are down some 7.5 percent since OPEC’s May 25 decision to extend the cuts.

Faced with lingering glut woes, the oil cartel also discussed last week reducing output by a further 1 to 1.5 percent, and could revisit the proposal should inventories remain high, according to sources.

But oil markets were offered some support by official data that showed crude inventories in the United States, the world’s top oil consumer, fell sharply last week as refining and exports surged to record highs.

Crude stockpiles were down by 6.4 million barrels in the week to May 26, beating analyst expectations for a decrease of 2.5 million barrels.

However, U.S. crude production rose to 9.34 million bpd last week, up nearly 500,000 bpd from a year ago.

“We may or may not see more huge draws. But crude production is slowly but surely going to neutralize the (OPEC-led)production cut,” said Sukrit Vijayakar, director of energy consultancy Trifecta.

Rising output from Nigeria and Libya, which are exempted from the deal, is also undercutting oil producers’ attempt to limit production.

Courtesy Reuters

U.S. job growth likely remained strong in May, a further sign of an acceleration in economic activity that would effectively seal the case for an interest rate increase this month despite sluggish wage gains.

Nonfarm payrolls probably increased by 185,000 jobs last month, according to a Reuters survey of economists, after surging 211,000 in April. May’s projected increase would be in line with this year’s 185,000 average monthly job growth.

The unemployment rate is forecast unchanged at a 10-year low of 4.4 percent. It has dropped four-tenths of a percentage point this year. The Labor Department will release its closely watched employment report on Friday, less than two weeks before the Federal Reserve’s June 13-14 policy meeting.

“Another strong jobs report would help the Fed proceed with another rate hike at its June meeting, by supporting its contention that recent weakness in retail sales and inflation data will prove transitory,” said Josh Wright, chief economist with recruitment software provider iCIMS in Matawan, New Jersey.

U.S. financial markets have almost priced in a 25 basis points increase in the Fed’s benchmark overnight interest rate this month, according to CME FedWatch.

Minutes of the Fed’s May 2-3 policy meeting, which were published last week, showed that while policymakers agreed they should hold off hiking rates until there was evidence the growth slowdown was transitory, “most participants” believed “it would soon be appropriate” to raise borrowing costs.

The U.S. central bank raised interest rates by 25 basis points in March. Data on consumer spending and manufacturing suggest the economy gained speed early in the second quarter after gross domestic product increased at a tepid 1.2 percent annualized rate at the start of the year.

The Atlanta Fed is forecasting GDP increasing at a 4.0 percent pace in the second quarter.

Courtesy Reuters

A Senate panel Thursday recommended a five-naira tax on any litre of petroleum products purchased by Nigerians to fund the proposed National Roads Fund.

The tax, which is contained in a bill entitled “National Roads Bill”, will compel motorists to pay N5 on each litre of ‎petrol and diesel purchased. By implication, the bill will affect all users of petrol and diesel, including industries.

Kabiru Gaya, Chairman, Senate Committee on Works, said the tax would be part of sources of revenues for the proposed National Roads Fund.

The Senate is expected in the weeks begin the clause-by-clause consideration of the report presented by the Senate Committee on Works.

The bill reads in part: “There shall be a road fund charge of 0.5 per cent on the assessed value of any vehicle imported at any time into Nigeria. There shall be lease, license or other fees, which shall be 10 percent of the revenue accruing from lease or license or other fees pertaining to non-vehicular road usage along any federal road and collected by the Federal Roads Maintenance Agency‎.”

By Business a.m. live staff