When we examine and value companies, we use a lens that is more than five hundred years old. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), which dates back to a Venetian Friar who lived in 1500 AD, has long been the determinant of what we how society measures value. According to this now global standard, things and money are valuable assets. People and ideas, and their development, are expenses. This means that investments such as education, healthcare, training, and research actually eat away at value creation.

Uber's self-driving Volvo SUVs are shipped off to Arizona from San Francisco on Dec. 22 (Uber) Uber packed up its fleet of self-driving Volvo XC90 SUVs from its home city of San Francisco on Thursday and shipped them to Arizona following a puzzling standoff with California over a requirement that the ride-hailing giant get a $150 permit before testing the high-tech vehicles on public roads. Seeing an opportunity to capitalize on the matter, Arizona Governor Doug Ducey welcomed the ride-hailing company to his state on Thursday, saying in a statement that "California may not want you, but we do." "Our cars departed for Arizona this morning by truck," Uber said in a statement. "We'll be expanding our self-driving pilot there in the next few weeks, and we're excited to have the support of Governor Ducey." The move came after California's Department of Motor Vehicles revoked registrations for all 16 vehicles Uber started testing in San Francisco on December 14.

A central problem of random matrix theory is to understand the eigenvalues of spiked random matrix models, in which a prominent eigenvector is planted into a random matrix. These distributions form natural statistical models for principal component analysis (PCA) problems throughout the sciences. Baik, Ben Arous and P\'ech\'e showed that the spiked Wishart ensemble exhibits a sharp phase transition asymptotically: when the signal strength is above a critical threshold, it is possible to detect the presence of a spike based on the top eigenvalue, and below the threshold the top eigenvalue provides no information. Such results form the basis of our understanding of when PCA can detect a low-rank signal in the presence of noise. However, not all the information about the spike is necessarily contained in the spectrum. We study the fundamental limitations of statistical methods, including non-spectral ones. Our results include: I) For the Gaussian Wigner ensemble, we show that PCA achieves the optimal detection threshold for a variety of benign priors for the spike. We extend previous work on the spherically symmetric and i.i.d. Rademacher priors through an elementary, unified analysis. II) For any non-Gaussian Wigner ensemble, we show that PCA is always suboptimal for detection. However, a variant of PCA achieves the optimal threshold (for benign priors) by pre-transforming the matrix entries according to a carefully designed function. This approach has been stated before, and we give a rigorous and general analysis. III) For both the Gaussian Wishart ensemble and various synchronization problems over groups, we show that inefficient procedures can work below the threshold where PCA succeeds, whereas no known efficient algorithm achieves this. This conjectural gap between what is statistically possible and what can be done efficiently remains open.

Uber takes its self driving cars to Arizona: Firm abandons... How a long SONG can make you late: Researchers find... Pokemon Go's last gasp? Apple Watch version of hit game... Pandora up close: Nasa releases stunning image from... Uber takes its self driving cars to Arizona: Firm abandons... How a long SONG can make you late: Researchers find... Pokemon Go's last gasp? Apple Watch version of hit game... Pandora up close: Nasa releases stunning image from... The world of Hyrule has come a long way since The Legend of Zelda was first released 30 years ago. Nintendo has revealed a series of sketches from the development of the original game, and they're sure to get the nostalgia flowing Along with the individual illustrations, Nintendo also released a video showing a look at a sketch of the entire map from the iconic game to celebrate its 30th anniversary this year.

More cities are adding smart city features so that Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and other connected technologies can improve the lives of citizens and visitors. As everyone knows, technology moves fast and finding out what's in store next is crucial to stay in the game. Diabetics have been waiting for years for better technology to manage their condition. Some got tired of waiting and hacked together an open source hardware and software solution. The concept of a smart city has been around for more than a decade, but it was only recently that the phrase "smart city" became part of the modern lexicon.

Uber is moving its fleet of self-driving vehicles from San Francisco to Phoenix, Arizona, having failed to gain support from California regulators for its stance that refusing to obtain a permit to test the cars was a matter of "principle". "Our cars departed for Arizona this morning by truck," an Uber spokesperson said in a statement. "We'll be expanding our self-driving pilot there in the next few weeks, and we're excited to have the support of Governor Ducey." Uber's self-driving pilot program lasted just one week in its hometown of San Francisco. Within hours of the pilot's launch, multiple cars were caught running red lights, and state regulators ordered the vehicles off the road until the company had obtained a permit.

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Uber's self-driving vehicle tests on the streets of San Francisco ended earlier this week when the California DMV stepped in. The state revoked the registrations on Uber's self-driving cars after the company flew in the face of both city and state officials, claiming it would continue operating in San Francisco without a permit. After all the back and forth, Uber is now taking its self-driving tests elsewhere -- specifically to the streets of Arizona. BREAKING: After defeat in California @Uber is moving its self-driving cars to Arizona, will begin testing there in next few weeks. An Uber spokesperson also told TechCrunch, that the vehicles actually shipped out for Arizona on a truck on Tuesday and that they will start rolling out there "in the next few weeks" with the approval of Arizona Governor Doug Ducey.

Will technology at last help us to feel richer in 2017? The prevailing concern for several years now has been that despite rising GDP most people are not feeling any richer, and some people attribute the success of populist politicians to this sense of resentment. But we will hear a lot more about the clutch of technologies that potentially can transform our living standards, and accordingly give a practical response to populism by showing that things can and will get better. The core set of these technologies goes under the umbrella term Artificial Intelligence. The New York Times Magazine has just run a piece by Gideon Lewis-Kraus, under the title "The Great A.I. Awakening", which sums up what is happening.

In President-elect Trump's interview with the NY Times yesterday, when discussing jobs, closed factories and factories that may leave the country, he was asked: "Are you worried that those companies will keep their factories here, but the jobs will be replaced by robots? They will, and we'll make the robots too. It's a big thing, we'll make the robots too. Right now we don't make the robots. But we're going to, I mean, look, robotics is becoming very big and we're going to do that.