Below is a rush transcript of this segment; it might contain errors.

Airing date: 05/04/2019

Slack Bridging Email – Spaceplane Nearing – Was Zuckerberg Involved In Blackmail – FAA Approves First Drone Delivery – US Airports To Scan All Travelers – Phone Scams And Dementia

Craig Peterson 0:00
Hello, hello. Good morning, everybody, Craig Peterson here. We’re going to answer some questions for you maybe even questions you weren’t aware that you had.

Craig 0:15
But man, there is some big stuff going on this week we’re going to be talking about.

Craig 0:20
I want to start with this Spaceplane thing. I think that’s really, really cool. The whole new story about the Zuck came out in the news this week.

Craig 0:30
And did you think Amazon was going to be the first to use drones to deliver stuff? Well, hey, guess what it ain’t Amazon. At we’ve got already FAA approval. And new scanner software hardware is going to be installed in our airports, we’ll talk about how that’s going to affect you. And a new sign here for early dementia detection. And it has to do with the bad guys. Some new creepy billboards you remember from Tom Cruise’s movie, and where he’s walked by a billboard and it greeted him based on an eye scan, retinal scan from a distance while there’s some creepy billboards in London tracking shoppers and kind of cool what they’re doing, kind of scary at the same time. And we will start with this one. And it’s a tool that I use. And so we’ll call this our tool segment today. And our team uses Slack. And if you’re a business person, frankly, this works well, for different organizations, it could be your soccer team, etc. You can use it for free on the lower end. But I use it in business and we pay a decent amount of money every month. It’s not like crazy. But it allows you to communicate, basically, it replaces email within our team. And it does a very good job of replacing email. They’ve been out there for about five years, you can find find them online at Slack.com, just like its name says. And they’ve been trying to kill email, which I don’t think will ever go away because we’re still sending emails. And now Slack is realized that and they’ve made email integration and important part of what they’re working. So here’s what they’ve done. They have integrated Slack with Office 365. They’ve also integrated it with email and calendaring, all directly into Slack. Now, that’s really something cool. So in a few months from now, with Slack, you’ll be able to mention people in a channel who are not necessarily in the channel. And it’ll send them an email, or you can even send them a direct message and will route the messages to their email inboxes. I think that’s going to be great replies that they make will come straight back into Slack. And the whole back and forth exchange will also transform a full Slack history if the person decides to join Slack. So very cool. I like this. And I’m thinking right now this might be a great way for us to do tech support. And when one of our customers emails tech support goes right into a Slack channel. Now it’s not as good as what we’re using right now we have some professional tools that track it all and age them and rate and grade and keep notes and stuff. But for the occasional person like somebody pops onto your website, and asks a question, that might actually be really good. So it’s great, go check it out. If you’re not using it already Slack.com

Craig 3:43
Spaceplanes, we thought about these for a very long time. NASA has worked on them. Many companies have worked on. Do remember, the Concorde would travel twice the speed of sound. So what’s that? Like 1200 miles an hour, remember the speed of sound, I think it’s 600 and something miles an hour. So it traveled very fast, and remember it’s faster, twice as fast as the speed of sound. And you could take that from New York to London and return all in the same day. It was just a phenomenal thing. And then they grounded them. That technology was old, it was 30 40 years old. They grounded them when one of the engines sucked some debris off of the runway into an engine and of course, caused the engine to fail. And you know what happened after that. It’s pretty bad. Well, the idea of a space plane is taking that whole Concorde approach even further. So whereas the Concorde flew pretty high up, and it did break the sound barrier, if you get into near space, you can travel extremely fast, like some of the satellites are traveling, they orbit the Earth in the matter of minutes, what 90 minutes, I think it is for the space station up there. So you think about that. And wow, why can’t we do that? Well, the main reason has to do with heat, can you believe that? Heat. Because you think about our space? What do you think of you think of cold, you think it well, it’s going to leach the fluids right out of your body, the heat right out of your body because it’s almost absolute zero in outer space. And, you know, that’s just going to be terrible. So the biggest problem you have in space people think is, wow, how do I stop from losing all of my heat?

Craig 5:32
Well, think about here on Earth, if you are, let’s say it’s just a regular day outside, let’s say it’s a nice day, it’s 75 degrees outside. For those of you in Celsius, that you know, it’s about 20 to 25 maybe degrees outside. And it’s a nice day. Are you going to be out there with their sweater on and heavy coat? No, of course not 75 degrees, it’s a nice out, the sun can be out, it can be warming you up, you might even be a little bit hot, right, if the humidity is up there. Well, if you’re a little hot at 75 degrees, how about Have you jumped into a 75 degree pool?

Craig 6:16
That water is going to cool you down very very quickly and you are going to get hypothermic. Then that’s going to happen pretty quickly, right? You You’re going to have to move you have to keep those muscles go and try and create body heat in order to not die right from from the cold. So what’s the difference, then? Why is 75 degree air really nice, but 75 degree water is terribly cold and you can die from it? Well, it’s the same type of trick when we’re talking about space. The water, of course, is able to suck the heat out of your body and transfer the cold and right it conducts heat fairly well. Air does not conduct heat anywhere near as well as water does. So the air, you’re actually kind of insulated, because it’s not pulling, pushing the cold in and pulling the warm out. So you see the difference between air and water when it comes to how warm you feel and how cold you might be?

Craig 7:26
Well, let’s go to outer space.

Craig 7:30
Is outer space less dense than water? Yeah. Less dense than air? Oh, yeah. Both right. So there is like basically nothing in outer space. So when you’re in outer space, one of the biggest problems you have in space is how do I get rid of the heat I’m generating? Now I’m not saying that if your body was in space, you wouldn’t, you wouldn’t freeze and crack up and everything else. Okay, don’t get me wrong. I’m being very simplistic about this. But in outer space, the real problem they have is getting rid of the heat. Machines inside the space station, generate heat, how do we get rid of that? Because we can’t just dump it into the air. We can’t use a water chiller right to dump it into the air. We can’t just  put a radiator down into a lake or a body of water and have that dissipate the heat, can we because we’re in outer space. There’s nothing to conduct the heat away. It’s a very interesting problem. And when I first heard about this years ago, I really had to think about it. Well, why did the Concorde fly at mach 2 and not faster? And you know, there’s a number of reasons for that the type of jets, you know, you get into the ram jets, the scram jets and everything else. And I love this tech, it’s so cool. Well, part of the reason it could not go faster is the same reason that we have trouble in space, they can’t get rid of the heat, they couldn’t get rid of the heat fast enough. And that caused serious problems. And when it comes to a Spaceplane,
you’ve got serious problems there, too. How do you get rid of the heat from the engines. So if you launch in New York heading to London, you’re going to go like almost straight up for number of miles, you’re going to get into the very high atmosphere. And so that you have something to help you burn and combust and everything else. And then you’re going to just run like crazy, until you get into the approach and in the new go back into the main atmosphere and go down. So how do you get rid of the heat while you’re up there, and they haven’t been able to solve it.

Craig 9:47
But this week, this week, it was announced that they have solved that problem. A Spaceplane that can fly 25 times faster than the speed of sound, has passed this testing milestone.

Craig 10:03
It can go from London to New York in less than one hour, and could go all the way from London to Australia in four hours. This is a project that the European Space Agency and the UK space agency BA Systems here in the US which of course is owned by Britain.

Craig 10:25
It has been working on for quite a while and they came up with reaction engines pre-cooler for the plane. And this is technology lots of travel faster than before. And I hope you’re sitting down because this absolutely blows my mind. The pre-cooler is critical because it’s required to stop the engine from melting down. Because you can’t get rid of the heat when you have that little air up there. And it’s able to lower the temperature of compressed air in the engine for more than a thousand degrees Celsius to room temperature in 1/20th of a second. They can take it from 1000 degrees, down to room temperature to 70 degrees to 20ish degrees, 22 Celsius. That’s absolutely amazing. This thing apparently has thousands of tubes inside it that’s thinner than human hairs. They’ve got liquid helium that can cool the air as it rushes past. This is not so. So I looked up their timeline.

Craig 11:35
They’re calling this Sabre, S-A-B-R-E, the next leap forward in powered flight. And they are running behind a little little bit here, which is just too bad. But they they did hit this, this main problem. They did solve it. And they’re about four years behind the ears. I can tell looking at this chart from BA systems but absolutely amazing what’s happening with that.

Craig 12:06
Okay, this, Zuck, let’s get on to Facebook, who trusts Facebook anymore, right? But well, we’re all still using it. Some people aren’t using Facebook anymore. And they’re not using it because why bother? Right? It’s, I’ve got something else I like better. Heck, we’re using Slack for internal communications or we’re, we’re doing however, right? People just aren’t using it. The younger generations definitely don’t use it. They’ve got all of their Snapchat type things. So the regular Facebook they’re not using. So considering all of that, you know, this decline in Facebook users is not terribly surprising. But here’s a problem that just came out.

Craig 12:52
About 4000 pages have leaked Facebook company documents were obtained by NBC News. Now these things included emails, web chats, presentation, spreadsheets, meeting summaries, and they show how a Zuckerberg along with his board and management team found ways to tap Facebook’s trove of user data including information about friends, relationships and photos as leverage over companies it partnered with Yes, indeed, Mark Zuckerberg is alleged to have leverage the information people working at companies that Facebook wanted to partner with. He used information to essentially blackmail them.

Craig 13:40
So he was blackmailing. That’s my word. That’s not what NBC used. They called it leverage. I call it blackmail. He allegedly blackmailed people into making sweet deals for Facebook. He also used it to help his friends. It’s just crazy. And in some cases, these documentation seems to show that Facebook would reward favored companies by giving them access to the data of its users and other cases, it would deny user data access to rival companies or apps. And I kind of wonder, thinking back to the Obama, the first Obama run where Facebook is alleged to have given Obama’s campaign every piece of data it had, you know, which makes the whole thing with the Trump campaign look like a bunch of amateurs.

Craig 14:31
I wonder if that was part of it. I wonder if that’s going to come out of NBC would even report on it if it were true, right. Facebook gave extended Amazon access to user data because it was spending money on Facebook advertising. Okay, partnering with social network on the launch of its Fire smartphone. Yeah, wow. Just amazing. Another case Facebook discuss cutting off access to user data for messaging app that have grown to popular that was viewed as a company editor according to the documents. So all of this is rather interesting. By the way, on top of it all, Facebook is facing a record fine, could be as much as $2 billion by the Federal Trade Commission. So Facebook could be seen some hard times in the very near future. 

Craig 15:30
Now, let’s move on to this story about Amazon and delivery services.

Craig 15:32
Amazon, you might know is putting almost a billion dollars into upgrading all of its systems to be able to do same day delivery throughout most of the United States. That my friends is a very, very big deal. And having same day delivery means they’re going to take even more business away from other big box retailers. You know, Target and Walmart have both been struggling. We’re trying to figure out how do we compete. And so Amazon doing same day delivery is part of its Prime service is really going to hurt them. So they’re going to have to step it up. I like what Walmart’s done. I don’t pay much attention to Target. I’m not a Target fan at all. After their massive data breach, I just I said forget about it. I just don’t need to go to a Target anymore. Plus that whole bathroom policy thing. But Walmart has done a lot with having the delivery of your goods being just you can pick it up, you can have it delivered to your house, pre-order it. You can sit in the store while they collect it. They’ve even got a nice little lounge area for you while you’re waiting. You know, they’re trying to compete on the ways they can compete and bravo to them. 

Craig 16:58
Well, the next step beyond same day delivery is what? Next hour delivery, right. And we saw a couple years ago, it was 711, who tried it. Do remember that this little project that they launched, where they were delivering. The whole idea was they can deliver you your soda and chips for the big game at the very last minute. And I thought that was kind of cool. And it’s not a bad idea for 711, frankly, but I guess it didn’t work out too well for them because they certainly didn’t roll it out further. Well, who’s going to win the delivery game? Well, I can tell you here who won the first battle and this is from this week. Google’s offshoot job just got the FAA is first go ahead for drone deliveries Google, not Amazon. So the FAA a week ago on Tuesday, authorized something called Wing Aviation. That’s a part of Alphabet, which of course is Google Now. They authorized Wing Aviation to start delivering goods via drones later this year. They’re going to start delivering commercial packages and unmanned aircraft in Blacksburg, Virginia. I don’t know why they’re the first ones but they’re the first ones. They partnered with Mid Atlantic Aviation Partnership and Virginia Tech, as a participant in the transportation departments unmanned aircraft systems integration pilot program.

Craig 18:24
Let’s see, TDUA, I know it doesn’t really spell anything. So maybe that’s why maybe Blacksburg is where Virginia Tech is. This is really cool. This is all part of an initiative to accelerate drone integration to help the Department of FAA devise rules surrounding drones. It’s a really important thing, everybody.

Craig 18:46
This is the first time the FAA has granted a so called air carrier certification for drone delivery of items like food medicine, small consumer products, Wing plans to reach out to the community before getting started in order to get a sense of its needs. So this is going to be interesting, Amazon we know has been working on drone package delivery. But Amazon Prime Air for quite a while it’s got development centers in the US, UK, Australia, France and Israel. George Mason University said a lot of students have some food and drinks be delivered via drone on the ground. We’ve seen ground drones as well, up in California at UC Berkeley, where Amazon has these little drones that drive around campus to deliver pizza and beer. I don’t know about beer, but whatever it is the students can get there on campus. It’s Wall Street Journal insane, it probably won’t be until 2020 2021, before the FAA implements broader rules that lay out the land, the land really for delivering packages. There’s a lot of issues here. But if you look at the picture, I’ve got it up on my website at http://CraigPeterson.com this drone. And it doesn’t look like any drone you like you’re likely to have seen before. This thing is called a Wing, it kind of looks like a wing. Actually, what it kind of looks like is a long stick with a bunch of blades on the side that it uses to drive around. So these things can be faster, cleaner, less expensive to transport stuff around our our cities. And did you hear that? Our Roomba just started up here. I got an automated drone, a little little device that crawls around the the studio here and cleans it up. So she’s, she’s off, I just hit the  switch. It’s all controlled by WiFi.

Craig 20:42
Okay, I reported earlier about Facebook, and this largest civil fine, it actually might be as much as $5 billion. I miss my note I had put down on that. Okay, if you’re departing from a US airport, your face will be scanned, it’s already being scanned in many of our airports. And this happens as you’re going through security, you might not have known it. But here’s what’s happening right now the US Customs and Border Protection is going to expand the program and the use of facial recognition technology. And their goal is to identify just about every person leaving the United States on a commercial flight. Now remember US citizens in order to go out and go back in reasonably easily, you need a passport, right? And so they have your face, they have your picture. It’s in a massive database, and they’re going to start using it. They’re already using this particular technology at 15 US airports already grabs a photo of you as you’re approaching the airport departure gate. It’s then compared to a visa passport applications to look for matches, and then create an exit records they’ll know when you leave. Now I imagine they’re going to keep track of when you come back as well.

Craig 22:07
But if you don’t have a match, you’re going to get pulled aside for closer inspection by Customs and Border Patrol. Now that’s kind of interesting too. Now in the fiscal year 2018 overstayed on these visas was a problem, right. But they didn’t have much technology in place to try and find them. And they’re saying this is in a report that came out from Customs and Border Patrol. But they’re saying that they’re going to be scanning 97% of departing commercial air travelers. And they’re saying it’s highly reliable. They’ve already scanned 15,000 flights. 7,000 passengers on those 15,000 flights were detected as over stays. Isn’t that amazing? And they only started using the system 2017. So you can see why they look at this as an important tool to control access here and watch for visa over stays. Very interesting. Okay. Do you know somebody who’s a little older? We only have a couple of minutes left here.

Craig 23:16
One of the interesting signs according to see and n report here, interesting signs of dementia, an earlier sign is falling for phone scams.

Craig 23:31
So what happens is a scammer call up and they have a cheery voice asking if you can use the first name. She doesn’t remember entering the sweepstakes, but he assures her that she’s won. What matters is that you’ve won all you need to do is we’ve got a unique investment opportunity for you, if you send 200 bucks, you’ll get 2000 return. 10 times return on investment. So she transferred 200 bucks to them. And it kept escalating. And this according to Dr. Angela Sanford, this particular case, who practices geriatric medicine is St. Louis University Hospital, she was probably 10 or $12,000, into this before the niece became aware of what was happening. So this patient who was later diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment, had not scored super low on memory test. she said. The problem in her brain affected not the patient’s ability to remember, but her ability to judge. So keep an eye out for the seniors, you know, this is a $3 billion dollar industry theft or defraud from millions of seniors. That’s according to the DOJ. And these creepy billboards that are tracking shoppers over in the UK, we already know that London is or at least was the most surveilled city in the world. They have the most surveillance cameras up and they use it to identify people. Well, it’s not illegal in the UK. And I don’t think it’s illegal in the US either to scan shoppers and not informed them that you’re scanning. So here’s what’s happening. They have facial recognition software that doesn’t recognize you like the, you know, Customs and Border Patrol is doing. But what it does is it recognizes your sex and your mood. So it knows well, we just had a bunch of men and their young men walk into the store, and they are happy, they’re excited. They’re sad, they’re angry, it figures out all of the sound. So the Sunday Times over there in the UK, discovered 50 of these screens that show ads based on who’s walking by, their sex and their mood. Isn’t that something. And the companies are claiming they comply with the law, and the legal requirement. An outdoor in the first tech companies use this kind of tech. It’s kind of interesting. They call it the lookout system. And it’s being used on billboards. So you can see a picture. Again, it’s up on my site at http://CraigPeterson.com. But there’s showing this Swarovski I guess it is ad, oh, I see they’re jewelry, I thought it was a clothing ad. And a big, big billboard, one of these bright LED billboard, and a little tiny camera on top kind of reminds me of an iPad or something right? And they measure your level of happiness or sadness, and they end dwell time. And they’re changing the billboard based on the audience. So expect more of that in the future. I’m sure that’s coming here. If it’s not here already.

Craig 26:48
Well, thanks for listening today. I appreciate you guys being with us. I ran a test the last couple of weeks over on YouTube. I put my shows up there and you know, I’m showing the articles and some photos and things, doing commentary, just like this show here on the radio and the podcasts that I do. And I’d love to get your feedback. Is it worth me taking the time to do that? Because man, I’m sinking a lot of time into all of this, keeping everybody up to date. If you think it’s worth your time, let me know. If you want to check it out. Just go to http://CraigPeterson.com/YouTube. Just my name http://CraigPeterson.com/YouTube and it’ll take you over there. And then email me@CraigPeterson.com and let me know. Just me@CraigPeterson.com. Let me know what you think. You can always send questions or comments and keep an ear out too. I’ve got another course coming up another three or four courses actually. Free courses, absolutely free. No selling involved. So keep an eye out for those two. http://CraigPeterson.com/subscribe to find out more. Have a good great week everybody. Take care. Bye bye.