Rev. Msigwa contributing parliament

INSURANCE GRABS DIGITAL'S REIGNS

I’m sitting in a hotel coffee shop one day removed from emceeing INN’s first Dig In: The Digital Future of Insurance conference, which we put on in Austin, Texas. Speakers from insurers like USAA and Farmers, startups like Automatic Labs and Insurify, and even representatives the venture capital world took the stage to talk about how the digital customer is shaking up the insurance business.

I probably don’t need to spend too much time making the case for why this conversation is important. The customer experience has, ostensibly, been top-of-mind for insurers – at least that’s what many carriers have said over the years as they’ve announced online, mobile, and other connected capabilities. What’s interesting to me today is how this is changing the face of the industry.

Hotshots from the startup world rubbed elbows with representatives from century-old firms at our event this week, and a funny thing happened. The energy in the room was quite different from some other industry conferences I’ve been to over the years. You could feel that people were really learning from one another about their wants and needs from these new relationships and technologies. There was a vitality of ideas as people discovered what was really possible in the 21st century.

We see the pitches come in every day that such-and-such an offering will “revolutionize” or “disrupt” insurance. There is, perhaps, an idea that the industry has to be overthrown from the old ways. While inertia is strong in any legacy company, it’s not an impossible barrier. In fact, as the venture capitalist Caribou Honig of QED Partners said, “Insurers are probably ahead of where banks were” relative to the growth of fintech around the industry. That is to say: Startups went after banks first, but the banks took longer to catch on than insurers have since insurance fintech has taken off in force.

When I came to my table here in the Hilton Austin Java Jive, there was a newspaper on the table open to the business section. Specifically, the first item I saw was an article on Filld, a mobile app that will arrange for gasoline to be brought to your home so you can fill up your car without going to the gas station. (Finally, no more tough decisions when you’re both exhausted and on fumes.) I admit, the first thing I thought was, “Why didn’t I think of that?” Second: Boy, there are major insurance implications here.

The on-demand, digital economy is marching on, and insurance is right in step. As we enter conference season in full force, I’m excited to see what else comes out.

Nato risks nuclear war with Russia 'within a year', senior general warns

Nato risks a nuclear war withRussia within a year if it does not increase its defence capabilities in the Baltic states, one of the alliance's most senior retired generals has said. 

General Sir Richard Shirreff, who served as Nato’s Deputy Supreme Allied Commander in Europe between 2011 and 2014, said that an attack on Estonia, Lithuania or Latvia – all Nato members – was a serious possibility and that the West should act now to avert “potential catastrophe”.

He has written a fictional book2017 War with Russia, but told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme the events it describes were “entirely plausible”.

In pictures: The adventures of Russian President Vladimir Putin

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General Shirreff said: “The chilling fact is that because Russia hardwires nuclear thinking and capability to every aspect of their defence capability, this would be nuclear war.

“We need to judge President Putin by his deeds not his words,” he added. “He has invaded Georgia, he has invaded the Crimea, he has invaded Ukraine. He has used force and got away with it. 

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“In a period of tension, an attack on the Baltic states… is entirely plausible.”

Nato members would be obliged under Article 5 of its founding treaty to come to the defence of another member if it came under attack.

General Shirreff said that Mr Putin could be persuaded into an intervention in the Baltic by a “perception” of weakness in Nato, and predicted that, as in Crimea, the Russian president would present his actions as an act of defence to protect the large Russian-speaking minorities in those countries. 

Nato has already stepped up defences in the Baltic states, but General Shirreff said that it needed to “raise the bar sufficiently high for any aggressor to say it is not worth the risk."

Russian jets practise attack on US Navy warship

“I would argue the bar is not high enough at the moment,” he added. 

In the preface to his book, General Shirreff is critical of recent defence cuts in the UK, writing: “A country famous for once ‘walking softly and carrying a big stick’… now had a leadership that shouted loudly but, thanks to ongoing defence cuts, carried an increasingly tiny and impotent stick.”

Higher insurance premiums and lower annuities for all if the European Court bans gender pricing

British consumers face hikes in the cost of car and life insurance as well as a reduced income in retirement if the European Court of Justice outlaws gender-based pricing of premiums on Tuesday.

"This has been rumbling on since 2004 and Tuesday is the final decision day," said Malcolm Tarling, spokesman for the Association of British Insurers . "If the ECJ rules that insurers can't take gender into account when pricing insurance, then that's it – we have to comply."

Many experts believe that if the ECJ makes that decision, it will have an almost instant effect on premiums. If the ECJ makes the ban retrospective, Mr Tarling says, it would "create chaos for the industry and for clients".

Gender is a factor in almost every car insurance quote. Young men often pay far higher premiums than any other group, reflecting their higher accident rate. Mark Hoban from comparison website Confused.com, said: "If the rules are changed, the result is likely to be a price rise for female drivers, and it's unlikely male premiums will fall, at least in the short term."

According to the AA, some insurers are already adjusting their premiums in anticipation of the ECJ decision. "Some correction is already happening with premiums for young women rising at a faster rate than young men," said Simon Douglas, director of AA insurance.

Matt Morris, of comparison service Lifesearch, reckons an ECJ ban on gender pricing will lead to higher life insurance premiums: "Prices will jump across the board as insurers try to price in the new risk and the cost of changing their systems. Everyone loses here. Insurers can no longer manage risk as effectively and consumers will be stuck with higher premiums. I just hope they don't rule retrospectively. That would create chaos."

At present, insurers use precise longevity calculations to work out how big an annuity – income for life – a pension pot can actually buy. As on average men die four years earlier than women they tend to get a higher annuity income. A ban on gender pricing would end this divide.

"The insurance industry is preparing for unisex annuity pricing as soon as next week," said Laith Khalaf, pensions analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown. "One provider, Living Time, has already moved to unisex, while others have stopped offering new annuities in anticipation of the judgment. The fear is that instead of annuity rates meeting halfway between the current higher levels for men and lower levels for women they will simply sink to the female rate."

Glu Mobile launches Britney Spears: American Dream

Glu Mobile, the maker of games like“Kim Kardashian: Hollywood”, “Deer Hunter”, and “Diner Dash”, is today unveiling another celebrity-branded game. This time, we’re taking a caricatured look into the life and times of pop queen Britney Spears with “Britney Spears: American Dream.”

As with these types of games, the exact goal is unclear. But Glu Mobile describes it as a way to allow “players to morph into pop stars fighting for fame and fortune in the music industry.”

In short, it’s much like the Glu Mobile games featuring Kim Kardashian and Katy Perry. Users compete as pop stars and design cover art, ‘record hit singles’ (which includes no recording or mixing of any kind), and perform on stage from small venues to international stages.

Of course, there are plenty of opportunities for in-app purchases, with prices ranging from $0.99 to $99.

If you recall correctly, Glu has seen both success and failure with these sorts of games.

For example, Kim Kardashian: Hollywood has seen 42 million downloads and generated $157.8 million in non-GAAP revenue as of March 2016. Whereas Kim Kardashian: Hollywood reached number two on the iOS app charts on its second day of availability, Katy Perry Pop only managed to hit number 101 at its peak.

“The greatest challenge in developing these titles is matching the right celebrity with the right game engine,” said Chairman and CEO Niccolo de Masi. “Simultaneously, maximizing the partnership with everything else going on in that celebrity’s world.”

Hopefully for Glu, the company matched Britney Spears with the right game engine. Though the company saw shares pop with the announcement of a forthcoming Taylor Swift title in February, Glu has shown signs of fiscal weakness.

The Street credits this to deteriorating net income, disappointing return on equity, and weak operating cash flow.

Both “Britney Spears: American Dream” and the forthcoming Taylor Swift game should give the game maker a bump, but as Kim Kardashian and Katy Perry have taught us, nothing is a sure thing.

Folding Paper with a Hydraulic Press What happens when you ignore the math

Folding Paper with a Hydraulic Press

What happens when you ignore the math

There’s a well-known bit of folklore that you can only fold a sheet of paper six times. The principle is true, although the details are wrong: as you keep folding paper, it gets thicker (twice as thick each time) and so harder to fold, and more of the length of the paper is used up in the curves around each fold.

The real rule is given by Gallivan’sPaper Folding Theorem, which relates the length of the paper, its thickness, and the number of times it can be folded. Gallivan’s formula for the minimum length is

where t is the thickness of the paper and n is the number of folds.

Gallivan at the eleventh fold

Gallivan proved this while a junior in high school, and then demonstrated it by folding a sheet of toilet paper in half twelve times. Applied to a sheet of standard letter- or A4-sized paper, Gallivan’s formula gives you a maximum of just under or just over six folds, depending on the thickness of the paper, just as elementary-school folklore says.

But what happens if you try to do itanyway?

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Here YouTube comes to the rescue, thanks to the Finnish operator ofThe Hydraulic Press Channel. As you may have guessed, this channel is dedicated to smashing things with a hydraulic press, and really this needs no further justification. So they decided to see what happens if you violate all the laws of mathematics by folding a sheet of A3 paper six times, and then fold it a seventh time using a press.

About two minutes and ten seconds in, the laws of physics assert themselves with a bang: with a loud noise, the paper is suddenly crushed, and out from the press comes a sheet of a flaky, limestone-like substance which once was paper.

What happened here? To be certain, I would need to repeat the experiment myself with a few more tools, like a thermocouple and an electron microscope. But I have a guess.

Paper is made by bleaching wood pulp to remove everything but the cellulose, then pressing and drying it into sheets. The result is a network of cellulose fibers, held together by “hydrogen bonds.”Under an electron microscope, it looks like this:

(In fact, you can even use this structure to “fingerprint” a piece of paper based on its microscopic shape!) Hydrogen bonds aren’t the ordinary chemical bonds you may have learned about in school: they’re what happens when two molecules next to each other have pointy bits sticking out (generally Hydrogen atoms hanging off the side, which is where they get their name). While free Hydrogen atoms have their (positively-charged) nucleus at the exact center of the (negatively-charged) electron cloud, the shape of the rest of the molecule pulls this electron cloud off to an angle. This means that from very close up, there’s a charge imbalance, and this imbalanced charge can pull at another imbalanced charge from a nearby molecule.

The resulting bond is very weak, only 1/1000th the strength of a normal chemical bond. But that makes these bonds incredibly important in biology, where it’s often very useful for a molecule to have a connection that can open and close without requiring enough power to rip the entire molecule apart.

When the piece of paper has been folded six times, there’s literally no way it can continue to fold at its current length. Gallivan’s Theorem tells us that to make it to a seventh fold, this sheet of paper would have to have been nearly a meter long — or phrased another way, for it to be crushed into a seventh fold, the paper will have to be stretched to over twice its original length.

There are thus two competing horizontal forces on the paper: the tension of the Hydrogen bonds holding the cellulose fibers together, and the tension of the paper being pulled by the force of the hydraulic press. At the same time, the paper is being compressed vertically (against its thickness).

Ultimately, something has to give. One thing that could happen is that the tension from the press wins, and the paper would simply tear at the fold. But apparently, something more is happening: the bonding of the cellulose into sheets is replaced by a bonding into a thick slab!

Both of these changes are happening because the force of the press is exceeding the bonding force of the Hydrogen bonds, so it’s not surprising that they happen at more or less the same time. What seems to be happening is that the amount of energy being transferred via the compression is finally enough to “melt” the bonds, and the paper momentarily ceases to be a sheet of cellulose fibers, and instead becomes a sort of three-dimensional cellulose soup. As soon as the tension is released, the compression of the paper continues very quickly, slamming the head of the press into the anvil, and the Hydrogen bonds can re-form.

But now, that slow and careful drying process which formed cellulose into sturdy sheets has been replaced by rapidly turning cellulose back into pulp, mashing it, and quickly re-drying it. So unsurprisingly, it isn’t very structurally sound, and it still has a lot of its old “sheet” structure, which is what makes it flaky and limestone-like.

To test this out properly, of course, we’d need to study it carefully: measure the pressure at which things happen (so that we can verify that the amount of energy being transferred is about enough to break Hydrogen bonds), measure the temperature of the system (so that we can see if there’s a sudden change, which we might expect), and most importantly, looking at the result under an electron microscope, so that we can see what the fibers look like before and after.

If anyone has these tools on hand, I think some important science needs to be done. And a new YouTube video has to be made.