The music streaming industry is now bringing in more money than sales of CDs, Music Business Worldwide reports.

Income from streaming services has been on the rise, while CDs are slowly dying out. Now, for the first time, musicians in the US are receiving more income from streaming sites than they are from CD purchases.

A new report from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) breaks down where artists are getting their money from. Income from streaming sites was up 3.2% to $1.87 billion in 2014, while CD income was down 12.7% to $1.85 billion.

Streaming isn't the dominant source of recorded music income for musicians in the US, though. Paid downloads are still big business, bringing in $2.6 billion. But that could change in the future — downloaded music income was down 8.5% from 2013.

Income from streaming music in the US is at a very different level to Europe. Countries like Sweden and Norway are dominated by streaming. Here's a chart that shows how big streaming is in Sweden:

And streaming is also credited with bringing about a collapse in music streaming in Norway. The drop in piracy (detailed in the chart below) is mirrored by the rise of streaming in those years.

Music has piracy collapsed in Norway since 2009, a country ruled by streaming sites.

It's a similar story in Finland, too. Streaming sites saw a 19.6% rise in industry-wide revenues in 2014 to €13.8 million, growing to make up 51% of recorded music sales. That's in contrast to music downloads, which collapsed 29.2% to €2.02 million.

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NOW WATCH: We Tried The Streaming Service That The Networks Are Trying To Shut Down — It's Amazing

New York City's cluster shelters are poorly maintained, vermin-infested, and lacking in adequate security and social services, according to a scathing report released last week by the city's Department of Investigation.

And don't expect those conditions to improve any time soon – because city-owned shelters are exempt from fines, the city has no incentive to avoid safety or administrative violations — or fix them when they arise. 

At the request of Mayor Bill de Blasio, the DOI spent four months inspecting 25 homeless shelters across the city. Investigators evaluated the sites based on a number of factors, including cleanliness, management, and integrity, and interviewed both residents and shelter staff regarding the conditions at the sites.

While the sites being run directly by the Department of Homeless Services (DHS) were for the most part well-maintained and clean, "cluster" shelters located in privately owned apartment buildings were "not properly maintained" by landlords, many of whom failed to correct open violations or even report them to DHS, according to the report.

"While, ideally, clusters could provide a useful and unique purpose in that they house large families...DOI investigators observed these buildngs to be run down, filthy, and often riddled with rats, mice and/or roaches," the report states.

At many cluster sites, landlords are not bound by any contract to provide their tenants with basic security and safe facilities, even though DHS is paying these landlords three times the market rent for use of their buildings.

Even at sites that are contracted, the terms are not enforced by DHS — as a result, breaches of contract, with impunity, are common. Residents have learned to dodge rotted-out staircase steps and pools of urine in common areas, and are no longer surprised by days-long power outages. Many live without furniture or lighting fixtures.

Residents at one cluster site in the Bronx complained of a rat infestation — upon visiting, DOI investigators were overwhelmed by the smell of decaying rodents that permeated the building's hallways. The same building received 23 fire safety violations from the FDNY in 2014, along with three general safety violations from the city's Department of Buildings. 

The cluster sites also lack basic security measures: at one 174th street location, the front door remains unlocked and there are no security guards, even though gang activity — including two shootings — has occurred in the building before, the report says.

Residents at one cluster site in Brooklyn have filed over 100 complaints to the NYPD since 2013 for felony assault, grand larceny and burglary. Still, the landlord has yet to invest in extra security or surveillance.

The five cluster shelters visited by DOI had received a total of 223 violations from the FDNY, DOB and Department of Housing Preservation and Development since 2012. Tier II shelters — while cleaner and better-maintained than clusters — received 230 violations, relating mostly to fire safety. Hotel facilities received 168 violations.

"Too many persistent problems — locked exits, obstructed passageways, broken fire alarms, and rodent infestations — are downright dangerous," the report concluded.

"At its worst, DHS is turning a blind eye to violations that threaten the lives of shelter residents."

We have reached out to the Department of Homeless Services and will update when we hear back.

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Cities power a country's economy. After Business Insider ranked all 50 state economies, we decided to turn our attention to America's big cities.

We ranked 354 metropolitan areas based on 2013 GDP per capita, December 2014 unemployment rates, Q2 2014 average weekly wages, change in housing prices between Q4 2013 and Q4 2014, and 2013 poverty rates and combined those into a composite index.

While we didn't factor them into the ranking, we also took a look at the Fortune 500 companies headquartered in each metro area and what industries had a large or disproportionate share of employment.

For more details on our methodology and sources, click here.

14. Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, Washington

The Seattle metropolitan area includes the headquarters of several Fortune 500 companies, including the tech giants Amazon and Microsoft. In addition to the massive software companies that call Seattle home, Boeing has one of its main airliner assembly plants in Everett, Washington, about 25 miles north of Seattle, and is a major employer in the metro area.

Seattle had the 10th-highest average weekly wage among metro areas, at $1,143, and its GDP per capita of $78,936 was 11th highest.

13: Bismarck, North Dakota

North Dakota had the strongest state economy in the country, fueled by the Bakken shale oil and gas boom, and its capital is also doing quite well. 

Bismarck's 8.3% poverty rate was the seventh lowest among cities, and its unemployment rate of 3.0% was tied for 11th lowest.

But with oil prices sliding, the future of Bismarck's position in this ranking is uncertain.

12: Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington

Exxon Mobil Corp., the second-largest company in the world, has its headquarters in Irving, Texas, part of the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington metro area. Other Fortune 500 companies based in and around Dallas include AT&T, American Airlines, and Southwest Airlines.

Dallas had a high average weekly wage of $1,042 and a solid GDP per capita of $65,714. Housing prices also had a healthy growth rate of 9.5% between Q4 2013 and Q4 2014.

In our recent ranking of the economies of US metropolitan areas, we used five measures of economic health. We ranked the 354 metropolitan statistical areas for which all five measures were available, and then averaged those rankings together to make a composite score.

Here are the five measures and their sources:

• Unemployment rate, December 2014: This key measure of the health of a city's labor market is released every month by the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Local Area Unemployment Statistics program.
• Gross Domestic Product per capita, 2013: The Bureau of Economic Analysis publishes annual estimates of GDP for metropolitan statistical areas, and we combined the BEA figures with Census Bureau 2013 population estimates to find per-person GDP for each MSA.
• Change in housing prices, Q4 2013 — Q4 2014: The Federal Housing Finance Agency publishes quarterly indexes of house prices in metropolitan areas and divisions.
• Average weekly wages, Q2 2014: Wage figures came from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages.
• Poverty Rate, 2013: The American Community Survey, an annual survey run by the Census Bureau that measures a wide variety of aspects of American life, includes poverty rates for metropolitan areas.

For a little more detail on the workings of a metropolitan area's economy, we also looked at Fortune 500 companies with headquarters in or around the cities we looked at (coming from a very helpful downloadable list compiled by GeoLounge) and what industries had a large or disproportionate share of each metro area's employment, based on the above mentioned Q2 2014 Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages.

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Virtuoso is a team of five guys from Singapore who specialize in the art of cardistry. Using only a simple deck of cards these guys are able to completely blow your mind with their extremely difficult card tricks, which are even more impressive in slow-motion.

Video courtesy of Virtuoso

To see more awesome card tricks visit thevirts.com

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In the US, between 40% and 50% of marriages in end divorce. 

While people break up for lots of reasons, some behaviors are more destructive than others. 

Peter Pearson, the cofounder of the Couples Institute in Menlo Park, California, says that he sees four relationship killers in his couples counseling practice. 

It's frightening stuff, since these "assassins of marriage," as Pearson calls them, have a way of sneaking up on you. 

They are:

1. Keeping a "why should I have to change" attitude.

Pearson says that when a couple comes in to get counseling, there's often one person who's experiencing their partner as critical, demanding, insulting, withdrawing, or disengaging. That person tries to do everything to handle the criticism or get the partner to re-engage — with little success.

"By the time I've come in, they say, 'I've done everything, it's time for me to get relief,'" Pearson says. "'Now you, the therapist, change my partner.'"

If that attitude gets entrenched, look out.

"Basically, they're saying, 'My partner needs to change, and if I like the changes they're making, I'll make changes myself," Pearson says. 

That attitude handicaps the whole process, since both people are going to have complaints. 

Pearson tries to nip it in the bud: When he starts working with a couple, he tells them to start changing in parallel, not sequentially.

2. Withdrawing into a "bubble." 

Another toxic behavior: hiding out in a protective bubble. 

People withdraw into protective bubbles because they're afraid of showing any vulnerability. 

But the bubble has risks of its own.

"The price for leaving your bubble is the risk that you might get rejected, and that it takes effort to manage your emotional reactions," Pearson says. "You pay a price if you stay hunkered down, since the partner then has their rationale for not changing." 

So if you're going to start changing in sequence, both people need to emerge from their bubbles. Because as sociology has discovered, vulnerability supplies the bandwidth to a relationship in the same way that a modem gives bandwidth to the internet.

3. "Just getting used to it."

It's a familiar story: Two people meet, fall in love. They get hitched. They have kids. Their careers advance. Kids leave home, and the parents say to themselves, I married a stranger.

It's a sense of "I married my partner for life," Pearson says, "but not for lunch. I don't know what to do with them." 

So what happened? 

While two people might live together, they don't automatically share one another's lives. 

Slowly, the energy animating the relationship ebbs away.

"That sets the stage for a lot of affairs," Pearson says, echoing the research. "Where you're just kind of numb in your marriage, then one partner meets somebody, and they start to feel alive again. It's not just a sexual-driven experience. Most of the time, affairs are an attempt to feel alive again." 

The withering comes from a lack of conscientiousness about the relationship itself — and an unhelpful assumption that if you've known your partner for years, then they should automatically know what you want. 

"Telepathy is an enormously unreliable form of communication," Pearson says, but "that doesn't stop people from wanting it or thinking that their partner should have that skill."

4. Adapting too much.

Being in a relationship means two individual humans living in the same space and doing all sorts of things together. Naturally, those individuals aren't going to fit together like gears inside a watch — people have different habits, preferences, and value systems. 

"It's going to require some adaptation to the other person from the start," Pearson says. "But when you start to resent the amount of adaption you have to do and you don't bring it up, that's when the trouble starts." 

That behavior comes from three assumptions:

• "I have to please my partner in order to be accepted." 

• "We can't want different things, because if we want different things, the relationship won't last." 

• "If I speak up, I'll be criticized. The consequences will be too negative." 

If these assumptions take hold, the relationship can get stuck in toxic dynamics, like hostile-dependent, where one person dominates the other, or conflict averse, where no one brings anything up. 

While it takes a lot of time and effort to re-calibrate these assumptions, Pearson says that learning the basics of compassionate — or at least non-triggering — communication is a start.

To reverse that trend, Pearson offers the following guideline to his clients:

When you want to bring something up that you think is going to be a problem for your partner to hear, I want you to say it in a way that doesn't make your partner look bad or feel bad. 

Pearson says that his clients often struggle with figuring out how to express their feelings without making the other person look bad. But even if it doesn't go smoothly every time, it can be beneficial to the relationship — since it allows either person to bring up issues that would have otherwise been avoided or triggered a fight. 

"If you're giving an account of your experience without making the other person look bad, then you've got a bullseye," he says. But "if in recounting my experience, I do a fair amount of finger pointing, then we don't get too far."

SEE ALSO: Marriages Fail When Couples Get Stuck In These 2 Toxic Relationship Dynamics

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Check out the Business Insider Jobs section >>

As part of our new partnership with CareerBuilder.com, each week we'll feature one of the awesome jobs advertised on the Business Insider jobs board.

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Paris (AFP) - Without reforms, the world will be plunged into a water crisis that could be crippling for hot, dry countries, the United Nations warned Friday.

In an annual report, the UN said abuse of water was now so great that on current trends, the world will face a 40-percent "global water deficit" by 2030 -- the gap between demand for water and replenishment of it.

"The fact is there is enough water to meet the world's needs, but not without dramatically changing the way water is used, managed and shared," it said in its annual World Water Development Report.

"Measurability, monitoring and implementation" are urgently needed to make water use sustainable, said Michel Jarraud, head of the agency UN-Water and the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO).

Surging population growth is one of the biggest drivers behind the coming crisis, the report said.

Earth's current tally of around 7.3 billion humans is growing by about 80 million per year, reaching a likely 9.1 billion by 2050.

To feed these extra mouths, agriculture, which already accounts for around 70 percent of all water withdrawals, will have to increase output by some 60 percent.

Climate change -- which will alter when, where and how much rainfall comes our way -- and urbanisation will add to the coming crunch.

The report pointed to a long list of present abuses, from contamination of water by pesticides, industrial pollution and runoff from untreated sewage, to over-exploitation, especially for irrigation.

More than half of the world's population takes its drinking supplies from groundwater, which also provides 43 percent of all water used for irrigation.

Around 20 percent of these aquifers are suffering from perilous over-extraction, the report said. 

So much freshwater has been sucked from the spongy rock that subsidence, or saline intrusion into freshwater in coastal areas, are often the result.

By 2050, global demand for water is likely to rise by 55 percent, mainly in response to urban growth.

"Cities will have to go further or dig deeper to access water, or will have to depend on innovative solutions or advanced technologies to meet their water demands," the report said.

The overview, scheduled for release in New Delhi, draws together data from 31 agencies in the United Nations system and 37 partners in UN-Water.

It placed the spotlight on hot, dry and thirsty regions which are already struggling with relentless demand.

In the North China Plain, intensive irrigation has caused the water table to drop by over 40 metres (130 feet) in some places, it said.

In India, the number of so-called tube wells, pulling out groundwater, rose from less than a million in 1960 to nearly 19 million 40 years later.

"This technological revolution has played an important role in the country’s efforts to combat poverty, but the ensuing development of irrigation has, in turn, resulted in significant water stress in some regions of the country, such as Maharashtra and Rajasthan," the report said.

- Empty taps and dry reservoirs -

Water expert Richard Connor, the report's lead author, said the outlook was bleak indeed for some areas.

"Parts of China, India and the United States, as well as in the Middle East, have been relying on the unsustainable extraction of groundwater to meet existing water demands," he told AFP.

"In my personal opinion this is, at best, a short-sighted Plan B. As these groundwater resources become depleted, there will no Plan C, and some of these areas may indeed become uninhabitable."

Last year, the Nobel-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimated that around 80 percent of the world's population "already suffers serious threats to its water security, as measured by indicators including water availability, water demand and pollution."

"Climate change can alter the availability of water and therefore threaten water security," the IPCC said.

Fixing the problems -- and addressing the needs of the 748 million people without "improved" drinking water and the 2.5 billion without mains sewerage -- requires smart and responsive governance, the new UN report said.

In real terms, this means putting together rules and incentives to curb waste, punish pollution, encourage innovation and nurture habitats that provide havens for biodiversity and water for humans.

It also means learning to defuse potential conflicts as various groups jockey for a precious and dwindling resource.

Tough decisions will have to be made on pricing, and on rallying people together.

"Present water tariffs are commonly far too low to actually limit excessive water use by wealthy households or industry," the report observed.

But it added, "responsible use may at times be more effectively fostered through awareness-raising and appealing to the common good."

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A total eclipse of the sun is one of those rare celestial events that you can go an entire lifetime without seeing, which would be a shame because they're spectacular.

Observers on the Faroe Islands and Svalbard — an island off the coast of Norway — were some of the lucky few who saw this year's only total solar eclipse, which took place Friday morning. People on the Faroe Islands caught some amazing footage of the event, shown below.

The alignment between the Earth, moon, and sun, as well as the moon's size makes it so that only a very small portion of our planet can actually see a total solar eclipse. (More people, like observers in Europe and North Africa, saw part of Friday's eclipse, when the moon covers only a chunk of the sun, instead of all of it.)

The BBC recently uploaded the amazing footage of Friday's eclipse as seen from Faroe Islands. It includes a perfect example of what is known as the diamond ring effect. This happens a split-second before totality, when the moon completely eclipses the sun. Check it out below:

The outline of the moon is not smooth because it has mountains and craters on its surface. As a result, when the moon passes in front of the sun, bright beads of light shine through the grooves.

As the moon edges closer to totality, the beads disappear one-by-one until there's only one bead left, which shines like a diamond ring in the sky. This is known as the diamond ring effect.

During totality, the narrator of the video points out a possible solar prominence peaking out of the moon's shadow in the image below. The sun's surface is very active, constantly emitting massive bursts of gas and energy in the form of what experts call a solar prominence.

Because of their massive size, which can be tens to hundreds of times larger than Earth, we can sometimes see them towering above the sun's surface during an eclipse, like the one on Friday.

The bright ring of white light, surrounding the moon's shadow in the image above, is the sun's outer-most atmosphere, called the corona.

The corona extends millions of miles beyond the solar surface and into outer space. Normally we can't see the corona because the sun is so bright during the day, but a solar eclipse easily fixes that.

Check out the full video of Friday's eclipse, uploaded by the BBC to YouTube, below:

SEE ALSO: Our solar system is home to a surprising number of places with liquid water and the potential for life

LEARN MORE: A discovery on one of Saturn's moons just changed how we think about alien life

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Liu Chunhua, who was born in eastern China in 1944, does not even have an English-language Wikipedia page — but he did produce an image that was printed a staggering 900 million times.

The painting that re-wrote history, typified one of modern China's turning points, and came to epitomize one of the towering figures of the 20th century.

Liu was a government propagandist who belonged to a paramilitary "Red Guard" unit. He painted "Mao Zedong Goes To Anyuan"when he was 24, just a couple years after Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, a disastrous, decade-long attempt to head off possible challenges to Communist rule by reshaping Chinese society according to hardcore collectivist principles.

As former Washington Post China correspondent Philip Pan writes in Out of Mao's Shadow, the government printed enough copies of the painting "for every man, woman, and child in China, making it perhaps the most reproduced painting in the history of the world." 

In her 2012 book Anyuan: Mining China's Revolutionary Tradition, Elizabeth J. Perry also notes that the poster "is said to be the most reproduced painting in history."

It's been called"perhaps the most important painting of the Cultural Revolution period," and "the benchmark for the iconographical representation of Mao."

The image depicts the young Mao on a mountaintop near the eastern industrial city of Anyuan in 1922, supposedly en route to the city to coordinate a landmark communist-led coal miners' strike.  The Chinese Communist Party had been founded just the year before, and the Anyuan strike was one of the iconic early moments in the movement's history.

But the painting is a politically-motivated fiction: as Pan writes, "Mao was only indirectly involved" in the strike, "but the party later exaggerated his role and wove the story of the strike into its founding mythology."

The painting is also meant to create a particular image of Mao within a very specific time and political context. Millions died in the Cultural Revolution, an upheaval that led to the imprisonment or forcible relocation of over 36 million Chinese, according to Pan. It required not just mobilizing the entirety of China's population, but whipping it into a state of permanent crisis and hysteria.

The image of Mao in the painting doesn't typify violent ideological frenzy — but that might explain why it's such effective propaganda. As Liu explained according to a 1968 book translated by ChinaPosters.net, the painting was meant to reinforce Mao's most positive and admired attributes while emphasizing his centrality to China's national existence.

"To put him in a focal position, we placed Chairman Mao in the forefront of the painting, advancing towards us like a rising sun bringing hope to the people," Liu explained. "His head held high in the act of surveying the scene before him conveys his revolutionary spirit, dauntless before danger and violence and courageous in struggle and in 'daring to win'; his clenched fist depicts his revolutionary will, scorning all sacrifice ... The old umbrella under his right arm demonstrates his hard-working style of traveling, in all weather over great distances, across the mountains and rivers, for the revolutionary cause."

Even nature itself recognizes it's in the presence of an unstoppable personality, subordinate to the historical forces he commands: "With the arrival of our great leader, blue skies appear over Anyuan. The hills, sky, trees and clouds are the means used artistically to evoke a grand image of the red sun in our hearts. Riotous clouds are drifting swiftly past. They indicate that Chairman Mao is arriving in Anyuan at a critical point of sharp class struggle and show, in contrast how tranquil, confident and firm Chairman Mao is at that moment."

This is a lie as well. Mao's rule was anything but tranquil, and China's human-made crisis during the decade of the Cultural Revolution was traumatizing enough to convince all of China's subsequent leaders to eschew collectivization and "Mao Zedong thought." 

But Liu's undeniably powerful image was used to create the exact opposite perception over 900 million times.

SEE ALSO: This map shows which countries export weapons to India and Pakistan

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By this point, we all know that most people eat things that are terrible for them on a regular basis.

Americans consume an estimated 500 more calories per day (the equivalent of a McDonald's Big Mac) than they did in 1970, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. 

But it's not all our fault: Americans get help in their bad eating habits from the companies that rely on those habits for profit, Jon Stewart argued in a segment on Tuesday's The Daily Show.

Stewart targeted "Big Agra and the food lobby" for feeding us what he called an "addictive, fattening, death menu of artificial chemicals, antibiotics, and cool ranch carcinogens," and ridiculed the ways companies are responding to Americans' increased dietary awareness.

"Screw your health study"

Rather than back off in the face of health concerns, some companies are doubling down. 

Stewart highlighted a new deep dish pizza wrapped in three and a half feet of bacon from Little Caesar's, plus advertisements for "endless" buffets and appetizers and Olive Garden's "buy one, take one" entree special.  

He called this the "I don't give a f*** approach," by which fast food companies essentially say "screw your health study."

A tiny, tiny bit better

Next, Stewart ridiculed "the making-food-slightly-less-bad-for-you craze." 

In this category, we see McDonald's announcing plans to phase out chicken raised with antibiotics from its menu — "I'll miss treating my ear infections with the buffalo ranch chicken," Stewart jokes — and Dunkin' Donuts planning to eliminate titanium dioxide from its powdered donuts. (The chemical, which makes food and also things like toothpaste appear bright white, is classified as safe by the FDA.)

Needless to say, however, chicken nuggets and donuts still don't qualify as healthy food.

Buying a fig leaf

Stewart reaches maximum scorn levels when he addresses companies that don't actually change their products at all, but pretend to be better through crafty PR. 

His case in point is Kraft, which got the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics' "Kids Eat Right"label on its Kraft Singles after donating to the Academy to support the program. (To be fair, the label says in small type "supporter of" Kids Eat Right — not "approved by.") Kraft Singles are labeled "pasteurized cheese product," not even real cheese. 

"It turns out the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics is an academy in the same way this [Kraft Singles] is cheese," Stewart quipped. 

Check out the whole video below, courtesy of Comedy Central. 

UP NEXT: Jon Stewart Perfectly Mocks Liberals Who Deny Science

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NOW WATCH: Watch Jon Stewart break it to his audience that he's leaving 'The Daily Show'

The beacon — a low-cost device that retailers can attach to store shelves or walls to communicate with customer smartphones — is coming into its own. Beacon programs are quickly moving out of beta phase and becoming an integral part of the retail industry.

Beacons can be used to power indoor maps, payments services, and location-sensitive product catalogs. There are many different beacon hardware vendors and systems — including Apple's iBeacon system — but they all share some basic characteristics. Namely, they allow retailers and event organizers to efficiently communicate indoors, without a need for GPS. 

In a new report from BI Intelligence, we gauge how far along beacons have advanced as an indoor-communication technology. Consider: 

• Beacons — low-cost devices that communicate with smartphone apps indoors — will begin exerting a significant influence on US retail sales in 2015. 
• Beacon-influenced sales volume will ramp up quickly, as many forms of in-store marketing take up the technology, including couponing. iPhone and Android smartphones are compatible with this technology. We estimate that beacon-triggered messages could directly influence up to $4.1 billion of total US store sales this year (or .1% of sales volume at top-100 retailers). That figure will grow 10X in 2016.
• Consumer app usage will help speed adoption of beacon programs. The lion's share of audience time on mobile is spent in apps. Beacon marketing requires that customers have targeted apps on their phones.
• Beacons will help offline retailers integrate their loyalty, payments, and digital-marketing programs. 

Access The Full Report By Signing Up For A Trial Subscription Today >>

In full, the report:

• Provides an explainer of how beacons work, as well as access to a supplementary FAQ 
• Shows a complete list of what factors are driving beacon adoption among retailers and shoppers
• Includes a dollar-figure market forecast of how many sales will be influenced by beacon-triggered messages this year and in 2016
• Looks at how much bigger sales influenced by beacons messages could be if retailers effectively harness the technology and convince consumers to opt-in to app-based beacon programs
• Gives detailed examples of how retailers are using beacons today, and how they might be used in the future, based on our conversations with beacon vendors

For full access to all BI Intelligence's reports, daily briefs and downloadable charts on the mobile, e-commerce and payments industries, sign up for a free trial.

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First Daughter Malia Obama will be taking an official tour of Brown University next week, according to the school's online blog. 

Malia's tour of Brown's Providence, Rhode Island campus is just the latest in a tour of East Coast schools. She visited another Ivy – Columbia University – as well as New York University and Barnard College earlier in the year.

She also toured several West Coast universities last year, visiting Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley.

"According to sources, neither the First Lady nor the President is expected to accompany Malia on the trip to Providence," local Providence news source, GoLocalProv, said. The First Lady has accompanied her on some of her previous college tours, while the President has been absent from them all.

The 16-year-old high school junior has yet to say if she has any favorites among the colleges she has toured, so there is plenty of speculation as to what her final choice will be.

One popular theory is that she will end up at the President's alma mater Columbia University. Other people believe that Stanford will win out due to the President's admitted fondness for the school. In fact, the President may have tipped his hand with a comment he made while in Palo Alto at a cybersecurity summit last week.

“Let’s face it, I like Stanford grads,” Obama said, adding that Stanford “is the place that made nerd cool.”

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Bruce Willis is in contract to buy a $16.995 million duplex on Central Park West, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Willis is purchasing the home from Milwaukee Bucks owner Wesley Edens. 

The duplex has six bedrooms, four and a half bathrooms, and gorgeous views of Central Park. Edens told the Journal his family no longer needs the 6,000 square foot space.

Jay Glazer and Landis Hosterman of Compass made the sale.

The 6,000 square-foot home has several living room areas.

Many of the rooms overlook Central Park.

A nice view of trees for a city apartment.

SEC chair Mary Jo White called out activist investor Bill Ackman, the CEO of Pershing Square Capital, during a speech at Tulane's Corporate Law Institute in New Orleans this week.

Without actually naming names, White referenced the Pershing Square Capital/Valeant Pharmaceuticals hostile takeover attempt of botox-maker Allergan last year. 

In that deal, Ackman teamed up with Valeant, providing the company with cash so that it could acquire another pharmaceutical company, Allergan. Ackman also purchased a 10% stake in Allergan.

There were a lot of questions about the deal when it was announced. It was legal, but Dealbook's Andrew Ross Sorkin called it "too clever by half." Business Insider's Linette Lopez wrote that it was an example of Wall Street's famous, 'heads I win, tails you lose' deals. White seems to agree.

"I recognize, of course, that highly sophisticated strategies have come to dominate proxy fights and takeover bids; I have been involved in them as a private sector lawyer. And it is not my intent to threaten the vibrancy of anyone’s practice area. But I do think it is time to step away from gamesmanship and inflammatory rhetoric that can harm companies and shareholders alike," she said.

Here's the excerpt from White's speech where she discusses the Valeant/Ackman deal (emphasis ours): 

While I am on the topic of disclosure, it was implicated in an interesting way in a recent takeover bid this past year — a bid with which you are likely familiar. In that bid, we saw a unique pairing of a strategic bidder and an activist hedge fund in which the parties took novel and, for some, controversial steps that generated significant interest. Initially, the hedge fund publicly sought to call an informal meeting of the target company’s shareholders and filed a proxy statement with the Commission for a solicitation in connection with such a meeting, which it referred to as a “shareholder referendum” — a mechanism not provided for in the company’s bylaws. The objective was to seek shareholder support in favor of a non-binding resolution to request that the target’s board promptly engage in good faith negotiations about an acquisition of the company.

Some questioned whether a shareholder has the ability to call a meeting of shareholders outside of a company’s bylaw framework, hold a non-binding vote by way of a proxy solicitation, and file a purported proxy statement under the proxy rules. Specific questions were raised about whether communications relating to such a shareholder referendum should be allowed to be filed as soliciting materials under the Commission’s proxy rules. The concern was that doing so could give the disputed materials a form of official imprimatur. All fair questions.

SEC rules do not specifically address shareholder referendums. And it is state law and a company’s corporate instruments that provide the rules for shareholder meetings and specify what are proper matters for shareholder action. Whether a shareholder referendum is a form of proper corporate action under state law is thus a question best left to state legislatures and the courts. For our part, the Commission has long taken steps to facilitate shareholders communicating with one another.[12] Our federal proxy rules, which quite broadly define the term “solicitation,” provide procedural protections that support the exercise of voting rights granted under state law.[13]

To fully effectuate that objective, the staff has a longstanding practice of accepting and looking at all filings, even if it is unclear whether the filing was required under our rules as a “solicitation.” Whenever a filing is made, we expect it to fully comply with the applicable disclosure requirements, and filers assume potential liability under the federal securities laws. The staff’s goal in such a situation is to ensure that the filing complies with the applicable rules and that shareholders are provided with complete and accurate material information. The alternative in this context would be for the referendum to go forward under the radar, without public disclosure, without SEC staff oversight, and without the protection of our rules.

Ultimately, the shareholder referendum I mentioned was abandoned and the hedge fund called a special meeting of the target company’s shareholders pursuant to the company’s bylaws. We do not know whether other activist shareholders will try the shareholder referendum approach in future campaigns. If they do, you can expect the SEC staff to perform its oversight role of ensuring that investors receive timely, complete and accurate disclosure.

Even though the SEC staff does not act as a “merits or behavior referee,” parties should still take a hard look at their actions and rhetoric and consider whether they are engaged in a constructive dialogue and facilitating a constructive resolution. I recognize, of course, that highly sophisticated strategies have come to dominate proxy fights and takeover bids; I have been involved in them as a private sector lawyer. And it is not my intent to threaten the vibrancy of anyone’s practice area. But I do think it is time to step away from gamesmanship and inflammatory rhetoric that can harm companies and shareholders alike. Fortunately, by some accounts, companies and activists are starting to make positive progress,[14] as they increasingly engage with each other and negotiate outcomes that seem more mutually beneficial.

In the end, all of Ackman and Valeant's offers for Allergan were rejected.

However, Ackman made more than $2.28 billion on his position in Allergan after the company was acquired by Actavis in a $66 billion deal.

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Paris (AFP) - The UN's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) said Friday that three pesticides, including a commonly-used weedkiller, were "probably" carcinogenic and two others, which have already been outlawed or restricted, were "possibly" so.

IARC classified the herbicide glyphosate and insecticides malathion and diazinon as "probably carcinogenic" on the basis of "limited evidence" of cancer among humans, while insecticides tetrachlorvinphos and parathion were "possibly carcinogenic" in the light of "convincing evidence" from lab animals.

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It was a busy week in markets, but the main action came on Wednesday afternoon when the Federal Reserve announced its latest monetary policy decision. 

And so to let off some steam on a slow Friday afternoon, the citizens of the internet — and Finance Twitter — had some fund with the hashtag #badhedgefundnames. 

You can find all of them here, some of which are bad, some of which were inadvertently the name of real hedge funds, and for your enjoyment we've collected a few of the best (or worst?) below. 

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By the end of March, an international team of physicists aims to awaken a monster machine from its two-year slumber and use it to hunt down one of the most elusive and mysterious particles in the universe: a dark matter particle.

The machine, called the Large Hadron Collider, is nestled underground in the suburbs of Geneva, and is the largest, most powerful particle physics accelerator in the world.

Inside the machine's long, underground, oval-shaped tunnel, physicists make subatomic particles like protons and neutrons move at nearly the speed of light. 

Typically, they point two beams of particles at each another, so that they smash into each other in cataclysmic, head-on collisions. These collisions generate hot clouds of debris that reach temperatures 100,000 times hotter than the center of the sun and can include new, never-before-seen particles.

Such was the case during the LHC's first run from 2009 through 2012, and now, after two years of heavy maintenance, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) is getting ready for round two. They plan to turn the LHC on sometime at the end of March (they haven't announced a set date) and then slowly ease up to maximum power over the next two months, according to a recent announcement from a panel of physicists during a press conference held Thursday, March 12.

Expectations are high for the LHC’s Run II. Afterall, the accelerator already has one Nobel Prize to its name. That prize was awarded in 2013 when the LHC detected a Higgs boson for the first time in history — after 50 years of searching. (You might know this particle by another name, the "God" particle, but never call it that in the presence of a physicist if you want their respect.)

The biggest scientific discovery of the 21st Century

The detection of a Higgs boson is considered by some to be the biggest scientific discovery of the 21st Century, and for good reason. Higgs bosons come with what physicists call a Higgs field, which is responsible for giving all of the atoms in the universe, like the atoms that make up people, their mass.

If the LHC team had not found a Higgs boson, it would have left a gaping hole in physics theory. Because without this vital particle, physicists can’t explain how the universe developed objects like galaxies, stars, planets, and, ultimately, life.

With round two just around the corner, the LHC team’s goals are as lofty as ever.

"Now that they've produced a Higgs boson, number one on their list is dark matter," Michael S. Turner, Director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, said during a Google Hangout on March 9.

The first light in the dark universe

Figuring out what dark matter is would be as much of an achievement as discovering a Higgs boson.

Right now, astrophysicists are at a real loss if you ask them what the universe is made of. A big chunk of it (26.8% to be exact), is composed of dark matter, which is inherently invisible and not well understood.

As far as astrophysicists can tell, dark matter is an exotic type of particle that doesn't interact with anything we can see. Because of this quality, it’s nearly impossible to detect. The only reason scientists are convinced dark matter exists at all is because of the gravitational influence it has on other objects, like galaxies and stars.

If dark matter is a type of particle, the LHC should be able to make one in much the same way that they made a Higgs boson — by smashing beams of particles together. And with its new upgrades, which include twice the power and five times the number of collisions, the LHC could just pull it off.

"We gain much more because of higher energy and higher mass particles, really a lot more capability to see new particles," German particle physicist Rolf Heuer, who is the Director General of CERN, said during the press conference on March 12.

Whether they will actually find a dark matter particle or not before 2018, when the LHC will be shut down for another upgrade, remains to be seen. In the meantime, thought, they can dream.

"I have a dream: I want to see the first light in the dark universe," Heuer said. "If I see that, then nature is kind to me."

Dark matter is just one of the many goals physicists hope to meet with the LHC's second run over the next three years. At the start of 2018, physicists will once again shut the LHC down for a couple years more of maintenance. This on-again, off-again pattern is scheduled to continue until 2035.

What will we find in the coming decades? Only time will tell.

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How bad is public transit in San Francisco? Bad enough that a huge industry of private transportation options have sprung up, from Uber and Lyft to newcomers like this week's controversial startup du jour, Leap Transit— a high-end line of private buses equipped with WiFi, coffee, snacks, power outlets, and leather seats. 

Leap's slogan is "Your daily commute. Redesigned." But San Francisco at large has backlashed: People see it as yet another way for startups to cater to the needs of those who can afford expensive private services. 

In an effort to see what the fuss is about, I took a trip from the start of the Leap line, up at the La Luna Inn, all the way downtown. Here's how the trip went.  

Leap, which opened for business on Wednesday, runs 4 private buses (with one kept in the yard for emergencies) that run loops between San Francisco's high-end Marina neighborhood, where plenty of techie types live, and the city's Financial District from 8am to 10am, and then the opposite way from 5pm to 8pm. Fares are a hefty $6 each way (compared to $2.25 for public transit), but less if you buy in bulk.  

Leap stops are demarcated by blue-and-white poles with the Leap rabbit icon on top. I was the only one waiting at this first stop.

From the outside, Leap looks like your normal, everyday city bus, just in a bright shade of blue.  In fact, three older tourists who were staying at the Inn asked if it was the bus that goes to Fisherman's Wharf (it isn't). 

Before you get on the bus, you have to pull up the app, which provides a real-time arrival estimate as well as a number for how many seats were left. You can either check in with a QR code activate an "express" check-in option which uses Bluetooth to check you in automatically. I went with the second option. 

I was skeptical, but as soon as I stepped on the bus, my phone buzzed, and Richard, the Leap "attendant" on duty, confirmed I was checked in. True to expectation, it was just me and Richard on this bus.

Given free rein to choose my seat, I sat down at what looked like the counter at your everyday coffee shop and sat on the leather stool, facing the window so I could watch the masses not on a private bus go by. On the other side of the bus were rows of black leather armchairs.

In the back of the bus was a more open seating area with benches and wood paneling.

Richard had a little bar counter where he could serve food and drink from a cooler and answer questions. A little Beats Audio boombox played indie rock from a Spotify playlist.

Striking up a conversation with Richard, I found out that it wasn't usually this empty, and that the bus loop he had attended previously had as many as eight people on board.

Given that the buses can seat around 30 comfortably, that's not exactly reassuring, but Richard said that the number has been growing every day. At one point, he had to go up front to confirm the route with the driver.

"We're still working on routing stuff," Richard said. 

I ordered a Stumptown Cold Brew iced coffee from the Leap app, which automatically charged me the $4.50 before Richard handed it to me. If I were hungrier, I could have also ordered a yogurt or energy bar. 

Two more people got on at Gough and Greenwich, bringing us up to our peak ridership of three. One of them said he had tried Loop, a black car company with a similar service plan, and the other told me he only works from the office one day a week but takes Uber rides.

For his part, Richard says that most riders who take Leap complain about packed San Francisco city buses that get so full, they stop picking up passengers and just drive on by.

For both of my fellow riders, Leap offered a cheaper and more relaxed way to get where they're going. They said they could see the service catching on. 

"I think this is gonna get packed so fast," one rider said. 

The best thing I could say about Leap is that it's boring: It's designed to be frictionless, so you sit there and have a smooth ride and get off. It is, admittedly, a stark contrast from a crowded city bus.

Feedback from San Francisco at large hasn't been so positive. When Leap launched, it became something of a local object of ridicule, just one more private transportation option for the 1% who can afford it but don't already work at a company like Google that has its own buses. One headline on Leap Transit reads "San Francisco Gets The Ridiculous City Bus It Deserves."

When a Leap bus broke down yesterday, on its second day of service, the schadenfreude ran deep.

Meanwhile, Leap — which doesn't have a permit to operate as a transit service or use bus stops in the city — has had to fiddle with where it puts its stops to avoid stepping on toes and blocking traffic. In one case yesterday, Richard said, a homeowner got mad at a Leap bus for blocking her driveway, so the company had to move the stop. But then the bus stop was blocking a convenience store, and the driver made a complaint with Leap, forcing Leap to move the stop again. 

Richard says a lot of complaints have come from people who live in the Marina who don't want more traffic or more squealing brakes in their neighborhood — a complaint he shrugs off, saying that traffic shouldn't anything new.

"You already live in the city," he says.

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