Welcome to News from trif.com! First time readers, I am glad you're here! Returning readers, welcome back!

I love to share the many photos I have taken of places, people and things throughout the country and beyond. Each month our headline photo will be something new and different. We hope you enjoy. Keep in mind, we don't want to waste your time. Articles will contain generally less than 250 words. Please have a look and give us your feedback. By all means, forward to a friend using the link at the bottom of the Newsletter. Thanks. Questions? Send me an email!

The New and Improved Panama Canal

The Panama Canal has just completed a 5-billion-dollar makeover adding a 3rd channel which began in 2006. The new expansion locks are 70 feet wider and 18 feet deeper allowing the Panama Canal to handle massive neo-Panamax vessels 1,000 feet long and 150 feet wide.

What might this mean?  Based on the studies, and more than a hundred were done, it will mean a change in the balance of rail (ocean container on rail) and over-the-road container transportation between the west coast and the east coast.  It will also require more port capacity on the east coast. Perhaps 10 percent of traffic from east-Asia now delivering to the west coast could transition to the east coast in the next few years.  

Currently almost 40% of all shipments to the United States arrive in the Los Angeles area. This is about to change reducing traffic into LA and increasing traffic to the east coast. That kind of re-routing is like creating a port 8 times the size of Boston. Are we ready?

For a video of the Panama Canal update June 2016, click here: https://youtu.be/SUSQ1Cf1PMM

How does your company stand up? 

Finding the right employer is getting more and more competitive and social.  Yes, you can scout LinkedIn for posts or past employees and reach out. But it might be easier just to read the reviews posted on Glassdoor.com. Glassdoor, Inc. (Mill Valley, CA) has set up a Job Posting web site with a twist.  They allow you to post jobs, but job seekers can also read reviews, research salaries, benefits and interview process. Employers are recommended to always keep their house in order so to speak. 

Just like a vendor for Amazon.com, if you see a bad review, respond. Try to keep your ratings on the high side.  Of course, no company is perfect, we all can’t be Google with a 4.4 (out of 5) score or VirginPulse (Framingham) with a 4.5. But we don’t want to be like the TSA either with a score of 2.5

Have a look and see if your company is listed and what people are saying about you.

Blow Your Mind...

"We're on the edge of a new frontier in art and creativity — and it's not human. Blaise Agüera y Arcas, principal scientist at Google, works with deep neural networks for machine perception and distributed learning. In this captivating demo, he shows how neural nets trained to recognize images can be run in reverse, to generate them. The results: spectacular, hallucinatory collages (and poems!) that defy categorization." That is what this TED talk is all about.

This image at left was created by a computer software program originally used to recognize birds but applied it to images that are not actually birds. It is like the game you play with young children, what do you see in the clouds.

It is an example of the possibilities that exist in big data and point to the possibilities in creativity using the power of a computer. You can hand an image of clouds to the application that handles face recognition, and it will determine the best fitting faces that apply to that image of clouds.

It is mind blowing to imagine for those of us that have written real-world software applications how this is accomplished, and just as mind blowing to consider the possibilities. Watch the video when you have time.