Become a Customs Broker, Class Begins Next Week

	Florida Customs Brokers & Forwarders Association, Inc.
	The Time is Now February 8, 2016 - March 31, 2016
	What's Covered: Customs Commodity Classification Training, Customs Valuation Title 19, Code of the Federal Regulations Review.  Various topics related to Customs Brokers responsibilities/ License Exam Preparation. With this practical training the student will walk out withdetailed knowledge of the Customs References such as Harmonized Tariff code of regulations; knowledge of quick use of such references; knowledge of the Customs Broker Exam questions preparation; study and note taking requirements. Course Materials: Each participant will need to purchase the following two items:  1. Harmonized Tariff Schedules of the United States  2. Title 19, Code of Federal Regulations Parts 0 to End These items may be purchased through the Government Printing Office on-line at http://www.gpo.gov .  Who Should attend:   Customs Broker Trainees; those studying for the License Exam; Importers, Freight Forwarders, and any person involved in Customs Transactions, Government Personnel in need of training. Details Date: February 8, 2016 - March 31, 2016 Days: Mondays and Thursdays Time: 6:00pm-9:30pm Cost: FCBF Members: $675 Non Members: $850 Location: FCBF Training Room 8228 NW 14 St Doral, FL 33126 Registration Forms should be sent via fax to 305-499-9491 or email events@fcbf.com
	Florida Customs Brokers & Forwarders Association, Inc. 8228 NW 14 St Doral, FL 33126 P.O. Box 52-2022 Miami, FL 33152 Ph: 305-499-9490 Fx: 305-499-9491 www.fcbf.com

CAMACOL Hemispheric Congress Trade & Tourism Conference: Februay 17, 2016 @ Port of Miami

Students Are Battling to Make Elon Musk’s Hyperloop a Reality

SpaceX's competition in Texas this weekend will be the world’s loopiest, way-out science fair.

Baby boomers had NASA and the Apollo moonshots to inspire them to dream big a half-century ago. Kids these days have Elon Musk.

When the Tesla Motors Inc. and SpaceX chief executive officer first unleashed his outlandish idea for a Star Trek-style capsule transporting passengers on a cushion of air at 700 miles an hour, it seemed like pure fantasy. Well, guess what? A lot of people—many of them young engineering students—took him seriously. More than 1,000 of them are gathering this weekend at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas, where SpaceX is sponsoring its first-ever, two-day Hyperloop Pod Competition, which promises to be the world’s loopiest, way-out science fair.

A sketch of the Hyperloop from Elon Musk's original 2013 paper. 

"There are a lot of crazy ideas out there, but when ideas are associated with someone like Elon Musk it feels like, OK, this is something," said Anshuman Kumar, 22, leader of the Hyperloop team at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and one of 20 CMU students traveling to Texas this weekend. "Everyone wants to be associated with the Hyperloop movement. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity."

Arriving from 20 countries, about 120 college teams and three from high schools will descend on the vast Texas campus to present their designs. They’re flying in from India’s Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Egypt’s Cairo University, Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and Imperial College London, to name a few. U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx is scheduled to deliver the keynote address.

Musk already has something of a cult following among a new generation of engineers, thanks to his work on electric cars, solar power and reusable rockets for eventual travel to Mars.

And now, the Hyperloop. Musk’s latest bright idea may or may not ever solve the world’s transportation challenges, but it’s certainly smart marketing. And the competition will bring the best and brightest engineering minds from around the globe under one roof, where SpaceX recruiters will have their pick of the crop.

The frenzy began with Musk’s Hyperloop Alpha, his 57-page manifesto released in 2013. The 44-year old Musk pulled an all nighter to finish his paper, which envisions a capsule hurtling on a cushion of air between San Francisco and Los Angeles in 30 minutes. Musk is the first to admit that pulling off such a feat will be no easy task.

"Short of figuring out real teleportation, which would of course be awesome (someone please do this), the only option for super fast travel is to build a tube over or under the ground that contains a special environment," Musk wrote. "This is where things get tricky."

A sketch of the Hyperloop from Elon Musk's original 2013 paper. Source: Elon Musk

After the paper was made public, the number of people following Musk on Twitter skyrocketed. At least two startups are trying to commercialize the idea on their own. But last June, when SpaceX itself announced a competition to build a pod, the idea caught fire. Within a week of the announcement, the company received 700 entries; the final total was 1,751, with 123 advancing to this weekend’s design competition.

The conference will be held in the 30,000-square foot Hall of Champions, next to Texas A&M’s football stadium. Many demonstrations and talks will be live-streamed. Booths will be brimming with students, some bearing prototypes, eager to talk about their designs and secure corporate sponsorship. An as-yet-undetermined number of teams will advance to a finals competition to be held this summer at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, where they will demonstrate their full-scale designs on a one-mile working test track.

"It’s rare to get the opportunity to design something, for the first time, from scratch," said Liam Richardson, 19, an aerospace-engineering student at California Polytechnic State University in Pomona, who spent most of winter break Skype-ing with his teammates about design specs. "A lot about the Hyperloop is still unknown, and there’s no reference to go off of, besides Elon’s paper.”

Each team comes to the fair with its own interpretation of Musk’s idea. Stanford University students, for instance, are opting for a passive magnetic levitation, or maglev, system, said Kendall Fagan, 21, a mechanical-engineering student at the California school.

“Transportation is really exciting right now because of autonomous cars," he said. 

"But the Hyperloop is the most out-there idea in transportation. Part of the excitement is that this is something that has never been done before. Is it even possible? There are different schools of thought as to how the levitation is going to work."

While SpaceX’s competition is geared toward university students, a few high school teams made the cut. Six students from St. John’s, a private high school in Houston, call themselves the "HyperLift." Their parents are driving them to the event.

"We decided to go with air bearings because that’s what Elon proposed in his paper, and it wouldn’t be true to his vision if we just modified a maglev train,” said Andrew Awad, 17, a junior. “The integration between our cooling system and the air-bearing system is revolutionary.”

Do you need a calculator: Five handy calculator apps for Windows

If the built-in Windows Calculator doesn't quite meet your needs, one of these alternatives might.

One of the built-in Windows apps I find myself using the most frequently is Calculator. As handy as it is, however, plenty of other calculator apps are available. These apps, many of which are freeware, often provide functionality that doesn't exist in the built-in Windows tool. Here are five choices that are worth a look.

1: Moffsoft FreeCalc

Moffsoft FreeCalc (Figure A) is a free calculator that's designed to act as an alternative to the built-in Windows Calculator. Although this app can't really do anything beyond basic arithmetic, it does have one feature I really like. The interface includes a side panel that the utility refers to as a tape. All calculations are written to the tape, and the tape can be saved to a text file for future reference.

Figure A

2: Calc98

Calc98 (Figure B) is another free calculator. Although its interface feels a bit cluttered, the application is lightweight and works well. It supports basic arithmetic as well as a few scientific functions, such as sin, cos, and tan.

Figure B

This calculator's best feature is the integration of copy and paste buttons.

3: Biromsoft Calculator

Biromsoft Calculator (Figure C) is a basic calculator for performing arithmetic, square roots, and percentages, but not a lot more. The good thing about this app is that it's designed to be accessible on demand. You can launch it from the system tray and once it's running, it occupies a minimal amount of desktop real estate. The interface fades and blends in with the desktop until you need it. With a simple click, the calculator becomes fully visible and ready to go.

Figure C

Biromsoft Calculator sells for $14.95, but a free trial version is available for download.

4: Graphing Calculator 3D

Graphing Calculator 3D (Figure D) is a great tool for anyone who has to graph functions. It can graph a wide variety of functions in either 2D or 3D. The graphs are colorful and can be rotated, customized, and even exported.

Figure D

It's worth noting that you must have Java installed on your computer to use Graphing Calculator 3D.

5: AllerCalc

The thing that sets AllerCalc (Figure E) apart from other calculators is its sheer number of built-in functions. There are more than 100.

Figure E

This awesome (and free) calculator also has a huge number of built-in constant values and a built-in conversion engine that can assist with common measurements.

Millennials, Here's What Your First Home Might Look Like

A homebuilder aims to entice young buyers with adaptable space and an outdoor kitchen.

The contemporary farmhouse, designed for buyers age 35 and younger, has an open plan design, an outdoor kitchen, and a suite of rooms accessible by a side entrance. That way, the owner can take on a lodger or, if she decides to start a family, give the tenant the boot and reincorporate the rental space into the home.

Is that what millennial homebuyers want?

It’s one idea. Pardee Homes, a subsidiary of Irvine, Calif.-based Tri Pointe Group, built the concept home1 to show off at the National Association of Home Builders trade show in Las Vegas this week. Its estimated price tag in the “mid-$300,000s” makes it more expensive than a traditional starter home in the Las Vegas market. In return for the higher price, Pardee is selling the idea of a home that can serve young buyers from one life stage to the next.

“Millennials are really interested in customizing their space,” said Klif Andrews, president of Pardee’s Las Vegas division. “We designed the house so that over time, it can be remodeled for minimal investment.”

Andrews said the Responsive Home, which is how Pardee is branding the farmhouse along with a second, upmarket concept called a "contemporary transitional," evolved based on years of research. In addition to incorporating spaces that are "preengineered" for easy adaptation, the houses are built for outdoor entertaining, Andrews said. They sacrifice closet and cabinet space for living areas because "research shows millennials are not big acquirers."

There was a time not so long ago when many in the real estate business worried that millennials—scarred by the housing crisis, drawn to apartment living in big cities—might never buy homes at the rate of earlier generations. Those fears seem to have dissipated, mostly because millennials keep telling pollsters that they want to buy homes and that actually, living in the suburbs wouldn't be so bad.

Still, the generation has been slower to enter the housing market than previous cohorts. That's probably because they're starting families later in life and because income growth hasn't kept up with rising home prices.

Can the idea of adaptable space persuade young buyers to take the jump? Pardee will get some feedback this summer, when it starts completing homes based on the Responsive Home concepts—about 80 of each in the Las Vegas area. 

The traditional starter home—smaller, cheaper, and further from the city center—is also making a comeback.