SmellPGH lets you report weird smells in Pittsburgh

Today in odd apps I present SmellPGH^[1], an app that lets you report weird smells in Pittsburgh. Why would you do this, you ask? Well hold on.

“If you smell something bad in the air, chances are that air isn’t good to breathe,” said Beatrice Dias, project director for the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute’s CREATE Lab. “Smell PGH provides a way for citizens to both report unhealthy air to authorities who can investigate it and alert other users so they can avoid it.”

In other words if you smell something, say something. The project is part of a wider effort to assess air quality through a semi-automated system and was created by the CMU Community Robotics, Education and Technology Empowerment Lab, a group dedicated to creating a more technologically fluid generation and empowering citizens and scientists.

The app, which is free for iOS and Android, has already been used by 1,300 people to report 4,300 odors. You can rate the smell based on “nature and intensity” and you can even receive alerts if things are extra stinky.

Pittsburgh folks seem to love it.

“The Smell PGH app is both simple and powerful,” said Mark Dixon, a filmmaker in the ‘Burgh. “The app’s reports are surprisingly well-correlated to air pollution monitors that I keep on my front porch, reassuring me that the devices are measuring meaningful information and that there is a community of air quality-minded citizens out there who share my concerns.”

Considering Pittsburgh once had awful air quality thanks to coal and steel industry it’s no wonder folks are still worried about stinky air. The app is not yet compatible with other geographic locations but I’m sure they could simply change a few words in the...

An asymmetric trade is a situation where investing a relatively small amount of money holds the potential of yielding a profit many times the amount of the original sum at risk. In other words, where the risk to reward is skewed massively in the direction of reward.

This took place recently with Bitcoin (BTC). Is this conceptually different from bets made years ago on Microsoft, Cisco, Amazon, or Facebook, which yielded hundreds of percent profit to intrepid investors? Does it have relevance to the possible returns during the next few years for those who hold physical gold and silver?

I would answer "yes" and "yes."

The current "mania" in the cryptocurrency space – most notably BTC and Ethereum (ETH), along with a few other "app coins" – offers an in-future lesson for a similar setup in the precious metals. (For more on the above topic, see "The Blockchain: A Gold and Silver Launchpad?"

First: This may be the first time ever that an investment "story" has had the ear and investment dollars of a global audience on a simultaneous basis. Individual investors, hedge funds, businesses, and even countries, are sending a torrent of funds, with the effect, to paraphrase Doug Casey's famous remark, of "trying to push the power of the Hoover Dam through a garden hose."

At this point, trying to use technical analysis, Elliott Waves – or common sense – in predicting when and how this moon shot is going to end, or even level out, is of little help. Taking some money off the table of a large position still makes sense. But "going to cash" with the idea of getting back in