Drone start-ups woo stretched miners for survey work
ALLISON MARTELL Globe&Mail/Reuters
Thursday, 3/07/2013
An unmanned miniature helicopter and something that looks like a small flying barbecue are among the gadgets turning the mining sector into an emerging frontier in the commercial use of drones, and at a fraction of the costs of piloted craft.
Aero experts and mapping geeks pitch remotely controlled aircraft as a cheaper and safer way to map deposit sites and even explore for minerals than traditional methods.
“They are really safe, easy to use, lightweight. You can put them in a small bag and take them everywhere,” said Olivier Kung, co-founder of Switzerland’s Pix4D, which makes software to convert photographs from the smallest drones into usable data…>>MORE>(Globe & Mail.com)
‘Gold Rush’ 3: Exec producer Christo Doyle on feud w/ Todd Hoffman & live finale
By Kate O’Hare 2/22/2013
Tonight (Friday, Feb. 22), Discovery’s hit reality series “Gold Rush” ends its third season with a live, two-hour finale coming from a set built in a warehouse in Portland, Ore. Series executive producer Christo Doyle took some time out from planning for the big finish to answer some questions about the men populating the gold-mining show — especially Todd Hoffman, leader of the show’s first mining crew — and his relationship with them.
On why there’s a live finale:
Doyle: “I opened my dumb mouth at the beginning of the season. I pitched that we do ‘Gold Rush’ live to kick off the season. But it would have been October in the Klondike, and it’s roughly negative 20 degrees there. It just didn’t make all that much sense. So I said, ‘You know what, we’ll just do it at the end of the season.’ And they held me to it.”
On what viewers can expect to see:
Doyle: “Normally in a season finale, we reveal the gold total for each crew, in the actual show. We are going to not be doing that. We are going to be revealing the gold totals live from Portland. The big one is, who hits the motherlode, and do the Hoffmans get the 1,000 ounces that Todd Hoffman told me he was going to get? >>>MORE(Zap2it.com)
Gold still at people’s fingertips in the Klondike
Travelers to Yukon still enamored with fascinating history of gold rush
By Lynn Martel, For the Calgary Herald March 14, 2013
At first glance, the wooden stake erected in the nondescript patch of dirt does not appear to be particularly remarkable in any way. But, if a wooden stake could tell its story, the original claim post at Bonanza Creek, where the first pieces of gold that ignited the Yukon Territory’s Klondike Gold Rush were discovered, would surely tell a whopper.
Planted in the ground on Aug. 17, 1896, today the Discovery Claim National Historic Site preserves the spot on Bonanza Creek, 15 kilometres from its confluence with the Klondike River, where George Carmack and his fishing buddies, Skookum Jim and Tagish Charlie established the first of their four claims…MORE (Calgary Herald.com)
Panning for gold at gold Bottom Mine
Photo: Government of Yukon/Fritz Mueller
SEE A GALLERY OF GOLD-PANNING TOURISTS IN THE YUKON
‘Bering Sea Gold’ loses one of its own
by Mandi Bierly ew.com Mar 15 2013
The title of tonight’s episode of Discovery’s Bering Sea Gold is “Gold Stress,” the term those who dredge the bottom of the Bering Sea for treasure use to describe what they feel when they’re coming up empty. As the show’s executive producer David Pritikin describes it, it’s a high stakes world with all alpha characters chasing a wish-fulfillment dream in the seas near Nome, Alaska, where life itself isn’t easy. That’s never been more clear than in this hour, which, as you can see in the clip below, takes a tragic turn when deckhand John Bunce, lovingly remembered here, takes his own life.
“Without knowing deep into John’s psyche or the problems that he may have been having, Nome is a depressing place at times for some because it’s cold, it’s harsh, it’s difficult,” Pritikin says. “[Bunce’s best friend] Zeke Tenhoff did mention earlier and throughout the series that John lives his life in extremes, which many of the people do in Nome and on the show. One of his demons, Zeke mentioned, was alcohol.”
Cameras were not with Bunce at the time, and in the aftermath, which will be shown next week, the crew — from Deadliest Catch producer Thom Beers’ Original Productions — didn’t film anyone who didn’t want to be filmed and waited for those closest to him, Zeke and Emily Riedel, to be ready to talk. “This is real life, and it took all the wind out of their sails. Their motivation was gone. They were angry at first. It was a very difficult time,” Pritikin says. Watch the exclusive clip below…>>More + clip (ew.com)
Gold Could Be The Next Libor Scandal
The Libor scandal is so 2012 you guys, so so boring, but thank goodness we have a brand new market-rigging scandal to enjoy now, one that will entertainingly interest the hyper-paranoid: Yes, the next Libor scandal is in gold.
Believe it or not, the global benchmark prices for gold and silver, the “London spot” prices, are not set by such old-timey folderol as “trading,” but by a small cabal of European banks that get together twice a day and decide what they think the price of gold and silver should be.
If that sounds familiar to you, then you win the prize for staying awake through all of last year’s tedious stories about the Libor scandal. The gold-pricing process is in fact akin to the process of setting the London Interbank Offered Rate, or Libor, a key short-term interest rate. In that case, a slightly larger group of banks sets Libor each day by self-reporting their borrowing costs, and it turns out they had constantly manipulated it for years and years…>>MORE>>(Huffingtonpost)
Gold: A Major Move Coming
Technical indicators are suggesting that a major move in gold is coming. First, the weekly chart of gold futures (see Figure 1) shows that the gold price is near the bottom of a well-defined range of $1550-1800. Thus, a break below the major support level is likely to produce heavily selling – a major move to the downside. Likely, if the support level of $1550 holds, the next move is likely to be sharply to the upside, back to the resistance level of $1800.
The daily chart of gold futures (see Figure 2) shows the behavior of gold price near the key support level, which could give some insights about the direction of the next move. Gold sold off in February as the $1640 support level was broken, which led the price to drop to the major support level of $1560. Next,…>>MORE>>(Seeking Alpha)
The Uptrend in Gold Is Broken, Next Stop Could Be $1000: Don Hays
Gold is getting a second look in many circles, which is probably no surprise considering the recent rebound in the dollar, the record run of stocks, and the never ending saga of sequesters and threatened service cuts emanating from Washington. This after the precious metal is in the throes of an 18-month sell-off from its all-time high of $1900 in the fall of 2011.
While many have argued that gold has finally found support at $1500, Don Hays, the founder and president of Hays Advisory in Nashville, is not one of them…
…”It’s hard to imagine, but I can’t see gold selling for much more than $1000 an ounce,” this one-time NASA engineer predicts. “Not immediately, but in the next two to three years .” >>MORE>>Yahoo.com
President McKinley signs Gold Standard Act, March 14, 1900
ANDREW GLASS 3/14/13 Politico.com
On this day in 1900, President William McKinley signed the Gold Standard Act, which established gold as the sole basis for redeeming paper currency. The act halted the practice of bimetallism, which had allowed silver to also serve as a monetary standard. It set the value of gold at $20.67 an ounce and valued the dollar at 25.8 grains of gold.
In the run-up to passage of the act, the nation went through a decades-long epic political battle over the relative value of gold and silver — a battle that tested whether one of those precious metals should be preferred over the other in the U.S. monetary system. Introduction of paper currency during the Civil War had complicated this debate because it promised to redeem the money in either gold or silver upon demand…>MORE> (Politico.com)