By mid-century, 10 million people a year are projected to die from untreatable infections. Can Cassandra, an ethnobotanist at Emory University convince Steve that herbs and ancient healing are key to our medical future?
Tag: Finance
NFTs, Explained | a16z Podcast
with @jessewldn @ljxie @smc90
Everything you need or want to know about NFTs (or to help others understand NFTs.) Cuts through the noise to share the signal:
covering what NFTs are, the underlying crypto big picture, and then specifically what forms they take; addressing common myths and misconceptions from “just a JPG” to the question of energy use; sharing briefly how NFTs work; providing a quick overview of the players/ ecosystem; and throughout, discussing various applications too.
This episode was originally released in March 2021.
— Read on a16z.simplecast.com/episodes/nfts-explained-CesNt_e1
American’s Beer Consumption up 19% During the Pandemic
America’s thirst for Budweiser is showing no sign of drying up as the brand dominates its rivals in the battle of the beers across the country.
— Read on topagency.com/report/beer-report/
Neighbours of Belarus say migrant crisis risks military clash | Reuters
Countries bordering Belarus on Thursday warned the migrant crisis on the European Union’s eastern borders could escalate into a military confrontation while Ukraine said it would deploy thousands more troops to reinforce its frontier.
— Read on www.reuters.com/world/europe/poland-reports-violent-clashes-overnight-migrants-attempt-new-border-breach-2021-11-11/
Humanity’s Impact | Studio Birthplace
Short film Humanity’s Impact explores the question:
‘How many plastic bottles do we produce globally in real time?’
And the accompanying Augmented Reality app
invites users to interact with the data on a personal level.
Animated Series
Did you know that globally, we produce about 1 million plastic bottles per minute?
What does that number even look like? This is what you’re about to find out in Humanity’s Impact.Set in a 1960s American suburb test site that is populated with plastic test dummies, the film unleashes 20,000 bottles per second that crash onto the unknowing cast of dummies. The bottles burst through the kitchen window, and engulf the family dog. The suburban paradise is quickly flooded, revealing the terrifying scale and rate at which we pollute our planet. Only 9% of the overwhelming pile of plastic bottles actually gets recycled, the rest is dumped or burnt, or ends up in landfills and our oceans.
Augmented Reality App
To be able to understand our own consumption behavior better, we partnered with interactive design studio Superposition to release the augmented reality app Humanity’s Impact to help users relate to consumption-related data on an even more personal level. For example, users can drop 20,000 bottles into their own kitchen or bedroom, pledge to reduce their own plastic use, track their progress, take a photo with their data and share it on social media to motivate others to take part. The app is available for free right now on the Apple App Store and on Google Play.
view more work
Before we made the highly successful film Wasteminster for Greenpeace, we made the pilot film Humanity’s Impact. With the film, we wanted to explore if we could make visible the incredible data related to humanity’s impact on our planet, putting a picture to the numbers.Both the animated series and the accompanying augmented reality app unleash impressive data simulations, visualizing the tremendous scale in which our consumer culture operates.
The project aims to create awareness and inspire action towards a more sustainable future
— Read on www.studiobirthplace.com/humanitysimpact
Why flat-Earthers are a clear and present threat to an AI-powered society
There are almost certainly people from every walk of life, in every industry, at every school, in every police precinct, and working for just about every news outlet who believe things about artificial intelligence that are simply not true.
Let’s make a short list of things that are demonstrably untrue that the general public tends to believe:
Big tech is making progress mitigating racial bias in AI
AI can predict crime
AI can tell if you’re gay
AI writing/images/paintings/videos/audio can fool humans
AI is on the verge of becoming sentient
Having a human in the loop mitigates bias
AI can determine if a job candidate will be successful
AI can determine gender
AI can tell what songs/movies/videos/clothes you’ll like
Human-level self-driving vehicles exist
And that list could go on and on. There are thousands of useless startups and corporations out there running basic algorithms and claiming their systems can do things that no AI can do.Those that aren’t outright pedaling snake oil often fudge statistics and percentages to mislead people concerning how efficacious their products are.
— Read on thenextweb.com/news/why-flat-earthers-clear-present-threat-ai-powered-society
Hackers bypass Coinbase 2FA to steal customer funds – The Record by Recorded Future
The Record by Recorded Future gives exclusive, behind-the-scenes access to leaders, policymakers, researchers, and the shadows of the cyber underground.
— Read on therecord.media/wp-content/themes/therecordmedia/
This is just to say,
No one should treat SMS based 2FA as secure or secret it is not a proper authentication method.
Least of all the massive banking institutions that use this method.
A World Without Sci-Hub – Palladium
David Wiley has proposed that the federal government take the intellectual property of academic publishers using the power of eminent domain. The fees that public universities have already paid (the University of California system alone paid $13 million to Elsevier in 2021) could go quite a ways towards the “just compensation” for property seizure specified in the Fifth Amendment.
Recently, supporters of Sci-Hub have begun creating copies of the site’s immense archive in case it is taken down. Their hope is to make Sci-Hub “un-censorable.” But it is still worth contemplating a world without Sci-Hub—that is to say, a world in which Sci-Hub would be unnecessary. The “effective nationalization” proposed by Wiley and by the academic publishers themselves might just pave the way there. Imagine it: a 21st-century Library of Alexandria, a truly utopian creation, gifted to the world by Uncle Sam.
— Read on palladiummag.com/2021/09/24/a-world-without-sci-hub/
Top 10 Quantum Machine Learning Companies to Watch in 2021
Quantum machine learning is an emerging trend. Here are 10 quantum machine learning companies to watch in 2021.
— Read on www.analyticsinsight.net/top-10-quantum-machine-learning-companies-to-watch-in-2021/
Automation can be our friend, but we must not let it turn into a foe | Robert Skidelsky | The Guardian
The growth of mechanisation brings many benefits, yet vigilance is needed to keep it in check
— Read on www.theguardian.com/business/2021/sep/25/automation-can-be-our-friend-but-we-must-not-let-it-turn-into-a-foe