US$190 million in investors’ money has been locked since Cotten died in December. His widow says she doesn’t know his passwords.
About US$190 million in cryptocurrency has been locked away in a online black hole after the founder of a currency exchange died, apparently taking his encrypted access to their money with him.
Investors in QuadrigaCX, Canada’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, have been unable to access their funds since its founder, Gerald Cotten, died last year.
Behold the new black gold. Dark and warm, it oozes water and teems with beneficial properties. It even harbors precious metals.
And boy does it stink.
Call it the excrement economy. Between the rise of fecal transplants and water strained from latrine sludge, the poop market is hot. Besides removing toxic waste, the commodification of crap could mean big bucks, especially in the developing world. Sounds crazy, but look at what happened with used cooking oil — now processed into biofuel instead of dumped into landfills — which went from being worth nothing in the early 2000s to $3.30 a gallon in 2011, according to the Utah Biodiesel Supply.
The theme for this year’s gathering is Globalization 4.0 – how we’re handling the changes wrought on the world by the increasing interconnectedness of cultures and economies.
We must also reckon with the future. Digitization, Big Data, and the migration of IT services to the cloud are driving change now but we’re also starting to see the opportunities that will lead to Globalization 5.0.
These are the themes that will dominate the Davos gatherings of the future, says General Atlantic’s Bill Ford.
“Human players must explicitly manage an ‘economy of attention’ to decide where to focus the camera,” said the DeepMind team. “However, analysis of AlphaStar’s games suggests that it manages an implicit focus of attention. On average, agents ‘switched context’ about 30 times per minute,” the team wrote, which was similar to Komincz’s and Wünsch’s behaviors.
Ultimately, the DeepMind team concluded that AlphaStar won against both pros because of “superior macro and micro-strategic decision-making, rather than superior click-rate, faster reaction times, or the raw interface.”
Some people on his communications staff at the time were not pleased.
Sims writes that he was “getting antsy” in the room due to Trump’s abrupt question shortly before a televised phone call with the Space Station. NASA officials were believed to have gone to great lengths to coordinate with the Space Station, which could only be reached during a certain time due to “orbital mechanics.”
“All I could think about was that we had to be on camera in three minutes … And yet we’re in here casually chatting about shaving a full decade off NASA’s timetable for sending a manned flight to Mars,” Sims reportedly wrote. “And seemingly out of nowhere.”
Trump, who appeared “distracted,” reportedly asked Lightfoot: “But what if I gave you all the money you could ever need to do it?”
According to the World Health Organisation, up to a half-million people around the world suffer a spinal cord injury each year. Often caused by road traffic crashes, accidents or violence, the loss of motor control or paralysis significantly impacts quality of life and requires years of treatment and care. Spinal cord injury is also associated with lower rates of school enrollment and economic participation, and carries substantial individual and societal costs.
Current methods for spinal cord injury treatment involve cumbersome brain-machine interfaces, with many cables linking the patient and a computer to restore limited motor functions. Other methods to map brain activity, such as magnetoencephalography, require very large machinery and particularly low-temperature working conditions.
To improve the quality of life of those suffering a spinal cord injury, ByAxon is bringing together a consortium of researchers from across Europe (Spain, Italy, France and Germany) to devise a new generation of spinal cord treatments. The four-year project started in January 2017 and is seeking to create implants that restore sensory functions.
Posted in economics, education, employment
Ladies Monday with Cindy Rampersaud.
How do we prepare young people for jobs that do not yet exist?
Global changes in technology, population and urbanisation are impacting the educational landscape. The role of skill-based education is now critical for many economies. Getting it right is essential for the economic and social aspirations of individuals, communities, employers, economies.
https://paper.li/e-1437691924#/
Amidst various sanctions by the United States, Russia might buy Bitcoins in the Billions as a way to mitigate these sanctions.
According to Vladislav Ginko who is a lecturer at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, the Russian government which sits on $466 Billion of reserves is planning to invest heavily into Bitcoin. He told Micky that he believes the government could start investing Billions in Bitcoin as early as next month which could potentially trigger a bull run.
Since 2012, the U.S has imposed over 60 rounds of sanctions against Kremlin, many of which do not have clear paths to get lifted. Sanctions are a way to achieve certain objectives (mostly political) in a nonviolent way, Russia certainly does not take this lightly and will try to mitigate these sanctions in any way possible.
