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Category: economics – Page 72

The company’s board and the Tesla CEO hammered out the final details of his $54.20 a share bid.

The agreement marks the close of a dramatic courtship and a sharp change of heart at the social-media network.

Elon Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion on Monday, the company announced, giving the world’s richest person command of one of its most influential social media sites — which serves as a platform for political leaders, a sounding board for experts across industries and an information hub for millions of everyday users.

The acquisition followed weeks of evangelizing on the necessity of “free speech,” as the Tesla CEO seized on Twitter’s role as the “de facto town square” and took umbrage with content moderation efforts he has seen as an escalation toward censorship. He said he sees Twitter as essential to the functioning of democracy and said the economics are not a concern.

Ownership of Twitter gives Musk power over hugely consequential societal and political issues, perhaps most significantly the ban on former president Donald Trump that the website enacted in response to the Jan. 6 riots.

Under the terms of the deal, Twitter will become a private company and shareholders will receive $54.20 per share, the company said in a news release. The deal is expected to close this year.

“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Musk said in the release. “I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans. Twitter has tremendous potential — I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it.”

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Discovering a system’s causal relationships and structure is a crucial yet challenging problem in scientific disciplines ranging from medicine and biology to economics. While researchers typically adopt the graphical formalism of causal Bayesian networks (CBNs) to induce a graph structure that best describes these relationships, such unsupervised score-based approaches can quickly lead to prohibitively heavy computation burdens.

A research team from DeepMind, Mila – University of Montreal and Google Brain challenges the conventional causal induction approach in their new paper Learning to Induce Causal Structure, proposing a neural network architecture that learns the graph structure of observational and/or interventional data via supervised training on synthetic graphs. The team’s proposed Causal Structure Induction via Attention (CSIvA) method effectively makes causal induction a black-box problem and generalizes favourably to new synthetic and naturalistic graphs.

The team summarizes their main contributions as:

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Making positive impacts on human longevity — sonia arrison, author, analyst, investor, entrepreneur.

Sonia Arrison (https://soniaarrison.com/) is a best-selling author, analyst, entrepreneur, and investor.

Sonia is founder of 100 Plus Capital (https://100pluscap.com/ — Investing in companies positively impacting human longevity), Chair of the Alliance for Longevity Initiatives (https://a4li.org/ — The first and only 501©(4) nonprofit organization founded with the goal of creating social and political action around the issues of combating age-related chronic conditions and increasing our number of healthy, disease-free years), co-founder of Unsugarcoat Media (acquired by Medium), and was an associate founder of Singularity University.

Sonia’s research focuses on exponentially growing technologies and their impact on society. Her book, 100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, From Careers and Relationships to Family and Faith, addresses the social, economic, and cultural impacts of radical human longevity, and gained national best-seller status.

In addition to the Alliance for Longevity Initiatives, Sonia is a Board Member at the Thiel Foundation, Foresight Institute, and Woodland School. She is also a Senior Fellow at the Fraser Institute in Vancouver, British Columbia, and author of two previous books (Western Visions and Digital Dialog).

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Circa 2021 Synthetic silicon dna storage.

In research, the demand for DNA strands often outpaces supply. To help supply keep up, researchers may set aside traditional molecular cloning techniques and embrace polymerase chain reaction select PCR)-based techniques. Alternatively, researchers may perform gene synthesis, or the de novo chemical synthesis of DNA. Besides accelerating the creation of genetic sequences, gene synthesis avoids the need for template strands and simplifies procedures such as codon optimization and the fabrication of mutant sequences.

Although gene synthesis can be performed in house, many laboratories prefer to focus on their core competencies and outsource their gene synthesis projects to service providers, especially if sequences of over 1,000 base pairs are desired. Outsourcing also allows laboratories to take advantage of service providers’ economies of scale and quick turnaround times. Finally, service providers offer ease of use. Clients can go online, upload the desired sequences, choose the vector, get the price, and place the order. The entire process takes only a few minutes, and the genes can be delivered a few days later.

Researchers needing a few genes have a choice of several providers. But what if researchers need 10,000 genes? “We’re probably the only game in town,” suggests Emily Leproust, PhD, co-founder and CEO of Twist Bioscience.

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Have you ever heard of the Scandinavian-Mediterranean Corridor? As the fifth of the Trans-European Transport Network’s nine priority axes, it is a critical path for the European economy.

It spans from Finland and Sweden in the north to the island of Malta in the south, passing through Denmark, Northern, Central, and Southern Germany, Northern Italy’s industrial areas, and southern Italian ports.

The Alpine mountain range between Munich and Verona, however, represents a major bottleneck for the corridor. The Brenner Base Rail tunnel is intended to solve this problem. It is scheduled to open in 2028 and seeks to reduce traffic while meeting the EU’s environmental goals for preserving the future of the environmentally vulnerable alpine region. If you want to understand more about the history and recent advancements of this gigantic project, be sure to watch the video by the YouTube channel The B1M posted above, and as always, enjoy!

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Solar energy has barely scratched the surface of its potential to decarbonize the global economy in time to avert catastrophic warming.

For all the activity in the solar energy marketplace, PV technology has barely even begun to hit the global economy in full force. Huge solar arrays filled with rows of super-efficient silicon solar panels are just one piece of an expanding universe. With that in mind, here are 4 new developments that could kick the slow pace of change into high gear.

1. Distributed Solar Energy

Distributed renewables are a big deal for the US Department of Energy and other solar energy planners, but they generally don’t catch the media spotlight. That’s because they tend to be small. On an individual basis, distributed energy resources range down to the kilowatt scale. They are easily eclipsed by huge multi-million megawatt PV arrays.

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2022 is set to be a major year for the space economy. According to the Space Foundation, 15 new launch vehicles are set to debut this year, more than any other year in space history. Last year, US spaceports had more launches than any year since 1967, and the number is climbing. Meanwhile, employment in the core US space industry employment is at a 10-year high.

The momentum is there for a flourishing space economy that, according to NASA leaders, could in 20 years take public and private missions beyond low Earth orbit (LEO), with services and infrastructure on the lunar surface and in cislunar space. It’s a fast-growing economy, NASA leaders said at the 37th Space Symposium, that offers promising opportunities for young people who want to get their foot in the door.

The space economy is already a $400 billion industry “and on the way to $1 trillion, and I suspect it’ll get there faster than we think,” James Reuter, associate administrator for the Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD) at NASA, said during a panel this week at the 37th Space Symposium in Colorado Springs.

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Public spaces, squares, and parks in New York City are administered by the city’s Department of Parks & Recreation (NYC Parks).

In recent years, the agency has been responsible for creating new programs to help children, youth and adults be aware of the importance of caring for their urban landscape.

One of these programs is a TreesCount! which in 2015 gathered 2,300 volunteers to learn about the trees in their environment, what state they are in, what care they need, what their measurements are, and how they benefit the surrounding community, etc.

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CSIS will host a public event on responsible AI in a global context, featuring a moderated discussion with Julie Sweet, Chair and CEO of Accenture, and Brad Smith, President and Vice Chair of the Microsoft Corporation, on the business perspective, followed by a conversation among a panel of experts on the best way forward for AI regulation. Dr. John J. Hamre, President and CEO of CSIS, will provide welcoming remarks.

Keynote Speakers:
Brad Smith, President and Vice Chair, Microsoft Corporation.
Julie Sweet, Chair and Chief Executive Officer, Accenture.

Featured Speakers:
Gregory C. Allen, Director, Project on AI Governance and Senior Fellow, Strategic Technologies Program, CSIS
Mignon Clyburn, Former Commissioner, U.S. Federal Communications Commission.
Karine Perset, Head of AI Unit and OECD.AI, Digital Economy Policy Division, Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD)
Helen Toner, Director of Strategy, Center for Security and Emerging Technology, Georgetown University.

This event is made possible through general support to CSIS.

A nonpartisan institution, CSIS is the top national security think tank in the world.
Visit www.csis.org to find more of our work as we bring bipartisan solutions to the world’s greatest challenges.

Want to see more videos and virtual events? Subscribe to this channel and turn on notifications: https://cs.is/2dCfTve.

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