China is no stranger to far-reaching plans with massive price tags that appear to achieve little. There is no guarantee this programme will deliver the economic rejuvenation its proponents promise. Unlike previous efforts to resuscitate the economy with “dumb” bridges and highways, this newly laid digital infrastructure will help national champions develop cutting-edge technologies.
The tech investment push is part of a fiscal package waiting to be signed off by China’s legislature, the National People’s Congress, which convenes this week.
Russian researchers from HSE University and Open University for the Humanities and Economics have demonstrated that artificial intelligence is able to infer people’s personality from ‘selfie’ photographs better than human raters do. Conscientiousness emerged to be more easily recognizable than the other four traits. Personality predictions based on female faces appeared to be more reliable than those for male faces. The technology can be used to find the ‘best matches’ in customer service, dating or online tutoring.
The article, “Assessing the Big Five personality traits using real-life static facial images,” will be published on May 22 in Scientific Reports.
Physiognomists from Ancient Greece to Cesare Lombroso have tried to link facial appearance to personality, but the majority of their ideas failed to withstand the scrutiny of modern science. The few established associations of specific facial features with personality traits, such as facial width-to-height ratio, are quite weak. Studies asking human raters to make personality judgments based on photographs have produced inconsistent results, suggesting that our judgments are too unreliable to be of any practical importance.
“Almost 21 million Americans have at least one addiction, yet only 10% of them receive treatment. Drug overdose deaths have more than tripled since 1990. From 1999 to 2017, more than 700,000 Americans died from overdosing on a drug. Alcohol and drug addiction cost the U.S. economy over $600 billion every year.”
Addiction is more common than many realize. Millions of Americans of all walks of life struggle with drug and alcohol addiction every day.
The United States has secured almost a third of the first one billion doses planned for AstraZeneca’s experimental COVID-19 vaccine by pledging up to $1.2 billion, as world powers scramble for medicines to get their economies back to work.
While not proven to be effective against the coronavirus, vaccines are seen by world leaders as the only real way to restart their stalled economies, and even to get an edge over global competitors.
After President Donald Trump demanded a vaccine, the U.S. Department of Health agreed to provide up to US$1.2 billion to accelerate AstraZeneca’s vaccine development and secure 300 million doses for the United States.
BENGALURU/LONDON (Reuters) — The United States has secured almost a third of the first 1 billion doses planned for AstraZeneca’s experimental COVID-19 vaccine by pledging up to $1.2 billion, as world powers scramble for medicines to get their economies back to work.
While not yet proven to be effective against the coronavirus, vaccines are seen by world leaders as the only real way to restart their stalled economies, and even to get an edge over global competitors.
This is a guest post by Shahrokh Shahidzadeh, CEO at Acceptto
These past two months have been among the most extraordinary times any of us can remember. The COVID-19 (CV-19) impact is all around us, indiscriminately impacting all of our lives, our work, the economy and for sure we are on the onset of a new normal that we are learning how to deal with daily.
There are always two stages of dealing with a change of this magnitude. First, we react immediately, thinking about what we must do differently now. Soon, we will begin to think in the longer term, reacting to and planning for permanent changes that result from the CV-19 pandemic.
Instead of shutting down, Sweden opted for much milder measures to stop the spread of the coronavirus. The idea looked appealing, with the possibility of containing the pandemic at a much lower economic cost. So far, however, the statistics suggest the Swedish model is more disaster than panacea.
US President Barack Obama called the Ebola outbreak in West Africa a threat to global security on Tuesday and broadly expanded the US response by ordering thousands of troops to the region along with an aggressive effort to train health care workers and build treatment centres. He called on other countries to quickly provide more helpers, supplies and money. “If the outbreak is not stopped now, we could be looking at hundreds of thousands of people affected, with profound economic, political and security implications for all of us,” Obama declared after briefings at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Obama acted under pressure from regional leaders and international aid organisations who pleaded for a heightened US role in confronting the deadly virus, especially in the hardest-hit countries of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea. “In West Africa, Ebola is now an epidemic,” Obama said. “It’s spiralling out of control, it is getting worse.“ The stepped-up US response includes sending 3,000 troops to the region, including medics and corpsmen for treatment and training, engineers to help build treatment facilities and logistics specialists to assist in patient transportation. Obama also announced that Major General Darryl Williams, head of US Army Africa, will head a military command centre based in Liberia. The announcement came the same day the World Health Organisation warned that the number of West African Ebola cases could begin doubling every three weeks and that the crisis could end up costing nearly 1 billion US Dollars to contain. Nearly 5,000 people have become ill from Ebola in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Nigeria and Senegal since it was first recognised in March. The World Health Organisation says it anticipates the figure could rise to more than 20,000. Obama described task ahead as “daunting” but said what gives him hope is that “the world knows how to fight this disease.“ You can license this story through AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/metadata/youtube/045def289101ceb2e47170324839d408 Find out more about AP Archive: http://www.aparchive.com/HowWeWork
This new paper argues that continued economic growth on Earth will hit a thermodynamic limit within the third millenium, if economic activities and energy consumption cannot be decoupled. The maximum size would be up to 7000 times the current one. An in-space economy would offer a way out.
A new, radical paradigm shift is in progress. The U.S. economy may shrink as much as 40% in the first semester of 2020. China, already the world’s largest economy by PPP for a few years now, may soon become the world’s largest economy even in exchange rate terms.
