Too many people spend their whole life on a treadmill striving for financial success and/or fame.
People often take a job or start a company because they think it’s a quick way to get rich or get noticed, i.e. to be successful.
Throughout my career, whenever I’ve started a company just to make money, it’s been a mistake. Starting any successful company is always hard work, and if my heart isn’t in it, the effort becomes hard, unfulfilling work, and I give up before the job is done.
Daniela Rus loves Singapore. As the MIT professor sits down in her Frank Gehry-designed office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to talk about her research conducted in Singapore, her face starts to relax in a big smile.
Her story with Singapore started in the summer of 2010, when she made her first visit to one of the most futuristic and forward-looking cities in the world. “It was love at first sight,” says the Andrew (1956) and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). That summer, she came to Singapore to join the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) as the first principal investigator in residence for the Future of Urban Mobility Research Program.
“In 2010, nobody was talking about autonomous driving. We were pioneers in developing and deploying the first mobility on demand for people with self-driving golf buggies,” says Rus. “And look where we stand today! Every single car maker is investing millions of dollars to advance autonomous driving. Singapore did not hesitate to provide us, at an early stage, with all the financial, logistical, and transportation resources to facilitate our work.”
Nice try; no faith it will succeed long term with QC.
Singapore-based Quantum Foundation announced that it is working on a new project called Qtum, which combines the technology of both bitcoin and ethereum to facilitate blockchain technology adoption for corporations. Qtum is an open-source blockchain project that aims to build smart contract functionalities that can be implemented at an enterprise level.
The initial financial backing of $1 million by several industry leaders is a testament to the validity of the technology that the Qtum project is creating but also demonstrates full faith in its team of developers. Early-stage angel investors in the project include ethereum co-founder Anthony Di Iorio, Fenbushi partner Bo Shen, and OKCoin CEO Star Xu, among others. The Qtum project also intends to launch its native cryptocurrency to support the project through a crowd sale to raise further funds.
“His body, along with the others, will remain frozen indefinitely, with enough ongoing financial support to sustain its current state, news.com.au reported.
Last year, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate successfully froze and reanimated a rabbit brain”.
Since his death, James Bedford’s body has been cryogenically frozen and awaiting reanimation on the edge of the Sonaran Desert in Arizona. This week marks the 50th year of Bedford’s deep freeze, making him the oldest “de-animated” human being on earth.
Bedford’s body is stored in the Alcor Life Extensions Foundation in Scottsdale, where it’s kept alongside 146 other frozen bodies, news.com.au reported.
“Jia Jia” can hold a simple conversation and make specific facial expressions when asked, and her creator believes the eerily life-like robot heralds a future of cyborg labour in China.
Billed as China’s first human-like robot, Jia Jia was first trotted out last year by a team of engineers at the University of Science and Technology of China.
Team leader Chen Xiaoping sounded like a proud father as he and his prototype appeared Monday at an economic conference organised by banking giant UBS in Shanghai’s futuristic financial centre.
In Brief
There’s a new way to make stock market predictions. One company, Numerai, is synthesizing machine intelligence to command the capital of an American hedge fund.
The team outlines the focus of their work, asserting that they take the most accurate and original machine learning models from the world’s best data scientists and synthesize them into “a collective artificial intelligence.” This AI controls the capital in Numerai’s hedge fund.
The answer may be counter-intuitive: Not only can Bitcoin be widely adopted under a supply cap, its trust and integrity are a direct result of a provably limited supply. As a result, it will flourish because it is capped.
Everyone Can Own and Trade a Limited Commodity, IF…
…if it is both measurable and divisible. Bitcoin has a capped supply just as gold has a capped supply. Although both assets will be mined for some time into the future, there is only so much that will ever be uncovered. Thereafter, the total pie cannot grow.
But the transaction units will continue to grow as needed, because the pie is divisible into very, very tiny units:
There will eventually be 21 million BTC and each coin is divisible into 108 units. This yields (21 million * 100 million), or 21 trillion exchangeable units. And, it can be divided further by consensus.
As Bitcoin is adopted—whether as a simple payment instrument, an investment asset or even as national currencies around the world—each unit of the limited supply simply rises in value. If thought of as a currency, with a value established by supply & demand, it leads to a deflationary economy.
But, Isn’t Deflation Bad for the Economy?
It’s common to associate deflation with economic ills. One need only glance back at the the last century to conclude that deflation coincides with wars, joblessness, recession and a crippling concentration of wealth. Perhaps, just as bad, the tools used to pull a nation out of deflation often force governments to cherry pick beneficiaries of stimulus spending.
But it is important to note that deflation plays no role in causing these things. On the contrary, it is an effect rather than a cause… In fact, when a supply cap is introduced as a designed control input for monetary policy, all sorts of good things follow. I address these in various answers at Quora. Dig in:
Philip Raymond co-chairs Cryptocurrency Standards Association. He was host and producer of The Bitcoin Event in New York. In his spare time, he edits A Wild Duck
