Our new book Intuitive Rationality describes how to marry intuition and other heuristics with logic to create amazing predictions. Intuality AI’s predictive analytics platform has produced remarkable accurate forecasts in different sectors, like financial markets, elections, health and sports.
Companies specializing in cutting-edge construction techniques are aiming to make a difference by churning out high-quality homes at a lower cost than traditional industry standards. Among these are 3D printed homes, “foldable” homes, and homes that ship in kits then are assembled like Ikea furniture.
Now a new player is joining the list, and it just got a serious financial boost. Vantem Global has already helped construct a total of over three million square feet of living space in six different countries, and earlier this month closed a Series A funding round co-led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures (Breakthrough was founded by Bill Gates in 2015 to invest in sustainable energy and emissions-reduction technologies).
Vantem’s energy-efficient prefabricated homes are made of structural panels. The panels were designed as a replacement for brick and cement, which are expensive, difficult to make, and heavy on emissions. Each panel consists of an insulating layer sandwiched by tiles made of a cement-like material. Since the panels are more similar to cement than wood or plastic are, they’re more likely to be positively perceived by customers who are used to cement (as many in Latin America are, where Vantem has thus far focused most of its construction).
Innovative Solutions For Unmet Needs Of Older Adults & Their Caregivers — Keith Camhi, Managing Director, Techstars Future of Longevity Accelerator — A Partnership With Melinda Gates Pivotal Ventures.
Keith Camhi is Managing Director, Techstars Future of Longevity Accelerator (https://www.techstars.com/accelerators/longevity), a program, run in partnership with Pivotal Ventures (https://www.pivotalventures.org/), an investment and incubation company created by Melinda French Gates, focusing on innovative solutions to address the unmet needs of older adults and their caregivers. The longevity accelerator core program themes include: Caregiver Support, Care Coordination, Aging in Place, Financial Wellness and Resilience, Preventive Health (both Physical and Cognitive), and Social Engagement.
Keith was previously the SVP of Accelerators for Techstars globally and was inspired to move to the MD role for the longevity program based on having built a venture-backed startup serving older adults himself, having experienced the gaps in America’s care giving infrastructure firsthand, and wanting to support entrepreneurs who are building solutions to address this substantial market opportunity.
Techstars is a global investment business that provides access to capital, one-on-one mentorship, a worldwide network and customized programming for early-stage entrepreneurs. It was founded in 2006 in Boulder, Colorado. As of May 2022, the company had accepted over 2,900 companies into its accelerator programs with a combined market capitalization of US$71 billion.
Prior to Techstars, Keith founded and led the rapid growth of two tech companies in the health and fitness industry – one that reached #20 on the Deloitte Fast 500, and another that made Entrepreneur’s Franchise 500 three times. He has raised over $50 million in venture funding, holds several patents for sensor and machine vision technology, has been an angel investor and LP in several venture funds, and enjoys mentoring promising startups.
Minxin Pei is professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and a nonresident senior fellow of the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
Confidence in the safety of Chinese banks has been badly shaken by the failure of several small banks in Henan Province in April this year. In terms of their assets of about 40 billion yuan ($6 billion) and the number of customers, roughly 400,000, the shuttered rural banks are minions in China’s financial system.
Tech giants including Alphabet and IBM are racing toward building a quantum computer, and financial firms including JPMorgan are exploring possible uses.
Does this really come as a shock to anyone?
The financial behemoth privately fears that regular people have too much leverage.
Smartphone ownership (85%) and home broadband subscriptions (77%) have increased among American adults since 2019 – from 81% and 73% respectively. Though modest, both increases are statistically significant and come at a time when a majority of Americans say the internet has been important to them personally. And 91% of adults report having at least one of these technologies.
A Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults conducted from Jan. 25 to Feb. 8, 2021, also finds that some Americans have difficulties when trying to go online. Some 30% of adults say they often or sometimes experience problems connecting to the internet at home, including 9% who say such problems happen often. Still, a majority of Americans say these connection troubles occur rarely (41%) or never (21%).
While there has been slight growth in the share who say they subscribe to high-speed internet, about a quarter of the population still does not have a broadband internet connection at home. And broadband non-adopters continue to cite financial constraints as one of the most important reasons why they forgo these services. Among non-broadband users, 45% say a reason why they do not have broadband at home is that the monthly cost of a home broadband subscription is too expensive, while about four-in-ten (37%) say the same about the cost of a computer. Beyond cost barriers, a little fewer than half of non-users cite having other options for internet access or the fact that their smartphone does everything online they need as a reason why they do not have a high-speed internet connection at home.
We live in an increasingly connected world, a fact underscored by the swift spread of the coronavirus around the globe. Underlying this connectivity are complex networks—global air transportation, the internet, power grids, financial systems and ecological networks, to name just a few. The need to ensure the proper functioning of these systems also is increasing, but control is difficult.
Now a Northwestern University research team has discovered a ubiquitous property of a complex network and developed a novel computational method that is the first to systematically exploit that property to control the whole network using only local information. The method considers the computational time and information communication costs to produce the optimal choice.
The same connections that provide functionality in networks also can serve as conduits for the propagation of failures and instabilities. In such dynamic networks, gathering and processing all the information necessary to make a better decision can take too much time. The goal is to diagnose a problem and take action before it leads to a system-wide issue. This may mean having less information but being timely.
Check Point Research, the Threat Intelligence division of the company, a leading global cybersecurity specialist provider, has released its Global Threat Index for the month of June 2022. Researchers have found that Emotet continues to be the number one malware and has also increased its global incidence by around 6%. Continuing with its climb of the last month, Snake Keylogger sneaks into the top three positions, taking the Formbook position, both still far from Emotet.
Emotet, has affected 14% of organizations around the world in June, an increase that is almost double compared to the previous month. This malware is highly profitable thanks to its ability to go unnoticed. Its persistence also makes it difficult to remove once a device is infected, making it the perfect tool in a cybercriminal’s arsenal. Conceived as a banking Trojan, it is often distributed via phishing emails and has the ability to embed other malware, increasing its ability to cause widespread damage.
There are other malwares that have increased their presence such as Raspaberry Robin, GuLoader and Wacatac. The first one was discovered a few months ago (September 2021) and is distributed via infected USB drives, uses various legitimate Windows functionalities to communicate with its C&C servers and execute malicious payloads. GuLoader first appeared in December 2019 and was used to download Parallax RAT, but has been applied to other remote access Trojans such as Netwire, FormBook, and Agent Tesla. Lastly, Wacatac is a Trojan threat that locks files but does not encrypt them like typical ransomware. When Wactac infiltrates a user’s system, it changes the names of the target files by appending a “”.wctw” extension. The lack of data encryption capability makes this threat reversible. Wactac is normally spread using spam email campaigns and rogue software.
Intel ((INTC) — Get Intel Corporation Report ) is the bearer of additional bad news.
The chip giant will give an extra blow to consumers and businesses concerned about the health of the economy. For several weeks in fact, consumers have seen their bills for groceries and other products increase. The price of gasoline at the pump has jumped when they go to fill up their car.
And the situation is not getting any better since inflation remains at its highest for forty years, which should push the Federal Reserve to be even more aggressive in raising rates. However, economists have already warned that this monetary policy would plunge the economy into recession.
