Lifeboat Foundation

This is a guest post by Mohammed Murad, vice president, global sales and business development, Iris ID.

The world is in the grip of a coronavirus epidemic the impact of which extends well beyond people’s health, including more than 1,300 reported deaths. The fear of this recently identified disease has closed businesses and grounded thousands of flights. The impacts have led to estimates of reduced economic growth in many countries.

While the virus that was first discovered in a Chinese province has killed far fewer people than influenza this year, the fatality rate has people worried. Influenza reportedly kills between 10 to 20 people per 100,000 infections each year. The death rate from the coronavirus tops 2,300 deaths per 100,000 cases. Those latter statistics change virtually daily as more cases of the virus are reported.

Never in history have we seen wealth concentrated (Apple is worth over a trillion dollars). Money and congressional power answers why legislators: let drug companies squeeze dollars from sick people, refuse to stop a president who winks and nods at Putin, at right-wing agitators, who stoke bigotry, or singles out Black, Hispanics, Jews, Muslims, immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees (let’s just lump them together). Fear of others comes from seeds planted early in life. Fear is personal — you don’t feel mine, I don’t feel yours.

But, alas, the future will be like nothing we have experienced. It’s a HUUUGE planet, with decades to come, which, if we lived long enough would from today’s vantage be unrecognizable. What we do know from our lives is that we are but a small part, not only small in terms of our kind or beliefs (political, religious, cultural), but small in influence over the planet’s trajectory (war, maybe atomic, population growth, immigration, climate, economy, racial, ethnic composition, e.g., in the U.S.).

Continue reading “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet” »

According to a new study from Oxford Economics, within the next 11 years there could be 14 million robots put to work in China alone.

Economists analyzed long-term trends around the uptake of automation in the workplace, noting that the number of robots in use worldwide increased threefold over the past two decades to 2.25 million.

While researchers predicted the rise of robots will bring about benefits in terms of productivity and economic growth, they also acknowledged the drawbacks that were expected to arise simultaneously.

The space industry is in the midst of a widespread transformation, as the last decade has seen several young, private companies seek to profit in areas historically dominated by governmental interests. Among these areas is lunar mining, which represents a crucial step for the development of the space economy by enabling the utilization of lunar resources. Though significant opportunities exist for wealth creation and societal benefits, it will require sustained multibillion-dollar investment to develop a vibrant lunar mining industry.

Exploration is the essential first step for any mining endeavor, terrestrially or otherwise, but with the technical challenges of lunar mining largely solved, access to capital has become the prevailing constraint. While the uncertainty of operating in space is the commonly used explanation for capital constraints, in reality, terrestrial explorers have seen funding steadily decline for a decade, with investors favoring lower risk, passive exposure to the mining sector. For lunar mining firms seeking to attract capital for exploration, this essay details the incompatibility of traditional investment options, the financing strategies developed by the similarly cash-strapped terrestrial mining industry, and how prospective lunar miners should capitalize on emerging trends in project finance.

Cities change as they grow — not only by adding area or population but also in a variety of other ways, from the length and width of their roads to economic growth to the distribution of elementary schools. Social scientists often clash over the best way to measure change as a city swells. Traditionally, they’ve taken a cross-sectional approach, which means collecting data on a large number of cities of diverse sizes at the same moment in time. More recently, some researcher…

New work reconciles divergent methods used to analyze the scaling behavior of cities.

Every crisis is an opportunity. With everyone staying home, this is the perfect opportunity for e-commerce, e-learning, online jobs, and big tech to expand. This is the beginning of a huge tech revolution. 2020 will be the techade (technology decade).

The virus is hitting China’s economy hard, but this is likely only temporary. China’s immune system is fighting back — building hospitals in record time, completely locking down a city and most importantly the entire nation uniting as one voice of support and solidarity.

Mario Cavolo called out the global response to the Coronavirus in his post “Something’s not right here folks” which originally went viral on LinkedIn and then subsequently all over Chinese social media. He compares the media response to Coronavirus with the H1N1 outbreak in the US, saying, “it’s not a conspiracy, it’s just a tragedy,” and “this vicious, political, xenophobic racist attacks and smearing of all things China needs to stop.”

Continue reading “Could the Coronavirus make China Stronger than Ever? 10 Trends that Indicate it Will” »

Circa 2019

Technology has long been helping to hack world hunger. These days most conversations about tech’s impact on any sector of the economy inevitably involves artificial intelligence—sophisticated software that allows machines to make decisions and even predictions in ways similar to humans. Food waste tech is no different.

Continue reading “Food Waste Is a Serious Problem. AI Is Trying to Solve It” »

The Pacific Ocean is becoming more acidic, and the cash-crabs that live in its coastal waters are some of its first inhabitants to feel its effects.

The Dungeness crab is vital to commercial fisheries in the Pacific Northwest, but lower pH levels in its habitat are dissolving parts of its shell and damaging its sensory organs, a new study found.

Their injuries could impact coastal economies and forebode the obstacles in a changing sea. And while the results aren’t unexpected, the study’s authors said the damage to the crabs is premature: The acidity wasn’t predicted to damage the crabs this quickly.