Lifeboat Foundation

Because global warming and its associated risks are here to stay.

Global warming is causing many physical risks such as droughts, wildfires, and floods. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, global warming is essentially irreversible, which means these dangers will keep coming up. Luckily, some countries have started planning ahead.

The Busan Metropolitan City of the Republic of Korea, the UN-Habitat, and OCEANIX have joined forces to build the world’s first prototype sustainable floating city in order to get ahead of physical risks.

Continue reading “The UN Is Engineering a Floating City. To Withstand a Category 5 Hurricane?” »

Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) shareholders voted overwhelmingly to retain Kimbal Musk, brother of CEO Elon Musk, and James Murdoch on Tesla’s Board of Directors, according to an 8-K filing with the SEC that revealed the number of votes to re-elect the two to the company’s Board for three more years.

On October 13th, Tesla filed an 8-K form with the SEC that revealed the number of votes that supported or were against the re-election of both Kimbal Musk and James Murdoch to the Tesla Board. The number of votes for other proposals was also revealed. However, prior to the company’s 2021 Shareholder Meeting on October 7th, proxy advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services, or ISS, urged Tesla investors to oust both Musk and Murdoch from the Board. Their reasoning was based on the belief that the two non-executive board members did not present any advantages to the automaker’s governance.

“Votes AGAINST directors James Murdoch and Kimbal Musk are warranted due to concerns regarding excessive compensation to named executive officers and to non-executive directors,” ISS wrote in a note to investors. The firm was adamant that Kimbal’s payout package was not necessarily logical for the company as he did not serve on any board committees. Additionally, ISS felt that Murdoch’s presence on the Tesla Board of Directors also was not justified due to his service on Audit and Governance Committees. The Audit Committee pledged a large sum of company stock to directors, which raised questions regarding its risk oversight. The Governance Committee failed to react appropriately to last year’s Shareholder proposal, which was supported by the majority of voters.

Coastal artisanal fisheries, particularly those in developing countries, are facing a global crisis of overexploitation¹. Artificial reefs (ARs), or human–made reefs², have been widely advocated by governmental and non-governmental conservation and management organizations for addressing these issues. Industries, particularly oil and gas, seeking to avoid the costs of removal or conventional disposal of used materials are often major advocates for deploying ARs. Yet, major questions remain regarding the success of such efforts in the context of weak governance and poorly sustained international investment in AR development projects. There is frequently confusion over whether or not ARs should be fishing sites and the precise goals of constructing such ARs are often unclear, making difficult to evaluate their successfulness³. Over the last 40 years, both failures and success AR implementation programs have been reported^4,5. The main point of the present work is to underline the importance of the governance issue and address social and management factors on AR “success”.

To improve fishery yields, it has been recommended that ARs must be no-take areas (e.g.,²). Yet, most ARs were historically delineated as sites for fishing⁴, and were rarely implemented at large scales in/for no-take zones, even in countries with centuries of experience in constructing ARs, such as Japan. In Japan, fishery authorities and local fishers use ARs to promote sustainable catches and to establish nursery grounds of target species⁶. However, fishery authorities and local fishery cooperatives in Japan have extensive management authority over ARs. For example, fishing around ARs is usually limited to hook and line techniques, with net fishing rarely being permitted in areas where risk of entanglement in ARs is high. Furthermore, during spawning, fishing gear and fishing season are often restricted around ARs in Japan. These practices are recognized for their effectiveness in maintaining good fishing performance and marine conservation in Japan and elsewhere where they have been implemented⁷.

Continue reading “Successful artificial reefs depend on getting the context right due to complex socio-bio-economic interactions” »

Creating Smart Home Ecosystems — Enabling Health & Well-Being In Every Home — Viren Shah, VP & Chief Digital Officer, GE Appliances, Haier

Mr. Viren Shah is Vice President & Chief Digital Officer, at GE Appliances (GEA — https://www.geappliances.com/), the American home appliance manufacturer, now a majority owned subsidiary of the Chinese multinational home appliances company, Haier (https://www.haierappliances.com/).

Continue reading “Viren Shah — VP & Chief Digital Officer, GE Appliances (Haier) — Creating Smart Home Ecosystems” »

“Right now, organizations see a twofold gain from consolidating around a platform player in cybersecurity,” Nichols said. The first is, “to increase efficiency” but the other, he pointed out, is legislation. With more regulatory oversight in how companies are handling their cybersecurity challenges, the pressure is on them to make their systems more resilient, and having too many components becomes a challenge to manage for that reason, too.

“Joining One Identity provides us with the ability to further accelerate our growth and provide additional value for both of our customers,” added Brad Brooks, CEO of OneLogin, in a statement. “With OneLogin’s robust unified platform for both workforce and CIAM, combining forces with One Identity’s suite of products including their PAM solution will allow new and existing customers, on a global scale, to tap into the market’s only unified identity security platform.” consolidation is afoot in the world of cybersecurity, specifically around services to help organizations manage identity and access. Today, One Identity — which provides tools for managing “zero trust” access to systems, as well as running log management and other governance services for enterprises — announced that it has acquired OneLogin, a rival to companies like Okta, Ping and others in the area of secure sign-on services for end users.

Terms of the acquisition — which officially closed last week, on October 1 — are not being disclosed, but we are trying to find out.

Companies have two to three years to lay the groundwork for successful use of generative AI, synthetic data and orchestration platforms.

Users want more than artificial intelligence can provide at the moment but those capabilities are changing fast, according to Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Artificial Intelligence 2021 report. Gartner analysts described 34 types of AI technologies in the report and also noted that the AI hype cycle is more fast-paced, with an above-average number of innovations reaching mainstream adoption within two to five years.

Gartner analysts found more innovations in the innovation trigger phase of the hype cycle than usual. That means that end users are looking for specific technology capabilities that current AI tools can’t quite deliver yet. Synthetic data, orchestration platforms, composite AI, governance, human-centered AI and generative AI are all in this early phase.

“We’re excited to share that AWS has acquired Wickr, an innovative company that has developed the industry’s most secure, end-to-end encrypted, communication technology,” Stephen Schmidt, Amazon Web Services’ vice president, wrote. With a nod to the company’s ever-deepening relationships with the military, and Washington in general, Schmidt added that Wickr’s features give “security conscious enterprises and government agencies the ability to implement important governance and security controls to help them meet their compliance requirements.” Schmidt himself has a background in this space: his LinkedIn profile notes he spent a decade at the FBI.

Wickr’s app — like secure messaging competitor Signal — has been popular with journalists and whistleblowers; it’s also been a go-to for criminals, Motherboard notes. It’s unclear if the proximity to the tech monolith will impact the app’s popularity for free users.

In Amazon’s case, Schmidt indicates the acquisition was at least partially influenced by the need to preserve information security while working remotely. “With the move to hybrid work environments, due in part to the COVID-19 pandemic, enterprises and government agencies have a growing desire to protect their communications,” he wrote.

I think we should. If it is corrupt or makes mistakes, it will at least be correctable.

LONDON — A study has found that most Europeans would like to see some of their members of parliament replaced by algorithms.

Researchers at IE University’s Center for the Governance of Change asked 2769 people from 11 countries worldwide how they would feel about reducing the number of national parliamentarians in their country and giving those seats to an AI that would have access to their data.

Continue reading “More than half of Europeans want to replace lawmakers with AI, study says” »

AI, self-driving cars, robotics and more… all in one place.

Find out more about our upcoming Global Technology Governance Summit: https://wef.ch/2NJDej0 # GTGS21.