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Archive for the ‘finance’ category: Page 122

Aug 7, 2017

Russia’s Banks Get Serious About Digital Currencies

Posted by in categories: bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, economics, finance

With Russia looking to cure its economy of a hydrocarbon addiction, a consortium of the country’s biggest banks is proposing that it explores a different kind of gas for the answer.

The lenders, including Sberbank PJSC and VTB Group, aren’t developing gas of the natural variety. It’s also the name of a virtual unit based on the blockchain of ethereum, the world’s biggest cryptocurrency after bitcoin. The banks are hoping that by adopting the technology they will make payments safer and faster, while thrusting Russia to the forefront of a trend that’s transforming the financial industry.

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Aug 3, 2017

The US Navy’s Railgun Breakthrough Could Change Energy Storage

Posted by in categories: energy, finance, military

New capacitors offer big power storage and transmission in a mini-package, with benefits beyond electro-cannons.

The U.S. Navy’s shipboard railgun is moving from the lab to the testing range, a big step for a weapon designed to fire massive bullets at hypersonic speeds. But a separate breakthrough in electrical pulse generation — capacitors that provide a bigger jolt in a smaller package — that may reshape the future of naval power.

The railgun’s electromagnets are designed to accelerate a Hyper Velocity Projectile from zero to some 8,600 kmph, about Mach 7. That velocity requires a lot of power. In early testing, the Office of Naval Research had relied on banks of commercial capacitors to pulse electricity to the gun. But they were “not suitable for integration aboard a ship” — too large to fit aboard Zumwalt-class destroyers, as Thomas Beutner, head of ONR’s Naval Air Warfare and Weapons Department, explained during a July event in Washington.

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Jul 31, 2017

How Blockchain Can Make Identification Borderless and Immutable

Posted by in categories: bitcoin, finance

Solutions with blockchain are helping against the battle of extreme poverty and improving the lives of refugees. BanQu is banking the unbankable.

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Jul 31, 2017

How this 32-year-old investor with ties to Elon Musk wants to use AI to build a perfect planet

Posted by in categories: economics, Elon Musk, finance, robotics/AI, transportation

In a not-too-distant future city, superintelligent robots will carry out the majority of vital tasks. Driverless cars will ferry passengers to and from points of interest. Housing and healthcare will be affordable, if not free to all. Political leaders and technologists will speak the same language. And life is good.

Sam Altman, the 32-year-old president of Y Combinator, the most prestigious startup accelerator in Silicon Valley, has laid out this utopian vision over the years, and most definitively in a job listing posted on YC’s blog in June 2016.

“We’re seriously interested in building new cities and we think we know how to finance it if everything else makes sense,” the post read. “We need people with strong interests and bold ideas in architecture, ecology, economics, politics, technology, urban planning, and much more.”

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Jul 24, 2017

Cory Doctorow on technological immortality, the transporter problem, and fast-moving futures

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, finance, government, life extension, neuroscience, security, surveillance

Cory Doctorow has made several careers out of thinking about the future, as a journalist and co-editor of Boing Boing, an activist with strong ties to the Creative Commons movement and the right-to-privacy movement, and an author of novels that largely revolve around the ways changing technology changes society. From his debut novel, Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom (about rival groups of Walt Disney World designers in a post-scarcity society where social currency determines personal value), to his most acclaimed, Little Brother (about a teenage gamer fighting the Department of Homeland Security), his books tend to be high-tech and high-concept, but more about how people interface with technologies that feel just a few years into the future.

But they also tend to address current social issues head-on. Doctorow’s latest novel, Walkaway, is largely about people who respond to the financial disparity between the ultra-rich and the 99 percent by walking away and building their own networked micro-societies in abandoned areas. Frightened of losing control over society, the 1 percent wages full-on war against the “walkaways,” especially after they develop a process that can digitize individual human brains, essentially uploading them to machines and making them immortal. When I talked to Doctorow about the book and the technology behind it, we started with how feasible any of this might be someday, but wound up getting deep into the questions of how to change society, whether people are fundamentally good, and the balance between fighting a surveillance state and streaming everything to protect ourselves from government overreach.

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Jul 21, 2017

World dominance in three steps: China sets out road map to lead in artificial intelligence by 2030

Posted by in categories: finance, government, robotics/AI, supercomputing

Government finance will lead the way in AI research, including the development of supercomputers, and high performance semiconductor chips, software and the hiring of key talent to lead the field, China’s science and technology minister Wan Gang said in March during the country’s parliamentary meeting.


The Chinese government’s July 8 plan aims to keep pace with AI technology by 2020, make major breakthroughs by 2025, and lead the world in AI by 2030.

PUBLISHED : Friday, 21 July, 2017, 1:28pm.

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Jul 4, 2017

Why France Is Taking a Lesson in Culture From Silicon Valley

Posted by in categories: finance, government

While France needs to lure more international investors and further ease rules for entrepreneurs, the country, backed by government officials and tech leaders, has started to inject new energy into the start-up scene. France has already become one of Europe’s top destinations for start-up investment; venture capital and funding deals last year surpassed that activity in Germany, making it second only to Britain in Europe.


A new start-up incubator in Paris symbolizes France’s tech ambitions, but can the land of the 35-hour workweek overcome its cultural and regulatory barriers to surpass London and other tech hubs?

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Jun 19, 2017

Solar Power Will Kill Coal Faster Than You Think

Posted by in categories: finance, solar power, sustainability

Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s outlook shows renewables will be cheaper almost everywhere in just a few years.

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Jun 17, 2017

These 7 Disruptive Technologies Could Be Worth Trillions of Dollars

Posted by in categories: finance, singularity

Scientists, technologists, engineers, and visionaries are building the future. Amazing things are in the pipeline. It’s a big deal. But you already knew all that. Such speculation is common. What’s less common? Scale.

How big is big?

“Silicon Valley, Silicon Alley, Silicon Dock, all of the Silicons around the world, they are dreaming the dream. They are innovating,” Catherine Wood said at Singularity University’s Exponential Finance in New York. “We are sizing the opportunity. That’s what we do.”

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Jun 17, 2017

Ray Kurzweil: Will Technology End the Nation State?

Posted by in categories: finance, Ray Kurzweil

Ray Kurzweil is an inventor, thinker, and futurist famous for forecasting the pace of technology and predicting the world of tomorrow. In this video, Kurzweil takes a look at the elementary particle of the classical world order, the nation state. Today, news, culture, and financial transactions cross borders in an instant. As technology makes borders less and less relevant, will we witness the end of the nation state as we’ve known it?

Article Image Credit: Stock media provided by BreakingTheWalls/Pond5.com

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