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Category: economics – Page 82

Top Technologies that are Taking Us to Metaverse in 2022

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The existence of ethical concerns is precisely why it’s important for business owners to understand the different technologies driving the Metaverse forward and what impact they may have on users, the environment, and our society. By understanding these technologies, businesses can find new ways to enrich our society with constructive uses of virtual reality connectivity that enrich our world and keep the digital economy booming.

In addition, understanding these technologies is important because as more advanced techniques are developed for use in Metaverse projects, the average cost of US$48,000 for app design in the USA will undoubtedly go up. Business owners need to understand what they need to focus on when planning their next move.

Businesses also need to understand that as the landscape of the Metaverse evolves, the nature of the content will change as well. Creating quality content marketing strategies with these immersive, virtual environments in mind is essential as the industry moves forward.

Twitter adds more users but makes less money, blames Elon Musk

What just happened? In addition to suing Elon Musk, Twitter is also blaming the world’s richest man for its falling revenue. The platform saw its number of users increase in the second quarter of the year, but that hasn’t translated to a healthier bottom line, something it partly blames on the disruption caused by Musk bidding for the company before walking away.

Twitter’s Q2 2022 results show its second-quarter revenue was $1.18 billion, representing both a quarterly and yearly decline, albeit only slightly. However, its average monetizable daily active users (mDAUs) was up 16.6% compared to Q2 2021, reaching 237.8 million globally.

$1.18 billion is no small sum, but Twitter’s costs and expenses for the quarter totaled $1.52 billion, an increase of 31% year-over-year. It reported net losses of $270 million, $33 million of which was related to the “pending acquisition” of the company. Q2 2021 saw a net profit of $66 million.

One step closer to providing customized climate control in the office

EPFL researchers have shown that people’s perception of office temperature can vary considerably. Personalized climate control could therefore help enhance workers’ comfort—and save energy at the same time.

Global warming means that heatwaves are becoming ever-more frequent. At the same time, we’re in a global race against the clock to reduce buildings’ energy use and carbon footprint by 2050. This has shone the spotlight on the importance of making the thermal comfort of buildings a strategic and economic priority. And this is the focus of research conducted by Dolaana Khovalyg, a tenure track assistant professor at EPFL’s School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering (ENAC) and head of the Laboratory of Integrated Comfort Engineering (ICE), which is linked to the Smart Living Lab in Fribourg.

In her latest study, published as a brief, cutting-edge report in the journal Obesity, she highlights the benefits of providing personalized thermal conditioning and heating for each office desk, rather than maintaining a standard temperature throughout an open space. Khovalyg and her team came to this conclusion after the human thermo-physiological data they collected showed that individuals display very different levels of thermal comfort under normal office conditions.

Report: Samsung adding land to $17B semiconductor campus in Taylor

The 6 million-square-foot Samsung plant will be located south of Highway 79 and southwest of Downtown Taylor, near Taylor High School. It is expected to bring 1,800 jobs to Williamson County.

The plant is expected to start operations in 2024. The City of Taylor, Williamson County and Taylor ISD all already have economic agreements in place related to Samsung’s development.

To learn more, read Community Impact’s full report.

COLMENA, a new concept on lunar exploration

Live now, on the Space Renaissance YouTube channel.

We are stepping at the gates of a new era in space exploration, one which will finally incorporate the inner solar system to society’s daily life and economics. The first step is the Moon, and the asteroids will probably follow. The surface of those bodies presents special challenges for human and technological activities as well as resource exploitation. These challenges, which include regolith, extreme thermal amplitude, high energy radiation and surface mineral mixing among others, open the door to new operational approaches. COLMENA is the pathfinder of one such avenue: using swarms of micro-rovers for scientific exploration, resource prospection or, eventually, mining The first COLMENA mission will deploy 5 microrovers (56 grams each) on the Moon surface by the end of this year, flying on board a private spacecraft. In the talk I will briefly explain the context, technical characteristics and objectives of the mission, as well as its future.

A short bio.

Dr. Gustavo MEDINA TANCO is Professor at the Institute of Nuclear Sciences of UNAM in Mexico, where he leads the group of ultra-high energy cosmic rays and is the Head of the Laboratory for Space Instrumentation, LINX, which he created in 2009. He has also created, and is responsible for, the National Laboratory for Space Access (LANAE) in state of Hidalgo, Mexico, which will start operation in 2022. He was for 10 years the science coordinator of the International JEM-EUSO Collaboration and member of its executive board and, as such he lead the Mexican participation in the development of several instruments under the coordination of CNES, NASA, ASI and ROSCOSMOS.

RV-8 | Build Your Plane! From The Ground Up PART 9 | Van’s Aircraft RV-8 Instructional Video

Roel van DijnenI did not realize that India still has such a small economy, smaller then Germany and UK 😳

Eric KlienAdmin.

Roel van Dijnen In related news, India has so far stopped Tesla and Starlink from operating in their country. Governments can, and often do, screw up their economy.

Roel van DijnenEric Klien The screwing up part is rather subjective, imagine the effect on earth when countries like India and Nigeria will adopt the same luxurious lifestyle that we have. But then again, Tesla and Starlink are trying to be part of the solution for that also 😉

Freya WildeRoel van Dijnen even if they did adopt a more luxurious lifestyle, who is to say it would be the same. Wouldn’t that be up to the people there? I have no idea how any country will ultimately act. And I have zero right to guess and interfere. No one doe… See more.

Roel van DijnenFreya Wilde I’m not claiming to have any right to intervene (forcefully) and I sure hope better more sustainable ways of having a great lifestyle will be upon us, preferably sooner rather than later!

Continue reading “RV-8 | Build Your Plane! From The Ground Up PART 9 | Van’s Aircraft RV-8 Instructional Video” | >

AI Would Run the World Better Than Humans, Google Research Claims

The bottomless bucket is Karl Marx’s utopian creed: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” In this idyllic world, everyone works for the good of society, with the fruits of their labor distributed freely — everyone taking what they need, and only what they need. We know how that worked out. When rewards are unrelated to effort, being a slacker is more appealing than being a worker. With more slackers than workers, not nearly enough is produced to satisfy everyone’s needs. A common joke in the Soviet Union was, “They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.”

In addition to helping those who in the great lottery of life have drawn blanks, governments should adopt myriad policies that expand the economic pie, including education, infrastructure, and the enforcement of laws and contracts. Public safety, national defense, dealing with externalities are also important. There are many legitimate government activities and there are inevitably tradeoffs. Governing a country is completely different from playing a simple, rigged distribution game.

I love computers. I use them every day — not just for word processing but for mathematical calculations, statistical analyses, and Monte Carlo simulations that would literally take me several lifetimes to do by hand. Computers have benefited and entertained all of us. However, AI is nowhere near ready to rule the world because computer algorithms do not have the intelligence, wisdom, or commonsense required to make rational decisions.

Deep learning accelerates the detection of live bacteria using thin-film transistor arrays

Early detection and identification of pathogenic bacteria in food and water samples are essential to public health. Bacterial infections cause millions of deaths worldwide and bring a heavy economic burden, costing more than 4 billion dollars annually in the United States alone. Among pathogenic bacteria, Escherichia coli (E. coli) and other coliform bacteria are among the most common ones, and they indicate fecal contamination in food and water samples. The most conventional and frequently used method for detecting these bacteria involves culturing of the samples, which usually takes 24 hours for the final read-out and needs expert visual examination. Although some methods based on, for example, the amplification of nucleic acids, can reduce the detection time to a few hours, they cannot differentiate live and dead bacteria and present low sensitivity at low concentrations of bacteria. That is why the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) approves no nucleic acid-based bacteria sensing method for screening water samples.

In an article recently published in ACS Photonics, a journal of the American Chemical Society (ACS), a team of scientists, led by Professor Aydogan Ozcan from the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and co-workers have developed an AI-powered smart bacterial colony detection system using a thin-film transistor (TFT) array, which is a widely used technology in mobile phones and other displays.

The ultra-large imaging area of the TFT array (27 mm × 26 mm) manufactured by researchers at Japan Display Inc. enabled the system to rapidly capture the growth patterns of bacterial colonies without the need for scanning, which significantly simplified both the hardware and software design. This system achieved ~12-hour time savings compared to gold-standard culture-based methods approved by EPA. By analyzing the microscopic images captured by the TFT array as a function of time, the AI-based system could rapidly and automatically detect colony growth with a deep neural network. Following the detection of each colony, a second neural network is used to classify the species.

After Meta, Microsoft, now Google to slow hiring for rest of the year

Tech major Google is reportedly slowing down its hiring processes for the rest of 2022. According to a memo by CEO Sundar Pichai to employees, obtained by The Verge, Google will still support its “most important opportunities”, and focus on hiring engineering, technical and other critical roles.

Until now, Google has remained relatively immune to economic uncertainties, and in fact, its sister brand YouTube did well in Q4 2020 — first year of the Covid-19 pandemic. It was reported that its ad revenue hit $6.9 billion — up by 46% quarter-on-quarter. Pichai, in his memo, also highlights that the company hired approximately 10,000 employees in the second quarter of this year, and has a “number of commitments for Q3”, Pichai said in the memo adding that “Google will pause the hiring process for the rest of the year”.

“For the balance of 2022 and 2023, we’ll focus our hiring on engineering, technical and other critical roles, and make sure the great talent we do hire is aligned with our long-term priorities,” he reportedly wrote in the memo.

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